The Road Trip of 1975: How Far We Have Come, How Close to Austin We Remain

In March of 1975, perhaps four or five of us students from U Wisconsin- Madison climbed into a station wagon, rented for us from the UW car pool by the Department of African Languages and Literatures, and traveled south toward the sun in Austin, Texas.We leftin the dead of night. The thought of real spring weather, the increasingly warm temperatures as we headed south, and the long drive made us giddy enough. But we were also nervous and excited about the fact that we would soon meet faces and bodies to match some of the famous names we knew . . .I had largely moved to African literature, as a French PhD student, because, as I often say, the faculty in African Studies-literature especially- would invite you to their homes. And you could actually MEET the writers and filmmakers you were studying. You could ask them questions, and they'd answer you (more or less), whereas in French, the writers we studied were mostly dead, and none of the living had ever come-during my years, at least- to Madison.It was also obvious that "African literature," as we then called it, mattered. These texts we were reading and debating were part of something real, something critical. They clearly made a difference. This was proven to us in the worst way: Writers, like political leaders, could be censored, jailed, tortured, exiled or murdered.So, a historic occasion was brewing and we students would be a part of it. We would in fact, if I may shiftmetaphors, be getting in on the ground floor.I don't remember much in the way of detail, except that I would be the guest of a UT graduate student, Patsy. I slept on her floor. She was a wonderful hostess.It was only the second professional meeting I'd ever attended, the first being the 1974 ASA meetings in Chicago when the ALA was born. It had seemed a radical break at the time, even though it was presented as a caucus more or less, which is to say that we would all still be attending ASA but would hold a separate meeting in addition, where literature, no longer overshadowed by political science and policy wonks, could come into its own. I didn't grasp then what a difference this would make and how much the ALA would shape me professionally and personally, nor how invested I would become in this little association, how it would give institutional credibility to the work we do, how it would enable women to also "be somebody."Students might be in awe of these household names ("household," among Africanists at least), but they were never treated like junior members: They were full-fledged participants in the debates, on the Exec Council right from the beginning. And so were women. Although it would take twelve years before the election of the first woman president of ALA.The theme of the Austin meeting was "Contemporary South African Literature." Among writers and scholars from West Africa, there were Chinua Achebe, Emmanuel Obiechina, Romanus Egudu, Pol Ndu, KofiAwoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo, and a Wole Soyinka protege, Biodun Jeyifo. From East Africa: Peter Nazareth and Ali Mazrui.What I remember most clearly of that first iteration, of course, was the overwhelming presence of South Africans-Dennis Brutus, Cosmo Pieterse, Mazisi Kunene, Ezekiel Mphalele, Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, our own Daniel Kunene. Many of these giants would be presidents of ALA over the following decade. And the ALA's next twenty years, with all their excitement, discovery and growth, would be painfully tethered to the evolution of South African politics.The tyranny at home in South Africa reached over and shaped the course of the ALA, located in the U.S. in those years. Individuals were silenced, expelled from meetings and membership on the basis of positions they took in or trips they took to South Africa. It was wrenching. But such was the acuity and urgency of the South African debacle, standing in for the whole continent, that it is hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. …