•ISSUE NUMBER TWO* 1997 on the Negritude issue for example where he writes that: 'Soyinka, while criticising Negritude, made the remark which has haunted him, that the tiger does not proclaim his tigritude' (p.90). Then, on the next page, cites Lewis Nkosi's report on the African Writ- ers Conference at the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda In 1962. Nkosi observed that while the 'older writers like the South African, Ezekiel Mphahlele and the Ni- gerian, Chinua Achebe, looked by far the calm- est, most disciplined and trustworthy, in what appeared to be a company of literary cut- throats, out to get one another at the slightest provocation... (t)he young Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, went so far as to invent a 'negritude' poem on the spot, while address- ing the conference, in a sudden astringent parody of Senghor's poetry and its preoccupa- tions with the African personality, an act of creation which succeeded only too well for it enraged the delegates from French West Af- rica' (p.91) Follow-up materials supplied in Janheinz Jahn's Neo-African Literature: A History of Black Writing are absent where the issue is revisited following a 1964 Berlin meeting. There the commentator was reported to have said, 'As Aime Cesaire said, it is quite com- mon for things to be quoted out of context and for portraits to be issued by foreign critics and even by African interviewers which end up by a little bit of distorting the real image. The point is this that, to quote what I said fully, I said: "A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces". In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: "I am a tiger". When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there. In other words: the distinction which I was making at this conference (in Kampala, Uganda, 1962) was a purely literary one: I was trying to distinguish between propaganda and true poetic creativity. I was saying in other words that what one expected from poetry was an intrinsic poetic quality, not a mere name- dropping.' A work of this significance and nature in my view is an opportunity to balance out and set records straight, particularly where the novelist's peers are concerned. This also goes for the references in the book to the Charles Nnolim debate when the critic announced that he had found a source for 'Ar- row of God.' Ayi Kwei Armah also suffers in the procession of Ohaeto's poor and imbalanced portrayals. • A young Nigerian-born writer, Idowu Omoyele lives in London. Inhospitable streets Report by Pius Adesanmi Georges Herault, Pius Adesanmi, Eds. IEUNES, CULTURE DE LA RUE ET VIOLENCE URBAINE EN AFRIQUE, French Institute for Research in Af- rica, Ibadan & African Book Builders Ltd.Ibauan, 1997, 419 pp. R EACTING to a 1996 report which estimated the number of street chil- dren and youths in Nairobi, Kenya at about 100,000, Jinmi Adisa, a United Nations consultant on con- flict resolution, exclaimed jocularly that Nairobi is now taking 'giant strides' in the pro- duction of street children in Africa! Comical as it may appear on the surface, Adisa's remark draws powerful attention to a phenomenon which has become one of the cornerstones of contemporary social discourse and political action in this fin de siecle - the phenomenon of urbanisation with its concommittant effects of demographic hyper-explosion, economic stasis and social dysfunctionality in the modern Af- rican polis. Glendora Books Supplement » 4.1 Design by Rosalie- Ann Modder ISSUE NUMBER TWO • 1 9 9 7* << When all the structures of modernity and the factors propitious to human develop- ment are concentrated in the city as is the case in Africa and the Third World in gen- eral, the stage is set for the progressive disempowerment of the rural areas, thus forc- ing the mass of impoverished peasants to migrate to the already overcrowded cities where amorphous survival strategies occasion serious spatial pressures. This cen- tripetal process, which con- tinually draws rural dwellers to the eldorado of the city, has been canonised in most dis- ciplines as rural-urban mi- gration. The net conse- quences of this situation are vividly- described by.Michel Marcus in his report on the International Conference on Urban Security held in Saint- Denis, La Reunion in 1995: Our cities are full of social malfunctions in terms of the family, education, employ- ment, culture, ethnic rela- tions, relations between young people and adults, the place of women in society, housing, access to land and so on... . Our cities have be- come insecure, while at the same time failing to provide their inhabitants with the in- gredients of sustainable de- velopment (14). In this equation, space in the African city has become highly commodified and is rigidly governed by a profit oriented axiology. Given that the commodification of space in the African city is compli- cated further by the factors of marginalisation and un- equal access to opportunities, the ground is prepared for the activities of the informal sector and the underworld to develop. Interestingly, recent empirical indices from Africa show that children and youths now form the bulk of urban street actors. Indeed, every African city now has an Glendora Books Supplement army of children and youths for whom the street has become a permanent home. Naturally, these street children construct their own subcultural ethos which are often at variance with the regnant socio-cultural orthodoxies of the larger soci- ety. This creates tensions and contradictions which are in- imical to the management of urban space in Africa. In response to this intimi- dating urban challenge, the Ibadan-based French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) convened an international symposium on the theme, Youths, Street Culture and Ur- ban Violence in Africa in Abidjan, the economic capital of Cote d'voire, from May 5-7 1997. The symposium, which was co-sponsored by the French Ministry of Coopera- tion and the Urban Manage- ment Programme of the UN, availed a good number of ex- perts from Africa, Europe and the United States the opportu- nity of establishing diverse but mutually enriching positinalities on the topic. Prior to the symposium, Professor Georges Herault, IFRA's erstwhile director, had commissioned eight city-spe- cific papers from seasoned scholars. The cities are: Abidjan (Alain Sisoko), Dakar (Ousseynou Faye and Momar- Coumba Diop), Johannesburg (Mart Shaw), Kano (Olawale Albert), Kinshasha (Tshikala Biaya), Lagos (Jinmi Adisa), Nairobi (Deyssi Rodriguez- Torres) and Umtata (Eghosa Osaghae). The submissions of these scholars in their various papers formed the epistemo- logical pivot of the symposium. Discussions bordered mainly on the need for fashioning out appropriate methodological paradigms for apprehending the phenomenon of street chil- dren; the need to put the amor- phous dysfunctionalities of the African city in proper perspec- tive as well as a close exami- nation of the interface between street culture and urban vio- lence. Other issues examined include the identification of the 'trigger issues' respon- sible for the high incidence of street deviance in African cit- ies, the role of the state and the civil society in the area of intervention strategies. The role played by the familiar binarism between tradition and modernity in frustrating intervention efforts was also discussed. that only With regard to methodol- ogy, participants were of the opinion a multidisciplinary approach could enable the scholar to grapple with the complexities of the phenomenon of street culture and urban violence. They however noted that the scholar must ensure that his findings are not merely a re- flection of his own idiosyn- cratic perceptions. Apart from this problem, the symposium also had to address the thorny question of defining who precisely is a street child. This task was made all the more difficult by the obvious fluidities of the concerned subjects in terms of age and identity. Quoting Schurink (1993:5), Osaghae described street children as: All categories of boys and girls who have not reached for whom the adulthood, street in the widest sense of the word, including unoccupied buildings, wasteland, etc.) has become the habitual abode and I or source of liveli- hood, who are inadequately protected, supervised or di- rected by their families or re- sponsible adults and in no position to assert the rights due to them as youths, be they children on or of the street, runaways or throwaways. The symposium went ahead to establish three cat- egories of street children on the basis of their mode of street occupation. They are: mid-career street youths, temporary street youths and ISSUE NUMBER TWO • 1 9 37 • career street youths. While a good number of these actors work in the informal sector (street hawkers, bus conduc- tors, car washers, porters, car guards, beggars) others are involved in illegal activities (pickpockets, shoplifters, area boys, touts, rapists, drug dealers, etc). by While the African partici- pants reasoned that the ma- jor cause of the phenomenon is the widespread poverty occasioned the wrongheaded foisting of Structural Adjustment Programmes on weak African economies, the French par- ticipants argued that the main causal factor should be located in the break up of the family and the progressive erosion of traditional control systems. This disagreement notwithstanding, the sympo- sium noted that the overall effect of street deviance in Africa lies in the generation of stress, chaos and, ultimately, violence. One of the partici- pants, Stephane Tessier, ad- dressed the issue of violence at length. Rather than view vio- lence as a phenomenon gener- ated by asocial street actors as is often the case in social sci- ence practice, he preferred to construct street actors as vic- tims of the psycho-social, sym- bolic and economic violence produced by the larger adult society in the public space. Consequently, Tessier ar- gued that the forms of violence which street children inflict on society should be seen as a re- sponse, a sort of counter-vio- lence to the violence they un- dergo. Examining efforts made in various African countries at stemming the tide of the ugly phenomenon, the symposium observed that African govern- ments, apart from erroneously seeing all street actors as pub- lic enemies, often tend to per- ceive private initiative (by NGOs) as affront. Thus, rather than complement each other, governments and NGOs see themselves as com- petitors. The symposium also noted that government effort is largely ineffective because the African state has col- lapsed and can no longer meet its social obligations. The action of NGOs were also criticised as being 'sympathy- driven.' At the end of the three-day symposium, wide- ranging suggestions and rec- ommendations were made to the appropriate authorities but Jinmi Adisa insisted that 'there can be no solution to all the problems we have dis- cussed in the last three days so long as our society does not learn to invest in its own people.' •Adesanmi. was the rapporteur at the Abidjan symposium A Rhyming Diary Sanya Osha Uche Nduba CHIAROSCURO, published by Yeti Press, Bremen, 1997. 200pp. 6 1 Uche Nduba Bttki 6 EXILE isn't always a pleasant experience for many artists. And this is probably truer in the case of literary art- ists who have to make greater effort in capturing the native smells, colours and textures of their homelands. The fact of exile usually disrupts or severes these nostalgic sensa- tions. But fortunately, Uche Nduka's latest offering of po- etry, Chiaroscuro passes through the crucible of exile and emerges on the side of po- etic maturity. Nduka has cer- tainly grown in stature since the publication of Flower child (1985). In that collection, Nduka had already laid the map of his future preoccupa- tions: life, joy, art and, need one add, individualism. The last characteristic propels him invariably towards a sometimes strident cosmo- politanism. In other words, he becomes the ultimate post-co- lonial/post modernist figure amalgamating and dismem- bering geographical realities and often divergent cultural codes with" random, even if productive, glee. But exile is surely far from the foreground in Chiar- oscuro as Nigena in all its awesome diversity seems to mark out the collection's tra- I