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Amatoritsero Ede: You were born in Africa, in Tanzania.
What citizenship do you hold? How does this intersect with questions
of identity or the apprehension of self?
Jane Bryce: I have a British
passport, because when I was born in Tanzania, it was a British
protectorate. We were given the choice of citizenship at ‘Uhuru’
and my father opted for British. As he was deported under the Africanization
policy, perhaps it’s as well, but then again, if we’d
been Tanzanian citizens we wouldn’t have been deported. Being
Tanzanian-born British is a conundrum. My skin colour, my accent
– my first language being English – all make me appear
to be conventionally British. I suffered terribly from this when
I was first sent to school in the UK at the age of 13, because I
didn’t FEEL British. I had no roots in England, no common
history with anyone there, no affection for a particular place,
no understanding of the British class system, no sense of appropriate
behaviour. I felt lost and isolated and misrecognised. In a way,
though I have grown a thicker skin since then, I still suffer from
this sense of misrecognition. In answer to the inevitable question,
“Where do you come from?”, I’ve created a category
called ‘colonial British-born and brought up in Tanzania.’
In fact, there are thousands of people like me, born one place,
educated somewhere else, living somewhere else. The difference in
my category’s case is that we shouldn’t have been in
Tanzania in the first place, we were interlopers, and so nostalgia
for our childhood there is politically vexed. All I can really say
in the end is that I’m driven by a feeling stronger than I
can control to describe myself as ‘African’, and I justify
this to myself by the fact that I’ve maintained my relationship
with the continent and built my entire life and career around it.
I have actively sought to experience ‘Africa’ as an
adult, free of colonial privilege and to engage with African modernity.
A long answer shows what a complex question this is!
A.E.: Does your study and teaching
of Africa not amount to a further engagement of your African-ness;
consider this in the light of the introspection of your collection
of short stories, Chameleon (2006).
J.B.: Yes. Obviously teaching
about Africa is directly related to my intellectual and academic
interests, just as before I became an academic, I was a freelance
journalist and editor specializing in Africa. The short stories
are different, a much more emotional thing. They lived in my head
for years, pushing to get out until I eventually wrote them down.
The Tanzania stories are fictionalisations of childhood memories,
so not autobiographical but highly personal nonetheless. The Nigeria
stories grew out of the writing I did in Nigeria – such as
a column I had in Vanguard under the pseudonym Kemi Cole
– poems, and the notebooks I kept the entire time I was there.
Nigeria was a fantastic place in that it provided ready-made drama
at every turn. I have never been so creatively stimulated as when
I lived there.
A.E.: In the spirit of current
debates in Africanist discourse, what is the state of African studies
- especially, the literary aspects of it, in the Caribbean at the
moment?
J.B.: The construction of Africa
in the Caribbean generally, and in Barbados in particular, is predicated
on factors of history, slavery, race, displacement and return. This
does not at all undermine a prevalent belief in African primitivism,
an assumption that Africa is somehow outside of modernity. Although
this might appear a contradiction, in fact it’s only another
manifestation of the thinking that has shaped both diasporic pan-Africanism
and Rastafarianism. Royalty and primitivism, the nationalist state
and Africa’s inability to rule itself may appear to be binary
opposites, but they are all nonetheless posited on the same premise:
that Africa is separate, subject to unchanging laws and outside
of history. The role of the African humanities in this situation
is clear - to demystify, to enable people to see Africa as fundamentally
not separate, but a
participant in the global project of modernity.
The difficulty with this view is that
it challenges the pieties of racial distinctiveness, and requires
a relinquishing of race as the ultimate signifier of ‘Africanness’,
the promise of recovery of a lost identity. This tension is seen
in the way African Studies was conceived at UWI. UWI, like Ibadan,
Makerere and Legon, started as a college of the University of London.
The first campus, at Mona, in Jamaica, was, like Ibadan, founded
in 1948 to create an educated cadre to serve the colonial administration.
The humanities therefore were seen as a way of introducing colonial
subjects to the superior civilisation of their colonial masters.
A radical overhaul of this concept was intrinsic to the project
of Independence and decolonization, and an important element of
this at UWI was the recognition of the centrality of Africa to West
Indian history and the construction of a West Indian identity.
African Studies at UWI now has both
African and Africanist scholars in different disciplines. At Cave
Hill, for example, there are currently African scholars teaching
Economics, Philosophy, francophone Literature, Education and Law;
three Africanist historians, one of whom studied at UI, and me –
a graduate of OAU, now Professor of African Literature and Film.
At the St Augustine campus (Trinidad), we find another ex-OAU scholar,
Professor Funso Aiyejina, teaching literature and creative writing.
Although not an African, Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis of Mona
has researched in Nigeria and written extensively on Yoruba influences
on Trinidadian culture.
Outside of the academy, we should ask
what perceptions of ‘Africa’ circulate in the media
and popular culture, and who is considered worthy to represent or
speak for ‘Africa’ in the Caribbean? The dominant discourse
is what Triulzi calls ‘a state-driven politics of memory’,
defined by ‘the commemoration of heroic deeds or the nation’s
suffering as a way of reformulating the moral boundaries of the
social body’. In Barbados, the nation’s suffering is
seen in terms of the legacy of slavery, the loss of a homeland,
and the conception of Africa as site of an originary identity which
remains fixed, unchanging and constituted by the marker of race.
The institution in Barbados charged with representing this view
of Africa and of its relationship to the island is the Commission
for Pan-African Affairs, founded in 1998.
What Zeleza calls a ‘metaphysics
of difference’, combined with the compulsory support of ‘heroic’
liberation struggles, can lead to some strange anomalies. In Barbados,
it has led to the spectacle of a Pan-African march in support of
Mugabe’s policies at the height of the ZANU-PF land reclamation
programme in Zimbabwe. It has also seen nonblacks thrown out of
the African and African Descendants' World Conference Against Racism
in October 2002. At the same time, the Pan-African Commission has
invited the young Nigerian/South African director, Akin Omotoso,
to its film festival to show his first feature, God is African,
a film which critiques the ‘makwerekwere’ phenomenon
of black-on-black racism in South Africa and undercuts the simplistic
notion of a single black identity and brotherhood based on race.
Instead of focusing on an unchanging essence, a more productive
way of conceptualizing the humanities is to look at what people
in Africa do and make, and to read these product(ions),
these texts, for what they tell us about a contemporary African
consciousness.
Soon after I started teaching African
literature at Cave Hill, I realized that the best route to achieving
this – in a context where my students had never heard an African
language spoken, never knowingly heard African music, didn’t
know that Africa had cities or roads or educated people –
was to show them African films. The graphic and kinetic nature of
film, and the naturalization of filmic narrative language across
cultural barriers, makes film a more seductive medium for diasporic
students than literary texts, though both are of an extremely minority
interest in the Caribbean. But the primary significance of African
film for humanities in the diaspora is the fact that it forces the
student to learn to look differently. In this process of
learning to look differently in order to read African film language,
students are enabled also to look differently at mainstream representations
of Africa, and to come to more informed, less credulous conclusions
about Africa and its place in the modern world.
A.E.: That
is a very elaborate submission on the trajectory of African studies
in the Caribbean. What is the impact of your strategy of teaching
Africa through films as distinct from textual representations alone?
J.B.: The impact has been considerable,
on two fronts specifically. First, when I started and for several
years afterwards there was no such thing as Film Studies being taught
on this campus, and the students who took my African Film course
were almost always engaging in film as an object of intellectual
analysis for the first time. They were often amazed at the insights
that could be gained by acquiring a basic understanding of film
theory and terminology. Second, they were being introduced to a
world of representation with which they were quite unfamiliar –
i.e. that of African film-makers. Many of them over the years had
seen Hollywood films like Black Hawk Down, Tears of the Sun, Hotel
Rwanda, etc, and were immediately struck by the difference it makes
when the point of view is that of an African film-maker.
Then, they had to come to terms with
the difference in production values, to consider such things as
funding sources and how they might affect editorial choices/ideological
representation, they had to attune their ears to African languages
and struggle with sub-titles (most people here don’t watch
‘foreign’ films but subsist on a diet of American blockbusters).
But I think the most rewarding thing, for me, has been the powerful
effect of visual images of urbanization, of African cities teeming
with cars and people (‘Africa’ is either a village or
a refugee camp to people brought up on CNN), of the beauty of actors’
bodies and faces (again, ‘Africans’ are people suffering
from AIDS or starvation or war or displacement, so Africans as fashion-conscious
members of a prosperous middle-class are a surprise).
I should say were a surprise,
because in the last couple of years Nollywood has become a big thing
in parts of the English-speaking Caribbean, including here in Barbados.
I walked into my local video shop one day and was amazed to see
a whole shelf of videos labeled ‘African Film’. When
I looked closer, I saw that in fact it was all Nollywood. I discovered
that the craze began in nearby Guyana where tapes were sold in the
marketplace, as in Lagos, and spread to neighbouring islands. They
are pirated, reproduced and sold cheaply; and people are making
money, I hear, reproducing them. The result has been a complete
change in the understanding of ‘Africa’ by the populace
at large. Suddenly, through these films they’ve found out
that people in Africa are dealing with issues of modernity and many
of the same problems they are wrestling with here, perhaps in more
dramatic form, and I’m told that more Nollywood than American
films are now being watched at home in people’s houses.
This almost overnight achievement can
be compared with my painstaking efforts over years to introduce
the Barbadian public to African cinema, through teaching and through
running a film festival which brought directors such as Newton Aduaka
(Nigeria), Moussa Sene Absa (Senegal), Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda (Congo),
Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Tunde Kelani (Nigeria), Mweze Ngangura
(Congo) and the actor, Eriq Ebouaney (Cameroon, title role in Lumumba)
to Barbados. That’s the power of popular cinema, but I still
persist with the ‘arthouse’ cinema because it too has
a lot to teach. Through the undergraduate course in African Film
and courses which mix film and literature like African Literature
and Orality, African Narrative in Film and Text, and the graduate
courses: Postcolonial Cinema and Women Writing, I have created a
context in which students are encouraged to research and write about
film, and I regularly supervise undergraduate and MA projects in
film. I am particularly proud of the fact that a student of mine,
Andrew Armstrong, produced the first ever PhD in African Literature
at this campus in 2006, Negotiations: Narrative Strategies and
the Negotiation of Selfhood in Late Twentieth Century African
Literature and Film, a thesis which dealt with both literary
and filmic texts, described by the External Examiner, Professor
Teju Olaniyan, as ‘lucid in composition, tight in structure
and meticulous in argumentation.’ As Andrew now teaches in
my Department you could say we have established a discourse, which
profoundly troubles the old simplistic view of ‘Africa’.
A.E.: The beginnings of modern
Caribbean and African writing was energized by certain cultural
movements in the trans-Atlantic ambience of early 20th-century Paris,
where Harlem Renaissance met Negritude and Indigeneity. Claude Mckay,
Rene Maran, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire are some of the writers
who came out of that black international ferment. Do you see or
note that kind of pan-African inspiration in contemporary Caribbean/African
writing in a different, more global configuration?
J.B.: Not really. I think that
moment has passed and what we have now is a more atomized and individualistic
ethos, with writers focusing on the specificity of their own situations,
albeit within a social context. And this, I think, is a good thing.
I’m with Njabulo Ndebele in prioritizing a diversity of subjectivities
rather than an overarching and ideologically determined collective
identity.
A.E.: Would you say this is
a reflection of the concentration of continental intellectual African
Diaspora in North America and Europe rather than in the Caribbean
and vice versa?
J.B.: That’s too big a
generalization to make. I think it’s to do with the nature
of modernity as it’s experienced today – that moment
of collective idealism belongs to the pre and early-Independence
period, and we are now faced with the systemic failure of post-Independence
African regimes, and the subjective experiences of suffering this
has engendered. African writing today is highly self-critical and
self-reflexive. If you want to trace lines of affinity between Africa
and the Caribbean, it might be better to think in terms of particular
types of narrative – narratives of migration, for example,
or of betrayal, or cultural alienation. Leaky boats are a trope
for both Haitians and Senegalese…
A.E.: Where would you say Africa
meets the Caribbean today, where do these two long lost siblings
hold their conversations.
J.B.: The terms of the question
are romantic, and I don’t think like that! I don’t assume
an essential connection and parity between the two. I think each
needs to learn about the other as a site of difference rather than
sameness, and the places for that are what they’ve always
been – creative fiction, drama, poetry, cinema, critical thinking
and theorizing, and now too the Internet.
A.E.: On a more general level
does the Caribbean consider its fate to be now separate from that
of Africa – that is, if we are to ignore those symbolic gestures
at different kinds of residual Pan-Africanisms, which energize the
study of Africa, high school curricula or inspire the consumption
of Nollywood and sundry filmic productions.
J.B.: Again, I find it hard
to speak of what ‘the Caribbean considers’. This is
a region, which, to a far greater extent than Africa, is marked
by colonial differences. People in the Spanish, English, French
and Dutch speaking territories have to make a big effort to speak
to each other across language barriers. Some places geographically
located in the Caribbean are politically elsewhere – Martinique
and Guadeloupe are in France; Anguilla is in the UK; Aruba, Bonaire
and Curaçao, Saba, St Eustatius and Saint Maarten are in Holland;
Puerto Rico is in the US, etc. Even the Anglophone Caribbean struggles
to come together, as is witnessed by the infighting over the Caricom
Single Market and the lifting of border restrictions.
A.E.: Should Africa not also
study the Caribbean in systematic way to complete the conversation
between the two?
J.B.: Yes, African people should
be aware of and study the Caribbean just as they should other parts
of the world – Brazil, Bangladesh, Bulgaria…
A.E.: In terms of Nollywood,
for example, we see a cultural traffic from Africa to the Caribbean.
What cultural traffic is there, in concrete terms, from the Caribbean
to Africa?
J.B.: It is mainly piecemeal
and depends to a large extent on individual initiatives. It also
differs from place to place. Trinidad, for example, has a vibrant
orisha-worshipping tradition with festivals and religious practices,
which are familiar to the whole populace regardless of whether they
participate. The same is true of Vodou in Haiti and Santeria in
Cuba. These are genuine African retentions, which inform West Indian
culture at many levels – religious rites, beliefs, music and
myths. Haitian visual art is shot through with vodou imagery, which
is recognizably African. In Trinidad, one of the most senior and
respected artists has taken a Yoruba name. Jamaica has a version
too in the form of pocomania, with its balm-yards and traditional
healers, its extended funeral rites lasting for nine nights, and
so on. Barbados, where I live, was the first island to be colonized
back in the 17th century, and has only the merest vestiges of anything
you could identify as ‘African’ – some of the
foods, e.g. ‘accra’ which are a form of ‘akara’,
and some musical and dance elements.
In terms of contemporary culture though,
one thinks of the (Trinidadian) calypsonian David Rudder, who greatly
admires Fela and has sung about him and ‘sampled’ Fela’s
music in his own compositions. The resonances between calypso and
highlife show how influences have crossed and recrossed the Atlantic;
the same is true of African reggae. Last time I was in Jo’burg
I went to a concert where Andy Narell, a celebrated steel pan player,
was playing, and the audience adored him. Last weekend in Barbados
I attended a concert by the Malian group Ngoni Ba, and they amazed
the audience. But is this in reality any different from the global
circulation of culture, which is going on all the time? The truth
is, it’s a minority of people who care about such things,
and the dominant influence is from North America. More people are
listening to hip hop than to kora music.
A.E.: Thank you for kindly
taking the time to talk to me.
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