What’s all the brouhaha about our reading culture?

By Abenea Odhiambo Ondago

Is it possible to deduce anything from the just concluded Dar es Salaam conference on Africa’s reading culture, which was attended by Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o? Our level of allergy to books is shocking and the economic situation or poverty is not to blame though they might contribute.

Language is also thought to affect reading culture. I have never understood those who prescribe writing in indigenous languages as a cure for our poor reading culture. How does writing a novel in a writer’s vernacular reduce its cost?

My point is that, in real terms, language is irrelevant. I will not miraculously afford a book whose cost is above my head simply because someone else has translated it into my vernacular.

Yet reading cannot be confined to arguments on language and the cost of books alone. Whether people read or not may also depend on the national environment.

Writers of yore

Quite subjectively, I think that those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s were better readers. There was genuine spontaneity even in the reading of fiction. At a young age, I used to hear Kenyan authors quoted with amazing clarity.

The names of Meja Mwangi, John Kiriamiti, Grace Ogot and David Mailu literally dangled on every teenager’s lips.

That literary thread painfully died out in the very early 1990s. In the Weekly Review of that period, book reviews were done by devoted bookmen — not journeying pedestrians.

Among others, you will read the names of the late Atieno Odhiambo, the late Joe Mwenda, William Ochieng, Chris Wanjala and Mukhisa Kituyi in that column.

Part of the reason, I think, is that there was an intellectual mood even in the arena of African leadership then.

You could not have talked about Julius Nyerere, Sedar Senghor, Agostinho Neto, Kwame Nkrumah, or Kamuzu Banda without a glimpse into their intellectual commitment.

Even today, the only Robert Mugabe we know is an African dictator with a piercing intellect sharper than Dambudzo Marechera’s.

Such is what led Nyerere into translating Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But I cannot tell whether he chose the book simply because it shared his name.

Literary shortcuts

Though translation itself is a worthy task, I say that of the Tanzanian statesman only because Anglophone Africa has an excellent appetite for shortcuts.

I have no other explanation for the current glut of biographies and autobiographies in this country. It is but another literary shortcut, an escape from genuine literary exertion. Strictly speaking, there is nil creativity.

The other danger is the problem of authenticity especially in this country. What on earth would prevent a fame-chasing, ‘autobiographer’ from hiring someone else?

On the other hand, Francophone and Lusophone African statesmen beat their Anglophone peers in literary commitment. Both Senghor and Neto were an exact definition of Okot p’Bitek’s philosopher-king to, respectively, Senegal and Angola.

On the pages of a newspaper, I once read only two lines of Robert Mugabe’s speech addressed to an international conference. I have heard that speeches are never written for him. My impression is that the tyrant should have served Africa better as a poet or playwright.

Presidents should write their own books and citizens will surely read them.