The Links that Bind Us

My wife and I are overwhelmed by the warmth with which we have been received by the people of Alma Ata, this famed father of luscious apples, in the heart of Kazakhstan. Even the weather has been smiling: the sunshine on green trees and grass along the wide spacious city avenues, and of course the snow on Tien Shan mountains which, I am told, once formed a veritable fortress for those Kazakhs fighting against Ghengis Khan and other foreign invaders in earlier times and later, in the nineteenth century, against tsarist feudalism and oppression. I hope that you will one day visit Kenya and enjoy similar sunshine in a land of green leaves and many coloured flowers and, of course, the permanent snow on Mount Kenya. This and the Nyandarwa mountain ridges were once a refuge for those Kenyans fighting against the British colonial occupation of our country.

I feel touched that my small efforts to sing about those patriots and their epic struggle have been honoured by this movement of African and Asian writers in the form of the Lotus Award. I feel proud to be in the company of such distinguished previous winners as Alex La Guma, Marcellino Dos Santos, Hiroshi Noma, Sonomyn Udval, Sembene Ousmane, and Agostinho Neto. I take this not as a personal honour but as a tribute to the creative efforts of writers in East Africa.

Equally important, especially in connection with the aims of this movement, the award to the songs that we have sung is a recognition of the basic and enduring links which bind the peoples of Africa and Asia, and it is only appropriate that this year’s award is being given simultaneously to Kateb Yacine from Algeria and Thu Bon from South Vietnam.

Friends, I will now seek your indulgence and for a few minutes echo the thoughts and words of the great genius of Pan-Africanism, W.E.B. Dubois, by posing the question he once raised, though in a slightly differing context, in his book Dusk of Dawn: What are the links that bind us?

The ties of geography are easier to see. Africa and Asia, two great continents, shake hands across the Suez Canal.