Tam Fiofori
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Tam Fiofori in Conversation with Jihan El-Tahri
Tam Fiofori in Conversation with Jihan El-Tahri
Part II: Going to America
Part II: Going to America
Like I said my dad was into politics and he used to discuss politics with us. I was very fascinated by the fact that the Nigerians who went to America were at the forefront of the freedom struggle. And one of such people was Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) who studied at Lincoln University and Columbia and he studied journalism. And for me he was like the beacon of the future. He was articulate, he had a world view. He actually wrote the book on Liberia. And he was bold enough to take on the British. Now there was the difference between the American-trained nationalist like Azikiwe, Mbonu Ojike, Mbadiwe and the British trained nationalists like Awolowo. The British trained were more sedate, more proper whilst the American trained—maybe because of the double prejudice they faced as black people in America, because Zik wrote a poem "despise me not because I'm black." He wrote that, you know, protesting against discrimination against black people in America.
Whilst the British trained Nigerians were not concerned with things like that. They were more concerned about—and I have to be careful here—but they were more concerned about learning professions like the law and accountancy and professions where they felt where they were fascinated by the wig and gown.
You quoted some poetry and you knew about all these guys. Did you used to read any magazines at the time?
Yes, well interestingly enough my father used to subscribe to Spear Magazine, which came out of South Africa—Drum magazine. And Drum had a very interesting policy. Amongst other things their chief cameraman, photographer, was a German who trained a generation of South African black photographers and their photographs were very very tortured. Documentary and Apartheid and then that nationalism kind of fired us as young people and that was why we were also interested in the black revolution in America.
Through Drum Magazine?
Yes, through Drum Magazine. Because the Drum magazine was also able to get the linkage between black America and South Africa through jazz music. So, we were interested in things like kwela music, the jazz music, the singers that came before Miriam Makeba and that of course made those...and my dad was a music fan, a jazz fan so we grew up listening to Duke Ellington and you know, because of that interest we went beyond their music to find out about their lifestyle. I remember in high school we had this very beautiful lady, Mrs. Butterfield, an English lady. And she was like, a mother teacher, she really took to us, Mrs. Butterfield. Her husband was a Captain Butterfield in the British Army then. And during class I said something about oh, I don't like Britain because there is a lot of racism and discrimination. She broke down crying because she said Why would you, a young man, attending a privileged sort of school,
why would you want to get involved in that discourse? and I said Mrs. Butterfield, this is just what we read about. This is what we hear about. And guess what: When I went abroad one of the most depressing incidents I had there was in the Underground, or The Tube as they call it. Looking very suave you know, nice suit, my blazer and a scarf because if you attend a college in London University, each college has its own distinctive scarf. There I was you know, looking good.
I must say with all due respect, I thought that I was quite—you know. In fact, someone actually told me I looked like Harry Belafonte, kind of got into my head. Then I was in The Tube on my way to lectures, nobody agreed to sit by me except an old lady who came and sat by me with a dog. The next thing I knew she bought out a piece of chocolate and she was sharing it with her dog. Now I know I felt a bit bad I said, I mean of all the people here, here I am was looking suave and confident and no one felt...there was that level of discrimination when we went to school and not too long ago I had to go and shake hands with Wole Soyinka you know, because he wrote a poem, The Telephone Conversation. Which, in a sense, encapsulated what we used to go through and that poem, The Telephone Conversation, is like a conversation between a young African student and a potential landlady. You know in those days they had all those flat for rent, bedsit up for rent. Then the lady says to him, are you white? And he says No, but the soles of my feet are white. So that was the level of discrimination.
How did you know about this poem, where did you read it, how did you find out about it?
I found out about it, I think after I’d left England to America. Because at that time also, my interest in black literature had been awakened. How? Because by reading a lot, when I was in England I had the opportunity to expand my interest in jazz music and through that I was also reading magazines like down beat, yes down beat that's what comes to mind. And then James Baldwin comes on the scene and he wrote this wonderful book, Another Country. I had a girlfriend from Ghana who was reading English at University of Leicester and James Baldwin had come to England, I think it was in 1962 or so to launch his book Another Country. I think it was published by Michael Joseph and he was staying in a hotel not far from the British Museum. So, me and my girlfriend, we said let's go and meet James Baldwin and there we were and we went to the hotel and we went to see Mr. Baldwin. And they looked at us young students who was in Leicester you know and James Baldwin gave us the most fantastic reception. I mean he kind of, he felt elated, two young African students coming to look for me? Of course, him and my girlfriend were talking literature, Jane Austen and all that and me and him now were talking politics, finding out about the black Muslims you know, things like that and that kind of, those incidents encouraged me to go to America.
How do you get to America?
Well, I was in communication with —I will call them a creatively revolutionary group. They were based in Detroit. Their two leaders were John Sinclair and his wife then Eleanor. Through mutual friends they have put us in touch. They ran two magazines, one called Change the other one called Guerilla. They appointed me their London editor and one of the first pieces I did for them was a review of Ornette Coleman’s concert in London, first time he went to Europe in 1965. So, I reviewed the Ornette Coleman concert for Change magazine. That led up to them inviting me to come and stay in their commune, so to say, in Detroit. And I arrived in America, checked my baggage into the, you know the huge station. I put my bag into one of those lockers and took off to Detroit. When I got to Detroit I was pleasantly surprised and at the same time a bit afraid. Because apart from their creative endeavours they were also into this legalised marijuana movement and I wasn't too comfortable with that aspect so I made sure I trod very carefully. And then it was very obvious I had to go to New York.
So I took off, got to New York, is it Central Station? Penn Station, and so I got out this tall black chap just took to me, came up to me and he says My name is (Henry) Dumas, you know and I say I’m Tam Fiofori. Within two minutes we found out that we both admired Leroy Jones as he was known then. We both admired Sun Ra and we're both into literature. That time I had started writing some poetry which was why I was contributing to Change and Guerilla, writing poetry and then doing music reviews. Then Dumas asked me to come and stay with him temporarily because his live-in girlfriend had gone away for the summer. And that evening he took me to town and we met fellow writers like Jay Wright and obviously after a few days we gravitated to Brooklyn where Leroy Jones was now staging his play called A Black Mass and for that play he had Sun Ra provided music on stage as they were performing. After the concert, I was quite bold. I tell you where that got me, I mean I had this African confidence. Nigerians especially, we've always been bold.
In 1953, Masuka scored her first big hit with ‘Hamba Nontsokolo’, a song that cemented her status as an artist who had early on distinguished herself on the Rhodesian music circuit by discarding the ‘copyrights’ and, in the tradition of urban women’s ‘folk’ songs, performing original music infused with her own life experiences and the local sounds of the region. She amplified the potency of this by capitalising on and transgressing the patriarchal Victorian and African gender conventions, boldly expressing herself beyond the mere adoptive repertoires of colonial modernity. In 1955, a coy Masuka was featured on the cover of Drum magazine, and declared as ‘Rhodesia’s Darling’. As the fifties progressed, Bulawayo’s Dorothy Masuka and Sophiatown’s Dolly Rathebe were more popular than most male vocal quartets.
"Voices as powerful as guns" Panashe Chigumadzi on Dorothy Masuka’s (w)ri(o)ting woman-centred Pan-Africanism, The Johannesburg Review of Books.
"We all voraciously read books and magazines by and on African Americans. The book that was at the center of our admiration of African American culture was Amiri Baraka‟s Blues People (1963). This book about African American jazz and blues strangely enough led me to read in a concentrated period of about six months all the novels and books of essays that James Baldwin had written up to that moment. The two books read then which have remained unforgettable are Go To Tell It On The Mountain (1953) and Notes Of A Native Son (1955). Subsequently I practically read everything he published except his theater work. Although the essays assembled here on African Americans here were written in West Berlin in the late 1980s, they reflect the instructive and joyous encounter with black American culture in the 1960s in Nairobi."
Ntongela Masilela, "An intellectual Itinerary"
"In the 1950s in Nigeria a literary renaissance was in full swing', and Mphahlele met many of its exponents: among them Kofi Awoonor (who became a lifelong friend), Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, J. P. Clark, and Ama Ata Aidoo. Rejoined the editorial board of the journal Black Orpheus, became a contributor and eventually coeditor. In 1961 Black Orpheus, under sponsorship of the Ministry of Education, published a collection of his stories, The Living and Dead, and Other Stories. The stories were written in South Africa, all except one had previously been published in journals—Drum, Africa South, Fighting Talk, New World Writing, and Black Orpheus—and two are very similar to incidents in Down Second Avenue. Unlike his first collection, in the 1961 book black people are shown in relation to the white world around them and often in conflict with it."
Ursula A. Barnett: Es'kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele.
Ntongela Masilela, "An intellectual Itinerary"
"In the 1950s in Nigeria a literary renaissance was in full swing', and Mphahlele met many of its exponents: among them Kofi Awoonor (who became a lifelong friend), Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, J. P. Clark, and Ama Ata Aidoo. Rejoined the editorial board of the journal Black Orpheus, became a contributor and eventually coeditor. In 1961 Black Orpheus, under sponsorship of the Ministry of Education, published a collection of his stories, The Living and Dead, and Other Stories. The stories were written in South Africa, all except one had previously been published in journals—Drum, Africa South, Fighting Talk, New World Writing, and Black Orpheus—and two are very similar to incidents in Down Second Avenue. Unlike his first collection, in the 1961 book black people are shown in relation to the white world around them and often in conflict with it."
Ursula A. Barnett: Es'kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele.
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