1This book is the record of the contributions of scholars, artists and African and Caribbean writers of English and French expression to the bilingual Cambridge Colloquium, which provided a rare opportunity for the participants to conduct dialogues and express views across the politically imposed linguistic boundaries. The central theme of the discussions is the power of the word, but in a truly multimodal fashion it is extended to the exploration of the power of the pictorial image, the power of the word in music, and the power of the literary prize.

3Stimulating as they are, the testimonies of the writers do not go beyond what has already been subjected to scholarly research and widely written about. However, a novel and exciting aspect of the language question is addressed by the translator Christiane Fioupou. She talks about the difficulty of translating indigenized literary texts, pointing to translations of pidgin and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s ‘rotten English’ into French. She also poses the question of how the translator should approach the task, for example, of translating a poem which is conceived in Yorùbá, a tonal language, and written down in English, a stress-timed language, into French, which is neither tonal, nor stress-timed.

5Gerard Houghton’s exploration of the power of the image loses its force as only Houghton’s talk is recorded. The paintings he discusses are not reprinted in the book - they are accessible only on the October Gallery website. Whereas having to go online while reading this dialogue is impracticable, reading the text without the images greatly reduces the aesthetic experience. Similarly, while one takes great interest in the composition of Chaka, the historic facts and the intercultural origins of both music and libretto as one reads about them in Akin Euba’s contribution, a fuller appreciation of the power of the word in music would be achieved only if the reader were given access to the music. In our digital age, both the images and the music could have been easily made part of the book on a CD.

6The background to the Nobel Prize in Literature, the selection criteria and the difficulties the Academy members face when assessing authors from different cultures are discussed by Marika Hedin. It is reported that George Steiner, whose contribution was not recorded as it was not intended for publication, argued that the political and even private considerations of the Nobel committee devalued the Prize. Anthony Kwame Appiah, however, emphasizes the significance of the Nobel Prize in bringing together a small but engaged cosmopolitan readership.

7In this wide-ranging, deeply probing intercultural debate, as Tim Cribb points out in his introduction, little reference is made to postcolonial theory, discourse, or the terms used by poststructuralism and deconstruction. Even if we agree that neither the authors nor the critics are under any obligation to conform to each other, the gulf between them seems to suggest that while the writers face and deal with the stark reality of life on a daily basis, the critics inhabit a virtual reality, and the power of the word may be understood differently in these two separate realities. As Nouréini Tidjani-Serpos points out, the language belongs to the people, but because of the inaccessibility of books in Africa, the power of the writers’ words remains, iconically, among the elite and in the West.