The season of Nobel Prizes has already set in. This year’s Nobel Award for literature is set to be announced in less than a week. As usual, many established writers are claiming the mantle and are nominated as the best candidates to win the most prestigious award and the best recognition any worthy writer can dream of. The time preceding the announcement is usually a time of speculation and suggestions about candidates who have the potential to shine at the Nobel Prize awarding ceremony. It is also a time of fierce endorsements by fans and critics of the best-known authors.
The Nobel Prize nomination and awarding process operate pretty much like the Ballon d’Or in soccer. The fans are divided in their preferences and/or predictions of who is going to win the award this year. In the case of the Ballon d’Or, there is usually too much passion governing the nominations from the fan base of the soccer stars. This is also true with the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is open to speculation by book readers and fans of the authors who pen the books and the critics and media that shape public opinions.
This phenomenon is unique to literature because it is exposed to public speculation and public passion, as is the Ballon d’Or in soccer. Both books and soccer are shared by the wider public, which is not the case with other disciplines like physics, chemistry, or economics, to name but a few of them. One does not expect the public to know much about advanced physics, chemistry, or about the scientists while people are expected to know a lot when it comes to books and soccer.
More than a dozen of writers of world renown are expected to be nominated for the Nobel Prize although the final decision rests with the Nobel committee that announces one candidate as the winner although there are often double candidates in other fields like Economics or Physics for instance. You cannot obviously write books for two as writing is by its very nature probably the most personal and private profession in the world.
So, from among the two dozen or so nominations for the Nobel literary prize, there is only one candidate who is finally selected as the winner. As a result of this, all the rest are cancelled to ran either for the nominations or the actual selection. Because of this, there are several authors who are often shortlisted but fail to pass the last hurdle. There are also those who fail to convince the Nobel committee that refuses to select the best among the candidates. A typical example may be the nomination of the late British author Graham Green who was a candidate nominated every year but failed to win it because one of the members of the Award committee was alleged to have said that, “Green would only win the Nobel on his grave”.
African writers are relative latecomers to the Nobel Prize, as the first winner was selected only in 1986, while the history of the prize stretches to more than a century. In the past, there were many African writers who were nominated for the prize for many consecutive years but continued to miss the award. One of them is obviously Kenyan author Ngugi wa Tiongo, who, in the eyes of many critics and readers, should have won the Nobel Prize a long time ago. Why Ngugi has so far failed to win the prize is something one can only speculate on. However, it is not definitely because he is black or African. Many black and African writers have won the prize many times in the past.
It would be relevant here to go through a list of African and black authors who have already won the Nobel Prize for literature at different times.
Africa has many writers who have won the Nobel Prize in literature although they were not any match to the European and American authors who have been honored with the coveted prize since its inception more than a century ago. The first African to grab the prize was Nigerian dramatist, essayist, novelist and poet Wole Soyinka in 1986. According to information pertaining to the prize, “The 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (born 1934) who, in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.”
Soyinka’s literary career is as diverse as his life experience stretching from his native Nigeria to the United Kingdom where he lived and studied drama, wrote some of his best drams and acted in many of them. In his long career as a writer he had written only one novel called, The Interpreters in 1965 until his second novel appeared in 2021 with the long title of, “Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth” which is a parody of life in contemporary Nigeria with its corrupt politicians, drug gangs and kidnappers and the spread of the crime syndicate that is virtually running the country.
Besides being a consummate writer, Soyinka is also a political activist always standing on the side of freedom and democracy. This was most evident in his Nobel acceptance speech, entitled “The Past Must Address its Present” which he devoted, to the South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela. His speech was an outstanding criticism of the apartheid system imposed on the black people of South Africa. Soyinka opposed military rule in his country and was exiled several times and more particularly during the late General Sani Abacha’s rule from 1993 to 1996.
The second African winner of the Nobel Prize for literature was South African female author Nadine Gordimer. She received the 1991 Noble Literature Prize because of her outstanding criticism of Apartheid and the lives of black majority African under the racist system. She used her novels and short stories to paint a stark portrait of the oppression and exploitation the majority black population suffered and endured under the system.
Although Gordimer was a white South African, her advocacy for racial equality had made an outstanding voice of the voiceless in her country. She was born in 1923 and she described by Seamus Heaney, the outstanding Irish poet who also won the prize after her, as one of “the guerrillas of the imagination”.
In 1998, the Nobel Prize went to Egypt where Naguib Mahfouz had long established himself as one of the leading writers of not only Egypt but also that of the Arab world. He was the first laureate who wrote in Arabic and his translated works conquered the world and gave him a prestigious place in the annals of world literature.
Mahfouz also rendered a great service to Arab literature that was ignored and sidelined for many years before his award and later on started to be respected as one of the most developed literatures of the world. His body of works encompasses the modern version of Egyptian myths and folklore that he derived from a large body of traditional Egyptian storytelling. Mahfouz also used ancient tales of kings and ordinary people, their power and wealth relationships and diverging dreams and illusions. He also used these tales to write similar tales in a modern context, as his major works testify. He has also written many short stories by using the Nile River as a backdrop for the lives of his characters, their aspirations and their dramas.
Then comes South African author John Maxwell Coetzee, who is largely known by his last name that has a South African black flavor although he was a white man of Australian descent. Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature as a recognition of developing a style that, “in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.” Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town and he was recognized by the Swedish Academy that hailed him as a “scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel nationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization.”
As we ca see from the above, not only black writers from Africa won the Nobel Prize for literature. There are two female writers who were honored by the Swedish Academy namely Nadine Gordimer who was black and African. The second woman laureate from Africa is also a white woman by the name Doris Lessing from Zimbabwe who is of British descent. According to Wikipedia, “Doris Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean author who was born to British parents and lived in Iran for some 25 years. She then moved to the then Southern Rhodesia were she remained until moving to London in 1941.
Lessing was recognized as, “One of the most important writers of the 20th century. She wrote over 70 works, covering a huge range of themes and styles, including three novels that were nominated for a Booker prize. Among her distinguished works are the novel entitled, “the Good Terrorist” and numerous African stories that reflected her experience while living in Southern Rhodesia. There is also the much-acclaimed novel by the title, “the Grass is Singing” that won her international acclaim and prestige.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2021and whom Wole Soyinka congratulated for bringing the prize back home after a long hiatus. As we said above, there were also near misses, the most famous case probably being the that of exiled Kenyan author Ngugi wa Tiongo who was nominated every year for the prize and expected to win while unexpected ones were lucky enough to claim the prize to the dismay of the literary world particularly in Africa. Who knows, this year may be Ngugi’s year as he nears retirement after a long and flamboyant career that has already made him one of the best writers in Africa if not in the world.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 6 OCTOBER 2023
