New African Literature
and the Arts, III

The third volume, and the first the series published itself: copyright 1973 by The Third Press — Joseph Okpaku Publishing Co., Inc., first printing, SBN 89388-074-4 clothbound and 89388-074-3 paperbound, designed by Bennie Arrington, who also did the jacket for the journal’s eleventh and twelfth numbers.

Its centre of gravity has shifted from the Journal to the continent. Most of the essays, marked with an asterisk throughout the contents, were delivered at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival held in Algiers in 1969 under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity — among them Houari Boumedienne on the Festival itself, Mamadi Keita, Seth Cudjoe, Ben Enwonwu on the battle for cultural freedom, Mazisi Kunene, Alex La Guma on African culture and national liberation, S. J. Ntiro, and Okpaku on the artist and politics. Later sections take in literature and criticism, negritude, poetry by Femi Fatoba, Syl Cheyney-Coker and Harold Head, and folklore, music and communications, with Agnes Nebo von Ballmoos on Liberian folk songs and Bai T. Moore on Liberia’s contribution to the science of communication.

In his preface, dated May 1973, Okpaku looks back to “the days of editing manuscripts in bed, sitting (some five or six of us) on the floor addressing envelopes to subscribers” at Stanford, and notes that the Journal is now lodged inside The Third Press — “a curious case of the father becoming the ward.” The front jacket flap quotes Toni Morrison, reviewing Volume 2 in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, on the emerging canon of black writing as “an organic process of becoming.”