As far as conversations go, generational ezines fare generally better than blogs on both sides. Saraba Magazine, African Writing and other Anglophonic ezines pay some attention to Francophone material. Africultures, the famous internet age successor of Présence Africaine in the Francophone world, also pays the occasional attention to Anglophonic material. However, popular blogs by prominent literati on both sides create universes of Anglophonism and Francophonism respectively. Ikhide Ikheloa's blog is doing incredible work for new African writing but it basks and waltzes in its Anglophonic non-attention to the other half of the continent's literature, even in English translation. Apart from the already-cited Waberi who invests a lot in Anglophonic knowledges, the novelists Kangni Alem and Bessora run very popular blogs. Both blogs, like Ikhide's on the Anglophone side, are monuments to Francophonic literary navel gazing.
Perhaps the privileging of social media co-presence over cross-border conversations is due in part to insufficient effort of cultural translation? If Abiola Irele robustly and relentlessly carried Négritude across to the Anglophone literati, who, in my generation, is doing the same for migritude today? Perhaps those of us with one leg in each world, Anglophone and Francophone, ought to do more carrying across work? Perhaps we need to try harder to sustain the example of Abiola Irele? Perhaps somebody like me needs to return to the role I played for my generation in the Lagos-Ibadan axis of Nigerian letters in the 1990s?
- Professor Pius Adesanmi.
Fighting words. It gets better. Read on...
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