Officially called a "Conference of African Writers of English Expression", it was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Mbari Club in association with the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of Makerere, whose director was Gerald Moore.
[3][4] The conference was attended by many prominent African writers, including: from West Africa Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka (later Nobel Laureate in Literature), John Pepper Clark, Obi Wali, Gabriel Okara, Christopher Okigbo, Bernard Fonlon, Frances Ademola, Cameron Duodu, Kofi Awoonor; from South Africa: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Dennis Brutus, Arthur Maimane; from East Africa Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (at that time known as James Ngugi), Robert Serumaga, Rajat Neogy (founder of Transition Magazine), Okot p'Bitek, Pio Zirimu (credited with coining the term "orature"), Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, David Rubadiri, Jonathan Kariara; and from the African diaspora Langston Hughes.
"[9] The conference dealt with the issue of how the legacy of colonialism had left the African writer with a dilemma with regard to the language choice in writing.
[10] As he would describe it in his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature: "The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation.
"[12] Writing of the conference 50 years later, James Currey in Leeds African Studies Bulletin quoted Chinua Achebe as saying in 1989: "In 1962 we saw the gathering together of a remarkable generation of young African men and women who were to create within the next decade a corpus of writing which is today seriously read and critically valued in many parts of the world.