E3W Literature | University of Texas

From RAL to Ira Aldridge: An Interview with Bernth Lindfors

This interview with Dr. Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and Researcher at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, was conducted on October 12, 2007 in his office at the HRC.

Naminata Diabate: Professor Lindfors, your contribution as the founding editor of Research in African Literatures is inestimable. The journal is positioned today as one of the main journals available for scholars, researchers, and students in African literatures. You founded the journal in 1970 and edited it until 1989. Could you tell us about the creation of the journal?

Bernth Lindfors: When I was a graduate student at UCLA in the 1960s, there were hardly any journals dealing with African literatures. I had the idea to start a newsletter that would put African literature teachers in communication with one another. The field was very young at that point, and there were not many universities offering courses on African literatures, but more and more institutions were starting to do so. I felt that there had to be some way for teachers of these new literatures to stay in touch because nearly all of them were working alone. No campus was likely to have more than one individual teaching in this area.

When I was being recruited by UT, it was suggested that the African and African American Research Institute, which was then a separate entity allied with the African and African American Studies program, could support such a venture, but I was encouraged to turn the newsletter into a proper journal. So that is how it happened, starting in my first year here, 1969-1970. We began modestly, with only two issues per year, each of which was illustrated by an African artist. A Tanzanian friend I had known from my time teaching in Kenya presented us with really nice graphics for the first two issues, and I think that it was his work, as well as the excellent articles we carried, that helped to catch the attention of the world.

An unusual feature of the journal is that it was free of charge. You didn’t have to pay a subscription fee. You just had to ask for it, and even if you did not ask for it, it might be sent to you. It was sent to all the university libraries in Africa and to all the African Studies programs in the US and Europe. This was a time when the university had lots of oil money that was being used to support research institutes on campus. With such generous funding we did not have to depend on paid subscriptions to cover our expenses. Also, the subsidy enabled the journal to circulate widely, and we soon started receiving a good number of manuscripts from abroad, particularly from Africa.

This was the best way to launch a new journal. Of course, we immediately became very popular, and RAL became increasingly expensive to produce as time went on. After the first three years we had to start charging our American and European subscribers a fee, but we managed to keep the journal free in Africa for another three years before asking individuals and institutions there to pay a fee. As soon as we did that, the number of our African recipients dropped dramatically for it was difficult for them to find the dollars necessary to sustain a subscription. Nevertheless, we had already penetrated Africa to such an extent that we were getting good submissions from African scholars, and that flow of scholarship continued in the years that followed.

In our seventh year, RAL turned from a bi-annual into a tri-annual publication in order to accommodate the growing number of excellent contributions we were receiving. The field was expanding rapidly, and we needed more space to deal with the overflow of material that was coming in. In its tenth year, RAL became a quarterly, but even then it was hard to keep up with the pace at which new scholarship was being produced. We could not exceed 144 pages per issue; this had been stipulated in our agreement with the University of Texas Press, which had taken over publication of the journal when we turned completely commercial.

ND: Was it for financial reasons primarily that the University Press took over publication of the journal?

BL: Yes. The University Press at that time was beginning to publish more journals, and it was quite willing to add RAL to its list. This took a large financial burden off the African and African American Studies Institute, so it was a good move for us not only financially, but also editorially, because it gave us a solid professional staff to deal with technical matters.

ND: Could you say why and when you thought it was valuable for the journal to migrate to another institution?

BL: Well, the job was getting bigger and bigger each year, and I had only one half-time graduate student assistant in the last ten years I was editing RAL. The workload was extremely heavy, and eventually I was warned that I would soon lose my assistant. The Graduate School had created for journals on campus a graduate student assistantship in editing; this was a one-year nonrenewable fellowship that supported someone who was expected to put in about twenty hours a week working on a journal. After I had had such help for ten years, the Graduate School informed me that it would be necessary to give this kind of support to another campus journal. At that point, knowing I could not carry the full load of editorial work by myself, I began looking for a successor and publicizing the availability of the journal. An excellent editorial team at Ohio State University agreed to take it over and arranged to have it published by Indiana University Press, which had a strong commitment to African studies. The University of Texas Press was known largely for its publications on Latin America, Mexico, and South West Americana; it had published very little on Africa, so RAL was really an anomaly on its list. However, the journal fit in perfectly with the line of books that Indiana University Press had developed, so the move there made good sense. The journal also benefited because IUP allowed the editors to include more pages per issue. With ever more scholarship coming in, RAL needed that kind of growth. I was delighted with the new arrangement, and I think the change has worked out well for everyone concerned.

ND: Do you still get consulted about the journal?

BL: No. When I retired as editor, I wanted to stop completely, so I refused to serve on the editorial board or to read manuscripts. I had read enough of them in twenty years, so I did not want to do anything further. Also, I felt that the new editors should have a free hand to do whatever they wanted with the journal and should not feel constrained to take into account any input I might make. I think it worked out very nicely. RAL is still thriving, and I have been free to focus on my own research projects, new and old.

ND: That brings me to the current state of African literatures at the University of Texas at Austin. What was its state then and now?

BL: When I came here in 1969, I was one of the first faculty members to teach in this area. Actually two of us came that same year. The Nigerian scholar Sunday Anozie and I started out together, but he stayed here only two years before moving on. I was the only one teaching Anglophone African literatures for a long time thereafter. The French Department had Hal Wylie teaching francophone African and Caribbean literatures, so I had at least one colleague on campus who shared some of my interests. Today the English Department has a more substantial commitment to Africa. Neville Hoad teaches South African literature, Brian Doherty includes African texts in his World Literature classes, and Barbara Harlow regularly teaches courses that have significant African content. But I regret that the literatures of West and East Africa are no longer getting the kind of attention they merit. The Department has not replaced me with another Africanist. When I retired at the end of 2003, they had the intention of doing so, but they did not get funding from the administration for that purpose, and the following year the Department’s recruitment priorities changed. I now tend to doubt that the Department will ever again hire a fulltime Africanist, which is what I was allowed to become. I had the luxury of being a specialist in this area, for my colleagues let me teach whatever I wanted and did not mind when I went off to Africa periodically to do research. I am thankful for having been given this freedom, but I do regret having left a small hole in the Department that may never be filled, for I am aware that there are students here, like yourself, who are interested in working in this area. It’s also a pity that major contemporary literary figures such as Chinua Achebe, Wolé Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o are now being totally ignored by our faculty, but I suppose one could say the same about some of the leading writers from the West Indies and South Asia. The Third World continues to be underrepresented in course offerings in the English Department.

ND: You were one of the founders of the ALA (African Literature Association). Do you have any comments about the creation of the association, and its current state?

BL: In the early 1970s, scholars working in African literatures could sometimes find a forum for speaking about their research at the annual conference of the African Studies Association (ASA) or at national or regional meetings of the Modern Language Association (MLA), but opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with others doing similar research were limited at such gatherings. Some of us felt that it would be useful to get African literature scholars together on an annual basis to exchange ideas and get to know one another, for most of us were loners working in isolation on various campuses. The exception was the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which had a well-staffed doctoral program in African languages and literatures, but few other campuses, not even those with strong African studies programs, had more than a single, token literary Africanist on their faculty. So it was felt that the time had come for African literature scholars to unite and establish our own academic organization.

During 1974-75 we had here at UT a visiting South African writer, Dennis Brutus, who was a very good organizer and knew most of the other African writers in the United States. The way we inaugurated the ALA was to create a symposium on black South African literatures with Dennis bringing in about eight South African writers to discuss issues relating to those literatures. Responding to those keynote speakers would be writers from other parts of the continent—primarily from West and East Africa. We set it up in such a way that all the panels were plenary sessions and the only speakers were African writers. Following a keynote address by a South African writer, there would be responses from a West African writer and an East African writer, after which the floor would be open for discussion by all in attendance for an hour and a half. This turned out to be a good way to get a great many people talking. The interactions were lively and thoroughly engaging. Among the writers who participated were Es’kia Mphahlele, Mongane Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, Mazisi Kunene, Dan Kunene, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Cosmo Pieterse, and Dennis Brutus from South Africa; Chinua Achebe, Kofi Awoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo, Pol Ndu, Romanus Egudu, Biodun Jeyifo, and Emmanuel Obiechina from West Africa; and Ali Mazrui and Peter Nazareth from East Africa. There were also about 250 scholars and students in the audience. At the conclusion of the symposium we had an organizational meeting of the ALA in which officers were elected, and plans were made for the next year’s conference. That was how the ALA got off the ground.

Since that time the ALA has had annual conferences, some of which have been held on campuses in Africa and the Caribbean—Senegal, Ghana, Morocco, Egypt, and Guadeloupe. This kind of outreach has enabled scholars from different parts of Africa to get involved in the Association, and it has also been good for some American scholars who had never set foot in Africa before. They may have been studying African literatures without having had an opportunity to experience conditions on the ground anywhere on the African continent. For them, these trips were an eye-opening adventure. The overseas conferences also increased membership in the ALA, which has stabilized now at around 600-700 active members. The ALA is still a relatively small Association compared with, say, the MLA, the conferences of which are so huge that some participants find them intimidating or alienating. The ALA is more like an extended family where people can get to know one another well and form lasting friendships. Several members have even found marriage partners at ALA meetings.

ND: Would like to comment on the state of African literature studies in the United States?

BL: The field has grown substantially, sometimes on its own, but more often as a branch of African studies, African American studies, global studies, postcolonial studies or as aspects of world literature or comparative literature. One can see this reflected in the ads nowadays for positions in African literature in specific departments or programs. There are more opportunities for teachers of African literature than ever before. There is more research being carried out, too. If one looks at where the doctoral dissertations are being produced nowadays, the number of campuses involved is really remarkable. This is evidence that the field has grown and become more diversified and better integrated into traditional disciplines. African literature study has finally been recognized in many places as having an integrity of its own.

ND: Do you have any comment about the state of the field in Africa?

BL: There has been a huge transformation in literature teaching in Africa. It started in East Africa with Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others voting at a faculty meeting at the University of Nairobi to abolish the English Department and replace it with a Department of African Literatures. That iconoclastic movement swept across the continent quite rapidly, with African literature displacing or minimizing the stranglehold that British literature had had on the curriculum. Many campuses in anglophone Africa may still claim to be giving due attention to the British literary canon, but the bulk of the research being done there by faculty and students now focuses on African texts. That has been a seismic change in a single generation. Today there is no African university that teaches no African literature at all. Progress has been slower in South Africa, but even there the battle has been won on the nationalistic level, so that every campus in South Africa now teaches some South African literature; however, these institutions haven’t yet paid enough attention to what has been going on further north in their own continent. Scholars there tend to know a bit about the major literary figures in West and East Africa but very little about the younger writers from these regions. However, this is gradually changing because in recent years the brain drain from tropical Africa, instead of going west to America or north to Europe, has been heading south, where conditions for university teachers are much better than what exists in their own home countries. In West and East Africa, universities have been under-funded for years, resources for research are hard to come by, and salaries are poor. As a consequence, teachers are looking for professional opportunities elsewhere, and one place they have found them has been South Africa, largely because the curriculum there has been changing in response to new institutional pressures. The student body at South African campuses is now predominantly black, and given the inadequate educational training some of these young people have had, immediate remedial work is needed, especially in language proficiency. Where can these campuses get good English language teachers? The answer has been in West and East Africa. And the teachers who are recruited often introduce literary texts from their home countries in the courses they teach, so one is beginning to see some evidence of change in the South African university English curriculum. Reading lists are gradually being Africanized, though progress to date has been slow and does not in any way compare with the radical revolution in literature teaching that has taken place in West and East Africa. Nevertheless, the change may prove beneficial for South Africans because through such books they will learn more about the rest of their continent instead of focusing almost exclusively on British literary texts, which was the prevailing pedagogical practice in the past.

ND: You have just mentioned how the abolition of the English department on a campus in Nairobi has had an impact on the study of African literatures in other parts of the African continent. Could the development of African literature studies outside Africa also have an impact on the study of African literatures on the continent?

BL: Yes, I think it already has had an influence in a number of ways. For one thing, a good number of African graduate students who came to the United States to study African literature went back home after writing their dissertations and started to teach what they had learned. The same was true of those who had studied in the United Kingdom; scholars such as Eldred Jones, Eustace Palmer, Donatus Nwoga, and Emmanuel Obiechina were among the first to teach courses on African literature in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Ngugi wa Thiong’o began reading Caribbean literature and a wider spectrum of African literature while he was studying at the University of Leeds, and when he returned to teach at the University of Nairobi, he wanted his students to have exposure to these texts. Cross-cultural influences of this kind have had a big impact on literature teaching and research in many parts of Africa.

ND: Given the diversity of the African continent, do you think we can study African literatures adequately from a single national literature perspective?

BL: I think it may be easier to do that than to try to work across national boundaries. Part of the problem today for scholars based in Africa is that much of the literature being produced locally does not move beyond national borders, even if the countries next door use the same language. In East Africa, for instance, you have Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, which once existed as an anglophone confederation, but the movement of books between them is difficult because each of these nations now has its own currency. Africa ought to have an equivalent of the Euro to facilitate commerce within the continent because the way things are presently structured, it can be difficult to import books from other African nations. Indeed, it is difficult enough to buy books in one’s own country. They can be costly, and if teachers try to order books from the West or anywhere else abroad, the expenses multiply. How do you get around such financial and structural problems? The least expensive thing to do if you are writing a thesis is to concentrate on writers in your own country. So it makes sense—fiscal sense—to study a national literature. In the old days, when there were multinational publishers like Heinemann or Oxford or Macmillan operating throughout Africa, it was much easier to get books written by authors from various corners of the continent. Today most of the multinational publishers are no longer on the scene. Heinemann has discontinued its African Writers Series, but it still has a separate office in Nigeria to sell such texts locally; other foreign companies have pulled out of Africa altogether. As a result you no longer have the migration of texts that would make it possible for a student or scholar in one part of Africa to monitor what is going on in literary environments elsewhere.

Economic problems can sometimes bring beneficial changes. In Nigeria, for example, when money was drying up at universities, the campus publications disappeared. There just wasn’t enough cash available to sustain them. What happened then was that one of the national newspapers started a weekly literary supplement that welcomed not only creative contributions, but also literary criticism. A professor could write a scholarly essay on Wolé Soyinka and have it published in a daily paper that went out to the whole nation. That democratized literary discussion in Nigeria because anyone reading that essay could respond to it, and usually somebody did by writing a letter to the editor or contributing a lengthy rejoinder. This was something that wouldn’t have happened in the ivory tower journals. But now you got real critical crossfire. The discussions became so lively and attracted so much attention that other newspapers followed suit by adding cultural pages of their own and hiring journalists whose sole responsibility was to provide copy for this part of the paper. Reporters had to go out and interview writers, cover theatrical events, write book reviews, and drum up contributions from literary critics. This is what the cultural journalists were being paid to do. A new specialty in Nigerian journalism was thus created, and this has become a mainstay in the nation’s leading papers. Writers benefited too by getting national exposure. A good review in a widely read newspaper could increase sales of a particular book. So, in Nigeria, severe financial constraints on universities ultimately and ironically produced greater public awareness of local literature. However, this hasn’t happened everywhere in Africa. You do find this kind of cultural journalism in South Africa where a lot of attention is paid to what writers are doing, but in smaller countries, especially those in which there is less freedom of the press, writers do not get much publicity.

One can study such phenomena if one has access to the Nigerian or South African press, but not many scholars working elsewhere in Africa or even at universities in Europe or America have resources of this kind readily available. It’s easier to work on something closer to home, where the necessary research materials are within reach.

ND: Do you see any relationship between the development of African literature studies as a field of inquiry and the emergence of the area studies programs?

BL: African studies programs got started on a few campuses long ago and were interdisciplinary right from the start. The African Studies Association, which is now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, grew out of these programs and initially was dominated by such disciplines as anthropology, linguistics, history, and political science. Literature eventually earned a niche within the ASA, though it was latecomer within that organization. Today, however, scholars may prefer to attend meetings of their own disciplinary association—the ALA, for example—but some of them continue to participate in ASA conferences, if only to renew acquaintance with some of their old friends from graduate school who work in other disciplines. The ASA was the parent organization from which the ALA split off, but the split has not been divisive or permanent.

Area studies in the United States have stabilized at a certain level. Government money has been going to campuses that offer a substantial number of African studies courses, but the only way a university is eligible to receive that kind of federal funding—soft money, as it’s called—is if it teaches a variety of African languages, the rationale being that graduate students cannot do worthwhile field research unless they know the language of the area in which they intend to work. A researcher has to be reasonably proficient in the local language in order to be able to communicate with the kind of people who will give him the information he needs for his thesis. This is a logical requirement, but it has prevented a campus like UT from getting that kind of support because we don’t offer enough African language instruction. Yoruba is now being taught here, and Arabic has been available for quite some time. We also once had someone teaching Swahili, but that person was not retained and was never replaced. We don’t offer the half-dozen or so languages needed to gain credibility with the US government as a viable candidate for federal support. Campuses such as Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana, Northwestern, Michigan State, Boston, Florida, and UCLA do get such support, and the money enables them to field additional courses, hire faculty, sponsor research, bring in speakers, show films, and promote African cultural activities on campus. The funding also gives programs some leverage when negotiating with traditional departments that may be reluctant or disinterested in hiring an Africanist.

ND: What is your current project? It seems you have been traveling extensively.

BL: I’m writing a biography of the first important black actor, an African American named Ira Aldridge, who was born in New York City in 1807, but had his entire professional career on stage in Europe, first in the British Isles and then later on the European continent. He started performing at age seventeen at a small theater in London and died on tour in Poland at age sixty, so he had a full forty-three years on the stage. What got me interested in him is that he pretended to be an African, someone born and brought up in Senegal. This was a good theatrical ploy because it increased attendance of the theatre and also led spectators to have very low expectations of what might be likely to happen with an African doing Othello or other black roles in melodramas about slavery or in comedies and farces. He eventually developed a substantial Shakespearean repertoire, performing not only classic black roles such as Othello or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus but also whiting up to play Macbeth, Shylock, Lear, and Richard III. Those are the plays he performed all over the British Isles and then took to the Continent.

He had an interesting life and a fascinating career, but I wondered what advantage it gave him to claim to be the son of a Christian Fulani prince from Senegal. I’m struggling to answer that question and also to write about the kind of reception he had. He was performing at a time when the debate about the abolition of slavery was going on in the British Isles. He was performing in Europe when the American Civil War was raging. Racial issues were important during the entire period he was in the public eye. This was also the time when ethnography was being developed as a science—largely a race science based on where the different peoples of the world stood in a graded scale devised by Europeans and Americans. Yet here he was—a black man, purportedly from Africa, who clearly was not a savage. He was interpreting Shakespeare after all, and thrilling audiences wherever he appeared. So his is an interesting life to examine. I have edited a book about him [Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius] that deals with his life and his career as seen by eighteen scholars, some of whom covered his activities in Germany, Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands. I’m also working on a full-scale biography which is getting much too long, so I intend to split it into two volumes, one dealing with his experiences in the British Isles, the other with his performances on the Continent.

A few years ago, a university library in South Africa acquired my entire personal collection of African literature. That was a rather big collection comprised of approximately 13,000 volumes, complete or nearly complete runs of about 300 journals, plus audio and video tapes, photographs, heaps of photocopies, some manuscripts, and lots of ephemera. When that was gone, I could turn my attention in a more single-minded fashion to Ira Aldridge. The loss of that library has simplified my life, but at the same time has complicated it because I now feel a need to travel all over the world searching for documentation on this interesting actor. This past summer I was in Poland, Romania, Turkey and Serbia collecting material on his performances in those countries. Earlier I spent a whole year in the British Isles following his trail and a second year doing the same in German-speaking territories in West and East Europe. I have also visited Sweden, St. Petersburg, the Baltic countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, and Hungary in my quest for new facts about this man. I have yet to go to the Ukraine and Moscow where there is substantial published commentary on him, but I may put that off until next summer. The problem I have now is finding translators to deal with the mass of photocopies I have retrieved. However, I still have time to sort out that problem because all the translated material will be going into volume two. Right now, I am fully engaged in trying to finish volume one.