Please sir, I want some more honour for literary heroes like Shabaan Robert

Just recently, the Brits celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of the greatest writers to come out of Britain and one of the leading literary influences of the Victorian era and beyond.

Dickens’s fame travelled well beyond the shores of cold and damp Albion and spread his influence among people who had absolutely nothing to do with the harsh realities of the Industrial Revolution and a heartless capitalism that crushed body and soul on its triumphant march to world domination.

Little children in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, in times so far removed from the 19th century, got hooked to the characters he created, characters that as a child you could almost touch, such as Pip, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. the Artful Dodger.

Of course, in the British colonies and dependencies, more than anywhere else except Britain, you had to deal with Dickens if you chose to do Arts. When you were too small to grapple with the full dose of Dickensian language they gave you the abridged version, which was a simplified telling of the story, to whet your appetite for when your grasp of the English allowed you to deal with the master in the original.

Pure pleasure it was for some of us. Who could complain about being made to meet a character like Oliver Twist – “Please sir, I want some more”?” Or Mr Gradgrind (Hard Times), who insisted that what little children needed to be taught was facts, facts, nothing but facts. “Facts alone are wanted in life.” Kill the imagination, stifle creativity. Or, the sinister Madame Defarge (Tale of Two Cities) who religiously recorded the sins of the French aristocracy in her knitting, keeping the count for the day when the Revolution would send these parasites to the guillotine.
Dickens gave the world these palpable characters who made you feel you had met them in a foggy place long before your granddad was born. They were so real they gave you this uncanny feeling of having lived elsewhere in your previous life. He also gave us the Dickensian sentence, which is an institution in its own right, having been passed down from generation to generation, losing neither its kilometric presence nor its charm of linguistic algebra. Try this one for size, and elegance:

In the consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage woman in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life, and secondly that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night. (David Copperfield)

Apart from his exceptional style, Dickens depicted the mood of his era and country, the rise of capitalism and its ravages; the dramatic industrialisation and urbanisation; the abject poverty of the downtrodden and the callousness of the well-to-do. He had firsthand experience of this state of affairs when his father was gaoled for being indebted and his family had to join him in prison for some time, standard practice in those days. Whence comes the empathy in these works, whence the greatness of the man.

All great nations honour their writers, artists, poets and scientists, alongside their warriors and statesmen. Mark Twain and others in the US; Victor Hugo and others in France; Wolfgang von Goethe and others in Germany; Lev Tolstoy and others in Russia, etc.

Only the genius of Tanzania’s bureaucrats can forget great men like Shaaban Robert, and others, while honouring bogus heroes to mark the 50th anniversary of Independence. We will not allow a nation’s memory to be lost because of bureaucratic absentmindedness.