FEATURED ARTICLES Remembering Early Issues of African Literature Today

Summary

African Literature Today, launched in print in the UK by Eldred Jones in 1968, was the successor to a Bulletin of the Association for African Literature in English that he had started editing in a modest cyclostyled format four years earlier in Sierra Leone as an outlet for scholarly commentary on the new literatures that were emerging in Anglophone Africa. The Bulletin wasn't the first journal published in Africa to carry literary criticism. It had been preceded by Black Orpheus in 1957, Transition in 1961, and Abbia in Cameroon in 1963, as well as by a number of campus magazines such as Penpoint at Makerere University in Kampala in 1958, The Horn at University College Ibadan in 1958, and The Muse at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka in 1963. But in these other journals, discourse on literature was a sideline, not the primary focus. Eldred Jones, one of the earliest university teachers of African literature, was also one of the earliest scholars to devote serious scrutiny to what African writers were producing. And through his pioneering editorial efforts he made it possible for others to express their ideas on this interesting new phenomenon too. His initiatives helped to turn African literary studies into a proper academic discipline.

But he was not the only one promoting this kind of cultural activity. Scholars elsewhere who were beginning to study the emergence of new English language literatures in areas of the world outside Britain and America were also engaged in developing vehicles for communication of their ideas. The 1960s saw the founding of a Journal of Commonwealth Literature in England in 1965 as well as a Conference on British Commonwealth Literature Newsletter in the United States in 1966, which in 1971 was expanded into a journal called World Literature Written in English. An older American journal, Books Abroad, founded as early as 1927, became World Literature Today in 1976. In addition, three Anglophone literature journals in India – The Literary Criterion, The Literary Half-Yearly, and The Commonwealth Journal – all published in Mysore, became increasingly international, and Canadians established Ariel in 1970 as their contribution to the broadening of English literary studies. In the process the word Commonwealth, a hangover from the British Empire, tended to be displaced by the word Postcolonial, which included non-British territories as well.