ANA Interviewed in todays Brittle Paper Magazine Brittle Paper: What is ANA? Is it a union of sorts, like the Actor’s Guild of Nigeria or is it more like PEN America? Can just anyone become a member? Richard Ali: ANA is the Association of Nigerian Authors and that is descriptive enough, I believe, of at least the scope of the body. It was founded in 1981 by the late Professor Chinua Achebe when he called a meeting of all Nigerian writers at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he was then based. The civil war had ended about ten years before yet writers and their business was still fragmentarily organized, each person writing his own thing and sometimes writers met informally according to the dictates of geography or simply ethnicity. So, Prof decided to do something about this situation and that Nsukka meeting, attending by two Kenyan writers, became the first Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors. Regarding structure, it is not a guild in the sense of the AGN—that would be quite impossible really, actors can be censured with pressure being put by the AGN on directors and producers but that is quite impossible with writing. Besides, expression is a fundamental human rights issue. So ANA is more like PEN International except that we are not elitist at all in the way PEN is; it is simply an organization to protect the interests of Nigerian authors and aggrandize their welfare and boost the prestige of our writing generally within and outside the country. In the last three decades, the manner in which these broad objectives have been interpreted has varied from time to time in line with the socioeconomic context of Nigeria and Africa. The present executive, of which I am a part, sees ANA’s objectives as being a sort of craft union for Nigerian writers. Who says it is easier to push papers in a government department all day than to write a short story or a critical essay? More difficult even, I think. So, writers are an interest group whose interests need to be clarified and presented—to State and non-State actors, including the corporate world. This mindset is, of course, a leap from the merely celebrative [and combative, when we were in the throes of the Abacha dictatorship] mindset of the ’90s or the ideological balancing act of the ’80s. Anyone can be a member of the association. There are four levels of membership. The Associate Members are literature enthusiasts who are not necessarily writers, mostly students and writers who do not yet have a book published. Full Members are writers who have a book published in print who are registered with one of the twenty eight chapters of the Association. There are Institutional Members, such as Colleges and Departments of Literature, English etc while Honorary memberships are reserved to eminent writers like Soyinka and JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiongo—writers who have and continue to affect the theory and practice of Africana studies as it relates to literature. Read full interview HERE ( tinyurl/pg8oj9v ) brittlepaper/2013/11/nigerian-writer-join-association-nigerian-authors-brittle-paper-qa-richard-ali/
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 06:15:06 +0000
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