African Literature

Article Outline

Introduction; Oral Traditions; Written Literature

African Literatures in European Languages

The European languages most commonly used in Africa are English, French, and Portuguese. Literature in the English language, known as Anglophone literature, is the African literature best known outside Africa, followed by Francophone (French-language) and Lusophone (Portuguese-language) literatures.

Anglophone African Literature

The British began colonizing Africa in the early 19th century. Their holdings eventually grew to include what is now Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya in North and East Africa; Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria in West Africa; and in the southern part of the continent, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. African literature in English is more extensive than African literatures in other European languages, but it generally made a later appearance than Lusophone or Francophone African literatures.

Poetry

The first collection of African poetry in English translation is An Anthology of West African Verse (1957), edited and compiled by the Nigerian Olumbe Bassir. It includes a large number of Francophone poems in English translation, which testifies to Anglophone literature’s slower and later development. And whereas French-speaking writers in Africa tended to celebrate African culture and blackness in a movement called négritude, English-speaking writers and intellectuals in Africa generally disdained négritude as ostentatious and unnecessary. Despite this, some early Anglophone poems resembled négritude verse in their examination of the effects of European colonialism on Africa.

One of the first African poets to publish in English is Lenrie Peters of The Gambia, whose poems examine the disorienting discontinuities between past and present in Africa. His book Poems came out in 1964 and Selected Poetry, his third anthology, in 1981. Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has published several volumes of poetry, including Idanre and Other Poems (1967). Fellow Nigerian Christopher Okigbo had established himself as one of the most important Anglophone poets in Africa before his death in 1967 during the Biafran war. His collected poems were published as Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder (1971). Ghana’s Kofi Anyidoho emerged in the 1980s as one of the most impressive African poets writing in English, earning critical praise for his treatment of both personal and political subjects. A Harvest of Our Dreams (1984) is regarded as his best work so far.

Fiction

Anglophone fiction is the richest genre of African literatures in European languages. Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) revealed the future nature and preoccupation of Anglophone fiction in his novel Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (1911). Several years later his compatriot, R. E. Obeng, in Eighteenpence (1943), depicted the procedures of the different judicial systems in use in the Gold Coast.

The publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town (1952), by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, was a momentous event in the history of Anglophone African fiction. It is the story of a man who journeys to the land of the dead to retrieve his bartender. The book achieved tremendous success in Europe and the United States, in large part because European and American critics mistook its idiosyncratic English for bold experimentation. But the book’s success also inspired African writers who were better educated than Tutuola to produce fiction. Soon after Tutuola’s work appeared, Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of five novels in which he chronicled the consequences of British colonialism in his country. Other Nigerian writers of mid-century include Cyprian Ekwensi, whose most popular work is Jagua Nana (1961), the life story of a charming Lagos prostitute, and Flora Nwapa, who writes of the social problems women in her culture face in Efuru (1966).

The Gambian William Conton published an improbable solution to South Africa’s racial problems through a new political party in The African (1960), while Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah criticized political corruption in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Armah’s compatriot Kofi Awoonor lamented the political woes of Ghana and their impact on individuals in This Earth, My Brother (1971).The Biafran War, a civil war that raged in Nigeria from 1966 to 1969, produced several works. They include Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), Eddie Iroh’s Forty-Eight Guns for the General (1976), and Destination Biafra (1982) by Buchi Emecheta.

Fiction developed later in the eastern and southern sections of English-speaking Africa than in the western part. Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o lamented the loss of land to colonizers in Weep Not, Child (1964). The novel describes the rift in the African community during the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule in Kenya in the mid-1950s, and was the first of several works to focus on that subject. With her novel The Promised Land (1966), Grace Ogot, also from Kenya, became the first woman from English-speaking East Africa to be published. Two other Kenyan female writers are Rebeka Njau, whose Ripples in the Pool (1975) discusses a woman’s marital problems, and Lydia Nguya, who writes of the conflict in her country between rural and urban cultures and values in The First Seed (1975). The Tanzanian Ismael Mbise’s Blood on Our Land (1974) dramatizes the importance of the land to Africans who lost their ancestral lands to colonizers. J. N. Mwaura’s Sky is the Limit (1974) explores a troubled father-son relationship.

Discussions of racial conflict predictably dominate English-language fiction by black South Africans. Among the earliest works are Tell Freedom (1954) by Peter Abrahams, Down Second Avenue (1959) by Es’kia Mphahlele, and A Walk in the Night (1962) by Alex La Guma. Later works—including Miriam Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan (1975), Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981), Mphalele’s The Unbroken Song (1981), and Sipho Sepamla’s A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981)—provide literary testimony to the durability of the race problem.

Drama

The first African play published in English was The Girl Who Killed to Save:Nongquase the Liberator (1935) by Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo of South Africa. Its subject of resistance to white oppressors foreshadowed Lewis Nkosi’s The Rhythm of Violence (1964) and other later works from South Africa. Early drama from West Africa portrays conflicts between parents and children in such works as Sons and Daughters (1963) by Joe de Graft of Ghana and Dear Parent and Ogre (1965) by Sarif Easmon of Sierra Leone. Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana focuses on intercultural marriage in her The Dilemma of a Ghost (1964). Her compatriot Efua Sutherland also discusses marriage in The Marriage of Anansewa (1975), a play based on traditional lore. Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, who later dominated drama from the continent, also wrote on social themes in such plays as The Swamp-Dwellers (written 1957; published 1963).

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Black Hermit (produced 1962; published 1968) marked East Africa’s debut in drama. The play is concerned with stamping out tribalism (racism among African ethnic groups). A later work, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976), written in collaboration with Micere Mugo, deals with the Mau Mau rebellion. The Tanzanian Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile (1970) received wide acclaim as a masterpiece meant to motivate responsible social action. It is set during the Maji Maji uprising from 1905 to 1907 against German colonizers of East Africa.

The souring political atmosphere on the African continent had a profound impact on drama, as on other genres. Nigerian Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers (1980) bases its political commentary on the government’s practice of publicly executing armed robbers. Soyinka’s A Play of Giants (1984) ridicules Africa’s flamboyant dictators. In South Africa, apartheid continued to generate powerful drama with such plays as Percy Mtwa’s Bopha! (1986) and Woza Albert! (1986), written jointly by Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon. Bopha! deals with the differences between an African activist and his policeman father. Woza Albert! speculates on what would happen if Jesus Christ suddenly reappeared in South Africa.

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