A brief intro to a vast subject: The Other Africa

It was impossible for the four writers on The Other Africa panel today to give us anything more than a glimpse of such a complex and diverse continent. And that was partly what Kwame Antony Appiah, Majok Tulba, Uzodinma Iweala and Sefi Atta talked about, in their conversation with Arnold Zable. I’ve been reading Iweala’s wonderful book Our Kind of People about people and communities in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The book takes an intimate view through Iweala’s conversations with HIV-positive individuals, community leaders, and government representatives; and through personal questions and reflections. As Iweala said on the panel, he was trying to find a ‘different way to talk about HIV/AIDS in Africa, which doesn’t descend into hyperbole’. He wants to get away from the idea of Africa as a monolith, and the way to do that is through individual stories, individual voices. Iweala spend four or five years on the book, letting himself be guided by the stories people told him.

Esteemed philosopher Kwame Antony Appiah spoke about the fact that, yes, Africa is an enormously diverse and complicated continent (and not just countries but the diverse cultures, languages and religions within them) but when travelling about the world he said that someone from Nigeria, South Sudan, Ghana (to name a few) is often simply perceived is as ‘African’. He said while that is never going to be enough (would ‘Australian’ be enough to describe you?) that perception still informs a part of one’s identity. It is not so much that people intentionally stereotype, though certainly reading nuanced stories about people from cultures other than our own goes some way to helping us break down stereotypes.

Fiction, of course, takes us into the world and experiences of another person, a character, and can be incredibly effective at building empathy and complexifying one’s relationship to other people and places. Nigerian-born Sefi Atta began writing when she was 30, living in the US. She realised she’d never read a novel about a Nigerian woman like herself. She builds up her stories with detail from the characters’ lives so as not to fall on/enforce any particular ideology, though she says ‘there’s something about integrity which matters’ to her as a theme in her writing. She says this is possibly a response to misconceptions about Africa. Her latest novel, being launched at the festival, is A Bit of Difference.

Majok Tulba’s debut novel Beneath the Darkening Sky I have written about in detail previously on the blog. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about his work. Tulba said that writing the book wasn’t easy, because of the topic. As a child he thought that starvation and war were ‘all the world was supposed to be’. In Australia he saw a different world. He returned to his village (which he talks about so movingly) in 2007 and was heartbroken to see the aftermath of war. He remembered some of his friends he used to play with, eat with. He believes in the power of writing, as a way to make people realise the horror of what some children go through (and he did choose not to specify the country in the novel, because he said it could have been a few countries besides South Sudan) but also to show them the beauty of the Africa ‘where we can tell the time by a rooster crowing’. ‘This is the Africa I love’, he said. He wrote the book also to ask the question: ‘why is this happening?’ And he hopes the reader will ask this too.

Appiah spoke about how problematic it can be when there is a perception that an ‘African writer’ is approached only to write about ‘African topics’. His latest book, The Honour Code, is about the role of honour in shaping some specific moral movements. He says that, of course, we also cannot deny the influence of our backgrounds, our cultures, and he recounted a story of his father lying in bed smoking and reading the Ghanaian newspapers, before (I believe) Appiah went off to England, and he said: ‘don’t forget you’re taking the family name with you’. Despite the fact Ghana, and Africa, are not present in the book, the idea of exploring honour may have come from his own personal (and cultural) background.

I don’t want to make this too long. As I said, the session barely scratched the surface (and my notes probably don’t even do it justice) so I would encourage you to check out the work of these writers, the fiction and the nonfiction, and try to catch them at their other sessions during the festival. Click their names in the first paragraph for more info on those.

I hope to see you at the first Morning Read session at 10am tomorrow (featuring Majok Tulba) or at the one on Sunday (featuring Sefi Atta and Uzodinma Iweala).

City of Festivals

Melbourne is the place to be for festivals. It really never ends. It’s pure sugar high all year ‘round. We’ve just finished the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Melbourne Jazz Festival, and the Festival of German Film, with the Emerging Writers Festival, St Kilda Film Festival and Melbourne International Animation Festival all approaching fast (and that’s by no means all and sunder for festivals of the moment). The Melbourne Writers Festival sits in good company in this City of Festivals, and yet remains unique and unrepeatable as the largest forum for writers in the state.

I’ve been involved with festivals in Melbourne for the last three years, beginning as a volunteer at the International Puppet Carnival in 2006. (Oh so many puppets!) What began as a dabble is now an addiction. There’s a calm that comes with being at the core of so much activity; it’s the centre of the storm. Pre-festival for me is primarily focused on booking flights and accommodation for our 40+ international and 80+ national guests, managing projects, coordinating mail outs, day-to-day finance and administration, researching t-shirts and lanyards, and above all cursing a certain widely-used software suite into shame.

In ode to both the first festival I was ever involved with and the Melbourne Writers Festival I have found these philosophy puppets for all to enjoy.

It’s puppet Plato, Kant, Hegel and Nietzche!

Louise
Festival Administrator