 Africa has been a focus of study at SOAS for the last 100 years, and our expertise is deeply rooted in our multidisciplinary specialties, as well as knowledge of African languages and cultures. SOAS has over 50 academics on campus, working directly on Africa, including the study of African literature. The study of African literature at SOAS was initially championed in the 1950s by Professor Ali Southerna, who pioneered the academic study of Swahili language. Today, SOAS continues to teach courses on contemporary African literature and literatures in African languages. SOAS scholars at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa have been at the forefront of the study of Africa, African orang-creative performance, including poetry and epics. Despite a flourishing of African literature, it is still all too often seen, although incorrectly, as a minority interest in Europe. We see great potential for SOAS to play a leading part in increasing the international understanding, awareness, and recognition that African literature so richly deserves. Therefore, we are very proud to be hosting this African literature conference here today. The conference commemorates the historical first conference on African literature held at Marquerie University in Uganda in 1962. That was a landmark moment in the history of writing from Africa and from leading writers who from then on became leading figures in African literature. The aim of this reunion conference of giants in African literature is to look at the past as well as the future of African literature in African languages in the 21st century. We have a wealth of experts here with us today from SOAS and from other institutions in West and East Africa, which assures me that it will be a very enriching day for everyone. The conference was convened primarily by Mr. Ivor Ajemadua, who is the editor of the book that will be launched here today, The Gods Who Send Us Gifts, An Anthology of African Stories. Together with Ms. Angelica Bashira, who is the manager of the Center of African Studies, with support from Zahida Nabar-Gereka, who is co-founder of Africa and a SOAS research student. We had aimed to bring most of the participants in the 1962 conference back here today, but for one reason or the other, we could not achieve that. However, we are pleased to have with us here today as our keynote speaker, one of the participants in the 1962 conference in person of the Nigerian playwright and poet, Professor Waleeshoyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, the first African to be so honored. We thank him and all our other respected guests for their time and effort to be here with us today. The Center of African Studies, which I share, aims to organize more events and collaboration on African literature here at SOAS, and we hope this conference is just the starting point of more similar events to come. I will therefore want to end my short speech by wishing all of us a very enjoyable conference. I will now hand over to Ivo, who will introduce the program in more details and also introduce our keynote speaker, Ivo. Good morning. Events of great importance are often named in history. As a majority of us are under 55, I presume it is the historical input that brings us together. I think we are many under 55, I guess. I think we are many under 55, I guess. Fortunately, SOAS was born before that history and understand the cause of this celebration. It created space for what Professor Waleeshoyinka said, was their generation's studies plotting headquarters. The quest for Africa's rebirth in the London Collegate System and for even those who were in the midlands, decades ago. It was whilst editing Crucible of the Ages, essays in honor of Waleeshoyinka at 80, published in England here, as essays in honor of Waleeshoyinka at 80 by Ibea Clark Publishers, that the importance of the conference of African writers of English expression dawned on me. Many of the contributors, which included three Nobel laureates, Nadine Godma, being one and her contribution, the last such writing before she passed on, could not help indirect and indirect passing commentaries about what took place when those writers, described by a critic as partly arrogant, met to plot the destiny of African literature. This could be attributed to some of the chance they said in 1962. Christopher Okibo, assured of his own creative powers, said he wrote his poetry in sophistry for poets. We remember Dan Lerical almost rhyming position. A tiger does not proclaim his tiger truth from our guest speaker this morning. After the publication of the book, the idea to have a 50th commemorative anniversary became clear. When we discuss it last year, we're the manager of the Center of African Studies, Angelica Becerra, who is also a Swahili expert. We set word to organize in it. She got approval of the board, whose chair just spoke to us, and ultimately of the director of SOAS, Baroness Amos. It also helped that last year, we worked together in getting Professor Shoyinka to give a centenary lecture at the same venue. So the motivation was also there. However, we did not also just want to remember in fleeting conversation, but to sit, so to speak, at the feet of the few survivors that include one of West Africa's theater experts and participant at that conference. That is Professor James Gapes, who should be here. Somewhere amongst us. Many are gone and will be remembered later on today. Professor JP Clark, now 83, was to be with us, but had to cancel his travel. Or to the few women among the men, such as Francis Adimola, who could not also be here with us. In a confession at a lunch in Lagos a couple of months ago, and looking at Professor Shoyinka straight in the face in wonder of his travel abilities and possible magical powers, JP Clark admitted partly to low energy level for travel. But appreciates very much today's memorial. Secondly, as this present generation adores the contribution of the past, it was taught in order that an anthology of short stories from across the continent be created in appreciation. So that has also been done with Ibea Clark publishers and will have his lunchtime in the course of the day. That is the lunch of the girls who send us gifts from 17 African countries. We do not however begin and end in London. In the middle of November, there will be a similar event in Kigali with the Ministry of Culture and the British Council. On November 22nd, the University of Johannesburg will host a similar event. From Johannesburg, the next destination will probably be Lusaka, and then in Accra in Lagos, if we have the energy. There is something that age alone brings. Choice of words and reaction to words. Last month at the University of Johannesburg, an anxious and seemingly by voice pitch, a desperate student asks a question after an inaugural lecture by Professor Shoyinka. It was to great audience laughter do, and it was, I want to be as great as you to be as successful as you. What do I do? The question also implied on the sources of Professor Shoyinka's generation. Then the audience felt silent and the answer was, I am not so sure if I'm as successful as you think, but yes, I know I am fulfilled. At least I have been able to do some of the things I set out to do on quotes. It was a humbling answer of Polish diplomacy. As it was also the case when he repeatedly says that productivity from his generations to now is the most successful engagement of post-colonial baton relayer. He who is alive has done more than being a source of inspiration. The Ole Shoyinka Foundation in Lagos now partners with the Cedar Institute in Lebanon. And in the last couple of years, many Nigerian writers have benefited from fellowship in Beirut. The foundation recently started a branch in Southern Africa at the University of Johannesburg. That seems to unearth talents in Botswana, Swaziland, Lusuti, and Zambia. The young man who saw the attributive calmness of the tiger 55 years ago knew what he was definitely talking about. Again at the lunch table in Lagos, I remember what Professor Clark said. He who some critics say was the most offensive with choice of language and had written that tongue in cheek, America, the America. In reference to someone he felt had low capacity, he remarked that it is like action amateurs to stage Othello. Now that is also quite diplomatic if you do not know the required talent for such a production. But whatever your reflections are on the events of 55 years ago and the elements of that gathering, we do appreciate your time and interest in this memorial as they who innocently did so in Kampala were never sure as history behaves how prosperity will interpret what pass as ordinary events or even fun. I would like to welcome participants from Ghana, from South Africa, from Kenya, from Uganda and elsewhere who are with us this morning. You will hopefully now join me to welcome Professor Wole Schoenker to give his keynote address. Good morning. Let me just... Ah, yes. I wonder how many of you here were at Makarere? We had a lawyer. He was known as D-Law in Nigeria. And he was very famous. He was a big, he had a big legal mind. His name was Rotimi Williams. But I think of all his legal feats, the most impressive was one case. And he argued the case at the lower courts all the way to the Court of Appeal. And finally, when the case reached the Supreme Court, he then went and argued for the other side at the Supreme Court. I forget which side won. But I noticed that one of the titles of the panel today is something about the antinomies. This is very, very prescient because that was the case of legal and antinomies. And today, I think I'm going to do something similar. I'm going to appear to, but not really, argue the case against a certain position which I took in Makarere. But it's a quote of the legal precedent because everybody does. But in any case, it's quite legitimate and I will prove it as we're going along. At least that I'm not alone in this respect. Needless to say, you can guess what the antinomies are. Deliberately titled is Thinking Negratitude. I'm dedicating it to a little piece to Christopher O'Keebo for the late Christopher O'Keebo. One, we celebrated his 50th, the 50th anniversary of his death quite recently in Ibadan. But then in relation to Makarere conference itself, he was, for me, the most memorable figure of that conference. One, the first reason for a very absurd reason which was that after the conference, we really retired to the hotel, nightclubs, et cetera, after the talk talk like this to relax and so on. And Christopher O'Keebo hijacked a bar girl from the club where we went, took her back to the hotel, named her the muse of the conference, and she stayed there throughout with us with O'Keebo shapering her all over the place to make sure she was not touched. She was like a queen virgin who presided over the conference. Everything was very chaste until O'Keebo was tired, abandoned her, you know, but the rest of us to look after. I think we ended up getting her a room because everybody had swung, we wouldn't even know. She was queen, she was the virgin and so on and so forth. Until the end of the conference, this was the muse. She went back to our bar to work and then came home with us, that used to the hotel, and stayed there supervising, looking after everybody. That was Christopher O'Keebo. Second reason, of course, was that he made that memorable statement that he only wrote poetry for fellow poets as I indicated in the article which was published as a preface to this. I also did my own stuff because that is where Tigertude was born. Now today, let's see if we can approach a kind of synthetic understanding of these two seemingly permanently opposed polarities. I think it's not as stereotypical as you might think. So, of the abundant memory hordes that have survived the plenary 1962 encounter of writers, artists, composers, ideologues, and even state officials of cultural portfolios from across the continent, one declaration continues to dominate wherever I'm concerned, both casual and formal recalls that seem to provoke it all the time. I'm not to devote these few moments to reviewing the context of that statement, its trajectory and implications over the past half century. My statement, in reality, was nothing more than a sort of buzz word, sort of buzz expression as a counter manifesto. So let's see if I can reposition it in relation to the original manifesto itself, which was negritude. And I say I dedicate this intervention to the memory of Christopher Kibo, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I reserve the last reason for this dedication and that is that in a tragic fashion, Christopher's life itself embodied much of the defining complexities of that, the counter manifesto, but let's not repeat that word. You all know it by now. The articulation of the manifesto itself was unfortunately much oversimplified, often self-contradictory, and much of its prospectus was simply unacceptable. Even Amy Césaire, one of the originals, indeed he's considered generally to have coined the term itself and he accepted as much later. He even repudiated some of his earlier statements and claims. We've met quite a few times, mostly in Martinique, revisited and debated the manifesto once or twice, I recall, with a biolaire relay and also sort of French a manuensis of Amy Césaire, French, who's very thin, tell you whose name, for some reason, just vanished when I was writing this up. Then nobody remembers it. His novel was entitled, I forgot. Anyway, I'll get the name before we leave here. I'm sure somebody remembered. And we used to have these discussions with Amy Césaire in Martinique about the excesses, the excessive claims, the hyperboles of negritude, which made it very, very difficult for many of us, especially from the Anglophonie, to accept it as a sort of battle cry for the black race. Discussions also went on with Leopold Sarasengar, who shifted his position also a little, but not quite as convincingly as Amy Césaire. Amy Césaire had going for him, of course, his Marxist position, his greater concern for the class struggle, et cetera, et cetera, which he tried to merge with the, shall we say, the romantic side of negritude. Leopold Sarasengar was a little bit more stubborn, but even he adjusted his position, just as I did also in the Anglophonie, as time went on. And people always, so stick, Tigritu to Wallachianca, but Tigritu was just another word for so many, for similar position vis-a-vis the position of the black man, both historically and, of course, in future projections. Nobody talks about Sembénéus man, who was even far more cost in his position, negritude in Nuri Par, that is, negritude doesn't feed us, whether we're gonna eat negritude, because I sometimes like to retranslate his own expression in the Nigerian, broken English, more colorful, and negritude will go chop. So, well, what came at that particular position from different attitudes? My Mrs. A and I became quite close collaborators. He invited me to return to Martinique, after our initial encounter, and made me take over a young theater company called Theatres de la Soif Nouvelle. And his purpose was to actually activate, actualize, negritude on the stage. He was very distressed by the exceeding Frenchification of the Martinique sensibilities, especially in the arts, and on theater. The theater company saw theater only from the very French and classic point of view. And Mrs. A was determined to fragment it, just recompose it entirely. For him, negritude in Martinique was like franitude, and he found it very distressing. And that was, he really was negritude constantly in action. However, all these preliminaries bring us to a number of yet unresolved questions. The answers to those questions, which were quite as you go along, every bit as discomforting, as the various circumstances that provoke the questions in the first place. After the chistening lessons of Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and of course Rwanda, yes, Rwanda most especially, I think it's only natural that we engage in a rigorous reconsideration of prior valuations of those virtues that were supposed to be pressed into service as the foundation of the cultural philosophy of race recovery and repositioning and its offshoots and indeed precedence that is of negritude. That exercise enables us at least to recall that even while locating the birth of negritude in a precise decade, even down to its year of birth, that we demystify any claims made for its terms, for it in terms of precedence. Negritude remains a project of multiple reincarnations of the response of the black race to external impulses, negative impulses before, but also as parent, but it's negative as parent to other conceptualizations. Thus, the African personality, authenticity, no more Muntu, the African Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, Ujama, once I even encountered Afritude, that didn't last very long. And there's also Kwanzaa in the States, the comparatively young festival that was instituted in the United States. Kwanzaa also is simply negritude, great current and of course, great big business with increasingly, just like Christmas for Christians. Finally, we must do more than pay lip service to the sociocultural rallying label that is most current, that being Ubuntu. Perhaps some of you have listened or too or watched Desmond Tutu waxing passionately on that bundle of African ethical practices, Ubuntu, an essence of social harmonization that is held to be distinctly African and from whose ethical principles and authority, even the project of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is held to have emerged. If we can gingerly pick our way through a bewildering mosaic of incompatible entities that even lack a symbolic cohesion in their rending, we find ourselves, we must be counted in a vast wilderness, not today in that paradise so ardently projected by the earliest precursors of negritude, especially in romantic recollection. Whether it is County Collins, land of strong bronze thighs, or Biragodiop's breaths, or Phyllis Wheatley's revisionist poetry, or the sonorous lines of collective loss and longing, which we find in Langston Hughes's The Negro Speaks Rivers, one experiences in real life a severe disjunct that is near tantamount to repudiation, if not wholesome betrayal, of those to whom the summative image of a continent often appears to be a resolute retreat from the peripheries of a possible African ideal, even in imagination. The resonant voice of one of the youngest of our ancestral voices, the late Maya Angelou, but her affirmative burst remains buffeted by shrapnels from the winds of African reality. I quote, out of the hearts of history's shame, I rise up from a past that's rooted in pain, I rise, I'm a black ocean leaping and wide, welling and swelling, I bear in the tide. How has this magnificent imagery fared in the active present? Where has this hope gone that aligned the Renaissance vision to suck fundamental ancestral summons again, into a daybreak that's wondrously clear, I rise, bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave? Open the time capsule of the African continent on the global template of race relations today. The trans-Saharan and then the trans-Atlantic slave trade with full African collaboration in both markets. An era of violent religious conversions of the indigens of the continent, demanding repudiation of their spiritual relations with phenomena. Kusmeh Sambani, author of the anti-negritute Putdown, Negritute Nenuri Pa, nonetheless proceeded to make the film Cheddar, a factual historical narrative of brutal conversions by Islamic overlords. The film that film was interdicted by Senghor out of concern, but it might rupture the delicate religious harmony that existed in that largely Muslim nation, Senegal, even though it was made with funds, especially because it was made with funds from the government. Christian conversion differed only in method, not in degree of violation. The same record of forced displacements, disruptions of antecedent economic practices, cultural force feeding, the cruelties of mandatory quarter returns in farm produce and ivory on pain of severed hands, what we refer to as a Belgian model. These are crucial milestones of collective memory, whose evocation becomes a duty for any African with a conscience and a sensitivity to the taunt of history's habit of repetition. Because today, when we look around, what do we encounter? A new wave of religious stormtroopers, laying claim to a divine mandate, yet again, strike at the heart of a continent, yet in recuperation from this cited, dismal passage of history. Al-Shabaab, Al-Saddin, Boko Haram, and all the other comers on the mission of so-called renewal. Shall we next expect a revivalist visitation of the European slavers, cultural and commercial imperators, bent on completion of their interrupted mission of the total subjugation of a continent? Picture a rampage of a Joseph Cornese revivalism traversing Africa on the divine boots of the Lord's Resistance Army, laden with war trophies, slick noses, shaved lips and severed hands. African humanism enjoins a hospitable face turned to strangers. Where there is no reciprocity, however, where such intruders are resolved to recreate African humanity in their own image, it is surely time for some radical, even brutal thinking. Now, Senghor, no emissary there, ever heard the name Boko Haram or Daesh any more than did County Collin, Imamo Baraka, Birago Diop, Etienne Leroy, Nicolas Guillen, Tierno Boca, the Muslim sage of Bandi Agara in Mali did preach against dogmatism. But not even he appeared to have predicted the Philistine affliction known as Answerdin, his own countryman, the destroyer of the Timbuktu learning heritage, which for us is an embodiment of negritude, wisdom, race, affirmation and exemplar of the humanism that is exalted by his own religious adhesion in tune with the catechism of negritude. None of the Ifa priests of the Yoruba ever defined the advent of a monstrosity named Sonia Bacha, who sometimes seemed infinitely angelic beside the sadism of Shekal and his elusive homicidal clones. The religious depredations on nations like Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, Kenya, Mauritania and others constitute an affront to the very existential assertion of black African cultures and all their derivatives, including both the written and orally transmitted findings of humanity under whatever retention strategies such as the traditions of the griot, for instance. Similarly, however named in aggregation, be it as negritude or whatever, responsibility to race, just in case pride of race is considered extravagant, at least responsibility to race, the natural asset of belonging, however we define it, it must require an unambiguous defense of the products of the community, including the non-tangible. Naming, the very act of naming, plays of course an insidious role in galvanizing resistance to the untenable and all weaponry, psychological, material, even purely theoretical, come into play, especially in the face of a potential repeat of a repudiated phase of history from which the very concept of reparations has been tabled. Negritude, however, as named did achieve preeminence in the field as if in anticipation of the later strategies of race affirmation which we've named earlier, with a creative framework for the recapture of minds that are already warped by either alien ideology, secular or theocratic. Today, beyond negritude, we have to recognize that it is time to stop playing footsie with the perpetuators of the culture of disdain. The mind, however, is the ultimate destination, that fragile instrument that is catered for today, thank goodness, even by the developed agencies of human advance known as technology, spearheaded these days by that promiscuous facilitator known as Intel, Internet, the virtual classroom that none of the midwives of negritude ever dreamt of in their life. Negritude in time of aggressive transformation that is negritude by whatever name, even where univoked is losing the battle for minds to atavistic forces, which are enthralled to extremist, irrational and anti-human abstractions, largely concocted from theologies. Like their forebears, they connive to resurrect the myth of an African continent as a void that requires reoccupation preferably by violence. Imperfect was negritude, but no more so than any other secular or theocratic manifesto, ideology or theology. Some of whose claims, from whose claimed scriptural mandates proved to be merely time bound, historical excursions into the field of contestation, between what? Between power and freedom, between dogma and exploration, between dictatorship and submission. These are the continuing impositions of choice that this continent faces. None of the negritude stalwarts could have dreamt the plague of the proliferation of child soldiers inducted by desecration of traditional rituals into the grossest profanities of the human condition. None, I insist, could have envisaged the abduction of nearly 300 school pupils for sexual slavery in the name of any known or unknown deity. None ever dreamt of Joseph Coney, of the Lord's Resistance Army. East Africa's Christian compliment of Boko Haram's Yusuf Muhammad or the self-proliferating Shekau, all masters of youth abduction, mass infanticide. Yusuf Coney still roams the forests uncannily eluding his hunters time and time again for constant in his dedication to Christ the Savior in between slicing off the lips of captives or followers considered tepid in their responses to his divine calling. Negritude has never held a knife to the throat of any of thus designated unbelievers and bloated before video cameras, before the climactic decapitation. Negritude has never destroyed libraries, contemporary oation. On the contrary, the retrieval and preservation of the African horde of knowledge, those material precipitates of the human imagination has been its insistent raison d'etre. Whether achieved or not, Negritude cannot be held to impede universal enlightenment in its advocacy of community founded on ancestral wisdom has never promulgated a jihad or a crusade in the name of any deity. So perhaps, Negritude may be grasped as an aggregate or synthesis of what it is not. No matter, I'm persuaded that it is time to unfurl that very diner that does not advocate enslavement or massacres as a means to human development in its continuing quest for the exploration of phenomena and the elevation of homo sapiens. Yes indeed, I do agree with the West Indian critic, Arnold Gibbons, when he wrote, the humanist tradition which predated the coming of the Europeans to Africa should be part of the education of contemporary blacks wherever there might be. That may be our mission for the future. Yes, the continent's future generations do need re-arming right from infancy so that their first words on sensing this world of ours in between bouts of puking do not turn out to be the mantra from that famous play to stop the world I want to get off. It's once again time, I believe, for inward stock-taking and repositioning of both fully embraced and gingerly approached concepts. The race armory needs to be revisited. It's contents rifled, burnished, and honed to an enabling intellectual and cultural counter-force. Yes, if you wish, call it an attitude by name or any other name. If that much touted African humanism turns out to be no more than a mere feat of conjecture or desire, a collective wish fulfillment, then perhaps it is time to invent it, render it accessible and combative, affronted as we are today by remorseless forces arranged yet again against our humanity resurrecting the lamentable history of disdain. To sum up, the lessons of Macerire were not learned in Macerire. Macerire, unwittingly, however, laid the foundations for the grand intellectual discourse raised questions that events around us have begun to clarify, if not exactly, resolve. Tigreatude or negritude? Well, wasn't Sango himself the great apostle of synthesis? In case nobody has noticed, the awe in that polarized phrasing has long given place to end. And to any doubters, I call on the spirit of Christopher O'Keebo, poet and warrior, and unarguable embodiment of that fusion to witness. On the theoretical field, I can assure you that Sango and I, even Sango and I, found common ground and reiterated this accommodation even during his 90th birthday celebration in Paris, albeit the effects of the age and even the ability to articulate intervene. But nonetheless, it was interesting we found common ground between the two. This commemoration is, in my personal perspective, a celebration of that earliest expression of both the diversity and the harmonization across a continent of varied historic formulations and cultural actualities. In short, an argument was generated in Kampala. 55 years later, perhaps it is time to reignite it, update it, but not along the principle of polarization. On the contrary, it's an opportunity to nudge it along towards a creative harmonization. Thank you very much.