Okello Ogwang & Susan Kiguli
16 March 2008
Nobel Prize winner in literature, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, commonly known as Sir Vidia, in company of his wife Lady Naipaul, has returned to Uganda since he was last here in 1966.
He is conducting research on traditional religion for a book in the offing. He has also returned to Uganda courtesy of the High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago, Mr Patrick Edwards.
Who then, some will ask, is this Sir Vidia? This question, we think, is neither mistaken nor misplaced. It may also easily generate several answers. For one though, it may well underscore the amount of premium Ugandans place on literature.
Ugandans are not strangers to the fact that sometime back, and even now, what was called bookshops were no more than stationery stores, and that some bookshops were turned into ice cream parlours.
In relation to this, the question may as well tell of the reading culture in this country. Be that as it may, we think the visit of Sir Vidia will give inspiration to young writers and encourage them to cultivate their talent.
Writing about a man so widely written about, a man with the highest honour one can receive in his craft, is our challenge here. It puts us in an awkward if pleasantly embarrassing situation of what one character in Sir Vidia's Miguel Street keeps saying he was doing, that is, "making a thing without a name".
But at any rate our author is greater than that pedestrian philosopher, because he is currently the only Nobel laureate who has also been knighted by the Queen of England, to the best of our knowledge.
Sir Vidia last came to Uganda as a Creative Writing Fellow in 1966 in the Department of English, now Department of Literature, Makerere University.
At that time Makerere, a constituent college of the University of East Africa, had a population of less than 5,000 students. Today, its student population stands slightly over 30,000. By that time, Sir Vidia had already published five works: The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, The Suffrage of Elvira, A House for Mr Biswas and Mr Stone and the Knights Companion. Many Ugandan students of literature are of course familiar with Miguel Street which has for long been on our ordinary level literature syllabus.
In a sense one may rightly say that Sir Vidia's life and his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, draw from his triple heritage, to borrow the phrase quite often used by Prof. Ali Mazrui.
One node is India, his ancestral land from where his grandfather and many others migrated to the Caribbean in the late 19th Century. Later, Sir Vidia himself was to travel to India out of which he wrote, first, An Area of Darkness and, subsequently, India, a Wounded Civilization.
The second node is the Caribbean island of Trinidad where the writer was born and raised, and which has been the subject of many of his writings like The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, The Loss of El Dorado and Guerrillas. The third node is the United Kingdom where he studied, settled and has lived. All these besides his travels and writings on, say, Africa and the Middle East.
It is on account of these diverse experiences that, when in 2001 the Swedish Academy awarded Sir Vidia the Nobel Prize for Literature, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, aptly said to him in his presentation speech: "Sir Vidia, your life as a writer calls to mind what Alfred Nobel said of himself: 'My homeland is where I work, and I work everywhere'".
In this more gracious manner of stating the issue Horace Engdahl was underscoring not so much an imagined unbounded universality of writers and artists, but also their miscellaneous, if peripatetic individual as much as social dispositions. He was also emphasising what metaphorically may be dubbed as typically gypsy or nomadic and wandering mode of life. It is little wonder that Sir Vidia too has been referred in some circles as footloose, in the best sense of the word.
It is a pleasant coincidence that Sir Vidia's current visit to Uganda comes at the moment when the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Literature is being announced in Kampala, specifically at Makerere University. Four decades back, African literature was just beginning to buoy itself into international limelight, albeit under diverse constraints.
Sure enough, constraints are still there, and will continue to exist. Nonetheless this does not cloud the clear fact that so much has been achieved during this period, and is cause for reasonable pride. Africa for instance now has harvested four Nobel prizes in literature through Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Nadine Gordimer and J.M.
Coetzee (South Africa). One can be sure that this is just the beginning. It is in this regard that we would like to not so much compare Sir Vidia's works with those of Africa; rather, it is to seek a common thread that links writers and artists across time and space, that is, their concern with the fate and future of humanity. It is to decipher their search and reflections on the intricate balance between individual freedom and creativity, and social justice.
In this sense we would like to think that his work challenges each of us to have courage enough to be an individual. And that when one finds that, then one has found the ability to leave vivid footprints on the walkways of history.
In our meeting with Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul, one thing struck us almost immediately: that is his photographic memory, gracefulness and ease with which he interacts with his guests on a more or less one to one basis. Also, we would like to think that reading the books and meeting the man, one cannot help but note that notwithstanding the distinction between the two, there is something of the books in the man, as there is some of this man is in his books.
On Thursday, March 20, Makerere University's Department of Literature, in conjunction with the Office of the Vice Chancellor, will be honoured to host Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul to a public dialogue with the university community.
Dr Ogwang and Dr Kiguli are academic staff, Department of Literature, Makerere University
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