Dr Ilieva
22 November 1998
Nairobi — In the customary date of September 30, the jury of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa announced its judgment for 1998.
The Award winner is The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider's View by Peter Adwok Nyaba of Sudan. Paulin Hountondji, from Benin, is the author of Combat pour le sens: Un itineraire Africain, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (Malawi) of The Manufacturing African Studies and Crises. The two books were jointly awarded special commendation.
Isabel Apawo Phiri (Malawi) is the writer of Women, Presbyterianism and Patriarchy: Religious Experiences of Chewa Women in Central Malawi, which was singled out for Honourable Mention.
There is a special message in this year's composite choice of the jury. It singularly celebrates individual's honesty, as well as consistency and excellence in scholarship at a time when these values, more than ever before, determine the possibility for a decisive intellectual intervention in proving the African condition.
The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider's View was cited as a "pioneering text, the most important book to have appeared to date about the struggle for African national liberation in the Sudan. It is a first-class inside story of the history of the civil war of the past 15 years, told with passion and commitment. Its stature, ringing significance and contribution to knowledge make it a powerful and unique book."
The testimony takes off, as it were, from the monumental volume of essays, Short-cut to decay: The case of the Sudan (1994), edited by Sharif Harir and Terje Tvedt. The latter examined the processes of decay unfolding in the Sudan from economic, historical, political and sociological viewpoints. It sought the underlying causes of the looming national disintegration in the Sudan in the prolonged misguided attempts to make the Sudan an "appendage" of Islam, Arabism or Africanism.
The Sudanese elites from both the so-called North and South were seen as having failed to appreciate, or even accept, the rich diversity on the Sudan. The latest Islamicist takeover was interpreted as yet one "dissipating attempt by a sector of this elite to recycle the past." The collective text reverberated with the warning: "Unless this vicious cycle is broken the prospects for the Sudan are bleak."
Nyaba probes into these prospects further, and his narrative builds into a startling declaration of their present-day grimness. He focuses exclusively on the New Civil War (1983-1997) which, as the earlier book predicted, may make the damage done during the First Civil War (1955- 1972) pale into insignificance.
Nyaba's honesty manifests itself above all in his going beyond the conventional treatment of the Sudanese problem from a South versus North perspective. He traces the splits and divisions among the Southern Sudanese political leadership, the growing personality cults and autocratic tendencies within it, and relates these to the stagnation of the liberation struggle.
The Noma Award jury sensitively prescribed that, "within Africa, this neglected story and the author's exposition of the crisis should be widely heard and understood".
Combat pour le sens: un itineraire Africain was described by the jury as "remarkable and unprecedented: An account of the development of an African intellectual, whose idea of being an African is central to his vision." Hountondji is, of course, the eminent scholar, a long-serving head of the philosophical section of Presence Africaine, who, together with such colleagues as M. Towa of Cameroon, and H. Odera Oruka of Kenya, in the late 1970s-1980s rejected the then influential concept of "African Philosophy." They castigated its proponents for producing "ethnophical patterns and meant to perform protective functions.
The present book, which is partly an intellectual autobiography, responds to the critiques of its predecessor, Sur la "philophie Africaine" critique de I'ethnophilosophie, written 20 years earlier, and sheds new light on the famous debate.
Manufacturing African Studies and Crises is Zeleza's second association with the Noma Award. In 1994, his A Modern Economic History of Africa Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century became the Award-winning title. Through this new book, Zeleza has provided a broad preliminary context for the second volume, which has already been completed and sent to press. In the opinion of the jury, the work is an "important contribution to African intellectual history... a rebuttal of interpretations and attitudes of scholars - mainly, though not wholly, outside Africa - who have appropriated for themselves the study of Africa."
We should, however, not be oblivious of the danger involved in categorising academics into insiders and outsiders. In scholarship, this most internalisation and collective of enterprises, there can be no "expatriates." It is noteworthy that Zeleza's concern about the fate of African studies is actually shared by non-African scholars devoted to the continent.
With Women, Presbyterianism and Patriarchy: Religious Experiences of Chewa Women in Central Malawi, Phiri has demonstrated that a pertinently chosen problem of study is what distinguishes useful gender research from the fashionable extrapolation of western feminist slogans to Africa.
The four 1998 Noma authors, with their brilliant pieces of writing, are throwing a life-line to those African intellectuals who have faltered in their mission and succumbed to ambiguous despair.
The Noma Award for publishing in Africa was established in 1979 as an annual prize for an outstanding new book from Africa. It is open to authors who are indigenous to Africa, and restricted to works that have been locally published.
Eligible entries may belong to any of the three categories: Scholarly or academic; books for children; and literature and creative writing. They can be written both in African and European languages. Besides the winning titles, books are selected for Special Commendation and/or Honourable Mention.
The Award was founded by Soichi Noma, who was the president of Kodansha Ltd, a renowned Japanese publishing house. Mr Noma's life was dedicated to the promotion of books and readership in developing in countries. The Managing Committee of the Noma Award also acts as its jury. Its members are African scholars and book experts, as well as representatives of the international publishing community.
The Sierra Leonean scholar, Eldred Durosimi Jones, served as the chairman for the first ten years. His organisational talent and refined academic and literary taste helped to solidify the Award into an institution, and to chart a lasting direction for its operation. He was succeeded by professor Abiola Irele of Nigeria, who chaired the jury from 1991 to 1994. The present chairman is the Tanzanian Walter Bgoya, a distinguished and widely respected publisher.
Over one hundred entries are presented for consideration by publishers from the entire continent each year.
The first recipient of the Noma Award, in 1980, was Mariama Ba of Senegal, for her novel Une si longue letre, later translated into English as So Long a Letter. In 1984, the Award was bestowed on Kenyan Gakaara wa Wanjau for his Gikuyu language Mwandiki wa Mau Mau Ithaamirio-ini (Mau Mau Author in Detention). He shared it with Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele of South Africa, the authors of Fools and Other Stories.
Within the 19 years of its existence, the Noma Award has indisputably become the major book prize in Africa. It owes its high reputation to the impartiality and enlightenment with which books are selected for the crowning glory, and to the inspiration it has provided for African publishing.
Dr Ilieva teaches literature at Egerton University
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