This Thursday has received the Nobel Prize for Literature the Tanzano writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, recognized for his “interest in colonialism and refugees”.
The slow but unstoppable awakening of the literature with African root has been sitting, at El Cubazos, for years.
Not very fast but without fainting.
And not only their members are black: there is.
M. Coetzee, South African writer and Nobel Prize in 2003 whose novelty novel (Debolsillo) showed violence in the country without contemplations, apartheid with all his crudity: the dread before whom, knife in hand, nothing has to lose, urged by
Misery, by envy, by resentment.
Or by those who try to preserve their privileges.
Revenge as an answer to the privileged target who lives in ghettos.
Constant mutual distrust.
With six years the British Doris Lessing arrived (Nobel in 2002) and his family at Rodesia del Sur (today Zimbaue) and there lived until 30. And from that world he wrote in within me, the first part of his memories, and in
African laughter.
In the prologue of this book, which mixes memory and history, Lessing remembers that white colonizers arrived in 1890 and that the purpose was that Cecil Rhodes’ dream was met, “Conquering all Africa for the British Empire.”
Two ways of understanding the world, that of the natives, who considered that the land was all, and that of the whites, who “brought with them private property concepts: fences, limits, property titles”.
Development came with European patterns, Wars of Independence, Mugabe access power, corruption, calls ethnic cleanings or tribal wars, more corruption, country bankruptcy, loans offered by the World Bank and the IMF with interests that can not be paid.
. Zimbaue as a metaphor of a good part of Africa.
Of that flame country, we said, wrote with knowledge of cause Doris Lessing also sing the grass, because she returned four times to continue taking the pulse to the country.
“In the old South Rhodesia, the attitude of the whites regarding blacks was extreme, full of prejudice and ignorance,” she read at the conference collected in ‘the prisons we choose’ (Lumen).
Another case.
The Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (83 years old).
Even without the Nobel, even if it rolls it.
May he be the fifth son of the third of the four wives who had his father was not so strange then in him.
Not that he had 24 brothers and stepsters.
Further than he ran 10 kilometers to go to school between endless fields, potatoes, peas and beans.
Together with goats of goats.
A brother of his fled and was imprisoned for being a member of the Mau Mau.
His mother also knew torture.
The lands of the family of him were expropriated by English colones.
NGUGI WA Thiong’o itself, who recalled in an interview with the world in May 2019 that “every night we met around the fire of the cabin” and when one ended with an another story he said: “That reminds me when
… “, he was imprisoned without prior judgment and between bars wrote, in toilet paper, the devil on the cross (Debolsillo).
Also there he made another decision: not rewritten in English.
He would do it in Gikuyu, his tongue of him, as protest against colonialism.
For more details, read the mind (Debolsillo), nothing to do with the sweetened Memories of Africa (Alfaguara), of the Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen.
Despite everything, Thiong’o was lucky because he learned English at a university, associated with London, in Makerere.
And he was able to meet the Father of African Literature, Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), the author of everything falls apart, during a meeting of African writers in 1962, where he discussed his tongue and not only.
Because, as he said in the interview, on the publication of the Vertical Revolution (Green Ray) and Meetings in Madrid and Barcelona: “The language is the basis. If I connect with the language I connect with the world. And when I talk about
Language I speak of politics, economics, culture. Africa needs its own base to connect with everything. The colonizers have always imposed their tongue “.
Nothing away from one of the reasons why the Nobel has fallen into the Tanzano Abdulrazak Gurnah “for its moving description of the effects of colonialism in Africa”.
The case of the Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the one with greater slightest.
She is an icon at her 44 years.
Because she in addition to denouncing racism she is one of the standard bearers of feminism.
She also addresses immigration, that she knows: At age 19 she, with her family, she traveled to the United States.
She has another look, another perspective.
Perhaps greater reach.
From this they give faith the purple flower, half a yellow sun, American or all should be feminists (all in Random House literature).
Africa and the United States.
The black continent and Europe.
This it is.