07 September 2004

Thank you, Programme Director
Vice Chancellor
Members of the Faculty
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

What we are performing today is an act of restitution. It is most appropriate that this ceremony takes place during the first week of Heritage Month, which this year we have dedicated to the celebration and recognition of the living heritage of the people of this country.

The archive which is being unveiled today is probably one of the largest collections of modern African literature in the world. I want to commend the University of KwaZulu-Natal for having taken the initiative to ensure that these works were returned to the continent they came from.

Afro-pessimism and Afro-denial

"Afro-pessimism" is a term used to express the view that Africa has gone into deep decline over the past three decades. This idea is usually coupled with another; that our continent has produced little of value for humanity, or even for its own people. Yet what Africa and its peoples have contributed to humanity is evident in virtually every part of the world.

After the opening up of Tutankhamen's tomb in the 1920s, the art, design and decor of ancient Egypt inspired a host of movements in style and decor. Sub-Saharan Africa's sculptors inspired the movement known as Cubism among western artists. Writers, artists, painters and musicians from Africa and of African descent have a continuing impact on contemporary sensibilities and aesthetics. Since the 1920s, African and African-American music came to dominate the popular idiom of the 20th century. Today its influence is felt even in parts of the world where there are very few or no Africans at all.

Not surprisingly, much of what humanity has accomplished is built on the achievements of many civilizations from all six of the world's continents. During the last four centuries, some continents may appear to have contributed more than others and have consequently come to be seen as the principal purveyors of human accomplishments, sometimes to the neglect of others.

Our African heritage is comparable to that of other continents, yet African achievements, ancient, medieval and modern, remain unacknowledged, regrettably, in Africa itself. It is the as yet untapped potential of our diverse African humanity that has to be harnessed for the renewal of our continent.

The Challenge of Modernity

One of the most telling indications of our achievements is that a hundred years ago, none of the leading statesmen of Europe, Japan or the USA would have blushed at being called "imperialist". It is an index of the manner in which the struggles of former colonial peoples, not least those of Africa, have transformed the political vocabulary of the modern world that the term "imperialist" is regarded as a term of political abuse in our day.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was feared that modern education might alienate African intellectuals from their past and create distance between them and the majority of their own people. But as they turned away from the familiar symbolic universe of the family, the clan and the ethnic group, the most progressive African intellectuals adopted the more inclusive concepts of the nation, of the African continent as part of an international community. They also embraced as worthy compatriots others, drawn from the most recent immigrant communities from Europe and Asia, who identified with Africa's struggles and aspirations of her people.

The concerns of Africa's intellectuals remain those that moved them a century ago. Today, as then, Africa’s intellectuals continue to wrestle with the challenge of securing African sovereignty, defending the rights of the African people and sustaining their dignity as members of the human family in a rapidly changing world.

The odyssey of the 20th century African intellectual was characterized by an agonizing existential dilemma that posed the alternatives of either confidently confronting the uncertainties of progress and the future or clinging to the dubious comfort of a disintegrating past. In all of colonial Africa, racist policies of the not too distant past mercilessly exploited the natural resources of our continent and the labour power of its people, while brutally excluding Africans from the body politic. It remains true even today that while Africa produces leather, most Africans are barefooted. While Africa produces sugar and cocoa, most African children do not eat chocolate. While Africa produces the most beautiful and highly priced gemstones in the world, our continent is the home of some of its poorest people. The oil wealth of Africa, rather than being a blessing, seems to be a curse that invites every kind of adventurer, exploiter and rogue to meddle in African affairs.

African writers, poets, musicians, artists, sculptors and leaders of thought thus experienced the modern era as highly ambiguous, with destructive and constructive elements interwoven. The excruciating ambiguities of modern times grew as urbanization accelerated. They peaked in the post-colonial era when Africans were free to govern and misgovern themselves. In their distress, a few intellectuals were tempted to lend an ear to the siren songs of a backward-looking nativism, which was frequently presented as "authenticity" by its adherents. "Authenticity" subsequently descended into gross depravity in, for example, the regime of Seso Seko Mobutu of Zaire (the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo), where a post-colonial indigenous elite shamelessly plundered the national wealth in an orgy of cheap debauchery and kleptocracy.

Ambivalence, obliquity and dissonance are consequently at the heart of the musical idiom evolved by Africa's modern musicians. Our continent's anguish has found its most poignant expression in their works.

Many modern African writers have portrayed the dilemma posed by modernity as tragic. But the most far-sighted among the generation of writers, artists, musicians, poets and playwrights who came into their own immediately before and after the Second World War demonstrated how to resolve this contemporary riddle of the Sphinx. Rather than wallowing in their alienation or seeking refuge in the past, they reintegrated themselves with the common people by active engagement in political and social struggles for freedom, independence and progress.

As we march into the third millennium, this is the lesson that African intellectuals must derive from our 20th century experience.

Black Orpheus Escaping from Hades

We are still in the first decade of a new millennium. The realization of Africa's potential requires the promotion of political stability and peace as the preconditions for her economic growth and the prosperity of her people. It also requires the cultivation of a capacity for unsparing, rigorous introspection, which recognizes both our achievements and our significant underperformance in a number of areas.

We therefore expect the intelligentsia of the continent, where necessary, to criticize our recent past and the performance of our leadership and statesmen unsparingly and rigorously. We also expect them to become keen advocates and defenders of tolerance, remaining rooted in an appreciation that truth is elusive and that it can only be sought in an environment of untrammeled contestation and debate among differing opinions. The best in the modern African political tradition has preferred secularism and advocated pluralism, not only to nurture diversity, but also for their intrinsic value.

The African creative artist has often been referred to as the "Black Orpheus". Indeed Ulli Beier, an early chronicler of modern African creative arts, called his literary journal Black Orpheus. If our Orpheus is ever to win back his Eurydice, who was swallowed up by the darkness of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, he must, like his classical namesake, march forward and upward into the light of the 21st century. He would be wise also to heed the admonition against looking back in nostalgic longing lest, as in the classical tale, Eurydice is called back, and is reclaimed by the darkness of Hades.

The art of the story-teller is essentially about memory. It was by developing and building on our capacity as humans to memorize, recall past experience and to transmit it from one generation to the next that we have been able to create what we have today. Orature - the oral transmission of information - was probably the first means by which we did this. Once the art of writing had been mastered, human beings acquired an even more flexible means of transmitting information from one person to the next. Since the first hieroglyphic was inscribed, humanity has evolved amazing ways of recording, storing and transmitting information.

Today’s event would not be taking place had it not been for a handful of dedicated scholars, writers and researchers who kept an African Studies Centre and the journal African Literature alive over the years. Apart from the Department of Arts and Culture, there are others who made the establishment of this archive possible by making financial contributions towards its acquisitions. We thank the University of KwaZulu-Natal Development Foundation and the Anglo-American Chairman’s Fund.

We regard this as one of many heritage projects which will not only restore to the African continent scholarly work done by Africans and about Africans, but will also restore to Africa and its people those aspects of our continent’s rich past which have been lost to us and to humanity. Our government has made a commitment to rescuing the Timbuktu manuscripts and to ensuring that they are restored and the information they contain preserved for posterity. There will be other projects, not necessarily beyond our borders but within South Africa itself, that we shall be embarking on. We trust that our scholars and our universities will be prepared to play their role in the realization of these. The Department of Arts and Culture is already cooperating with a number of tertiary institutions in its endeavours to preserve our cultural treasures, but also, metaphorically, to excavate what has been lost or misplaced.

It is through memory that we have made and re-made ourselves as a human race. It is through memory, too, that we will scale the heights of achievement and create a better world.

The art of the story-teller is essentially about memory. It was by developing and building on our capacity as humans to memorize, recall past experience and to transmit it from one generation to the next that we have been able to create what we have today. Orature - the oral transmission of information - was probably the first means by which we did this. Once the art of writing had been mastered, human beings acquired an even more flexible means of transmitting information from one person to the next. Since the first hieroglyphic was inscribed, humanity has evolved amazing ways of recording, storing and transmitting information.

Today’s event would not be taking place had it not been for a handful of dedicated scholars, writers and researchers who kept an African Studies Centre and the journal African Literature alive over the years. Apart from the Department of Arts and Culture, there are others who made the establishment of this archive possible by making financial contributions towards its acquisitions. We thank the University of KwaZulu-Natal Development Foundation and the Anglo-American Chairman’s Fund.

We regard this as one of many heritage projects which will not only restore to the African continent scholarly work done by Africans and about Africans, but will also restore to Africa and its people those aspects of our continent’s rich past which have been lost to us and to humanity. Our government has made a commitment to rescuing the Timbuktu manuscripts and to ensuring that they are restored and the information they contain preserved for posterity. There will be other projects, not necessarily beyond our borders but within South Africa itself, that we shall be embarking on. We trust that our scholars and our universities will be prepared to play their role in the realization of these. The Department of Arts and Culture is already cooperating with a number of tertiary institutions in its endeavours to preserve our cultural treasures, but also, metaphorically, to excavate what has been lost or misplaced.

It is through memory that we have made and re-made ourselves as a human race. It is through memory, too, that we will scale the heights of achievement and create a better world.

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