PROFESSOR ELLISON

Professor Ellison. I must acknowledge the fact that today, your number is extraordinary.[ fevered applause from enthusiastic students] the turn up today is overwhelming. It gives credence to our awakening literary instincts which in turn will propel our nascent literature to a stage synonymous to literary revolution, renaissance in African literature. I will like to commend you all boys, for making it. For it is like a dream fulfilled and I hope that by few years to come our interest to re imbue and re invigorate the essence, the sum and substance of African literature and to give it a totally new direction would be a reality. That is the vision I want to nurse in you, the course I will challenge your consciences to pursue, to turn you all into seekers, to encourage you to seek, to understand and appreciate works of art. Works of seers. That do not only transform and reform but brews the heart and mind for greater aspiration, works that speaks of and immediately addresses our situation. Works that seek to salvage blighted souls. These are the seeds of knowledge we seek to sow in your maturing minds here at the premier university.

Let us proceed. Some themes keep on recurring in works of art, like love, death, the meaning of life etc. in the same way, when writing, our works must reflect our culture, the works must be vociferously shrill in portraying the kind of people we are, the strange and uncertain dilemma that engulf us. As Africans, our experience was outrageously unique. The rush for our souls, the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience. The pain, the agony we went through. A people with one aim divided and destiny distorted, history misrepresented. The images of ourselves in cheap literature. The distortion of our past, the structured and crude mystification and yet still they still pursue us with manic raw hatred seeking for our extermination, our destruction in the lowermost echelons of hell. To the writer, this appalling pillage of souls and enigmatic dilemma on the brink of total evanescence must not go uncommented, undiscussed. An attempt must be made to lay bare the ritualized facts, the writer, the intellectual the seer, the visionary must speak out loud and clear for he is the man of the people. I know the so called learned people who have spent all their lifetime learning empty arguments woven into deceptive jewelry would maintain that such a person is either a psychopath or paranoid. For some of us to maintain such a stance is unfortunate.

I don’t know all the mysteries of art but I know that it is a history, geography. You learn more about a society from a good novelist or poet or playwright than all the history books can provide. So you must be firm. I am not trying to indoctrinate or imbibe you with my own ideas; all that I stand for is a tower of inspiration. An intermediary of the muse to aid you bring out relevant works of art that will deal directly with our situation and not a cacophonous jamboree of discordant jabber that is irrelevant in space and time but mere sound and fury signifying nothing, a toddler’s tale.

By way of conclusion, I will like to tell you that any time you take a pen and a paper, anything that will come out must be the basis for reconstruction, the work must give more insight, must reflect what is gnawing at our consciences. Thank you. [Thunderous applause from students]