African Literature: Culture, History, and Themes

• Literature has gained importance in classrooms worldwide, helping young learners develop basic language skills and intercultural awareness.
• Learning about other cultures helps individuals understand life in different times, spaces, or communities and promotes cross-cultural understanding

Learning Outcomes

• Discuss the historical background of African literature.
• Identify the different African literary forms.
• Recognize famous African writers and their literary pieces.
• Read and analyze the African literary work “The Leopard", a Folklore from Central Africa.

Historical Background

• Understanding the historical background helps to appreciate the origins of African literature.
• African literature comes from Africa and includes oral literature.
• Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu coined the term "orature" for oral literature.
• Traditionally, Africans integrate art with teaching, using beauty to convey truths and information.
• Objects are considered beautiful based on the truths they reveal and the communities they support.

Four Types of African Literature

• Oral Literature
• Pre-colonial Literature
• Colonial Literature
• Postcolonial Literature

Oral Literature

• Oral literature (or orature) can be in prose or verse.
• Prose includes mythological or historical tales, often featuring a trickster character.
• Storytellers use call-and-response techniques. Includes narrative epic, occupational verse, ritual verse, and praise poems.
• Praise singers, or "griots," use music in their storytelling.
• Love songs, work songs, children's songs, proverbs, and riddles are also recited.
• Examples exist in languages like Fula, Swahili, Hausa, and Wolof.
• In Algeria, Berber oral poetry (Isefra) was important for religious and secular life when most people were illiterate.
• In Mali, oral literature continues to be broadcast on the radio in the Booma language.

Pre-Colonial Literature

• Numerous examples of pre-colonial African Literature exist.
• In Ethiopia, literature in Ge'ez dates back to the fourth century AD.
• The Kebra Negast, or "Book of Kings," is a well-known work.
• A popular folktale is the "trickster" story, where small animals use wits to survive encounters with larger ones.
• Animal tricksters include Anansi (spider in Ghana), Ijàpá (tortoise in Nigeria), and Sungura (hare in East Africa).
• Written works are abundant in North Africa, the Sahel region of West Africa, and the Swahili coast. Timbuktu alone has an estimated 300,000 manuscripts in various libraries and private collections, written mostly in Arabic but also in native languages such as Fula and Songhai.
• These writings cover astronomy, poetry, law, history, faith, politics, and philosophy. Swahili literature is also inspired by Islamic teachings but developed under indigenous circumstances, one of the earliest known Swahili is Utendi wa Tambuka or "The Story of Tambuka".

Colonial African Literature

• The best-known African works in the West from this period are slave narratives, such as Olaudah Equiano's autobiography.
• Africans exposed to Western languages began to in write those tongues during the colonial period.
• Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford (Ekra-Agiman) published what is likely the first African novel in English, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation, in 1911.
• African plays written in English began to emerge during this period.
• Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo published the first English-language African play, The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberatorin 1935.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote the first East African drama in 1962, the Black Hermit, about tribalism.
• Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) received significant worldwide critical acclaim analyzing the effect of colonialism on traditional African society during the late colonial era.
• African literature during the late colonial period (between World War I and independence) reflected themes of liberation, independence, and négritude. Léopold Sédar Senghor, a leader of the négritude movement, published the first anthology of French-language poetry written by Africans in 1948 featuring a preface by French existentialistwriter Jean-Paul Sartre.

Postcolonial African Literature

• With increased literacy and liberation since the 1950s and 1960s African literature has grown dramatically in quantity and acclaim appearing on Western academic curricula and "best of" lists
• African writers in this period wrote in Western and traditional languages
• Ali A. Mazrui and others identify seven conflicts as themes:.
• Conflicts between Africa's past and present, between tradition and modernity.
• Conflicts between indigenous ways and foreign influences, between individualism and community.
• Conflicts between socialism and capitalism, between development and self-reliance.
• Conflicts between Africanity and humanity.
• Other themes in this period include social problems like corruption, economic disparities, and women's rights.
• Female writers are better represented in published than prior to independence.
• Wole Soyinka became the first post-independence African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and Albert Camus was previously awarded the prize in 1957.

Orature: African Oral Literature

• Includes praise poems, love poems, tales, ritual dramas, and moral instructions in proverbs and fables.
• It also includes epics and poems and narratives.

Griots

• Griots are keepers of oral literature in West Africa.
• They are professional storytellers, singers, or entertainers skilled at creating and transmitting African literature.
• Bards, storytellers, town criers, and oral historians preserve and continue oral tradition.

Features of African Oral Literature

• Repetition and parallel structure: memory aids for storytellers which creates rhythm, builds suspense, and adds emphasis. Repeated lines or refrains invite audience participation.
• Repeat and Vary Technique: lines or phrases are repeated with slight variations, sometimes changing words.
• Call-and-response format: includes spirited audience participation.

Lyric Poems

• Lyric poems create vivid, expressive testaments to a speaker's thoughts or emotional state, rather than telling a story.
• Love lyrics were influenced by the New Kingdom and were written to be sung with instruments.

Hymns of Praise Songs

• Hymns of praise songs were offered to the God Aten.
• The great hymn to Aten, found on the wall of a tomb of the scribe Ay and his wife, assured their safety in the afterlife.

African Proverbs

• Proverbs represent a poetic form using few words to convey deep meaning and function as essence of people's values offering great depth of understanding through brevity of expression.
• They are used to settle legal disputes, resolve ethical problems, and teach philosophy, also contain puns, rhymes, and diver allusions.

Dilemma or Enigma Tale

• Key African moral tales where listeners debate open-ended stories that conclude with audience questions .
• Dilemma tales invite the audience to think about right and wrong behavior and how to live within society.

Ashanti Tale

• Comes from Ashanti, which maintained its ancient culture in their geographical stronghold.
• The tale exemplifies common occupations and such realistic elements with fantasy elements like talking objects and animals.

Folktales

• These were handed down in the oral tradition from ancient times.
• They embody African people's most cherished religious and social beliefs to entertain, teach, and explain nature. The forests play a primary role in this context, sometimes also called the bush.

Trickster Tale

• Enormously popular type of African Literature where characters come in animal form showing traits and weaknesses of humans.

Moral Stories

• These are meant to give the reader certain lessons.

Epics

• Partly human, partly superhuman, who embody society's highest values and culture's history, values, and traditions. African literary traditions boast several oral epics.

African Poetry

• It's expression articulated African thoughts and about the inhumanity they suffered.

African Novel

• These novels contain stories that Africans themselves want to tell with elements of suffering giving way to surprises of triumph, community, magic, justice, philosophy, wisdom, humor and the habits of African daily living.

Famous African novels include Things Fall Apart, Petals of Blood, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, Nervous Conditions, Maru, Stay with me, Dust, Tram 83, Born on Tuesday, Black Moses, and many more

Major Writers

• Okot P'Bitek (1930-1982): Born in Uganda during British domination and embodied contrast of cultures attending English-speaking schools yet never losing touch with traditional African values.
• Chinua Achebe (1930-2013): A prominent Igbo novelist acclaimed for depictions of the social and psychological disorientation accompanying imposition of Western customs and values.
• Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014): A South African novelist and short story writer whose major theme was exile and alienation.
• Bessie Head (1937-1986): Described contradictions and shortcomings of African society morally.
• Barbara Kimenye (1929-2012): Wrote twelve books on children's known as the Moses series now a for African school children..
• Ousmene Sembene (1923-2007): A writer and filmmaker who's works reveal commitment to political and social change.
• Wole Soyinka (1934): A Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and who was African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wrote of Modern West Africa in style to show the tragic obstacles.
• Leopoldo Sedar Senghor (1906-2001): A poet and statesman who was cofounder of and literature. discovered imprint of on modern confirmed in Africa's to culture.

Points to Remember

• African literature is written for or by African people.
• African literature, often oral, may be in prose or poetry
• An African storyteller expects the audience to respond or comment
• Literature offers the opportunity to hear the voices of African people and increase consciousness and awareness of social, political, and economic crises in Africa

Explore the incorporation of literary texts into language learning and how studying literature enhances understanding of cultures. Examine African literature, its themes, and its significance in a global context, focusing on cultural perceptions and post-colonial themes.