E3W Literature | University of Texas

The Bernth Lindfors Papers
The Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin

Reviewed by Naminata Diabate

The emblematic and prolific Africanist, Kenneth Harrow, in “Bernth Lindfors and the Archive of African Literature,” writes of Bernth Lindfors’s scholarship and discipline-shaping of African literatures, “In studying the work of Ben Lindfors, one gets the impression that it spans the entire history of African literature: that he began the study of African literature not only when it was in its infancy, but that he was part of that beginning of the critical work.” Kenneth Harrow’s “encomium” of Bernth Lindfors’s achievement in the field of African literary studies in the United States and even in Africa resonated more as I sat for an interview with Lindfors in October. After the interview, as well as after examining The Bernth Lindfors Papers, housed at the Harry Ransom Center, as an African female graduate student in the United States, I felt truly humbled by Prof. Lindfors’s dedication and interest in Anglophone African literatures.

Bernth Lindfors was born in a small village near the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. Two and a half years later, his family settled in Mamaroneck, New York. After attending Oberlin College, spending a year at Harvard, and earning a degree from Northwestern University, Bernth Lindfors enrolled in a program called Teachers for East Africa, which allowed him to teach for two years in Kenya. With the introduction to and experience of East Africa and its writers, Lindfors entered UCLA with the goal of writing a dissertation on African literature. In 1969, Lindfors accepted a position in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin with the prospect of turning a newsletter into a proper journal that would put in dialogue scholars and students of African literatures. From 1970 to 1980, Lindfors produced a tremendous scholarship on African literatures, convened numerous conferences, served as editor of Research in African Literatures for twenty of its thirty-seven years in publication, located the manuscripts of Anglophone African writers and was instrumental in the creation of the African Literatures Association (ALA). Lindfors is currently compiling a biography of the first famous black actor, an African American named Ira Aldridge, who was born in New York in 1807 but spent forty-three years of his life performing on stage in Europe.

As I paged through The Bernth Lindfors Papers, acquired between 1998 and 2006, Lindfors’s accomplishment in introducing Anglophone African writers to the United States took on a life of its own. The papers, spanning about thirty years from the 1970s to 2000s, comprise interviews, correspondence, and postcards with African writers and publishers on the African continent, Europe, and America; newspaper clippings from The Daily Texan, The New York Times Review of Books, and other publications as well as African newspapers covering events on African writers’ activities in the United States. The collection also features photographs of David Maillu, Peter Nazareth, John Updike with Nigerian writers in Nigeria, Stephen Gray in Austin, and the itineraries of a number of African writers’ or Africanists’ visits to the University of Texas at Austin.

By examining the papers, one can come to understand and appreciate the long and rigorous work involved in conducting and publishing interviews. The collection illustrates the different versions of interviews Lindfors conducted in Africa with several writers, scholars, and publishers from East and West Africa, starting in the early 1970s and published in several edited books including: Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas: Chinua Achebe, John Pepper Clark, Dennis Brutus, Ezekiel Mphahlele [and] Kofi Awoonor (1972); Dem-Say: Interviews with Eight Nigerian Writers: Michael J. C. Echeruo, Obi Egbuna, Cyprian Ekwensi, John Munonye, Gabriel Okara, Kole Omotoso, Ola Rotimi, Kalu Uka (1974); Mazungumzo: Interviews with East African Writers, Publishers, Editors, and Scholars (1980); and Kulankula: Interviews with Writers from Malawi and Lesotho (1989) with Audrey Kalitera, Ken Lipenga, Anthony Mazombe, Njabulo Ndebele, and David Rubadiri.

The wealth of the Bernth Lindfors papers in part lies in offering researchers the first-hand experience of the politics of interviews. The different stages of the interviews range from the spontaneous reactions of the interviewees to the final and “politically correct” statements that are ready-made for public consumption. From the deletions, additions, modifications, and editing of both writers and scholars, one comes to witness and appreciate the changing positions of the interviewees on certain questions as new social, cultural, and political developments occur. The shifting positionings of the interviewees offer new insights into their development as the period from the actual interview to the final version of the interview can span years.

The body of the Lindfors papers illustrates the difficulties in the state of communication and the politics of publication in the Africa of the 1970s and 1980s. In the absence of emails, instant messaging, mobile phones, and probably telephones, portable camcorders, personal computers, webcams, and other communication gadgets that we take for granted today, conducting interviews and maintaining communication with writers such as Grace Oknot, Okot p’tek, and Chinua Achebe was difficult and often resulted in delayed or postponed publication opportunities.

For instance, after Lindfors interviewed thirteen writers and scholars from East Africa, much of his correspondence with The International Studies Program at the Ohio State University Press, the publisher of Mazungumzo: Interviews with East African Writers, Publishers, Editors, and Scholars, reveals his difficulty in locating the writer Okot p’tek whose release was necessary for the publication of the book. Okot p’tek’s’ authorization only later allowed the publication of the collection. The difficulty of acquiring the release explains in part the time lag between the initial interviews in 1976 and the publication of the book in 1980.

Another insight gleaned from the papers is the story behind the absence of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’ from Mazungumzo. As a graduate student in African literatures, I was puzzled by Ngugi’s absence from the book. As I went through The Bernth Lindfors Papers, I came to understand that first a refusal and second a detention explain Ngugi’s non-participation. In 1976, Ngugi refused to grant an interview until the publication of his book Petals of Blood (1977). Following the publication of Petals of Blood, Lindfors returned to Kenya in 1978 to interview Ngugi and found the writer in detention.

The Lindfors collection contains an extensive section on Kofi Awoonor, from his pronouncements on the differences between Africans and African Americans to the African and Africanist organizing to liberate Awoonor when he was held in detention in Ghana from late 1975 to 1976. In an article from The Richmond-Times Dispatch, “Contemporary Ghana Writer Discusses Africa Changes” dated November 4, 1973, Awoonor discusses the political atmosphere in a few African countries and goes on to argue the significant differences between Africans and African Americans, differences that he claims stem from African Americans’ relocation in the New World. In November 1975, while teaching in Ghana after holding visiting professorships at the University of Texas at Austin and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and chairing the department of Comparative Literature at the latter, Awoonor was arrested on charges of attempting to subvert then-Ghanaian president Ignatius Kutu Acheampong’s regime. Lindfors’s February 19, 1976 correspondence with Amnesty International and Dennis Brutus’s petition signing and performance on the UT campus to raise awareness and incite activism in 1976 all combine to serve as a testament to the University of Texas at Austin’s interest in African writers and literatures at that time. Several newspaper clippings from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books covering various stages of Awoonor’s detention reveal the Africanist community’s activism against his incarceration. The widespread activism and call for Awoonor’s release led to his appearance in court in October 1976, his sentencing to one year in prison and his release merely a few days after his sentencing.

The archival collection of Lindfors illustrates the long list of African writers and scholars who visited and lectured at UT-Austin. The string of speakers from Kofi Awoonor, Lloyd Brown, Leonard Thompson, Dennis Brutus, Eldred Jones, David Rubadiri, Houston Baker, Kole Omotoso, Daniel Kunene, Ola Rotimi, Muhamed Hassan Abdulaziz, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Ayi Kwei Armah, John Pepper Clark, Dennis Duerden, Robert Armstrong, Nyong Udoeyop, Richard Rive, to Stephen Gray and many others correlates with David Attwell’s assessment of the state of African Literatures on the UT campus in “Under The Eyes of Texas,” when he writes that “throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Austin, Texas—in the mind of any student from Africa interested in the continent’s literary affairs—would have had the plenitude of the Vatican, or Mecca.”

The Bernth Lindfors Papers also illuminate the shift, or rather the widening of scope in Lindfors’s academic and scholarly interests with the correspondence and audio tapes of a number of Indian and Caribbean writers including Sam Selvon, Raja Rao, Wilson Harris, and Jan Carew.

Lindfors’s papers, of course, will be of significant value to any one interested in African literatures; the history and politics of Heinemann and James Currey Publishers publishing in East, South, and West Africa, and the interactions between literature and politics on the continent. Bernth Lindfors, in his various roles of scholar, teacher, interviewer, editor, archivist, and conference convener, is leaving to future generations of Africans and Africanists a wealth of materials that will tell the truth of the literary journey in Anglophone Africa. Lindfors’s determined commitment stems from his strong belief in the value of archives. “You may wonder why I am so obsessed with the preservation of literary documents,” he writes in Long Drums (1995). “The reason is that I believe that this way lies the truth.”