Welcome to the University of Texas at Austin, to our Symposium on Contemporary South African Literature and the Inaugural Conference of the African Literature Association. It is my pleasant duty to welcome you on behalf of our Working Committee and our numerous sponsoring bodies, particularly the African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center. I hope you will have a pleasant stay, and that you will forgive any defects in the arrangements.

I would especially welcome our Speakers and Respondents; many of them agreed to come here at considerable sacrifice, and we are deeply grateful to them.

The subject of African oral literature is so vast that it would require more than an hour to present it in an understandable way, particularly to people for whom some of its dimensions may be new or completely unknown. Southern African oral literature is even more difficult to handle because there is not one southern African oral literature, there are several. These are divided not by languages, forms, or types, but rather by geography and history. The Sotho-speaking peoples, for instance, include the Kgatlas, the Ngwatos, the Pedis, and various other subgroups. Sotho literature does not necessarily follow the history of the Sotho nation, because there are several Sotho peoples distributed in different areas who are producing their own unique literatures. So in discussing the oral literature of southern Africa, we are actually discussing several literatures created by several peoples. If you happen to know the literature of one Sotho group, you are not necessarily versed in Sotho literature. You are versed only in the Sotho literature of a particular region. This is very important to understand.

I will not say much about autobiography in South Africa because it’s a given. It’s the kind of thing that has emerged naturally from South African conditions, and in fact, we are seeing it emerge all over Africa as a literature of self-definition. It has become a peculiar genre in Africa, a genre that depicts the very social conditions that have given rise to it.

My remarks this morning will be concerned mostly with the novel. This is a more problematic genre in South Africa than in other parts of Africa, and we may need a long time to debate and discuss the issues surrounding it.

Before I go on, however, I would like to add to what Mazisi said this morning, even though it is not connected with my talk. I want to say this by way of preface. Since we are talking about South Africa, we need to know that we are talking about African people rather than about ethnic groups, rather than about “tribes.”

The only was I can describe black South African writing is to say it’s a very tragic thing in its own way because of what is happening in South Africa. The writing seems to have no continuity; usually when we talk about black South African writing, we start around the sixties, but I think it started long before then. We have people writing in Setswana, Sevenda, Shangaan, Xhosa, and many other indigenous languages, and I’m sure that up to now we still aren’t fully aware of the wealth of literature written in those languages.

When I started writing, it was as if there had never been writers before in my country. By the time I learned to write, many people—Zeke, Kgositsile, Mazisi Kunene, Dennis Brutus—had left the country and were living in exile.

I would like to start talking by reading. Yesterday on this campus, the campus of the University of Texas, as incongruous as that might seem, we had a Sharpeville rally. Some people that spoke made a lot of sense; I suppose some people that came also, perhaps, needed to hear what some of those people said. Among those who spoke was a brother I respect highly—or I should say, comrade, because brother contains no commitment—Cecil Abrahams. And this poem is called “For Cecil Abrahams.” It starts out with an epigram from David Diop: “With you I have refound the memory of my blood/ and necklaces of laughter around my days.”

Dr. Ezekiel Mphahlele spoke at the end of the session yesterday, and since there is considerable misunderstanding about at least one of the points he made, he has offered to make a clarification this morning.

Yesterday I got the impression that people left the meeting under the impression that I was trying to be an iconoclast and trying to bust things up. I am always considered to be a bull in a china shop. But far be it from me to want to bust people’s games up. Just before I spoke, my longstanding friend from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Donatus Nwoga, said the same things in so many words, expressing a wish that he could be back home.

As we come to the end of the Symposium, it is my pleasant duty to thank all those who have made this occasion and these events possible. I must, of course, single out first of all the writers who consented to speak on the different panels, and then those who responded to them. I think the consensus of opinion is that all of the sessions have been exciting, and some have been enormously exciting and have made this Conference worthwhile.

I must also, of course, thank the people who ran the local Working Committee.

I would like to take the liberty of responding to a “statement” which appeared at the end of Issue, number 4 [Winter 1975] which was recently sent to the ASA membership. Since the authors have often sought to keep “politics” out of the Association I was rather surprised to see them taken by a “matter of conscience” which is perhaps one of the most politically charged issues of the day. In any case I was annoyed with the inference that the fight against colonialism, racism, apartheid, and fascism was a “partisan urge” while attributing only the noblest sentiments to their “statement”.

It was particularly ironic for the authors to note that they will withdraw their “support” from nationalist organizations and governments which identify Zionism as a form of racism since they stood against a resolution raised and passed in the 1973 ASA meetings calling upon the United States government to recognize the Republic of Guinea Bissau.