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, literature, conference and/or african:
“English Bob: What I heard was that you fell off your horse, drunk, of course, and that you broke your bloody neck.
Little Bill Daggett: I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead. ‘Til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska.”
—David Webb Peoples, screenwriter. English Bob (Richard Harris)
“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.”
—Thylias Moss, African American poet. As quoted in the Wall Street Journal (May 12, 1994)