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Literature

A brief history of African literatures

Africa has a long and complex literary history. So complex that to suggest that one historical account can represent all of the literatures, across time, from all of the regions of Africa is misleading. There is considerable debate about where African Literature first appears and what originates in Africa and what is borrowed from elsewhere. What follows us a general overview.

Oral Literatures

Oral literatures have flourished in Africa for many centuries and take a variety of forms including folk tales, myths, epics, funeral dirges, praise poems, and proverbs. The most well known of the African oral forms is probably the proverb, a short witty or ironic statement, metaphorical in its formulation, that aims to communicate a response to a particular situation, to offer advice, or to be persuasive. The proverb is often employed as a rhetorical device, presenting its speaker as the holder of cultural knowledge or authority. Yet, as much as the proverb looks back to an African culture as its origin and source of authority, it creates that African culture each time it is spoken and used to make sense of immediate problems and occasions. Oral literary forms, such as folktales and praise-songs, flourish in contemporary Africa.

Literacy in Africa

A discussion of written African literatures raises a number of complicated and complex problems and questions that only can be briefly sketched out here. The first problem concerns the small readership for African literatures in Africa. Over 50% of Africa's population is illiterate, and hence many Africans cannot access written literatures. The scarcity of books available, the cost of those books, and the scarcity of publishing houses in Africa exacerbate this already critical situation. Despite this, publishing houses do exist in Africa, and in countries such as Ghana and Zimbabwe, African publishers have produced and sold many impressive works by African authors, many of which are written in African languages.

Many of the works identified by teachers and researchers in North America and Europe as African literature, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for example, are texts published by presses outside of Africa. Some of these works are not even available to African readers. Likewise, what an American teacher might recognize as an African novel might be very different from the locally produced, popular novels that are sold to and read exclusively by people living in Africa.

Scholars have identified three waves of literacy in Africa. The first occurred in Ethiopia where written works have been discovered that appeared before the earliest literatures in the Celtic and Germanic languages of Western Europe (Gerard 47). The second wave of literacy moved across Africa with the spread of Islam. Soon after the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, its believers established themselves in North Africa through a series of jihads, or holy wars. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Islam was carried into the kingdom of Ghana. The religion continued to move eastward through the nineteenth century. The encounter with Europe through trade relationships, missionary activities, and colonialism propelled the third wave of literacy in Africa. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary activity in the British colonies was conducted almost entirely in vernacular languages. Missionaries found it more useful to translate the Bible into local languages than to teach English to large numbers of Africans. This resulted in the production of hymns, morality tales, and other literatures in African languages concerned with propagating Christian values and morals.

Negritude

Although Africans had been writing in Portuguese as early as 1850 and a few volumes of African writing in English and French had been published, an explosion of African writing in European languages occured in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1930s, black intellectuals from French colonies living in Paris initiated a literary movement called Negritude. Negritude emerged out of "a sudden grasp of racial identity and of cultural values" (Gerard) and an awareness "of the wide discrepancies which existed between the promise of the French system of assimilation and the reality" (Owomoyela). The movement's founders looked to Africa to rediscover and rehabilitate the African values that had been erased by French cultural superiority. Negritude writers wrote poetry in French in which they presented African traditions and cultures as antithetical, but equal, to European culture.

In the mid-60s, Nigeria replaced French West Africa as the largest producer and consumer of African literature, and literary production in English surpassed that in French. Large numbers of talented writers in Francophone Africa came to occupy important political and diplomatic posts and gave up creative writing. Furthermore, the tenets of Negritude seemed far less relevant after independence and as newly independent nations found themselves facing civil wars, military coups and corruption (Gerard 53).The vastness in size and population of Nigeria gave it an advantage over smaller countries. In the 1950s, a large readership made up of clerks and small traders and a steadily increasing number of high schools students developed in Nigeria, and this readership enabled the emergence of Onitsha market literatures. Ibadan college, founded in 1957, produced some of the writers that came to the forefront in the 60s. East Africa followed West Africa, and in the 60s, Makerere College became a productive center for East African literature. By the mid-70s, after the coup that brought General Idi Amin to power in Uganda, Kenya became the literary center in East Africa.

An African Literary Tradition

The written literatures, novels, plays, and poems in the 1950s and 60s have been described as literatures of testimony. (See Kenneth W. Harrow's Thresholds of Change in African Literature, Portsmouth and London: Heinemann and James Curry, 1994.) Novels such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Flora Nwapa's Efuru are a few of the novels that might be described as literatures of testimony. These works, in part, attempt to respond to derogatory representations of, and myths about, African culture. Frequently written in the first person, literatures of testimony are concerned with representing African reality and valorizing African culture.

The following generation of African authors produced literatures in European languages that have been described as literatures of revolt. These texts move away from the project of recuperating and reconstructing an African past and focus on responding to, and revolting against, colonialism, neocolonialism, and corruption. These literatures are more concerned with the present realities of African life, and often represent the past negatively. As Harrow explains, "…instead of a past, a family, and a cultural background being reconstructed in positive terms, exemplary of African culture, the past is often viewed negatively, as something from which the protagonist has to escape" (84). Mariama Ba's Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), Birgo Diop's L'Aventure Ambigue (Ambiguous Adventure), and Peter Abrahams' Tell Freedom exemplify these literatures. The final group into which one can organize African authors is post-revolt writers. These writers move away from the use of realism and aim to develop new discourses and literary styles. They often focus on oppressive African regimes and employ an ironic style. The work of Sony Labou Tansi, Henri Lopes, Yambo Ouloguem, and Ahmadou Kourouma illustrate the style and content of post-revolt literatures.

Source: Matrix, Mar 10th 2005.

Educational Resources - A thorough resource of literature and writers
Matrix - An article about African Literature
Africa World Press Guide