[Pius72]

"I am solidly persuaded that if he, the Nigerian writer, were not alienated, by choice or negligence, from the peculiarities of his Nigerian home and internalized his western indoctrination, there would be absolutely no reason, yes no reason, why his thought-processing (which, after all, are informed by his Nigerianess) and writing cannot easily capture his Nigerian audience because he himself, as a Nigerian, is a part of his own audience."

WayoGuy:

I give you twenty-five and a half gbosas for this statement. Remind me to send you thirty drums of palmwine. Moses must also give you the original LP of cock crow at dawn. The only draw back here is your reference to Negritude. It has nothing doing here. Negritude had nothing to do with the idea of writing to reconnect with the idiom of the street in Francophone Africa. At least not in the way Moses has framed this debate. Their "return to source" philosophy was ideological and spiritual. Senghor and the generations of writers he influenced never wrote for the "maquis" - what we would call burukutu joint. They returned spiritually to a rarefied version of Africa.

Pius