A Survey of African Poetry in the London Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement 1865-1985

"Literature as Symptom", The Times Literary Supplement, 11 Jan 1963, p. 25 The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive,, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/EX1200130705/GDCS?u=linc74325&sid=GDCS&xid=d0e54fc6. Accessed 17 Dec 2019

[Excerpt]: "It is not only the Russians whose literature, as last week's front-page article argued, is liable to be dissected for its bearing on social and political conditions. To a certain extent this happens anywhere--the Russians themselves, for instance, often do the same thing for that of capitalist countries, sometimes with very misleading results--and it is a useful enough pastieme so long as it is not allowed to determine aesthetic judgments...Even then, if white writers are excluded from consideration, as they tacitly were throughout the conference, the basis for any kind of critical generalization is still slight. Perhaps that is why both Mr. Donatus Nwoga's paper on the short story and Mr. Mphahlele's own on the novel consisted largely of lengthy quotations from a handful of writers. Even Mr. Ulli Beier, of Ibadan, who is the outstanding critic in this field, confined himself virutally to the writings of the Nigerians Christopher Okigbo and J. P. Clark and the South African poet Dennis Brutus, saying that he had not seen more than six or seven poems by such other promising writers as Wole Soyinka and Gabriel Okara. We are certainly far from being able to speak of African literature as a whole..."