Foreground: the part of a scene or picture nearest and in front of the viewer.

Background (several meanings): scenery located behind something; the part of a picture that provides relief for objects or designs in the foreground; an area, sound, music or radiation that is relatively unnoticeable or inconspicuous; circumstances and events surrounding or leading up to an occurrence; a person's experience, training and education.

Middle ground: the area between the foreground and background; a point between extremes.

As a foreground, the following selections from

· fiction by F. Odun Balogun from Nigeria

· the Tigrinya poetry of Reesom Haile from Eritrea

· the Gikuyu poetry of Gitahi Gititi from Kenya

· the painting of Yegizaw Michael from Eritrea

· an interview with Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya

· the English poetry of Tanure Ojaide from Nigeria

are humbly offered as an invitation to Left Curve readers to enter the African world picture.

With no intention to frame or project, imagine or represent this picture, I stress a "a foreground...to enter" as someone who would repeat the phrase of the great theologian and bishop, St. Augustine, who was born in Africa. At the beginning of the third chapter of his 4th-century Confessions, his autobiography, he writes that along his physical and spiritual journey ultimately to Rome, "Veni Karthaginem, " "To Carthage I came," recalling in dismay a place and time when "a whole frying pan full of abominable loves crackled round about me, and on every side." After many trips - physical and spiritual - of my own to Rome, I find myself following Augustine's route, only somewhat in reverse, because

I came to Carthage from the other direction,

From Rome back to Rome's Rome.

I wrestled the devil to a draw and won

The need of a god and moved on.

Cairo, Dakar, Nairobi, Asmara, home:

I came to Carthage from the other direction.

The journey provided interpretation.

Connection made both sides of the poem.

I wrestled the devil to a draw and won.

A beam in the old house had a medallion

I carved in a dream out of Red Sea foam.

I came to Carthage from the other direction.

Local marble with corn, voices like springs in the sun,

Child-safe city and a camel with a hilltop to roam -

I wrestled the devil to a draw and won.

Chinua Achebe has famously revealed the unconscionable distortion when a writer, particularly a non-African writer, uses Africa merely as background - a stage or setting - to portray his or her sense of moral, spiritual and historical crisis and struggle, unaware that African languages, literatures, and cultures function and thrive in the foreground and the middle ground "round about...and on every side," in Augustine's phrase.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o foresees a time when African-born writers, in Europhone languages but primarily in African languages, consider them not merely as personal, historical or spiritual background but functioning and thriving in the foreground and the middle ground "round about...and on every side." In Ayi Kwei Armah's phrase, "the beautyful ones not yet born" will see, as Ngugi does, "their role as that of doing for African languages and cultures what all writers and intellectuals of other countries and histories have done for theirs":

They will also learn the best they can from all world languages and cultures. They will view themselves as scouts in foreign linguistic territories and guides in their own linguistic space...they will take whatever is most advanced in those languages and cultures and translate those ideas into their own languages. They will have no complexes about borrowing from others to enrich their own...

With over five million copies having been sold, Achebe's Things Fall Apart has been perceived as a kind of trademark African novel for the twentieth century. Engaging a verbal tradition of more than 1000 African languages dating back over the course of a millennium and beyond - yet engaging the issue of how to maintain cultures and to move forward at the same time -"the beautyful ones" plot a new course. It is in the foreground.

Things come together.

CHARLES CANTALUPO teaches English at Pennsylvania State University and is the editor of The World of Ngug i wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts. He is also the author of A Literary Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes's Masterpiece of Language and Anima/l Wo/man and Other Spirits, a book of his collected poetry, 1987-90. The Africa World Press,

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