 I'm very, very pleased to introduce the speakers on this panel. As you can see, the topic will be mainly translation and African languages. To my far left, Quagio Oseinyame, he's not on the program, but he has joined us last minute, who will introduce his paper himself, Martin Owen who will also speak on behalf of Mr. Hassan Dahil Ismail Oseinyame, whose paper is called Form and Feeling in Translating Somali Poetry, Sophie Alal, who will speak about reclaiming tongues. Then Dr. Wangui Wa Goro, I don't think I need to introduce her, she's already spoken in the morning, but to my knowledge she's one of the most famous translators from African languages, so I'm very pleased to introduce her on this panel. Then we have Mr. Richard Odwar, who is himself a writer, by the way best regards from Jeff Reimann, who is very sorry that he cannot be here, so I thought I would tell you about that. And then the discussant is Dr. Shaggy Theora. Okay, so I would like to ask the speakers to speak for about 10 maximum 15 minutes. If you can target at 12, I think it will be perfect. From this position I cannot really waive at you much for if you go to speak at the lectern, so please just time keep the time as strictly as possible. Richard, would you like to be the first speaker? Hello everyone, I'm Richard, Richard Theora from Jelada Africa, from Nairobi, so I'm going to talk about Jelada's translation work and I'm going to talk about the possibilities for translations in the digital age. So we've been given 10 to 12 minutes, I'm going to try to fix. We had been told it's 15, we were told before, it will be 15 but I'll fix everything within 10 minutes. So a few weeks ago Google launched Bluetooth earbuds called the Pixel Buds and the developers announced that the technology had the ability of translating over 40 languages simultaneously from one earphone to another that if one that I could speak in one language and 40 different people speaking different languages could comprehend what I was saying in their language. Another company called Bragy released their own version called Dash Pro Earbuds which they branded as true wireless intelligent earphones. Now this application had the ability to translate over 40 languages simultaneously. There's another application called Microsoft Sky Translator which is started to have the ability to translate into 50 languages. Now when we talk about translations in relations to technology these are the applications that come to mind and for those who have been the netizens those who use internet all the time Google Translate is one of those technologies that has become part of our everyday trying to understand texts that you find either in emails that are not your language. Now what the recurring characteristics in these technologies is that they are utilizing developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence and that they seek to break the barriers between languages, the barriers between people and the barriers between translating cultures. Now one of the problems with these applications is that they remove speech from the process of communication and to achieve a simultaneous literal translation from one language to another and there are commentators who have likened these technologies to the bubblefish and the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy in which you know the creature there that secretes simultaneous like secretion into the ear canals and then the people in that world are supposed to understand what everybody means without going through different languages and the ability of translation technologies to translate meaning was fast put to test during the early days of computational linguistics when Alta Vista a web search engine that came before Google was asked to translate the sentence the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak from English to Russian it gave the literal equivalent of the vodka is excellent but the meat is lousy now we both know that's that was not the intended meaning of that sentence now the loss of meaning and missed representations is one of the biggest challenges when you're using technology in translations and so one of the ways in which this can be solved especially for literary translations is having a hybrid between technology and then human expertise so while such technologies are useful in the literal transfer of meaning in knowledge rented genres of writing like and so encyclopedic entries standard academic texts and newspapers they're not particularly useful in literary translations because the core linguistic operations operations are both literal and metaphoric and employ complex forms of writing when embedding meaning into texts literary translations demand not just the promise and capabilities of translation techniques but more important to the great the greater capabilities of contextual meaning making as professor google with young reminded us languages are not just objects are not are not inert objects used simply for communication rather every language is both a career of communication and a career of culture the second problem has always been the invisibility of African languages in these developments therefore utilizing technology in translation work to increase representation of African languages requires a hybrid approach that employs both expertise of literary translations and the capabilities of new digital platforms now since the 1990s standalone on network computers have grown to become new playgrounds for for thriving literatures these literatures have a tendency to work against or challenge the dominating tendencies of publishing and scholarship for instance while print publishing has changed boundaries digital publishing presents opportunities for breaking these established boundaries while traditional but publishing is still controlled by the traditional power actors like publishers like literary agents and distributors digital publishing is adaptive fluid and suspicious of gatekeepers while traditional publishing format is limited to text digital literatures can exist in multiple forms can exist in multiple forms as texts or audiovisual productions in both web and mobile platforms now the gelada translations issue was enabled by these capabilities it was grounded on the understanding that translation is a process through which language transports meanings from one culture to another we were cognizance of the politics around the hierarchies of languages but we were more interested in the idea that translation can offer space for languages to meet and converse and share meanings instead of setting another debate on the reasons why those under production in African languages we opted for what our managing editors called a practical vision where our main focus is on doing the translation as opposed to enumerating the countless reasons why that could not be done so we our approach was an experimental approach so we began by building a network of translators editors and proofreaders across the continent we started with emails to friends that we had worked with before in early anthologies and then these emails created a web of digital identities that crossed both language and physical geographies so they were black the web platform is both a space for publication and enable of cross-cultural communication and networking offered as a dynamic zoom that the static book format could not publishing online provided multiple pages that could be updated periodically as translations in different languages were submitted edited proofread and published our first translation issue featured a short story by Professor Ngugiwa Diogo and the short story and translated into English was written in Ikekuyu and then translated into English by the author and called the upright revolution or why humans work upright in the end after four four months of being taking work we published translations in 33 languages and this became the single most translated story in the history of African writing but because this was an ongoing project the translations continued as we reached out to more people and currently as we speak now the short story has been translated into 70 languages these 70 languages are spoken in 30 countries and 49 of those 70 languages or 70 percent are African languages some of these languages are supernatural in their reach and use some cross a few national boundaries and some lie within the geography of a single country but more importantly each of these languages house the diverse ways in which humans have always mapped the realities and imaginations all these translations are available for free online or the Jalada Africa website and we continue to invite readers and scholars to enjoy review and critique and to capture not only the beauty of form of these languages we continue to update the pages with audio versions of these translations during the Jalada mobile literary and arts festival which was we executed in five different countries for a whole month in East Africa this story was performed was adapted for stage and performed in nine languages so we are trying to bend the genres and we are trying to find in ways in which stories that appear only in text can take other forms now all experiments are a response to specific problems in the society in this case the problem that we identified was the underrepresentation of human imaginations in African languages now experiments can borrow from what has existed before or can create a new paradigm that changes how things are done so while we viewed this and as an experiment it doesn't mean that we didn't have a farm theoretical grounding in what we were doing rather we were adopting a more scientific approach in which ideas are tested in the laboratory of human production and then the best ways of doing something naturally come up from trying to adopt the very best alternatives in creating and then disseminating these literatures in multiple platforms now the translation work is just beginning we hope that we'll stimulate interest in translations within and outside the continent and especially in African languages we believe that the future lies in utilizing this diverse web and mobile platforms and applications to advance the literary course and maybe one day in the future humans will succeed in developing AI powered translation systems that are capable of detecting the nuances of literary texts both the complexities of language and cultural ideas that make us uniquely human in this pale blue dot or as the American astronomer called it the mote of dust suspended in a sandbin thank you so much thank you so much for your paper and thank you for keeping the time very well the next speaker is my colleague Martin Owen from so as we'll talk about Somali poetry why yeah yeah I'm going to speak today about translating Somali poetry it's a massive topic there's not a lot of time and I was going to be doing it with a friend of mine has and I had a similar word summit suddenly he's stuck in adzababa he was refused a visa to come here he lives in a hargaysa and he's gone to Addis to try and get his visa but he's so he won't be here but we will be reading his poem this evening at the reading Galileo catastrophe that we did with the poetry translation centre right form and feeling in Somali poetry in translating Somali poetry the the first thing I would say about translating I think anything but certainly my own sense in translating Somali poetry is about is there's one word is responsibility it's a massive responsibility and it's responsibility at different levels you've got a responsibility to the poem a responsibility to the poet and with Somali you've even got a responsibility to the language and I'm just going to read a very short quotation from a review of a book of a collection of translated Somali poems which came out in 1994 and the reviewer says in this review all in all the anthology provides ample proof that poetry of a high order though not of the highest can flourish in an oral tradition I mean to have such a prejudicial and just the absolutely stunningly awful statement in world literature today of all journals is absolutely stunning and I always remember when I first read that I thought and so it's part of what led me on to the road of really sort of engaging more with Somali poetry translation myself some of the translations that I'd seen from the past whilst done by people who knew the language very well just didn't sort of start to gel once I started to get to know that the language well enough to feel the poetry in the language that of course takes time it takes time for somebody like me who comes to the language later on in life to really start to feel what's going on and you have to study and study and study and study and then do more and that's what I did and then basically today just going to talk a little bit about three poems one that I'm actually in the process of translating one that have turned to that I've actually already translated and now the first thing to say it's interesting how listening this morning is that the whole language issue just doesn't figure in this if you're Somali and you're out in the countryside you want to make a poem you do it in Somali there's just simply no question you're not going to know any of the language let alone actually have the discussion about whether to do something in English or whatever the most famous Somali poets today are not particularly well known outside of the Somali territories one or two maybe I mean every I imagine everyone in the room here has heard of Nooruddin Farah but maybe not many people have heard of Muhammad Ibrahim Barsameh Hadrawi has anyone heard of Hadrawi right if there was this number of people in Somalia and I said who's heard of Hadrawi everyone would put their hand up who's heard of Nooruddin Farah a few people would put their hand up who's actually heard a poem by Hadrawi everyone would put their hand up who's read a novel about Nooruddin Farah possibly two people might put their hand up so this is the context that I'm coming from why yeah so I want you to all now imagine that you're basically in the Somali territories in the 19th century and that you have basically you're feeling very sorry for yourself okay if you're a man but this is a poem by a man and the woman he was going to marry who is in love with had been married to another woman so if you're a woman you imagine it the other way around or if you're you know imagine our own way okay so what he says I'm just going to translate those four you'll give the working translation that I've got at this point in time so night has fallen and behind closed doors everyone was sleeping thunder called out a clamor of rain shots from a thousand rifles now the next line in this poem is for me it's quite frankly one of the most beautiful sound objects that I've ever come across he says I did a bit he bought it by him and the mood I I do not know how to translate this the other lines I can translate now I know what it means it's actually quite clear the language is straightforward but listen to it the feeling in there even hopefully some of it comes across just as I say to you now the assonance just the sheer musicality of those words and so this is now how on earth do you get that into a translation so I pose that as a question this of course happens with all the lines in this poem and indeed any other poem that's worth its salt of course not there's good poetry and bad poetry in Somali is just as in any other language and I only put good poems to translate so so but that feeling is the feeling of a man in the 19th century and we can be pretty confident those are his actual words even though he knew how to read and write Arabic as far as we know he was well educated Islamically but he there was no reading and writing of Somali in those days apart from possibly just little bits and people where people did it a little bit in Arabic but not unlike Swahili and how so we don't have any manuscript tradition in Somali like we do with those other languages so now the other thing about that is this is a long line let me turn now to another poem and this is a poem we don't know who first made this poem this is a this is part of the the sort of general heritage of the people and for this one you need to imagine that your whole life literally revolves around your livestock particularly camels camels are the most important livestock to the Somali nomads sheep and goats are also very important but the camels are the ultimate that they are simply the most important now when when the camels have not drunk for a long time and they're taken to a well they'll first drink very quickly and then they go off and they sit down and the water sort of gets into their system then they'll come back and they'll drink some more and so the men it's always the men look after the camels they will take the water out of the well put it in a trough and the camels drink again and they will sing to the camels and there's lots of these sort of short poems stroke songs the distinction is not as clear-cut in Somali and one of them I'm going to just read it and then I'm going to sort of perform it as it would normally be performed so it's that's it and they were singing and they'll sing these things to their camels now what does this mean I think you but focus I obey you I stand by you that's it so I translated this this is very simple the language is so simple and yet it's so profound in the context and again the language is not an issue you're talking to your camel now okay camels don't speak Somali but you're Somali and that camel is going to hear you and they do and they the camels are so so precious people you know they're never mistreated I mean they're they're handled from a since they're from that when they're born the camels so they're used to being there they'd be quite sort of grumpy things camels on their own but you they so if you say that then your own experience and your whole relationship with the camel is presented in in these in such a sort of simple and yet very profound way so I translated this very simply as I you obey I stay by you and hopefully the feeling of it the sort of simplicity and yet one of the things there is that it's a short meter all this poetry is all metrical and this is one of the shortest meters so trying to get something of that into the translation is important as well and the final poem I'm just going to sort of mention a little bit about is the one that we're going to read tonight Galileo by word summit now this is in a sort of intermediate meter it's a short line meter so there's a literation in each line there's just one literative word there's a whole issue of a literation and how that works in Somali poetry but there's some lines particularly that we're challenging when translating this and he says I can tell me I'm going to show you the inside out give a little kitchen when the busted calls out from the bush to warn of the heavy spring showers the gales and afternoon downpours are you not grown up enough to know to tighten the roof mat on the frame of your hut now the feeling of this is he's admonishing people this poem is about Tahrir it's about the the what sometimes so be regular migrations etc. from Africa as a whole but there's a lot of people come from the Horn of Africa and this poem is about people who have been killed in the Mediterranean and on that perilous journey that we've all heard about in the news but this is a Somali voice talking about it you'll hear the full poem this evening but the way that he's expressing this is in yet another meter so he's doing it in this rhythmic way but the the point is that the the whole form and the way that he's crafted the language means that when people hear it they're not just hearing words and just like any purchase I'm the same in English or in French or in Arabic or in Swahili and and go and any language where we're making poetry you're crafting it such that you are really presenting your message as powerfully as possible so how do you actually get that across in the translation and really just to sort of throw out there to me one of the most important things that I feel is to try and counter these sort of awful statements like in this in this in that review that I mentioned is is to obviously do one's best to make a translation that comes across well in the target language but to try and get the flow of language and the feeling through as far as possible and that doesn't always mean that you're actually sort of translating it very literally means that lines sometimes you need to change the lines maybe sometimes need to add lines I've done translations where in fact gileli was one where there's actually quite a few more lines in the English than there are in the original Somali but when I read it to to where Samir in Hargesa which I did in the summer he didn't notice that it's it doesn't matter you've got a few extra lines or maybe have a few less as long as the flow of the language everything is there and that flow and that sheer sort of power comes through so I threw that out as sort of questions and statements and it's all been sort of very quick hopefully you've got a little sense of Somali poetry I can recommend it to everyone to go away and read Somali poetry actually on the poetry translation website there's a there's there's quite a bit there that I've been involved with them and quite a few others have been involved with as well and we'll be reading the whole of this poem this evening so thank you very much Martin our next speaker is miss Sophie Alal yeah it's a pleasure to be here and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to join everyone on such an auspicious occasion the title of my talk this afternoon is reclaiming tongues and the rest of it is what translation told me about cultural competence when the dominant culture is not enough now mostly I'm going to share my personal experience doing translation work among low communities in northern Uganda and especially among people who came from oral cultures and because that's because Uganda has a really huge refugee community and all those communities have stories that they come with them when they've lost everything that they attached to their identity the stories always remain and these stories are not merely stories people tell each other but the kind of the intangible heritage of a people who hang on to their folktales to their traditional namings for children or for people as a way of remaining and being competent in their humanness when everything seems to be fragile so I curate what is called day African and day African started as a means of changing the narrative around storytelling because I was tired of the what many people call poverty porn and it was the stock images of going online and seeing the starving child with the flies I said no we don't want this anymore but we don't have the huge resources what can we do about this the simple thing is start with what you have so you've got a reading group it brings together lots of people who interested in writing and these are the literati of Kampala and this is just friends meeting just like the Dalada people and coming up and saying we're going to publish these produce stories and then we're going to look for opportunities to have our short stories poetry read at fora outside of the country and that is how day African started now the story of day African it was actually much more critical around 2012 when the Joseph coin I think one invisible children had that viral campaign it was all over the news but when I went back to the camps and to the communities who have left the IDP camps to actually speak to people and understand from what perspective the people telling us the story of coin versus the people who had lived that experience it was actually quite a disjuncture and for those who had lived out the war and who knew that even despite all these hardships they still had their folk tales it was another betrayal in the sense that it created a huge narrative around post-conflict society that was trying to heal and try to frame the narrative as a community that is beholden to imperial interests to try to see themselves come out of war again so personally what I've been doing is trans translating simple folk tales and what I learned that as a person who came from the city and with privileges I could just not enter into a deprived community and tell them hey tell me your story and I'm going to translate it in this way there's a way I had to approach the people there's a way I had to humble myself and come to their level of understanding there's a way I had to leave my educated self back in the academy or back in the university and try there's a way I had to be culturally aware of the struggles of the community before trying to put my own meanings into what they were saying and also because I was speaking to old ladies who in the old days used to sit around the fireside what was called a one or now the one or is the place whereby all intergenerational knowledge creation happened and what the disseminate where the dissemination of knowledge took place so you have the elderly and the young and those of time I was in a place called Pai Bona Pai Bona is not is in northern Uganda and I was with a family and those an elderly granny who came from a place called Madio pay Madio pay is near the border between Uganda and South Sudan but because of the fluidity of borders and boundaries she had married inside Pai Bona so she was telling me a folk tale about lightning and thunder and then she used the word dare now in actually from eastern Uganda we don't say dare we say the word for thunder is different it's it's another word anyway it's escape me now but the importance about that was the old people had their register and the young people also had their register and whereas this story was about thunder and lightning when a young person told it I heard the same story told by a little boy who told me the elephant had a gun and then he shot lightning and thunder into the sky so it showed me that the language had evolved and the culture that was carried in lightning and thunder was just no longer about the sky but it was also about the people coming out of conflict and not under evolution in storytelling meant that the language was a living thing and when the elderly people passed away there was going to be a new memory a new memory of gun battles and lightning and thunder no longer being something in the sky but something manufactured so that profoundly affected the way I saw translation and it took me back to the past and for us the past was the golden age of the 1960s and the Makare conference the 1962 conference which was essentially about African literatures in English expression now we've already heard Wale Sheinka speak about how amazing the conference was but what was also not talked about was the profound psychic effect and physical effect that that conference had on the people who attended it for instance when we talk about the suits that obviously is a smart way of being relevant and being respectful and the culture of the conference of course entail that people dress up nicely but a couple of years later or caught Bitec who was I think he's up there at the branch cheek of Rajan Yogi who was just up on the picture so God Bitec wrote a seminal essay the title of which was Africa's cultural revolution and inside Africa's revolution there's a quote that says it decries apement ship or reproduction of knowledge without essentially having a critical look into what makes that knowledge relevant in Europe and how when it comes to the ground in Uganda at that time it was different and how applicable was it it was so for instance we're now aware that many of the people who attended the conference changed their names or they gave back their European sounding names and what one had to ask was why was that why did James Ngugi become Ngugi what younger it meant something and so the important thing about what the men and women who came to the conference friends did was to find a means of the different ethnicities and languages and nationalities I have a way of finding community and talking to each other but yet for a young person like me a person who has grown up in many countries I still have Ugandan roots and I look at Uganda today and I'm afraid I do not want to talk about the negative aspects but I'd like to talk about the positive aspects that bring us together and for us it's the digital era the important things to us is for instance you know global anti-blackness how does it manifest when we leave Africa and go and live in Europe you know if black lives matter happens in the United States of course a young woman lost his life to police brutality and if we go online and we still go and then they still a Chinese museum exposition that shows Africans faces next to the faces of animals or if we look into the Academy and the prevailing conversation around how we translate our cultures into meaningful expressions of our humanity is still you know they raise an invisibility of knowledge systems from people of African heritage it still means the roads must fall campaign is still very valid for us but also it means things like why is my curriculum white is still very valid for us because these are ways for us to reclaim our heritage and our heritage includes the languages of our ancestors and my talk was a bit longer but I'd like to talk about you know to conclude by you know thinking about digital humanities because what Richard the door or Ducco said was incredibly important the fact that this is you know this is the era of social media of Instagram Facebook and Snapchat when anything happens online there's a swift movement and retribution is vicious but it also allows us to come together and have conversations so those of us who steal value oralities we are still looking at how even on Facebook and Instagram sometimes it's this small audio visual elements that make being online quite attractive to all of us and when you think about you know how translation for us matters you know I'd just like to think to for us to think about Jordan Pills new film and if you see this this is the fear issue of collaboration between Jalada and transition now transition is the magazine that Rajat the yogi initiated in Kampala but Jalada is was done by the is an African collective but when you see how Jordan pills pills film get out I wonder how many of you have watched get out now yes you recall that there's a Swahili song and it's not translated and you know when when the protagonist is running through the forest you know you hear this all the sounds and they singing and it's ominous and it's being done in Swahili it means it's bringing you know disparate aspects of the ancestral voices that kind of still live in the southern tradition of ghost stories or you know haunted memories the kind that Tony Morrison speaks about in Beloved you know the kind of singing and tales and stories of haunting so it's it all comes together really beautifully and to close capital up I'm just saying that sometimes translation is great but it has to be meaningful before we enter into any society and try to translate it's important that we understand the cultural context of our people we have to insert ourselves among them in such humility as to make to make us a part of the people we live with and to cap it up digital humanities is great but also the dangers of artificial intelligences it only replicates human knowledge that's I think when we're going to use the tools of computing for instance to translate for instance there's a view the word for water in Japanese is omizo and in logand it's amazi so it's like when you try to translate that and you find the affinities between the languages I mean it makes us capable of of influencing anthropology of finding the roots of words and I think it's important that more Africans and Africanists engage with with computing to ensure that for the extended global heritage African languages actually continue being important and the dissemination of knowledge continues in the great tradition of keeping our cultures alive because languages are living things if children are going to tell stories that have changed drastically from what their ancestors stories were then all these changes have to be captured in a way that entails that one day when we're not here some aliens might look at our records and say yes this was a beautiful moment in humanity thank you who is a lecturer in African literature so first of all thank you very much my panel members for accommodating me and smuggling me in last minute I'm I'm going to try and use my full 15 minutes and hope hope that I don't have to beg for another five minutes to complete my title is translating Africa in literature culture and history reflections past present and future there's no doubt at this point in historical time that writers from Africa and of African descent to speak especially perhaps of the best and the most canonized have established a creative tradition in European languages English French Spanish German Portuguese etc that has primed the consciousness of the world to the most important events and occurrences within African existence the critique of Arab and European slavery in Iqama's 1973 novel 2000 seasons and in Amatheidu's Twin Plays the Dialogue of a Ghost and Anua 1970 1965 to the Morrison's classic novel of African American slave American slavery in Beloved 1987 the affirmation of African writers of reclamation in Tuna Chabes thanks for a part 1958 and Ngugi Wa Thiongos with no child 1964 on the river between 1965 the novels of rural Igoland by Florang Wapa a full 1966 and Idu 1970 the 1980 Noma Award winning so long a letter by Senegalese Myama Bah the classic African autobiographical novel by Woleh AK the years of childhood 1981 a narrative classified together with Sheikh Hamid Hamedou Khan's ambiguous adventure 1961 and in more recent times City Danganambas novel Nevers Conditions as among the very best of stories of growing up and self-humation conventionally referred to as the Buddhist Roman in World Fiction which show in case a case standing taller simply by virtue of being more lengthy detailed a comprehensive in its portrayal of African familiar life at one of the most important points of contact with Western culture and civilization novels addressing questions of nationhood and nationalism such as Chinua Chabes a man of the people 1966 Iqamahs the beautiful ones are not yet born 1968 and fragments 1969 in Ngugi Wa Thiongos petals of blood of 1977 and is 1980 devil on the cross narratives such as Bessie Heads a question of power 1973 and butchers the joys of motherhood examining gender and power relations within Africa these and many more texts the list goes on and on infinitely have illuminated our understanding of Africa and African lives all of the above mentioned accounts of Africa have attained the status of masterpieces within African fiction and contributed immensely in helping Africans define and shape our destiny today even as we somewhat collectively journey towards an uncertain future they remain important fictional historical works that form part of that essential intellectual and ideological toolkit that has been central in helping us come to terms with the cacophony of experiences within contemporary African existence some of these works have been central in a feminine legitimating us as historical subjects who were not and never shall be barbaric others to other civilized selves and have proven that we were not living in a state of primitivism and savagery before Europeans ventured into colonizing us a fact established even earlier much earlier with a heavy African philosophical disk disk position of positions articulated as far back as case they have what Ethiopia and bound of 1911 and so a plot is moody published in 1930 these are both examples of narratives that began the project of African self reclamation and renaissance way before even Chinua TV celebrated definitive text of African liberation thanks for a part despite the monumental achievement of the existing body of works within African literature which have robustly resisted any attempt to marginalize us within history we face other enormous tax in our terms are developing our thought and visions for the future for a multiplicity of reasons today in the here and now Africans both within the continent and in the extended homelands of the new world Caribbean and other diaspora face a lot of challenges we face extreme political right wing wingism from the Western Europe and in America xenophobia blatant overt and disguised anti-African racism a vitrolic and a civic anti-immigrant culture and attitude which we black folk often seem to suffer from most or at least so we feel remember she who feels it knows it in the America the ultra conservatives have re-emerged who have historical affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan in the form of a hydra-headed dragon beast of the leader media images continually show Africans being washed ashore the Mediterranean as they seek to flee the colonial and new colonial induced poverty poverty and economic hardship triggered in the first instance by the encounter with European adventures pirates conquistados pillagers and planters it matters not really that much of this economic dispossession is now super intended by a bunch of small minded and highly ideologically unprogressive characters masquerading as our leaders there's such probably deep hatred for Africans and people of African descent today with a hostile mindset which seeks to continually reinforce the high barriers and walls of fortress you and great white Americana the policymakers and overlords of these would have been host nations who ordered that African victims of economic dispossession be put in body bags and sometimes down back into the sea to be food for the whales and sharks and other predator fishes forget a fundamental principle of logic and life articulated in the Ebo proverb if you bring anti-infested maggots into your house you must expect the visit of lizards slavery and colonialism came and visited us otherwise we were sitting out somewhere drinking tasty pomegranate under the hot and pleasurable African sun after having worked long hard in productive hours on our farms and eating a nice meal of plantain and spinach we did not know the roots to fortress Europe and great white Americana until the David living things and Mongol parts and Christopher Columbus's and the safe Francis Drake's and long John Silver's and all them bloody imperialists and colonizers decided to visit us either on the continent proper or in our Caribbean and New World homelands what we have learned from our history and from our encounter with the West is that we are not congenitally poor we are not a naturally underdeveloped people the sense of gloom and gloom engendered in the Western media about Africans as perpetual economic scavengers requiring aid and charity from the West needs to be challenged and exposed for the glaring falsities and contradictions for this is the dominant mode of thought even in Western academic curricula it is ideological for around which certain courses in anthropology or economics or development studies or history operate in certain universities the institutional mechanisms and epistemological based of Western scholarship validates and legitimates this view of an African of Africa endlessly needing aid or charity when students of African descent with a different experience of the of life question this posture they often fall in trouble with their teachers and lectures and particularly when it happens to be the case as it really is for example that Africa and Africans are blessed with some of the wealthiest of the world's resources but still suffer mass social deprivation and the deepest and most shameful forms of economic stagnation we are made to believe especially seeing the perilous journeys we are not taking across Atlantic to enter Europe and Americana that we are natural beggars always in want of somebody else's assistance this dominant mode of thought portrayed consistently with sheer abandon and with flagrant delight by Western media is the same dominant of formulaic approach to knowledge production within much of Western academy it's precisely this manner of thinking that bifurcated wessness into superior superordinary humans and Africans into the worst evolutionary inferior as represented for example in that infamous Polish descent English writer just have cornered out of darkness and it is this which led to the memorable rebuttal essay by Chinua Chibi an image of Africa racism in cornered out of darkness this is the very same ideological approach and code which counted in metropole versus periphery binary discourse seeks to locate Africa as an eternal child on the evolutionary scale of human growth as perpetually underdeveloped what we need to question though is what kind of phenomenon within nature never passes a stage of infancy. Teenagehood youthhood and never matured into adulthood and old age I cannot identify any single living organism or phenomenon that does not undergo this life cycle yet Africa is perennially moored to a state of infancy and underdevelopment. We should not succumb to this epistemological motif of a primordial Africa as a continent of backward and degenerate people. This is a myth created by recycled and perpetuated by Europe to suit its own exploitative purposes. For while the West will point out to you that Africans have been brutalized and dispossessed in this day and age by their own you worry most of Venice by their own Denis Sassoon questions and by their own poor BS dimension only a few they will not admit to you that these butchers and madras and nation dispossessors are indeed popped up by the in the same manner as the West did the Sania Bacchus the Jean Bado Bocasas the Mobutus is the second in the Hastings Kamudu Banders of years back some easy questions to ask to prove the point are when these people masquerading as our leaders loot and fleece as of our wealth where do they keep their legally acquired booty in which banks are the billions of Naira ten dollars and the billions of CDs ten pounds and use extra stolen from Africa kept which economy benefits from these huge fraudulently dispossessed amount whose population gets to have the money and the large chunk of cash for all manner of developmental projects these questions must be answered before anyone attempts to portray corruption as an innate and naturally inherited African trade even if inherited then we should know by now also where from shouldn't we it is crucial to know that though that in spite of Africa's present condition and all it has suffered via colonialism slavery and new colonialism we still look up to a radiant new dawn of course we have many and angst many a price of identity that we are going through no doubt our situation is very complicated and complex for even as I've been talking about Africa in a homogeneous universe sense we are made up of a multiplicity of ethnicities and languages and cultures many of us combine a myriad of towns that are multilingual nomadic world travelers and world citizens and denizens of planet mother earth and especially by virtue of our process of becoming largely through western colonial education we are as a busier supposedly puts it in her poem all my friends are exiles we are all exiles who though born in one we are some of us are exiles who though born in one place live in another busier as in a poem that with a global command we have everywhere to go but home viewing it from this angle it is not so easy to lump together Africa as a unified continent or peoples with a common sense of home while this may be true but we are firm and we engage with the metaphor of home and indeed homelessness that busier deploys in a very rigorous manner ideologically and link it to the transfigurative and transformative power of the new radiant dawn that we must envision for Africa both continentally and in the diaspora and homelands we must not forget for example that our ongoing struggle against xenophobia against anti-immigrant attitudes and sentiments is very consequent on the fact that empire and the empire and the commonwealth is using all surreptitious manner of means to question the validity of our presence in the west here in the diaspora despite western powers of course having freely roamed the globe and earth at a point in time and gone everywhere and taken everything that belonged to others and kept it for themselves if you per chance dance doubt what i'm saying just this is the British museum which is just five minutes walk from here and see who owns how who owns what and how come someone owns everything that is for several other people how did that happen and how did that come about lot of mercy on our souls British museum out of here 10 right in the face of the ongoing assault on Africans and people of African descent we need a fuller understanding of the contradictions and opinion of contemporary global existence we need a better understanding of the paradoxes that inform our journeys the multilingual multi-ethnic intercultural identity that we have is still very much the 40 of our resistance to this onslaught and this is particularly because the assault on us is one which very much questions the very validity of our identities of our very existence just as it did from the moment when the first enslaved African set foot in the Americas and in the western hemisphere valuing retrieving and treasured and protecting that identity is an essential part of our struggle for self-esteem and for our collective and individual freedoms indeed the perpetration of our existence evolves on our very ability to self-define and self-articulate the world we want to live in in our own terms in this reimagine of our African future language and culture will play a central part on home soil consequently it should be less about Lafa locally acquired foreign accents and more about immersion in our indigenous languages and cultures with a view to deriving maximum benefit from the deep philosophical world views inherent in our numerous languages and cultures it should be less about interpreting and translating Mexican and Spanish telenovelas and superpowers into our local languages and more about reproducing and disseminating our own indigenous adforms language signals and equals culture and culture signals and equals language in the diaspora too it should be less about us embracing a trumped up but very very multicultural diversity that is all political talk and rhetoric and which in any case visibly contradicts the xenophobic and anti-African discourses imagine and seeping out of the same political talk for us it should be more about a fidelity to the language and culture of our Orida homelands it should be less so to speak about the self-elination of us from our African heritage let me share a brilliant poem by Kivvedian poet Louie and Bradley Silver titled The Immigrant's Son that illustrates the point I am making The Immigrant's Son that thin little boy bundled up to protect himself from the rain and snow black smoke frail body moth eating beret pulled over his head and hands in his pockets he's an immigrant he speaks French he knows the history of Napoleon his he reads Sartre and Te had the Chardon nevertheless he would like to know something of his country each day he must face the racism of his schoolmates and ask himself why he must live in this country his parents exhausted from hard daily struggle deflect his questions with a simple look of sadness they hope to return home next year on holiday and do so they must work 16 and to do so they must work 16 hours a day if God wills he'll go to if only his thin little body can survive winter racism and other miseries within the constraints of the predominant cultures of French or English or Portuguese or Spanish or Italian or whatever we find ourselves in our Keith and Ken associated with who must not deflect the pertinent questions about our existence with a simple look of sadness otherwise conventionally as is the case of the immigrant son the children's interest in their heritage and culture wane the desire to explore the world of their heritage is sometimes frustrated by the harsh economic social realities of daily existence that their parents are confronted with of course this is not a scenario in every single case of migrant life abroad the point being made is that the undesirable migrants and migrant children who may be victims of xenophobia even in a society that appears to have accepted them should be equipped with alternative worlds and worldviews as part of their rights of passage into an increasingly hostile and uncertain world it is imperative that they know some language some culture some home that they and we all can fall back on and where we will be received and warmly embraced in Dambudio Maraturas twenty-two thirty-five I've done eleven how many minutes have I done I sat on a twenty-two and I'm on thirty-five you still have one more minute twelve you know if if you breathe I'll give you two okay in Dambudio Maraturas polemical novel of 1979 the house of anger the young protagonist comes home from the colonial school one day speaking to his mother I remember coming home one day running with glee I forget what it was I was happy about and though it was a rather dismal day I was on heat with living I burst into the room and all at once exploded into my story telling it to restlessly and with expansive gestures telling it to mother who was staring a stinging slap had made my ears sing stopped me I stared up at mother in confusion she hit me again how dare you speak to me in English she said crossy you know I don't understand it and if you think because you're educated I'm not speaking in ink I began but stopped as I suddenly realized that I was talking to her in English I rushed out of the room I jumped and rushed back into the room and dragging my box from under the bed took out my English excise books and began to tear them up with a great childish violence mother watched me in silence what we witness in the passage above especially the anger that the young protagonist's mother expresses through her visitation of fiscal violence on her poor innocent child is simply a protective cry from mother Africa her actions are against the background of the turbulent violence imposed on Zimbabwe society by white settler colonialism an invading culture of conquest and subjugation that has not only stolen her land and her people but is now stealing her own child from her her anger and rage futilely rooted through her slapping of her son is actually directed at white colonialism and imperial racism it is a white man who has invaded her land taken her land and seeks to institute her rapture within African family her particular understanding of the colonial experience shared by other African mothers okay I guess my time is up but I could finish in five minutes but is it with my time up if my time up this is a good enough completion but if you give me another five minutes after is it it's time up yes okay right fine and last but not least Wangui Wangoro thank you so much still trying to breathe for Koju it's a great pleasure for me to be here let me get into this because my minute gone okay there we are and I'm really honored to be here I believe it's a historic an historical event like that one and I just like by a show of hands to know how many translators are here don't be shy translators stand up and be seen let's celebrate us please thank you much of what I wanted to say has been said so if my paper is disjointed do forgive me it's just the joy to be with this very wonderful panel and for us to be able to hear us ourselves it's very rare and we're very proud to have been offered this very large panel I also want to acknowledge the publishers of translation can you show your hands don't be shy Ayabea where are you at Kadija Margaret's Ayabea is not here James yeah there you are good and good and shaky of course so I think we are moving forward and Jelada you didn't put up your hands Jelada here and we must celebrate them as the new babies on the translation circuits but we're very proud of them they are strong and exciting baby so my talk was supposed to be about translation African knowledge and African knowledge futures and I also wanted to go back to this 1962 conference I think it was framed to be of African literature in English language and it was held as you know in 1962 and I think it was officially called the Conference of African Writers of English Expression so here for me is the starting point of my talk that it was for Anglophone speakers and if you look at who was there Chair Bae Wali-Shawinka John Clark Avivali Lekara etc you will see mainly that they are from the English speaking Anglophone world indeed so in terms of the African project in terms of the period it was 1962 when most countries were preparing for independence and of course the big Pan-African Unity conference was going to happen and the African organization of African Unity was going to be formed in 1960 in the following year that it is quite striking that the African writers African writers were meeting without their counterparts their plusiform if we can call it that Afrophone Arabophone and Hispanic phone in fact and all the African 2000 plus languages as we know of them today what has struck me as really exciting is to have living people who can actually tell us what happened here as well as us trying to discover what happened we could have asked Shawinka here what exactly happened rather than guessing and there are a large number of those people are still living and I hope that this conference triggers us to go and actually talk to them and ask them who was there as you saw with the photo he couldn't remember who it was and hope to hear a little bit about that as soon but it's a great honor to have continuity in living people like Professor Shawinka and in my own case as you know I've had interactions with Professor Kuki Watyonga for a long time and they talk about this moment as a moment of great importance to them it brought them together and it started a conversation that we in the African in the Anglophone world of course cherish and value very much with all its contradictions and I believe that there are many contradictions as you heard here today that I won't go into them at all but most of my observations are drawn from my own experiences and some of them are of us a number of us here who are direct and indirect products of such a conference if I can say in my own case this conference influenced the change of curriculum of the English department in at the Nairobi University of which then I'm subsequently a product of where the curriculum changed from being an Anglophone European phone English phone curriculum and it focused more on African literary traditions and some of those writers like Shawinka Professor Shawinka etc became part of the curriculum that I studied so I don't have those tensions that others may have but we grew up reading a Chebe and so forth and so on and I'm sure Professor Pelleve would attest to this that it was an important moment for us and IEBIA and others who are probably my generation and it went on to influence other developments that have happened in world literary history as a result so although there's a lot that one could say is that I believe that the conference has gone on to produce great writers of those who were present but it has also shaped the African literary canon because of the press the importance of the English language in the world and also we must remember this time that the Commonwealth writers were quite united in what they were doing so this literature was sitting globally alongside other literatures of Asian Caribbean and so forth and so on so the transnational nature of these writers is also very important and we heard about the Negritude movement but we must also remember this Commonwealth movement and it's important for Southern peoples so the North-South and there's also the lateral movements and it has continued to fire our imagination our scholarship our productivity in publishing and publications and literary engagement through criticism evaluation and writing and this is just a microcosm of what goes on every day in some of our lives as you know there's an African Literature Association which is existent and some of us are part of that so this is part of our daily diet and for those who are not aware that there are places where African literature is being discussed all the time in Africa in the North and so forth and so on and it's important to be part of those ongoing conversations as was spoken about the importance of conferences but I think that the Macarii conference was framed by wider political cultural and economic context of decolonization from colonial rule and therefore it was itself an artifact of what I would call future which we're still living today and I think it's a long moment if we take it from that moment I still think we're in that moment of framing future and it's not a simple one but I think in retrospect and we will come to see that it we can try and unpack as we're trying to do in this conference the complex contradictions of that period of time like we've heard about funding who holds these conferences why are they being held there's a sign here saying 100 years of so as why are we not at Nairobi why are not we not at Macarii why are we not in Johannesburg but we are thankful to be here obviously these are some of the contradictions so as I said that there is an absence of the Lucophone Afrophone the 2000 African languages the Francophone literature and the Arabic literature not to not to mention the Egyptian hieroglyphics the Timbuktu texts the Ethiopian texts etc etc that we only frame these moments in the colonial moment but African writing and literature goes way back and definitely we don't have a presence of African texts in being discussed at this time and the question does come and I think it was Obi Wali who at that conference raised the question of what is African literature which is at the heart of what I want to speak today and I think it's still a question that we can still debate and for me that's what focused me to my work on translation that question is it literature in European languages or is it literature in in European languages about Africa and I think Palliva has addressed this question about authenticity so I won't go into it but I think it is a complex question that we should pay attention to within the decolonizing frame against which we must place it so it's not just a moment of translation it's a specific moment in time where we are talking about decolonizing Africa and then many theories have come about since then about post-colonial theory decolonial theory colonial theory and so forth and so on so we must see translation and this particular meeting within this context as part of a long historical frame which was still 55 years it's not a very long time in cultural history I also wanted to talk to you a little bit about my own involvement in translation as part of translation history as I do embody it and to say that while Googie was having his big moment of epiphany of writing in African languages in Kenya I was here at university trying to learn to be a translator and one of the requirements was that we must learn to speak in our mother tongue and of course I was supposed to offer English as my mother tongue and you can imagine psychologically this impact on the trauma this had on me because English clearly is not my mother tongue nor is it even my second language it's probably my third language as I grew up hearing and learning Kiswahili all my life until I was three four is when I started encountering English so I was emotionally bothered by this lack of mother tongue so it was very fortunate that Googie was having this epiphany moment because it created immediate work for me because when I left university I went to Henry Chakava and he allowed me to translate Googie's children's stories at the age of 23 and it did change my life we're talking now for those who actually want to know my age I've nearly given myself away but that's a long time ago let's just say let's just say about 30 30 or so years if you add 23 then you'll get a number so it's a long time ago so translation has been happening at least embodied by me for a long time and I know that there are many other translators Shoinka himself Professor Irelia who we'll hear about and many other people have been translating African literature and you'll see on the Heinemann readers series which I think James published you'll see that there was already a tradition of publishing African languages at least European those literatures at least across the European languages you could read Francophone literature in English not so much into the French language and so on but English did do its best despite the marginal position of African literature in the world canon which we tried to address with a hundred best books of the 20th century which is a project I could talk about and how hard you fought to put African language books on that list how hard we even tried to find them but in the end you'll see it's the old canon of that was predominant and you'll see it's the English language canon that was even in that hundred books of the 20th century you'll see that it's the English books that were predominant and probably books by men I could say that as well so my own experience of course was starting from nowhere because in Kenya it's not the tradition that we weren't taught our languages in schools but I was brave because I had to be and it gave me a sense of purpose and it shifted my own positioning around how literature and where literature should be positioned and I'll just rush and say that the main question for me at this conference is what is the location of African literature which is not a question I have asked but it's a question that was asked by Homi Baba in his seminal text The Location of Culture and I think that is one of the issues that we are trying to address today where is it situated in the wider scheme of things in the wider scheme of power and where are the individuals and I think again this is not something I'm raising but Carol Boyce-Davies has theorized it in a book of the same year and where she raises the issue of the location of the subject so I think the question of gatekeepers has been raised and who pays and who pays the piper who pays the piper what's the expression so I think you can answer that for yourself and I think in that whole question of positioning we have not yet arrived at independence but I think we are on the way there but it has its complexities but I won't go into those but I can share with you some theoretical issues that I've come across that I want you to think about their theoretical issues and they're very big but I'll just mention them I like talking about them I think you've heard on around the Somali question about this question of translatability and the importance of context of translation and who you're translating for what's your purpose and who's paying you and we've seen that Africa has been the place play of global politics whether it's terrorism as professor talked this morning whether it's the Cold War whether it's the resource war whether it's the whatever it is it is the site of contestation and we cannot deny that so what is the translation what is the equivalence of a word in Somali or in Tigrinya and how do we understand it in the European frame I think somebody talked about how images of Africa are projected I think those images also influence the words that are used to understand a context I also believe firmly that there are limits of translation it's something for a long time as a theorist I didn't want to contemplate I always for a long time argued everything is translatable but I think at the psychic and emotional level not everything yet is translatable and I use the word yet guardedly I hope of course the utopia of equivalence will one day arrive but I think we are quite a far away we're quite far away from that point I also think that the terrain is ever shifting and I'd like to just refer to the great moment of fake news that we are living through now I don't think it's very new but it's very amplified now that public policy is being declared as fake news and that people are claiming fake news daily and I think this fakeness is impacting on our learning environment and it's also impacting the publishing environment and it's also inevitably going to impact on the translation environment as many of you know translators have been killed for their work and I'd like just to mention that one well-known translator was killed was a Japanese translator he translated Salman Rashdi's satanic verses so there are limits to translation and then the question that arises is do we censor ourselves or do we leave those texts to some other safe time in the future and what is the impact of the ethics of reality today I will move to another issue is that I went recently to Ghana to a conference on African Studies Association of Africa and I'm raising this as a concern because it's only now that an African Studies Association of Africa has actually been launched in Africa while we're heading for the 50th or 60th I think 60th anniversary of African Studies Association in the United States you would want to ask yourself why has it taken so long to have an African Studies Association in Africa itself there are many arguments which I will not go into such as that everyday scholarship in Africa is African Studies but I think this is the first time a formal body has been formed and it was talking about some of these issues and one of the issues that I walked away with in terms of my own work is the whole question of commensurability which again I won't go into detail but it's again to do with the standards and the measures of translation and its limits and its compatibility and its desirability in my own personal practice after that moment of epiphany a lot of people used to say you couldn't translate African language literatures into European languages which of course now we've proved as you heard with this story one minute zero zero minute as you heard with Jalada they have 40 70 stories in African languages which blows the idea that it's not possible to translate in African languages but I do want to say there are many institutions now we run SIDENSI here in London Africa writes holds a session called Africa in Translation we have African Literature Association has translation caucus of the African Study Literature Association I run an institution called SIDENSI and I wanted to show you some books which have the table here I think this work going in and out of African languages now so I don't think it's new and it's growing it's coming to an exploding moment and I think it's a wonderful time and I for an old practitioner I'm very excited that we are growing and we want you to join us and to support us and to buy our books and to review the translations it's very important for you to review the translations not just saying it's a good translation but to say why look at the original and look at the final text and tell us why it's a good translation so far people just translate read the English or French and say it's a good translation and it may not be the truth but I'm celebrating and I'm very happy that you're here thank you very much Finally we have our discussant Dr. Shaggy Thiora who also teaches at SOAS and he also teaches translation so I believe we will have a very good summary and discussion of the papers Thank you very much I now have the task of sort of summarizing briefly and also maybe try and look for a bit of thread through the very brilliant talks that we've had this afternoon about this very very live topic of translation We started out with Odwar and his discussion is bringing us to date up to date on Jalada this online journal and here the main point is about the importance of machine translation which I think he correctly pointed out as a very important tool not only for breaking barriers between language and cultures I would add it's a machine machine translation is very important for democratization it is really critical in the situation of Africa where most countries most populations are multilingual that access to knowledge information and other things is made possible through translation and obviously the most feasible means is having these machines that can actually do the job really really quickly about the question of just how much machines can do with culture and other pragmatic issues related to translation that remains to be seen I believe there's still a long way to go before machines can actually mirror the human mind exactly as it is and incorporate all elements of culture and so forth I mean we keep getting very interesting updates about the advances particularly in places like Japan about artificial intelligence and the extent to which doubles people are making actually doubles that can mimic the whole human all registers of talk but I think that's a much broader topic I think the key thing here is that artificial intelligence machine translation can enable conversation among many many languages of course the question of the hierarchy of languages remain now it's very impressive to us to hear that we have 70 languages this story has been translated into 70 languages but which of these languages why the 70 languages out of the 2200 that we have in Africa that is question that we have to obviously deal with about the hierarchy of languages and the choices that we have to make we moved on to a very very wonderful presentation by my colleague Martin Orwin about Somali poetry Martin it is very clear has been working intensively and with great passion on this topic of Somali language as we know from his today's presentation as well as other past presentations and publications and I think the key point here I understood was the responsibility of the translator to the translation to the language to the culture to the people behind that language and I think it seems like a responsibility that Martin takes very very seriously and I think all translators suddenly would have this burden upon them it is up to us actually it's actually a very very big burden to try to live up to all those standards that have been mentioned and of course the difficulties of translation right in particular are not exclusive to African languages but translating the music the alliteration the rhythm of the Somali language or any other language for the matter it is really really difficult and also and therefore these are very very hard to capture as he put it as Martin put it himself simple but profound messages are very very can be very very difficult to translate it may seem very simple in the language that of the of the source language but actually translating it can be much more problematic than it may seem on the surface and therefore omissions additions I believe these are things that all of us translators have to contend with we constantly have to change and you know add or omit or etc etc which is meant to ensure the flow of the language and the power so and so that the power of the language can come through we moved on and this guy we heard more from Sophie about the key point here I understood was the need for cultural competence and I think that ties in very well with what the other speakers have talked about that it is impossible to be a good translator without having a full competence in both cultures of the source language and the target language this is something we all know but sometimes we take it very lightly we take it as if well I know the language and therefore it's easy for well I can't transfer the meaning from X language to Y language but beyond that there are lots of other nuances that I think every translator must be conscious about and not just being cautious of them but actually be competent to them in order to deliver a proper good translation and so in translating Ugen and Luuk oral literature the other key thing that she raised that comes out of that is how to translate oral literature translating orality is also another challenge why mainly because we have all these other parallel linguistic features or rather extra linguistic features which have to be which are parts of the poetry or the narrative for example in traditional stories or traditional poetry but very very hard to put into paper very hard to place into another language so again I see a common thread between these two especially Martin and Sophie in describing the challenges of translating orality onto written into writing however that links very well also with the larger questions about writing itself as Octavio Paz the Mexican poet and writer says writing itself is a form of translation you actually you know anytime you write you're translating the thoughts you're translating the culture you're translating so many things onto paper and therefore in itself that is a form of translation so it's not just about what we do as professional translators but also each one of us on a day-to-day basis is also a translator and this is particularly important in the case of Africa because which how many of us Africans are not not multilingual we are mostly multilingual many people in Africa speak not one two or three languages and what happens whatever language we choose to write in we are constantly translating if I choose to write in English I have to think about some things in Swahili some things in Gikuyu maybe some things in Spanish as well and therefore this is a reality for all of us and it cannot be gained say the importance of our all understanding that translation plays a very big role in our lives whether or not we are actually doing translation as professionals so putting meaning into what was said again that's something that Sophie that caught my attention from Sophie's presentation and beyond that her point about a blind reproduction of knowledge and this ties in with also what my colleague Kojo brought up thereafter that there has to be meaningful translation and also Wangui has just brought it up towards the end of the discussion what choices do we have to make in translating what books shall we translate are we going to shy away from sun or and so forth so this decision I mean this is a common thread that I can see throughout this particular discussion well Kojo my colleague here brought up also the point about translating culture but more importantly I think the first time I heard about the discussion about multilingualism and the relevance of translation what are the meaningful translations that we need to come we what are the texts that we need to select in order to translate the fidelity to our languages and cultures and the question that arises here I wasn't sure whether what direction that Kojo was taking as is translation rather yes is multilingualism a bulwark all right all a barrier I got a sense that it can act as both it can be seen mostly of as many of us see multilingualism as a barrier to communication to good communication it is expensive to translate back and forth we have too many languages to deal with 400 Nigeria you know 65 in Kenya 125 in Tanzania how do we do all this shall we become a wholly monolingual world in favor of one of these languages of wider communication such as Swahili or Hausa or Yoruba or shall we try to deal with all the languages at once or shall we reverse to the ex-colonial languages and say oh look we have a ready choice here let's use English let's use French let's use Spanish these are serious questions that have to come and therefore this is why I think you know we can look at this multilingualism A as a barrier to communication but also I think you suggested that it can also be a bulwark to preventing our total real neo-colonization of our minds because I think there is also that danger that if we give out everything if we do not retain any of our what we have we might end up with a what Harish Trivedi described us as a whole monolingual monocultural monocultivated world that speaks English or French or German or something like that so these are important questions and nicely summarized by Wangui here but also who also brought up a very important point about translators invisibility I think increasingly translators are becoming more visible right I think for the tradition has always been that a translator should remain invisible all right you do the translation make it so clear and so unnoticeably translated all right we don't want to hear it was a translation so for a long time this has been tradition so in many cases even the name of the translator may not be very seen as very important now I think the recognition of the translator as a re-writer translation as a rewriting exercise that involves omissions additions redefinitions moving around dislocations of the grammar this is now becoming a lot more recognized as serious intellectual input to the extent that now there is no longer the need to hide the translator so I was very pleased when you asked translation in the room to raise your hands because not only on text but also in a physical kind of way so I think these are very important questions which can be brought forward finally I think Ongoi also brought up very important issues about the 1962 conference I agree with her that perhaps in another organization of a similar conference as we have today would involve more of the actual participants because they're still around there are many of them as we have seen I think it would be they have a lot more stories such as we had this morning with one of the speakers today and a bit we had from Professor Shoyinka in the lunchtime conversations we've had some conversations James and others you know who are in the room here very interesting stories the backdrop to this 1962 conference about which we do not have to guess because the wielders of those events are still with us here today and so the true voices are important to be heard I think that point about 1962 being an important point of decolonizing the curriculum in East Africa and Africa very crucial we cannot ignore that that this conference paved the way for all of us now to actually read the relevant books for Africa Chinua, Chebe and Guguathion and so on so forth or Korpi Bitek of course in my own high school we all grew up on or Korpi Bitek and Guguathion without this particular event obviously this may have taken another decade or two so it's an important point that was raised here by Wangoi this morning this afternoon right questions of authenticity has been raised again and this came up earlier this morning it goes back to the question of language right which language we are writing in are we authentic enough if we are writing in ex-colonial languages or is it by writing in an African language only that one can be authentic I think that's an ongoing discussion it's not something that I can summarize in any way right here so I think that historical perspective in addition to the question of ethics of translation the choice of texts very important and finally that little point about the realization that there are there is something called untranslatability and that's another big point of discussion which can go on and on for more but I will leave that now for the general discussion to which maybe these questions can be raised more thank you very much for this