SURVEY OF AFRO-ASIAN

LITERATURE
 MAJOR REQUIREMENTS/OUTCOMES

• Reporting
• Demonstration
• Learning Plan
• Compilation of the Reports(hard copy)-Final
Requirement
 COURSE OUTLINE
• African Literature
• Egyptian Literature
• Arabian Literature
• Chinese Literature
• Hindu Literature
• Hebrew Literature
• Persian Literature
• Japanese Literature
• Korean Literature
• Vietnam Literature
• Indonesian Literature
AFRICAN LITERATURE
HISTORY OF AFRICAN
LITERATURE

hieroglyphs

Colonizatio
n

African
Diaspora
• African literature is literature of or from
Africa and includes oral literature. Oral
literature may be in prose or verse. The prose
is often mythological or historical and can
include tales of the trickster character.
Storytellers in Africa sometimes use call-and-
response techniques to tell their stories. CHARACTERISTICS
OF AFRICAN
Poetry, often sung, includes: narrative epic,
L I T E R AT U R E
occupational verse, ritual verse, praise poems
to rulers and other prominent people. Griots,
tell their stories with music. Also recited,
often sung, are love songs, work songs,
children’s songs, along with epigrams,
proverbs and riddles.
• Hymns of Praise songs –
this hymn was found on
the wall of a tomb built
for a royal scribe named CHARACTERISTICS
OF AFRICAN
Ay and his wife. It was L I T E R AT U R E

intended to assure their

safety in the afterlife.
• African Proverbs- are much
more than quaint old
sayings, instead they
represent a poetic form that CHARACTERISTICS
uses few words but achieves OF AFRICAN
L I T E R AT U R E
great depth of meaning and
they function as the essence
of people’s values and
knowledge.
African Proverbs:

Kenya: No day dawns like

another. CHARACTERISTICS
OF AFRICAN
South Africa: No elephant ever L I T E R AT U R E
found its trunk too heavy.
Kukuyu: War is not porridge
Dilemma or Enigma Tale
-is an important kind of African moral tale
intended for listeners to discuss and debate
on. It is an open-ended story that
concludes with a question then asks the
audience to choose from among several CHARACTERISTICS
OF AFRICAN
alternatives. By encouraging animated L I T E R AT U R E
discussion, a dilemma tale invites its
audience to think about right and wrong
behaviour and how to best live within
society.
• Folk Tales- have been handed
down in the oral tradition from
ancient times. The stories
represent a wide and colourful CHARACTERISTICS
OF AFRICAN
variety that embodies the African L I T E R AT U R E
people’s most cherished religious
and social beliefs and are used to
entertain, to teach, and to explain.
NOVELS
• The Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono- points out the
disillusionment of Tounndi, a boy who leaves his parents’
maltreatment to enlist his services as an acolyte to a foreign
missionary. After the priest’s death, he becomes a helper of
a white plantation owner, discovers the liaison of his
master’s wife, and gets murdered later in the woods as they
catch up with him.
Toundi symbolizes the disenchantment, the coming of
age, and utter despondency of the Cameroonians over the
corruption and immortality of the whites.
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe- depicts a vivid
picture of Africa before the colonization by the British. The
novel laments over the disintegration of Nigerian society,
represented in the story by Owonko, once a respected
chieftain who looses his leadership and falls from the grace
after the coming of the whites.
• No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe- is a sequel to Things Fall
Apart which is alluded to Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi. The
returning hero fails to cope with disgrace and social pressure.
Owonko’s son has to live up to the expectations of the Umuofians,
after winning a scholarship in London, where he reads literature, not
law as is expected of him, he has to dress up, he must have a car, he
has to maintain his social standing, and he should not marry an ozu.
In the end, the tragic hero succumb to temptation; he, too, receives
bribes, and therefore ‘no longer at ease.’
• The Poor Christ of Bombay by Mongo Beti- exposes
the inhumanity of colonialism. The novel tells of Fr.
Drumont’s disillusionment after the discovery of the
degration of the native women, betrothed, but forced
to work like slaves in the sixa.
• The River Between by James Ngugi- shows the
clash of traditional values and contemporary
ethics and mores.
• A Few Days and Few Nights by Mbella Sonne
Dipoko- deals with racial prejudice. It’s all
about the torn between the love of a Swedish
girl and a Parisienne show father who owns a
business establishment in Africa. The father
rules out the possibility of marriage.
• The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka is about a
group of young intellectuals who function as
artists in their talks with one another as they try
to place themselves in the context of the world
about them.
MAJOR AFRICAN
WRITERS
• Is one of the Nigeria’s greatest
noveslists. His novels are written
mainly for an African audience, but
CHINUA ACHEBE
having been translated into more
than forty languages.
Literary Pieces: Things Fall apart,
No Longer at Ease, A Man of the
People, Anthills of Savannah and
Arrow of God.
• first black African to be awarded
the Noble Prize for literature in
WOLE SOYINKA
1986.
• he founded the theatre group,
“The1960 Masks” and in 1964, the
“Orisun Theatre Company”,
Lietrary Pieces:
The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the
Jewel, The Trial of Brother Jero, Jero’s WOLE SOYINKA
Metamosphosis, A Dance of the Forest,
Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists,
The Road and Death, King’s Horseman,
The Bacchae of Euripides, The
Interpreters, Season of Anomy.
Poems: A Shuttle in the Crypt, Ogun
Abibiman, Mandela’s Earth, Other Poems.
Lietrary Pieces:
Telephone Conversation- is the poet’s
most anthologized poem that reflects WOLE SOYINKA
Negritude. It is a satirical poem between
a Black man seeking the landlady’s
permission to accommodate him in her
lodging house. The poetic dialogue
reveals the landlady’s deep-rooted
prejudice against the colored people as
the caller plays up on it.
• is a poet and statesman who was
co-founder of the Negritude
movement in Africa art and
literature.
• he is also co-founded the journal LEONOR
Presence Africaine with Alione SENGHOR
Diop.
Literary Pieces:
Songs of Shadow, Black LEONOR
Offerings, Major Elegies, SENGHOR
Poetical Work.
Literary Pieces:
Totem- shows the eternal LEONOR
linkage of the living with the SENGHOR
dead.
• was a popular Ugandan poet who earned
worldwide recognition for his poem Song of
Lawino(an epic poem that highlights the
sufferings of an African wife whose husband
is carried away by life in the city and he
wishes to be western.
• he wrote mainly in his vernacular.
OKOT P’ BITEK
Literary pieces:
Song of Lawino, Song of Ocot, African
Religions and Western Scholarship, Religion of
the Central Luo, Horn of My Love, White
Teeth
Song of Lawino- is a sequence of
poems about the clash between
African and Western Values and is
regarded as “the first important
poem in English to emerge from
Eastern Africa.” Lawino’s song is a OKOT P’ BITEK
plea fo the Ugandans look back to
traditional village life and recapture
African Values.
• is a South African novelist and short story
writer whose major theme was exile and
alienation.
• she received the Noble Prize for Literature
in 1991.
NADINE
• her works exhibit a clear, controlled, and
unsentimental technique that became her
GORDIMER
hallmark. She examines how public events
affect individual lives, how the dreams of
one’s youth are corrupted and how
innocence is lost.
Literary Pieces:
The Soft Voice of the Serpent, NADINE
Burger’s Daughter, July’s GORDIMER
People, A Sport of Nature, My
Son’s Story
• described the contradictions
and shortcomings of pre- and
post colonial African society in BESSIE HEAD
morally didactic novels and
stories.
Literary pieces:
When Rain Clouds Gather, A
Question of Power, The BESSIE HEAD
Collector of Treasures, Serowe.
• is a writer and filmmaker from
Senegal. His works reveal an intense
commitment to political and social
change. In the words of one of his
characters: “You will never be a good OUSMANE
writer so long as you don’t defend a SEMBENE
cause.” Sembene tells his stories from
out of Africa’s past and relates their
relevance and meaning for
contemporary society.