LITERATURE 1

Cards (38)

  • There are 54 nations which make up Africa. Each of these separate countries have their own history, culture, tribes, and traditions.
  • African literature

    Literary works of the African continent. It consists of a body of work in different languages and various genres, ranging from oral literature (Swahili, Arabic, Zulu, Xhosa, Amharic, Yoruba) to literature written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and English)
  • Oral literature

    • stories/folktales
    • riddles
    • histories
    • myths
    • songs
    • proverbs
  • Oral literature

    • Employed to educate and entertain children
    • Oral histories, myths, and proverbs additionally serve to remind communities about their ancestors' heroic deeds, their past, and their customs and traditions
    • There is a concern for presentation and the oratory
    • Folktale tellers use call-response techniques
    • A griot (praise singer) will accompany a narrative with music
  • Slave narratives

    The first African writings to gain attention to the West. They vividly described the horrors of slavery and the slave trade
  • The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789)
  • As Africans became literate in their own languages, they often reacted against colonial repression in their writings.
  • Since the early 19th century writers from Western Africa have used newspapers to air their views. Several founded newspapers that served as vehicles for expressing nascent nationalist feelings.
  • Negritude movement

    A movement by French-speaking Africans in France, led by Leopold Senghor, along with Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire, French speakers from French Guiana and Martinique. Their poetry denounced colonialism, and proudly asserted the validity of the cultures that the colonials had tried to crush.
  • One difficulty which headed to several others is that of colonization. The problem with colonization is when the incoming people take advantage of the indigenous people and the properties of the occupied land. Colonization led to slavery. Millions of African people were enslaved and brought to Western countries around the world from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
  • African Diaspora
    The spreading of African people, largely against their will, around the world
  • After World War II, as Africans began demanding their independence, more African writers were published. The writers wrote in European languages, and often they shared the same themes: the clash between indigenous and colonial cultures, condemnation of European suppression, pride in the African past, and hope for the continent's independent future.
  • Apartheid
    A system of racial segregation by the National Party government in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by whites was maintained.
  • Themes in contemporary African literature

    • deceit and corruption
    • colonial tyranny
    • hardships and struggles under colonial rule and influences
    • criticism of the government
  • Wole Soyinka

    Born in Abeokuta, Nigeria on July 13, 1934. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, becoming the first African laureate. Alongside his literary career, he has also worked as an actor and in theaters in Nigeria and Great Britain. His works include plays, poetry, novels, and essays. He writes in English, but his works are rooted in his native Nigeria and the Yoruba culture, with its legends, tales, and traditions. His writing also includes influences from Western traditions - from classical tragedies to modernist drama.
  • Wole Soyinka: '"The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism."'
  • Wole Soyinka: '"The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny."'
  • Wole Soyinka: '"Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth."'
  • Chinua Achebe

    Born in Ogidi, Nigeria on November 16, 1930. He is a Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental depictions of the social and psychological disorientation accompanying the imposition of Western customs and values upon traditional African society. His particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of crisis. His novels range in subject matter from the first contact of an African village with the white man to the educated African's attempt to create a firm moral order out of the changing values in a large city.
  • Chinua Achebe: '"The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience."'
  • Chinua Achebe: '"People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories."'
  • Things Fall Apart

    The first novel by Chinua Achebe, written in English and published in 1958. It helped create the Nigerian literary renaissance of the 1960s. It describes the simultaneous disintegration of its protagonist Okonkwo and of his village. The novel was praised for its intelligent and realistic treatment of tribal beliefs and of psychological disintegration coincident with social unraveling.
  • Ngugi wa Thiong'o

    Born in Limuru, Kenya on January 5, 1938. Kenyan writer who was considered East Africa's leading novelist. His popular Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by an East African. Also known as one of Africa's most articulate social critics. As he became sensitized to the effects of colonialism in Africa, Ngugi adopted his traditional name and wrote in the Bantu language of Kenya's Kikuyu people.
  • Weep Not, Child

    The story of a Kikuyu family drawn into the struggle for Kenyan independence during the state of emergency and the Mau Mau rebellion.
  • The River Between
    Tells of lovers kept apart by the conflict between Christianity and traditional ways and beliefs and suggests that efforts to reunite a culturally divided community by means of Western education are doomed to failure.
  • Petals of Blood

    Deals with social and economic problems in East Africa after independence, particularly the continued exploitation of peasants and workers by foreign business interests and a greedy indigenous bourgeoisie.
  • J.M. Coetzee

    A South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide. He became an Australian citizen in 2006. He is inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author.
  • Before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, CNA Prize(thrice), the Prix Femina Étranger, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Booker Prize (twice), among other accolades.
  • "As a Woman Grows Older"
    An evocative narrative by J.M. Coetzee, in which a woman visits her daughter in Nice after many years. Her son, en route to a conference, will join them. The convergence of these dates piques her curiosity. She wonders if her children have a hidden agenda—a proposal to address her perceived obstinacy and self-will. Perhaps they believe she can no longer care for herself. Despite their love, she feels like a Roman aristocrat awaiting the fatal draft, advised to drink it down without fuss. Her children, dutiful but perhaps not equally dutiful as a mother, will have to wait for another life to even the score.
  • Kofi Awoonor

    A Ghanaian poet and author whose work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams, and was also published as Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. He taught African literature at the University of Ghana. He was killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a participant at the Storymoja Hay Festival.
  • Kofi Awoonor was born in Wheta, in the Volta region of what was then the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana. He was the eldest of 10 children in the family. He was a paternal descendant of the Awoonor-Williams family of Sierra Leone Creole descent.
  • Kofi Awoonor was educated at Achimota School and then proceeded to the University of Ghana, graduating in 1960. While at university he wrote his first poetry book, Rediscovery, published in 1964. Like the rest of his work, Rediscovery is rooted in African oral poetry.
  • Kofi Awoonor managed the Ghana Film Corporation and helped to found the Ghana Playhouse, going on to have a significant role in developing theatre and drama in the country. He was also an editor of the literary journal Okyeame and an associate editor of Transition Magazine.
  • Kofi Awoonor: 'The First Circle (Poem): "the flat end of sorrow here / two crows fighting over New.Year's Party / leftovers. From my cell, I see a cold / hard world. / So this is the abscess that / hurts the nation- / jails, torture, blood / and hunger. / One day it will burst; / it must burst. / When I heard you were taken / we speculated, those of us at large / where you would be / in what nightmare will you star? / That night I heard the moans / wondering whose child could now / be lost in the cellars of oppression. / Then you emerged, tall, and bloody-eyed. / It was the first time / I wept."'
  • Ladan Osman

    A Somali-American poet and teacher. Her poetry is centered on her Somali and Muslim heritage, and has been published in a number of prominent literary magazines. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony. Osman was born in Mogadishu, Somalia and later moved to Columbus, Ohio in the United States.
  • For her post-secondary education, Osman earned a BA from Otterbein University. She subsequently studied at the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, where she obtained an MFA. Additionally, Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Michener Center for Writers. Osman is a teacher by profession.
  • Osman's poetry is shaped by her Somali and Islamic heritage. Fellow Somali author Nuruddin Farah serves as among her main artistic influences.
  • Ladan Osman: 'Tonight (Poem, 2010): "Tonight is a drunk man, / his dirty shirt. / There is no couple chatting by the recycling bins, / offering to help me unload my plastics. / There is not even the black and white cat / that balances elegantly on the lip of the dumpster. / There is only the smell of sour breath. Sweat on the collar of my shirt. / A water bottle rolling under a car. / Me in my too-small pajama pants stacking juice jugs on neighbors' juice jugs. / I look to see if there is someone drinking on their balcony. / I tell myself I will wave."'