LESSON 4

• Africa


  54 nations which make up Africa with its own separate cultures
• African literature


  • Oral literature (Swahili, Arabic, Zulu, Xhosa, Amharic, Yoruba)
  • Literature written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and English)
• African 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
  • Includes: stories/folktales, riddles, histories, myths, songs
  • 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, vividly described the horrors of slavery and the slave trade
• Colonialism in Africa and its effects in their literature

  1. Since the early 19th century writers from Western Africa have used newspapers to air their views

  2. Several founded newspapers that served as vehicles for expressing nascent nationalist feelings

  3. French-speaking Africans in France, led by Leopold Senghor were active in the negritude movement along with Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire, French speakers from French Guiana and Martinique

  4. Their poetry denounced colonialism, and proudly asserted the validity of the cultures that the colonials had tried to crush

  5. Africa suffered several difficulties in its lengthy history which gave an influence on the themes and topics of its literature

  6. Colonization led to slavery, millions of African people were enslaved and brought to Western countries around the world from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries

  7. This spreading of African people, largely against their will, is called the African Diaspora
• Post-colonial African literature


  1. After World War II, as Africans began demanding their independence, more African writers were published

  2. 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

  3. In South Africa, the horrors of Apartheid have, until the present, dominated the literature

  4. Apartheid is 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

  5. Contemporary African literature reveals disillusionment and dissent with current events, involving themes such as: 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, 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
• Chinua Achebe


  • Born in Ogidi, Nigeria on November 16, 1930
  • 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
  • Things Fall Apart (1958) is the first novel by Chinua Achebe, written in English and published in 1958, it describes the simultaneous disintegration of its protagonist Okonkwo and of his village, and 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 (1964) is 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 (1965) 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 (1977) 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


  • South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide, became an Australian citizen in 2006
  • 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" by J.M. Coetzee (1940) - In this evocative narrative, 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


  • 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, 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
• Ladan Osman


  • Somali author, earned a BA from Otterbein University, studied at the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, where she obtained an MFA, received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Michener Center for Writers
  • Osman's poetry is shaped by her Somali and Islamic heritage, fellow Somali author Nuruddin Farah serves as among her main artistic influences