African literature

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African literature literary works of the African continent. African literature consists of a body of work in different languages and various genres, ranging from oral literature to literature written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and English).

See also African languages ; South African literature .

Oral literature, including stories, dramas, riddles, histories, myths, songs, proverbs, and other expressions, is frequently employed to educate and entertain children. Oral histories, myths, and proverbs additionally serve to remind whole communities of their ancestors' heroic deeds, their past, and the precedents for their customs and traditions. Essential to oral literature is a concern for presentation and oratory. Folktale tellers use call-response techniques. A griot (praise singer) will accompany a narrative with music.

Some of the first African writings to gain attention in the West were the poignant slave narratives, such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), which described vividly the horrors of slavery and the slave trade. As Africans became literate in their own languages, they often reacted against colonial repression in their writings. Others looked to their own past for subjects. Thomas Mofolo, for example, wrote Chaka (tr. 1931), about the famous Zulu military leader, in Susuto.

Since the early 19th cent. writers from western Africa have used newspapers to air their views. Several founded newspapers that served as vehicles for expressing nascent nationalist feelings. French-speaking Africans in France, led by Léopold Senghor , were active in the négritude movement from the 1930s, along with Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire , French speakers from French Guiana and Martinique. Their poetry not only denounced colonialism, it proudly asserted the validity of the cultures that the colonials had tried to crush.

After World War II, as Africans began demanding their independence, more African writers were published. Such writers as, in western Africa, Wole Soyinka , Chinua Achebe , Ousmane Sembene , Kofi Awooner, Agostinho Neto , Tchicaya u tam'si, Camera Laye, Mongo Beti, Ben Okri, and Ferdinand Oyono and, in eastern Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o , Okot p'Bitek , and Jacques Rabémananjara produced poetry, short stories, novels, essays, and plays. All were writing in European languages, and often they shared the same themes: the clash between indigenous and colonial cultures, condemnation of European subjugation, pride in the African past, and hope for the continent's independent future.

In South Africa, the horrors of apartheid have, until the present, dominated the literature. Es'kia Mphahlele , Nadine Gordimer , Bessie Head , Dennis Brutus , J. M. Coetzee, and Miriam Tlali all reflect in varying degrees in their writings the experience of living in a racially segregated society.

Much of contemporary African literature reveals disillusionment and dissent with current events. For example, V. Y. Mudimbe in Before the Birth of the Moon (1989) explores a doomed love affair played out within a society riddled by deceit and corruption. In Kenya Ngugi wa Thiong'o was jailed shortly after he produced a play, in Kikuyu, which was perceived as highly critical of the country's government. Apparently, what seemed most offensive about the drama was the use of songs to emphasize its messages.

The weaving of music into the Kenyan's play points out another characteristic of African literature. Many writers incorporate other arts into their work and often weave oral conventions into their writing. p'Bitek structured Song of Iowino (1966) as an Acholi poem; Achebe's characters pepper their speech with proverbs in Things Fall Apart (1958). Others, such as Senegalese novelist Ousmane Sembene, have moved into films to take their message to people who cannot read.

Bibliography: See R. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (1970); R. Smith, ed., Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature (1976); W. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976); A. Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981); B. W. Andrzejewski et al., Literature in African Languages (1985); S. Gikandi, Reading the African Novel (1987).

slavery, the literature of. This refers to the literature written during or about the period between the 16th and 19th cents when Europeans colonized the Americas and the Caribbean using slave labour from Africa.

The anti-slavery movement, at its peak in the 1780s and 1790s, attracted many poets to its cause, including Wordsworth, Blake, Cowper, and Southey, and ‘The Dying Negro’ (1773) by T. Day became one of the best known abolitionist poems of the day. Two of the century's most popular plays in Britain, Southerne's Oroonoko (1696) and Colman's Inkle and Yarico (1787: one of 45 different versions of the tale that circulated through Europe) were concerned with slavery. A critique of civilization and commerce links anti-slavery with primitivism; stock images of the Noble Savage were used as a comparison with the greed and cruelty of Europeans. As an arena for the expression of pity and suffering, slavery was the perfect subject for sentimental novels such as H. Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné (1777) and Sarah Scott's The History of George Ellison (1766). Even sympathetic observers such as John Stedman, whose Narrative (1796) catalogued the horrors of slavery in Surinam, argued for amelioration of the slaves' conditions and not their freedom.

Recent scholarship has focused on literature produced by ex-slaves such as Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. Books such as Equiano's played an important role in the abolition movement because writing and art were given value as expressions of humanity and civilization; by writing his own narrative, Equiano countered the argument that Africans could not be considered human. These 18th-cent. narratives may be seen as the precursors of the hundreds of slave narratives written in 19th-cent. America, the most famous of which were written by Frederick Douglass (1817–95) and Harriet Jacobs (1813–97).

Since the 1960s these narratives have been central to attempts to recover works by black writers previously excluded from literary history and have formed the basis of newly constructed Black British and African-American canons. The most famous of these was T. Morrison's Beloved (1987). In Britain, F. D'Aguiar, D. Dabydeen, Caryl Phillips, and Beryl Gilroy have all written literature that re-imagines the history of slavery, and novels by Philippa Gregory, Unsworth, and M. Warner have explored the role slavery played in British society. In the Caribbean, the need to develop a post-colonial literary identity has encouraged writers such as Lamming, Walcott, and Earl Lovelace to explore and reinterpret the slave past.