BUKENYA: What would José do if he won a Sh10 million prize?

Prof Austin Bukenya: Do you remember the language lessons on “if” or conditional clauses? PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • This Creole title, and the resumé of the novel, also resonated with me. ‘Creole’ means hybrid or “mixed-race”, which Agualusa, like many of my own relatives, obviously is.
  • The book apparently tackles the challenges of identity that this reality of existence poses. More importantly, it reminded me of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s observation that we are all cultural hybrids (métis culturels, in his own words).

Do you remember the language lessons on “if” or conditional clauses? The teachers and books tell us about likely or possible conditions, unfulfilled conditions and unlikely or improbable conditions. What would you do if you were President of Kenya for a week?

That is a pretty improbable condition, although I remember once writing a piece for young readers about what I would do if I were President for a week. But the most memorable answer to that improbable condition was from a man who was asked what he would do if he were President for a day. His reply was, “Worry.”

Anyway, a common improbable condition we use in teaching the “if” clauses is having Sh1 million. What would you do if you had Sh1 million today? In the hunger-ravaged situations of late morning classrooms, the commonest answer is probably, “I would buy pyramids of maandazi and distribute them to my friends.”

Anyway, maandazi or pyramids, our José is way past the improbable condition. He actually has more than Sh1 million. My estimate is that he has close to Sh10 million, yes, Sh10 million in his pocket. What is more, Bwana José knows exactly what to do with his millions.

No, he is not going to buy star strikers for his football team, as his most famous namesake in the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world, José Mourinho, would do.

Our new multi-millionaire friend is José Eduardo Agualusa, an Angolan novelist who won this year’s International Dublin Literary Award, for his book, A General Theory of Oblivion. The prize is worth a whopping €100,000, (about £88,000). Now, that is enough to make you sit up and listen, even if you are not a literary junkie or galley slave, like some of us.

But several other things got me excited about Agualusa’s triumph. One was the discovery of yet another African writer about whom I had not heard before. It was like a star-gazing astronomer suddenly espying a new planet in the skies. Yet José Agualusa has been around, and making an impact, for quite some time. I learnt that he had won a smaller prize, worth €10,000, ten years ago, for his novel, A Book of Chameleons, and that his first novel was called Creole.

This Creole title, and the resumé of the novel, also resonated with me. ‘Creole’ means hybrid or “mixed-race”, which Agualusa, like many of my own relatives, obviously is. The book apparently tackles the challenges of identity that this reality of existence poses. More importantly, it reminded me of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s observation that we are all cultural hybrids (métis culturels, in his own words).

This has been disputed by many, especially Anglophone, Africans, who try to pin it exclusively onto the Francophone and Lusophone communities, where the policies of cultural assimilation were actively pursued by the colonists. But I am yet to come across a convincing and irrefutable argument proving that Anglophone post-colonial Africans are less hybrid or even mélange (mixture) than their counterparts elsewhere.  Maybe we should ask Barack Obama to say something about this.

Anyway, the encounter with José Agualusa’s work also aroused in me tender and moving memories of the lively work of Portuguese-speaking Africans to which we were introduced, in translation, in our youthful days. Most of the Portuguese-occupied African territories — Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique — remained under colonial rule well into the 1970s. Most of the literary work we got from there, like Luis Honwana’s short stories in We Killed Mangy Dog and the anthologised verse of poets like Agostinho Neto, were about experiences of life under colonialism and the struggle against the yoke. 

Our favourite reading was the anthology, When Bullets Begin to Flower, sampling the verse of the Lusophone Africans’ anti-colonial struggle in its advanced stages. This document, compiled by Margaret Dickinson, and eventually translated into Kiswahili by Paul Sozigwa as Risasi Zianzapo Kuchanua, was strictly required reading for us literati.

We might not have gone to fight in Msumbiji (Mozambique) like some of our colleagues did. But we struggled against the “abysmal ignorance” of relevant issues that I once heard Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of FRELIMO, say was the worst weakness of the average university student. Mondlane, a don-turned-freedom fighter, used to visit us and lecture to us frequently at the University in Dar. I just wonder if current students are less “abysmally ignorant” of the issues in their societies than we were.

Anyway, one of our favourite pieces in Bullets, was “Letter From a Contract Labourer”, a dramatic monologue of a worker on a colonial shamba who wants to write a love letter to his beloved. As it turns out, the worker is illiterate, just like his girlfriend. I remember Kamau Kanyanga, in his student days, giving a tellingly powerful stage rendition of this piece at the Education Theatre Two of UoN, under the direction of John Ruganda.

Anyway, José Agualusa’s winning novel, A General Theory of Oblivion, is a kind of sequel to the anti-colonial struggle. It is the story of Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese settler woman, who walls herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence, and stays there for nearly 30 years. The author says he made up the story, but real life parallels have been suggested in Mozambique, where Agualusa spends most of his time these days.

This brings us to what the winning author wants to do with the big money he has won. He is building a library on a Mozambican island in the Indian Ocean. There he will place his own book collection and any other acquisitions, and invite all of us avid readers to come, see and read. Is that not the kind of person we would like to see winning more and more literary prizes?

It reminds me of my yet-to-be reading room in Machakos. It will not wait until I, too, win the big one.

 

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa. [email protected]