>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
>> My name is [inaudible] and I work at the Kluge Center at the Library
of Congress' Office of Scholarly programs,
and I welcome you all today to one in a series of lectures
that the Kluge Center sponsors.
Today's talk is by Dr. Peter Kailiney,
and its entitled Modernism, African Literature and the CIA.
Now, I'm going to remind you as usual to turn off your cell phones,
tell you that there will be questions at the end,
and if you have any questions,
you're asking them will be understood as permission for us
to broadcast them via a live feed over the library's website.
Obviously, I also want to thank the John W. Kluge family for its support
of the Kluge Fellowships and the Kluge Center here
at the Library of Congress.
Remember to go to the library's website and sign up for RSS feeds,
and if you're looking for brochures that explain more
about the Kluge Center, they're right up front here,
and we have plenty more of those.
If we run out, we'll run down the hall and get more for you.
Dr. Peter Kailiney is an Associate Professor of English
at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches 20th century British
and Post Colonial literature.
His first book, Cities of Affluence and Anger, a Literary Geography
of Modern Englishness, was published in 2007
by the University of Virginia Press.
His next book will be out later this summer,
and it's entitled Commonwealth of Letters, British Literary Culture
and the Emergence of a Post-Colonial Aesthetic,
and it will be published by Oxford -- excuse me --
Oxford University Press as part
of the Modernist Literature and Culture series.
Now, today's presentation draws on work that he's doing
for his next project, concerning the Cold War era and decolonization.
He's done most of the work for this here at the library
over the last year, and we're very eager to hear what has come
from the research that he's been doing here.
During the Cold War era, particularly during the 1960's,
the CIA was very active in funding African writers.
Now, why would the CIA be particularly interested
in the emerging literature of Africa,
and why would a fiercely independent cohort
of African writers be interested in receiving that funding?
If you help me welcome Dr. Peter Kailiney, I think we will learn
at least some of the answers to those questions.
[ Applause ]
>> Okay. I want to thank Mary Lou, and Caroline, and Travis,
and all the other people at the Kluge Center and of course,
the Kluge family that's helped fund this center.
It's been a really great home for me this year,
and I really appreciate not only the staff
but the other scholars who have been there.
I've had some really interesting conversations with some
of my colleagues there, and it's --
I've learned a lot and I've also thought in new ways
about some of my own research.
So the title of the talk today is Modernism, African Literature
and the CIA with this question mark.
It's sort of an odd triumvirate,
and hopefully I'll raise a few questions even
if I don't provide that many answers.
It's not widely discussed even among scholars of African literature
that the CIA was the most active and influential patron
of Anglophone African writing during the 1960's.
Through its European affiliate the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
the CIA dispersed funds to many
of Africa's emerging cultural institutions,
although the real source of the funding was hidden
from the recipients, and that's important to keep in mind.
The first major international symposium on African literature,
The Conference of African Writers of English Expression
at Kampala's Makerere University in 1962,
was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The CIA supplied programming for African radio
with the Transcription Center; a London based recording studio
and clearing house for African cultural materials.
Black Orpheus, the Nigerian Arts Review and Transition,
the slick cultural magazine started in Uganda,
were both supported by CIA's inventions.
The Bari Club in Nigeria,
the Kemkemi [assumed spelling] Arts Center in Kenya,
were also beneficiaries of CIA interests
in Africa art and literature.
By sponsoring these organizations,
the CIA monies reached nearly all the Anglophone African intellectuals
of the day.
Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Ezekiel
or now Eskia Mphahlele, Christopher Okigbo,
John Pepper-Clark and many others.
Now, why would the CIA divert resources
to support a whole generation of African intellectuals,
many of whom were staunch critics of the United States and its allies?
Scholars may never be able to answer that question definitively,
the CIA being what it is.
But their cultural patronage in Africa was part
of a much larger scheme to court intellectuals the world over.
As a number of historians and journalists have documented,
the CIA used the Congress for Cultural Freedom headquartered
in Paris, to fund an enormously wide range
of cultural institutions on every continent.
African writers and intellectuals were merely one part
of a vast global conspiracy, and an extremely important part
of Cold War maneuvering, as I shall argue in this presentation.
Winning the favor of African intellectuals was deemed
of vital significance in the geopolitical context
of decolonization in the Cold War.
U.S. intelligence officers were fearful
that decolonizing nations would drift toward the Soviet Union
and they believed that covert support for intellectuals
in those regions might help limit communist influence.
Surprisingly, CIA support for the arts came
with relatively few strings attached,
partly because the operation was covert and the money routed
through various front organizations,
partly because African intellectuals adamantly refused
to have their political opinions dictated to them.
Protecting the secrecy of the program often took priority
over directing the political tenor of CIA funded programs.
As a result, the Congress for Cultural Freedom tended
to sidestep political confrontations out of concern
that they would alienate the very people they hoped to influence;
or worse yet, that the cover would be blown on the program.
At most, CIA hierarchy tried to be very selective about the type
of intellectual it would bring into the fold, although it managed
to support a number of writers who could be quite critical
of the United States and its allies.
So before talking in more detail about the types of projects
that benefited from CIA support, I thought I'd introduce you to some
of the key personalities and say a few words about some
of the conferences and magazines that were affected by this program.
Tom Braden, he's born in 1918 in Iowa, he enlists in the British Army
for the Second World War before the U.S. entered the conflict.
Allan Dulles, in the late 1940's starts to recruit him to be one
of his deputies at the CIA when it was founded.
Braden is a self-described intellectual,
who was much more interested in the ideas being debated in the Cold War
than in assassinations or even in gathering intelligence,
and he led the psychological warfare initiatives
in the early 1950's at the CIA.
He left the CIA, at least officially and formally, in 1954.
Now, in 1967, the cover for this Congress of Cultural Freedom,
or Congress for Cultural Freedom was blown and he was working
as a journalist at the time, and he wrote an article
that went a long way to disclosing some of the aspects of this program,
and it was called I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral.
Scare quotes, and that was published
in the Saturday Evening Post on 20th of May, 1967.
He's a very colorful character.
He's probably best known for writing an autobiography called Eight is
Enough, about his family of eight children, and it was turned
into a somewhat successful television series in the 1970's.
He also -- and this picture comes from it,
he went on to become a TV pundit.
He was the brainchild of CNN's Crossfire, and he was the guy
on the left, and Pat Buchanan
for a long time was his sparring partner on the right.
And this is an important thing to note.
A lot of these CIA characters saw themselves as politically left
of center, for whatever that's worth; rabidly anti-communists,
but also rabidly anti McCarthyite.
They thought they could win the Cold War by having better ideas,
not by suppressing free speech.
This is a great sort of CIA power lunch supposedly
from where this photograph was taken.
The guy in the center of it is Michael Joshelson.
He's born in Estonia in 1908.
He was in Berlin in the 1920's.
He came to the U.S. in 1936.
He served during World War II
in the U.S. military's psychological warfare division, and immediately
at the end of the war, he became very active
in intelligence services.
He was known as a fixer, which means he could get anything done.
If you wanted you know, bootleg liquor for a party,
he was the guy to get it for you.
If you wanted a passport fixed or to move somebody quietly from one zone
to another, he was the guy to do it.
He spoke four languages fluently, and he was very, very cultured.
He was very interested in some of the literary figures that he worked
with in the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
He was the CIA's direct link at the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The guy on the right front is Melvin Lasky.
He was born in the Bronx in 1920.
He served in World War II as the official combat historian
for the U.S. Seventh Army in France and Germany.
In 1948, he starts an anti-communist magazine
in Berlin called Der Manotz [assumed spelling],
and that's during the blockade of Berlin.
Very involved.
He went on to work for Encounter magazine,
which I'll talk about in a minute.
He also made in the early 1960's,
an important reconnaissance trip throughout English speaking Africa,
and he was one of the guys who was involved in this program
who says hey, we need to get more involved in Africa,
which I'll talk about in just a moment.
This is a picture from the first meeting in Germany in 1950
of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, okay,
and this is how the CIA developed its cultural diplomacy programs.
As I said, it was born in Berlin in 1950.
It was revealed as a CIA front in 1967.
So those are main years of operation,; 1950 to 1967.
And what the Congress for Cultural Freedom did is they supported
cultural programming of their own, but they also dispersed a lot
of money to various cultural organizations;
some of which I'll talk about in a moment.
It's a CIA front.
Now, the CIA got their money to the Congress for Cultural Freedom
by establishing front organizations or dummy foundations.
So the main one was called The Farfield Foundation,
and this was a pure fabrication of the CIA.
The CIA would give Farfield money.
Farfield would give it to the Congress of Cultural Freedom.
The Congress of Cultural Freedom would spend some of it,
and then give some of it to other organizations.
CIA interestingly enough, also routed some of their money
through very legitimate foundations like the Carnegie, and Ford,
and Rockefeller Foundations, right.
These are some of the wealthiest and most prestigious foundations
in the U.S., and the CIA used them to get money
to places it wanted to go.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom never hid the fact
that it was anti Soviet, but it always insisted that the money came
from non-governmental sources because it was thought
that the Congress for Cultural Freedom would be more effective
if the people involved with it weren't paid stooges, right.
This was one of the main complaints
with the Soviet cultural diplomacy machine, is that if you accept money
for the Soviets, you've got to buy their line.
And so the CIA thinking was we've got to make this patronage covert
because it's important that the intellectuals who are involved seem
as if they're speaking of their free will.
Very important part of the covert operations in the program.
Encounter magazine; it's launched in 1953.
It's probably the preeminent Anglo American magazine during this time.
It had a blend of high modernist art.
So there were poems by Edith Sitwell and extracts
from Virginia Wolfe's diary and extracts from W.B. Yates's letters,
but it also had long op-ed pieces and coverage of current events.
Stephen Spender, a well- known poet, British, from the Auden Generation.
He was one of the first editors of Encounter,
along with Irving Crystal who I'm not going to talk about much today,
but he's an important intellectual in the U.S.
in the period from about 1950 to 1970.
So Stephen Spender -- I mention him because he was one
of the people involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom
who was very active in recruiting African intellectuals
and convincing them to become part of this Congress
for Cultural Freedom network.
He had a, you know, reasonably close relationship with Wole Soyinka
and some of the other characters that I'll discuss today.
Ezekiel, as he was known later, Eskia Mphahlele,
he's a South African ex-patriot.
In 1959, he publishes Down Second Avenue, an autobiographical book
with Faber and Faber, a very well known British publisher.
It's T.S. Elliott's publisher.
And this establishes him as one
of the preeminent English language African intellectuals of the period.
He's recruited to be the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Africa chief
in the early 1960's, and he's the person who comes up with the idea
for the African Writers Conference in 1962, okay.
He probably didn't know, for what it's worth, about CIA funding.
Stephen Spender, he probably didn't know either.
Only a very few people who actually knew, about CIA funding.
Okay, some of you who are familiar
with African literature may have heard of this;
the 1962 African Writers of English Expression conference.
This is by far and away the biggest international conference.
It's really the first conference of African writing in English
and anybody that you're likely to have heard of from
that early 1960's generation was there.
Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Mphahlele himself was there.
Christopher Okigbo, who I'm going to talk about a little bit,
Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Rajat Neogi, who's the editor
of Transition magazine, which I'll also talk a little bit.
The Congress is pretty well known
because in Ngugi Wa Thiongo is carrying the manuscript
of his first novel, "Weep Not Child" in his suitcase,
and he shows up after the conference proceedings
and Achebe says here, read this.
Achebe reads it on the spot and offers him a contract,
and that's how Ngugi becomes part
of the African writer's series in the early 1960's.
Black Orpheusmagazine.
It's launched in 1957 by a German ex-patriot working in Nigeria.
His name's Ulli Beier.
It's important to note that in1957 when the magazine is launched,
it's launched on a shoestring budget and there's no CIA funding involved.
The CIA approaches Beier in 1960 and says, "Hey, we like your magazine.
We want to give you some money."
Beier says, "Okay, sounds like a good idea.
What do I have to do?"
They say, "Nothing.
Keep doing what you're doing.
We like your magazine."
It's important to note that Black Orpheuswas totally apolitical,
and it's a point to which I'll return in a little while.
Transition magazine -- this is a picture taken from the cover
of Transition after its revival by Henry Louis Gates
in the early 1990's, but it starts out in 1961
on Rajat Neogi's porch, and this is Rajat Neogi.
He's Ugandan of Indian family, Indian origin.
He's a very interesting guy.
He's imprisoned by Abote in 1968 and after a period
in detention comes out, leaves Uganda,
ends up in the United States, gives up the editorship of Transition
and most people say he never really recovered
from that experience in prison.
It's very much Transition [inaudible] modernist [inaudible]
magazine along the lines of Encounter.
There's lots of original poetry, which I'll talk
about a little bit today, but there's also current affairs
and coverage of political events.
Before I move on to talk about Wole Soyinka, it's important to remember
that Transition magazine is also not funded by CIA at the inception
or the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
It's only about a year, a year and a half after the start of the magazine
that the Congress for Cultural Freedom approaches Neogi
and says the same thing they said to Beier.
Hey, we like your magazine.
We want to give you some money.
Wole Soyinka, he's the first African Nobel Laureate
in literature in 1986.
He broke onto the scene in 1960 when he won a playwriting competition
and as a result of that, his play "A Dance of the Forest" was staged
at the official Nigerian Independence Celebrations in 1960.
That playwriting competition was run by Encounter magazine
and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
When Soyinka goes to jail later on in the 1960's,
during the Nigerian Civil War, it's the Congress for Cultural Freedom
that helps pay for his lawyers and leads the international outcry
to try to get him released from jail.
Last guy I'll mention here briefly, Christopher Okigbo, a Nigerian poet,
often talked about as the most promising poet of his generation.
He's on the left.
You can see he was quite friendly with Achebe.
He's pictured there in the middle.
He is a poet who writes very much in the high modernist mode,
which I'll talk about a little bit more, as I continue.
So those are some of the personalities
in some of the institutions.
Now, one of the most surprising things
about the cultural organizations that the CIA funded
through the Congress for Cultural Freedom is that they tended
to be thoroughly non political.
In the few instances when these organizations started
to address political questions, as in the case of Transition,
they took a stance of Cold War neutrality,
arguing that newly independent African nations needed to be able
to choose their own direction free from interference
from the U.S. or the Soviets.
When I first learned that the CIA had funded a number
of artistic centers and literary magazines and writer's conferences
in 1960's Africa, I assumed that this was part of some subtle effort
to turn African intellectuals into apologists for U.S. foreign policy.
However, my archival research revealed
that this was not at all the case.
Even if the CIA had originally intended to operate this way,
a number of factors prevented them from doing so.
First of course, was the importance of preserving the secrecy
of the program, and this took priority
over all other considerations.
Any effort to pressure intellectuals into taking a stance
on Cold War issues would threaten to blow the cover of the operation.
So the secrecy of CIA funding was a double edged sword.
On one hand, it allowed the CIA to support writers
who would never have agreed to accept CIA funding.
On the other hand, the secrecy
of the program severely limited the sort of influence
that the CIA could possibly hope to observe.
The other major factor that limited the CIA's political maneuvering was
the skepticism and fierce independence
of African intellectuals themselves.
You know, and this resonates with images that we have of Soyinka.
Nobody is going to tell him what to do; CIA, nobody else.
When African writers first heard that the funds supporting some
of their organizations came from U.S. foundations,
they immediately asked if the CIA
or some other governmental agency was behind the money.
Of course, they were told no, and to prove it,
their patrons gave them great latitude.
In order to placate the intellectuals they hoped would
accept their support, the CIA had to be extremely cautious about the sort
of political demands it could place upon the people
who were recipients of its funding.
The result, as I will suggest in the remainder
of my time, was very interesting.
Rather than sponsoring cultural institutions
that adopted a clear Cold War stance, the CIA funded organizations
that were neutral and largely silent
about political matters pertaining to the Cold War.
The African cultural institutions funded by the CIA
in the early 1960's, usually operated on the art
for art sake model, keeping politics out of their operations.
My working premise today is that the art for art sake line,
which is largely the doctrine of European modernism in the first half
of the 20th century, provided a sort of common ground upon
which African intellectuals and their CIA backers could agree
to suspend their political differences.
The philosophy of art for art sake, or aesthetic autonomy
as it is sometimes called, was manifested
in different ways during the European modernist period,
roughly the first half of the 20th century.
In music, we have the evolution of atonal symphonies by composers
such as Schonberg, Stravinsky and Pecofief [assumed spelling],
who were freeing music from the need to conform
to conventions of harmony.
In the visual arts, you have a variety of sculptors and painters
who were challenging the idea that art had to be representational,
thereby freeing the visual arts from the need
to represent objects from the physical world.
In literature, modernism made it fashionable to write
without having words necessarily tied to literal or worldly meanings.
Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens,
are all well known for producing this type of literature
in which language could be freed from referring
to something external or outside of itself.
I will suggest that these aesthetic conventions were both used
and transformed in the context of 1960's African literature.
In particular, the idea that true art could not be bought,
and that the artist needed to remain aloof from the world of politics
and commerce, found a new lease
on life during decolonization in the 1960's.
In this version of modernism, the artist could be free to express him
or herself by remaining independent
of political or commercial interests.
Now, I should add in passing that modernism is largely by default,
the aesthetic credo on the western side of the iron curtain.
Now the reasons for this are complex, but it certainly wasn't
because all cold warriors were admirers of T.S. Elliott,
or Igor Stravinsky, or James Joyce, right?
What happened is that the Soviets start condemning modernism
as bourgeois and decadent.
And if the Soviets condemn it, well the U.S. had better say well no,
we defend these people and their right to free expression.
So on the western side of the iron curtain during the 1950's,
modernism becomes a convenient symbol
in the cultural world for aesthetic freedoms.
Finally, I'd like to suggest that modernist aesthetic ideas,
especially the art for art sake model were appealing
to intellectuals in the decolonizing world
because they were Cold War neutrals,
unwilling to support either the U.S. or the Soviets.
A supposedly apolitical version of modernism was attractive
to young African writers because it allowed them to style themselves,
as disinterested or as objective intellectuals
who were not bought off by either side, in the Cold War.
So in the story that I'm telling here,
the image that modernism sometimes like to project about itself,
that the arts are autonomous, free from external considerations
like commerce and politics.
This aesthetic philosophy was almost tailor made for intellectuals
from non-aligned regions in the Cold War who liked
to affirm their independence and their neutrality in the Cold War.
The logic of the non-aligned movement when translated
into aesthetic form could be expressed roughly speaking
as modernism.
Three of the Congress for Cultural Freedom's favorites in Africa,
Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and Rajat Neoji,
all fit this basic profile.
They were Cold War neutrals, anti-totalitarian in their politics
and very much admirers of high modernist European literature.
It's a very curious combination born out of the strangeness,
the convoluted logic of the Cold War.
So now I want to turn to some of these programs that the Congress
for Cultural Freedom funded in Africa.
So first, the Nakari conference in 1962.
One of the reasons the conference is well known is
that it deepened the divide between English language
and French language African writers.
Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo,
and other Anglophone writers were parodying negritude
at the conference and saying look at this farcical idea
that all these French language writers have come.
That's one of the reasons why the conference is well known.
One of the other reasons the conference is well known is,
it was the place where the whole language debate
in African literature started.
So is English just an imperialist language or is something
that African writers can use
to reach an intercontinental even international audience?
Now, because these language debates were so polemical,
much of the content of the conference has been relegated
to the long forgotten footnotes of intellectual history.
The transcripts of the conference show a strong preference
for detachment, irony, and universality, somewhat surprisingly,
as these standards were developing in the literature
of an independent Africa.
To put it another way, the conference presenters argued
that racial consciousness
and political militancy are not appropriate literary messages.
People have long forgotten that this is the way the conference proceeded.
Two of the keynote speakers, Saunders Redding
and Arthur Drayton presented on African American
and Caribbean literature, both arguing that black writers
from the America's offered Africans good literary models
because they did not confine themselves to racial themes.
Saunders took James Baldwin, surprisingly, as his example,
insisting that Baldwin goes beyond representations of racial conflict
to present Universalist messages,
and this is a highly debatable interpretation of Baldwin
as a Universalist writer.
But it's an interesting representation of him.
Other presenters insisted that the best young African writers were
already creating literature that transcends racial categories,
and I'll quote from one discussion of the poetry
from the Nigerian poet, John Pepper-Clark.
And this is from the conference proceedings.
"Here in his poetry is no gesture of political or historical protest,
no advice, no statement even of the poets color or its significance,
but a faithful and beautifully controlled account
of individual experience."
Now, given that the conference took place at the height
of the decolonization moment, and I should also add the height
of the civil rights movement really, in the United States,
when politics were all important in sub Saharan Africa,
the conference's aesthetic standard seemed like a protest,
insisting that the best literature avoid excessive racial
consciousness; instead, striving for some kind of universalist messages.
The presence of Christopher Okigbo, the flamboyant Nigerian poet,
certainly added to the impression
that the conference organizers had a deep attachment
to modernist aesthetics.
In one memorable moment during the conference, Okigbo pronounced,
"I don't read my poetry to non poets."
He did consent however, to share some of his verse
with the McCary delegates, and here's a short lyric poem
that we think Okigbo read to the audience,
and this is on the handout that went around.
"Suddenly becoming talkative like weaver bird summoned it off side
of dream remembered between sleep and waking, I hang up my egg shells
to you of palm grove, upon whose bamboo towers hang,
drip with yestrip wine, a tiger mask and nude spear,
queen of the damn path light, I had had my cleansing,
immigrant with air borne nose, the he goat on heat."
So written in the early 1960's,
published in African Little magazines,
were cited at the most important meeting
of Anglophone African writers.
Given the context, it's difficult to imagine poetry more conspicuously
and self consciously modernist in idiom.
It's a sonnet -- I guess, and the meaning is at best, obscure.
This sort of poetry deliberately difficult and willfully apolitical,
was designed to provoke his audience
and Okigbo certainly had his detractors among his peers.
I'm also tempted to say that Okigbo is here engaged in a kind
of playful game of one up man ship with some
of the other people at the conference.
They're saying, "Hey, we need your poetry to be non racial,
nonpolitical, universal."
And he says here, "I am taking the idea
of detachment to a whole new level."
The poet seems to liberate poetic language
from the drudgery of prosaic meaning.
Now, from the evidence, The Congress
for Cultural Freedom were well satisfied
with the conference in its proceedings.
The meeting was discussed at great length throughout the network's
affiliates, especially in Transition magazine.
There were certainly no concerns that the content
of discussions had been insufficiently political.
Now, I want to turn for a few moments to talk
about Black Orpheusand Transition magazines.
I'll get to this in a moment.
This is on the flip side of your handout.
As I mentioned, Black Orpheusis founded in 1957
by a German expatriate, Ulli Beier, with a grant from the Ministry
of Education in Nigeria's western region.
It was only in 1960, as Joshelson and Spender were hoping
to expand the Congress for Cultural Freedoms' African base that Beier
and the magazine joined the network.
One of the most notable features of Black Orpheuswas
that it was a black Atlantic journal operating during the height
of the civil rights and decolonization,
and yet it was fastidiously apolitical,
as I've already mentioned.
Wole Soyinka later described it.
"Black Orpheuswas literally non political.
It published poetry and plays.
It reproduced artworks.
The plastic arts reported on performance arts.
Its mission was to link the disparate culturally with Africa
without getting involved in politics."
For the editors, this was partly a pragmatic decision;
avoiding politics in a divided, ethnically diverse
and rapidly changing West Africa, allowed the journal
to attract contributors and readers of all stripes
from across the black diaspara.
Finding contributors and readers
from across the diaspara was facilitated
by side stepping political differences
and focusing exclusively on art.
Now, Neogi's magazine, Transition, was self consciously modernist
in a way that Black Orpheuswas not.
The title, as some of you may know, alludes to one
of the legendary little European Littlemagazines
of the inner -- in a war period.
Neogi's first literary contribution to the magazine,
"7T1 Equals 70 Ton", appears near the beginning of the first issue.
It's a short prose poem, offering a condensed view of the type
of literary ambitions Noegi was then nursing.
"Muriatic existence is forgotten," begins the piece,
seemingly in mid sentence, and this is the back of your handout.
"over a tense past and a vocabulary future full of new cooked meanings,
meaning, meaning, but nothing else."
And it goes on from there.
It's sometimes hard to read it without parodying it
but we can leave that for another time, I suppose.
Now, the sputtering repetition of meaning
in this opening line might make the knowing reader think
of a Wallace Stephens poem or a Gertrude Stein piece, right?
A rose is a rose, is a rose, or something like that.
Meaning here is self-identical.
Any attempt to attach external reference
to this vocabulary future would be futile.
This sort of tautological word play represents an attempt
to proclaim the autonomy of poetic language;
that poetry can be released from the burden
of meaning anything prosaic or literal.
But such assertions of autonomy, I would argue, are heavily contextual.
From this perspective, we might gloss Neogi's lack of meaning
as a direct reference to the tradition of modernist word play
in its proper performance space, the Little magazine.
A few issues later, an article by Robbie McCauley
on literary periodicals claims that the Little magazine,
once the lifeblood of Euro-American modernist culture, was evolving
and maturing in exciting new ways in decolonizing regions.
McCauley, who incidentally was a CIA officer,
was editor of the Kenyan Review, the only sort of modernist --
or one of the only modernist Little magazines still operating
in the U.S. in the 1950's.
He was also a participant at McCary.
The CIA flew him out there to participate
in the McCary conference.
And so he writes this article in Transition that says,
magazines like Transition's are the place
where modernism is still thriving.
And on the evidence of Neogi's literary stuff,
that would seem to be a valid plan.
For Neogi and McCauley,
the Modernist magazine was the natural home of free expression.
The liabilities of the Little magazine, insecure funding,
erratic publication schedules, and distribution channels,
and editorial sloppiness, which all plagued Transition
in its early years, were more than offset by the strengths
of the Little magazine; namely, its supposed independence
from vested interests, making it exceptionally nimble and quick
to recognize new talents, allowing Neogi to take substantial risks
that more established publications could not afford.
So here, there's a strong association between the sort
of little review, the Little magazine
that flourished during the modernist period, and the idea that hey,
we're intellectuals who are not bought off.
We're not mouthpieces for any kind of vested interest,
Cold War interests or otherwise.
In writing about Little magazines in Africa,
the literary critic Eric Bolson says that Transition
and Black Orpheusoffer, "...an alternative model
of the global literary field, one that is not confined to the movement
of minor literatures through Western based capitals."
Now, I think there's some evidence to support this claim,
although CIA sponsorship of Transition
and Black Orpheusencourages me to shy away from the conclusion
that these magazines reached a global audience without the support
or approbation of centers in the U.S. or Western Europe.
But neither do I find compelling the idea that the CIA was squarely
in control of these far flung projects
as the conspiracy theorists are want to infer.
The covert nature of the sponsorship made it almost impossible
to dictate a party line, even if the CIA had wanted to do so.
Rather, I think it's more plausible to suggest
that Transition was able to reach or create a global audience,
because of external funding without then insisting
that this patronage turn Transition
into a mouth piece for U.S. propaganda.
If there was a party line, it was drawn around aesthetic rather
than ideological convictions.
For a brief while at least,
the Congress for Cultural Freedom supported a number of periodicals
in the modernist pattern, which was appealing to Africans precisely
because it seemed to affirm the autonomy
and to secure the neutrality of intellectual work.
The form of the Little Modernist magazine, its willingness
to experiment, its presumption of a like-minded audience
and even its haphazardness created the impression
that Transition was a space free from orthodoxies
and vested interests of any kind.
So in my last couple minutes, I'm going to try
to draw a few conclusions from this, beyond the mere scandal
of CIA funding, which is always sort of interesting to read about,
especially when it's supporting these, you know, writers.
Where's the CIA funding now?
Anyway, first, it's worth pointing out how inter-war modernism,
especially the idea of aesthetic autonomy was requisitioned
by African writers and inflected rather strongly by ideals
of impartiality and detachment.
Whatever modernism may have been in the 1920's, by the 1950's,
non-communist intellectuals were prone to represent modernism
as an aesthetic philosophy of critical disinterest
and freedom from orthodoxy.
The Cold War context helps explain why African intellectuals
such as Neogi, Okigbo, and Soyinka,
would enthusiastically attach themselves to the legacy
of modernism, especially to the form of the Little magazine,
and also how modernism would become attached to
and dependent upon the health of literary culture
in the decolonizing world.
Second, I'm here offering a revisionistic account
of post-colonial African writing, which has been so frequently read
for its anti-colonial messages
and for its various political engagements.
Instead, I'd like to suggest that in the early 1960's at least;
aesthetic autonomy and apolitical writing were perhaps the most widely
accepted literary models among young African intellectuals.
Modernism's evolution in the middle decades of the century during
which time it became the dominant 20th century artistic movement
taught in universities and conserved in museums globally,
was affected by its use in cultural diplomacy programs during the
Cold War.
So the ability of modernism to seem as if its autonomous,
to not paid by vested interests was, I want to suggest,
crucially informed by this moment in the Cold War
when modernism may have become something
that it wasn't necessarily in the 1920's.
It's rewriting literary and cultural history of modernism,
from a Cold War perspective.
Finally, it's evident that the revelation of CIA funding
in 1967 carved out yet another of modernism's gravestones,
providing a handy commemorative date
for literary historians, such as myself.
Modernist literature has been declared dead many times
and in many places and I'm not here to lay modernism to rest once
and for all in the late 1960's sub Saharan Africa.
In Anglophone Africa however,
CIA funding of cultural institutions left a gap
that would not be filled for several generations.
The void was institutional.
As money dried up, magazines and publishing houses went bust
and lavish international conferences became a thing of the past.
But there was also a kind of aesthetic void.
The damage caused by covertly funding writers
who believed passionately in aesthetic autonomy was lasting,
making the principles of detachment; disinterest and impartiality seem
like indefensible positions for African intellectuals in the 1970's.
In the process,
it also substantially widened the ideological distance
between metropolitan and post-colonial intellectuals;
a distance that seemed unbridgeable for several decades.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> All right.
We have about 10 minutes for questions, if you're willing.
>> I would be happy to field some questions if anybody has any.
Yes.
>> Why was the American CIA program
in Africa exclusively to an Anglophone Africa?
>> It's a good -- I think they felt --
there were a couple of things going on.
The feeling in the CIA or some of the cultural officers
that weren't necessarily working directly for the CIA
but were working for the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
felt that the Presence de Afrikaans crowd and the group associated
with Senegal and its affiliates were too strong --
in too strong a position in the Francophone world.
They also felt that they were too closely aligned
with the Soviet position, which may not be accurate.
It seems clear to me from reading Presence Afrikaans, that they were
as decidedly neutral in their Cold War politics as the folks
in the Anglophone region.
But that at least, was the impression for the Congress
for Cultural Freedom perspective.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also thought
that they had a good wedge in the Anglophone regions; namely,
they exploited feelings
of antagonism toward the outgoing British to create a kind
of Anglophone or English language global intellectual community.
They were very concerned that the Anglophone intellectuals
like Soyinka be tapped into a global community of English speakers,
and they thought they had a real vested interest therefore,
in promoting the use of the English language
for intellectual endeavors in the continent.
So those are two sort of preliminary reasons
for why they targeted Anglophone regions especially.
And I should point out that they were well positioned
in other respects to exploit the Francophone connections.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was headquartered in Paris.
A lot of its programs are happening in French and German.
It wasn't exclusively a language question that prevented them
from becoming more involved in Africa.
It was largely the dominance of the Presence Afrikaans collective
that dissuaded them from doing so.
Yes.
>> [Inaudible] the CIA side and the African writing [inaudible].
>> It was a very, very heavily male world.
There were a few African women writers
that were involved, but very few.
There was a playwright, Efwa Sutherland in Ghana, who was working
in the 1950's, who was a very well known writer at that point,
who was invited to the McCary conference, and couldn't attend
because of prior considerations.
And I'm not sure what sort of effect it may have had on her career,
because that conference was one of --
it's just a moment when African writing
in English is effectively born.
Her absence from that conference must have had an effect
on her career.
The CIA types who were involved in this are all --
they're all men, and I suspect that they were better at recruiting men
because of the culture at the organization, not just the CIA,
but especially at the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Yes.
>> What was the response of these writers when they determined
where that funding was coming from?
>> Most were outraged.
So Neogi wrote a long piece in Transition when he found
out about the skunk, the scandal of CIA funding saying hey, I was duped.
I was misused.
I didn't know anything about it.
And the most surprising thing he said is
that he never asked me to do anything.
They never asked me to change my position.
So his reaction is telling for a couple of reasons.
One, he's outraged because he felt used.
The other is, he's immediately retreating to defend his integrity
as an intellectual, right?
I never made any compromises.
I never said anything that I didn't fully believe, so that was one
of the important lines of defence.
Stephen Spender, the British poet that I talked about who's the editor
of Encounter, he worked on Encounter for --
I don't know, about 10 years, was very involved
with the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
He said he had absolutely no idea and he was adamant that he was
in the dark about CIA funding.
And he defended himself along exactly those same lines.
He says, "Hey, I was doing things that I believed in.
This was a chance to promote my version of culture
and I never made any kind of political compromises.
I never did anything that I didn't feel totally comfortable doing."
So there was a huge attempt to shore up the integrity.
Wole Soyinka said something interesting years later,
which is he said "I wish we had just known that it was all CIA funding.
We could have done so much with that money
if the CIA had just been up front about it."
Because what happens is when the cover is blown, that's it.
The funding disappears.
The CIA steps in and gets the Ford Foundation, I believe,
to provide a sort of stop gap funding for the Congress
for Cultural Freedom for two years, but after those two years are up,
the funding goes the way of the dinosaur.
And that was Soyinka's attitude.
>> How was the cover blown?
>> It was blown -- and there are some good historians and journalists
who have written -- I should mention Francis Stoner Saunders wrote
a book.
It's called Who Paid the Piper in the British version.
I can't remember what the U.S. version of the book is called,
but it's a long book documenting it.
There were some very enterprising investigative journalists working
on a magazine called Ramparts, who tracked down several leads.
It turned out that you know, the African stuff was a very small part
of the CIA's overall cultural programming.
Involved with this programming, filtrated unions
in the U.S. They infiltrated the National Student Association
and that was one of the biggest scandals,
was their infiltration of the -- the NSA.
And as I said, it was some investigative journalists
who figured this out.
Yes.
>> I was on the faculty at the University of [inaudible].
>> No kidding.
>> I was very interested because I didn't know anything
about this at all.
But is there any evidence that the CIA used Soyinka in any way
because you know his reputation is very anti-Nigerian.
>> Anti-totalitarian, right?
So based on what I have seen, I have seen no evidence
that the CIA used Soyinka for anything.
Perhaps the only thing that they collected
from these writers really was bits and pieces of information,
but I don't think the CIA actually did anything
with that information, to be honest.
They're often used as hosts.
So when CIA agents came to Africa under some cover,
they would go out for drinks with Beier or Soyinka, under the cover
of being what I would call cultural diplomats.
So the CIA often placed people in magazines and that was their cover.
So if Wole Soyinka went out for drinks with a CIA agent
when he was touring around Nigeria, Soyinka had absolutely no idea.
So there's very little evidence that I have been able to uncover
that the CIA used people like Soyinka for operations, let's say.
But it's also clear that Soyinka's anti-totalitarian politics fit very
comfortably with the CIA's overall objectives.
>> Maybe would you have time for one more question?
>> You pick.
>> I pick?
>> Oh, there's like six hands up.
Otherwise, I seem like the bad guy.
>> So since I...
>> I'll be fast.
How about that?
>> [Inaudible] based on your research, people will go
to what you say, but French [inaudible] remained outside
the CIA?
>> So far as I know, yes, largely outside this influence.
And it's important that the African operations was really started
in 1959, 1960.
That's when they got interested in Africa.
Interestingly enough, the Congress for Cultural Freedom tried
to be really involved in India and they just never made any headway.
The Indian intellectuals were like this is a CIA front.
Forget it.
We have nothing to do with it.
They had much more -- they probably learned some things
about their failure in India, and they had much more success
in sub Saharan Africa, but there is no evidence that I have uncovered
that they had much influence at all
in the Francophone or Lusophone regions.
>> Yeah, I'm interested to know your opinion
as to how sophisticated the CIA's understanding and analysis
and what they were doing actually was.
I know that there were experiments in East Germany to hire --
or to coordinate factory workers to write literature and so forth.
>> Yeah.
>> But that was a complete disaster and no one took it seriously
and so did they -- is there evidence that they learned from mistakes
of their opponents in the Cold War?
Did they see modernism as a kind of bulwark
against things like the Soviets...
>> Very much so.
>> ... if [inaudible] some kind of discussion [inaudible].
>> There -- now a lot of that stuff has not come
out into the public domain, so a lot of it is speculation.
Part of it is that the U.S. as a whole and the CIA in particular,
certainly saw modernism as a bulwark against communism.
And again, the idea that modernism is somehow autonomous,
that it's a place that's anti-orthodoxy and that the people
who produce modernism can't be bought off.
That is very different than the Soviet cultural diplomacy programs,
which I should add, the CIA was trying to emulate.
The CIA thought that they -- the U.S. was losing the diplomacy war,
especially in the arts, and that's why they came up with this Congress
for Cultural Freedom in the first place.
So that's the first thing that I would say about that.
The second thing is that there was very,
very loose oversight at the CIA.
Tom Braden and Michael Joshelson were given a pot of money
and given very great latitude about what they wanted to do with it.
And as I was talking about this project a little bit with my spouse,
she said, "I reckon they just liked going
to cocktail parties with writers."
And it's sort of a facetious comment, but it's very true
to the culture of the CIA during this period.
All these guys, if they're from Europe are very much educated
in the elite cultural tradition.
In the U.S., they're all Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Yale especially,
and they were absolutely fascinated with the world of high culture.
And they did everything that they could to attach themselves
to it and to patronize it.
So there were -- I would argue
at least a couple reasons why they were interested in modernism.
Abstract expressionism becomes --
in painting, becomes the defacto advertisement
for the U.S. protecting modernism, right?
And the bonus is it's produced
by U.S. artists first and foremost, right?
So Europe, after World War II is exhausted.
They have no business preserving and promoting modernism, so you know,
we'll take over that responsibility here in the U.S.
And abstract expressionism.
Cannon, George Cannon, who's involved in writing the policy
of containment, he was very -- he was on the --
I believe he was on the Board of the Museum of Modern Art
and he was very involved there
in promoting abstract expressionism in the 1950's.
This was seen as a crucial part of Cold War policy.
>> Thank you, Peter.
You were great.
You brought us a wonderful presentation
and there's lots more questions.
>> [Applause] This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.