INTERVIEW

Sofia Dati & Helena Kritis – The Africans, A Radio Play in Three Acts is an adaptation of the 1971 novel The Trial of Christopher Okigbo by the late philosopher and political writer Ali A. Mazrui. How did you come across this novel? 

Christian Nyampeta – I first encountered the book in 2012 in London through discussions with my mentor and PhD supervisor, artist Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group (with Anjalika Sagar). We’ve conducted enduring and still ongoing discussions about the history of ideas, especially “Afrofuturist” and “Afropessimist” literature by non-US African writers. I remember reading this book on my first trip back to Rwanda –which I hadn’t visited for 14 years– and being completely shocked. I have this memory of me sitting in the backyard of where my parents now live. I had never been in that house and overall, I felt as if I was in “After-Africa.” I was at home, without really being at home. There I was, reading this book and feeling like I was the one on trial for having left, and also for being an [removed];

SD & HK – The radio play raises questions about Panafricanism, civic duty and universal laws, the artist’s role within historically and politically charged contexts. What brought you to unbury these narratives today? 

CN – The novel holds an idea that I keep going back to: a poet passes away, arrives in After-Africa and is put on trial. The ensuing debates function as a container for ideas, questions and problems I’ve been dealing [removed];Altogether, the novel is a search for the role of an artist in the face of pressing historical demands.

In the novel, the artist is Christopher Okigbo, the late Nigerian poet. The writer, Ali A. Mazrui, was Kenyan himself. Which shows how someone from Nigeria had a lasting influence on people in East Africa. From what I understood, this is due in part to Okigbo’s passing on the battlefield during the Biafran War in 1967, an event that signalled a shift in the course of the Pan-African [removed];

The prose of the novel is somewhat dated and even clumsy at times, but its wider themes remain very relevant; they resonate across borders, across generations, and also across the cultures in which the specificity of the book is rooted. The book also has a very personal meaning to me, not in biographical terms, but in terms of my own “sociography:” it helps to respond to questions that may affect most individuals working in the fields of culture at this particular moment in history. Over the years, I’ve returned to the novel and have generated various formats in response to it. In a way, my films are characteristically set in After-Africa, understood as a transient, dialogical spacetime that brings together echoes and dimensions that are usually separated by either physical limits of life and death, or by conflicting cultural and political [removed];

The radio play is no different in that it is situated in this long line of artistic enquiry guided not by my “subjectivity” but rather by my sociography, since I learned from Kodwo Eshun who in turn learned from Sylvia [removed];

SD & HK – What you call the radiophonic format seems to be in line with the ideas of collectivity, conversation and transmission that are very much embedded in your practice as a whole. Could you elaborate on your choice to work with this medium? 

CN – When I received this invitation from WIELS to contribute to what is now Risquons-Tout with a new commission, I was already in dialogue with Ntone Edjabe of Chimurenga who had invited me to think of a live contribution to the Chimurenga Library, which would host the Pan African Space Station in Paris. Needless to say, there were postponements, but the now forthcoming iteration of the Chimurenga Library in Paris engages with Black intellectual lives and histories in France, beyond US influences. I was thinking of making a play about After-Africa: a space-time populated by all the promises and contradictions that could be inscribed or described as “African.” Edjabe is of course no stranger to these histories; Chimurenga once published documents from the Okigbo archive. So, he was very encouraging. With After-Africa I wanted to address the awful linguistic divide between English, French and Portuguese within African studies. The divide is obviously not an essence of Africanity but a consequence of its history, marked by colonial domination. Also, the main protagonist, Hamisi, is a radio [removed]; 

And then, the most extraordinary thing happened….

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