ABSTRACT
Reminiscing about his friendship with Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera and South African John Matshikiza as young African writers in 1970s London, Nigerian author Ben Okri says:
There was a sense that we had to take on the Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi generation; not in a bad way, not in the way of killing your father. We wanted to take the story and run away with it. And, finding ourselves in London, we had to take on the challenge of Western literature. We had to write in full cognisance of everything that had been written. We couldn’t write as if [James] Joyce hadn’t written Finnegan’s Wake or [Fyodor] Dostoevsky hadn’t written Crime and Punishment. That was a steep challenge. There was, for us, a double challenge: the challenge of the older generation of African writers and the challenge of world literature. Maybe the toughest [of the two tasks] was the challenge of world literature at the point we found ourselves. We had to face the challenge and still be ourselves.
(Zvomuya 2012, n.p.)