Asian and African Writers Meet in Korea.

The biggest literary festival in Asia took place in Jeonju, South Korea when 70 Asian and African writers from 17 and 27 countries respectively held communion with 200 literary figures and colleagues from South Korea. The one week gathering under the Asia- Africa Literature Festival (AALF) was dubbed Marvelous Encounter and had as theme The World is Reborn within Your Eyes. It was a first step towards an extensive cultural-diplomatic exchange through literature and the creation of a world-wide network that would see the establishment of a publication market by the two continents.

Sponsored by a multiplicity of organizations including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Arts Council of Korea and Chonbuk National University, Dr. Palik Nak-Chung, Chairman of the AALF was poetic enough in his opening address when he told the delegates “Just as each star shines alone in the night sky, but people have drawn imaginary lines to form constellations, our gathering will grow into a network that will reconfigure and enrich world literature.” Mindful of the historical precedent in the 1980s which led, in the dying days of the Cold War, to the collapse of the Afro-Asian Writers Congress ( the Soviet Union had insisted then that because it was in the Euro- Asia region, it should be a member which led to the West’s infiltration and the Congress’s collapse), Nak- Chung added: “ in the past century, under the influence of the Cold War regime, solidarity movements of Asian and African writers sometimes veered toward political bloc-making. We will hold fast to the political cause of world peace and the solidarity of the third-world peoples.”

Famous Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thing O’ in a solidarity message expressed delight about the formation of such a union since the writers and the peoples from the two continents share similar problems.

From Egypt came its world acknowledge dissident writer and America based- Nawal El Saadawi, with Lewis Nkosi from South Africa and the national poet of Palestine and globally acknowledged Palestinian literary figure- Mohamoud Darwish who served as key-note speakers to usher in the inaugural meeting. They spoke on topics that had brought them fame- El Saadawi’s Creativity and Dissidence, Nkosi’s concern with Language and Darwish’s meditation of Exile From Ghana three selected writers and critics went: the award winning poet and University of Ghana Professor, Kofi Anyidoho, Dr. Nana Wilson –Tagoe, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London who is a leading figure in Afro-Caribbean Literature and Judge of the Canine Prize for African Writing and Ivor Agyeman-Duah, essayist, literary editor and London based diplomat. Kofi Anyidoo’s contribution to For Languages on the verge of Extinction and Wilson-Tagoe and Agyeman-Duah’s presentation on Those Who were Exiled from their Land (Diaspora and Creativity) would feed in the final communiqué of the inaugural gathering.

The anticipation would be that the bi-annual meeting of the writers would rotate between Asia and Africa.