Book and Mortar

When faculty member William Shullenberger arrived at Uganda’s Makerere University in 1992 to begin a year-long Fulbright professorship, he was asked to teach American literature. Shullenberger’s specialty was the poet John Milton and other English writers; forced to find ways to make the American classics relevant in a society emerging from years of brutal dictatorship, he hit on how American writers had discovered their own voice, and their nation’s, after the end of British colonialism. Thus was born the course “Literary Nation Building.” Last semester Shullenberger taught it at Sarah Lawrence; this time, though, the subject was Africa.

Shullenberger, named in 2003 to the Joseph Campbell Chair in the Humanities, says his course examines the role of African writers as both historians and prophets—keepers of cultural memory who see the past as a possible blueprint for the future in countries struggling to create political and economic identities. It can be risky work, he says.

“In many African nations writing is considered dangerous,” he says, “because it affects how citizens see themselves and their governments. That’s why some of Africa’s greatest writers have chosen exile and seen their works banned in their own countries.

“In America and democratic Europe, a writer can write just about anything he or she wants, without worry of being arrested. This is a sign, on one hand, of societies that tolerate freedom of expression; but it’s also a sign that literature has less social and political power.”

Shullenberger and his wife, Bonnie, an Episcopal priest, liked Uganda so much that they stayed an extra year and later wrote a book, Africa Time: Two Scholars’ Seasons in Uganda. Makerere University, Shullenberger remembers, was a shadow of its former self. The library had been ransacked, the pages from the books used to wrap food and other items for sale in the marketplace. Then-SLC president Alice Ilchman had earlier toured the university and organized a book drive after her return to Bronxville. Fifty car tons were donated; they docked in Tanzania—a country nearly as desperate for books as Uganda—and then they disappeared.

Shullenberger hopes “Literary Nation Building”—which included works from Nigeria, Congo, Uganda, Senegal and Zimbabwe, among others— will motivate students to discover Africa for themselves. “I want them to see that there’s more to Africa than appears in newspapers,” he says. “You can only know it if you’ve been on the ground there, walked the streets, bartered in the markets, enjoyed a goat roast, experienced the tenderness, toughness, hopefulness and generosity of the people. Once you’ve been there you can never get it out of your blood or your memory.”

“These are complex, rich and dynamic cultures—they’re not all disaster stories. They have produced a number of extraordinary writers who are re-making literature, doing things in French and English that are very exciting.”

It turns out that John Milton is not as unrelated to the African experience as one might suppose. “The character of Satan in Paradise Lost provides insight into ways that totalitarianism masks itself as liberation and democracy,” says Shullenberger, noting that some leaders in Africa and elsewhere have pretended to be populists as a means of consolidating power.

“Milton offers a powerful imaginative impetus for modern liberation movements, and a powerful critique of the ways they can be exploited. He also provides a great example of how the English language itself—a former and always a potential instrument of domination—can be, in the hands of the conscientious and the creative, a force for imaginative and political freedom.”

– J.B.