ICALEL is an acronym for the Calabar International Conference on African Literature and the English Language founded and chaired by African scholar and critic Ernest Emenyonu. At the centre of the conference are African writers and critics from all over the world. The first conference entitled “The Woman as a Writer in Africa” was held at the University of Calabar auditorium in May 1981 and Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo was keynote speaker. The themes of 1982 namely “Literature in African Languages” and “Writing Books for Children” featured Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Bessie Head as keynote speakers. Till date a host of African writers have featured at the conference including Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Chinweizu, Dennis Brutus, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, Ken Saro Wiwa, Chukwuemeka Ike, Nurrudin Farah, Syl Cheney Coker, to mention a few.
Famous quotes containing the words english language, english, language, literature, conference and/or african:
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football’s place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)
“So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)