A HISTORY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY

AFRICAN LITERATURES
Edited by

Oyekan Owomoyela
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
© 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
239.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A History of twentieth-century African literatures / edited by
Oyekan Owomoyela.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8032-3552-6 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8032-8604-x
(pbk.: alk. paper)
I. Owomoyela, Oyekan.
PL80I0.H57 1993
809'8896—dc20
92-37874
CIP
To the memory of John F. Povey

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction I
CHAPTER I English-Language Fiction from West Africa 9
Jonathan A. Peters
CHAPTER 2 English-Language Fiction from East Africa 49
Arlene A. Elder
CHAPTER 3 English-Language Fiction from South Africa 85
John F. Povey
CHAPTER 4 English-Language Poetry 105
Thomas Knipp
CHAPTER 5 English-Language Drama and Theater 138
J. Ndukaku Amankulor
CHAPTER 6 French-Language Fiction 173
Servanne Woodward
CHAPTER 7 French-Language Poetry 198
Edris Makward
CHAPTER 8 French-Language Drama and Theater 227
Alain Ricard
CHAPTER 9 Portuguese-Language Literature 240
Russell G. Hamilton
-vii-
CHAPTER 10 African-Language Literatures: Perspectives on Culture
and Identity 285
Robert Cancel
CHAPTER II African Women Writers: Toward a Literary History 311
Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido
CHAPTER 12 The Question of Language in African Literatures 347
Oyekan Owomoyela
CHAPTER 13 Publishing in Africa: The Crisis and the Challenge 369
Hans M. Zell
The Contributors 389
 Index 393
-
viii-

Acknowledgments
Sometime in 1984 the editor-in-chief of the University of Nebraska Press asked if I
would consider editing a volume on the history of twentieth
century African literatures.
I eagerly embraced the opportunity, because I shared his conviction that such a book was
both necessary and of potentially great appeal to a sizeable audience. Furthermore, the
interest of the press in the subject represented a major advance for African literary
studies, and African studies in general—the addition of another top-flight university press
to the number making African material available to the serious reader.
The volume makes its appearance now several years behind schedule owing to the
difficulties inherent in assembling commissioned original essays according to the
timetable I naively established at the start. I have since learned from those with more
experience in such ventures that the delays are quite typical. They have nonetheless tested
the patience and dedication of those contributors whose chapters came in on schedule.
My greatest gratitude is due, therefore, to my contributors, who have borne with good
grace the frustration of long delays in seeing the fruition of their efforts. I hope they will
agree that the result has been worth the wait.
Several passages in the following chapters have been translated from other languages.
Unless otherwise indicated, the translations have been by the contributing authors. For
the rest, I bear the responsibility for whatever flaws the texts contain.
-ix-

Introduction
In the half millennium that has elapsed since Christopher Columbus's fateful "discovery"
of the New World, humankind has experienced profound revolutions directly related to
Columbus's voyage and those of the European explorer-adventurers who came after him.
Nowhere has the impact of those revolutions been more dramatic than on the African
continent, for as a consequence of the voyages Africa quickly became an object of
European attention—as either an obstacle or a restocking facility for ships on their way to
the spices of the Indian Ocean, as a treasure trove of possessions to be transferred from
one European power to another in treaties concluding intra
European wars, as a source
of slave labor for the new plantations in the Americas, and as a group of colonies
supplying European empires with raw materials, markets for finished goods, and career
opportunities for European civil servants.
That original relationship between Europe and Africa has undergone many
transformations in the past five centuries. The last of these was decolonization—the
formal termination of imposed European rule and the resultant transfer of power to
Africans. The colonizers finally acknowledged the inevitability, and even desirability, of
that process in the years following World War II, when they began the belated work of
cultivating suitable Africans to assume power on the departure of their European rulers.
The transformation, observers agree, is still in progress. What is important for our
purpose is that, as an integral part of that process, African literatures, essentially a
twentieth-century phenomenon, came into being.
In this volume Africa is conceived as a cultural entity, not a geographic entity.
Accordingly, the book excludes the countries of North Africa, for while they share some
historical experiences (such as colonialism) with the countries below the Sahara, they are
in fact Arab in culture, outlook, and lingua franca, and they perceive themselves to be
part of the Arab world. The literatures discussed in the following pages, therefore, are
those of the sub
Saharan countries, which share a cultural unity. Another result of this
cultural conception of Africa is the exclusion of the literature produced by European and
other foreign settlers on the continent, past and present. A partial exception is that of the
white community of South Africa: the perva
-i
sive weight of apartheid on the consciousness of writers, settler or native African, along
with its equally pervasive ramifications in the life of the country, necessitates occasional
allusions to certain settler writers and their works.
Studies of African literatures implicitly or explicitly argue a continuity with traditional
verbal artistry, which, in the absence of a popular writing tradition, was exclusively oral.
One can read that intent, for example, in Jonathan Peters's assertion that "the production
of fiction in West Africa is virtually as old as communication through the spoken word."
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike similarly see the traditional
narrative forms of African societies as "Africa's oral antecedents to the novel" and argue
at some length against critics who suggest differences between the two ( 25 -32). But
while there can be little doubt that some connection does exist between the traditional
forms and the modern, it would be an error to imagine that modern African literatures
wholly evolved from, or had an unbroken relationship with, traditional verbal artistry.
The modern literatures are quite evidently a legacy of the European irruption on the
African scene, and they differ markedly from the traditional forms. It is also futile to
suggest that the differences between traditional forms and modern literatures are
immaterial, as the proponents of "orature" suggest, or that the distinction that one is oral
and the other written is of little significance, as Wellek and Warren argue ( 21 -22), and
as Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch also do in their book Literatures in African
Languages (18). Oral performances are by their nature intimately personal and
immediate, involving a performer in close physical contact with an audience—performer
and audience sharing not only the same spatial and temporal space but also a cultural
identity. Literature's audience is characteristically remote, oftentimes separated by vast
spatial, temporal, and cultural distances. Fortunately, we need not be concerned with
determining the extent of the field covered by the term "literature" (even though a
resolution of the question would be desirable, for the manner of its resolution would
determine whether or not "orature" was an unnecessary neologism, "written literature"
redundant, or "oral literature" an oxymoron).
Another important difference between traditional African oral art and modern African
literature involves the identity and social standing of their respective practitioners. Like
the Mali griot, who according to D. T. Niane "occupie[d] the chair of history" in his
village ( viii ), the traditional oral artist was required to be deeply immersed in the
traditional mores and the history of his or her community. This incumbency invested the
artist with some formal or informal authority, along with commensurate dignity, even if
(as was sometimes the case) he or she eked a living out of mendicancy. The modern
writer does not have the sort of worry Niane expresses on behalf of the griot—that of
being regarded as an object of scorn—since in the postcolonial context he or she is a
member of the elite class. But although the modern
-2-
writer would claim the same legitimacy the traditional artist enjoys, as witness Wole
Soyinka's lament that the course of affairs on the continent is set by politicians and not
artists ( 18 ), that claim has little basis or justification, given the circumstances of writers'
constitution as a westernized elite class. African writers bear the traces of their
origination as a class in colonialists' desire to hand control to worthy successors they
could trust to oversee and preserve the sociopolitical structures colonialism had built. In
its present conception, therefore, African literatures inevitably reflect the social and
cultural alienation of the writers from their communities, as well as their identity with the
Europeans whose languages and cultures they share. In this regard modern African
literatures again testify to the great and continuing impact of the colonizing project on the
African universe, not least in the persistence of its magisterial role in the definition and
self-definition of Africans.
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with discourses concerning African literatures is
aware that the mention of the subject automatically suggests writings in European
languages. Works in African languages float into consciousness only as an afterthought.
Consequently, the arrangement and number of chapters in this book reflect not only this
condition but also the relative extent and importance of the literature each linguistic
group has produced. For example, literature in English is the subject of five chapters, and
French the subject of three, while literature in Portuguese is confined to a single chapter.
The paradoxical primacy of European languages in African literatures necessitates
another anomaly—the inclusion of a separate chapter on literature in African languages.
The chapter, by Robert Cancel, is a useful reminder that another Africa exists besides the
one that normally preoccupies the world's attention, and that it also produces noteworthy
literatures. The difficulty that confronts any scholar who might be interested in these
African-language literatures is considerable, owing, no doubt, to the multiplicity of
African languages. A definitive coverage of the subject would demand the collaboration
of several scholars who commanded among them all the languages in which significant
literature exists. Cancel accomplishes the more modest intention of providing an
authoritative discussion of a representative sampling of this body of works.
Russell Hamilton's chapter mentions the reasons that Lusophone African literature was
"the first written, the last discovered." Among them one cannot discount the distinction
Portuguese colonial policies enjoyed as the most repressive and unenlightened
manifestation of a system that is by definition already repressive and unenlightened. Like
Belgian colonialism, the Portuguese version concentrated on the exploitation of Africans
and their resources, and it failed to follow suit when the French and the British, for
different reasons and to different extents, embarked on the westernization of their
colonial subjects. Even at the end of the twentieth century the Portuguese enclaves in
Africa have not fully divested themselves of their stigma
-3-
as Portuguese-run prisons for Africans, devoid of much of the romance that attracted
European students and tourists to Anglophone and Francophone areas. The interest in
Lusophone literature is thus commensurate with that in other aspects of life in the
Portuguese spheres.
The story could not be more different with regard to the other two "Europhone"
literatures. In all genres the countries that emerged from British colonialism have been
the most fecund literary sources, Nigeria being preeminent among them. As far as fiction
is concerned, it is customary to cite the publication in 1952 of Amos Tutuola's novel The
Palm-Wine Drinkard as the beginning of sustained Anglophone literature, although as
Peters points out there had been earlier works, especially from the Gold Coast ( Ghana).
Tutuola was quickly joined in international popularity by his compatriot Chinua Achebe,
and it was, not surprisingly, another Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, who became in 1986 the
first African, and the first Black writer, to win the Nobel Prize for literature.
Arlene Elder notes the delay in the entry of Anglophone East Africa into the literary
arena, and the embarrassed sense of exclusion that people like James Ngugi ( Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o) and Grace Ogot felt when their part of Africa had no representative among the
participants in the 1962 African Writers Conference held in Kampala, Uganda. That
event became a powerful catalyst for aspiring writers, among whom Ngrgĩ is now one of
the most renowned. In South Africa the history of literature has largely repeated that of
other parts of Africa, with the difference that it has been more intense and more
passionate because of the conditions imposed by apartheid. The all
consuming claim of
that system of official racism on the consciousness of African peoples, and consequently
its recurrence as a theme in South African writing, are vividly evident in John Povey's
chapter.
Servanne Woodward establishes that fiction from Francophone Africa has been quite
considerable, both in volume and in quality, and she shows that here too fiction writing
commenced much earlier than the 1950s. It began as a trickle in the 1920s, produced by
writers well schooled in the French assimilationist system of education, but in the years
leading up to and encompassing the anticolonial struggle it was eclipsed by the poetry of
the Paris-based African cultural affirmation movement known as Negritude. Edris
Makward traces that movement's origins in Paris and its influence in Africa and
Madagascar, even among poets who never lived in France. He places emphasis on its
initial connection with such European movements as surrealism and existentialism, along
with its militant rebuttal of the colonialist misrepresentation of Africanity as the
degenerate opposite of westernity, which supposedly embodies the only acceptable
paradigm for humanity. The considerable influence of Negritude on the African scene
lasted for at least two decades, and both Woodward and Hamilton acknowledge its
influence in Francophone fiction and Lusophone poetry. Indeed, even though
Anglophone writers such as Ezekiel Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka showed open
-4-
disdain for the promotion and flaunting of Negritude as a sort of black mystique,
Anglophone poetry itself evinced some of the tendencies of the Negritude poets. The
"pastoral images of nature and nurture, symbolized often as a woman in tropes that are
both maternal and erotic," and the "dance, drums, masks, and other artifacts" that Thomas
Knipp identifies as characteristic imagery of modern Anglophone poetry are not much
different from the devices popular with Negritude poets. Nonetheless, since the 1960s,
when the Negritude movement achieved many of its cultural goals, the work of the
Negritude poets has been somewhat eclipsed, as Woodward points out, by the fiction of
such Francophone writers as Ousmane Sembène, V. Y. Mudimbe, Ken Bugul, and
Aminata Sow Fall.
Despite the general agreement that Africans employed narrative and poetic forms for
entertainment, edification, and dissemination of information and ideas in the pre-
European past, when discussion turns to drama opinions differ greatly. Some scholars
argue that here, too, a long tradition existed among African peoples before the arrival of
Europeans. They see the mimetic elements in traditional ritual performance as drama,
with some going so far as to assert that modern African drama in fact developed directly
from those elements. It is clear from James Amankulor's chapter that he belongs to this
school of thought. Others prefer to see rituals, however considerable the mimetic or
theatrical instances they include, as phenomena distinct from drama, and point to the
clear line of descent of modern African drama from the performances that resident
Europeans introduced into their African enclaves for their own amusement. Anglophone
Africans have been more concerned with establishing an autonomous origination of
drama in Africa than have their Francophone siblings; unlike Amankulor, Alain Ricard
states matter-of-factly that drama came to Africa with the Europeans. Whatever the case,
the theater has flourished more in Anglophone than in Francophone countries, as the
relative proportions of Ricard's and Amankulor's chapters aptly illustrate.
Until very recently one of the most contentious issues among African literary scholars
was the near invisibility and inaudibility of women in literary discussions. To some
extent their minimal representation for so many years reflected their marginal
participation in the creation and analysis of literature. The articulation of colonial policy,
as well as African practice, gave men a head start in Western education and consequently
enabled them to dominate the early years of literary activity. To some degree, of course,
force of habit also contributed to the tendency of the predominantly male literary
establishment to ignore or discount women's activities even after these became
considerable. The chapter by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido addresses this
issue. It also bears testimony to the extent to which women have breached the male
ramparts to make themselves seen and heard as artists and critics, as well as touching
upon international feminism and African women's attitudes toward it.
 -5-
Readers will notice that in several chapters the authors refer to constraints on the
production and circulation of literature on the continent, especially to writers' limited
access to publishing outlets. As some add, the works that do achieve publication often fail
to reach wide audiences because of inadequate mechanisms for distribution.
Unimaginative or deliberately unhelpful government policies and severely depressed
economic conditions sometimes add to the difficulties. The issue is important enough to
warrant its own chapter. Hans Zell, who has for many years been deeply involved in
seeking ways to alleviate and solve the problem, provides readers with a vivid account of
some of the problems that writers, publishers, and readers face.
I would not wish to leave the impression that the domination of African literary
expression by European languages has met with routine approval among African writers
and critics. Despite the sometimes strident protests by some of them that Africans have a
right to claim those languages as their own (Achebe 74-84; Chinweizu, Jemie, and
Madubuike 14), other writers, such as Ngũgĩ, achieved international recognition for their
European
language works only to come later to view the embrace of colonial languages
as inimical to the furtherance of Africa's cultural interests. This vexing question of
language merits a sustained discussion, and it is accordingly addressed in my own
chapter.
The essays in this volume emphasize the historical events that have shaped African
literatures during the twentieth century. African writers, as readers will find, differ to
some degree in their representations and assessments of these key events, but
transcending their differences are certain constants: the literatures they produce have in
common an undeniable European inspiration and a necessary preoccupation with the
vicissitudes that European activities have unleashed all over the continent, activities
whose disorienting ramifications persist. These include the abduction of millions of
Africans for enslavement in the Americas, the appropriation of African resources and
African labor on the continent for the benefit of Europe, the imposition of colonial rule
and the attendant disruption of ethnic and national cohesiveness in favor of a mosaic of
colonies and later so-called nations, the imposition and underpropping of unworkable
postcolonial structures and compliant regimes, and the resultant incoherence of the
African world. Also inescapable in the essays, of course, is the sometimes impassioned
engagement of the persisting structure of apartheid by the writers of South Africa, whose
works have not begun to reflect recent developments in government policy.
This volume joins a growing number of studies on African literatures. It has an advantage
over most, however, in its assemblage of eminent scholars who together provide a full
coverage of the entire subject with uniform depth and assurance, and in its emphasis on
the historical dimension, which contextualizes the various developments in African
writing so far. It was conceived to appeal to a wide audience. Readers who seek a better
than superficial acquaintance with the entire field of African literary expression, and with
-6-
the forces that have impinged on it, will find it most rewarding. So will students in
courses on African literatures, whether at the undergraduate or the graduate level, as it
provides a vivid backdrop for the consideration of individual works. And since few
scholars whose specialty is African literatures can be equally versed in all areas of the
subject, even they will find in this volume a handy companion. The book is also designed
to appeal to students of comparative literature, history, sociology, and cultures. Because
our main focus is the historical dimension in the growth of African literatures, we have
not gone to great lengths in the critical evaluation of literary works or movements. Yet
discussion of significant works and how they reflect their times inevitably implies some
critical assessment. For this reason readers in search of critical insight will find much in
the volume to interest them.
I began this introduction by pointing out the centrality of European activities in the
development of the modern African literary tradition. For so long, the European was such
an oppressive fact in African lives that the fiction writer Mongo Beti quoted an old friend
and a sage as once predicting that "wherever there was a Negro, there would always be
some European colonial to kick his backside" (Beti 2). For most of the years this volume
encompasses (by consensus, until the end of 1988) the preoccupation with Europeans
evident in African writing would seem to justify the prediction. Moreover, during the
heyday of empire the image that the world had of the continent and its peoples was
formulated by Europeans, and, as was to be expected, that image was concocted to
legitimize colonialism. With the emergence of their own creative writing, Africans began
to appropriate from Europeans the right to speak for themselves, to interpret their
universe to the world and even to themselves. Achebe, for example, has repeatedly stated
that he was inspired to become a writer by such colonial novelists as Joyce Cary, in
whose Africans he could not recognize himself, and as a corrective for whose creations
he counterposed his own. Thus, through the works of African authors, Africa is being
rediscovered by readers around the world, including Africans themselves.
Furthermore, a trend noticeable in recent writing from the continent suggests that the
doomsayer in Beti might be wrong after all: the figure of the European, along with direct
mention of the European presence, is becoming increasingly peripheral, with the world of
Achebe's Things Fall Apart yielding to that of Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre. Works
like Ngũgĩ's Devil on the Cross, however, serve to remind us that colonialism dies hard,
and that old colonialists and their behind-the-scenes manipulation of African affairs have
not quite faded away.

Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. "The African Writer and the English Language." In Morning Yet on
Creation Day, 74-84. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976.
-7-
Andrzejewski, B. W., S. Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch. Literatures in African Languages:
Theoretical Issues and Sample Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Beti, Mongo. Mission to Kala. Translated by Peter Green. London: Heinemann, 1964.
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonization
of African Literature. Vol. I, African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. Washington,
D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983.
Niane, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. London: Longman, 1965.
Soyinka, Wole. "The Writer in a Modern African State." In The Writer in Modern Africa,
edited by Per Wästberg. Uppsala, Sweden: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies,
1968.
Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3d ed. New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1956.
-8-

1 English-Language Fiction
from West Africa
JONATHAN A. PETERS
The production of fiction in West Africa is virtually as old as communication through the
spoken word. Rich in traditional lore from many ethnic groups, the region has produced
folktales that are among the most famous in the world, part of a corpus of what is now
usually referred to as orature (to distinguish it from literature). West African literature
includes the epic tradition kept alive by the griots, traditional bards who recounted the
history of their clans as well as of heroic figures in their region. In the epic tradition, the
exploits of Sunjata, the medieval founder of the Mali empire, is the most celebrated.
Although a continuing tradition of oral literature has been passed down over many
generations, the written tradition has lagged far behind, because writing arrived only
with first Arab and then European influences. Even then, it was not until the twentieth
century that an established body of writing began to emerge, first in European languages
and then in indigenous ones. While such writing has been in existence for perhaps too
short a time for one to talk about a fully established tradition, a number of important
phases, landmarks, themes, and trends distinguish its development and form the subject
of this essay.
The older oral literatures of West Africa have for the most part been defined from culture
to culture, though a handful of studies treat folklore in general and oral traditions in
particular as a national or regional phenomenon. Scholars tend to consider the oral
tradition separately from the written body of creative literature, even though the latter
has been informed to a great degree by the traditional cultures of which the writers are
inheritors. One anomaly of the European influence is that some ethnic groups were split
by the colonial division of territories between two, often French- and English-speaking,
zones. Depending, therefore, on who is doing the collection and analysis, some
traditional cultures will be located within either French-speaking or English-speaking
Africa, or within a combination of the two, as with Senegambia.1
Most studies of African written literatures attempt to define their subjects
-9-
in regional, national, or linguistic terms. The present discussion, for example, is based on
genre, region, and language, the subject being written prose fiction by West Africans
originally produced in English. Such a definition is as much a matter of convenience as of
established practice. Few critics are fluent in all of the three European languages that
dominate the political and literary arenas of West Africa—namely, French, English, and
Portuguese— and fewer writers still have a command of more than one of those
languages. Most West African countries have retained their linguistic alliances with the
former mother country and have continued educational systems introduced from these
metropoles. Thus, while the cultural links and similarities among many cultures are
strong, there is not the level of cross-fertilization (let alone amalgamation) that would
make a comparison of works in these three nascent linguistic traditions very profitable at
this time, especially given the variations in accessibility of many works in translation to
writers and readers across the region.

Early West African Literatures in English

The development of literatures by West Africans in English, French, and Portuguese is a
by-product of colonial domination following the "Scramble for Africa" by European
nations. The Berlin Conference on Africa during 1884-85 set in motion the full-scale
colonization not just of territories in West Africa but of the entire continent ( Flint,
"Chartered Companies"), excepting only two countries: Ethiopia, in East Africa, and in
West Africa, Liberia—a country that had achieved political independence from the
United States in 1847. The establishment of English as the official language in Liberia
goes back to the early nineteenth century, when missionaries in the United States set up
the American Colonization Society and obtained lands for the settlement of free blacks in
West Africa. The other English-speaking countries of West Africa— The Gambia, Sierra
Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, and the English-speaking sector of Cameroon—acquired English
as a result of British domination. In the case of Cameroon, British influence came as a
result of the provision of the armistice following World War I, which placed part of the
country under British and part under French control.
The 1890s saw Europeans using expeditions to stake their claim in Africa by wresting
control of the territories they had carved out among themselves with virtually no
knowledge of natural or ethnic boundaries. That period also marks the flowering of
"colonial" novels in English (as well as in French), in which European writers used
Africa and Africans as setting and characters. Among the most artistic and the most
widely read in and out of Africa from this early period was Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness ( 1898), which, while reflecting Conrad's horror at what the Belgians were
doing in the Congo, still helped reinforce images of Africa as the "dark continent,"
cloaking an evil that was almost palpable. Among the most popular were the
-10-
novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard set in southern Africa and published between 1885
and 1924 (see Killam, Africa). Perhaps the most influential twentieth-century British
writer of colonial fiction is Joyce Cary. In response to Cary's four published "African"
novels, particularly Mister Johnson ( 1947), which were set in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe, a
young man in his midtwenties in the mid-1950s, became determined to write about his
people, whom he felt were being caricatured.
Achebe, one of the foremost African writers, depicted in his first novel, Things Fall
Apart ( 1958), the clash of cultures attendant on the arrival of European missionaries and
colonists. The subjugation of African peoples that they rigorously and sometimes
ruthlessly pursued took place in the name of bringing Christianity and civilization to
backward peoples. The process of "pacification," as the often brutal expeditions were
called, was not always very swift, nor did colonialism in West Africa last as long as is
sometimes imagined; indeed, resistance to colonial rule preceded the 1920s, and the
achievement of political independence within the national boundaries arbitrarily set up by
the Europeans began in earnest with Ghana in 1957 (a generation after Egypt's
Independence in 1922), and was soon after followed by territories elsewhere.
The beginning of the twentieth century, as the following excerpt indicates, found the
affairs and destinies of African nations largely controlled by Europeans:
At the dawn of the twentieth century, men of light and leading both in Europe and
in America had not yet made up their minds as to what place to assign to the
spiritual aspirations of the black man; and the Nations were casting about for an
answer to the wail which went up from the heart of the oppressed race for
opportunity. And yet it was at best but an impotent cry. For there has never lived a
people worth writing about who have not shaped out a destiny for themselves, or
carved out their own opportunity. Before this time, however, it had been
discovered that the black man was not necessarily the missing link between man
and ape. It had even been granted that for intellectual endowments he had nothing
to be ashamed of in an open competition with the Aryan or any other type. Here
was a being anatomically perfect, adaptive and adaptable to any and every sphere
of the struggle for life. Sociologically, he had succeeded in recording upon the
pages of contemporary history a conception of family life unknown to Western
ideas. Moreover, he was the scion of a spiritual sphere peculiar to himself; for
when Western Nations would have exhausted their energy in the vain struggle for
the things which satisfy not, it was felt that it would be to these people whom the
world would turn for inspiration, seeing that in them only would be found those
elements which make for pure altruism, the leaven of all human experience.
(Casely-Hayford I-2)
Thus begins the only work of fiction by Joseph E. Casely-Hayford ( 1866
1930), the
journalist, barrister, and nationalist whom Magnus J. Sampson hails for his public service
as "a link between the old order and the new, an
-11-
'uncrowned King' of British West Africa" (Ugonna viii). Casely-Hayford, born in the
Gold Coast (now Ghana), is better known for his political, sociological, and legal
writings, beginning with his first book, Gold Coast Native Institutions ( 1903). His one
novel, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation ( 1911), reads more like a
sociological work than a work of fiction. Yet the ideas he expresses in the opening
paragraphs of his novel, with due modification of the propagandist tone in which they are
expressed, deal with important concerns about twentieth-century African (or more
specifically West African) society and literature.
Casely-Hayford's book is Afrocentric. It looks at African culture from within and
endorses its value. It is more anthropological than artistic; many of the chapters are self-
contained essays on one issue or another. Although Casely-Hayford uses fictive
characters like Kwamankra and the Reverend Silas Whitely, their story is developed
spasmodically, only to be abandoned in the novel's final pages. Still, the work expresses
the author's views on many issues, not the least being the question of the Black man's
claim to greatness along with the white. The novel's title is a tribute to Ethiopia as a land
that did not succumb to the yoke of colonialism and thus is a beacon of light, hope, and
promise for Africa and her sons. Casely-Hayford shows his interest in African—
specifically Ghanaian—culture by referring to traditional customs and by using Fanti
names. Interesting episodes paint institutions of the day, Fourah Bay College being a
notable one. He also shows some novelistic skills, like the use of allegory in the episode
where an African woman confronts the English minister and, after telling a story about an
Arab, points out before she passes out and dies that the minister is the Arab in the story.
In its conscious use of language, judicious use of Fanti expressions, and concern with
malignant colonialism, Ethiopia Unbound shares a common spirit with such later works
as Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
Much of the early twentieth-century writing by West Africans was published in
newspapers (Ugonna viii-x)—and Casely-Hayford's first entry to the world of letters was
through journalism—but a few authors besides Casely-Hayford produced books as well,
such as Edward Wilmot Blyden of Liberia; Samuel Johnson, Dr. Africanus Horton, A. B.
C. Merriman-Labor, and Joseph Renner Maxwell of Sierra Leone; John Mensah Sarbah
of Ghana; and Henry Carr of Nigeria. Most of their works are either political or
socioanthropological. Few are fiction: poetry, influenced by English poetics, is the
dominant mode of creative self-expression. Following the appearance of Ethiopia
Unbound was a lengthy pause in the publication of long fiction by West Africans, at a
time when novels on West Africa by British writers proliferated. The second attempt by a
West African in English was by another Ghanaian writer, R. E. Obeng, whose
Eighteenpence ( 1943) "chronicles the life of Obeng-Akrofi; it also documents the
judiciary and legal systems of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) during the colonial days"
(Zell, Bundy, and Coulon 135).
-12-
Just as English- and French-speaking West Africa as a region has far exceeded other
regions in literary production, so within English-speaking West Africa Nigeria has clearly
dominated in both creative output and critical commentary. The reason partly relates to
size, for the combined population of The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the
English
speaking sector of Cameroon makes up no more than a fraction of Nigeria's
population, estimated at about one hundred million people, close to a third of the
population of the entire continent. The country also has, comparatively speaking, a larger
number of institutions of higher learning, which provide instruction for students as well
as places where academics and artists can interact. It has many printing presses, both
private and university-run, and these provide an outlet for reputed writers as well as those
who have not secured access to the international press. Moreover, urban and university
centers (such as Ibadan in the 1960s) have attracted a concentration of writers and critics
who in turn have provided inspiration and role models to aspiring writers. Also,
importantly, organizations like the Mbari Club promoted the exchange of views on many
issues, and many regional, national, and international conferences have brought writers,
critics, and students together. This constant ferment of activity has resulted in Nigerian
writers being among the best known and most accomplished on the continent.
Since it is scarcely a generation old, it is probably too early to talk of generations of West
African writing in English. I have elected instead to speak of "waves" of West African
writing, dictated by developments more in Nigeria than in the other countries. The first
wave of writing terminated at 1964, just before the spate of novels that express
disillusionment with the outcome of political Independence in 1960; the second
constitutes the period from 1965, a period during which the tensions in Nigerian politics
climaxed in the military coup in January 1966, to about 1976, when the cycle of war
novels subsided; and in the third, from about 1976 to 1988, newer writers began to
publish works in which the colonial themes continued during the second phase all but
completely disappeared.

The First Wave

AMOS TUTUOLA
It has now become fashionable, if inaccurate, to date the beginnings of West African
fiction in English with the publication in 1952 of Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine
Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town. Though many of
Tutuola's critics predicted that his "miracle" would not be repeated, within fifteen years
he went on to publish five other books: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts ( 1954), Simbi and
the Satyr of the Dark Jungle ( 1955), The Brave African Huntress ( 1958), Feather
Woman of the Jungle ( 1962), and Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty ( 1967). After a
silence of fourteen years, Tutuola came back with The Witch Herbalist of the Remote
Town ( 1981
-13-
came back with The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town (1981). Still, references to his
kind of writing as a cul-de-sac in African literature are not far off the mark. Tutuola
created a tradition for himself but not for others to follow, and he proceeded to iron out in
his later writings the curious turns of syntax that had endeared him to European readers
and alienated him from African ones.
Tutuola's fame as a writer came as the result of a number of accidents, perhaps the most
important of which were the rave reviews The Palm-Wine Drinkard received from such
writers and critics of stature as Dylan Thomas and Kingsley Amis (see Lindfors, "Amos
Tutuola"). Ironically, the instant reputation the book received in Britain did not flow
quickly across the Mediterranean to colonial Africa. Most of the reading public in
Tutuola's own country was unaware of the book's publication, and when Nigerians and
other West Africans finally got to read the book they gave it a mixed review.
What was this work of fiction, that it should attract European praise and draw at best a
lukewarm reception from the writer's own compatriots? I will let Tutuola summarize the
story in the words of his "drinkard," who is addressing his dead tapster:
I told him that after he had died, I wanted to die with him and follow him to this
Deads' Town because of the palm-wine that he was tapping for me and nobody
could tap it for me like him, but I could not die. So one day, I called two of my
friends and went to the farm, then we began to tap for ourselves, but it did not
taste like the wine he was tapping before he died. But when my friends saw that if
they came to my house there was no more palm-wine to drink again, then they
were leaving me one by one until all of them went away, even if I should see one
of them at outside and call him, he would only say that he would come, but I
would not see him come. (98)
The drinkard decides to search out his tapster in the Deads' Town and ask him to come
back. During the course of his travels he saves a young woman from The Complete
Gentleman Reduced to a Skull and marries her. Pointing to his wife, who has
accompanied him, he concludes his story as follows:
And how before reaching here, we met much difficulty in the bush, because there
were no roads to this Deads' Town and we were travelling from bush to bush
every day and night, even many times, we were travelling from branches to
branches of trees for many days before touching ground and it was ten years since
I had left my town. Now I was exceedingly glad to meet him here and I should be
most grateful if he would follow me back to my town. (99)
It is probably true that not only the Europeans who lavished praise on Tutuola for his
"grisly" tale written in "young English," as Dylan Thomas put it ( 1952), but also the
African readers and critics who condemned the work were overreacting to Tutuola's
writing. Well-educated West Africans, cognizant of the influence of African languages
on the novel's English style, were appalled by what they saw as Tutuola's lapses because
they had been so
-14-
well attuned to writing in the King's English. Indeed, West African educated speech
tended to be much more formal, much closer to the written form. Tutuola's writing, a
blend of biblical-sounding or Bunyanesque writing with Yoruba idioms rendered directly
into English, along with high-flown words that represent Tutuola's attempt to "swank a
bit," was seen as utter profanity. Yet it was this very quality of Tutuola's work—a blend
of the sacred and the secular with the macabre content of his "ghost novels," as they have
been dubbed—that endeared him to his English readers, attuned to a language in which
the standard forms and idioms were well worn. To these readers, Tutuola's "accidents"
were fresh and new and exciting. His writing sounded original and seemed to portend a
new literary trend. Moreover, the adventures in the heart of the forest appealed to
Europeans' notions about a mysterious Africa, notions that had held on for centuries and
had been made popular in the colonial period through novelists like Haggard, Conrad,
and Cary. Revaluations of Tutuola's work since this early period include book
length
studies, principal among them Bernth Lindfors's Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola (
1975), which gives a profile of judgments from the earliest reviews through the mid-
1970s.
Although Tutuola did not found a tradition of writing in West Africa, he demonstrated
that the oral tradition was very much alive and that it was possible for an individual
writer to draw on a communal source and use it to create works that bear the writer's
individual stamp. He had received little formal education. The factual and the fantastic,
the traditional and the technological cohabit in his landscapes without friction, and his
settings are invariably the primordial forest peopled more often with creatures who have
never been among the "alives." Yet his writing has endured in spite of its odd beginning,
though how much longer it will enjoy such a reputation is uncertain. More certain is the
significance of the ongoing debate about language, style, and audience in African
literature sparked by the reception of Tutuola's works.
Those works have received an uncertain classification. Some see them as basic stories of
a hero or heroine, embellished and lengthened by the addition of folktales. Others
describe them as romances, for their use of supernatural events and creatures. When
critics refer to them as novels, it is often because they see them as picaresques absolved
from the necessity of fulfilling the demands of European realist fiction. Still others,
rejecting the notion of the novel as a European form, speak of Tutuola's books as novels
derived from African oral traditions.

CYPRIAN EKWENSI AND CHINUA ACHEBE

Two years after the publication of Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard, Cyprian Ekwensi
published his first novel, People of the City ( 1954), which is as urban as Tutuola's work
is rural. Preceding it were stories published in magazines as early as 1945 and the
novelette When Love Whispers ( 1947), a work whose
-15-
heroine is something of a prototype for the eponymous protagonist of Jagua Nana (
1961). When Love Whispers, however, belongs less to the realm of so‐ called serious
fiction and more properly to that realm of popular fiction which Ime Ikiddeh has
graphically defined as "cooked to the taste of large numbers, finished and served out fast
and consumed while it is still hot" ( 106 ). And although Ekwensi, with eight full-length
novels, a novella, and two collections of stories, not to speak of his thirteen children's
books, has been one of the most prolific writers to come out of Africa, his work has not
been as enthusiastically received as that of Tutuola, even though his style is much more
polished and he writes more often of the sort of individuals who people the rapidly
growing towns and cities in Nigeria and other African countries.
In spite of his prolific output, Ekwensi is no more a stylistic trendsetter than Casely-
Hayford, Obeng, or Tutuola. For while his writing is considerably more within the scope
of the European novel as transposed into West Africa, Ekwensi has not developed a
reputation as a skilled craftsman the way Chinua Achebe was to do with his very first
book, nor has his art developed much over the years. People of the City shows many of
his weaknesses and a few of his strengths as a writer. By depicting the seamy side of city
life through the story of Amusa Sango, a journalist and bandleader in Lagos, the novel
drew protests from many Nigerian readers, just as Tutuola's accounts of jungle life
offended many West Africans. Sango's interest in success and the good life leads to
triumphs and reverses: triumphs in the praise and promotion that his graphic reports on
the coal strike in the "Eastern Greens" bring, as well as his successes as a rake; reverses
when he turns his sensational reporting style (hitherto successfully directed at the British)
against the "Lebanese Menace" and gets the sack, followed by eviction from his
apartment. Ekwensi shows himself capable of telling descriptions and interesting little
episodes. But such faults as inconsistencies of plot, episodic and sometimes confusing
narration, far-fetched improbabilities, gratuitous sensationalism, melodrama, and lack of
a moral code of some sort—in other words, a combination of problems in artistry and
vision— have led to its placement more within the category of popular fiction.2 In an
interview published in African Writers Talking Ekwensi concedes that he is "a writer who
regards himself as a writer for the masses," and he goes on to say, "I don't think of myself
as a literary stylist: if my style comes, that is just incidental, but I am more interested in
getting at the heart of the truth which the man in the street can recognize than in just
spinning words" (Duerden and Pieterse 79). Ekwensi's revelation in the same interview
that he spent twelve intense days at the typewriter for the writing of Jagua Nana supports
critical observations about the weakness of his style.
One important motif that Ekwensi introduced into Nigerian fiction in his pursuit of "the
heart of the truth" is the recurring violence in Nigerian politics. In People of the City we
see it for the most part in colonial violence,
-16-
but it also occurs in the work of the Ufemfe Society, which lets people in with promises
of prosperity but will not let them out, because those who joined its ranks have "literally
sold their souls to the devil" ( 71 ). The theme of political violence erupts in Jagua Nana,
considered by most critics to be Ekwensi's best work. This novel first appeared in 1961,
shortly after Nigeria had won its political independence in October 1960. Ekwensi ably
depicts violence in party politics through links between Jagua, the aging prostitute, and
Uncle Taiwo, whose bloated corpse he graphically portrays:
Rosa told the story of Uncle Taiwo: a terrifying one indeed, and one that taught
Jagua that politics was dirtiest to them that played it dirty. Rosa told how she was
going to market and she heard that a dead man was lying at the roundabout in the
center of the city. She was terrified. It was said to be lying near the market-place,
in front of the Hotel Liverpool.... The roads were all muddy and pitted; the gutters
were full, the farms in the suburbs were overgrown with weeds. Lagos was in a
state of chaos that day. It seemed as if the ghost of that corpse had gone abroad
among them. The body was lying there twisted and swollen; one knee was drawn
up against the chest, the arms were clutching at the breast, rigid like a statue.
(139)
Even though the flamboyant Uncle Taiwo was killed not by the opposition represented by
Freddie (Jagua's younger lover, whom Taiwo had killed) but by his own party for the loss
of the elections, violence goes hand in hand with bribery and corruption. The focus,
however, is on the book's heroine, a colorful prostitute whom Ekwensi's portraiture
invests with the advertised "grace, space and pace" of the automobile that gave her her
nickname. She is so "Jagwaful" that Ekwensi himself becomes captivated with her
magnificence and power to the point of exonerating her faults. For while Taiwo receives
his just deserts, Jagua, who escaped to Lagos to become a prostitute because her
husband did not meet her demands for sex and the good life, ends up with five thousand
pounds, which, in an implausible contrivance, her latest lover, Taiwo, had left her before
he died. She is able to go to Onitsha to start life as a merchant princess with money that
Taiwo had stolen from party coffers.
Despite its faults, Jagua Nana succeeds in presenting a slice of Lagos life, albeit the
seamy side. Designed for immediate, sensational effect, the novel is memorable for its
quick and easy scenes of sex and intrigue, not for a deepened awareness of human
conflict and motivation. Jagua Nana has been compared to another picaresque heroine,
Defoe's Moll Flanders ( Killam, "Cyprian Ekwensi" 86-87), but the similarity has to do
with their circumstances as thieves and prostitutes rather than with their motivation and
inbred morality ( Palmer, "Cyprian Ekwensi" 46-49). All in all, Ekwensi seems to be at
his best when dealing with people in the city, whereas those episodes set in the
countryside generally lack conviction, vigor, and relevance. When, however, the focus of
the action is a rural setting, as in his most artistically successful novel, Burning Grass (
1962), Ekwensi's prose can take
-17-
on an evocative charm free of the racy patterns of cheap fiction and imbued with graceful
echoes from the oral tradition.
The oral tradition found its most striking and most successful exponent during the
transitional period between self-government and independence in the person of Chinua
Achebe, whose remarkable first novel, Things Fall Apart, quickly established itself as an
African classic. The first major work of historical fiction by a West African novelist
writing in English, it set to rights the one-sided portrayals of Africa and Africans that had
stereotyped the continent and its inhabitants in the colonial writings of not only British
writers but also other Europeans, notably the French (see Fanoudh-Siefer). In his essay "
The Novelist as Teacher" Achebe views himself as espousing an "adequate revolution"
designed "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the
years of denigration and self-abasement" (3). Europeans had assumed, in Kipling's
phrase, "the white man's burden" as an imposition placed on them from the outside
instead of as a deliberate program of worldwide imperialism. That attitude made possible
a psychological oppression that in turn had caused "a wound in our soul" ( Achebe, "The
Black Writer's Burden" 135). Achebe's aim was to teach fellow Africans the truth about
the colonial experience so that, unlike the man in the Igbo proverb who did not know
where rain began to beat him, African people as a body could know where the colonial
"rain" began to beat them and hence the locus in independence where they "dried [their]
body" ( Achebe, "The Role of the Writer in a New Nation" 163; Arrow of God160).
Things Fall Apart does not express these concerns baldly, but rather with profound
evocative power depicts the precolonial Igbo society as a paradigm of traditional African
societies, with all their alluring and endearing qualities as well as with their less
appealing sides. Unlike other colonial novels, so many of which have a negative and
patronizing attitude and a bias against Africans and African institutions, Achebe's novel
begins with the African writer looking at his society and conjuring it up for us. By
reshaping the borrowed English language he details the life of his central figure, whose
"fame spread like a bush-fire in the harmattan," but who in the end, as the point of view
shifts to that of the new colonial administration, would be buried like a dog because he
tried vainly to prevent the takeover of his patrimony. Things Fall Apart does not succeed
only or even chiefly because Achebe is attempting a corrective view of African society.
The primary reasons for its success include its insight into the culture of the Igbo seen
from the point of view of an "inside outsider" (a role he had as an Igbo whose missionary
upbringing prevented his participation in traditional rituals), a thorough understanding of
narrative organization and style, and a keen observation of and absorption with day-to-
day happenings, not through the lenses of the anthropologist, but through the clear sight
of one who was involved with and felt at one with his culture while at the same time
inculcating Western ideas.
-18-
Born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, the son of Isaiah Okafor Achebe, a catechist with the
Church Missionary Society, Achebe was not only barred from traditional Igbo rituals but
was also proscribed from eating in the houses of his unconverted fellow Igbos. Achebe
developed an involved detachment with his ethnic group that enabled him to see its good
and bad sides and to present them honestly in his fiction. Achebe's empathy with the Igbo
was one of his greatest assets, enabling him to paint the society in word pictures that have
made him the West African novelist—if not simply the African writer—most written
about since the definitive beginnings of West African literature in English a generation or
so ago. He managed that depiction not only by representing a classic example of racial
conflict in an illuminating way but also by selecting episodes and developments that
combine to form a composite picture of his society expressed with uncanny exactitude.
The debate over language, audience, and style that Tutuola's books sparked expands in
the study of Achebe's fiction and takes on additional dimensions dealing with culture,
theme, and sensibility.
Achebe's historical depiction did not end with Things Fall Apart. He had originally
conceived the novel as an extended history that would end in the present, but instead
divided the material and brought his first novel to a close with the beginnings of colonial
rule. The sequel, No Longer at Ease ( 1960), however, does not pick up where the first
novel leaves off, but goes straight to the eve of Independence for Nigeria, in a story about
Okonkwo's grandson, Obi Okonkwo. Eventually Achebe completed his history in a
sequence of four novels, each set at a crucial moment in history: the first direct contacts
and clashes with the Europeans during the 1890s in Things Fall Apart; the period when
the dual mandate was introduced as British colonial policy in Arrow of God ( 1964), set
during the 1920s; the period just before Independence in No Longer at Ease; and, in A
Man of the People ( 1966), the violent aftermath following Nigeria's Independence in
1960.
A good many readers and critics think that the first novel is unquestionably the best in its
evocation of the traditional past; others prefer the more equably balanced Arrow of God,
where the point of view shifts every chapter or so between Ezeulu and his people on the
one hand and Winterbottom and the British colonial administration on the other. The
crisis that results from the discrepancy between the arrival of the harvest and Ezeulu's
calculation of that arrival precipitates a spate of conversion to Christianity, as the people
try to avoid the famine brought on by rotting yams. Their active conversion contrasts
with the passivity of the crowd at the end of Things Fall Apart. The other two novels do
not have the same psychological depth, for Achebe loves the society of yore more than the
chaotic present, where alienated people see the government as deserving of no allegiance
( No Longer at Ease), or where the country is seen as a bounty, with everyone fighting to
have his or her share ( A Man of the People). What is incontestable is that with the
publication of his novels West African fiction in English had come into its own.
-19-
A number of themes recur throughout Achebe's four-novel cycle. Things Fall Apart
exhibits the clash of cultures, the destruction of the old value system and authority, and a
number of sociocultural themes dealing with religion, custom, taboo, and the
supernatural. No Longer at Ease best exemplifies the theme of the child of two worlds.
The colonial theme receives its most extensive exposition in Arrow of God, but Achebe
also brings in a wealth of cultural episodes that paint a more complete picture of an Igbo
society that has shown tremendous resilience in its recovery from the shock of colonial
domination, even though the end of the novel, with Ezeulu gone mad, shows one more
blow to traditional ways. The later developments chronicled in A Man of the People
make it a characteristic novel of the second wave, and accordingly it is discussed later in
this essay.

OTHER FIRST-WAVE WRITERS

The novels published by West Africans writing in English during this first wave of
writing covered such broad themes as the quest, which typifies Tutuola's books; city life
with its glitter, debauchery, and victimization of the unwary; rural life; colonial conflicts;
and political violence. The full-length works published in the 1950s, written exclusively
by Nigerians, sparked an interest among European writers to find out what the "real"
African was like. Accordingly, it was only natural that a book entitled The African (
1960) should capture the attention of Europeans and Americans who wanted to find out
what made the African tick. Its author, the historian William Conton, wrote this
interesting but in many parts implausible novel to depict political intrigue in the
immediate aftermath of Independence. Conton's book is now important chiefly as a work
that introduced first-person narrative into the modern West African realistic novel in
English and as the first novel by a Sierra Leonean. Conton wrote no more fiction, nor did
the publication of The African set off a chain of writings by other would-be writers in
Sierra Leone. Another work published outside Nigeria during this phase was I Was a
Savage ( 1958) an autobiographical work by Prince Modupeh, a native of Guinea who
went to America to study. (The sensational title was changed to an opposing image, that
of A Royal African, in the 1969 edition.)
In the wake of Chinua Achebe's immediate success as a writer of fiction, a large number
of Africans from all over the continent began to write fiction. More and more Nigerian
writers began to emerge whose books would number among those introduced into
schools as the curricula began to emphasize more African themes and fewer European
ones. Among these were Onuora Nzekwu , whose Wand of Noble Wood was published by
Hutchinson in 1961, followed by Blade among the Boys the year after. Probably inspired
by Achebe's example, Nzekwu sought to interpret areas of his culture to a predominantly
Western audience that was developing an appetite for works by Africans. Nzekwu was,
however, ill equipped to convey with the same poise and judiciousness the essence of
Igbo society. He may therefore be
-20-
credited with beginning what has been referred to as the sociological or anthropological
novel, a type of work that seeks to explain African traditional customs to aliens to the
culture; that credit has also been given to Achebe for his presentation of family and clan
life, notably in Arrow of God. Critics have pointed to a number of weaknesses in
Nzekwu's style, weaknesses that derive not only from his limited schooling but also from
his producing his first two novels while also writing sociological essays as editorial
assistant for Nigeria Magazine, that is, from 1956 until 1962, when he became editor-in-
chief (Zell, Bundy, and Coulon 440). Nzekwu simply turned to fiction as an additional
outlet for explaining his society to the outside world.
Probably inspired by Achebe's No Longer at Ease, where Obi, the child of two worlds,
confronts the problem of Clara being an osu (an outcast), Wand of Noble Wood is the
story of Peter Obiesie, who proposes marriage to Nneka, a village schoolteacher, only to
find out from his parents (whom he had given limited authority to help him find a wife)
that, through her mother, she is under a market woman's curse. The author's idea, derived
from tradition but not from Achebe, is to counteract the curse by a ritual of cleansing, but
Nneka commits suicide following her discovery in a vision that the rite would be
ineffectual. Blade among the Boys deals with the problem faced by the hero, whose
mother tries to recover him so he can prepare to assume the role of okpala (spiritual head
of his people) after what she sees as the attempt to "make him a eunuch" by the Catholic
seminary that is training him for the priesthood. The more complex plot also sees the
hero, Patrick Ikenga, becoming at one point a bribe-taker and, while a seminarian, being
seduced by Nkiru, the young woman he was to marry, aided by a love potion. In addition
to the sociological cast of both books, in which the author gives running commentaries on
customs instead of allowing characters to be the central medium for exhibiting culture,
improbabilities of plot and the many breakdowns in the use of language substantially
reduce the value of these two novels as examples of successful realistic fiction in English
(Taiwo 185-90).
Another Nigerian writer who employs social commentary is Timothy Aluko, who began
his literary career with short stories in the 1940s, but whose reputation has come from his
novels. Aluko's first novel, One Man One Wife, the first full-length work issued by a
Nigerian publishing house, was brought out in 1959 by Nigerian Printing and Publishing
Company. In the international market, the book was the third of his novels to be
published by Heinemann, which brought it out in 1967, behind One Man One Matchet (
1965) and Kinsman and Foreman ( 1966). As an ethnic historian, Aluko is the Yoruba
counterpart of Chinua Achebe, his first five novels serving to depict Yoruba society from
the 1920s to the 1960s. The signal conflicts in his works, while often centered on
traditional values of the village pitted against modern urban ways, do not focus on race as
an issue. One Man One Wife deals not only with the theme of polygamy—which is raised
when Joshua, a stalwart
-21-
Christian, decides to marry a second wife without even consulting his first— but also
with such other concerns as the influence of traditional beliefs on urban Yorubas and the
conflicts between those who adhere to tradition and those who espouse modern ideas.
One important contribution Aluko makes to the development of West African fiction in
English is his use of satire, which pervades his works from the beginning. Unlike
Achebe, who reveres ancestral traditions and whose irony or satire is usually directed
against those forces antagonistic to traditional mores, Aluko's irreverent satire spares no
one. This ability to highlight the comic in both those who are vicious and others who are
victims without embracing a moral vision against which the actions of the characters are
weighed has led to criticism for his failure to take a moral stand, a charge that Aluko
acknowledges (Zell, Bundy, and Coulon 350).
The theme of polygamy is central to another first novel, Obi Egbuna's Wind versus
Polygamy. According to Egbuna, wind signifies change while polygamy represents "a
change of Eves." Like Modupe, the author subsequently changed the sensational title of
the 1964 Faber edition, which catered to a European readership, to Elina, the name of
his heroine, in the second edition, published by Fontana Books in 1980. Like Egbuna's
subsequent books, the novel has many weaknesses in conception, design, language, and
plausibility, as Oladele Taiwo has pointed out ( 38 -45). The work is another product of a
writer who has not developed the technical facility for harnessing creative ideas and
whose work is directed at a foreign audience.
This first period of fiction writing by West Africans ends, fittingly enough, with Gabriel
Okara's only novel, The Voice ( 1964). While Tutuola's syntactical errors were the result
of an imperfect education, Okara's departures from standard English are the conscious
choice of a writer seeking to transmit the syntax of Ijaw speech into English. The Voice is
a poet's novel, a parable about Okolo's search for a nebulous "it." The novel presents a
moral world where the search for "it" is a quest for the meaning of life, where people are
defined not in terms of their outward appearances but in terms of their "insides," which
are either good or bad, and where the protagonist is exiled by his village elders because
they fear that his questioning is a threat to their way of life.
The first wave's dozen years of literary activity also saw the organization of conferences
on African literature in different regions of the country. Scholars began to be active in
producing commentaries on works, and a magazine specifically devoted to the study of
African literature, Black Orpheus, began publication. Although bibliographical works
began to be prepared during this phase and Margaret Amosu brought out her
preliminary bibliography, Creative African Writing in the European Languages, through
the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan in 1964, the bulk of such
activities had their fruition later, in publications from 1965 on.
-22-

THEMES AND TENDENCIES

In the first wave of West African fiction in English, a limited number of themes
emphasized either colonialism and its clash with autochthonous cultures or village life,
which was presented, on the one hand, as a whole without outside urban interference or,
on the other, as a contrast to city and Western ways. Broadly speaking, fictional works
dealt with historical, cultural, social, and religious issues in the past and the present and
in urban or rural contexts, which sometimes contrasted and sometimes complemented
each other. (In this regard, Tutuola's fiction has been unique insofar as his works center
almost entirely on picaresque adventures not within the world of human beings but of the
denizens of the forest, who have often never had earthly existence as we know it.)
Conflicts ranged from the colonial and the generational through the ethnic, political, and
religious to the battle of the sexes, the alienation of the child of two worlds, and the
debate on tradition versus modernism. These themes do not disappear in the second wave
but, along with new themes, continue the discussion of such subjects as polygamy,
supernatural involvements, the importance of offspring, the relationship between the
human community and the deities, and the individual's role in the community.

The Second Wave

HOLDOVERS AND NEWCOMERS
The advent of the second wave of fiction writing in English by West Africans may be
marked by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's novel The Interpreters ( 1965), which is as
much a poet's novel as Gabriel Okara's The Voice. Soyinka had already been
anthologized as a poet with pieces like "Telephone Conversation" and "Abiku," and
Oxford University Press had published A Dance of the Forests and Three Short Plays in
1963, thus launching his career as Africa's leading playwright. The first part of the novel,
with its leaning toward the stream-of-consciousness technique, is an interpretation of the
status of the newly independent Nigerian society. The interpreters, a group of young
intellectuals, find graft and corruption rampant in their society. Through them Soyinka
raps the hypocrisy and pretentiousness in their elders, typified by the bribe-taking Sir
Derinola and his half-educated crony Chief Winsala, and by the affected Professor
Oguazor, whose railing against "meral terpitude" hides his own culpability in the
illegitimate daughter ("the plastic apple of his eye") whom he keeps cloistered from
public view.
The second part of the novel takes up the question of what the interpreters are doing with
their own lives. Sekoni, the naive, honest engineer, becomes mad and finally dies after
his hydroelectric plan is passed over for the proposal of a corrupt contractor. Sagoe, the
newspaper columnist whom
-23-
Derinola and Winsala try to fleece, to their own discomfiture, is the exponent of the
philosophy of Voidancy, an exposition on bowel movements, which he deifies in the
expression "To shit is human, to voidate divine"; though more capable of adjustment than
Sekoni, he finds that his attempt to expose the engineer's treatment merely plays into
Derinola's hands, his piece being used in a "swap of silence" ( 95 ). Egbo, another of the
interpreters, is caught in a double bind: he has "a choice of drowning" between being a
village chief ("the warlord of the creeks") and working as a senior officer at the foreign
office ("the dull grey filing cabinet faces of the foreign office" [ 12 ]). Kola, the painter,
helps to provide continuity in the novel through his painting of the Yoruba pantheon,
using his friends as models. The narrative, which focuses on the interpreters' views in
part I, here concentrates on the actions of Lazarus, a beach preacher, and his acolyte, the
newly baptized Noah, who is killed when he jumps to his death in order to escape from
the African
American homosexual Joe Golder. All in all, the novel provides concrete
evidence that the euphoria that Soyinka had warned against at impending Independence
in A Dance of the Forests has evaporated and that morality and fair play are being set
aside.
Following close on the heels of The Interpreters was Chinua Achebe's A Man of the
People. Achebe's only first-person novel, it etches out an unflattering portrait of Nigerian
independence through the eyes of an "interpreter," a university graduate who comes into
conflict with his former mentor, Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga (a schoolteacher
turned politician), over a young woman and the extension of this rivalry into village and
national politics. The alienation Achebe had expressed in No Longer at Ease as a
distancing from the government and politics, seen as "they" in relation to "us," now
becomes a viciously exploitative cynicism that considers the nation as a cake of which
everyone is entitled to a piece. The pidgin expression "you chop, meself I chop, palaver
finish" (you eat your own share, I eat mine, so we have nothing to quarrel over)
epitomizes the contrast between this state of affairs and the well-ordered society of
Things Fall Apart. This breakdown, coupled with the novel's climax in a military coup
prompted by the violence of the national election, prefigures the successive military
coups that have plagued Nigeria in the last twenty years or so, and the untamable
corruption that has bedeviled Nigerian and other African public and private sectors since
Independence.
Although The Interpreters and A Man of the People gave notice that a mood of
pessimism and disillusionment was beginning to set in, that mood was by no means
dominant in this early period of the second wave. In 1965, the year Soyinka's novel came
out, a work of shorter fiction was published by the Sierra Leonean surgeon Davidson
Nicol, writing under the name Abioseh Nicol. The Truly Married Woman and Other
Stories subsumes " The Leopard Hunt" and " The Devil at Yolahun Bridge," which were
also published that same year under the title Two African Tales. The stories demonstrate
Nicol's
-24-
fine handling of wit and irony, and they furnish insights into customs and beliefs of
Freetown's Creole society, including the engagement ceremony in the title story, as well
as the belief in spirits (" The Devil at Yolahun Bridge"), in divination and charms (" As
the Night, the Day" and " The Leopard Hunt"), and in the ability of the dead to use kinetic
powers (" Love's Own Tears") or to appear in bodily form to the living (" Life is Sweet at
Kumansenu"). A typical setting in the stories is the transitional period between self

government and independence, when colonial administrators were on guard against
conduct that might promote tension and nationalist fervor. Nicol's competent handling of
point of view and tone, of narrative design and dialogue, is nowhere more evident than in
one of the two stories that draw on his years in England as a student: " The Leopard
Hunt," a finely executed tale that shows a well-developed sensibility.
Nicol far surpasses the two Sierra Leonean writers of fiction who are better known in part
because they wrote full-length novels. Yulisa Amadu Maddy's No Past, No Present, No
Future ( 1973) examines the lives of three young men, "brothers three," two of whom are
from the hinterland, while the third is a Creole from the capital. Maddy plays on ethnic
divisions, echoing the prejudice of those Creoles who see themselves as elite in
comparison to "provincials." By amassing money through theft at the railway station
where they all go to work after their Catholic schooling, they fulfill their ambition to go
to London to study. Although Maddy is aware of their faults and, for example, makes Joe
Bengoh condemn Santigi Bombolai for being something of a "black Nazi" in taking out
his frustrations with European whites on their women, he does not overtly point to their
ruthlessness, their lack of a moral core, and their passion for self-gratification as the
reasons for their failure. He seems to side with Joe Bengoh in his silent reproach of Ade
John, the Creole member of the trio. Eustace Palmer, in his review of Maddy's novel,
observes that Maddy "construes [Ade] as another example of Creole tyranny" ( 164 -65)
when Ade demands his turn with the girl (also of provincial extraction) whom Joe has
just wantonly seduced. Gripping scenes make this morbid novel a better-realized work
than Conton's book; yet Maddy's anger and bitterness toward Creoles and whites is hardly
disguised. By making his three protagonists as vicious as they are, Maddy makes us feel
sympathy by default for their victims.
R. Sarif Easmon, like Nicol a surgeon, is better known for his plays than for his fiction.
His novel The Burnt-Out Marriage ( 1967), like some of Nicol's stories, draws on
supernatural themes. Its protagonist, Chief Briwa, goes through a death ordeal by fire, the
outcome of sorcery earlier in his life, to gain power and prestige. Gondomboh had
predicted at the time that the sterile Briwa would die by fire when one of his wives
became pregnant, and it is the half-Creole wife Makallay who becomes the agent of
fulfillment when she falls helplessly in love with another man and succumbs to him.
There have been charges and an effective rebuttal of those charges that Easmon
-25-
looks down on his African characters and exhibits Creole superiority over non-Creoles, a
carry-over from Great Britain's settlement of freed slaves in the Freetown colony in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The only published novel by a Gambian writer thus far is by the poet Lenrie Peters. The
Second Round ( 1965), whose setting is Freetown, also looks at the Creole society to
which Dr. Kawa (and Peters himself) returns after his medical training in England. Like
Casely-Hayford's novel, Peters's semiautobiographical work captures something of the
ethos of Freetown society, this time in the 1950s to 1960s; it is prefaced by a poem on
Freetown, at the foot of the "Lion Mountains" of Sierra Leone, at the heart of which
stands the silk cotton tree, "her every root and hope." Though "Free as a summer cloud /
and inordinately proud," the city is also "old and worn / uncoordinated" ( vii -ix) and
caught up in a stagnation that "was the reflection of the British genius for making their
colonial peoples march no nearer than a century behind them, so that when frock coats
and bowlers were being frowned on and discarded at Westminster, they had become the
height of fashion in the tropical heat" ( 15 ). Happiness from the enthusiastic welcome
home of Dr. Kawa soon fades as Kawa tries to cope not only with an affair whose
compass from beginning to end is improbable, but also with the goings-on in the
household of his next-door neighbor, Mr. Marshall, who eventually goes mad because,
like the turtle the two of them hunt, Marshall is too much in love with his blatantly
unfaithful wife and too much restricted by the dictates of the Catholic church to file for
divorce. The death in their home from nose cancer of Marshall's nephew, after the
nephew's long
drawn-out affair with Marshall's wife, and his wife's death at the hand of
their eight-year-old daughter, Sonia, strain the reader's credulity but point to a tragic
vision. Peters's characters, whether they speak flawless English or a frequently less than
authentic Krio, present us with a number of pithy reflections on religion, morality,
politics, and society. Peters also uses symbolism, not just in the turtle love of Mr.
Marshall, but also in Sori's carved turtle shell, which depicts the kind of love and
friendship Kawa has found elusive thus far in his "second round."
The love theme is treated with much greater effectiveness in The Concubine ( 1966), by
the Nigerian novelist Elechi Amadi. Apart from Tutuola, who belongs in a class by
himself, Amadi is perhaps the best-known novelist of the supernatural in English-
speaking West Africa. The Concubine is the finely wrought story of Ihuoma, the wife of a
sea god who has permitted her incarnation as a mortal but remains jealous of her. The
initially inscrutable Ihuoma grows in human warmth as she grows older, but the men she
attracts to her become afflicted with tragedy. Her first husband, Emenike, dies after a
fight with Madume, and Madume is blinded by a spitting cobra when he pays court to
Ihuoma later on. Finally, Ekwueme, who had for long nursed a love for Ihuoma, is
vanquished by his father when he makes a bid to marry the beautiful widow, forcing him
to marry Ahurole, an immature woman whom
-26-
Ekwueme's parents had chosen for him. When Ekwueme turns mad after ingesting a love
potion from Ahurole, it is Ihuoma who nurses him back to health. With every obstacle
now cleared from their path, the couple plans to marry, but a respected diviner reveals
that marriage to Ihuoma will always be fatal for her husband: she can only be a
concubine. Another diviner's attempt to counteract the charm of the sea god yields clear
evidence that the gods cannot be vanquished. The diviner may be able to offset the taboo
if he can get Ekwueme to the middle of the sea for a midnight ritual. But fate and the
gods deal a cruel irony: Ihuoma's son launches a poison arrow to kill a lizard necessary
for the sacrifice, and Ekwueme is slain.
Amadi's subsequent novels, The Great Ponds ( 1969) and The Slave ( 1978), treat varying
aspects of village society and of conflict within it and between villages, but neither has
the same evocative power or enduring charm as The Concubine. The practice of
consigning families to the service of a god, one of the themes in Achebe's No Longer at
Ease, is also to be found in The Slave, in which the hero, Olumati, returns to his duties as
an osu in the service of Amadiora, the god of thunder, after his unsuccessful attempt at
integrating himself into his village society. Paying tribute to the gods through sacrifice is
a theme of The Great Ponds, which concerns the conflict between the villages of Chiolu
and Aliakoro for ownership of the great ponds; the wrath of the gods comes to the
villages in the form of a disease that spares no one, and the people also lose the use of
one of the ponds as a result of a suicide.
The Cameroonian writer Mbella Sonne Dipoko's A Few Nights and Days ( 1966) also
deals with male-female relationships that end in tragedy. The focus of the novel's conflict
is not ethnicity, as in novels by Easmon, Maddy, and to some extent, Peters (even though
a Creole element survives in Cameroonian society), but race. The central character plans
to wed a French woman who has fallen prey to him and to take her back to Cameroon.
Tragedy intervenes, for the prospective wife commits suicide when a reluctantly
prospective father-in-law connives in her fiancé's departure from France without her
knowledge. In Because of Women ( 1969), Dipoko is alternatively a hedonist, as his hero,
Ngosi, indulges in gratuitous acts of sexual intercourse, and a moralist, as he disposes of
him with a fever as if to say that he has received his just deserts. Dipoko's talents do not
match those of the most accomplished of his French-speaking compatriots like Mongo
Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, and Francis Bebey, but he ranks above the few other fellow
English-speaking Cameroonians, such as L. T. Asong, Ba'Bila Mutai, and Kenjo
Jumbam, who are part of the third wave of writers.

NEW THEMES OF DISILLUSIONMENT

During the first wave of West African fiction in English, every published work had some
significance on account of the small corpus of literature being produced. In the second
wave, the reverse was true. A large number of new writers entered the scene; their
audience and their talents were more diversi
-27-
fied, and their styles reflected that variety. In addition, the popular market literature of
Onitsha and the popular literature of Ghana provided dozens of chapbooks, which could
not be confused with "serious" literature.3 Optimism over the end of colonialism soon
faded, as economic independence lagged far behind political independence. Many
Africans soon saw that their newly installed government officials were too preoccupied
with feathering their nests to show concern for the poor and disadvantaged. Corruption
was rampant, and with it came violence and military coups. From the early euphoria of
liberation one moves to the dismal landscapes of West African second-wave fiction,
which focuses on disillusionment at the outcome of Independence. For the first time,
women writers began publishing works of fiction, thus adding new dimensions and
perspectives. Finally, the Nigerian civil war produced a spate of works whose themes and
settings were inspired by the war and its aftermath.
The most successful writer of this second phase was not a Nigerian but a Ghanaian, Ayi
Kwei Armah, whose scathing denunciation of corruption focused on the themes of
corruption and hypocrisy that Soyinka's interpreters had pointed to, without, however,
suggesting ways to relieve society of apathy, cynicism, moral degeneracy, and inertia.
After having examined the status quo of corruption, graft, and materialism in Ghanaian
society in his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born ( 1968), Armah proceeded
to trace its parallels in revolutionary and capitalist structures within and outside Africa in
Fragments ( 1970) and Why Are We So Blest? ( 1972). He traced its African origins in
Two Thousand Seasons ( 1973) and laid a foundation for its cure in The Healers ( 1978).
Each of Armah's five novels is an independent work of the imagination that takes a
critical look at society. Each novel, nonetheless, also forms part of a comprehensive study
reinforcing concepts, themes, and meanings in both earlier and later works as Armah
delivers a penetrating analysis of ethnic, African, and world history. Even when the focus
of a novel is contemporary society, as in the first three novels, the past acts as an
important backdrop against which the actions and conflicts are played out and as a
shaping force in their outcomes. The five novels together portray a revalorized history of
Ghana and of Africa. Armah is not a cultural historian but a novelist, and his study is not
chronological in the sense that subsequent novels offer historical portraits consecutively.
Armah's opinions on history contrast with those of Achebe. For Armah, the disintegration
of African society began, not with colonialism, but in the distant past, following the
encounter with the Arabs. Both writers perceive the same moral decay in contemporary
society: Achebe's A Man of the People deals with corruption and ends with violence and
a military coup; Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born dwells on the choice
between poverty and wealth through corruption, with the failure of Kwame Nkrumah's
messianism and the 1966 military coup in the background. But while Achebe looks to the
past, Armah
-28-
looks to the future for salvation, because, as the inscription says on the new and smaller
bus at the end of the first novel, " The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born."
Images of desolation and despair permeate the first three of Armah's novels. Throughout
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born are images of excrement and filth, of rotting wood
and rotten people. Even the image of the gleam is not an encouraging one, for it
"invariably evokes the sulphur brilliance of artificial light in tropical darkness" as Robert
Fraser has observed ( 21 ), a white thing enticing people to give up their honesty and
morality to obtain wealth and status through corruption. These images are part of a
complex symbolism that has as a central motif the archetypal image of the journey, a
journey in which the honest people are walkers and the dishonest ones are drivers bent on
getting as much speed as they can.
Perhaps because its protagonist, called simply "the man," is so alone and so
undifferentiated, Armah's first novel has relatively less autobiographical content than do
his next two. In Fragments the "been-to" Baako returns from his studies abroad to a
rabidly materialistic society, represented by the ostentatious Brempong and his sister, and
by Baako's own mother, who had been hoping that he would complete the house she had
begun building. Baako is repulsed by this acquisitiveness, which shows itself in the
traditional "outdooring" for his sister's child. The event is celebrated on the fifth day after
birth, fully three days ahead of the customary eighth day, because it is payday and people
will therefore give more generously. What is more, the infant, wrapped up in many folds
of kente cloth and left unattended while relatives try to squeeze the last cedi from those
attending, expires. The grandmother, Nana, asks, "What new power has made them forget
that a child too soon exposed is bound to die?" She later opines, "The baby was a
sacrifice they killed, to satisfy perhaps a new god they have found much like the one that
began the same long destruction of our people" ( 284 ).
Baako's own disintegration takes place because he has become willy-nilly a child of two
worlds who is now ill at ease in the old/new dispensation of his society. Not even the
New World psychiatrist, Juana, who is a kindred spirit, can prevent his falling into the
abyss. Sexual intercourse with her is no more fulfilling than Modin Dofu's with either
Aimée or Mrs. Jefferson in Why Are We So Blest? As an artist, Baako had planned on
replacing fiction writing with television scriptwriting, but no one is interested in his
scripts, which require attention and reflection. Rather, they prefer inoffensive pabulum
that requires no thought or, worse yet, scenarios designed to glorify the everyday events
in the life of the country's rulers. Baako's resignation parallels both Dofu's rejection of a
scholarship at Harvard University because the officials wanted him to believe that he was
an exception to the rule of the African's backwardness and infantilism, on the one hand,
and on the other, Dofu's prematurely leaving Harvard without earning his degree. Armah
had earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a master's degree from Columbia
-29-
University before returning home to the same disillusioning experiences of Baako and
Modin, who repairs to the fictitious Congheria and works there as a translator. Similarly,
Armah had worked in 1963 as a translator in Algeria, a country that, following its
successful war of liberation from French domination, had become a refuge for
revolutionaries and revolutionary movements. The malaise that besets characters like
Maanan, Baako, and now Modin, who loses his identity and his manhood while
successfully bringing out Aimee's femininity and her identity, Armah imputes to the
historical forces "which began the same long destruction of our people," a slavery that
continues in the actions both of the corrupt minister in The Beautyful Ones and of the
giver and recipient of college scholarships in Why Are We So Blest?
In these novels Armah is both castigator and conscience; he uses parody and satire as
scourges against the pretentious and arrogant who, using such ploys as high-sounding
compound names, ostentatious display of wealth, and cultism, place themselves in a class
above everyone else. A writer with a social vision, he advocates a socialist revolution of
ideas and of polity, a revolution that would change the view of upward mobility
expressed in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. We learn there that there is "only one
way. There would always be only one way for the young to reach the gleam. Cutting
corners, eating the fruits of fraud" ( 112 ). At age twenty-nine when this work was
published, Armah was an angry young man who had left home for America believing in
the promise of the future held out to Ghanaians by Nkrumah, only to find himself, after
the revolution was betrayed, an iconoclast not only castigating the leadership of the
moment but also reaching back into the past to find the seeds of the disease from which
his society suffers. This iconoclasm can sometimes go too far, as critics like Wole
Soyinka, Gerald Moore, and Robert Fraser have observed. Oyekan Owomoyela writes
that Fragments "suffers, like many of the new African novels of alienation, from an
untempered emotional partisanship." Ironically, it is this very partisanship that serves as
the basis of the fourth novel, Two Thousand Seasons, without, however, making
"discernment difficult and art impossible" (Owomoyela 110).
Two Thousand Seasons provides an important instance of an African novelist meshing
the European realistic novel with the narrative art of the traditional African griot. Here,
however, the narrator is not a single bard who has inherited the knowledge of the history
from his forebears but a composite character, a collective "we," that has witnessed both
the originating events and the subsequent historical developments. Armah posits an
explanation for Africa's centuries of denigration in a moral vision of communal guilt and
venality, drawing, in part, on the prophetic literature that is found in many religions and
that, in secular literature, goes back to the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt. The novel's
basic thesis is that Blacks as a people lost a path that Armah calls "the way of
reciprocity" ( 25 ), and it is clear even from the prologue that this loss is responsible for
the travail suffered by Blacks over a
-30-
period of one thousand years, the "two thousand seasons" of the novel's title. "Receiving,
giving, giving, receiving, all that lives is twin. Who would cast the spell of death, let him
separate the two. Whatever cannot give, whatever is ignorant even of receiving, knowing
only taking, that thing is past its own mere death. It is a carrier of death. Woe the giver on
the road to such a taker, for then the victim has found victorious death" (xiii).
Blacks, Armah argues, gave without receiving to two waves of white predators, as the
prophetess Anoa foretold. The first came over the desert sands, precipitating the
devastation of Black Africans, and the second came over water, sending millions of
Blacks to be slaves in lands across the seas. By casting the story into a griot framework,
Armah is able to cover a vast period similar to that of Yambo Ouologuem in Le devoir de
violence ( 1968; Bound to Violence, 1971). But the book is not simply a catalogue of
woes. In the chapter entitled "The Dance of Love," Armah depicts a successful mutiny of
slaves that recalls that of the Black slave dealer Momutu in Ousmane Sembène 's story
"Le voltaïque" ( 1962; Tribal Scars). The mutiny is significant in that the slaves are able
to return to their homeland. Still, as Armah shows, the prophetic necessity of doom
cannot be avoided. Not even the teaching of Isanusi, who anticipates Densu of The
Healers, can save the people from their destiny. Nonetheless, through the collective
consciousness of his narrator Armah predicts that "the reign of the destroyers cannot
reach beyond these two thousand seasons" ( 318 ), for exploitative kings like King
Komanche and white predators alike will be destroyed, paving the way for the healing
that is the focus of Armah's last novel, The Healers.
The Healers covers a much shorter span of history than does Two Thousand Seasons, and
its tone is much more in keeping with therapeutic impulses than the alternately
accusatory and condemnatory voice in the earlier work. The Healers is rooted in
Ghanaian history of the late nineteenth century, when the British fought and eventually
defeated the Ashanti in a war that showed the prowess and skill of Black Africans in war.
Armah skillfully but unobtrusively weaves Ashanti history into his novel, revealing that
the reason for the kingdom's defeat derived from internal disunity, rivalry, greed, and the
psychosocial sickness that recurs in all of Armah's works. In spite of the defeat, Armah
intimates that in the work of the great healer Densu, who rehabilitates both Araba Jesiwa
and General Asamoa Nkwanta, the period of the Black African's suffering under the curse
of the prophecy of slavery and destitution is drawing to a close.
The same year, 1968, that Armah published his first novel, his compatriot Joseph
Abruquah published his second, The Torrent, which, like his first, The Catechist ( 1965),
dwells on the theme of education as a key to prosperity. By that same year Christina Ama
Ata Aidoo, another compatriot, had already been hailed as a promising writer with her
first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost ( 1965), drawing on a theme of the adjustment of a
son lately returned from a stay in the United States, a theme Armah was later to use in the
story of
-31-
Baako, the hero of Fragments. Although her first major work of fiction, Our Sister
Killjoy, was copyrighted in 1966, it was not published until 1977; consequently, the
honor of being the first published woman novelist in English-speaking West Africa goes
to the Nigerian novelist Flora Nwapa for her novel Efuru ( 1966). A third woman
novelist of note is the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta, who has written several novels set in
London (the scene of her married life and of her experience as a single parent of five
children) and in Nigeria, to which she later returned. These three writers provided the
female voice in an arena that was previously the exclusive preserve of male writers.
Together they view from a feminine—and sometimes a feminist—perspective society in
English-speaking West Africa.
The heroines in Nwapa's novels tend to be idealized characters, while their male
counterparts are often weak-willed or lackluster. In her first novel, Efuru, the title heroine
grapples with a recurring problem in the writings of male authors, that of an individual
whose life is by heredity or custom dedicated to the service of a god ( Chinua Achebe's
No Longer at Ease and Elechi Amadi's The Concubine are examples), a problem that is
here complicated by the heroine's womanhood. Efuru is blessed with wealth and beauty,
but because she is pledged to the goddess of the lake, getting married or having children
will prove calamitous, a predicament that echoes the theme of the Ijaw myth " The
Woman Who Tried to Change Her Fate," in which Ogboinba finds that her choice of
power and prestige as a healer carries with it barrenness.4 The young, beautiful, and
assertive Efuru is unable to succeed as a wife in two marriages and loses her only child
when her husband abandons her for another woman. But even though she is assertive and
breaks with both husbands when she feels herself victimized by them, Efuru does not
develop a strong social consciousness: her problem with Adizua is that he abandoned her,
for she accepts polygamy as an institution and was ready to propose that he take the
woman he had abandoned her for as his second wife.
Nwapa's second novel, Idu ( 1969), pursues the exploration of the feminine viewpoint,
but neither this nor the first novel produces a compelling examination of the African
woman's role in society, for Nwapa declines to deal with the moral and philosophical
issues that obviously present themselves (Emenyonu 1975). The heroine, Idu, neither
affirms the life of the baby she is carrying for her dead husband nor establishes the
independence that a progressive woman might be expected to show; instead, she commits
suicide in order to join her husband. A recent novel, One Is Enough ( 1981) is about
marriage, but the heroine does not take the decisive stand that the title might lead us to
expect. The decision not to marry a second time is not one she makes deliberately, but
one that comes when the priest she was about to marry has a sudden change of heart as a
result of narrowly escaping an accidental death. As its title suggests, Nwapa's collection
This Is Lagos and Other Stories ( 1971) dwells on young women's problems in modern,
urban
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Nigerian society, particularly problems relating to pregnancy, domination by men, and
the quest for formal education.
Buchi Emecheta's early novels are autobiographical and sociological studies of women in
their involvement with men. Her first novel, In the Ditch ( 1971)—its title drawn from
the column she practically forced the editor of The New Statesman to allow her to write
after a series of evasions—tells the story of Adah, who, like so many other women, Black
and white, is forced to live in subsidized housing in London (Zell, Bundy, and Coulon
384-85). Its sequel, Second-Class Citizen ( 1974), continues the story of Adah's life in
London. For her third novel, The Bride Price ( 1976), Emecheta takes up a theme treated
by writers like Achebe ( No Longer at Ease) and other Igbo writers. It is the story of the
outcast who is rejected by the family of a loved one. Although it is the man who is an
outcast, it is the woman who, defying her relatives and marrying her lover, suffers a
tragic end: Akunna dies giving birth to her child. The Bride Price is the first of three
successive novels set in the Nigeria of the past; all three focus on the experiences of
female characters within a male-dominated society. The second novel of the series, The
Slave Girl ( 1977), deals with a young girl's virtual slavery, and the third, The Joys of
Motherhood ( 1979), presents the questionable joys that the heroine, Nnu Ego,
experiences in two marriages, the first of which produces no children. The ironic title of
this, Emecheta's fifth novel, belies what Eustace Palmer refers to as "the
singlemindedness with which she has presented the female point of view" (" Feminine
Point of View," 51). Emecheta's use of the limited omniscient point of view, such that
much of what goes on is presented from the point of view of the heroine, helps reinforce
this singlemindedness of vision (see especially Palmer 44-47). Apart from her adult
fiction, Emecheta has also written books for children, the first two of which, Titch the Cat
( 1978) and Nowhere to Play ( 1980), reflect experiences of her children that parallel her
own life as an underprivileged, second-class citizen.
Christina Ama Ata Aidoo has written poetry, short stories, and a novel, as well as plays.
Her novel, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint ( 1968), echoes
her ethnic culture in its fluid blend of poetry and prose. The mixture of styles enables
Aidoo to blend the intensely subjective with the less fiercely subjective and with the
objective in her narrative of Sissie's experiences, beginning on the eve of her departure
for Europe. Sissie's observations of the people she encounters justifies the appellation
Aidoo gives her of "a black-eyed squint." These encounters cover a wide spectrum,
including male-female, lesbian, and Black-white relationships. In addition, Aidoo uses
the opportunity to descant on social and political issues beyond the situations in which
Sissie finds herself. Aidoo not only invests her heroine with a consciousness of
oppression and of racial and sexual inequality but also takes the liberty as the author to
display her own notions about colonialism and other matters. Preoccupation with colonial
and neocolonial attitudes is a hallmark of Aidoo's social vision, a concern she also deals
with in the opening and closing stories of her collection No Sweetness Here ( 1971
-33-
opening and closing stories of her collection No Sweetness Here (1971), whose title is
borrowed from Armah. Aidoo shows a pessimism about Black Africans under a cloud
(perhaps even a shroud) of colonial domination past and present. She posits the situation
of women within a much broader historical pattern of oppression than either Emecheta or
Nwapa.
Kofi Awoonor, Aidoo's Ghanaian compatriot, had distinguished himself as a poet before
writing his lone novel, This Earth My Brother ( 1971), whose central character, Amamu,
follows a trajectory (much like Baako's in Fragments) from his wanderings abroad to his
eventual suicide. Here is a capsule of what Awoonor and the book are about from Lewis
Nkosi's Tasks and Masks:
As befits a modernist novel, This Earth My Brother is a melting pot of varied
ingredients: of actual history, personal memories, anecdotes, a mixture of
autobiography and invention, linked together by a style which is a constant
blending of different genres and literary techniques, an adroit wedding of
European and African narrative procedures. The novel uses what must be
acknowledged as a fresh device in the handling of African experience. That is to
say, we are given a simple narrative in the third person but every chapter has an
alternative one consisting of a more undifferentiated, freer flow of images and
memory in the Joycean manner of the stream-of-consciousness; each alternate
chapter therefore acts as a commentary on the first and vice-versa. ( 63 )
Awoonor uses the recurring image of the mermaid or "mammy wata," combining the
mythic with the realistic and projecting African history through an individuated
consciousness—the central character, who moves through a course of identification and
integration through a successful career and self
alienation to chaos and madness,
culminating in suicide.
Nigeria's war novels—that is, novels that focus on events during the Nigeria-Biafra War,
its aftermath, and its effect on people's lives, or that use the war as a backdrop to
unfolding events in the lives of characters—supply ample reminders that internal
dissensions, which Armah stressed in his drawing on Ashanti history, are not a thing of
the past in African polity. Occasioned by the secession of the eastern region of Nigeria
under Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu in the wake of the killing of Igbos in northern
Nigeria in 1966, the failure of attempts at a rapprochement, and the decision by the
military government under General Yakubu Gowon to prevent the breakup of the
Nigerian Federation, the war lasted from 1967 to 1970. The actions of both Western
nations and rival Eastern bloc countries in the support of one or the other side, as well as
the grim realities of starvation, carnage, and destruction, intensified the war's devastating
effects on the Nigerian people's lives and on their psychological well-being. Writers have
continued to base works on the war long after its conclusion, leading one critic to refer to
"a still lingering 'war consciousness'" (Amuta 83).
Olalere Oladitan has tentatively classified the varied treatment Nigerian writers have
given the war. His categories include pioneering forecasts,
-34-
notably Achebe's novel A Man of the People; novels involved "with witnesses to and
record of events" (II) of the violent war years, as represented by John Munonye 's A
Wreath for the Maidens ( 1973) and Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn ( 1976);
nonfiction personal accounts such as Elechi Amadi's Sunset in Biafra ( 1973) and Wole
Soyinka's prison notes, The Man Died ( 1972); examinations of the "roles of ideology and
violence in a revolutionary transformation of society" ( 14 ), such as Soyinka's symbolic
novel Season of Anomy ( 1973); works dealing with the aftermath of the war, along with
the worship of money and materialism, which Samuel Ifejika evokes in the title of his
novel The New Religion ( 1973); and satires or parodies of the Nigerian situation, as in
Kole Omotoso's two novels, The Edifice ( 1971) and The Combat ( 1972). In addition,
purely historical accounts include N. U. Akpan 's The Struggle for Secession ( 1971) and
R. B. Alade's The Broken Bridge: Reflections and Experiences of a Medical Doctor
During the Nigerian Civil War.5
This sampling of war writings from Nigeria is far from complete, as Oladitan makes
clear. Also worthy of note are Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories ( 1972),
which includes three stories about the war, among them the title story; Isidore Okpewho's
The Last Duty ( 1972); Eddie Iroh's Forty-Eight Guns for the General ( 1976) (the "guns"
are the white mercenaries hired by the "general" of the Biafran army); Kalu Uka's
sensitive examination of the devastating effects of the war on his title hero in Colonel
Ben Brim ( 1972); Chukwuemeka Ike's Toads of War ( 1979), the second novel of a
projected trilogy; and two novels by Cyprian Ekwensi, Survive the Peace ( 1976) and
Divided We Stand ( 1980), the latter reputedly written during the war (Zell, Bundy, and
Coulon 149). With the publication of Flora Nwapa's Never Again, which is largely
fictionalized history from a feminist viewpoint (Amuta 90), and of Buchi Emecheta's
Destination Biafra ( 1981), Nigeria's two principal women novelists also added to the
number of war-related fictional works.
Soyinka's Season of Anomy and Kole Omotoso's The Combat stand out for their use of
symbolism and allegory. Soyinka had delivered a good deal of personal invective in his
angry prison notes, The Man Died ( 1972), and his play Madmen and Specialists ( 1971)
depicts a virtual wasteland in stark, dark contours. For Season of Anomy ( 1974) he drew
on the myth of Orpheus, which Jean-Paul Sartre had used to characterize the poetry of
Negritude in his 1948 essay "Orphée noir." Soyinka's quip that African writers should
live their Negritude like the tiger its tigritude, not declaim it, helped to make him a
controversial figure. When, however, he experienced a similar psychological privation,
which forced him to turn inward, Soyinka had recourse to the same mythic image of the
Black artist and his existential situation in a Black nation. Soyinka reworks the myth such
that the songs of Ofeyi ( Orpheus) become revolutionary songs designed to undermine
Nigerian power brokers' "superstructure of robbery, indignities and murder, ending the
new phase of slavery" ( 27 ). The plaintive song of Negritude becomes a revolu
-35-
tionary weapon, and Soyinka's alter-ego Ofeyi is not beyond using violence to end
violence (like Daodu of Kongi's Harvest [ 1967]). He searches for Iriyise, comatose but
not dead, and is exposed to madmen in the bowels of Temoko. Soyinka's blend of the
realistic with the mythic is well realized, but although much of his anger has been
tempered and Iriyise is rescued from the dungeons, the ending conveys the sense neither
of a great purgation nor of triumph, but of the quiet stirring of a new and perhaps hopeful
dawn.
Soyinka's work is as moderately paced—even in its scenes depicting violence—as
Omotoso's The Combat is hurried in its course. The allegory in the latter novel is far more
direct: a conflict between two friends, Ojo (a federated Nigeria) and Chuku ( Biafra), who
claim fatherhood of a ten-year
old son, Isaac ( Nigeria as an independent nation), born
in 1960, the year of Nigeria's birth as a nation. The mother of the child is a prostitute
whose father and mother are also interested in dominating Isaac, who, like his biblical
counterpart, is an offering for slaughter. She is unsure of which of the contestants is the
father and, after having become "fat and sloppy [so that she moves] like one mountain
going up another" ( 23 ) she no longer has any use for the contestants, only one of whom,
Ojo, is interested in her anyway. The central crisis in the novel comes when Chuku runs
over Isaac with his taxicab and, rather than go back to apologize, agrees to single combat
with Ojo. The plausible narrative realism breaks down as the novel switches back and
forth unnervingly between the past and the present. What would have been a serious
examination of the conflict between Biafra and the federal forces becomes a mere
burlesque as ponderous issues are reduced to trifling matters. The credibility of incidents
is also called into question as both combatants go to the same church to prepare for the
combat and enlist the aid of the West ( Ojo as Nigeria) and the Soviet bloc ( Chuku on
behalf of Biafra) in their fight.6 All the same, Omotoso's vision is tragic, for Isaac dies
from the hapless crushing under Chuku's taxi and is abandoned to his mother, Moni,
transformed as Dee Madam, while everyone, including foreign envoys, go to watch the
combat for which the rival blocs of East and West have prepared the adversaries.

The Third Wave

The characteristic features of the third wave of West African fiction in English are
somewhat difficult to define, because the issues at stake in the socioeconomic, cultural,
and political spheres are far less clearcut than were those of colonialism, the conflict
between traditional and modern ways, and the initial disenchantment with new leaders.
The problems that now face not just West Africa but the entire continent and indeed the
Third World as a whole are far more complex and require far more elaborate solutions
than what starry-eyed idealists (whether politicians, bureaucrats, artists, or the average
individual) had contemplated.
Still, a number of characteristics present themselves. The writers of the
-36-
third wave are younger people in the main, writing (by and large) for an African as
opposed to a Euro-American audience, and attempting to reach a far wider audience in
their countries than the prominent writers of the 1950s and 1960s. Their vision is, on the
whole, more down to earth and therefore far less grandiose than that of many of their
predecessors. They either oppose the elitism of their precursors with a grassroots
orientation and an interest in the fate of the common man or are too preoccupied with the
problems of the downtrodden to install themselves on a visionary level. Apart from the
few historical novels that appear from time to time, they are concerned less with
colonialism than with the remnants of colonialism evident in the neocolonialist attitudes
held by many of those in the chambers and corridors of power. This new populist
approach is different from that of chapbook literature. Chapbook literature (which is
outside the scope of the present examination) has an overwhelming interest in
entertainment, while the new wave of writings seeks not only to entertain but to edify and
instruct, as well as to forge a common cause with ordinary people.
Buchi Emecheta, although she began writing during the second phase, perhaps more
properly belongs to this new phase because of her support of the common woman, whom
she portrays as a victim in a male-dominated society. Her early novels draw on her fresh
experiences with colonial and male domination, and while subsequent novels go back to
the past, she returns to the present in a novel like Double Yoke ( 1983), whose title refers
to the "yokes" of the old ways and the new. In Double Yoke, Miss Bulewao is a successful
writer and university lecturer (obviously a surrogate for Emecheta) who interacts with
Ete Kamba, a male-chauvinist student of hers and the hero of the novel. For all the
comeback that Miss Bulewao makes to Ete Kamba's remarks, it is still difficult to dismiss
the comment he makes about male-female relationships: "Madam, you seem to be
forgetting that I am a man. I can do what I like. A man can raise his own bastard, women
are not allowed to do that" ( 162 ).
Femi Osofisan has tentatively put forward three categories of writing in Nigerian
literature in the aftermath of the civil war; these supply a number of handholds useful for
grappling with the fiction of the region as a whole. The first is the "war literature," which
straddles the second and third waves. The second category is "popular literature," and
the third "socialist literature," or what, to avoid misunderstanding, he terms "the
alternative tradition" ( 170 -71). The popular literature presented here is more
sophisticated than the pamphlet literature of the Onitsha Market variety, which
Emmanuel Obiechina has discussed in detail in his An African Popular Literature (
1973), or for that matter the popular literature that, beginning in Ghana in the 1940s with
J. B. Blay's Be Content with Your Lot, grew steadily in the 1950s and 1960s (Ikkideh).
The flourishing of this new brand of popular literature resulted from greater access by
authors to a publishing outlet. It was Faber and Faber's opening of its doors to an
unlikely writer such as Amos Tutuola that launched him into a prominent place in the
development of African
-37-
literature; in similar fashion, Heinemann's African Writers Series, Longman's Drumbeats,
Oxford University Press's publication of plays in its Three Crowns imprint, and
acceptance by other British publishers as well as American ones like Doubleday-Anchor
Books in the early days, and by Africana Publishing Corporation and Three Continents
Press in the 1970s and 1980s, all provided creative outlets for African writers as well as
for critics of their writings. The pamphlet literatures of Nigeria and Ghana were spawned
by the establishment of local printing presses to cater to the purely entertainment needs of
the masses. The third wave's popular literature did not obliterate that already existing
popular literature but represented another tier between market literature and the
sophisticated literature that pays homage to exacting aesthetics, form, and style. Its
readers, no less than its writers, have been better educated, and the published product is
the preserve not exclusively of second-rate printing presses but also of state-of
the-art
local and international publishing houses. Among these newer publishers are Onibonoje
Press, Ethiope Publishing House, Fourth Dimension, Nwamife, and Flora Nwapa's new
publishing company, Tana Press, which brought out her most recent books. In addition,
some international publishers established subdivisions that catered to writers in this
intermediate group, as Osofisan observes of Macmillan ( 170 ).
Among the Nigerians who fall within the category of popular writers is Obi Egbuna, who
continued his early work with the following works of fiction published by either a British
or Nigerian publisher: Daughters of the Sun and Other Stories ( 1970), Emperor of the
Sea and Other Stories ( 1974), The Minister's Daughter ( 1975), Diary of a Homeless
Prodigal ( 1978), The Rape of Lysistrata and Black Candle for Christmas ( 1980), and
The Madness of Didi ( 1980). Other popular writers include Sulu Ugwu, Anezi Okoro,
Victor Thorpe, and Mohamed Sule. Agu Ogali, described as "one of the most prolific and
successful of the Onitsha chapbook writers" (Zell, Bundy, and Coulon 161), also
produced such works in this intermediate category as Coal City ( 1978) and The Julu
Priest ( 1978). Among the women writers are Helen Ovbiagele , who authored Evbu, My
Love ( 1983), and Adaora Lilly Ulasi, whose novels Many Things You No Understand (
1970), Many Things Begin for Change ( 1971), Who Is Jonah? ( 1978), and The Man
from Sagamu ( 1978) are set in the colonial past and make conscious use of pidgin, not
always with satisfactory results. Flora Nwapa's recent books, One Is Enough in particular,
fall more nearly within this category. One recurring feature in this popular fiction is the
fast-paced detective thriller (which has its counterpart in the Hollywood character of
recent Nigerian films), a form that finds a prototype in Ekwensi's short thriller Yaba
Roundabout Murder ( 1962). Kalu Okpi 's two books, The Smugglers ( 1978) and On the
Road ( 1980), exemplify this cops-and-robbers fare, of which one of the more explicitly
titled works is Fidel Onyekwelu's The Sawabas: Black Africa's Mafia ( 1979).
In Ghana, Amu Djoleto, whose earlier novel The Strange Man ( 1967) appeared a decade
previously, published his second novel, Money Galore ( 1975
-38-
1975), which spikes corruption and the corrupted represented by its hero, Kafu, a
businessman and politician. Other writers include J. S. Kwarteng ( My Sword Is My Life,
1973); E. Y. Egblewogbe ( Victims of Greed, 1975); Selby Ashong-Katai ( Confessions of
a Bastard, 1976); Afari Assan ( Christmas in the City, 1978); Nii Ofoli ( The Messenger
of Death, 1979); I. S. Ephson ( Tragedy of False Friends, 1969); and A. M. Oppong-Affi (
The Prophet of Doom, 1980). Also of note are the short stories of Kofi Aidoo (
Saworbeng: A Collection of Short Stories, 1977) and the science fiction of J. O. Eshun (
Adventures of the Kapapa, 1976). With the exception of Ephson's book, which is from the
University of Ghana Bookshop, and Assan's, which was put out by Macmillan, all these
other writers were published by Ghana Publishing Company, and this fact indicates the
important function played by local publishers in providing access to writers who are
unable to secure as an outlet those publishing houses, mostly European and North
American, that have a wide network of distribution for their books.
The third category of the third wave, Osofisan's "socialist literature" or "alternative
tradition," has fewer adherents than the other two and is also much less distinctive.
Osofisan identifies his own novel, Kolera Kolej ( 1975), which chronologically belongs
within the second wave, as falling within this tradition, along with the novels of Kole
Omotoso, but acknowledges that the new socialist literature regrettably smacks very often
of popular literature in its willingness to sacrifice art for immediacy and accessibility to
the average reader. He discusses Omotoso's novels as examples of both the aims and
shortcomings of the subgenre. Omotoso's The Edifice looks at problems confronting the
contemporary individual, in this instance a young Nigerian who falls in love with an
English girl, marries her, and brings her back to Nigeria, only for the dream to fail and for
the wife, abandoned for another white woman and for a woman from her husband's
village, to give up her shattered dream. The theme itself is not a new one, for it is found
in as early a work in French-speaking West Africa as Ousmane Sembène's O pays mon
beau peuple! ( 1957; O my country, my good people!) and again in a recent novel by
another Senegalese writer, Mariama Bâ's Un chant écarlate ( 1981; Scarlet Song), as well
as in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters, where it is, however, not a central theme. But if
the aim of this new kind of socialist writing is to be easily within the capabilities of the
masses, then The Edifice's haphazard shifts in narrative progression are difficult to
explain, as they serve to make the structure complex while providing little, if anything, in
aesthetic appeal. Omotoso's novel has received very favorable literary judgments, and he
is himself aware that one should not have to compromise art to educate and entertain the
masses.

CHARACTERISTICS AND PREOCCUPATIONS

The socialist view is not new in the evolution of African fiction. It has been
overwhelmingly evident in the work of Ousmane Sembène, who did not compromise his
art to suit the taste of a less educated or uneducated populace
-39-
but sought another outlet, that of filmmaking, in order to reach the masses. A social
vision was present in the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o from the first, although his
endorsement of socialist principles and the patent influence of Marxism on his work
come across most strongly in works like Petals of Blood ( 1977), written after his
celebrated novel A Grain of Wheat ( 1967). The move toward endorsing socialist
principles came late for Soyinka, whose Season of Anomy proclaims such an outlook, but
he reverts to the hierarchical in his play Death and the King's Horseman ( 1975).
Moreover, in the course of the second wave of writing, Ayi Kwei Armah overtly
endorsed Marxism in his works without sacrificing art or complexity, though a stripe of
partisanship marks (some would say mars) his works.
A few works stand outside these categories. Among them are Ben Okri's Flowers and
Shadows ( 1980) and The Landscapes Within ( 1981), the second of which has been
discussed as a novel of personal development; Isidore Okpewho 's The Victims ( 1970);
Wole Soyinka's Aké; and Yaw Boateng's The Return ( 1977).
In The Return, the action takes place in the first third of the nineteenth century. The story
of the lust for revenge of a younger brother on an older brother he had revered until he
felt betrayed by him, this short novel is as Afrocentric in its own way as are Two
Thousand Seasons and Ethiopia Unbound. It does not attempt to set the story of Asante
within a vast panorama of myth and history but to flesh out and clothe the bare bones of
the actual historical personages and incidents for which, as for many political changes,
"history did not give the full reasons" ( 116 ). Through the story of Seku and Jakpa, and
of the young woman, Asamoa, with whom Jakpa falls in love, Boateng is able to conjure
an authentic world infected with the pernicious disease of slavery, which Olaudah
Equiano had first described from the African perspective in his autobiography, Equiano's
Travels ( 1789), and, in the gripping account by the castrated Imam in the seventh
chapter, to give a purview of the tragic bind in which Africans found themselves.
Although Boateng does not pursue them, the parallels with contemporary society are all
too evident, notably in the view among African Marxists and others that most of the
current problems in Africa and in the Third World have to do with methods of capitalist
countries that amount to a new form of slavery.

Criticism
This essay would not be complete if I made no reference to the new approaches to
criticism that have emerged, since constructive criticism helps engender a budding
literature, and indeed, the role of creative writer and critic are complementary and
mutually reinforcing. The early reviews and short critiques in chiefly British and
American periodicals by pioneering critics such as Janheinz Jahn, Eldred Jones, and Ulli
Beier soon gave way to full
fledged periodicals on African literature and society like
Black Orpheus,
-40-
Transition, African Literature Today, Research in African Literatures, and Okike; to full-
length studies of individual writers like Achebe, Soyinka, and Armah; and to collections
of critical essays by individual writers or in edited volumes. The early preoccupations
with theme and language yielded some of their ground to new critical approaches
beginning in the late 1960s, including structuralist, deconstructive, semiotic, and Marxist
interpretations. The old debate about language took on a new guise as a result of
nationalist fervor deriving from frustration over the continuing influence of the former
colonial powers on politics, from pride at political independence, and, in the case of the
Igbos, from Igbo nationalism arising out of the failure of the first Nigerian republic and
their alienation from the much more populous and dominant northerners. The cultivation
of literatures written in indigenous languages was part of the new nationalism, so that
there emerged not only the notion of a national literature but of an ethnic one, a notable
example being the nurturing of an Igbo literature, which was not so much literature
written in Igbo but by Igbo writers and purporting to express an Igbo worldview.
Similarly, in Cameroon a new nationalism developed, expressed for the most part among
French-speaking writers.
The new controversy began in the 1970s with criticism of Soyinka's poetry by Chinweizu
and Soyinka's reply that such criticism prescribed the suicide of poetry. The debate has
continued into the 1980s with the publication of Toward the Decolonization of African
Literature ( 1980), whose authors— Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu
Madubuike—criticize both Eurocentric critics who are patronizing toward African
literature or see it as an extension of European literature, on the one hand, and on the
other, creative writers, especially bourgeois ones (among them Wole Soyinka), whom
these critics find irrelevant to African society and especially to the welfare of the masses.
They label themselves bolekaja ("Come down, let's fight!") critics, "outraged touts for the
passenger lorries of African literature ... administering a timely and healthy dose of much
needed public ridicule to the reams of pompous nonsense which has been floating out of
the stale, sterile, stifling covens of academia and smothering the sprouting vitality of
Africa's literary landscape" (xii). Soyinka took up the gauntlet this "troika," as he calls
them, threw down, calling their approach "neo
Tarzanist" and evidence of the
emergence of a "leftocracy" in African literary criticism ("The Critic and Society"). The
tone of these three critics is frankly polemical, and their aim of "decolonizing" African
literature is a good one, as such critics as Jonathan Ngaté have acknowledged, while
pointing up the book's partisanship. Indeed, a good deal of early criticism and some
subsequent judgments by both Western and African critics have revealed a Western bias.
But the selection by Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madhubuike of whom to praise and whom to
criticize is sometimes suspect, especially since they discountenance the discussion of
drama, in which Wole Soyinka has excelled. The critics are, however, as careful in their
choice of
-41-
subtitle— African Poetry and Fiction and Their Critics—as they are in their avoidance of
the Caucasian press. Moreover, they praise Léopold Senghor, the unabashed Francophile
whom Soyinka has criticized, while subjecting Soyinka's poetry to "a corrective
tussle."Whatever may be the outcome of these debates, one thing is clear. Both creative
writers and critics are committed to a literature centered on Africa and Africans, one that
serves a useful purpose. And if disagreements have arisen about the value of art and
aesthetics in relation to didactic purpose and accessibility to the average individual, they
may be taken as healthy signs of a literary family grown large over a generation and
possessing within it gems of literature that have won national and international
recognition. Rapidly changing facets of African politics, society, and culture have been
tellingly mirrored in works of prose fiction, a genre that thrives in the region and in the
rest of the continent. And although the quality of writing has been uneven, one may assert
with confidence that already there have appeared several works by gifted writers that will
endure.
Notes
i. See Berenger-Feraud, Burton, Christaller, Cronise and Ward, Harris, Koelle, Landeroin and
Tilho, Lippert, Prietze, Robinson, Roger, Schön, and Schlenker as examples of folklore
collections.
2. Bernth Lindfors dismisses Ekwensi's work as based on the worst possible models in his
1969 article "Cyprian Ekwensi: An African Popular Novelist," provoking a rejoinder from
Ernest Emenyonu in African Literature Today 5. More balanced judgments include Douglas
Killam, "Cyprian Ekwensi" ( 1971), and another piece, also titled " Cyprian Ekwensi," by
Eustace Palmer ( 1979).
3. For studies of Onitsha chapbooks, consult, inter alia, Obiechina ( 1973), Lindfors ( 1967),
and Collins ( 1968).
4. This myth is included in Ulli Beier, ed., The Origin of Life and Death: African Creation
Myths; it was transformed into the play Woyengi by Obotunde Ijimere (a pseudonym for
Ulli Beier and Duro Ladipo) and published in The Imprisonment of Obatala and Other
Plays.
5. The following are suggested by Oladitan as important historical contributions to
documentation on the war in note 2 of his essay "The Nigerian Civil War and the Evolution
of Nigerian Literature" (93): Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (
1980); Forsyth, The Biafra Story ( 1979); and Obasanjo, My Command ( 1980).
6. For a short, comprehensive assessment of Omotoso's art, see Femi Osofisan's article,
written in 1980, "The Alternative Tradition: A Survey of Nigerian Literature in English
since the Civil War" ( 1986), in particular pp. 176-80.

Bibliography
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—. The Torrent. London: Longman, 1968.
-42-
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2 English-Language Fiction
from East Africa
ARLENE A. ELDER

Uncertain Beginnings
"Twenty years ago East Africa was considered a literary desert." This observation, with
which Bernth Lindfors begins Mazungumzo, his 1976 collection of interviews with East
African writers, publishers, and critics, reflects a generally held opinion, especially when
literary production in that area of the continent is contrasted with the achievements of
West Africa, where Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others were
already established writers. The Ugandan writer Taban lo Liyong made this deficiency
public in 1965 when he raised the controversial question that forms the title of his article
"Can We Correct Literary Barrenness in East Africa?" in East African Journal, thereby
sparking a vigorous debate in the pages of Transition ( Knight 901). Most of Lindfors's
questions to his interviewees, however, were intended to explain why, by the mid-1970s,
East Africa had experienced such a growth of artistic vitality that numerous foreign and
indigenous publishing houses were thriving there, and the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o had achieved both a local and an international stature comparable to that of
Achebe and Soyinka. More than a decade after Mazungumzo, one can identify three
major influences that have led to this flowering of creativity and publishing and
contributed to the shape it has taken. The major determinants of East African writing in
English appear to be colonial and postcolonial education; the establishment of local and
foreign publishing houses; and pre- and post-Independence politics in East Africa.
If "African literature is a child of education" (Bakari and Mazrui 868), its village
forebearer, traditional orature, did not have as much influence on its English-language
progeny as its alma maters, the university colleges established by the British. Because of
the relative lateness of East African colonization, however, this educational phenomenon
occurred in the region long after it had in other areas of the continent: "Though there
was a British Resident in Zanzibar, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that
the British attempted to open up the bulk of East Africa, at a time when vast
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portions of West Africa were already an integral part of the British or French empires"
(Bakari and Mazrui 866).
The first graduates of the colonial mission schools were trained to be bureaucratic
functionaries and therefore received a vocational rather than an academic education. The
earliest East Africans with university degrees received them in America and Britain and
produced autobiographical and anthropological works in English, as they were
encouraged to do by their Western patrons. The first publication of this type is by the
Ugandan Ham Mukasa, secretary to Sir Apolo Kagwa, the Ugandan official
representative at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. Uganda's Katikiro in
England concerns that visit to London. It first appeared in 1904 and was translated from
Luganda by Taban lo Liyong in 1975 as Sir Apolo Kagwa Discovers Britain ( Lindfors
49). Twenty years were to pass before the Gikuyu teacher Parmenas Githendu Mockerie,
who studied at both the Fabian Summer School in Surrey and the Quaker Fircroft College
for Working Men in Birmingham, England, followed Mukasa's literary lead ( Mockerie,
An African Speaks19; see also Mockerie, "Story"). Mockerie's autobiographical An
African Speaks for His People ( 1934), published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, with a
foreword by Sir Julian Huxley, foreshadows Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya (
1938) in its revelation of Gikuyu society and commentary on the insensitivity of
European rule. The next early work, Story of an African Chief ( 1935), republished in
London the next year as Africa Answers Back, was written by Akiki K. Nyabongo (b.
1907), a prince from Uganda who attended Yale and Harvard and, as a Rhodes scholar at
Oxford University, obtained his B.Litt. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1940. This
autobiographical work, too, has a dual purpose. Nyabongo presents a detailed description
of life among the Buganda aristocracy, while implicitly criticizing the high
handed
cultural elitism of European missionaries and government functionaries.
Of course, the most politically significant figure of this early group is Jomo Kenyatta (
1891-1979), the charismatic Gikuyu political prisoner during the Kenyan Emergency
period of the 1950s and president of the nation from the Independence in 1963 until his
death. However significant and controversial his later political success, his first
prominence came in 1938 with the publication of his anthropological treatise on the
Gikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya. Kenyatta had been hired part-time at University College,
London, as an informant in Gikuyu phonetics and, about the same time, joined the classes
taught at the London School of Economics by the functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski, who subsequently wrote the preface to Kenyatta's work. 1
Like its predecessors, although considerably more systematic and complete, Kenyatta's
study was intended to valorize African traditional life and challenge the racist and elitist
assumptions of the Europeans. Tanganyika, too, produced early English works, but ones
with completely different mo
-50-
tives than those from Uganda and Kenya. Their author, Martin Kayamba ( 1891-1940),
after a visit to Europe in 1931, eventually became the highest African civil servant in the
territory, the chief clerk to the provincial commissioner in Tanga (Arnold 950). His two
books, An African in Europe and African Problems, both published posthumously in
London in 1948 by the United Society for Christian Literature and commonly considered
to have been ghostwritten by whites, present an honorific and appreciative attitude
toward British civilization and colonialism. Stephen Arnold notes: "Carefully guided,
Kayamba saw through rose-coloured glasses a Britain populated by gods.... On returning
home, the pious Martin, so inspired by his colonial saviours, changed his name to
Kayambason in order to cloak his Bantu name in European garb. He has since become
the target of many scornful jokes and is a common symbol in Tanzanian literary culture"
(950).

The Influence of Makerere University

It was not until the 1960s that East Africa began to develop literature in English that was
imaginative rather than solely historical, anthropological, or political. The single most
significant educational force behind this development was Uganda's Makerere University
College in Kampala, which had been established in 1939 to provide higher education for
all of British East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar. 2
Makerere University attracted an interterritorial group of students— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
from Kenya, for example, and Ugandan Asians like Peter Nazareth, as well as
Europeans—and after its affiliation with the University of London in 1953, it drew its
staff from universities in Europe and America. The "destiny of Makerere as the most
significant educational institution in East Africa became closely tied to the destiny of
creative writing in this part of the continent" (Bakari and Mazrui 868).
Despite the important role the institution eventually was to play in the promotion of
creative literature, its colonial bias, that is, its Great Tradition of canonized British texts,
and its rigid insistence upon "correct" British usage, actually mitigated against the early
development of an authentic East African voice in English: "It is precisely because of this
almost sanctified approach to English that East Africa failed to produce its own Tutuola.
The limited usage of the other registers of English led to absurd inflexibility in the
creation of near-life characters and even the semi-educated protagonists in Ngũg's
novels speak formal, grammatical English. Makerere writers were not favoured with
West Africa's luck in having an English based creole and pidgin on whose resources they
could draw" (Bakari and Mazrui 874).
Nevertheless, as one of the university's most influential British lecturers, David Cook, is
reported to have observed, many of the students in the English Department were there
reading English literature with an eye to writing themselves; "language was a tool, not
an end in itself" (Bakari and
-51-
Mazrui 875). Of those students Mohamed Bakari and Ali Mazrui write: "It was the
generation of the fifties in the twentieth century which was to lead the way towards
establishing a legacy of literature in the English language, and Makerere College in
Uganda was to become the most eminent centre of literary activity.... It was there that the
first examples of literature in English drawing on the East African experience were
created" (868).
Besides the rigorous English-language training and the heady association with members
of various African communities and other national and racial groups that the Makerere
experience provided, it also offered, through its student journal, Penpoint ( 1958), the
opportunity for budding writers to see their works in print. As Bakari and Mazrui point
out, the main difference between this journal and its counterparts as West African
universities was its multiracial character (875). David Cook's ground-breaking anthology
of East African poetry, Origin East Africa ( 1965), is heavily dependent on Penpoint for
its selections. Student journals were also launched at the universities founded in 1961:
from the former College at Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, came Darlight ( 1966),
superseded by Umma ( 1970), and from Nairobi, Kenya, came Nexus ( 1967) and, later,
Busara ( 1968). Indeed, as the intellectual and creative center of East Africa shifted in the
1960s from Kampala to Nairobi, it was Busara that became the most influential of the
student publications. Penpoint was superseded in 1971 by Dhana, which reflected
Makerere's much more Ugandan student population by that date (Heron 923). All of
these student journals were extremely important in encouraging and offering outlets for
many of the writers later to shape the East African literary scene; Peter Nazareth, Ngũgĩ,
and Barnabas Katigula are just a few examples.
Of great significance as well, and reflective of the intellectual activity at the universities,
were the two conferences on African literature that serve to frame the decade of the
1960s, the African Writers Conference held in Kampala in 1962 and the East African
Writers Conference in Nairobi in 1971. Speaking of the first meeting, Bakari and Mazrui
conclude: "This gathering was probably the most important single event that acted as a
catalyst for emergent East African authors.... The Conference can truly be said to have
opened to East Africa new horizons of literary activity and 1962 became the turning point
in serious literature in English" (876, 877). Writers, critics, and publishers from
throughout English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States attended, and
the quantity and quality of their publications, contrasted with the dearth of works from
East Africa, led to a profound sense of inadequacy and resolve on the part of the young
writers at Makerere. Grace Ogot of Kenya remembers the occasion as "a time of heart
searching and self-examination." She recalls a "feeling of literary barrenness in East
Africa arising from the helplessness of East African writers at this conference.... Through
sheer embarrassment Ngugi and I took the challenge without any delay. And so did other
East African writers
-52-
who attended the conference" (Lindfors 124). Ngũgĩ praised the meeting in the Nairobi
Sunday Nation of I July 1962 (Bakari and Mazrui 876) and later wrote in Transition:
"What may be born here and grow as a result is yet too early to predict. I have no doubt
that writers from East Africa will rise. The few that I met at Kampala were very
enthusiastic and eager to push ahead" (Knight 887).
Push ahead they did, and by 1971 the conference in Nairobi could be focused on East
African writing, particularly on its future direction, "the existence or establishment of a
distinct East African voice, the nature of the writer's audience and the choice of
language" (Knight 902). Two collections of theory and criticism resulted: Black
Aesthetics ( 1971), edited by Pio Zirimu and Andrew Gurr, and Writers in East Africa (
1974), edited by Andrew Gurr and Angus Calder.

Literary Nationalism in the Academy

The difference in tone of the 1962 and 1971 meetings signals a significant movement
from the young Makerereans' painful sense of silence to their conscious shaping of their
African voices, from their acute awareness of a missing literary identity to their conscious
definition of themselves as East African writers. In a historical sense, too, the change in
the locales of those two important conferences, from Kampala to Nairobi, represents the
shift by the beginning of the 1970s of intellectual and artistic influence from politically
chaotic Uganda to Kenya.
Additional evidence of the growing anticolonial self-confidence of this group of writers
and critics and its inevitable influence on those following them through the university
system is the event that Tanzanian critic Grant Kamenju rightly terms "the 'revolution'
that took place during our Annual Interdepartmental Subject Conference in Nairobi in
1969 when, at the initiative of the African members of staff from the three sister
Departments of Makerere, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, it was decided to abolish the three
English Departments and to set up instead Departments of Literature" (Lindfors 38). In
"On the Abolition of the English Department," the appendix to his earliest collection of
essays, Homecoming ( 1972), Ngũgĩ, one of the architects of this change, comments on
the catalyst for it, the proposal presented by his Department to the Arts Faculty Board at
the University of Nairobi in September 1968, which raised the "main question: If there is
need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture,' why can't this be African?
Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in
relationship to it?" ( 146 ). The "revolution" led to the end of "the reign of Shakespeare"
(Arnold 953) in East African universities, especially at Nairobi, where Ngũgĩ, lo Liyong,
and the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek were lecturers. Acutely aware of the shaping
influence of formal education on young minds, Ngũgĩ also called for a conference of
secondary
-53-
school teachers of literature in Kenya in September 1974 to overhaul their syllabi along
the lines of that at the university. In addition to these institutional changes, according to
the Kenyan critic Chris Wanjala, the very presence of Ngũgĩ, lo Liyong, and p'Bitek in
Nairobi's newly restructured Literature Department "indirectly boosted creativity not only
at the campus but in the whole country" ( 98 ).
Ngugi's concern with formal education's role in culture formation was well placed, for
primary and secondary schools mushroomed in East Africa after colonialism, with
obvious and direct consequences for both the writers and those they wished to reach. As
p'Bitek observed in 1976, "Written literature depends on a reading audience and that can
only be produced in schools.... People will begin to express themselves in English
through such forms as the novel, the stage play, the poem when there are enough people
to read what they write. The place has to ripen educationally first" (Lindfors 139).

Publishing Opportunities
The increase in the literate population after Independence in the three countries led
directly to the growth of East African publishing, which meant, of course, that more
writers found their way into print than ever before.
Much of the output of the publishers went directly into the classrooms. John Nottingham,
formerly with the East African Literature Bureau and later the founder of Transafrica,
asserts, "The school market has been the reason why we have had any publishing houses
at all, whether they were indigenous firms or branches of British companies. The only
exception is the East African Literature Bureau, which has a vast Government subsidy"
(Lindfors 115). Nottingham attests to the stimulating effect of the competition among
these firms to supply materials for the needs of primary and secondary schools,
especially, at first, collections of folktales: "Sometimes it was just a matter of trying to
publish the first collection from a particular area or a particular tribe. One was trying to
get the first book of folktales from Kisii, from Taita or from Turkana" (Lindfors 116).
The East African Literature Bureau had been founded by the British shortly after World
War II to stimulate writing in African languages; its Nairobi and Kampala branches
began publishing imaginative work in English in 1970 under their "Student Book-Writing
Scheme." This company was dissolved in the late 1970s and replaced by the Kenya
Literature Bureau (Knight 888). Another local firm, the East African Publishing House (
1965), existed side by side with branches of foreign publishers such as Longman,
Heinemann, Macmillan Books for Africa, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge
University Press. The influence of the decisions of these firms regarding the needs and
desires of their target markets, and of their editorial philosophies in general in stimulating
or stifling creative writing in East Africa, can hardly be exaggerated.
-54-
As Grace Ogot notes, before Independence there was not such a wealth of publishing
outlets; moreover, it was difficult to get manuscripts accepted abroad (Lindfors 124). The
popular Kenyan writer David Maillu, for a while a successful publisher himself, attributes
that difficulty to a colonial attitude on the part of foreign publishers:
At that time it was assumed that only English people wrote. The African was
hardly given any chance. Those who wanted to be published had to be published
outside East Africa in a place like London, and English people had their own way
of assessing African writers. I mean, you couldn't publish anything because they
thought it was not right for Africans to publish anything. To be published by
them, you had to write in a certain way, in a certain style, and depict the African
in the image that they liked. And this, of course, discouraged many people from
writing.... When I sent my manuscripts to England, they were always returned by
British publishers who did not want to publish them. (Lindfors 64, 65)
Reflecting a basically anthropological desire to record traditional orature and customs,
"literature which could later on be kept in libraries for future research" (Lindfors 125),
the East African Literature Bureau was prepared to publish both original work and
collections of traditional poetry, tales, and so forth, in both English and the indigenous
tongues, but nothing of an imaginative nature in English. The bureau also demonstrated a
fairly rigid notion of appropriate subject matter and treatment. Grace Ogot reports that
she took
some of my short stories to the Manager, including the one which was later
published in Black Orpheus. They really couldn't understand how a Christian
woman could write such stories involved with sacrifices, traditional medicines
and all, instead of writing about Salvation and Christianity. Thus, quite a few
potential writers received no encouragement from colonial publishers who were
perhaps afraid of turning out radical writers critical of the colonial regime....
Many people writing today simply did not have an outlet for creative writing. If
you wrote a story, you kept it to yourself. I think that the lack of publishers with a
correct approach to African literature was a major setback for East African
writers. (Lindfors 124)
With Independence in the early 1960s, however, when local people took over the East
African Literature Bureau, this colonially inspired, conservative attitude lost force. One
indication of the publishers' vigorous new efforts to encourage local imaginative writing
was the inauguration of literary contests, such as the "School-Book Writing Scheme,"
sponsored by various firms, and for which Ngũgĩ wrote The River Between ( 1964)
(Lindfors 76). In the 1970s the publishers contributed to the Jomo Kenyatta Prize, which
Taban lo Liyong credits with inspiring not only activity among the writers but also a
competitive impulse among the publishers themselves: "Soon all of them were trying
very, very hard to produce books which could be entered
-55-
for that competition" (Lindfors 53). A somewhat different viewpoint is expressed by the
Kenyan Meja Mwangi, himself the winner of the 1973 Kenyatta Prize for Kill Me Quick.
Mwangi agrees that the competitions and prize have had some effect but, owing to their
scarcity, doubts that people are often motivated to write for such awards. He goes
further: "If writing paid, I think we would have a lot more and better writers in East
Africa. We have a lot of talented young people at the university, some of whom, I know,
would like to do more writing, but they can't because they have to work for a living. So
literary development here tends to progress slowly" (Lindfors 77). In the same interview
he notes that both the growth of literacy in the region and the "shock of recognition"
within the literate public that African writers are worth reading has had a tremendous
effect on the publishing houses, thereby encouraging creative production.

Journals
To appeal to this new market, a number of journals providing additional outlets and a
regular opportunity for writers to reach the public have been launched by the publishing
houses themselves. Before Independence, according to Grace Ogot, aside from the
college journals, there were only a few church- and foreign-owned magazines, "but these
did not really encourage local participation in their columns" (Lindfors 124). The
notable exception to this dearth of journals was Transition, founded in 1960 by the
Ugandan Asian Rajat Neogy and edited in Kampala until 1969. As suggested earlier,
some of the most significant and heated debates about African culture were expressed in
its pages, and most of the well-known figures of contemporary East African writing
appeared there on occasion. By 1971 Transition had moved to Accra, Ghana, but other
East African publications had been launched. In 1967 Oxford University Press introduced
Zuka, "a journal of East African creative writing"; Ghala, a regularly published literary
issue of the East African Journal, was begun the next year by the East African Publishing
House (Knight 888). The popular magazines Drum and Viva, along with the ever-popular
humor magazine Joe, further extended outlets for writers. As Grace Ogot remarks, the
presence of such magazines "is very encouraging for younger writers as well as older
writers who are engaged in poetry and short story writing, and don't often have enough
collected for a book" (Lindfors 128).

Popular Literature
Increasing literacy in East Africa, obviously a boon to publishers, led in the early 1970s
to the immense commercial success of a controversial new popular literature focusing on
love stories and urban problems such as unemployment, prostitution, and corruption
among politicians and businessmen.
-56-
Charles Mangua's crime thriller Son of Woman ( 1971), winner of the literary prize
offered by the East African Publishing House, is generally credited with initiating the
trend. His subsequent A Tail in the Mouth ( 1972), actually written first, with its emphasis
on a genial urban antihero, a former home guard turned Freedom Fighter, assured his
prominence (Lindfors 117).
The greatest forces shaping popular literature were the reading tastes and urban
experiences of eighteen- to thirty-year-old high school graduates, or "school leavers."
According to the editor of The Weekly Review, Hilary Ng'weno , whose own crime
thriller The Men from Pretoria ( 1976) is a skillful narrative dramatizing undercover
links between Kenya and South Africa, the "older generation, including university
graduates ... don't read much. They spend most of their time either making money or
drinking" (Lindfors 105). The Men from Pretoria began as a screenplay, but was
rewritten when Ng'weno could not secure the funds for its filming. As a book, it was
intended for an audience similar to that which frequented the popular imported films,
what Ng'weno describes as "the average young person who has left school and is seeking
two or three hours of light entertainment without having to worry too much about the
deeper processes of thought. I believe this is the major reading public in East Africa
today" (Lindfors 103, 104).
As his comment suggests, the content and style of the imported films of the I950s and
I960s cannot be discounted as another important factor shaping the taste of potential
readers and, therefore, the selections of publishers. Ng'weno observes, "to a certain
extent, this explains the popularity of the so-called popular literature that deals with
crime, sex and violence" (Lindfors 104). He notes especially the popularity of American
films featuring Black actors triumphing over predictable racist antagonists; films shot in
recognizable locales, such as Shaft in Africa and The Wilby Conspiracy, "most of it . . .
shot in Kenya, [so] people could recognize their own friends on the screen"; and kung fu
films, providing an exciting, escapist experience (Lindfors 104). In a curious instance of a
reversal of the usual literary influence, Meja Mwangi's novel about poaching in
contemporary Kenya, The Bushtrackers, published as a Drumbeat book by Longman in
1979, is based on a screenplay and bears a dedication "to the four men who died in a
tragic aircrash during the shooting of the film which inspired this novel."
Despite the aforementioned Africanization of the primary and secondary school syllabi,
the general reader had, during and after colonialism, been heavily exposed to British and
American popular literature by authors like Agatha Christie and James Hadley Chase
and dashing, amoral heroes like James Bond. Reading material was valued by young
readers, as Mwangi comments, mainly as entertainment: "Most of them are more likely to
pick up a book by Maillu than one by Ngũgĩ" (Lindfors 78). Lo Liyong agrees, "in
Nairobi almost everybody reads crime stories.... They don't read the classics, just the
popular writing" (Lindfors 56).
"Escapist" would be the kindest of the judgments offered about East
 -57-
African popular writing by some of its critics. Mwangi, for instance, himself a prolific
and popular author of books set both in post-Independence Kenya ( Kill Me Quick [
1973], Going down River Road [ 1976], The Cockroach Dance [ 1979], The
Bushtrackers) and in the pre-Independence Emergency period ( Carcase for Hounds [
1974], Taste of Death [ 1975]), complains about the effect of what he considers the
popular books' overly dramatic, sensational quality: "They become completely distorted.
Young people reading them may get the wrong impression of life in the city" (Lindfors
79). According to Ng'weno, this "misconception of life in the city" is precisely the germ
that creates the worst of the genre, for he feels the writers themselves are uncomfortable
with their urban experience and latch onto the most superficial aspects of it to criticize
and exploit: "you are dealing with the first generation of writers, most of them born and
brought up in rural areas, who came to the city for the first time when they were admitted
to the university. They feel very, very uneasy with the urban situation because they don't
understand it at all" (Lindfors 100). Okot p'Bitek sees the trend toward popular writing as
both "healthy and unhealthy" (Lindfors 144), regretting most what strikes him as its
"light-hearted" nature that precludes any serious discussion of social ills. Mwangi agrees:
"Some of these popular works have no message at all. They are simply words, words,
words" (Lindfors 79). Chris Wanjala's dismay extends beyond the books to questions
about the public they serve: "A society which cherishes the sick fantasies of the
American thriller and the sex wasteland of Charles Mangua is decidedly sick" ( 48 ).
Whatever their judgment of his art, David Maillu, whose name became synonymous with
East African popular writing, is mentioned by every commentator on it. Maillu describes
himself as both a serious researcher and a moralist committed to positive social change.
He studied for four or five years, he says, the psychology of the general East African
reader and of the storyteller "to find out what they liked talking about and hearing"
(Lindfors 65). Armed with this information, he founded Comb Books, many of whose
volumes are sized small enough to carry around comfortably in a coat or skirt pocket.
Comb published Maillu's own works as well as those of others. He considers himself a
Christian writer dealing realistically with common experiences and vividly demonstrating
the sad consequences of corruption: "I write about what's happening—about corruption,
sex or anything. It has not been my interest to dwell on the beautiful or to set my stories
in the nicer parts of town.... I rather like to believe I am an educator as well as an
entertainer and that my books have a moral purpose. Perhaps this is why so many people
read them" (Lindfors 68, 69). Indeed, the results of a questionnaire published with the
first volume of his three-volume poem The kommon man ( 1975-76) declared Maillu the
most popular writer in East and Central Africa (Lindfors 69).
An objective look at many of his fictional works reveals an ambivalence in them
reflective of Maillu's yoking together his moralistic intent with his
-58-
interest in sensational style and subject matter. No! ( 1976), a tale of the downfall and
suicide of a corrupt civil servant, rather incoherently alternates between graphic scenes of
sex and violence and interludes indicating Washington Ndava's growing awareness of his
wasted life, a character development unconvincingly intended to demonstrate that
suffering can bring new depths of feeling and understanding. Moreover, Ndava's injuries
are so numerous and extreme that they become unintentionally comic, as is the end of the
novel, where his chauffeur is feeling up Washington's widow on their way to his funeral.
It is difficult to reconcile Maillu's believable statement of his moralistic intentions with
the actual horrifying and titillating effect of his works. In contrast to Wanjala's contention
that it is Maillu's didacticism that "undermines his artistic means" (Lindfors 152), perhaps
a more valid criticism might be that his books do not hold together for the literary critic,
as either popular entertainment or cautionary tales, precisely because Maillu lacks the
skill to bring together seamlessly two such divergent impulses. It is true, however, that
his brief epistolary novels Dear daughter ( 1976) and Dear Monika ( 1976) and a
collection of rural tales, Kisalu and His Fruit Garden ( 1972), are more unified. Dear
Monika, as a matter of fact, is quite effective, almost a primer for replying to abusive
husbands.
The body of writing that immediately comes to mind as a sister of writing such as
Maillu's or Mangua's is the well-known Onitsha Market literature from Nigeria. The
critic Henry Chakava, director of Heinemann East Africa, however, points to a
significant difference between the two: "Most of the people who write these novels here
have had some education and adopt a more enlightened and sophisticated approach than
do the Onitsha writers, who produced some fiction of extremely low quality. As a
consequence, East African popular literature may have a much wider audience, too"
(Lindfors II).
A similar realization of the potential popularity of this kind of work occurred to others,
and most of the publishers in East Africa initiated subject series geared to what they
foresaw as a growing and lucrative market. Oxford University Press began its New
Fiction from Africa series in 1972 with Murder in Majengo by Marjorie Oludhe
Macgoye, a British writer married to a Luo doctor and living in Nairobi. In 1973, the year
when Maillu created Comb, Foundation Books started its African Leisure Library with a
collection of articles entitled Bless the Wicked by the editor of Drum magazine, P. G.
Malimoto. Transafrica launched its Afroromance series with Love and Learn ( 1974) by "
Mary Kise" (Knight 911). John Nottingham later revealed that, despite the different
authors listed on the Afroromance publications, all of them actually were produced by a
single male writer, "a talented Ugandan[,] and then marketed under various pseudonyms"
(Lindfors 120). Nottingham obviously veered from this practice at least once, for he also
issued the well-known writer Grace Ogot's collection of short stories The Other Woman (
1976) as part of this group. As the first title of a different series, New
-59-
Writing, Transafrica published The Day the Music Died and Other Stories ( 1978) by
Ciugu Mwagiru (Lindfors 116). East African Publishing House brought out J. C.
Onyango-Abuje's eerie Fire and Vengeance in 1975 as a Heartbeat Book, the same year
that Heinemann launched its Spear series with four titles. They produced a further four in
1976, one of which was Mwangi Gicheru's topical The Ivory Merchant. Its Longman
Crime Series published Ng'weno's The Men from Pretoria the same year.
Retrenchment
The boom, however, did not last. All the publishers in the late I970s cut back their lists or
completely collapsed. Reasons for the decline include the comparatively high cost of
books for a populace striving to pay for physical necessities; the lack of a book-buying
habit in East Africa, as noted by Nottingham (Lindfors 122); and the colonially inspired
prejudices of a reading public that still held African writers in less esteem than foreign
ones. Moreover, Tanzania's banning of some of the most popular of these writers
eliminated one-third of the region to which they could naturally expect to appeal for local
support.
Slick urban fiction, it turns out, developed in both Kenya and Uganda in the early 1970s;
if anything, Uganda's contribution, according to the critic George Heron, reflected "an
even greater interest in sexual themes than its Kenyan counterpart" (924). English-
language readers in Tanzania preferred British and American writers such as Ian Fleming
and Harold Robbins to the home-grown variety (Bakari and Mazrui 959), although the
misleadingly titled Veneer of Love ( 1975) by Osija Mwambungu was a commercial
success. In a very real sense, popular literature in Tanzania is exclusively in Swahili,
since, because of government philosophy and directives, that language has become
almost universal. As Grant Kamenju observes, fewer people in Kenya read the English-
language authors than those in Tanzania reading the works produced in Swahili (Lindfors
42-43).
Because of Tanzania's developing sense of its socialist identity and desire, therefore, to
purge itself of all Western cultural influences judged detrimental to its progress, popular
fiction of the Maillu and Mangua type was banned by President Julius Nyerere's
government. It was not only their explicit sexuality, then, that led to their disfavor; they
were also judged counterprogressive. Chris Wanjala explains, "Tanzania has put its
emphasis on rural development. Urbanization has been played down because they want to
try to enhance rural culture. Novels that deal with the urban situation adulterate that
emphasis" (Lindfors 159).
As one might expect, David Maillu received the full blast of official Tanzanian
disapproval. Comb Books as a group were not banned, but all advertised as written by
Maillu definitely were. The writer's response seems remarkably philosophical:
-60-
Each country has its ideology, and maybe my books are not compatible with
Tanzania's ideology.... In the long run, I am sure the books go back and are read
there, but I have nothing against Tanzania simply because a few individuals there,
thinking on behalf of other people, regard these books as bad. I am not in a
position to know whether my books are bad or not, but I would assume that if
they were bad, they would have made me bad. (Lindfors 67, 68)
Kamenju admits that despite the book banning, foreign movies continue to contribute to
the kind of cultural imperialism that the government, especially since the Arusha
Declaration of 1967, with its emphasis on self
reliance, is trying to eliminate (Lindfors
44).

Tanzania and Swahili

In addition to discouraging certain kinds of literature, the Tanzanian government, through
its emphasis on Swahili as the official language of the country, and because of its
austerity programs and shortages, has greatly limited the amount of English-language
writing produced by its citizens. Because of the multiplicity of ethnic groups within its
borders (including Zanzibar, since 1964), the Independence government found itself
faced with over 120 oral and literate traditions and decided in 1966 on one language,
Swahili, in an attempt to unify communication within the country and promote
nationalism (Arnold 946). Vigorous efforts were made in both the private and public
sectors to guarantee the success of the linguistic experiment; therefore, at the very time
when English-language writing was emerging in Uganda and Kenya, it was receiving
much less encouragement in Tanzania. 3
The first Tanzanian novel in English, Peter Palangyo's introspective study of personal and
social conflict Dying in the Sun, did not appear until 1968. In contrast, the first Swahili
novel, an apologia for British rather than German rule, Uhuru wa Watumwa, by James
Juma Mbotela, had been published in 1934. Mbotela's choice of language reflects the
established tradition of literature in non-European languages on which modern
Tanzanian policy could build.
Nevertheless, a number of Tanzanian novels in English appeared in the 1970s. Following
Dying in the Sun came Gabriel Ruhumbika's Village in Uhuru ( 1969) and, in 1974,
Barnabas Katigula's Groping in the Dark, published in Kenya and notable for its
progressive view of women. Ismael R. Mbise 's Blood on Our Land, also published in
1974, is set among the Meru of Tanganyika during the onslaught of colonialism and
contains an introduction by the author raising important issues of genre and style. The
last English novel to have been printed in Tanzania was The Wicked Walk ( 1977) by W.
E. Mkufya , which, with its focus on urban life, prostitution, incest, and the loss of
innocence, could be classified with the disparaged popular literature of Tanzania's
neighbors. 4
-61-
According to Steven Arnold, most examples of Tanzanian short fiction in English have
been written as school texts to teach grammar, syntax, and morality; "another type, which
became nearly extinct in the seventies, was the pulp pamphlet story for youths," for
example, F. Kawegere's Inspector Rajabu Investigates, and Other Stories ( 1968) and
Akberali Manji's The Valley of the Dead and Other Stories ( 1972) (954). Additionally,
one must note the short stories by numerous authors published in Darlight and Umma,
including those by Martha V. Mlangala, who, under her married name, Martha Mvungi,
subsequently produced a collection in English of Hehe and Bena folktales, Three Solid
Stones ( 1975), and a Swahili novel, Hana Hatia. Her progress is typical, says Arnold,
for "only expatriate writers (e.g. Asare, Pierce) have ever written more than one novel in
English. Almost without exception those who have proven themselves in English ... later
switched to Swahili" (959).
While this linguistic movement might have occurred naturally, given the Swahili cultural
tradition of Tanzania, its pace was accelerated by the government's nationalizing the
major means of production in the country in 1966, thus cutting off the advertising base of
many of the journals that published English material. Moreover, when a severe paper
shortage occurred from 1971 to 1974, priority for scarce supplies was given to
government documents, school texts, and literature in Swahili: "By 1975 it had become
much easier to get published in Swahili than in English and few writers will probably
ever turn back. English has lost its prestige" (Arnold 959).
An issue related to that of language choice is one debated hotly in most of the recently
independent African countries, namely, the relationship of the artist to his or her society.
Grant Kamenju explains that the Tanzanians are aiming toward a less elitist role for the
artist than that influenced by colonial attitudes and a return to a more traditional
conception of the origin and purpose of art: "We want literature that is worthwhile, that
is really grounded in the society itself. This is the direction in which we would like to see
it develop, and this is where we hope to play our part, assisting in the establishment of a
grass-roots literary tradition. Such a tradition will have to emerge in a language of the
people, an African language, and in Tanzania this language is Kiswahili" (Lindfors 44).
Taban lo Liyong complains, however, that the writing that aims toward this nationalistic
goal is uncritical and simplistically celebratory of Ujumaa, African socialism. In
contrast, he judges the writing from his own country as "arriving at the moment of self-
criticism and search," an important point in history he attributes to the scourge of Idi
Amin, who taught Ugandan writers that they, at least, "can no longer sing songs in praise
of Africans because they know that devils come in various colors, guises, religions,
standards of education, and so on.... So we have been liberated from an uncritical love of
Africa and of Africans. I think that is beginning to come out" (Lindfors 59-60).
-62-

Hard Times in Uganda

Certainly, if the Tanzanian writers' experience the pressure of political philosophy on
artistic choices, the Ugandan situation demonstrates the consequences of political chaos
and oppression on the very survival of artists. The upheaval in Uganda could not have
been predicted with any certainty, since Makerere University, as already mentioned,
served as such a center of academic stability during the colonial period, and, as George
Heron notes, the Ganda heartland kept its traditional political system largely intact (923).
In other peripheral geographic areas, however, customary authority was weakened during
the nineteenth century by large-scale slave raiding, cattle thieving, and ivory trading.
Consequently, after Independence, both the incoming kabaka of Buganda and Milton
Obote, prime minister of Uganda, inherited a fragmented country, ripe for political
conflict. Obote's arrest of the kabaka in 1964 and the subsequent 1971 coup by Idi Amin
attests to that instability. The coup was bloodless, but it soon spawned arrests and
massacres of Amin's opponents both military and civilian. The ensuing flight of many
educators from the country severely gutted the educational system.
One of the first casualties of Obote's regime was Transition. Its editorial staff was
decimated by detentions and the threat of long prison terms for sedition; its outspoken
editor, Rajat Neogy, was stripped of his Ugandan citizenship and forced to emigrate
(Benson 210). Among the writers who fled to neighboring Kenya was the celebrated poet
Okot p'Bitek. Okot, already the author of Lak Tar ( 1953), a novel in his native Acholi,
had been working in Gulu, in northern Uganda, but in 1966, when his influential poem
Song of Lawino was published, he had moved to Kampala to direct the Ugandan Cultural
Centre. By the end of 1967, however, he was dismissed and went into exile in Kenya,
taking up a position at what was then still the English Department at the University of
Nairobi. Another exile was Peter Nazareth, for a while a civil servant in the Ministry of
Finance, whose political novel In a Brown Mantle ( 1972) provides insight into Ugandan
life under Obote, particularly the peripheral position of the Asians shortly before Amin
was to exile them. Also to leave was the Lango writer Okello Oculi, author of the long
narrative poem Orphan ( 1968), which he describes as a "village opera," and the novel
Prostitute ( 1968), frequently classified as popular literature. Henry Kimbugwe, a Ganda
writer who goes under the pseudonym of Eneriko Seruma , author of The Experience (
1970) and a collection of tales, The Heart Seller ( 1971), joined the East African
Publishing House in Nairobi. His work reflects the racial and class interests of many
African writers of the time. The Experience was one "of the first East African novels to
use rapid and violent action and a variety of sexual experiences to comment on racial
relationships" (Heron 939); the title story of The Heart Seller ironically depicts what the
recently discovered technique of heart transplants might mean economically to an
impoverished African. The controversial Taban lo
-63-
Liyong joined Okot p'Bitek at the University of Nairobi. In contrast to the Tanzanian
writers in particular, lo Liyong, who was trained in America, demonstrates idiosyncratic
and Western attitudes toward art and the autonomy of the artist. His two collections of
short stories, Fixions ( 1969) and The Uniformed Man ( 1971), testify to his desire for
formal experimentation rather than political or moral didacticism, although some of the
stories, " Fixions," for example, ironically treat political topics. A writer who also
eventually migrated to Kenya is Barbara Kimenye, who worked in the kabaka's
government and produced two genially humorous, but not idealizing, collections of
stories about village life, Kalasanda ( 1965) and Kalasanda Revisited ( 1966). These two
works, notably, are the "first pieces of [native] Ugandan creative writing to reach book
form" (Heron 924). That they and almost all the works written subsequently in the
country were published in Kenya attests to the unstable climate in Uganda, which
fostered neither money-making publishing ventures nor artistic creativity.
Yet, as Heron points out, "It is conspicuous that Ugandan writers in exile failed, or more
probably, refrained, to comment through art on their country's tragedy, which the eviction
of Amin Dada did little to alleviate" (947). Moreover, lo Liyong notes that in contrast to
the Tanzanians, the Ugandan writers have maintained individual voices and outlooks,
rather than a "corporate view" (Lindfors 59). Unlike Ngũgĩ, lo Liyong judges the political
influence of the writer to be severely limited and, shortly before Tanzania moved troops
into Uganda in the late 1970s to oust Amin, asked, "If even the commanders in the army
can't overthrow him, what can you do with a pen?" (Lindfors 61).
One writer who knew precisely what to do with a pen, that is, to poke outrageous fun at
the violent leader in the form of the traditional cautionary animal tale, was the author of
Field Marshall Abdulla Salim Fisi; or, How the Hyena Got His! Writing under the pen
name Alumidi Osinya, this author published his extremely funny and effective satire
through Joe Publications, an imprint of Transafrica Press, in Nairobi in 1976. The book is
a roman à clef, presenting in transparent animal guise many of the major actors on the
political stage during the Amin (Fisi) regime. Another author employing a subtle
traditional form to make political observations is John Nagenda, whose magical,
allegorical The Seasons of Thomas Tebo was published in 1986, the year Nagenda
returned to Uganda after the overthrow of Amin by the National Resistance Army. A
much more straightforward account is Return to the Shadows ( 1969), the account of a
post-Independence African country in the throes of a coup, by the Ugandan Robert
Serumaga.

Kenya and the Durable Emergency

While the succeeding political upheavals in Uganda served to fragment the society and
effectively silence its artists within the country, a comparable pre
Independence
situation within Kenya, the British oppression leading to the
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formation of the Land and Freedom Fighters (designated Mau Mau by the colonialists)
and the subsequent Emergency, not only unified many of the African citizens against the
British but also provided a compelling subject for a considerable body of literature. The
first response to the rebellion of the 1950s and its aftermath came in the form of
autobiographical works "which were halfway between the earlier didactic and polemical
writings" of aspiring Gikuyu political spokesmen "and genuine fictional narrative"
(Bakari and Mazrui 871). These writings include the Gikuyu writer M. P. Joshua Mwangi
Kariuki's post-Independence memoir Mau Mau Detainee ( 1963), which provides
valuable information about conditions in the various concentration camps established to
contain the guerrilla fighters and their sympathizers; Freedom and After ( 1963) by the
popular Luo politician Tom Mboya ; the more anthropological and personal A Child of
Two Worlds ( 1964) by another Gikuyu writer, Mugo Gatheru; and D. Barnett and K.
Njamais's Mau Mau from Within ( 1966), which describes the Land and Freedom army as
a mass underground movement. That the Emergency period was not the only phase of
Kenya's modern history when sudden violence was the order of the day is substantiated
by the fate of both Mboya and Kariuki, victims of assassination, Mboya in 1969, Kariuki
in 1975. 5
Fiction writers, too, many of whom were children or adolescents during the Emergency,
have been drawn irresistibly to the 1950s period in Kenyan history. Ngũgĩ's novels Weep
Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat ( 1967) and the stories collected in the section "Fighters
and Martyrs" in Secret Lives ( 1975) show the result of the struggle upon ordinary
Gikuyu villagers. A Grain of Wheat, his most complex interpretation of that extremely
difficult period, places moving yet ironic emphasis on betrayal, the need for confession,
and psychological as well as physical suffering. Later, in 1976, Ngũgĩ was to team up
with his colleague at the University of Nairobi Micere Mugo to write the vivid play The
Trial of Dedan Kimathi, about one of the heroes of the struggle. It opened that year amid
a swirl of controversy at Nairobi's National Theatre, with Micere cast as the Woman.
Meja Mwangi, also a Gikuyu, reveals that Weep Not, Child was the only novel he had
read on the subject of the Freedom Fighters before he began writing about it himself: "It
encouraged me because it was closer to me than anything I had read before. The books I
had read earlier were written by Europeans and were alien to me" (Lindfors 75). His own
treatments of the guerrilla rebellion, Taste of Death and Carcase for Hounds, concentrate
on the experience in the forest itself. Mwangi is particularly successful at depicting
differences among the individuals caught up in the struggle, their insecurities, conflicts,
and fear, despite his overall appreciation of the fighters' courageous determination to
restore Kenya to its original inhabitants:
"This is our land," Kariuki said. "The white man is just a foreigner and will have
to go back to his country some time."
"... What are we fighting for if we know he will go one day? Why don't we
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go back to our villages and wait until he goes back to his accursed country, and
then take back our land?"
"You fool, can't you see?" Karuiki swung on Mbogo. "Our land is productive. We
have to force him to go."
"Is this the way to force him?" Mbogo sneered. "When you are being wiped out in
scores? Do you think he will go now?" He shook his head. "I call this suicide." (
146 )
In contrast, the semi-autobiographical Daughter of Mumbi, by Charity Waciuma
(according to John Nottingham, a pseudonym for his sister-in-law [Lindfors 113]),
centers on the changed life in the villages during the Emergency period. She writes of
"Gitati," the communal work instituted in the so-called White Highlands by the
colonizers: "This work was supposed by law to be done for twenty-four days a year by all
men on various public works, like roads, schools or dispensaries. But during the
Emergency it was done by men, women and children six days a week, every week, and
increasingly it was confined to improving the farms of Chiefs, headmen and other
'Loyalists' " ( 113 ).
Forced off the white-owned estates, more than a hundred thousand Africans, transformed
into squatters on their own land, migrated during this period to the native reserves in the
Rift Valley, a mass movement causing untold disruption to already beleaguered families.
To help provide a context for the experiences of her young female protagonist, Waciuma
concentrates particularly on the situation of the children:
When they moved from the farms, children were separated from their parents and
many have never been traced to this day. In many cases they were herded into
camps like cattle, men in one place, women in another and children in yet
another. After "screening" they were sent back to their district or division. Many
 small children did not know where they came from and were left, often at railway
stations. They spent months wandering about the countryside. ( 117 )
Waciuma is successful in suggesting the sense of tension and isolation that made all
Central Province "a prison" ( 129 ).
The unequal struggle during the Emergency of the poorly armed Freedom Fighters
against the might of the British forces—and often against the members of their own
community they took to be traitors and accomplices— is the compelling subject of many
Kenyan novels and forms important sections in others. Godwin Wachira's Ordeal in the
Forest ( 1968) provides details about how leadership developed among the forest fighters
and explains the significance of their frequent oath taking. Like Charity Waciuma,
Leonard Kibera and his brother, Samuel Kahiga, in their collection of short stories Potent
Ash ( 1968), sensitively reveal the ambivalence toward the dangerous guerillas because of
the suffering heaped by the Emergency on ordinary people in the villages. The Land Is
Ours ( 1970), by John Karoki Njoroge, tells the tale of the conflicted Chief Elijah
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the tale of the conflicted Chief Elijah, "torn between the loyalty to indigenous
nationalism on the one hand and alien imperialism on the other" (Foreword). Through the
self-serving meanderings of its picaresque hero, Charles Mangua's A Tail in the Mouth
also indicates that a desire for survival was foremost in the minds of most people during
the Emergency; thus they feared the guerrillas and the British alike. Three works actually
centered on other topics— Mwangi Ruheni's comic The Future Leaders ( 1973), Kenneth
Watene 's Sunset on the Manyatta ( 1974), and Grace Ogot's The Graduate ( 1980)—also
contain characters affected by the uprising. Similarly, in A Curse from God ( 1970)
Stephen N. Ngubiah briefly depicts a British police sweep against suspected Mau Mau
activists in Nairobi. It is hardly surprising that even Ngũgĩ's later novels, set in post-
Independence Kenya, Petals of Blood ( 1977) and Devil on the Cross ( 1982), feature
important characters shaped by their experiences during the Emergency.
Despite these numerous attempts to depict this crucial stage in modern Kenyan history
and to account for both the idealism and the heroism of the Freedom Fighters as well as
the fear and ambivalence caused by their dangerous tactics and the bloody response of the
British, Meja Mwangi, for one, opines "that so far not enough has been written about this
crucial stage of our development. Unless it is written now, it will fade from our memory,
so it is very necessary that it be recorded today by the generation that lived through it.... I
just keep on tackling certain issues that have not been tackled so far. In fact, I think I may
write a couple more books about the Mau Mau" (Lindfors 74, 75).

Tradition in Literature
Another important aspect of East African history, specifically, its traditional culture, has
not only been recorded in anthropological or autobiographical works like Nyambongo's,
Mockerie's, Kenyatta's, and Gatheru's, mentioned earlier, but it has also led to numerous
collections of indigenous orature and cultural studies. Okot p'Bitek's Horn of My Love (
1974) and Africa's Cultural Revolution ( 1973) are important examples. Traditional
culture also provides subject and background for a large body of the fiction produced in
the modern period and appears in snatches in even a work like Gicheru's The Ivory
Merchant, concerned with contemporary poaching in Kenya. Many of these depictions of
customary blessings, proverbs, stories, rituals, ceremonies, and dances are intended
primarily to convey the sense of the lives of the indigenous people, thus providing
characterization and background for the protagonists. Many other examples, however,
are used contrastively to illuminate the differences between African ways and those of the
colonizers.
Various critics of East African literature mention its depiction of the past as one of its
major subjects. Bakari and Mazrui speak of "the conflict
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between the African past and the African present, often betraying a deep nostalgia, an
idealization of what once was, or might have been. Related to this is the clash between
tradition and modernity [and] the antimony between the indigenous and the foreign"
(878). Elizabeth Knight, too, mentioning the "disillusionment that came after the
euphoria of independence" sees one of the resulting trends in Kenyan literature as "an
intensification of the depicting of the traditionalistic orientations of the preceding decade,
contrasting, implicitly or explicitly, the fragmentation of modern Kenyan society with the
cohesion of earlier tribal life" (905). Since their understanding of what traditional life
provided to create a positive inheritance of East African identity is crucial, obviously,
even to the author's presentation of contemporary life, a detailed inclusion here of some
of their depictions of customary life and oral art seems useful.
Traditional songs, for example, enliven the texts of most of these works. Ngũgĩ's five
novels offer songs sometimes intended primarily to reveal Gikuyu legend and myth and
to inform readers about his community's traditional culture—the praise of Gikuyu and
Mumbi in A Grain of Wheat (202) or the pleas for the gift of oratory in Devil on the
Cross (9), for example. Some songs, like those celebrating the Freedom Fighters in A
Grain of Wheat (26), those commenting on neocolonial political corruption in Petals of
Bloods and Devil on the Cross, and those vowing to overthrow neoimperialism (
Devil47), reflect recent and current political realities. Ngugi's traditional songs also
celebrate circumcision ( Petals207), acknowledge the frequent difficulty of distinguishing
good from evil ( Devil25), and lyrically express love ( Devil 241). In To Become a Man,
the Masai writer Henry ole Kulet offers three songs celebrating the custom of cattle
raiding practiced by the morans (72, 98, 101-2); S. N. Ngubiah's A Curse from God
presents a song of mockery against charcoal burners (40); Osija Mwambungu
demonstrates how contemporary events like a well-publicized court decision are almost
immediately turned into popular songs ( Veneer36); Ismael Mbise's Blood on Our Land
ends with three women's coded songs to their men, lamenting the exploitation of the
white settlers in Tanzania. Most of these verses are presented in English, but Ngũgĩ does
not translate the Congolese popular tune played at the Devil's feast in Devil on the Cross
(93), and Mwambungu offers both the original and a translation of a drinking chant of the
Wanyakyusa ( Veneer33).
The original educational and social function of the traditional song, then, not just its
content, is presented to suggest subtly the changes wrought by colonialism. Frequently,
that change is demonstrated by the inclusion of Christian hymns, as in Mwambungu (
Veneer81), and by references to Western popular music. In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ
satirizes missionary hypocrisy with a chant, "The Beatitudes of the Rich and the
Imperialists":
Blessed is he who bites and sooths
Because he will never be found out.
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Blessed is the man who burns down another man's house
And in the morning joins him in grief,
For he shall be called merciful.
(209)
The weakening of traditional culture by colonialism is touched upon by Mwambungu in
his depiction of young Africans who feed coins into jukeboxes, playing and replaying
American songs like the Everly Brothers' "Devoted to You" ( Veneer4). 6
In contrast to this imported art, traditional songs and dances are shown as both liberating
and unifying forces for cultural cohesion. Dances celebrating the activities of certain
times of the year, the harvest, for instance, or important religious and social occasions,
involve the entire village as participants of one sort or another. Henry ole Kulet pictures
women in a Masai village gathering to honor the returning morans after their successful
cattle raid:
Then the women started to sing, their voices rising gradually, until at last, at the
peak of the song, they were heaving their chests forward and backwards, throwing
up and down their beautiful, multi-coloured jewelry. The jewelry shone
beautifully in the moonlight. The song praised the brave men who brought
Pukoret to where she belonged. ( To Become a Man101)
Osija Mwambungu described an age-old game among the Wanyakyusa, as
choreographed as a dance, in which young people select each other for the evening on the
basis of beauty of both body and character. Mwambungu goes to some pains to explain:
Beauty among our people at the time, embraced values which are normally not
associated with outside appearance only. A beautiful person to us, in a serious
sense of the word, was someone who had a clean body with a smooth skin and an
attractive general appearance. He or she was also not a liar, thief, proud, rude,
jealous, lazy, disrespectful (usually to older people), dirty, selfish, snobbish,
merciless or unkind. He or she had to be a person who was both clean in body and
soul. ( Veneer27)
Traditionally, the game of selection ended with everyone briefly going into hiding with
his or her "beautiful one," a short interval "intended for isolating the unselected ugly
children" ( 29 ). The narrator and his friend discover, however, that the Christian youth
were using this period of isolation for sexual purposes:
"Boy! It is a complete misunderstanding of our culture," [Roses] moaned.
Roses had discovered that the big Christian boys and girls were undressing in the
dark and were making love! In the pagan game this never happened....
It is a wonder that when on Independence day we discovered that the Christian
missionaries had wrecked our entire philosophy of life in the name of progress
without replacing it with anything comprehensible we decided to revive our
culture at break-neck speed? ( 29 )
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Nowhere in these novels is the societal value of traditional song and dance so often and
clearly expressed as in their depictions of the rites and celebrations of male circumcision.
Ngũgĩ spends a great deal of time depicting this ritual in both The River Between and
Petals of Blood. Ole Kulet's description of a Masai celebration in To Become a Man is
arguably the most vivid, detailed, and realistic in all these works, with its dual focus on
the protagonist's internal and external experiences.
In general, it is the psychological and social significance of this ordeal, which all the
young people are expected to undergo to become adult members of the community, that
is emphasized in the fiction, not just the painful details of the operation itself. While
among the Wanyakyusa according to Mwambungu, only the Muslims in their midst
practiced either male or female circumcision, fictional accounts of the other peoples of
East Africa attest to the ritual's central importance in their societies. Leshao's uncle's jibe,
"I would like to see an old uncircumcised man, or is he an old boy?" ( Kulet, To Become
a Man63), signifies the general attitude toward the ritual as a marker of adulthood.
Among the Meru in Tanzania, for instance, as Mbise shows, circumcision was essential
for complete manhood, and without going through it, a "maseka, an uninitiated boy,"
could not participate in some official traditional ceremonies and could not dance with or
court any of the girls ( Blood on Our Land28).
Much of the conflict of Ngũgĩ's The River Between stems from the colonial missionaries'
attempts to ban female circumcision. As far as male circumcision is concerned, the
greatest threat, at least among the Masai, seems to be the preference among the educated
boys for having the operation performed in a hospital, a striking evidence of the influence
of the West. In To Become a Man, Leshao's simple statement that he is considering such
an act almost causes a rift between him and his elders. The older members of the clan
view the hospital, even more than the school, as evidence of the danger to their way of
life:
Elders are not usually alarmed by anything. But his news undid them.
"Surely it is a new danger. When we first sent our sons to school, we thought they
would get lost and we would never see them again. The white men were unable to
lure them away. They are still Maasai. But this new threat is dangerous. We have
all heard that it is not mere talk. Pushuka's son has been circumcised in that
 place. He has never come home again...."
"Not only has he not come home," another old man put in. "I understand he no
longer wants to speak our language. He puts on long white robes and a red cap!"
"So the plague is spreading?" ( Kulet, To Become a Man66)
Even when lamenting the incursion of the Europeans, the African characters in these
stories express themselves in traditional modes. Proverbs abound, for in all the areas
depicted, the general feeling is that "the witty made frequent use of proverbs" (Ngubiah
131). From the Gikuyu we hear, for example, that "a lamb takes after its mother" ( Ngũgĩ,
Weep Not54) and
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"the wood which is in the drying platform above the fire laughs at the one in the fire"
(Ngubiah 185); the Masai warn, however, " 'the pots alternate on the fire'; He who has
today might not have tomorrow" ( Kulet, To Become a Man10); Barnabas Katigula,
writing of Tanzania, cautions, "A single hand does not slaughter a cow. You need other
people" ( Groping in the Dark29). Under neocolonialism, however, the people's wisdom
is shown to have become perverted for selfish ends. One of Ngũgĩ's white-worshiping
thieves in Devil on the Cross confesses, "I have two mistresses, for you know the saying
that he who keeps something in reserve never goes hungry, and when an European gets
old, he likes to eat veal" ( 99 ).
As condensations of wisdom, aphorisms can be seen as "stories" in small. They reflect
the didacticism of much orature and indicate the accepted teaching-learning relationship
among members of the community. East African novels also present numerous examples
of lengthier tales that, through their content and the dynamics of their performance,
demonstrate this educative interaction.
Emphasized by the novelists are the emotional and psychological benefits of instructing
and being instructed. Both the teller and the listener feel closer to each other and to the
community as a whole through the experience. The act of retelling the traditional myths
and listening to them, instructing others in legendary knowledge or clan wisdom and
partaking of this instruction, is shown to be itself a ritual of unity.
In Ngũgĩ's Weep Not, Child, Nganga, an elder, is praised because he "could tell a story.
This was considered a good thing for a man" ( 23 ). Ngotho, too, the hero's father, while
generally austere—"The children could not joke in their father's presence" ( 26 )—draws
his children close to him as he recounts the well-known legend of Gikuyu and Mumbi.
Other legends and myths Waiyaki and his brothers hear are those of Demi na Mathathi,
two generations of Gikuyu giants who communed with the ancestors and cut down the
forests to prepare the land for cultivation ( 10 ). "Storytelling was a common
entertainment in their family" ( 250 ). "And when there was no moonlight at night it was
the time for story telling" in Mwambungu's Veneer of Love:
All the stories would have been handed down to us by parents, relatives and
friends. One of the reasons for visiting your uncles, aunts, cousins and a host of
 other relatives was to ensure that when it came to story telling you had enriched
your knowledge of them after having listened to their stories. A person who knew
how to tell nice and new stories was greatly admired. We would sit round a fire
with our parents or relatives in the evening and take turns to tell stories while
waiting for supper to be ready. (36)
Mwambungu reveals that in his society one was allowed to tell only new stories; clever
orators, who could modify a familiar story into something novel, were thus greatly
valued.
Clearly, such tales are not intended for enjoyment alone. In addition to
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strengthening the children's sense of identity and teaching tribal history, many of them
inculcate virtues considered essential for survival: "The tribal stories told Waiyaki by his
mother had strengthened [his] belief in the virtue of toil and perseverance" ( Ngũgĩ,
River55). Abdulla, the unlikely hero of Ngũgĩ's Petals of Blood, reveals his growing
sense of harmony with others and his developing self-esteem by becoming the teller of
customary animal stories:
Abdulla expecially seemed to have gained new strength and new life. His
transformation from a sour-faced cripple with endless curses at Joseph to
somebody who laughed and told stories, a process which had started with his first
contact with Wanja, was now complete. People seemed to accept him to their
hearts. This could be seen in the children. They surrounded him and he told them
stories. ( 116 -17)
Based upon a traditional Gikuyu poetic form, the song of the gĩkaandĩ player, Ngũgĩ's
Devil on the Cross combines mythic and realistic elements throughout. The Devil appears
one Sunday on a golf course in the town of Ilmorog in Iciciri District to tempt Ngũgĩ's
heroine, Jacinta Warĩĩnga. By the end of Jacinta's story, with her striking Gikuyu dress,
her traditional songs, and, most importantly, her killing of the Rich Old Man from
Ngorika, representative of neocolonial vice, Jacinta assumes the characteristics of a tribal
saviour. Ngũgĩ uses the tradition of myth, legend, and storytelling to recall the need for
heroism to combat dangers to the people.
Mbise's Blood on Our Land demonstrates the educative function of storytelling and the
loving relationship between the performer/teacher and his audience/students. Kilutaluta
begins his lessons for children and adults after evening meals:
All the children of all the neighbouring houses came for evening talks. At times
the initiated came for talks with Kilutaluta. But these talks were hardly
comprehensible to the little ones because the conversation started with proverbs
and was highly metaphorical. This conversation started after the children's normal
classes with the old man. The grown-ups came just before the children left for
their beds. (5)
Kilutaluta often started his teachings by teasing the kids; especially so when he
 had noticed any of the children sitting carelessly. All the same the children
enjoyed Kilutaluta's teasing enormously:
"You remember, my sons, last time I posed a question before you. Just before I
tell you a story I would like to know whether you still remember the question, and
of course, the answer. Yes Tareto, what was the question?" Tareto coughed a little
and answered.
"The question was why we should always sit around you at this time ..."
"Or around any other elder, don't forget," he reminded them.
"Or around any other elder," they all repeated smiling.
"And what was the answer?"
"Duty. Our real duty," a gallant chorus answered him.
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"And it should always remain." He blessed them.
Kilutaluta introduced a new topic. ( 19 )
Charity Waciuma's children's book Mweru, the Ostrich Girl ( 1966) is in its entirety a
legend, containing a richness of proverbs, riddles, and stories of ogres, giants, sorcerers,
and personified animals and birds. Contemporary East Africans' desire for a positive
children's literature to counter the westernizing effect of neocolonial culture has led to the
publication of quite a number of children's books. Waciuma has also produced The
Golden Feather ( 1966), Merry-Making ( 1972), and Who's Calling ( 1973).
Understandably, women writers have been in the forefront in answering this need, but
Ngugi, too, has written Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus and Njamba Nene's Pistol,
translated from the Gikuyu by Wangui wa Goro, and other male writers have also been
active in this field. 7
A much more ambivalent attitude than their universal honoring of storytelling is
expressed in these writers' presentations of the image and role of the medicine man or
witch doctor. Frequently the depiction takes the form of a conflict between Western and
traditional medicine. In Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi, for example, a delegation of
native doctors comes to the narrator's father, a Western-type doctor, to ask that he stop
saying his medicine is better than theirs ( 26 ). Grace Ogot's Professor in The Other
Woman also butts heads with such tradition when he plans to perform a heart transplant
operation at the medical school at the University of Nairobi. Not only are the common
people suspicious of the transplant procedure itself, but the family of the donor will not
touch his body until an artificial heart is sewn into it, for burying "the body without its
vital organs is viewed as mutilating the body, as sorcery . . . an abominable act" ( 237 ).
The full implications of nontraditional acts like heart transplants are reflected upon by
Professor Miyare's wife:
Her husband ... had cheated the ancestors by giving the donor's heart a new life
 and by subverting its journey to the land of the dead. Alice Musa would have a
dead man's heart ticking away in her bosom, and her own heart would be buried
untraditionally at nightfall away from the glaring eyes of the sun, because this was
a sacrilegeous act. And the spirit would hover in the oblivion till Alice Musa's
body returns to dust to dwell at the bowels of the earth waiting for the days of
resurrection. Would the professor's father consult a medicine man to cleanse his
son from such an unheard of act which bordered on witchcraft? (239-40)
Indeed, although Miyare believes he is doing God's work by saving lives through science,
and the heart-transplant team "felt very close to God during the tedious and delicate
operation" ( 225 ), his acceptance of Western secularism is made clear when, as he
prepares for his second heart transplant, on his laboratory wall hang three wooden
placards, proclaiming: "GOD AND MAN, SCIENCE IS GOD and GOD IS DEAD" (
246 ). The title story of Eneriko Seruma 's The Heart Seller
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Seruma's The Heart Seller concerns a contemporary ne'er-do-well, an educated African
who offers his heart eagerly to anyone who would pay him a million dollars and allow
him ten years in which to spend it; the religious implications of such an act never arise.
Jane Bakaluba's heroine, Naiga, reflects a similar, practical attitude toward native
doctors. She admits they perform a useful service to society, but what she finds
unforgivable are the high fees they charge, and the sometimes humiliating, sometimes
impossible acts they demand that their patients perform for a successful treatment (
Honeymoon for Three47).
Many of the writers, however, go into a great deal of interesting detail about conventions
of dealing with native doctors or present them favorably as not only trustworthy but also
representative of the old life shattered by colonialism. "Customarily a witchdoctor should
always be passed on the left hand side for it is on his right that he carries the sacred
objects of his craft" reports Waciuma ( Daughter of Mumbi30). Her narrator's father,
despite his own disbelief, successfully employs a native doctor against thieves who steal
his maize, knowing that they are believers. Such faith is passing with time, however, as
Waithaka, the renowned medicine man in Samuel Kagiri's Leave Us Alone ( 1975),
laments:
Everybody in the land knows that I, and my ancestors before me, have had the
power to heal the sick, foresee what is to come, and shield our people from
catastrophe.... On innumerable occasions we have saved our people from
suffering by averting famine, floods, epidemics, and disasters in war.... From now
on ... things will not be the same. You, my children, will never in your life hear
the voices that I have spoken. You will not see the sights I have seen. (54)
He expresses this change as a retreat of the gods from human affairs:
The things that have been will cease to be. For the High God and the Spirits of our
Ancestors will no longer speak. They will no longer understand the language in
which I have spoken to them. They will no longer meddle in the affairs of men.
 They have withdrawn and gone far, far away from the Holy Mountain. They will
never return. ( 55 )
While both Meja Mwangi ( Kill Me Quick128-29) and Hazel Mugot ( Black Night of
Quiloa54-55) also deal briefly with this topic, the most extensive portrait is that of the old
medicine man in Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool ( 1975), whose lyrical language is
intended to remind his young apprentice of the traditional wisdom of living close to
nature and accepting whatever personal fortune the gods send. By the end of his tale,
however, he realizes that he can no longer communicate with the villagers, who have
become westernized, and so can no longer heal them: "To you the mystery is dead. / The
dew on the leaves is just water to feed the plant" ( 87 ). A similar realization occasions a
nostalgic idealization of traditional life in the opening pages of Samuel Kagiri's Leave Us
Alone ( 1975).
The most negative aspect of traditional culture with which East African
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fiction writers deal is the issue of tribalism. Despite his nostalgic memory of past days,
Samuel Kagiri's narrator recalls, "I had seen strangers being badly treated back home
during the days of my boyhood. The people of Kagaita, for all the kindness which they
showed to each other and to people from the immediate surroundings of the Ridge, did
not like strangers" (720). Reflecting on the precolonial battles over cattle, Waciuma
recalls, "There used to be fighting always between Masai and Kikuyu and sometimes
with the Kamba" ( Daughter of Mumbi923). These battles, occasioned by cattle raiding,
determine much of the narrative of Kulet's To Become a Man and Lydiah Nguya's The
First Seed ( 1975). The extremely violent and complex story the grandmother in Bernard
Chahilu's The Herdsman's Daughter ( 1974) tells the young girls gathered in her hut
begins with a clan murder ( 178 -90), and even Austin Bukenya's satiric look at
undergraduate life at the University of Dar es Salaam, The People's Bachelor ( 1972),
mentions tribalism continuing among students there.

The Inalienable Land

Even as tribalism is condemned in these works, the communities' commitment to
maintaining their homelands is shown to be one of East Africa's most important forces
for cultural cohesiveness. The powerful concept of a community existing throughout
history in one secure geographic locale is emphasized, particularly in works written about
Kenya; the Tanzanian concern is to show the value of the concept of community that
traditional life on the land fostered. Before colonialism most of the Kenyan population
lived in dispersed rural settlements; villages and towns existed only along the coast. Land
was held in traditional, communal ownership.
The homeland of the Gikuyu, the area to be taken over as the "White Highlands," was
precisely such a fertile mountain area, and it provided the indigenous people with both
physical sustenance and emotional and spiritual security. In his books, Ngũgĩ returns
again and again to his people's myths and legends linking them to the land. The legend of
God, Murungu, giving the first man and woman, Gikuyu and Mumbi, ownership of the
land for their descendants for all eternity is presented in both Weep Not, Child and The
River Between.
In the latter novel, Waiyaki is led by his father to the Sacred Grove, where Gikuyu and
Mumbi were brought after their creation on Kerinyaga, "the mountain of He-who-shines-
in-holiness" ( 17 ). Chege blesses their journey in the traditional way, by spitting on his
breast, and instructs his son along the route in the medicinal properties of certain barks
and herbs. When they reach the Sacred Grove, he tells Waiyaki:
"All this is our land." ...
"He stood them on that mountain. He showed them all the land."
... His father's voice had a magic spell.
-75-
"From that mountain he brought them here"
"... it was before Agu; in the beginning of things. Murungu brought the man and
woman here and again showed them the whole vastness of the land. He gave the
country to them and their children and the children of the children, tene na tene,
world without end. Do you see?" ( 17 -18)
The integral link between the land and the people's physical and religious well-being is
stated explicitly: "These ancient hills and ridges were the heart and soul of the land. They
kept the tribes' magic and rituals pure and intact. Their people rejoiced together, giving
one another the blood and warmth of their laughter" ( 3 ). In Petals of Blood Ngugi
acknowledges the responsibility of defending this valuable possession: "Gird your loins
and always remember everything good and beautiful comes from the soil" ( 89 ).
The significance of the land is expressed less mystically in the novels about Tanzania.
Their focus is on the mutual use of the land and the people's acceptance of responsibility
for it as indicative of the precolonial value of communality. Mbise's portrait of the rural
community of Engare Nanyuki, it is true, evokes a precolonial paradise:
Engare Nanyuki looked across Waato river and the green plains rose gradually to
the Meru mountain.... Along each side of the river were the Meru people who had
inherited their land from Lamireny, their great ancestor. Houses, like harmony
and love, were scattered all over the green plains.... The plains were rich with
crops: maize, beans, wheat and millet. There was no hunger. ( Blood on Our
Land2)
A principal reason for this harmony and love, Mbise suggests, is the communal attitude
of the Meru people. People, cattle, and herds of other animals wander over the plains with
no concern for boundaries marking private property: "Land was a common property
inherited from a common ancestor for a common people under a common chief and rule.
Every individual was obliged to utilise it for a common basic purpose" ( 2 ). He speaks of
the role even children played during the sowing season, keeping birds and domestic
poultry out of the fields. Mwambungu, too, writing about the Wanyakyusa of Tanzania,
shows the custom of individual farmers seeking assistance from their neighbors to
cultivate a large area of land. The number of helpers depends on the number of pots of
Kimpumu, a local beer, and the amount of food the farmer's wife can prepare (
Veneer32). In a similar setting, Barnabas Katigula , in Groping in the Dark ( 1974), gives
a picture of a communal boar hunt to rid the village of the animals that had become a
serious menace to their crops: "This was to be a joint activity for the entire village, a
collective duty, and nobody except women, children and very old men, could stay away
without getting into serious trouble" ( 17 ).
Largely because of this sense of an inviolate space and an immutable way of life among
these people, the coming of the colonizers is pictured as tantamount to the end of the
world. Nothing, for instance, in the Gikuyu's
-76-
legends or beliefs prepared them for the devastation of being exiled from their lands. On
the contrary, the legends reinforced the idea of the continuation of the traditional way of
life on the traditional homelands:
"The white man cannot speak the language of the hills."
"And knows not the ways of the land." ...
"Who from the outside can make his way into the hills?" ( Ngũgĩ, River8)
Despite the Africans' confidence in the land's promise of eternal security, the colonizers
penetrated deep into East Africa, appropriating the land and uprooting the traditions as
they went, until, after listening again to his father tell the legend of Gikuyu and Mumbi,
"Njoroge could not help exclaiming, 'Where did the land go?"' ( Ngũgĩ, Weep Not28).
While Ngũgĩ, both in his essays and in novels such as Petals of Blood and Devil on the
Cross, strives to answer Njoroge's question with a political analysis of imperialism, most
of the other East African fiction writers concentrate more on trying to convey the
postcolonial experience itself. The fragmentation, rootlessness, and ultimate sense of
despair in independent East Africa is the subject of scores of these novels.
Mwangi's Kill Me Quick, for example, is a powerful, naturalistic look at the fate of the
relatively privileged school leavers, unable to find work in Nairobi, cut off from their
expectant relatives in their villages, and destined only for a life of crime and violence.
His other two novels set in an urban environment, Going down River Road and The
Cockroach Dance, examine the same sense of the exploitation of ordinary people in
independent Kenya; the latter ends with a sense of hope in political action. Also hopeful
at the end is Kenneth Watene's Sunset on the Manyatta, which follows a young Masai
from the schooling that is to alienate him emotionally from his people, through his
hopeless search for employment in the city, to Germany, where he undergoes both
training in engineering and immersion in various kinds of racism, and home again with
his newfound sense of identity and determination to work for the real liberation of his
country. The plight of an individual caught between the traditional and modern worlds is
also presented in J. N. Mwaura's study of a Gikuyu father-son conflict, Sky Is the Limit (
1974); Grace Ogot's depiction of a female M.P. torn between family and political
responsibility, The Graduate; the Ugandan novelist Bahadur Tejani's examination of
interracial love in a racist society, Day after Tomorrow ( 1971); Alfred M. M'Imanyara 's
Agony on a Hide ( 1973), with its picture of urban violence; and the conflict between
urban and rural life in Lydiah Nguya's The First Seed.

Women's Writing
Another important subject, fiction by and about East African women, must be mentioned
briefly, although the subject of women's writing commands a separate chapter in this
volume. It is indicative of the resolve created by the
-77-
African Writers Conference at Makerere University in 1962, noted earlier, that the first
novel published by the East African Publishing House was a study of traditional-modern
conflict, The Promised Land ( 1966) by Grace Ogot . The Promised Land was the first
imaginative work in English by a Luo writer, and its author the first female novelist in
East Africa (Knight 893). Her novel The Graduate offers several studies of contemporary
African women, and her collections of short pieces, Land without Thunder ( 1968) and
The Other Woman ( 1976), contain stories like "The Old White Witch," reflective of her
own experiences as a nurse, and the shocking "Pay Day" and "The Middle Door,"
concerning dangers to women in urban environments. Barbara Kimenye, as mentioned
previously, produced the first book
length pieces of Ugandan fiction in English with her
1965 and 1966 tales of Kimenye village. Subsequent East African female fiction writers
include Hazel Mugot, whose lyrical Black Night of Quiloa ( 1971) tells of a painful
Black/white love relationship; Miriam Khamadi Were, with her disparaging look at
polygamy in The Eighth Wife ( 1972) and revelations of the conservative rejection of
female education in Your Heart Is My Altar ( 1980); Jane Jagers Bakaluba from Uganda,
who contrasts traditional and westernized women in Honeymoon for Three ( 1975);
Majorie Oludhe Macgoye, whose Coming to Birth ( 1986) is a sensitive examination of
marriage in a political pressure cooker; and Rebeka Njau, whose Ripples in the Pool
presents one of the most bizarre images of a modern woman in all of these books. Worthy
of mention, too, are several novels by East African male writers concerned with issues of
polygamy, traditional versus modern notions of the role of women, and the positive and
negative aspects of bride price: Samuel Kagiri's Leave Us Alone, Bernard P. Chahilu's
The Herdsman's Daughter, Barnabas Katigula 's Groping in the Dark, Samuel Kahiga's
The Girl from Abroad ( 1974), and Mwangi Ruheni's The Minister's Daughter ( 1975).

Conclusion
"East African writing in English ... began in 1964 or so with Ngũgĩ's Weep Not, Child"
(Lindfors 150), asserted Chris Wanjala in 1976, testifying to the great influence of his
colleague at the University of Nairobi on the shape of creative literature in English in the
region. It seems appropriate, then, to end this brief survey with some observations on
what the movement of Ngũgĩ's career might signify for creative writing in East Africa. As
indicated by earlier mention of his spearheading the Africanization of the Literature
Department at the university and of the school syllabi in Kenya, Ngũgĩ's sense of his own
African identity and commitment to espousing anticolonialism and antineocolonialism
developed early and has grown steadily in his public utterances, his critical writing, and
his creative work. Well-known by now is the story of his detention for almost a year in
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison after the opening of the play Ngaahika ndeenda (
1977; I Will Marry When I Want
-78-
Marry When I Want), written with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩrĩ and the villagers of Limuru, and
produced at the community-built Kamiriitihu Education and Cultural Center, later razed
to the ground by the Kenyan government (see Ngũgĩ, Detained). It is ironic that, while
earlier English-language works by Ngũgĩ— The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Petals of
Blood, for instance—have caused controversy and grumbling among those who
considered themselves and their class criticized in them, it was when Ngugi turned away
from English to Gikuyu to reach his own people, and away from a Western‐ oriented
conception of writing and publishing to traditional, communal involvement in the
production of art, that the might of official wrath attempted to silence him.
Dismissed without stated charges from his university position, the writer has been living
in exile. Ngũgĩ himself translated Ngaahika ndeenda into English, as well as the novel he
wrote in prison, Caithani mutharaba-ini ( Devil on the Cross). He has indicated,
however, that these translations and the collection of essays Barrel of a Pen ( 1983) will
be the last of his writings in English. His musical Maitu njugira ( Mother Sing for Me),
about colonial Kenya, was suppressed by the Kenyan government, and a 1987 political
novel, Matigari, written in Gikuyu and subsequently translated into English ( 1987), was
banned in Kenya. In effect, then, Ngũgĩ has been silenced in his own country as surely as
those artists who fled political oppression in Uganda.
Okot p'Bitek's comment in 1976 seems eerily prophetic of this situation: "Writers in East
Africa are becoming timid because they know the hawk is flying overhead. They know
there is detention and imprisonment awaiting us, and I think this is discouraging people
from commenting on certain political matters that are going on in all East African
countries. There is self‐ imposed censorship because people are afraid to speak out,
although occasionally, in their lighthearted way, they do manage to say something"
(Lindfors 144). Significantly, the most committed writing in the region at present is not in
English at all, but is originating in Tanzania in Swahili.

Notes
I. According to Bakari and Mazrui, Professor Malinowski, already an established
anthropologist and a celebrity in his field when Kenyatta made his acquaintance, was an
advocate of functionalism (see Malinowski). "Put simply, functionalism was interested in
establishing the systematic uniqueness of each culture by emphasizing the specific functions
of its institutions and focusing on the differences between cultures rather than their
similarities. The functionalist approach to anthropology demanded that the researcher
learn the language of the community he was studying as a key towards a full understanding
of the social dynamics of the society and its customs.... Kenyatta as a native speaker of
 Kikuyu fascinated Malinowski as a describer of a society which he understood and was
qualified to give seminars on" (Bakari and Mazrui 870).

-79-
2. While the countries of Somalia, Djibuti, and Ethiopia are commonly considered regions of
East Africa as well, this essay covers only the three former British colonies of Uganda,
Kenya, and Tanzania (Tanganyika/ Zanzibar).

3. According to The Encyclopedia of Third World Countries, Tanzania "is the least
homogeneous nation in the world with 7% homogeneity (on an ascending scale in which
North and South Korea ranked I35th with 100% homogeneity). Africans, who form 99% of
the population, are divided into over 130 groups, each with its own physical and social
characteristics and languages" ( 1904).

4. In his study of Tanzanian writing, Steven Arnold mentions several novels written by
expatriates, "fully inspired by participatory residence in Tanzania: The People's Bachelor (
1972) by Austin Bukenya from Uganda; Bamanga ( 1974) and Leopard in a Cage ( 1976)
by Bediako Asare from Ghana. Two Kenyans might also be included: Grace Ogot's The
Promised Land ( 1966) is set in Tanganyika, and Henry R. ole Kulet has published Is It
Possible and To Become a Man ( 1972), two tales about the Masai who are as Tanzanian as
they are Kenyan" (958).

5. The emotional title story in Grace Ogot's The Island of Tears ( 1980) presents the reaction
of the Luo people in Mboya's home district on the day of his funeral.

6. These youths are akin to those in Seruma's The Heart Seller, who adopt flashy Western
dress and spend their hard-earned shillings on comics and movies, especially Westerns
with heroes like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, whom they consciously imitate.

7. Other East African books for children and adolescent readers include Miriam Were , The
Boy in Between ( 1970) and The High School Gent ( 1972); Asenath Odaga, Jande's
Ambition ( 1966), The Secret of Monkey Rock ( 1966), The Hare's Blanket ( 1967), The
Diamond Ring ( 1967), Sweets and Sugar Cane ( 1969), and The Villager's Son ( 1971);
Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye, Growing Up at Lina School ( 1971); Pamela Kola, East African
How? Stories ( 1966), East African Why? Stories ( 1966), and East African When? Stories (
1968); John Nagenda, Mukasa ( 1973); and Mwangi Ruheni, In Search of Their Parents
(n.d.).
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Bakaluba, Jane Jagers. Honeymoon for Three. Nairobi: East African Publishing House,
1975.
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Bodker, Cecil. The Leopard. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1972.
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1974.
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Gicheru, Mwangi. The Ivory Merchant. Nairobi: Spear Books, 1976.
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Kagiri, Samuel. Leave Us Alone. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1975.
Kahama, C. George, T. L. Maliyamkono, and Stuart Wells. The Challenge for Tanzania's
Economy. London: Heinemann, 1986.
Kahiga, Samuel. Flight to Juba. Nairobi: Longman, 1979.
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3 English-Language Fiction
from South Africa
JOHN F. POVEY
The history of South African literature contains several strands, beginning with the
English and Afrikaans settler traditions, which should be recognized for their influence
on more recent work. Alongside those strands, an extensive and significant African
literature, originally oral, has developed as well, including works both in several of the
indigenous languages and, more recently, in an English aimed at the growing educated
urban readership.

The Early Works

The earliest South African written literature was connected with British colonization and
is comparable with similar literature that emerged from other so-called Old Dominions.
As in Canada and Australia, nineteenth
century British immigrants to South Africa,
beginning with the 1820 settlers, began to force an identifiable and original voice in
response to their new environment. At first they merely appended a description of the
newly encountered topography to their residual but deep-seated British cultural
inheritance. Later, decades of geographic separation necessitated the expression of a local
viewpoint, from which emerged a recognizable national ethos and attendant literature.
In South Africa, Dutch settlements predated British colonization by more than one and a
half centuries. While fervently retaining their individuality as a separate people, these
Afrikaaners failed to develop even a minor literature, partly because of their migrant
lifestyle and more certainly because of their religious beliefs, which proclaimed the Bible
as virtually the sole acceptable reading matter. Only in the last forty years has there been
Afrikaans writing vigorous and independent enough to achieve international
consequence.
Publication in South African languages—especially Sotho and Zulu—is unexpectedly
extensive, for elsewhere on the continent, where oral forms predominate, printing (other
than biblical translation) generally began with the adoption of a European language. One
innovative novel in Sotho,
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Thomas Mofolo's Chaka ( 1925), has received justifiable critical acclaim as a historical
tragedy. Unlike most of these African-language books, Chaka transcends the restrictions
imposed by the missionary-controlled presses, whose authors, to be published, needed to
adopt the requisite moral and educational tone.
Literature in African languages is treated in depth elsewhere in this volume (chapters 10
and 12). The emphasis of this chapter is on English
language writing from South Africa
of the last forty years. To see this writing in perspective, it is necessary first to have some
awareness of the historical British tradition, which provides antecedents and influences
all contemporary writing in South Africa, even that recently produced by Africans.
The first British South African work of major caliber was Olive Schreiner 's Story of an
African Farm ( 1883). In her introduction to a recent paperback reprint, Doris Lessing
describes how central this work was to the awakening of her own national cultural
awareness. The novel powerfully conveys the awesome violence that the South African
veld inflicts on its white farmers. Ironically, it ignores African inhabitants, seeming to
find them merely one aspect of the landscape. This attitude allows Schreiner to make
South Africa itself the central aspect of her tale. Her descriptions are visibly those of the
resident, not the immigrant, and a good deal of subsequent writing—the work of Pauline
Smith, for example—draws on her perceptions.

A New Uniqueness
At this early stage, there was little difference between the emerging patterns of South
African writing and Australian writing, but already by the 1920s the uniqueness of the
South African situation was becoming evident. Writers began to reflect on the central
problem that continues to suffuse all subsequent writing: the issue of race. Sarah Gertrude
Millin's popular God's Step Children ( 1924) was original for addressing the problem of
the "colored" people of the country, if in a somewhat sentimental and patronizing tone. A
more sophisticated and penetrating early statement was made in William Plomer 's
Turbott Wolfe ( 1925), which was found to be most prescient and relevant when it was
republished in 1965. Plomer's merciless condemnation of white arrogance, his sympathy
for Africans, and his understanding depiction of miscegenation caused an outcry, and
Plomer became one of the first writers driven to exile by antagonistic racist public
reaction.
In spite of such relatively early criticism of the racial situation, it was not until after
World War II, fought with an idealism that found colonialism intolerable, that South
Africa, resistant to the winds of change, became recognized as a reactionary bastion of
racism and was universally condemned by world opinion. The book that best expressed
this new mood of moral concern was the impassioned novel by Alan Paton, Cry, the
Beloved Country ( 1948). Perhaps nowadays one may find its tone too sentimental, its
compas
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sion too paternalistic, its solution too naively optimistic. Many also find Paton's sonorous
biblical style excessively rhetorical, particularly when it seeks to emulate in English the
cadences of Zulu speech. It is interesting to learn Mbulelo Mzamane's opinion of a
version translated into Zulu by Cyril Sibusiso Nyembezi: it "exceeds the original since it
doesn't have to strain for an appropriate register for African characters, something that
makes the dialogue in the English version so stilted" ( Mzamane, Mzalax).
Paton himself has written elsewhere with more penetrating urgency. The far harsher Too
Late the Phalerope ( 1953) avoids the earlier novel's condescension of tone and excess of
style. But the theme of Cry, the Beloved Country remains worthy. One should not too
casually dismiss Paton's plea for Christian understanding and compassion, nor scorn the
earnest sympathy in which he delineates the quandary of the liberal conscience affronted
by his society. Only more recent events have made it seem a less than adequate response.
The influence achieved by its fame has made it not a negligible book. It may prove, like
Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that exerts a profound impact out of all proportion to its
historical accuracy or its literary quality, a novel, for all its visible limitations, capable
of moving a mass audience to active concern. Even now it may be the only South African
work known to other than a specialized readership.
That Paton's optimistic mood of idealized racial reconciliation was not solely confined to
white writers is proved by the plot of Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy ( 1946), the first
"nonwhite" novel to reach an international audience. Though written from the other side
of the color bar, it takes a similar philosophical stance in suggesting that racial problems
are as much moral as political issues, and that personal goodwill can heal a divided
society. The plot has become familiar and has been characterized by Nadine Gordimer as
the "countryman-comes-to-town" story ( Black Interpreters29). Xuma, an innocent and
honorable African, comes to Johannesburg to work in the mines. Though honest and
hardworking to the point of nobility, he experiences the hardships that the system
imposes on those who live in the segregated slums. He also encounters decent and
dedicated people of all races who challenge the regime by refusing to follow racist codes
of behavior. The conclusion, where the white miner abandons his own group to support
the Black strikers, may seem too much like Paton's expectations, optimistic and
sentimental, but at the time it had some legitimate plausibility.
The change of attitude that the years of continuing oppression have caused can be seen in
the contrast in a later Abrahams book, written while in exile, entitled A Night of Their
Own ( 1965). It is little more than a crude adventure story interrupted with political
harangues. Its plot replaces the solution to racism through Christian tolerance with more
belligerent events—for example, a mysterious submarine landing an armed guerrilla on
the coast—that bring sabotage to the country. Abrahams's implicit assertion provides that
violence, not tolerance, is now the inevitable means of change.
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Paton's attitudes are carried forward in the novels of other white writers who share the
historical inheritance but retain little of his sublime optimism. Dan Jacobson and Jack
Cope exhibit an increasing pessimism and anxiety as the long dream of justice and
understanding proves an inadequate response to the racial intolerance and the penal
political circumstance they see about them. Their several novels present different
situations, but they all dwell upon the impossibility of achieving any personal or political
equality given the mode of life they are forced to live. Their despair generates a cynicism
that undermines even potential means to achieve their long-sought ends.
Jacobson's Evidence of Love ( 1960) describes a London group, dedicated as the Free
African Society, that can achieve nothing, being a base for incompetent white fatuity and
Black manipulations. Its members are "free thinking Jews and devout Anglicans in the
usual admixture among the whites, and earnest students and untrustworthy politicians in
the usual admixture among the blacks" (Jacobsen 172). The novel tells of a colored man
and a white woman who find that they can discover a nonracial humanity in exile but feel
morally obligated to return to South Africa and to inevitable persecution and jail. They
come back "because we are South Africans." That is a stigma of birth that exile cannot
cure. Their return is a useless but heroic gesture
making, better than absence; it is
"evidence of love" for country as much as each other. Their solution is pointless and
romantic and yet tragically profound.
The title of Jack Cope's The Dawn Came Twice ( 1969) is ironic, because in this novel no
illumination comes, unless death be considered an enlightenment. In its place is constant
moral conflict, of a young white man torn between his inbred sense of moderation and the
obligation to become a terrorist to advance the cause in which he believes, and of the
woman who tries to abandon her rich and privileged upbringing to join the freedom
struggle. They desire to find a basis for personal tenderness, yet they pursue violence.
That may be a necessity, but it destroys the decency and hope that are their declared ends
in a country "where there is no place for justice or love or hope," not ultimately for those
who may wish to serve those ends. The final dismissal of these two white ideals is made
in this exchange:
"Well, I want people to accept freedom. I want them to accept good as a motive in
life."
"That sounds fine but it's all shit." (Cope 70)

Contrasting Attitudes
WHITE VOICES
The problem for the South African novel, if the conclusion of Cope's novel is accepted as
reasonable, is that the moral qualities that mark human experience elsewhere are in this
country rendered worthless and impossible and
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therefore can sustain neither the society nor its literature. A violent pessimism rules, one
that justifies a writing based on anger and revolt. Since the 1960s, when the expression of
a liberal optimistic sensibility became blighted by political extremism, the development
of white and Black writing demonstrably diverged. The discrepancy is not simply one of
different beliefs. Honorably enough, there is no South African equivalent of those Soviet
authors who gained reputation and rewards for reverently following the party line. No
defenders of this regime exist outside of parliament, no national bard sings to commend
apartheid.
All South African writers of consequence and conscience condemn the absurd and
malevolent policies under which they live. But recognizable variations mark their
attitudes and approaches. The white writers' indignation and shame derives from an
intellectual rather than a visceral assessment. They have to recognize that their privileged
existence plays its part in the maintenance of apartheid, and they cannot abdicate the
elitist status their skin color awards. Not only are Black persons more closely tied to the
suffering and brutality of daily events, but they remain permanently committed by their
race, whereas white support of political activism can be withdrawn at will. No matter
how dedicated to social reform honest, concerned whites may be, they remain to some
degree outsiders in the struggle, whether they present a sympathetic or antagonistic face
toward the essential reformation.
Authorial expectations and assumptions, consequent upon this inevitable distinction, are
clearly observed in the contrasting tones and styles of writers of the different races. White
writers, determined to scarify an intolerable regime, brilliantly employ a range of subtle
devices that allow them to explore with fearsome sarcasm the metaphysical absurdity of
the system and the inconceivable crimes it generates. Black writers speak more directly,
preferring to oblique reference an exact and pungent description of the atrocities that
make up the daily circumstances of their lives. This distinction is more than technical,
since it touches on a very arguable issue in conveying reality: what is the function of
artistic construct and what is the appropriate formal stance of a writer in times of political
oppression? Blacks sometimes express scorn at formal technique, dismissing skillful
devices as artificial, even frivolous in a situation that to them requires only vehement
condemnation. White writers consider that literary technique in itself is part of the means
by which they forge their moral stance and guide readers to a deeper comprehension of
the situation.
Undoubtedly, the finest white South African writer is Nadine Gordimer, whose brilliant
short stories and powerful novels surgically expose the bizarre attitudes and behavior that
become manners of survival in so repugnant a system. With exquisite penetration she
exposes the raw vulgarity of racial prejudice. With even more acute wit she strips away
the pretensions and posturings that mark the self-satisfied liberals, finding them more
self

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deluding than self-aware. She perceives their assertions of sympathetic comprehension
acting only as a mask, which often slips to expose the unconsidered racism of their
instinctive and inherited responses.
In her earlier works, no matter how incisively she writes, there appears to be almost an
element of satire. This may not be entirely a literary contrivance. Local behavior, merely
scrupulously observed and accurately reported, often seems to merit the accusation of
being as much ludicrous as wicked. But as South African conditions became more bleak
she jettisoned this characteristic tone, and her later novels, The Conservationist ( 1974),
Burgher's Daughter ( 1979), and July's People ( 1981), have taken on a far darker
texture, as if confronting the imminence of Armageddon. In July's People a wealthy
Johannesburg family, living in the immediate future, fears the increasingly reactionary
urban violence. They seek safety in the village of their longtime servant, July. Here they
are shocked to encounter the daily privations that have been July's lifelong norm.
Gradually they fall under the dominance of the African way of life. The ending brings the
landing of an unidentified helicopter. One does not learn whether it brings conquering
guerillas to round up white escapees or victorious government troops to reinstate white
authority. Such is the emotional power of the book that neither ending brings comfort nor
the resolution of the moral conflict propounded. The family has lost any sense of the
legitimacy of their elitist status, but the future can provide no encouraging alternative,
whichever way the temporary military and political impasse is resolved.
Recently, J. M. Coetzee, a writer of extraordinary and disturbing power, has extended
Gordimer's increasingly apocalyptic vision into the presentation of a surreal nightmare of
violence. Waiting for the Barbarians ( 1980) has received the most attention. It has a
disturbing mixture of tone, in which atrocious cruelties are described with horrendous
realism and then carried beyond realism into hallucinatory dreams akin to madness. The
novel, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, makes clear that the boundless horrors inflicted
derive not from Africa but from the vile recesses of the human heart, justified by debased
principles. As Nadine Gordimer correctly observes, Coetzee writes "with an imagination
that soars like a lark and sees from up there like an eagle" (" Idea" 3). She could also be
describing the effect of her own masterly works.
The stylistic switch from intolerable reality into symbolic statement constitutes one of the
means by which whites seek to engineer some literary mode that will prove capable of
expressing the moral horrors among which they live. They require this more complex
intellectual and psychological interpretation to comprehend their world and achieve
some measure of sanity. African writers assume that the very description of the realities
that they regularly encounter provides the kind of moral judgment that whites reach after
much more convoluted analysis.
By about 1970, the increasing degeneration of the political situation finally
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brought forth condemnation from several Afrikaaner writers who for the first time
exhibited an urgent, liberal conscience not commonly associated with their kind. To the
dismay of the bigoted orthodox Afrikaaner, condemnation of the regime began to be
heard, not from the hated British, whose national loyalties had always been suspect, but
from renegades who employed the revered Afrikaans language previously used only to
sanctify religious identity and racial purity. The all-powerful censorship board was
appalled to discover the disturbing necessity of banning works written in Afrikaans, an
unthinkable extension of the harsh authority they had so widely exerted to render
English-language literature free of dangerous taint.
The most influential and provocative Afrikaan writers banded together to form the
"sixties" or "sestiger" group. It included André Brink, Etienne Leroux , Jan Rabie, and
Breyten Breytenbach, whose Confessions of an Albino Terrorist ( 1985) describes his
own imprisonment under the Terrorist Act. André Brink is the member of this group who
has achieved the greatest international recognition, partly because he translates his own
work into English, a language that appeals to other than a parochial local readership. In
his judgment, the cruelty of the present system does not derive from recent legislation but
has its origins in the broader context of Afrikaaner nationalism and its assertion of the
eternal and irresistible superiority of the "volk."
Refusing to take shelter behind Paton's generalized compassion or Gordimer's protective
irony, Brink insists in his indicatively titled Looking on Darkness ( 1974) that "nothing in
this novel has been invented." For his plots he draws on past history rather than present
experience, but that history becomes a kind of metaphor for the more immediate disaster.
His unforgiving and apparently true story describes a crescendo of white savagery
culminating in a shameless execution. Brink recognizes that savagery as his own
inheritance. His theme condemns his people through a truthful reexamination of the
history that had been propagated to justify their destiny.

BLACK VOICES
Parallel to these developments in white writing grew a vigorous Black writing that
expressed the African perception of events and inevitably gave challenge to the regime
under which they were forced to live. An early influential work was Ezekiel Mphahlele's
Down Second Avenue ( 1959). Like much African writing—for example, Peter
Abrahams's Tell Freedom ( 1954), Bloke Modisane 's Blame Me on History ( 1963), and
Alfred Hutchison's Road to Ghana ( 1960)— Mphahlele's book is autobiographical. It
draws on the young boy's experience as he was brought up by a kindly aunt in the Black
section of Pretoria. Despite hardships and oppression, the book displays a tolerant and
affectionate tone, recognizing that even in the harshest conditions for children there are
always times of happiness, and that to deny this is political posturing. It is this
evenhanded tone that gives Mphahlele's writing a strength and honesty that escapes those
who vehemently stress only the
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intolerable elements of experience. His is the writing of a humanist rather than a
polemicist.
Mphahlele began his writing career as a journalist for the legendary Drum. The magazine
continues to exist, but is now a slick commercial production, far from the bright,
inventive periodical initially aimed at a new audience: the Black urban population.
Socially committed and yet lively and popular, Drum boasted columnists who can be
considered primarily responsible for the development of a new South African writing:
Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Todd Matshikaza, Nat Nkasa, Bloke Modisane. They
exploited the new market with investigative journalism and descriptions of life seen from
the African point of view.
A Drum "Hall of Fame" included in the anthology Reconstruction, edited by Mothobi
Mutloatse, reprints some of the more renowned articles, among them, Henry Nxumalo's
"The Story of Bethel," a shocking exposé of the exploitation of prison labor on the farms,
and Can Themba's "Dinokana: The Target," which describes the women's revolt against
carrying the abhorred passbooks. Todd Matshikaza's lively description is recalled in his
"We Invented 'Majuba' Jazz." These are typical examples of the material that sustained
this widely read magazine, topical, cheerful, familiar, but closely identifying with the
concerns of a growing literate proletariat. A characteristic example, blending wry humor
and bitter anger, comes from the professional hand of Mphahlele, writing an editorial
column under the pseudonym of Bandi Mvovo. He describes one of those situations
incomprehensible to the outsider and yet commonplace in South Africa, where prejudice
leads inevitably to the most absurd contrivances. A white lady is explaining to her tea-
time guest that she cannot allow her servant to use her toilet because "natives are so
dirty." When the maid brings in the tea, the guest questions the convolutions of the racial
situation: "If she is so filthy that she can't use your toilet—how do you drink her tea? I
don't think I'll wait for it, thank you" ( Mutloatse, Reconstruction179).

The Short Story

THE FIRST GENERATION OF WRITERS
Perhaps it is because of the importance of Drum's influence that a review of the last thirty
years of Black South African writing shows clearly that the most popular genre is the
short story. Some argue that this preference derives from the pressure of external threats,
which prevented people from committing themselves to elongated composition. That
theory does little justice to other writers who in far worse circumstances have created
extended master
pieces. Rather, the short story fits the present intention of Black South
African writing. Its anecdotal form allows authors to draw directly from their ex
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periences and present the social environment to a wider world. It also bridges the gap
between true autobiography and quasifictional events. Mbulelo Mzamane, with deliberate
overmodesty, suggests that in his case "the short story is a genre most suited to my
prosaic mind, without making the kinds of demands (in terms of self-discipline,
concentration and sustained effort) which the novel form makes on the writer" (
Mzalaviii). More important than this objection to the hardship of expansion is the
recognition that reality and art blend most readily in the short story, which—consider
even the tales of Somerset Maugham—always contains an element of reportage and
factual incident. In a reversal of the usual authorial denials, Mzamane prefaces his
collection with the determination "to make it categorically clear, that all the 'characters' in
these stories are actually based on people I know . . . I claim absolutely nothing for
myself" ( Mzalaxii).
Ezekiel Mphahlele in the mid- 1950s developed a natural and personal style that
combined the immediacy of Drum with the formal literary style found in international
short stories. With this technical combination he wrote a series of stories that explored
the subjects and form that were later to become common, and anticipated the many
vigorous writers who were later to draw on his initial efforts.
Mphahlele's characters carry out a day-to-day existence in the midst of violence, both
mental and physical, and in spite of strife and various forms of official persecution. When
employed as servants, his people are forced to interact not only with snobbish racists but
also with vigorously involved activists, whites like the title character in "Mrs. Plum,"
who "loved dogs and Africans and said that everyone must follow the law even if it hurt"
( The Unbroken Song216). Her affectation of tolerance does not survive the rumor that
Africans may murder her vicious dogs, nor the discovery that her daughter wishes to
marry one of the Africans she so generously and nobly invited to the house. She asks her
servant, "Tell me, Karabo, what do you people think of this kind of thing between a white
woman and a black man? It cannot be right is it?" Believing that "what I think about it is
my business," the maid's mental response is pragmatic rather than political. "I said to
myself, I say these white women, why do not they love their own men and leave us to
love ours!" ( 236 -37).
In spite of racial strains, a strange intimacy develops. After the servant is dismissed, Mrs.
Plum feels compelled to drive to her village and beg her to return, even accepting her
insistent demands for higher wages and longer holidays. Clearly the relationship has
become not that of mistress and servant, nor even that of racial equals, but a kind of
inescapable and intense symbiosis. This intimate connection suggests a significant and
often-ignored element in the complex interrelationships that dominate the South African
situation. The inevitability of the mutuality makes for circumstances very different from
the white-Black divisions of Kenya, where a transient elite
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profit from a period of residence while reserving their most specific allegiance for
elsewhere. Most whites and Blacks in South Africa recognize the unavoidable
continuance of close association.
The Johannesburg scene seemed to dominate publications until Richard Rive, himself a
distinguished writer, edited a timely and important anthology of short stories, Quartet (
1963), which presented to a wide audience four new Cape Town writers: Rive himself,
James Matthews, Alex La Guma, and Alf Wannenburgh. Rive's own much-anthologized
contribution includes "The Bench," which describes a weary African's refusal to move off
a "whites only" seat when commanded by railway officials. By his skill Rive takes a
common enough, even minor, incident and extends its consequences beyond reportage
into political evidence.
James Matthews draws his stories directly from experience, often to the degree that they
become virtual anecdote or journalism. But they exert a powerful effect for just that
reason. They have a precise sense of context and a striking immediacy in their record of
the hard days when the misery of poverty spills out into active grievance. His most
famous tale, " The Park," also provides the title of his collected stories. Denied access to
amenities provided for white children, the young protagonist gazes wrathfully through the
railings that both actually and metaphorically enforce the racial separation. His
resentment explodes into a cosmic anger caused by his deprivation, directed not at the
whites who cause his misery but at the environment it forces on him. "Rage boiled up
inside him. Rage against the house with streaked walls and smashed panes, filled by too
many people; against the overflowing garbage pails outside the doors, the alleys and
streets; and against a law he could not understand ..." (Matthews 206). Only at the end is
causation hinted at, and even then it seems unbelievable that the consequences should be
so grim. The boy's rage exposes his impotence and he bursts into tears, only to suffer the
unsympathetic jeers of his friends who prefer a small victory over him to sharing his
bitter alienation. "Cry baby!" they shout, and in self-defense the boy is forced to deny his
entirely legitimate reaction. "Who say I cry? Something in my eye and I rub it." In this
way matters of conscience remain private, their public admission impossible.
In " The Party" Matthews satirizes the pretenses of white liberals by describing an
attempt to socialize between races. The party is hosted so that white intellectuals can
meet Black artists and implicitly patronize them in both senses of the word. The gesture
allows them a warm glow of generosity as evidence of their particular sympathy and
understanding. Matthews views the event more harshly, condemning both the hostess and
Ron, the African intermediary, for putting Africans' talents "on display like virgins to be
sold to those like her and Ron was their pimp" (Matthews 128). When the protagonist
mischievously pretends he neither writes nor sculpts but works as an office messenger, he
is immediately denounced and evicted. Who would want to waste the gesture of goodwill
on an untalented common
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worker? By such satires Matthews describes the impossibility of links across the race
barrier under present circumstances. The two different worlds cannot impinge on any
level of equality.
" The Party" is one of the rare stories that cross the color line. Nadine Gordimer has also
attempted this double vision. Many hold the opinion that an author's own color
determines the accuracy of character portrayal, claiming that both sides tend to be less
accurate, less aware when they depict the other race. This shortcoming would be
understandable in so divided a society, though the imagination of great writers can
compound all worlds. It is indicative that within Matthews's story a white admirer,
intending to expose only her respectful admiration on encountering the African author, is
made to remark, "I always thought that those stories were not written by white writers.
They were too authentic, too close to the subject ... you know what I mean" (Matthews
182).
There is a general truth in her observation: used as a means of characterizing the foolish
speaker, at the same time, taken in itself, it makes a critical statement concerning African
short story writing and the broader issue of the relationship between literary quality and
authenticity. It is not necessarily unqualified praise to observe that as artists some
Africans do get "too close to their subject." Equally, it is hard to see how, given their
present lives, detachment can be seen as a practical alternative for South African writers.
Like Matthews, La Guma draws on his experience in the "colored" section of Cape
Town, the legendary District Six. But he is sometimes more skillful than Matthews in
deriving profounder moral judgments from the events he describes. His plots demonstrate
his instinctive recognition of an acute danger that confronts the African writer. When
good and evil are so clearly ranged within the society, it is easy to make characters
equally extreme, to make suffering Africans represent all the virtues and whites
unmitigated evil. There are understandable personal reasons for such an attitude, but it
does not allow the subtle examination of the complexities that motivate human actions,
which is central to major literature.
La Guma impressively avoids such a simplistic dichotomy in his novella A Walk in the
Night ( 1962). This work describes the brutal circumstances of slum living: the arrogance
of the bosses, the sadism of corrupt policemen, and the dehumanizing quality of poverty-
induced despair. Yet La Guma makes his plot prove a far deeper and in some ways a
more painful truth than the obvious injustice of oppression: that the human capacity for
violence when stirred by misery can take directions that serve no purpose or reveal only
iconoclastic ferocity.
La Guma's protagonist, Michael Adonis, commits a murder, not to assert any heroic
cause of racial justice, but in a moment of uncalculated drunken resentment. His anger
explodes, not against the cruel police, but against someone who, if technically white, is in
every way more broken and impoverished by the system than Michael is. As his victim
protests when
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attacked for the elitist rank of his color, "Here I am in shit street and does my white
help?" As if this irony were not sufficient, in La Guma's conclusion the police shoot and
arrest for Adonis's crime a completely innocent character, who in turn seems not the least
surprised by such injustice, having suffered during his entire youth equivalent cruelties
from his own father.
The tone of such a conclusion, where not a hint of poetic justice is represented or
expected, does not permit any easy political attitudinizing about the system, yet obviously
La Guma is urgently aware of the underlying causes. His condemnation is the more
profound because it exposes the ideology of a system that prevents all normal standards
of morality from operating. La Guma's sequence of harsh and ultimately irrational
injustices is no more absurd and improbable than those continuing, persistent injustices
that are the very substance of his society. La Guma says nothing more than that in a
depraved world mad things happen.

THE SECOND GENERATION OF WRITERS

With their individual skills, the first generation of Black short story writers established
accepted models, which accelerated the development of a contemporary Black South
African literature. Newer writers such as Mbulelo Mzamane had the historical advantage
of being able to draw on the works of those pioneers. Mzamane realized that censorship
robbed him of access to several proscribed authors, but the early works of R. R. R.
Dhlomo and Ezekiel Mphahlele were available to build upon. Similarly, La Guma, Rive,
and Matthews "all captured my imagination in a way no other group of writers had done
before . . . the literature that had the greatest impact on me stylistically and theatrically,
was what I read in Classic" ( Mzamane, Mzalaix).
Classic (inaugurated in 1963) was a vital transitional publication, which is still existent in
a much modified form. More self-consciously literary than Drum, it provided an early
and vital outlet for the publication of contemporary writing by South Africans of all
races—a desirable policy of integration rarely maintained subsequently on either side of
the color bar. By making African writers adapt to the expectations of more formal
publication and by imposing literary standards more openly, Classic directed individual
experiments into channels that were to become more clearly part of the overall
development of a significant modern South African literature.
Typical of this next generation of short story writers is Mothobi Mutloatse. In Mama
Ndiyalila: Stories ( 1982) he makes the familiar denunciation of racist restrictions, but
more original is his protagonist observer, Mada Yeke, a schoolgirl who witnesses and
rejects her father's habitual and docile acceptance of the existing regime. His assumption
that one can best seek survival within the limited opportunities that regime permits
provokes the girl into outright criticism that would be unforgivable in the traditional
family. As a representative of a more aware and educated generation, she condemns as
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delusion her parents' belief that if only they display surface cooperation their lives will be
made easy and they will achieve some acceptable measure of success. Her words presage
the motivation of the present township violence and give evidence of the generational
change and heightened expectations that occasion it. Rhetorically she proclaims her
dissatisfaction: "How long have we appealed to them to do their duty as parents and make
their voices known? It would seem as if our parents are refusing to defend the right of
their own flesh and blood" ( Mutloatse, Mama12). Her vigorous spirit soon moves other
young people to join her vehement attack. They have none of the fears of their parents.
As Mada Yeke wryly remarks, "Havenotians are not easily intimidated."
Mzamane's story collection Mzala ( 1983) is a remarkable example of the adoption of a
tradition. He takes the familiar theme of the country boy coming to Jo'burg and extends it
into a very up-to-date mode. There is none of the earlier naïveté and admiring innocence
in his story " Jim." Mzal'u Jola from his first arrival in the city becomes a slick operator,
adapting his wits to the agreeable process of hoodwinking all the people he encounters.
He is a jaunty, amoral creature living happily by his own measures of achievement,
which go considerably beyond any satisfaction with drab survival. Such a bold,
extravagant character, displayed at the same time as both amusing and dangerous, is a
development of authorial sophistication within the context of the common township
environment. The author's tone is satiric, balancing dismay and admiration at such
provocative posturing.
A curiosity of Mzamane's writing is his contrast between a highly realistic setting and an
occasional use of very formalized language. Not for him the regular use of township
argot that marks the dialogue embraced by many similar writers as an evidence of
realistic legitimacy. He describes a lecherous relative as follows: "Devouring like some
omnivorous beast, ready to cohabit with any woman who crosses his path, his behavior
has been as unjust to his victims as it has been degrading to my family" ( Mzamane,
Mzala14).
Yet Mzamane's striking and perceptive tales, simultaneously bitter and comic, fix the
experience of the Black urban areas. " The Soweto Bride" is a sarcastic description of an
African bringing home his conceited Black American wife, who is appalled by local
custom. The story is a masterpiece of accurate reportage and deliberate irony. "To me the
'back to Africa call' would always remain a black American myth" ( Mzamane,
Mzala141). In what seems little more than a casual aside, Mzamane tosses the
relationship between Africans and African Americans a deadly dismissive shaft.
Njabulo Ndebele's collection Fools ( 1983), the winner of a Noma Award for Publishing
in Africa, introduces a new element into the continuing development of the short story
form. Like earlier authors, Ndebele draws upon the township experience, but because the
writer has returned to South Africa with a master's degree from Cambridge and an
American doctorate, he inevitably sees things somewhat more dispassionately and with a
more
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literary control of circumstances. He deals with another stratum of township society: not
the deprived unemployed, but those to be judged as successful, the upwardly mobile
bourgeoisie. His characters are eagerly seeking more than survival; they strive for visible
achievement within a system that allows a modest advantage to those who neither
challenge the restricted opportunities it provides nor fret at the human inhibitions it
imposes.
Ndebele's stories tell of the evolving Black middle class, whose acquired, secondhand
values contrast with the vigorous defiance of the streets. In " The Music of the Violin,"
parents who have a daughter "started in ballet recently" and wish their son, Vukani, to
learn to play Mozart on the violin, have less in common with the average Black than with
whites inspired by similar expectations. For their cultural dedication Vukani suffers
constant mockery from the street gangs, but his desperate appeals for release from his
musical obligation achieves nothing. At one level he is assaulted with the common
parental argument that what is, is. "A violin you have and a violin you will play"
(Ndebele 141). At another level their determination exposes the clearest evidence of their
profound conviction that it is only by those values certified by white arts, by ballet
dancing and violin playing, that their social distinction will be made credible.
It consequently follows that only by repudiating indigenous values and Black attitudes
will the family be able to free itself from their inherent sense that it is degrading to be
associated with vulgar urban workers. Success is measured by a changed allegiance, by
developing lifestyles that seem superior to the slum existence of neighbors. Their attitude,
which relates achievement to snobbery, is common enough in many parts of the world.
The difference in South Africa is that it requires a double rejection, one impossible, the
other regrettable, of pigmentation and of tradition.
A bitter irony is suggested by the author but entirely unrecognized by the father, who
asserts, "How difficult it is to bring a child up in Soweto" (Ndebele 150). So far there
would be a total agreement, but he continues, "To give him a culture. African people just
turn away from advancement." Many questionable layers of conviction are expressed in
those lines. Why do Africans have to be "given" a culture when they have inherited a
distinguished one? African advancement is not measured in the expectation of political
change, since to some degree the parents benefit from the existing discrimination.
Advancement is to be measured only against the yardstick of white expectation and white
cultural values.
The platitudes advanced by the father are not so different from the unctuous phrases of
government spokesmen. The father attacks a teacher who is not sufficiently uplifting the
Black nation because "that fellow was just not teaching gardening and that is dead against
government policy" (Ndebele 127). He complains about the racist system only when his
own search for white values is challenged. He grieves against the "Boers," not so much
because they apply oppressive legislation, but because they unsympatheti
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cally deny him his opportunity to escape from the blackness that both parties feel is a
measure of inferiority. Boers tell Blacks that "Western civilization is spoiling us and so
we have to cultivate the indigenous way of life" (Ndebele 143). The family fights such a
threat, advertising their commitment to Western civilization by violin lessons and more
openly by extravagant purchases of china. The mother gloats, "How many households in
the whole of Johannesburg, white and black, can boast of such a set?" (Ndebele 145). It is
a practice too depressing to be laughable.
Again and again Ndebele's title— Fools—echoes in the mind as his characters expose
their self-delusion and their folly. There is the school principal who solemnly and without
sarcasm after the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, a primary architect of apartheid,
gives "an inspired eulogy" for "a man whose strength of mind and character stood before
the world as a shining example of leadership" (Ndebele 126). Then there is the absurd
reaction of an interviewer who proclaims, "Ordinary people have no problems. They
don't make a nuisance of themselves ... but you have to display your education" (Ndebele
270). Such an attitude is breathtaking in its ability to turn facts on their heads. The
equation that education makes Blacks a nuisance is profoundly believed by the
reactionaries in this society, not all of whom are white. Such blindness in the face of
racism is extraordinary, but this principal has his eyes opened in a way that might be
anticipated: he is given an unprovoked beating by a Boer thug. Only then, with the
lacerations on his body, does he recognize the truth that he is confronting a people
"whose sole gift to the world has been the perfection of hate . . . they will forever destroy,
consuming us and themselves in a great fire" (Ndebele 276). It is a likely but despairing
conclusion.

The Novel
Overall, the quality of Black South African novels has been less consistent, although
there have been several impressive individual examples. An important early work,
Richard Rive's Emergency ( 1964), takes as its factual basis the happenings that followed
the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960 and the state of emergency declared by the
government in an attempt to control subsequent unrest. By showing the effect of events
on a series of fictional characters, Rive develops a structure that was to be commonly
followed: an imaginative recreation of a historical situation. It is an extended example of
the technique of the short story writers and exposes again the South African necessity to
come to grips with actual experience within the context of creating fiction.
Understandably, jail is a common experience, since it is likely that the most sensitive and
articulate people will attract the immediate attention of the government. An early
example was La Guma's haunting and claustrophobic novel The Stone Country ( 1967).
Moses Dlamanini has published "reminiscences" of a maximum-security prison, Robben
Island, Hell-Hole( 1983
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"reminiscences" of a maximum-security prison, Robben Island, Hell-Hole (1983). D. M.
Zwelonke's Robben Island ( 1973) painfully exposes the atrocities of this prison, where
criminals and political activists serve together. This body of work has counterparts in a
regrettably similar vein from several countries. The experience of the political prison is
so familiar that its description has almost become a twentieth-century genre in itself.
Wole Soyinka's denunciation in The Man Died ( 1972) of the indignities he suffered in a
Nigerian jail is a powerful example from elsewhere in Africa, and one remembers that
part of his indignation derives from his resentment that his incarceration was not
happening in South Africa, where it should reasonably be expected, but in his own
independent Nigeria.
Zwelonke's novel raises, in a most acute form, the problem for the South African writer
of how to turn realistic narrative into art. Reality is so desperate that it may seem
diminished by the fabrication of fiction. Zwelonke insists, "I had decided to bar my
mouth from telling the story of the place. But I am going to write about it." He then
argues the complexity of discriminating between factual truth and artistic truth. "For
various reasons I have written it as a work of fiction. Fiction, but projecting a hard and
bitter truth; fiction mirroring nonfiction, true incidents and episodes. The characters are
all fictional, including in a sense myself" (Zwelonke 3). The last wry dismissal exposes
the problem for the author/activist.
Zwelonke's assertion that he will attempt some aesthetic distancing through fictionalizing
his subject has additionally to be set against the clear recognition that the events in the
life of his fictional hero, Bekimpi, most precisely parallel the tragedy of Steve Biko's
actual jail torture and murder. For that reason, it is not so much the construction of the
novel that carries the deepest conviction as the undoubted realism of its incidents. The
information Zwelonke records seems quite probable. Prisoners become aware of a fiery
anti-South African speech in the United Nations only when they are immediately and
additionally abused. Equally convincing, because it replicates Nazi history, is the
observation that wardens tolerate crooks in a relatively friendly manner—they were
familiar game. They hated and feared political prisoners because they perceived them as
threatening to the entire social and prison system, and therefore to the self-confidence of
the guards, by constituting "a new subject: self-disciplined, cool, not begging, not
crouching, not expecting favours but always complaining his rights within the
regulations" (Zwelonke 68).
In the brutal ending, Bekimpi is hanged upside down until he suffocates. The novel
expresses an eternal verity of human nature when the regular army colonel, trained to
some standards of martial gallantry, condemns the Special Branch inspector, saying,
"This is your work." But he takes no action. Such Pontius Pilate evasions have a long
history. Horror at excesses of brutality do not produce justice in South Africa any more
than they have elsewhere. In
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this case, the power of color allegiance overrides a more general sense of human decency.
Two important novels have been written, indicatively, by distinguished poets: Sipho
Sepamla's A Ride on the Whirlwind ( 1983) and Mongane Serote 's To Every Birth Its
Blood ( 1981). Sepamla's title sounds prescient, given subsequent South African events.
His plot is a kind of political thriller, with the protagonist, Mzi, returning from
revolutionary training abroad to advance the violent revolution. The novel emphasizes
two major confrontations of political philosophy. Suspicion rather than collaboration
arises between two generations of activists: the younger, represented by Mzi and
Mandela, and the established resistance group, which finds these upstart student
revolutionaries and their motives dubious, when their experience has been so limited. The
second touches on the antagonism toward those Blacks who serve the white regime. Mzi
is commanded to assassinate a Black policeman who has collaborated too enthusiastically
with the regime and thus is seen as a "legalized terrorist."
After the successful bombing of the police station, the authorities angrily respond with all
their power. As the Security Police colonel observes, "The death of Sergeant Ntloko is to
be regretted, gentlemen ... but we must all appreciate the damage done to the police
station" (Sepamla 51). When one of the group is finally arrested, he is tortured not by the
white police but by Batata, an African, who like all efficient torturers enjoys his role.
Gleefully and absurdly he shouts amid the blows, "I am practising for power." With
cynicism the guard supports him with the challenge: "Batata is a black man, he's just
showed you what is meant by black power" ( 181 ).
This incident provides the new recognition that the color divisions accepted by earlier
authors, that Blacks are good and whites are bad, are too simple to be applied with
conviction. That admission goes far to explain the violence in the South African
townships in the 1980s and 1990s, which seems directed less against whites than against
Africans who sustain the regime by accepting positions of personal authority within the
structure and who enjoy the power it permits them. Later historical developments, as so
often, are anticipated by a writer's imaginative formulation.
Serote begins his novel, as most must, with his experience of ghetto township life: a
world of "tins, broken bottles, bricks, dirty water running freely on the street ... a dead cat
or dog lying somewhere in the donga." It is a world where police "came on horseback, in
fast cars, in huge trucks, and shot for real; they came in Saracens and with machine guns"
(Serote 30). It is a world where Blacks battle police authority and whites yearn for exile
because, by departure, "[t]hey would leave behind them all the bloody problems.
Servants, nasty neighbors. Guilt of being white. Shit, the lot" ( 200 ).
Both sides, differently motivated, whether sympathetic or antagonist, confront the
appalling recognition that violence is inescapable: "There was
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no way any other thing could be done with the present way of life, with this South Africa,
with the South African way of life; there was nothing else that could be done to save it"
(Serote 232). With an impassioned rhetoric approaching poetry, Serote mounts his
indictment: "The country had gone mad. By 'country' I mean the government and those
who protected it, those who lubricated it with money, wealth, oppression, violence and
their lives. They had no choice but to go mad. We had no choice but to stop the madness,
to achieve this" ( 344 ). The novel's conclusion juxtaposes the new headlines of " Daring
Terror Attack" against a pregnant woman about to give birth who is commanded by her
attendant to "push push push." These words, echoing in the hero's mind as he walks
away, become a suggestive metaphor. In the last lines of the book the author has moved
from toleration into challenging action. "Push push push" will painfully bring to birth the
new society. The agony of parturition will be the same for a race as for a single mother.

To Sing or to Rage?
Straddling the corpus of writing from the early days of Drum to the present and
emphasizing its continuity is Ezekiel Mphahlele, now choosing to write as Es'kia
Mphahlele. He has become the senior spokesman of South African literature. His
collection The Unbroken Song ( 1981) brings together the majority of his stories, most of
them first printed in important but ephemeral publications. His title comes from a
suggestive quotation from Vinoba Bhave: "Though action rages without, the heart can be
tuned to produce unbroken music." This expression seems to apply at several levels to the
consistent humanism of Mphahlele's own work: to the continuity of African literary self-
expression and, more philosophically, to the vital question of the relationship between
external event and creativity, which provides such a consistent division in the approach of
the contemporary writer in South Africa.
It is Mphahlele who has best and most consistently attempted to explore the difficulties
that this dilemma presents. Literature continues, as he beautifully expresses it, when "our
players refuse to hang up their harps, because they daren't forget this lovely bleeding
land, lest their tongues cleave to the roof of the mouth" ( Mphahlele, The Unbroken
Songviii). His idealism causes him to deplore above all the separation that racism
imposes: "We keep on talking across the wall, singing our different songs, beating our
different drums." Mphahlele, better than other writers and critics, perceives and
articulates this dilemma, trying to balance the vicious input of experience against the
means of its literary expression. He recognizes that the unbalanced impetus that the South
African experience brings to local writing can be dynamic but can equally be destructive.
He reports a dialogue that
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occurred some years ago as friends tried to dissuade him from the immediate necessity of
exile:
You've got all the material you want here, and the spur is always there. That's the
trouble: it's a paralyzing spur; you must keep moving, writing at white heat
everything full of vitriol hardly a moment to think of human beings as human
beings and not as victims of political circumstance.... I'm sick of protest creative
writing and our South African situation has become a terrible cliché as literary
material. ( Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue199)
This dichotomy between the political and the aesthetic has dictated an attitude to South
African authors, though few openly admit it for fear they might be deemed insufficiently
committed to the cause of liberation. But for the true writer the dilemma is a real one. It
affects all the writing produced under existing circumstances. Every creative writer
believes in the necessity to devote his or her creativity to an examination of race relations
in the country. This direction leads to propaganda rather than literature, but the necessity
to continue to proclaim the injustice of apartheid and to demand a remedy must
preoccupy a writer, though it need not in itself preclude a deeper and more general human
statement.
South Africa is unique. As Nadine Gordimer observes in a tone almost of puzzlement, "It
is an extraordinarily interesting society you never come to an end of discovering its
strangeness. There's never a point where all that can be said has been said." There is a
professional dispassion about this comment. The immediate fate of African writing is
more likely to follow the outline suggested by D. M. Zwelonke in the introductory
statement to Robben Island. It affirms the motivating belief of the Black South African
writer, for in its lines the literary figure and the political activist have finally merged:
My concept of fighting is not limited only to action on the battlefield. Fighting
means making no surrender to irrationality, not abdicating from one's convictions
even when chained to a tree at the point of a gun. (Zwelonke 2)
If all South African writers refuse to "surrender to irrationality," they will not only
produce a significant literature but also make a vital contribution to the resolution of the
divisions within their unhappy land.

Bibliography
Brink, André, and J. M. Coetzee, eds. A Land Apart: A South African Reader. London:
Faber, 1986.
Brown, Godfrey N. Apartheid: A Teacher's Guide. Paris: UNESCO, 1981.
Cope, Jack. The Dawn Came Twice. London: Heinemann, 1977.
Daymond, J. M., J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta, eds. Momentum on Recent South
African Writing. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1984.
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Gordimer, Nadine. The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing. Johannesburg:
SPRO-CAS/RAVAN, 1973.
—. " The Idea of Gardening." New York Review of Books, 2 February 1984, pp. 3, 6.
Gray, Stephen. Southern African Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1979.
Heywood, Christopher. Aspects of South African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1976.
Jacobson, Dan. Evidence of Love. London: Weindenfeld & Nicholson, 1960.
Kunene, Daniel P. "Ideas under Arrest." Research in African Literatures 12, no. 4 (
1988): 421-39.
La Alex Guma, ed. Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by
South Africans. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Lapping, Brian. Apartheid: A History. London: Grafton, 1986.
Lonsdale, John. South Africa in Question? Cambridge: African Studies Centre,
University of Cambridge; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1988.
Matthews, James. The Park and Other Stories. Athlone, South Africa: BLAC, 1974.
Motsoko, Pheko. Apartheid: The Story of a Dispossessed People. London: Marram
Books, 1984.
Mphahlele, Es'kia [Ezekiel]. Down Second Avenue. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
—. The Unbroken Song. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981.
—. Voices in the Whirlwind. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972.
Mutloatse, Mothobi. Mama Ndiyalila. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982.
—, ed. Reconstruction: 90 Years of Black Historical Literature. Johannesburg: Ravan,
1981.
Mzamane, Mbulelo. Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Short Stories.
Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1986.
—. Mzala. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980.
Ndebele, Njabulo. Fools and Other Stories. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983.
Ndlovu, Duma, ed. Woza Africa: An Anthology of South African Plays. New York:
George Braziller, 1986.
Nkosi, Lewis. Tasks and Masks. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981.
Omer-Cooper, J. D. A History of South Africa. London: Heinemann, 1987.
Parker, Kenneth. The South African Novel: Essays in Criticism and Society. London:
Macmillan, 1978.
Sepamla, Sipho Sidney. A Ride on the Whirlwind. Johannesburg: Ad. Danker, 1981.
Serote, Mongane. To Every Birth Its Blood. London: Heinemann, 1981.
Shava, Piniel Viriri. A People's Voice: Black South African Writing in the Twentieth
Century. London: Zed, 1989.
Wauthier, Claude. The Language and Thought of Modern Africa. New York: Praeger,
1964.
Writers from South Africa: Fourteen Writers On Culture, Politics, and Literary Theory
and Activity in South Africa Today. TriQuarterly Series on Criticism and Culture 2.
Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 1989.
Zwelonke, D. M. Robben Island. London: Heinemann, 1973.
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4 English-Language Poetry
THOMAS KNIPP
The composition and publication of Anglophone poetry in Black Africa has a long but
disjointed history. In one form or another, poetry has been and is being written in English
in all areas of the continent and has been composed for well over one hundred years.
Because of these factors of time and space, it is useful to think of this poetry as having
several interrelated regional "histories" and to consider its development in terms of
generations. South African poetry, however, has developed under such different
circumstances as to require its own unique historical approach, taken up in the last
section of this essay.

The Pioneers
In the nineteenth century anglophone poetry was composed in places as widely separated
as Sierra Leone and the Cape Colony. Most of this verse was religious. Hymns, hymn
adaptations, and verse expressions of religious sentiment and moral instruction were
encouraged by Christian missions and published by small mission presses and in
ephemeral mission journals. Much of this material has been lost. What survives reveals
an unsophisticated piety expressed in a prosody modeled on that of the Protestant
hymnals. As the twentieth century progressed, these religious verses were augmented by
expressions of racial pride and assertions of continental destiny. The piety, the pride, and
the prosody are all illustrated in the following quatrain by a Ghanaian resident of Sierra
Leone, Gladys Casely-Hayford ( 1904-50):
Rejoice and shout with laughter
Throw all your burdens down
If God has been so gracious
As to make you black or brown.
(Nwoga 6)
Gladys May Casely-Hayford, daughter of Joseph E. Casely-Hayford, is one of a number
of heterogeneous West African poets of the 1940s and early 1950s who have been called
the "pioneer poets." They bring to a culmina
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tion the racial and religious themes of the earlier poetry and are a last expression of
Protestant and Edwardian prosody. Because of the increase of both mission- and
government-sponsored schools in the middle third of the twentieth century and increased
access to university and professional training and the consequent formation of fairly
extensive "elites," the generation of late pioneer poets is fairly numerous. Prominent in its
numbers along with Casely-Hayford are Michael Dei-Anang of Ghana, Dennis Osadebay
of Nigeria, Crispin George of Sierra Leone, and Roland Dempster of Liberia. Perhaps the
most significant of them is the Ghanaian R. E. G. Armattoe.
Armattoe ( 1913-53) is more of a transitional figure than the other pioneers, closer in
spirit to the ironists of the succeeding generation. In his two collections Between the
Forest and the Sea ( 1950) and Deep Down in the Black Man's Mind ( 1954) he deals
with the two dominant themes of modern Anglophone poetry: the meaning and uses of
the African past and the nature and meaning of the modern African's life and experience.
Often he does this in unworkable stanzas and rime schemes, but sometimes he is effective
in simple unrhymed lines.
I am not sure of anything here
No known values hold, nothing certain
Save uncertainty, nothing expected
Save the unexpected.
(Dathorne 155-56)
He takes the great themes of anglophone African poetry farther than any of his
contemporaries, but he stops well short of his successors.
In African Literature in the Twentieth Century ( 1974), O. R. Dathorne said of the pioneer
poets, "Their influence cannot be disregarded" ( 172 ). This is really not the case. They
have proved to be not pioneers at all but rather the last inheritors of a dying tradition. The
important poets of the following generations have learned not from them but from
encounters—at Ibadan, Legon, and elsewhere—with the major English and American
poets of the Euromodernist tradition and from their determined return to the forms and
figures of African oral poetry.

West Africa
The break—the important alteration in tone and technique—between the poetry of the
pioneers and that of the "moderns" who follow them coincides with a generational shift.
Most of the pioneers were born between 1910 and 1920 and published their work in the
I940s and early I950s. With the exception of Gabriel Okara, the poets of the first modern
generation were born between 1926 and 1936. The major poets of this generation are
Lenrie Peters of The Gambia, Kwesi Brew and Kofi Awoonor of Ghana, and Gabriel
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Okara, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark Bekederemo, and Christopher Okigbo of
Nigeria. Of course, significant poetry was written by other members of this generation,
including Ayitey Komey and Frank Kobina Parkes of Ghana and Michael Echeruo,
Chinua Achebe, and Emmanuel Obiechina of Nigeria.Sharing a particular moment in
time, these poets share similar educational and political experiences as well. Educated in
developing African institutions such as the University of Ibadan and the University of
Ghana, they encountered the Anglo-American expression of the Euromodernist poetic
tradition. They read Hopkins and Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Their early poetry, which
began to appear in the late 1950s, is often imitative of those masters. The presence of
Eliot is strongly felt in Okigbo's earliest lines, and some of Pepper Clark's early poems
are inscapes in sprung rhythm in the manner of Hopkins. But one thing they learned from
the Euromodernists is the efficacy, indeed, the primacy, of the individual voice. These
poets learned, they did not imitate. As a result they developed individual, highly
distinctive voices and styles. They arrived at their individuality through complex
processes: by selecting and adapting Euromodernist techniques, by developing unique
personae as responses to their experiences as men and as Africans, by interacting with—
coming to terms with—Negritude, and above all, by working their way back to their own
indigenous oral poetry.However distinctive their voices, tropes, and techniques, they are
nevertheless united thematically. They all write about the same things, the same two
great, deep themes: the meaning of African history and the significance of their own
experiences as modern Africans. These themes can best be explained as two intersecting
myths. The first is a paradigm of African history, and the second might be called the
psychological myth of the cyclical journey.The historical paradigm is the conjugation of
a long historical process consisting originally of five "tenses":
i. A rich traditional past that is both pastoral and romantic and is made up of both villages and
empires
2. A ruthless European conquest against heroic resistance
3. A period of oppression and exploitation in which Black character was purified through
suffering
4. A determined struggle for liberation culminating in triumphant independence
5. A returning glory to independent Africa.
This vision of the African past is, in effect, a kind of countermyth, a repudiation of the
European myth of the dark continent to which Europeans were bringers of light. It
provides African poets with a tropology and with a
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set of moral assumptions on the basis of which African experience can be interpreted.
The psychological myth casts the experience of the westernized African into the pattern
of a cyclical journey. Born into the tradition of hearth and village, the African is pulled
away in the disorienting world of the West. Through schools and universities and often
extended periods of time spent in Western countries, he is transformed into a modern
African. But in the process he finds himself rejected by the West while, at the same time,
he learns to see—and then see through—its racism, imperialism, and materialism. The
cycle of this journey is completed as the altered African returns to an altered Africa, often
to help in the attempt to build a meaningful future out of a usable past.
Much of the imagery of the modern Anglophone poets is derived from the historical
myth. Africa is depicted in pastoral images of nature and nurture, symbolized often as a
woman in tropes that are both maternal and erotic. The traditional past, figured by dance,
drums, masks, and other artifacts, is both sustaining and creative. The Europeans who
violate it are presented as birds of prey or other predators. The psychological myth often
determines the character of the persona and its relation to historic Africa. Awoonor writes
from Stoneybrook, New York, as an exile; Okigbo presents himself to Idoto as a
prodigal; Okara wanders as the lonely African between the piano and the drum.
These myths are seen in their purest form in Léopold Senghor and David Diop, the
Francophone poets of Negritude. Writing later, after a different set of political
experiences, the Anglophone poets bear a complex, ambivalent relationship to the two
myths and the images derived from them. They completed their education during the
struggle for political freedom and matured as artists during the first decade of
independence, when, amid coups, wars, and scandals, glory simply failed to return to
Africa. This first generation of modern Anglophone poets developed strategies for coping
with the dysfunction between myth and experience. The bereft personae mentioned
above, suspended between the past and the future, are one example. Most importantly,
the Anglophone poets develop strategies of irony that enable them to take this
dysfunction to the brink of tragedy without quite abandoning hope in Africa's future.
Thus, on the basis of their most distinguishing common trait, they can be thought of as
the ironic generation.
All seven major poets have produced a substantial body of work, and each is represented
by at least one collection. Collections are the result of design and arrangement; they are
wholes greater than the sums of their parts. It is in their collections that one can see the
common themes of these poets and hear their unique voices. It is in the collections that
one can see the members of the ironic generation bring together in personal, individual
ways the rich traditions of Anglo-American and vernacular poetry. The result is what
Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier call "a fresh exploration of language" ( 22 ).
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set of moral assumptions on the basis of which African experience can be interpreted.
The psychological myth casts the experience of the westernized African into the pattern
of a cyclical journey. Born into the tradition of hearth and village, the African is pulled
away in the disorienting world of the West. Through schools and universities and often
extended periods of time spent in Western countries, he is transformed into a modern
African. But in the process he finds himself rejected by the West while, at the same time,
he learns to see—and then see through—its racism, imperialism, and materialism. The
cycle of this journey is completed as the altered African returns to an altered Africa, often
to help in the attempt to build a meaningful future out of a usable past.
Much of the imagery of the modern Anglophone poets is derived from the historical
myth. Africa is depicted in pastoral images of nature and nurture, symbolized often as a
woman in tropes that are both maternal and erotic. The traditional past, figured by dance,
drums, masks, and other artifacts, is both sustaining and creative. The Europeans who
violate it are presented as birds of prey or other predators. The psychological myth often
determines the character of the persona and its relation to historic Africa. Awoonor writes
from Stoneybrook, New York, as an exile; Okigbo presents himself to Idoto as a
prodigal; Okara wanders as the lonely African between the piano and the drum.
These myths are seen in their purest form in Léopold Senghor and David Diop, the
Francophone poets of Negritude. Writing later, after a different set of political
experiences, the Anglophone poets bear a complex, ambivalent relationship to the two
myths and the images derived from them. They completed their education during the
struggle for political freedom and matured as artists during the first decade of
independence, when, amid coups, wars, and scandals, glory simply failed to return to
Africa. This first generation of modern Anglophone poets developed strategies for coping
with the dysfunction between myth and experience. The bereft personae mentioned
above, suspended between the past and the future, are one example. Most importantly,
the Anglophone poets develop strategies of irony that enable them to take this
dysfunction to the brink of tragedy without quite abandoning hope in Africa's future.
Thus, on the basis of their most distinguishing common trait, they can be thought of as
the ironic generation.
All seven major poets have produced a substantial body of work, and each is represented
by at least one collection. Collections are the result of design and arrangement; they are
wholes greater than the sums of their parts. It is in their collections that one can see the
common themes of these poets and hear their unique voices. It is in the collections that
one can see the members of the ironic generation bring together in personal, individual
ways the rich traditions of Anglo-American and vernacular poetry. The result is what
Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier call "a fresh exploration of language" ( 22 ).
-108-
set of moral assumptions on the basis of which African experience can be interpreted.
The psychological myth casts the experience of the westernized African into the pattern
of a cyclical journey. Born into the tradition of hearth and village, the African is pulled
away in the disorienting world of the West. Through schools and universities and often
extended periods of time spent in Western countries, he is transformed into a modern
African. But in the process he finds himself rejected by the West while, at the same time,
he learns to see—and then see through—its racism, imperialism, and materialism. The
cycle of this journey is completed as the altered African returns to an altered Africa, often
to help in the attempt to build a meaningful future out of a usable past.
Much of the imagery of the modern Anglophone poets is derived from the historical
myth. Africa is depicted in pastoral images of nature and nurture, symbolized often as a
woman in tropes that are both maternal and erotic. The traditional past, figured by dance,
drums, masks, and other artifacts, is both sustaining and creative. The Europeans who
violate it are presented as birds of prey or other predators. The psychological myth often
determines the character of the persona and its relation to historic Africa. Awoonor writes
from Stoneybrook, New York, as an exile; Okigbo presents himself to Idoto as a
prodigal; Okara wanders as the lonely African between the piano and the drum.
These myths are seen in their purest form in Léopold Senghor and David Diop, the
Francophone poets of Negritude. Writing later, after a different set of political
experiences, the Anglophone poets bear a complex, ambivalent relationship to the two
myths and the images derived from them. They completed their education during the
struggle for political freedom and matured as artists during the first decade of
independence, when, amid coups, wars, and scandals, glory simply failed to return to
Africa. This first generation of modern Anglophone poets developed strategies for coping
with the dysfunction between myth and experience. The bereft personae mentioned
above, suspended between the past and the future, are one example. Most importantly,
the Anglophone poets develop strategies of irony that enable them to take this
dysfunction to the brink of tragedy without quite abandoning hope in Africa's future.
Thus, on the basis of their most distinguishing common trait, they can be thought of as
the ironic generation.
All seven major poets have produced a substantial body of work, and each is represented
by at least one collection. Collections are the result of design and arrangement; they are
wholes greater than the sums of their parts. It is in their collections that one can see the
common themes of these poets and hear their unique voices. It is in the collections that
one can see the members of the ironic generation bring together in personal, individual
ways the rich traditions of Anglo-American and vernacular poetry. The result is what
Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier call "a fresh exploration of language" ( 22 ).
 -108-

THE NON-NIGERIAN IRONIST POETS

Lenrie Peters. The Gambian poet Lenrie Peters has produced four collections of poetry:
Poems ( 1964), Satellites ( 1967), Katchikali ( 1971), and Selected Poetry ( 1981). This
last collection contains selections from his previous volumes and fifty-four new poems.
In all these he is something of a literary maverick and very much his own man, though he
writes within the mythopoeic matrix. That is, he writes with an awareness of the personal
consequences of the cyclical journey, and he focuses frequently on the dysfunction
between the promise of the African past and the experience of the present. In fact, the
center of his poetry is an African present of grief, violence, oppression, loneliness, and
death.
In Satellites Peters calls this Africa "a house without a shadow / lived in by new
skeletons" ( 31 ). This dead land is the result of a "bartered birthright" ( 44 ). And he
views it from the perspective of one devastated by westernization:
We have come home
From bloodless wars
With sunken hearts
Our boots full of pride
From the true massacre of the soul.
(31)
Peters believes that what happened to the individual and the race is the result of a rupture,
not a transformation. In a quatrain of remarkable insight he suggests that the rupture has
occurred because change has been so sudden that a healing mythopoeic process has not
had time to work.
Too strange the sudden change
Of the times we buried when we left
The times before we had properly arranged
The memories that we kept.
(39)
In the new poems of Selected Poems the primary focus is the present, depicted in the
lives of individuals, in the clash of cultures, and in the exploitation of neocolonialism.
Peters is compelled to make the simple, sad assertion: "It has been dismal / since the new
freedoms came" ( 91 ). Juxtaposed against this view of the present is an intense nostalgia
expressed in pastoral images of traditional Africa. He speaks longingly of "messages
from wood fires and the warm / pungency of cooking" ( 113 ), messages he receives in
the "shanty town sinks" of modern urban Africa. One of the best of these nostalgic poems
begins with what seems to be the poet's claim to both of these worlds, but it ends with the
sad failure of separation. Speaking of men roasting nuts and girls dancing by firelight, he
says:
 -109-
They know where sorrow ends,
and I, the broken bridge
across the estuary,
across worlds, cannot reach them
(129)
Nostalgia is the mood that enables Peters to explore the suffering of contemporary Africa
and the disconnection between the present and the past.
Kwesi Brew. In two collections, The Shadows of Laughter ( 1968) and African Panorama
( 1981), the Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew writes longingly of the past and hopefully of the
future, but he does so while maintaining a personal sense of a present made up of
uncertainty and fear. In the earlier collection Brew focuses on the process by which
Africa was forced to encounter change and the process that took the poet persona from
the secure center of tradition to the painful realization that he had been "crippled by a god
/ I do not know" ( 53 ). In the title poem, this alienation and discontinuity are presented in
lines as moving as any in West African verse.
We fear the look in the eyes of our old men
Where they sit in the corners
Of their crumbling huts
Casting tremulous looks
At the loud crashing waves.
(I)
Section 3 of The Shadows of Laughter begins and ends with poems that incorporate either
implicitly or explicitly the entire historical myth. " The Lonely Traveller," the often-
anthologized first poem of the section, begins with the Senghor-like oxymoron "sweet
enemy" and develops through a series of characteristically African images—the spear,
the shield, the drum, the green hills of the African savannah. Here the past is a source of
strength. Then the image shifts from the martial to the musical. "Our hands that slept on
the drums / Have found their cunning" ( 33 ). The result of this quickening of the present
by the invocation of the past is the promise of the future:
Now far on the horizon
The red suns set
The tired suns set
To turn old nights into new dawns
And people the skies with black stars.
(33)
This is pure Negritude, not only the imagery and the myth but also the hopeful attitude.
But neither here nor in the second volume is Brew able to maintain the optimism. He is
subdued by the broken dream of the present.
Brew's second volume shows his creative staying power. Its greatest
-110-
strength is his ability to construct images that are sharp and detailed and mythopoeically
resonant. Even the titles illustrate this ability: " Our Hillside Home," " Drum Song," "
Consulting a Fetish," " Dancers." The persona folds the historical myth within his own
psychological journey by writing of the past and the future from the vantage point of the
disordered present. It is there that the ironies gather to make the poet aware of his own
contradictory role as a modern African poet—African and Western, son and stranger:
We are the old dancers of a new dance
an old dance revived by new men,
strangers who are no strangers to our songs.
(55)
Kofi Awoonor. Kofi Awoonor, Ghana's most important poet, has produced five
overlapping volumes of poetry: Rediscovery ( 1964), Night of My Blood ( 1971), Ride
Me, Memory ( 1973), The House by the Sea ( 1978), and Until the Morning After ( 1987).
In all of them he develops his own richly textured version of the historical myth in which
a sustaining tradition is celebrated as
The trappings of the past, tender and tenuous
woven with the fiber of sisal and
washed in the blood of the goat in the fetish hut.
For Awoonor this is the old, which must become the basis for the new. "Sew the old days
for us, our fathers / That we can wear them under our new garment" ( Night of My
Blood29).
Awoonor is resolutely a poet of hope. Encouraging his African readers (and, indeed, all
of us) with the concept of ongoing revolution—the need for continued struggle in the
present against the forces of oppression—he promises a triumphant future based on the
values and strengths of the past. " The Wayfarer Comes Home," the final poem in The
House by the Sea, is one of the best mythopoeic poems in all West African poetry. In it
Awoonor offers this affirmation:
... the dance has begun
the drummers all in place
this dreary half life is over
our dream will be born at noon.
(77)
But this rich past and bright future are viewed from within the broken dream of a present
in which the exploitive white West and its Black bourgeois henchmen bring suffering and
sorrow to Africa. The house by the sea in his fourth collection is in fact a cell in Fort
Ussher prison in Accra, from which he complains, "I never had known that my people /
wore such sad faces" ( 41 ).
In each of the collections Awoonor infuses the historical myth with two
-111-
highly personal components: first, the record of his own cyclical journey to the West and
back, and second, his sense of the special role of the artist in building the African future
out of the past. He makes many references to his own journey and subsequent
disillusionment.
If only I had known
I would have stayed at home
to clear the bush.
( Night of My Blood49)
Beyond this, Ride Me, Memory and The House by the Sea are structured around the
journey. In the former Awoonor writes from America about his disillusioning experiences
there and about an Africa to which he returns in memory. The latter collection begins
with American recollections of Africa and concludes with poems, many of them painfully
ironic, of his return to a troubled land. Still, he returns to Africa to carry out the task of
the artist as a man of action, that is, to weave Africa's future out of the raffia of its past.
... I plait my hope
into poems
The sounds I make here
part of the landscape
of my new homeland
(62)
These themes are restated in the few new poems included in Until the Morning After, in
which his tough, idealistic hope is expressed as a promise to continue the poet's militant
task "until the morning after freedom" ( 206 ).
THE NIGERIAN IRONIST POETS
The largest number of significant poets of the ironic generation come from Nigeria, most
of them connected at one time or another with either the University of Ibadan or the
University of Lagos. They share with their fellow West Africans a preoccupation with the
two dominant mythic themes, the historical experience of the continent and the
psychological experience of the individual African. All of their work, however, was
deeply affected by the Nigerian civil war. For all Nigerians the war was the most
devastating experience of the 1960s. For the Nigerian poets it became the primary
symbol of the failed present and their third great theme.
Gabriel Okara. Gabriel Okara has produced a smaller body of poetry than any other
major poet of the ironic generation. His one collection, The Fisherman's Invocation, was
published in 1978. Nevertheless, he had been publishing verse since the 1950s and has
composed poems before, during, and after the civil war. He has written a half dozen of
the finest lyrics to come out of West Africa, all of which are contained in the collection.
-112-
In most of his prewar poetry Okara deals with the two mythic themes, the African past
and the African's journey. To depict the latter he projects an alienated persona, longing
for death: "And O of this dark halo / Were the tired head free" ( 21 ). He makes this
alienated voice specifically African, the product of the cyclical journey. In contrast to
Awoonor's and Okigbo's prodigal, his is the voice of the lonely African. In " One Night at
Victoria Beach" the poet observes the ritual of the Aladuras, a syncretistic religious sect,
taking place on a stretch of beach symbolically situated between a traditional fishing
village and a string of "modern" highlife bars. He longs to join them, to connect, but
instead,
... standing dead on dead sands
I felt my knees touch living sands
but the rushing winds killed the budding words.
(29)
Cut off in midjourney from both traditional Africa and the West, he finds himself, in his
most famous poem, " Piano and Drums,"
lost in the labyrinth
—wandering in the mystic
rhythm of jungle drums and the concerto.
(20)
From the perspective of the lonely African, Okara explores the historical relationship of
the two worlds, tradition and the West. In " The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down" he
presents this relationship in surreal but very African pastoral imagery.
I dreamed of birds, black
birds flying in my inside, nesting
and hatching on oil palms bearing suns
for fruits and with roots denting the
uprooters, spades. And I dreamed the
uprooters, tired and limp, leaning on my roots—
their abandoned roots
and the oil palms gave each of them a sun.
He then points out that Africa's tragedy is that the uprooters frowned and rejected the
suns which "reached not / the brightness of gold" ( 30 ).
In the war poems Okara struggles with the central irony in the historical myth, the failure
of independence to ameliorate and enrich the lives of Africans. The suns are gone;
instead the poet sees "sad smoke curling skywards" ( 37 ), "bodies stacked in the
morgue," and "children playing at diving jets" ( 31 ). The postwar poems suggest that a
great spiritual fatigue has been added to the poet's sense of alienation. He speaks of "tired
songs" and complains: "I am tried, tired. / My trembly feet drag" ( 56 ). Since then Okara
has fallen silent in his loneliness.
-113-
J. P. Clark (Bekederemo). J. P. Clark Bekederemo has published five volumes of poetry:
Poems ( 1962). A Reed in the Tide ( 1965), Casualties ( 1970), A Decade of Tongues (
1979), and State of the Union ( 1985). A Reed in the Tide incorporates and rearranges the
poems from the first collection. A Decade of Tongues incorporates poems from the first
three collections with very little new material. State of the Union comprises new, highly
political poems composed between 1975 and 1980.
Pepper Clark is very much a man of his time and place and, in his early verse, very much
a poet of the two great mythic themes. He weaves those themes together in the long early
poem " Ivbie," in which he speaks of traditional Africa's "treasures so many and
beautiful" ( Poems45). And he attempts to speak for those "that cry out of a violated past"
but fails because, as a result of the westernization to which he has been subjected, he
finds that he is only the Niger's "bastard child" ( Poems51).
A Reed in the Tide is designed to reflect the first half of the cyclical journey. The poems
are arranged to reflect the persona's movement from childhood to adulthood and from the
banks of the Niger to Times Square. All through this journey the imagery of the
individual poems is derived from the historical myth. In the best poems Africa is
symbolized by images of women: maternal images of a grandmother's protective hug and
a mother securing her home against the rain and erotic images of dancers and bathers
both emanating from and integrated with nature. In " Agbor Dancer" he says of the
dancing girl:
In trance she treads the intricate
Pattern rippling crest after crest
To meet the green clouds of the forest.
(7)
Africa contrasts with the West, to which he journeys only to find that "spirits / sink with
sirens" ( 34 ) and "all [is] sterile and faceless" ( 35 ).
Casualties and State of the Union are poetic reflections on the civil war and life in
postwar Nigeria. Both reflect contemporary Nigeria as a betrayal of the past—a bitterly
ironic conclusion to the historical process and to the promise of independence.
Casualties, a controversial book, is a poetic record of the war and the poet's involvement
in it. It concludes with the following lines:
A song was begun one night,
The song should have begun
A festival of three hundred tribes,
Instead it lit for cantor
 And chorus a funeral pile.
(40)
Burning on that pile was a nation—its myths, its men, its past, and its culture. Along with
several miscellaneous poems, State of the Union consists of
-114-
twenty-five poetic comments on life in postwar Nigeria. The first line of the first poem
reads "Here nothing works" ( 3 ). The last poem begins "It never was a union" ( 30 ).
Everything in between is a variation or a particularization of the vision of contemporary
Nigeria implicit in those two statements.
Wole Soyinka. Wole Soyinka, best known as a dramatist, is also a significant poet. His
four main poetry publications are Idanre and Other Poems ( 1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt
( 1972), Ogun Abibiman ( 1976), and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems ( 1988). All
these works reflect Soyinka's awareness of the mythopoeic power of art and the social
significance of myth. In Myth, Literature, and the African World, a collection of essays
and lectures, Soyinka speaks of "one of the social functions of literature: the visionary
reconstruction of the past for purposes of social direction" ( 196 ). His poetic works are,
or contain, visionary reconstructions of the past, present, and future.
Soyinka has always insisted on the appropriateness of Yoruba mythology and
metaphysics as instruments for the interpretation of modern life. He finds this
appropriateness especially in the irony with which the Yoruba mind contemplates the
relation of violence to creativity, war to peace, and life to death. In Idanre and Other
Poems these ironies are reflected in a number of fine lyrics and especially in the title
poem, " Idanre," in which they are all personalized in Ogun, the Yoruba god of creation
and war, life and death, "the shield of orphans who is also the orphan-maker." As a
cautionary tale, "Idanre" contains the same wry warning that is found in Soyinka's play A
Dance of the Forests. The poem tells of Ogun's "reluctant kingship," assumed only at the
insistence of the people, and of his battle slaughter—how, after leading his people to
victory, he turned and slaughtered them:
... their cry
For partial succor brought a total hand
That smothered life in crimson plains
With too much answering.
(78)
On the brink of civil war, Soyinka reminds his people that the blood of mankind is on the
hands of men for having made Ogun king.
The second collection, A Shuttle in the Crypt, comprises poems written in prison during
the civil war. It constitutes a harrowing personal record of the consequences of having
made Ogun king. The central experience in the collection is the poet's coming to terms
with the hanging of five prisoners, and the image that haunts the volume is the image of
the dead dangling men. "Their hands are closed on emptiness" ( 43 ). It ends on a
personal note close to despair. In the last poem the poet suggests to the shade of
Christopher Okigbo that it might be better to be killed than to survive—to die like Christ
than to endure like Prometheus.
This is the point where the tragic ironist must fall silent or turn to new
-115-
visions. In his next published major poem, Ogun Abibiman, Soyinka turns to the concept
of ongoing revolution by recasting Ogun as a "revolutionary archetype" who "appears to
be a definitive symbol of Africa's immediate destiny" (jacket note). In the poem Ogun
meets Shaka, and of that meeting of north and south, myth and history, Abibiman, the
triumphant black nation, is born. The future stands clear on the horizon, and "the clans
are massed from hill to hill / Where Ogun stood" ( 22 ).
Mandela's Earth is more ironic and less militant than Ogun Abibiman. It focuses on the
South Africa of Soweto and the Mandelas and on the New York of befouled subways and
"packaged" news. Its prevailing tone is controlled rage—rage at Africa's failure to rise to
the challenge of Mandela's courage and vision and at the rest of the world's indifference
to it, as symbolized by a New York television anchorman's "Mind calloused to universal
loss" ( 43 ).
Christopher Okigbo. In 1967, at the age of thirty-five, Christopher Okigbo was killed
while serving in the Biafran army. He left behind a group of "organically related" poems
that were published together in 1971 under the title Labyrinths, arguably the most
important single volume of poetry to emerge from Anglophone Africa. Certainly it is the
most difficult and complex. The early sections are very much in the Euromodernist
tradition of Eliot; the later sections are increasingly enriched by the incorporation of
elements from traditional oral literature. Okigbo said the poems constitute "a fable of
man's perennial quest for fulfillment" (xiv). That quest is depicted in the African context
of the cyclical journey. "Heavensgate," the first section of Labyrinths, begins with the
persona, having returned bereft from his journey, invoking the spirit of an African river
and river goddess—the African muse:
Before you, mother Idoto,
naked I stand
before your watery presence
a prodigal.
(3)
Having invoked the muse, the poet depicts a series of departures and returns by a lonely,
abandoned African who is himself "sole witness to my homecoming" ( 53 ).
Through this cycle of cyclical journeys key images emerge from the historical myth.
Traditional Africa and Africanness are personified as Idoto and the lioness and also
depicted in images of river and grove. In contrast, the Africa to which the persona
returns is violated and abandoned. Okigbo compresses the whole history of colonialism
into a quatrain:
A fleet of eagles
over the oilbean shadows
-116-
Holds the square
under curse with their breath.
(31)
But the prodigal African also bears a burden of guilt because he has abandoned his
traditions. "Our gods lie unsung . . . Behind the shrinehouse" ( 34 ).
The cruelest irony on which the collection insists is that the prodigal returns not to a
living tradition but to this violated and abandoned land about to self-destruct. The last
section of the volume, " Path of Thunder," is subtitled " Poems Prophesying War." Here,
as in Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt and Clark's Casualties, the Nigerian civil war
constitutes the failure of myth. Independence brings not glory but self-destruction.
The smell of blood already floats in the lavender mist
of the afternoon.
The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors
of power.
And a fearful great thing already tugs at the cables of
the open air.
(66)
The result is, seemingly, the death of myth and of hope:
The glimpse of a dream lies smouldering in a cave
together with the mortally wounded birds.
And the Ibo poet's only consolation is the Yoruba ontology of cyclical change, the "going
and coming that goes on forever" ( 72 ).

OTHER IRONIST POETS

To these major voices of the ironic generation it is possible to add the voices of other
talented West African poets. Included among these are A. W. Kayper Mensah of Ghana
and Michael Echeruo of Nigeria. An important early collection is Songs from the
Wilderness by Frank Kobina Parkes. Parkes, who complains in one poem that "the hour
of hope is long, long lost" ( 9 ), is among the earliest to lament the failed dream of
independence. The Cameroonian Mbella Dipoko records the disillusionment and
alienation of the cyclical journey in Black and White in Love ( 1972). Several members of
the generation better known in genres other than verse have published important
collections. Chinua Achebe published Beware, Soul Brother in 1971. In 1973 he added
seven new poems to the collection, then retitled Christmas in Biafra. Along with searing
images of war's cruelty, Achebe's collections communicate the fear that the modern
African may "become / a dancer disinherited in mid-dance" ( 47 ). In Locusts ( 1976) the
scholar and critic Emmanuel Obiechina expresses the same fear in a parallel image:
"Musician, you lost your song. / Your tune is a dry echo" ( 32 ).
-117-

THE DISILLUSIONED GENERATION

A second generation of Anglophone West African poets has established itself in the late
1970s and 1980s. Like their predecessors, these poets, who were born in the 1940s, come
from different countries and draw on different indigenous traditions as well as different
aspects of the Euromodernist tradition. The result is a poetry of great range and diversity,
yet united by theme and mood. Having experienced their own cyclical journey and
acquired a strong sense of disillusionment, the younger poets continue variations on the
theme of African history, in which the present is seen as a betrayal of the past and of the
political leaders and intellectuals of the previous generations.
Although this disillusionment is more pronounced in some poets' work than in others, the
mood and subject are pervasive. Themes of disillusionment can be found in Ghanaians as
different as Atukwei Okai ( Lorgorigi Logarithms and Other Poems, 1974) and Kobina
Eyi Acquah ( The Man Who Died, 1984) and in Nigerians like Ken Saro-Wiwa ( Songs in
a Time of War, 1985), Tanure Ojaide ( The Blood of Peace, 1991), and Niyi Osundare.
Osundare 's The Eye of the Earth ( 1986) is an effective fusion of nostalgic pastoralism
and revolutionary vision. Together with his earlier collections, it establishes him as a poet
of major importance. But perhaps the three most significant poets of the generation are
Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone ( The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, 1980), Odia
Ofeimun of Nigeria ( The Poet Lied, 1980), and Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana ( A Harvest of
Our Dreams, 1984, and Earthchild, 1985).
Syl Cheney-Coker. At his best, Syl Cheney-Coker is a strong, angry poet. He is also
conscious of influences, among which he includes the social vision of radical Latin
American poets like Pablo Neruda and the surrealist techniques of Tchicaya U Tam'si.
These influences suggest a closer affinity to Francophone African poets than we find in
other West African Anglophones—an affinity seen in the surreal imagery and in the
declamatory rhetoric and invective of which he is fond. More important, however, is the
moral dimension of Cheney-Coker's work, expressed over and over again in judgmental
terms—rages against past and present betrayals of the cause of Africa and the cause of
man. There is little variety of mood in his poetry, which is shrill with anger and sorrow.
What redeems it is its confessional intensity.
The confessional quality is presented in terms of the myth of the cyclical journey. The title
of Cheney-Coker's slim early collection, later incorporated into The Graveyard Also Has
Teeth ( 1980), is Concerto for an Exile. His exile is similar to Awoonor's, but he adds his
own Krio dimension to it. His alienation is not just geographical or cultural but genetic,
carried in his "tainted" Creole ancestry, which he calls "the plantation blood in my veins
/ my foul genealogy" ( 7 ). The only way he can end his exile is to "return" to Africa as a
poetic man of action, a poet of revolution. "I write the brushfire that
 -118-
spreads," he promises ( 61 ). This revolutionary poetry emanates from the historical
myth. Cheney-Coker depicts a Sierra Leone of rich tradition violated by the Creole taint.
His most focused rage, however, is directed at that tradition's betrayal by the
contemporary black bourgeoisie:
my poetry assumes its murderous intensity
because while remaining quiet I have observed the
politicians
parcelling out pieces of my country.
(65)
Odia Ofeimun. Odia Ofeimun has been West Africa's angry young man. He is also the
poet as a man of action, translating his anger into poetic indictments and promises of
revolutionary triumph. He insists on the political significance of the poet's craft. "At the
moment I can't think of putting anything down on paper unless I want to influence some
situation" (Osofisan et al., 9). Poetry's social utility is the basis of Ofeimun's evaluation
of the poets of the ironic generation. He praises Achebe, Okigbo, and Soyinka for their
conduct and their vision of the African past and future while he excoriates Clark for his
ambivalence during the civil war and his failure to provide vision.
The Poet Lied is a collection of forty-one poems in four sections: " The New Brooms," "
Where Bullets Have Spoken," " Resolve," and " The Neophytes." These titles reflect a
thematic organization. The first section deals with post—civil war life and leadership, the
second with the war and its consequences. His disillusionment and sense of betrayal can
be seen in the following lines:
the magic promises of yesterday
lie cold like mounds of dead cattle
along caravans that lead nowhere.
(4)
Three persistent themes run through all four sections: the exploitive corruption of the
elite, the sordidness of contemporary Nigerian life, and the role of the poet in African
society. In sections 3 and 4 he carries out the poet's role by projecting a bright future that
might result from his own generation's revolutionary action. He alternates between
hopelessness and hope. In one place he confesses the need "to scream / on paper" ( 36 ).
But he concludes by offering hope for the future if the integrity of the myth and the future
of the continent are in the hands of the resolute of his generation, who are determined
"that the locust shall never again visit our farmsteads" ( 42 ).
Kofi Anyidoho. Kofi Anyidoho, perhaps the best poet of the disillusioned generation, is
the author of three collections: Elegy for the Revolution ( 1978),
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A Harvest of Our Dreams ( 1984), and Earthchild ( 1985). The best of what this good
poet has done can be found in A Harvest of Our Dreams, a collection filled with echoes.
His use of Ewe forms suggests Awoonor. The controlling images of seedtime and harvest
remind one of Soyinka's Idanre, while other images—heaven's gate, the sun bird—
suggest Okigbo. But he is not a deliberately derivative poet. He speaks in his own voice,
but where the ironic generation learned from their encounter with Euromodernism,
Anyidoho and his contemporaries have learned by reading the ironists.
A Harvest of Our Dreams is divided into six sections, some of which contain very
personal poems, others of which contain the poet's reflections on America. But the two
most important sections are the first and the last, " Seedtime" and " Elegy for the
Revolution," the latter a reprinting of the first collection. The poems in the other sections
exist in a parenthesis of mood controlled by these two sections.
The title of the first section seems hopeful in its own pastoral way, but it is ironic rather
than hopeful. The irony derives from the vantage point from which the persona
contemplates the hopes of seedtime—the failed harvest, the ruined present. Everywhere
are images of despair—references to "discarded myths," "sickness of soul," "famished
dreams," "exiled gods." In every poem in the section are lines that speak of the poet's
sorrow and the country's desolation: "Our hive went up in flames"; "Harvests go
ungathered in our time" ( 6 ).
" Elegy for the Revolution" suggests the mood and tone of the collections of nearly all the
poets of the post-Independence generation. The dedication of the section is "to the
memory of / The revolution that went astray" ( 57 ). In it the dreams are "unhatched,"
"corpses lying strangled" in "smouldering wastelands." The collection ends with pastoral
images made tragically ironic: images of the calabash, the gourd, the iron pot, in all of
which "there was a void." Faced with this void, the poet is forced into grotesque art.
"Mine is the dance of the hunchback," he says ( 83 ), and then a generation's cri de coeur:
"My mind fails / my heart dies" ( 85 ).

East Africa
Anglophone poetry in East Africa reflects the same mythic patterns and the same
generational development as poetry in West Africa, but its flowering came later and has
been less abundant. This slower, thinner growth has been discussed extensively by East
African critics and scholars. There is no agreement about the causes of this rate of
"development," but the character of the indigenous cultures, the smaller populations in
East Africa, the vitality of Swahili literature, and the characteristics of colonial rule all
play a part. Two important stimulants to Anglophone literary growth in East Africa have
been Makerere University, where undergraduate literary activity has been encouraged
since the 1950s, and the East African Publishing House in
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Nairobi, which, in the 1960s, published much important East African literature, including
Okot p'Bitek's masterpiece Song of Lawino ( 1966) and the first important anthology of
East African verse, Drumbeat ( 1967). A number of good, potentially important ironic-
generation poets appeared in Drumbeat, including John Mbiti, the transplanted David
Rubadiri, and Taban lo Liyong .

THE IRONIC GENERATION

Okot p'Bitek. The most important East African poet in English is the late Okot p'Bitek of
Uganda, author of three remarkable volumes: Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol ( 1970), and
Song of a Prisoner ( 1971). The first two are extended dramatic monologues, the third a
series of monologues. They all deal with the relationship of the past to the present in
Africa and with the dilemma of the modern African, but the mood in which they treat
those fundamental issues deepens and darkens from volume to volume, progressing from
the comic through a kind of self-reflexive satire to rage. Each volume contains startlingly
effective images and short, clear, rapidly moving lines that owe much to Acholi oral
verse and to p'Bitek's habit of composing first in Acholi.
Song of Lawino is possibly the most successful comic work in modern African literature.
It is the lament of Lawino, the naive, abandoned traditional wife of Ocol, a westernized
Acholi. Lawino tells her husband, "The ways of your ancestors / Are good" ( 29 ), and
warns him, "Let no one / Uproot the pumpkin" ( 63 ). Her indictment of Ocol for
abandoning these ways and treating them contemptuously is simple and powerful:
Like beggars
You take up white men's adornments
Like slaves or war captives
You take up white men's ways.
(47-48)
Later she cries, "You behave like / A dog of the white man" ( 204 ). Along the way (there
are thirteen sections and 216 pages), Lawino satirizes Western food, fashion, religion,
education, and politics. Her lament ends poignantly as she comes to embody the tradition
she defends.
Let me dance before you
My love,
Let me show you
The wealth in your house.
(216)
Okot's two succeeding volumes are increasingly ironic acknowledgments of the African
dilemma. In Song of Ocol the persona defends change and westernization with despairing
intensity and indicts tradition with a passion
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that suggests self-hatred. Song of a Prisoner takes the modern African deeper into his
self-dividing dilemma by making him a prisoner of his own independence. Functioning
as synecdoche for all Africans, the prisoner calls himself
 A broken branch of a tree
Torn down by the whirlwind
of UHURU.
(120)
Taban lo Liyong. Taban lo Liyong is one of the most versatile and flamboyant men of
letters in East Africa. He has written criticism, including some negative comments on
Okot p'Bitek, and four volumes of poetry: Eating Chiefs ( 1970), Frantz Fanon's Uneven
Ribs ( 1971), Another Nigger Dead ( 1972), and Ballads of Underdevelopment ( 1976).
The first is a recasting into blank verse of a number of Luo oral poems, a sustained
example of his own injunction to "treat ... tribal literature as raw material" (x).
The next two titles suggest a connection with the predominant myths of modern Black
African poetry, but the voice that runs through them is heavily Americanized. They are
written, for the most part, in Whitmanesque free verse. In the first, a Whitmanesque "I"
predominates, often functioning as a cosmic ego speaking for and to his generation. The
allusions, too, are American—an invocation to Whitman, a poem about Stokely
Carmichael, satiric wordplay around the negative stereotypes of Uncle Tom and Aunt
Jemima. The attacks on racism are more generic and less specifically African than in
other Anglophone poets.
Though often flip, sarcastic, and Americanized, lo Liyong nevertheless projects the image
of the alienated African and presents the tragic message of Africa's failed present: "We
have at last nationalized POVERTY" ( Another Nigger Dead9). In Ballads of
Underdevelopment he contrasts Black and white and plays Africa against Europe. He
never stops being a mainstream African poet, but he does seem to subside finally in the
shadows of a more universal, more existential angst.
The world goes where it goes
The captainless ship
the beast without a rudder
Our mother divine
Born in woes and woos.
( Ballads51)

THE DISILLUSIONED GENERATION

The East African poets born in the 1940s and 1950s share the themes and moods of their
contemporaries in West Africa. The similarity, apparent in the early work that appeared
in university publications in Kampala and Nairobi and in Cook and Rubadiri's anthology
Poems from East Africa ( 1971), be
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comes very clear in the collections that begin to appear after 1970, as the younger poets
achieve maturity and accumulate substantial bodies of work. Among the more interesting
volumes are two from Uganda and three from Kenya: Orphan ( 1968) by Okello Oculi,
Words of My Groaning ( 1976) by p'Bitek's son-in-law Cliff p'Chong, Jared Angira's
Silent Voices ( 1972) and Cascades ( 1979), and Gerald Kithinji's Whispers at Dawn (
1976).
Orphan is a sequence of statements about, by, and especially to an orphan (the symbolic
modern African) by a series of shifting personae. The orphan's absent mother, the symbol
of traditional Africa, is the great unifying force and focus of the book. The orphan learns
that he can reunite with his mother and reclaim his past only by struggling to build the
future. If he struggles "through the thorns on strange pathways," he is told, he will be able
to "Enshrine the spirit of your Mother / In the new homestead" ( 100 -101).
Cliff p'Chong's small volume is a collection of painful, angry images of life in newly
independent Africa—rampaging elephants, leaky houses, drunkenness, degraded
sexuality. In " Lament for Alumya the Voter" p'Chong projects these images into the
future with a devastating sense of hopelessness.
My children
Will die
Slaves
Of Joblessness
And their children
Will be tethered
To the pole
Of poverty.
(52)
Jared Angira's Silent Voices is a varied, almost random collection. Lacking design or
development, it is held together by image motifs that owe a debt to Christopher Okigbo,
to whom two of the poems are dedicated—images of collapsing mud walls and children
wailing in hunger. It is also held together by a unifying voice, a kind of persona that
stands and speaks bereft in the center of Africa's shattered present. The voice speaks over
and over again of dysfunction, disconnection, and despair:
Disconnected circuit
The stones that roll down
Thunder that tears humanity.
(54)
Kithinji is not as good a poet as Angira—not as complex or as resonant— but he reflects
all the characteristic themes and modes of Angira and the others. He has the same
enemies—the West, with its materialism and its ideologies, and the exploitative Black
bourgeoisie—and the same hero

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victim, the suffering African, and even the same pastoral images of trees and huts and
fields. Occasionally he is able to gather all the angst of modern Africa into one image, as
in his reference to "kinsmen / dancing on a volcano" ( 70 ).

Central and Southern Africa

Serious modern Anglophone poetry also developed later in Central and Southern Africa
than in West Africa. There are a number of reasons for this slower growth in Malawi,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe: their isolation, the oppressive colonial administrations, and the
repressive and disruptive effects of industries, especially mining, under European control.
One consequence was the later development of Western education, especially at the
university level. As a result, writers contemporaneous with the ironic generation were
dispersed, forced to seek education and careers elsewhere in Africa. David Rubadiri (b.
1930) of Malawi, the author of prose fiction and several fine poems, was educated at
Makerere University in Uganda and later returned there to teach. Although a Malawian,
he became part of the literary community that produced Okot p'Bitek, Ngujgĩ wa
Thiong'o, and Taban lo Liyong. Dennis Brutus was born in Zimbabwe (at that time
Rhodesia) in 1924 but educated in South Africa. His subsequent career as a poet and as a
leader in exile of the literary opposition to apartheid has placed him firmly in the South
African literary orbit. Thus modern Anglophone poetry did not really develop in the
region until the 1970s and 1980s, but in those decades an important body of work
emerged, especially in Malawi and Zimbabwe.

MALAWI
One significant development in the 1980s in Malawi was the evolution of an indigenous
publishing industry capable of printing collections and anthologies by Malawian poets,
such as Raw Pieces by Edison Mpina ( 1986) and Steve Chimombo's Napolo Poems (
1987). Nevertheless, the most important collections have been produced outside the
country: Jack Mapanje's Of Chameleons and Gods ( 1981), Felix Mnthali's When Sunset
Comes to Sepitwa ( 1982), and O Earth, Wait for Me ( 1984) by Frank Chipasula.
The sociopolitical situation out of which these collections emerge is contemporary
Malawi, that is, Malawi in the first decades of its independence. These have not been
happy years. Politically Malawi has developed into an authoritarian one-party state in the
firm grip of a dictatorial ruler who, in his determination not to tolerate discussion, much
less dissent, has not hesitated to use detention and even torture. The country has suffered
from an economic stagnation marked by agricultural deterioration and very limited
development in mining and manufacture. The population has steadily drifted toward
urban and semiurban areas, with a consequent spread of slum neighborhoods. In other
words, Malawi has shared the fate of its neighbors and much of the rest of Black Africa.
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The special feature of Malawi's malaise is its relationship to the Republic of South
Africa. It was for a long time the only Black state to have diplomatic relations with the
republic. The reason for this connection is that Malawi's largest export and greatest single
source of hard currency is manpower contracted to work in the South African mines.
Thus, although separated from South Africa by hundreds of miles, it is, like Swaziland
and Lesotho, a client state. This is arguably the most odious form of neocolonialism. It
results in an exploitive symbiosis in which the elite (the Black bourgeoisie) become,
willy-nilly, collaborators in apartheid. It is this ongoing tragedy over which Malawian
poets brood and to which their verse responds.
In Of Chameleons and Gods Jack Mapanje's response takes the form of an attempt "to
find a voice or voices as a way of preserving some sanity" (introduction). The "voice" he
seems to settle on is a very personal one. The design of the search for this voice—and
thus the design of the collection—is that of the cyclical journey. The book is arranged in
four sections, in the first of which Mapanje focuses on rooted Malawian subjects ranging
from Chiuta, the traditional god of creation, to John Chilembwe, an early liberation hero.
These are his reference points for condemning the tawdriness and repression of
contemporary Malawian life. The second section, " Sketched from London," shows that
this furthermost point in the cyclical journey is no viable alternative to the tragedy at
home. Section 3, " Re-entering Chingwa's Hole," portrays the completion of the cyclical
journey—the return to oppression and torture on the one hand and to shrines and the
buried heart of Africa on the other. In the fourth section, "Assembling Another Voice,"
the returned African finds his new voice and a new vision of Africa.
Running through all the sections are an evocation of the strength of the past and a harsh
indictment of the Malawi of the 1970s and of those responsible for its tragedy. " The
Palm Trees of Chigawe," for instance, is an elegiac piece of nature imagery in which
trees that once produced fruit and milk and served as "banners for night fishermen" are
"now stunted" and "stand still beheaded" ( 24 ). Elsewhere the poet returns from England
to a diminished present in which rivers "without their hippos and crocs / merely trickle
gratingly down" ( 42 ). "The gods have deserted," Mapanje says, "these noble shrines" (
43 ). But he discovers that the past lives in him in memory:
I remember ...
... watching the endless blue waters of
The vast lake curl, break, lap-lapping at my
Feet as little fishes nibbled my toes. Then
A loin-cloth fisherman, emerging from the men
Bent mending their broken nets under the shade
Of the lone beachtree, jumped into a canoe
Fettered to a nearby colony of reed and grass
He sculled away lazily perhaps to check the night's
Fishtraps.
(54)
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This pastoral past becomes the moral and psychological base from which the poet indicts
the present, symbolized vividly by the detention of Mapanje's friend Felix Mnthali.
Included in the indictment of the present are those who cause its suffering—the "hounds
in puddles," he calls them ( 49 )—the Black bourgeoisie and their white neocolonial
collaborators. He asks:
 The canoe has capsized, the carvers are drowned ...
... should we fell
More poles to roll another canoe to the beach?
Is it worth assembling another voice?
(69)
Of Chameleons and Gods is his answer, given in the name of the violated past and the
sufferers of the present. And the answer is yes.
Like Mapanje's collection, Felix Mnthali's When Sunset Comes to Sapitwa is primarily a
product of the 1970s. In it the substructure of historical myth, though muted, is
nonetheless evident, with an emphasis on the broken dream of the present. In the first
section an invoked voice or muse instructs the poet write for those
who suffer the void
of a prison without walls
and groan at the tread
of idols without a face.
(3)
The most important poem he writes to and for this suffering audience is the culminating
poem of the first section, " December seventh, 'seventy‐ six." The title refers to the date
on which Mnthali was released from detention. The poem depicts the forces that imprison
him, the factors that lead to his release, and the physical and psychological alterations
consequent upon confinement and release. We learn that he is arbitrarily locked away "in
this walled wilderness" with "some of the best brains in the land" and that his release is
the result of the arbitrary attention of the world press to "ideas whose time had come."
Against this background of malign and indifferent forces, the persona moves from
confinement to freedom. Before his release he stands on the brink of emotional collapse
and depression: "It's the walls within me / that are beginning to cave in." Then, as his
name is read from the release rolls, his response is a multilayered irony of self-parody.
Verbally he embraces his liberators, who are also his captors, with one of the most hated
nouns of colonial subservience: "B W A A A N A A A" ( 23 ). The final irony is that,
released from prison, he finds not joy but another kind of sadness.
This is the dominant poem in the collection. In it the broken dream of the present is
symbolized by the poet's own detention. Fuguelike, the theme is restated in the third
section, "Until the next encounter with our diminished
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selves," in a series of mutually reinforcing images: the mean lives of the poor, the
contrast between the poor and the bourgeoisie, the contrast between the diminished
present and the heroic past. The section concludes with a picture of what Mnthali calls
"the looters' / contemptuous largesse":
Crumbs of bread
 and mildewed chips
from the white man's table
will keep us on our feet
until the next encounter
with our diminished selves.
(45-46)
In Frank Chipasula's O Earth, Wait for Me the prevailing mood is one of lamentation
rising occasionally to exhortation. A close reading reveals a pattern of two interwoven
thematic threads holding the collection together. One thread is overtly political and
comprises poems and images of oppression and exploitation. The other theme is
aesthetic—an inquiry into the nature of art (song) and the function of the artist in
contemporary Malawi.
The dominant political image of the collection is the victim, who appears in a variety of
manifestations. Diminished descendants of those who fought for independence, modern
Malawians are a people who merely "smile sickly from postcards." They are excluded
from the high-rise buildings they themselves had built only to have "come-back-
tomorrows" flung in their faces. The most powerful image of victimization is found in the
poem " A Hanging." The hanged man's writhing body dangles and swings for Malawi:
His body sang until it could not
stand its own song ...
All his blood stood up and sang
twisting toward his throat.
(14)
The role of the poet and the nature of the poem under conditions like those in Malawi
constitute the most persistent theme in the collection. The titles scattered throughout
make this theme clear: " A Singer's Dilemma," " The Blind Marimba Player," " Bangwe
Player," " The Witch Doctor's Song." In the second of these the blind musician is a
symbol of the African artist who creates "melody . . . resurrecting the spirits / of our
ancestors." It is on the basis of this vital and authentic past that he builds his creative
protest and points the way:
But I, attentive, watched him strum the sweet past
Touch the present momentarily, letting the threads of
rhythm
Grope for truth and proceed violently almost bringing
down heaven
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To challenge us to fill in the dark gaping blanks ...
Where the future should be.
(20-22)
The whole myth of African history is here, past, present, and future. Activism and
militancy are of the very nature of African poetry for Chipasula. For the African poet a
poem should be a weapon. Armed with his song, he must play his part. Accepting that
role himself, Chipasula says in "Everything to Declare," "I will start the world afresh" (
59 ). But if Chipasula is a poet of the future rooted in the past, he is nevertheless
overwhelmed by the present. In " A Singer's Dilemma," the final poem of the collection,
he wonders if the poet can make poetry out of Africa's reality.
Is this the right material for my poetry ... ?
Today I must wait for the wind to blow more gently
... but death's omnipresent stench creeps into my peace ...
Give me a metaphor that is not scared of shrapnel wounds.
(82-83)
Napolo Poems by Steve Chimombo is perhaps the most interesting of the collections
published within Malawi. In it the poet weaves a collection out of a great seismic
upheaval in Malawi in 1946 and the concept of Napolo, "the mythical, subterranean
serpent residing under mountains and associated with landslides, earthquakes, and
floods" ( vii ). These two motifs—the earthquake and the mythological monster—enable
Chimombo to operate on many levels, through strategies of indirection made necessary
by the political climate in which he composes and publishes. In the introduction he insists
on "different levels" and speaks of "the reception of the phenomenon on the physical,
psychological, social, religious, and political planes" ( vii ). That is, he uses the historical
and mythological to comment on the contemporary and political. Like many of his
contemporaries, he pokes "fingers into the myth
infested crevices" ( 49 ) on behalf of
his countrymen. He too is the poet as a man of action.

ZIMBABWE
Like Malawi, Zimbabwe produced little significant poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and early
1970s, but experienced something of a poetic renaissance in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The results of this late and modest outpouring include a number of significant locally
published collections: F. E. Muronda's Echoes of My Mind; Counterpoint, a joint
production of the poems of Hope‐ well Seyaseya and Albert Chimedza ( 1984); and
Chenjerai Hove's Red Hills of Home ( 1985). These poets are stylistically very dissimilar.
Seyaseya's rather stately free verse bears no resemblance to Hove's two- and three-foot
lines. But they all write from the same perspective, and they see and say very similar
things. They are poets of the "broken dream," poets who stress the
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anguish of contemporary life. But they do not see the viable past as a point of reference
and departure. There are very few allusions to traditional gods and heroes and a notable
absence of the pastoral. In this they are more like the poets of South Africa, especially the
poets of the Sharpeville generation, than like the poets of West and East Africa. The
reason is not that they are imitative but that they developed as artists in circumstances
analogous to those found in the Republic of South Africa. Less urbanized and
"detribalized" than the township poets of South Africa, they nevertheless matured as
members of a Black proletariat struggling against white settler domination.
Seyaseya's is a voice of sorrow and controlled rage speaking from the center of the
broken dream of the present, "the rubble of a failed coup." He speaks of "my people's
wounds / The bleeding of the land," and wonders, "Is this the gods' twisted sense of
humour?" ( 9 ). He connects the suffering of his country with that of neighboring lands.
He looks to Mozambique, where Samora Machel has begun "the journey without end" (
21 ) and to South Africa where, on Robben Island, "the spears are whetted . . . on the hard
road to Azania" ( 13 ). His poems alternate between hope and despair. At one point,
contemplating the present, Seyaseya cries,
I hang
on the edge
of insanity.
(22)
But he also finds consolation in the promise of the future: "When our time comes, we
shall join hands" ( 22 ). And this future, he promises, will be the result of revolution:
Tomorrow they will come from the east blowing like the wind
To right a wrong done
To destroy the chains of slavery.
(12)
Seyaseya's poetry is controlled; it focuses the reader's attention steadily on the people's
painful present and promised future. Albert Chimedza's voice and focus are notably
different. His work is self-indulgent and out of control, an unstructured, undisciplined
hallucination marked by the gratuitous use of shocking language—"Slow goes this
fucking train" ( 35 )—and outrageous characterization: "I screw my brother's wife / I am
the slithering snake in the grass." This latter quote begins a self-depiction by a Black
bourgeois exploiter that is not without power; still, the overall effect of the verse is
exhibitionist, like a sudden burst of beat poetry in the Zimbabwe of the 1980s. Still,
Chimedza is a symptom—an occasionally moving one—of the suffering of the modern
African artist. He is, as he says, both "the dreamer / of sunsets" and "cold and hungry and
away from home" ( 35 ).
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Chenjerai Hove is one of the more finished and complex poets of Zimbabwe, and his
work in English and Shona has been widely anthologized. He is best seen in his
collection of English-language poems Red Hills of Home, which is dominated by the
poet's sense of the suffering of contemporary Africa. The focus and tone are set in the
prologue, in which he quotes Neruda: "Come and see / the blood in the streets." The
images of that suffering are scattered everywhere in the collection. For him African
history is "the interrupted tale / of hunger and strife" ( 43 ).
More than any other Zimbabwean poet, he depicts this present suffering as an
aberration—a departure from the African essence and the African past. He does this by
weaving two large motifs through the collection. The first is the disruption of the flow of
the seasons: "There was no explanation / of the season's withdrawal" ( 56 ). The second,
linked to the first, is of the scattering of the migratory birds. In one poem the bird asks,
"Why did I migrate?" and laments:
... I shall never sing
the seasons' flow again
Till my people rescue me
With yesterday's echoes.
(42)
And the poet, in turn, stands as synecdoche for the modern African struggling to
reconcile tradition and change:
Maybe I will carry my coat
my new coat
on my torn shoulders.
(9)
Like the West African poets, Hove gives unity and focus to the collection by means of this
symbology. He is able to create, out of personal experience and interior landscapes that
parallel the African landscapes, images that reflect the experience of a whole generation
of Africans. Those images link poet and reader to the experience of the mass of Africans
struggling in the poverty of the village:
If you stay in comfort too long
you will not know
the weight of the water pot
on the bald head of the village woman.
(3)
South Africa
The history of Black Anglophone poetry in South Africa is long and complex. Like poetry
in West Africa, it can be traced through a series of pioneer
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generations back into the nineteenth century. For well over a hundred years, pious and
patriotic verse appeared in mission journals and emanated from mission presses. Most of
this early verse is of limited thematic or aesthetic interest. By the middle of the twentieth
century, however, two concerns dominate the works of the last of the "pioneer"
generations: nostalgia and politics, the longing to reclaim a lost past and the
determination to oppose white oppression. B. W. Vilakazi, for instance, a poet who
composed in Zulu and translated his own work into English, brought the two themes
together by depicting the plight of the migrant mine worker. Perhaps the best-known
work of this generation, however, is Valley of a Thousand Hills ( 1941), by Herbert I. E.
Dhlomo, brother of novelist R. R. R. Dhlomo. This long poem—over a thousand lines—
demonstrates the thematic concerns and prosodic limitations of the tradition.
The analysis of more recent Black poetry—that written after the coming to power of the
Nationalist party in 1948 and the consequent hardening of political and poetic lines
around the issue of apartheid—is complicated by four factors: (i) the development of a
parallel poetic tradition in African languages like Zulu and Xhosa; (2) the urban,
essentially proletarian experience of "coloured" writers with no real ties to indigenous
African cultures; (3) the interaction of Black and "coloured" writers with an extensive
indigenous white literature; and (4) the disruptive effect of the forced exile of a
generation of militant poets. This extensive body of work can best be appreciated by
considering Black and "coloured" poets together (as they now consider themselves) and
by grouping them into two generations—the Sharpeville generation and the Soweto
generation.
The Sharpeville generation includes Dennis Brutus, Arthur Nortje, Cosmo Pieterse,
Keorapetse Kgogsitsile, and Mazisi Kunene. These poets range in age from Dennis
Brutus (b. 1926) to Arthur Nortje ( 1942-70). Two things hold them together and mark
them as a group: (I) their lives and art were shaped by the increasing racial oppression of
the Nationalist government through the 1950s and given focus by the tragedy of
Sharpeville in 1960; (2) by the end of the 1960s they were all forced into exile by that
oppression.
Brutus has made an important distinction among the militants between protest poets and
resistance poets. Protest poetry might be thought of as a Black expression of liberalism—
a poetry of personal response to oppression based on assumptions of justice, rights, and
human dignity. Resistance poetry is provocative, defiant, confrontational—a call to
action. To the extent that poets have target audiences, the former attempts to awaken the
liberal sensibility of an international community of poetry readers, while the latter calls
the oppressed themselves to action. The two best poets of the Sharpeville generation,
Brutus and Nortje, are protest poets.
Nortje was an enormously talented poet who took his own life in 1970. His most
important collection, Dead Roots, was published posthumously in
-131-
1973. It offers many images of oppression, humiliation, and detention—the appalling but
numbing facts of life under apartheid. Yet his best poems are not about life in South
Africa but rather about exile and its consequences: isolation, alienation, and self-hatred.
In fact, chronologically arranged in Dead Roots, the poems constitute an
autobiographical descent into hell. There is no evidence that the self-absorbed, Camus-
like Nortje would not have followed the same descent had he not been victimized by his
country's racist policies, but he was indisputably a victim. And as a victim he left a
record of loneliness ("The heart is a stone in water," 98 ), dissipation ("I have felt my
loins go numb at the blue burn of alcohol," 112 ), and self-disgust ("The poisoned spring
has bubbled through my veins," 133 ).
The best-known and most prolific poet of the Sharpeville generation is Dennis Brutus. He
is the author of four major collections and several smaller ones. The larger collections
are Sirens, Knuckles and Boots ( 1963). Letters to Martha ( 1968), A Simple Lust ( 1973),
and Stubborn Hope ( 1978). All these collections demonstrate Brutus's passionate love
for his country. That love has made his actions militant, but it has made his voice ironic
and controlled. He has been forced to develop poetic strategies that enable him to
communicate his love of the land itself and his hatred of the day-to-day experience of that
land. When he sings to his country like a troubadour to his lady, and even when he writes
of his experiences on Robben Island and uses prison as a metaphor for South Africa,
Brutus maintains a rhetorical distance and detachment.
In the later poems written in exile—he left South Africa in 1966—he is able to claim with
justice after many years of labor, "I am a rebel and freedom is my cause" ( Stubborn
Hope95). But even in exile and wearing the mantle of prophesy, his voice is quiet,
controlled, understated:
Behind the dark hills
the spears of dawn advance
the fieldflowers, drenched and bowed,
lift with the coming light:
the long night lumbers grudgingly
into the past.
( Stubborn Hope95)
On either side, as it were, of these two protest poets of the Sharpeville generation are
Mazisi Kunene and Keorapetse Kgogsitsile. Like Brutus, Nortje, and Pieterse, Kunene
has lived in exile for many years, but unlike them, he is a Zulu, not a "coloured" writer.
He writes in the Zulu language and in Zulu forms, translating his work later into English.
The first of his major collections, Zulu Poems, was translated and published in 1970; the
most recent, The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain, in 1982. Kunene's work may raise
the question of the place of translations in the study of English‐
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language literatures, but his best pieces are very effective in English. They bring together
two themes of Black South African poetry: the fate of traditional culture and the fate of
Black South Africans confronting technology, industry, and apartheid. On the one hand,
he writes poems with titles like " The Rise of the Angry Generation" and " Police Raid,"
while on the other hand he promises a future based on the traditional past:
My child takes the poem that is old
And learns from it our legends
To see life with the eyes of the Forefathers.
(Ancestors 17)
If Kunene is a traditionalist and a protest poet, Kgogsitsile, who has been in exile since
1961, is a resistance poet pointing the way to the Soweto generation. The title of his
major work, My Name Is Afrika ( 1971), makes this clear. It is a collection shot through
with images of fire and expressions of defiant rage.
It is the rhythm of unchained spirit
will put fire in our hands
to blaze our way
to clarity to power
to the rebirth of real men
(85)
Oswald Mtshali is a more truly transitional figure than Kgogsitsile for two important
reasons: he lived, wrote, and published in South Africa in the grim years between
Sharpeville and Soweto, and his transformation from a protest poet to a resistance poet
parallels and reflects the growing militancy of Black South Africans. His first collection,
Sounds of a Cowhide Drum, was published in Johannesburg in 1971. It is a protest
collection, the possibility of censorship and even imprisonment imposing on the poet
strategies of obliqueness, allusiveness, symbolism, and irony. But in his second
collection, Fireflames ( 1981), the subtle, even sly tonalities give way to direct,
confrontational verse. " I'm a burning chimney" is subtitled " A Militant's Cry." It begins
with the poet acknowledging that he stands "on the debris of... the Black man's life," but
it ends with the promise:
We will ascend to take up our rightful places,
we will sing a song in unison,
"At last victory is ours
the whole household now belongs to us."
( Fireflames37)
Militancy is one of the tones of the Soweto generation, poets who matured and emerged
in print in the 1970S. That generation, most of whom continue to live and publish in
South Africa, includes the older short story writer
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James Matthews, who in the 1970s turned to popular verse as a way of reaching the
masses. His poems in Cry Rage ( 1972) convey both a warning and a prophesy—almost a
prediction of the Soweto uprising in 1976, the tragedy waiting to happen. The best-
known poet to emerge in the early 1970s is Mongane Wally Serote, who overcame
detention in the Transvaal and exile in Botswana to publish four volumes in that decade.
In spite of the Zulu titles of his first two collections, Yakhal'inkomo ( 1972) and Tsetlo (
1974), and the occasional poem he has composed in Zulu, Serote is a location or
township poet. His diction is hip—deliberately shocking in a streetwise way, as in the
famous "What's in This Black 'Shit'" ( Yakhal'inkomo9). But he is also capable of
distilling the fire imagery that is so characteristic of the Soweto poets into simple,
moving language:
 White people are white people,
They are burning the world.
Black people are black people,
They are the fuel.
( Yakhal'inkomo50)
Two other important poets of the Soweto generation are Mafika Pascal Gwala and Sipho
Sepamla. Like Serote's, their style owes more to the American poets of the civil rights
movement— Imamu Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Haki Madhubuti—than to their
exiled predecessors of the Sharpeville generation. It is hip, jazzy, bluesy, a poetry made
out of the incidents and the language of the streets of Soweto and the other Black
townships. Sepamla is, perhaps, the most prolific of the poets who found their voices in
the 1970s. He has published both before and after Soweto. In the earlier collections like
Hurry Up to It ( 1975) and The Blues Is You in Me ( 1976), he sings the blues: "the blues
is the shadow of a cop / dancing the Immorality Act jitterbug" ( Blues70). After Soweto,
however, the blues and the anger he kept at an ironic distance with a cool, even comic
tone are transformed into simpler, more immediate images of horror and expressions of
hope. In The Soweto I Love ( 1977), he describes the results of the uprising this way:
bullets
pierced the backs of kids killed and
killed and killed.
(12)
Still, in the face of that atrocity, he dares to hope that those who remain in the township
will carry on with the job
of building anew
a body of being
from the ashes of the ground.
(24)
-134-
The themes of South African poetry are, of course, more varied than these excerpts
imply. Nevertheless, the dominant themes parallel those found in the poetry of
independent Black Africa—they parallel and yet they differ. In spite of the living literary
traditions in indigenous languages, the English
language poets are not greatly
concerned with roots and the recovery of a lost heritage. But they are deeply concerned
with the immediate effects of fascist, racist oppression. This is inevitable. They have not
lived uhuru ("freedom")—even uhuru betrayed. Their art, like their lives, is
determined— contained—within the events that have labeled the generations: Sharpeville
and Soweto.

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Acquah, Kobena Eyi. The Man Who Died. Accra: Asempa, 1984.
Angira, Jared. Cascades. London: Longman, 1979.
—. Silent Voices. London: Heinemann, 1972.
Anyidoho, Kofi. Earthchild. Accra: Woeli, 1985.
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Brew, Kwesi. African Panorama. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press,
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—. The Shadows of Laughter. London: Longman, 1968.
Brutus, Dennis. Letters to Martha. London: Heinemann, 1968.
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—. A Stubborn Hope. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1978.
Cheney-Coker, Syl. The Blood in the Desert's Eyes: Poems. Oxford: Heinemann, 1991 .
—. The Graveyard Also Has Teeth. London: Heinemann, 1980.
Chimombo, Steve. Napolo Poems. Zomba, Malawi: Manchichi, 1987.
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Mandubuike. Toward the Decolonization
of African Literature. Vol. I, African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. Washington,
D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983.
Chipasula, Frank. Nightwatcher, Nightsong. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986.
—. O Earth, Wait for Me. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984.
—. Whispers in the Wings. Oxford: Heinemann, 1991.
Clark J. P. [Bekederemo] Casualties. New York: Africana, 1970.
—. A Decade of Tongues: Selected Poems, 1958-1968. London: Longman, 1981.
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—. Poems. Ibadan, Nigeria: Mbari Press, 1962.
—. A Reed in the Tide. London: Longman, 1965.
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Dhlomo, H. I. E. Valley of a Thousand Hills. Durban, Natal: Knox, 1962.
Dipoko, Mbella Sonne. Black and White in Love. London: Heinemann, 1972.
Hove, Chenjerai. Red Hills of Home. Harare: Mambo Press, 1985.
Kgogsitsile, Keorapetse. My Name is Afrika. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
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—. Frantz Fanon's Uneven Ribs. London: Heinemann, 1971.
Mapanje, Jack. Of Chameleons and Gods. London: Heinemann, 1981.
Matthews, James. Cry Rage. Johannesburg: Spro-Cas, 1972.
Mnthali, Felix. When Sunset Comes to Sapitwa. London: Longman, 1982.
Moore, Gerald, and Ulli Beier. Modern Poetry from Africa. Baltimore: Penguin Books,
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Mpina, Edison. Raw Pieces. Blantyre, Malawi: Hetherwick, 1986.
Mtshali, Oswald. Fireflames. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter & Shooter, 1980.
—. Sounds of a Cowhide Drum. New York: Third Press, 1972.
Muronda, F. E. Echoes of My Mind. Harare: College Press, n.d.
Nortje, Arthur. Dead Roots. London: Heinemann, 1973.
Nwoga, Donatus. West African Verse. London: Longman, 1967.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. Locusts. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1976.
Oculi, Okello. Orphan. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968.
Ofeimun, Odia. The Poet Lied. London: Longman, 1980.
Ojaide, Tanure. The Blood of Peace and Other Poems. Oxford: Heinemann, 1991.
—. Children of Iroko and Other Poems. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review
Press, 1973.
Okai, Atukwei. Lorgorigi Logarithms and Other Poems. Accra: Ghana Publishing Corp.,
1974.
Okara, Gabriel. The Fisherman's Invocation. London: Heinemann, 1978.
Okigbo, Christopher. Labyrinths. New York: Africana, 1971.
Osofisun, Femi, San Aseir, and Kole Omotoso. "Interview: Odia Ofeimun." Opon Ifa 2,
no. I ( 1976): 7-9, 12-18, 21-22, 24, 27-29.
Osundare, Niyi. The Eye of the Earth. Ibadan, Nigeria: Heinemann, 1986.
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p'Bitek, Okot. Song of a Prisoner. New York: Third Press, 1971.
—. Song of Lawino. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966.
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p'Chong, Cliff. Words of My Groaning. Kampala: Uganda Literature Bureau, 1976.
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—. Poems. Ibadan, Nigeria: Mbari Press, 1964.
—. Satellites. London: Heinemann, 1967.
—. Selected Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1981.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Song in a Time of War. Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Saros, 1985.
Sepamla, Sipho. The Blues Is You in Me. Johannesburg: Donker, 1976.
—. Hurry Up to It. Johannesburg: Donker, 1976.
—. The Soweto I Love. London: Collins, 1977.
Serote, Mongane Wally. Tsetlo. Johannesburg: Donker, 1974.
—. Yakhal'inkomo. Johannesburg: Renoster, 1972.
Soyinka, Wole. Idanre and Other Poems. London: Methuen, 1967.
—. Mandela's Earth and Other Poems. London: Deutsch, 1989.
—. Myth, Literature, and the African World. London: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
—. Ogun Abibiman. London: Collins, 1976.
—. A Shuttle in the Crypt. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972.
-137-

5 English-Language Drama
and Theater
J. NDUKAKU AMANKULOR
Drama and theater—that is to say, dramatic literature and the art of theatrical
presentation—have the same unity that goes for bread and butter as food. As bread and
butter is food so is drama and theater performance art. Describing the two terms as a
singular notion or activity does not imply that there is no discrimination to be made, but
rather that both terms perform together, and hardly could the one be talked about without
the other being implied. They may be taken together to refer to the technique of telling a
story directly to an audience or spectators, through actors who impersonate the characters
in the story, thereby giving the impression that the events are taking place there and then.
The forms in which the story may be preserved and disseminated are various in modern
times; they include printed literature, film, and videotape. Because stage performances,
unless captured in one of the latter two media, are ephemeral, the playscript remains the
most reliable method of preserving the dramatic material independent of a specific
performance. The convenience of storing and retrieving the play in its literary form, and
the fact that it can be read and appreciated cerebrally without a formal staging, have
tended to invest the written play with a life of its own, to the extent that cultures lacking
their own scripts or story maps preserved in writing are thought of as not having drama.
African societies are categorized as such; hence drama is said not to be indigenous to the
continent. The controversy over this issue is now itself part of the history of drama in
Africa.
I have drawn attention elsewhere to the complex structure of indigenous African religious
and social practices, including festivals, in which, I believe, we can locate several art
forms, including drama, dance, music, poetry, and storytelling, either in their distinct
forms or in performance combinations ( Amankulor, "Concept and Practice"). If we
realize that sculpture, which Wole Soyinka ( Art, Dialogue and Outrage192) aptly calls
"a sister art" to drama, was denied a place in African culture by missionary-colonizer
pioneers until European artists themselves redressed the erroneous assessment,
-138-
we should be able similarly to correct the judgment by the same Europeans that drama in
Africa is nothing but ritual ceremony.
The process of reassessment has indeed already begun. With the work of such concerned
theater artists as Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski, the theater world is
making an objective journey into non
Western theater cultures and considering a theory
of drama in which the techniques transcend the merely material and which regards a
journey into the spirit as the ultimate function and essence of performance.
The distinction between drama and theater, as well as their interdependence, must be kept
in mind throughout any discussion of drama and theater in contemporary English-
speaking African society. In such discussions the tendency too often is to go straight to
the published plays because they represent the modern tradition and are easily retrievable
and accessible. Such an approach gives a misleading impression of contemporary African
theater, which I consider to include both the indigenous and Western traditions of the art.
I therefore attempt to discuss both forms in their historical perspectives in the following
pages. Moreover, many of the contemporary African playwrights are products of two
cultures, indigenous African and Western, so that the English-language plays cannot be
fully understood without recourse to their traditional cultural backgrounds. Also, if we
locate the contemporary African theater only in the historical period beginning in the
1960s, when the majority of English-speaking African states achieved independence, we
risk ignoring earlier play and theatrical traditions, including not only that theater which
was part of the colonial encounter but also the evolution of popular traditions such as the
concert party and operatic performances, sometimes in English and sometimes in African
languages, which are still part of the contemporary scene.

Indigenous African Theater in the Contemporary Setting

The strength of indigenous African theater before the coming of the Europeans and Arabs
resided in cultural associations and community institutions. These associations, which
were community-based, were often distinguished in their varying functions by the age,
sex, and sometimes occupation of the members. In addition to the political, social, and
artistic obligations they fulfilled for their people, which included the initiation of new
members, the associations formed performance groups for drama, music, and dance, as
well as sculpting, decorative, and other artistic groups.
Since public performance is the usual medium adopted by the arts in indigenous African
as in other societies, it was not difficult to find one kind or another going on throughout
the year's cycle. Drama, dance, poetry, storytelling, music, and the creation of sculpture
lent themselves readily to performances, which naturally exploited contemporary
religious and social realities. That these performances drew large crowds indicates that
they
-139-
were fully supported by the community; it is therefore not difficult to see why the Islamic
and Christian organizations tried hard to stamp them out. The Muslims banned the use of
the principal form of character representation, the mask, while the Christians raided
ancestral shrines and forbade African converts to participate in their cultural association's
activities, or even play their musical instruments. The attacks on the Yoruba Egúngún,
the Igbo Mmonwu, the Mende Poro, the Chewa Nyau, or the Luo Isinyago and M'dimu
were aimed at the peoples' indigenous religious and political ethos, as dramatized in these
performances. To attack the cultural associations and pronounce their practices evil or
barbaric was the best way to stamp out the art forms and politics engendered by them.
Nevertheless, the reappearance of the banned performances and their incorporation of
characters and themes involving the colonizers themselves in performances such as in the
ikoro of the Ngwa in Igboland, the egúngún of the Yoruba, or the gule wa mkulu of the
Chewa, shows the resilience of indigenous dramatic art and its ability to cope with the
changing political and historical climate. Indigenous artists remained faithful to the
tradition of their art, through which they interpreted political, religious, and social
developments.
Before Africa's contact with Europe's colonialism, Africans were already accustomed to
treating political and religious matters in their drama. Performances reached the highest
state of artistic inclusiveness and excellence during festivals at which certain central
myths and rituals were reenacted by the people as a whole, and which also provided
opportunities for the treatment of purely social issues through the use of masked
characters, puppets, and other techniques. The use of masks for character representation
had the effect of liberating the actor from psychological inhibitions and imbuing him at
the same time with the sacred essence that, by convention, enabled him to be unique and
to project a role that nobody would dare challenge or contest. The masked actor thus
embodied the holy actor, spirit essence, ancestor, or supernatural essence the dramatic
role transformed him into.
In the contact with the colonial administration the mask was a symbol of both mystical
and political authority, hence the reluctance of masked performers to submit to colonial
law enforcement. According to Isaac O. Delano, when a Yoruba egúngún was arrested
for committing a criminal offense during a performance, he claimed he was "a native of
another planet, and therefore outside this world's police authority" ( 164 -65). In spite of
strong protests the egúngún was tried in court and sentenced to two weeks' imprisonment
with hard labor. This incident best illustrates the easy confusion of the artistic, religious,
and political functions of the masked performer. Nor has the situation changed in post-
Independence African states, where performances by cultural associations still constitute
a claim to power and display a willingness to court danger by defying civil law. In
Nigeria, where a rich diversity of performances is sponsored by cultural associations,
masked performers have often been known to clash with the police. In the cos
 -140-
mopolitan city of Lagos, Èyò performances hold sway, and efforts by the police to control
their activities have often ended in social disorder. The same can be said of the Egúngún
in Ibadan, the Mmonwu in Enugu, the Ekpe in Calabar, or the Bori in Kaduna. John
Nunley reports the same situation about the Ode-lay masking society in Freetown, Sierra
Leone, which courts confrontation with police and government in its street performance
as an integral aspect of its aesthetic and spiritual success ( 102 ). Ode-lay groups, whose
names—such as Firestone, Rainbow, Bloody Mary, and Joyce Wata— suggest a certain
physical toughness and supernatural association, have remained part of the reality of the
urban environment, and they delight in choosing strategic locations in the streets for their
performances.
In the true sense of artistic development and awareness, indigenous theatrical
performances mirrored the historical realities of the colonial period and therefore
contributed to helping rural Africans develop what David Kerr describes as "cross-
cultural competitive organizational skills ... an essential element of the consciousness-
raising that preceded the formal struggle for independence" (" Unmasking the Spirits"
116). British colonialism came down heavily on indigenous African culture, especially
the performing arts. The reaction of the indigenous theater to colonial efforts to gag it
was similar in many African countries. The Igbo in Nigeria created new plays featuring
British colonial officers—administrators, police, missionaries—and their families as
characters to replace the banned traditional characters. The new plays were satiric
comedies imitating the manners and foibles of the European in a very broad sense, but
also more incisively where historical circumstances provided materials on such
characters. The colonial district commissioner, popularly known as "Nwa D.C." (nwa
being an Igbo term for "child," which the elders used in this context to draw attention to
the young administrative officers who were made to rule over and command their elders,
contrary to the Igbo system of authority), has become a stock character in contemporary
indigenous theater. He can be seen in a variety of performances strolling along with his
aides and muttering instructions to them. The policeman is another stock character,
frequently sheepish in his execution of authority. Colonial Europeans, men, women, and
children, feature in the Ijele, Uzoiyi, Odo, Omabe, and Ikoro performances, to mention
only a few in Igboland.
In Ikoro the repertoire of European characters includes the King and Queen of England,
the Governor General in Lagos, the Residents and District Commissioners in the
provinces and districts, and the law enforcement officers ( Amankulor, "Concept and
Practice"). The performance takes the form of an official visit by the king and queen of
England to their subjects at Ngwa in Igboland and the ceremonies and protocols
performed to receive them, including the presentation of the welcome address and the
response to it. In spite of the obvious satire of the performance, the ikoro drum, the
original symbol of the performance before colonial intervention, still oc
-141-
cupies the center of the arena stage, surrounded by a chorus of dancers. Other social
dramas, such as the negotiation for medicines hawked by an itinerant Hausa trader, take
place on the outskirts of the ring formed by the dancers. Also, the Aba Ugwu festival of
Okpatu Udi in Igboland features a district commissioner of the 1930s, a Mr. Chadwick,
who was notorious for sending men on forced labor for weeks without considering the
effect their absence would have on their families. Elsewhere in Africa, the Nyau cult
leaders in Malawi reacted to colonial interference in their Gule wa Mkulu (big dance) "by
incorporating stereotypes of colonial political and religious figures into the satire of the
anthropomorphic masking traditions" ( Kerr, "Unmasking the Spirits" 116, quoting
Schofeleers and Linden 1972), and in the Bamana puppet plays in Mali the characters
include colonial as well as modern-day police (Arnoldi 66).
The contradictions of colonial contact that led to the incorporation of European characters
into indigenous African plays have become a regular, albeit anachronistic, feature of the
performances. Their place within the total structure of the performance, however, shows
that although they form a constellation of history, they are only peripheral to the people's
lives and worldview. Thus, in the variety of festival and other performances where they
are featured, the colonial figures yield the center of the performance space to the
enactment of the original myths or stories at the basis of the performance.
The foregoing is only a brief overview of indigenous theatrical performances in Africa.
The scholarly debate on the question of indigenous theater and drama in Africa has been
conducted by such scholars as Ruth Finnegan, M. J. C. Echeruo, Oyekan Owomoyela,
Alain Ricard, Oyin Ogunba, J. Ndukaku Amankulor, Ossie Enekwe, and S. O. Obuh, to
name but a few. In my view, indigenous theater and drama are alive and well in
contemporary African culture, conflicting theories of the drama notwithstanding.

The Colonial Legacy

There was no lack of enthusiasm by the British to build theaters, especially in the
cosmopolitan cities where the seats of government were located. As early as 1800 Sir
George Yonge had built the African Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. Although it
was forced to close in 1839 because of the puritanical campaigns against it by the
Methodist church, which accused it of "sinful practices," the African Theatre's premiere
production, Shakespeare's Henry IV, showed its strong cultural orientation. Similar
theaters, sometimes all-purpose town halls, were built in Lagos, Accra, Lusaka, and
Nairobi, to mention only a few capitals, and thrown open for cultural uses by Europeans
and sometimes by elite Africans whose aesthetic taste mimicked that of the whites. Lagos
still has its Glover Memorial Hall, and Nairobi its Donovan Maule Theatre and the
Kenya National Theatre, which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ( Decolonising the Mind41
-142-
wa Thiong'o (Decolonising the Mind 41) decried because they were still European-
dominated. The Glover Memorial Hall opened in Lagos in 1899 and catered to the
interest of Europeans, as well as of Black elite clubs formed by returnee ex-slaves such as
those who formed "The Academy" in 1866, the Philharmonic Society, the Lagos Glee
Singers, and Brazilian Dramatic Company. The preoccupation with European culture was
so undisguised in these colonial theater establishments that any play with an African
cultural theme presented in them was considered greatly favored. Thus in 1904 when D.
A. Oloyede's premier Nigerian drama, King Elejigbo and Princess Abeje of Kotangora,
was performed at the Glover Memorial Hall, the event made history because it was the
first play written by a Nigerian (and the first church-sponsored drama group) to be
presented there (Ogunbiyi 19).
Colonial theaters were designed as institutions to showcase European culture and
civilization, a function that church organizations and educational institutions were later to
help promote and perpetuate. The establishment of the European form of theater in
complete indifference to traditional forms, which Robert Serumaga and Janet Johnson
lament, was aided by the formal study and practice of the European tradition in the
schools and among church groups. According to Serumaga and Johnson, the theater of
Europe "did not even superimpose itself onto the traditions, but rather led an isolated
existence related only to the needs of the few who fell within its ambit" ( 52 -53). I have
offered cultural and political reasons why this could have happened. Moreover, Serumaga
is aware that the major aim of colonialism was not to promote indigenous culture and
give the Africans a sense of pride in themselves and in their institutions, but, to the
contrary, to "civilize" Africa, which means bringing up its people in the image and
likeness of the colonizers.
In South Africa the formation of the Bantu Dramatic Society in 1933 led to the
production of English plays, the first being Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.
The founder of the society, Herbert I. E. Dhlomo, was in 1935 to write the first published
African play in English. The Girl Who Killed to Save explores an aspect of a traditional
story, which he gives a Christian moral twist by attacking traditional dependence on
mystical and magical powers as worthless. Dhlomo's heroine, Nongqause, leads her
people to famine and dependence by her announcement that the ancestors of the Ama
Xhosa have told her that the invading white people will be defeated if the Ama Xhosa
slaughter their cattle and leave their soil uncultivated. They follow her advice and suffer
famine and hardship, later to be restored to prosperity through the efforts of the same
invaders in the persons of the commissioner, his wife, his brother-in-law, and a
missionary.
Elsewhere in Africa the British system of education, which encouraged the use of
indigenous languages at the early stages, led to the production of plays in those languages
first. The church-sponsored schools frequently organized
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social, educational, and religious celebrations and activities where plays in African
languages were performed, interspersed with music, dance, and recitations, most of
which drew their creative origins from indigenous art forms. Biblical stories were
dramatized and presented in programs containing dramatized local tales, selected local
dances, and songs. In West Africa this medley of theatrical presentation, often known as
concerts, offered inspiration for further dramatic creativity, which blossomed into the
Yoruba operas in Nigeria and the concert party groups in Ghana. The organizers of the
church and school concerts frequently kept the performances indoors— in the assembly
or social halls, which may or may not have raised stage areas, but which in terms of
spatial and conventional standards constituted direct borrowings from the presentation
techniques of Europe. Many church and government school assembly halls were
therefore furnished with raised
platform stages, house curtains, and backdrops, which
became standard equipment for all kinds of performances, no matter how inappropriate
the halls were for the materials being presented in them. Thus with school concerts and
plays the proscenium stage became the model for all performances and occasions. It
became a legacy that the universities would later adopt, and as such the spatial point of
reference for African playwrights and producers. Popular European playwrights such as
Shakespeare, Molière, George Bernard Shaw, and Henrik Ibsen were featured in the
school productions by literature students, who constituted the backbone of the dramatic
societies and participated in the productions, because doing so they had the opportunity to
memorize the lines of the relevant plays on which they were to be tested in their literature
examinations. The performances were duly reported in the local papers as well as in the
teachers' educational journals, such as the Native Teacher's Journal in South Africa and
the Nigerian Teacher in Nigeria.
Achimota College, in Ghana, also became involved in dramatic activities from the early
1920s. Here students produced their own plays in indigenous African languages. By
1933, after a two-year assistance by the staff to help the students produce English plays,
there came a decision by the students "never to put on a vernacular play again" (Williams
63). In a reverse situation in the same country, the Accra Dramatic Society (founded by
Africans in 1929) was discouraged by their mentor and British educator, J. M.
Winterbottom, from producing Ibsen, Shaw, and Galsworthy, because "they were
concerned with situations the majority of which have not yet arisen in West Africa" ("
Experimental Drama" 113). In any case, the dramatic fare in Ghana, as in Nigeria, was
largely foreign. Even on the eve of independence, in the 1950s, the University College
Ibadan dramatic presentations featured such performances as Arms and the Man by the
Student Dramatic Society ( 1958), H.M.S. Pinafore by the Ibadan Operatic Society (
1958), and the Mostellaria in Latin and the Cyclops in Greek by the Classics Society (
1957 and 1961 respectively). Dramatic activity that encouraged indigenous play
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wrights started in earnest in both countries with the founding of the Arts Theatre Group
in 1958 at the University College Ibadan and of the Ghana Experimental Players by Efua
Sutherland in Ghana.
School plays did not become a popular tradition despite their medley performance
convention, and neither did the African elite club performances. They lacked grass-roots
supports. With the eruption of World War I cultural development diminished in
importance as attention was diverted to helping the British in their war effort, and there
was less interest in theatrical development. In West Africa, it took the efforts of people
like Hubert Ogunde in Nigeria and Ishmael Johnson in the Gold Coast ( Ghana), working
within the syncretistic tradition of the Western church-oriented morality musical plays
and the indigenous aesthetic conventions, to build a popular tradition of African theater
outside the walls of the secondary schools, colleges, and universities. Hubert Ogunde was
influenced in his operatic performance convention by the theatricalized church services
of the breakaway African churches in Nigeria, especially the Aladura sect, which made
use of African and European music and musical instruments along with dance, song, and
mimes in their worship. As an organist and composer of native airs, Ogunde became
involved in dramatic presentations for his church. The moral religious emphasis is
evident in his first two plays, The Garden of Eden and the Throne of God ( 1944) and
Worse Than Crime ( 1946), which respectively deal with Adam and Eve's rebellion
against God, and the evils of the slave trade.
The success of those two plays encouraged him to resign from the police force to become
a professional theater artiste, and with his total savings of only nine pounds he founded
his first theater company, the African Music Research Party. Acknowledging the reality
of his indigenous Yoruba culture and its influence on him as a product of "the ritual
ceremony, the ritual priest and communal life" (Ogunbiyi 10), Ogunde strove to reflect
his society by focusing on its social, political, and moral concerns. He contributed
actively through theater to the fight against colonialism with such plays as Strike and
Hunger ( 1945)—for which the colonial police arrested, tried, and fined him at Jos in
1947 on the charge of inciting the workers to rebel—and Bread and Bullet ( 1950), which
treats the Enugu coal miners' strike of 1949 and the massacre of eighteen miners by the
police. With other Yoruba artistes, especially Kola Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo, Ogunde
created a distinct theatrical tradition in contemporary Nigerian theater, the Yoruba
operatic theater. It is believed that there are about one hundred Yoruba traveling theater
groups today in the Association of Nigerian Theatre Practitioners.
Like Ogunde in Nigeria, Ishmael Johnson pioneered a popular tradition of theater, the
concert party, in the former Gold Coast, now Ghana. Kwabena N. Bame writes that the
history of this new form of dramatic entertainment, which drew upon indigenous as well
as foreign influences, may be traced to a certain Teacher Yalley, headmaster of a Sekondi
elementary
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school who began giving "concerts" and acting in his school's Empire Day celebrations
back in 1918 (Bame 8). Yalley's performances were a medley of "jokes, singing and
dancing," in which he disguised himself with fancy clothes, wigs, false mustaches, and
minstrel makeup. His audiences were the elite of society, and it took Ishmael ("Bob")
Johnson, himself a pupil of Yalley in the Sekondi school, to bring the "concert" to the
masses by playing to popular audiences in the towns. Influenced by the Yalley tradition,
church morality and musical plays, Charlie Chaplin's characteristic walk in the silent
movies, Black American vaudeville, and the Anansesem ( Spider folktales) storytelling
conventions of the Akan peoples, Johnson created in 1930 a concert trio known as The
Two Bobs, including himself and his two school friends J. "Bob" Ansah and C. B. Hutton.
Johnson and Ansah played the "Bobs" (male roles) and Hutton played the female
character, in which she was later to be popularly featured as "the Carolina Girl."
According to E. J. Collins, these shows were publicized "by a masked bell-ringer wearing
a billboard" ( 52 ).
The performance structure consisted of one half hour made up of an "Opening Chorus,"
an "In" and a "Duet," and the "Scene" or the play proper. The opening chorus was sung
and danced by the three actors, the "in" comprised ragtime sung by one of the Bobs, and
the duet, which closed the thirty-minute introduction, featured the two Bobs in a joking
session. The scene (or play) lasted one hour. The language of presentation was English
(occasionally translated into Akan and Pidgin English), which was also the language of
the highlife lyrics. In effect the performance catered to a wide variety of audiences,
including those who had received some Western education, people whose education was
picked up in the city streets, and people who knew no English.
Between 1935, when Johnson left The Two Bobs to join another concert party, The Axim
Trio, and 1960, twenty-eight guitar bands with concert parties had been registered, and
about the same number had become members of the Musicians Union of Ghana
(MUSIGA), formed on 24 June 1978. The MUSIGA—whose constitution included,
among other aims, the protection of the creative and performing rights of the musicians
and the encouragement of talent and research into indigenous music and culture—is a
tribute to the creative seed sown by Ishmael Johnson and his friends in the popularization
of the performing arts. Like Ogunde, they brought the practice of theater within the
reality of a profession capable of earning them a living while also entertaining and
educating their audiences. Presentations such as " The Jealous Rival " and " The
Ungrateful Husband " were not just invitations for the audience to "come and laugh"
(Bame 103-90) but also pleas to them to reflect on the moral, social, and cultural
implications of the actions of the people they laughed at.
On the eve of the 1960s, when the majority of African countries were granted
independence by the British and the French, some African play
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wrights had started to demonstrate sufficient mastery or competence in the dramatic form
to declare their independence from the earlier religious, educational, and cultural tutelage
of the churches, the schools, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Plays from West
Africa, like Kobina Senyi's The Blinkards and J. B. Danquah's The Third Woman (both
from the Gold Coast), were already exploiting the themes of social responsibility and the
cultural image of the African in the light of his acquired European civilization. In general
the plays urged the ideal of a balance between traditional African and European cultures
so that the African might still identify with the masses in the rural villages as well as the
elite in the urban environment.
In Nigeria, the same concern with the conflict between indigenous and European cultures
marked Wole Soyinka's early plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel,
written between 1957 and 1958. Igwezu, the protagonist of The Swamp Dwellers, finds
no comfort in the swamps, where his parents live, nor in the city, where his twin brother
now lives. In the swamp his crops are washed off by the floods in spite of the mandatory
sacrifices he makes to the Serpent god through his priest, Kadiye, and in the city his own
wife is seduced by his twin brother—an abominable offense in traditional society. Igwezu
is no longer at ease in either environment. In The Lion and the Jewel Lakunle's mindless
application of Western strategies to indigenous situations results in failure. Traditional
culture, symbolized in the character of Baroka, the Lion of Ilujinle, proves to possess
greater stability and common sense. Sidi, who stands in the middle of the two cultures,
prefers to seek a union with Baroka rather than Lakunle. Baroka's mesmerizing address to
her, urging that "the old must flow into the new," suggests the playwright's solution to the
conflict, a realization that one culture cannot now exist independent of the other: Africa
and the West, the old and the young.
Unlike the healthy conflict and optimism of the West African plays on the eve of
independence, the plays written by Africans at the same time in South Africa were rather
less robust and more pessimistic. Dhlomo's Dingane ( 1959), like his earlier play, reveals
a fixed pessimism from which there appears to be no relief except for the moral religious
recourse to forgiveness. The play takes its title from the name of one of Shaka's brothers,
who planned and executed his death. Dingane is hated fiercely by Shaka's sister, who,
however, by the end of the play decides to forgive him, saying, "I must cease to hate." In
other words, the entire heroic tone of the Shaka story, based on revenge tragedy, sobers
into a morality tale of forgiveness. Tjaart Coetzee 's Kwa-Namakunde is another
pessimistic portrayal of an African kingdom after its conquest by the Europeans. Anthony
Graham-White attributes the pervading pessimism in South African plays to the political
reality the Africans there faced, which was different from that in West Africa ( 81 ).
The British Broadcasting Corporation, an active partner in the cultural
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formation of Africa in the European tradition, played a significant role in the
development of contemporary African theater of English expression. The BBC African
Service program featured a monthly series, "African Theatre," designed to encourage
dramatic creativity among African writers and to further the cultural development of the
theater through the medium of radio. Shirley Cordeaux writes that the first production in
the new series was an adaptation of a part of the Wakefield Cycle of medieval English
mystery plays by a South African author, Tjaart Coetzee, writing under the pseudonym
Chawanda Kutse ( 147 ). The Creation was aired on 21 March 1962. But why adapt from
the Wakefield Cycle? Cordeaux explains, "The reasoning went as follows: These
Mystery plays were the beginning of theatre in England. Adapt them to an African
setting, and update the language to be comprehensible to a present-day audience, and this
will make an acceptable introduction to radio drama for an African audience" ( 148 ).
This reasoning, I daresay, has had an overwhelming effect in the development of
contemporary African drama, which has largely followed the structure and form of the
English tradition of literary dialogue while adapting the local materials to fit into this
form. Chawanda Kutse's The Creation obviously explored a Christian religious theme
that perhaps was considered safe for the African audience. Two more radio plays by the
same author, The Crucifixion and The Resurrection, broadcast in the next two months,
completed this Christian trilogy and fulfilled, as it were, the messianic introduction of the
African radio audience to the aesthetics of modern theater.
The BBC "African Theatre" audience was very narrow indeed. Although people from
different walks of life could listen to and enjoy the broadcasts and satisfy a variety of
their aesthetic interests, the plays were beamed especially at the educated African class
"able to speak and think comfortably in English ... people who have undergone some
course in higher education" (Cordeaux 150). While Cordeaux makes excuses for the BBC
African Service for not wishing "to set itself up as an arbiter of African radio drama," yet
the organization through the " African Theatre" series "acted as a radio nursery for
African writing talent ... a nursery for African actors and actresses." The influence of the
BBC on the educated African elites in English-speaking Africa is an important factor in
the formation of a new taste in dramatic art. That this influence has remained a tradition
among many in contemporary society probably explains why the struggle between the
integration of indigenous and western dramatic tastes and concepts remains unrealized.
Participation in the " African Theatre" series attracted the cream of Africa's creative
writers in English. Apart from the sense of achievement and publicity they received from
having their works broadcast worldwide, they were also paid a modest stipend into the
bargain. It is therefore not surprising that almost all the well-known and the not-so-well-
known English
speaking African playwrights participated in the African Theatre
Competition organized between 1962 and 1969, and their works were broadcast
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whole or in part. Wole Soyinka's The Detainee was broadcast on 5 September 1965, six
months after his Camwood on the Leaves was aired. Later (in 1966 and 1969,
respectively), his Lion and the Jewel and The Swamp Dwellers were broadcast. Other
names that have become famous in contemporary African theater and that appeared in the
program include those of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, formerly James Ngugi, and Kuldip Sondhi
( Kenya); Ama Ata Aidoo and Joe de Graft ( Ghana); John Pepper Clark [ Bekederemo],
Femi Euba, and Obi Egbuna ( Nigeria); Pat Maddy ( Sierra Leone); Guillaume Oyono-
Mbia ( Cameroon); and Chewanda Kutse and Bloke Modisane ( South Africa), among
many others. Judging from the level and quality of participation the BBC African Service
"African Theatre" series attracted in the decade immediately following Independence in
the 1960s, one may assert that contemporary African theater in English would never have
been the same without it.

Independence and After

The attainment of political independence in the 1960s by the majority of the Anglophone
and Francophone African countries was a boost to contemporary African literature.
Although the groundwork had been laid through a variety of cultural, religious, and
educational institutions, the arrival of political freedom triggered the need for freedom in
other fields of national endeavor, including literature and the arts. The Kampala
Conference on African Literature in 1964 and the Congress for Cultural Freedom
meetings in Senegal and Sierra Leone in 1963 were concerned with the definition of
African literature and the need for its study in the universities. They were clear
recognitions by Africans that the time had come for them to be conscious of the national
and cultural relevance of that literature which they could call their own.
That many Anglophone African countries, except perhaps Kenya and Zimbabwe, may be
said to have attained their independence without much bitterness and bloodshed meant
that the need to examine the historical, political, and cultural imperatives of African
identity was not considered pressing in the era before political independence. As a result,
the treatment of the conflict with colonial authority was not as strident in the drama and
theater of independent English-speaking African states as was the case in South Africa.
The conception of the relevance of African literature, especially drama, was that it had to
examine a variety of contemporary social, political, and religious issues. Although the
phenomenon of the contemporary African personality as one delicately balanced between
indigenous culture and western civilization has already been explored in pre-
Independence writing, there was an intensification of its probing by post-Independence
playwrights and an expansion of its application to include economic and political
implications. The sheer outpouring of creative energy was a symbolic
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declaration of independence by the playwrights, even though they continued to rely
largely on European dramatic form and production conventions.
From playwrights commanding a high degree of national and international visibility, like
Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and others, to the more local, like the Onitsha Market
playwrights, came plays that tackled the problems of society, social relationships, and
national independence with varying degrees of success, and that appealed to different
social classes. Soyinka's plays, for example, could be visually appealing to popular
audiences, and also had the intellectual sophistication that made them an intellectual
challenge for university audiences. Hubert Ogunde and other Yoruba traveling theater
practitioners, on the other hand, reached the masses more easily, and the Onitsha Market
plays found ready audiences among high school students, who often produced them to
entertain fellow students.

Themes
The themes of the plays written from the late I950s through the I980s range over a wide
spectrum of issues, which include social relationships and institutional changes affecting
marriage and family life, ethnic taboos, prejudices, chauvinism, and social responsibility.
Political themes, including corruption among the ruling classes, are also explored by the
playwrights. Even religion, especially the conflict among the new religions and their
corruptive influences, finds its way into the plays. In thematic terms, it is fair to say that
African playwrights writing in English, like their French-language counterparts, have
displayed considerable concern for the problems of their society even though their styles
of treating the issues naturally vary according to the influences affecting them and the
degree of their social commitment to those issues.
The theme of conflict between African and European traditions is pervasive in the early
plays of Wole Soyinka. This concern continues in his plays of the 1960s (including The
Trials of Brother Jero [ 1960], Camwood on the Leaves [ 1960], Childe Internationale [
1987], The Strong Breed [ 1963], Kongi's Harvest [ 1965], and The Road [ 1965]), and in
the post-civil war plays (including Madmen and Specialists [ 1971], The Bacchae of
Euripides [ 1973], Opera Wonyosi [ 1981], and Death and the King's Horseman [ 1975]).
His interest in cultural nationalism, for which he reinvents the myth of Ogun, may be
seen in many different guises in his plays. In Brother Jero the conflict between Jero and
Old Prophet dramatizes the corruptions that have permeated the field of religion as a
result of the selfish quest for material gains. In Camwood the conflict is between Isola,
the rebellious son of a Christian pastor who has made the daughter of the Olumorins
pregnant, and his father, whom he kills in an attempt to shoot a boa that threatens to
exterminate a tortoise and her young ones. Childe Internationale is a light-hearted
treatment of cultural conflict. In it Titi, the daughter of a local politician and student at an
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international school, returns home to practice her newfound European freedom, actively
encouraged by her "been-to" mother. Indigenous culture prevails here, as in The Lion and
the Jewel.
In The Strong Breed and Kongi's Harvest, Soyinka explores two kinds of conflict, the one
cultural and metaphysical and the other cultural and political. The ritual ceremony of the
scapegoat in the former play is one of those cultural practices that may offer society a
psychological renewal but that, in the light of contemporary civilization, needs to be
abolished. In the latter play the cultural celebration of the New Yam Festival by Oba
Danlola is usurped by Kongi, president of the Republic of Isma. This usurpation of ritual
authority by a political leader creates a conflict in which both cultural and political
stability are threatened. In The Road cultural symbols are exploited for the personal and
selfish benefit of the Professor, whose death becomes a victory for Say Tokyo Kid and
the other layabouts whom he had continuously exploited. The conflict (with regard to
moral responsibility) is played out in Death and the King's Horseman, in which Elesin
Oba's delay to perform the ritual suicide demanded of him causes his British-educated
son and medical student, Olunde, to commit suicide in his place. Although Olunde's
death brings shame to his father and prompts him to kill himself rather belatedly, it is
questionable whether his personal sacrifice represents a triumph for the younger
generation in any meaningful or progressive sense. Biodun Jeyifo has criticized Soyinka's
resolution of the conflict as a typical African "bourgeois" historical tragedy characterized
by conformism ( 106 -7).
With regard to political themes, Soyinka is at his best with the satiric portrayal of corrupt
and power-hungry political figures. Kongi's Harvest, Opera Wonyosi, and A Play of
Giants are full-length plays dealing directly with politics and power. In Kongi's Harvest a
life-giving institution, the New Yam Festival that constitutes the permanent backdrop of
the play, is travestied by Kongi, who turns it into a sterile, life-threatening celebration.
The travesty in turn breeds plotters like Daodu and Segi, who plan to assassinate Kongi in
order to restore the communality and spirituality of the traditional celebration. The failure
of the assassination plot creates a confusing denouement that leaves Kongi still in control
and likely to become even more ruthless in the consolidation of his political power.
Extreme degrees of such callous ruthlessness characterize the actions of the African
leaders portrayed in A Play of Giants, published in 1984. Idi Amin, the deposed Ugandan
tyrant (Kamini in the play), is the central butt of this deadly satire. With such other
political tyrants as Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Jean Bedel Bokassa, the self-
styled emperor of the Central African Empire, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire,
respectively disguised in the play as Benfacio Gunema, Emperor Basco, and Barra
Toboum, he poses for a sculptor attended by Gudrum, a hypocritical and fawning
Scandinavian journalist. Soyinka chronicles the sadistic and blood-chilling repressive
measures adopted by these leaders, the "giants" of Africa, in keep
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ing themselves in power with the active connivance of the imperialist forces, East and
West, and the support of local functionaries, including intellectuals, economists and
image-makers. Kamini, a symbol of evil in all its ramifications, unleashes a desperate
assault on the United Nations (symbol of superpower politics) when news reaches him
that he has been overthrown with arms supplied by the superpowers to his country of
Bugara. Although A Play of Giants is set in New York rather than Africa, its symbolic
denouement is unmistakably positive for the oppressed in Africa, who are the ultimate
victims of the ineptitude of the African political process created and exploited by
imperialist forces. The play endorses the stand that when true freedom comes in Africa
with the entry of patriotic and well-informed leaders, the monsters forced on the people
as leaders will, like Frankenstein's, turn against the very powers that created or nurtured
them. Thus the giants in the play are political midgets in fact, whose leadership is both an
imposition and an insult to the natural potential of the African.
Soyinka's countrymen who have won international recognition as playwrights include
John Pepper Clark, Ola Rotimi, Obi Egbuna, and Femi Osofisan. While J. P. Clark's Song
of a Goat ( 1964) established him as a playwright, his Ozidi ( 1966) testified to his
indebtedness to traditional folk material and Ijo performance tradition. Other plays such
as The Raft and The Masquerade (both 1964) equally exploit the folktale models for
contemporary social and political meaning. Ola Rotimi is well known for his successful
adaptation of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex into an African play with a Yoruba background,
titled The Gods Are Not to Blame ( 1971). Kurunmi ( 1971) deals with the nineteenth-
century Yoruba wars, and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi ( 1974) tells the story of an Oba of
Benin who was forced to surrender to British soldiers in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. Both plays are fatalistic tragedies in the classical Greek mode, and Rotimi has
been criticized for adopting a tragic form that does not serve the needs of contemporary
Nigerian society in any positive way. If... ( 1983), subtitled The Tragedy of the Ruled,
purveys a concept of the hero and of collective action consistent with those of the other
plays. In it the collective action of renters against a corrupt landlord and politician fails,
and the young boy who represents the future continuation of the struggle is killed during
the police action to evict the renters. Rotimi's plays, though culturally interesting and
dramatically moving, fail to suggest a positive basis for a new social order.
The younger generation of Nigerian playwrights have, since the civil war, been critical of
their predecessors for not providing a guiding social vision for contemporary society.
They have therefore written plays to fill this artistic ideological vacuum. The outstanding
playwright of this generation is Femi Osofisan. Others are Tunde Fatunde, Egiab Irobi,
and Segun Oyekunle, whose plays demonstrate the same urgency and social awareness
that suffuse contemporary Black South African drama. Among the female playwrights,
Zulu Sofola's depiction of the traditional role of women is contrasted with
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her younger counterpart, Tess Onwueme's, who challenges the traditional gender
assumptions in her plays.
In Ghana, Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, and J. C. de Graft have played major roles in
the establishment of contemporary drama and theater. Efua Sutherland especially has
worked consistently since the days of Kwame Nkrumah in the early 1960s toward the
founding of a national theater and dramatic culture in Ghana. Her most important plays,
Edufa, Foriwa, and The Marriage of Anansewa, show her development within the
European dramatic tradition as well as her determination to create a new dramatic
aesthetic that would define for her what a truly African theater should be. She founded an
open-air theater called the Ghana Drama Studio in Accra, and the Kodzidan (Story
House) in Ekumfi-Atiwa.
Edufa ( 1967) is the story of a man of that name who seeks to escape death by
manipulating his wife, Ampoma, to succumb to a death the oracles predicted for him.
Although the similarities between this play and Alcestis by Euripides have been
remarked, Sutherland nevertheless exploits traditional beliefs in divination and the
interplay of traditional and European ceremonies in the attempt to portray a rich and
successful modern Edufa held in high esteem by his people. In Foriwa ( 1967) Sutherland
uses her protagonists, Foriwa, the beautiful and enlightened daughter of the queen mother
of Kyerefaso, and Labaran, a graduate from the north of Ghana who lives a simple and
unostentatious life, to bring enlightenment to the town of Kyerefaso, which has been
abandoned to ignorance and backwardness by its elders' refusal to learn new ways. The
theme of the play is obviously national, namely, the promotion of a new national spirit in
Ghana that would encourage inter-ethnic cooperation and openness to new ideas. This is
the significance of the queen mother's promise to use the festival of the town as a symbol
of positive renewal, because "Kyerefaso needs the new life ... and men to make it true."
The Marriage of Anansewa ( 1975) is Sutherland's most valuable contribution to
Ghanaian drama and theater. In it she transmutes the traditional Akan Spider tales
(Anansesem) into a new dramatic structure, which she calls Anansegoro. In the play the
storyteller occupies his traditional prominent position as the wise commentator and
narrator, uniting the audience with the actors onstage and preventing false emotions
from passing for facts by debunking the actions of pretenders such as Ananse and his
aides.
Ama Ata Aidoo has produced literary works in drama, fiction, and poetry. She is not as
strongly attached to practical theater as Sutherland, but her two plays, The Dilemma of a
Ghost ( 1965) and Anowa ( 1970), are strong contributions to the Ghanaian theater of the
mid-1960s and early 1970s. Both plays deal with the role of positive communication and
mutual confidence, or the lack of them, in the relationship between men and women. In
The Dilemma Ato Yawson, a Ghanaian, marries Eulalie Rush, an African American, in
the United States, promising her a life full of pleasure and free from extended
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family intervention in his native Ghana. The conflict between the couple arises from
Ato's romantic promise, which the realities of an African marriage will not support. It
takes Ato's mother, Esikom, to educate Eulalie and save the marriage. In Anowa the
marriage of Kofi and Anowa heads for a disastrous tragedy because of the failure of Kofi,
though a wealthy and handsome businessman, to communicate positively with his wife,
especially about his impotence, which appears to have resulted from a curse placed on
him by the ghosts of the slaves he keeps to promote his business. Unable to stand the
shame they have brought on each other and on themselves, Kofi and Anowa commit
suicide, leaving behind their alienated families and townspeople to pass judgment on
them.
Like Aidoo's, J. C. de Graft's plays Sons and Daughters ( 1964) and Through a Film
Darkly ( 1970) had a tremendous impact on African theater in English in the 1960s and
1970s. They have been produced by drama groups in universities and urban areas
throughout the continent. Sons and Daughters, which deals with the choice of suitable
professions for the youngest son and daughter of a self-made African whose two oldest
sons are a doctor and accountant respectively, was topical in the early days of
independence. It remains so today. The desire of the father to have his youngest son and
daughter become an engineer and a lawyer respectively, against their wishes of becoming
an artist and a dancer, amounts to a critique of the value of education in contemporary
African society. Through a Film Darkly explores the tragedy inherent in the sort of lack
of honest communication we have observed in Ama Ata Aidoo's two plays. John breaks
his promise to marry Rebecca when he falls in love with an English girl, but eventually
he breaks up with the latter also. When he returns home, he marries Sewah. Rebecca
learns the truth of John's insincerity, confronts him with his deception, and finally kills
herself. Unable to accommodate his deceit of Rebecca and his humiliation at the hands of
his English girl, who in fact used him only as an anthropological specimen, John commits
suicide. The dilemma for the emergent educated African who must play a role in
divergent contemporary cultures is clearly evident in John's fate. De Graft's last play,
Muntu ( 1977), is a philosophical portrayal of the history of Africa from its mythic
origins, through the scramble for Africa and the slave trade, to the struggle for
independence. The inability of Muntu's children to remain united, aggravated by pressure
from external forces, leads to political turmoil and rapid changes of governments, civilian
and military, with dictatorial tendencies. Commissioned by the All Africa Council of
Churches, Muntu projects a religious yet deterministic image of man, who must always
continue to struggle in life and death, "Because at the heart of Creation / There seems to
lie a will counter-purposed" ( 89 ).
Other major Ghanaian playwrights include Kwesi Kay, whose plays have been broadcast
on radio, and Kofi Awoonor, whose one-act plays include Ancestral Power and Lament
(both 1972). Kwesi Kay's Laughter and Hubbub in the House ( 1972
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in the House (1972) and Maama ( 1968), Darlene Clems's radio plays The Prisoner, the
Judge, and the Jailor and Scholarship Woman (both 1973) have also been published.
Asiedu Yirenkyi's collection of five plays, titled Kivulu and Other Plays ( 1980), deals
with a variety of domestic problems, sometimes set against the background of traditional
ritual or urban environment.
Post-Independence plays in other parts of English-speaking West Africa, including Sierra
Leone and The Gambia, have been influenced by similar social, cultural, and political
pressures observable in the plays from Nigeria and Ghana. Sarif Easmon put Sierra Leone
on the map of African drama and theater with his two plays, Dear Parent and Ogre and
The New Patriots (both 1965), both of which are peopled by characters who control the
wealth, influence, and top positions in society, flaunt their decadence shamelessly, and
drown their corruption in champagne, fine talk, and the superior mannerisms of cozy
affluence. Dear Parent and Ogre shows how dirty politics gets among people of this
class even in negotiating a marriage. The New Patriots reveals in a rather melodramatic
way the corrupt record of a minister of state and his associates who scramble to grab their
country's money. "These are the NEW PATRIOTS," Easmon says.
Yulisa (Pat) Amadu Maddy's handling of the social and political problems of society is
more effective than Easmon's. Maddy has published many plays since the 1960s, and he
is still quite active, especially in his commitment to bringing a theater of conscience to
the people. His plays, published in 1971, include Obasai, Yon-Kon, Life Everlasting,
Gbana-Bendu, and Alla Gbah. They expose the hypocrisy of those who are supposed to
have the public trust, especially men who are supposedly called to God's service. Alla
Gbah is the social tragedy of Joko Campbell, a young man conceived and raised in deceit
and hypocrisy, the offspring of a local pastor and a widow. He learns the truth of his
parentage and exposes their hypocrisy in his death cell as he awaits hanging for the
murder of his lover. In his later plays, Maddy embraces the role of the theater activist,
turning to the problems of the poor masses of his country and raising the battle cry for
social reforms.
In The Gambia Ramatoulie Kinteh's full-length play Rebellion ( 1968) joins those
celebrating African independence in the I960s. Here, the daughter of a village chief who
has hitherto been protected from the world travels abroad and returns home as a doctor to
a new kind of life in the public service. Another playwright, Gabriel J. Roberts, has
written for radio, his works including The Trial of Busumbala ( 1973).
In East and Central Africa the situation has changed radically since Martin Banham wrote
in 1976: "East Africa has not, perhaps, produced any playwrights in recent years of the
quality and substance of the leading playwrights from Nigeria and Ghana" ( 81 ).
However, as Banham also correctly observes, dramatic activity grew in this part of Africa
in the 1960s, especially in the universities, unlike in Nigeria and Ghana, where the
development of popular drama and theater took place outside the universities.
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Kenya became independent in 1963, but it was not until five years later that its National
Theatre came under the direction of an African, Seth Adagala. The year following
Independence witnessed the founding of a new theater group, the Chemchemi Theatre
Company, by the then-exiled South African writer Ezekiel (Es'kia) Mphahlele. The
company performed in both English and Swahili. The National Theatre, in spite of
national independence, remained dominated by foreign interests and aesthetics. However,
a great deal of creative revolt with strong nationalistic flavor did take place in the 1960s
and 1970S, when Kenyan playwrights, directors, and actors began displaying their
vibrant dramatic creativity in a variety of communication media, including radio,
television, and theater. High school students wrote and produced plays in Swahili, and the
University of Nairobi expanded its drama and theater program to include experimental
theater. With this explosion in dramatic and theatrical activity emerged prominent names
like Francis Imbuga, Kenneth Watene, Kibwana Micere Mugo, Seth Adagala, Tirus
Gathwe, Waigwa Wachiira, and David Mulwa, who are involved in writing and directing
for the contemporary Kenyan theater.
Kenya's leading novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, wrote the first full-length play by an East
African, The Black Hermit, in 1968. He followed with a collection of three short plays
published under the title This Time Tomorrow ( 1970) comprising the title play, The
Rebels, and The Wound in the Heart. The Black Hermit is the story of an educated man
who causes the suicide of his village wife in his attempt to condemn and distance himself
from the tribal bigotry that hampers national consciousness and unity. In a short preface
to the play Ngũgĩ condemns tribalism, "the biggest problem besetting the new East
African countries," and urges national cooperation to stamp out the cancerous effects of
"tribalism, racialism and religious factions." Ngũgĩ's social realism permeates his creative
works. The insensitivity of the rich to the sufferings of the poor is the subject of This
Time Tomorrow, in which slums erected by the poor are bulldozed by the city government
in order to boost income from tourism. The crowd, representing the masses of the people,
is totally alienated from the system and bemoans the fact that uhuru "has brought us
nothing."
Francis Imbuga and Kenneth Watene are two other contributors to the nationalistic spirit
of contemporary Kenyan theater. Imbuga's The Fourth Trial and Kisses of Fate (both
1972) are based on the theme of the clash of values between educated young people and
their old parents or relations. Kisses of Fate furthers the theme of sociocultural
responsibility by exposing an incestuous relationship between a brother and his sister.
Both have been separated for a long time, and the riotous encounter of a promiscuous
student life provides the occasion for the incest. Kenneth Watene's earliest play is My Son
for My Freedom ( 1973), the title piece in a volume that also includes The Haunting Past
and The Broken Pot. These plays, like Ngũgĩ's, are committed to educating the people on
the need for social responsibility,
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reconciliation between the past and the present, and commitment to a true nation-building
program. While The Broken Pot underscores the dignity of manual work and the dangers
in overrating one's position in society, The Haunting Past cautions against the total
rejection of traditional values in preference for an alien one. The theme is similar to that
of Sarzan, adapted by Lamine Diakhate from a story by Birago Diop during the colonial
period (Graham-White 82). Watene's plays, My Son for My Freedom and Dedan Kimathi
( 1974) come closer to Ngũgĩ's revolutionary plays of the 1970s and 1980s.
On the eve of Independence in 1962, the appointment of the director of Uganda's
National Theatre was terminated. He was charged with trying to indigenize that country's
theater productions. Events, however, moved rapidly thereafter. Ngũgĩ's The Black
Hermit was performed by the Dramatic Society at Makerere University in that year, and
in the next the university started a Free Travelling Theatre, while the National Theatre
founded a drama school. The result is that since Independence Uganda's theater and
drama activities have been Africanized, and today the country's prominent playwrights
and creative producers like John Ruganda and Mukotani Rugyendo work within or
outside the country and contribute to contemporary African theater.
Robert Serumaga (now deceased) founded a professional theater company, Theatre
Limited, in 1968, and the company presented his play The Elephants at the National
Theatre the following year. It has participated in several international theater festivals in
Manila, Belgrade, and elsewhere. His plays are concerned with form as an essential
ingredient for an authentic African theater aesthetic. He freely uses music, dance, and
song to strengthen or replace verbal dialogue, as his play Renga Moi illustrates (Renga
Moi is unpublished but was staged in London in 1975). The Elephants offers a huge
dramatic irony when the symbolism of the title is applied to what it signifies, the
protagonists. They may be huge on the outside, apparently strong and self-confident, yet
in reality they are dependent and insecure, "no better than just big mice." A situation in
which people will exploit others to boost their own feeling of self-importance best
defines the social relationship in the play. Serumaga's Theatre Limited productions reveal
the contradictions of an artist of his stature who aspires to make African theater a viable
commercial venture. After the financial disasters that followed the company's production
of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Wole Soyinka's The Road, Theatre Limited was forced
to present Molière's School for Wives in order to attract a wider international patronage at
the box office. In Africa as elsewhere, financial dependency has been the bane of many
an effort to establish professional theater companies. At the present level of economic
activity, the prospects for success are even bleaker.
John Ruganda, a graduate of Makerere University and a Ugandan citizen, currently
directs and practices theater at the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
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His plays to date include The Burdens ( 1972), Black Mamba: Covenant with Death (
1973), The Floods ( 1988), Music without Tears ( 1982), and The Glutton (unpublished).
The Floods deals with the issue of naked power. Apparently based on the murderous
regime of Uganda's Idi Amin, and by extension other military regimes in Africa in which
the innocent victims suffer brutally at the hands of culpable psychopaths, the play
penetrates the depths of human feeling by exposing horrible murders by the gory agents
of death, two of whom are the head of the secret police and a pseudointellectual. The play
is structured as the flow and ebb of three successive floods, whose flows spawn crimes,
the gory results being revealed after the ebbs. Ruganda has become a master of
psychological realism, which he employs to great success. The Burdens, which brought
him to theatrical prominence, deals with the inability of an erstwhile politician, Wamala,
to live with the reality of his failure in politics. Instead he clings to unrealistic dreams.
His wife, Tinka, finally shatters his make-believe world and kills him to relieve the family
of the burden he has inflicted on it. Black Mamba is a satiric treatment of the sexual
adventures of an expatriate, Professor Coarx, with the wife of his houseboy, Namuddu,
whenever the professor's ill-natured wife is away. Covenant with Death explores the
ravages of a curse that destroys mind and body as well as fertility and life in a couple,
Mutama and her white-man city friend; it is based largely on a folkloric background. On
the whole Ruganda explores a wide range of contemporary conflicts, including poverty,
prostitution, class conflict, land seizure, and power control.
Tanzania's contribution to contemporary African drama and theater comes from
playwrights such as Ebrahim Hussein; Mukotani Rugyendo (a Ugandan national and
editor in the Tanzanian Publishing House), and Bob Leshoai, a South African playwright
who became the first African to head the Department of Theatre Arts at the University
College, Tanzania, the only such department among East African universities. It is also
important to note that President Julius Nyerere himself has an abiding interest in dramatic
art, as is evident in his translation of some of Shakespeare's works into Swahili.
Moreover, his political ideology as an African committed to the building of African
socialism was bound to affect dramatic and theatrical expression as an instrument in the
service of national consciousness and aspiration.
The conviction that theater should be a medium of mass communication unhindered by
language constraints has led such playwrights as Ebrahim Hussein, Farouk Topan, and
Penina Muhando to write in Swahili in order to make the plays accessible to a wider
Tanzanian public. This approach to a national theater unencumbered by the distraction of
an alien language recalls Ngugi's. Some of the Swahili plays have been translated into
English, though, either by the playwrights themselves or by others. Ebrahim Hussein 's
Kinjeketile ( 1970) is one of the finest African plays, embracing the unity of ideology and
art and employing theater as a consciousness-raising medium. The same is true of
Mukotani Rugyendo's plays such as The Barbed Wire
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Wire, The Contest, and And the Storm Gathers (all 1977), plays that advance the
argument for a socialist African state. In The Barbed Wire Rugyendo presents the conflict
between a small peasant community and a rich farmer who tries to acquire their
communal land to make himself an even bigger and richer farmer. In The Contest the
playwright demonstrates how a modern African play can speak to popular audiences and
still remain relevant in terms of its approach to social issues.
In Central Africa, as in East and West Africa, the development of modern African drama
and theater has been nurtured through the schools, the radio, and the universities, which,
apart from fostering dramatic activities on the campuses, have sponsored traveling theater
groups and companies. Although the writing and publishing of plays did not flourish here
in the 1960s as in other parts of Africa, Malawi and Zambia today boast a vibrant theater
culture, especially in those experiments that bring theater to the local audiences. Andrew
Horn, James Gibbs, Michael Etherton, Fay Chung, and David Kerr are among the
expatriates who have helped to develop a tradition of African theater in the universities in
Zambia and Malawi through theater workshops and traveling troupes. But their work
could not have succeeded without the enthusiastic and creatively robust contributions of
indigenous artists like Kabwe (Godfrey) Kasoma, Masauto Phiri, Stephen Chifunyise,
Fwanyanga Mulikita, and Andrea Masiye in Zambia; and James Ngombe, Joe Mosiwa,
Innocent Banda, Chris Kamlongera, and other playwrights published in Nine Malawian
Plays ( 1976), as well as Steve Chimombo, Peter Chiwona, and Father Joseph Chakanza
in Malawi.
Kabwe Kasoma's plays include The Long Arms of the Law (unpublished), The Fools
Marry ( 1976), Katongo Chala (n.d.), and the Black Mamba trilogy ( 1970). Like his
counterparts in Tanzania, Kasoma models his plays on the Zambian national philosophy
of humanism and the leadership of Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, whose political career is the
focus of the Black Mamba trilogy. Masautso Phiri has published a play titled Nightfall
(n.d.) dealing with Ngoni history. Another play of his, Kuta (unpublished), is a dance-
drama. Soweto: Flowers Will Grow, the product of an extensive research and theater
experiment by Phiri and other collaborating artists, symbolizes the radical contribution
of a frontline African state to the cultural dimension of the struggle against apartheid.
The epic proportion of Mulikita's Shaka Zulu ( 1967) and the title of Masiye's play The
Lands of Kazembe ( 1973) indicate the concern of Zambian playwrights for the political
realities of Southern Africa. Stephen Chifunyise, a Zimbabwean national, is perhaps
better known for his contributions to the Zambian theater through radio, television, and
the stage. His plays, such as Shimakamba's Dog, The District Governor Goes to a
Village, and I Resign (all unpublished), address the issues confronting the poor in an
independent African state, educating party cadres in the process (Etherton 326-34). Back
home in Zimbabwe, Chifunyise has resumed the crusade for a humane society that caters
to the interests of all. Medicine for Love and Other Plays ( 1984
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Love and Other Plays (1984) ranges over issues such as domestic jealousies (Medicine
for Love), rape (Women of Courage), and society's reluctance to reintegrate those of its
members who have acquired the stigma of imprisonment (When Ben Came Back).
Nine Malawian Plays comprises pieces that resulted from creative writing courses in the
Department of English, University of Malawi, and that were subsequently broadcast on
radio or performed at drama festivals. Chris Kamlongera 's The Love Potion won a BBC
runner-up prize, while Innocent Banda 's Lord Have Mercy has been broadcast on
Malawi Broadcasting Corporation. The plays are as diverse as their authors, in the sense
that they do not seem to be as socially committed and cohesive as those by Tanzanian and
Zambian playwrights, for example. But this is to be expected, judging from the relative
conservatism of the Malawian writers and the conservative political ideology of their
government. Spencer Chunga and Hodges Kalikwembe satirize the dangers of a little
learning in That Man Is Evil, while Joe Mosiwa adapts a local folk material in Who Will
Marry Our Daughter?, using a narrator-chorus technique. The play presents a fight
between modernity and tradition, which ends in a compromise resolution that
accommodates both. Steve Chimombo's The Rain Maker ( 1975) integrates the ancient
M'bona legends with extant M'bona cult masking tradition, following the advice by Fr.
Matthew Schoffeleers that Nyau cult and its protodramatic characteristics should be used
as the basis for a modern Malawian theater (Roscoe 271). Opera Extravaganza ( 1976),
as the name suggests, represents another direction in the search for identity in Malawian
theater. Its slight plot, comprising issues such as courtship, marriage, and peacemaking, is
augmented by extraordinary dancing, drumming, and singing.
Ethiopia, the oldest self-ruling African country, has not produced great drama and theater
that can match those of the newly independent African states. Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin is
the country's best-known playwright. His Oda Oak Oracle ( 1965) is a legend of Black
peoples and their relationships with their gods as well as a tale of their hope, love, fears,
and sacrifices. Another play, Collision of Your Altars ( 1970), is based on the fall of
Emperor Kaleb's Axumite kingdom in sixth-century Ethiopia, which was considered the
third greatest power in the world. It foreshadows the overthrow of Emperor Haile
Selassie of Ethiopia by radical forces in 1974. Menghistu Lemma, another Ethiopian
playwright, has published The Marriage of Unequals ( 1970). It dramatizes the story of a
Western educated elite who returns home and settles among the rural population, builds a
school for them, and marries his maid. His aunt, a social snob, wants him to assume his
proper place among the country's elite and to choose a wife among them. The popular
orientation of his protagonist notwithstanding, the playwright does not succeed in making
his play into a radical social statement of any significance.
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Contemporary Radical and Experimental African

Drama and Theater
In the foregoing pages, in which we have taken a rather sweeping view of the
contemporary drama and theater scene in English-speaking African countries, we have
observed in a number of countries a style of dramaturgy that does not merely describe the
contemporary situation but appears to interpret sociopolitical phenomena in such a way
as to educate the reader or spectator on the desirability of mass enlightenment and
commitment to the issues raised.
The task of tackling those issues has been the major burden of African drama and theater
since the 1970s. In the independent African countries, where the powerful ruling military,
political, or religious classes appear to have generated more poverty and social strife than
existed during colonial times, the playwrights engage in historical or social analyses of
the situation to arrive at an enlightened interpretation. In those parts of Africa where
Africans are still politically dominated, the need for such social education becomes even
more urgent. Thus we have so far not discussed the contemporary South African dramatic
and theatrical scene, because the plays of that country are of the radical political type.
Also in this section, we shall examine the phenomenon of experimentation as a crucial
factor in the development of modern African drama and theater. Experimentation
flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and promises to significantly affect the African theater
in the twenty-first century.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has become one of the most important writers to emerge on the
contemporary African scene. Among his most revolutionary contributions to African
theater are The Trial of Dedan Kimathi ( 1976), which he coauthored with Micere Mugo,
and I Will Marry When I Want ( 1982), an English translation from the Gikuyu of the
play Ngaahika ndeenda, the result of his experiments on African theater with Ngũgĩ wa
Mĩriĩ at the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Center, inaugurated in 1977.
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is an interpretation of history. It examines the intensity and
commitment of ordinary Kenyan citizens in the social mobilization led by Dedan Kimathi
twenty years earlier, during the struggle for independence from the British. The play also
clearly analyzes the self-interest of the Kenyan bourgeoisie, and their consequent role
aborting this grass roots
inspired revolution.
I Will Marry When I Want, according to the author, "depicts the proletarization of the
peasantry in a neo-colonial society" ( 44 ). It is in many ways the follow-up of the events
in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, especially after Kimathi's execution. It thus deals with a
Kenyan society that is independent only in name, and that is materially and socially
controlled and exploited by the erstwhile colonial forces. Focused on the land question,
the play shows
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how a multinational firm owned by Japanese and European businessmen enters into an
alliance with their African counterparts to deprive the Kiguunda family of their one-and-
a-half acres of land, which they depend on for subsistence. As a continuation of the
Kimathi-led Kenya Land and Freedom Army revolution, the play examines how the
struggle for independence in Kenya, for which thousands of its citizens died, has now
been hijacked by neocolonial forces extending from America to Japan. In the process of
researching the play at Kamiriithu, a town that historically was involved in the Kimathi
struggle, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and his creative associates had to contend with the problem
of the language, the history, the social and working conditions of the people, and the
artistic elements of the indigenous African theater, such as song, dance, mime, and
ceremony, in their quest for an authentic African drama and theater. In 1981 they devised
another production, Maitu njugira ( Mother Sing for Me), which extended their search for
a socialist-oriented society, using more than eighty songs from eight ethnic nationalities
in Kenya to celebrate and to bemoan the joys and sorrows of the Kenyan people's
struggles. Ngũgĩ's commitment to the struggle for real freedom has even prompted him to
abandon the English language and to write in Gikuyu and Swahili in order to reach the
vast majority of ordinary Kenyans. The English versions of his future works will
therefore come only as translations. Still, he uses his essays and critical commentaries on
culture and other sociopolitical issues to communicate to a wider English-speaking world.
Ngũgĩ's commitment to the use of drama and theater as a potent instrument for mass
education through a clearer interpretation of history is shared by his countryman Kenneth
Watene. Watene chose the Kimathi-led revolution as his subject in My Son for My
Freedom and Dedan Kimathi. In the former, he uses the struggle to reveal the
contradictions and fratricidal conflicts members of the same family may experience as a
result of divided loyalties. The fact that Mwaura has taken the oath of solidarity with the
struggle while his brother-in-law, Gacem, wavers angers Mwaura to the point of total
hatred. In Dedan Kimathi ( 1974) the playwright brings the hero down to earth by
exposing the suspicious and autocratic dispositions that prompt him to kill Nyati, his best
friend and ritual leader of the Mau Mau.
In Nigeria, Femi Osofisan leads the group of new playwrights advocating radical social
change. Unlike their older predecessors Soyinka, Clark, and Rotimi, these playwrights
are unequivocal in their sympathies with the working masses, and even when they use
myth as their backdrop for dramatic action it is manipulated in such a way that the
message comes out clearly in favor of radical change. From the early social farce Who's
Afraid of Tai Solarin ( 1978), in which Osofisan takes a roll call of corrupt Nigerian
citizenry, to the more mature political plays such as Once upon Four Robbers ( 1980),
Moróuntódùn ( 1982), and The Chattering and the Song ( 1977), he has demonstrated a
commitment to social justice and political change. The Chattering and the Song is
ideologically situated to reflect the struggle of the
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farmers—the neglected masses of the population—to be free. Their freedom will not
materialize until such a time as "everyone's a farmer." In Moróuntódùn the playwright
demystifies an ancient Yoruba myth by transforming Moremi, the mythical heroine
whose self-sacrifice saved Ile-Ife from its erstwhile marauders, into a sympathizer and
advocate for the peasants after sharing their material condition. The class war continues
in Once upon Four Robbers. A group of armed robbers forms a syndicate under the
spiritual leadership of Asafa, a babaláwo (seer). As it turns out, the syndicate becomes
an instrument for fighting the overprivileged military class. Their principle of robbing
public places only but never the poor or private homes demonstrates their sympathy with
the underprivileged in society, and the subversive ideological import of the play.
Ebrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile ( 1970) is set in the colonial period and explores the Maji
Maji revolt against the Germans in 1904. Hussein selects only such historical details as
contribute to and clarify his point of view. Kabwe Kasoma's Black Mamba trilogy is
based on Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia Shall Be Free and therefore represents the same sort
of artistic extension of a political program or historical reality as is observable in the
plays of Ngũgĩ and Hussein. Kasoma means the trilogy not only to portray Kaunda as a
political leader but also to propagate his views among the people of Zambia. His creative
work is also part of the experiment to take theater to the people rather than wait for them
to come to the theater; this strategy facilitates reaching wider urban and rural
communities with plays designed to be stageable anywhere. Moreover, Kasoma believes
in improvisations, especially in the use of appropriate linguistic registers to drive home
the points of his plays. The three Black Mamba plays may be roughly divided into the
three crucial stages in Kaunda's struggle for Zambian nationhood: (I) colonial domination
and the inability of even the most qualified Africans to secure suitable jobs in the colonial
administration; (2) the political struggle by Africans for independence, including the
arrest of the Black Mambas: Nkumbula, Kaunda, Kapwepwe, Kalulu, and Kamanga; and
(3) the emergence of an independent Zambian nation.
Stephen Chifunyise's plays are squarely set in this new Zambian nation. They portray the
undermining of its independence by neocolonialist forces and the fate of the poor in the
rural areas. I Resign exposes the machination of Mr. Leeds, the white managing director
of a British company based in Zambia, to further mechanize the company's production
assembly with "a British machine," thereby depriving 115 Zambian workers of their jobs
and livelihood. Although Leeds wins the support of some Zambian collaborators, the
stalwart stand of Mr. Banda, the Zambian general manager, on behalf of the Zambian
workers wins the day. In another play, The District Governor Goes to a Village,
Chifunyise exposes the corruption among public servants, in this case in the guise of a
regional secretary who misrepresents the governor's message to the villagers.
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Soweto: Flowers Will Grow ( 1979) represents another effort at using theater to aid the
struggle for political emancipation and freedom in contemporary South Africa. It
emerged out of an experimental workshop by Masautso Phiri and members of his
Tikwiza Theatre between 1976 and 1979. It comprises fragments of songs, poetry, music,
testimonies, and history by prominent indigenous South African authors such as Dennis
Brutus, A. N. C. Khumalo, Mazisi Kunene, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, and Tandie
Rankoe. Soweto is a collage of the foregoing as well as other extracts from Aimé Césaire,
Parnell Munatamba, Donald Wood's Biko, and the creative input of the artistic
collaborators. In this technique history and creativity mix to produce a play that raises
strong political emotions in three movements respectively captioned " Soweto: A Dirge to
the Youth of Soweto," " Soweto Revisited," and " Soweto Remembered." The play was
presented at the Lagos Black Arts Festival, and in the frontline states of Zambia and
Botswana. Among the themes it exploits are the exposure of the double roles religious
influences play in the struggle, and an examination of the origin of the oppressive
policies in South Africa. The events are selected to create an awareness among those
fighting apartheid.
Inside South Africa Black drama and theater have been prominent and successful on the
cultural front of the war against apartheid. Playwrights of the early 1960s like Lewis
Nkosi (whose play is among those described by Anthony Graham-White as "bitterly anti-
European" [ 87 ]) can fit into Phiri's category of "postermen," or moderates, only if their
plays are compared with those by their more militant countrymen of the 1970S and after.
Both Nkosi and Athol Fugard wrote plays that preached racial integration and tolerance.
In Nkosi's Rhythm of Violence ( 1964) an interracial plot by a club of young people
determined to change society is frustrated by the intrusion of their personal affairs, which
hinders any united effort and causes them to fail in their mission.
Younger Black playwrights have tended to eschew the intrusion of such personal
problems by devoting their energies to raising the consciousness of their fellow Africans
in the light of the historical and cultural contradictions inherent in apartheid. Steve Biko
and other leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement encouraged the formation of
grass-roots theater organizations in the African townships. The result has been the
reinvention of old techniques essentially drawn from the traditional African performance
conventions such as storytelling, music, song and dance, multiple role playing, open-
space utilization, and the active involvement of the audience during performance to suit
the demands of an urgent guerrilla-like urban theater.
There has existed, from the 1970s, what the International Defence Aid Fund calls "a new
wave of cultural energy" resulting from the conscious education of the participants to
recognize and promote the identity and dignity of the Black person even in the face of the
oppression inherent in all forms of apartheid legislation. Among the theater groups
formed for this purpose were TECON (Theatre Council of Natal, 1969), PET (People's
Experi
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mental Theatre, 1973); and MDALI (Music, Drama, Arts, and Literature Institute, 1972).
Other groups are The Serpent Players ( 1963) and Workshop '71 ( 1971). The vigorous
political orientation of these theater groups quickly attracted the attention of the
government, which has wasted no time in declaring them "prejudicial to the safety of the
state," and has therefore proceeded to arrest, interrogate, detain, and imprison their
members and ban the organizations. Furthermore, the government, seeing in what it
considered the permissive conditioning of the young one of the methods of international
communism, reinvigorated its censorship regulations with the new Publications Act of
1974. The result was that the three Black theater groups, TECON, PET, and MDALI,
formed under the auspices of the Black Consciousness movement, were forced to disband
following constant banning orders and harassment of their members. Gibson Kente,
Khayalethu Mqayisa, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona are among several Black South
African theater activists who have been arrested and detained by the police at one time or
another.
Contemporary Black South African plays reflect the material existence of Black people
under the apartheid government. Theater is considered an effective method of portraying
that existence. This is what John Kani and Winston Ntshona meant when in an interview
they declared, "We believe that art is life and conversely, life is art" ( 5 ). It is also the
concern of contemporary Black South African plays. Black theater artists are turning
away from such white-masterminded "blacksploitation" musicals as King Kong and Ipi
Tombi and creating their own powerful plays, like Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, u Nosilimela,
Shanti, Too Late, Survival, Woza Albert, Gangsters, Born in the RSA, Asinamali! ,
Bopha! , and many others. The plays, which are mostly created under experimental or
workshop conditions, collectively signify the intensification of the political struggle on
the cultural front through grass-roots mobilization and consciousness raising among the
urban masses. As experimental plays, they are unencumbered by Western production
conventions, and this quality gives the artists the freedom to experiment with techniques
with which the audience is already familiar in traditional performances.
The play u Nosilimela ( 1981, South African People's Plays ), by Credo V. Mutwa, is
taken from an epic. In it the playwright exploits a variety of traditions indigenous to
African people such as narrative, satirical, ritualistic, and realistic sequences, all rolled
into one performance. In doing so, Mutwa touches on the history, tales, allegory, and the
future aspirations of his people. The heroine of the play, u Nosilimela, goes through a
difficult process to attain self-knowledge and greater awareness of the conditions
surrounding her; she emerges as a conscious inheritor of a proud African civilization. The
play thus tells the audience members to cease being mindless imitators of foreign cultures
and civilizations and understand the values of their own.
The majority of contemporary Black South African plays are not based on
-165-
myths and legends but on contemporary history. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead ( 1974), by Athol
Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, attacks the evils of such apartheid legislations
as the Group Areas Act and the Pass Law. The protagonist, Sizwe Bansi, is forced to
inherit a dead African's name and passbook so that he may legally stay and work in New
Brighton. Mthuli Shezi's Shanti ( 1981) addresses, in addition to the issues raised in
Sizwe Bansi, the question of color classification and the effects of the Immorality Act and
the Terrorism Act. Because Thabo, an African student, is in love with an Indian girl, he is
accused of theft, while the girl's family is charged with running an illegal drinking place.
Thabo is imprisoned, but he escapes and joins General Mobu's guerrilla fighters across
the border in Mozambique. In Gibson Kente 's Too Late ( 1981) a young boy, Saduva, is
imprisoned for defending his handicapped cousin against the menace of a scheming,
illiterate, and rude Black policeman, Pelepele. In prison the innocent lad is further
brutalized by other prisoners, and he comes out an embittered, violent, and angry young
man. Survival ( 1981), by Workshop '71, like Shanti, is one of the most radical plays
from contemporary South Africa. It is a call for the oppressed people of the society to
join hands, "to go forward" and change the system. According to Themba, one of the five
narrators on the oppressions of apartheid:
THEMBA: A people survive by grimly holding on. But at the same time they
achieve what their oppressors cannot help envying them for. The strength lies
with the people, who carry with them in their lives the justification for the
struggle—the victory that is ...
ALL [together]: SURVIVAL! (170)
Woza Albert, a collaboration by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon;
Gangsters, by Maishe Maponya; Born in the RSA, another collaboration by Barney
Simon and the cast of the Market Theatre; Asinamali!, by Mbongeni Ngema; and Bopha!,
by Percy Mtwa, together represent a continuum of the historical and material realities of
apartheid as well as its contradictions for Black people. As Imamu Amiri Baraka writes
in his preface to the anthology Woza Afrika ( 1986), the plays constitute a "poignant and
purposeful self-evaluation" and "reveal the joy of bearing witness" (Ndlovu xv). Woza
Albert reviews the scenes of evil and oppression in contemporary South African society
and speculates on what would happen if Jesus Christ were to return to that country in the
1980s. Gangsters tackles the issues raised in the death of Steve Biko, by revealing details
of his murder and the police role in covering it up. Born in the RSA is a complex story
reflecting the attitudes of Blacks and whites in a racially segregated South Africa.
Asinamali! is the story of five persons imprisoned for their role in rent-boycott protests
led by Msizi Dube in Lamontville against substandard government housing.
Bopha! examines the effects of apartheid on a Black family in which the
-166-
father is a police sergeant and the son of a young student activist of the Sowetoan
generation. Initially divided by their conflicting emotions about their employment as
policemen in a repressive regime, employment that both demeaned them and set them
against their own people, the Njadini family finally finds harmony by abandoning the
false security of the police force and embracing their people's cause.
The vibrancy and vitality of contemporary Black South African theater is the result of an
ideological commitment to promote the image and views of Black people in their struggle
against apartheid. The creative vigor that has flourished in the I970s and I980s
corresponds with the heightening of awareness of the role art must play in the fight for
freedom and a distinct identity. This cultural struggle is not confined to South Africa but
can be observed as well in other parts of the continent where the legacy of European
theater conventions is being challenged, modified, or replaced with new forms of
performance expression. Such replacements have not been based on mere cultural
chauvinism. On the contrary, they are the benefits of research into indigenous African
performance traditions in the effort to take theater down from the ivory towers to the
grassroots of Africa's population.
Playwrights like Efua Sutherland of Ghana have succeeded in converting the traditional
African folktale convention into a contemporary dramatic form. Some may see her
dramaturgy as being influenced by Brecht's epic theater techniques; nonetheless,
Sutherland is simply using an indigenous African performance format that may have been
lost to those Africans who seek cultural and artistic validation from without the continent.
Sutherland has continued to experiment with storytelling and other dramatic forms rooted
in indigenous Ghanaian traditions.
The search for indigenous performance forms and techniques and the effort to reach the
rural masses of Africa with contemporary performances are typical of the Zambian
National Theatre Arts Association and Chikwakwa Theatre, the Kenyan Kamiriithu
project, grass-roots theater experiments in Uganda and Tanzania, the Botswana Popular
Theatre Movement, and the experiments taking place in many Nigerian universities—in
Benin, Ife, Nsukka, and Zaria, where the theater is either being indigenized or serving as
an instrument for raising consciousness. The Zaria experiments, or Popular Theatre
Workshops, have succeeded in increasing the concerned awareness of a number of Hausa
communities around the university by getting the people to participate in performance
projects designed to help them identify and articulate their local problems with a view to
finding appropriate solutions to them.

Conclusion
Western theatrical practices were undoubtedly part of the complex of cultural imports
Europeans brought with them to Africa. Through government

-167-
and church-sponsored formal education in the colonial era, Africans were taught western
dramatic and theatrical aesthetics, following which they quickly learned to write plays in
the European tradition. The British Broadcasting Corporation and other local radio and
later television establishments contributed largely in the successful tutelage of English-
speaking African playwrights. Meanwhile, the traditional forms of dramatic expression
were either ignored or only grudgingly accepted. However, the independence of several
African countries meant less interference in cultural matters by outsiders, and African
playwrights and performers began looking inward for artistic resources, from which they
have devised new contemporary plays and performance modes that define their culture
and personality in a more authentic and relevant way. The concern of playwrights has
also shifted from the colonial theme of the clash of cultures (African and European) to
the sociopolitical concerns of post-Independence Africa, especially the justification of
that independence and the raising of the masses' consciousness. In this regard, indigenous
African performance conventions and techniques are being harnessed to foster a livelier,
people-oriented African theater.
The future of the continent's drama and theater is very bright indeed, so bright that the
ongoing experiments and workshops, which are sometimes integral with real-life history
and political struggles, as in South Africa, must produce models that will further define
the direction of contemporary African drama and theater. Wole Soyinka and the older
playwrights whose works were accepted in the 1960s without question have, since the
early 1970s, been the butts of critical attacks by radical critics who do not now see the
relevance of their mythopoeic dramas to the sociopolitical contradictions of
contemporary society. The result is that African drama and theater in the 1970s and
1980s increasingly adopted a Marxist approach to social criticism, a response to the
large-scale corruption among government officials and the widening of the economic gap
between the rich and the poor. It is to the credit of contemporary African dramatists that
they are able to address Africa's post-Independence social, political, and economic
problems, and that they do so through techniques of mass appeal and recourse to
indigenous performance traditions. It is only a matter of time before the gap between
indigenous African and European dramatic conventions is completely bridged.

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6 French-Language Fiction
SERVANNE WOODWARD

The Beginnings
African voices were initially heard in French around the end of the eighteenth century, in
the form of translations of oral fables in travelogues. Abbé Henri Grégoire ( 1750- 1831),
a philanthropist who championed the cause of slaves and of women during the French
revolution, published De la littérature des Nègres ( 1808; On Negro literature), thus
becoming one of the few to signal to French-speaking audiences the existence of African
authors such as Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley in the Anglophone tradition.
Mohamadou Kane observes that the Francophone African novel, when it finally emerged,
had no other choice than to follow the lead of French colonial novels ( 106 ). Both were
considered to be "African" literature and touched the same European public. Kane cites
Roland Lebel's Histoire de la littérature coloniale en France ( 1931; History of colonial
literature in France) as an indication of French colonial interest in ethnographic
information, which French and African colonial novels sought to satisfy. Such works
provided the public and the authorities valuable knowledge that could be exploited by
administrative and political agents (M. Kane 109).
Philippe van Tieghem traces the "exotic" themes in French literature, as well as in those
of England, Spain, and Italy, in Les influences étrangères sur la littérature francaise
(1550-1880) ( 1961). Prosper Mérimée ("Carmen") and George Sand (Indiana) in the
nineteenth century were followed by Loti in the twentieth. Greenwich Village and the
Harlem Renaissance served as catalysts for Negritude. Josephine Baker, dancing in a
banana skirt, became the star of Paris in the 1920s, while sculptors and painters such as
Picasso, Derain, and Matisse adopted new forms suggested by museum collections and
souvenirs brought back from Africa. But the French public was probably not ready to
purchase works by African authors before the 1920s.
Albert S. Gérard points out that if French-language publications appeared later than
English ones, the blame lies with French publishers ( European‐ Language145). His
other suggestion—that French is a difficult language to master—is unconvincing.
Senegal had been in contact with the French, based at the Fort of Saint-Louis and on the
coast, since 1639. In 1854 Louis
Léon-César Faidherbe became the first governor of
Senegal. Saint-Louis,
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Gorée, and later Rufisque and Dakar were the four communes whose citizens were given
French nationality. A few decades later, those citizens were fighting to retain their full
privileges. Thus the first African Francophone authors were interested in becoming part
of the fabric of French society.
Ahmadou Mapaté Diagne, a Senegalese schoolteacher, authored the first piece of
imaginative writing published in French by a Black African: Les trois volontés de Malic (
1920; The three wishes of Malic). Diagne's book is often discounted because it belongs in
the genre of juvenile literature, and, according to European aesthetic categories and
values, children and the literature devoted to them are at the lowest end of its scale.
Diagne chose the same means of entry into writing as that adopted over a century earlier
by such French women as Mme Leprince de Beaumont, Mme d'Epinay, and Mme
Campan.
In 1921, however, Batoulala by René Maran, a French Guyanese, received the
prestigious Goncourt Prize. Maran, a French citizen and a métis born in Martinique,
became one of the most prolific Negro authors. Léopold Sédar Senghor nevertheless
regards him as the father of the African novel ( Chevrier , Littérature nègre, 32).
Batouala does not differ substantially from colonial literature, but its strongly
anticolonialist preface, which earned him the prize, also created a scandal because it
exposed to the French public the crude abuses of colonizers. The French right
counterattacked, and the author lost his job and career with the colonial administration.
After World War I the redistribution of certain African colonies as mandates to the
victorious allies brought Africa to the forefront of European politics. Sylvester Williams
convened the first pan-African conference in London in 1900. In 1919 William Edward
Burghardt Du Bois convened what is commonly referred to as the first Pan-African
Congress in Paris. This was followed by another gathering in 1921 which convened in
London and continued in Brussels and then Paris. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (
1903) and his role in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People in 1909 were aimed at the celebration of the African heritage and the
reconstruction of the image of Blacks in white European consciousness. The diverse
fashions of Black exoticism in vogue, combined with political events, created a favorable
moment for a Pan
African movement that eventually embraced the mulatto élite and the
diaspora as well as continental Africans.
More African novels in French were published in the next several years: Le réprouvé (
1925; The outcast), in a Senegalese periodical edited by the author, Massyla Diop; Force-
bonté ( 1926; Benevolent force) by Bakary Diallo; L'esclave ( 1929; The slave) by Félix
Couchoro; Doguicimi ( 1938) by Paul Hazoumé ; Karim ( 1935) and Mirages de Paris (
1937; Mirages of Paris) by Ousmane Socé; and in the late 1940s, works by Abdoulaye
Sadji. While the novelists started rooting their identity in Africa, it would take many
more years for them to reorient their attitudes toward France. Albert Memmi's The
Colonizer and the Colonized
-174-
The Colonizer and the Colonized and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks analyzed
the sort of mental alienation that informs these early novels.

Incipient Anticolonialism
Although the tone in these works is procolonial, it might be intriguing to analyze the
ways in which protest subsists even in such alienated expression. For example, the paean
to France in Force-bonté, though enthusiastic, is at times unconvincing (Riesz 17, 19).
Diallo praises the French as essentially strong and benevolent at the most unlikely
moments, when they have demonstrated brutality and weaknesses. Praise may indeed be
an indirect reproach against the state of affairs, the projection of an ideal world of fiction
rather than realistic representation. Although Paul Hazoumé of Dahomey (now Benin)
did not address the issues of colonialism directly in his historical novel Doguicimi, his
affirmation of African culture and history "firmly rejected the notion that Africa lay in
darkness before the European arrived," according to Priscilla P. Clark ( 122 ). In these
early novels, therefore, whether through irony or by direction representation, the authors
confront the French reader with the logical necessity of becoming reformist or
anticolonialist.
The writers identified with the transition to a more militant literature are Ousmane Socé
and Abdoulaye Sadji. Both were politicians, and both were involved with Bingo, a
journal founded by Socé, who was later to become a part of the Negritude movement.
With Massyla Diop, the elder brother of the poet Birago Diop and a witness of cultural
conflict, they are the original enunciators of the themes that would later be fully
developed by Ousmane Sembène of Senegal. These early novelists had a considerable
thematic or psychological effect on the careers of later writers; Camara Laye credits
Ahmadou Diagne with his inspiration to become a writer, and Mohamadou Kane
acknowledges Félix Couchoro as the first author to treat the problem of cultural identity
(III). Their influence continues to be felt even today.
The history of African publications in French has inevitably been determined to some
extent by political events and the material conditions available for the creation and
publication of books. Thus, of the early writers previously mentioned, only Diop and
Sadji published in Dakar, while Couchoro worked in Togo; the others had their works
published in France. Couchoro's public consisted of the bourgeois readers of local
journals that promoted literary works. Togo now produces detective stories aimed at the
same public. Adrien Huannou, identifying Couchoro as the founder of Benin's literature (
15 ), reminds us that these journals predate L'esclave by twenty-four years ( 31 ).
The nature of the colonial presence was also important in the development of early
African literature. Upper Volta and Niger were poorer regions of lesser interest to the
French, and were therefore late in developing a litera
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ture. French Equatorial Africa (AEF) did not contribute to early writing either, probably
because it was colonized late. Likewise, Cameroon, a German colony before it was
mandated to France, was not as intimately integrated into the French academic system as
were Senegal and the other West African colonies. Joseph Owono was the first
Francophone novelist from this territory, and his Tante Bella ( 1959; Aunt Bella) is,
interestingly, not an anticolonial work but a denunciation of the traditional abuse of
women and an expression of hopes for some equity with the advent of colonization.
Tante Bella cannot be vindicated by her young nephew, who narrates her story. A social
change is intensely desired and called for, but neither colonization nor independence
fulfilled the expectation of the people, according to African novelists.
Madagascar, with a strong poetic tradition (the hain-teny) that predated European
contacts, produced mainly poets. The first Madagascan novel (published in Paris) was La
soeur inconnue ( 1932; The unknown sister) by Edouard Bezoro; it may have been the
transcription of a play and is comparable to Force-bonté. It is also oddly detached from
ideological revolt, especially when one considers that 1932 also witnessed the creation of
the journal Légitime défense ( Self-defense), and that in 1934L'étudiant noir ( The Black
student) articulated the tenets of Negritude. With the decline of the Pan
African and
Negritude movements, Madagascar is now mostly absent from African anthologies.
The first novel purported to be published by an African author from the Belgian sphere is
L'éléphant qui marche sur des oeufs ( 1931; The elephant that walks on eggs). Mukala
Kadima-Nzuji believes, however, that the book was a hoax perpetrated by its Belgian
authors, Gaston-Denys Périer and J. M. Jadot ("Belgian Territories" 160). He blames the
long delay in literary creativity in the Congo on Belgium's colonial policy, the practical
effect of which was that no schooling system existed comparable to those in the
territories under French control. Education was left in the hands of missionaries, and
consequently, the first generation of French-language authors in Belgian Africa were
people whose education was preparatory to entering the priesthood. Modern authors from
this area are still heavily involved in the disciplines of theology and philosophy. They
include Alexis Kagame (from Rwanda), Antoine-Roger Bolamba, Paul Lomami-
Tshibamba, and Joseph Saverio Naigiziki (all from Zaire). Lomami-Tshibamba is one of
the occasional novelists among the crop; his Ngando won the Literature Prize at the
Colonial Fair in Brussels in 1948. The launching of La voix du congolais ( The voice of
the Congolese) in January 1945 in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) and the inauguration of
the Union Africaine des Arts et des Lettres in December 1946 in Elisabethville (now
Lubumbashi), with its magazine Jeune Afrique ( Young Africa), translated into more
published opportunities for these early authors, even more than were available to writers
in the French territories. As Robert Pageard notes, however, it is a telling fact that the
first university
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in the Belgian Congo, the Université Lovanium, founded in 1954, had produced no more
than six graduates by the time of independence in 1960 ( 29 ).

Negritude and Francophonie

In the aftermath of World War II, the cultural crisis that prompted Gen. Charles de Gaulle
to promote francophonie (probably aimed more at European countries than at the African
territories) tied in with the efforts at self
definition undertaken by the proponents of
Negritude. Lylian Kesteloot is convinced that Léopold "Senghor ... made use of it
[francophonie] to accord legitimacy to African literature" (" Senghor" 52). In the
Hegelian tradition of artistic theory then prevailing, Western art was felt to be in decline,
as if it were becoming moribund at the end of its life cycle. In that perspective, Africa
stood to offer renewed vitality to European art, and France and Belgium would be
beneficiaries in a true relation of exchange with their former colonies.
Negritude's major literary achievement was in poetry. The movement had intimate ties
with the surrealists, whose principles were embraced by the originators of Negritude:
Senghor, from Senegal, and Aimé Césaire, from Martinique. In French aesthetics, poetry
is held to be the highest form of art, and thus poetry best served the wish of Francophone
African artists in the 1930s to achieve recognition. The choice of the genre was
particularly fortuitous for those artists, since the French had had few poets to boast of
since the beginning of the century. Jacques Chevrier also suggests other reasons in favor
of poetry as the genre of choice for the time; most important was its ability to skirt the
censorship enforced by the Vichy government, as demonstrated by Césaire's explosive
but cryptic Tropiques ( 1941-45; Tropics) (66).
While poetry enjoys a greater prestige than does prose, the latter genre has certainly not
been neglected. It has in fact been employed extensively for historical and folkloric
subjects. Clark suggests that such subjects enabled prose writers to achieve the same sort
of escape from present realities that the Negritude writers found by other means:
One problem is that if the writer wished to deal with contemporary life (as the
 poets did not), he was all but forced to deal with changes wrought by the colonial
presence. The negritude poets, encouraged in their aestheticism by surrealism,
escaped from the colonial reality into a mystical Africa which obviated any
necessity of a realistic presentation. The early African writer of prose fiction had
no such solution. His model was the nineteenth-century (European) novel firmly
anchored in the study of contemporary society. ( 129 )
It is futile to criticize Negritude for its benign and tolerant attitude toward France and
Belgium, and for its escape into symbolism (see Makward, "Negritude"). The major
contemporary literary figures in Europe— Io
-177-
nesco, Beckett, Artaud, Genet, and those involved in the Eastern European formalist
school of criticism—all participated in a revolt that was muted at best. Indeed, they were
publishable only because of their symbolic and abstract style, which bypassed censorship.
Jean-Paul Sartre was exceptionally allowed to express himself clearly (in classical
French) and without constraint. President de Gaulle likened him to Voltaire ("On
n'embastille pas Voltaire"—One does not imprison Voltaire) and turned down demands
for his imprisonment when, in May 1968, the leftist philosopher addressed Renault
workers of Billancourt in an inflammatory manner. It is not by sheer chance that Sartre's
"Orphée noir" ( Black Orpheus) prefaces Senghor's first anthology of Negro poetry.
Commentators harshly criticize the colonized mentality evident in the novels preceding
World War II. They also point to their formal awkwardness (Chinweizu, Jemie, and
Madubuike 3). The authors stand accused of being either too slavish in emulating their
French models, such as the colonial novels of Pierre Loti, or sociological models
provided by naturalism and Marxism. Otherwise, they are at fault because they do not
respect the Western model and intervene too frequently in their text.
Speaking of Force-bonté, Frederic Michelman represents the awkwardness as indicative
of tensions with African oral traditions: "The perfectly linear narrative is broken from
time to time by philosophical reflections inspired by event and usually dealing with what
the author conceives as the basic oneness of the universe and all its creatures, despite its
astonishing diversity" (" Beginnings" II-12). Clark is of a similar opinion: "The absence
of an African vision in the early West African novel is compounded by the lack of a
personal voice. The tone is generally didactic and highly moralistic, perhaps another
legacy of the folk tales whose function is precisely to teach" ( 130 ).
Adèle King extends the criticism to the authors of Senghor's generation, three of whom
appear in her Trois écrivains noirs ( 1947; Three Black writers): Jean Malonga of the
Congo, Sadji, and Alexandre Biyidi. With the exception of Bernard Binlin Dadié of the
Ivory Coast, a graduate of colonial Senegal's Ecole William-Ponty (see chapter 8), King
has little regard for the first generation of post— World War II novelists. She finds them
overdetermined by colonial culture, whether they abide by it or oppose it. While
Malonga's themes are anticolonialist, Le fils du fétiche ( 1955; The son of the fetish) by
David Anamou of Togo betrays a strong missionary influence. King dismisses Ibrahim
Issa's Les grandes eaux noires ( 1959; The great black waters) as a novel of "confused
ideology," wavering between anticolonial, Islamic, and French values. On the other hand,
Dorothy S. Blair, who sympathizes with Issa's Muslim perspective, commends him for
producing a "pioneering study of an era and subject otherwise untouched by African
Literature" ( African Literature in French78). With regard to Nazi Boni, a teacher,
journalist, and politician from Upper Volta (also a graduate of William
Ponty), King
raises other questions:
-178-
Boni's style and sense of structure are not those of a novelist. The typical folk
tales included in Crépuscule [des temps anciens, 1962; The twilight of old times]
comes closest to narrative art. The richness of the ethnological detail is perhaps
impossible to blend with the story. Rather than judge it as a failed novel, however,
one should see Crépuscule as a successful presentation of the validity of a
traditional society, without reference to another cultural tradition. The poetic story
of Térhé and Hakanni, whose tragedy parallels the decline of the tribe, also has
epic dignity. (497)
Since Présence Africaine reprinted Boni's work in 1976, King has revised her opinion of
him, acknowledging his affirmation of traditional values.

The Question of Africanity

Beyond the problem of identity, these novels raise the question of a coherent aesthetic for
the development of a new African genre. In Essais d'histoire littéraire africaine ( Essays
on African literary history), Gérardsuggests that the novel is a genre born out of Western
civilization at a specific moment in the development of the bourgeoisie, and that its
premises are incompatible with African cultures ( 206 ). Claire L. Dehon is ready to
recognize that Cameroonian authors have transformed the aesthetics of the novel. They
redefined the genre: "It often resembles a long short story; the events tend toward
generalization and follow each other often without true separation. The characters appear
not to think and not to know internal deliberations" ( 6 ; my translation).
It is legitimate to ask whether the Francophone African novel in the golden age of the
1950s and 1960s is less "African" because the form is not African, even if the authors
openly contested the colonial ideology. Chinweizu and his collaborators in Toward the
Decolonization of African Literature would answer in the affirmative, but such a view
would be too negative and confining, and ultimately alienating as well, since it would
define Africanity in terms of race, color, geography, residence, nationality, adopting
approved "purist" models, and rejecting modes of expression that are not "African." A
comic dialogue by Werewere Liking, from her novel Elle sera de jaspe et de corail (
1983; She will be of jasper and coral), pokes fun at the desire to construct "African art"
in a way that precludes for the artists all the available possibilities: her ironic dialogue
forbids theater, painting, poetry, and novels as non
African genres (55-61). Her book is
a "song-novel," freely borrowing from traditional and Western forms.
Jonathan Ngaté chooses an image from Valentin Yves Mudimbe's L'autre face du
royaume ( 1973; The other side of the kingdom), the metaphor of the elevator, to illustrate
the stance of the African author of the first generation, trapped in an unlikely asylum of
mobile ambiguity. Ngaté recasts the infernal couple depicted by Memmi in The Colonizer
and the Colonized as the hypocritical reader, the double, and the brother of the
Francophone African
-179-
writer ( 40 ). Ngaté refers here to René Girard's theories—articulated by Tobin Siebers in
The Mirror of Medusa—whereby the colonizer and the colonized find themselves in a
sort of sibling rivalry for the seduction of their French-speaking public. At stake also is
the shared anxiety as to legitimate authorial ancestry, the African author suddenly
claiming French letters. Gérard suggested that Corneille, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo,
the surrealists, and Gorky are so many literary fathers to Francophone African literature (
Essais d'histoire215-16). For Ngaté this pioneering literature, produced by Camara Laye
( Upper Guinea), Alexandre Biyidi (alias Erza Boto and Mongo Beti), Ferdinand Oyono (
Cameroon), and Cheikh Hamidou Kane ( Senegal) is "a literature of trace and influence,
be it Bloomian in its anxieties, Derridean in its deconstructive possibilities, or negritudist
in its unacknowledged illustration of the celebrated 'double-consciousness' of Du Bois 's
The Souls of Black Folk ( 1903)" (40). Kane's L'aventure ambiguë ( 1961; Ambiguous
Adventure, 1963), which was awarded Le Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire
d'Expression Française in 1962, is an autobiographical manifestation of the ambiguous
African identity.

The Uses of French

The adoption of French for creative expression has been the subject of some debate.
Many authors and critics consider it simply to be an expedient "tool." While asserting his
belief that African national literatures should be written only in African languages, the
Togolese writer Victor Weka Yawo Aladji , author of La voix de l'ombre ( 1985; The
voice from the shadow), nevertheless adopts French as an "instrument" (Herzberger-
Fofana 112
13). Likewise, Ide Oumarou of Niger, author of Gros plan ( 1977; Close-
up) and Le représentant ( 1984; The representative) uses French as "un outil de travail"
(a work tool) that offers him access to a broader international audience than he would
have otherwise (Herzberger-Fofana 38). Whatever misgivings he might have about the
expediency of his linguistic choice, they are eased by his ability to rationalize French as a
"weapon" ( 39 ) as well as a tool, a role that a more immediate African language would
be inadequate to play.
Gaoussou Diawara of Mali also compares his writing to the weaponry befitting a warrior:
"I am a poet, but also a prose novel author. At some point I abandon the light arm, the
machine gun, of poetry to use the tanks that are the novels, the short stories" (Herzberger-
Fofana 20; my translation). Statements such as these may be typically male, and may
indicate an intriguing relationship between the writer and the language he uses.
Makouta-M'Boukou's impatience with Mudimbe ( 225 -26, 314 -18) derives from the
latter's use of language. Mudimbe typically resorts to several languages (Greek, Latin,
Italian) in his novels, which are consequently out of reach for most African readers. But
inasmuch as books are so exorbitantly
 -180-
priced as to be beyond the means of the generality of the people, and inasmuch as the
isolating habit of reading is not one that they have cultivated, M'Boukou's criticism may
be pointless (cf. Mbwil a Mpaang, in Herzberger-Fofana 119). On the other hand, that
criticism raises such important questions (since the 1950s) as the public envisaged by the
writer, the actual readership of literatures (from popular and local to world class), and the
politics of the authors.

Language and Audience

One of the most innovative approaches to the language issue has come from Sembène.
Having studied cinema with Mark Donskoï in the late 1950s, he has also made several
highly successful movies based on his novels; his interest in the cinema derives from his
determination to find a genre through which he could better address his African public. In
L'Harmattan ( 1963) he addresses the problem of using a foreign language to create a
national literature. Sembène believes, like Memmi, that the use of French rather than
African languages must be a temporary expedient ( L'Harmattan68). It would appear that
Mudimbe and Sembène write for different audiences. But if language use alienates the
majority of Africans from Mudimbe's writing, Blair has commented that Sembène's
syndicalism also isolates him from the public, in comparison with other authors from the
1950s who, continuing the "tradition of Karim and L'Enfant Noir," were more
representative of the bulk of African Francophone writing ( 245 ). What Dehon says
about Cameroonian writers is generally applicable over the field: most authors opt for a
"craftsmanship" and style that would make them accessible to the people, as opposed to
an "art" of writing that would allow the African authors to reach international and
Western spheres and elitist readership. Typically, authors who opt for the latter apply
considerable work to their linguistic medium, which may include several Western
languages as well as traces of African proverbs and syntax. Makouta-M'Boukou places
himself in a paradoxical bind by requiring that the text be toned down and "clearly"
written for the people, when such transparency derives from classical French—the most
conservative style issued from a French colonial and monarchic system of expression.
Mpang, who sympathizes with the most sophisticated writers— as most intellectuals
probably will—decries what he calls "myths of readability and opacity" (Herzberger-
Fofana 119).

The Moderns and African Identity

It is customary to date the modern Francophone African novel from the time of the
appearance of Camara Laye's L'enfant noir ( 1953; The Dark Child, 1954). Robert
Pageard notes that before its publication Parisian publishing houses shied away from
African authors ( 28 ). Mongo Beti criticized L'enfant noir
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noir when it came out because its idyllic, autobiographic theme was not obviously
anticolonialist. To the contrary, Laye was interested in affirming the world of his youth,
untouched by Europeans, before Africa was defined as the negative of Europe, in the era
of autonomy. He was defended by Senghor in Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme ( 1964;
Liberty I: Negritude and humanism); but in contrast to L'enfant, which was an affirmation
of African identity, when Laye's Dramouss appeared in 1966 (translated as A Dream of
Africa, 1968) it turned out to be a bitter attack against the tyrannical regime of his
country (M. Kane 115).
Dadié's Climbié ( 1956), reminiscent of L'enfant noir, is also autobiographical to some
extent, as are his travel books, Un nègre à Paris ( 1959; A Negro in Paris), Patron de
New York ( 1964; Boss of New York), and La ville où nul ne meurt: Rome ( 1968; The city
where no one dies: Rome). The travels are in fact a process of arriving at self-identity.
Tracing the theme of cultural identity in the Francophone African novel, Mohamadou
Kane ( 1986) spoke of the enduring influence of Negritude; he named Oyono and his
compatriot Beti as the forefathers of modern African identity. Both use more humor in
their depiction of social chaos than do their West African counterparts. Beti's Mission
terminée ( 1957; Mission to Kala, 1958) exemplifies a trend in this Cameroonian type of
humor analyzed by Roger Berger in "Comedy in Mongo Beti's Mission to Kala." Humor
has long been integrated in the African identity by Negritude as emotional. Lylian
Kesteloot sees in the theme of "African personality" a continuation of Negritude ("
Senghor" 51‐ 57) as Senghor originally defined it in the preface of Liberté I.
The second generation of Negritude novelists, born in the 1920s, steered away from
cultural identity toward a more aggressive political assertion. Their stance, which was
strongly anticolonial, received a strong impetus from Césaire's Discours sur le
colonialisme ( 1950; Discourse on colonialism, revised in 1955, 1958). Independence,
achieved in Senegal in 1960, significantly interrupted the development of this theme,
Ousmane Sembène being one of the few major authors to consistently pursue it in the
early 1960s. Unlike the other Senegalese authors, Sembène had no higher education.
Instead, his preparation was as a docker in Marseille, in which career his trade union
affiliation converted him to Marxism. His first novel, Le docker noir ( 1956; The Black
Docker, 1987), was followed shortly by O pays mon beau peuple! ( 1957; O my country,
my good people!), and in 1960 by his masterpiece, a prose epic titled Les bouts de bois de
Dieu ( God's Bits of Wood, 1962). Later came Voltaïques in 1962; L'Harmattan, a
collection of short stories, in 1963; Vehi Ciosane and Le mandat ( The Money-Order,
1972) in 1966; Xala in 1974, all published by Présence Africaine; and Le dernier de
l'empire in 1981 ( The Last of the Empire, 1983). His most important innovation, for our
present purposes, is that he creates full-fledged female characters who cannot be
stereotyped as African, French, or even as some abstract muse. They are individuals,
produced by certain historical conditions and taken in a given
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context, but they also have their own aspirations. This achievement is noticeable in his
novel Fatou Ndiaye Diop, with reference to which he says, "The idea behind the book is
that without the liberation of women, if women do not escape conformism, Africa will not
be free" (Novicki and Topouzis 67). Tante Bella will have to free herself, since neither
colonization nor independence helped her much.
Zairian authors of the late 1960s continued to dwell on the themes that characterized the
second generation of Negritude writers of some twenty years earlier. The new
preoccupation with anticolonialism, as seen in Timothée Malembe 's Le mystère de
l'enfant disparu ( 1962; The mystery of the lost child) is reminiscent of L'enfant noir.
National literature, it seems, is destined to repeat a prescribed pattern at each
emergence.
The Senegalese writer Ken Bugul for her part combines the "been-to" with the
anticolonialist themes in her 1982 novel Le baobab fou ( The crazy baobab). A mother
separates from her child after her husband leaves. The baby girl is next to a baobab pit,
which grows into a tree of sympathetic psyche; in France, the girl becomes crazy along
with the baobab, which dies upon her return to Africa. The female hero may now grow
new roots. The novel is made of a series of new beginnings, with the new hopes they
entail. To a degree, it is symbolic of each new emancipation. The first female African
authors adopted the same strategy (of anticolonialism) against domination that all quests
for emancipation require.
Another development, which Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana applauds, is the recent growth
of a children's literature, in particular from the pens of writers like Ken Bugul, Aminata
Sow Fall, and Abdou Anta Kâ ( 12 ). Another author of juvenilia is Nafissatou Diallo of
Senegal, whose Awa, la petite marchande ( Awa, the petty trader) came out in 1981.
Diallo became the first woman to break into the ranks of African Francophone novels in
1975, with a fictional autobiography, De Tilène au plateau: Une enfance dakaroise (
1975; From Tilène to the plateau: A Dakar childhood). Susan Stringer considers that her
accomplishments helped women in a way comparable with what Camara Laye did for
African men ( 165 -66). Diallo's work is also reminiscent of Diagne's Les trois volontés
de Malic, which was Laye's inspiration as well.
Gabriel Ilunga- Kabalu's Journal d'un revenant ( 1968; Journal of a ghost) is another
"been-to" account of a young man who confronts the unknown and deculturation in a
European country, according to the Orphic theme. In this sense, it is not original, but it
affirms the necessity to repeat a familiar African experience, and it inaugurated what has
become known a "Zairian concretism" in the early 1970s: "The rehabilitation of the
African tradition and the questioning of contemporary society" (Kadima-Nzuji 553). It
could be described as a conflation of Negritude and the post-Independence nationalism.
The most prominent exponent of concretism is Mudimbe, who achieved an international
reputation through his novels: Entre les eaux ( 1973; Between the waters), Le bel
immonde ( 1976; Before the Birth of the Moon, 1989); and
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L'écart ( 1979; The gap). L'écart might be indicative of a breach that corners the main
character into madness. Characteristic of Mudimbe's style is the juxtaposition, in a most
sophisticated fashion, of social structures and thoughts from Africa and Europe.
For these writers, literature serves a self-constitutive function. It adopts the earlier
strategies of Negritude for an inward glance toward the essential self, anchored in
childhood or ancestry; it also determines the author's perception of his or her relationship
to Europe. As long as the politico
economic world situation remains as it is, the
tendency will probably persist.

Drought in the Late I960s

The career of the Malian writer Seydou Badian Kouyaté is typical of the profiles of the
authors who became active in the 1950s. His first published work, Sous l'orage ( Beneath
the storm), appeared in 1957, but after the ensuing La mort de Chaka ( 1961; The death
of Shaka) he stopped writing, when he became a government minister ( 1960-66). He
resumed writing, though, when he was imprisoned after a military coup in 1968. Le sang
des masques ( Blood of the masks) was published in 1976, and Noces sacrées ( Sacred
nuptials) in 1977. A similar hiatus occurred in the creative career of Aké Loba; ten years
of silence were to elapse after Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir ( 1960; Kocoumbo, the Black
student) before he was heard of again with Les fils de Kouretchka ( 1970; The sons of
Kouretchka) and Les dépossédés ( 1973; The dispossessed). The former attracted hardly
any notice, while the latter simply rehashed outdated anticolonialist themes. Similarly,
Beti's Remember Ruben and Perpétue ( 1974) came after fully sixteen years of midcareer
silence (Blair 282).
John D. Erickson has indicated that in the late 1960s and 1970s no new authors seemed to
be emerging from Francophone Africa ( 254 ). The production of fiction did indeed drop
in the years immediately preceding and following Independence. But Herzberger-Fofana
points out that Zaire and Togo emerged on the literary scene in 1960 with novelists who
were more interested in existential themes than in anticolonialist ones. Blair identifies
four works between 1966 and 1968 that she finds "completely original and outstanding" (
293 ). Sur la terre en passant ( 1966; On the earth in passing) by François-Borgia Marie
Ewembe of Cameroon, which Blair describes as "economically composed," "most
moving," and "rich in social implications and philosophical significance" ( 295 ), depicts
a man who is terminally ill, and strives to maintain his dignity. Malik Fall's La plaie (
1967; The wound), influenced by the former but with "greater subtlety of treatment" and
"more poetry" ( 296 ), shows how an accidental wound shapes the social interaction of a
young man who voluntarily reopens his flesh to maintain his social status. Ahmadou
Kourouma's Les soleils des indépendances ( 1968; The suns of independences, 1981),
characterized by "kaleidoscopic," "exotic" style and
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"picturesque neologisms" ( 301 ), addresses Malinke people independently from the new
sovereign national borders. And Yambo Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence ( 1968;
Bound to Violence, 1971), which received the Prix Renaudot and acclaim from France
until it was accused of being plagiarized from André Schwarz-Bart's Le dernier des justes
( 1960; The last of the just [Prix Goncourt 1960]). Ouologuem's work is a sadistic and
iconoclastic reconstruction of African history from the thirteenth-century empire of
Nakem onward; the combination of plagiarism and sadism is reminiscent of Lautréamont
's Chants de Maldoror, the bible of the surrealist poets, who in turn strongly influenced
the poets of Negritude. It appears as though the authors of the African "new novel" have
opted for strategies similar to the surrealists' in waging their literary revolution with a
view to transforming society.
Beyond Anticolonialism: The New Realism
Jonathan Ngaté identifies Camara Laye's Dramouss, Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence,
and Kourouma's Les soleils des indépendances as signaling the move away from
anticolonial subjects. Gérard cites the same authors as evidence of liberation from both
anticolonialism and the myth of Negritude. As for Laye, Gérard chooses Le regard du roi
( 1954; The Radiance of the King, 1965) rather than Dramouss ( Gérard, Essais19).
Dramouss contrasts starkly with L'enfant noir in style, having none of the limpid
classicism of the earlier novel, a possible indication of the author's emancipation from
French academism. Dramouss portrays the country as a prison run by a sinister giant. The
same type of country appears in Tierno Monénembo's Les crapauds‐ brousse ( 1979;
The bush toads), where the whole country revolves around concentration camps; some
will almost manage to cross the border, until they realize external help or escape is
beyond reach and the only issue left is to fight, albeit hopelessly. Ouologuem and
Kourouma share the credit for breathing new life into the Francophone African novel in
the late 1960s. Sunday O. Anozie has described their style, in particular Ouologuem's, as
a "new realism" ( 250 ). Ouologuem employs narrative devices from old Muslim
chronicles, while Kourouma adapts the French language to Malinke idioms and syntax.
Makouta-M'Boukou provides a rigorous investigation of Franco-African expression that
could serve for further studies ( 294 -324). Amadou Kone, Gérard D. Lezou, and Joseph
Mlanhoro, in the introduction to their anthology of literature from the Ivory Coast,
remark that Kourouma was the initiator of the most modern novelistic trend, adding that
by the late 1960s the novel had become the most important genre ( 13 ).
Ngaté writes that these three authors ( Laye, Ouologuem, and Kourouma) demonstrate "a
noticeable decrease in the obsession with Europe and Europeans: the colonial era has
ceased to be the temporal frame in which events are set; strong and pointed criticism has
assumed a key function, and an African audience is clearly being cultivated" ( 58 ). He
also recognizes in their
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works, along with Makombo Bamboté's Princesse Mandapu ( 1972) and Mudimbe 's Le
bel immonde, the beginning of a new form, which he describes in the words of Henri-
Daniel Pageaux:
In these "new" novels, it is less theme and argument in the usual sense (bad living
conditions in Africa, disappointment in the face of dictatorial and corrupt
politics) that matter as it is the search for a new novelistic diegesis: the revision
of the notion of character, a new way of organizing dialogues, chronology and a
questioning of meaning (be it social or textual).... Here, the novels selected create
a problematic space ( Sassine's "sand") where the internal imperfection of the
individual and his decentering in relation to the social, political, cultural space,
and to a confused and crushing "hic et nunc," never cease to turn themselves into
words. ( Pageaux 33, translated and quoted by Ngaté70)
Although Pageaux's comment addressed novels produced between 1979 and 1984, Ngaté
notes that Dorothy Blair had made a similar observation in her 1976 African Literature
in French (70).
In these new novels, experimentation is meant for the informed African reader able to
submit to the guidance of a discreet but demanding narrator. A good example is the
Ivorian writer Charles Nokan's Le soleil noir point ( 1962; The black sun rises), of which
P. Ngandu Nkashama writes: "[It] is not a continuous narrative but a juxtaposition of
short vignettes and sketches consisting of dialogues, descriptions, letters, excerpts from
diaries, dreams or prose poems. This loose structure evidenced the author's determination
to experiment outside the conventions of the traditional French novel" (538). An
indication of Le soleil noir point's unconventionality is the apparent confusion about
which genre it belongs in, since the Anthologie de la littérature ivoirienne ( Anthology of
Ivorian literature) lists it as a play (Kone, Lezou, and Mlanhoro 306).
While Ngaté and Pageaux speak of a new novel, others see a continuation of surrealism
in the telescoping of words and spaces, continents and cultures:
Some authors, such as Bernard Nanga, Moussa Konaté, Ibrahima Ly in
Spiderwebs, etc.... borrow repeatedly from the realist-naturalist novel of the past,
this "ready-made writing" of belles lettres. But more and more, the African novel
is distancing itself from this type of epic enunciation in favor of a jarring, violent
writing, baroque and polyphonic at times, surrealist at other times, as if for a
disjointed world only fragmentary and disarticulated narrative forms are
appropriate. ( Chevrier, "L'image" II; my translation)
Chevrier's assessment of it notwithstanding, Toiles d'araignées ( 1982 ; Spiderwebs) did
win the first prize of the Foundation L. S. Senghor in 1985.
Critics and authors are ever alert to any indications of new aesthetics. Blair, proclaiming
an African "New Novel," hailed Pierre Makambo Bamboté 's Princesse Mandapu ( 1972)
as a "loosely connected baroque narrative,"
-186-
and the best or only example of "literature of the absurd" in African Francophone
literature ( African Literature316), although A. C. Brench had earlier noted that Camara
Laye's Le regard du roi ( 1954) shared some kinship with Kafka ( Writing120).
Another form of experimentation worthy of note is the attempt to merge genres, as in
Assoka, ou les derniers jours de Koumbi ( 1973; Assoka, or, The last days of Koumbi), a
historical novel by Amadou Ndiaye, which combines "cinematic techniques with the
traditional narrative devices of the griots" ( Gérard "Nouvelles Editions" 1986: 574).
Jacques Chevrier predicted in 1989 that future developments in Francophone African
fiction will be in the direction of allegory, parable, and fables. They are supposedly more
"African." These forms are also conveniently cryptic and relatively anodyne compared to
realist novels, and afford authors greater flexibility in repressive political contexts.

The Harvest of the I970s

The growth of national literatures in the I970s was not confined to Zaire and the Ivory
Coast, but involved Cameroon and the Congo as well. According to Fernando Lambert,
the Centre de Littérature Evangélique (CLE) was responsible for the development with
regard to Cameroon and the Congo between 1963 and the mid-1970s (571). Francis
Bebey of Cameroon won the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noire in 1968 with his
first book, Les fils d'Agatha Moudio ( 1967; Agatha Moudio's Sons, 1972). Henri Lopès
of the Congo, author of Le pleurer-rire ( 1982; The tearful laughter), is among the major
writers to emerge during this period. One should also mention Sony Lab'ou Tansi, who
published four novels with Le Seuil between 1979 and 1985.
The Senegalese writer Aminata Sow Fall's first novel, Le revenant ( 1977; The ghost) is
about a young man just out of prison, but in 1979 she published La grève des battù ( The
Beggars' Strike, 1981) which redirected literary focus onto the plight of the
subproletariat in the megalopolis. L'appel des arènes ( 1982; The call of the arena) is
more traditional, as she deals with African identity. Sow Fall has also published Ex-père
de la nation ( 1987; Ex-father of the nation), thus becoming one of the most prolific
female authors in French from Africa.
Based in Senegal and the Ivory Coast, the publishing house Nouvelles Editions
Africaines was flourishing and offering new opportunities for African writers. By
publishing local authors, it brought to the local reading public works that featured places,
events, and names recognizable to them. Many of these works are autobiographical and
suitable for creating self
constitutive mirror narratives. Although these pieces address
an African audience with the aim of constructing an Afrocentric identity, they are written
in comprehensible—in classical—French.
-187-

Variations in Style
A recent new form is what P. S. Diop has described as "psychological novels" written in
the first person singular. Mariama Bâ ( 1929-81) is typical of the authors in this literary
current. Une si longue lettre ( 1979; So Long a Letter, 1981) is an epistolary novel, which
Diop asserts is almost purely autobiographical. A mature traditional marriage falls apart
when the combined greed of the in-laws deprives the wife of all her rights. She is
compelled to leave her husband, to whom she writes a long letter. Among the novel's
distinctions is the fact that it is a rare instance of social criticism by a woman, and that
its target is neither the colonial past nor the politically troubling present, but rather the
problems of polygamy. Bâ continued to explore the issue in Un chant écarlate ( 1981; A
scarlet song), with the added twist of a mixed marriage. What would appear to be the
debunking of the combined project of Negritude and métissage is further complicated by
the authorial identification, which may bind the heroine of So Long a Letter with the
white woman who is the first Muslim wife of a weak and egocentric husband.
Other novels in the psychological tradition are Mudimbe's Entre les eaux, about a man
unable to commit himself to any ideal or relationship; Ken Bugul 's Le baobab fou and
Rilwan, ou la chute des nuages ( 1987; Rilwan; or, The fall of the clouds), Abdou Anta
Kâ's Mal ( 1975; Evil), and Mbwil a Mpaang Ngal 's Giambattista Vico, ou le viol du
discours africain ( 1975; Giambattista Vico; or, The rape of African discourse), which
questions the aesthetic appropriateness of the novel as a means of expressing African
traditions (Diop 88-91).
Ngal, whose other works include L'errance ( 1979, 1985; Wandering), applauds the
formal revolution that is shaping new Francophone African novels, the better to respond
to their new political contexts (Herzberger
Fofana 117). He agrees with Gérard and
Ngaté in his assessment of the new tendencies of the African novel: "One may say that
the movement begun by Yambo Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence and Ahmadou
Kourouma's Les soleils des indépendences received added impetus from the arrival on the
literary scene of Labou Tansi's La vie et demie, Tierno Monénembo's Les crapauds‐
brousse, and Henri Lopès' Le pleurer-rire" (Herzberger-Fofana 117; my translation). The
three new authors are inspired by Latin American authors ( Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Augusto Roa Bastos, Alejo Carpentier) in their criticism of dictatorship and their
depiction of social realities (Herzberger
Fofana 118). What is "African" in these works,
according to Ngal, is their use of European languages "impregnated" by African
languages ( 118 ). In his view Henri Lopès's Le pleurer-rire and Monénembo's Les
crapauds-brousse are Afrocentric insofar as their French is transformed by African
languages ( 119 ): several sentences appear in Arabic, from Koranic expressions to
common exclamations. Diouldé, the protagonist of Les crapauds-brousse is a "handful of
flesh" of mythical dimensions. He is also a tragic character
-188-
whose political awareness develops too late. He dies secretively, and faceless, having
been unable to construct his personality (Ngal 12). Dehon regards Le nègre de paille (
1982; The straw Negro) by Yodi Karone, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail by Werewere
Liking, and Bernard Nanga's La trahison de Marianne ( 1984; Marianne's treachery) as
exemplifying both the new tendency and the ability of Cameroonian writers to find
ingenious solutions to aesthetic problems ( 282 ).
Stressing the importance of style, Huannou writes: "Revolutionary writers of Benin will
produce valuable aesthetic works when they have understood and accepted the fact that
what is essential in literary creativity is not the message but the manner of its delivery, in
other words, the style" ( 272 ; my translation). Gaoussou Diawara has made much the
same point: "The people of Mali cannot read their own languages. A literature that
aspires to compete in style and syntax with the great literatures of the world must be of
good craftsmanship" (Herzberger-Fofana 16; my translation).

Richness and Uniformity

At the turn of the 1970s, Bernard Mouralis notes, a malaise descended upon compilers of
African anthologies and literary history, because the corpus of production had become so
extensive that it would be practically impossible for any single person to keep track of
what was being written in European languages alone ( 38 ). Analytical works about
Francophone literature from Togo, Cameroon, and the Congo are wrapped in ambiguity
because, he believes, one cannot speak of a national literature by applying the notion of
"nation" derived from the results of the political developments in Europe between 1750
and 1850 (see also Mpang, in Herzberger-Fofana 120-21). A national literature, in his
view, is articulated in a language accessible to the "people," a term that remains to be
defined in terms of culture, since social structures affect literary production and their
reception. Developments since the 1970s would suggest that the term covers a wider part
of the population in Africa than in Europe. Furthermore, Mouralis recommends the study
of the cross-cultural effects of hegemonic or dominant cultures on national literatures ( 42
-44). In any case, he views the concept of national literatures as restrictive compared to
the earlier Pan-Africanism, and he questions its pertinence in view of the arbitrary
manner in which national boundaries were drawn in Africa ( 48 -49).
Also commenting on the recent flood of Francophone literary works, Diop observes that
there are "no less than 2,900 titles and close to 1,800 authors to this day. And each year
the number grows" ( 61 ; my translation). For Cameroon alone, Dehon counts more than
fifty titles between 1954 and 1984 ( 6 ). But the harvest has not been uniformly plentiful.
Huannou remarks that despite the impressive early showing of Benin the novel no longer
flourishes there. L'esclave, the first regionalist novel in Africa, and Doguicimi, the first
-189-
historical novel, came from that country, but by 1979 a definite drought had occurred (
272 ). He conjectures that the explanation might be the waning fortune of French in that
country, especially since oral genres are flourishing.
Another obstacle that authors face is a lack of encouragement from local publishing
houses, who often consider them to be unacceptable financial risks. Furthermore,
increasing materialism among the youth is not conducive to the emergence of new
authors. Ahmadou Ousmane makes similar points about his native Niger, where the
publishing houses display little interest in their national authors, among the most
prominent of whom are Ide Oumarou and Abdoulaye Mamani (Herzberger-Fofana 42-
43). Diawara notes that even where authors enjoy publication by their national publishing
outlets, as in Mali, they still cannot hope for international recognition because of
inadequate distribution (Herzberger-Fofana 14). There have been some ameliorating
developments in Benin, however, such as the founding of an association of writers and
literary critics ( 1980); the institution of festivals, colloquia, and prizes; and the
inauguration in 1983 of a radio program devoted to cultural affirmation. Comparable
developments have taken place in other Francophone African nations.

The Future of the Francophone African Novel

Memmi predicted that "colonized literature in European languages appears condemned to
die young" ( ColonizerIII). Whether Francophone African literature is a "colonized"
literature even today may be debatable. Meanwhile France is embarking on a campaign to
revitalize French influence in Europe and the Francophone world. On 26 February 1990
the French ministers of francophonie and of education, Alain Decaux and Lionel Jospin,
urged French high school professors to commend francophonie to their classes on its
official celebration day, 20 March. Three Francophone summits took place recently (
Paris 1986, Quebec 1987, Dakar 1989) with the same end in view. What effect such
efforts will have on the fortunes of literary production in the French-speaking African
communities remains to be seen.
Léopold Senghor offers his prediction for the future in responding to two questions
addressed to him in 1991 (personal correspondence, II April 1991). With regard to
prospects for francophonie after the establishment of a unified European community he
predicts, "La construction européenne sera d'autant plus solide que l'Europe aura
conservé, mieux, renforcé, sa coopération économique, mais aussi culturelle avec
l'Afrique" (The unification of Europe will be that much stronger, in that it will have
retained and, better yet, strengthened its economic and cultural cooperation with Africa).
As for Francophone literature, he says, "En ce qui concerne la littérature Francophone
en Afrique, celle-ci se développe, année après année. D'autant qu'elle est inscrite dans
les programmes des enseignements secondaires, mais surtout supérieurs. Je vous dirai
même que mes oeuvres sont beaucoup
-190-
plus étudiées au Maghreb qu'en Afrique noire" (As far as Francophone literature is
concerned, it grows year by year, inasmuch as it is part of the syllabus for secondary
education, and especially for higher education. I will even tell you that my works are
studied more frequently in North Africa than in sub-Saharan Africa).

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7 French-Language Poetry
EDRIS MAKWARD

Beginnings in Paris
In the early 1930s a group of French West Indian students in Paris united their energies
and their voices to express their radical opposition to the colonial conformism of their
elders. The names of the leaders of this group were Etienne Léro, René Ménil, and Jules
Monnerot. The nature of their protest was twofold, political and literary. These young
men were all from the mulatto middle class of the French Caribbean island of Martinique.
They all had been sent to Paris by their parents to complete and crown the latter's dream
of total assimilation to French culture with successful French university degrees, and
subsequently to return to their native island to join the dignified civil service and
professional classes. These young men, however, decided to resist violently their elders'
dream of assimilation. Instead of quietly pursuing their studies, they launched their own
organ of protest on I June 1932: Légitime défense (Legitimate defense).
Ménil and his friends had deliberately borrowed from André Breton's 1926 surrealist
manifesto not only the title but also the tone of revolt. They proclaimed that they were
"suffocating with this capitalistic, Christian, bourgeois world," that "among the filthy,
vile, bourgeois conventions" they abhorred "particularly human hypocrisy, this stinking
emanation of Christian rottenness" ( Kesteloot, Les écrivains25; my translation). Above
all, they wished to reject vehemently what they saw as the "fake personality" of the
imitative Black and mulatto middle class of the French West Indies from which they
came. Most of these young men were budding poets whose vision was strongly
influenced by the surrealists' new and invigorating approaches. Thus, following in the
footsteps of Michel Leiris, Ménil predicted the advent of a man "armed with poetic
power" who will overturn the social, political and moral life of his country through the
power of the word ( Kesteloot, Les écrivains50; my translation).
This group of young poets and intellectuals, mainly from Martinique, living and studying
in Paris, and known as the Légitime défense group, from the name of their single-issue
magazine of June 1932, are seen by scholars as the precursors of a more mixed group,
also composed of young students, poets, and intellectuals living in Paris in the 1930s but
originating not only
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from French-speaking countries of the Western hemisphere, such as Martinique,
Guadeloupe, and French Guyana, but also from continental Black Africa and
Madagascar. This group in 1934 assembled around their own journal, L'étudiant noir (
The Black student), under the emerging leadership of Aimé Césaire from Martinique,
Léopold Sedar Senghor from Senegal, and Léon Damas from French Guyana.
In Damas's own words, the first merit of L'étudiant noir was to bring together Black
students of different horizons and backgrounds, for as he put it, it was "a corporate
magazine of combat whose objective was the end of tribalization, of the clannish system
then commonly practiced in the Latin Quarter. One was now no longer essentially a
Martiniquan, a Guadeloupean, a Guyanese, an African, or a Malagasy student, but just
one and the same Black student. Life was no longer to be lived in isolation" ( Kesteloot,
Les écrivains91; my translation).

The Negritude Poets

It is among the members of this latter group, under the leadership of Senghor, Césaire,
and Damas and including Léonard Sainville, Aristide Maugée, Birago Diop, and
Ousmane Socé Diop, that the ideology and the movement of Negritude was to emerge
and develop, sustained above all initially by the works of poets. The principal concern of
these poets was indeed the assertion of their confidence and pride in the originality and
beauty of Black and African cultures.
The study of contemporary African literature in French, whether prose or poetry, almost
always starts with reference to the ideology and poetry of the Negritude movement. And
while some critics would assert the chronological precedence of prose writing and fiction
by Africans from the former French Empire over the later appearance of poetry, there is
an almost universal consensus with regard to the initial primacy of poetry and the
importance of Negritude in the development of contemporary African literature in
French. It is undeniable that the influence of these earlier works of prose by Francophone
Africans as negligible in comparison to the influence, both literary and political, of the
poetry of the Negritude era.
Thus, at the opening of the historic Dakar colloquium "African Literature and the
Curriculum," sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom in March 1963, Senghor,
then president of Senegal, could exclaim with emotion:
Unthinking people will no doubt look for something exotic. Because what we are
to discuss is, after all, not just any literature written in French, but negro literature,
nurtured on the full and vigorous sap of négritude. Yes, I have used the word that
does not appear in the title of your colloquy. I understand why you did not use it.
You had no wish to attract a crowd of tourists, in dark glasses and topees. (Moore
13)
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RABÉARIVÉLO AND THE LURE OF FRANCE

While it is possible to extract some earlier poetic activity by French-speaking Africans in
such colonial publications as La revue coloniale ( The colonial review), or in even more
obscure local publications, the study of Francophone African poetry must start with the
poetry of Senghor and his generation, that is, the poetry of Negritude. There is, however,
one remarkable exception: Jean-Joseph Rabéarivélo from Madagascar, who died in 1937
without achieving his cherished dream of visiting the "mother country." Although his
troubled life was prematurely ended by suicide at the age of thirty-four, Rabéarivélo left
us with a rich legacy of some of the most sophisticated and arresting Francophone poetry,
and he unquestionably deserves the conspicuous place that he receives in anthologies and
collections of contemporary Francophone literature. Albeit a contemporary of Senghor
and his friends, Rabéarivélo wrote his poetry outside the framework of his Black African
and Caribbean counterparts, and his work must be studied separately yet simultaneously
with the poetry of Negritude.
A true autodidact whose formal schooling was interrupted at the age of eleven and
terminated about a year later, Rabéarivélo was an avid reader who devoured the works of
his self-appointed masters: Baudelaire, Hugo, Claudel, Valéry, and Gide. Also a
compulsive letter writer, he corresponded with Gide and a number of contemporary
French poets whose works had some influence on him: Pierre Camo, P. J. Toulet, Ormoy,
and others referred to in French literary history as les poètes fantaisistes ( the whimsical
poets). Although he had to work at several menial jobs for a living and was burdened
with a large family, Rabéarivélo was a prolific poet. His first poems appeared in Le
journal de Madagascar, and in 1923 his brilliant essay on Malagasy poetry appeared in
the Austrian review Anthropos; he was only twenty years old. Soon other volumes of
poetry followed: La coupe de cendres ( 1924; The bowl of ashes), Sylves ( 1927; Virgin
lands), and Volumes ( 1928). These early poems were clearly influenced by the
nineteenth-century French symbolists and Parnassians. Rabéarivélo's later works,
Presque-songes ( 1934; Half dreams) and Vieilles chansons du pays d'Imérina ( Old
songs from the land of Imerina), published posthumously in 1939, show a genuine and
strong attachment to the people, the traditions, and the literary culture of the Imerina high
plateau. His fascination with death, the other world, and the ancestors was apparently
intensified by the premature death through illness of one of his daughters, Voahanny.
This almost morbid sensitivity, coupled with his vivid awareness of the ambiguity of his
cultural condition, has marked some of the most moving poetry of the Francophone
world:
You who left at dawn
and who thus entered a doubly walled night,
human words can no longer reach you,
nor can these floral stalks be a crown for you
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having turned into bursting buds around the trees of Imerina
The very morning you departed from us.
A stone door separates us:
A door of wind divides our lives.
Do you sleep on the red earth of your couch
on that red earth where no grass grows
but where blind ants get intoxicated
by the wine of the dark grapes of your eyes?
(Presque-songes, in Chevrier113; my translation)
While Rabéarivélo's correspondence reveals a passionate love and awareness of the
literary Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, whence he would order recent publications at
devastating cost to his modest purse, and while he was aware of the presence in Paris of
René Maran, the author of the prestigious Goncourt Prize—winning novel Batouala (
1921) to whom he even sent a few early poems, he apparently had not heard of Senghor,
Césaire, and their friends or of the idea of Negritude.
Rabéarivélo was indeed a predictable product of the French assimilation policy; for him,
France, and Paris in particular, was the birthplace of the poets and writers he admired
above all others and whom he passionately wished to emulate. But unlike his
contemporaries from the French West Indies or from the African continent then living
and studying in France, he had not reached the stage of protest and denunciation. In fact,
in spite of constant humiliations and indifference, he continued to strive for recognition
and acceptance by the French colonial administration through wearying and frustrating
efforts to obtain a government position and a place among the Malagasy delegation that
was to represent the territory at the historic Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937. The
latter would have naturally fulfilled his lifetime dream of visiting his poetic and cultural
Eldorado.
The final rejection, which he received on 20 June 1937, was doubtless an immediate
cause of his suicide two days later. This final blow was probably only the straw that
broke the camel's back, however, for Rabéarivélo had been deeply troubled and frustrated
throughout his adult life. His daughter Voahanny's premature death four years earlier,
which plunged him into an extensive gloomy meditation, was most certainly one other
decisive cause of his suicide.
Nevertheless, this deep introversion, on the one hand, and his apparent total acceptance of
the colonial order, on the other, did not prevent him from expressing in many of his
poems the ambiguity of his condition between two cultures. This is exemplified in the
poem Flûtistes ( Flute players), which ends with the following lines:
His flute
is like a reed bending
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under the weight of a bird of passage
not a bird captured by a child
and whose feathers rise up,
but a bird separated from its kind
looking at its own shadow, for comfort
on the running water.
Your flute,
and his—
they mourn their origins
in the songs of your troubles.
(Presque-songes, in Wake26)
But even in his expression of loss between two cultures, Rabéarivélo's words ring more
like a resignation and the acceptance of a dilemma than the characteristic challenge or the
deliberate rejection of a Damas or a Senghor.
Rabéarivélo will continue to occupy an important place in Francophone African and
Black poetry, by virtue of the depth and the harmony of his images and the rigorous form
of his verse. It is no accident that his work is included in Senghor's historic Anthologie de
la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française ( 1948; Anthology of the new
Black and Malagasy poetry), which is preceded by Jean-Paul Sartre's celebrated preface
"Orphée Noir" ( Black Orpheus) and which continues to be viewed as the true manifesto
of Negritude. Nevertheless, his poetry belongs to a different ideological stance and era in
the history of Francophone African and Black poetry.
THE IDEOLOGIES
Like most world literatures, contemporary African and Black literatures, whether in
French or in other languages, are generally characterized by specific ideological stances
within which individual literary trends as well as individual authors and works can be
easily classified. Borrowing from the landmark analyses of Frantz Fanon in Les damnés
de la terre ( 1961; The Wretched of the Earth, 1963) and Albert Memmi in L'homme
dominé ( 1968; The dominated man), we can identify four basic stances in a loosely
connected chronological order, starting with the ideology of white superiority, used by
colonial rulers to justify their domination of darker races and faithfully internalized by
generations of Africans and Europeans alike up to about the advent of World War II.
This first ideological stance is not well represented in the poetic genre in Francophone
Africa, but it is abundantly so in the French West Indies and in Haiti through a host of
faithful imitators of the nineteenth-century Parnassian and symbolist schools of French
poetry. This servile imitation is naturally to be seen as just one confirmation of the
unquestioned acceptance of the stance of absolute white superiority by the colonized
educated elite.
The prose narratives of the period between the two wars, such as Ousmane Socé Diop 's
first novel, Karim, roman sénégalais ( 1935; Karim, a Senegalesenovel
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Socé Diop's first novel, Karim, roman sénégalais (1935; Karim, a Senegalese novel), all
belong to this first stance of unconditional acceptance of the supremacy of Western
European civilization. The same is true for some of Birago Diop's early poems, which
Damas dismissed as not "Black" enough, as "classical reminiscences," and in which
Mohammadou Kane finds "the characteristic themes of the poetry of the early 1800s: the
tears, the sighs, death, the flight of time, impossible love, the pangs of passion" (Kane 81;
my translation). Even Senghor, known as one of the "founding fathers" of Negritude,
does not escape completely, in Jacques Chevrier's words, "from the temptation of
imitation of the symbolists and the Parnassians in his early poetic attempts" (Chevrier 27;
my translation).
The second ideological stance corresponds to the era of the struggle for independence—
roughly the period from immediately before World War II to the early 1960s. This stance
is that of a new consciousness, of one's legitimate pride in one's cultural and historical
heritage, a stance of protest, of criticism and challenge to the colonial ideology of
absolute white and Western superiority. This new consciousness started with Senghor and
his friends in Paris in the mid 1930s, but the influence of their ideas did not spread from
the banks of the Seine to those of the Senegal, the Niger, or the Congo until the post—
World War II years. The two principal landmarks associated not with the birth or the
development of Negritude but with its dissemination to the four corners of the Black
world, and to Africa in the first place, are undeniably the publication in 1948 of Senghor's
Anthologie and the simultaneous appearance a few months earlier of the first issue of
Présence africaine in Paris and in Dakar, in December 1947. This is confirmed by
Senghor himself, in a letter to Lylian Kesteloot:
 Naturally, Paris is small . . . at least for the Black intellectuals who always end up
meeting in the Latin Quarter or in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It is in those
circumstances that I came into contact with a good number of Black intellectuals
of the second generation, during the years of the Occupation.... Thus was
Présence africaine born after the war. ( Kesteloot, Les écrivains207; my
translation)
Alioune Diop, the late founder of Présence africaine, expressed eloquently the raisons
d'être of this important review in its first issue:
We were a number of overseas students in Paris who, in the middle of the
sufferings of a Europe that was reexamining her own essence and the authenticity
of her values, came together to study our situation and the distinguishing
elements that defined us.... As it was no longer possible to return entirely to our
original traditions or to assimilate ourselves to Europe, we felt that we were now
a new race, mentally the result of a cross between several cultures. (A. Diop 7;
my translation)
For Diop, in those years following the liberation of France, the principal preoccupation
of the Black African intellectual, whether poet, journalist, or
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historian, could only be "the search for a true understanding and a definition of the
African's originality and his insertion into the modern world."
The promoters of Negritude were initially more concerned with the creative and aesthetic
expression of their new consciousness than with establishing a comprehensive and
coherent statement explicating their position in the world. That explication would come
only later. Thus, at the 1963 meeting in Dakar referred to earlier, Senghor felt the need to
reiterate a precise definition of Negritude:
Once more, négritude is not racialism; it does not spring from a vulgar and
distorted attitude of mind. It is simply the sum of civilised values of the black
world; not past values but the values of true culture. It is this spirit of Negro

African civilisation, which is rooted in the land and in the heart of the black man,
that is stretching out towards the world of men and things in the desire to
understand it, unify it and give expression to it. (Moore 15)
In an earlier statement—and significantly, at an important political gathering, the 1959
congress of the Parti du Rassemblement Africain (PRA)— Senghor the political leader
had insisted on the role of Negritude as an instrument of struggle against colonialism and
domination: "To stage an efficient revolution, our revolution, we had above all to rid
ourselves of our borrowed garments—those of assimilation—and to assert our own
existence, that is to say, our Negritude" ( Kesteloot, Les écrivains110; my translation).

SENGHOR AND THE POETRY OF RECONCILIATION

It is first in the poetry of Senghor and his friends, and later in that of younger Black
African poets, some of whom are true disciples of Negritude, that the themes that
characterize this second ideological stance are most eloquently developed. For instance,
the persistence of one's culture over the centuries and the sense of a continuity between
the dead and the living in the traditions of Black Africa are recurrent themes in many
poems of that early era:
O Dead ones who have always refused to die, who have known
how to fight death
All the way to the banks of the Sine, to the banks of
the Seine, and in my fragile veins, my indomitable
blood
Protect my dreams as you have protected your sons, the
thin-legged migrants.
( Senghor, "In Memoriam," Chants d'ombre [Songs of darkness],
in Poèmes9-10; my translation)
Woman, light the clear oil lamp, that the Ancestors
may chat and the parents as well, with the children in bed.
( Senghor, "Nuit de Sine" [Night of Sine], Chants d'ombre,
in Poèmes14; my translation)
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Those who are dead have never gone away.
They are in the shadows darkening around,
They are in the shadows fading into day,
The dead are not under the ground.
They are in the trees that quiver,
They are in the woods that weep,
They are in the waters of the rivers,
They are in the waters that sleep.
They are in the crows, they are in the homestead.
The dead are never dead.
( B. Diop, "Souffles" [Breaths], in Reed and Wake20-23)
There is naturally the evocation of a glorious Africa, the Africa of the prestigious
empires, of brave warriors and audacious princesses, the Africa of beauty, wisdom, and
splendor characterized also by a closer intimacy of man with his environment, with
nature, as opposed to a dry, lifeless, and decadent Western world characterized by
excessive rationality and materialism, and by its remoteness from nature and its
propensity for the destruction of life. In an early poem, "Neige sur Paris" ( Snow on
Paris), Senghor wishes to forget
The white hands that fired the shots that brought the
empires crumbling
The hands that flogged the slaves, that flogged you.
 The white dusty hands that buffeted you, the powdered
painted hands that buffeted me.
The confident hands that delivered me to solitude,
to hatred
The white hands that felled the forest of palm trees
that commanded the heart of Africa.
("Neige sur Paris," Chants d'ombre, in Poèmes22; my translation)
Senghor has often been referred to as the poet of reconciliation in comparison to say, a
more aggressive Césaire. Such an assessment, however, does not preclude the
denunciation of colonialism and its abuses in Senghor's poetry, as in the lines quoted
above or in "Ndéssé":
Oh! How heavy is the pious burden of this falsehood.
I am no longer the functionary with authority, no
longer the holy man surrounded by charmed disciples.
Europe has crushed me like the flat warrior under the
monstrous paws of her tanks.
My heart is more bruised than my body on my return from
faraway escapades to the enchanted realm of the
Spirits, in the days of old.
(Hosties noires [Black sacrifices], in Poèmes81-82; my translation)
The tone of reconciliation, of pardon, is sounded in many of Senghor's poems. An
example is the beautiful "Prière aux masques" ( Prayer to masks):
-205-
Let us report present at the rebirth of the World
Like the yeast which white flour needs.
For who would teach rhythm to a dead world of machines and guns?
Who would give the cry of joy to wake the dead and the
bereaved at dawn?
Say, who would give back the memory of life to the man
whose hopes are smashed?
They call us men of coffee cotton oil
They call us men of death.
We are the men of dance, whose feet draw new strength
pounding the hardened earth.
(Chants d'ombre, in Poèmes23-24; my translation)

LÉON DAMAS AND AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

Similar themes are echoed in the poetry of Damas and Césaire. In Césaire's celebrated
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal ( 1956; Return to My Native Land, 1969), heralded in
the book's preface, by the French surrealist poet André Breton, as "the greatest lyrical
monument of our time" ( 17 ), there are many instances where the poet defines and
redefines Negritude, what it is and what it is not, always in that high tone characterized
by Breton as "that culmination into the concrete, that unceasingly elevated quality of the
tone that distinguishes so readily major poets from minor ones" ( 17 ). Here is one of the
most eloquent examples:
O friendly light
my Négritude is not a stone, its deafness
thrown against the clamor of the day
my Négritude is not a speck of dead water
on the dead eye of earth
my Négritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it thrusts into the red flesh of the soil
it thrusts into the warm flesh of the sky
it digs under the opaque dejection of its rightful patience
Eia for the royal Kailcedrat!
Eia for those who invented nothing
for those who have never discovered
for those who have never conquered
but, struck, deliver themselves to the essence of all things,
ignorant of surfaces, but taken by the very movement of things
not caring to conquer, but playing the game of the world
truly the elder sons of the world
porous to all the breath of the world
fraternal space of all the breaths of the world
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bed without drain of all the waters in the world
spark of the sacred fire of the world
flesh of the flesh of the world
panting with the very movement of the world.
( Césaire, Cahier114-19, trans. Snyder)
Again, Césaire expresses not only his rejection of hatred and revenge against any race but
also his commitment to what Senghor will develop in numerous essays and speeches as
"la civilisation de l'universel" ( Civilization of the universal):
But so doing, my heart, preserve me from all hatred
do not make me that man of hate for whom
I feel nothing but hate
for cantoned in this unique race
you know, however, that my tyrannical love
is not out of hatred for other races
 that I am the toiler of this unique race
what I want
is for the universal hunger
for the universal thirst
I call the race to be finally free
to produce out of its closed intimacy
the succulence of fruit.
( Césaire, Cahier122-25, trans. Snyder)
It was undoubtedly such passages that were already included in Senghor's anthology that
led Sartre to exclaim in his preface "Orphée noir" that "this antiracist racism is the sole
road that can lead to the abolition of racial differences" ( Senghor, Anthologiexiv).

DAVID DIOP: POETRY OF COMBAT

The only continental African poet represented in the Senghor anthology, other than
Birago Diop and Senghor himself, was David Mandessi Diop, a much younger man then
living in the southwest of France, where he was born of a Senegalese father and a
Cameroonian mother. Born in Bordeaux in 1927, Diop was definitely not a member of
Senghor's initial Paris Negritude group of the mid-1930s. A sensitive adolescent and avid
reader, he was already writing poetry in the ninth grade (quatrième in the lycée), and
Senghor had had a chance to see some of these initial efforts. By the time Senghor was in
the process of compiling the material for his anthology, several of Diop's more mature
poems had appeared in the second issue of Présence africaine. While choosing to include
Diop's poems because of their compelling directness and vigor, Senghor felt the need to
point out the young poet's aggressive tone and to state his belief that that tone would no
doubt change when Diop
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came to understand that the "Negritude of a poem lies more in its form ... than in its
theme" ( Senghor, Anthologie173). Here is one example of David Diop's vigorous,
committed poetry:
The White killed my father
My father was proud
The White raped my mother
My mother was beautiful
The White bent my brother under the sun of the roads
My brother was strong,
The White turned toward me
His hands red with black blood
And said in his Master's voice
"Boy! A drink, a towel, some water!"
("Le temps du martyre" [The time of the martyr],
in Hammer Blows40-41)
Appropriately, Senghor described David Diop's poems as aggressive, direct, and efficient
in displaying an acute, uncompromising race consciousness. But in light of Diop's later
poems and other activities up to the time of his premature death in a 1960 plane crash off
the coast of Senegal, these traits, which Senghor attributed mainly to youth, remained the
trademark of this genuine representative of the stance of protest to European supremacy.
Significantly, what Senghor describes as the principal characteristic of the Negritude
poem, that "emotional warmth that gives life to words and transmutes the word into
Logos" ( Liberté I24; my translation), is definitely one distinguishing feature of Diop's
poetry. This is true of almost every verse of his thin but invaluable volume of poems
Coups de pilon ( 1956; Hammer Blows, 1973), from the moving poem about the African
mother "A ma mère" [ To my mother] to the thought-provoking "Nègre clochard" [
Nigger tramp], dedicated to Césaire. In sum, Diop's poems can be said to be thematically
circumscribed within a framework of uncompromising and sometimes deliberately harsh
denunciation of prejudice and exploitation, and an unconditional faith in the Black man's
capacity to rise triumphantly into a new and scintillating dawn. And it is within this
framework that the secondary themes of love, brotherhood, beauty, tenacious courage,
and admiration for one's elder's visionary example of dedication are developed. Here are
two additional examples from Coups de pilon:
Your smile that spoke old vanquished miseries
O mother mine and mother of all
Of the negro who was blinded and sees the flowers again
Listen listen to the voice
This is the cry shot through with violence
This is the song whose only guide is love.
( Hammer Blows2-3)
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From the biting A un enfant noir ( To a Black child):
And that justice might be done there were two of them
Exactly two on the pan of the scales
Two men on your fifteen years and the glimpsed kingdom.
They thought of the mad blind man who saw
Of their women besmirched
Of their tottering rule
And your head flew off to hysterical laughter.
In air-conditioned mansions
Around cool drinks
An easy conscience relishes its rest.
( Hammer Blows26-27)
The latter excerpt is from one of the most biting denunciations of racism, inspired by the
lynching in Mississippi in 1955 of Emmett Till, a Black youngster from Chicago.
It is clear from these excerpts that David Diop, though not a member of Senghor's inner
circle of Negritude poets and intellectuals, had read Senghor's works and those of
Césaire, and his own poems were indubitably in the same protest vein. The tone of his
protest was, however, much more uncompromising and harsh. A poet of pardon and
reconciliation he was not.

JACQUES RABÉMANANJARA: THE POETRY OF COMMITMENT

Along with Rabéarivélo, two other Malagasy poets were included in Senghor's
anthology: Jacques Rabémananjara, born in 1913, and Flavien Ranaïvo, born in 1914. Of
the two, the former was unquestionably the closest to the Paris group of Black poets both
ideologically and poetically. A sincere admirer of his elder Rabéarivélo, whom he
revered as a mentor, Rabémananjara was allowed the two privileges that had been refused
his predecessor: to complete a solid secondary education and join the colonial civil
service, and be allowed to visit Paris. His formal education was with the Jesuits at the
Tananarive Seminary, and in 1939 he traveled to Paris as a member of the Malagasy
delegation to attend the commemoration of the I50th anniversary of the French
Revolution. With the outbreak of World War II, he did not return to Madagascar but
stayed in Paris to study for a degree in literature. He became an active member of the
Black literary and intellectual circles in Paris and a friend of Senghor and Alioune Diop.
At the end of the war he was elected deputy of his native island in the French National
Assembly in Paris. One of the first Francophone African leaders to state unequivocally
his commitment to total and immediate independence, he was arrested, charged, and
sentenced to death as one of the instigators of the tragic upheaval of 1947 in Madagascar.
After almost ten years in prison in Madagascar and later in Marseilles, he was released on
parole in 1956. He then moved to Paris and resumed his literary activities with the Black
intelligentsia. With the advent
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of independence, in 1958, he returned to Madagascar and came to occupy prominent
positions in the government up to the time of the military takeover in 1975.
Unlike his compatriots Rabéarivélo and Ranaïvo, Rabémananjara believed staunchly in
the poet's duty to participate in the effort to resolve the problems of his nation and not to
leave the latter solely in the hands of politicians. With this idea of the function of the poet
as a fighter and a liberator for his people, it is not surprising that the principal themes of
Rabémananjara's poems and plays center on the lyrical expression of the poet's pride and
love for the national past, and his determination in the struggle for freedom and justice.
Rabémananjara is the author of several long poems and collections: Antsa, Lamba,
Antidote, La lyre à sept cordes ( The seven-stringed lyre), and Aux confins de la nuit ( To
the ends of the night). His plays include Les dieux malgaches ( Malgasy gods), Les
boutriers de l'aurore ( The armors of the dawn), and Les agapes des dieux Tritiva: une
Tragédie ( The love feast of the Tritiva Gods: A tragedy). Despite the horrors of prison
and later of poverty and humiliation in France, the tone of his poems, even of those
written in prison, is always controlled, almost serene. Jacques Chevrier calls this the
"paradox of this poetry of combat that rejects the hatred of France, which remains for
Rabémananjara, in spite of the varied experiences resulting from colonization, a spiritual
mother and lover" (Chevrier 119; my translation).
Many images in Antidote ( 1961) and Antsa ( 1956) are reminiscent of Senghor's favorite
themes: the urge and call of the simple pleasures of dance, of communion with nature, of
love, of the kingdom of childhood—"le royaume d'enfance," the innocence of Africa
confronted with treacherous Europe, characterized by the harshness of stone and rock and
by the cold solitude she brings with her:
When will I dance covered with roses
in a frenzy of corollas
and of paschal chimes!
Oh when shall we dance,
on the esplanades of love!
A sky purer than all the dreams
of childhood
Oh! the rape of innocence
on Easter day
in the double clamp
of rock and of solitude.
(Pâques [ Easter], in Wake119)
Lodged in the naked heart of the South,
I shall dance, Oh! Beloved
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I shall dance the flash dance
Of the reptile hunters,
Madagascar!
I shall throw my mythic laughter
On the bold face of the South
I shall throw to the stars my transparent blood!
I shall throw the luster of your nobility
on the thick nucha of the Universe,
Madagascar!
But tonight, the machine gun
Scrapes the kingdom of sleep
Death prowls
Among the lunar songs of the lilies.
The great night of the earth,
Madagascar!
( Antsa, in Wake121)
FLAVIEN RANAÏVO: A BLEND OF CULTURES
Ranaivo, a contemporary of Rabémananjara who also considered Rabéarivélo as a
master and a mentor, has been accurately referred to as "l'incarnation même du métis
culturel" (The true incarnation of the cultural hybrid) so dear to Senghor. Born in 1914
in the traditional Merina nobility of Tananarive (now Antananarivo), the modern capital
city of Madagascar, he had a sheltered childhood and grew up in a relatively affluent and
open environment where the hostility and even the ambiguity of a divided or pluralistic
world was not apparent to him. This explains partly, in Senghor's view, the harmonious
serenity of his "retour aux sources" ( Senghor, Anthologie207)— his return to the
sources.
Ranaïvo's poetry—L'ombre et le vent ( 1932; Shadow and wind), Mes chansons de
toujours ( 1955; My songs of forever), and Retour au bercail ( 1962; Return to the fold)—
is intimate and deeply rooted, both thematically and in its form and inspiration, in the
tradition of the ancient Malagasy hain-teny. In an era where the formerly colonized world
perceived literature and art in general as always functional and committed, Ranaïvo
writes apparently without any affectation or regret, in an "art for art's sake" vein. His
themes center on the chaste flutterings of the lover, the pains of separation and distance,
and the humorous and often witty confessions of the village sage. Here are two
characteristic examples, which were included by Senghor in his anthology as unpublished
items and have since appeared in separate collections:
Epithalamium
Just one word, Sir,
Just a piece of advice, Madam.
I am not one-who-visits-often
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like a spoon of feeble volume,
nor am I one-who-talks-all-day-long
like a bad brook across the rubble
I am one-who-speaks-of-love-of-one's-neighbor.
I am not the slight-canoe-that-drifts-on-the-tranquil-water
Nor the pumpkin-that-draws-itself-a-figure-on-its-belly,
And if I cannot make a great deed,
I can always make a small one.
Regrets
Six paths
start from the foot of the traveling tree:
the first one leads to the village-of-oblivion,
the second is a cul-de-sac,
the third is the wrong one,
the fourth saw the beloved one go by,
but did not keep track of her footprints,
the fifth
 is for the-one-whom-wisdom-stings,
and the last ...
I know not if it leads anywhere.
( Senghor, Anthologie216-17)
While Ranaivo is genuinely enjoyable and pleasant and a true poet indeed, he must be the
only African poet of this century who escapes classification in the ideological framework
around which this chapter is written. He fits neither with the poets of Negritude, like his
contemporary Rabémananjara, nor with the preceding generation of writers whose stance
correspond to an unquestioned acceptance of the French assimilation policy.

THE FECUND POSTWAR YEARS

The years following the end of World War II were years in which the influence of Black
intellectuals expanded and developed both in Paris and in the overseas territories. A
number of factors contributed to this expansion. First, the ranks of colonial students in the
metropole, or "mother country," grew from just a few score in the 1930s to thousands
after 1946. Second, the French intelligentsia, who after the occupation of their own
country by a foreign power had become more sympathetic to the aspirations of their
colonized counterparts, were now ready to support the publication of works by Black
writers and poets. The latter's presence in the book and print markets became more
visible, and consequently their ideas circulated more widely in metropolitan France, at
least. Third, even without the encouragement of local colonial authorities, these writings
circulated in the overseas territories, where they understandably caught the keen attention
of a growing number of younger African men and women who had not had a chance to
go abroad for further studies. This did not just happen by chance, for it must
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be remembered that when the first issue of Présence africaine appeared in 1947, the
venture was announced officially as appearing simultaneously in Paris and in Dakar,
which was then the capital of French West Africa (AOF), a federation comprising eight
territories: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan (renamed Mali after independence),
Guinea, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), the Ivory Coast, Niger and Dahomey (now
Benin), and the United Nations trusteeship territory of Togo (a former German colony).
This simultaneous official launching was definitely not just a symbolic ceremonial
gesture. It was intended to be a significant step toward reeducation and a better
circulation of relevant information in Africa itself. And this deliberate move did produce
results: some new poets, true disciples who had not left the African continent, began to
produce some noteworthy poems. The influence of the two International Conferences of
Black Writers and Artists ( Paris, 1956, and Rome, 1959) was also an important factor.

BERNARD BINLIN DADIÉ: A HOMEGROWN ORIGINAL

Within the expansion of the Negritude movement to the African continent, the most
significant and genuine poet was undoubtedly Bernard Binlin Dadié, from the Ivory
Coast, a founding member of Présence africaine in Dakar. Dadié is the author of many
poems appearing in that and in other periodicals and of two early collections of poems:
Afrique debout ( 1950; Rise Africa!) and La ronde des jours ( 1956; The passing of days).
While Senghor was correct in warning against sterile imitation or futile repetition at the
Dakar Colloquium on Negritude in April 1971, he could not have been thinking of the
poems of Dadié, his junior by ten years when he confessed, "When I recognize in the
poems that I am sent by young writers reminiscences of Damas, Césaire, or Senghor, I
can hardly suppress a yawn" (Chevrier 123, my translation).
Though Dadié is now better known for his prose writings and his plays, he made his
initial mark on African literature as a Negritude poet. His themes were then centered on
the denunciation of prejudice, the reassertion of racial pride, and the determination to
partake in the making of a new Africa. Thus his poem "La vie n'est pas un rêve!" ( Life is
not a dream), dedicated to "mes frères" (my brothers), ends with:
Together, let us build the new city.
You, bent over your books, your distilling vases
And I, with my spade in hand, in the marshes
You, draped in broadcloth, in smock
And I in coarse canvas, my feet in clogs.
Let us think of Africa wanting for us,
Let us think of the world to which we owe so much!
Let us continue the struggle without respite, my brother
For life is not a dream!
( Dadié, Légendes et poèmes [ Legends and poems] 28; my translation)
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There is also the poem "Sèche tes pleurs" ( Dry your tears):
Dry your tears, Africa!
Your children are returning to you
With hands full of toys
And the heart filled with love.
They return to dress you
With their dreams and their hopes.
( Dadié, Légendes et poèmes245; my translation)
Poems dealing essentially with the theme of pride in one's blackness, such as "Je vous
remercie mon dieu" ( I thank you, Lord) or "Le noir de mon teint" ( The black of my
complexion) may be read today as unnecessarily obsessional, but not if one is aware of
the early 1950s context in which they were written:
White is a color for special occasions
Black the color for every day
And I have carried the World since the first evening.
I am happy with the shape of my head
 Made to carry the World,
Content with the shape of my nose
That must sniff every wind of the World.
( Dadié, Légendes et poèmes239-40; my translation)

Post-Negritude Poetry
In 1966, as part of the activities surrounding the Premier Festival des Arts Nègres in
Dakar, Senegal, Présence africaine brought out another literary landmark: a five-
hundred-page collection of poetry, Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir ( New sum
of poetry from the Negro world). While we may notice today, with regret, the volume's
lack of poetry in the African languages or in the various creoles of the diaspora, this
collection was an unprecedented and important cultural and literary endeavor. It was
indeed the most eloquent and effective way of showing the world the flourishing of
poetry in Africa and in the rest of the Black world, in the preceding twenty
year period.
It brought together some younger but already established poets such as David Diop,
Lamine Diakhaté, Edouard Maunick, Cheik A. Ndao, Paulin Joachin, Tchicaya U Tam'Si,
and some other greener but promising men and women who were appearing in print for
the first time. Among this latter group, one should include Charles Nokan and T. M.
Bognini from the Ivory Coast, Annette Mbaye from Senegal, Yambo Ouologuem from
Mali, and Henri Lopès from the Congo.
Aimé Césaire's opening statement on the first page of this special issue of Présence
africaine constitutes a fitting introduction to the discussion of post
Negritude
Francophone African poetry:
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But why poetry? One might ask.
Do we need to look hard for an answer?
A victim of the colonial traumatism and in search of a new equilibrium, the Black
man is still in the process of liberating himself. All the dreams, the yearnings, all
the accumulated rancors, all the unspoken hopes that were suppressed for a
century by colonialist domination, all this needed to come out, and when it does
and expresses itself and spurts out carrying along indistinctly the individual and
the collective, the conscious and the unconscious, the present and the future, then
what you get is poetry.
Suffice it to say that that essential language, that language of the essential that
characterizes poetry is resorted to here, and that poetry plays fully its liberating
role.
That the themes have changed, that the media are more varied, that in some
instances, the French or the English influence is more perceptible, that in other
instances, in contrast, the traditionalist element prevails; that is appropriate.
 This evolution and this variety show one thing: that Negritude expands as well as
it renews itself. A sign that Negritude continues. ( Nouvelle somme3; my
translation)
It is easy to agree with almost everything said here. However, to agree with the closing
point, that is, that Negritude "expands," that it "renews itself" and "continues," one has to
agree on the meaning of the word Negritude. If the word implies the unconditional
rejection of domination, of exploitation, of prejudice in all its overt or covert forms, if it
implies, to paraphrase Fanon, the "interiorization" of the sense of equality and self-worth,
and the staunch commitment and effort to rebuild a strong, harmonious and fulfilling
homeland for one's people, then one could readily agree with Césaire that Negritude
renews itself and continues. One would then see how this progression leads naturally in
fact to a third and even a fourth ideological stance, which are both translated poetically in
the works of some of the younger poets mentioned above and which will be discussed
later in this chapter.
But if the word continues to convey above all what Sartre called that "coming into
consciousness" (prise de conscience) or that "being-in-the
world" of the Black man, or
to convey that exacerbated race consciousness that we have seen in some of Dadié's early
poems, and does not evolve to include the reconstruction and the true development of the
African nation, then one would have to reject Césaire's closing point, for it then would
not account for some of the best poetry included in the Nouvelle somme or for most of the
more recent poetic contributions of the younger African poets from all over the continent.
And here the sometimes acrid critique of Negritude by the Beninois scholar Stanislas
Adotévi comes to mind:
The Black man who is conscious of his race is a good Black man, but if he loses
the memory of our fall, if he forgets himself and fades into a mystical trance, if he
sees black instead of seeing right, he will lose himself, he will lose the Black
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man while losing his own sight. In other words, one will not help cure the Black
man if one becomes ill or insane. (Adotévi 102; my translation)
For Adotévi and for many African writers and intellectuals of his generation, Fanon's
analysis of the colonial condition and his conclusion that race and racism are only
accessory to economic subjugation and control in the process of domination remain
fundamental. Thus, quoting Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs ( 1952; Black Skin,
White Masks, 1967), Adotévi ( 102 ) emphasizes the urgency of further action for his
generation to move beyond the stage of prise de conscience, beyond Negritude, in order
to rid Africa of economic domination and inferiority:
For us the disalienation of the Black man implies an abrupt awareness of the
social and economic realities. If there is a complex of inferiority, it has come as a
result of a double process:
-economic first
 -then through internalization or better still through the "epidermization" of this inferiority.
(Fanon 28, my trans.)
Consequently, for Adotévi and those of his generation who belong to the third and fourth
ideological stances, some of Senghor's pronouncements on the specificity of the Black
man's mind are simply unacceptable: for instance, his often quoted "l'emotion est nègre,
comme la raison hellene" (emotion is Black as reason is Hellenic), which appeared first
in print in 1939 ("Ce que l'homme noir apporte" in Liberté I24).
Apparently, Senghor was aware of these reservations well before Adotévi's time, for in a
1956 article, "L'esthétique négro-africain" (Negro African aesthetics), he protested as
follows:
This is to say that the Black man is devoid of reason, as I have been accused of
saying. But his reason is not discursive, it is synthetic. It is not antagonistic, it is
sympathetic. It is another mode of learning.... European reason is analytical
through utilization, and Black reason intuitive through participation. ( Liberté I,
203; Senghor's italics, my translation)
As can be expected, these attempts at further clarification and elaboration did not
convince Senghor's detractors.

THE POETS OF THE AGE OF DISILLUSION

The third ideological stance appeared in the I960s. It is a stance of disillusionment with
the new independence and the new African rulers, and it is expressed sometimes with
great bitterness. Although a number of poems included in the Francophone section of the
Nouvelle somme were still in the vein of the second stance—that of protest and
denunciation of colonial abuses and prejudice—the new stance was already apparent.
Thus Alpha Sow, from Guinea, probably already disillusioned with Sékou Touré's
leadership after the euphoria of his country's symbolically coura
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geous vote in 1958 against membership in de Gaulle's French Community, wrote:
One sees only Night, the demons on our heels;
One feels only time, mournings, sobs
Of a country that wails in the spring of life!
Where did they go, the indomitable heroes,
Who used to brave the storm, pull us away from distress,
Revive our confidence and lead us in battle?
Under the weight of demons, of lackeys, of accomplices,
To revive the Voices, their complaints, their revolt,
To scorn death, march to battle, snatch victory,
A thousand years! We looked for the ray to draw the furrow!
Revive the fire, sister;
The dark night has come;
 We must walk noiselessly.
("Où sont-ils donc allés?" [Where Then Have They Gone?],
in Nouvelle somme75; my translation)
The Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, the author of the controversial novel Le devoir de
violence ( 1968; Bound to Violence, 1971), a bitter satire of the new order, which seems
to have swallowed up the exalting dream of the previous era, writes as follows:
We eat grapes pasteurized milk gingerbread all imported
And we eat little
It's not your fault
Your name was Bimbircokak
And all was just fine
Then you became Victor-Emile-Louis-Henri-Joseph
Which as far as I can remember
does not indicate that you are related to Roqueffelère
(Pardon my ignorance I know nothing about finances and fetishes)
But as you can see Bimbircokak
It is your fault that
From being underdeveloped I have now become undernourished.
("A mon mari" [To my husband], Nouvelle somme95; my translation)
In the Beninois poet Emile Hologoudou's lines that follow, the ambiguity of the people's
victory tempers all exhilaration:
On the mound of anger,
they celebrate outrageous triumphs,
and,
on their chests,
their throbbings of bravery burst in fine droplets
tomorrow,
at dawn, they will all leave across the desert,
shoddy goods of vermin and dust
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palpitating and hairy joy,
Never mind the lukewarm thousands,
the heroism of some
makes up for the trembling of others,
They trudge along for moons and moons,
and suddenly, in front of them,
nearing the crumbling hour when dawn
lights up its brushfires on the hill,
the promised land appears,
that chilly hallucination of the confines of the valley.
 ("Légende et mythe" [Legend and myth],
Nouvelle somme67; my translation)

A NEW GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS

Of the many poets of the Nouvelle somme, those who were to become most outstanding in
the Francophone literary scene were without any doubt the Congolese poets Tchicaya U
Tam'Si and Henri Lopès, the Mauritian poet Edouard Maunick, and the Senegalese poet
Cheik Aliou Ndao. Although he was not included in the Présence africaine volume,
another Congolese poet was soon to join this group with some of the most compelling
and engaging poetry of the 1970s: J. B. Tati-Loutard.
It is in the poetry of this latter group that the fourth and most current ideological stance—
that of genuine commitment to national, political, economic, and social reconstruction—
has its most convincing representatives. The themes and tone of these poets go one
important step beyond either a sterile imitation of their immediate predecessors or simply
a harsh expression of their disillusionment and their denunciation of the latter.
There is, on the part of this more current group, a genuine attempt to participate in the
effort toward true social reform and development. Though some of these poets may have
started with works belonging to either the second or the third stances—or even to both
stances consecutively—they would subsequently move to the fourth stance of more
constructive involvement.
The most prolific and original of these poets is Tchicaya U Tam'Si (the pen name of
Gérard Félix Tchicaya), the author of six volumes of poems, the most recent of which,
Arc musical ( Musical bow), came out as long ago as 1970. Tchicaya U Tam'si's first
collection was published in 1955, when he was in his early twenties. Born in the Congo
in 1931, he went to France as a high school student when his father was elected deputy of
his territory in the French National Assembly in Paris, in 1946.
With his six volumes of poetry—Le mauvais sang ( 1955; Bad blood), Feu de brousse (
1957; Brush fire), A triche-coeur ( 1960; To a tricking heart), Epitomé ( 1962), Le ventre
( 1964; The belly), and Arc musical ( 1970), Tchicaya U Tam'Si established himself as
the most prominent Francophone African poet to have emerged after the generation of
Senghor. Tchicaya is not a
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disciple or a convert to Negritude; neither is he a disciple of surrealism, though he no
doubt read abundantly the surrealist and the Negritude poets. His poetry is characterized
by a personal and acute exploratory inspiration combined with a deeply rooted
abhorrence of dogmatism of any kind. His best poetry is strikingly sincere and reveals a
keen, sensitive soul striving for an ever-illusory world where true harmonious love and
unselfish sacrifice are a reality.
Tchicaya's imagery is often spontaneous and convincing, but his symbolism is not always
readily decipherable, even to the most attentive reader. This has led to his reputation as a
difficult, almost hermetic poet. Tchicaya himself reacted to that reputation in a 1970
interview during the African Studies Association annual meeting in Montreal by insisting
that his poetry should be seen as an intimate and sincere unveiling of his soul to his
reader. And he added that, as can be expected in his kind of intimate communications, the
flow is not always continuous, and one will naturally encounter here and there obstacles,
which are only indications of one's reluctance to strip completely one's soul at once, so to
speak; but this should not be taken as the consequence of the poet's desire to be hermetic.
It is in his 1962 volume Epitomé that Tchicaya U Tam'Si's poetry becomes most
revealing and convincing. This volume was clearly inspired by the mental and physical
confusion caused by the poet's brief experience as the editor-in-chief of Patrice
Lumumba's Congolese National Movement (MNC) newspaper, Congo, in Léopoldville
(now Kinshasha) during the traumatizing months that led to the assassination of the
charismatic leader and the chaos and misery that followed. Gerald Moore advises that
Tchicaya's poetry be read in extended passages for a full appreciation of the intensity
and all‐ consuming passion of his explorations ( Tchicaya, Selected Poemsviii-ix). Here
are two eloquent short excerpts from Epitomé:
Already there were showers of flesh
of younger flesh under your sky
drenching the year 1908
Then 1959
Splendid meteorites
fell on the earth
at Kin and Kinshasa
A dove fell
upon a slaughterhouse
so fatally
that she had hallucinations.
( Selected Poems57)
Am I quite sure that backbone was mine
Said she, who perpetrated the crime
And then who was that woman I loved
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She had the blue scent of burnt grasses
on the savannah at pitch of noon
at noon when the cicada sings
in the shadow of some murdered shade
a woman with arms blackened by the sun
a woman with empty cradled arms that rocked me
poisoned my soul to love no one but her.
( Selected Poems68)
Another remarkable Francophone poet of the second generation is J. B. Tati-Loutard,
born in 1938 in Pointe-Noire, French Equatorial Africa (now in the People's Republic of
Congo). While Senegal dominated the Francophone poetry and the literature of the first
contemporary generation of African writers, the Congo seems to have played that role for
the current generation.
Tati-Loutard, a graduate of the University of Bordeaux, taught at the University of
Brazzaville before becoming dean of the faculty of arts there, and then director of higher
education and research. He is the author of six volumes of poetry—Poèmes de la mer (
1968; Poems of the sea), Les racines congolaises ( 1968; Congolese roots), L'envers du
soleil ( 1970; The reverse side of the sun), Les normes du temps ( 1974; The standards of
the time), Les feux de la planète ( 1977; The fires of the planet), and Le dialogue des
plateaux ( 1982; The dialogue of the plateaus)—and the editor of an Anthologie de la
littérature congolaise d'expression française ( 1976; Anthology of Congolese literature in
French). One feature that Tati-Loutard's poetry shares with Tchicaya's is the absence of
dogmatism. It is also characterized by a genuine warm concern and love for Africa. But
while Tati-Loutard's theme and tone are often also intensely personal and sincere,
Tchicaya's sense of loss, of angry revolt and despair is absent here. Tati-Loutard's poetry,
together with the few poems and several important prose works of his countryman Henri
Lopès (born 1937), belong definitely in that fourth ideological stance of the poet's
determined involvement in the reconstruction of the African nation and continent. Cheik
Aliou Ndao, from Senegal, Francis Bebey, from Cameroon, and a number of younger
poets are also representatives of this ideological stance.
Thus Tati-Loutard advises in "Retour au Congo" ( Return to the Congo):
Follow not the river!
Let the cicada rip the rays of sun
In search of a marrow of shade;
Leave the hummingbird and its piercing song
Among the red bougainvilleas.
Do not fall for the slender plant
That only the wind can hold by its waist;
Return toward the men of the new Africa
Where the factory raises its nostril
Among the high palm trees.
( Racines congolaises37; my translation)
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In the same section of Racines congolaises is a moving statement on the poet's concern
and compassion for those who suffer from poverty and from the inhuman indifference of
those who made it to the top in the new economic and social order in Africa:
This is my concern
Up there the sun is endlessly exploding
And the moon is endlessly milking the sun
And generously offering us its milk
 Month after month day after day.
Thus goes the world which from the poles
Has stopped turning round on its cushions of ice.
But that is the way God suns his world;
It is an ancient pact I would not mingle in.
But you my brother who would not stop wearing away
Your hands and always hard up
Day after day month after month
May I say to you without jamming my heart
Just this one time between two hard days:
"Your misfortune is a pact with which I do not meddle"?
( Racines congolaises45; my translation)

THE FUTURE
It is appropriate to end this chapter with quotations from two Senegalese poets, Cheik
Aliou Ndao and Marouba Fall, and from former Congolese statesman and prime minister
Henri Lopès. These quotations from West and Central Africa epitomize the most current
trends in Francophone African poetry. They also exemplify what the directions of this
poetry are likely to be, namely, a poetry that thematically will still continue to explore
some of the areas pioneered by the Negritude predecessors. These themes will naturally
include the pride and genuine admiration and respect for one's past and the exaltation of
one's heroes from the remote as well as from the recent past. A strong sense of race, but
without undue ostentation, will still pervade this poetry; there may still be some
references to past abuses and prejudices, but such themes will no longer be a principal
concern.
Indeed, this poetry will continue to convey a genuine confidence in the making of a new
and strong Africa, but the abuses by the post-Independence rulers and leaders of Africa
will also continue to be denounced. More often than before, these themes are likely to be
treated in a more personalized and less grandiose tone. Lastly, the mastery of the poetic
medium and the confidence and competence of these younger poets will continue to be
more and more convincing. There will also be more attempts at borrowing from
traditional African verbal art forms.
Ndao, who holds an English degree from the University of Grenoble in France, wrote in
English a tribute to Kwame Nkrumah, the architect of
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Ghanaian independence and a passionate champion of Pan-Africanism. In another poem
whose inspiration stems from pride in one's culture. Ndao describes the beautiful African
hairstyle using the traditional braids. This hairstyle is now the fashion all over the
continent:
Braids
Simple clusters
Of complex lines
 savannah's forests
Ancestral witchcraft
Dissipate the overseas era
And bring back the dance of naked Breasts.
Braids.
( Ndao, Mogariennes34; my translation)
And from the younger Marouba Fall, born in 1950, a message of determination and
commitment to an Africa devoid of corruption and war:
But I say that Paradise can be invented here
Let nations be to one another
What milk is to couscous
Let each one cultivate its garden
For the joy and repletion of all.
( Fall, Cri d'un assoiffé de soleil
[ The cry of one parched by the sun] 30; my translation)
In a 1963 poem Henri Lopès reveals his mixed-blood origin and the painful but real sense
of rejection it often implies, despite his undivided loyalty to the continent of his birth:
The teeth and the hair
Married
One day in a smile
under the arch of the mangrove
I am the flower of their love
The child of Ebony and of Ivory
The color of clay
But child of a premarital love
Nobody wants me
In the family council
Though tomorrow I see
Fields covered with flowers of clay
Filling the horizon
You may at once
Howl like a dog
I am African.
( Tati-Loutard, Littérature congolaise177; my translation)
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Lopès ended an earlier ( 1961) praise song to a modern African hero, Patrice Lumumba,
in words of determination and confidence in the future:
We will swear to go
 And march in warlike
Four by four
To the nonburial
Of this giant
For in a whisper his heart still in our hearts beats
A pointed finger
In the direction of Katanga
To the burial we will go
Of the colonial helmet
Of the tyrants' helmets
White black or khaki
never mind the color.
( Tati-Loutard, Littérature congolaise176; my translation)
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8 French-Language Drama
and Theater
ALAIN RICARD
The first book-length study of theater in Africa, Bakary Traore's Le théâtre négro-
africain et ses fonctions sociales ( 1958; Negro-African Theater and Its Social Functions,
1972) clearly shows the influence of missionaries and of the public school system in
French-speaking Africa. Unfortunately, Traore does not draw a strict line between the
concepts of theater and drama. Drama is a constant in social life: dances, rituals, and
burials all have an element of show and action that is indeed dramatic. But theater is
something different: it originates in a desacralized society that is willing to play with its
problems, even with its myths. The Bambara koteba—sketches acted out by youngsters—
is no doubt one of the indigenous African theater forms; so are the Malinke puppets. Both
deserve to be included in a history of theater in Africa. The same can be said of other,
very different forms that also contain this element of narrative playacting. The Togolese
kantata in Ewe—religious drama using biblical themes—dates as far back as the 1920s
and is still being staged today. In other parts of what was considered French-speaking
Africa, in Malagasy, one can cite the mpilalao—a kind of musical vaudeville—whose
origins are traditional and which also persists today. Strictly speaking, these forms
(koteba, kantata, mpilalao) do not belong to the history of theater in French, but they
have had an influence on writers in French. They flourished throughout the colonial era
and are still being maintained.
To write the history of African theater in French is to write the history of texts staged by
actors, that is, by people playing a role for fun or for money, but certainly not for ritual
reasons. There are very few professional actors in Africa today, yet the existence of a
professional society of actors is what would define, for the sociologist, the presence of
theater. In the case of theater in French-speaking Africa, let us say that such a corporation
exists in embryonic form and that the texts produced during the last two decades have
helped shape it.
Actors attempt to create a work of art by presenting a story composed by somebody else.
Their craft is a form of art, not a part of daily or ceremonial
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life. Theater is thus a way of telling stories using people and relying on a fixed scenario,
which then allows the actors to improvise. A breakthrough transforms the traditional
performances. Language, gestures, and music are suddenly presented in a new synthetic
form, or rather should be. Language is now an imported one. What happens then to a
medium—theater—that strives for a synthesis of the arts when the relationship between
spoken language, music, and dance is no longer embedded within a tradition, and has to
be totally re-created? The story and the future of theater as an art form in French-
speaking Africa is the record of several such attempts to re-create this relationship.
I concentrate in this study on those texts that can function as works of art, that can
communicate a message beyond the boundaries of their original ethnic group, and that
can exist independently of those who first composed them. The essay is divided into three
parts: (i) a historical overview of the birth and development of theater in Francophone
Africa; (2) an analysis of the plays, grouped into three categories; and (3) remarks on the
new directions present writers are taking and an attempt to assess what this means for
theater as an art form.

Historical Survey: The William-Ponty Formula

It can rightly be said that theater in French on a stage in Africa started at the Ecole
William-Ponty, a teachers' training college established in 1930 in Senegal by the French
colonial administration. Here, schoolteachers from all over West Africa were trained.
Dramatic activity within the school curriculum emphasized stories and dances from the
different cultural groups to which the students belonged. As these stories were
dramatized, a dialogue in French was added, and an annual theater show presented the
results of this interesting pedagogical experiment.
These shows became African theater: at the 1937 Colonial Exposition in Paris the
students won critical acclaim. Their dramatic training would have numerous
consequences throughout West Africa, since the students came from all the different
French territories. They brought to their home countries a concept of theater that has had
profound influence, until the 1980s, on dramatic productions in French-speaking Africa.
The "Ponty formula"—if we judge by the texts published in the journal Présence
africaine, such as Sokame ( 1948), a ten-page historical play about a Dahomean queen—
consisted of spoken text in French with sung text in an African language. Text was
interspersed with songs and dances, which probably attracted most of the audience
response, at least during the European tour. The spoken text was, according to L. S.
Senghor, "bland and stiff, without style" (Liberté I [ Liberty I] 66), and could not pretend
to the dignity of literature if it were not for the formula that invented this type of didactic
folkloristic theater, so widespread until today and so well suited to the students' demands.
The
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Ponty formula provided an outlet for the students' two basic and suddenly complementary
desires: to speak French in a public situation, and to present publicly on a stage their
native songs and dances.
In 1938 in the Ivory Coast, Ponty alumni Coffi Gadeau and Amon d'Aby created the
Théâtre indigène de Côte d'Ivoire. Bernard Dadié, also a Ponty alumnus from the Ivory
Coast, was to become the most famous dramatic writer in French in the late 1960s. And
in 1958 another Ponty alumnus, Bakary Traore, published his book on African drama.
Theater was in the hands not only of schoolteachers but also of missionaries. Missionary
forms paid more attention to African languages and thus aimed at a better aesthetic
synthesis, mediated by indigenous African music. The Togolese kantata, with its blend of
music, songs, dances, and biblical evocations, is directly descended from that effort. But
missionary theater, rarely being in French, does not fall within the scope of this study,
even though it had a considerable influence on the concept of dramaturgy that was to
preside over the efforts of many an aspiring writer.
Theater in the Ponty vein, acted by students, was to experience a kind of revival (after the
school changed emphasis during the overhaul of the colonial educational system in 1948)
with the creation by the French colonial government of the Cultural Centers in French
West Africa in 1953. These centers subsidized and controlled cultural life within the
colonies. Buildings were provided that could be used as libraries and theaters under the
aegis of the French colonial administration. The annual drama competition of the
Cultural Centers rapidly became a feature of African dramatic life and created the
competitive pattern so important even today in African theater.
Not enough attention has been given to the two most original dramatic texts of the end of
the colonial era: from Senegal, Senghor's Chaka ( 1956), and from Guinea, Fodeba
Keita's Aube africaine ( 1955; African dawn). Chaka is a poetic drama, a kind of oratorio,
"a dramatic poem for several voices with a drum accompaniment." The text, included in
the collection Ethiopiques, is dedicated to the "Bantu martyrs of South Africa." It is a
meditation on power, a drama of the man of action sacrificing his love to the necessity of
armed struggle: "Power is not obtained without sacrifice. Absolute power is obtained by
giving the blood of the most cherished being." Chaka is a short play with a choir, an
interesting experiment in marrying French text and African music. Aube africaine is a
dance drama, marked by the hope for better days after the end of colonization. Both
Chaka and Aube africaine try to reconcile the spoken text with music and with dance,
because as self
conscious artists, Senghor and Keita Fodeba know that theater is an art
form that seeks a dynamic synthesis of image, words, and sounds, and not an educational
medium, as was the fashion in the Ponty vein. Their example was not followed (was it
understood?). Independence saw the flourishing of school drama to an extent that even
the most enthusiastic Ponty zealots could not have envisaged.
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The Dominant Genres: Village Drama, Urban Drama,

and Historical and Political Drama
Jacques Scherer, head of the Institute for Theater Research at the Sorbonne, undertook a
survey of African theater in 1965; in six months he read 136 plays and met with many
authors. He found that the proclaimed goal of universal primary education and the
correlated development of high schools in all countries had given the necessary
manpower to theater in French. The output of plays has been large, but their quality has
remained low, and no writer stands out, as for instance, Wole Soyinka does in the same
period in Nigeria. Works can easily be grouped into three categories: the village drama,
the urban drama, and the historical drama.
The paradigm of village drama is the Cameroonian playwright Guillaume Oyono-Mbia 's
Trois prétendants, un mari ( 1964; Three Suitors, One Husband, 1968). The play has
been a best-seller (fourteen editions to date) and the all‐ time favorite of school groups
for over two decades, and rightly so. It deals with the cupidity of a father who wants to
marry his daughter to a rich suitor in disregard of the girl's preference. In the best
Molièresque style the play is written with a touch of lightness, a zest for social criticism.
It has all the ingredients to ensure its success among students wishing to separate
themselves from so-called backward village practices. Oyono-Mbia's achievement
remains unchallenged. Unfortunately, the play uses only the resources of the classical
comedy and does not show the theatrical inventiveness of a comparable work by Wole
Soyinka: The Lion and the Jewel ( 1963), which addresses the same kind of audience but,
for instance, uses dance in a very creative way.
The Congolese playwright Guy Menga also produced a play, L'oracle ( 1969; The
oracle), whose topic is the humorous condemnation of village practices, in this case,
fetish priests. L'oracle is a great favorite of school groups and one of the repertory
classics in French-speaking Africa. L'os ( 1973; The bone), by Birago Diop from Senegal,
a poet and an accomplished writer of folktales, was first produced in Dakar in 1965. In
the vein of the village comedy but with the bite of satire, L'os deals with human greed in
a situation of extreme need such as prevails in many Sahelian villages.
Just as village life is a great topic for the satirist, so is office life, but the urban dramas'
achievements do not measure up to the standards of the village dramas. Corruption in
high places, graft, and abuse of women are the topics of many plays, from La secrétaire
particulière ( 1970; The private secretary) by the Republic of Benin's Jean Pliya and
Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini ( 1970) and Papa Sidi, maitre escroc ( 1975; Papa Sidi, master
swindler) by Senegal's Bernard Dadié to Le club ( 1984) by Togo's Senouvo Agbota
Zinsou.
Independence also saw the development of historical drama. It had been in the Ponty
tradition to present the ways of the old African kingdoms, but no political discussion was
included. After Independence, the new states tried
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to reflect upon their history, and drama was seen by the students and the new elite as a
proper vehicle for such soul-searching. A long list of plays using the pageantry of
traditional courts were written and presented. Among them we can cite, from Mali,
Seydou Badian's La mort de Chaka ( 1961; The death of Shaka) and Djibril Tamsir
Niane's Sikasso, ou la dernière citadelle ( 1971; Sikasso; or, The last citadel); from
Senegal, Amadou Cissé Dia's Les derniers jours de Lat Dior ( 1965 ; The last days of Lat
Dior) and Cheik Ndao's L'exil d'Albouri ( 1968; The Exile of Albouri); from Benin, Jean
Pliya's Kondo le requin ( 1966; Kondo the shark); from Niger, André Salifou's
Tanimoune ( 1974); and from the Ivory Coast, Raphaël Atta-Koffi's Le trone d'or ( 1969;
The golden throne).
Themes of death and exile are dominant; they can be confronted now that the new nations
have been born. These plays have been widely presented in their respective countries of
origin as well as in festivals, and they constitute another salient feature of the repertory of
school companies. Unfortunately, their artistic achievement does not match the interest of
their political content. No balance has been achieved between the spoken and the sung
parts, and the result is often weak. Reflection on history should be combined with a
reflection on artistic forms, as is the case in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests or Kongi's
Harvest, where poetry becomes an instrument of power in itself and not a mere
illustration of political theories and of historical knowledge.
Some plays try to deal with the political theme in a more ambitious way, attempting an
aesthetic as well as political debate of the dominant discourse on history. Such is the
Ivorian playwright Charles Nokan's Les malheurs de Tchako ( 1968; The trials of
Tchako), which heralds the type of critical outlook that would become the norm in the
next decade, although in a rather unaccomplished way.
The best work of the 1960s is probably Béatrice du Congo ( 1969 ; Beatrice of the
Congo), written by the grand old man of African drama, the former Ponty student
Bernard Dadié, who, along with Amon d'Aby and Coffi Gadeau, was a former leader of
the Cercle culturel et folklorique de la Côte d'Ivoire. Beatrice is the daughter of the King
of the Congo. She exhorts her father and her people not to submit to the people of
Bitanda (i.e., Portugal), not to abandon their wealth and their culture for a mere mimetism
of European ways. Her speeches and her personal commitment make her a kind of
African Antigone. She is sentenced to death, her last scream a call for a grant of
happiness and joy by the elemental forces of the continent. The play is written with
mastery; dialogues are fast paced and the historical setting well constructed. Béatrice du
Congo was the only African play to be produced at the Avignon Drama Festival ( 1971),
one of the best-known drama festivals in Europe, under the direction of Jean-Marie
Serreau, former director of many of Aimé Césaire's plays.
One of the more original plays of the 1960s was L'Europe inculpée ( 1969, 1977; Europe
indicted) by the Congolese writer Antoine Letembet-Ambilly, first produced in 1969
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first produced in 1969. Here is the argument of the play as presented by the author:
This play uses the biblical episode of Noah with his three sons Sem, Cham and
Japhet.
In this five-act play, Japhet, father of Europe, upon learning that his daughter
Europe is accused in front of judge Humanity, exhorts his father Noah, back on
earth, to intervene and stop the trial. (Letembet-Ambilly 5-6)
The schematism of the situation, as well as the coded rhetoric, has an interesting, operatic
quality. It belongs to the universe of religious drama, of passion plays, often produced,
but in an African language, by missionaries. This is the first example, and still a rare one,
of the influence of this type of dramaturgy on theater in French.
This survey of the first period of African theater in French would not be complete if we
neglected Guinea and Zaire, where historical developments have been quite different
from the other French-speaking countries. In Guinea, the promising debut of Fodeba
Keita came to a halt with the dictatorship of Sekou Touré: writers and poets were killed (
Keita, himself once a minister, disappeared) or went into exile. Theater was reduced to
the competitive singing of praise for the so-called revolution.
A Guinean play presented in Lagos in 1977, L'aube sanglante ( Bleeding dawn), was an
obvious sequel to Keita's Aube africaine. Its aesthetic treatment was "based on socialist
realism using a fighting vanguard technique opposed to the contemplative theater" (
d'Aby, Dadié, and Gadeau, L'aube sanglante; my translation). In its ethical proposal, it
glorifies "all fighters who fell on the front of the anticolonial struggle." And true to this
announcement, the play treats anticolonial struggle in a realistic and prosaic way, using
all the techniques of the so-called bourgeois theater it claims to replace. It is supposed to
be "a collective creation," which probably expresses the difficulty of finding a self-
respecting writer in the nightmarish republic that Guinea had become at that time.
In Zaire, the theatrical movement has deep roots in missionary activities. Many groups
existed in the 1950s and put on plays in African languages. There even existed a popular
theater in broken French, which was often broadcast over the radio. Plays written by
Albert Mongita enjoyed vast popularity. Theater was thus at the same time a popular and
an educational medium to an extent unknown in other French-speaking countries.
Plays by Justin Disasi were published in the journal Présence congolaise in 1957, while
plays by Mongita appeared in La voix du congolais in the same year. It is fair to say that
this theater, although active and popular, remained poor artistically. The schooling of the
authors did not go far, since the intellectual promotion of an African elite was not high on
the agenda of Belgian colonization. Still, granting the crudeness of the language and
artistic devices, these plays had a strange revealing power, according to the
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Zairean scholar P. Ngandu Nkashama, who has written a profound and simulating study
of theater in Zaire. It is because of the plays' very marginality "that they signify the
relevant manner in which colonial reality was reflected in the frightened and troubled
eyes of the elite of the Belgian Congo ... and of Rwanda Burundi. They [the elite]
remained inhibited and panicked at the thought of a theatrical discourse that would
investigate deeply and reflect upon their very conditions of existence" (Nkashama 65; my
translation).
One could not better express the limitations of colonial drama. In a way, the lack of
formal slickness, of that Ponty polish, makes Zairean theater more revealing, more in
touch with the essential realities. It has a more direct relationship to truth, and this may be
a better road to art.
In the mid- 1960s Zairean theater was very active inside the country: students in the big
cities such as Kinshasa and Lubumbashi provided a large and receptive audience. Hardly
anything was known of the outside world, although eager Zairean students would put on
foreign plays. Nkashama has documented some of this activity: names such as D.
Bolamba (Geneviève, martyre d'Idiofa—Geneviève, martyr of Idiofa) and Valerien
Mutombo-Diba (Le trône à trois—The throne for three) were well-known among
students (Nkashama 68). In 1967 a national theater group was created, and by the early
1970s it counted as many as four hundred people in its company.

New Perspectives
I would like, in this final section, to reflect upon the sociological conditions of theater
production and to analyze in this light recent developments and essential trends.

INSTITUTIONS
The creation of national theater companies was for a time a new element in the picture.
Senegal built the Théâtre Daniel Sorano in 1965; the Ivory Coast had the Institut national
des arts and later the Ecole nationale de théâtre. Zaire, as mentioned above, created a
national company in 1967, as did the Congo in 1972 and Togo in 1973.
Today ( 1985), few countries are without some kind of official support of or involvement
in theater: in the Cameroons it was the university theater that, following the Nigerian
example, was supposed to stimulate dramatic creativity. Official cultural polices were
developed in the early 1970s and varied from a liberal and tolerant attitude, as in Senegal
or even in the Congo, to the militant, verbose, and more or less totalitarian postures of
Zaire and Guinea. These policies have direct bearing on dramatic writing and production.
For instance, how can one speak of theater in what was the Central African Empire?
Reality was far beyond anything that could be written, so writers went into silence or
exile.
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More beneficial to the long-term development of theater has probably been the gradual
development of publishing. In the late 1960s only a few publishers— P. J. Oswald, who
started the Théâtre africain series in 1967; Présence africaine; and CLE—included plays
in their catalogues. The French radio network (ORTF) started its own series ( Ricard,
"The ORTF"). Then a new multinational company, Nouvelles Editions Africaines,
created by Senegal and the Ivory Coast, built quite a sizable theater list, as did Hatier,
which now publishes the prize-winning radio plays of the Concours Théâtral Inter

africain, sponsored by the ORTF, now Radio France Internationale ( R.F.I.).
The diffusion of drama through the radio is still a significant feature of cultural life in
French-speaking Africa. The aforementioned competition is a major event, and the grand
prize is usually won by writers who are either confirmed— Jean Pliya from Benin and
Guy Menga from the Congo, for instance—or of great promise, like the Congo's Sony
Lab'ou Tansi or Togo's Senouvo Agbota Zinsou.
A permanent hindrance for the development of theater is the lack of qualified
professional actors. Guillaume Oyono-Mbia comments thus:
 It is unnecessary to recall, I believe, that there is still no professional theater
troupe in the Cameroons. Many African countries are in the same situation.
Consequently, there is nothing astonishing in the fact that dramatic authors are
themselves not professionals....
One of my dearest desires would be, as you might guess, the creation of one or
several professional theater troupes in the Cameroons and elsewhere in Africa.
This is so, on the one hand, for the reasons already enumerated above and, on the
other hand, because authors who merit it should be able to earn a living with their
work or at least be justly remunerated. ( Oyono-Mbia, Le train8)
Where professional companies exist ( Senegal and the Congo, for instance), they have
become bureaucratized: administration and diplomacy take precedence over
responsiveness to innovation and creativity. Where they do not exist, authors and actors
have hopes that soon they will. A rather difficult balance must be achieved between a
strictly administrative approach and an approach that would encourage only specific
productions. If actors are unable to secure a means of livelihood, how can they improve
their art? How can authors experiment and develop their skills? It is worth noting that
some of the most creative groups of the last decade have been only marginally supported
by cultural institutions. Such was the case of the Mwondo Theater from Lubumbashi,
which experiments with dance drama. The same is true of Rocado Zulu from Brazzaville,
which uses (in an independent way) actors from the national theater group to produce
Sony Lab'ou Tansi's plays, and of Koteba, which borrows the name of the traditional
genre from Abidjan and experiments with dance drama and popular French, trying thus to
achieve a new synthesis of words, gestures, and music.
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EXPERIMENTS
The key problem remains one of achieving this new synthesis of words, gestures, and
music. Several playwrights have tried to respond to this challenge: Werewere Liking in
the Cameroons with the ritual theater, and Porquet Niangouran in the Ivory Coast with
griotique. One grasps the intent, but unfortunately, few works exist, and the results are
difficult to judge.
Other experiments tackle the language problem and in the name of social realism try to
reconcile the spoken French on the stage with the language spoken in the streets. One of
the most successful such attempts is by the Congolese playwright Sylvain Bemba in Un
foutu monde pour un blanchisseur trop honnête ( 1979; A wretched world for a too
honest washerman ).
The quest for new means of expression, for a new dramatic form, goes along with the
desire for a more direct political expression. Such at least is the case with Sony Lab'ou
Tansi, especially in Je soussigné cardiaque (unpublished; I, the undersigned cardiac ),
and Chadian M. Naïndouba in L'étudiant de Soweto ( 1981; The Soweto student ). The
recent interest for the Soweto theme should also be put in perspective, since it has a
strong element of parody in Zaire, but also elsewhere, as P. Ngandu Nkashama remarks:
"In denouncing apartheid ... in South Africa, by sublimating the unarmed struggle of
students in the face of violence and weapons, in the search for a more just and freer
society, the authors are in fact superposing two distinct languages: the general
revindication of all African countries and their personal revolt against a society that
rejects them" ( 74 ; my translation).
This perceptive quote helps us understand the frequent re-creation of the South African
political scene in Francophone theater. It forces us to deal with an interpretative
sociological criticism that cannot simply describe the contents of the play. The transition
is from Shaka as emblem of the political ruler to Soweto as metaphor of political
oppression, valid south as well as north of the Limpopo. For many writers caught in small
countries that stifle freedom of expression, South Africa offers an easy and efficient way
to parody their own situation.
In many countries, what is not possible on a stage is the direct questioning of abusive
political power, of what political scientists call the patrimonial character of many African
regimes, especially in French-speaking Africano in Togo and Zaire, to name a few. The
concept of patrimonialism is of direct relevance to the art of drama, since it is meant to
describe the concentration of power in the hands of the head of state, leading to confusion
between the private and public domains. The state tends to become the private property
of the president, and accordingly, political criticism is taken personally and castigated
directly. It is, then, quite understandable that political plays should be written by
expatriate writers. Tchicaya U Tam'si, a well-known poet from the Congo, has taken to
drama, and his play Le zoulou ( 1977; The Zulu ) was produced in France
-235-
Zulu) was produced in France. Aside from the resources of exile and parody, little room
remains for directly political plays.
The last and probably central problem of African theater in French has been, and still is,
the lack of theoretical reflection, of confrontation between theory and practice. The
conservatory tradition—by which I mean special technical schools of drama such as exist
in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Zaire—by separating technical training from general
university education in the humanities and social sciences, is probably responsible for
this state of affairs. The situation is on the way to change. The work of P. Ngandu
Nkashama on Zairean theater and of Senouvo Agbota Zinsou on Togolese theater, as well
as their own plays, for instance Zinsou's On joue la comédie ( 1984; We are doing
comedy), show a new direction, conscious of the necessity to combine social and
historical information with an aesthetic awareness. Both writers are particularly
concerned with the development of popular forms, either in French or in African
languages, and try to adapt their writing to this grass-roots creativity. Neither writer
theorizes his work in an ideological sense. Zaire, for instance, is not a place for social
criticism. But their example opens new avenues of freedom to dramatic writing.

Conclusion
Our harvest has been meager. No writer of Soyinka's stature has emerged in African
theater in French, and too few confirmed poets and novelists have tried their hand at
dramatic writing. A strange phenomenon has occurred, though: creativity in
representational arts seems to be concentrated in movies. This is where the good actors
and the good directors are to be found. No dramatists equal cinematographers like
Souleymane Cisse or Sembène Ousmane in the mastery of their art. The question arises,
Why are there such good films and such poor plays in French-speaking Africa? One
might suggest an answer by taking into account the development of the film industry as
well as the history of theater. Filmmaking in French-speaking Africa was introduced at
the time of the New Wave movement in France. African filmmakers had the best possible
training in the late 1950s and were in the vanguard of film as an art form. On the
contrary, theater was taught by schoolmasters who were not real artists. Training in the
dramatic arts was continued in second-rate conservatories trying to emulate French
institutions. Many African actors worked with Jean-Marie Serreau, one of the best French
directors of the 1960s, but Serreau never worked in Africa, and many African actors lived
in Paris. In English-speaking Africa, the reverse was true: in Nigeria, for instance, the
film industry was started by second-rate Hollywood directors working with brilliant
Nigerian actors and it failed, whereas a young Nigerian writer could work for several
years with the Royal Court Theater, one of the leading centers of theater in the late 1950s.
Theater, like film, is a specific art form, and its development cannot be
-236
confined to a mere didactic medium. African film in French was directly in tune with the
New Wave. African theater in French was never really in tune with the development of
the medium: the Living Theater or the Performance Group never went to Africa, and
Peter Brook limited his stay to Nigeria. In the 1970s many repressive regimes came into
power, hiding their cultural conservatism under the disguise of authenticity; but this
authenticity is only folklore and not the adventurous search for a language that would
create a new synthesis of word, music, and gesture, which would be real theater.
The history of African theater in French has so far been the history of an artistic failure.
Recent years have shown an awareness of this situation among young writers striving to
confer autonomy on theater as an art form and to separate it from the schools. Only by
cutting the umbilical cord that links it with the school can theater thrive as an art form.

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Lumumba, 1977. A play presented by the Republic of Guinea at the Second World
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Bemba, Sylvain. Un foutu monde pour un blanchisseur trop honnête ( A wretched world
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Bonneau, Richard. Ecrivains, cinéastes et artistes ivoiriens, aperçu bio-bibliographique [
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—. Papa Sidi, maître escroc [ Papa Sidi, master swindler]. Dakar: NEA, 1975.
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Keita, Fodeba. Aube africaine [ African dawn]. In Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre
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Letembet-Ambilly, Antoine. L'Europe inculpée [ Europe indicted]. Paris: 1969;
Yaoundé: CLE, 1977.
Liking, Werewere. Une nouvelle terre, suivi de Du sommeil d'injuste [ A new land, with
About the sleep of injustice]. Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1980.
Menga, Guy. La marmite de Kola-Mbala [ Kola-Mbala's cooking pot]. Paris: ORTF,
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—. L'oracle [ The oracle]. Paris: ORTF, 1969.
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Naïndouba, Maoundoé. L'étudiant de Soweto [ The Soweto student]. Paris: Hatier, 1981.
Ndao, Cheik Aliou. L'exil d'Albouri, suivi de La décision [ The Exile of Albouri, with The
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9 Portuguese-Language
Literature
RUSSELL G. HAMILTON
R. G. Armstrong observed that the "serious business of the mid-twentieth century is
carried on in four languages: English, French, German and Russian" (quoted in Roscoe
5). And Chinua Achebe, after a visit to Brazil in the mid-1960s, reported that a "number
of the writers I spoke to were concerned about the restrictions imposed on them by their
use of the Portuguese language" ( 18 ).
The lesser international prestige of Portuguese (despite its nearly 170 million speakers
worldwide), compared to English and French, has much to do with the relative obscurity
of the writing from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and
Mozambique. A paucity of translations has also kept this writing largely inaccessible to
the non-Portuguese-reading world. 1 But even those who do know the language have had
limited access to works from the former Portuguese colonies, which were themselves
generally closed to outsiders. Although by now its existence is at least known to most
serious students of African literature, writing from Lusophone Africa still gets short shrift
in an Anglocentric and Francocentric Africanist universe.
Ironically, Lusophone African writing has been around for a long time. Gerald Moser
argues this point in his appropriately titled " African Literature in Portuguese: The First
Written, the Last Discovered" ( 1967). Moser documents the mid-nineteenth-century
origins of a Portuguese-language literature written from what can be loosely defined as
an African perspective. Although never in large numbers, the Portuguese have had the
longest, most sustained European presence in Africa. Centuries-long contact with
Portuguese traders, adventurers, slavers, missionaries, and outcasts, including not a few
political exiles of a liberal bent, exposed segments of the local African populations to a
process of acculturation that led to sporadic social and linguistic creolization, especially
in urban centers. During long periods of neglect by the metropole, Africans and
Europeans, to varying degrees in
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all five colonies, were virtually left to their own devices. Often out of expediency
Europeans, especially in rural areas, adapted to African ways and spoke local languages
just as Africans and mestiços (mixed race), principally in the colonial towns and cities,
were westernized and spoke Portuguese.
In Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau—the colonies with the largest numbers of
unassimilated Africans—only a small fraction of the indigenous population learned to
speak Portuguese beyond a rudimentary level. Conversely, the unique history of
acculturation in all five colonies gave rise to small but significant African and mestiço
urban elites, many of whose members spoke and wrote Portuguese as their first and, in
some cases, only language. In Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Guinea-Bissau,
Portuguese-based creoles have served as the first, second, or only language for large
segments of the population. In Cape Verde, especially, and to a significant degree in
Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, many of the Portuguese-speaking members
of the privileged social strata have also been fluent in the local creole vernacular. The
indigenous middle classes in all five colonies gave rise to the intellectual and, in some
cases, interracial elites from whose ranks emerged the majority of the writers who
produced the earliest acculturated literature of sub-Saharan Africa.
After independence, even as they attempted to validate the nineteenth
century
precursors of their respective literatures, most Lusophone African writers and critics
would probably concede that the mainly Portuguese
language works truly worthy of
being labeled Angolan, Cape Verdean, and so forth, are products of the twentieth century.
With the exception of Cape Verde, whose modern literary movement dates from the mid-
1930s, a nativistic literature emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s simultaneously
with the crystallization of nationalist sentiments among influential members of the
Lusophone African intelligentsia and their Portuguese allies.

African Poetry in Portuguese

Members of the urban intelligentsia, in search of an emotive means of expressing their
growing social and political consciousness in the years before independence, seized upon
poetry as a more accessible and malleable medium than prose fiction and drama. Whether
occasional or "serious," poets could often overcome editorial, economic, and
governmental restrictions by surreptitiously distributing their typed or handwritten poems
among like-minded intellectuals. Despite government-imposed censorship, writers often
found outlets for their poems and occasional stories in a few local newspapers,
magazines, and publishing houses run by sympathetic Europeans, and in even fewer
African-owned newspapers in cities like Luanda and Lourenço Marques (now Maputo).
Some writers even managed to publish their works in Portugal. Starting in the 1950s in
Lisbon and Coimbra,
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Black, mestiço, and white students from the colonies, along with their Portuguese
sympathizers, controlled a few editorial outlets for their largely socially conscious poetry
and prose.
The Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI—House of students from the empire) was
founded in Lisbon in 1944 with, ironically, the blessings of António Salazar, the chief
architect of Portugal's fascist New State. By the 1950s the CEI had become a hotbed of
political and literary activity. This activity led to three anthologies and a number of slim
volumes of poetry of cultural revindication and implicit social protest, as well as to the
CEI's demise, in 1965, at the hands of PIDE (the Portuguese acronym for the infamous
International Police for Defense of the State). In its heyday the CEI's roster of members
read like a who's who of Lusophone African nationalist leaders and writers—in several
cases, the former and latter being one and the same.

A POETRY OF CULTURAL REVINDICATION

A poetry "of," as opposed to "about" or simply "in," Africa is an emotive form of cultural
resistance predicated, to a greater or lesser degree, on a desire for social change. With
antecedents dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, a poetry of cultural revindication
flourished in the Portuguese colonies before anything comparable emerged elsewhere
south of the Sahara.
Cape Verde. Jorge Barbosa ( 1902-71) published Arquipélago ( 1935; Archipelago), the
first of his three books of a poetry of cultural revindication, ten years before Léopold
Senghor's Chants d'ombre ( Songs of darkness). If Senghor's first book of poems
harbingered the themes and discourse of the Senegalese poet's most rhapsodic Negritude,
Barbosa and other Cape Verdeans had long before fashioned nativistic poems around a
unique ethnic ethos.
"Momento" (For just an instant), one of Barbosa's most compelling nativistic and
geocentric poems, codifies the archipelago's ambiance of bittersweet melancholy in the
expression of a hushed sense of peoplehood:
who here has not felt
this, our
refined melancholy?
that which unexpectedly suspends
a laugh just begun
and leaves a sudden bitterness
in the midst of our joy
in our hearts,
and for no reason at all
clouds our speech with some sad utterance.
( Arquipélago18; my translation)
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Barbosa, along with Manuel Lopes (b. 1907) and Osvaldo Alcântara (the pseudonym of
Baltasar Lopes da Silva [ 1907-89]), form a triad of poets belonging to the Claridade
generation (so named for the literary journal they and others founded in 1936). Members
of this generation hit on the idea of a single ethnic group with a creole language and ethos
as the stuff from which Cape Verdean cultural revindication could be fashioned.
Angola. In Luanda in the early 1950s, a nucleus of Black, mestiço, and white intellectuals
and high school students, members of the Regional Association of Angola's Native Sons
(Anangola), rallied around the banner of cultural revindication as they intoned their
hortatory poems. "The Young Intellectuals," as they dubbed themselves, founded
Mensagem ( The message), a literary journal, of which only two issues were published, in
1951 and 1952, but which launched the so-called Generation of 1950, with its
preponderance of poets, who invoked Africa and vowed to "discover" Angola. 2
Out of this initial flurry of literary activity emerged Viriato da Cruz ( 1928
73), a
mestiço who was Mensagem's prime mover and whose best poetic efforts resulted in
ballads composed in an innovative, hybridized Portuguese
Kimbundu language that
revindicated the semicreolized city of Luanda and, by extension, a reinvented Angola.
Cruz's poem "Sô Santo" (so being a black corruption of the standard Portuguese senhor,
which, in the poem's title, is equivalent to the English "mister") tells the story of a local
Kimbundu entrepreneur and landlord who has fallen on hard times. To the rhythm of the
rebita, a popular Luandan dance, a chorus of bessanganas (Kimbundu for "young
women") sings, in creolized Kimbundu:
Mauari-ngana Santo
dim-dom
ual'o banda o calaçala
dim-dom
chaluto mu muzumbo
dim-dom...
[Mister Santo
dim-dom
down the street he goes
dim-dom
a cigar stuck in his mouth
dim-dom...].
( 166 ; my translation) 3
At the poem's end the narrator wonders whether Mister Santo offended the gods or
whether he is just a symbol of the fate of the race, all of which is coded commentary on
the influx, around the end of World War II, of Portuguese settlers that sent many of
Luanda's black and mestiço residents into a downward socioeconomic spiral, as they lost
middle-level jobs to the
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new arrivals and were forced, paradoxically, to move up to shantytowns (musseques) that
ringed the European lower city. Thus the members of the Generation of 1950 came of age
at a time when Luanda was becoming two cities: a prosperous European one, with
skyscrapers and bustling commerce, and a poor African one, with its squalor and cheap
source of labor.
Mário António ( 1934-89), along with other poets of his generation, evoked that real and
imagined creole-Kimbundu Luanda that existed before the arrival of waves of settler
families. In "Rua da Maianga" ( Maianga street), António poetically captured, with
sentimentality and irony, a toponymic detail that emblematized the creeping
Europeanization of a traditional Luanda neighborhood:
Maianga Street
now bears the name of some missionary or other,
but for us it is still the street of Maianga.
( Crónica da cidade estranha154; my translation)
Other significant poets of the Mensagem generation are António Jacinto ( 1924-91), Alda
Lara ( 1930-62), and Agostinho Neto ( 1922-79). The latter, about whom I have more to
say shortly, is Angola's best-known poet of cultural revindication and social protest. Also
significant among the poets of cultural revindication are Aires de Almeida Santos (b.
1922), Samuel de Sousa (b. 1927), Ernesto Lara Filho ( 1932-75), António Cardoso (b.
1933), Manuel Lima (b. 1935), Arnaldo Santos (b. 1936), Costa Andrade (b. 1936), and
Henrique Guerra (b. 1937), all of whom opened the way for and contributed to the next
phases of social protest, proindependence, and combative poetry.
Mozambique. The interrelated socioeconomic conditions and cultural and political
factors that gave rise to Angola's nationalist literary movement brought about a similar
phenomenon on the opposite side of the continent in the Mozambican cities of Beira and,
especially, Lourenço Marques. While Angolan intellectuals were coalescing under the
banner of such racially integrated organizations as Anangola and the Cultural Society of
Angola, comparable groups were forming in Mozambique, but largely along color lines.
South Africa's recently officialized apartheid and the color bar in the British-owned
Rhodesias directly influenced racial mores in neighboring Mozambique. As a result,
much Mozambican poetry of cultural revindication reveals a stronger sense of racial
affirmation than Cape Verdean and Angolan writing of the same period.
José Craveirinha (b. 1922), Mozambique's most celebrated modern poet, is a mestiço
who, years before independence, carried cultural and racial revindication to rhetorical
heights unequaled in Lusophone African writing. Craveirinha assaulted an acculturated
discourse still allied with a European canon. With affirmation and sardonic posturing, he
wrote: "On my thick
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lips ferment / the grains of sarcasm that colonized my Mother Africa" ("África" in
Xigubo15)
Noémia de Sousa (b. 1927) has the distinction of being the first female poet of color
writing in Portuguese, and perhaps, in any language in all of southern Africa. Eugénio
Lisboa, a Euro-Mozambican critic of considerable acumen, but with little patience for
what he deemed to be artistic ineptitude, characterized Sousa's poems as prolix and
babbling. Ironically, it is these apparent defects that lend vigor and urgency to her
diction. Verbosity and a stammering search for a liberated mode of expression were the
weapons the mestiça Sousa used, in the 1950s and 1960s, to lay siege to acculturated
language. Her persona's voice is throaty and almost frenetic in "Sangue Negro" (Black
blood):
Because the strength of your vigor conquers all!
And nothing more was needed, than the incomparable sorcery
of your war drums calling out,
dundundundun-ta-ta-dundundun-ta-ta,
nothing more than the raw madness
of your wildest and terribly beautiful rites ...
—so that I could tremble
—so that I could scream
—so that I could feel, deep, in the blood, your voice, my Mother!
And overcome, I saw that which joins us ...
 And so I returned to my millennial origins.
( Ferreira, No Reino92; my translation)
With only a handful of poems and no book to her credit, Noémia de Sousa's passionate
voice faded early, and in the 1950s she went into voluntary exile in Paris (in the 1980s
she moved to Lisbon, where she lives today). Craveirinha remained in Mozambique,
where he continued to write (to date he has published four volumes of poetry) throughout
the years of war and persecution, to which he himself fell victim when he was
imprisoned, from 1965 to 1969, as an enemy of the state. Both poets set a standard for a
poetic discourse that defied the very language of its acculturated composition.
Other noteworthy poets who, in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to revindicate a cultural
Africanness or protest colonial rule in Mozambique are Orlando Mendes (b. 1916),
Virgílio de Lemos (b. 1929), and Sebastião Alba (b. 1940). In line with the unique
racial/ethnic composition of literary movements in Lourenço Marques and Beira, it is
also worth noting that these three, along with the majority of the poets publishing in
Mozambique during that period, were Portuguese or Europeans born and raised in the
colony.
A Poet from São Tomé and Negritude in Portugal. In 1974 a military coup overthrew
the Portuguese dictatorship, and within a year all of Portugal's African colonies had been
granted independence. Only a few months after
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the coup, a curious event took place in Lisbon. Léopold Senghor, by invitation of the
Lisbon Academy of Sciences, delivered an address titled "Lusitanianism and Negritude."
The celebrated Senegalese poet attributed the deposed Portuguese regime's downfall to its
abandonment of Lusitanianism, which, Senghor assured his august audience, is grounded
in the ethnic character of a people whose civilization has much in common with that of
Black Africa. According to Senghor, the Portuguese possess African politesse, civility,
and xenophilia, and, like Africans, they are instinctively and congenitally poets.
Negritude and Lusitanianism may seem strange bedfellows, but the relationship dates
back to well before the 1974 coup.
In "Portugueses e Negritude," a three-part essay that first appeared in 1970 in a Lisbon
newspaper, Maria da Graça Freire compares Negritude to the tropicalist ideology of the
Portuguese colonies. As proof of a genuinely Portuguese brand of Negritude, Freire
quotes from "Canção do Mestiço" (Mestiço's song"), by Francisco José Tenreiro ( 1921-
63):
When I make love to a white woman
I am white ...
When I make love to a Black woman
I am Black
 Oh yeah!
(Freire 62; my translation)
Although the poem perhaps better exemplifies "Mulattitude," Freire's characterization of
Tenreiro as a poet of Negritude—the Portuguese way—has some validity.
Tenreiro, born to an African mother and a Portuguese father on the tiny equatorial island
of São Tomé, was taken as a child to Lisbon. In Portugal he rose to unprecedented
heights as a scholar (he was a professor of geography), a politician (he served in the
Portuguese National Assembly), a respected literary critic, and a much-heralded poet.
Although held aloft by the right as living proof of Portugal's vaunted racial tolerance,
Tenreiro traveled in circles ideologically inimical to the regime. He coedited Caderno de
poesia negra de expressão portuguesa ( 1953; A collection of Negro poetry in
Portuguese), the first anthology of its kind to be published in the Portuguese sphere.
Mário Pinto de Andrade ( 1928-90), Tenreiro's Angolan coanthologist, has impressive
anticolonialist and antifascist credentials. He cofounded, in 1956, the People's Movement
for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and he has distinguished himself as a literary critic
and an articulate, militant essayist who became a close associate of Amílcar Cabral (
1924-73), the father of Guinea-Bissau's and Cape Verde's independence.
Death overtook Tenreiro before the appearance of his Coração em África ( 1964; With my
heart in Africa), which was issued posthumously as part of a volume of his collected
Obra poética ( 1967; Poetic works), and which established him as a formidable
Lusophone African poet. And insofar as Negri
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tude was launched in Europe as a cultural formulation of the ideologies of Pan-
Africanism and Black consciousness, many of Tenreiro's poems fall into that category (
Tenreiro was also influenced by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other poets of
the Harlem Renaissance). In the title poem of Tenreiro's collection, the persona
proclaims:
With my heart in Africa, I tread these foggy city streets
with Africa in my heart and a bebop rhythm on my lips,
while all about me they whisper, look,
a black man (OK), look, a mulatto (same difference),
look, a darky (ridiculous).
( Coração126; my translation)
The quasiofficial acceptance, in Portugal, of Tenreiro's Negritude constituted, in effect,
an adaptation of his broader sense of Pan-Africanism to a mitigating justification of a
Lusotropicalist ideology out of step with a decolonizing world. In a way, Tenreiro is as
much a paradox of Portuguese colonialism as are those Angolans and Mozambicans of
European extraction who joined the nationalist movements and wrote literary works of
African cultural revindication and social protest.
A POETRY OF PROTEST AND COMBAT
Some Lusophone African intellectuals have declared that their literary movements were
born in struggle, while Negritude was conceived in defeat. However exaggerated that
contention may be, it is true that in the 1960s, with the outbreak of the wars of
independence in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, cultural revindication and
racial affirmation became hand
maidens to social protest and combativeness. Mário de
Andrade, who lived many years in Paris and who once had praised Negritude as a potent
weapon in Africa's struggle for independence, later characterized the Black ideology as
having outlived its usefulness. And in 1972 Amílcar Cabral, during a visit to the United
States, told a group of African-American students that Negritude had little relevance for
his people in their struggle for liberation, because it and Pan-Africanism "were
propounded outside of black Africa" ( Return to the Source62-63). Indeed, it was chiefly
in Portugal, during the years of the wars of liberation in Africa, that a few poets,
including Tenreiro and the Angolan Geraldo Bessa Víctor ( 1917-89), practiced the art
and adhered to the precepts of Negritude, Lusitanian style.
Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Cape Verde, as the poet and short story writer Gabriel
Mariano (b. 1928) argues in his essay "Negritude e caboverdianidade" ( 1958; Negritude
and Cape Verdianism), the Cape Verdeans' collective sense of cultural singularity and
ethnic identity precluded the need for any imported racial ideology. And so it is that on
the archipelago, some three hundred miles west of Senegal, Cape Verdean intellectuals
have long clung to
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their creole ethos of the biological, linguistic, and cultural mulatto. (Estimates put the
islands' population at around 70 percent mestiço, 20 percent Black, and 10 percent white.)
Writers of the group known as Certeza (Certainty—so named for yet another short-lived
but historically significant literary journal, founded in 1944) generally evinced a keener
social awareness than their Claridade predecessors. In 1952 Amílcar Cabral wrote,
however, that although both the Claridade and Certeza groups had made undeniable
contributions to a new Cape Verdean social consciousness, their message had to be
transcended in favor of a poetic expression that would reveal "another land within our
land" (" Apontamentos" 8). 4 Cabral's own phrase was transcended by the fervent avowal:
"We will not go to Pasargadae!"
The reference to Pasargadae, the capital of ancient Persia, comes from a poem by Manuel
Bandeira, Brazil's celebrated modernist poet, who, along with other Brazilian writers,
profoundly influenced the Claridade group. For Bandeira's persona Pasargadae was a
Camelot to which he escaped to live out hedonistic fantasies. And following that line, the
Cape Verdean poet Osvaldo Alcântara wrote "Itinerário de Pasárgada," in which the
persona expresses a "keen longing" for that mythical place.
Militant Cape Verdean writers and intellectuals seized on the Pasargadae metaphor to
contest what they saw as the claridosos' failure to address the archipelago's chronic
socioeconomic problems and political dependency. Thus was born a literary movement
based on anti-evasão, which is the title of a poem, written around 1962, by Ovídio
Martins (b. 1928). With terse and unembellished diction, Martins's persona avows:
I will scream
I will shout
I will kill
I will not go to Pasargadae!
(Burness 117)
Without totally abandoning the ethnocentric notions of creole singularity, these militant
poets attempted to locate Cape Verde's destiny in a more African context than had their
Claridade and Certeza predecessors. They also more vehemently protested the chronic
economic and social ills that plagued the islands, including the institution of contract
labor, which, beginning in the nineteenth century, sent thousands of Cape Verdean
peasants to the harsh conditions of the cacao and coffee plantations of São Tomé.
Onésimo Silveira (b. 1935), one of the firebrands of the antievasionist group, chronicled,
in poetry and short stories, the abuses of the plantation island, where he himself had lived
from 1956 to 1959. Silveira's experiences in São Tomé and, later, Angola undoubtedly
led to his insistence on Cape Verde's African roots, in contrast to the Claridade claim of
the islands as
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"a mixture of two cultures—but, more European than African" (34; my translation). 5
The war in Guinea-Bissau, under the leadership of the African Party of the Independence
of Guinea[-Bissau] and Cape Verde (PAIGC), led a number of young Cape Verdean
intellectuals to identify even more closely with the continent and its destiny. One such
intellectual, Felisberto Vieira Lopes (b. 1937), using the provocative creole name of
Kaoberdiano Dambará, authored Noti ( 1964; Night), a collection of militant poems
written in the creole of Santiago, usually characterized as the most African of the ten
inhabited Cape Verde islands. 6
The patterns of European settlement, with the imposition of Western social institutions
and economic structures, which in the other Lusophone colonies gave rise to a small but
significant indigenous bourgeoisie, applied to a much lesser degree in the enclave of
Portuguese Guinea. Due in part to the virtual absence of a homegrown acculturated elite
(the colony's first high school opened in 1949, in contrast to 1917 in Angola and 1860 on
the Cape Verde island of Santiago), Guinea-Bissau's modern literary movement began to
materialize only after Independence. In a very real sense, cultural revindication, social
protest, combativeness, and an exaltation of the word came about almost simultaneously
in post-independence Guinea-Bissau poetry. 7
São Tomé and Príncipe. The Portuguese- and creole-language writing on the two
equatorial islands that form the republic of São Tomé and Príncipe is another distinctive
phenomenon within the singular history of Lusophone African literature. During colonial
times on these plantation islands of largely absentee Portuguese landlords, social and
economic conditions made for the emergence of a black and mestiço managerial class
known as filhos da terra (sons and daughters of the land), more or less the equivalent of
the Cape Verdean crioulos. However, unlike Cape Verde, with its early and
unprecedented cultural and literary activities, before independence there was virtually no
coordinated literary movement in São Tomé and Príncipe. Many of the filhos da terra left
their native islands at a tender age to be educated and often to live out their lives in
Portugal. Tenreiro, with his nativistic and Negritude poetry, all but initiated modern
island literature—in Portugal. Some fifty years before him, Caetano da Costa Alegre (
1864-90), a black filho da terra also from São Tomé, lived most of his short life and
wrote all of his poems, contained in the posthumous volume Versos ( 1916), in Portugal.
Alda Espírito Santo (b. 1926), Maria Manuela Margarido (b. 1926), and Tomás Medeiros
(b. 1931) formed the nucleus of an embryonic São Tomé and Príncipe literary movement,
similar, in terms of cultural revindication and protest writing, to what occurred in the
1950s and 1960s in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique. Espírito Santo and Medeiros,
from São Tomé, and Margarido, from the smaller island of Príncipe, were active in the
1950s in the Lisbon-based House of Students from the Empire (CEI), where they
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rubbed shoulders with other militant writers from the Lusophone African colonies. But of
the three, only Espírito Santo, after completing her education in Portugal, returned to the
islands, where she taught school during the final decades of colonial rule and where, after
independence, she became a government official.
É ' nosso o solo sagrado da terra ( 1978; The sacred soil of this land is ours), a volume
of Espírito Santos's collected poems, bears the subtitle Poesia de protesto e luta ( Poetry
of protest and struggle). Included in the volume is "Onde estão os homens caçados neste
vento de loucura" (57; Where are the men hunted in this wind of madness), a poem
written in the 1950s to commemorate the police massacre that in 1953 took the lives of
nearly one thousand striking São Tomé dock workers. If Espírito Santo had published
nothing else, this poem alone would have established her reputation in the constellation
of Lusophone African writers. 8
Margarido and Medeiros also wrote nativistic poems of protest, such as the former's "Vós
que ocupais a nossa terra" ( You, who occupy our land) and the latter's "Meu canto,
Europa" ( My song, Europe). It is, however, to Angola and Mozambique that one must
turn for the best examples of literary events and works as aesthetico-ideological artifacts
of Lusophone Africa's proindependence movements.
Angola. In quantitative and qualitative terms, the poetry of cultural revindication, social
protest, and combativeness, produced mainly by Black, white, and mestiço members of
Angola's urban middle social stratum, stands out in the Portuguese-language writing of
mid-twentieth-centuyyAfrica.
In the original Portuguese, poems by more than fifty Angolans appear in Manuel
Ferreira's anthology No reino de Caliban2. The anthologies, whether those compiled by
Ferreira, Mário de Andrade, or, in English translation, Wolfers and Burness, include,
among the most socially conscious Angolan poets, Agostinho Neto, António Jacinto,
António Cardoso, Arnaldo Santos, Costa Andrade, Deolinda Rodrigues ( 1939-69?) Jofre
Rocha (b. 1941), Jorge Macedo (b. 1941), and Manuel Rui (b. 1941), to mention but a
few.
Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Agostinho Neto, who in 1975 became
Angola's first president, wrote several poems in which the public and private voices
merge in expressions of nationalist resolve and anticipatory patriotism. In October of
1960, while a political prisoner in a Lisbon jail, Neto wrote "Havemos de voltar" ( We
shall return), an anthem in which the persona promises that
to marimbas and finger pianos,
to our carnival,
we shall return,
to the beautiful Angolan homeland,
our land, our mother, we shall return.
(132; my translation) 9
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"Havemos de voltar," along with others of Neto's poems, was spirited out of Lisbon's
Aljube prison to Milan, Belgrade, and Dar es Salaam. Ironically, speakers of Italian,
Serbo-Croatian, and English had access to Neto's poem in translation before it was
available, in the original Portuguese, to most Angolans. Fourteen years later, after the
coup, "Havemos de voltar" found its way back to Portugal and then "returned"
triumphantly to its intended constituency in newly independent Angola.
Neto's collected poems—like those of any number of poets who had lived in exile, spent
time in political prison, or remained in Angola, where throughout years of repression they
wrote surreptitiously—went from clandestineness to legitimacy. Almost overnight
underground poems became the core of a national literature. During the first years of
independence, poets and writers in general, riding the crest of a wave of patriotism and
socialist revolution, produced circumstantial art, replete with political slogans.
Some fifteen years after independence, public poetry—some of it quite good, some
painfully bad—continued to be important as Angolans attempted to set the historical
markers and establish the terms of the literature of their new nation and of a nationality
still in formation. With political independence, overtly combative, anticolonialist poems
lost their immediacy and were turned into historical artifacts. Tensions between the
public and private voices that date back to the 1950s resulted, by the late 1970s, in a
group of Angolan poets who, as I attempt to demonstrate in a later section, increasingly
appreciated the subtleties and exalted the power of the word.
Mozambique. The word as political message and social instrument received special
expression among practitioners of poetry who lived in or gravitated toward those areas of
northern Mozambique that had fallen, by the late 1960s, to the forces of the Mozambican
Liberation Front (FRELIMO). Because it was, for all intents and purposes,
Mozambique's only nationalist movement, and because it was early able to consolidate its
power among substantial numbers of peasants, FRELIMO succeeded in institutionalizing
a relatively small but significant body of political and combative poetry. This poetry,
written in Portuguese, served didactic purposes, including that of mnemonic aid and
pedagogical tool in alphabetizing the members of several ethnolinguistic groups brought
together under the flag of a single, embryonic nationality. After serving their often
didactic purpose in the liberated zones of northern Mozambique and, in the exterior, a
morale-boosting end among anticolonialist exiles and their sympathizers, more than
eighty such poems were issued by FRELIMO'S Department of Ideology in two volumes
under the title Poesia de combate ( 1971 and 1977; Poems of combat).
Several of the poets included in the volumes are anonymous. Among the best known of
those whose names do appear are José Craveirinha, Marcelino dos Santos (b. 1929), Rui
Nogar (b. 1932-93), Armando Guebuza (b. 1935), Fernando Ganhão (b. 1937), Jorge
Rebelo (b. 1940), and Sérgio Vieira (b.
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1941). Circumstantial poems like Rebelo's "Carta de um combatente" (Letter from a
combatant) and Rui Nogar's "Na zona do inimigo" ( In the enemy zone) set the tone for
the two volumes. But it is Marcelino dos Santos who qualifies as the foremost
practitioner of what might be called the "communique poem."
Pamphletary verse, like Marcelino dos Santos's "Para uma moral" ( To teach a moral
truth), is testimony to and a codification of collectivized experiences as prime requisites
for a sense of nationality among diverse ethnic groups and social classes. These militant,
revolutionary poems by a relatively small group of educated individuals are testimonials
to the transition from colony to nation-state.
An episode that illustrates the holistic socioaesthetic function of "good" public poetry
took place in Mozambique shortly after independence. The newly installed FRELIMO
government published Eu, o povo: Poemas da revolução ( 1975; I, the people: Poems of
the revolution) in an unprecedented printing of thirty thousand copies. According to a
story circulating in Maputo and Beira at the time, the collection's twenty-seven poems
were discovered among the belongings of one Mutimati Barnabé João, a FRELIMO
soldier killed in action. In reality, the poet/freedom fighter is a heteronym of António
Quadros (b. 1931), a Portuguese poet who lived in Mozambique from 1964 until the early
1980s and who played a prominent role in the literary and the other cultural activities
dominated, during the latter years of colonial rule, by a small cadre of politically liberal
Europeans.
Rather than a hoax, the episode is, in effect, revolutionary theater. On the level of verbal
gesture, the poet combined his private and public voices so that message and form
coincide in such a way that the former does not—as is frequently the case with overtly
political poetry—overwhelm the latter. The poet as witness to momentous events in the
lived collective experience dignifies such terrifying occurrences, turned banal in war, as
the death of one stranger by the hand of another: "And I regret that only now, by the hand
of death, / Has he come to the same side of Life" (João 14; my translation)
Quadros/Mutimati is typical of a number of serious poets in all of the former colonies
who, although they practiced an art form that was often transitory by virtue of its
historical-political immediacy, also exalted the word. By the end of the I970s, this
exaltation of the word became a standard for those who wrote poetry with a sense of
craft.

POETRY AS EXALTATION OF THE WORD

Angola. In celebration of Angola's independence, Manuel Rui wrote, in his "Poesia
necessária" ( Essential poetry), "Of new words a country is also made / in this country so
made of poems" ( II Poems em novembro20; my translation). 10 Indeed, an inordinate
number of former freedom fighters and other nationalists were writers who began their
literary careers simultaneously with the awakening of their political consciousness. Rui,
who him
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self has served as a high government official, is one of a cohort of Angolan poets who
have sought to express changing social realities and produce a new Angolan poetry.
Along with Rui, chief among these poets is Arlindo Barbeitos (b. 1941), whose Angola,
Angolé, Angolema ( 1976; Angola, hail Angola, Angola the word), contributed to a new
poetic diction in the fledgling country. In the volume's preface Barbeitos states his
intention of avoiding "the conventional paths of African poetry of Portuguese
expression," by which he means to throw off the mantle of cultural dependency inherent
in that outmoded appellation and to eschew the clichés of cultural revindication, protest,
and combativeness. Barbeitos further states that "poetry is a fictionalized symmetry
between words and things, expression and reality" (2), as evidenced by these lines from
one of his titleless poems:
In the forest
of your eyes
only night is seen
In the night
of the leopard
only eyes are seen
In the dawn
of the night
only your eyes are seen
and
in your leopard eyes
only the forest is seen.
(45; my translation) 11
Barbeitos and other poets of his generation discovered what "primitives," like the
Kwanyama of southeastern Angola, had long known, and what many of the acculturated
had forsaken in their revolutionary zeal to fashion art out of abstractions: poetry—
whether intimist or popular—as a fictive compromise between expressions and reality,
often suggests as much as it states, which is, of course, the essence of the symmetry
between words and things.
Similarly, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (b. 1941), an Angolan of Portuguese extraction, has
combined concretist phrasing with the tonality of ancient African chants to produce
poems, collected in three slim volumes, that are visual, audial, and kinetic codifications
of the culture and social practices of southern Angola's nomadic peoples. As do Rui and
Barbeitos, Carvalho offers some thoughts on the nature of Angolan cultural expression in
a new age: "The question of culture [in Angola] is, in the final analysis, a question of
lore. Today we can identify, in an abstract way, of course, three types of lore: traditional
lore, the lore that comes from the colonial experience, and revolutionary lore whose
emergence and dissemination characterize the present" (" Angola" 48; my translation).
"Revolutionary," in this sense, tran
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scends the message-laden, rhetorical glosses of political upheaval; rather, it has to do
with the formal and thematic restructuring of culture within an open-ended temporal and
circumscribed spatial context.
The open-endedness is also social in nature, and an undeniable factor in the uniqueness of
Lusophone Africa's acculturated literature is the imposing presence of somatically
European individuals among engagé writers of Angola and Mozambique, to cite the two
former Portuguese colonies that most often capture the attention of the outside world. In
the parlance of the Western media, these two nations of southern Africa—a region that
more often than not makes headlines in Europe and America because of racial strife—
have "Black-run" governments. Yet in Angola and Mozambique racial labeling, on any
official level, is nothing short of heresy. Idealistically, this lack of racial categorizing
constitutes a progressive exercise in democracy; pragmatically, official color blindness is
a component of the effort to create a single nationality without regard to ethnic group or
race (tribalism and distirctions based on color being two negative legacies of colonial
rule). Moreover, pragmatism also dictates that these new societies use all their human
resources, whether the individual be African, European, East Indian, or of mixed
ancestry. 12 Idealism and pragmatism notwithstanding, even the most open-minded
outsider, whether from Europe, America, or other African countries, may experience at
least mild surprise upon verifying that several of Angola's most prominent contemporary
writers, such as the poets Carvalho, Barbeitos, Costa Andrade, and David Mestre (b.
1948), are phenotypically European.
In Angola and Mozambique some writers of European ancestry have displayed an
overcompensatory Africanness and revolutionary zeal. But poets such as Carvalho,
Barbeitos, and Mestre have not so much overcompensated as they have attempted to
combine those distinctive historical and cultural experiences. In some of the best of
Lusophone African poetry, by members of the three social-racial groups, these
combinations have surpassed categorizations with imaginative exaltations of the word.
Cape Verde. After independence the imperative of the reintegration of a historical time
and geographical space occupied the attention of poets in all five of the emerging nations
of Portuguese-writing Africa. In Cape Verde, this poetic reintegration of time and space
has special implications for the other former colonies.
Beginning with the rise of Cape Verdean nationalism and culminating with
independence, a creole ethos, combined with an intensified sense of an African time and
space, has lent an especially epic tenor to poets' exaltation of the word. Arlindo Barbeitos
coined the term angolema to invoke and codify a nation "so made of poems." For similar
purposes, the Cape Verdean poet Corsino Fortes (b. 1933) gave the title Pão e fonema (
1974; Bread and phoneme) to his collection of poems. A symbol of human sustenance
joins
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with the force of pure utterance to exalt the word, which, in Fortes's poetry, frequently
reaches epic levels. Pão e fonema contains three cantos, and the poetic voice, as if
inspired by a creole muse, takes on heroic proportions in the volume's twenty-two poems,
which can be read as a single narrative. Fortes's bilingual (Portuguese-creole)
phantasmagoria and his epic flights of surrealism are an exaltation of the word that
metaphorically reveals Cape Verde in its cosmic dimensions.
No less exuberantly, João Varela (b. 1937), under the creole pseudonym of Timóteo Tio
Tiofe, wrote the long poem O primeiro livro de Notcha ( 1975; Notcha's first book—
Notcha being the creole sobriquet of Varela's grandfather). With no false modesty, Varela
confides in his preface that "I suppose I have written a poem that my generation expects
or expected of me" (8; my translation). Apparently, the same creole muse who inspired
Fortes also compelled Varela to recount the deeds of a historic people. But Varela had
deferred his Cape Verdeanness during a long interlude in Europe, where, under the name
of João Vário, he wrote metaphysical verse. The narrator of O primeiro livro de Notcha
returns as a prodigal to reclaim his and his people's birthright in the epic poem his
generation expected of him. The result is a verbal and imagistic pastiche that surpasses
Fortes's poetry in surrealistic phantasmagoria. What most distinguishes Varela's poem is
its discursive, soaring regeneration of the Cape Verdean people in their historic time,
African space, and proverbial wanderlust. The persona waxes prophetic in his
regenerative diction and spiritual re-Africanization of Cape Verde:
Because they shall say: there is a man of this century,
a man of Africa, under his mango tree
and under his papaw, a man
yearning for audience and history ..."
(13; my translation)
Fortes's and Varela's lofty verse reflects a trend toward exultant rhetoric in contemporary
Cape Verdean poetry. One of the best contemporary practitioners of this kind of verbal
exuberance is Oswaldo Osório (b. 1937). Osório, along with Arménio Vieira (b. 1941)
and the latter's more contemplative exaltation of the word, forms the core of an important
generation of Cape Verdean poets. While many Cape Verdean writers were living
abroad— some in voluntary exile— Osório and Vieira remained on the islands, where
they bore witness to the events that accompanied social and political change and wrote
poems from these experiences, before and after Independence, that helped lend continuity
to a literary thread that had become tenuous in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During
that period Osório wrote the patriotic poems contained in his exuberantly, if somewhat
pretentiously, titled Caboverdeamadamente, constnção, meu amor ( 1975; Cape Verde-
lovingly, building a nation, my love) and the spiritually epiclike poems of O cântico do
habitante ( 1977; The inhabitant's hymn). For his part, in a volume bearing the decid
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edly unpretentious title of Poemas ( 1981; Poems), Vieira brought together some sixty
poems—several of them prize winners—written between 1971 and 1979. Although
Vieira's persona speaks most often with a private voice, both he and Osório figure
significantly among those Cape Verdeans who would regenerate a national poetry by
exalting the word.
Guinea-Bissau. In this tiny West African country, wedged between Senegal and the
Republic of Guinea, the traditional orature of several ethnolinguistic groups had begun,
during the long guerrilla war, to influence writing in Portuguese and the Portuguese-
based creole. The poems published in Mantenhas para quem luta! ( 1977; Hail to those
who struggle!) and Antologia dos jovens poetas ( 1978; Anthology of the young poets)
hold interest as overdue aesthetico-ideological artifacts, even though the revindication,
anticolonialist protest, and combativeness come somewhat after the fact. As might be
expected, many of these poems are cliché-ridden anthems. There are, however, a few
among these mainly beginning poets who succeed in turning that rare phrase or capturing
that ineffable moment that gives even overtly political art a feeling and integrity that
surpass its explicit message. One such poet is Helder Proença (b. 1956), several of whose
poems appear in both anthologies. But it is perhaps with five poems published in 1979 in
the Lisbon-based journal África that Proença realizes his true potential. "Pérola
cintelante" ( The sparkling pearl) and "Reconstrução, se! ..." ( Reconstruction, if! . . .)
display a verbal complexity that mediates between the intimist soliloquy and the
collective voice.
The 1980 coup that toppled the government of Luís Cabral also dealt something of a
blow to the incipient processes of a national cultural integration in Guinea-Bissau. A
casualty of what some called ethnic-inspired political conflict was Mário de Andrade,
who, although an Angolan, had served in Luís Cabral's government as Guinea-Bissau's
minister of culture. 13 Andrade was a mentor to the young poets who, in the cities of
Bissau and Bolama, were beginning to organize around national cultural integration. The
setback was, however, temporary. By the mid-1980s, and with the impetus of the two
modest anthologies of the late 1970s and the leadership of writers and intellectuals like
Proença, the young poets began working anew toward the attainment of a national literary
expression.
Mozambique. At the end of 1971 and the beginning of 1972, in the colonial capital of
Lourenço Marques, Rui Knopfli (b. 1933) and J. P. Grabato Dias (another pseudonym of
António Quadros, of Mutimati João fame) coordinated the three issues of Caliban, an
unassuming but disarmingly important poetry journal, which, as its title suggests, had
much to do with language as empowerment. Several years later, in the People's Republic
of Mozambique, the abiding influence of Craveirinha and the Caliban legacy were points
of departure for a new Mozambican poetic expression.
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One of the first important heirs to a legacy established during the waning years of
colonialism is Luís Carlos Patraquim (b. 1953), author of Monção ( 1980; Monsoon), a
volume that ushered in a period of innovative poetry in Mozambique. Patraquim's
"Metamorfose," a poem dedicated to Craveirinha, begins: "when fear pulled light to the
city / I was a little boy," a line inspired by the latter's "Lustro à cidade" ( When light
comes to the city), originally published in the first issue of Caliban. Craveirinha used
grotesque totemic symbols and opulent surrealistic imagery to convey, however
cryptically, a message of cultural resistance and social protest:
Old hyena
eyes streaked with blood
suck the anguish from my kidneys
and with teeth of carniverous loathing
gnaw on the unbreakable marrow of my dreams.
( Caliban I:22; my translation)
Patraquim's likewise oneiric and sensuous poetry has a tropical exuberance that
metaphorically overcomes fear and tests the waters of experimentation. Through this
sense of aesthetic and thematic freedom defied the prescriptive language of structured,
revolutionary poetic discourse—still prevalent in Mozambique of the late 1970s—and
resulted in sometimes esoteric symbology, Patraquim's use of dream imagery is a
statement of cultural liberation. In "Adágio" Patraquim constructs an ecology of tropical
sensuality:
I open wide the afternoon curtains
to have you fully
within the poem
and dressed in your capulana you walk by my window
and your body is like the dunes
planted to pines
murmuring near
the waves' fury
falling softly
on my gesture.
( Monção38; my translation)
The literal meaning of the Italian word adagio is "at ease," a state that describes the
aesthetic and ideological posture of a group of serious poets in Lusophone Africa in the
penultimate decade of the twentieth century.
African Prose Fiction in Portuguese
In spite of the material and political difficulties of publishing prose works in colonial
Lusophone Africa, members of the acculturated elites knew that
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short stories and novels were indispensable components of any corpus of works that
presumed to constitute a national literature. The novel, like the epic poem before it, is a
cultural icon and linguistic marker of a people, especially one seeking to rewrite history
and consolidate itself into a nationality. Even before nationalism had crystallized in
Lusophone Africa, those acculturated intellectuals who had begun to define history from
their and not the former colonialists' perspective, responded to the storytelling urge and
the desire to relate individual and shared experiences. Not only did socially conscious
writers of prose fiction face economic and material barriers, but they also had to contend
with concerns stemming in part from the existence, starting in the late nineteenth century,
of the novela colonial. Cultivated by Portuguese expeditionaries, missionaries,
adventurers, and settlers, this subgenre of ethnographic tales and novels bears such titles
as Princesa negra: O presço da civilização em África ( 1932; Black princess: The price
of civilization in Africa), by Luiz Figueira. These novels were exotic portrayals of the
ways and customs of peoples depicted as existing on the margins of civilization.
By the mid- 1950s those Black, mestiço, and white writers committed to a revindication
of African culture and belief systems found prose narrative ideal for adapting oral
traditions to acculturated literary expression. And therein lay the danger, for no matter
how noble and politically well-informed their intentions, those acculturated writers who
simulated orature or fashioned stories in Portuguese about precolonial or semiassimilated
societies ran the distinct risk of appearing patronizing or condescendingly folkloric.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL REALISM

The ethnographic narrative and the literary text that simulate oral expression can attain
artistic integrity only when their language is adequate to social and cultural referents.
Whether consciously or intuitively, engagé writers knew that the Portuguese words and
syntax they used had to capture and transmit at least the essence of the worldview
embedded in indigenous languages and cultural values.
There are some important precursors of those who sought that "right" language. In
Angola, António de Assis Júnior ( 1878-1960), one of a handful of assimilated Africans
who fired the first salvos for self-determination in the Portuguese colonies, published O
segredo da morta ( 1934; The dead woman's secret). Subtitled Romance de costumes
angolenses ( Romance of Angolan customs), this novel is a curious blend of the narrative
style of Victor Hugo, a plot reminiscent of an Anatole France work, a positivistic faith in
a civilizing process, and a republican political outlook. But true to his subtitle, Assis
Júnior also filled his romance with Kimbundu proverbs and depictions of the ways and
customs of those with whom he simultaneously identified and characterized as the
"others."
Early writers, like Assis Júnior and Fausto Duarte ( 1903-55), a Cape
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Verdean mestiço who lived in Guinea-Bissau and wrote several novels about the
Mandinkas and other local ethnic groups, gave a more sympathetic twist to the
conventional novela colonial. Fernando Castro Soromenho ( 1910-68), born in
Mozambique to Portuguese parents and raised in Angola, qualifies, according to some
historians, as the father of the modern Angolan novel. Although he began his writing
career within the tradition of the colonial novel, in his second phase Soromenho wrote
Terra morta ( 1949; Dead earth) and the posthumous A chaga ( 1970; The bleeding sore)
to dramatize the clash of cultures and the exploitation inherent in colonial social
structures. Soromenho's combining of neorealism and ethnography set a standard for the
social realism and cultural revindication that inform much of the prose fiction produced
in the 1950s and 1960s by engagé writers from Angola and Mozambique.
In assessing the overall uniqueness of Lusophone African writing, we must take into
account that for decades most writers from the former Portuguese colonies had limited
contact with the literary currents in the rest of Africa. (A handful of these writers,
especially those who lived or traveled in Europe, did have some knowledge of other
African literatures as well as the poetry of the Anglophone, Francophone, and
Hispanophone diasporas of the Americas.) On the other hand, intellectuals in the
Lusophone colonies had long and sustained contact with literary currents and access to
works from Portugal and Brazil. By the mid-twentieth century, in the eyes of many
members of the indigenous elites of Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique, Brazil was a
model. Moreover, numbers of these intellectuals embraced the Lusotropicalist ideology
that romanticized Brazil as a new world in the tropics where European, African, and
Amerindian peoples, values, languages, and customs had blended harmoniously.
On a less romanticized, if still somewhat idealized, plane, Brazilian modernism and
Northeast regionalism gave birth to a sociological novel of cultural revindication, which
influenced Portuguese neorealism and, together with the latter, engaged the imagination
of a number of Lusophone African writers. The Brazilian cultural and literary movements
and Portugal's neorealism contributed to the early emergence of a relatively small but
significant body of social realist short stories and novels in Cape Verde, Angola, and
Mozambique.
Cape Verde. Chronologically, Cape Verdeans, because of the early consolidation of their
intellectual elite, were the first Lusophone Africans to produce a number of characteristic
short stories and novels. Imbued with a sense of their islands' creole originality, the
Claridade intellectuals saw Cape Verde as a sort of mini-Brazil. Some even claimed that
their tiny archipelago had surpassed the South American giant as an example of
biological and cultural homogeneity in the tropics.
One of the fiercest proponents of Cape Verde's creole preeminence in the
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so-called Portuguese space was Baltasar Lopes da Silva, whose poetry appeared under
the pseudonym Osvaldo Alcantara. As early as 1937, in the pages of Claridade, Lopes da
Silva published excerpts from his novel Chiquinho ( 1947), which, in opposition to the
novela colonial, he subtitled a romance caboverdeano.
Lopes da Silva sets the tone for his tropical bildungsroman with an epigram in the creole
of his native windward islands: "The slave body departs / the unshackled heart remains"
(my translation). Wanting to stay and having to leave (and vice versa) is an intertextual
theme and structural motif in Cape Verdean social realist fiction. Chiquinho's decision to
set sail for New Bedford, Massachusetts, as his father had done years before, completes
the novel's socially homologous structure. Moreover, in Cape Verdean literature a
centrifugal force (i.e., wanderlust and the economic imperative to emigrate) juxtaposes
with a centripetal force (i.e., a sentimental attachment to the land).
Manuel Lopes, Baltasar Lopes da Silva's Claridade colleague, wrote two novels around
the dyadic theme-motif of departing/staying. Much of the appeal of Manuel Lopes's
Chuva braba ( 1956; Torrential rain) and Flagelados do vento leste ( 1959; Victims of
the east wind) lies in the author's nativism, similar to that which characterizes many
nineteenth- and twentieth-century New World novels, like those of the Brazilian
northeast. In these "frontier" narratives the forces of nature (in Manuel Lopes's novels,
the devastating Harmattan blowing off the Sahara and the resulting drought) take on the
grandeur of prosopopoeia.
For Manual Lopes and others of his generation, Cape Verde was a harsh land where those
who survived had to persevere in the face of adversity. The Social Darwinism that
informs Manuel Lopes's prose fiction, as well as his poetry, led later, more militant Cape
Verdeans alternately to praise and criticize the pioneering writer's works. They praised
Chuva braba because the protagonist, after the rains come, resolves to stay on the
ancestral land rather than emigrate to Brazil. But they criticized Lopes and other
Claridade intellectuals for evading the issue of colonial rule as the ultimate source of the
islands' endemic social and economic ills. Manuel Lopes, Baltasar Lopes da Silva, and
the majority of writers of their generation did stop short of challenging the political order,
but their social realist works, as reformulations of acculturated fictive discourse,
constituted meaningful texts of cultural resistance.
António Aurélio Gonçalves ( 1902-84), a third major writer of the Claridade group,
anticipated the concerns of the antievasionists when he characterized the principal
determinants of Cape Verdean literature as "the conviction that there was a Cape Verdean
regionalist originality, the necessity of calling attention to and protesting against an
economic crisis caused by drought, the abandonment of the port of São Vicente, and the
hardships brought about by the closing off of emigration to North America" (xxix; my
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translation). Gonçalves's five novellas portray Cape Verdeans enmeshed in situations
caused by the archipelago's chronic problems. All of Gonçalves's principal characters are
strong-willed women, such as Nita, the protagonist of Noite de vento ( 1970; A windy
night), who defy the rules that govern conventional male-female relationships in a social
environment in which temporary unions are a function of the economic crisis and the
long-standing male emigration. In Gonçalves's stories women are the focal point of
rebellion against the system; implicitly they are metaphors of protest.
Social protest intensified in the short stories of members of the next generation,
particularly those associated with Certeza. Henrique Teixeira de Sousa (b. 1918), with his
"Dragão e eu" ( 1945; Dragon and I) and Gabriel Mariano , with "O rapaz doente" (
1957; The sick boy), were more explicit in their neorealist portrayals of Cape Verde's
social ills.
Over the years, what the claridosos routinely referred to as "regionalist" singularity—in
other words, Cape Verde as a unique region in the Portuguese space—evolved into an
ethos that nurtured later nationalist and Pan‐ Africanist sentiments. Prose writers,
during the last two decades of colonial rule, sought with their sociological short stories
and novels to provide the historical substance of that ethos, just as poets like Corsino
Fortes resorted to heroic verse to celebrate Cape Verdeans as a historic people. Teixeira
de Sousa subordinated the lyrical-nostalgic quality of the ethos to sociological
documentation in several short stories. And with Ilhéu de contenda ( 1978 ; Isle of
contention), Teixeira de Sousa expanded his short docudramas into a monumental
historical romance.
Since its beginnings in the 1940s much Cape Verdean fiction, including Teixeira de
Sousa's novels, retain a somewhat outmoded neorealism. But there is also something
unconventional about many of these works, from the tropical Gothic romances of Manuel
Lopes to Luís Romano's (b. 1922) Famintos ( 1961; The famished), a decidedly non-
novel novel, despite its stylistic and thematic similarity to some late nineteenth-century
Brazilian fiction. 14 Historically, the belief, on the part of Cape Verdean writers of diverse
political persuasions, in their culture's singularity—whether regional within the
Portuguese sphere or as a sui generis extension of Africa— has contributed to that
unconventionality as represented in novels and short stories.
Because of historical factors that allowed for the early formulation of the terms of a
unique ethos, Cape Verde, with fewer than 200,000 inhabitants, gave rise—in advance of
the fact—to a "national" literature. Cape Verde's creole literary preeminence
notwithstanding, it is, however, the larger milieu of Angola that has produced some of the
most compelling examples of ethnographic and neorealist writing in a conflictive colonial
sphere of social action.
Angola. Oscar Ribas (b. 1909), a Luandamestiço, although blind since the age of twenty-
one, carefully documented Angolan (principally Kimbundu)
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lore in such fictionalized ethnographic works as Uanga: Romance folclórico angolano (
1951; Enchantment: an Angolan folkloric novel). Among members of the Generation of
1950, the Guerra brothers, Henrique (b. 1937) and Mário (b. 1939, also known as
Benúdia), cultivated stories of cultural revindication based on indigenous Angolan
societies. In the same vein of fictionalized ethnography, Henrique Abranches (b. 1932)
produced A konkhava de Feti ( 1981; Feti's Hatchet), the novelistic recreation of a legend
of southern Angolan peoples. 15
Another writer worthy of note is Manuel Pacavira (b. 1939), whose Nzinga Mbandi (
1975) chronicles the exploits of the legendary Angolan queen, who in the early
seventeenth century led an alliance of tribal groups in resisting Portuguese domination.
Pacavira's work qualifies as the first historical romance to be produced in Angola.
As did poets, fiction writers among the Young Intellectuals achieved some of their best
successes when they set their works in the city of Luanda. In his Crónica da cidade
estranha ( 1964; Chronicle of this uncommon city) and Farra no fim de semana ( 1965;
Weekend spree), Mário António adopted the chronicle, which had developed as a literary
subgenre in Brazil, to depict the outwardly subdued but socially charged day-to-day
existence of Luanda's mestizo middle class. Much of the success of António's chronicles
stems from the author's skill in converting the ambivalence of the relatively privileged
mulatto, perched precariously on a social ledge in the "uncommon" colonial city, into
something more than the conventional neorealist statement on the half caste caught
between two worlds. In his chronicles, the "true" mulatto—meaning the legitimate child
of stable mestiço parents, as opposed to the often illegitimate mestiço offspring of a Black
mother and a white father— acts out his or her angst in the alienating space of colonial
Luanda.
The chronicle, as a literary codification of quotidian events, suited the ends of Angolan
intellectuals seeking to define the temporal and spatial dimensions of a colonial reality
that itself seemed a fiction. Farra no fim de semana gives a different psychological twist
to the conventional dichotomy of the city and the countryside when a group of urban
mulattoes gathers at a seaside home, on the outskirts of town, for an all-night party that
banishes them to a kind of twilight zone between the hubbub of the modern,
Europeanized city and a mystified primitive world, which inspires one of the revelers to
pose the rhetorical question: "Don't you find their songs very beautiful, carefree, really
the image of a people who still place great value on the joy of living?" ( 49 ; my
translation).
In a similar way of qualifying trivializations that lie between illusion and reality, Arnaldo
Santos (b. 1936) wrote Quinaxixe ( 1965) (the name of an old neighborhood of Luanda)
and Tempo de munhungo ( 1968; Vertigo time), two collections of chronicles that capture
the essence of the absurd in the social and cultural contradictions inherent in the daily life
of a city at odds with itself. The chronicle-story "Bessanganas de mentira" (Make-believe
African
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maidens) revolves around a social gathering of "true" mulattoes, during which two
women bedecked in colorful Kimbundu robes pose for photographs. At the height of the
posturing a bemused guest observes that "we exoticize our own race" ( Munhungo57).
António's chronicles depict psychologically charged encounters among the middle-class
colonized who blankly contemplate their ambivalent places in a city divided by its
Africanness and that European-defined tropicalism that earned colonial Luanda its
reputation as the Rio de Janeiro of Africa. The characters of Santos's chronicles indulge
in philosophical ruminations that adduce reflectiveness to the social realist narrative.
Both writers' works convey a sense of waiting for something to happen, and this fictive
air of expectation helped establish a thematic framework for the contemplative prose
fiction that would emerge in Angola after independence.
Other significant short narratives, written after Independence and set in Luanda, are Jofre
Rocha's (pseudonym of Roberto de Almeida, b. 1941) Estórias do Musseque ( 1977;
Musseque tales) Jorge Macedo's (b. 1941) Gente de meu bairro ( 1977; People from my
neighborhood) and Boaventura Cardoso 's (b. 1944) Dizanga dia muenho ( 1977; The
lagoon of life) and O fogo da fala ( 1980; The fire of words). All of these works constitute
reworkings of acculturated language and validations of cultural values engendered in a
changing urban milieu.
Mozambique. João Dias ( 1926-49) was born into a middle-class African family in
Lourenço Marques. His legacy to an emerging acculturated literature is Godido ( 1952), a
posthumously published collection of short stories. If Dias's autobiographical and
journalistic stories presaged the beginning of a genuine Mozambican prose fiction, then
Nós matamos o cão tinhoso ( 1964; We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Mozambique
Stories, 1969), by Luís Bernardo Honwana (b. 1942), was that beginning.
The English translation of Honwana's book has the distinction of being the first
Lusophone African work to be included in Heinemann's African Writers Series. The
stories' principal appeal stems from the author's narrative timing and rhythm, his often
humorous use of irony, and his ability to combine the styles of neorealism and the oral
expression of his own Ronga origins.
Although there were several other works of note, such as Orlando Mendes 's racial novel
Portagem ( 1965), until Independence Nós matamos a cão tinhoso was the prose work
quintessentially of Mozambique. With the collection's title story, as well as with " Papa,
Snake & I" and " Dina," Honwana established the epistemological contours of a
Mozambican prose fiction.

THE VERBAL STRATEGIES OF FOUR ANGOLAN WRITERS

José Luandino Vieira. Born José Vieira Matéus da Graça, in 1935, in rural Portugal, and
raised from about the age of one in Luanda, José Luandino
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Vieira qualifies as a true phenomenon in the realm of Lusophone African letters. The son
of a shoemaker, Luandino (the name by which he is most commonly known) grew up in
and around Luanda's working-class neighborhoods and shanty towns with playmates
from the three racial-social groups, in a world dominated by African foods, music, and
verbal cadences. A cidade e a infância ( 1957; Childhood and the city), Luandino's first
collection of stories, written when he was in his late teens, bears the dedication: "For you,
childhood companions."
In 1959, accused of being an MPLA sympathizer, Luandino spent a month in a Luanda
jail; in 1961 he was arrested again for distributing subversive pamphlets. By the time
Luuanda ( 1964; Luuanda: Short Stories of Angola, 1980), his first major work of fiction,
appeared in print, Luandino had begun serving nearly eleven years as a political
prisoner. And it was in prison, mainly in the infamous concentration camp at Tarrafal,
that Luandino wrote at least four of his eight books of stories and one of his two novels.
Although he wrote all of his published works before independence, Luandino has had the
greatest influence on the Angolan prose fiction of the 1970s and 1980s. He is a language
innovator and the creator of a subgenre he calls the estória, a term he prefers over the
conventional conto (short story). According to the author, estória is the closest
Portuguese equivalent of musoso, a Kimbundu word meaning "fable" or "moral
narrative." Moreover, Fernão Lopes, the fifteenth-century chronicler to the Portuguese
kings, used estória to signify "narrative." And João Guimarães Rosa, who revolutionized
contemporary Brazilian narrative, defined estória as a short, popular epic. The word's
Kimbundu, Portuguese, and Brazilian interconnectedness has suited Luandino's attempts
to formulate a hybridized, uniquely Angolan literary form and language. Many writers,
from Cape Verde to Mozambique, have since adopted estória as a generic term.
Luandino, whose own sobriquet combines a Kimbundu root word with a Portuguese
suffix, experimented with language in such ways that lexical items, syntax, and the
cadences of musseque speech—which many Portuguese settlers and even some members
of the indigenous middle class pejoratively labeled pretoguês (literally, "blackieguese")—
suggested a creolized Kimbundu and lent legitimacy to an even more creolized
Portuguese. His purpose has been to dignify the stigmatized black vernacular by
elevating it to the level of a literary language, not just in dialogue, but also in the
narrative voice of a kind of urban and suburban griot. Luandino went beyond most of his
predecessors and many of his contemporaries who Africanized acculturated writing in an
ostensively European language by sprinkling their narratives with indigenous words and
phrases. Luandino has bent Portuguese syntax to simulate Kimbundu word order and has
used whole sentences in Kimbundu without providing Portuguese translations. Tamara
Bender , the American translator of Luuanda, writes that "Vieira refused to provide a
glossary for his book because, as he explained, he wrote his estórias
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for the very people whose language he used, adding that ignorance of musseque speech
was the problem of the Portuguese colonizer, not his" ( vii ). 16
For all his populism, Luandino has also been sensitive to the risks of being labeled a
déclassé and exoticizer. In all his mature works Luandino's concern with finding the right
mode of expression has resulted in metalanguage and metatexts. In a revised, second
edition of Luuanda he modified the verbal and situational formulas conventionally
associated with oral expression to suggest, rather than explicitly state.
After independence, a number of Angolan intellectuals, struggling with how their
literature could better serve the revolution, began to question those works that eluded the
masses. Other intellectuals of a cultural nationalist bent, also committed to a restoration
of Angola's indigenous languages in their purest form, took issue with linguistic
hybridization. Thus, starting with its title, Luandino's Macandumba ( 1978) caused a stir
among Angola's relatively tiny but growing and avid readership. The Kimbundu word
macandumba, freely translated, means "big happenings," and is a combination of maka
(literally, "conversation," and, by colloquial extension, "heated discussion") and ndumba
(literally, "a great quantity" or "a lot"). In colonial times newsboys from the musseques
hawked their papers in the European lower city with cries of macandumba (i.e., the
equivalent of "read all about it!"), and the term entered into the vocabulary of even those
colonists who generally disdained "native dialects."
After independence some purists, decrying lexical and semantic bastardization, pointed
out that Kimbundu orthography called for k, a letter that does not figure in the Portuguese
alphabet. Luandino has argued that the c and the word's semantic shift resulted from
macandumba's status as a loan word used in colonial Luanda by Africans and Europeans
alike. The term maka, on the other hand, popularized in post-independence Angolan
usage, retains its original Kimbundu meaning and spelling.
Luandino coined numerous hybridized words that forsake neither the purity of Kimbundu
nor that of Portuguese. And Luandino's estórias have set a standard for those Angolan
writers of prose fiction searching for new discourses for new realities.
Uanhenga Xitu. Uanhenga Xitu was born in 1924 in the village of Calomboloca in the
heart of Kimbunduland. The name Agostinho Mendes de Carvalho is, according to the
writer himself, the pseudonym Xitu uses in his public life as party member, the former
governor of the province of Luanda, and Angola's ambassador to East Germany.
If Luandino, true to his hybrid name, has cultivated "creole" texts, Uanhenga Xitu and
Mendes de Carvalho exist in a dyadic relationship from which derive discourses formed
on the tensions that occur first at those points where Kimbundu, a semicreolized
Kimbundu, standard Portuguese, and Black Portuguese converge and then separate to
confront each other at
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short range. Thus the verbal uniqueness of Manana ( 1974), Xitu's first novel, and
"'Mestre' Tamoda" ( 1974; "Professor" Tamoda) derives from the conscious and
unconscious use of sociolinguistic juxtapositions and unorthodox verbal strategies that
challenge the conventions of acculturated discourse.
Xitu came to the city with his Kimbundu identity and his official Portuguese name. In
Luanda he worked as a nurse and joined the nationalist movement; in 1959 he was
sentenced to ten years in the Tarrafal concentration camp. During his confinement he
began to write fiction with the help of fellow prisoners, including Luandino. And like
Luandino, he sought to neutralize that which was imposed and impose that which was
disdained by the colonial system.
Luandino used untranslated Kimbundu epigraphs to parody Portuguese writers' penchant
for untranslated English and French inscriptions. Xitu went beyond parody of a Western
literary convention by introducing Manana with a barrage of nine dedications to those
who, like himself, do not speak "the Portuguese you learn in school," and to those who,
attempting to do so, appear ridiculous. As the implied author of Xitu's works flaunts his
less-than-standard Portuguese, he simultaneously ridicules the pompous, malapropism-
laden speech of those Africans who outdo themselves in using the king's Portuguese.
Tamoda, the self-styled professor, is the embodiment of and, ultimately, the
quintessential tragicomic, semiassimilated African.
At one extreme, Xitu's works display a pure, almost reverently treated Kimbundu. And
despite his implied author's professed disdain for the Portuguese one learns in school, at
the opposite extreme he flaunts a scrupulously written, erudite Portuguese in footnotes
and glossaries, presumably provided by Mendes de Carvalho to explain the Kimbundu
words and phrases used by Xitu and his characters. Thus Xitu's works somewhat
ambivalently sort out the components that make up the linguistically variegated and
socially amorphous world of the city that encroaches on the indigenous languages, belief
systems, and customs of traditional rural society.
Pepetela. Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos (b. 1941) is, like Luandino, a highly
touted Angolan writer of Portuguese descent. Unlike Luandino, Pestana dos Santos—
whose nom de plume and de guerre, Pepetela, means "eyelash" in Umbundu—was born
in Angola, in the city of Benguela, a kind of smaller replica of creole Luanda. After a few
years of studying in Portugal and exile in Algeria, Pepetela returned to Angola in the late
1960s as an MPLA combatant.
Since 1969 Pepetela has published two plays, three novels, and two novellas, including
the enormously successful As aventuras de Ngunga ( 1976; Ngunga's adventures).
Written in 1972, this short, didactic novella about a small boy caught up in the war was
originally distributed, in five hundred typed copies, on the MPLA's eastern front. With
the arrival of independence Ngunga became a national symbol, and three successive
editions of the book,
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with a total printing of seventy-four thousand copies, sold out in Angola. Not only did the
book's success serve as added evidence of literature's and writers' prestige in
revolutionary Angola, it afforded Pepetela the opportunity to publish, after Independence,
a reputedly controversial novel he had completed in 1971.
Some citizens of the fledgling one-party state predicted that the authorities would prohibit
the novel's publication. In the security-conscious climate of a country with a tenuous hold
on its polity and whose sovereignty has been threatened from within and from the
outside, ideological zeal and proscriptive measures, if not outright censorship, came as no
great surprise. Much to the surprise of many, however, not only was the manuscript
published, but the novel won the government-sponsored Angolan National Prize for
Literature. The book in question, Mayombe ( 1980; English translation, 1984), is a
monumental novel in which Pepetela takes a hard, analytical look at the Angolan
nationalist war.
Set in the Mayombe rain forest of Cabinda, that tiny enclave separated from the rest of
Angola by Zaire, the novel is a study in solitude and introspection during the virtual
impasse that occurred in the tenth year of the protracted war. Pepetela broke with the
linear narration and patriotic message of conventional war novels by using
quasiallegorical characters who speak discursively and synchronically, often in stream of
consciousness, as they contemplate their individual roles in an endless armed struggle
and as part of a nonexistent nationality). In arriving dialectically at the core of this
nation(ality), threatened by tribalism, regionalism, class and racial divisions, and
individual ambitions pitted against the will of an abstract collective, Pepetela fashioned a
bold verbal universe.
Following the pioneering lead of Luandino's Nós, os do Makulusu ( 1975; We, the folks
from Makulusu), Pepetela wrote Yaka ( 1984), a novel whose title refers to a mysterious
statue and whose story revolves around the settler experience in Angola. In Luandino's
quasiautobiographical novel, a second
generation white Angolan repeats, refrainlike
throughout the narrative, variations on the wistful statement: "We were almost bilingual."
This state of almost bilingualism stands as a metaphor for the biculturation that hangs
precariously on the ambivalent settler experience.
On one narrative level Yaka is the saga of an old settler family, and the novel's emotional
and ideological message is one of a difficult, albeit inevitable, Angolanization of settlers
over five generations. On another level the novel is a mythic transfiguration, as
represented by the enigmatic statue. Together with Luandino's experimentalist fiction and
Uanhenga Xitu's liberties with acculturated discourse, Yaka, along with those other of
Pepetela's works with an African mythic base, represents a high point in the verbal
strategies used by Angolan writers in their search for new discourses.
Manuel Rui. A mestiço from the south central city of Huambo (formerly Nova Lisboa),
Manuel Rui started his own revolution in Angolan poetry and
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prose fiction. Rui earned a law degree at Coimbra, published two books of poetry in
Portugal, and in 1974, when he went home to Angola, his ironically titled Regresso
adiado ( Postponed return) was published in Lisbon. This collection of short stories
established Rui as one of Angola's foremost fiction writers. Rui entered into a course of
history that swept him to notoriety: he participated in the transitional government that
ruled Angola briefly after the Portuguese military coup of 1974, and he presided as judge
at the trial of a multinational group of captured mercenaries. He also achieved literary
fame as a witness to the momentous events, including the bloody civil war, that marked
the troubled eve and hope-filled dawn of Angola's independence.
Rui's most original writing grew out of the vital day-to-day experiences in that short span
roughly between 1974 and 1979, the period covered in Sim camarada! ( 1977; Yes,
comrade, 1992) and Quem me dera ser onda ( 1982; Oh, that I were a wave in the sea).
The five estórias that make up Sim camarada!, from "O conselho" (The council) to
"Cinco dias depois da indepêndencia" (Five days after independence), cover the period
from the installation of the transitional government to the establishment of the People's
Republic of Angola. The stories are largely circumstantial and directed to those who also
witnessed the dramas played out in the national microcosm of Luanda when these
episodes were becoming part of a collective, lived history. The volume's final three
estórias recount incidents from the civil war, or what MPLA adherents call their "second
war of liberation," much of it waged in and around Luanda, in neighborhoods like Vila
Alice and on city streets like the once fashionable Avenue of Brazil.
Manuel Rui's estórias convert the urban geography into a theater for the historic events
that unfolded in Luanda. These testimonial vignettes derive their uniqueness from the
ways in which colloquial speech and attitudes toward language work on an emotional and
ideological plane. Ironically, the role of Portuguese, as the language of national unity,
heightens in a tension
breaking, burlesque scene in the story "O último bordel" ( The
last brothel). A frightened Angolan prostitute, in a burst of patriotic defiance and
linguistic chauvinism, refuses to go to bed with a Zairean soldier (sent to Angola to
bolster the forces of the National Front of the Liberation of Angola [FNLA]) because she
does not sleep with any man who speaks French.
Manuel Rui, like no other Angolan writer, has capitalized on the language usage that
characterized a sometimes overreaching attempt to forge a vernacular of national
unification during the first, heady years of independence. Thus the story " Cinco dias
depois da independência" represents the apotheosis of Rui's ability to encode urban slang,
political and military acronyms, and new forms of social address.
As a chronicler Rui blends humor with intense involvement and cool detachment that at
once celebrate the power and expose the banality of patriotic rhetoric. With Quem me
dera ser onda, Rui tests the waters of social, if not overtly political, satire. This short
novel focuses attention on the
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institutions, social attitudes, and language generated just before and after independence.
As the latter approached, the civil conflict drove thousands of rural people into Luanda in
search of refuge. Villagers unaccustomed to city dwelling moved into the apartment
buildings abandoned by middle- and upper-class Europeans who fled Angola in droves.
Stories circulated in Luanda about livestock transported in elevators and fish laid out to
dry on the roof tiles of once-fashionable apartment buildings. In Rui's novella, a family
turns a section of an apartment veranda into a fattening pen for a pig. When the couple's
young sons take pity on the doomed animal and concoct a scheme to save it from its fate,
the story becomes a clever satire of social mores as well as an artful commentary on the
unsolidified institutions that accompany the new social order.
More so than occurred with Pepetela's Mayombe, speculation ran high that the
authorities would prohibit the book's publication. Once again proving the skeptics
wrong, Quem me dera ser onda was published in Luanda and awarded the grand prize in
the first Comrade President Literary Contest (established in memory of Agostinho Neto).
Manuel Rui remains firmly in the vanguard of Angolan writers. He has joined with
Luandino, Xitu, and Pepetela in significantly altering and enhancing the dialect of
acculturated literary discourse (see Butler, "Colonial Resistance and Contemporary
Angolan Narrative").

Lusophone African Drama

In their African colonies the Portuguese authorities controlled theater and film as tightly
as they did the news media and certain other forms of information and entertainment
accessible to broad segments of the indigenous population. Despite this repression and
the self-censorship prudently practiced by members of the acculturated elites, there were
a few sporadic breakthroughs in the area of live theater. Manuel Ferreira attributes the
scarcity of theater to a corresponding paucity in Portugal and Brazil ( Literaturas70).
A historically important breakthrough came in 1971, when Norberto Barroca, a young
Portuguese director recently arrived from Lisbon, staged in Lourenço MarquesOs noivos,
ou conferência dramática sobre o lobolo ( The newlyweds; or, Dramatic consultation on
the bride price), by Lindo Lhongo (b. circa 1940). This drama, by an African educated in
Protestant mission schools, is based on the theme of "tribal life in transition," with all that
such transformations implied in social, economic, and cultural terms. It played to packed
audiences of mainly Europeans, in a downtown theater, and mainly Africans, in an
Indian-owned movie house in the suburb of Xipamanine. If the play itself, with its social
message and use of traditional musical and dramatic dance expression, was a major
cultural breakthrough, that it was allowed to be staged at all was of historical and political
significance. (Some speculate that although the war continued in the northern zones, the
Por
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tuguese, believing they were winning, could afford to be cosmetically tolerant of African
cultural expression.)
In Luanda, during this same period of relative liberalization in the colonies, Domingos
Van-Dúnem (b. 1925), who in the late 1940s had founded the short-lived theater group
Teatro Gesto (Gesture theater), wrote and staged Auto de natal ( 1972; Christmas play).
Van-Dúnem's bilingual (Kimbundu and Portuguese) musical drama of religious and
cultural syncretism played to racially mixed and socially heterogeneous audiences.
Although Lhongo's and Van-Dúnem's plays have artistic appeal and historical
significance, neither signaled the start, during colonial times, of a socially conscious
theater in Mozambique and Angola. The authorities apparently had second thoughts
about their permissiveness, and for the duration of colonial rule any popular, socially
conscious theater was confined to the liberated zones. Indeed, makeshift folk and
agitprop productions were common in the maquis bordering Angola's eastern war zone,
in the FRELIMO strongholds of northern Mozambique, and in the Fnlcc-controlled areas
of Guinea-Bissau.
Starting in 1974, a more sophisticated agitprop, social realist theater, with Brechtean
influences and heavily laced with regional music and dance, accompanied the return of
nationalist revolutionaries to the cities of all five former colonies. In Luanda, during the
tumultuous days before the installation of the MPLA as the government of Angola,
intellectual revolutionaries organized worker-student theater groups. By 1977 there were
three such groups in Luanda: Xilenga Theater, National Theater School, and Ngongo
Theater. Plays with such epic titles as História de Angola ( The history of Angola) were
brought to the proscenium stage. These ambitious productions captured the patriotic
fervor of the times, and if they occasionally reached heights of exciting musical and folk
spectacle, they were also mainly transitory and often banal attempts at bridging the gap
between the drama-poor colonial period and the early years of independence, with its
need for collective, emotive expression.
In 1978 Pepetela staged his A corda ( The rope), a patriotic play that makes up for its
tendentious message with its appealing allegory. Similarly, Henrique Guerra, under the
influence of Bertolt Brecht by way of the Spanish dramatist Alfonso Sastre, wrote O
círculo de giz de bombó ( 1979; The Manioc chalk circle).
When independence came to Mozambique, in villages, towns, and especially in the cities
of Nampula, Beira, and the newly named capital of Maputo, a spate of social nationalist
dramatic presentations, performed by students and workers, accompanied the nation-
building imperative. In May of 1978 Belo Marques, a Portuguese-born journalist and
dramatist, initiated in Maputo a highly successful series of radio plays with the broadcast
of an African fable presented in the simulated sound environment of oral expression,
complete with audience response. Some of these experimental radio
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dramas were adaptations of literary works, including stories from Honwana's We Killed
Mangy Dog.
In São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, and most notably, Cape Verde, theater based
on folk forms and with social and political themes helped fill a cultural void during the
first years of independence. In 1977 Kwame Kondé (the pseudonym of Francisco
Fragoso, b. 1940) founded Korda Kaoberdi (creole for "Awaken, Cape Verde"), a theater
group organized as a "Scenical Nucleus of Workers and Students." Kondé collaborated
with Kaoberdiano Dambará, the poet and playwright, in producing original folk musicals
and social dramas.
Korda Kaoberdi's limited success—measured in part by sparse attendance at its
performances—can be laid to a number of factors. Not the least of these factors is a
political tendentiousness, which, even though mitigated by music and dance, largely
failed to engage the imagination of enough of the people for whom the spectacles were
intended. Similar factors, including amateurism and a tendency toward the superficially
folkloric, likewise accounted for the limited successes that theatrical experimentations
met with in Angola during the late I970s.
In spite of the false starts and shortcomings, enthusiasm, improvisation, and the
combining of folk and classical elements contributed to a theatrical infrastructure. By the
early 1980s, in all five Lusophone countries, playwrights with a sense of craft were
beginning to build on that base.

Lusophone African Literature in the I980s

Despite war, drought, and famine in Angola and Mozambique and varying degrees of
socioeconomic woes in all five Lusophone countries, writers continued to write and
publish during the 1980s. By 1987 all five countries had associations of artists, writers,
or both. In Luanda the Union of Angolan Writers, to cite the outstanding example of
productivity, had published by 1989 more than 250 titles, amounting to more than two
million copies.
Our temporal proximity to recent literary and editorial events in Lusophone Africa
precludes the kind of sifting and filtering that normally allows for the identification of
literary canons. But in the Lusophone African countries, where for only a decade and a
half relatively few writers have been engaged in defining the terms of their national
literatures, nearly every work—pre- or post-independence—commands the attention of
the literary critic and historian.
Because of the historical period and the manner in which many Third World countries
came into being, there has been an inevitable acceleration and truncating of the normally
long-term and slow processes that resulted in the formation of the nation-states and
nationalities of the West. In the fifteen short years since the achievement of political
independence, the national unification that has been taking place in Lusophone African
countries—
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despite the problems of ethnic diversity and regional rivalries, and in part because of
these very difficulties—has given special importance to the cultural and literary events
and works of the 1980s. Thus a concluding attempt at sifting and filtering, so as to
highlight some of what might at least tentatively be considered the major events, writers,
and works of the 1980s, will ideally put the phenomenon of twentieth-century Lusophone
African literature into sharper focus.
In the 1980s, along with the founding of writers' organizations in four of the emerging
nations (The Union of Angolan Writers was founded in December 1975, about a month
after the declaration of independence), young and beginning writers formed into brigades
and launched several literary journals. A group of aspiring Cape Verdean writers, led by
José Luís Hopffer Almada (b. circa 1958), formed the Pro-Culture Movement, which in
1987 published the first issue of Fragmentos, a magazine of Cape Verdean letters, arts,
and culture.
Hopffer Almada, himself a promising poet, also edited the anthology Mirabilis
(forthcoming), containing the works of about sixty young poets. The established poets
Corsino Fortes, with his Arvore e Tambor ( 1986; Tree and drum), and Oswaldo Osório,
with Clar(a)idade assombrada ( 1987; the Portuguese title is a play on words that can be
read as "Overshadowed clarity"—an allusion to the famous journal Claridade—or
"Bright age overshadowed"), have contributed to the refinement of the epic discourse and
rewriting of history that began to emerge in the immediate post-Independence period. A
preoccupation among Cape Verdean intellectuals with redefining the archipelago's place
in history and its national identity led Henrique Teixeira de Sousa to write Xaguate ( The
hotel Xaguate, 1987), his second historical novel. In Xaguate a note to the reader explains
that the text contains expressions in the islands' creole, which Teixeira de Sousa, holding
on to a rather outmoded notion, assures us is a dialect of Portuguese.
Manuel Veiga (b. circa 1955), a linguist from Santiago, more than likely disagrees with
Sousa's characterization of Cape Verdean crioulo as a regional dialect of Portuguese. Oju
d'agu ( 1987; The wellspring), Veiga's first attempt at fiction, may well be the most hotly
debated Cape Verdean novel ever published. Written in creole, this landmark novel may
also be one of the least-read Cape Verdean works of the decade, for the simple reason
that even many of those who normally read creole with no difficulty find the language of
the text nearly unreadable due to the effort required to decipher the spelling of individual
words. Veiga, applying his considerable linguistic knowledge, and wanting to establish
the vernacular's phonological and morphological distinctiveness from Portuguese,
adapted the international phonetic alphabet to a standardization of creole orthography.
The linguistic parameters of Cape Verdean literature are as much a preoccupation of
Veiga's creolist and cultural nationalist novel as is a symbolic, literary rewriting of the
island's history.
Literary texts in Portuguese and creole have been produced by Cape
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Verdeans living abroad, particularly in the large communities of the United States and
Portugal. For one, Orlanda Amarilis (b. 1924), who published her first volume of stories
at the age of fifty, has emerged as one of the most powerful writers of the Cape Verdean
diasporas. The stories collected in her three volumes—Caís do Sodré té Salamansa (
1974; From the docks of Sodré to the port of Salamansa), Ilhéu dos pássaros ( 1983; Bird
island), and A casa dos mastros ( 1989; The house of the masts)—build an imaginative
bridge between Lisbon and the islands.
Since the archipelago's independence, in cities like Boston and Providence a growing
group of mainly young Cape Verdeans, many U.S.-born, have begun to write poetry and
prose in creole, Portuguese, and English. Some of these writers founded, in Boston,
Atlantis Publishers, which since the late 1970s has issued such works as Descarado ( The
shameless man), a creole
language play by Donaldo Macedo (b. 1950), and Across the
Atlantic: An Anthology of Cape Verdean Literature ( 1988), containing poems and stories
in English translation.
In Guinea-Bissau, despite such setbacks as the 1980 coup and the departure of Mário de
Andrade, there have been some literary bright spots. A notable one is Helder Proença's
Não posso adiar a palavra ( 1986; I can no longer postpone the word), a most
appropriate title, given the lull in Guinea
Bissau writing, for this collection of poems.
Proença's work, as well as that of a handful of others, and the founding, in 1986, of the
Union of Artists and Writers of Guinea-Bissau helped bring that tiny nation into line, on
the level of literary and cultural activities, with the newly formed confederation known as
PALOP—the Portuguese acronym for the somewhat awkward designation African
Countries Whose Official Language Is Portuguese.
In São Tomé and Príncipe, on 30 September 1986, even as the tiny, two
island republic
struggled with a myriad of economic and political problems, the Association of Writers
and Artists, with some fifty members, came into being. A year before the association's
founding, Albertino Bragança (b. circa 1960) published Rosa do Riboque ( 1985 ; Rose
from Riboque). This "modest but significant work," as the preface accurately terms the
volume of short stories, is important because it constitutes the first such effort since
Independence. Bragança was a genuine revelation, and the association was a major
breakthrough in the institutionalization of São Tomé and Príncipe art and literature.
Frederico Gustavo dos Anjos (b. 1957), who, ironically, refused to become a member of
the association (he believed its founding to be premature), was in the 1980s one of the
islands' most productive writers. His A descoberta das descobertas, ou as descobertas da
descoberta ( 1984; Discovery of the discoveries; or, Discoveries of the discovery) is a
small anthology of only forty pages containing ten short selections by six island poets.
Except for Alda Espírito Santo, who began her career as a poet in the late 1940s, all of
the contributors ( Conceição Lima, Carlos Vaz de Almeida, Armindo Aguiar, Armindo
Vaz, and dos Anjos himself) came of age after independence. Dos Anjos followed
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his anthology with three equally modest volumes of his own poetry, one short story, and
an essay. The twenty-page critical essay, included in As descobertas da descoberta, ou a
dimensão de uma mensagem poética ( 1985; The discoveries of the discovery; or, The
dimension of a poetic message) summarizes the literary history of São Tomé and
Príncipe. What is fascinating is the very existence of an evolving literary expression and
criticism in a nation of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.
In Angola in the 1980s, the prevailing climate of discussion and debate gave added
impetus to an evolving literary criticism. One of the principal post-Independence critics is
the poet David Mestre, whose Nem tudo é poesia ( 1987; Not everything is poetry) brings
together six essays on individual writers—including Agostinho Neto, António Jacinto,
and Aires de Almeida Santos—with two articles on the history and nature of Angolan
literary criticism.
Other Angolans, especially those who, in 1985, launched Archote (Torchlight), the
official journal of a group of aspiring writers who call themselves the "Young Flame of
Angolan Literature," began to devote themselves to serious criticism and commentary.
One of the most assiduous of these commentators is E. Bonavena (b. circa 1950), who
has been a regular contributor of editorials and a section, called "Documentos," to
Archote. In the same category of research and close analysis is Luís Kandjimbo (b. circa
1955), whose Apuros de vigília ( 1987; Anguishes of vigilance) revealed him to be a well-
read scholar, versed in theory and familiar with several literatures.
Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, with Ondula, savana branca ( 1982; Roll on, white savanna)
and Hábito da terra ( 1988; Habit of the land), and David Mestre , with Nas barbas do
bando ( 1985; In the face of the mob), continued to be two of Angola's most productive
poets in the 1980s. They, along with other seasoned poets, transmitted their feel for
language to several promising poets, including E. Bonavena, Rui Augusto (b. circa 1950),
and José Luís Mendonça (b. 1955). Of particular interest and importance are Paula
Tavares (b. 1952) and Ana de Santana (b. 1960), two female poets in what has been a
male domain. Tavares's Ritos de passagem ( 1985; Rites of passage) and Santana 's
Sabores, odores e sonho ( 1985; Tastes, scents, and dream) demonstrate that, as poets,
they have given original dimension to the discourse of tropical sensualism that
characterizes some of the best contemporary poetry of Angola and Mozambique.
Pepetela, one of four Angolan writers with a readership among the entire Portuguese-
speaking world and beyond, published O cão e os caluandas ( The dog and the
Luandans, 1985), a futuristic and satirical fable set in post
Independence Angola.
Uanhenga Xitu's Os discursos do "Mestre" Tamoda ( 1985; "Professor" Tamoda's
speeches), capitalized on the popularity of his first Tamoda book. And Arnaldo Santos,
after a long silence, published O cesto de Katandu ( 1986; Katandu's Basket), a collection
of five chronicle stories, all but one of which were written in 1982.
A conjura ( 1989; The conspiracy), a historical novel and first published
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work of Jose Eduardo Agualusa (b. 1962?), won the Sonangol Prize for the Revelation of
the Year. Manuel dos Santos Lima, who wrote the preface for A conjura, produced, with
his own Os anões e os mendigos ( 1984; Dwarfs and beggars), what he himself has called
a political fable about African reality. Lima, who has lived abroad since the 1960s, has
retained his membership in the Union of Angolan Writers, but has felt generally
disaffected from the social and political directions of his native land—hence his novel
contesting the post-Independence state of affairs in sub-Saharan Africa in general and
Angola in particular. 17
With regard to theater, with all its potentially socially contentious possibilities, Domingos
Van-Dúnem, with O panfleto ( 1988; The pamphlet), and Jose Mena Abrantes, with Ana,
Zé e os escravos ( 1988; Ana, Joe, and the slaves), are two experienced playwrights who,
although not in an overtly contentious way, use their art for social commentary.
In Mozambique, the 1980s witnessed a resurgence in literary activity and productivity.
Under the aegis of the Association of Mozambican Writers, established in 1981, young
writers organized the João Dias Brigade. They launched Charrua ( The plow), which
along with the news magazine Tempo ( Time) and the literary supplement of the
newspaper Domingo ( Sunday), became as important an outlet for individual poems,
stories, and essays as the association's several Mozambican Authors series were for books
by experienced as well as beginning writers.
In the capital city of Maputo—one of the urban islands of relative normality in a country
beset by a brutal insurgency—the writers of the brigade have held, starting in 1982, a
monthly open-air "happening" known as a msaho (a Cicope or Chope word meaning,
literally, song), and consisting of singing, dancing, theater, and poetry readings.
The first of the msahos held in Maputo's Tunduro Park honored and celebrated José
Craveirinha, who has become a living legend in Mozamique. Maria ( 1988), a volume of
homage to Craveirinha's wife, who met with a tragic death, contains poems that inspired
Rui Knopfli to write, in the volume's preface, that "I consider Jose Craveirinha to be—by
far—the greatest African poet of Portuguese expression" ( Maria10). And Craveirinha's
persona, in "O genero" ( The genre), the final poem in the collection, acknowledges his
role in the convoluted, acculturated world of intimist and public poetic discourse:
I take increasing pride
in the undeserved honor of belonging
to the majority in which I am confined.
A bothered and pathetic citizen
I rigorously recopy
the genre: Ze Craveirinha.
(62; my translation)
-275-
Craveirinha, as an institution unto himself, became a major force in the reshaping
of contemporary Mozambican poetry. Luís Patraquim followed his
aforementioned Monção with A inadiável viagem ( 1985; The urgent voyage), the
best poems of which also display the unmistakable influence of Craveirinha's
diction, phrasing, and images.
Prominent among a new generation of Mozambican poets is Hélder Muteia (b.
1960), whose first poem was published in 1979 and whose first book, Verdades
dos mitos ( 1988; The truths of myths), contains some of the most imaginative
African poetry in Portuguese to appear since Independence. Armando Artur (b.
1962), who published his first poem in 1982, also produced a book, Espelho dos
dias ( 1988; Mirror of the days), that contains poetry that—as does much of the
most compelling of contemporary Lusophone African poetry—seeks to take the
measure of relationships between the past and the present and the private and
public voices.
In their attempt to balance the two voices, many recent Mozambican poets—
beginning with Patraquim, but harking back to some of Craveirinha's surrealistic
and erotic poetry—use tropicalist, sensual imagery and symbology. The Indian
Ocean, most notably in the verse of Patraquim and Eduardo White (b. circa
1960)—whose Amar sobre o Índico ( 1987; To love over the Indian ocean)
established him as another significant poet—became a kind of nature icon in the
literary expression of an evolving Mozambican ethos.
In the 1980s the words "calamities" and "emergency" took on special meaning as
RENAMO, also known as the MNR (the Mozambique Resistance Movement),
continued to terrorize the rural populace. As a response to the calamities, there
emerged a kind of emergency literature, like Eduardo White 's Homoine ( 1988),
eight short poems to honor the victims of the MNR's massacre of dozens of men,
women, and children in the village of Homoine, about two hundred miles north of
Maputo.
Lina Magaia (b. 1946) produced the first emergency stories, published first in
several issues of the magazine Tempo and then in a volume titled Dumba nengue (
1987; Run for Your Life!, 1989). The title is a Xitsonga expression meaning "trust
in your feet," 18 and the book, whose Portuguese subtitle translates as Tragic
stories about banditry (the RENAMO guerrillas are commonly referred to as
bandidos), sold out its first printing of ten thousand copies.
The 1980s ended the virtual impasse in Mozambican prose fiction that followed
the seemingly intimidating success of Honwana's We Killed Mangy Dog. A
growing group of Mozambican fiction writers began to manifest a concern—
shared with their Angolan and Cape Verdean counterparts—for the retelling and
remythification of history. Albino Magaia (b. 1947)—a poet, the editor of Tempo,
and the brother of Lina Magaia—published Malungate ( 1987), a narrative that
rewrites a portion of the history of the final decades of colonial rule.
-276-
In 1986 Mia Couto (b. 1955), a white Mozambican from the city of Beira,
published Vozes anoitecidas ( Voices turned to night). This book of estórias (
Couto's use of this designation pays homage to Luandino's influence)
revolutionized Mozambican fiction writing by establishing a new literary
discourse from the perspective of those who dwell in the cultural interstices
between two societies.
Along with Mia Couto, another revelation in Mozambican narrative of the 1980s
is Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (the Tsonga name of Francisco Esau Cossa), born in
1957 in the province of Sofala. Khosa's Ualalapi ( 1987) contains phantasmagoric
stories that, in a manner similar to Mia Couto's estórias, reintegrate the past and
present and fashion a new literary language to transmit Mozambique's transitional
social history. Drawing on the oral traditions of the Sena and Changane peoples,
and influenced by such writers as Luandino and the Colombian novelist Gabriel
García Márquez, Khosa's first book demystifies and remythifies Mozambique's
historical time and space.
Mia Couto and Ba Ka Khosa are among the Young Turks who have challenged
and even influenced the "consecrated" writers—meaning those who came of age
before Independence, under the banners of cultural revindication and social
protest. One of the younger "consecrated" writers is Raul Calane da Silva (b.
1945), who, as a founding member of the Association of Mozambican Writers,
joined with the João Dias Brigade in organizing the monthly msahos. Silva, who
began his literary career as a poet, turned to prose in 1987 with Xicandarinha na
lenha do mundo ( Teapot on the wood fire of the world), a collection of estórias
whose uniqueness derives from the author's ability to transform the time-honored
neorealist story into surrealistic social vignettes.
The resurgence of the Mozambican short story and novel has also given new life
to theater. In the decade of the 1980s Maputo's historic Avenida Theater has been
the stage for several experimental plays, mainly adaptations of short stories,
including those by Mia Couto, and other Young Turks.
Finally, individually and as a whole, these five literatures in Portuguese have
already fulfilled their promise as the first acculturated writing from modern
Africa. From its precursors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
 through its origins in the 1930s, and up to the present, Lusophone writing is a
unique social and aesthetico-ideological phenomenon.

Notes
I. Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier characterized the poetry from the then Portuguese colonies as
"little more than a cry of sheer agony and loss" ( 23 -24). In a revised 1984 edition the
anthologists included a few more poets and selections from the former Portuguese colonies,
and they expanded on their original, reductionist characteriza

-277-
tion of that poetry. Michael Wolfers's and Don Burness's anthologies, among others, have
made greater numbers of the poems by more Lusophone African writers available to
English-speaking audiences.

2. According to Mário de Andrade, he and Viriato da Cruz used "Vamos Descobrir Angola"
(literally, "Let's Discover Angola") in letters they exchanged while the former was living in
Paris and the latter in Luanda, but the phrase was not the war cry of the Generation of 1950,
as many literary critics and historians consistently and erroneously have claimed.

3. Muari-ngana is the Kimbundu equivalent of "mister," calaçala is a Kimbunduized version

of calçada, Portuguese for "sidewalk," and chaluto is a corruption of charuto, meaning
"cigar."

4. In the 1940s Cabral himself wrote a number of poems, most of which were discovered only
after his death. See O. Osório, Emergência.

5. This is indeed a departure from the usual creole ethnocentrism. The poem is, in effect, a
celebration of a "black being in the world."

6. Noti was issued by the Central Committee of the PAIGC. The 1980 coup resulted in the
splitting of the binational PAIGC into separate parties, the PAIG and the PAICV.

7. In a 1979 issue the Lisbon journal África carried ten previously unpublished poems by
Vasco Cabral (b. 1926). The Guinea-born Cabral had lived in Portugal from early
childhood through college and beyond. With independence he became a high official in the
 newly formed government of Guinea-Bissau. Some students of Lusophone African
literature, on the basis of these ten poems of revindication and protest written in Portugal,
see Vasco Cabral as an important precursor of modern Guinea
Bissau literature.

8. The poem has been translated into English, French, Russian, and Swedish, among other
languages, and ranks as one of the most anthologized of Lusophone African poems. It
appeared, for example, in Moore and Beier's Modern Poetry from Africa and, in French, in
Mário Andrade's La poésie africaine d'expression portugaise.

9. M. Wolfer's English translation of the poem as " We Must Return" is included in his Poems
from Angola (19-20). Burness's version, also titled "We Must Return," appears in his
anthology (37).

10. Angola's independence became official on II November 1975.

II. Burness has an English version of this poem, " In the Forest of Your Eyes," in his anthology
(73).

12. At this historical juncture it is, however, doubtful that a European, East Indian, or a
mestiço, for that matter, could rise to head of state in these countries, where, as a legacy of
colonialism, ethnic, if not racial, politics do play a role. See Hamilton 1985.

13. After the 1980 coup, Andrade relocated to Paris. He died in London in 1990.

14. Romano has lived much of his adult life in Brazil; before that he lived in Senegal and
Morocco. It seems plausible that Romano's sometimes flamboyant Cape Verdeanness, in
both his poetry and prose, is in part an aesthetic and ideological overcompensation for
having lived most of his adult life away from his native land.

15. The Portuguese-born Abranches emigrated at the age of fifteen to Angola, where, as a
young man, he became an MPLA militant. He began writing his monumental ethnographic
novel in 1961 while confined in a Luanda prison. Along with being a novelist and short
story writer, Abranches is also a poet, literary critic, historian, painter, cartoonist,
anthropologist, and museum curator.
 -
278-

16. For the Brazilian edition Luandino reversed his policy by providing two glossaries, one of
typical Luandan terms, the other of Kimbundu words and phrases.

17. Lima, although his novel is a thinly veiled criticism of the regime, is nonetheless not a
persona non grata in Angola. One of the few cases in independent Angola, and certainly the
most notorious, of the apparent political persecution of a writer occurred when Costa
Andrade was imprisoned for nearly a year, in 1979-80, because of allegedly offensive
allusions to government officials in his play No velho ninguém toca ( 1980; Nobody touches
the old man).

18. The term apparently became popularized in Maputo, where makeshift black markets sprang
up on many city streets. As the story goes, when the police approached, the cry dumba
nengue would go up, and the illegal vendors would gather their wares and literally "trust in
their feet."

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—. " Manuel Rui's "Sim camarada: Interpolation and the Transformation of Narrative
Discourse"." Callaloo 14, no. 2 ( 1991): 307-12.
Ribas, Oscar. Uanga: Romance folclórico angolano [ Enchantment: An Angolan folkloric
novel]. 2d. ed. Luanda, Angola: Privately printed, 1969.
Rocha, Jofre [ Roberto de Almeida]. Estórias do Musseque [ Musseque tales]. Lisbon:
Edições 70, União dos Escritores Angolanos, 1976.
Romano, Luís. Famintos [ The famished]. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Leitura, 1961.
Roscoe, Adrian A. Mother Is Gold: A Study in West African Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Rui, Manuel. II Poemas em novembro [ II poems in November], vol. I, 2d. ed. Luanda,
Angola: UEA, Cadernos Lavra, 1977.
—. Regresso adiado [ Postponed return]. 2d. ed. Lisbon: Edições 70, União dos
Escritores Angolanos, 1977.
—. Sim camarada. Lisbon: Edições 70, União dos Escritores Angolanos, 1977. Yes,
Comrade! Translated by Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
forthcoming.
—. Quem me dera ser onda [ Oh, that I were a wave in the sea]. Lisbon: Edições 70,
1982.
Santana, Ana de. Sabores, odores e sonhos [ Tastes, scents, and dreams]. Luanda,
Angola: União dos Escritores Angolanos, 1985.
Santos, Arnaldo. Quinaxixe. Lisbon: Casa dos Estudantes do Império, 1965.
—. Tempo de munhungo [ Vertigo time]. Luanda: Nós, 1968.
—. O cesto de Katandu e outros contos [ Katandu's basket and other stories]. Lisbon:
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Senghor, Léopold S.Lusitanidade e negritude [ Lusitanianism and Negritude]. Instituto
de Altos Estudos, Nova Série. Lisbon: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, 1975.
Silva, [Raul] Calane da. Xicandarinha na lenha do mundo [ Teapot on the wood fire of
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Silveira, Onésimo. Hora grande [ A long hour]. Nova Lisboa ( Huambo), Angola:
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-283-
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—. A chaga [ The bleeding sore]. 2d. ed. Lisbon: Edições 70, União dos Escritores
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—. Coração em África [ With my heart in Africa]. Linda-a-Velha, Portugal: Africa—
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—. "Mestre" Tamoda e outros cantos ["Professor" Tamoda and other stories]. 2d. ed.
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—. Os discursos do "Mestre" Tamoda ["Professor" Tamoda's Speeches]. Lisbon:
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10 African-Language Literatures:
Perspectives on Culture and Identity
ROBERT CANCEL
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu
in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment—three to
five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks—or was made to carry a metal plate
around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY.
Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford.—( Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o , Decolonising the Mind II)
During the 1980s two extensive studies appeared that explore the history and content of
literatures written in African languages from most regions of the continent. Albert
Gérard's African Language Literatures ( 1981) is a broad survey of the corpus, from the
oldest to the most contemporary literatures in African languages. One of the author's
main points is that for the amount of writing and the length of time some of it has existed,
there is a woeful lack of scholarship about these literatures. Similarly, he points to the
unevenness of our knowledge regarding these traditions. On the one hand, aspects of
Swahili, Amharic, Xhosa, and Zulu literatures have been studied by European and
African scholars in some degree of depth. On the other hand, our knowledge about
writing in Gikuyu, Ewe, Shona, and Bemba, for example, suffers from great lacunae in
both criticism and explication. Three Polish scholars, B. W. Andrzejewski, S.
Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch, in their study Literatures in African Languages: Theoretical
Issues and Sample Surveys ( 1985), acknowledge the impossibility of a thorough survey
of all African-language writing and concentrate instead on a sizeable sample of literatures
from various parts of the continent. They also include the consideration of "oral
literature" from each of the traditions studied, thus emphasizing the continuity between
oral art forms and the written genres of particular African languages.
This essay proposes to find a path between these seminal studies to focus on certain
issues as they are exemplified in several African literary traditions. Perhaps the best way
to suggest, at least in a modest way, the richness of
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artistry and the cultural and political significance of literatures in the vernacular
languages of African people is to begin with a brief historical overview of writing in
Africa, then to examine a few case studies, and finally, to consider the sociocultural
implications of African-language literatures. 1

Early Writing Traditions

The hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians was one of the continent's oldest forms of
writing. There was also the writing, in an epigraphic script, of Ge'ez in Ethiopia which
dates back to at least the fourth century B.C.E.. Amharic followed Ge'ez as another
language that has for centuries been written in Africa. 2 But perhaps contemporary
writing in African languages can more readily be traced back to the advent of Arabic
writing in several regions of the continent. The West African trading empires that grew at
the southern margins of the Sahara desert included numerous scholars, scribes, and holy
men who used Arabic as their literary or at least record-keeping language. The great
founder of the Malian Empire, Sunjata ( thirteenth century), encouraged writing and its
related arts at court, as did his successors. These states can be dated from the end of the
first millennium on. Though Arabic has largely remained a language of religion in most
of sub-Saharan Africa, it provided the valuable service of stimulating the so-called Ajami
writing traditions ( Gérard, African Language Literatures47-170). Simply put, these were
cases of African peoples using Arabic script as a medium to reproduce their own
languages. This happened among the Fula people of Cameroon, Guinea, and Senegal;
among the Hausa, in Nigeria and Niger; and among the Wolof in Senegal and Gambia.
The art form most commonly appropriated for these efforts was Arabic religious and
secular poetry, which had strict rules of prosody and rhyme—though these written poems
were often sung for audiences and were tied to an oral tradition. Chronicles and histories
also appeared in these languages, written in Arabic script.
Several other regions of Africa used Arabic script to reproduce the local languages.
Ajami writing in Madagascar, for instance, dates back at least as far as the thirteenth
century, and it was not until the nineteenth century that Latin script was officially
sponsored by the government. Swahili was another African language that was not only
written in Arabic script but whose very formation was heavily influenced by the Oriental,
and later Muslim, culture that grew and flourished on Africa's east coast from around the
first century C.E. As in other cases, the most popular genre was poetry, eventually written
in the local language but following the formal, and often moral and didactic, tenets of
Islam and Arab culture.
As time went on and colonial powers from Europe made themselves felt in such matters,
most indigenous languages turned to Latin script. An unusually old example of European
influence is the case of the Kongo kingdom, which had trade ties with the West since the
fifteenth century, and whose
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court regularly sent selected members to Portugal for higher education. On returning,
they employed Portuguese as an official language of written communication between
functionaries. Ironically, Kongo itself was written down and used in literary endeavors
only after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, when Protestant missionaries developed and
disseminated a system in which to publish and read the language ( Gérard, African
Language Literatures286
93). A further irony, one of many produced by conditions and
consequences of the slave trade, was that English became the first literate language of the
leaders of the modern states of Sierra Leone and Liberia. As former slaves, taken mostly
from West Africa and repatriated by the British and Americans, the people who became
the elites and rulers of these countries, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, had been trained to read, write, and communicate—first with their masters then
among each other—in English. While many of the intellectuals of these groups, or their
descendants, kept English as their medium of scholarship, a number of them took on the
task of evangelizing local and neighboring peoples. For this vital work they took to heart
the methods of their European Protestant teachers. That is, they settled areas, learned the
local languages (if they did not already know them), created an orthography, and went
about translating the Bible into those languages. Furthermore, the English-speaking
elites, of Sierra Leone in particular, were responsible for the creation of a new language
that drew on elements of English (mostly vocabulary) and the indigenous languages
(syntax, pronunciation, and elements of tone): Krio. It was also in Sierra Leone and
Liberia that several ethnic groups, as a means of rejecting European languages and script,
developed their own local orthographies for writing their languages, the best known of
these being the Vai script. 3
Missionaries and the Emergence of Yoruba Literature
By far the most common pattern of reducing African languages to European script was
the one established in the British colonies. 4 For reasons of religion and, I suspect,
control, early missionaries, especially Protestants, would from the earliest contact set out
to learn and write down local languages. They recognized the importance of allowing
people to pick up this new knowledge in their own languages, in their own patterns of
thought and philosophy. The missions therefore developed an early generation of
"educated" converts whose facility with European languages would allow them to fill the
crucial civil service and labor ranks needed to run the colonies. Many in this educated
class used those metropolitan languages as a means of personal advancement and status.
Others went beyond producing translations of Biblical works or—that most ubiquitous of
translated texts— John Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress, and began writing creatively in
their own languages for readers of their ethnic-linguistic groups. The type of writing they
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produced and the information conveyed in this writing is of central interest to this
discussion. We can examine these dimensions by considering a few linguistic regions
where writing in local languages took place before and especially during the twentieth
century.
In what would eventually become the nation of Nigeria, the Yoruba people made up a
sizeable group when missionaries arrived to begin the work of evangelization. It is
relevant to consider the development of their written literature because it is a fairly long-
standing one and because the Yoruba remain one of the larger ethnic and linguistic
groups in Africa. Perhaps the most remarkable of the early missionaries was Samuel Ajai
Crowther ( 1807?
91). Taken as a slave, then freed and repatriated to Sierra Leone, this
Yoruba graduated from Fourah Bay College in 1827 and, after his ordination as a Church
Missionary Society (CMS) minister, returned to Nigeria as a missionary. Some of his
earliest accomplishments were the production of a Yoruba dictionary and five school
primers. In 1900 Crowther's full Bible translation was published, and this was followed in
1911 by the issuing of his translation of The Pilgrim's Progress. While he produced these
important works, Bishop Crowther formalized a Latin script orthography for Yoruba, in
the process developing a written form of "standard" Yoruba based mainly on the Oyo
dialect, though three of the nine major dialects also contributed to this form. As was the
case for numerous African languages entering the medium of written traditions, poetry
was an early popular genre of expression. Oral poetry, so prevalent in Africa, was an
important part of traditional art and expression for the Yoruba and was the source for
early writers such as J. Sobowale Sowande ( 1858-1936), who is credited with writing the
first published "original" Yoruba poems. This means that, as opposed to the early hymn-
writers who used Western models for their efforts or merely reproduced the words of oral
Yoruba poetry, Sowande began with the formal model of traditional poetry—specifically,
the chants employed in the Abeokuta festivals of Orò, the ancestor of the Earth Spirit—
and infused them with Christian themes and personal experiences and observations. 5 The
first two collections of his poems were published in 1905 and 1906, respectively.
Literacy was embraced as a means to success in colonial Africa—success being defined
as employment and eventual financial security. The Yoruba people took to the
preservation and promotion of their language in the form of cultural societies and
Yoruba-language newspapers and periodicals. The first novelette written in Yoruba found
its initial forum in such a newspaper, Akéde èkó ( Lagos herald), where it was serialized
before its 1929 publication. The plot detailed a cautionary tale, narrated by a "fallen
woman" who had debased herself through prostitution, adultery, and abortion and is
afflicted at the end with an incurable illness. The irresistible title of this work, by Isaac
Babalola Thomas ( 1888- 1963) is Sègilolá, eléyinjú egé ( Segilola, woman of ensnaring
eyeballs).
It was not until 1938 that the first full-fledged novel in Yoruba was pub
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lished, and this turned out to be a signal occasion for the future of Yoruba literature. A
church primary school headmaster named Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa produced a vivid,
fantastic story called Ògbójú ode nínú igbó irúnmalè ( 1938; The Forest of a Thousand
Daemons, 1968). In a narrative that draws on Yoruba cosmology and oral traditions, as
well as Greek, Latin, and Middle Eastern mythologies, Fagunwa weaves an episodic
quest tale that depicts fantastic creatures and adventures in the mysterious bush
combined with observations on many elements of traditional Yoruba life: "the virtue of
courage and perseverance; rivalry between co-wives in polygamous families; various
vices such as wickedness, cruelty, treachery, theft, greed and ingratitude; the laws of
retribution; parents' problems in choosing a husband for their beautiful daughter; belief
about spirits and witches" (Babalola in Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 167).
Fagunwa's book became very popular; in fact, it set the pattern for three more successful
novels. 6
For virtually the remainder of his life, Fagunwa was known as the Yoruba prose stylist.
He published collections of traditional Yoruba tales and reports on his eighteen-month
visit to England. Fagunwa's last novel departed from the familiar pattern by depicting a
much more realistic, yet no less didactic and moralistic, situation: Adììtú-Olódùmarè (
1961; [ Biography of a man named] God's mystery knot). By writing about fantastic
events and traditional values, Fagunwa partly combined the two streams of early African
writers who had, or at least felt, the responsibility to preserve, to preach, or both. He drew
from and therefore approximated the oral tradition while also setting up lessons in ethical
and moral values for younger readers to absorb. Much of his writing was destined, often
intended, for primary and secondary school readership, and the didactic bent was part and
parcel of the literary effort.
In 1947 Adekanni Oyedele published a fictional autobiography, Ayé rèé! ( Thus goes the
world!), set before the arrival of whites in the Yoruba area. It differed notably from
Fagunwa in its "realistic" depiction of characters and events. Adeboye Babalola points
out that this novel's "overriding theme" was the notion of predestination and fate.
Another well-known novelist is Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano (b. 1904), an officer in the
Yoruba cultural society Egbé Omo Odùduwà (Association of the children of Oduduwa).
His first novel, Aiyé d'aiyé òyìnbó ( 1955; The world has become a white man's world), is
set in the Yoruba area before the coming of Europeans and, cast as a fictional
autobiography, covers that period up to the current era. Babalola says that the "author
brilliantly adopts a narrative style fashioned on the characteristic mode of Yoruba elders'
delivery of their recollections. Consequently the novel is rich in Yoruba proverbs and
idioms and the prose has a delightful measured tread" (Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and
Tyloch 169). Chief Delano eventually devoted his full attention to writing, producing a
Yoruba monolingual dictionary and another historical novel.
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Yoruba dramatists produced, in addition to contemporary types of plays, a new genre
termed "folk opera." As a departure from the syncretic dramas performed in earlier
colonial contexts, a transitional sort of play set out to dramatize scenes from the Bible but
ended up as free interpretations, at times rather ribald and accompanied by Yoruba music
(Babalola and Gérard 255). These dramas, when combined with traditional Yoruba
dramatic festival forms (masks, ritual celebrations, acting out of historical and mythical
events), eventually evolved into the folk opera. The pioneer in the genre was Herbert
Ogunde, who in the 1940s "began to secularize this syncretic medium" (Babalola and
Gérard 255). Drama, music, song, and historical and mythical sources were combined
with topical and satirical commentary to constitute a vital and popular art form. Many
actor/writer/producers succeeded Ogunde, but it was not until 1969 that Duro Ladipo's
popular Oba kò so ( The king did not hang), first performed in 1963, reached print to
become the first published version of the genre.
Contemporary Yoruba writers are numerous, thus it is important to identify at least two
more. Adebayo Faleti, an acknowledged master of language, is a dramatist, poet, and
novelist. His lengthy novel Omo olókùn esin ( 1970; Son of the keeper of horses) is called
by Babalola "a feast for the reader." It has a historical, pre-nineteenth-century setting, and
the author employs three separate narrators to tell different parts of the complex tale.
Faleti depicts the various tactics employed by slaves both to free themselves and to
depose the slaver rulers of the Otu kingdom. Several collections of poems, a novelette,
and two plays, one of which is a densely evocative historical epic, have placed Faleti
among the best-known and most highly regarded Yoruba writers.
Afolabi Olabimtan is also a playwright, poet, and novelist. His play Oláòré afòtèjoyè (
1970; [ Chief] Olaore, king by treachery ) is allegorical, alluding to the downfall of a
good king due to an error of judgment. The allusions to contemporary politics of the
1960s are quite clear, as is the play on the name of the good king, Obalowo. 7
Olabimtan's poems have been praised for their evocative qualities as well as their
adherence to traditional Yoruba poetic patterns. Says Babalola of the second collection,
Ewì orísìírísìí ( Poems of various types), which deliberately showcases several styles of
oral poetic genres, "The compositions are remarkably successful; those which are
divination poems have provided scholars with an insight into the process of the growth of
the Ifa literary corpus in the oral traditions" (Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch
174). Finally, Olabimtan has written two novels, both noted for their realism and
unflinching portrayals of urban and rural life, with their various problems and
consequences.
Adeboye Babalola, on whose scholarship this section is based, points to a situation that
no longer strictly applies to Yoruba writing and its readership, though his statement holds
true for the current status of African-language writing in a majority of countries:
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The contemporary creative writer in Yoruba has a relatively small audience
among the adults because of the still high percentage of adult illiteracy and the
continuing indifference of many educated Yoruba citizens to their mother tongue.
It appears the further development of Yoruba literature will depend on the
determination of talented writers to continue to produce Yoruba literary works in
obedience to the dictates of their genius and not merely to meet the demands of
the market existing in the primary and secondary schools. (Andrzejewski,
Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 175-76)
Perhaps the greatest influence colonial rule had on Africa was a linguistic, and therefore
cultural, one. Frantz Fanon suggested that to adopt a new language was to "take on a
world," and the process that moved Africans towards the adoption of a foreign language
is still, I think, not properly understood. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, for instance, notes the early
growth of a "messenger class" in colonial times and how these purveyors of translation
"for a price," as depicted in some of Achebe's novels, used the European language as a
tool for personal gain ( Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind63, 67). Before going into this
question in more depth, it is worthwhile noting the growth of written African literatures
in other sections of the continent.
The Southern African Experience
In southern Africa, the Xhosa people were among the first and largest indigenous groups
to begin writing creatively in their own language. As early as the 1820s a mission station
of the Church of Scotland was established in the vicinity of Tyume, among the Ngqika
people of the Xhosa group. When a small press was introduced in 1823, the Ngqika
dialect was launched as the future "standard" form of Xhosa literature, in much the same
way that the Oyo dialect became the model for written Yoruba. In 1825 the Tyume
mission was rechristened Lovedale and, after a shift to a new site following the 1834-35
frontier war, became the center of Xhosa publishing activity. As with the Yoruba, Xhosa
was first reduced to writing by the missionaries, then converts were to take up the tasks
of translating—at times retranslating— some of the important religious or literary works
brought from Europe, such as the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress. Vernacular poetry
and prose were screened by officials of the mission press, and the works that were
selected were distributed among the growing numbers of literate Xhosa people. One of
the most influential early writers was Tiyo Soga ( 1825-71). Gérard may have been
referring to Soga, as much as to any number of early African writers, when he said,
That is where modern African literature may truly be said to have begun: with
Christian hymns composed by Africans, with recording of oral lore (especially in
the form of traditional stories), with the earliest attempts at oral prose
composition imitating the kind of stories that the pupils had read at school, either
in English or in vernacular versions. ( African Language Literatures180-81)
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Tiyo Soga's earliest contributions were indeed church hymns. He also translated sections
of the Xhosa Bible and a large portion of Bunyan's classic—the translation being
completed years later (published in 1926) by his son, John H. Soga. The elder Soga was,
like Crowther for the Yoruba, one of the earliest codifiers of written Xhosa literature.
The advent of the twentieth century in what was to become the Republic of South Africa
was a sobering time for Xhosa and other Bantu-language writers. These early
convert/teacher/intellectuals were to find that their prose was most often confined to
newspapers when they wrote in protest of oppressive conditions. 8 By the middle to late
1800s the relatively liberal mission encouragement of Black writing and advancement
had turned much more conservative. Elements of racial determinism in European
scholarship and colonial policies combined readily with the discovery of precious metals
and gems in the Orange Free State to institutionalize the subservient position of Black
Africans, especially the Black writer, in South Africa (see Gérard, Four African
Language Literatures,174-98 and Scheub in Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 542-
50). The gifted and committed Christians among the Xhosa and other peoples were hard
pressed to find a sympathetic ear for their growing discontent. Censorship or repression
of manuscripts and eventually even newspaper writing—for many of the liberal Xhosa-
language newspapers were white owned and controlled—were to force writers to shift
their emphasis from blatant protest to subtler or even mundane themes. 9 Two major
outlets became feasible for the Christian intellectuals: political activity and agitation,
and pedagogical pursuits. As the former alternative resulted in more frustrations and
official censure, the latter choice became the more common for activists.
In southern Africa, as in many other parts of colonized Africa, Christian mission activity
often encouraged converts to renounce their precolonial practices and beliefs and to
embrace an essentially Western ethos. Daniel Kunene, who refers to this process as
"deculturation," claims that many southern African writers were channeled into themes
that made for an exercise in "self-devaluation." The main character of a Nyanja-
language novel from Zambia illustrates Kunene's argument effectively when he warns his
son that a traditional festive dance is "dirty and evil, and those people dance naked, with
only small patches of cloth around their loins—very shameful indeed.... Most of their
songs are obscene. It fills one with shame to watch those dancers. And what is good in
them anyway?" ( Kunene, "African Vernacular Writing" 648). Indeed, that was the
attitude fostered by many mission-run educational systems. On the other hand, even from
early times the traditional life was often a draw to the Xhosa writer. For some it was
merely the convenient target of editorial moralizing, ending with the lauding of the
coming of new Christian ways. Yet there was also the recognition of positive elements of
Xhosa culture, and those elements would eventually be paired with the good things of
rural life in thematic contrast to the evils and perils of the city.
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Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi ( 1875-1945) is considered to be "the father of Xhosa
poetry." He was said to be equally skilled in the traditional art of the imbongi (the oral
bard) and written poetry. His earliest themes lauded Christianity, but he later turned to
lamenting the rising and inevitable conflict between Black and white South Africans. The
two themes alternate in Mqhayi's work. His utopian novel U-Don Jadu ( 1929; Don Jadu)
hypothesizes a South Africa where all races would live peaceably and profitably. In 1925
Mqhayi addressed to Britain's Prince of Wales an at times ironic praise poem, in the
traditional form, that contains the following allusions:
Ah, Britain! Great Britain!
Great Britain of the endless sunshine!
You gave us Truth: denied us Truth
You gave us ubuntu: denied us ubuntu
You gave us light: we live in darkness
Benighted at noon-day, we grope in the dark.
(Cited in Jordan 114)
Harold Scheub says of James J. R. Jolobe ( 1902-76) that "he is the greatest of the Xhosa
literary poets, an experimenter, an eloquent manipulator of imagery" (Andrzejewski,
Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 558). Like Mqhayi, Jolobe was an ordained minister with a solid
education. The winner of various literary prizes in his lifetime, Jolobe wrote the earliest
collection of essays by a Xhosa writer, Amavo ( 1940; Personal impressions). Though he
experimented with various forms of poetry and rhyme, his poem " The Ingqawule,"
considered the finest in Xhosa literature, approximates the traditional oral form. The
poem depicts a crucial event in Xhosa history, whereby the lethal threat of hostile settler
armies is responded to by an extreme milennarian solution. A prophetess is inspired by a
vision to advise the people to kill all their cattle and destroy their crops as a mass
sacrifice to the spirits, thereby ensuring deliverance from this grave and impending
danger.
... all the livestock
And the harvest of the earth were to be sacrificed.
Even the corn reserves would be destroyed.
The promise was a new abundance:
Great herds of cattle, a surfeit of maize;
Old women would be revitalized,
They would acquire the freshness of youth.
The long hills, the low lands,
From the Mbashe to the Nxuba, would be ruled by Xhosa
And the foreigners would be swallowed by the sea.
( Scheub in Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 566)
Jolobe was also a thoughtful educator and man of letters who not only wrote, in addition
to his poetry, a novel and a play, but translated numerous works
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from English and Afrikaans into Xhosa as well. He also wrote about Xhosa literature.
The novel in Xhosa was inaugurated by Henry Masila Ndawo in 1909 with uHambo
lukaGqoboka ( Journey of a convert), an allegorical novel influenced in great part by The
Pilgrim's Progress. Again, a common theme is reiterated as Xhosa tradition is tied in
with Christian mores. Speaking about another Xhosa novel, u Nomalizo, okanye izinto
zalomhlaba ngamajingiqiwu ( 1918; Nomalizo, or the things of this life are sheer vanity),
by Enoch S. Guma, Scheub echoes the observations of Kunene when he says, "the
characters in the novels of this period in Xhosa literary history are not subtle
psychological studies. They are frequently caricatures, their functions and actions being
far more significant than their characters" (Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 575).
Kunene, examining fiction in southern Africa, laments that "full, rounded characters are
apt to be rare." He goes on to suggest that the problem is a narrow and relentless
didacticism, saying of a Xhosa novel that "the writer's worst offense as an artist is his
apparent determination to give us the sermon for its own sake, in a work that nevertheless
purports to be art" ( Kunene, "Problems" 91).
All scholars of Xhosa literature agree that the 1940 novel by A. C. Jordan, Ingqumbo
yeminyanya ( The wrath of the ancestors), was a breakthrough work. Its success is in part
due to Jordan's skillful and imaginative use of the language. Moreover, the novel
combines the conflicts of old and new, Xhosa culture and the West, tradition versus
Christianity, into one unifying work. Scheub says that "with Jordan, the Xhosa novel
becomes a purely literary form" (Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 581), owing to
both formal and thematic attributes. Formally, Jordan is able to combine tenets of the oral
narrative tradition with those of the Western literary forms adapted by the early Xhosa
writers. Thematically, he goes beyond the "right and wrong" polarization of traditional
and contemporary mores and, rather than argue about whether or not change will come,
insists that it has already arrived and been accepted. His point is that people must decide
what kind of change is to be embraced and how it is to happen. Significantly, the only
character in the book who is able to weather the devastating events is among the most
flexible of the novel's protagonists. The many themes and questions raised by Jordan and
those who preceded him were to be further explored by the generation of writers who
followed.

INFLUENCES OF THE ORAL TRADITION

Two elements raised so far deserve closer examination. The first is the debt to the oral
tradition, and here again Scheub ( Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch) is the
strongest proponent of the idea that formative elements in Xhosa fiction stem from the
tenets of the so-called ntsomi tradition. He argues that the basic oral narrative
movements, most often from a known
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place to an unknown or dangerous one, are preserved in much Xhosa prose. Further, the
rapid action and often minimal characterization are traits of the oral tradition. Most of all,
symmetrical patterning is a means of structuring both fiction and oral narrative. For
example, in the "good girl/bad girl" pattern, found in oral traditions throughout the
continent as well as in Xhosa written fiction, a virtuous or obedient character is
consistently compared with one who acts in the opposite manner, the good person in the
end winning out over the bad one. Hence, there was a built-in attraction to the familiar
patterning and allegorizing in a work like The Pilgrim's Progress. Kunene notes the same
kind of pattern in a subcategory of his "transgenerational story progression": the
"pampered child" versus the "harshly-treated step-child" ("Problems"). 10

The Government and African Languages

A second problem raised by the examination of Xhosa fiction is the question of African
languages and their use by African governments. In the case of Xhosa, censorship and
repression were common concerns from before the turn of the century. The example of
the Sotho writer Thomas Mofolo is a famous case in point. Mofolo's first novel, Moeti oa
bochabela ( 1907; Traveler to the east), was eagerly published by a mission press
because it was written in the Bunyanesque allegorical format, praising the great bounties
of the Christian West and condemning the excesses and savagery of traditional Sotho life.
Mofolo's second novel, Pitseng ( 1910), was also published expeditiously because its
theme again reaffirmed the values of Christianity and a solid Western-type education.
When the author offered his classic work Chaka for publication in 1910, there was a
delay of fifteen years before the novel saw print. Though the book was a rather
unflattering portrait of the great Zulu king, it did not contain a clear Christian message. In
fact, it used as one of its central literary devices the decidedly non-Christian practices of
divination and "magic." Furthermore, whether the portrait was unflattering or not, the
mission press was probably not prepared to publish an account of such a powerful
African conqueror for a readership whose past it sought to erase or denigrate. Colonial
government presses preferred works for the primary or secondary school child. Ideally,
these works were simplistically wrought, providing a bit of "moral" guidance while the
student learned to read and appreciate the connections between his own writers and the
translations of the "great" books from Europe. Kunene, when talking about the process of
"self-devaluation," gives several causes for the problem, and among them are both
conscious and unconscious constraints that led to moralizing and unimaginative
syncretisms (" African Vernacular Writing"). On the other hand, there always existed the
possibility for writers to appropriate the imported literary elements and use them for their
own, often nationalistic, purposes. 11
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Somali Literature
Though the area that was to become the independent nation of Somalia had for centuries
embraced Islam and therefore had a long history of scholars and poets who wrote in
Arabic, the Somali language has been written for only a relatively short period of time.
At first Somali poets and record keepers used the Arabic script to write the language.
Over time several scripts were developed, and these reflected the complex colonial
history of Somalia; because each of these scripts carried some kind of sociopolitical
baggage, it was not until 1972 that the nation finally adopted an official orthography. 12
The Somali-speaking people have for centuries possessed a popular and highly valued
oral poetry, traditionally sung and composed by bards at all levels of Somali society.
Despite its association with oral Arabic poetry and later with written Arabic poetry,
Somali poetry, even when written with Arabic characters, managed to maintain its
distinctive identity, in part because the Arabic language in Somalia did not have the
intrinsic artistic or political prestige that accrued to it in, say, East Africa.
The origins of modern Somali literature can arguably be traced to the man who is still
acknowledged as the nation's greatest poet: Sayyid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan ( 1856-
1921). Referred to as the Mad Mullah by the British, his longtime political enemies,
Maxamed can rightfully be called the first great Somali nationalist. He led a group known
as the dervishes on a protracted campaign of resistance to English imperial efforts. He
was also a master of oral Somali and Arabic poetry. An example of why he is held in
such high esteem as both poet and nationalist is provided by B. W. Andrzejewski. In his
poem "Xuseenow caqligu kaa ma baxo idam Ilaahaye" ( O Xuseen, God willing may
good sense never leave you), Maxamed righteously criticizes
The men who of their free choice carry out menial tasks
for the infidels
Those who, though uncoerced, go on errands for them as if
they were bound to them by the loving bonds of kinship
And who became like the offspring of the Christians and made
a life-protecting pact with the Europeans.
(Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 348-49)
Despite arguments about how Maxamed, a consummate politician, really felt about the
majority of Somalis who were not of his own lineage ( Laitin), he is unquestionably
venerated today for both his art and political struggles.
It is important to note this link between the poet and the politician in Somalia for, as
David Laitin emphasizes, the spoken word has more than purely aesthetic power in that
society:
The extensive and conscious cultivation of the art of speaking is one of the most
striking features of Somali culture.... Quotations from poems and
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alliterative proverbs, characterized by their pithiness and condensed imagery,
adorn the prose style of sermons and speeches at assemblies, arbitration tribunals
and political meetings.... And so poets in Somalia have political power in their
own society far beyond their colleagues in other cultures. ( 37 )
Given the importance of verbal forms of art and wisdom on the continent of Africa, this
claim requires a contextual tempering and qualification. But it must also be
acknowledged that Somalia is in the almost unique situation of having essentially one
culture and language in one nation—recognizing the great diversity of families and clans,
as well as a small minority whose first language is not necessarily Somali—and it may
therefore be quite true that the language and its literature exert an exceptionally powerful
influence on contemporary culture and politics.
Somali writing of this century has mainly consisted of poetry, a good deal of it
constituting the written record of orally composed works. Said S. Samatar has written an
extensive study of Somali oral poetry and prose, and his work on the oral prose of rural
Somalia is exceptionally helpful in understanding the forms of Somali oratory and the
roots of the nation's written literature. Written prose has been sporadic, at least until
recently. A short story by Axmed Cartan Xaarge "Qawdhan iyo Qoran" ( Qawdhan and
Qoran), which reached print in 1967, depicts the tragic situation of two lovers forced
apart by the woman's arranged marriage. Apart from this story, Andrzejewski notes only
a published but unproduced play, some poetry appearing in journals, and some literary
essays. After 1969 activity picked up, with plays and historical novels representing a
trend whereby written prose was moving away from oral influences. Yet above all, poetry
still dominates the Somali literary scene, and the most prevalent medium of
dissemination, aside from live recitation, is nationwide radio broadcasts. John Johnson,
B. W. Andrzejewski, and David Laitin all emphasize the great power and passion of this
art form; whether the content is mainly nationalistic or harks back to older times, the
poems are appreciated, argued over, and interpreted by many Somalis:
Most Somali poets now rely on writing in the composition of their works, but
their poems reach the public mainly in oral form at private or public recitals,
through the radio and more recently through tapes, which circulate throughout the
country. Those poets who have achieved fame in the New Era have done so
through such oral channels and not through their published works. (
Andrzejewski, in Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch 375) 13
The emphasis on nation-building by the Somali government has put a premium on
literacy, and most Somali writers are today urged to develop new texts for primary and
secondary school students, as well as technical manuals for farmers and medical workers.
There are, to be sure, a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts of Somali prose
fiction, poetry, and drama, but the concerns and priorities of the government printers
make it
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unlikely that these works will see print for some time. For Somalia, the greatest literary
battle had been won when the government finally chose a controversial Latin script to
represent the language—a choice based, among other concerns, on the facility of
typesetting and publishing the language for workers, teachers, and students. Somalia was
not, in practice, differing much from the policies implemented by British colonial
educational mandates. The essence of the literacy policy differs substantially, however,
from its colonial predecessors. The educational materials are geared toward furthering
true nationalist goals for an independent nation, forming them in the language and culture
of the entire polity.

Literature in Swahili
Farther south along the East African coast, including the southern part of Somalia,
Swahili has for centuries been spoken as a first language. It is important, when discussing
Swahili literature, to distinguish between the language and the people. The language was
first the sole property of the people who lived in areas of the coastlines of what are now
modern Kenya and Tanzania. It is their form of the language that is still referred to as
classical Swahili. As the language spread in this century to people of non
Swahili
descent, the most popular form of the language came to be called standard Swahili. Over
the years, the Arab and Indian settlers who helped to establish commerce between this
region of Africa, the African peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent mixed with the
indigenous African population to form the people who are, rather generically, known as
the Swahili. This contact with the Arab and Asian worlds can be dated back to the first
century C.E. Arabic was the spoken and written language of these early traders who came
to stay. Literature, in the form of historical records and poetry, was exclusively written in
Arabic. As the Swahili language developed, it became the chosen medium of daily
speech, but Arabic remained the language of literature and religious rite.
The oldest known literary manuscript in Swahili, written in Arabic script, is the
seventeenth-century poem "Hamziya." As in numerous African literatures whose written
forms were associated with either Christianity or Islam, a good deal of Swahili writing
was hagiographic. Heroes of stories or poems were often either Muslim saints or allies of
famous religious historical figures. In fact, one of the great epic poems of the Swahili
people is about the "pagan" king Fumo Liyongo ( 1160-1204?), though in most literary
accounts of his life he is somehow associated with the Muslim heroes who fought against
the non-Muslim Bantu-speaking peoples ( Ohly, in Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and
Tyloch 462).
Most early writing in Swahili was carried out by scholars, poets, and clerics who were
devout Muslims and who had little empathy for the lives or cultures of the nonbelievers
in the interior. That situation would change with
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the coming of colonial rule and the use and eventual official adoption of Swahili as a
lingua franca in the Tanganyika (later Tanzania), Uganda, and Kenya colonies. Though
the Swahili language had been spread by the interior trade routes of the East Coast slave
trade and other forms of long-range commerce, the use of the language to facilitate
colonial efforts was to lead to a much wider network of speakers and writers. 14
Gérard and others look to 1925 as a marker for the birth of "modern Swahili literature"
(see Gérard, African Language Literatures134 and Hellier). At that time an education
conference moved to adopt a single vernacular language for schools in British East
Africa. Simply put, this meant that non
Muslims and non-Swahili were to begin reading
and eventually writing creatively in that language. The early writers of this new era, as in
many parts of Africa, wrote for juvenile audiences, in publications that became school
"readers" or primers. During this early period, the most popular Swahili writer by far was
a customs official from Tanga named Shaaban Robert ( 1909-62). Shaaban was a poet,
novelist, and essayist. Though his parents were Yao, from Malawi, Shaaban's writing,
personality, and ethos were quintessentially Swahili. A master of the language, Shaaban
Robert extolled the virtues of his culture, a culture that, he emphasizes, is African and not
Arab or Western. He, like many Swahili and Arabic poets, was an inveterate moralizer,
going so far in his didacticism as to include glossaries at the end of his works so that non-
Swahili Swahili-language readers could delve into the nuances of the language ( Harries,
"Tale," " Swahili Literature"). Along these lines, he was an advocate of culture and
language as important adjuncts to the colonial types of education:
Perhaps better literature than that from my own wretched pen already exists in
East Africa, but the disadvantages of the foreign language in which it is written
are not negligible. Africans are forced to get knowledge from it with much
difficulty, like children fed from the bottle instead of from their mother's breast.
My writing will be in the one important language of East Africa. (Cited in Gérard,
African Language Literatures138)
By 1951 Shaaban was a full-time writer and chair of the Swahili Language Committee
and a member of the East African Language Bureau. 15 He was, in other words, in a
position to promote the language he called the most important in East Africa. Though at
times the moral elements of his poems and prose recalled the mostly conservative
elements of the Muslim roots of the literature, Shaaban is today revered as a patriot who
strove to create a truly national literature. He remains immensely popular.
But my desire here is not so much to focus on Shaaban Robert, or even the many talented
poets and prose stylists of the pre-Independence era—before, say, 1960—as it is to see
Swahili in both its national and nationalist contexts. Though a major national language at
the time of Tanzania's Independence ( 1961), it did not immediately become that nation's
official language. Sim
 -299-
ilarly, Swahili in Uganda was treated as simply one of several national languages, as it
was, despite its greater historical and immediate constituency, in Kenya. In all three East
African nations, then, Swahili was a language of varied importance, yet it was English,
the language of the former colonial rulers, that became the official language. It was not
until after the famous Arusha Declaration ( 1967) of Tanzania's president, Julius Nyerere,
that the choice was made to use Swahili as the nation's official language. That decision
meant that education, commerce, science, parliamentary debate, newspapers, and the
electronic media were to use that one language as the principle means of communication.
One outcome of this new focus was the establishment of the Society for Swahili
Composition and Poetry (Chana cha Usanifu wa Kiswahili na Ushairi Tanzania, or
UKUTA), which was mandated to promote Swahili writing that would both aid in the
literacy education of the populace and provide inspiration for the understanding and
conceptualizing of national goals. An immediate outcome of UKUTA's effort was a flood
of poetry, referred to as ngonjera, that stressed patriotism and the various collective
projects instituted by the government. Poems about the Arusha Declaration, Tanzania's
struggle against imperialism, and the glories of the Ujamaa village projects were the
order of the day. One is reminded of the cynical description of Soviet socialist realism in
writing and film as a case of "boy-meets-tractor" romantic plotting. Not surprisingly,
Western, and not a few African, literary critics were not impressed by such heavy-handed
efforts, suggesting that the social content of the poetry was overwhelming any aesthetic
or artistic considerations ( Harries, "Swahili Literature," and Gérard, African Language
Literatures 147-48).
As in other regions of Africa, prose was often relegated to the role of a recorder, a tool to
reproduce and preserve oral narrative traditions and historical events. One of Shaaban
Robert's many contributions to Swahili literature was his role as a bridge between the
older generation of Muslim poets and the newer post-Independence writers. In that role
he introduced the novel to the language, or at least a prose form that was as close to the
European idea of "novel" as Swahili had up to that time come. In 1960 Muhammad Said
Abdullah took the Swahili novel further by writing the first full-length detective story,
which nonetheless was still set in the classical Swahili/Arabic mode of moralizing
literature. Faraji Katalambulla moved further away from Shaaban Robert by writing an
urban police thriller in standard Swahili, Simuya kifo ( 1965 ; Phone call to death). By the
late 1960s writers in Tanzania and Kenya were producing novels in growing number. In
many ways, these newer themes and directions were presaged by the so
called Tales
from Tanga in the mid-1960s. During this period in the Tanga area of Tanzania, young
journalists and writers published stories in magazines and newspapers that ran serially
and became very popular. They were often violent and explicitly sexual—a combination
that any bookseller would
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confirm as a sure-fire formula—depictions of contemporary urban and rural lifestyles (
Harries, "Tale"). The language of these narratives was also a contemporary form of
Swahili as it is spoken by urban dwellers. It is filled with slang and borrowings that are
often the provenance of non-first-speakers. The stories are comparable, at least in tone,
with the Onitsha literature of Nigeria, wherein urban realism and the depiction of the
plight of the innocent in such settings was a real and vibrant focus. Ironically, the
political goals of the Tanzanian government proved to be the liberating force that would
allow nondoctrinaire new writers, some influenced by the Tanga example, to see
publication.
Various styles and themes were to grow out of that post- Arusha era. Perhaps the most
liberating effect was the sense that Swahili was to be used as an official language and that
the growth of the language was open to new ideas and vocabulary. The government
formed scholarly bodies to renovate and shape the language to suit a modern world of
science and technology. New vocabulary had to be found for things that had never
needed description before. In the field of literature this has had similar ramifications. For
instance, the Swahili detective novel soon became one of the most popular contemporary
genres. In both Kenya and Tanzania, newspapers, magazines, and books carried the
works of writers like Eddie Ganzel, who successfully borrowed from such pulp stylists as
Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. The detective writers had to coin new phrases to
describe the blue smoke that was alternately curling up either from the hero's nostrils as
he coolly smoked a cigarette or from his gun after he coolly dispatched his enemies.
In the valuable introduction to her current bibliography of Swahili literature, Elena
Zubkova Bertoncini provides information on themes and trends. She points out that the
audience for "popular" writing is growing so quickly that it is an almost causal element in
the concurrent rapid growth of literacy in Tanzania. The growing audience of readers has
spurred a parallel boom in publishing houses. She notes that reader preferences have
shifted from "tale and romance" to the "realistic novel and short story"—realistic, in the
context of Swahili literature, being a relative term. Bertoncini observes that the detective
genre is so popular that "serious" Swahili writers have attempted to use it as a means for
getting across socially relevant themes to the masses. Finally, she refers to the sizeable
percentage of thrillers listed in her bibliography, almost one third of the titles, many of
which are carbon copies of U.S. and foreign spy and detective films (527-28). While
these thrillers lack the moralizing and didacticism of traditional Swahili writing,
Bertoncini suggests that a lot of this social prescriptiveness is being carried out in
contemporary Swahili written drama. The reason for this, she theorizes, may be that
"theatre is near to the oral tradition which is basically didactic" (528).
Popular literature is not the only product of Swahili authors. Tanzanian and Kenyan
writers have produced some extremely interesting and success
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ful works, pleasing to both the average reader and the more demanding literary critic.
Among these writers, the Tanzanian Euphrase Kezilahabi is the most praised for his
innovative and linguistically evocative efforts. His novels include the highly regarded
Rosa mistika ( 1971), which exposes a serious problem of the abuse and harassment of
schoolgirls by their teachers, and Dunia uwanja wa fujo ( 1975; The world—a field of
chaos), a complex story that moves its protagonist from life in a rural area to a small
town, where he experiences all the concomitant corruptions, then to a form of salvation
on the land as he works hard to amass a large farm, and finally, ironically, to a tragic end
when the state collectivizes and socializes all large landholdings.
Ebrahim Hussein is Tanzania's best-known playwright, and his works Mashetani ( 1971;
Devils), Wakati ukuta ( 1971; Time is a wall ), and especially Kinjeketile ( 1969) are
critically lauded. Another Tanzanian, Penina Muhando, has also gained fame for her
dramas. She differs from Hussein in her approach to both audience and plotting, but some
scholars feel she is reaching the masses more effectively than any other playwright. 16
Her works include Tambueni haki zetu ( 1973; Recognize our rights ), Heshima yangu (
1974; My dignity ), and Pambo ( 1975), as well as several unpublished plays. Across the
border from Tanzania, one of Kenya's best young novelists is Katama G. C. Mkangi,
whose novel Ukiwa ( 1975; Desolation) is a depiction of a tragic love story wherein a
young Mombasa couple are separated when the girl goes off to study in Nairobi,
forgetting her lover and, more importantly, her background and cultural ties.
In Tanzania the proliferation of works published in Swahili, initially encouraged by
government decree, is accelerating as the reading audience similarly grows. In Kenya the
growth is less obvious, perhaps owing in large part to the still-nebulous status of Swahili
as a semiofficial language. Theorists such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o go so far as to suggest
that Swahili and other Kenyan languages have not only lacked active promotion from the
government but have in some cases been repressed, especially when they threaten to raise
the general level of consciousness of a "national culture." Whatever the actual situation, it
is not unfair to say that the popularity of Swahili writing is nonetheless growing and
appealing to many readers across ethnic and national boundaries. That growth alone is a
positive sign, since the lively evolution of Swahili literature is assured as its audience and
pool of potential writers and critics grows. Despite the many economic and political
problems facing Tanzania internally and externally, its language policy has irreversibly
led the nation towards the fulfillment of the linguistic integration of a national culture.

Bemba Literature
The final African-language literature to be examined here is Bemba writing from Zambia.
Historically, the Bemba people were among the most powerful
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groups in what is today the nation of Zambia. They live in the northern part of the
country, and Bemba is spoken over a wide area. Again, it is important to separate the
people and the language, since Bemba is the best known of a cluster of languages in
northern Zambia and has, since the days of colonial rule, been promoted in literature,
school texts, and radio broadcasting. Though linguists might argue over the current
definition of the languages in the Bemba family—that is, whether some of the languages
are actually dialects—it is safe to assume that because of its status as a national language
Bemba is today the dominant member of that family. Like Yoruba in Nigeria and Xhosa,
in southern Africa, Bemba was the language of the earliest group in Zambia to be
evangelized, and consequently it was used in early translations and education, thus
becoming the standard model for literary language. In the case of the Bemba people it is
also significant that they were the dominant military state in their region of Zambia at
least two centuries before the coming of colonial rule. 17
As was a general trend in the British colonies, an African Literature Committee was
established in 1937 for what was then Northern Rhodesia. Writing in local languages was
encouraged by the offering of annual prizes for the best works. This committee also
sought teaching texts for schools, which were to be produced by local writers. By 1948
the committee combined with one in Nyasaland to form the Northern Rhodesia and
Nyasaland Publications Bureau. One of the first publications of the bureau was a Nyanja-
language novelette by Ned B. Linje, Nthano ya Tione ( 1947; The story of Tione). In a
short time, as in other parts of the continent, European and South African publishers saw
the potential for a sizeable market and began publishing works in local languages,
especially, at first, in Nyanja, a language spoken in Malawi and Zambia. It was not long,
however, before the largest language group in Zambia, Bemba, found outlets for
publication in the literary market. Though Gérard( African Language Literatures) and
Kunene ("Analysis") locate the origin of modern Bemba writing in the publication in
1960 of Stephen A. Mpashi's novel Cekesoni aingila busoja ( Jackson becomes a
soldier), the novel actually was first published in 1948. Mpashi had therefore been an
active writer and chronicler for some years and had a loyal readership among the literate
Bemba-speakers and schoolchildren. Two of Mpashi's earlier works were also popular:
Uwakwensho bushiku ( 1951[ 1955]; He who hurried you through the night) and
Uwauma nafyala ( 1955; He who beats his mother-in-law). 18
Scholars tend to praise the above three works for their structure, themes, and language—
the latter quality being as important as the other two among Bemba readers. A look at
some of Mpashi's other publications suggests his important role as a chronicler of Bemba
culture, mores, and history: Umucinshi ( 1952; Traditional manners, [lit. Respect or
Homage); Icibemba cesu na mano yaciko ( 1955; Our Bemba language and its wisdom),
a collection of proverbs and their explication; and Ubusuma bubili ( 1955; [ Two kinds
of] goodness[es]), detailing desirable qualities in women. Mpashi's role as a
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cultural preserver and, at times, validator recalls the seminal functions of many early
writers in African languages. Where numerous elements of language and culture may
have originally been fluid or relatively localized, the African-language writer became the
conduit and editor-arranger for much of this information, and after a while the published
works themselves became not only codifiers but sources of linguistic and cultural
validation. 19 And of course Mpashi was not alone, even within Bemba literature. Many
writers followed his example in one genre or another, whether it was in producing
didactic school readers, chronicling oral traditions, or writing history or fictional
narrative.
At least among the writers of the I950s and early I960s, there was often a tie to either an
educational or a religious organization. Didacticism and some sort of religious or moral
message was, as in other similar literatures, the order of the day. Several of Mpashi's
books were published or sponsored by the Catholic church, the most obvious instance
being his historical work Abapatili bafika ku babemba ( 1956; The Catholic priests arrive
among the Bemba). A similar work by M. K. Chifwaila, Ululumbi lwa mulanda
kukakaata ( 1956; The fame of the stubborn poor person), details some of the difficult
times brought to the Bemba by the slave trade and the concurrent wars with the Ngoni
people. The "solution" to those hard times was found in the coming of missionaries and
the institution of a new and benevolent colonial administration.
Aside from Mpashi's writings on culture, many writers put together collections of
traditional tales. For instance, Paul M. B. Mushindo, a renowned Bemba minister, wrote
Imilumbe ne nshimi: Shintu bashimika ku lubemba ( 1957; Stories [with and without
songs]: The ones they tell in the Bemba area). M. K. Chifwaila also wrote Amalibu ya
kuilombela ( 1958; Self‐ inflicted misfortunes), a book of traditional tales, mostly of the
imilumbe type, that is, stories without songs that usually have explanations appended to
the end. The title of the collection is also the title of one of the stories and is, itself, a
common saying used to warn others about greed or meddling in things best left alone. An
offshoot of this type of writing can be seen in J. M. Bwalya 's Umupushi na bambi (
1970; The beggar and others), a collection of stories based in part on oral narratives but
admittedly reworked into something more akin to literary short stories.
These titles suggest both continuity and diversity. Mpashi was clearly a role model of
sorts for other Bemba writers. A perceptive dissertation by Dr. Kalunga Lutato, "The
Influences of Oral Narrative Traditions on the Novels of Stephen A. Mpashi," examines
"traditional Bemba aesthetics." Lutato's information is drawn in part from Mpashi's own
Ifyo balemba amabuku ( 1962; How they write books), a kind of how-to manual for
prospective Bemba authors, and in part from Lutato's knowledge of traditional life and art
of the people he grew up with. One of the more interesting outcomes of his discussion is
its reminder of the powerful role played by "explanation" or
-304-
didacticism in traditional thinking about art. This is not to say that the colonial-era
presses encouraged any other type of writing for what eventually would be used for
school readers; they most often selected this very kind of sermonizing over other themes
or forms. Still, the confluence of the didactic oral tale—there were of course other kinds
of oral tale—and the colonial-missionary criteria for publications is obviously responsible
for the overall frequency of didactic writing in earlier versions of African-language
literatures.
Mpashi himself advises writers of the value of didacticism:
In fiction, one should bear one thing in mind, and this is that, although the book is
fiction, it should have something to teach the readers.... It would not be
aesthetically pleasing to write a book from which, when one is done with the
reading, one does not retain a worthwhile message at all because, then, the writer
will have failed. Written fiction is similar to oral narrative performances. You
perform a narrative, the audience apprehends a worthwhile message. (Cited in
Lutato 32)
One is tempted to see in Mpashi's words a slightly subversive piece of advice that has
more to do with getting published in the colonial-era press than with a real Bemba
aesthetic description. In any event, various studies of oral traditions indicate that the so-
called didactic elements in those traditions are much more fluid than earlier researchers
had supposed. (See, for instance, Okpewho and Cosentino.) In fact, what writing initially
does is to reduce many of the elements of fluidity into a frozen set of truisms and pieces
of lore and law. Although Bemba sources themselves may point to the importance of a
story's message or moral, such a comment is based on the overall effect of a live
performance, not just its obvious homiletic qualities. Lutato accordingly notes elements
of the Bemba aesthetic, ubusuma, which also relate to form and "effect." It is only when
all salient aspects are skillfully worked that a tale or, today, a piece of literature may be
considered a successful work of art.

The Writer's Language

African authors have been reassessing their own roles vis-à-vis the languages in which
they write. One of the earliest to do so was Ousmane Sembène, who, tired of "enriching
the French language," chose to make films that would reach his desired audience in
Senegalese languages—specifically Wolof and Diolla. In reality, literacy that is
functionally greater than being able to read and write one's name is still decades away
from a truly representative proportion of African people. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o discovered, through personal experience, that his many critical essays and
speeches in English did not bring down government censure onto his head. However, his
involvement with the production and writing of a Gikuyu‐ language play that had a
theme critical of current conditions directly resulted
-305-
in his imprisonment and the loss of his position as chair of the Department of Literature
at the University of Nairobi. Gérard says of this incident:
As long as Ngũgĩ, or Kibera or the many others who were critical of the
corruption and exploitation characteristic of the Kenyatta regime voiced their
objections in English novels and plays which can only be understood by a small
number of highly educated people, most of whom belong to the privileged class
anyway, there was obviously no need to ban them, for as Fibi Muene aptly put it,
"if a play is in English or Kiswahili, it leaves out the majority of the people in this
country." Conditions become vastly different when a gifted writer manages to
phrase his message in the language really spoken by men, so that the majority of
the people can grasp what he has to say. ( African Language Literatures314)

Conclusion
In most cases, African-language writing was initially sponsored by outside religious or
political interests. There was a need at those periods for merging local languages and
conceptual frames with the information and concerns being spread by the newer
institutions. In almost every case, literature growing out of such conditions began by
imitation: Arabic poetic forms, church hymns, allegorical tales inspired by The Pilgrim's
Progress, hagiographic works, or the recording of texts of traditional narratives and
poetry. Over time, themes of immediate relevance inevitably crept into these literatures.
Depending on the sociopolitical situation of the languages and governments where these
literatures were evolving, experimentation was either encouraged or censured. While
Babalola does not suggest a strong degree of colonial or independent government
censorship of Yoruba writing, he does lament that the promotion of the language was for
some time not all it should have been. In South Africa, and among other colonial-era
literatures, Xhosa writing was subject to official control. Before 1990 the most common
forms of Black South African literary activity seem to have been urban street theater and
poetry published quickly on mimeograph or photocopy machines, or even recited at
gatherings and not written down at all. The format of the art work reflects both the
immediacy and volatility of the situation as well as the obvious risks taken when
"seditious" ideas are committed to paper or print.
A survey made by the Zambian government's Institute for African Studies in 1973
unearthed a revealing statistic. Of the many Zambians polled on their preference of
language for broadcasts from Radio Zambia, a large majority stated that if they could
not listen to their own language they preferred to hear programming in other Zambian
languages, even those they did not understand, rather than in English (Mytton 27-39).
Shaaban Robert's comparison of foreign and native languages to bottle feeding and
breast feeding may be the ultimate statement on the relevance of African-language
literatures and their role in shaping the future of the continent.
-306-

Notes
I. I am greatly indebted to several scholars who are working in the field of African
language
writing for their help and advice in the preparation of this chapter. David Laitin, at the
University of Chicago, provided information on Somali literature; Richard Lepine, at
Northwestern University, commented on an earlier draft of the material on Swahili writing;
John Chileshe of the University of Zambia, in 1986-87 a visiting Fulbright scholar at the
University of Wisconsin, added suggestions and corrections of the entire chapter and on the
Bemba material in particular; and Oyekan Owomoyela provided an overall critique of the
article as well as specific comments on the Yoruba-language section.

2. In addition to the numerous studies of Ethiopian-language literature, Albert Gérard 's Four
African Language Literatures offers a fairly comprehensive examination, with a broad-
ranging bibliography of earlier scholarship as well. See also Gérard, African Literatures,
and Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch.

3. Again, Gérard, African Language Literatures, has a valuable bibliography of work on

Sierra Leonean and Liberian language writing. Some of the more illuminating studies
include Jones, Dalby, and Goody, Cole, and Scribner. Simon Battestini, at Georgetown
University, is currently preparing a book-length study of indigenous African writing,
including systems that are not specifically syllabic scripts as well as plastic arts used as
 symbolic systems of communications.

4. Gérard ( African Language Literatures173-86) discusses the differences in, say, French and
British colonial policies concerning the uses of indigenous languages for education and
literary purposes. While I think there was in actuality a more complicated situation (for
instance, Ngũgĩ[ Decolonising the Mind] sees no essential differences in these policies), an
exploration of this history is slightly out of the realm of the current examination. Gérard's
bibliography for his discussion is an informative one for anyone wanting to explore the
question in greater detail.

5. Besides sections on Yoruba writing in Gérard, African Language Literatures, and

Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch, see also Babalola and Gérard; Babalola; and
Olatunji.

6. Fagunwa's three successive fiction works are Igbó Olódùmarè ( 1949; The jungle of the
almighty), Ìrèké-oníbùdó ( 1949; The camp-commandant's sugarcane), and Irinkerindo ninu
igbo elegbeje ( 1954: Wanderings in the forest of innumerable wonders). See also
Bamgbose.

7. The king's name is a thinly veiled approximation of that of the Nigerian politician Chief
Obafemi Awolowo.

8. A. C. Jordan cites an example where the Xhosa newspaper Isigidimi publishes such a
protest. The protest, using direct allusive and allegorical references to Tiyo Soga's
translation of Bunyan's classic, treats the issue of voting and the dilemma of having such
poor candidates to choose from. Jordan's study, cut short by his untimely death, remains one
of the more lucid and revealing works on an African-language literature written by a native
speaker of that language.

9. See Jordan ( 100 -102) for an example of how literate Xhosa wrote letters to protest a
certain newspaper's editorial policies.

10. Scheub makes the same point in a much broader survey ("Review"), claiming that the roots
of the novel were indigenous to Africa and owed only a small debt to the coming of Europe.
II. See for instance, the discussion below of Shaaban Robert's reputation as a

-307-
nationalist. Also, Ngũgĩ( Decolonising the Mind) provides several examples of Gikuyu
nationalists writing protest literature during the time of the so-called Mau Mau struggle.

12. David Laitin documents the history of Somali writing and the many political ramifications
inherent in the search for an official orthography.

13. Andrzejewski has an extensive bibliography at the end of his article; see in particular
Johnson.

14. For a powerful and thought-provoking study of how one colonial power used the Swahili
language for its own purposes, see Fabian, and also Whiteley.

15. Shaaban, often seen as the father of modern Swahili writing, held a position in the
Language Bureau that paralleled the job performed by Stephen Mpashi as head of the
Zambia Publications Bureau after Independence. Mpashi too is the acknowledged father of
another African-language literature, Bemba.

16. An extensive discussion in English of Muhando's work may be found in Jesse L. Mollel and
Stephen Arnold's "An Introduction to the Drama of Penina Muhando and the Theme of
Wapotovu na kuwarudi ( Deviants and rehabilitation)." See also Mugo.

17. See Roberts for a detailed exposition of Bemba history and their expansion in the northern
part of what is now independent Zambia.

18. The translations of Bemba titles are my literal renderings. Both Lutato and Chileshe
translate some of the same titles in a more poetic or allusive way. For instance, to suggest
the actual proverbial reference that Uwauma nafyala makes, Chileshe uses a title taken
from a familiar English proverb: "As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb." See
Chileshe and Lutato.
19. Though Mpashi is seen as someone who wrote down and thereby preserved the "true"
Bemba language and body of traditions, he often used borrowed English terms in his urban
novels. See Lehmann, Kashoki, and Chileshe. See also Maxwell for his account of how
once-fluid cosmological beliefs and ritual practices became formalized and narrowed into a
more monotheistic framework when writing was introduced to Bemba society through
missionary and colonial intervention.

Works Cited
Andrzejewski, B. W., S. Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch, eds. Literatures in African
Languages: Theoretical Issues and Sample Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
Babalola, Adeboye. "A Survey of Modern Literature in the Yoruba, Efik, and Hausa
Languages." In Introduction to Nigerian Literature, edited by Bruce King. New York:
Africana, 1972.
Babalola, Adeboye, and A. Gérard. "A Brief Survey of Creative Writing in Yoruba."
Review of National Literatures14, no. 2 ( 1971): 188-205.
Bamgbose, Ayo. The Novels of D. O. Fagunwa. Benin City: Ethiope Press, 1974.
Bertoncini, Elena Zubkova. "An Annotated Bibliography of Swahili Fiction and Drama
Published between 1975 and 1984." Research in African Literatures 17, nos. I-2 ( 1971):
525-62.
Chileshe, John. "Literacy, Literature and Ideological Formation: The Zambian Case."
Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 1983.
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Cosentino, Donald. Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in
Mende Story Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Dalby, David. "A Survey of the Indigenous Scripts of Liberia and Sierra Leone: Vai,
Loma, Kpelle and Bassa." African Language Studies 7 ( 1981): 3-5.
—, ed. Language and History in Africa. New York: Africana, 1970.
Fabian, Johannes. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the
former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Fagunwa, D. O. Ògbójú ode níní igbó irúnmalè . London: Nelson, 1950. Forest of a
Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga. Translated by Wole Soyinka. London: Nelson,
1968.
Gérard, Albert. Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.
—. African Language Literatures: An Introduction to the Literary History of Subsaharan
Africa. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1981.
Goody, Jack, M. Cole, and S. Scribner. "Writing and Formal Operations: A Case Study
among the Vai." Africa 46, no. 3 ( 1971): 289-304.
Harries, Lyndon. "Tale from Tanga: A Literary Beginning." East African Journal 3, no.
2( 1966):4-6.
—. " Swahili Literature in the National Context." Review of National Literatures 2, no. 2
( 1971): 45-50.
Hellier, A. B. "Swahili Prose Literature." Bantu Studies 14, no. I ( 1940): 247-57.
Johnson, John W. Heellooy Heelleellooy: The Development of the Genre of the Heello in
Modern Somali Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.
Jones, Eldred D. "The Potentialities of Krio as a Literary Language." Sierra Leone
Studies 9 ( 1957): 40-48.
Jordan, A. C. Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.
Kashoki, Mubanga E. "Town Bemba: A Sketch of Its Main Characteristics." African
Social Research 13( 1972):161-86.
Kunene, Daniel P. "African Vernacular Writing: An Essay in Self-Devaluation." African
Social Research9 ( 1970): 639-59.
—. " Problems in Creative Writing: The Example of Southern Africa." Review of
National Literatures 2, no. 2 ( 1971):81-103.
—. "An Analysis of Stephen Mpashi's Uwauma nafyala." In Neo-African Literature and
Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Ulla Schild.
Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976.
Laitin, David. Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali Experience. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Lehman, Dorothea. Loanwords in S. A. Mpashi's Bemba Story "Uwakwensho bushiku."
University of Zambia, Institute for Social Research Bulletin, no. 4 ( Lusaka, 1969).
Lutato, Kalunga S. "The Influence of Oral Narrative Tradition on the Novels of Stephen
A. Mpashi." Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1980.
Maxwell, Kevin B. Bemba Myth and Ritual. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.
Mollel, Jesse L., and Stephen Arnold. "An Introduction to the Drama of Penina Muhando
and the Theme of Wapotovu na kuwarudi (Deviants and rehabilitation)." Greenfield
Review 8, nos. I-2 ( 1980): 188-202.
 -309-
Mpashi, Stephen Andrea. Cekesoni aingila ubusoja [ Jackson becomes a soldier]. Cape
Town: Oxford University Press, 1950.
—. Uwakwensho bushiku [ He who hurried you through the night]. Cape Town: Oxford
University Press, 1951; 1955.
—. Uwauma nafyala [ He who beats his mother-in-law]. Lusaka: Publication Bureau,
1955.
Mugo, Micere G. "Gerishon Ngugi, Peninah [sic] Muhando and Ebrahim Hussein: Plays
in Swahili." African Literature Today 8 ( 1976): 137-41.
Mytton, Graham. Listening, Looking and Learning: Report on a National Media Survey
in Zambia, 1970-73. Lusaka, Zambia: Institute for African Studies, 1974.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Writers in Politics. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981.
—. Decolonising the Mind. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1986.
Okpewho, Isidore. Myth in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Olatunji, Olatunde. "Religion in Literature: The Christianity of J. S. Sowande (Sobo
Arobiodu)." Orita 7 ( Ibadan, 1974): 3-21.
—. Adebayo Faleti: A Study of His Poems, 1954-1964. Ibadan, Nigeria: Heinemann
Educational Books, 1982.
—. Features of Yoruba Oral Poetry. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1984.
Roberts, Andrew. A History of the Bemba. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.
Samatar, Said S. Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayyid Mahammad
'Abdille Hasan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Scheub, Harold. "A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature." African Studies
Review 28, nos. 2-3 ( 1985): I-72.
Whiteley, Wilfred. Swahili: The Rise of a National Language. London: Methuen, 1969.
-310-

11 African Women Writers:

Toward a Literary History
CAROLE BOYCE DAVIES AND
ELAINE SAVORY FIDO

African Women Writers and the African Literary Canon

African women writers 1 engage in several different discourses, which give voice to their
many realities. They are conscious of neocolonialism and are interested in fighting
through their work for a greater genuine independence for Africa. They are critical of the
exploitation of women. African women explore what is useful and what is dangerous to
them as women in traditional cultures. At the same time, they examine which influences
from the West (or from countries such as the former Soviet Union and Japan) are positive
or negative in their environment. They write of realities in ways male African writers do
not. They also pay particular attention to the insider-outsider dichotomy, because they are
often aware of participating in their societies but not always being part of the
contemporary political decision-making structures. Because of these varied challenges,
African women writers bring specific perspectives to the evaluation of their societies.
They become not just artists but also pathfinders for new relations between men, women,
and children.
The study of the work of African women writers is an engaging experience, not only for
of all of the above reasons, but also because there now exists a rich opportunity for critics
in the field of African literature to reevaluate, in the light of the special contributions of
women writers, all earlier critical canons, which heretofore have been the work of male
critics evaluating male writers. The relative scarcity of women writers in the African
literary canon may be partly explained by the opposition of colonial education, family,
and gender policies to women's engaging in pursuits apart from domestic ones. After
colonial education established the literary arts in general, a few women, through
migration, or family privilege, or exceptional brilliance and determination, or strong
support from others, were able to publish their writing. When women did begin to write
in Western languages,
-311-
however, more commonly during the late colonial period, their work was not recognized
like that of male African writers of the same generation (with the exception of Nadine
Gordimer, who has a large audience outside Africa).
O. R. Dathorne includes a few references to women writers in his African Literature (
1976), but most other works do not. Course syllabi, textbooks, and anthologies of African
literature have been dominated by male writers. The situation is changing gradually now,
but an acceptance of different conceptions of what African writing is and how it should
be approached is needed to comprehend some of the experiments that women writers are
making. The tendency of literary critics in each generation to establish certain
expectations, based on the career patterns of the dominant group of writers (i.e., male
writers) with which they deal, requires that we alter these assumptions for women
writers, whose career patterns are different.
Some of the domestic pressures on women writers easily explain gaps in writing. Women
may stop writing because their male relatives feel they are being immoral or disloyal by
telling too much about issues considered private. Husbands have been known to threaten
to take actions such as leaving the marriage or establishing other relationships if their
wives do not stop writing. Buchi Emecheta writes about her husband's destruction of her
manuscript in her autobiographical Second-Class Citizen ( 1975). Also, women writers
must often, if free from marital pressures, function as mothers and breadwinners in a
world where career levels are based on work expectations of men who are fully supported
in domestic arrangements by their womenfolk. Relatives of African women writers may
feel that traditional hospitality must be extended at all times to them, because they
assume that the woman writer's life is primarily centered in domestic functions. Domestic
tasks remain for most women a tremendous user of time. Much depends on the ability of
the women to pursue self-set goals rather than be endlessly at the service of their families.
2

Beyond the personal, women still have relatively less access to publishers than do men.
Many African women writers speak of manuscripts that are ignored for years by male
editors and reviewers. Criticism of African women writers must therefore be responsive
to the politics of their individual lives. 3 A critic must engage not only with the
hermeneutic concerns but with all the peripheral issues that relate to the politics of
writing and publishing as well.

African Women and Oral Literature

The question of whether constraints on the development of female talents with language
have always existed is an area for much-needed research. 4 Women told tales or sang
songs to children in the family compound, and excellent women narrators were
appreciated by the family and community. Several African societies have female oral
artists who travel beyond the confines of their villages, but the common misconception is
that the "profes
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sional" oral performer or griot is male. Ruth Finnegan makes the distinction that some
genres are the specific preserve of men, others of women, but that there is variation in
specialization throughout the continent:
Certain kinds of poetry are typically delivered or sung by women (particularly
dirges, lullabies, making verses or songs to accompany women's ceremonies or
work), and each culture is likely to have certain genres considered especially
suitable for women. However, references to men seem to occur even more often,
and, with a few striking exceptions, men rather than women tend to be the bearers
of the poetic tradition. (98)
Finnegan suggests that gender conventions and specializations vary from culture to
culture, but that by and large, "serious tales" like myths and oral history tend to be the
preserve of men ( 375 -76). The image of the griot is always male.
Traditional scholarship on oral literature has also tended to focus on male oral artists. At
a 1977 University of Ibadan conference on African oral poetry, the bulk of the papers
showed an overriding assumption that oral artists are male. Only one paper, that of G. G.
Darah on Urhobo dance songs, made references to women's participation in communal
culture. This imbalance suggests that major research is necessary to uncover the extent of
women's creativity in orature. One breakthrough in this respect is Harold Scheub's
collection African Oral Narratives, Proverbs, Riddles, Poetry, and Song, which has a
large concentration of female contributors. Scheub suggests this female emphasis also in
his preface, where he quotes the Xhosa performer Nongenile Masithathu Zenani on the
art of composing: "and our grandmothers said that oral narrative had been created years
before by their grandmothers" ( vii ).
A number of recent studies have begun to establish concern for the orature of women in
different parts of Africa. Enoch T. Mvula, in "Tumbuka Pounding Songs in the
Management of Familial Conflicts," reveals how women use poetic license and a number
of other "veiling devices" to comment publicly on issues that affect them and that
propriety dictates they should keep private. Mvula concludes that "by singing about their
familial problems, the women construct and reconstruct their personal histories, as well
as reflect on the values and attitudes of the society" ( 113 ). Beverly Mack's work on
Hausa women's oral lore demonstrates "how traditional women, using traditional
literary art forms, advocate women's independence through the pursuit of both new and
customary professions" ( 15 -16). The study also shows how Hausa women's songs
emphasize the role of choice in women's lives and speak of women's need for solidarity.
Thomas Hale's Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire
( 1990) has some work on griottes, or female keepers of the Songhay-Zarma oral
tradition.
Much of the work available on women's oral literature is still in doctoral
-313-
dissertations or is unavailable in the West. A doctoral dissertation by Pauline Nalova
Lyonga , "Umahiri: A Feminist Approach to African Literature" ( 1985), demonstrates a
thematic continuity between African women's oral lore and written literature. May
Balisidya's "Language Planning and Oral Creativity" ( 1988) is another important work.
Some studies have been done in East Africa by Penina Muhando and published in
Swahili. Micere Mugo's work in Zimbabwe on oral literature and her article on "Orature
Aesthetics" ( 1987) have as well to be noted. One recognized extended study of Yoruba
women's orature is Karin Barber's I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the
Past in a Yoruba Town ( 1991).
According to Mamadou Diawara in "Women, Servitude and History: The Oral Historical
Traditions of Women of Servile Conditions in the Kingdom of Jaara (Mali) from the
Fifteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century" (in Barber and Farias), the literature concerning
African women as a source for the history of their society is meager in the extreme.
Diawara contends that this paucity has not been significantly improved, the rise in
women's studies notwithstanding, because African studies continues to be "profoundly
marked by the male point of view," with the result that women frequently are not cited
when they supply information or are not interviewed at all. Studies such as Diawara's,
however, reveal that in many cultures, women are the experts in oral traditions and are
central in the transmission of group ideology, values, history, and literature. Further,
there is often a female mode in the transmission of narrative that Western or male
researchers would never find out. Joan Russell, for example, in "Women's Narration:
Performance and the Marking of a Verbal Aspect," looks at ways in which women
present their narratives.
The above survey points only in the very barest of ways to the substantial work in
women's oral literatures still unknown or undone. In the West, one can know these stories
only in translation or transmission to print. Martha Mvungi , for example, has a story,
"Mwipenza the Killer," which she heard from her mother, published in Charlotte Bruner's
Unwinding Threads ( 1983), an anthology that has been instrumental in bringing many
women's work to the reading public. As a teacher, for example, Mvungi has collected and
recorded oral narratives from older people and has published Three Solid Stones( 1975),
comprising twelve folk narratives from Tanzania. Writers such as Penina Muhanda
Mlama ( 1991) have worked oral narratives into dramatic presentations. Moreover, a
number of oral personal-experience narratives or life stories have been collected and are
being transmitted in print form, with all the implications of oral-written literary
conversions applicable. This reveals the whole area of orature and writing as a rich one
for literary examination. It allows us, as well, given the contemporary work on speech act
and discourse theory, to move from a specifically reductive construction of "women's
writing" to women's oral and written discourses.
Obviously, oral art is especially nourished by a strong cultural and spir
-314
itual environment that can relate to the past. It requires also a sense of community and
time to experience it. Urban and oppressed conditions alienate women from traditional
orature as much as they interfere with other kinds of creativity. As one South African
woman says in the anthology Lip:
I get up every day at 4:30, and I only get home about 6:15 P.M. By then my
daughter has already made the fire. But I do the cooking. After supper we wash
ourselves and go to bed. I read the paper when I go to bed—not novels and things.
I usually have a headache and I am too tired. (Brown, Hofmeyr, and Rosenberg
95)
But as the following pages demonstrate, that creativity flourishes nevertheless and is
expressed through accessible media.

African Women Writers: Shaping Forces

GENERATIONAL AND CLASS DIFFERENCES
As in the case of other writers in the continent, African women writers have to be seen
partly in terms of the changing concerns of and changing societal pressures on different
generations. One early woman writer who offered critiques of the colonial situation was
Adelaide Casely-Hayford ( 1868-1959). Of Fanti and British parentage, Casely-Hayford
was born in Sierra Leone, educated in England and Germany, and married to the well-
known lawyer Joseph Casely-Hayford. The combination of her privileged social status,
mixed race, and international travel gave her special perspectives on her society. Her
story " Mista Courifer" ( 1961; reprinted in Bruner 8-16) concentrates on the problem of
the collision between African and Western elements of culture in a person's life, a theme
that was to become familiar in later African writing. The story's central character rejects
his father's desire that he project a British exterior and instead favors African dress. He
also, importantly, rejects expectations of wifely subservience. His unusual
encouragement of a woman's autonomy is matched by his friendly and affectionate
relations with his sister. The story, while exploring aspects of mediation between African
and European customs, is definitely written with a woman's consciousness.
Mabel Dove Danquah (b. 1910 in the Gold Coast [now Ghana]) presents polygamy from
an amusing though distinctly critical female point of view in "Anticipation" ( 1947;
reprinted in Bruner 3-7). The story shows a chief remarrying a wife (and paying a second
bride price) because his having so many other wives has confused him and caused him to
forget about having married her before. Danquah's vision here is opposed to that part of
her tradition that is male and exploitative.
The earliest writings of a people in the process of self-identification are often
autobiographical in form. By such means people write themselves into history, as in the
narratives of enslaved Africans, which began the African

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American literary tradition. Adelaide Casely-Hayford's "Reminiscences" (in Dathorne
and Feuser 131-38), taken from material she used for her Memoirs, compiled at the age
of ninety-one, relate how as a young schoolteacher Casely-Hayford began to develop
views on the role and behavior of women in modern African societies—for example, that
African women should wear traditional dress and not copy European fashions. 5 Like
Casely-Hayford, Noni Jabavu (b. 1919), the daughter of Professor D. D. T. Jabavu and
granddaughter of the journalist, teacher, and editor John Tengo Jabavu, looked back on
her life in the earlier part of the century in The Ochre People ( 1963), which gives us a
strong impression of her attachment to her family, describing her patriarchal father, who
holds court while female servants bustle about.
In neither fiction nor memoir did these writers discuss women's fruition as such.
Nonetheless, their very existence as women writers, necessarily focused on what they
saw as major issues of their day (cultural change, inequality, African identity), signals the
beginning of a tradition of writing in European languages that continues today.
During the period 1900-1950 a number of women writers, working mainly in African
languages, emerged. As early as 1913 or 1914, Lillith Kakaza (circa 1885-1950) wrote
and published a short novelette and a long piece of fiction in Xhosa. Victoria Swaartbooi
also wrote Xhosa fiction in the 1930s. Violet Dube published a volume of Zulu short
stories in 1935 and a novel in 1936. The life histories of these women suggest that they
were part of intellectual writing communities. 6
Poetry by African women was rarely included in early African poetry anthologies.
Langston Hughes was an exceptional editor in this respect, including several women in
Poems from Black Africa ( 1963). 7 Martin Banham's early anthology of Nigerian student
verse ( 1959) includes one poem by a woman, Minja Kariba, whose subsequent poetry
has been anthologized in various volumes (see Bankier and Lashgari). In the 1960s a few
other woman poets, such as Noemia de Souza, Maria Manuela Margerido, and Efua
Sutherland, began to be recognized.
Similarly, the 1960s saw the emergence of fiction writers such as Grace Ogot (b. Kenya,
1930). A number of the women writing in Kenya seem like Ogot (b. Kenya, 1930). A
number of the women writing in Kenya seem, like woman Rebeka Njau (b. 1932) has had
a distinguished career as headmistress of the Nairobi Girls School from 1964. Flora
Nwapa (b. Nigeria, 1931) is another of this generation, which is chronologically the same
as the generation of Soyinka, Achebe, Ngũgĩ, and others.
The writing of women of this generation, which was educated in colonial schools and
came to maturity at about the time of Independence and early post-Independence in their
various countries, has received much less attention than that of men. Although
Sutherland's Edufa ( 1967) and Ogot's The Promised Land ( 1966) and Land without
Thunder ( 1968) were clearly important, their work never received proper critical
attention in comparison to the
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attention give to male writers of comparable achievement. Although the publication in
1962 and 1963, respectively, of Noni Jabavu's Drawn in Color: African Contrasts and
The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life, when their author was then in her
midforties and previously unpublished, might be taken to signal the beginning of a more
receptive literary climate for women's work than had existed before, recognition of
Jabavu's work did not come until the 1980s.
Only since the 1970s has the writing of African women really come into its own and
found acceptance. Writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head,
Lauretta Ngcobo, Mariama Bâ, Miriam Tlali, Nafissatou Diallo, and Aminata Sow Fall
have received attention lately partly because of the awareness raised by the women's
movement, which has also been an important stimulus in getting the writing done.
Mariama Bâ (b. Senegal, 1929) did not emerge until after her strong involvement with
the feminist movement there. Her first novel, Une si longue lettre ( 1980; So Long a
Letter, 1981), appeared after she was fifty. Each year, new voices are added (too slowly,
it still seems), but they arrive to critical encouragement from a growing body of women
critics, many of whom write themselves. Tsitsi Dangarembga , the author of Nervous
Conditions ( 1988), began her publishing career in her twenties. African-language writing
by women is also continuing to develop. Penina Muhando (or Penina Mlama) is a
Tanzanian dramatist whose work in Swahili, Tanzania's national language, has become
well known inside her own country and enjoys a growing reputation outside (see
Balisidya 15-19). Her keynote speech at the 1990 African Literature Association annual
conference identified many issues related to audience, orality, literacy, and writing in
Africa.
The conditions that encourage writing by African women are complex and various. In
some cases, as with Ama Ata Aidoo, a family with respect for education and the written
word stimulates a daughter's achievements. Publication often depends on catching a
publisher's notice. Faith in the power of literature is also important. Buchi Emecheta,
with an experience of urban poverty in Britain, believed strongly in education and in the
power of the written word to help her change her condition, and that belief enabled her to
study successfully and to write, whereas other women in her situation might have been
silenced by their difficulties.
Emecheta's story brings us to the question of class contexts in women's writing. Although
some significant women writers in Africa are centrally concerned with peasant or
working-class women, Micere Mugo has challenged many middle-class women writers
for too often portraying these women as victims who lack the enduring, fighting spirit she
finds in the true peasant women of Africa. From this kind of debate comes stimulation,
freshness, new directions: Flora Nwapa has challenged those younger women ( Catherine
Acholonu from Nigeria, specifically) who criticize older writers' limitations to pick up
their pens and create what they want to see themselves.
One important new development perhaps is that some women writers in
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Africa have attempted to establish publishing enterprises. Flora Nwapa and Buchi
Emecheta have both established presses ( Tana and Ogwugwu Afor, respectively). But
problems of distribution and foreign exchange hamper their full development as
flourishing businesses. One hopes that this trend will allow other women writers to have
a better chance to become published by presses that understand their experiences and the
context of their writing.

REGIONAL, NATIONAL, AND ETHNIC INFLUENCES

Varying circumstances within different regions of Africa dispose women to differing
priorities in their writing. Southern African women have struggled most urgently against
racial oppression—not only Black writers such as Amelia House, Miriam Tlali, Fatima
Dike, and Lauretta Ngcobo, but also white writers such as Nadine Gordimer and the
white contributors to Lip: From Southern African Women. 8 Black women in South Africa
must fight for the freedom to live and develop so that their literary creativity can flourish
(see Davies, "Finding Some Space"). Fatima Dike, the South African dramatist,
illustrates the possibility of turning the trauma of living through violence and racism into
fierce, committed theater. Lauretta Ngcobo confesses that her novel Cross of Gold (
1981) turns away from its initial focus on a woman and becomes a man's story, because
she finds it difficult to focus only on women's issues and to develop sustained and strong
women characters. Bessie Head, on the other hand, is equally concerned with race and
gender in A Question of Power ( 1947). For some women in South Africa, where
oppression is multiple, writing becomes an act of courage in adverse circumstances.
Gcina Mhlope, an actress, poet, and short story writer, lives in a women's hostel in
Johannesburg, where she cannot write late in the night because the hostel rises early, at 4
A.M. During weekends, when other women are out seeing boyfriends, she writes. Her
attitude toward the deprivations, loneliness, and tension of living in such a situation is
"You just have to cope" ( 8 ).
Similarly, women elsewhere in Africa find common ground in shared regional, linguistic,
or religious experiences. In West Africa, for example, a central concern of women writers
is the relation of tradition to Western cultural influences (Christianity, capitalism,
urbanization). Women writers from Islamic cultures often question the role and place of
women there, and to do so they must also recognize that to attack the culture on behalf of
women may be seen as a threat to the entire social fabric. Their interest must therefore
often balance the need for reform in relation to women with a need to protect their world
against dissolution in the face of pressures from the West or from modernization. Alifa
Rifaat's Distant View of a Minaret ( 1983) is powerful precisely because it gives us this
balancing, a vision of a dissident womanhood within Islam that nevertheless intends to
remain within that culture. Similarly, Zaynab Alkali's The Stillborn ( 1984; see Acholonu
1986) is a Nigerian woman's portrait of Muslim society from the perspective of a woman
seeking personal development. Senegalese and Ivorian writers such
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as Bâ, Sow Fall, Diallo, and Adiaffi have expressed overwhelming concern with male
prerogatives and the excesses of polygamy within the socially conscious literary and film
tradition headed by Ousmane Sembène.
Certain national, ethnic, regional, and historical influences encourage women to write,
while others do not. Today, Igbo women writers such as Nwapa, Udensi, Ulasi,
Emecheta, Okoye, Onwueme, and Acholonu form a significant group, as do male Igbo
writers (and there is a predominance of fiction writers in both groups). Nigerian Female
Writers: A Critical Perspective, edited by Henrietta Otukunefor and Obiageli Nwodo (
1989), testifies to Nigeria's current predominance. At an earlier period, most well-known
women writers seem to have come from Ghana or Sierra Leone. Igbo culture may have
particular elements within it, such as a tradition of storytelling and a respect for
language skills, that predispose it to the development of literary arts, but then so do other
ethnic groups. Nowhere is there a correlation between population size and the number of
writers. For instance, the population of the Muslim north of Nigeria, for reasons that are
primarily cultural, has produced the fewest writers. Precolonial Nigeria's strong oral
literary traditions, which accorded respect to wordplay and to the verbal artist, has led to
a flourishing written literary culture in modern times. Writing is more likely to be a
chosen profession in cultures where it is respected and where creativity in writing is seen
as an important extension of oral art. Many of the Arabic cultures, for example, have
ancient traditions of poetry and prose fiction, but the woman's voice is often not heard.
Finally, a woman's perception of her culture can be markedly different from a male
vision of it. In 1966 both Flora Nwapa's Efuru and Elechi Amadi 's The Concubine were
published. Whereas the former presents a water maid as a model for a woman trying to
find a place for herself within traditional society as a single woman without children, the
latter presents a water spirit incarnated as woman who, as the possession of a vengeful
Sea King who destroys her happiness, becomes a destructive agent in the lives of men
who love her without realizing what she truly is (Banyiwa-Horne 1986).

African Women's Prose

Storytelling is in many African societies a woman's genre, often used to instill morality in
the young and for a variety of other aesthetic and functional reasons. Beginning writers,
drawing on a tradition of women narrating, can therefore cross over from oral to written
literature fairly easily. Flora Nwapa says the story of Efuru came to her while she was
driving to her brother's house and that she wrote the novel within weeks. 9
But the transition is not always easy. For one thing, writing in European languages can
create difficulties in expression for writers whose mother tongues are African languages.
Moreover, criticism of novels and stories still tends to be drawn from criteria that are
conceptually European in origin as
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well as male-orientated. Critics must be careful not to imprison experimental new forms
in old critical compartments out of sheer ignorance.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Women who want to be writers tend to undergo a period of self-examination, and
autobiography thus becomes an important form for them. African women write
autobiography in different tones, from the distanced, sociocultural ( Joyce Sikakane's A
Window on Soweto [ 1977] and Noni Jabavu's The Ochre People) to the cautiously
personal ( Nafissatou Diallo's A Dakar Childhood [ 1975]) and the frankly personal,
thinly disguised as fiction ( Buchi Emecheta 's Second Class Citizen [ 1975] and In the
Ditch [ 1972]) (see Davies, "Private Selves"). Autobiography is of course a structured
mode of writing, and related to fiction in the sense that it constructs the self as part of an
integrated discourse. But it is not the same as autobiographical fiction, the difference
being a question of the degree to which a piece of writing consciously embraces
conventions of fiction as opposed to those of autobiography. The narrative voice may or
may not admit to the material's autobiographical nature. Bessie Head's novel A Question
of Power ( 1977) is an example of the latter. It includes several important details that
appear in her " Biographical Notes: A Search for Historical Continuity" ( 1982).
Although autobiography deals with personal experience, and although African women
are clearly drawn to attempt autobiography, self-revelation may offend the strong sense
of decorum and propriety with respect to the family that suffuses African life. Miriam
Tlali's clearly autobiographical novel Muriel at Metropolitan ( 1975), for example,
focuses on the world of work, on race issues in South Africa, and not on personal
intimate revelation. (It was also heavily censored in South Africa, with several chapters
deleted). In this hesitancy about baring the self, which is clearly present in many
autobiographical works, Buchi Emecheta is a notable exception, though she creates some
distance from her personal experience in her first two novels by using a third-person
narrative voice and by creating a separate persona, Adah, as the central character. Both
works have been highly attacked for their frank criticism of Igbo customs relating to
women. Chikewenye Ogunyemi has said of Emecheta's Second Class Citizen that it is
"aesthetically unsatisfying to a reader who comes from a culture where it is unethical to
reveal the unpleasant details of a martial breakdown" ( 9 ).
But Ama Ata Aidoo has spoken about the emotional cost of trying to be honest:
Most certainly my trials as a woman writer are heavier and more painful than any
I have to go through as a university teacher.... You feel awful for seeing the
situation the way you do, and terrible when you try to speak about it.... Yet you
 have to speak out, since your pain is also real, and in fact the wound bleeds more
profusely when you are upset by people you care for, those you respect.
(Aidoo1984,262)
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Such conflicts are bound to arise when a writer's perception of "herstory" comes into
opposition with protective nationalism or racial pride. Emecheta speaks of this problem:
There are many who think I exaggerated in Second Class Citizen, that I distorted
reality. But the cruelty with which I was treated by both my husband and by
English society is truthfully rendered in the book. Reality appears unbelievable
the moment other people see it on paper. My husband wasn't really a bad guy, but
he wasn't able to accept an independent woman. My writing began to develop
only after I had left him. As I wrote in my book, he actually destroyed my first
efforts to put my experiences on paper, my first attempt to stake out my terrain.
("It's Me" 4, our italics)
It is no doubt the permanence of "putting it on paper," as well as the understandable
protectiveness of a people toward a culture that has been distorted by Europeans, that
causes African women writers to shy away from explicit and intimate details of personal
oppression. But for Emecheta, as for many other writers who use personal experience in
their creative work, it is the pain involved in telling the story, in reexperiencing it, that
prompts the writing. The act of writing becomes a cathartic response, allowing what
happened to be understood, to make sense. Emecheta needs to tell her readers what it is
like to grow up female in a society that favors boys, and also of the struggle to make her
personal choices, or of the husband who failed her: all of this serves to prepare us for the
account of her eventual triumph over adversity. In American society, the confessional
aspect of this kind of writing has been much more acceptable. Interestingly, Emecheta's
equal openness about race and class oppression in English society has provoked little
comment in England.
In this light, it is understandable why Noni Jabavu's Drawn in Color and The Ochre
People are more travelogue than autobiography. On only a few occasions—in Drawn in
Color, for instance, only when the writer leaves the family and is journeying on her
own—is the inner self revealed in such experiences as her confrontation with a Boer
immigration officer. Most of the revelations of private life are not of the author, however,
but of a sister who is experiencing a bad marriage in Uganda. Much like Emecheta, who
has been accused of betraying Africa by writing the kind of criticisms of African society
that ignorant and racist Europeans want to read, Jabavu devotes large chunks of her
narrative to commentary on what she sees as the unsavory lifestyles of the Ugandans,
focusing on the issue of male privilege and concomitant loss of female self-esteem.
Through all of this, Jabavu's personal life is never revealed. The Ochre People is another
excursion into the culture and history of three geographical regions of South Africa—
Middledrift, Confluence Farm, and Johannesburg—seen through the eyes of Jabavu's
family. Her discussion of Aunt Daisy, " Big Mother," is the only telling of a woman's
story, although there are brief vignettes on other women. The work
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juxtaposes family history and cultural history with the nascent system of apartheid.
For those who find personal detail irrelevant or even embarrassing or dangerous,
individual stories are less important than the story of the group. An alternative approach
is offered by Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman ( 1985), which provides an important
model of group and personal life coconstructed; i.e., she tells her own story, but toward
the end of it she includes references to other women's lives, seeming to emphasize the
representative nature of her individual experience. Women enjoy telling their life stories,
and several oral autobiographical narratives have been subsequently transcribed into
print; among them are Iris Andreski's Old Wives Tales: Life Stories of African Women (
1970), June Goodwin's Cry Amandla: South African Women and the Question of Power (
1984), and "Going Up the Mountain" by Motlalepula Chabaku in Sisterhood Is Global (
1984). The "life story" genre may become an important aspect of an African woman's
aesthetic in circumstances where defending a culture is not an issue.
Between Emecheta's confessional style and Jabavu's sociocultural style is the sort of
narrative found in Nafissatou Diallo's A Dakar Childhood, which centers on a Muslim
family. The story is about the love between the small girl and her father and
grandmother, and even where conflict arises (as when the father and grandmother
confront each other over the head of the girl about her education), it is expressed as
nothing more serious than the natural ups and downs of a happy and united family.
Perhaps, as Diallo says within the fiction itself, the most important aspect of the story is
the lifting of the Muslim "taboos of silence" about familial emotions—a brave thing to
attempt.
A similar undertaking is Charity Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi ( 1969), in which a
surface text on Gikuyu culture and traditions clearly submerges a more personal text on
the exploitation of women. Another is Le baobab fou ( 1982; The crazy baobab) by Ken
Bugul (a pen name for Marietou Mbaye, a Senegalese sociologist). Bugul's novel—a kind
of "fictional biography" that some critics say is autobiographical—deals with the story of
a child who, alienated at home because of the circumstances of her birth and subsequent
abandonment, becomes even more alienated through French colonial education. She
travels to Europe and through a series of sexual and other misadventures, including a
devastating abortion and drug addiction, loses touch with reality and identifies with the
only thing that gave her stability at home, the baobab tree. Sekai Nzenza's Zimbabwean
Woman: My Own Story ( 1988), by contrast, offers a specific grounding in a cultural
context of women as bearers of tradition. Tainted by negative colonial values, though, she
learns to hate herself and her blackness. Nevertheless, through the telling of her life she
reconstructs herself with dignity.
A great deal of life writing is taking place, from the many collections of life stories to the
controversial Poppie Nongena: One Woman's Struggle against Apartheid ( 1990). The
life story, lived or completely fictional, is an important
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strand of African women's writing, crossing the generic boundaries of the novel and
autobiography. Autobiographical narratives are cumulatively exposing their readers to the
politics of African women's lives. Their importance lies not only in the vital information
they provide but also in the formal shapes and thematic concerns they have contributed to
African women's writing. Those themes include the construction of gender roles,
marriage, family, tradition, the education of a girl to be a woman, and social power
relations.

GENRE-CROSSING NARRATIVES AND THE NOVEL

In a sense, the epistolary novel, an eighteenth-century genre, is the most convenient form
for sharing a personal story. This form has been popularized in the United States by Alice
Walker's The Color Purple ( 1982). Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ's novel Une si longue
lettre ( 1980; So Long a Letter, 1981) is in the form of an extended letter, written by
Ramatoulaye to her friend Aissatou. Letter writing functions as a catharsis for
Ramatoulaye, who can reveal all the hurt and joy she experienced throughout the various
phases of her growing from girlhood to womanhood, and the many steps along the way
that both she and Aissatou took together as girls and women. Because one expects
personal documents such as letters to friends to be kept in strict confidence, the reader
has a sense of eavesdropping on the narrator. The same device allows the narrator to
bare herself completely, in the guise of sharing her secrets only with the one designated
for hearing them. The letter novel, with its air of confidentiality, then becomes a truly
intimate medium for the woman who wants to tell the story of her inner life. 10 The
epistolary novel of women confiding in each other, like the novel in the form of diary
entries, can thus be a more personal medium than autobiography, which assumes a
public audience, and may therefore be particularly suited to the African woman writer
who wants to adjust to revelation through the written word.
For some African women writers, the epistolary novel and other confessional genres,
surprisingly, have antecedents from within Islamic culture, despite Muslim restrictions on
public speech for women. Mbye Cham locates Mariama Bâ's approach within the Islamic
custom of mirasse, which allows an Islamic widow to divest herself publicly of the gains
and losses of the marriage.
The letter, the diary, and the life story—all shades of the same confessional mode—
connect in Lauretta Ngcobo's Cross of Gold. In the first section of the novel, the central
character, Sindiswe, tells her son:
I cannot now tell you the long story, but I have some of my life stored away for
you in my case. It is a strange story, my child. But from here, when all is over, you
will go to Sharpeville, Number 20, Tema Street, where you will find a good friend
of mine.... She knows the whole story. (9; our italics)
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At the friend's house the son is given Sindiswe's diary, which contains her story and
which charts her awakening into the consciousness of her part in the freeing of her
people.
Ama Ata Aidoo, in Our Sister Killjoy ( 1977), experiments with a number of forms:
poetry, prose, brief journalistic entries, anecdotes, and the letter. The final section of the
book, " A Love Letter," is written to a male friend. It is not a love letter in traditional
terms but rather an excursion into a number of issues—African and European slavery,
African women's traditional assertiveness, the reality of loneliness in Western culture,
motherhood, exile, male-female relationships—many of which she treats thematically in
the rest of the novel. Of relevance to our discussion is Sissie's use of the letter, which she
writes on her airplane flight home, as a purgation. Her decision not to mail the letter
coincides with her looking out the window and realizing that she is in Africa. Realizing
that she has been writing the letter throughout the flight and that it is "deservedly long,"
"too long," she questions sending it. More importantly, "Once written it was written. She
had taken some of the pain away and she was glad. There was no need to mail it" (133;
our italics). 11 The writing of the letter becomes a ritual of release, self-sufficient, coming
out of the need to communicate.
Writing a novel is a difficult and painstaking undertaking; its sheer length requires not
only skill but also time and space. Yet African women writers, despite their frustrations
in achieving their work, have become increasingly proficient in full-length fiction. Many
African women write about social and political issues, and about women's domestic and
personal lives. Being a woman often involves being both emotional and analytical,
physical and intellectual, and this duality comes across in the way African women write
about the experience. Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power is a brilliant exposition of
a disturbed consciousness and of a society in deep trouble. Many readers find it difficult,
but its complexity comes not only from intellectuality but also from the intense emotional
process that complicates the narrative form and meaning. 12 Flora Nwapa's Efuru tells the
central character's story through details of her personal relations, motherhood,
bereavements, business ventures—in short, from a whole life, private and public. In So
Long a Letter, feelings shape the texture and form of the letter writing: "My heart
rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows. I know the field of our gains is
unstable, the retention of conquests difficult" ( 56 ).
Ramatoulaye's conflicts are characteristic of the conflicts expressed in plot and
characters in many novels by African women, and they may be summed up as "a woman
is often divided against herself: she loves to serve her family and society but often finds
that her service denies her basic humanity as much as it supports and develops it." The
hero (or anti-hero) in, for example, A Question of Power, or So Long a Letter, or
Nwapa's novel One Is Enough ( 1981) is not sure of her choices, or of her self, but
painfully aware of her restrictions and contradictions. Her uncertainty often comes across
in the
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writing. In One Is Enough Amaka, the heroine, pours out questions: Is childlessness
really the end of the world? Is she useless to society if she is not a mother? Is she useless
to the world if she is unmarried? Is she going to cope if she leaves her husband? The
novel shows Amaka making choices that negate these questions.
Plenty of novels, however, address the woman's condition in a reactionary manner. One
of them, Behind the Clouds ( 1980) by Ifeoma Okoye, is an unevenly written saga of a
wife who cannot have a child and whose husband has one with someone else. The
jealousy described between the women is doubtless a reflection of actual commonplace
behavior, but the novelist seems depressingly unaware of better possibilities.
By contrast, in searching for new forms, writers like Head and Bâ are also redefining
women's experience, perceiving it from an assertive point of view that promises the
chance of improvement in women themselves and in their condition, through change and
through resistance to exploitation. Just as we have come to expect the bulk of African
literature in modern forms to be anticolonial, radical, and desirous of better social
conditions, so we have come to see the best of women's writing as expecting different
and more developed relations among women themselves and between women and the rest
of society, as well as heralding a more confident sense of self to come from self-
examination. For some writers, such as Aminata Sow Fall of Senegal (Le revenant [
1976; The ghost], Lagrève des battu [ 1979; The Beggars' Strike, 1981], and L'áppel des
arène [ 1982; The call of the arena]), social detail is a mainspring of narrative style, for
her interest is in the socioeconomic relations at the basis of social order. In illustrating her
fictional thesis, she shows both men and women as victims of social collapse and
economic privation.
African women writers' development from novel to novel is sometimes impressive, as in
the case of Buchi Emecheta's steady growth from autobiographical works to novels
proper ( Double Yoke [ 1982]) to science fiction and allegory ( The Rape of Shavi [
1983]). The Family ( 1989) moves beyond Emecheta's usual focus on African
communities to examine the life of a young woman from Jamaica who makes her home
in London. Also, writers of short stories often attempt novels and vice versa. For
example, the short story writer Grace Ogot wrote the novel The Promised Land ( 1966),
the novelist Flora Nwapa has written short stories, and Bessie Head has written both
novels and stories. As with other types of writing, each woman tries to turn the novel into
something reflective of her focus on her traditional society or modern condition, and she
develops whichever aspects of the genre are most appropriate for her vision of woman.
Adaora Lily Ulasi, for example, has concentrated on detective novels such as Many Thing
Begin for Change ( 1971). Many African women novelists deliberately keep their focus
on personal, emotional, and domestic elements in the lives of women, letting the ideas
come through indirect means and not theorizing about women's
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roles except emotively and generally. It is early yet to draw conclusions about what is
happening with the novel as African women develop it as their own, but clearly it is
changing as they use it to tell their own stories.
New writers continue to appear. Farida Karodia's Daughters of Twilight ( 1986) deals
with a girl growing up in South Africa in the 1950s, the child of an Indian father and a
"coloured" mother. Karodia now lives in Canada, where she is a full-time writer. Many
people are also excited about Tsitsi Dangarembga 's first novel, Nervous Conditions (
1988), which won the African nomination for the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction. It is a
well-crafted novel, told through the eyes of a young girl, Tambudzai, who witnesses as
she struggles to go to school the intersection of colonial dominance and entrenched
African patriarchal power. Jean-Paul Sartre's quote, "The status of 'native' is a nervous
condition," in his introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth ( 1966) serves
as her epigraph. Her pluralizing of the "condition" directs attention to the "gendered-
female native" and the many conditions she confronts in society. A cousin, Nyasha, who
is central to the narrative, suffers a nervous breakdown as she holds consciously the
problems of oppression. And the entire family and community seem gripped by all these
"nervous conditions." It is a worthy accomplishment for a first novel, one that holds the
reader's attention from its controversial first line: "I was not sorry when my brother died."
Yet with all the new work being produced, much work by African women writers
remains outside the pale of critical examination. Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool (
1975) deserves much more attention than it has received so far. Also, the work of Miriam
Were gets only passing mention in larger studies. And writers such as Werewere Liking,
whose works include La puissance de Um ( 1979; Um's power) and Elle sera de jaspe et
de corail ( 1983; She will be of jasper and coral), which she calls a chant-roman,
continue to fall through the cracks in literary scholarship, with some discussion in
conferences but few published studies. Werewere Liking is offering some important
genre-crossing work and is mounting radical critiques of the social construction of
gender.

THE SHORT STORY

Short stories are produced both as collections by writers established in other genres and
as separate pieces in journals and magazines. The better-known collections include Grace
Ogot's Land without Thunder ( 1968), which came out two years after her novel The
Promised Land; Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here ( 1970); Flora Nwapa's This Is
Lagos and Other Stories ( 1971) and Wives at War ( 1980); and Bessie Head's The
Collector of Treasures ( 1977). Other writers with individual stories in magazines and
journals include Amelia House, Miriam Tlali, Charity Waciuma, Miriam Were, Elvania
Zirimu, Martha Mvungi, Mabel Segun, Efua Sutherland, and Catherine Acholonu.
Anthologies help to make these pieces less fugitive; an excellent
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illustration is the fate of Efua Sutherland's anthologized story "New Life at Kyerefaso,"
which has now become quite well known. Similarly, Frances Ademola 's Reflections (
1962) helped popularize Mabel Segun's works. Charlotte Bruner 's anthology Unwinding
Threads ( 1983) includes a number of otherwise unavailable stories by several writers
and is balanced regionally as well as chronologically. Bruner has Mabel Dove Danquah's
"Anticipation," and Adelaide Casely-Hayford's "Mista Courifer" from the early period, as
well as pieces by Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ, Flora Nwapa, Buchi
Emecheta, Martha Mvungi, Charity Waciuma, Grace Ogot, Miriam Tlali, Amelia House,
Alifa Rifaat, Fadma Amrouche, and others. But a large anthology devoted to short stories
by African women is needed.
A number of South African women have published short stories. Zoe Wicomb 's
collection of semiautobiographical short stories (which some read as a novel) called You
Can't Get Lost in Cape Town ( 1987) deals with life in a South African township,
migration to England, and separation and alienation. Gcina Mhlope has written a few
autobiographical sketches; "The Toilet" and "It's Quiet Now" were published in
Sometimes When It Rains: Writing by South African Women and reprinted in Somehow
Tenderness Survives ( 1988). Miriam Tlali, one of the most important of the preceding
generation of South African women writers, has published Mhloti ( 1984; Teardrops), a
collection of travelogues, short stories, interviews, and what she calls "new journalism."
Most of these pieces first appeared in Staffrider, which was important in providing the
avenue for a number of writers to publish their work. A second collection of short stories
and articles, Soweto Stories ( 1989), will be published in South Africa as Mehlala
Khatamping ( Footsteps in the Quag). Cheryl Clayton's Women and Writing in South
Africa: A Critical Anthology ( 1989) testifies to the burgeoning of creative work in South
Africa and provides a fairly extensive bibliography.
The form of the short story is related to the tradition of the personal anecdote as well as to
the traditional folk tale or narrative. Yinka Shoga suggests that the reason African women
writers use this form successfully is because of its concentrated nature. Perhaps this
quality and its compactness explain its popularity among African women writers. Those
writers marry two traditional elements in their stories: female conversational forms and
such traditional African story forms as the cautionary tale, the dilemma tale, and the
moral fable. But they use these elements often to examine the meaning of highly complex
modern life. Ama Ata Aidoo's "In the Cutting of a Drink" ( 1970) is a moving tale of a
brother who is sent to find his sister in the city and discovers that she is a prostitute: it
expresses a concern for the plight of the woman in the city coupled with an original
perspective on male
female (sister-brother) relations. Aidoo's "Certain Winds from the
South" ( 1970) has her characteristic use of dialogue, a natural quick interchange that
creates a sense of character and place, and that derives from her ear for women's talk. She
often uses repetition, patterns of formal greeting, and
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conversational interjections and expressions. Her stories are the more economical for her
sensitive use of dialogue to explore the center of relations between people. Similarly,
Efua Sutherland uses traditional women's culture to good effect in her stories. Her " New
Life at Kyerefaso" opens "Shall we say / Shall we put it this way," and goes on in a
traditional manner with the story. It is not surprising that both Aidoo and Sutherland are
dramatists, because the skills they display in their stories are also a dramatist's stock in
trade. Sutherland's "New Life in Kyerefaso" has a rhythm that recalls alternating stabs and
longer rhythms of the drum. Sometimes song is used in Sutherland's story, to amplify the
plot and strengthen the theme.
By contrast, Mabel Dove Danquah's "Anticipation" and Adelaide Casely
Hayford 's
"Mista Courifer" are more of the written mode, with long passages expressed from the
viewpoint of a third-person, omniscient narrator. Similarly, Grace Ogot's stories in Land
without Thunder are told in an authoritative single narrative voice, often woven around a
traditional story: "For many years Mboga had beseeched Ramogi, the ancestor of the Luo
people to intercede on his behalf for his son." Her stories do not have the performance
orientation of the work of Sutherland and Aidoo.
Thematically, a number of writers who are less innovative in the use of traditional forms
demonstrate a clear consciousness of women's problems and their resourcefulness and
strength. Flora Nwapa's stories are concerned with the problems of women in difficult
circumstances in the city or in wartime. In " Daddy, Don't Strike the Match," the
apparently bold and protective father kills himself in his laboratory by carelessness,
whereas the mother takes the care of the children, thus ensuring their survival. She is the
one who maintains the security of the family in difficult and changing circumstances,
whereas he is modernistic and irresponsible. In " The Chief's Daughter," an attempt to
follow an old Igbo tradition by which a father could keep a daughter with him, single, and
adopt her children as his own is foiled by the daughter's desire to marry, and by her
elopement. Her education overseas is blamed for her rebellion.
Bessie Head's stories, in The Collector of Treasures, show a thematic development from
traditional to modern situations and from mythic to realistic treatments. The prose in her
stories, as in her novels, is subtle and sometimes difficult. Her feminism is quite clear,
though. In " Hunting" the men insist on sex without responsibility and the women are left
with the consequences. Tholo, who lacks the surface showiness of some men, treats his
woman well, but he is unusual. " Snapshots of a Wedding" shows a young woman
modifying her personality to become a respectful wife who respects her people. The title
story is set in a prison where a number of women are confined for killing their husbands.
Two of them had castrated their husbands. In Kebonye's case, castration was in
retaliation for her husband's sexual ill treatment of her and his habit of getting young
girls pregnant. The setting of the story is crucial to understanding it: the women are in a
cell and share stories as they
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eat together and offer each other support. Theirs is a female society and a culture
subversive toward the male oppressors.
Miriam Tlali's story "Point of No Return" (Bruner 129-41; see also Davies, "Finding
Some Space"), deals with a South African man and woman grappling with the conflict
caused by his twin responsibilities, his political commitment to ending apartheid and his
commitment to his family, and shows the woman reluctantly realizing that she does not
have the luxury of being an attached, dependent wife, but must develop qualities of
resourcefulness in herself. The story has a tighter construction than her first novel, Muriel
at Metropolitan, which is interesting in its use of incident but loosely constructed and
sometimes flat. In fact, all of the Soweto Stories are carefully crafted pieces dealing with
South African folk struggling as they cope with difficult life experiences under apartheid.
Amelia House's "Conspiracy" (Bruner 142-55) deals with a clandestine interracial
relationship between a Black woman and a white man and with the larger notion of
whether love is possible in such a situation. Its resolution demonstrates how apartheid
causes fear and betrayal to permeate even intimate lives of both Black and white South
Africans. A first sexual encounter is suddenly the center of a public situation, a police
raid: "Their world caving in around them. Two very tiny people viewed by giants in
boots. Lights. Policemen everywhere like cockroaches. Even more lights. More
cockroaches" ( 155 ).
Just as the politics of race looms large in the works of South African women writers, so
does the politics of gender in the works of women writers throughout Africa. African
women are reading and writing off African patriarchy in different ways. Miriam Tlali, for
instance, actively organizes women for writing in South Africa. And Catherine Acholonu,
in Nigeria, published "Mother Was a Great Man" ( 1989), which raises interesting
questions of the social construction of gender identity in an African context.

Drama
The full extent of women's participation in the immense variety of African traditional
theatricality has not yet been documented. Because modern theatrical ventures make
demands on time in the evenings, when family responsibilities are most pressing, it is
difficult for many women to participate in them. Also, acting is considered to be an
immoral profession in many African societies, as elsewhere. Playwriting can be done at
home, at least partly, but the dramatist needs involvement in a theater company in order
to learn her craft.
Female modern dramatists are fairly rare in Africa, even in places where a strong male
tradition of playwriting might have encouraged women to try as well. Yoruba drama is
almost entirely a male affair (e.g., Soyinka, Ogunyemi, Osofisan, Sowande). Although
Zulu Sofola lives and works in the west of Nigeria because she is married to a Yoruba
man, she is not Yoruba, but
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comes from Bendel, a culture close to Igbo. The dramatists Uwa Udensi and Catherine
Acholonu are both Igbo. A younger playwright, Tess Onwueme, also from Bendel State
in Nigeria, has written over twelve plays. She won the Association of Nigerian Author's
Drama Prize in 1985 for The Desert Encroaches. Tess Onwueme's and Fatima Dike's
works were shown at the First International Women Playwrights' Conference in Buffalo,
New York, in 1989. Ghana has produced Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Patience
Addo , whose Company Pot appeared in Gwyneth Henderson and Cosmo Pieterse 's Nine
African Plays for Radio ( 1973). Sutherland was a moving force in the establishment of
the modern Ghanaian dramatic tradition at the Ghana Drama Studio and the Institute of
African Studies at the University of Ghana at Legon. Her involvement in that
development gave her a central role as director and the opportunity to participate in
production. For younger women like Ama Ata Aidoo and Patience Addo, she was a
ground
breaker, someone who showed that women could be primary creative sources in
the theater.
In East Africa, Rebeka Njau, of Kenya, was writing in the 1960s ( The Scar [ 1963]), and
later on Micere Mugo, also of Kenya, worked with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on The Trial of
Dedan Kimathi ( 1976). Elvania Zimiru, of Uganda, wrote her Family Spear in 1974.
Penina Muhando Mlama, of Tanzania, has written a number of plays in Swahili: Hatia (
1972; Crime), Tambueni haki zetu ( 1972; Recognize Our Rights), and Nguzo mama (
1982; A Pillar of a Mother). Her study Culture and Development: The Popular Theatre
Approach in Africa ( 1991 [see Savory 1993]) uses her own experience in performance
with the community to identify the developments in popular theater in Africa.
It is much easier for women to participate in theater if other women have preceded them.
The establishment of major theater schools in African universities has been important
here; both Efua Sutherland and Zulu Sofola have worked in association with academic
institutions. Sutherland, however, has always had a firmly established contact with the
world outside the university, through her work in children's drama, theater in Twi, and
production tours of Ghana, as well as through her theater work in the city of Accra.
We could speculate that Sutherland and Aidoo emerged in Ghana partly because Akan
culture allows for directorial and active women and thus permits the development of a
woman's confidence to cope with theatrical work. But it would remain a shaky
speculation, because we really do not know much about why fiction seems to outweigh
drama (and even poetry) in women's writing in Africa. Perhaps the storytelling tradition
is a powerful influence toward fiction. But sometimes telling a story becomes itself the
structure of a play, as in the case of Efua Sutherland's The Marriage of Anansewa (
1977). In other works, tradition itself is challenged, as in Bertha Msora 's domestic drama
I Will Wait ( 1984), which won a first prize in
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Zimbabwe Publishing House's Playwriting Competition, and which portrays a woman
who tries to challenge traditional attitudes to marriage by choosing her own man. Msora
comes from a theatrical family and started acting when she was five years old. She has
appeared in Ama Ata Aidoo's play The Dilemma of a Ghost ( 1965). But her desire to
write more plays has to coexist with a busy life, for Msora is a married woman with three
children and works as a market research executive with an advertising company.
Professional modern drama is an exception rather than a rule in modern Africa, and
outside university drama companies there is a need to combine jobs and theatrical
commitment, which itself can limit opportunities to be productive.
As with other genres, we find that anthologies of African drama tend to be male-
dominated. A dramatist such as Zulu Sofola, who has written many plays, has only a few
in print, and some of those are now hard to find. But this body of drama is important in
the establishing of women's perspectives on experience, and moreover, in the provision
of good, central roles for actresses, permitting them to develop their skills and escape
stereotypes. Efua Sutherland's Edufa has a range of significant roles for women, as do
Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost and Sofola's The Sweet Trap ( 1977 [see Savory Fido
1987]). Each of these plays deals with cross-cultural, gender-specific conflicts in a
different way. Sutherland deals with a husband's betrayal of his wife in Edufa, using
many elements of ritual and symbolism but telling the story in the context of the man's
modern capitalistic abandonment of his moral commitment to his wife, and of her firm
stance with the other women for the morality of the past, a stance supported by Edufa's
father. Aidoo presents a confrontation between the African family, the African-American
wife, and their American-educated son, in which it is the women who finally resolve the
tensions and not the "ghost" of a husband. The remarkable use of language registers in
this play conveys the spectrum of usage from traditional, indigenous language to modern
American English. Nonverbal symbolic languages are also important in the play. Sofola's
domestic drama The Sweet Trap uses Western conventions to underline the alienation of
the intellectual and professional African middle class from tradition and show how this
alienation is at the root of tensions between men and women. Sofola sees tradition as a
better place for women than modern middle-class life.
Women dramatists are concerned not only with the politics or the implications of
women's experiences and roles but also with wider political issues. Micere Mugo's work
with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a socialist treatment of the Mau
Mau/settler conflict in Kenya, includes an awareness of women's roles in that
revolutionary context. The settler associates "my wife, my daughter, my property"
together, but African men and women are shown as comrades and equals in their vision.
Additionally, Ngũgĩ and Mugo demonstrate a symbolic unity of the sexes in creative work
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within the socialist framework. Uwa Udensi has written on the Biafran War ( Monkey on
a Tree [ 1975]). Elvania Zimiru, who tragically died in a car accident in 1979, was an
actress, dramatist, and director. She often wrote on themes of general interest, like
generational conflict. For a South African writer like Fatima Dike( The Sacrifice of Kreli
[ 1977], The First South African [ 1979], The Glass House [ 1980]), playwriting is an
emotional response to the dehumanization of her people (she was specifically affected by
the rape and death of a seven-year-old girl whose body was found stuffed into a garbage
can behind a row of shops where Dike worked). Her language is Xhosa, but she can reach
more people by using English, and her treatment of interracial conflict and the violence
of present-day South Africa is intended to reach the whole country. Gcina Mhlope was an
actress with the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Her work has been staged in the United
States and Europe. Born in the RSA, staged at Lincoln Center in New York City, won an
Obie Award. In 1988 her play Have You Seen Zandile? had its American premiere in
Chicago.
Forms differ not only from dramatist to dramatist but from play to play within the work
of one writer. Zulu Sofola, for example, uses the domestic drama and the symbolic,
poetic play ( Reveries in the Moonlight [ 1977] and Omu Ako of Isele-Oligbo [n.d.; both
unpublished]), and has included some Igbo and Edo in her most recent English-language
work. Sutherland seems to have found Euripedes' Alcestis a good inspiration for
beginning Edufa, and she turned to a Ghanaian form and content entirely for her
Marriage of Anansewa. This experimentation with form is characteristic of modern
African drama in English by men as well as women, as in the increasing use in more
recent plays of small elements of African-language writing. Sutherland and Aidoo use
women's talk in their drama as they do in their stories, and they portray women
performing rituals that sustain a traditional identity in a community. Werewere Liking's
Orphée d'Afric: Theatre-rituel ( 1981; African Orpheus: Ritual theater) uses traditional
Cameroonian rituals in a contemporary, creative manner. Tradition is often seen as a
positive aspect of African life by women dramatists, and thus they frequently portray
women in their plays as good guardians of it. Nevertheless, traditional female figures can
also be perceived negatively. Catherine Acholonu's The Trial of the Beautiful Ones, 13 for
instance, portrays a sea goddess, Owu, as a dangerous spirit who is defeated by the good
male Christian figure of Michael.
Community and popular theater has developed in South Africa, where a group of Xhosa-
speaking women have produced plays such as Imfuduso, a political play of resistance to
apartheid. According to Beverly Couse, the play demonstrates that "the art of black South
African women cannot be interpreted by the guidelines of white, western feminism,
which still basically looks for the self-actualization of the individual, or for the
enhancement of a unique art form" ( 12 ).
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Poetry
A limitation in our assessment of the poetic achievement of African women is the
difficulty of procuring volumes of poetry by individual poets published in Africa. Berrian
lists a considerable number of volumes by individual poets, such as Grace Akello, Micere
Mugo, and Clementine Madiya Faik-Nzuju, 14 but these volumes tend to be published by
small publishing houses based in Africa and to have a limited and fairly localized
distribution. Of these, Mugo's Daughter of My People Sing ( 1976) is perhaps best
known. A number of poets, such as Amelia Blossom House ( Our Sun Will Rise [ 1989]),
write steadily and are well recognized. Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie has a volume, Sew the
Old Days and Other Poems (see Ogundipe-Leslie, "Not Spinning"), and a number of her
poems have appeared in a variety of journals.
Many of these poets are accomplished in other genres as well, but Noemia de Souza is
known as a poet only. Beier and Moore list her as the "first African woman to achieve a
genuine reputation as a poet" ( 253 ), whereas her entry in Herdeck ( 109 ) remarks that
she wrote no poetry in the "relatively calm and happy period" of her marriage to a
Portuguese man, during which period she lived in Lisbon. It is rare to find such linking of
personal life and creative achievement in the discussions of male African writers. We will
not investigate here the ring of the term "genuine reputation as a poet."
Noemia de Souza has a strong consciousness about women. In "Appeal," in Poems of
Black Africa ( 1975), she asks, "Who has strangled the tired voice / of my forest sister?"
The same poem describes a woman as "leashed with children." This awareness is clear in
the work of many other women poets from Africa. Francesca Yetunde Pereira, of Nigeria,
is most polemical in her "Two Strange Worlds," in Poems from Black Africa ( 1963). She
writes:
Woman
What fools we are
Invading unprotected
The world of men so alien
And ever manifesting
Weakness in tenderness.
Efua Sutherland's lovely poem "The Redeemed," in Messages ( 1971), is written from a
Christian standpoint, portraying the serpent's vision of an African Eve. The serpent
intends to suck "sweet life out of eggs," but she defeats him:
Her dark lips smiled.
Her dark eyes beamed delight,
 The copper neck swerved back with its load
And down the slope of the market road,
She strode.
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Grace Birabawa Isharaza's "The Smiling Orphan," in Summer Fires ( 1983), tells of an
aunt's death and how the funeral was filled with people who had ignored the woman
while she was alive. Only her daughter was with her when she was dying (her son was on
"Official Duty").
Personal experience is strong in some poems, but confessional poetry is rare, perhaps
because of attitudes toward disclosure in the poets' cultures. Mabel Segun has a wry
poem about self-knowledge, "The Pigeon-Hole," in Aftermath ( 1977). She writes, "If
only I knew for certain / What my delinquent self would do." Abena P. A. Busia has
written of her father's death:
Time finds us still your children
and we make fellowship
with fractured pieces of life passed
like the fragments, of the wafer.
(Summer Fires)
Her first volume, Testimonies of Exile and Other Poems was published in 1990. The "i"
in Catherine Obianuju's Achonolu's "The Spring's Last Drop" ( 1982) is both personal
and general in this maternal poem about sustenance in the midst of dwindling resources:
i obianuju
i shall provide my children
with plenty
i shall multiply this drop
they will never taste
of the sea.
Achonolu writes prolifically in both English and Igbo, with several volumes published in
Nigeria.
Sometimes a poem expresses a political vision that is wide in scope, as in Ama Ata
Aidoo's "Cornfields in Accra," in Aftermath, or Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie 's "Song of the
African Middle Class" in the Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry.
Much Negritude poetry idealized women and romanticized motherhood, making them
synonymous with tradition, with Africa. For this reason, according to Andrea Benton
Rushing, there are few negative images of women in African poetry, and those are limited
to women who have rejected traditional women's roles. Women poets clearly have a
different perspective, a more complex and realistic one, on themselves, and one hopes
that perspective will begin to emerge as women write more and more in poetic form.
From the beginning, African women have subverted conventions in their poems.
Francesca Pereira, in her "Mother Dark," in Poems from Black Africa, offers a powerful
mother image, "she was dark, very dark / and her voice shook the world," and then an
image of the mother crying "loud in pain," because "her children now / Oppress her
children." " Mother Africa"
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has been courageously fighting for her children's freedom, but now she is not heard
because the oppression comes from within the family. A number of newer voices emerge
all the time. Irene Assiba d'Almeida published five poems in "Black Women's Writing:
Crossing the Boundaries," a special issue of Matatu ( 1989).
Jean Benjamin and the Bellville uwco branch's "The Curse of Adam and Eve" is a
performance poem that links the oppression of women at home and at work in South
Africa, using both English and Afrikaans:
I'm up at four
In the morning
Do the ironing
The cleaning
Dress the kids
Get them to school
Run to work
Get there on time
To stand in the production line.
Ek het is baas baas baas
Sy naam is Klaas Klaas Klaas
En hy vat hie
Dan vat hy da
Hy vat ans dew me kaar
Push up production!
Push up production!
Haai girls laat ons line
Fok die corruption!
[I've got a boss boss boss
His name is Klaas Klaas Klaas
He touch me here
He touch me there
He touch me everywhere
"Push up production!"
"Push up production!"
"Hey girls, let's go"
Fuck this corruption!] 15
According to Benjamin, the words of this song are a rewriting of some popular lyrics that
she realized were destructive when she heard one of her young daughters singing the
popular version, which makes light of the abuse of women and even poses women as
delighting in their acceptance of abuse.
Amelia House is clear in her articulation of resistance in the South African struggle. In
the final poems of Our Sun Rises she links South Africa to a delivering woman whose
labor must be induced:
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You amble on
We can no longer
Wait for nature's course
We must deliver
You
With
Force
(63)
The link is made as well to her own daughter's birth and to all South African children, as
her dedication indicates. It ends with "We Still Dance" (71), which is both an echo of an
earlier poem, "I Will Still Sing" (21), and a forecast of victory and celebration.

The Writers' Themes

African women's writing consistently portrays women in various struggles for self-
definition. A character's ability to define herself is shaped both by her understanding of
the boundaries by which society circumscribes her and by her ability to transcend those
boundaries and attain self-actualization while remaining nonetheless within her society.
This struggle generates conflict, which is universally a source of creative power. In the
writing of African women, certain themes present this process, and they may be
summarized as follows: (I) the contradictions of motherhood; (2) the struggle for
economic independence and success; (3) the precariousness of marital relationships; (4)
tradition and modernity in relation to the role of women; (5) the politics of colonialism
and neocolonialism and their effects on society in general and women in particular; and
(6) the nature of power relationships in society.
Although certain texts, such as Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood ( 1979), deal
substantially with overturning myths about mothering, the subject comes up again and
again as part of a play's or novel's theme (e.g., in Bâ's Une si longue lettre, in
Sutherland's Edufa, and in Ngcobo's Cross of Gold). Sutherland's Foriwa ( 1967)
presents an important mother-daughter relationship. In many works the struggle for
economic success is central, as in Nwapa's Efuru, Idu, and One Is Enough and Njau's
Ripples in the Pool ( 1978). Both Ripples in the Pool and The Joys of Motherhood treat
the idea that women can become economically self-sufficient through prostitution.
These themes are frequently combined with differing emphases according to the writer's
intention. Marriage and sexual relationships are often intertwined with the subject of
motherhood; a notable exception is Nwapa's Idu, which deals with a husband-wife
relationship that does not require the addition of children (although society would insist
on the contrary). For Senegalese writers, Islamic polygamy in which a wife can be
abandoned, is an important theme. In Sow Fall's La grève des battù ( 1979; The Beggars'
Strike, 1981) a man is callous to his extremely supportive wife and takes an
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other, younger wife who is less respectful of him; the same theme is also an important
aspect of Bâ's Une si longue lettre. Many works show evidence that a new kind of woman
is being envisaged by the writers, one who will challenge the societal order (as in
Nwapa's One Is Enough).
The conflict between tradition and modernity is a theme that has concerned many African
writers, both men and women, since joining these two worlds is a principal challenge of
contemporary African experience. Women writers are concerned particularly with the
woman's role in this process. For Ramatoulaye in Une si longue lettre, tradition is
oppressive, something that can hurt as well as console. In Sutherland's Edufa, Ampoma's
integrity is linked strongly to her loyalty to the spirit of tradition. In Bessie Head's A
Question of Power, a woman confronting social rejection achieves inner peace by
turning to nature, to growing plants and food and tending to children; in this way ancient
traditions heal modern crises. Noni Jabavu in The Ochre People shows how a family
blends the modern and traditional to avoid conflict between the two worlds.
Tradition often means woman as mother, grandmother, guardian of old ways, and teacher
of those ways to the young. But assuming these roles is difficult when women see
opportunities in societies moving toward modern technological development. The Hausa
oral poet Binta Katsina therefore sings, "Women of Nigeria you could do every kind of
work," and goes on to list being a minister, doing clerical work, driving cars, and flying
planes, among others (Mack). Yet in many works, women writers indicate that the old
authority figures, both men and women, still contribute a powerful sense of identity to the
individual and relate her to her culture. That contribution may be destructive or
constructive. In A Question of Power, both male authority figures, Sello and Dan, are
damaging to Elizabeth in different ways. In Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, the
patriarchy refers to male and female elders who together maintain power relations in the
clan. In the autobiographical writings of Diallo and Jabavu, patriarchal fathers are
admired. It depends on the writer and her culture how these things are interpreted.
Emecheta presents a negative image of maternal power through Ma Palagda in The
Slave Girl ( 1977). Zulu Sofola has her central character Clara kneel to her husband in
deference to a male authority figure, Dr. Jinadu, at the close of her play The Sweet Trap (
1977). 16 Nwapa tends to show authority figures as being good or bad depending on how
they wield authority. Overall, then, the variety of approaches to the meaning and value of
tradition represents the present confusion of directions for many individuals caught in a
situation of rapid change.
Women writers also add another dimension to the portrayal of political reality in Africa.
In many works ( Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood or Bessie Head's Maru, for
example), the condition of the woman is placed within a context of politics in the whole
society. Perspectives are different. Sow Fall is much less sympathetic to the neocolonial
politician Mour Ndiaye in La grève des battù
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in La grève des battù, who lugs beef in the heat of the day to beggars who have been
driven into a camp by his own directive, than is Head to Maru, a male leader with
difficulties.
Domestic content in women's writing, however radical it may be about male-female
relations, is less politically disturbing to society than the direct political statement of a
Sada'aw in Woman at Point Zero ( 1975). Boitumelo, in an interview titled " Women
Writers Speak," first published in Staffrider, quotes the young South African writer
Manoko Mchwe on what constitutes women's literature:
I believe a woman, as mother in her society, as the first teacher of her children
and also as an ordinary member of society, is in a very good position to
communicate with people she writes for. The usage of simple domestic language
can be very effective as it will be easily understood, but I must stress that a
woman is not confined to write about domestic life. I only gave that as an
example. (76; our italics)

Feminism and African Women Writers

"The female writer should be committed in three ways: as a writer, as a woman
and as a third world person; and her womanhood is implicated in all three."—
Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, "The Female Writer"
The question of political and social responsibility and the writer is addressed to the
African woman writer by the Ogundipe-Leslie formulation above. Ogundipe-Leslie is
concerned that "many African female writers like to declare that they're not feminists, as
if it were a crime to be a feminist" (I I). This she attributes to successful intimidation of
African women, which has resulted in women being apologetic for asserting women's
rights. This became the central question in a trialogue between Micere Mugo, Ama Ata
Aidoo, and Buchi Emecheta at the 1988 African Literature Association Annual
Conference held at the University of Pittsburgh. It became clear in the ensuing discussion
that all three writers were in support of the necessary links between gender, location, and
writing because they were aware of the dangers of prescriptiveness. Further, all three
writers felt that while they identified themselves with feminist politics, it had to be
redefined within African contexts.
Not every woman who makes a statement through writing is necessarily a feminist. There
is a tendency to ascribe feminism to a woman writer simply because she shows women
grappling with society's definitions of women. A number of African women writers dislike
the label feminist, but not its politics. Nwapa, for example, says in an interview with
Alison Perry in 1984, "Just because I write about women people accuse me of being
feminist." But she accepts Alice Walker's term womanist because it conveys a
commitment to the "survival and wholeness of the entire people, male and female." Aidoo
-338-
also says, "I shall not protest if you call me a feminist. But I am not a feminist because I
write about women" ("Unwelcome Pals" 40). Similarly, Emecheta has expressed
difficulties with the application of the term. According to Emecheta, "I will not be called
a feminist here, because it is European. It is as simple as that. I just resent that.
Otherwise, if you look at everything I do, it is what the feminists do, too; but it is just that
it comes from Europe, or European women, and I don't like being defined by them"
(Grandquist and Stotesbury 19).
Some theorists have sought to bring together the meaning of feminist that many African
women adopt and use it within African contexts. Filomina Steady talks of an "African
feminism" that conveys the strength of precolonial African women, their autonomy and
respect for motherhood and woman's contribution to society. Ama Ata Aidoo in Our
Sister Killjoy ( 1978) has her character Sissie say, "But wasn't her position among our
people a little more complicated than that of the dolls the colonizers brought along with
them who fainted at the sight of their own bleeding fingers?" (117). Ogundipe-Leslie sees
activism for women as part of an attack on social exploitation in general: "Women's
liberation is but an aspect of the need to liberate the total society from dehumanization. It
is the social system which must change. But men do become enemies when they seek to
retard or even block these necessary historical exchanges when for selfish power-
interests, they claim as their excuse culture and heritage" (" Not Spinning" 503).
Disregarding terms, women writers largely share a determination to achieve a freedom
for men and women within an overall humane and just society. Perhaps Ogundipe-
Leslie's assertion that the female writer should be committed in three ways, "as a writer,
as a woman and as a third world person" is an ideal close to the position of many women
writers, although they may not choose to be called feminists. A special issue of Current
Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, "Feminism(s) and Writing in English in
South Africa" ( 1990), contains several interesting essays on feminist theory and the role
of feminism in South African liberation. The role and history of feminist politics or
activism on women's rights in Africa is a discourse which African women are studying
and clarifying for themselves.

Criticism and African Women's Writing

The critical reception given African writers has been slow and often inadequate, tending
to focus on a few writers. White women critics have hardly recognized African women's
writing. Some Black male critics have been involved in this field from the beginning,
either usefully ( Lloyd Brown) or superficially ( Taiwo, Little). Major volumes of
criticism on African women writers by single authors tend to be by men, while women
critics tend to produce collaborative efforts. Ngambika: Women and African Literature (
1986) is a collection coedited by Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves.
-339-
Rhonda Cobham-Sander and Chikwenye Ogunyemi have coedited a special issue of
Research in African Literatures ( 1988) on African women writers. Anne Adams is
editing 70 African and Caribbean Women Writers: A Bio‐ Bibliographic Study for
Greenwood Press. Perhaps what this means is that male critics have been able to find the
time needed to finish long and sustained work, whereas women need to write and edit
collaboratively or communally to produce long pieces of criticism. Certainly even
professional women have domestic responsibilities that interfere with their time for work,
whereas men frequently can devote themselves to work without interruption. But a
number of single-authored volumes by women are in progress. Much of the work has
appeared as single essays, articles in journals and magazines, or chapters in books.
Susheila Nasta edited Motherlands ( 1991), a collection of critical essays including pieces
on Nwapa, Emecheta Bâ, Sa'adawi, Aidoo, Njau, Head, Macgoye, and by Aloena Busia,
Judie Newman, Pro, Euke Bochmer, C. L. Innes, and Jane Bryce-Okunlola.
At any rate, interest in African women writers is rising. A number of special issues of
academic journals have been devoted to the topic ( Research in African Literatures,
African Literature Today, World Literature Written in English). Sage: A Scholarly
Journal of Black Women, which continues to publish work on Black women
internationally, often includes work by and about African women. Others, such as
Callaloo, have issues looking at Black women writers cross-culturally. Some professional
associations, such as the African Literature Association's Women's Caucus, have
developed a core of interested critics who discuss women's writing at the annual
conferences, and a great deal of research is being done at African universities on women
in general. Out of this kind of activity, sustained criticism is developing. 17
But establishing the field is not without controversy and some clear resistance from male
critics. Debate is healthy, but too often criticism speaks without understanding or
sympathy—and this is not always a male shortcoming, by any means. Nadine Gordimer
said that Flora Nwapa could not handle theme, and that the portrait of the main
character in Efuru is obscured by "rambling details of daily life, mildly interesting but
largely irrelevant" ( 20 ) and has responded similarly to Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman
( 1973). We should not desire total agreement about this body of literature, but we should
tackle critical prejudice for what it is, the product of misunderstanding and sometimes of
fear of change. 18 For whatever else this new literature represents, it certainly represents a
stride into the future, determinedly carrying whatever is of use and value from the past.
These women writers struggle to express their reality with honesty, with complexity, and
with concern for their societies. We honor that effort.

Notes
I. Critics and editors define this group differently. Brenda Berrian's Bibliography includes
European women married to African men, yet excludes Nadine Gordimer.

-340-
Chinua Achebe and Lyn Innes include Gordimer and Alifa Rifaat, from Egypt, in their
African Short Stories. In forming any set of criteria, it is necessary to avoid simplistic
categories. Although Gordimer is an African of European settler ancestry, her work has
contributed greatly to our understanding of the African experience. Nevertheless, we have
chosen not to discuss her work here, opting instead to concentrate on lesser-known writers.
 Similarly, we exclude Rifaat because, as an Arabic woman writing in North Africa, she
already has a place within the African canon, and because the focus of this book is on sub-
Saharan Africa.

2. Much of the information in this paragraph came from personal conversations, interviews,
personal knowledge, or written reviews, and we have respected the privacy of sources.

3. For some writers, children's literature provides a way of bringing traditional women's uses
of words and the modern writer's role together. Barbara Kimenye, of Kenya, is one of these
writers.

4. A special issue of Research in African Literatures (forthcoming) edited by Omolara

Ogundipe-Leslie and Carole Boyce Davies focuses specifically on African women oral
artists.

5. West African Review published a number of extracts from Casely-Hayford's Memoirs (see
Berrian I). It is hard to see why in their introduction Dathorne and Feuser call her style
"toffy-tainted," a description that seems needlessly insulting to a woman who was born into
a certain elite, colonially educated place, where she could not help a certain linguistic
stiffness, and at least did her best to fight for the preservation of creative aspects of her
traditional culture, as well as for progressive ideas like the education of girls.

6. Berrian lists Kakaza, Intyatyambo yomzi ( 1913; The flower in the home) and u Tandiwe
wakwa Gcaleka ( 1914; Tandiwe, a damsel of Gaikaland); Swaartbooi, u Mandisa ( 1933;
Bringer of joy) and Dube, Wozanazo izindaba zika Phoshozwayo ( 1935; Tell us the stories
of Phoshozwayo). Swaartboi was born in 1907, the daughter of a headmaster of a Methodist
school; she became a teacher herself. Violet Dube was the pen name of Natale Nxumalo (
née Nxaba), who was married to the Zulu writer and teacher James Alfred Walter Nxumalo.

7. Hughes includes Marina Gashe (according to Berrian, a pen name for Rebeka Njau), Aquah
Laluah, and Francesca Pereira. Laluah (the pen name of Gladys Casely-Hayford, Adelaide's
daughter) published two poems in the Philadelphia Tribune, 14 October 1937, and a small
volume of partly Krio poetry, Take 'um so (1948).

8. Brown, Hofmeyr, and Rosenberg, voicing their regret that fewer Black women's voices are
represented in Lip than they had hoped, note that white women "have had disproportionate
 recognition in the arts of our countries, because of their privilege and the oppression of
others" (2). Not only such well-known white Southern African women writers as Olive
Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer but also minor writers such as the novelist Yvonne
Burgess( A Life to Live, 1973; The Strike, 1975) have much better access to publication
than Black women in their societies.

9. Informal discussion, 1985 African Literature Association conference, Northwestern

University, Evanston, Ill.

10. Beverly Mack's study of Hausa women's oral literature shows that "women find ways to
work within the religious and literary parameters of their culture to speak their minds on
political and social issues that affect them" (" Waya Daka" 28).

II. This is the same "letter to self/letter to God" motif Alice Walker employs in The Color
Purple

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The Color Purple. The letter becomes a prayer, in the mode in which Black women use
prayer and testimonial to dramatize and release pain and suffering.

12. Oladele Taiwo, at the beginning of his Female Novelists, places female writers in Africa in
relation to intellectual women writers of Europe by assuming that women's activism must
come from outside Africa by some influence, in direct opposition to his position on the
subject of European influences on male novelists in his earlier Culture and the Nigerian
Novel.

13. Unpublished; produced by the Imo State Council for Arts and Culture, 7 and 26 February
1985.

14. See Berrian 49-76. Akello published a volume of poems, My Barren Song ( 1979). Faik-
Nzuju has published several volumes in Kinshasa, e.g., Murmures, Poemes ( 1968).
15. Lyrics supplied by the author in Oxford, England, August 1989.

16. This incident caused controversy at Ibadan University, where it was performed for the
Nigerian Association of University Women on International Women's Day, 1975. Sofola
argues that modern women lose twice over, because they do not understand the advantages
in traditional culture, where men and women respect each other and maintain a balance of
power, and because modern relations between men and women are inadequate and produce
bad behavior on both sides. Education misleads women, she argues, placing the blame on
feminist influence from the West.

17. Also, such new anthologies as Charlotte Bruner's African Women's Writing ( 1993) bring
more writers to critical attention. Unfortunately, as we go to press, we cannot extend this
discussion to include new voices and newly discovered voices, such as Zaynab Alkalis,
Orlanda Amarilis, Aminita Maïga Ka, Awuor Ayoda, Violet Das Lannoy, Daisy
Kabagarama, Lina Magalia, Ananda Deri, Jean Marquand, Sheila Fugard, Gisèle Halimi,
Leila Sebbar, Andrée Chedid, nor the new issues in this field that their work raises.

18. For instance, Wole Soyinka's failure to realize the significance of women poets in his
Poems of Black Africa ( 1975) indicates that a major African writer had not developed a
consciousness about a new literary tradition, at a time when he was breaking new ground
creatively and intellectually in other areas.

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12 The Question of Language

in African Literatures
OYEKAN OWOMOYELA
Personne n'entend plus un peuple qui perd ses mots.
[Nobody listens to a people that has lost its voice.]
— François Mitterand
The phrase "Russian literature" customarily implies the Russian language; the phrase
"Russian literature in Russian" is therefore tautological. Put differently, if a literature is
Russian it is so by virtue of its creation out of the Russian culture and is necessarily in
the Russian language. The same logic applies to English literature, French literature,
Chinese literature, and so forth, and by extension to European literatures and Asian
literatures, for example. In other words, one cannot separate a literature from the culture
and the language that define it; mainly for that reason, works translated from one
language to another lose some essential qualities that cannot cross linguistic and cultural
barriers.
In this regard the widely recognized and acknowledged literatures of Africa are unique
among the literatures of the world. Whereas elsewhere language in literature attracts
attention and debate only in terms of the artistic effectiveness of its use, in Africa the
major point of contention is in what language or languages the literatures may
legitimately be expressed. To be sure, in the context of Spanish literature the preference
for Castilian over Aragonese might occasion debate, and in English literature pundits
might argue about the literary properties and legitimacy of Cockney or the Scottish
brogue in comparison with the Queen's English, but in each case the choice would be
between or among indigenous languages, one having achieved ascendancy over the
other(s). In Africa the question is whether what the world regards as the literary
expression of the African imagination should be in African or foreign tongues.
Houston Baker poses the crucial question in his "English as a World Language for
Literature: A Session for the 1979 English Institute." Given that language is inseparable
from thought, he asks, "How then, does Tewa or
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Yoruba or Sotho thought achieve literary form in English? How, given the inseparability
of thought and language, and the diversity of the world's language communities, should
one approach the notion that English has global status as a literary language? What
presuppositions are embodied in this view, and what are the implications?" ( ix ). More
recently, and in a similar vein, a Yoruba scholar discussing the anomaly of practicing
what passes as African philosophy in non-African languages cites Ludwig Wittgenstein's
assertion that "the limit of our language is the limit of our world" (Makinde 17).
Modern African literatures are a product of the encounter between African and European
cultures. Their development has been significantly influenced by the nature of that
encounter, and later by colonial expediency and the exigencies of decolonization. An
understanding of the linguistic anomaly that is a feature of those literatures thus
necessitates an archeological probing of those events.

Archeology
The story effectively begins in the Victorian era, when European attitudes toward
Africans were dominated by a strong belief in their inferiority to Europeans and some
suspicion about their humanity. Africans were supposed to suffer from a mental "deficit,"
as Victorian natural scientists put it, that rendered them incapable of the sort of
enterprises, intellectual or cultural, that other humans could accomplish. Their languages
were held to reflect that deficit. Referring specifically to the Africans transplanted as
slaves to the Caribbean, Edward Braithwaite notes that their native languages had to be
"submerged" because the European slavers regarded them as those of beings who were
"inferiors—nonhuman, in fact" ( 18 ).
In that prevailing atmosphere, when the question of African education arose it inevitably
generated some controversy. Those who believed in the deficit argued that forcing too
much education into the deficient African brains might have pathologically debilitating
consequences. Others were not so much interested in Africans' mental health as in the
possibility that education might adversely affect their perception of their proper place in
relation to Europeans in the order of things. T. J. Jones, of the Phelps-Stokes studies, and,
unfortunately, Booker T. Washington exemplify the conviction that Africans (and
African Americans) should be offered only the sort of education that would ensure their
usefulness to the dominant white society and would not give them any ridiculous idea of
equality to whites. The proper education would teach only enough English to make them
functionally useful; otherwise instruction would concentrate on menial and industrial
subjects. 1
Humanitarians and Christian missionaries unimpressed by the notion of an African
"deficit," and wishing to disprove the racists' contention that the
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African could not be civilized, set out to establish schools on the continent that would be
isolated "islands of civilization," hermetically sealed off from surrounding Africa. They
would be laboratories from which would issue finished, educated specimens, proof of
African educability. These specimens would, of course, have shed all vestiges of Africa,
including language, and would speak in the "tongue of 'civilization'" (Lyons 83). The
missionaries "hoped that gradually they would expand their 'islands of civilization' until
the last traditional African society would be not transformed but destroyed." The policy
was no different from the one that underlay the establishment of residential schools for
American Indians in the United States and Canada, as documented in such television
programs as " White Man's Way" (the United States) and " Where the Spirit Lives"
(Canada).
Whatever the missionaries' plans, practical considerations intervened to modify them, at
least initially, and especially in "Anglophone" areas. They had to discharge their primary
duty of spreading the gospel to people who had no knowledge of European languages and
must therefore be reached, at least initially, in their indigenous languages. Moreover, the
size of the task necessitated the employment of African helpers, who had to be literate in
their own languages. The missionaries also faced the necessity of producing literature,
preferably in applicable local languages, suitable for proselytization and, later,
instruction. This was true even for Catholic missionaries, who did not bear the obligation
the Reformation imposed on Protestants to make the Bible accessible to every believer
(see Ologunde 279-80).
The onset of colonialism once again forced the missionaries' hand, as developments in
the Yoruba area of Nigeria illustrate (see Ologunde 281
83). The missionaries still
retained control of education during the infancy of the colonial era, with Yoruba as the
medium of instruction. But the needs of the colonial administration soon assumed
precedence over those of the missions. Rather than propagators of the gospel, the
colonists needed messengers, clerks, civil servants, and court interpreters. The
educational system responded to the development. The missionaries, always strapped for
money for their projects, were induced with the grant of governmental subventions to
embrace the change in orientation. But contrary to the popular notion that contemporary
Africans surrendered to Europeans without a fight, in this instance nationalists protested
the supplanting of their language by the European imposition (Ologunde 281-82).
A major difference in colonial ideology existed between Britain and France, the two most
important colonial powers as far as the present discussion is concerned: while Britain
favored "indirect rule," a system that was based on administration through the agency of
indigenous rulers and that sought to preserve traditional institutions, France opted for
assimilation, a system designed to transform her African subjects into Black French men
and women. Christine Souriau has described the practical application of this policy of
cultural domination, with regard to language, in the Maghreb,
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where Arabic was already established as a written, scholarly medium. The French policy
discouraged instruction in Arabic, stopped financing local education, replaced Arabic-
speaking personnel with French speakers practicing French ways (thus relegating the
former to inferior status), and forbade French personnel to learn Arabic ( 320 -21).
The task of linguistic assimilation was easier in sub-Saharan Africa, where no challenge
existed to French like that which Arabic posed in the Maghreb. Indeed, even now the
controversy about the choice between African and European languages is virtually
confined to the Anglophone parts of the continent, because with regard to Francophone
areas, Arabization has made it irrelevant in the Maghreb while sub-Saharan Africa has
shown little evidence of discomfort with the primacy of French. In fact, while
complaining about the encroachment of English on French around the world and
chastising French diplomats for occasionally departing from French, François Mitterand
singled out the leaders of Francophone Africa for their exemplary loyalty to the language.
At the Brazzaville gathering of mayors from Francophone territories in 1987, Jacques
Chirac in his capacity as mayor of Paris proposed as the group's motto, "Cooperation for
development, friendship, francophonie" (see " Francophone Mayors Meet"). As S. K.
Panter
Brick has shown ( 330, 341 ), francophonie as a concept developed in the early
1960s to enfold collectively all French-speaking peoples, but especially those who share
a French identity—la francité. In practice the group has come to include only the peoples
of France and Francophone Africa, not those of Belgium, Quebec, or even Francophone
Antilles, even though these last are considered départments of France.
Regardless of the colonial power involved, colonial education throughout the African
continent uniformly privileged European cultures and languages over African ones. Peter
Lloyd writes of the schools:
Some were government managed, others run by missionary bodies. In either case
the schools were usually located in the capitals or principal towns; most were
boarding schools. Those of the French colonial territories were overtly
assimilationist—many indeed had the children both of African and settler
European populations. In the British territories of East and Central Africa with
settler populations segregated educational facilities existed. But although the
principles of indirect rule and association (in contrast to assimilation) guided the
colonial governments in their policies of developing indigenous political
institutions, in the educational sphere their schools were run on the lines of the
English boarding school. The content of the curricula was almost entirely
European—the staff knowing little about Africa. These schools divorced the
youth from his local community during the most formative years of his life. They
thus produced men who were elitist in outlook. (20)
Dennis Brutus, the South African poet, testifies from his own experience that the African
writer educated under the colonial system was exposed to the mainstream of the English
literary tradition, which left a lasting impres
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sion on him or her. It is little wonder, then, that, as he also observes, "some African
writers have been criticized for a too-slavish imitation of their English models" ( 7 ). 2
Edward Braithwaite's Caribbean experience parallels and corroborates Brutus's, for, as he
remarks, the effect of English education was to make the Caribbean more familiar with
Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood than with "Nanny of the Maroons, a name some of us
didn't even know until a few years ago" ( 18 ).
A not so direct but equally eloquent testimony to the effects of colonial education comes
from Africa's first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Wole Soyinka. Aké, his
memories of a colonial childhood, pictures an idyll centered in the sequestered mission
parsonage, in the care of "Wild Christian," his mother, and Essay, his schoolteacher
father, whose passions were for scholarly disputations and cultivating roses; Sunday
afternoons at the parsonage featured high tea ceremonies. The laureate recalls an
occasion when a colorful police band parade lured him to wander far beyond Aké until he
found himself at the end of the parade in the police compound. There an English officer
gamely but unsuccessfully attempted to communicate with him in Yoruba. The befuddled
young Soyinka asked another (Yoruba) officer standing by, in English, what the
Englishman was saying. The Englishman was amazed at Soyinka's English, and a rapport
immediately developed between them ( 46 -47). Soyinka also recalls that contemplating
the figures on the stained-glass windows of their church, who looked very much like
egúngún (masqueraders), he wished that they would some day materialize, but only on
condition that they spoke English, for only then could he converse with them ( 32 -33).
When the colonial powers eventually came to see empires as misfortunes to be shed as
speedily as possible (Austin 23), their desire was to leave affairs in the hands of Africans
who could be relied upon to maintain a continuity with the policies of the colonial period.
France's assimilationist policy was well designed to serve that purpose, but not so
Britain's "indirect rule." That policy was therefore discarded in favor of the strategy
devised by Andrew Cohen, the colonial officer most responsible for the dismantling of
the British empire in Africa. The traditional rulers, bastions of "indirect rule," were
useless in the new scheme of building modern states; the elite, who had been hitherto
largely excluded from the legislative and representative councils, were now to be
groomed as successors of the colonizers (see Robinson).
At Independence the westernized elite class comprised three elements: the politicians,
who constituted the ruling class; the intellectuals; and the army, or "elite with guns"
(Clayton 207). Among the three the degree of westernization was by no means uniform,
and the division of functions not always stable. As in the case of Léopold Sédar Senghor,
sometimes the first two classes or elements coincided or overlapped, and soon after
Independence the military element would also often become the ruling element.
Whatever the
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case, the writers constitute part of the intellectual branch of the elite segment, and their
operative language is the one the colonizers left in their wake.

Postcolonial Linguistic Continuity

In order to explain the persistence of European languages in independent Africa one
might simply argue that since other colonial legacies have persisted—some as important
as the fragmentation of formerly cohesive ethnic groups into different colonial zones, and
the agglomeration of hitherto disparate groups into single states—there is no good reason
to expect that language would be an exception. There are, however, other reasons. As I
noted earlier, modern African literature is a product of the assimilated elite. When they
tried their hands at creative writing they had no other choice of language than that of their
education. Also, given the stigma of inferiority that attached to the use of African
languages in the colonial era, the educated African felt hardly any misgiving about
preferring European substitutes. At this point one should stress that Soyinka's account of
his early proficiency in English and corresponding inadequacy in Yoruba is to be
understood as evidence of precociousness rather than a lament over some sort of cultural
deprivation. He was, he was informing us, the proverbial àsàmú . According to a Yoruba
proverb, Omo tó máa jé àsàmú , kékeré ló ti nsenu sámú-sámú (A child that will grow to
unparalleled stature will show his or her genius from childhood.)
The enduring colonial imprint on the African intellectual is evident in J.-L. Miège's
observation that the universities remain even after Independence "the best examples of
the colonial past" ( 45 ). The differences among postcolonial Africans, he suggests, are
not ethnic (they may be from the same ethnic group) but derive from their different
colonial pasts, and are discernible in the different ways that they write, think, and live.
Those differences between the Anglophone Yoruba of Nigeria and their Francophone
relatives across the border in the Benin republic prove his point.
The consequence for African literatures is that they have come to mean writings in
English, French, and Portuguese. Only as a conscious effort does one include,
grudgingly, "African-language literatures," and then only because the customary
assumption about what constitutes African literatures, and in particular what part
language plays in the determination, has lately lost its early confidence. 3
Proponents of the status quo have offered other reasons for retaining non
African
languages for literary purposes. One such reason appears in Sartre's "Orphée noir," the
preface to Senghor's 1948Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue
française ( Anthology of the new negro and Malagasy poetry in the French language).
Sartre pointed out that colonized peoples lacked a common language as a consequence of
the manner in which the colonial powers constituted their colonies. In general, distinct
peoples
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who had never had much to do with one another were consolidated willy
nilly into
administrative units for colonial convenience. As a result, people who found themselves
as subjects in the same colony, and eventually as citizens in the same postcolonial nation,
often could communicate among themselves only in the language of their colonizer.
Ezekiel Mphahlele therefore had a point when he said that ironically, "colonialism had
not only delivered 'the writers' to themselves, but had delivered them to one another, had
provided them, so to speak, with a common language and an African consciousness; for
out of rejection had come affirmation" ( 2 ). For, he added, even where colonialism had
receded on the continent, European languages still served as a unifying force ( 8 ).
Writers obviously have certain readers in mind when they settle on the language to
employ, if indeed they have a choice. (The question does not arise for some writers, of
course, who conceive their activity as part of an intra
cultural dialogue.) For Chinua
Achebe, for example, the chosen audience is one involved in "international exchange" (
Morning82-83). Writing for that audience distinguished between "serious" and
"nondescript" writers. The former are those like him who have something to say to the
world, and who are consequently better off expressing themselves in European
languages. The latter are those of a much more modest calling, who must accordingly be
content with African languages. Lewis Nkosi's description of the delegates to the 1962
Kampala conference of Anglophone writers captures the affectation of self-importance
that attends the consciousness of election to international responsibility evident in
Achebe's statement: they were mostly young, sardonic writers, he wrote, whose mien
suggested amazement "that fate had entrusted them with the task of interpreting a
continent to the world" (Nkosi I). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has also testified that writers at that
time understood their duty to be "to explain Africa to the world: Africa had a past and a
culture of dignity and human complexity" ( 20 ). When later on, antipathies developed
between writers and rulers, be they civilian or military, the writers found their most
sympathetic champions among the audiences they had cultivated abroad, and,
understandably, they continued to direct their messages and complaints to those
audiences. Charles Larson has in fact contended that the sometimes impenetrable English
Wole Soyinka affected in his writings was a deliberate stratagem to get his works past
African censors to his foreign readers ( 24 ).
Yet another argument for not writing in African languages rests on a practical
consideration such as the writer's need to reach enough readers to make writing worth his
or her while financially. Thus Gerald Moore insists that a writer should express himself
"in a language that gives him a hearing (and a living)," leaving the development of
"vernaculars" to those who are content with a "vernacular audience" (" Polemics" 9).
Similarly, the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène commented at the
1963 Dakar conference of Francophone writers that writing, "which is now my
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job," is a social necessity, like the jobs of the mason, the carpenter, or the ironworker" (in
Moore, African Literature57). He went on to assure his audience that if he had taken the
trouble he could have written his novel Le docker noir in Wolof, his native language.
"But then," he asked, "who would have read it? How many people know how to read the
language? ... Even written in French, how many Africans have read Le docker noir?
Eighty-five per cent of the people here are illiterate; the rest can read and write but they
do not read African authors. That means that our public is in Europe" ( 58 ). Along the
same lines, Chinua Achebe's brief article on African reading habits (in Morning50-54)
outlines the reasons why the African writer could not hope to make a living writing for
Africans. African intellectuals, he reports, read (if they read anything at all) history,
economics, mathematics, and the like, hardly ever fiction or poetry; they simply had not
developed the leisure habit of reading such things, as their European counterparts had.
In addition to the better living that writing in European languages affords African writers,
another determinate factor is the international acclaim that comes from direct access to
the international custodians of literary taste, and the rewards such access entails. Not least
among these is the frequent invitations favored writers receive to speak of their writing
(and otherwise perform) before audiences around the world, but especially in Europe, the
Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and formerly, even in the Soviet Union. 4 As
important, and perhaps more important, are the many prizes available to writers who
address themselves directly to the external world. The list of African writers in European
languages who have won such honors is impressive, honors such as the Commonwealth
Literature Prize, the Noma Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Jock Campbell/New
Statesman Prize, Prix Renaudot, Prix Saint-Beuve, Prix Charles Veillon, and, of course,
the most coveted of them all, the Nobel Prize that Soyinka finally captured in 1986.
Although some African writers have chosen to forgo the opportunity for such honors and
have instead elected to stick with African languages, we cannot minimize the temptation
that the allure of a possible Nobel Prize and the status of cosmopolitan celebrity
represents for a young and aspiring artist.
In discussing the problem of language policy in contemporary Africa in general, one must
be mindful of the implications of the reality that in African literary studies and in African
studies as a whole, Africa itself is at the periphery, while the centers are located
elsewhere—in Europe or America. As long as that condition persists it is logical to
expect that the operative and favored languages will be those of the centers.
The benefits of producing "African" literatures in non-African languages do not accrue
only in the direction of the African writers, for non-African literary scholars and critics
have correctly noted that were Africans to write in African languages their works would
be inaccessible to all but a handful of the non-Africans to whom they are available at the
moment. Robert Plant Armstrong, for example, sees Amos Tutuola's preference for
English despite
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his lack of facility in the language as a boon for his foreign readers. Because Tutuola's
material is close to Yoruba folklore, Professor Armstrong writes, "he has doubly blessed
the serious student who does not command enough of Yoruba to understand the
traditional texts as they are traditionally communicated by writing in English" ( 151 ).
Similarly, O. R. Dathorne defends the same writer's idiosyncratic English, describing it as
"a sensible compromise, between raw pidgin (which would be unintelligible to European
readers) and standard English" ( 72 ).
Dathorne apparently believed, as many other critics did, that Tutuola's "young English,"
as Dylan Thomas described it in his Observer review, was a deliberate put-on by the
writer rather than the best English he was capable of, as was indeed the case. As late as
1987 the same misconception persisted on the part of some critics. As an example, Mark
Axelrod faults Dan Kunene 's handling of his characters' language in From the Pit of Hell
to the Spring of Life, saying, "No attempt is made to alter the prose, as Amos Tutuola
does . . . to make it sound less Anglicized and more African" ( 18 ).

From Expediency to Preference

The discussion so far indicates that expediency and certain exigencies determined the
language of African literatures in the crucial formative stages. A logical inference would
therefore be that with their passing, and the return of more auspicious circumstances,
normality will ensure. On the contrary, however, the predominant sentiment is in favor of
perpetuating the preemption of African languages by European ones. The proponents of
that option have been eloquent and energetic in justifying it.
Frantz Fanon's famous observation that "to speak means ... above all to assume a
culture" ( 17 -18) refers in general to colonized peoples' attitude toward the colonizers'
languages, not specifically to their employment for creative literary expression, but the
statement is particularly relevant to the literary enterprise. Christine Souriau elaborates
on Fanon's statement, describing language as "a guide to social and political
relationships within a community as also between different communities" ( 310 ). Its
discussion, she goes on, is not always objective, because it is always colored by ideology.
"But," she surmises, "perhaps it is unrealistic to seek objectivity in this area which
touches directly on the problem of identity and its affirmation" ( 311 ). The enduring
controversy on the subject bears her out on the issue of objectivity.
Jean Paul Sartre's celebrated "Orphée noir" represented Negritude as a rebuttal to
colonialist slanders against the African experience. "When you removed the gag that was
keeping these black mouths shut," he asked, "what were you hoping for? That they would
sing your praise?" ( 5 ). He further contended that the African writer, even though he
might write in a European language, was really not interested in any manner of
communica
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tion with the white world, which he had pointedly obliterated from his consciousness the
better to celebrate blackness. That contention prompted O. Mannoni's invocation of the
Caliban-Prospero relationship, which has proved so useful to some advocates of African
faithfulness to European languages. Mannoni countered Sartre with the view that the
assimilated colonial was not indifferent to the colonizer; rather, in reaction to the trick the
latter had played on him—lifting him out of his native milieu only to strand him in a
limbo, short of complete acceptance—the colonial was embittered and full of hatred for
the colonizer. The colonial's complaint, like Caliban's to Prospero, was that at first the
colonizer seduced and taught him the colonizer's language, then abandoned him in
inferiority (Mannoni 76-77).
I have already alluded to Achebe's variation on the argument, which seems to have lost
little of its appeal with the receding of the colonial period. In a similar vein Kofi
Awoonor invokes the Caliban-Prospero relationship and argues that just as Caliban
turned Prospero's language into a weapon against him, so African writers have converted
the appropriated European languages into "an internalized weapon of our self-assertion
because what we are also doing in the same process is to liberate ourselves from the
strangle hold of Western cultural structures" ( 149 ). Also along the same lines Ezekiel
(Es'kia) Mphahlele, calling to mind the multiplicity of languages on the continent, sees
English and French as affording Africans "the common language with which to present a
nationalistic front against white oppressors" ( 8 ).
Soyinka in effect reiterates Awoonor's points in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In a
ringing homage he describes his native Yoruba world as "that which I so wholeheartedly
embrace, . . . a world that nourishes my being, one which is so self-sufficient, so replete
in all aspects of its productivity, so confident in itself and in its destiny that it experiences
no fear in reaching out to others and in responding to others." He adds that because that
world forms "the prism of our world perception ... our sight need not be and has never
been turned permanently inwards. If it were, we could not so easily understand the enemy
on our doorstep, nor understand how to obtain the means to disarm it." He goes on to say,
"When we borrow an alien language to sculpt and paint in, we ... begin by coopting the
entire properties of that language as correspondencies to represent our matrix of thought
and expression" (in Gates, "Rhetoric" 21). One can fairly comment that Soyinka doth
protest too much, for the very reasons that necessitated his construing rejection of a
language as a testimony to its self-sufficiency and a demonstration of affection for it.
Most revolutionary perhaps are those arguments that set out to relegate language to near
or total irrelevance in the realm of literature. One example is the complex of opinions that
have emerged in approbation of Amos Tutuola's writing in English. Their underlying
thesis amounts to an assertion that an artist need not be a master of his or her medium.
The dissertation by Chinweizu and his collaborators on this subject in Towards the
Decolonization of African Literature
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of African Literature is a notable example. They insist that literatures written in European
languages by non-Europeans are distinct from European national literatures ( 9 ), a
proposition that is unlikely to incite opposition. But in order to legitimize African writers'
use (or misuse) of non-African languages they devise a revolutionary set of criteria for
attributing literatures to cultures. Accordingly they argue that although language
embodies and expresses cultural values "it is not a crucial generator of those values and
cannot alone be relied upon to supply literary criteria" ( 12 ; their italics). To underscore
the limited role they would assign to language in such matters they resort to a musical
analogy: "Just because an African or an Afro
American plays a piano—a European
invention—does not at all mean that the highlife or jazz he produces on it is European
music, which therefore should be judged by the same standards as European music" ( 14
). They thereupon propose a ranking of the criteria that should determine the
categorization of literatures, according to which language places in the fourth and last
slot, behind (I) primary audience, (2) the work's implicit cultural and national
consciousness, and (3) the author's nationality by birth or naturalization ( 13 ).5
Mphahlele's objection to African languages arises from his conviction that they are
simply inadequate, because they lack "a technical terminology and a vocabulary that
meets the needs of systematic analytic contemporary thought" ( 8 ). Unfortunately, that
patently untenable opinion is current among a distressing number of intellectuals in the
African diaspora; Baker reports that a Yale University Professor from a formerly
colonized portion of the world ... claimed that he could not express his "most complex
and striking notions" in any language other than English. "I suggested," says Baker, "that
the Creole of his native island might be quite suitable for 'advanced thought'" (x).
Time after time some new argument surfaces to demonstrate, among other truths, that
once one commits oneself to an option one's lucidity and objectivity regarding that option
vis-à-vis alternatives become easy casualties. As an instance Olasope Oyelaran argues
against replacing English with Yoruba in the relevant parts of Nigeria by suggesting that
language and culture are not necessarily linked. He quotes Malcom Gutherie as authority
to assert that English, unlike other languages, is culture-neutral ( 304 ), and that the
Yoruba person who uses it presumably only avails himself or herself of a resource that
belongs to all peoples of the world. Furthermore, he calls attention to the immense
prestige it confers, adding:
There is no doubt that social and parental attitudes towards the acquisition of
 English are exuberantly enthusiastic in Nigeria.... Even the Yoruba speaking
Nigerians would sacrifice anything to acquire English, because it is the way to
academic honors—the proverbial 'Golden Fleece' to all Nigerians. And academic
honors are widely cherished as the key to material well-being. ( 309 ; Oyelaran's
italics)
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Another irresistible argument (in his view) for not disturbing the status quo is, ironically,
that the Yoruba area is only part of a country that includes people who speak other
languages; the promotion of Yoruba would, he thinks, be disruptive for the political
arrangement ( 302 ). The same argument would of course apply to the other indigenous
languages of the country. The irony of using the mosaic nature of postcolonial countries,
which is blamed for necessitating the imposition of European languages in the first place,
as a reason for not restoring African languages is inescapable.
In 1963 Obiajunwa Wali recommended that African writers follow the examples of
Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, writers who opted for their national languages
even though the fashion favored the more prestigious Latin ( 13 -15). To continue writing
in alien languages, he warned, would be to pursue "a dead end, which can only lead to
sterility, uncreativity, and frustration." Moore, holding brief for the writers, rejected that
course and offered his own vision of the future instead. "More likely than a simultaneous
renaissance of hundreds of African vernaculars," he wrote, "is the gradual divergence and
emergence of a distinctive African idiom in English, a process which has already taken
place in America and the West Indies" (" Polemics" 9).
The arguments for retaining the hegemony of European languages in African letters are
not uniformly spurious. Some have some cogency and deserve serious attention. One of
these comes from Dennis Brutus. South Africans, he explains, are suspicious that
attempts to turn them toward their own languages and cultures are simply another
strategy to consolidate apartheid. He notes that a great deal of literature, both oral and
written, is produced in South African languages such as Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and others.
He continues:
There is a very special bind here, though, that I ought to explain. Because the
apartheid government—the minority white government—has tried to revive the
old tribal structures and to force the Africans back into those structures in order to
prevent them from participating in the present political process, the Africans tend
to be suspicious even of their own languages and literary vehicles. They are
fearful that these might be turned against them and used as one further pretext to
force them back into a tribal mode within a broad policy of what are known as the
Bantustans—a strategy that is aimed at forcing black Africans back into tribal
structures. (II- 12 )

Coping Strategies
Having deprived themselves of the most obvious and customary index of the cultural
grounding of their literary products, which would be the language of the particular
culture, African writers in European languages have had to explore alternatives to suggest
a cultural ambiance, in other words, to add a cultural flavoring. One of the best-known
devices, exemplified in the early
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novels of Chinua Achebe, is the use of proverbs. Since traditional African discourse tends
to rely to a considerable degree on proverbs, the writer creates frequent opportunities to
insert them both in his authorial descriptions and in the dialogue of his characters.
Another device is to suggest the lyricism and dignified profundity characteristic of
traditional discourses by preferring words with Anglo-Saxon origins to those with Greek
or Latin roots. While Achebe also adopted this device, the best examples occur in Ayi
Kwei Armah 's The Healers and Two Thousand Seasons (both 1979). The relative
simplicity of Anglo-Saxon words, coupled with the relative brevity of sentences in the
dialogue, justifies the description of the language in such works as simple, a description
that has been mistaken by some critics for an imputation of artlessness. For example,
Eustace Palmer objected to my pointing out this feature with regard to early Anglophone
African writers. He took exception to what must have seemed to him a charge that the
writers lacked complete mastery of their adopted language ( 113 -14).
Other strategies include the literal translation of African idioms into English—either
deliberately, as in the case of Nkem Nwankwo's Danda ( 1964), for example, or
innocently, as in the early works of Amos Tutuola. The most famous use of this strategy
is the bold experiment Gabriel Okara carried out in The Voice ( 1964), in which he
combined Ijo syntax with English lexis. The freshness of the result is apparent in such
passages as the following: "A stinking thing like a rotten corpse be, which had made us
all, you and me, breathe freely no more for the many years past. Now we are free people
be, free to breathe" ( 72 ). Where the writers wish to indicate some difference between an
object they have in mind and the one commonly understood to be designated by the
English word they have chosen, or where they have chosen to use the African word, they
have usually resorted to what Niyi Osundare describes as "cushioning," brief (but
sometimes extended) explanatory diversions, or the attachment of a comparable English
term as an alternative. Again Achebe's earlier novels offer the best instances in such
constructions as "agadi-nwayi, or old woman" ( Things Fall Apart9), "elders, or ndichie"
( 10 ), "hut, or obi" (II), "chi or personal god" ( 14 ), and so forth.
Generally speaking, with enough practice the writers develop the ability to integrate their
chosen devices into their works seamlessly, such that they call little attention to
themselves. Here again Achebe set the example, for his later works such as A Man of the
People ( 1966) successfully and unobtrusively integrate his glosses with the contextual
materials. These stratagems are not without pitfalls, for while certain readers and critics
applaud the poetry of Armah's language in his historical novels, for example, others find
his style somewhat too labored and affected. Moreover, however much the writers
succeed in masking the dilemma that attends their choice of language, Osundare's
observation that they are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy on
medium at the expense of content will remain valid. Instead of struggling with "lexical
equivocations" ( 16 ) and "masochistic
 -359-
linguistic acrobatics" ( 21 ), he suggests, the writers would do better to write in their own
languages.

Objections to the Deemphasis of Language

To reiterate the basic thesis of this discussion, the relegation of language to the margins
in literature certainly defies logic and common usage, and has inevitably led those who
attempt it into considerable difficulties. By its very nature literature is the manipulation of
language, and the established practice is to base the determination of its cultural
underpinning on the language of its expression. The nationality of the writer is not
enough to assign his or her writing to a particular tradition. French literature is not simply
the literature of French-speaking peoples, but literature written in French, and Arabic
literature is similarly not simply the literature of Arabic-speaking peoples but literature
written in Arabic. When one speaks of English, or French, or German literature one does
not speak in political terms but rather in linguistic or cultural terms. The confusion would
be eliminated if the lexical formulation were not the same for both. Consider, for
example, Arab literature and Arabic literature. The former would be literature written by
an Arab, whether it is in Arabic or not, and the latter would be literature written in
Arabic, answering to whatever cultural values one associated with Arabic, whether the
work was written by an Arab, an African, an Indian, or an Indonesian.
Significantly, in the discipline of literature one customarily refers to English literature
rather than British literature, to emphasize the linguistic and the cultural rather than the
political aspect. (On the other hand, one speaks of the British empire, rather than the
English empire.) The point is that one may carry the passport of a nation (an African
nation, for example) and yet write literature that would belong in a different tradition
(say, Arabic or French).
Acceptance of the other criteria that some writers and scholars have offered instead of
language poses its own problems. If one were to take the audience for which the work is
written, one would have to conclude that those works the writers themselves concede
were directed at Europeans to correct or debunk their slander against Africans must be
regarded as European literature. Championship of European languages as the proper
media for African writing has engendered, as one would expect, some confusion and
inconsistency. Ngũgĩ lists Taban lo Liyong among the three lecturers whose activism
resulted in the dethronement of English literature as the centerpiece of the literature
department at Makerere University ( 94 ). Those lecturers believed that in an African
institution African cultures (and African cultural products) should occupy that position,
while those that belong to other parts of the world must position themselves around the
periphery
-360-
according to their relevance. Yet while fighting that entirely heroic battle on behalf of
African cultural rehabilitation, lo Liyong also ridiculed Nigerian university graduates for
finding fault with Tutuola's choice of English as his medium ( 160 ).
Similarly, in a BBC program in December 1986 Chinweizu responded to the award of the
Nobel Prize to Soyinka by describing the laureate as a "euro
assimilationist type of
writer as opposed to the frankly nationalist and Africanist kind of writer" (see " Soyinka
on BBC"). He referred in particular to Soyinka's famous ridiculing of Negritude in its
heyday, a ridiculing that, in Chinweizu's view, "marks the division ... between the
assimilationists who do not want to have much to do with African nationalism in cultural
matters and the Négritude writers who made that part of their central theme" ( 20 ). He
added:
I thought that his works and the Nobel Prize deserve each other and for those of
us who hold that the Nobel Prize is an undesirable prize in Africa and who also
find most of Wole's works unreadable I thought from that position that his getting
the Nobel would be a case of the undesirable honoring the unreadable. ( 21 )
That indictment of Soyinka, a writer who prides himself on being an African nationalist,
is undoubtedly harsh. Chinweizu's disapproval results from what he perceives as
Soyinka's too intimate familiarity with Greco
European sensibilities and his
incorporation of them in his works—and, of course, from what he regards as the opacity
of Soyinka's English. Considered in light of the critic's rather visible and vocal campaign
in favor of decolonizing African literature and the African mind, it is not surprising or
unexpected. But while he objects that the difficulty of Soyinka's language, which makes
him unreadable to university professors like himself, also renders him undesirable in
Africa, he does not similarly object to the use of the English language itself, which makes
African writers unreadable or unintelligible to most Africans. Thus, while dismissing
Soyinka's Nobel Prize, earned for his English-language writings, he had no qualms about
himself accepting the Association of Nigerian Authors Prize for his own English-
language poetry in 1985.

Facing the Future

Several commentators have remarked on the brevity of the colonial period in Africa. John
Hargreaves, one among them, observers, "In the long perspective of history, the period
when Europeans exercised direct political control over West African peoples was brief:
except in a few special areas closely involved in the conduct of oceanic trade, it nowhere
exceeded the life-time of an old man" ( 73 ). In response to the question of whether these
were "years of
-361-
revolutionary importance," he cites J. F. Ajayi's representation of the colonial period as
"just another episode . . . in the continuous flow of African history." Hargreaves
continues:
Africans who successfully practiced the "politics of survival" were able
eventually to recover their sovereignty with their essential identities intact, having
acquired new institutions, techniques and problems without suffering fundamental
social or cultural upheaval. He could find unwanted support among those old
imperialists who, shaking their heads over the latest news from Uganda or
 Angola, conclude that Africans are reverting to their unregenerate past; being
colonized has done them no good at all. ( 73 -74)
Osogbo, the town in which I grew up, was a colonial district headquarters—the seat of a
district officer—and an important stop on the Lagos— Kano railway. It also had its
European quarters and branches of assorted European commercial enterprises. Yet I knew
people who lived their entire lives in the town without once coming in direct contact with
a European, or ever once seeing a railway train. Such was the colonial experience for
most Nigerians, not the sort that results in a sea change. It seems in retrospect hardly
enough to obliterate permanently such an important cultural resource as language; but
that prospect is a distinct possibility if the present attitude of writers and intellectuals
toward African languages persists.
But there are reasons to believe that the trend is not irreversible. Ngũgĩ's announcement
in 1986 that henceforth the vehicle for all his writing would be "Gĩkūyū and Kiswahili all
the way" (xiv) is a positive development. Before him Sembène had arrived at a similar
decision, after an encounter with his people opened his eyes to the hiatus that separated
him as a French speaker from them. When in 1979 he showed his French-language films
to village audiences, for whom he professed to have made the films, they asked him why,
if the films were for them, he had made them not in their language but in his own (Armes
83). "I had not at that moment realized how far I had alienated myself from my people,"
he commented. "I made a study of our films and then I realized that if I wanted to make
films for my people, then it must be in their language." Since the choice of language
implied the choice of audience, he vowed that he would thereafter direct himself to his
own people and not to the world (Gabriel 38). If enough canonical literary figures
followed suit they might persuade aspiring writers that they have a viable future as users
of their own languages.
We may also take heart from the tendency of praise for African masters of European
languages more and more to be alloyed. Thus, while he celebrates Soyinka's capture of
the Nobel Prize, Henry Louis Gates also acknowledges that Africans' use of European
languages signifies and repeats the economic dominance of Western Judeo-Christian,
Greco-Roman cultures and their traditions over those of color (" Writing" 6).
Moreover, Africa can hardly remain immune from the nationalistic and
-362-
linguistic revolutions that periodically erupt to reinstate submerged and subjugated
national languages. Wali had such an eruption in mind when he urged African writers to
take a leaf from the book of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and an example from the
medieval revolt against the hegemonic languages of the period. He was on far surer
grounds than Gerald Moore, who rebutted him with the experience of the West Indies,
which he recommended for Africa also. Frederich Heer, describing in The Medieval
World how subjugated peoples used their national languages as rallying points to assert
their distinct identities, writes:
Anguish, anger, sorrow, burning hatred and burning love presided over the birth
 of the national literatures of Europe. The growth of languages implies the growth
of nations. The people came alive as their languages gathered strength in
opposition to the Latin which was the trademark of Rome and of the
universalizing culture of professors, clerks and officials. ( 360 )
The medieval period in fact provides useful ammunition for those who would see
national languages triumph over "universal" or "world" languages. Souriau notes several
instances of resistance to linguistic domination through history, including the struggle in
England between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries among the Britons, the Saxons,
and the Normans, a struggle settled in favor of the English language in the area of
London. The Latin Middle Ages, she observes, may be seen as evidence of cultural
universalism, or as "organized domination by elites," but it also involved "the long
neglect and underdevelopment of popular or national languages" ( 312 ). Braithwaite
cites Dante Alighieri as the "forerunner . . . who, at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, argued, in De vulgari eloquentia ( 1304), for the recognition of the (his own)
Tuscan vernacular as the nation language to replace Latin as the most natural, complete,
and accessible means of verbal expression" ( 22 ).
Our own times have their own instances of linguistic and cultural reassertion. In the
months preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 we watched Soviet Georgians
revolt when authorities from the Kremlin attempted to relegate the Georgian language to
parity with Russian within the Georgian republic. Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians
similarly continued to demand that their languages be accorded priority in their republics
over Russian, flatly rejecting the proposition that a universal Russian sway in the Soviet
Union would cement "national" bonds or promote the "nation." The nations that matter
most to these peoples are those defined by their languages and cultures, and these they
were not about to surrender in preference for some meaningless geographical pastiche
superimposed on them by a coercive will. Along the same lines, the French-speaking
Canadian province of Quebec has rekindled the old smoldering fire of their campaign to
make French the only legitimate language in the province, and thus to ensure that the
French character of the province, at least of the majority of
-363-
the population, is reflected in the language it uses, permits, or privileges. English, the
dominant language of the Canadian nation as a whole, the provincial government would
confine to shop signs well hidden within the stores. Without guarantees to that effect the
Quebecois threaten to declare themselves a sovereign nation; so important are language
and culture to them.
I have mentioned the allure of prestigious international prizes as one reason African
writers steer away from their own languages and toward European ones. With the award
of the Nobel Prize for literature for 1988 to Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian who writes in
Arabic, that particular inducement for adopting "world languages" (meaning European
languages) 6 has lost much of its force. Mahfouz caught the attention of the international
community without compromising his tongue and culture; someday an African writer
might afford enthusiasts for African languages an opportunity to celebrate by earning the
prize with works in African languages.
The limitation that the multiplicity of African languages, or lack of a common African
language, imposes on writing in African languages deserves a brief comment. The
concept "African literature" is of a kind with, say, "Asian literature," or "European
literature," in that all are geopolitical constructs that embrace a number of distinct
elements, especially languages and nationalities. Africa encompasses a number of
different nations (whether we mean true traditional nations or postcolonial
pseudonations), just as do Asia and Europe. Therefore, just as "Asian literature" would be
a convenient shorthand for a long list of literatures—Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indian,
and so forth—and just as "European literature" would similarly be a shorthand
collectively for English, French, Dutch, German, Polish, and other literatures of the
subcontinent, so "African literature" must be seen as a convenient shorthand for the many
distinctive literatures of the African continent.
A critic may be justified in dismissing the tenor of the whole debate on the language of
African literatures, as I have traced it in this discussion, as beside the point. The critic
might argue that the debate does not take sufficient account of the fact that by derivation,
in name and in practice, African literatures (canonical African literatures, that is) are
imported Western forms, be they poetry, drama, fiction, autobiography, or the essay. That
there are in certain cases more or less analogous indigenous forms is immaterial. Since
African literatures are imitative, the critic might then argue, there is no reason why the
imitativeness should exclude language, the medium of the art. After all, the argument
would go, if there were a musical form called the "African symphony," one would not
insist that its instruments and instrumentation be indigenous. That line of argument does,
however, place the putative form at the margins of African life, where its threat to
traditional institutions is limited. One cannot say the same of African literatures.
This discussion of the language of African literatures, whether canonical
-364-
or hegemonic, has been more historicist than historical. One major reason is that the
history of language in the discipline has been virtually a lack of history, a lack of
movement, for little has changed since the pioneering producers of the literatures made
their fateful and all but inevitable choice of their colonizers' languages for their writing.
Wali's call for a return to African languages did occasion some debate, and the debate
still continues. The optimism I expressed with regard to gestures on behalf of African
languages (like Ngũgĩ's and Sembène's, referred to earlier, and Soyinka's
recommendation of Swahili to all African writers at the time of the 1977 Second World
Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture—Festac II) may prove unjustified, for
they have been ineffectual. They have had little effect in redirecting aspiring African
writers from European to African languages. Indeed, the African embarking on a literary
career will be aware that no matter in what language Ngũgĩ writes, his work will be either
simultaneously or immediately translated into "world languages," because his reputation
has already been made, thanks to his English career. The new aspirant would
understandably choose the same avenue and medium to establish himself or herself. And
while Ngũgĩ has at least made the gesture of writing in Gĩkũyũ, Soyinka for his part has
not followed his own recommendation and written in Swahili.
One could certainly write a rich history of the twists and turns in the debate on the proper
language(s) for African literatures, but such an essay would be more appropriate in a
history of African literary criticism. A historicist essay is proper in this context,
especially because of the necessity of stressing the historicity of the displacement of
African languages by European ones for the expression of what are nonetheless regarded
as "African voices" (Rutherfoord 1970). Acceptance of the fact that historical
developments, specifically those associated with the subjection and colonization of the
continent by Europeans, gave rise to the anomaly would increase the likelihood of the
acceptance of the corollary proposition that historical processes can correct it. In other
words, when properly placed in the context of historical dialectics, the use of European
languages by African writers loses the aura of necessity some Europhone writers and
Europhile critics are wont to invest it with, and the various arguments that serve them as
subterfuges also lose their force.

Notes
I. For a fuller discussion see chapter 5, "Prejudice and Policy, 1914-1960," in Charles H.
Lyons's To Wash an Aethiope White.

2. In this regard see Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike on the derivativeness of the poetry of
Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo, which they stigmatize as "The Hopkins Disease"
(172ff).

3. As early as 1963 Donatus Nwoga voiced his objection to that assumption at the

-365-
Freetown seminar on "African Literature and the University Curriculum." "It has been
suggested," he said, "that what we call African writing is really primarily English or French
or Portuguese or Italian or Spanish literature, and only secondarily African. I would prefer
to consider that what we call African literature is primarily African and secondarily English
or French etc." ( Moore, African Literatures84-85; Nwoga's italics).

4. It is something of an irony that Ngũgĩ's dissertation on why Africans should write in

African languages took shape as a series of lectures he was invited to give at Auckland
University in 1984. We may safely assume that he would not have received the invitation
had he written in Gikuyu. He indirectly says as much when he writes ( 6 ) that he qualified
to attend the 1962 conference of writers in Kampala, even though he was a student with
only two stories in English to his name, while well-established writers in African languages
were not invited. It is also interesting to note that the African Literature Association ( USA)
has honored Amos Tutuola by inviting him as an honored guest to one of its annual
 conferences, whereas (to my knowledge) it has not so honored established writers in
African languages.

5. For an extended discussion of the debate on what standards African literatures should
observe see Rand Bishop, African Literature, African Critics: The Forming of Critical
Standards, 1947-1966, New York: Greenwood Press, 1988, especially chapter 2.

6. I am indebted here to Chinua Achebe's usage of the term in his discussion of the usefulness
of English to the Third World writer ( Morning79).

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Austin, D. G. "The Transfer of Power: Why and How." In Decolonisation and After: The
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Baker, Houston A., Jr. "English as a World Language for Literature: A Session for the
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Clayton, Anthony. "The Military Relations between Britain and Commonwealth
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Dathorne, O. R. "Amos Tutuola: The Nightmare of the Tribe." In Introduction to
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Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research
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Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "On the Rhetoric of Racism in the Profession." ALA Bulletin 15,
no. I ( 1989): II-21.
—. " Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes." Critical Inquiry 12, no. I ( 1985): 2-
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Hargreaves, John D. "Assumptions, Expectations and Plans: Approaches to
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-368-

13 Publishing in Africa:
The Crisis and the Challenge
HANS M. ZELL
l The indigenous book and publishing industries in most African countries are currently
in a state of crisis after a decade of relative boom and rapid expansion. Much of Africa
has become a bookless society. Because of foreign exchange constraints most libraries in
Africa have been unable to purchase any new books for the past few years, much less
maintain their journal subscriptions. Research and teaching, meanwhile, have been
crippled.
The constantly deepening economic recession and chronic balance-of
payments
problems in most African countries have taken a severe toll on publishing and book
development in general, and on the output of new African writing in particular. Many
publishing enterprises have become dormant; others have drastically cut back their
operations, with far fewer new titles being published each year. The dearth of publishing
outlets has meant that young writers and scholars are finding it difficult to place their
work. Most literary magazines and scholarly periodicals have stopped publication or
publish only sporadically, providing fewer and fewer publishing facilities and leading to
a stifling of scholarship as well as creative writing.
Yet in the midst of the most adverse circumstances some remarkable books continue to
come off African presses, and a new self-help marketing initiative by African publishers
will henceforth greatly enhance the visibility of African publishing in Europe and North
America.

Publishing in Crisis
The salient facts about Nigerian publishing are a vivid example of the handicaps under
which publishers are laboring. In this previously oil-rich country, the introduction in 1986
of the second-tier foreign exchange market (an element in an overall structural
adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund) led to a dramatic
devaluation of the naira.
____________________
Some sections of this paper first appeared in Logos I, no. 2 ( London, 1990).
-369-
From being on par with the dollar in the mid-I980s, by 1990 it required seven naira to
purchase one dollar. Many of the materials for book production still need to be imported
into Nigeria, including paper and printing equipment and supplies. But the loss of
purchasing power of the naira has had a crushing effect on import prices, and publishers
also face high customs tariffs. Nigerian publishers have thus ended up in a Catch 22
situation. They should be able to benefit from the much-restricted flow of imported books
by filling the vacuum, yet they cannot do so because they face prohibitive import prices
for the materials to publish locally. The demand is there, but it cannot be met, and this at
a time when the need is probably greatest.
Elsewhere in Africa the situation varies from country to country, but few indigenous
publishers have been able to meet the challenges of the book shortages caused by the
economic crisis. Moreover, the majority of them are still at a disadvantage over the
multinationals and are unable to compete with them on real terms. A viable indigenous
publishing industry that can produce books on a scale that matches local needs is, sadly,
still largely a dream in most parts of the continent.
It seems to be stating the obvious that African authors should have the realistic option of
publishing within Africa, that the image of the cultural heritage of any country can best
be projected by indigenous publishers, and that school textbooks should be available that
emanate from and reflect the country in which they are used. Over the past two decades
several international organizations, and many individuals, have suggested long-term
measures that would favor the local production of books and aid the setting up of truly
autonomous publishing enterprises—that is, enterprises that might be run without undue
government interference or pressure and that could exist without massive subsidies.
Numerous conferences and meetings in Africa on publishing and book development have
been preceded by fine opening speeches by government ministers stressing the
importance of books in national development and concluding with pious resolutions. And
in the current discussions on the grave book famine in Africa it has been repeatedly and
quite rightly stressed that book donations alone cannot and should not be seen as the
long-term solution to the shortage of books in Africa, and that it is vital for indigenous
publishers to be supported. Yet the indisputable fact remains that few African
governments have taken positive and decisive action to support their indigenous book
industries, certainly not in the private sector. Meanwhile, the book industries and library
development continue to take a back seat in the pursuit of national development, despite
pious conference resolutions to the contrary.
In the case of Nigeria again, and when there was a favorable environment in the early
1980s for the development of a strong autonomous publishing industry, the Nigerian
government of the time provided neither encouragement to indigenous publishers, nor
investment, nor concessions. The net re
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sult is that today there is a continuing reliance on the importation of finished books and
the materials required for printing and paper manufacture.
Instances of rather more enlightened government attitudes may be found, in Zimbabwe,
for example, and especially in Francophone West Africa, where the governments of
Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Togo jointly set up Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines,
albeit with French publishing interests. Nouvelles Editions Africaines is now a major
force in all areas of publishing, with a massive and impressive list, although it can be
argued that their dominance and near monopoly has probably stifled the growth of small
independent publishers.

MULTINATIONALS
The much-maligned multinationals, which so dominated the publishing scene in the
1960s and 1970s, are now largely out of favor with African governments, or certainly no
longer play such a dominant role as they coexist, relatively peacefully, alongside
indigenous publishers.
Over the years a great deal of stereotypical claptrap has been said and written about the
multinationals, and while their sometimes exploitative role has been rightly exposed and
criticized, some of the accusations—for example, that the multinationals are producing
books that are not relevant to an African reader or an African environment—may have
been true thirty years ago but are certainly no longer universally true today. There is
plenty of evidence that many of the multinationals are now engaged in publishing
African-oriented books and literature, conceived and published in Africa by Africans. In
other cases, former branches of the multinationals have paved the way for new
indigenous companies. For example, at Heinemann Kenya, while continuing some links
with Heinemann's in the United Kingdom, the majority equity is now firmly in Kenyan
hands, and the Heinemann Kenya list is probably one of the most innovative and
enterprising in the whole of Africa. True, they too must first and foremost concentrate on
the bread-and
butter lines and mainstream educational publishing, but the firm has also
published a whole broadside of creative writing and popular fiction and has an extensive
list of children's books and books in the African languages.

STATE PUBLISHING
The verdict on government involvement in publishing must be that by and large it hasn't
worked. Parastatals, where they exist, are frequently hampered by bureaucracy,
inefficiency, or lack of motivation on the part of their staff. Many state publishing
enterprises were ill conceived, many of the projects supported by international lending
agencies were simplistic in design, and much aid money in books or library development
schemes was invested in an unplanned or uncoordinated way.
In some countries the government has decided that only books written by
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their own curriculum development advisors or curriculum institutes should be used as
textbooks, the lack of competition leading sometimes to poor
quality material and
depriving local publishers of a vital source of income.
In Kenya a completely new educational system and syllabus was introduced in the mid-
1980s that brought with it the need for a vast number of new textbooks to replace existing
ones. There were great expectations that this demand would benefit not only the
transnationals but also the burgeoning indigenous publishers, who were keen to get a
slice of the cake. The government subsequently decreed, however, that it would
recommend only those books published by the state publishing corporations, such as the
Jomo Kenyatta Foundation and the Kenya Literature Bureau, and only material written at
its national curriculum development center. This decree set up the kind of incestuous
arrangement—seen elsewhere in the past both in Africa and other developing countries—
whereby books are written, vetted, approved, and published and distributed by the same
state monopoly, leaving the market without competition and the private publishing sector
out in the cold.

THE BOOK FAMINE

Collapsing economies and the chronic balance of payments problems in almost all
countries of the continent have taken a heavy toll on educational budgets and, in turn, on
libraries and the book industries. The picture of Africa at the beginning of the 1990s is
largely that of a bookless society. Not only has there been a dramatic decline of funds
available for book and journal purchases generally, but because of the foreign exchange
constraints many university and public libraries in Africa have been unable to purchase
any new books over the past four or five years, much less able to maintain their current
periodicals collections. Most bookshops present a picture of empty shelves, schools are
without books, research has been crippled, and teachers and scholars are divorced from
the materials needed to pursue their studies, to maintain their understanding of
developments taking place in their disciplines elsewhere in the world, and to keep their
teaching or research up to date. African academics are more and more marginalized,
unable to participate in contemporary academic debates or at conferences.
The scarcity of books has meant that neither the needs of educational institutions nor the
general public can be met. The effects of the book famine also mean that devastating and
quite possibly lasting damage is being inflicted across a whole generation of people going
through primary, secondary, or university education in Africa today. A generation of
students is now being taught by lecturers who are unable to gain access to current
research and scholarship. The lack of books and teaching materials has led to students'
having to rely on lecture notes provided by their teachers, and it hardly needs to be stated
that such teaching methods cannot be conducive to enlightened learning and the
acquisition of knowledge.
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Meanwhile, in libraries the poor state of provision of books and journals has lead to a
whole wave of vandalism, characterized by the mutilation of books and journals, or
outright theft.

INDIGENOUS PUBLISHING
What is remarkable is that, despite the overall gloomy picture I have recounted in the
previous pages, and despite the difficult economic conditions and lack of government
encouragement, new indigenous imprints continue to mushroom all over Africa, and
some privately owned firms have shown a great deal of imaginative entrepreneurial skill
in the midst of adversity. This flowering is not quite the paradox it might seem.
Established and new firms do flourish, but not always to their full potential, and not
enough of them to meet the needs. There is, alas, also a high mortality rate among the
new companies. Some of them have come to grief not only because of unfavorable
economic conditions but because of sometimes inept financial management, poorly
trained and motivated staff, inadequate day-to-day administration, or ineffective
marketing and promotion, especially overseas.
New autonomous publishing firms invariably face the need to raise fairly substantial
sums of high-risk and initially low-return investment capital, and most of them are badly
undercapitalized. At the same time, I am always astounded by the constant woes and cries
that new African or Third World publishers are grossly undercapitalized, as if this were
something unique to struggling new publishers in the Third World, whereas in fact the
new publisher starting off in Abingdon, Berkshire, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, faces precisely
the same problems, admittedly in a somewhat different publishing environment.
There are particularly dynamic indigenous publishing companies in Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Nigeria, and even in Ghana, which was especially hard hit by the economic recession. In
Nigeria some indigenous imprints have had notable successes and have conducted
aggressive local marketing campaigns for some of their output. Nigerian editions of
books by prominent African writers such as Chinua Achebe or the Nobel laureate Wole
Soyinka are now increasingly published locally at realistic, albeit still expensive, prices.
Another positive development is the fact that Nigerian newspapers ( Nigeria has a
vigorous newspaper industry, with some thirty dailies in addition to dozens of weeklies)
devote much more space nowadays to book reviews and articles on publishing and book
development. There is also a vast crop of a whole new generation of writers looking for
publishing outlets—many Nigerian writers now bitterly complain that local publishers
have not risen to the occasion, or are extremely slack in submitting royalty statements,
much less parting with hard cash!
Piracy, meantime, seems to be on the wane, although a number of Nigerian academics
and writers have come out with some of the most extraordinary statements encouraging
piracy. For example, Onwuchekwa Jemie, writing in the Nigerian Guardian ( 25 January
1987
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writing in the Nigerian Guardian (25 January 1987), a respected high-quality daily,
lumped all publishers together as a class of "mostly liars and cheats," calling on book
pirates to unite and make a major onslaught of illicitly reprinting everything they could
lay their hands on. Happily, the call does not appear to have been taken up.

KEY ISSUES
The development of the book industries in Africa today has been affected, and will
continue to be heavily affected, by infrastructural problems and the economic recession.
Many social and cultural dimensions compound the problem: a multiplicity of languages,
a still high level of illiteracy (over 50 percent of Africa's population is still illiterate),
poor transport and communications, lack of training and expertise, and other obstacles
have all played their part in hindering the development of the reading habit and the
growth of a healthy book industry. For general publishing—or publishing in the African
languages, or children's books—effective distribution is still the main headache, although
some publishers have tried to come to grips with the problem and have explored novel
and innovative ways of getting books to the marketplace and to the rural communities.
One of the most fundamental issues for publishers and writers alike is the matter of
language. The question whether to write in an African language or in a European
language has been vigorously argued, and debates about new norms, new ways for
writers to reach the people, are recurring themes. An increasing number of African
authors are trying to reach a national audience through an indigenous language, most
prominent among them the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (who, paradoxically, is
living in exile in London). Ngũgĩ has repeatedly stated that only through writing in an
African language can an African sensibility truly develop, and that writing in an African
language might compel African writers to become more relevant, more meaningful, and
closer to the realities of African life. Dissenting voices have argued, however, that to
write in any of the African languages would restrict their work to a small group of
readers, and to select an international language provides them with a medium of
communication that will allow their books to be published in many countries.
While this debate will no doubt continue, the language issue also greatly affects
publishing developments: on the one hand, the vast number of languages creates special
problems for African publishers, and on the other, African governments' decisions on
language policy will significantly influence future publishing developments in Africa in
general, and the success and viability of publishing in African languages in particular.
There have been repeated calls by African writers for African publishers— both the
multinationals and the indigenous—to devote more time and spend more of their
resources on publishing material in African languages for the general reader, and material
intended for enjoyment rather than achievement
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reading. Some firms have bravely experimented in this area—some, for example, have
published translations into African languages of works of fiction written in English by
major African writers—but although there have been some modest successes, publishing
in the African languages has often proved to be disappointing in commercial terms,
certainly for titles for the general markets. New approaches will be needed, innovative
experimentation in seeking out the audience, eliciting feedback and response, and
ultimately meeting the challenge of a potentially vast local readership and bringing books
into the economic reach of the rural poor. But no publisher in his right senses will want to
dabble in such worthy causes unless either the books are subsidized or the publisher can
also benefit from more mainstream publishing and the more lucrative educational book
markets.

READERSHIP
Another key issue is that of readership and the reading habit. Attitudes toward books and
reading in Africa have been governed by social circumstances and by cultural and
economic factors. Economic factors are certainly a major issue: annual income per capita
is still very low in most African countries, ranging from as little as $200 in the poorest
nations to something in the region of $700-$800 in countries such as Nigeria and
Zimbabwe. With such levels of income the problem is survival; there are precious few
resources for buying books.
It has frequently been lamented in the past, by such prominent writers as Chinua Achebe,
that Africans do not continue with reading once formal education or a university degree
has been obtained. It is probably quite true that, in the past, reading was never a large part
of the tradition of life in Africa, and more pleasure was derived from the oral tradition
and the performing arts than from reading a book. But then the educational methods
imposed on Africans by their erstwhile colonial masters hardly encouraged them to read
for enjoyment. Reading was a serious business, not to be indulged in for pleasure.
Reading was only for prescribed literature at school, an instrument with which to acquire
academic knowledge and success and with which to pass examinations. Nonetheless,
whereas much of the reading that takes place in Africa today may still be geared toward
achievement reading, the remarkable success of a substantial number of general books in,
for example, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe has demonstrated that the readers are there.
In Nigeria, for instance, Kole Omotoso's Just before Dawn, a lively blend of fact and
fiction dramatizing the first one hundred years of Nigeria, has been a runaway best-seller
and has sold in quantities well in excess of twenty thousand copies.
The emergence during the past decade of African-produced mass paperbacks of popular
fiction has also created a new kind of readership. And while some controversy about the
sometimes dubious quality of some of this popular literature continues, it has nonetheless
created an appetite for read
 -375-
ing among people who did not in the past want to read books for pleasure. It can also be
argued that this popular fiction may sensitize the ordinary reader to progress ultimately to
more serious works of creative writing.
In the meantime, it is clear that the whole question of the audience has to be more fully
studied and investigated. More research has to be carried out to determine what people
want to read—the preferred reading interests in different African countries—and how
reading can contribute to the improvement and enrichment of the quality of life of the
ordinary African reader. The question of the audience certainly presents a formidable
challenge to African publishers.

AFRICAN BOOKS COLLECTIVE

The priorities of many publishers in Africa, of necessity, must still lie at home. But with
the proliferation in particular of African scholarly and literary works, a great deal of
African-published material is now much in demand by libraries, scholars, and other book
buyers throughout the world. Unfortunately, overseas promotion by African publishers
has been weak, the international markets have been barely touched, and export earnings
have been negligible. Moreover, the acquisition of African publications by libraries in
Europe and North America has been difficult. All this should now change, and another
bright spot amid all the gloom is the early success— probably much to the surprise of
several skeptics—of a new African self
help initiative, African Books Collective Ltd.
From concepts and proposals first explored at a 1985 London meeting of a representative
group of African publishers, this new operation has now started trading, following four
years of preparatory work and fund-raising activities. The collective addresses both the
needs of African publishers to more effectively promote and disseminate their output in
the major English-language markets and the needs of libraries facing chronic problems in
the acquisition of African-published material.
Nineteen African publishers have joined African Books Collective (ABC) as founding
members and will produce joint lists and catalogues, with ABC providing centralized
order fulfillment, billing, and shipping. The collective maintains small office premises in
Park End Street in central Oxford and has on its premises a small showroom with a
constantly changing display of titles distributed by the collective, in addition to sample
copies of backlist titles not carried as part of the inventory but that may be obtained on
special order. Warehouse premises are maintained separately in nearby Burford.
The unique nature of African Books Collective is that it is a nonprofit organization that
aims only to cover its operational costs, although it naturally seeks to be profit-making on
behalf of its constituent members by substantially increasing their export earnings.
Overseas list prices are established in consultation with member publishers and on the
basis of what the market will bear. African publishers fully benefit from the proceeds of
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the overseas markup, and their net sales earnings are substantially higher than what
would be the case with conventional commercial distribution agreements.
Governed by a Council of Management consisting of elected representative publishers
from East, West, and Central and Southern Africa, funding for the organization has come
in part in the form of onetime membership fees paid by founding members and applied
against capital and setting-up costs. However, in the light of ABC's nonprofit status and
the preferential terms offered to publishers, who receive roughly 65 percent of net
receipts, it was realized at an early stage that the initial volume of turnover and the
proportion of the income retained by the collective would be insufficient to meet
recurrent operational costs and that there would be considerable shortfalls of income over
expenditures, at least in the first few years. The collective therefore sought seed money to
meet the initial deficits and to separate finance capital and setting-up costs. The Ford
Foundation, NORAD, and SIDA have provided financial support, and the
Commonwealth Foundation provided partial funding for an inaugural meeting of the
Council of Management. And while the money raised did not entirely meet the fund-
raising targets, sufficient financial support was raised to enable the collective to set up an
efficient operating base and to start trading.
African Books Collective's financial position is still rather precarious, and fund-raising
activities continue to seek support for recurrent cost budgets. Setting up its own
warehousing has not come cheap, but it will enable the collective to have full control of
its distribution service and, even more vital, of its own credit and cash collection. About
400 titles were in distribution in 1990, for the most part recently published, with the
expectation of adding some 150-200 new titles to the inventory each year. The emphasis
is on scholarly and academic books, creative writing by African authors, and critical
works on African literature, but certain general interest items and some children's books
are also stocked.
The establishment of ABC has already generated a great deal of excitement among
Africana librarians, and the collective is offering standing orders and "profile" plans to
meet individual library requirements.

Literary Publishing in Africa South of the Sahara:

A Brief Overview
Literary publishing in Africa does not have a long history: apart from some of the early
Onitsha Market novels and a number of titles in African languages, literary book
publishing activities, or literary imprints, did not begin to emerge on any scale until the
early 1960s.
One of the earliest indigenous publishing ventures in Black Africa was the establishment
of the Mbari Artists' and Writers' Club and Mbari Publications in Ibadan, Nigeria, in July
1961 by a group of writers, artists, and art
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lovers. Ulli Beier, a member of this group and arguably its prime inspirer, had earlier
helped to launch the literary and cultural magazine Black Orpheus, together with the late
Janheinz Jahn. The first issue of Black Orpheus was published in 1957, and between
1961 and 1965 Mbari released some thirty titles by a number of aspiring young African
writers, both from Nigeria and other parts of Africa. They were little known at the time,
but are now household names of modern African literature. Kofi Awoonor, Dennis
Brutus, Es'kia Mphahlele, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and Tchicaya U Tam'si
were among them. Almost all of their books published by Mbari— now long out of print
and prized collectors' items—have since been reissued either individually or have been
included in expanded collections of these authors. By the early 1970s, however, the
operation became dormant and an initiative later by the University of Ife Press to revive
its activities proved abortive.
On the other side of the continent, the bulk of literary publishing output came from the
East African Publishing House, which, established in 1965, was instrumental in
launching several series devoted to African creative writing, including the Modern
African Library, with its best-selling Song of Lawino by Okot p'Bitek. Sadly, the East
African Publishing House went into liquidation in 1988, but a number of the titles on its
list have recently been reissued under the Heinemann Kenya imprint.
The early I970s saw an explosion of mass paperback publishing of popular fiction,
especially in Kenya, and where a number of publishers were suddenly discovering new
markets. David Maillu's Comb Books were the pioneers in this area. The books were
similar to the Nigerian Onitsha Market literature, but they were rather more sophisticated,
more elitist, and better produced. Some of David Maillu's books came under fire,
however, because of their sometimes cheap morality, and several were actually banned in
Tanzania for a period. A whole broadside of popular paperbacks, most of them thrillers or
romantic fiction, later on emerged in Nigeria as well.
In Francophone Africa publishing has mainly flourished with the help of either
government or church support. Francophone book industries at first tended to lag behind
their Anglophone counterparts. The situation was dramatically changed, however, with
the founding in Dakar, in 1972, of Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, as a joint
undertaking of the governments of Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Togo, along with French
publishing interests. NEA has since progressed to a position where it is undoubtedly the
leading publisher for the whole of French-speaking Africa. There is little competition,
and the only two other sizeable publishing operations in French
speaking Africa are the
Center d'Edition et de Diffusion Africaines (CEDA) in Abidjan and the church-sponsored
Centre de Littérature Evangélique (CLE) in Yaoundé, Cameroon. As mentioned earlier,
this lack of multiplicity of publishers has come in for some criticism, for providing
African writers with limited outlets and putting them in a subservient position; the nature
of the
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partnerships between Francophone African governments and French publishers has also
come under some hard scrutiny. Nonetheless, the establishment of NEA must be
considered one of the more enlightened publishing initiatives and it has helped to break
the near-monopoly exercised by French publishers in the African markets in the past.
Literary publishing activities in Africa today are primarily concentrated in a few
countries, which the following sections examine in turn.
WEST AFRICA
Nigeria, despite all the problems, maintains a lively publishing industry, and new
imprints continue to emerge every year. Publishers with strong literary lists include
Fourth Dimension Publishers; Heinemann Nigeria; Macmillan Nigeria; University Press,
Ltd. (the former Oxford University Press Nigeria); and Spectrum Books of Ibadan, which
has a reputation for the aggressive marketing of its products. Occasional works of literary
criticism come from the university presses such as Ibadan University Press, Obafemi
Awolowo University Press (formerly Ife University Press), and the University of Lagos
Press. There are also several small imprints with high-quality literary lists, among them
'Biola Irele's New Horn Press, Ltd.; Chinweizu's Pero Press; Ken Saro-Wiwa's Saros
International Publishers; Flora Nwapa's Tana Press; Dillibe Onyeama's Delta
Publications; Agbo Areo's Paperback Publishers; Dafe Otobo's Malthouse Publishers; and
Fountain Publications, the publishers of the Nigerian edition of Wole Soyinka's Isara: A
Voyage Round Essay. And Update Communications in Lagos has recently published, on
behalf of the Association of Nigerian Authors, several volumes of verse by young
Nigerian poets.
As indicated earlier, however, indigenous publishers have had to take a lot of flak from
Nigerian writers, who have accused them of being interested in publishing only for short-
term gain and making a "fast buck," and of generally lacking vision. To some extent,
perhaps, this is true; for one thing, good author relations do not seem to be high on the list
of priorities of some publishers, and there also seem to have been some serious
shortcomings in royalty accounting. For others, marketing and promotion beyond Nigeria
appears to be nonexistent. It must also be said, however, that many writers— both
established writers and aspiring ones—lack a real grasp of publishing realities, especially
the realities of operating in a Nigerian situation. It takes a brave publisher to publish
volumes of poetry or fiction by as yet little known writers: few retail outlets will be
willing to stock them, and those that do may insist on sale-or-return terms and may return
half the consignment in tatty condition a few months after they were supplied; or there
may be serious collection problems. To sell books in neighboring countries, say, within
the ECOWAS region—much less in other parts of Africa—is virtually impossible
because of the currency problems.
In Ghana literary publishing has been severely curtailed in recent years
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because of the country's balance-of-payments problems, resulting in acute paper
shortages and lack of spare parts to repair defective printing presses. The position is now
beginning to improve again, and one imprint with an attractive and imaginative literary
list is W. A. Dekutsey's Woeli Publishing Services, whose authors include Kofi Awoonor
and Kofi Anyidoho.

FRANCOPHONE WEST AFRICA

Publishing in Francophone West Africa has already been mentioned briefly. Nouvelles
Editions Africaines in Dakar, along with NEA operations in Abidjan and Lomé, heavily
dominates the scene, with a massive literary list of over 250 titles of fiction, drama, and
poetry, together with several collections and volumes of literary criticism. Many of the
familiar and distinguished names from the literary as well as the academic world now
appear on their list, and NEA has also published a wide range of writing by young and as
yet little known authors. The late Mariama Bâ's remarkable first novel on the female
condition in Africa, Une si longue lettre, was the first winner, in 1980, of the Noma
Award for Publishing in Africa (the Japanese-sponsored five‐ thousand-dollar annual
prize established to honor indigenously published African authors), and the novel
subsequently appeared in sixteen different editions and translations. Five years later,
NEA again won the ( 1985) Noma Award for a novel by the Cameroonian writer Bernard
Nanga, La trahison de Marianne, which was awarded posthumously.
In the Côte d'Ivoire CEDA has an active literary list, and in Togo literary publishing is
spearheaded by Yves-Emmanuel Dogbe's Editions Akpagnon, whose list includes fiction
and poetry as well as several short story collections.
Publishing activities in the Cameroons have declined sharply in recent years. Notably,
the well-known Editions CLE and small independent firms such as Buma Kor, Rene
Philombe's Editions Semences Africaines, and Timothée Ndzaagap's Editions Populaire,
in Bafoussam, seem to have been largely dormant for the past few years.

FRANCOPHONE AFRICA ELSEWHERE AND

INDIAN OCEAN ISLANDS
In Francophone Central Africa there are sporadic outbursts of literary publishing
activities, as well as a substantial amount of popular fiction publishing. Most of this
comes from Zaire, where publishers in the forefront of literary publishing include
Editions Lokole, Editions Impala, and Les Presses Africaines. The Presses Universitaires
du Zaire publish a wide range of scholarly books, including several critical studies on
African literature, and CEEBA in Bandundu produces several series of specialist volumes
on African myths and folklore. In the neighboring Congo Popular Republic publishing is
still in its infancy, but some volumes of poetry and drama have come from Leopold Pindy
Mamonsono's Editions Heros dans l'Ombre, in Brazzaville.
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Mamonsono was also the prime mover behind the establishment of the Association des
Ecrivains d'Afrique Centrale, which organized an International Literary Symposium of
African Writers against Apartheid in May 1987 in Brazzaville, and which established the
Concours Littéraire International de Poesie contre l'Apartheid, with the first award going
to Marouba Fall of Senegal.
Book production in the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar is primarily in the national
language, Malagasy, and some of the major publishers include Editions Takariva,
FOFIPA, and the Madagascar Print and Press Company. In Mauritius there is a dearth of
publishing outlets for local writers, which has prompted many of them to publish their
work in India. There is only one publishing house of any size, Editions de l'Océan Indien
(jointly owned by the government of Mauritius with British and French publishing
interests), which produces largely educational texts, although a small amount of creative
writing, including several anthologies, has also appeared. Much of the local publishing is
in Mauritian Creole by authors who double as their own publishers and distributors. On
the island of Réunion, finally, is quite a flourishing literary publishing scene, and much
of the initiative has come from the Association des Ecrivains Réunionais, which has
published a sizeable number of books under the appropriately named imprint Editions
Goute d'Eau dans l'Océan.

EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA

In Kenya, which had the liveliest book industry in English-speaking Africa for many
years, publishing activities, particularly in the literary arena, have dramatically declined
over the past decade. Several publishers have gone bankrupt, notably the East African
Publishing House, along with several small imprints. Publishers are given little
encouragement to produce works of fiction or books aimed at the general markets, and
they have to work in a generally hostile business environment. One notable exception is
Heinemann Kenya under Henry Chakava, the publisher of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and, as
mentioned earlier, without doubt the most enterprising and most adventurous firm in the
literary field, with an imaginative list of works of fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as
creative writing in several African languages. The only other publisher with any
significant literary output is Longman Kenya, which boasts a strong line of popular
fiction, with Meja Mwangi as its star author. Occasional literary titles come from
Foundation Books (in Swahili), the Kenya Literature Bureau, Oxford University Press
Eastern Africa, Uzima Press, and Asenath Odaga's Lake Publishers, in Kisumu.
Literary publishing activities in Uganda are virtually nonexistent, although there is now
evidence of one or two small new imprints emerging, for example, Crane Publishers in
Kampala. In Tanzania the publishing industries face enormous obstacles, and the flow of
new books from major pub
-381-
lishers such as the Tanzania Publishing House has been dramatically cut back. Zambia,
too, is another country where the development of an active indigenous book industry has
been beset with many difficulties and, as elsewhere in Africa, has been tied up with the
country's chronic balance
of-payments problems. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored
Kenneth Kaunda Foundation (formerly the National Educational Company of Zambia)
struggles on bravely and produces occasional literary items, as do one or two other
publishers such as Multimedia Zambia and Dzuka Publishing.
In Malawi the main thrust of literary publishing has come from Popular Publications of
Limbe, and their Malawian Writers Series has now grown to a respectable number of
titles, consisting of short stories, folklore, drama, texts of oral narratives and poetry, and
works of fiction in the country's main language, Chichewa.

SOUTHERN AFRICA
Probably the most exciting publishing developments in Africa at the present time are
taking place in Zimbabwe, which has one of the continent's most dynamic publishing
industries. Ironically, Zimbabwe is also the country that imposes and operates some of
the most restrictive practices with regard to the free flow of books in Africa. On the one
hand, Zimbabwe imposes a 20 percent duty on book imports (and slaps on a further 15
percent sales tax for good measure), and, on the other, makes the exporting of books as
difficult and cumbersome as it possibly can. Local publishers first have to obtain an
export license (or the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe may insist on prepayment by the
recipient for any books leaving the country, clearly an impractical requirement, especially
where large consignments are involved), and all sorts of red tape and bureaucracy first
have to be overcome before indigenous publishers are allowed to sell their books abroad,
and actually earn their country some much-needed hard currency.
The major publishers of literature are College Press—with an impressive list of books in
English by Zimbabwe's leading writers, and also publishing fiction and short story
collections in Shona and Ndebele—the Zimbabwe Publishing House, Mambo Press,
Longman Zimbabwe, and the Literature Bureau. Several recently established small
imprints include the Anvil Press and Baobab Books. The tenth Noma Award for
Publishing in Africa, awarded in 1989, went to the Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove
for his powerful novel Bones, published by Baobab Books in 1988, and which was also
the recipient of the Zimbabwe Publishers Literary Award. Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi
Dangarembga, copublished by the Zimbabwe Publishing House and the Women's Press
in the United Kingdom, won the Africa Region Commonwealth Prize for Literature for
1989.
In Lesotho and Swaziland local publishing is still largely underdeveloped, but a
proliferation of government and scholarly publishing in Botswana has arisen to meet the
needs of an expanding educational and scholarly market,
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and some of the multinationals, especially Macmillan, have set up sizeable operations in
the country and are benefiting from one of the few booming economies in Africa today.
But the size of the market is probably too small for any indigenous publishers to survive
and prosper.
In Namibia local publishing has been virtually nonexistent apart from government and
newspaper publishing and the output of a Native Language Bureau. In the wake of
Namibian Independence in 1990, this situation will no doubt change, new indigenous
imprints reflecting African aspirations will probably emerge soon, and already there is
talk about the setting up of a Namibia Publishing House. The multinationals, too, will
probably be clamoring for a slice of the new business that is going to be in the offing.
In Lusophone Mozambique and Angola publishing and the book trade is controlled by
the government, through each nation's Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco. The INLD
in Maputo has produced over two million books since its inception, and this number
includes some splendid children's books as well as creative writing by Mozambican
authors. In Angola the main initiative has come from the Angolan Writers Union, which
has led to substantial print runs of the works by over seventy Angolan authors. In 1986 an
INALD book from Angola, Sobreviver em Tarrafal de Santiago ( Surviving in Tarrafal
de Santiago), * Antonio Jacinto's lyric testimony to the human spirit triumphant over
tyranny and injustice, won that year's Noma Award.
This overview of literary publishing in Africa will not attempt to report in depth about
publishing in South Africa, which of course has a well
established book industry, and
which has largely escaped the economic ravages elsewhere in Africa. Tribute must be
paid, however, to a number of small independent companies who have actively
encouraged Black expression in South Africa, and who have published a great deal of
socially committed writing despite having to operate under a repressive regime that, until
very recently at least, has faced them with threats of banning, harassment, or arrest.
Ravan Press of Johannesburg is probably the best known among the small crop of
publishers who have been in the forefront of oppositional publishing in South Africa over
the past decade, courageously challenging apartheid ideology and actively promoting the
struggle for a just, democratic and nonracial society. Ravan Press has a strong fiction list,
several series of poetry and drama, as well as children's books. They have twice won the
prestigious Noma Award—in 1988 for a history book aimed at a popular audience (by
Luli Callinicos), and earlier, in 1984, for Njabulo Ndebele's short story collection Fools
and Other Stories.
Three other imprints that must be mentioned are Adriaan Donker, David Philip, and
Skotaville Publishers: Donker has a particularly strong poetry list; David Philip has an
extensive list of fiction, drama, poetry and criticism;
____________________
*
Tarrafal is the name of the concentration camp in colonial Cape Verde where the author
was incarcerated for several years. Ed.
-383-
and Nadine Gordimer, the late Richard Rive, Miriam Tlali, Alan Paton, Jack Cope, Guy
Butler, and Menan du Plessis are among David Philip authors. David Philip is also the
publisher of the Africasouth Paperbacks series, reissues of works of Southern African
literature that have been long out of print but that deservedly have now been rescued
from neglect. The same series also includes original writing and books by a number of
Black African authors whose work was previously banned in South Africa.
Skotaville Publishers is a wholly Black-owned publishing collective established in 1982
and named after Mweli Skota, secretary general of the ANC in the 1930s and a writer and
editor as well as a politician. Skotaville was set up by the African Writers Association,
and its two prime movers are Jaki Seroke and Mothobi Mutloatse, who work with a board
of directors that includes Miriam Tlali, Sipho Sepamla, and Es'kia Mphahlele.
Among other alternative presses are a women's publishing cooperative named Seriti sa
Sechaba Publishers, Buchu Books, and Jonathan Ball Publishers. Following the
momentous events in South Africa early in 1990 and the signs that, at long last, there may
now be some genuine reform in South Africa, there are exciting times ahead for all of
South Africa's progressive publishers.
Literary Periodicals and Magazines
Literary journals in Africa, as elsewhere, tend to live a precarious existence. Many new
journals are started in Africa each year; a few have been successful and prosper, but most
others have sunk after the first issue or have become dormant after a year or two. Many
have taken off with the best of intentions and fine first issues—and frequently with
recklessly optimistic initial print runs—but have not survived beyond "volume I, number
I." High editorial standards, a sense of purpose and mission, and a clear focus are clearly
all vital if a journal is to build for itself a reputation of excellence. But editorial vision is
not enough, and one of the most persistent reasons for the high mortality rate among
African literary journals—and indeed, literary magazines published elsewhere—is that in
addition to usually feeble overseas promotion and marketing, the vital aspects of effective
subscriptions management and fulfillment, and the business and administrative side, are
usually neglected. Many journal publishers also seem not to realize just how difficult it is
nowadays to start a new journal, how long it will take to attract, and thereafter retain,
overseas library subscriptions, and that libraries in most parts of the world now face
serious budgetary restraints and many must face canceling existing subscriptions, much
less taking on new journals. Too many new journals are still started without editors or
publishers first identifying their key market segments and determining just how large that
market is, how that market can be reached and at what cost, how a new journal might be
made attractive to that target market, and how long it might take (in most
-384-
cases several years) to build up a solid subscriber base and to generate sufficient income
to at least recover editorial, manufacturing, and marketing and promotion costs.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an abundance of African literary magazines, notably
those published in East Africa. But all of them, Busara, Dhana, Joliso, Umma, and Zuka,
have long since ceased publication. The most influential and most outspoken cultural and
political magazine was Transition, once aptly described by Abiola Irele as a journal that
was "not merely reporting about Africa or feeling its pulse, but charting the directions of
its mind." Transition was published in Uganda between 1961 and 1975, edited by Rajat
Neogy. It then moved to Ghana and was renamed Ch'indaba with its fiftieth issue, and
Wole Soyinka became its new editor for a period until it ceased publication in 1976.
Plans to recommence publication in London did not materialize. Happily, in 1991
Transition restarted publication from a U.S. base, with Henry Louis Gates and Kwame
Appiah as editors, and Wole Soyinka as its editor-in-chief.
Another journal that continues to be sporadically revived is the famous Black Orpheus.
Occasional issues have appeared in recent years under the imprint of the University of
Lagos Press, and most recently under the editorship of Theo Vincent. The longest
survivor, and arguably the most important and most successful literary magazine actually
published in Africa, is Okike ( Enugu, Nigeria) under the editorship of Chinua Achebe,
although it, too, has suffered from frequent delays in publication. Kiabara ( Port
Harcourt, Nigeria) is another survivor published irregularly, but the attractively produced
New Culture ( Ibadan, Nigeria) unfortunately is one of the many literary magazines that
had to suspend publication after only a year or two.
Francophone West Africa has two impressive journals in Ethiopiques ( Dakar), published
quarterly by the Fondation Léopold Sédar Senghor and edited by Moustapha Tambadou
(a special issue, vol. 5, nos. I-2 [ 1988], was devoted to "les métiers du livre"—the book
trade), and the Revue de littérature et d'esthétique négro-africaines ( Abidjan), edited by
N'Guessan Djangone Bi and published by the Côte d'Ivoire branch of NEA. The well-
known Abbia has been dormant for many years, but may well be resuscitated once more
in the near future.
In Southern Africa literary and cultural journals of note are Marang ( Gaborone),
published, albeit irregularly, by the Department of English at the University of Botswana
since 1980, and Moto ( Harare), published by Mambo Press, a monthly digest of
comments and events concerning Zimbabwe and the international scene, and including
news and reviews of film, radio, and television programs as well as providing regular
space for publication of creative writing by Zimbabweans.
In South Africa, the leading literary and cultural magazines are the large
format ADA
Magazine ( Howard Place); The Classic ( Braamfontein), sponsored by the African
Writers Association and published by Skotaville Pub-lishers
-385-
sored by the African Writers Association and published by Skotaville Publishers, which
contains short stories, drama, poetry, critical writing, and graphics and photography;
Contrast ( Cape Town); Critical Arts ( Durban); Journal of Literary Studies ( Pretoria);
UNISA English Studies ( Pretoria); and the excellent critical forum English in Africa (
Grahamstown), published twice yearly by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa
at Rhodes University.
But perhaps the most interesting and most successful venture on the South African
literary scene was the launching by Ravan Press, in 1978, of Staffrider ( Braamfontein),
which is still going strong and celebrated its tenth year of publication by issuing a special
edition (vol. 7, nos. 3-4) bringing together some of the finest stories, poems, photographs,
graphics, essays, and popular history published over the past decade. The magazine takes
its name from the young men who ride "staff" on the crowded commuter trains from
South Africa's Black townships, by climbing perilously on the roofs of the carriages or
standing on the steps, entertaining or alarming their more sedentary fellow passengers.
The name of the magazine therefore reflects the precarious lifestyle of young urban
Blacks. Staffrider is under the control of an informal editorial collective, and whereas
many well-known writers have appeared in its pages, it was principally conceived as an
outlet for young and often inexperienced writers and to feature, in its arts sections, the
work of community-based projects.
Among new literary and cultural journals that have commenced publication over the past
several years are Ngoma ( Lusaka, Zambia, 1986-), Journal of the Humanities ( Zomba,
Malawi, 1987-), Uwa ndi Igbo/Journal of Igbo Life and Culture ( Nsukka, Nigeria, 1984-
), Ifè: Annals of the Institute of Cultural Studies ( Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1987-), Kriteria: A
Nigerian Journal of Literary Research ( Onitsha, 1988-), Mokwadi: Writers Workshop
Journal ( Gaborone, Botswana, 1987-), EJOLLS: Ekpoma Journal of Languages and
Literary Studies ( Ekpoma, Nigeria, 1988-), and the African Theatre Review ( Yaoundé,
Cameroon, 1985-). Finally, the ANA Review ( Lagos, 1985-), the annual journal of the
Association of Nigerian Authors, is an absolutely goldmine of information for current
literary activities in Nigeria. Unfortunately, the publication is "for private circulation
only," restricted to members and the ANA seems to be determined that nobody outside
Nigeria should hear about its activities!

Conclusion
Whereas the 1970s might have been described as a decade of boom and expansion, the
1980s can only be described as a decade of crisis for the African book industries. The
chronic balance-of-payments problems in most African countries have had a crippling
effect on publishing and book development. Government funds available for school
textbooks, or library funds, have steadily and dramatically declined, with inevitable
consequences
-386-
for the book industries. And for lack of funds and hard currency, much of Africa is
becoming a tragically bookless society.
Yet amid the most difficult circumstances, there is still evidence of a great deal of
intellectual vigor and enterprise by African publishers. Moreover, despite the enormous
problems and obstacles, there are important challenges to seize. New directions can open
up if African publishers respond in the 1990s to the opportunity to develop, by publishing
in African languages and promoting African-language literatures. New approaches will
be needed: innovative experimentation in seeking out the audience, eliciting feedback and
response, bringing books into the economic reach of the rural poor, and exploring new
and more effective marketing and distribution channels. The challenge is there.
A positive development amid all the gloom is the establishment of African Books
Collective. Essentially a marketing and distribution operation, it may represent a turning
of the tide well beyond marketing. First, it will enhance the visibility of African book
publishing output. Second, by collectively providing their own nonprofit organization,
African publishers will improve their economic base, providing them with more hard
currency sales earnings. Those earnings, in turn, will also stimulate increased publishing
activities at home. Third, the existence of the collective will help African publishers to
persuade top African writers and scholars to publish with them, rather than with overseas
firms, and those publishers will be able to demonstrate to their authors that they can
effectively project their work and standing in the international markets. These
developments will help to promote the independence of African publishers and their
authors on a basis of equality with their colleagues overseas.
Works Cited
Bâ, Mariama. Une si longue lettre. Dakar: Nouvelle Editions Africaines, 1979. So Long a
Letter. Translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas. London: Heinemann, 1981.
Dangaremba, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. London: Women's Press, 1988.
Ethiopiques. Special issue of Les métiers du livre 5, nos. I-2( 1988). Dakar: Foundation
Léopold Sédar Senghor.
Guardian ( Lagos), 25 January 1987.
Hove, Chenjerai. Bones. Harare: Baobab Books, 1988.
Jacinto, António. Sobreviver em Tarrafal de Santiago [ Surviving in Tarrafal de
Santiago]. Luanda: Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco, 1985.
Nanga, Bernard. La trahison de Marianne [ Marianne's treachery]. Dakar: Nouvelles
Editions Africaines, 1984.
Ndebele, Njabulo. Fools and Other Stories. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983.
Omotoso, Kole. Just before Dawn. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books, 1988.
p'Bitek, Okot. Song of Lawino. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966.
Soyinka, Wole. Isara: A Voyage Round Essay. Lagos: Fountain, 1989; New York:
Random House, 1989.
-387-

The Contributors
J. Ndukaku Amankulor
J. Ndukaku Amankulor teaches at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he heads the
School of Dramatic Art. He has also taught at the University of California at Los
Angeles, where he did his graduate studies in theater.

Robert Cancel
Robert Cancel teaches at the University of California, San Diego, in the Department of
Literature. His research interest includes the fields of African oral traditions, literature,
and film. His Allegorical Speculation in Oral Society: The Tabwa Narrative Tradition
was published by the University of California Press in 1989.

Carole Boyce Davies

Carole Boyce Davies is an associate professor with joint appointments in English, Afro-
American and African studies, and comparative literature at the State University of New
York at Binghamton. Her research and teaching interests span African, Caribbean, and
African-American literatures, with special focus on women writers and the relationship
between oral and written literary traditions. She coedited, with Elaine Savory Fido, the
volume of criticism Out of the Kumba: Caribbean Women and Literature, published by
the African World Press in 1990.

Arlene A. Elder
Arlene Elder is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of
Cincinnati. She has published The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications of Early
African-American Fiction and essays on African-American, African, and Australian
Aboriginal writing, and is working on a comparative study of African and African

American writers.

Elaine Savory Fido

Elaine Fido teaches at New York University. She has taught at universities in Ghana,
Nigeria, and the Caribbean, and was involved in the development of the Women's Studies
program at the University of the West Indies. Her interests include gender
-389-
issues, women's writings, and theater in Africa and the Caribbean. She coedited, with
Carole Boyce Davies, Out of the Kumba: Women and Caribbean Literature.

Russell G. Hamilton
Russell Hamilton is a professor of Brazilian and Lusophone African literatures and dean
of the Graduate School at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author
of Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature, and Literatura
Africana, Literatura Necessaria.

Thomas Knipp
Thomas Knipp teaches African literature and American literature at Saint Louis
University. His publications on African poetry have appeared in WLWE, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, The South Atlantic Review, and elsewhere.

Edris Makward
Edris Makward is a professor of French and African literatures at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, where he has taught since 1967 and is currently the director of the
African Studies Program. Before coming to Madison he was on the faculty of the
University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of African Literature (Random House,
1972) and numerous other articles and essays on contemporary African and Caribbean
literatures.

Oyekan Owomoyela
Oyekan Owomoyela is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
where he teaches courses in African literatures, folklore, and film. His publications
include African Literatures: An Introduction (Crossroads Press, 1973), A Kì í: Yoruba
Proscriptive and Prescriptive Proverbs (University Press of America, 1988), Visions and
Revisions: Essays on African Literatures and Criticism (Peter Lang, 1991), and several
articles on African literatures, folklore, and philosophy.

Jonathan A. Peters
Jonathan Peters is a professor in African American studies at the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County. He previously taught at the University of Alberta and the City
University of New York's La Guardia Community College. He has traveled widely in
Africa, Europe, and the United States. His previous publications include A Dance of
Masks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka (Three Continents Press, 1978), and Literature of
Africa and the African Continuum (Three Continents Press, 1989), which he coedited
with Mildred Mortimer and Russell Linneman.

John F. Povey
John Povey was educated in the United Kingdom and in South Africa, and came to the
United States to earn a doctorate at Michigan State University. In 1964 he was
-390-
appointed to the African Studies Center at UCLA, where he introduced the first courses
on African literature in English, a field in which he later published numerous articles and
books.

Alain Ricard
Alain Ricard teaches at the Centre d'Etude d'Afrique Noire (Center of Black African
Studies) at the University of Bordeaux. He has worked extensively with theaters in both
Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. His books include Théâtre et nationalisme:
Wole Soyinka et Le Roi Jones ( 1972; Theatre and Nationalism, 1983), published by
Présence Africaine, and Livre et communication au Nigéria (Présence Africaine, 1975;
Book and communication in Nigeria).

Servanne Woodward
Servanne Woodward is an associate professor at The Wichita State University, where she
teaches French. She is a consulting reader for the Continental Latin American and
Francophone Women Writers yearly Wichita Conference Papers. She recently published
" La tête du serpent rusé: Grammaires et dictionaires bilingues en Afrique et aux
Caribbes" in Diogène ( 1990).

Hans M. Zell
Hans Zell was the first editor-in-chief at Africana Publishing Corporation in New York
before establishing his own publishing company in 1975. He has written and consulted
extensively on publishing and book development in Africa. He is the author of African
Books in Print, The African Book World & Press, and Reader's Guide to African
Literature.
-391-

Index
Abapatili bafika ku babemba ( The Catholic priests arrive among the Bemba), 304
Abdullah, Muhammad Said, 300
Abrahams, Peter, 87, 91
Abrantes, José Mena, 275
Abruquah, Joseph, 31
Achebe, Chinua, II, 12, 18 -20, 21, 22, 28, 35, 107, 117, 341, 353, 354, 356, 359, 373, 385
Acholonu, Catherine Obianuju, 317, 318, 319, 326, 329, 330, 332, 334
Acquah, Kobena Eyi, 118
Across the Atlantic: An Anthology of Cape Verdean Literature,273
ADA Magazine,385
Adams, Anne, 340
Addo, Patience, 330
Ademola, Frances, 327
Adììtú-Olódùmarè ([ Biography of a man named] God's mystery knot), 289
Adotévi, Stanislas, 215 -16
Adventures of the Kapapa, 39
Afor, Ogwugwu, 318
Africa, II
Africa Answers Back, 50
Africana Publishing Corporation, 38
African Books Collective Ltd. ( ABC), 376, 377, 387
African Contrasts,317
African Dawn. See Aube africaine.
African in Europe, An,51
" African Language Literatures: An Introduction to the Literary History of Sub‐ African
Vernacular Writing: An Essay in Self-Devaluation," 285, 286-87, 291, 292, 299, 300, 303,
306, 307
African Literature ( Dathome), 312
African Literature in the Twentieth Century, 106, 354
African Literature Today, 340
African Oral Narratives, Proverbs, Riddles, Poetry, and Song ( Scheub), 313
African Orpheus: ritual theater. See Orphée d'Afric: Thêàtre-rituel
African Panorama, 110
African Popular Literature, An: A Study of Onifsha Market Pamphlets,37
African Problems,51
African Short Stories,341
African Speaks for His People, An,50
African Theatre Review,386
African Women's Writing,342
African Writers Association, 384, 386
African Writers Talking,16
Africasouth Paperbacks, 384
Afrique debout ( Rise Africa!), 213
Aftermath, 334
Agapes des dieux Tritiva, Les: une Tragédie ( The love feast of the Tritiva gods: A tragedy),
210
Agatha Moudio's Sons. See Les fils d'Agatha Moudio
Agony on a Hide,77
Agualusa, José Eduardo, 275
Aguiar, Armindo, 273
Aidoo, [Christina] Ama Ata, 31 -32, 33 -34, 39, 149, 153 -54, 317, 320, 323, 326, 327, 328,
330, 331, 332, 334, 338 -39
Aiyé d'aiyé òyìnbó ( The world has become a white man's world), 289
Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty,13
Ajayi, J. F., 362
Ake: The Years of Childhood,40, 351
Akéde èkó ( Lagos Herald), 288
Akello, Grace, 333
Akpan, N. U., 35
Alade, R. B, 35
Aladji, Victor Weka Yawo, 180
Alba, Sebastião, 245
Alcântara, Osvaldo, 243, 248, 260. See also Lopes da Silva, Baltasar
Alegre, Caetano da Costa, 249
Alkalis, Zaynab, 318, 342
Alla Gbah, 155
Almada, José Luís Hopffer, 272
Almeida, Carlos Vaz de, 273
Almeida, Roberto de.See Rocha, Jofre
Aluko, Timothy, 21 -22
-393-
Amadi, Elechi, 26 -27, 35, 319
Amalibu ya kuilombela ( Self-inflicted misfortunes), 304
Amankulor, James Ndukaku, 142
Amarilis, Orlanda, 273, 342
Amar sobre o Índico ( To love over the Indian Ocean), 276
Amavo ( Personal impressions), 293
Ambiguous Adventure. See L'aventure ambigue
Amis, Kingsley, 14
Amosu, Margaret, 22
Amrouche, Fadma, 327
Amuta, Chidi, 34
Ana, Zé e os escravos ( Ana, Joe, and the slaves), 275
Anamou, David, 178
ANA Review,386
Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain, The,132
Ancestral Power,154
Andrade, Fernando Costa, 244, 250, 254
Andrade, Mário Pinto de, 246 -47, 250, 256, 273
Andreski, Iris, 322
Andrzejewski, B. W., 285, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 298, 307, 308
And The Storm Gathers, 159
Angira, Jared, 123
Angola angolé angolema ( Angola, hail Angola, Angola the word), 253
Anjos, Frederico Gustavo dos, 273 -74
Anōes e os mendigos, Os ( Dwarfs and beggars), 275
Another Nigger Dead, 122
Anowa, 153, 154
Ansah, J. Bob, 146
Anthologie de la littérature congolaise d'expression française ( Anthology of Congolese
literature in French), 220, 222, 223
Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie nègre et malgache de langue fiançaise ( Anthology of the
new Black and Malagasy poetry), 202, 203, 207, 208, 211, 212, 352
Anthropos,200
Antidote, 210
Antologia dos jovens poetas: Momentos primeiros da construção ( Anthology of the young
poets: the first moments of nation building), 256
António, Mário ( Fernandes de Oliveira), 244, 262 -63
Antsa, 210-II
Anvil Press, 382
Anyidoho, Kofi, 118, 119 -20, 380
Appel des arènes, L' ( The call of the arena), 187,325
Appiah, Kwame, 385
Apuros de vigília ( Anguishes of vigilance), 274
Archote ( Torchlight), 274
Arc musical ( Musical bow), 218
Areo, Agbo, 379
Armah, Ayi Kwei, 28 -31, 40, 359
Armattoe, R. E. G., 106
Armes, Roy, 362
Armstrong, Robert Plant, 354 -55
Amold, Stephen, 308
Arquipélago ( Archipelago), 242
Arrow of God, 18, 19, 20, 21
Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture,138
Artur, Armando, 276
Arvore e tambor ( Tree and drum), 272
Asare, Bediako, 80
Ashong-Katai, Selby, 39
Asinamali!, 165, 166
Assan, Afari, 39
Assis Junior, Ant6nio de, 258 -59
Association des Ecrivains d'Afrique Centrale, 381
Association des Ecrivains Reunionais, 381
Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), 379, 386
Assoka, ou les derniers jours de Koumbi ( Assoka, or, The last days of Koumbi), 187
A triche-coeur ( To a tricking heart), 218
Atta-Koffi, Raphaël, 231
Aube africaine ( African dawn), 229, 232
Aube sanglante, L' ( Bleeding dawn), 232
Augusto, Rui, 274
A un enfant noir ( To a black child), 209
Austin, D. G., 351
Auto de natal (Christmas play), 270
Autre face du royaume: une introduction à la critique des langages en folie, L' ( The other
side of the kingdom: an introduction to the critique of language in insanity), 179
Aux confins de la nuit ( To the ends of the night), 210
Aventuras de Ngunga, As ( Ngunga's adventures), 266
Aventure ambiguë, L'( Ambiguous Adventure), 180
Awa, la petite marchande ( Awa, the petty trader), 183
Awoonor, Kofi, 34, 106, 108, III-12, 113, 154, 355, 356, 378, 380
Axelrod, Mark, 355
Ayé rèé! ( Thus goes the world!), 289
Ayoda, Awuor, 342

Ba, Mariama, 39, 188, 317, 319, 323, 325, 327, 336, 380
Babalola, Adeboye, 289 -90, 306, 307
Bacchae of Euripides, The,150
Badian [Kouyaté], Seydou, 231
Bakaluba, Jane Jagers, 74, 78
Baker, Houston, 347, 357
-394-
Ballads of Underdevelopment,122
Bamanga, 80n. 4
Bamboté, Pierre Makambo, 186
Bame, Kwabena N., 145, 146
Banda, Innocent, 160
Bandeira, Manuel, 248
Baobab Books, 382
Baobab fou, Le ( The crazy baobab), 183, 188
Barbed Wire, The,158-59
Barbeitos, Arlindo, 253 -54
Barber, Karin, 314
Barbosa, Jorge, 242 -43
Barnett, D., 65
Barrel of a Pen,79
Barroca, Norberto, 269
Batouala, 174, 201
Béatrice du Congo ( Beatrice of the Congo), 231
Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, The,28-29
Bebey, Francis, 187, 220
Because of Women,27
Be Content with Your Lot,37
Before the Birth of the Moon. See Le bel immonde
Beggars' Strike, The; or, The Dregs of Society. See La grève des battù
Behind the Clouds,325
Beier, Ulli, 108, 378
Bel immonde, Le ( Before the Birth of the Moon),183, 186
Bemba, Sylvain, 235
Bender, Tamara, 264
Benjamin, Jean, 335
Berrian, Brenda, 340 n. I, 342
Bertoncini, Elena Zubkova, 301
Beti,Mongo, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184
Between the Forest and the Sea, 106
Beware, Soul Brother,117
Bezoro, Edouard, 176
Bhave, Vinoba, 102
Bi, N'Guessan Djangone, 385
Bibliography, 340
Bingo, 175
Biyidi, Alexandre. See Beti, Mongo
Black Aesthetics,53
Black African Theater and Its Social Functions, The. See Le théâtre négro-africain et ses
fonctions sociales
Black and White in Love,117
Black Docker, The. See Le docker noir
Black Hermit, The,156
Black Mamba: Covenant with Death,158, 159, 163
Black Night of Quiloa, 74, 78
Black Orpheus, 22, 40, 378, 385
Black Skin, White Masks. See Peau noire, masques blancs
Black Writers in French. See Les écrivains noirs de langue française: Naissance d'une
littérature
Blade among the Boys,20, 21
Blair, Dorothy S., 186
Blame Me on History,91
Blay, J. B., 37
Bless the Wicked,59
Blinkards, The,147
Blood of Peace and Other Poems, The,118
Blood on Our Land, 61, 68, 70, 72-73, 76
Blues Is You in Me, The,134
Boateng, Yaw, 40
Bolamba, Antoine-Roger, 176
Bolamba, D., 233
Bonavena, E., 274
Bones,382
Boni, Nazi, 178 -79
Bopha!, 165, 166-67
Born in the RSA, 165, 332
Bound to Violence. See Le devoir de violence
Boutriers de l'aurore, Les ( The armors of the dawn), 210
Bouts de bois de Dieu, Les ( God's Bits of Wood),182
Boy in Between, The,80
Bragança, Albertino, 273
Braithwaite, Edward Kamau, 348, 351, 363
Brave African Huntress, The,13
Bread and Bullet,145
Brew, Kwesi, 106, 110
Breytenbach, Breyten, 91
Bride Price, The,33
Brink, André, 91
Broken Bridge, The: Reflections and Experiences of a Medical Doctor During the Nigerian
Civil War, 35
Broken Pot, The,156-57
Bruner, Charlotte, 314, 315, 327, 342
Brutus, Dennis, 124, 131, 132, 350, 358, 378
 Buchu Books, 384
Bugul, Ken ( Marietou Mbaye), 183, 188, 322
Bukenya, Austin, 75, 80 n. 4
Buma Kor, 380
Bunyan, John, 287, 292
Burdens, The,158
Burgess, Yvonne, 341 n. 8
Burgher's Daughter,90
Burness, Donald, 250
Burning Grass, 17
Bumt-Out Marriage, The, 25
Busara, 385
Bushtrackers, The,57, 58
Busia, Abena P. A., 334
Butler, Guy, 384
Bwalya, J. M., 304
Caboverdiamadamente, construção, meu amor ( Cape Verde—lovingly, building a nation,
my love), 255
-
395-

Cabral, Amílcar, 246, 247, 248

Cabral, Luís, 256
Caderno de poesia negra de expressão portuguesa ( A collection of Negro poetry in
Portuguese), 246
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal ( Return to My Native Land), 206-7
Cais de Sodré té Salamansa ( From the docks of Sodre to the port of Salamansa), 273
Caithani mutharaba-ini, 79
Calder, Angus, 53
Caliban, 256, 257
Call Me Woman,340
Callaloo, 340
Callinicos, Luli, 383
Camwood on the Leaves, 149, 150
Cântico do habitante, O ( The inhabitant's hymn), 255
Cão e os caluandas, O ( The dog and the Luandans), 274
Carcase for Hounds,58, 65
Cardoso, António, 244, 250, 263
Carvalho, Agostinho Mendes de.See Xitu, Uanhenga
Carvalho, Ruy Duarte de, 253 -54
Cary, Joyce, II
Casa dos Mastros, A ( The house of the masts), 273
Cascades,123
Casely-Hayford, Adelaide, 315 -16, 327, 328, 341
Casely-Hayford, Gladys May, 105, 341
Casely-Hayford, Joseph E., II, 12
Casualties,114
Catechist, The,31
Centre d'Edition et de Diffusion Africaines (CEDA), 378
Centre de Littérature Evangélique (CLE), 234, 378
Certeza, 248, 261
Césaire, Aimé, 177, 182, 206 -7, 214 -15
Cesto de Katandu e outros contos, O ( Katandu's basket and other stories), 274
Chabaku, Motlalepula, 322
Chaga, A ( The bleeding sore), 259
Chahilu, Bernard P., 75, 78
Chaka, 86, 229
Chakava, Henry, 381
Chant écarlate, Un ( Scarlet Song),39, 188
Chants d'ombre ( Songs of darkness), 204, 205, 242
Charrua ( The plow), 275
Chattering and the Song, The,162-63
Chedid, Andrée, 342
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 118 -19
Chevrier, Jacques, 174, 177
Chifunyise, Stephen, 159 -60, 163
Childe Internationale, 150
Child of Two Worlds, A, 65
Chimedza, Albert, 128, 129
Chimombo, Steve, 124, 128, 160
Ch'indaba, 385
Chinweizu, 41, 178, 356 -57, 361, 379
Chipasula, Frank, 124, 127 -28
Chiquinho,260
Chirac, Jacques, 350
Cholera College. See Kolera Kolej
Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems,117
Christmas in the City,39
Chunga, Spencer, 160
Chuva braba ( Torrential rain), 260
Cidade e a infância, A ( Childhood and the city), 264
Círculo de giz de bombó ( The bombo chalk circle), 270
Cisse, Souleymane, 236
Clar(a)idade assombrada ( Overshadowed clarity), 272
Claridade, 248, 259, 260, 272
Claridade generation, 243
Clark, J. P. [Bekederemo], 107, 114 -15, 149, 152
Classic, The,96, 385
Clayton, Anthony, 351
Clayton, Cheryl, 327
Clem, Darlene, 155
Climbié , 182
Club, Le,230
Coal City and the Juju Priest,38
Cobham-Sander, Rhonda, 340
Cockroach Dance, The,58, 77
Coetzee, J. M., 90
Coetzee, Tjaart, 147 -148
Cohen, Andrew, 351
Collector of Treasures, The,326, 328
College Press, 382
Collins, E. J., 146
Collision of Your Altars, 160
Colonel Ben Brim,35
Colonizer and the Colonized, The,175, 179
Combat, The,35, 36
Comb Books, 58, 60, 378
Coming to Birth,78
Commonwealth Foundation, 377
 Company Pot,330
Concerto for an Exile,118
Concours Littéraire Internationale de Poesie contre l'Apartheid, 381
Concubine, The,26-27, 319
Confessions of a Bastard, 39
Confessions of an Albino Terrorist,91
Conjura, A ( The conspiracy), 274-75
Conrad, James, 10
Conservationist, The,90
Contest, The,159
Conton, William, 20
Contrast,386
Cook, David, 51, 52, 122
-
396-

Cope, Jack, 88, 384

Coração em África ( With my heart in Africa), 246
Corda, A ( The rope), 270
Cossa, Francisco Esau. See Khosa, Ungulani Ba Ka
Couchoro, Félix, 174, 175
Counterpoint,128
Coupe de cendres, La ( The bowl of ashes), 200
Coups de pilon ( Hammer Blows), 208, 209
Couto, Mia, 277
Crane Publishers, 381
Crapauds-brousse, Les ( The bush toads), 185, 188
Craveirinha, José, 244, 251, 275 -76
Creation, The,148
Creative African Writing in the European Languages, 22
Crépuscule des temps anciens ( The twilight of old times), 179
Cri d'un assoiffé de soleil ( The cry of one parched by the sun), 222
Critical Arts,386
Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola, 15
Crónica da cidade estranha ( Chronicle of this uncommon city), 262
Cross of Gold,318, 323, 336
Crucifixion, The,148
Cry Amandla: South African Women and the Question of Power, 322
Cry Rage, 134
Cry, the Beloved Country,86
Culture and Development: The Popular Theatre Approach in Africa, 330
Culture and the Nigerian Novel,342
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 339
Curse from God, A, 67, 68
D'Aby, Amon, 231
da Cruz, Viriato, 243
Dadié, Bernard Binlin, 178, 182, 213 -14, 215, 229, 230, 231
da Graca, Jose Vieira Mateus. See Vieira, Jose Luandino
Dakar Childhood, A, 320, 322
Dalby, David, 307
d'Almeida, Irene Assiba, 335
Damas, Léon, 199, 203, 206
Dambará, Kaoberdiano, 249, 271
Damnés de la terre, Les ( The Wretched of the Earth),202, 326
Dance of the Forest, A, 23, 24, 115, 231
Danda, 359
Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 317, 326, 337, 382
Danquah, J. B., 147
Danquah, Mabel Dove, 315, 327, 328
Dark Child, The. See L'enfant noir
Darlight, 52, 62
Dathorne, O. R., 106, 312, 341, 355
Daughter of Mumbi, 66, 73, 74, 322
Daughter of My People Sing, 333
Daughters of the Sun and Other Stories,38
Daughters of Twilight,326
Davies, Carole Boyce, 320, 329, 339, 341
Dawn Came Twice, The,88
Day after Tomorrow,77
Day the Music Died and Other Stories, The,60
Dead Roots, 131-32
Dear Daughter, 59
Dear Monika, 59
Dear Parent and Ogre, 155
Death and the King's Horseman, 40, 150, 151
Decade of Tongues, A: Selected Poems, 1958‐ 1968, 114
Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature,143, 285, 291, 307
Dedan Kimathi, 157, 162
Deep Down in the Black Man's Mind,106
de Graft, J. C., 149, 153, 154
Dei-Anang, Michael, 106
 Dekutsey, W. A, 380
De la littérature des Nègres ( On Negro literature), 173
Delano, Chief Isaac Oluwole, 140, 289
Delta Publications, 379
Dempster, Roland, 106
Dépossédés, Les ( The dispossessed), 184
Deri, Ananda, 342
Dernier de l'empire, Le ( The last of the empire), 182
Dernier des Le justes ( The last of the just), 185
Derniers jours de Lat Doir; La mort du Damel, Les ( The last days of Lat Doir; The death
of Damel), 231
Descarado ( The shameless man), 273
Descoberta das descobertas, ou as descobertas da descoberta, A ( Discovery of the
discoveries; or, Discoveries of the discovery), 273
Descobertas da descoberta, ou a dimensão de uma mensagem poética, As ( The discoveries
of the discovery; or, The dimension of a poetic message), 274
Desert Encroaches, The,330
Destination Biafra, 35
Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, 79
Detainee, The,149
De Tilène au plateau: Une enfance dakaroise ( From Tilene to the plateau: A Dakar
childhood), 183
Devil on the Cross,67, 68-69, 71, 72, 77, 79
Devoir de violence, Le ( Bound to Violence), 31, 185, 188, 217
Dhana, 52, 385
-
397-

Dhlomo, Herbert I. E., 131, 143, 147

Dhlomo, R. R. R., 96, 131
Dia, Amadou Cissé, 231
Diagne, Ahmadou Mapaté, 174, 175, 183
Diallo, Bakary, 174, 175
Diallo, Nafissatou Niang, 183, 317, 319, 320, 322
Dialogue des plateaux, Le ( The dialogue of the plateaus), 220
Diamond Ring, The,80
Diary of a Homeless Prodigal, 38
Dias, J. P. Grabato. See João, Mutimati Barnabé
Dias, João, 263
Diawara, Gaoussou, 180
Dieux malgaches, Les ( Malgasy gods), 210
Dike, Fatima, 318, 330, 332
Dilemma of a Ghost, The,31, 153-54, 331
Dingane, 147
Diop, Alioune, 203, 209
Diop, Birago, 175, 203, 207, 230
Diop, David, 108
Diop, David Mandessi, 207 -9
Diop, Massyla, 174, 175
Diop, Ousmane Socé, 199, 202 -3
Dipoko, Mbella Sonne, 27, 117
Disasi, Justin, 232
Discours sur le colonialisme ( Discourse on colonialism), 182
Distant View of a Minaret, 318
District Governor Goes to a Village, The,159, 163
Divided We Stand,35
Dizanga dia muenhu ( The lagoon of life), 263
Djoleto, Amu, 38
Dlamanini, Moses, 99 -100
Docker noir, Le ( The Black Docker),182, 354
Dogbe, Yves-Emmanuel, 380
Doguicimi,174, 175
Domingo ( Sunday), 275
Donker, Adriaan, 383
Doubleday-Anchor Books, 38
Double Yoke,37, 325
Down Second Avenue, 91, 103
Dramouss ( A Dream of Africa), 182, 185
Drawn in Color: African Contrasts,317, 321
Dream of Africa, A. See Dramouss
Drum,92, 93, 96
Drumbeat, 121
Duarte, Fausto, 258 -59
Dube, Violet ( Natale Nxumalo), 341
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 174
Dumba nengue: Histórias trágicas do banditismo,276
Dunia uwanja wa fujo ( The world—a field of chaos), 302
Dying in the Sun,61
Dzuka Publishing, 382
Earthchild, 118, 120
Easmon, R. Sarif, 25, 155
East African How? Stories,80
East African Journal, 56
East African Publishing House, 54, 56, 378, 381
East African When? Stories, So
East African Why? Stories,80
Écrivains noirs de langue française: Naissance d'une littérature, Les ( Black Writers in
French),204
Edifice, The,35, 39
Editions Akpagnon, 380
Editions CLE, 380
Editions Goute d'Eau dans l'Ocean, 381
Editions Heros dans l'Ombre, 380
Editions Impala, 380
Editions Lokole, 380
Editions Populaire, 380
Editions Semences Africaines, 380
Editions Takariva, 381
Edufa, 153, 316, 331, 332, 336, 337
Efuru,32, 319, 324, 336
Egblewogbe, E. Y., 39
Egbuna, Obi, 22, 38, 149, 152
Eighteenpence, 12
Eighth Wife, The,78
EJOLLS: Ekpoma Journal of Language and Literary Studies,386
Ekwensi, Cyprian, 15 -18, 35, 38
Elegy for the Revolution,119
Éléphant qui marche sur des oeufs, L' ( The elephant that walks on eggs), 176
Elephants, The, 157
II Poemas em novembro ( II poems in November), 252
 Elina. See Wind versus Polygamy
Elle sera de jaspe et de corail ( She will be of jasper and coral ), 179, 189, 326
Emecheta, Buchi, 32, 33, 35, 37, 312, 317
18, 319, 320, 321, 322, 325, 327, 336, 337,
338 -39
Emergency,99
Emperor of the Sea and Other Stories,38
Enekwe, Ossie O., 142
Enfant noir, L' ( The Dark Child),181-82, 185
English in Africa,386
Entre les eaux ( Between the waters), 188
Envers du soleil, L' ( The reverse side of the sun), 220
Ephson, I. S., 39
Epitomé , 218, 219
Equiano, Olaudah, 40, 173
Equiano's Travels: His Autobiography,40
Errance, L' ( Wandering), 188
Esclave, L' ( The slave), 174, 175
Eshun, J. O., 39
Espelho dos dias ( Mirror of the days), 276
-
398-

Espírito Santo, Alda, 273

Estórias do Musseque ( Musseque tales), 263
Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation, 12
Ethiopiques, 229, 385
Étudiant de Soweto, L' ( The Soweto student), 235
Étudiant noir, L' ( The Black student), 176, 199
Eu, o povo: Poemas da revolução ( I, the people: poems of the revolution), 252
Euba, Femi, 149
European-Language Writing in Sub
Saharan Africa, 173
Europe inculpée, L' ( Europe indicted), 231
Evbu, My Love,38
Evidence of Love,88
Ewembe, François-Borgia Marie, 184
Ewì orísìírísìí ( Poems of various types), 290
Exil d'Albouri, L' suivi de La décision ( The exile of Albouri, with The decision), 231
Ex-père de la nation ( Ex-father of the nation), 187
Experience, The,63
Eye of the Earth, The,118
Faber and Faber, 37
Facing Mount Kenya, 50
Fagunwa, D. O., 289, 307
Faik-Nzuju, Clementine Madiya, 333, 342
Faleti, Adebayo, 290
Fall, Aminata, 187
Fall, Malick, 184
Fall, Marouba, 221, 222, 381
Family, The,325
Family Spear,330
Fanon, Frantz, 175, 202, 216, 326, 355
Farra no fim de semana ( Weekend spree), 262
Fatou Ndiaye Diop, 183
Fatunde, Tunde, 152
Feather Woman of the Jungle, 13
Female Novelists,342
Ferreira, Manuel, 250, 269
Feu de brousse ( Brush fire), 218
Feux de la planète, Les ( The fires of the planet), 220
Few Nights and Days, A, 27
Field Marshall Abdulla Salim Fisi; or, How the Hyena Got His!,64
Figueira, Luiz, 258
Filho, Ernesto Lara, 244
Fils d'Agatha Moudio, Les ( Agatha Moudio's Sons),187
Fils de Kouretchka, Les ( The sons of Kouretchka), 184
Fils du fétiche, Le ( The son of the fetish), 178
Finnegan, Ruth, 142, 313
Fire and Vengeance,60
Fireflames, 133
First Seed, The,75, 77
First South African, The,332
Fisherman's Invocation, The,112
Fixions and Other Stories,64
Flagelados do vento leste ( Victims of the east wind), 260
Floods, The,158
Flowers and Shadows,40
Flûtistes ( Flute players), 201 -2
FOFIPA, 381
Fogo da fala, O ( The fire of words), 263
Fools and Other Stories,97, 383
Fools Marry, The,159
Force-bonté ( Benevolent force), 174, 175, 178
Ford Foundation, 377
Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga (Ògbójú ode nínú igbó irúnmalè), 289
Foriwa, 153
Fortes, Corsino, 254 -55, 261, 272
Forty-Eight Guns for the General,35
Foundation Books, 381
Foundation Léopold Sédar Senghor, 385
Fountain Publications, 379
Fourth Dimension Publishers, 38, 379
Fourth Trial, The, 156
Foutu monde pour un blanchisseur trop honnête, Un ( A wretched world for a too honest
washerman), 235
Fragmentos, 272
Fragments, 28, 29
Fragoso, Francisco. See Konde, Kwame
Frantz Fanon's Uneven Ribs, 122
Fraser, Robert, 29
Freedom and After,65
Freire, Maria da Graca, 246
From the Pit of Hell to the Spring of Life, 355
Fugard, Athol, 166
Fugard, Sheila, 342
Future Leaders, The,67
Gabre-Medhin, Tsegaye, 160
Gabriel, Teshome, 362
Gadeau, Coffi, 229, 231
Gangsters,165
 Ganhão, Fernando, 251
Ganzel, Eddie, 301
Garden of Eden and the Throne of God, The, 145
Gashe, Marina. See Njau, Rebeka
Gates, Henry Louis, 356, 362, 385
Gatheru, Mugo, 65
Gbana-Bendu, 155
Geneviève, martyre d'Idiofa ( Geneviève, martyr of Idiofa), 233
Gente de meu bairro ( People from my neighborhood), 263
George, Crispin, 106
Gérard, Albert, 173, 285, 286 -87, 290, 291, 292, 299, 300, 303, 306, 307
-
399-

Gérard Félix Tchicaya. See U Tam'si, Tchicaya

Ghala, 56
Giambattista Vico, ou le viol du discours africain ( Giambattista Vico; or, the rape of
African discourse), 188
Gicheru, Mwangi, 60, 67
Girl from Abroad, The,78
Girls at War and Other Stories,35
Girl Who Killed to Save, The,143
Glass House, The,332
Glutton, The,158
Godido e outros contos ( Godido and other stories), 263
Gods Are Not to Blame, The,152
God's Bits of Wood. See Les bouts de bois de Dieu
God's Step Children,86
Going down River Road, 58, 77
Gold Coast Native Institutions,12
Golden Feather, The,73
Gonçalves, Ant6nio Aurélio, 260 -61
Goodwin, June, 322
Goody, Jack, 307
Gordimer, Nadine, 87, 89 -90, 95, 103, 312, 340 -41, 384
Graduate, The,67, 77, 78
Grain of Wheat, A, 40, 65, 68
Grandes eaux noires, Les ( The great black waters), 178
Graves, Anne Adams, 339
Graveyard Also Has Teeth, The,118
Great Ponds, The,27
Grégoire, Henri Abbé, 173
Grève des battù, La ( The Beggars' Strike; or, The Dregs of Society),187, 325, 336, 338
Groping in the Dark,61, 76, 78
Gros plan ( Close-up), 180
Growing Up at Lina School, So
Guardian Fiction Prize, 354
Guebuza, Armando, 251
Guerra, Henrique, 244, 262
Guerra, Mario, 262
Guma, Enoch S., 294
Gurr, Andrew, 53
Gwala, Mafika Pascal, 134
Hábito da terra( Habit of the land), 274
Hale, Thomas, 313
Halimi, Gisèle, 342
Hammer Blows. See Coups de pilon
Hana Hatia, 62
Hare's Blanket, The, 80
Hargreaves, John D., 361 -62
Harmattan, L' ( Harmattan), 181, 182
Harvest of Our Dreams, A, 118, 120
Hatia ( Crime), 330
Haunting Past, The,156, 157
Have You Seen Zandile?, 332
Hazoumé, Paul, 174, 175
Head, Bessie, 317, 318, 320, 324, 325, 326, 328, 337 -38
Healers, The,28, 31, 359
Heart of Darkness, 10
Heart Seller, The,63, 74, 80
Heer, Frederich, 363
Heinemann Kenya, 371, 378, 381
Heinemann Nigeria, 379
Heinemann's African Writers Series, 38
Henderson, Gwyneth, 330
Herdsman's Daughter, The,75, 78
Heshima yangu ( My dignity), 302
High School Gent, The,80
Histoire de la littérature coloniale en France ( History of colonial literature in France),
173
História de Angola ( The history of Angola), 270
Hologoudou, Emile, 217 -18
Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics,53
Homme dominé, L' ( The dominated man), 202
Homoine,276
Honeymoon for Three,74, 78
Honwana, Luís Bernardo, 263, 271, 276
Horn of My Love,67
Horton, James Africanus, 12
Hosties noires ( Black sacrifices), 205
House, Amelia Blossom, 318, 326, 327, 329, 333, 335
House by the Sea, The,III, 112
Hove, Chenjerai, 128, 130, 382
Hughes, Langston, 316, 341
Hurry Up to It,134
Hussein, Ebrahim, 158, 163, 302
Hutchison, Alfred, 91
Hutton, C. B., 146
Ibadan University Press, 379
Icibemba cesu na mano yaciko ( Our Bemba language and its wisdom), 303
I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town,314
Idanre and Other Poems,115
Idu, 32, 336
If..., 152
Ifè: Annals of the Institute of Cultural Studies, 386
Ifejika, Samuel, 35
Ifyo balemba amabuku ( How they write books), 304
Igbó Olódùmarè ( The jungle of the almighty), 307
Ike, Chukwuemeka, 35
 Ikiddeh, Ime, 16
Ilhéu de contenda ( Isle of contention), 261
Ilhéu dos pássaros ( Bird island), 273
-
400-

Ilunga-Kabalu, Gabriel, 183

Imbuga, Francis, 156
Imfuduso, 332
Imilumbe ne nshimi: Shintu bashimika ku lubemba ( Stories [with and without songs]: the
ones they tell in the Bemba area), 304
In a Brown Mantle, 63
Inadiável A viagem ( The urgent voyage), 276
Ingqumbo yeminyanya ( The wrath of the ancestors), 294
Innes, Lyn 341
In Search of Their Parents,80
Inspector Rajabu Investigates, and Other Stories,62
Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco ( INLD) ( National Institute for Books and Discs),
383
Interpreters, The,23, 24, 39
In the Ditch,33, 320
Intyatyambo yomzi ( The flower in the home), 341
Ipi Tombi,165
Irèké-oníbùdó ( The camp commandant's sugarcane), 307
Irele, Abiola, 379
I Resign, 159
Irìnkèrindò nínú igbó elégbèje ( Wanderings in the forest of innumerable wonders), 307
Iroh, Eddie, 35
Ìsarà: A Voyage Around "Essay,"379
Isharaza, Grace Birabawa, 334
Isigidimi,307
Is It Possible?,80
Island of Tears, The,80
Issa, Ibrahim, 178
Ivory Merchant, The,60, 67
I Was a Savage,20
I Will Marry When I Want (Ngaahika Ndeenda), 161
I Will Wait,330
Jabavu, Noni, 316 -17, 320, 321, 337
Jacinto, António, 244, 250, 274, 383
Jacobson, Dan, 88
Jadot, J. M., 176
Jagua Nana, 17
Jahn, Janheinz, 378
Jande's Ambition,80
Jemie, Onwuchekwa, 41, 178, 373
Je soussigné cardiaque ( I, the undersigned cardiac), 235
Jeune Afrique ( Young Africa), 176
Jeyifo, Biodun, 151
João, Mutimati Barnabé, 252, 256
Jock Campbell/New Statesman Prize, 354
Johnson, Ishmael, 145, 146
Johnson, Janet, 143
Johnson, John W., 297
Johnson, Samuel, 12
Joliso, 385
Jolobe, James J. R., 293
Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 372
Jonathan Ball Publishers, 384
Jones, Eldred D., 307
Jones, T. J., 348
Jordan, A. C., 294
Journal de Madagascar, Le,200
Journal d'un revenant ( Journal of a ghost), 183
Journal of Literary Studies,386
Journal of the Humanities, 386
Joys of Motherhood, The,33, 336, 337
Juju Priest, The,38
July's People,90
Just before Dawn, 375
Kâ, Abdou Anta, 188
Ka, Aminita Maïga, 342
Kabagarama, Daisy, 342
Kadima-Nzuji, Mukala, 176
Kagame, Alexis, 176
Kagiri, Samuel, 74, 78
Kahiga, Samuel, 66, 78
Kakaza, Lillith, 316, 341
Kalasanda,64
Kalasanda Revisited,64
Kalikwenbe, Hodges, 160
Kamlongera, Chris, 160
 Kandjimbo, Luís, 274
Kane, Cheik Hamidou, 180
Kane, Mohamadou, 173, 175, 203
Kani, John, 165, 166
Karim, roman sénégalais ( Karim, a Senegalese novel), 174, 181, 203
Kariuki, M. P. Joshua Mwangi, 65
Karodia, Farida, 326
Karone, Yodi, 189
Kashoki, Mubanga E., 308
Kasoma, Kabwe, 159, 163
Katalambulla, Faraji, 300
Katchikali, 109
Katigula, Barnabas, 52, 61, 71, 76, 78
Katongo Chala, 159
Katsina, Binta, 337
Kawegere, F., 62
Kay, Kwesi, 154 -55
Kayamba, Martin, 51
Kayambason, 51
Keita, Fodeba, 229, 232
Kenneth Kaunda Foundation (formerly the National Education Company of Zambia), 382
Kente, Gibson, 165, 166
Kenya Literature Bureau, 54, 372, 381
Kenyatta, Jomo, 50, 79
Kerr, David, 141
-
401-
Kesteloot, Lilyan, 204
Kezilahabi, Euphrase, 302
Kgogsitsile, Keorapetse, 131, 133
Khosa, Ungulani Ba Ka, 277
Kiabara, 385
Killam,G. D., II
Kill Me Quick,56, 58, 74, 77
Kimbugwe, Henry. See Seruma, Eneriko
Kimenye, Barbara, 64, 78, 341
King, Adèle, 178
King Elejigbo and Princess Abeje of Kotangora, 143
King Kong, 165
Kinjeketile,158, 163, 302
Kinsman and Foreman, 21
Kinteh, Ramatoulie, 155
Kisalu and His Fruit Garden, 59
Kisses of Fate, 156
Kithinji, Gerald, 123 -24
Kivulu and Other Plays, 155
Knopfli, Rui, 256, 275
Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir ( Kocoumbo, the Black student), 184
Kola, Pamela, 80
Kolera Kolej ( Cholera College), 39
Komey, Ayitey, 107
kommon man, The,58
Konde, Kwame, 271
Kondo le requin ( Kondo the shark), 231
Kongi's Harvest, 36, 150, 151, 231
Konkhava de Feti, A ( Feti's hatchet), 262
Kourouma, Ahmadou, 184 -85, 188
Kouyaté, Seydou Badian, 184
Kriteria: A Nigerian Journal of Literary Research, 386
Kulet, Henry R. ole., 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 80
Kunene, Daniel P., 292, 294 -95, 355
Kunene, Mazisi, 131, 132 -33
Kurunmí , 152
Kutse, Chewanda [ Tjaart Coetze], 148
Kuzwayo, Ellen, 322, 340
Kwa-Namakunde, 147
Kwarteng, D. K., 39
Lab'ou Tansi, Sony, 187
Labyrinths,116-17
Ladipo, Duro, 145, 290
Lagos Herald. See Akéde Èkó
La Guma, Alex, 94, 95, 99
Laitin, David, 296 -97, 308
Lake Publishers, 381
Lak Tar, 63
Lalua, Aquah. See Casely-Hayford, Gladys May
Lamba, 210
Lament, 154
Land Is Ours, The,66
Landscapes Within, The,40
Lands of Kazembe, The,159
Land without Thunder,78, 316, 326, 328
Lannoy, Violet Das, 342
Lara, Alda, 244
Larson, Charles R., 353
Last Duty, The,35
Laughter and Hubbub in the House,154-55
Laye, Camara, 175, 180, 181 -82, 183, 185, 187
Leave Us Alone,74, 78
Lebel, Roland, 173
Légendes et poèmes ( Legends and poems), 213-14
Légitime defense ( Self-defense), 176, 198
Lehman, Dorothea, 308
Lemma, Menghistu, 160
Lemos, Virgílio de, 245
Leopard in a Cage,80
Léro, Etienne, 198
Leroux, Etienne, 91
Leshoai, Bob, 158
Lessing, Doris, 86
Letembet-Ambilly, Antoine, 231 -32
Letters to Martha, 132
Lhongo, Lindo, 269 -70
Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme ( Liberty I: Negritude and humanism), 182, 208, 216,
229
Life Everlasting, 155
Life to Live, A,341
Liking, Werewere, 179, 189, 235, 326, 332
Lima, Conceição, 273
Lima, Manuel dos Santos, 244, 275
Lindfors, Bemth, 15, 49
Linje, Ned B., 303
Lion and the Jewel, The,147, 149, 151, 230
Lip: From Southern African Women,318, 341
Lisboa, Eugénio, 245
Literature Bureau, 382
Literatures in African Languages: Theoretical Issues and Sample Surveys,285
Littérature nègre ( Black literature), 174
Lloyd, P. C., 350
Loba, Aké, 184
Locusts,117
Lo Liyong, Taban, 55, 57, 63 -64, 121, 122, 124, 360 -61
Lomami-Tshibamba, Paul, 176
Long Arms of the Law, The,159
Longman Kenya, 381
Longman Zimbabwe, 382
Longman's Drumbeats, 38
Looking on Darkness,91
Lopes, Felisberto Vieira. See Dambará, Kaoberdiano
Lopes, Manuel, 243, 260, 261
Lopès, Henri, 187, 188, 218, 220, 221, 222
Lopes da Silva, Baltasar, 243, 260
Lord Have Mercy,160
Lorgorigi Logarithms and Other Poems,118
 -
402-

Love and Learn, 59

Love Potion, The,160
Lutato, Kalunga S., 304 -5
Luuanda ( Luuanda: Short Stories of Angola), 264
Ly, Ibrahima, 186
Lyons, Charles H., 349
Lyre à sept cordes, La ( The seven-stringed lyre), 210
M'Imanyara, Alfred M., 77
Maama, 155
Macandumba, 265
Macedo, Jorge, 250, 263
Macgoye, Margorie Oludhe, 59, 78
Machel, Samora, 129
Mack, Beverly, 313, 341
Macmillan, 38, 383
Macmillan Nigeria, 379
Madagascar Print and Press Company, 381
Maddy, Yulisa (Pat) Amadu, 25, 149, 155
Madmen and Specialists, 35, 150
Madness of Didi, The,38
Madubuike, Ihechukwu, 41, 178
Magaia, Albino, 276
Magaia, Lina, 276, 342
Mahfouz, Naguib, 364
Maillu, David G., 55, 58, 59, 60, 378
Maitu njugira ( Mother Sing for Me),79, 162
Makinde, M. Akin, 348
Makouta-M'Boukou, J. P., 180, 181
Mal ( Evil), 188
Malawian Writers Series, 382
Malembe, Timothée, 183
Malheurs de Tchako, Les ( The trials of Tchako), 231
Malimoto, P. G., 59
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 79
Malonga, Jean, 178
Malthouse Publishers, 379
Malungate, 276
Mama Ndiyalila: Stories,96-97
Mambo Press, 382, 385
Mamonsono, Léopold Pindy, 380 -81
Manana, 266
Mandat, Le ( The Money-Order), 182
Mandela, 116
Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, 115, 116
Man Died, The,35, 100
Man from Sagamu, The,38
Mangua, Charles, 57, 58, 67
Mannoni, O., 356
Man of the People, A, 19, 20, 24, 28, 35, 359
Mantenhas para quern luta!: A nova poesia da Guiné-Bissau ( Hail to those who struggle!:
The new poetry of Guinea-Bissau), 256
Man Who Died, The,118
Many Things Begin for Change, 38, 325
Many Things You No Understand,38
Mapanje, Jack, 124, 125 -26
Maran, René, 174, 201
Marang, 385
Margarido, Maria Manuela, 249 -50, 316
Maria, 275
Mariano, Gabriel, 247, 261
Marquand, Jean, 342
Marques, Belo, 270 -71
Marquez, Gabriel García, 277
Marriage of Anansewa, The,153, 330, 332
Marriage of Unequals, The,160
Martins, Ovídio, 248
Maru, 337-38
Mashetani ( Devils), 302
Masiye, Andreya, 159
Masquerade, The,152
Matatu, 335
Matigari, 79
Matshikaza, Todd, 92
Matthews, James, 94, 96, 134
Maugée, Aristide, 199
Mau Mau Detainee, 65
Mau Mau from Within,65
Maunick, Edouard, 218
Mauvais sang, Le ( Bad blood), 218
Maxwell, Kevin B., 308
Mayombe, 267, 269
Mazungumzo: Interviews with East African Writers, Publishers, Editors, and Scholars, 49
Mbari Artists' and Writers' Club, 13, 377
Mbari Publications, 377, 378
Mbaye, Marietou ( Ken Bugul), 322
Mbise, Ismael R., 61, 68, 72, 76
Mbiti, John, 121
Mbotela, James Juma, 61
Medeiros, Tomás, 249 -50
Medicine for Love and Other Plays, 150-60
Mehlala Khatamping ( Footsteps in the quag), 327
Memmi, Albert, 174 -75, 179, 202
Memoirs,316, 341
Mendes, Orlando, 245, 263
Mendonça, José Luís, 274
Men from Pretoria, The,57, 60
Menga, Guy, 230, 234
Ménil, René, 198
Mensagem ( The message), 243
Mensah, A. W. Kayper, 117
Merry-Making, 73
Mes chansons de toujours ( My songs of forever), 211
Messages,333
Messenger of Death, The,39
Mestre, David, 254, 274
 Mhlope, Gcina, 327, 332
Mhloti ( Teardrops), 327
Miège, J.-L., 352
Millin, Sarah Gertrude, 86
-
403-

Mine Boy, 87
Minister's Daughter, The,38, 78
Mirabilis, 272
Mirages de Paris ( Mirages of Paris), 174
Mission terminée ( Mission to Kala), 182
Mission to Kala. See Mission terminée
Mister Johnson, II
Mitterand, François, 350
Mkangi, Katama G. C., 302
Mkfuya, W. E., 61
Mlama, Penina ( Penina Muhando), 314, 330
Mlangala, Martha V., 62
Mnthali, Felix, 124, 126, 127
Mockerie, Parmenas Githendu, 50
Modisane, Bloke, 91, 149
Modupeh, Prince, 20
Moeti oa bochabela ( Traveler to the east), 295
Mofolo, Thomas, 86, 295
Mogariennes, 222
Mokwadi: Writers Workshop Journal, 386
Mollel, Jesse L., 308
Monção ( Monsoon), 257, 276
Monénembo, Tierno, 185, 188
Money Galore,38-39
Money-Order, The. See Le Mandat
Mongita, Albert, 232
Monkey on a Tree, 332
Monnerot, Jules, 198
Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini, 230
Moore, Gerald, 108, 353, 358, 363
Morning Yet on Creation Day,353, 354
Moróuntódùn, 162, 163
Mort de Chaka, La ( The death of Shaka), 184, 231
Moser, Gerald M., 240
Mosiwa, Joe, 160
Motherlands, 340
Mother Sing for Me. See Maitu njugira
Moto,385
Mpashi, Stephen Andrea, 303 -5, 308
Mphahlele, Es'kia [Ezekiel], 91, 92, 93, 96, 102 -3, 156, 353, 356, 357, 378, 384
Mpina, Edison, 124
Mqhayi, Samuel Edward Krune, 293
Msora, Bertha, 330, 331
Mtshali, Oswald, 133
Mtwa, Percy, 166
Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, 179, 180, 181, 183 -84, 186, 188
Mugo, Micere G., 65, 161, 317, 330, 331, 333, 338
Mugot, Hazel, 74
Muhando, Penina ( Penina Mlama), 302, 317
Mukasa, Ham, 50, 80 (biography)
Mulikita, Fwanyanga, 159
Multimedia Zambia, 382
Munonye, John, 35
Muntu, 154
Murder in Majengo, 59
Muriel at Metropolitan,320, 329
Murmures,342
Muronda, F. E., 128
Mushindo, Paul M. B., 304
Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA), 146
Music without Tears, 158
MUSIGA. See Musicians Union of Ghana
Muteia, Hélder, 276
Mutloatse, Mothobi, 92, 96, 384
Mutombo-Diba, Valerien, 233
Mutwa, Credo V., 165
Mvovo, Bandi. See Mphahlele, Es'kia [Ezekiel]
Mvula, Enoch T., 313
Mvungi, Martha, 62, 314, 326, 327
Mwagiru, Ciugu, 60
Mwambungu, Osija, 60, 68, 69, 71
Mwangi, Meja, 56, 57, 58, 65, 67, 74, 77, 381
Mwaura, J. N., 77
Mweru, the Ostrich Girl,73
My Barren Song,341
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,13
My Name is Ajrika, 133
My Son for My Freedom, 156, 157, 162
Mystère de l'enfant disparu, Le ( The mystery of the lost child), 183
My Sword Is My Life,39
Myth, Literature, and the African World,115
Mzala, 97
Mzamane, Mbulelo, 87, 93, 96, 97
Nagenda, John, 64, 80
Naigiziki, Saverio, 176
Naïndouba, Maoundoé, 235
Namibia Publishing House, 383
Nanga, Bernard, 189, 380
Napolo Poems, 124, 128
Nas barbas do bando ( In the face of the mob), 274
Nasta, Susheila, 340
Native Language Bureau, 383
Native Teacher's Journal, 144
Nazareth, Peter, 51, 52, 63
Ndao, Cheik Aliou, 218, 220, 221 -22, 231
Ndawo, Henry Masila, 294
Ndebele, Njabulo, 97, 383
Ndiaye, Amadou, 187
Ndzaagap, Timothée, 380
Nègre a Paris, Un ( A Negro in Paris), 182
Nègre de paille, Le ( The straw Negro), 189
 Nem tudo é poesia ( Not everything is poetry), 274
Neogy, Rajat, 56, 63, 385
Nervous Conditions,317, 326, 337, 382
Neto, Agostinho, 244, 250 -51, 269, 274
Never Again, 35
New Culture,385
New Horn Press, Ltd., 379
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New Patriots, The, 155

New Religion, The,35
Nexus,52
Ng'weno, Hilary, 57, 58, 60
Ngaahika ndeenda, 78-79
Ngal, Georges. See Ngal, M(bwil) a M(paang)
Ngal, M(bwil) a M(paang), 188
Ngambika: Women and African Literature, 339
Ngando, 176
Ngaté , Jonathan, 41, 179-80, 185-86
Ngcobo, Lauretta, 317, 318, 323, 336
Ngema, Mbongeni, 166
Ngoma, 386
Ngubiah, S. N., 67, 68, 71
Ngugi, James. See Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Mĩrĩi, 79, 161

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 40, 51, 53, 54, 55, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78 -79, 124, 142 -
43, 149, 150, 156, 161 -62, 285, 291, 302, 305, 307, 308, 330, 331, 353, 360, 362, 365, 374,
381
Nguya, Lydiah Mumbi, 75, 77
Nguzo mama ( A pillar of a mother), 330
Niane, Djibril Tamsir, 231
Nicol, Abioseh, 24 -25
Nicol, Davidson. See Nicol, Abioseh
Nigeria Magazine, 21
Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical Perspective,319
Nigerian Teacher,144
Nightfall, 159
Night of My Blood,III
Night of Their Own, A,87
Nine African Plays for Radio, 330
Nine Malawian Plays, 159, 160
Njamais, K., 65
Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus,73
Njamba Nene's Pistol,73
Njau, Rebeka, 74, 78, 316, 326, 330, 336, 341
Njoroge, John Karoki, 66
Nkashama, P. Ngandu, 233, 235, 236
Nkosi, Lewis, 34, 164, 353
No!, 59
Nobel Prize, 354, 356, 361, 362, 364
Noces sacrées ( Scared nuptials), 184
Nogar, Rui, 251 -52
Noite de vento ( A windy night), 261

Noivos, ou conferência sobre o lobolo, Os ("The newlyweds; or, Dramatic consultation on

the bride price"), 269
Nokan, Charles, 186, 231
No Longer at Ease,19, 20, 24
Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, 97, 354, 380, 382, 383
No Past, No Present, No Future,25
NORAD, 377
No reino de Caliban: Antologia panorâmica da poesia africana de expressão portuguesa (
The kingdom of Caliban: comprehensive encyclopedia of African poetry of Portuguese
expression), 250
Normes du temps, Les ( The standards of the time), 220
Nortje, Arthur, 131 -32
Nós, os do Makulusu ( We, the folks from Makulusu), 267
Nós matamos o cão tinhoso ( We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Mozambique Stories),263,
271, 276
Nosso o solo sagrado da terra, É: Poesia de protesto e luta ( The sacred soil of this land is
ours: poetry of protest and struggle), 250
No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories,34, 326
Noti ( Night), 249
Nouvelles Editions Africaines, Les ( NEA), 371, 378, 379, 380
Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir ( New sum of poetry from the Negro world), 214-
15, 216, 217, 218
Nowhere to Play,33
Nthano ya Tione ( The story of Tione), 303
Ntshona, Winston, 165, 166
Nunley, John, 141
Nwamife, 38
Nwankwo, Nkem, 359
Nwapa, Flora, 32 -33, 35, 38, 316, 317 -18, 319, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 336, 337, 340,
379
 Nwodo, Obiageli, 319
Nxumalo, Henry, 92
Nxumalo, Natale. See Dube, Violet
Nyabongo, H. H. Prince Akiki K., 50
Nzekwu, Onuora, 20 -21
Nzenza, Seka, 322
Nzinga Mbandi, 262
Obasai, 155
Obeng, R. E., 12
Obiechina, Emmanuel N., 37, 107, 117
Obra poética ( Poetic works), 246
Obuh, Sylvanus O., 142
Ochre People, The: Scenes from a South African Life, 316-17, 320, 321, 337
Oculi, Okello, 63, 123
Odaga, Asenath, 381, 80
Oda Oak Oracle,160
O Earth, Wait for Me, 124, 127-28
Of Chameleons and Gods, 124, 125-26
Ofeimun, Odia, 118, 119
Ofoli, Nii Yewoh, 39
Ogali, Agu, 38
Ògbójú ode nínú igbó irúnmalè ( Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga),289
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405-

Ogot, Grace, 52, 55, 56, 59, 67, 73, 77, 78, 80, 316, 325, 326, 327, 328
Ogun Abibiman, 115, 116
Ogunba, Oyin, 142
Ogunde, Hubert, 145, 150, 290
Ogundipe-Leslie, Omolara, 333, 338, 339, 341
Ogunmola, Kola, 145
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye, 320, 329, 340
Ojaide, Tanure, 118
Oju d'agu ( The wellspring), 272
Okai, Atukwei, 118
Okara, Gabriel, 22, 23, 106 -7, 108, 112 -13, 359
Okigbo, Christopher, 107, 108, 113, 115, 116 -17, 123, 378
Okike, 385
Okoye, Ifeoma, 319, 325
Okpewho, Isidore, 35, 40, 305
Okpi, Kalu, 38
Okri, Ben, 40
Oladitan, Olalere, 34 -35
Oláòré afòtèjoyè ( Chief Olaore, king by treachery), 290
Olatunji, Olatunde, 307
Old Wives Tales: Life Stories of African Women, 322
Ologunde, Agboola, 349
Oloyede, D. A., 143
Oludhe-Macgoye, Marjorie, 80 n. 7
Ombre et le vent, L' ( Shadow and wind), 211
Omotoso, Kole, 35, 36, 39, 375
Omu Ako of Isele-Oligbo, 332
On joue la comédie ( We are doing comedy), 236
On the Road,38
Once upon Four Robbers,163
Ondula savana branca: Expressão africana: Versões, derivações, reconversões ( Roll on,
white savana: African expression: versions, derivations, reconversions), 274
One is Enough,324-25, 336, 337
One Man One Matchet, 21
One Man One Wife,21-22
Onibonoje Press, 38
Onwueme, Tess, 153, 319, 330
Onyango-Abuje, J. C., 60
Onyeama, Dillibe, 379
Onyekwelu, Fidel, 38
O pays mon beau peuple! ( O my country, my good people!), 39, 182
Opera Wonyosi, 150, 151
Oppong-Affi, A. M., 39
Oracle, L' ( The oracle), 230
Ordeal in the Forest,66
Origin East Africa, 52
Orphan, 63, 123
Orphée d'Afric: Thêàtre-rituel ( African Orpheus: ritual theater), 332
"Orphée noir" ( Black Orpheus), 178, 202, 352, 355
Os, L' ( The bone), 230
Osadebay, Dennis, 106
Osinya, Alumidi [pseud.], 64
Osofisan, Femi, 37, 38, 39, 119, 152, 162
63
Osóvio, Oswaldo, 255, 272
Osundare, Niyi, 118, 359
Oswald, P. J., 234
Other Woman, The, 59, 73, 78
Otobo, Dafe, 379
Otukunefor, Henrietta, 319
Oumarou, Ide, 180
Ouologuem, Yambo, 31, 185, 188, 217
Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint,32, 33, 324, 339
Our Sun Will Rise,333
Ovbiagele, Helen, 38
Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, 152
Owomoyela, Oyekan, 30, 142
Owono, Joseph, 176
Oxford University Press, 38
Oxford University Press, Eastern Africa, 381
Oyedele, Adekanni, 289
Oyelaran, Olasope, 357
Oyono, Ferdinand, 180, 182
Oyono-Mbia, Guillaume, 149, 230, 23
Ozidi, 152
p'Bitek, Okot, 53, 54, 58, 63, 64, 67, 79, 121, 123, 124, 378
p'Chong, Cliff, 123
Pacavira, Manuel, 262
Palangyo, Peter K., 61
Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm‐ Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, The,13, 14
Palmer, Eustace, 25, 33, 359
Panfleto, O ( The pamphlet), 275
Panter-Brick, S. K., 350
Pão e fonema ( Bread and phoneme), 254-55
 Papa Sidi, maître escroc ( Papa Sidi, master swindler), 230
Paperback Publishers, 379
Pâques ( Easter), 210
Parkes, Frank Kobina, 107, 117
Paton, Alan, 86, 87, 384
Patraquim, Luís Carlos, 257, 276
Patron de New York ( Boss of New York), 182
Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Masks),175, 216
Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry,334
Penpoint,52
People of the City, 15, 16
People's Bachelor, The,75, 80
Pepetela, 266 -67, 269 -70, 274
Pereira, Francesca Yetunde, 333, 334, 341
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Périer, Gaston-Denys, 176

Pero Press, 379
Petals of Blood, 40, 67, 68, 70, 72, 76, 77, 79
Peters, Lenrie, 26, 106, 109
Philadelphia Tribune,341
Philip, David, 383, 384
Philombe, René, 380
Pieterse, Cosmo, 131, 330
Pilaszewicz, S., 285, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 298, 307
Pilgrim's Progress,287-88, 291-92, 294-95, 306
Pitseng,295
Plaie, La ( The wound), 184
Play of Giants, A, 151
Plessis, Menan du, 384
Pleurer-rire, Le ( The tearful laughter), 187, 188
Pliya, Jean, 230, 231, 234
Plomer, William, 86
Poemas ( 1971-79) ( Poems, 1971-79), 256
Poèmes, 204, 205, 342
Poèmes de la mer ( Poems of the sea), 220
Poems ( Clark), 114
Poems ( L. Peters), 109
Poems from Black Africa, 316, 333, 334
Poems from East Africa, 122
Poems of Black Africa, 342
Poesia de combate ( Poems of combat), 251
Poet Lied, The,118, 119
" Polemics: The Dead End of African Literature," 358
Poppi Nongena: One Woman's Struggle against Apartheid, 322
Popular Publications of Limbe, 382
Portagem ( Toll), 263
Potent Ash,66
Présence Africaine, 203, 207, 213, 214, 228, 234
Présence congolaise, 232
Presque-songes ( Half dreams), 200
Presses Africaines, 380
Presses Universitaires du Zaire, 380
Primeiro livro de Notcha, O ( Notcha's first book), 255
Princesa negra: O preço da civilização em África ( Black princess: the price of civilization
in Africa), 258
Princesse Mandapu, 186-87
Prisoner, the Judge and the Jailer, The,155
Prix Charles Veillon, 354
Prix Renaudot, 354
Prix Saint-Beuve, 354
Proença, Hélder, 256, 273
Promised Land, The,78, 80, 316, 325, 326
Prophet of Doom, The,39
Prostitute,63
Puissance de Um, La ( Um's power), 326
Quadros, António. See João, Mutimati Barnabé
Quartet,94
Quem me dera ser onda ( Oh, that I were a wave in the sea), 268
Question of Power, A, 318, 320, 324, 337
Quinaxixe, 262
Rabéarivélo, Jean-Joseph, 200 -2, 209, 210
Rabémananjara, Jacques, 209 -II, 212
Racines congolaises, Les ( Congolese roots), 220
Radiance of the King, The. See Le regard du roi
Raft, The,152
Rain Maker, The,160
Ranaïvo, Flavien, 209, 210, 211 -12
Rape of Lysistrata and Black Candle for Christman, The,38
Rape of Shavi, The,325
Ravan Press, 383, 386
Raw Pieces, 124
Rebellion,155
Rebelo, Jorge, 251 -52
Rebels, The,156
Reconstruction: 90 Years of Black Historical Literature, 92
Red Hills of Home,128, 130
Rediscovery, III
Reed in the Tide, A, 114
Reflections,327
Regard du roi, Le ( The Radiance of the King), 185, 187
Regresso adiado ( Postponed return), 268
Remember Ruben, 184
Renga Moi, 157
Répresentant, Le ( The representative), 180
Réprouvé , Le ( The outcast), 174
Research in African Literatures, 340, 341
Resurrection, The,148
Retour au bercail ( Return to the fold), 211
Return, The,40
Return to My Native Land. See Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
Return to the Shadows, 64
Return to the Source,246
Revenant, Le ( The ghost), 187, 325
Reveries in the Moonlight,332
Revue coloniale, La ( The colonial review), 200

Revue de littérature et d'esthétique négro‐ africaines ( Review of negro-African literature

 and esthetics), 385
Rhythm of Violence,164
Ribas, Oscar, 261 -62
Ricard, Alain, 142
Ride Me, Memory, 112
Ride on the Whirlwind, A,101
Rifaat, Alifa, 318, 327, 341
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Rilwan, ou la chute des nuages ( Rilwan; or, the fall of the clouds), 188
Ripples in the Pool,74, 78, 326, 336
Ritos de passagem ( Rites of passage), 274
Rive, Richard, 94, 99, 384
River Between, The,55, 70, 72, 75-76, 77
Road, The,150, 151
Road to Ghana, 91
Robben Island, 100
Robben Island, Hell-Hole, 100, 103
Roberts, Andrew, 308
Roberts, Gabriel J., 155
Robinson, Ronald, 351
Rocha, Jofre, 250, 262 -63
Rodrigues, Deolinda, 250
romance caboverdeano, 260
Romano, Luís, 261
Ronde des jours, La ( The passing of days), 213
Rosa, João Guimarães, 264
Rosa do Riboque e outros contos ( Rose from Riboque and other stories), 273
Rosa mistika, 302
Rotimi, Ola, 152
Royal African, A. See I Was a Savage
Rubadiri, David, 121, 122, 124
Ruganda, John, 157 -58
Rugyendo, Mukotani, 157, 158 -59
Ruheni, Mwangi, 67, 78, 80
Ruhumbika, Gabriel, 61
Rui, Manuel, 250, 252, 267 -69
Rushing, Andrea Benton, 334
Rutherfoord, Peggy, 365
Sabores, odores e sonhos ( Tastes, scents and dreams), 274
Sacrifice of Kreli, The,332
Sadji, Abdoulaye, 174, 175, 178
Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women, 340
Sainville, Léonard, 199
Salifou, André, 231
Samatar, Said S., 297
Sang des masques, Le ( Blood of the masks), 184
Santana, Ana de, 274
Santo, Alda Espírito, 249 -50
Santos, Aires de Almeida, 244, 274
Santos, Arnaldo, 244, 250, 262 -63, 274
Santos, Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos. See Pepetela
Santos, Espírito, 250
Santos, Marcelino dos, 251 -52
Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 118, 379
Saros International Publishers, 379
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 178, 202, 326, 352, 355, 356
Sastre, Alfonso, 270
Satellites,109
Sawabas, The: Black Africa's Mafia, 38
Saworbeng: A Collection of Short Stories,39
Scar, The,330
Scarlet Song. See Un chant écarlate
Scheub, Harold, 293, 313
Scholarship Woman,155
Schreiner, Olive, 86, 341
Schwarz-Bart, André, 185
Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire,313
Scribner, S., 307
Season of Anomy, 35, 40
Seasons of Thomas Tebo, The,64
Sebbar, Leila, 342
Second Round, The,26
Second-Class Citizen, 33, 312, 320
Secret Lives,65
Secret of Monkey Rock, The,80
Secrétaire particulière, Le ( The private secretary), 230
Sègilolá , eléyinjú egé ( Segilola, woman of ensnaring eyeballs), 288
Segredo da morta: Romance de costumes angolenses, O ( The dead woman's secret:
romance of Angolan customs), 258
Segun, Mabel, 326, 327, 334
Selected Poems,219-20
Selected Poetry,109
Sembène, Ousmane, 31, 39, 175, 181, 182
83, 236, 305, 354, 362, 365
Senghor, Léopold S., 108, 174, 182, 199, 203, 204 -6, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 216, 228,
229, 242, 246, 351
Senyi, Kobina, 147
Sepamla, Sipho Sidney, 101, 134, 384
Seriti sa Sechaba Publishers, 384
Seroke, Jaki, 384
Serote, Mongane Wally, 101, 134
Seruma, Eneriko [ Henry Kimbugwe], 63, 73-74, 80
Serumaga, Robert, 64, 143, 157
70 African and Caribbean Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic Study,340
Sew the Old Days and Other Poems,333
Seyaseya, Hopewell, 128, 129
Shaaban Robert, 299 -300, 306, 307, 308
Shadows of Laughter, The,110-II
Shaft in Africa, 57
Shaka Zulu, 159
Shanti, 165, 166
Shimakamba's Dog, 159
Shuttle in the Crypt, A, 115
SIDA, 377
Sikakane, Joyce, 320
Sikasso, ou la dernière citadelle ( Sikasso; or, the last citadel), 231
Silent Voices,123
 Silva, (Raul) Calane da, 277
Silveira, Onésimo, 248
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Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle, 13

Sim camarada! ( Yes, comrade!), 268
Simon, Barney, 166
Simple Lust, A, 132
Simu ya kifo ( Phone call to death), 300
Sir Apolo Kagwa Discovers Britain,50
Sirens, Knuckles and Boots,132
Sisterhood is Global, 322
Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, 165, 166
Skota, Mweli, 384
Skotaville Publishers, 383 -84, 386
Sky Is the Limit,77
Slave Girl, The,27, 33, 337
Smugglers, The,38
Sobreviver em Tarrafal de Santiago ( Surviving in Tarrafal de Santiago), 383
Socé (Diop), Ousmane, 174, 175
Soeur inconnue, La ( The unknown sister), 176
Sofola, Zulu, 152 -53, 329, 330, 331, 332, 337, 342
Soga, John H., 292
Soga, Tiyo, 291 -92, 307
Sokame, 228
Soleil noir point, Le ( The black sun rises), 186
Soleils des indépendances, Les ( The Suns of Independences), 184-85, 188
So Long A Letter. See Une silongue lettre
Somehow Tenderness Survives,327
Sometimes When It Rains: Writing by South African Women,327
Song in a Time of War, 118
Song of a Goat, 152
Song of a Prisoner, 121, 122
Song of Lawino, 63, 121, 378
Song of Ocol, 121-22
Songs from the Wilderness,117
Son of Woman,57
Sons and Daughters, 154
Soromenho, Fernando Castro, 259
Souls of Black Folk, The,174
Sounds of a Cowhide Drum,133
Souriau, Christine, 349, 355, 363
Sousa, Henrique Teixeira de, 261, 272
Sousa, Noémia de, 245, 316, 333
Sousa, Samuel de, 244
Sous l'orage ( Beneath the storm), 184
South African People's Plays: Ons Phola, 165
Sow, Alpha, 216
Sowande, J. Sobowale, 288
Soweto: Flowers Will Grow, 159, 164
Soweto I Love, The,134
Soweto Stories, 327, 329
Sow Fall, Aminata, 317, 319, 325, 336, 337
Soyinka, Wole, 23 -24, 35 -36, 39, 40, 100, 107, 115 -16, 138, 147, 149, 150 -52, 230, 231,
329, 342, 351, 353, 354, 356, 361, 362, 365, 373, 378, 379, 385
Spectrum Books, 379
Staffrider, 327, 386
State of the Union,114
Steady, Filomina, 339
Stillborn, The,318
Stone Country, The, 99
Story of an African Chief, The,50
Story of an African Farm, 86
Strange Man, The,38
Strike, The,341
Strike and Hunger,145
Strong Breed, The,150, 151
Struggle for Secession, The,35
Stubborn Hope, 132
Summer Fires, 334
Sunset at Dawn, 35
Sunset in Biafra, 35
Sunset on the Manyatta, 67, 77
Suns of Independences, The. See Les soleils des indépendances
Sur la terre en passant ( On the earth in passing), 184
Survival,165, 166
Survive the Peace,35
Sutherland, Efua, 145, 153, 167, 316, 326
27, 328, 330, 331, 332, 333, 336
Swaartbooi, Victoria, 316, 341
Swamp Dwellers, The, 147, 149
Sweets and Sugar Cane,80
Sweet Trap, The,331, 337
Sylves ( Virgin lands), 200
Tail in the Mouth, A,57, 67
Taiwo, Oladele, 21, 22, 339, 342
Tambadou, Moustapha, 385
Tambueni haki zetu ( Recognize our rights), 302, 330
Tana Press, 38, 379
Tanimoune, 231
Tansi, Sony Lab'ou, 188, 234, 235
Tante Bella ( Aunt Bella), 176
Tanzania Publishing House, 382
Taste of Death, 58, 65
Tati-Loutard, J. B., 218, 220 -21
Tavares, Paula, 274
Teacher Yalley, 145 -46
Tejani, Bahadur, 77
Tell Freedom,91
Tempo,275-76
Tempo de munhungo ( Vertigo time), 262
Tenreiro, Francisco José, 246, 247, 249
Terra morta ( Dead earth), 259
Testimonies of Exile and Other Poems,334
That Man Is Evil,160
Théâtre africain, 234
Théâtre négro-africain et sesfonctions sociales, Le ( The Black African Theater and Its
Social Functions),227
 Themba, Can, 92
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Things Fall Apart, II, 12, 18, 19, 20, 24, 359
This Earth, My Brother..., 34
This is Lagos and Other Stories,32-33, 326
This Time Tomorrow,156
Thomas, Dylan, 14, 355
Thomas, Isaac Babalola, 288
Three Continents Press, 38
Three Short Plays, 23
Three Solid Stones,62, 314
Through a Film Darkly, 154
Tiofe, Timóteo Tio, 255
Titch the Cat, 33
Tlali, Miriam, 317, 318, 320, 326, 327, 329, 384
Toads of War, 35
To Become a Man, 68, 70, 71, 75, 80
To Every Birth Its Blood, 101
Toiles d'araignée ( Spiderwebs), 186
Too Late,165
Too Late the Phalerope, 87
Torrent, The,31
Touré, Sékou, 216
Toward the Decolonization of African Literature,41-42, 356-57
Tragedy of False Friends,39
Tragedy of the Ruled,152
Trahison de Marianne, La ( Marianne's treachery), 189, 380
Train spécial de son excellence, Le ( His Excellency's special train),234
Transition, 41, 53, 56, 63, 385
Traore, Bakary, 227, 229
Trial of Busumbala, The: Nine African Plays for Radio, 155
Trial of Dedan Kimathi, The,65, 79, 161-62, 330, 331
Trial of the Beautiful Ones, The,332
Trials of Brother Jero, The,150
Trois écrivains noirs ( Three Black writers), 178
Trois preténdants, un mari ( Three suitors, one husband), 230
Trois volontés de Malic, Les ( The three wishes of Malic), 174, 183
Trône a trois, Le ( The throne for three), 233
Trône d'or, Le ( The golden throne), 231
Tropiques ( Tropics), 177
Truly Married Woman and Other Stories, The, 24
Turbott Wolfe,86
Tutucla, Amos, 13 -15, 16, 22, 23, 37, 86, 354 -55, 356, 361
Two African Tales, 24
Two Thousand Seasons, 28, 30-31, 359
Tyloch, W., 285, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 298, 307
U-Don Jadu ( Don Jadu), 293
Ualalapi, 277
Uanga: Romance folclórico angolano ( Enchantment: an Angolan folkloric novel), 262
Ubusuma bubili ( Two kinds of goodness), 303
Udensi, Uwa, 319, 330, 332
Ugandas Katikiro in England,50
Ugonna, F. N. Nabuenyi, 12
uHambo lukaGqoboka ( Journey of a convert), 294
Uhuru wa Watumwa, 61
Uka, Kalu, 35
Ukiwa ( Desolation), 302
Ulasi, Adaora, 38, 319, 325
Ululumbi lwa mulanda kukakaata ( The fame of the stubborn poor person), 304
u Mandisa ( Bringer of joy), 341
Umma, 52, 62, 385
Umucinshi,303
Umupushi na bambi ( The beggar and others), 304
Unbroken Song, The, 93, 102
Une si longue lettre ( So Long a Letter),188, 317, 323, 324, 336, 337, 380
Uninformed Man, The,64
UNISA English Studies,386
University of Lagos Press, 379, 385
University Press, Ltd. (formerly Oxford University Press Nigeria), 379
u Nomalizo, okanye izinto zalomhlaba ngamajingiqiwu ( Nomalizi, or the things of this life
are sheer vanity), 294
u Nosilimela, 165
Until the Morning After,III, 112
Unwinding Threads, 314, 327
Update Publications, 379
u Tamsi, Tchicaya ( Gérard Félix Tchikaya), 118, 218-19, 235-36, 378
Uwakwensho bushiku ( He who hurried you through the night), 303
Uwa ndi Igbo/Journal of Igbo Life and Culture,386
Uwauma nafyala ( He who beats his mother‐ in-law), 303, 308
 Uzima Press, 381
Valley of a Thousand Hills,131
Van-Dúnem, Domingos, 270, 275
Vário, João. See Tiofe, Timóteo Tio
Vaz, Armindo, 273
Vehi Ciosane, suivi Le mandat ( Vehi Ciosane, Followed by The Money Order),182
Veiga, Manuel, 272
Veneer of Love,60, 71
Ventre, Le ( The belly), 218
Verdades dos mitos ( The truths of myths), 276
Versos ( Poetry), 249
Victims, The, 39, 40
Víctor, Geraldo Bessa, 247
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Vie et demie, La ( The life and a half), 188

Vieilles chansons du pays d'Imérina ( Old songs from the land of Imerina), 200
Vieira, Arménio, 255 -56
Vieira, José Luandino, 263 -66, 267, 277
Vieira, Sérgio, 251
Vilakazi, B. W., 131
Village in Uhuru,61
Villager's Son, The,80
Ville où nul ne meurt: Rome, La ( The city where no one dies: Rome), 182
Vincent, Theo, 385
Voice, The,22, 23, 359
Voix de l'ombre, La ( The voice from the shadow), 180
Voix du congolais, La ( The voice of the Congolese), 176, 232
Voltaïques ( Tribal scars and other stories), 182
Volumes,200
Vozes anoitecidas ( Voices turned to night), 277
Wachira, Godwin, 66
Waciuma, Charity [pseud.], 66, 73, 74, 322, 326, 327
Waiting for the Barbarians, 90
Wakati ukuta ( Time is a wall), 302
Wali, Obiajunwa, 358, 363, 365
Walk in the Night, A, 95
Wand of Noble Wood,20, 21
Wanjala, Chris, 54, 58, 59, 60, 78
Wannenburgh, Alf, 94
Washington, Booker T., 348
Watene, Kenneth, 67, 77, 156 -57, 162
Weep Not, Child,65, 70, 71, 75, 77, 78
We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Mozambique Stories. See Nós matamos o cão tinhoso
Were, Miriam K., 78, 80, 325
West African Review, 341
Wheatley, Phillis, 173
When Ben Came Back, 160
When Love Whispers,15, 16
When Sunset Comes to Sapitwa, 124, 126-27
" Where the Spirit Lives," 349
Whispers at Dawn, 123
White, Eduardo, 276
" White Man's Way," 349
Who's Afraid of Tai Solarin?, 162
Who's Calling, 73
Who is Jonah?, 38
Who Will Marry Our Daughter?, 160
Why Are We So Blest?,28, 29-30
Wicked Walk, The,61
Wicombe, Zoe, 327
Wilby Conspiracy, The, 57
Window on Soweto, A, 320
Wind versus Polygamy,22
Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, The,14
Woeli Publishing Services, 380
Wolfers, Michael, 250
Woman at Point Zero,338
Women and Writing in South Africa: A Critical Anthology,327
Women of Courage, 160
Words of My Groaning, 123
World Literature Written in English,340
Worse Than Crime,145
Wound in the Heart, The,156
Woza Afrika! An Anthology of South African Plays, 166
Woza Albert!, 165, 166
Wrath of the Ancestors, The. See Ingqumbo yeminyanya
Wreath for the Maidens, A, 35
Wretched of the Earth, The. See Les damnés de la terre
Writers in East Africa, 53
 Xaarge, Axmed Cartan, 297
Xaguate ( The hotel Xaguate), 272
Xala, 182
Xasan, Sayyid Maxamed Cabdulle, 296
Xicandarinha na lenha do mundo ( Teapot on the wood fire of the world), 277
Xitu, Uanhenga, 265 -66, 267, 274
Yaba Roundabout Murder,38
Yaka, 267
Yakhal'inkomo, 134
Yirenkyi, Asiedu, 155
Yon-Kon, 155
Yonge, Sir George, 142
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town,327
Your Heart Is My Altar,78
Zimbabwean Woman: My Own Story,322
Zimbabwe Publishers Literary Award, 382
Zimbabwe Publishing House, 382
Zinsou, S. Agbota, 230, 234, 236
Zirimu, Elvina, 326, 330, 332
Zirimu, Pio, 53
Zouluo, suivi de Uwene le fondateur, Le ( The Zulu, with Uwene the founder), 235-36
Zuka, 56, 385
Zulu Poems, 132
Zwelonke, D. M., 100, 103
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