JONALA
The First

The founding number, published from Box 4392, Stanford University, where Okpaku was a postgraduate student in structural engineering. At this stage the title is simply Journal of the New African Literature — “and the Arts” is added with the second issue — and the masthead runs to three names: Okpaku as editor, Zamba Liberty as associate editor and Laura Davidson as assistant editor. The editorial, The Philosophy of the New African Literature, is a manifesto: Okpaku argues that African writing has been frozen into a single theme, the conflict between Western and African cultures, whether in “the worn-out negritude of Leopold Senghor” or in English-speaking writers’ lamentations for a lost grandeur, and that the African writer has been confined to what the West will certify as authentically African. Against this he sets three aims: the change from the provincial to the universal, freedom to write multithematically, and philosophical depth. The issue carries J. F. Povey on changing themes in the Nigerian novel, Benedicta Nwozomudo’s critique of Okpaku’s own play Born Astride the Grave (printed here in full), poems by Laura Davidson, Romanus Egudu, Zamba Liberty and Ernest Attah, stories by Joshua Ndlovu, Lemuel Johnson and Okpaku, Samuel Akpabot on the organisation of the African orchestra, and Daniel Crowley on future research in African art.