‘I could hear my voice in the distance; I could identify it.’
Ugandan Crossing Borders participant

Graham Mort

Crossing Borders is a cross-cultural distance learning scheme linking young African writers to experienced UK mentors and developing their work through e-mail tutorials. We try to get them to hear, identify and develop their voices as writers. We operate in Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, Ghana and Cameroon. Over one hundred African writers are enrolled, working in poetry, fiction and children’s literature with around 30 mentors drawn from a wider range of cultural backgrounds in the UK.

The idea began as a pilot scheme in Uganda in 2001, the product of a residency I undertook for the British Council at the University of Makerere. Even before that residency, I had become seriously interested in the relationship between mentors and students in distance learning programmes, especially the way text exchanged electronically becomes a shared and intimate space. Spatial and temporal distance can be overcome at a keystroke, but what of perceived cultural distance? In pursuit of that question the pilot project has grown into something much more significant, finding a home in Lancaster University’s department of English and Creative Writing where I run postgraduate programmes in writing.

My introduction to Africa had been a crash-landing into the turbulent politics and social conditions of the continent. I met a generation of writers working in English, but cut off from their own literary roots through years of social upheaval. Like many African countries, Uganda was an emergent democracy wrestling with the problems of economic development, post-colonial dependencies and a huge AIDS/HIV epidemic. But it was exciting to meet young African writers who saw writing as a means of social change as well as personal expression.

In my very first tutorial exchanges I was astonished by writing that seemed stripped of cultural context. I would never have known my students were Africans, let alone Ugandans. That led to some serious questions: who did they think they were writing for? What was their notion of the UK, of me as an English reader? Come to that, who was I writing for? I decided to challenge this cultural reticence, asking my students to write about Uganda as they experienced it from day-to-day. The results were poems and stories engaging directly with contemporary Uganda, often exploring the tension between traditional and modern lifestyles. The exchange of values does not just happen between cultures, but within them – and often between generations.

Uganda is a small country exemplifying the social, political and economic conditions in other African states. A good place to start; though I see now that it was an act of hubris to situate this project in a post-colonial environment. In the academic mêlée of post-colonial studies, even the hyphen between the two words has been contested. But, having made friends in Uganda and begun to understand their need for contact with other writers, doing nothing was not an option. In response to such post-imperial pitfalls and the dangers of a ‘second colonisation’ we established a project in which reflection and feedback hold a crucial role at all levels – in tutorial exchanges, through revision and re-drafting, and through project evaluation.

Our geographical reach is growing and so is the project’s cultural richness and logistical complexity. We now have a project manager based at Lancaster to manage liaison with each constituent African British Council office. Their role, in turn, is to co-ordinate the selection and induction of participants. What I have called the ‘cultural equity’ of the project – the knowledge writers hold about individual and collective human experience – flows freely in both directions. The presence of the project has begun to affirm and influence aspects of my own University department. We have a new lecturer appointed to teach and research ‘other literatures in English’, an African writing module is being revived and we’re planning to set up a residency for an African writer next year.

The enthusiasm for the project in the African countries has been strong and the Film and Literature Department of the British Council in London has put the scheme high on its agenda, contributing financial resources and expert support. But we have to anticipate the consequences of that funding being re-distributed to equally important projects in the future.

In anticipation, we built a new website. This crossroads on the information super-highway will allow participants to do that uniquely human thing – talk. The website will also develop long-term resources. The first step is a feature in which contemporary writers from varied cultural backgrounds discuss the genesis, technique and cultural context of a piece of their own creative work. Instead of a pedagogically narrow or orthodox approach to writing, we will create a flexible and heterogeneous resource reflecting a multiplicity of literary practice and cultural influence. We also hope to publish the work of participants themselves, creating a sense of celebratory exchange across Africa.

Meanwhile, the post-colonial ironies and complications of Africans writing in English will not go away. Rather than treat these issues as an inconvenience, we aim to explore them through academic research into the project: in this case action-research, which marries proactive development to reflexive practice.

The more I talk to participants on both sides of the tutorial process, the more I’m convinced that what matters is not our sense of difference, but our fundamental need to define and express a sense of selfhood. Somewhere in there is the riddle of consciousness – what is it like to be alive? Cultural, racial, religious and linguistic differences are an affirmation of synchronous human energy rather than the definition of alienation. In a newly dangerous world a project such as Crossing Borders, with its potential to work across continents, takes on a wider importance than the support of individual writers.

It’s an exciting time for the project. The potential for failure – or more realistically, for a sense of disappointment to set in – is high. The energy exchange between writers is vitalising, even in the face of Africa’s problems. Our currency is language: cheap, easily traded, inexhaustibly variegated. It’s impossible in this short article to give much more than a glimpse into a rapidly evolving operation. In any case, the project is not defined by one person’s vision, but by what is actually happening out there through our world-wide IT links.

Unlike the retrospection of post-colonial studies or literary criticism, this kind of creative writing development is all anticipation, possibility, future. A future that will belong to writers and readers not yet born; but born, we hope, into conditions that will offer more opportunity, artistic freedom, and tolerance through their democratic structures

Graham Mort is director of postgraduate studies in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He has published five collections of poetry, many short stories, and has also written for BBC radio. A new collection of poems, A Night On The Lash was published by Seren in August 2004.

Crossing Borders