We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.

The goal was very clear. Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonized. The success of these policies is undeniable. A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every post-colonial situation. In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone, mainly. Even where the elite are nationalistic and assertive of their independence, they find it easier to express their outrage and hopes in the languages of imperial conquest. Ninety percent of the monies allocated for language education goes to pamper imperial languages. Ninety percent of the population still speaks African languages anyway. Some governments even view African languages as enemies of progress. They believe that imperial languages are really the gateway to global modernity.

All this calls for a grand alliance of scholars, academies, publishers, and educational policymakers. Intellectuals inside and outside Africa must lead: they have to live up to their venerable tradition. The intellectual in all cultures and histories has been a pathfinder, and in all cultures, these intellectuals have had to pay a price, not too big a price, but a price all the same: prison, exile even. The intellectuals of our times must not run away from the fight, from the zones of war.

I was attracted to move by the idea of the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), but that was not how I answered my concerned questioners. My response was simple and always the same: “I am going to UCI, the center of the world.” By that I meant no more than the fact that in a world like ours, every point on its surface is a center of the whole. The challenge is for the inhabitants of a specific point to see the links that bind them to all the other points. Every center should reflect the globe as much as the globe should reflect them. William Blake put it better when he challenged his readers to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.

No university should be proud of monoculturalism or monolingualism. Building bridges between even apparently irreconcilable viewpoints is an important function of the university. Just as ecological diversity is important for a healthy and robust social life. In fact, cultural diversity is not an addendum to the intellectual life of a university; it is an essential. I believe it was Plato’s most famous pupil, Aristotle, one of the earliest academicians of Ancient Greece, who once wrote that while each one of us can know only a part of the truth, the union of many can illuminate a greater area of truth. An approximation of truth, of course, never the final truth. Given its very intellectual constitution and mission of truth and excellence, the university should strive for the aesthetic of a multicolored garden.