By Toby Green
It is the richest, oldest, and – many would say – the most prestigious prize in World Literature. On October 5, the Nobel Prize in Literature (worth 11 million Swedish Krone – roughly US$993,000) was awarded to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse for “his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.
Fosse had been spoken about as a contender for the prize for many years and said that it had not come as a complete surprise. He received hundreds of emails and said that he would try to respond to all of them.
Nevertheless, the award was also a reminder that many African contenders were never awarded the coveted prize.
Since its inception, six Africans have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Wole Soyinka from Nigeria was awarded the prize in 1986. The most recent laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah is from Tanzania - born of Yemeni parents.
Before that, JM Coetzee (South Africa), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), and Doris Lessing (Zimbabwe) were white African winners of the prize. Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt also won the award in 1988.
Avid readers of African literature will not have to think far to consider the more African writers ignored for the prize both in the past and the present.
In the independence era of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, three names were standout candidates for the Nobel: Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, and Aimé Césaire (in the diaspora of Martinique).
Achebe was known as the “father of African literature” for his classic novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958.
This became the most-read novel in African literature, depicting how colonial rule brought about the destruction of pre-colonial life among the Igbo of Nigeria; the tragic story of Okonkwo, killed for trying to preserve Igbo customs, was quickly understood as a metaphor for how colonial rule assaulted Africa.
As Okonkwo is buried, the British district commissioner ponders how this vignette might make an interesting chapter - or “a reasonable paragraph, at any rate” - for his book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
After this book – one of the top 100-selling books of all time -- Achebe published several important novels, including No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. Yet, he was never awarded the Nobel prize.
Many said this was because of his essay on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which he concluded that the famous book had been racist.
Senghor became the first president of Senegal after independence. Before that, in the 1940s and 1950s, his fame had been as one of the architects of the négritude movement alongside Aimé Césaire. Negritude was a movement aimed at developing a Black consciousness across Africa and its Diaspora, which could stand as a counterpoint against the violent weight of European colonial power.
Negritude grew alongside the ideals of pan-Africanism and was also an influence in the radical anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon.
However, in the 1960s, some Black outspoken writers criticised it as a movement for being too apologetic. Despite the political and literary significance of the poems and writings of both Césaire and Senghor, neither was ever awarded the Nobel prize or even considered a major candidate for it.
In recent years, the clamour has built around two new candidates for the Nobel Prize: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (of Kenya) and Maryse Condé (of the diaspora in Guadeloupe).
Thiong’o was a perennial betting favourite for the award in the 2000s and 2010s, although less so in recent years, as he seems destined to follow Achebe’s path.
The author of pathbreaking novels of the early independence years, such as A Grain of Wheat, Thiong’o became the most important figure in African anti-colonial literary criticism in the past forty years following his book Decolonizing the Mind.
In the last few years, Maryse Condé has often also been talked about the award. The Guadeloupean novelist taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal during the independence era (1960-72) before eventually teaching literature in a range of Ivy League universities in the US.
Condé is the author of perhaps the best historical novel on precolonial Africa – Ségou – and its follow-up, The Children of Ségou.
Like Thiong’o in the 2000s and early 2010s, Condé has been repeatedly mentioned in association with the prize in the last few years, but to no avail.
Sixty-five years after the inauguration of modern African literature with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the statistics are stark. Six Africans have been awarded the Nobel Prize, of whom only one is a Black African.
The reality is that, as Thiong’o’s many fans now put it, it’s not that Ngũgĩ (or Condé, for that matter) needs the Nobel, but instead that the Nobel needs them.
The author, Toby Green, is a professor of African history at King’s College London.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT Afrika.
