Awesome, isn't it, that Tanzania, a Swahili-speaking former German Colony in East Africa, with a population of sixty million people can boast of up to 50 writers, if not more, currently singing the praises of their countryman who has finally put that country on the world's literary map, writing in English.
You don't have to be a prophet or professor of World Literature to profess or to prophesy that it will probably take between another hundred years ( until circa the year 2121) to a thousand years (circa 3121) before another Tanzanian or Zanzibari is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
However, it will probably not take up to a minimum of one hundred years after Soyinka's crowning glory in 1986 (till circa 2086) before another Nigerian will be crowned with that literary accolade. This is because there are already a good number of names in the offing, my own preferred favourite Teju Cole is surely on his way but only after he has added many more miles of inspired print to his name, so as to be indisputably deserving. I'm constantly floored by his articles and essays – quality-wise often on another wavelength. In my mind's ear, I hear the rebellious Don Harrow – an Honorary African, wincing, " who the heck determines/ dictates / imposes this so-called quality? Whose quality? "
Holy Bible! Septuagint! King James version!
Also, the one on everyone's lips, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The other day, Baba Kadiri suggested that maybe our good friend Sheikh Per Roguey, the wannabe "Buckingham Palace Professor of English" ( A Special Chair to be created for him ) will soon be awarded the Nobel Prize. For What? I asked him. For satire? For a sense of humour? Maybe, for fictions written in great or big grammar, but unfortunately, there are no prizes being awarded for that and if there were, I'm sure that such an idea would never be seconded by e.g. Per Wästberg
More seriously, I'd just like to add that it's significant that a Tanzanian has bagged the Nobel Prize for Literature, a prize emanating from Sweden which in my opinion as an interested observer of Sweden- Africa relations since my taking up permanent residence in this country in 1971, I must confess that Tanzania has been Sweden's favourite African country - especially during the good old days of Tanzania's socialist experiment which was implemented as Ujamaa by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. Before that Ethiopia was Sweden's favourite country in Africa - the current King's great grandfather was a good friend of Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie - and after that, unceasingly, Sweden identified with the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa and Madiba Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid South Africa eventually became Sweden's favourite African Country...
I wonder to what extent the economic and social climate created by Ujamaa's agrarian revolution is part of the landscape, political and social environment of Gurnah's novels set in that country. We're in the library queue for his works in English – the queues for his forthcoming translations into Swedish are already more than a mile long...
A final word on Swahili: Sometime in the 1980s Wole Soyinka proposed that if there was to be a ( one) intra-continental language of communication it should be Swahili....I wonder if he still thinks so, and when like Ngugi writing in Kikuyu, Nobel Laureate Abdulrazzak Gurnah is going to opt for putting that language on the literary world map, perhaps he himself translating his output, from English to Swahili?
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