Pan African Writers’ Association Discusses African Unity

Leaders Must Walk the AU Talk
Public Agenda (Accra)

NEWS
26 November 2007
Posted to the web 26 November 2007
Prof. Femi Osofisan, the Pan African Writers’ Association’s (PAWA) Vice-President for West Africa says there is the need for African leaders to go beyond meetings and summits on the proposed one African state in order to see to its realization in the shortest possible time.

He noted that, “African unity is not about meetings and cocktails by African leaders”; instead it was about taking pragmatic and realistic steps towards cultural, economic and political integration among African states.

The occasion was the 4th PAWA Annual Lecture on the occasion of the celebration of the 15th International African Writers’ Day recently at the Naguib Mahfouz and Wole Soyinka Courtyards, PAWA House, Accra.

Speaking on “Shifting the Gains of the Glass: The African Dictator and the making of African Unity”, Prof. Osofisan, also took on African writers and the media for not researching enough to expose the rot and negatives in the policies of African governments which have been the bane of the African continent.

He therefore encouraged writers that, even in the wake of some African governments prosecuting and harassing some writers for expressing dissenting views on policies, they must muster all the courage they are capable of to continue to expose the negatives in government policies in order to develop the African continent.

The idea of continental African Unity which has continued to offer itself as a viable and feasible possibility, according to Prof. Osofisan, was not because of “random political attempts but rather largely because of the works of literature that the writers produce.” Accordingly, he paid glowing tribute to celebrated African writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Kofi Awoonor, Ama Ataa Aidoo and others.

Prof. Osofisan further noted that, one of the ironies of the history of Africa was that, as soon as the “colonialists retreated, the call for Africa Unity faded to the background”. That, he attributed to the fact that, the major players and combatants in the quest for African unity were sidelined or booted out of power early citing the overthrow of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekou Toure of Guinea as examples.

As far as the realization of African Unity is concerned, according to Prof. Osofisan, the contribution of the African writer cannot be over emphasized because it was the “African writer who contributed most to sustain the vision of the continental unity.” He further observed that, “literature is the glass of history which provides a mirror by which people see themselves” and therefore challenged African writers to make “literary interventions more conscious and more ideologically determined in the heart of African unity”.

In his remarks, Prof. Akilagpa Sawyerr, the Secretary-General of the Association of African Universities (AAU), who chaired he lecture, congratulated African writers on their creative quality of mirroring universal truths by exposing the ills in their respective countries, and further charged the African writer to “create ideas which change other existing ideas”. Such literary works according to him, when well packaged, would bring about the desired change the African continent was crying for.

The Secretary-General of PAWA, Prof. Atukwei Okai, in his remarks hinted that, PAWA was in talks with other institutions to organize a six-month course in playwriting for students and the general public.

He indicated that, the 4th PAWA Annual Lecture was instituted as part of PAWA’s efforts to “sensitize the African people to the basic truism of their common destiny through literature”.

In a reaction to a question on what PAWA intended doing on the infamous statement by the Nobel Laureate in medicine, Dr. George Watson, proclaiming that the African was genetically inferior in intelligence and hence in every other sphere of life to the white man, Dr. Festus Iyayi, the PAWA Programmes Development Advisor debunked Dr. Watson’s assertion saying that, “nothing can prove this rabid racist talk more wrong than what we (Africans) have achieved”.

He therefore advised Africans to see the racist talk as a challenge to Africans to attain higher heights saying “if we can get our acts right and harness our potentials these racist talks would come to naught”.