by Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the 1991 Nobel prize for literature.

We have to recognize that the first – what we hope to achieve in terms of literary directions – is heavily dependent on the second: the condition under which we shall be working as writers. A literary culture cannot be created by writers without readers. There are no readers without adequate education. It’s as simple – and dire – as that. No matter how much we encourage writers who are able to fulfill, according to their talents, the various kinds and levels of writing that we take literature out of the forbidding context of unattainable intellectualism, we shall never succeed until there is a wide readership competent beyond school-primer and comic-book level.

And where there are readers there must be libraries where the new literature we hope to nurture, satisfying the need of identification with people’s own daily lives, and the general literature that brings the great mind-opening works of the world to them, are easily available to them.

And there is yet one more problem to be faced by the naked power of the word, which is all we have, but which has proved itself unkillable by even the most horrible of conventional and unconventional weaponry. Looking back, many well-known factors inhibited the growth of a modern African culture, an African literature, in the century whose sands are running out through our fingers. One hardly need cite the contemptuous dismissal of all African culture by frontier and colonial domination; the cementing-over of African music, dance, myth, philosophy, religious beliefs, and secular rituals: the very stuff on which the literary imagination feeds.

The creativity of Africa lay ignored beneath the treading feet of white people on their way to see the latest Hollywood gangster movie or to pick up from the corner store a comic with bubble text in American. And soon, soon, these were joined by black people in the same pursuit, having been convinced, since everything that was their own was said to be worthless, that this was the culture to acquire. The habit of chewing cultural pulp is by now deeply established among our people. And it is so temptingly cheap to be bought from abroad by our media, including the dominant cultural medium of our time, television, that literature in Africa not only has to express the lives of the people but also has to assert the beauty and interest of this reality against megasubculture-the new opium of the people ...

Surely the powers of the imagination of our writers can be exerted to attract our people away from the soporific sitcom, surely the great adventures that writers explore in life can offer a child something as exciting in image and word as the cumbersome battle between Japanese turtles? We in Africa don't want cultural freedom hijacked by the rush of international sub-literature into the space for growth hard-won by ourselves in the defeat of colonial culture. That is perhaps the greatest hazard facing us as we turn the pages of African literature and write the heading: twenty-first century.

Book: Living in Hope and History
By Nadine Gordimer
ISBN: 0374189919