boswestblog.com

by Lewis Nkosi
Umuzi, 2006

reviewed by Ben Oswest

Despite Africa’s large, often unrecognised, literary wealth (its robust oral traditions; its poetry and proverbs; ancient writings like the Timbuktu Manuscripts; the more recent tradition of fine playwrights and novelists), African “master texts” are few and far between. For writing in the West, the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and others supply a vast, rich - and tamed - metaphorical space for new works to resound in, their own meanings amplified by echoes from the past. Modern African literature enjoys no such milieu - but what Africa lacks in great texts, it makes up for with a powerfully symbolic pantheon of great men, the continent’s liberators, who loom so large in the popular imagination that they are themselves like great texts, their lives of struggle and triumph echoing with as much force here as, say, The Odyssey in imagined Europe.

This would explain autobiography’s prominence in contemporary African literature: the need for the great men’s lives to be made into books underscores a larger project of making independence permanent, of bolting the fact of liberation securely down into world history. In effect, then, the autobiographies of great men stand in as Africa’s master texts - and among them none can be accounted more weighty, more foundational, than Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom.

Enter Lewis Nkosi, who, with Mandela’s Ego, rushes in like a literary David to contest the Goliath autobiography’s claim to the territory of the African imagination.
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It was Leila Khaled Hijacker, a relatively new documentary, and Leila Khaled herself - the “Che Guevara of the Palestinians” - was there for a post-screening discussion. She hijacked one plane in the late-60s, and attempted to hijack another in the early-70s, as a member of the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and was catapulted to fame, aided by her beauty and audacity. Today, she is revered as a hero by millions, especially in the pan-Arab world.

The object of her missions was publicity for the Palestinian cause, which until then, she says in the film, had gone largely ignored in the mainstream media. From that point of view, both operations were a success - unless you take the line, like the Swedish Palestinian filmmaker, that Khaled and her comrades gave the Palestinians a “bad reputation” through their acts. (No one was killed in the PFLP hijackings, the second round of which were coordinated across four filghts, Khaled’s being the only one that didn’t come off; planes were landed in friendly territory, then, after everyone had disembarked, spectacularly blown up.)

Leila Khaled and Dennis Davis

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