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 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
54 ~ The Criticism of African Literature

Amechi Nicholas Akwanya

he corpus of scholarly work on African literature has grown to such

T an extent over the past two decades or so that there is Iittle hope of
keeping abreast of all the developments taking place in the field.
except perhaps by means of an annotated bibliography, updated every few
years. The initial impetus to this development was probably the early entry
of European reviewers and diletantes into the field. These critics often
tended to be patronizing or to treat the work they discussed as an input in
the struggle against imperialism, and therefore necessarily antagonistic to
the wh ite man. Such titles as Emenyonu's 'African Literature: What does
it take to be its critic?' (1971), Chinua Achebe's 'Colonialist Criticism'
(1975, 1988), and lyasere's 'African Critics on African Literature: A Study
in Misplaced Hostility' (1975) remind us of the function of reaction in the.
history of criticism of African literature. As is well brought out in Iyasere's
article, the controversy does not resolve into a binary relation, with the
Afncans knowing the facts, and accordingly, producing scholarly works,
while the Western intellectuals were all misguided. He tells us rather that
'we Africans ourselves - with all our so-called "inside knowledge" of the
social realities behind the novels at our disposal - have not provided
significantly more insightful criticism' (p.21). Some African studies like
'Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People', by gugi wa Thiongo(19G6, 1979).
'Cultural Nationalism in Modern African Creative Literature' (Obiechina
1968), and Black Writers: White Audience (Egejuru 1978) may seem,
\
triumphantly, to confirm the prejudice that the new African writings are
largely polemic, and little of literary interest.
The controversy over whether African writing was literature in the same
sense in which, say, the European literatures were identified as such had
died down by the 1980s. But it only gave way to another debate, namely,
what approaches were most appropriate for the study of the new literature.
The question has continued to generate passion. And Adebayo Williams

55
 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
58
equally to the literary works themselves, except perhaps that the operative
theory is lost with the authorial intention at publ ication (Barthes 1977), and
therefore the writer's reminiscences in which he explains his motivations
are to be taken for what they are, reconstructions after the fact - another
fiction. We have already seen something of what the pursuit of the real can
lead to in African literary studies. The pursuit of the author's intention is
no more helpful because the so-called intention is a construct of the author's
or of the reader's, and quite different from the work itself.
Traditional Aesthetics and Modern African Literature
The question whether traditional notions of art might not be applied to
modern African literature has been given fresh impetus with some
important modern African writers, like Ngugi, using exclusively their native
language as demanded in Obi Wali's 'The Dead End of African Literature?',
and by Mazisi Kunene, Kofi Awoonor, and Okot p'Bitek, using the Western
language as a medium for a text whose original language and conventions
are native African. The latter, a middle course between the ideal of using
the native language and the expediency of the discourse policies of the
former colonist, seems to have the advantage of maintaining a wide
readersh ip for the writer, wh ile at the same time confronting the reader with
the sem iotic practices of a particular African culture. In point of fact, much
ofthe work that has already been done towards elucidating the content and
workings of the traditional notions of art has been done by the creative
writers themselves. For instance, we have it from Soyinka that the model
that informs Yoruba traditional art is the ritual enactment, in which a
representative 'man', usually a divine endowed with human qual ities,
breaches the self-contained world of the gods for the purpose of bringing
relief to men (1976, 2-3). For this reason, dramatic representation is the
pnmary genre.
But the reason that Lewis Nkosi gives for the priority of drama has
potentially wider application to all the different cultural regions of Africa.
He argues that,
the kind of art which was prized above all others in the Old Africa
was the one which promoted harmonisation of the potenti~areas
of conflict within the community by psychological projection or
the externalisation of opposing forces of good and evil through
ritual and communal forms of art (1981,5).
THE CRITiCISM OF AFRICAN LITERATURE 59
Drama, and in many parts of the Old Africa, also poetry, is the main form
of communal art. The novel is acknowledged as 'a radical departure from
native art forms'. That it has become the dom inant literary form in Africa
today must be put down as a function of domestication. But according to
Nwoga (1982), modern African poetry itself has come into being by
domesticating an alien tradition. This is equally true of the new drama.
In the light of the novelty of the forms, it is pointless to seek in
traditional African aesthetics the principles of modern African literary art,
as if the latter derives from the same matrix. We should rather be asking
whether there are concepts in the traditional value system that may be
pertinent in the discussion of modern African literature - and perhaps any
literature. The satirical function is one such concept. The public
performance of oral poetry and drama is frequently connected with satire,
just as in the mbari of the Jgbo. But satire seems to be of relatively low
importance in Igbo art. Here the guiding principle is 'to re-enact... the
m iracle of creation in its extravagant profusion' (Ache be, 1988). This
applies to mbari as well as the masquerade. The latter is not only a 'full-
fledged drama' (Okafor, 1991); according to Achebe, it also subsumes all
other art forms, puts the kinetic energy highly admired by the Igbo in full
display, and also imitates the full range of human experience. Thus art for
the Igbo is a way of experiencing the variousness of things, and the artist is
one who surprises his audience with this fact. Of all the modern forms, the
novel is the one most adapted to celebrate this rich variety. But we are told
that art also serves a 'practical purpose' namely,
to channel a spiritual force into an aesthetically satisfying physical
form that captures the presumed attributes of that force ... It is like
'earthing' an electrical charge to ensure communal safety (pA3).
Igbo art, therefore, has a dual function. At the level of representation, it
brings out man's awareness of his environment and of the variety of human
experiences and energies. That is to say, art is addressed to the intellective
memory, or seeks to bring into consciousness new objects of knowledge.
At the level of its total significance, however, it is an expression of their
religious sensibility. Awoonor (1975) tells us this two-fold relation applies
to all African art, and that everywhere the religious function is the more
important.
The religious thought that underlies African art may be manifested as
ritual, or it may be purely symbolic. This latter aspect is stressed by
 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
60
Achebe and Awoonor, who present African art as an activity performed on
behalf of the community, as if the art was a kind of priesthood. The
judgemental aspect of criticism seems to be foreclosed by the association
with religious experience. Criticism can hardly be productive in these
circumstances. For criticism has to do with productivity. To understand
this, we need to relate it to the other activities with which it belongs
together, namely, literature and literary theory, the one the object in itself,
the other the discourse that attempts to explain it.
Criticism and Literary Studies
The interrelationship between these activities is such that a faulty theory can
cause a loss of focus, as a result, the work is perceived as something other
than literature. Such a misperception can arise from the use of the religious
metaphors of the traditional aesthetic for the explanation of modern art,
causing the affiliation of literature to a cultural function with which it
shares a common border, and denying its specificity. This kind of
misperception is bound to arise also from Williams's theory of cultural
production.
Literature is indeed a cultural production, as Williams has argued; but
it is so in exactly the same way that human economic practices, modes of
political organization, and religious systems are cultural. The difference
is that the energies ofthe individual which the other cultural practices seek
to collectivize are allowed a certain range of freedom in art and literature.
There is no doubt that it is making a theoretic statement to say that literature
is a cultural product, and it is as general and as vague as a theoretical
statement can be. But since this statement embraces all other forms of
cultural experience, we need further statements within the theory that
address specifically the nature of literature. One reason the suggestion to
take each work of literature on its own terms can never be taken seriously
is that one wishes to know, for a start, why the particular work is literature,
and why it shares this designation with thousands of different texts, but not
with many other thousands. Besides seeking to understand a given work,
the study of literature clearly also implies a criterion, as an instrument
independent of the work itself, for the recognition of literary works. But
not only does literature open out to infinity, by reason of the number and
variety of works that may be written, but also it is enigmatic (Foucault,
1970). Therefore, it is likely to frustrate the theories that are formulated
to try and explain it. That this is in fact the case can be seen in the history
THE CRITICISM OF AFRIC~~ I,..1JERATU RE
61
"f
of Iiterary studies, in the number of failed theories. Yet it is not that these
are all false, in the sense of falling short of the reality they set out to
describe, or of grasping the wrong things about this reality. In principle,
every theory captures a truth about its objeQt.: The issue over which literary
theories often fail is whether they are adequate for the object. This is to
say, they do not contain hypotheses against which the data may be tested,
so that the hypothesis is substituted if found to be inconsistent with the
data, wh ile the theory itself remains untouched. Theories of Iiterature may
only have the so-called meta-hypotheses, of which the most decisive are
adequacy and internal consistency. If the theory is found in practice not to
account adequately for the phenomena or to involve internal breaks in the
accounting, the whole thing is abandoned. This is the fate of Matthew
Arnold's Humanism, just as it is that of the anthropological account of
African literature. I
Where I locate criticism is between literature and literary theory, as the
discourse that links the one to the other. It is not an activity taking place
between the text of literature and the author's audience, as a form of
advocacy (Izevbaye 1988) or a mediation (Irele, 1981), or instruction
(Obiechina 1968). In as much as criticism has an audience, it comprises the
other critics, scholars, writers. The language of criticism usually excludes
the so-called audience of the creative writer, for its distinctive feature is its
rigour, or the aspiration. towards this. Every approach to literature implies
a statement of the criteria for determining certain works as literature and
excluding others; and every theory that announces itself as such is explicit
on the criteria upon which this judgement is based. A theory is, to adapt
Awoonor's (1975,54) phrasing, a broad philosophical statement, which sets
out a 'rational pattern of thoughts and ideas' for describing the phenomena
it deals with. The task of criticism is to study given texts in the light of
what Mulder and Hervey (1980) call the 'primitive statements', namely, the
criteria and metaphors supplied initially in the theory which generalize on
the nature and perhaps value of literature.
Thus the first function of criticism is classification: it seeks to establish
on the basis of the primitive statements that the given works have the
quality of literature, and in this way to assign them a place in the canon.
That is, they are brought to the notice of other critics, who are in fact the
guardians of a literary tradition. Their discourse also comprises the
explication of the text. We can see an example of this whole process in the
career of Formalism. The key statement in this theory is that literature is
62 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
a linguistic construction, having the distinctive quality of 'literariness'
(Swingewood 1986). This notion is in turn defined in terms of the
rhetorical devices, both the traditional ones like irony, imagery, symbol, and
rhythm, and the ones that have developed with the novel, such as narrative
techniques and point of view. Formalist criticism therefore analyses the
work as language, but as one that is deJamiliarized. Its sub-text is tha
literature works by denying language its referential meaning, thereby
constituting the work as a self-sufficient world. The concrete things and the
recognizable situation found in the text are treated purely as appearances.
The discourse of Formalist criticism comprises the study of the functioning
of the devices in individual texts; that literature is creative means for the
scholars of this school that language has been used in such a way that it
behaves differently from the everyday language, and things which areto all
appearances concrete cease in this wholly new context to be ordinary
everyday things of our experience, but entirely new positivities. Both the
language and the positivities become new objects of knowledge in their
own right, and not by virtue of a perceived similarity to the real or the
familiar. Bu-Buakei Jabbi's 'Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart'
(1979), referred to earlier in another context, is an example of this method
of reading applied to African literature. And one must distinguish it from
other kinds of criticism, and distinguish each critical practice from all the
others, because each one depends for its form on a specific theoretic
statement. For criticism is a derived practice.
This is what is confused in Williams's essay, 'Towards a Theory of
Cultural Production in Africa', where he claims that 'Literary criticism as
it is known in contemporary Western scholarship is nothing but a shorthand
for practical criticism' (p.8). Literary criticism in the West, as anywhere
else, including Africa, is as varied as there are philosophical
presuppositions about literature. Practical criticism involves a philosophical
presupposition of its own, but it is not as productive as some of the other
well-known theories of literature because of its own structural weakness.
Its doctrine of 'close reading' limits its effectiveness to lyric poetry and
short, intense pieces of prose, and so on, on the basis of which a value
judgement is pronounced on the whole work. It never developed a
technique for dealing with a novel as a whole. Eagleten writes, concerning
the limitations of this approach: 'It was a matter of assessing the tone and
sensibility of a particular passage, "placing" it definitively and then movin~
on to the next' (1983,43). This technique has often been used with African
THE CRITICISM OF AFRICAN LITERATURE
63
poetry, ~ut hardly ever in the discussion of the novel or drama. What it
share~ With Formalism is that it endows the text of literature with an infinite
capacity to surprise. For what appears perfectly straightforward in a novel
or ~ poel.n can also be un~e.iled to b~ a trope. Thus each work may generate
an Infi~l~e number of.cr .•tical readings. This inexhaustibility becomes a
determl.l1l1lgcharacteristic of literature, The key difference is that while
Fo~~~hsm grasps the work in cognitive terms, LA. Richards's Practical
Cntlcl~m, and some early forms of the American New Criticism as well
relate literature purely to the emotions (see Eagleton, 45). ,
An understanding of the essential connection between a critical work
and the theo~ i~pres~pp?ses will probably help clear up the antagonism,
reported ~y ~r1hams 111 his essay, among Nigerian scholars especially, over
tl~e ~ontnbutlOn one scholar makes to African literary studies being
?lsl11lssed by another as literary criticism, not theory. In any event, a theory
IS not !au.nched for the sake of having one's own theory, or because it has
value 111. Itself. Its value is determined in the practice, in terms of how it
pr?v~s It~ worth in the. han~s of the c~itics using it for analysis. What
Williams s theory lacks ISan instrument 111the form of primitive statements
to be used by the critics for distinguishing literature from non-literature
and for the analysis of individual works. For this it cannot be the theory it
set out to be.
Dialogue with Non-African Literary Traditions
Perhaps the theory most widely used in the criticism of African literature is
Ileo-Aristoteli.ani.sm, ~mphasizing such criteria as realist mimesis, plot,
them~, authonalll1te~tlOn, characterization and character types, the quality
?factlOn, argumentative structure, and style. Of course, neo-Aristotelianism
IShardly thought of as a theory. The same is true of humanism. Yet each
of them embodies primitive statements about the nature ofliterature. What
is illustrate? in this deflection of attention from 'the unexplained founding
statements ISthe career of theory in its transformation into the self-evident
that is, an ideology. '
The neo-Aristotelian approach seems particularly suitable because of
the overlap with that aspect of the traditional aesthetic in which art is a
form of imitation connected directly to the real. However, the values of the
mimetic tradition are precisely what Formalism attempts to undermine.
Because mimesis seeks to close the gap between the real and its
representation in literature, and bases the differentiation of forms on the
64 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
kinds of actions and human types imitated, it has had trouble from the start
with the question if literature is not a needless duplication. For Aristotle,
a discipline is worth attention only if it mediates the truth. But since
literature is by definition concerned with representing human action, of
which its two aspects, the individual, goal-oriented is registered in the
writings of the historians, while statements about the quality and types of
these acts is the concern of ethics, how is literature to be distinguished from
history and moral philosophy? What is the 'specific difference', to use
Aristotle's own terminology?
The question has not been tackled by the neo-Aristotelians in Africa.
Thus such works as Jonathan Peters, A Dance of Masks (1978),
Ogungbesan's 'Wole Soyinka and the Novelists Responsibility in Africa'
(1979), Wren's Achebe's World (1980), and Ngara's Stylistic Criticism and
the African Novel (1982) emphasize character and situation, and pursue the
correspondences and the author's intention so persistently that it isn't always
clear if the fiction is not really getting in the way. Would it not have been
more straightforward for the author to take off the mask, to use Peters'
metaphor, and speak in his own proper name and by means of logical
arguments, as Achebe and Elechi Amadi have apparently done in their The
Trouble with Nigeria and Ethics in Nigerian Culture respectively?
The advantage of the neo-Aristotel ian method over the Formal ist is that
whereas the latter treats literature as a pure object of knowledge, with no
spatial or temporal determinations, the former facilitates the grouping of
texts into national and regional literatures, in as much as the elements of the
real world which enter into the construction of the fictional one are
bounded by space and time. Historical and sociological criticism are linked
to the neo-Aristotelian by way of the object of imitation, whereas
Humanism builds on Aristotle's notion of 'poetic truth', and emphasizes the
ethical aspect of mimesis. The latter is the dominant influence in Cook's
African literature: A Critical View. For instance, he tells us that,
There is every reason to fear that in this computerised age African
communities may follow faster and faster along the bleak path
towards total alienation of individuals by the social machine, a
transition chronicled already in work such asA Man of the People.
Whether Africa takes warning from the dreary European and
American experience of this process may depend to a large extent
on influences which are difficult to measure, and perhaps not least
on her novelists (32).
THE CRITICISM OF AFRICAN LITERATURE
6S
The potential of literature for good is indeed boundless. Creative writers
are not only 'the expression of [their] society's self awareness', as Cook
argues elsewhere, they are also the feelers that society sends abroad to
register and bring back information essential for its survival and well-being.
A similar faith in the power of the writer and of literature is reflected in the
work of African critics, such as E. Obiechina, 'The Human Dimension of
History in Arrow of God' and D. 1. Nwoga, Visions and Alternatives:
Literary Studies in a Transitional Culture.
Humanism had a wide appeal in its own day, and its doctrine that man
is improvable if exposed to the best influences struck a chord with the
Christian church, which immediately incorporated it, giving rise to the
ideology known as Christian Humanism. This comprises the optimistic
mood that informed the Christian m issionary activities in Africa, and whose
influence is seen in the early twentieth-century southern African poetry (See
Nkosi 1981), and fiction (Kunene 1976). But we see forms of resistance to
the ideology in West African literature of the 1960s. For example, in
Okigbo's Heavensgate and Soyinka's The Interpreters, return to the value
system and beliefs supposed to have been left behind under the influence
of the Christian ideology is approved by the authoritative voice in the text.
Given that the key statement in the humanistic theory is that the work
of art incorporates a value system, which may be appropriated by the
reader, a distinction is maintained between 'content' and 'form'. The mode
of imitation need not be realistic, provided it is suited to the content or
intended meaning. It is the form, which is variable, that distinguishes
Iiterature from both history and moral philosophy. Humanistic criticism is
mediation, its object, not so much the work of art as art, but the meaning
which must be laid bare, strangely, for the reader of criticism. So the
perceived fai lure of humanist values to influence the younger generations
of African societies is seen also as the critic's failure, as is suggested in
Nwoga (1987).
A large body of African critical work analyses literature, in Edward
Said's phrase (1984), as a way of being in the world. The human world is
.een as a field where forces are at work, specifically, the forces protecting
II1dreinforcing the status quo, and those contesting the dominant power
tructure (see Jameson, 1981). But the reading of African literature as a
rode of being in the world follows two paths mainly, reflecting two
iterpretations of the status quo. In the discourse of Engagement, the socio-
olitical system is organized to further the interests of the few, and it is
 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
66
understood that creative writing necessarily contests the status quo.
Soyinka's Season of Anomy is decidedly committed, being structured ~n.the
opposition between a Cartel of four, who control the state political
apparatuses for their own economic interests, on the one ha~d, and on the
other, the forces seeking to break this monopoly, and to establish a classless
society by redistributing power to the people. Other African writers whose
works are structured on this opposition between the few and the many are
Ngugi, Ousmane, Aw?on~r, and Oyo~o. B~t Ogun~b~s~n ~a~ arg~ed t.hat
Iiterary art can be nothing, If not committed: The writer s ind ividualism IS...
the highest form of protest and insurance against tyranny -. from. ~ny
pol itical system' (1978, 18). By turning its back on the S?CIO-polttlc~1
context, and looking inward, art does not evade the real, but It becomes m
the most profound way committed. This is a metaphysics 0: the text of
literature that seeks to anticipate and render absurd any question as to the
validity of the ideology of commitment. In the same movement, the
possibility of art promoting the interests of the dominant ~h'>s is totall~
excluded. Art is always a form of ressentiment, defined by N ietzsche as the
response to oppression by 'those to whom the only authentic way of
reaction - that of deeds - is unavailable, and who preserve themselves from
harm through the exercise of imaginative vengeance' (see Jameson, 1981,
210).
To the Feminists, however, the status quo is domination by the male
sex. In their discourse, it is not at all taken for granted that the creative
writer is on the side of the oppressed. There is rather a tendency to suspect
the male writers of complicity with the forces of domination to the extent
that they actively promote and reinforce the male-centred world view. Th.e
female writers divide between those whose writing is alienated, because It
is tied to the ideology of domination by the male sex, and those who are
politically aware, and are consciously subverting the male viewpoint. And
the Feminists have identified a core group of African female writers who
promote the female viewpoint, namely, Flora Nwapa, Mariama Ba, Buchi
Emecheta. and Zaynab Alkali.
The conflict between the dialectics of Feminism and of commitment is,
symptomatic of the fragmentation inherent in the functional view of
literature. In telling us that his theory of cultural production' leaves enough
spacefor feminist theory', as for traditional literary criticism, and so on
(15), Williams is making an impossible promise. Feminist criticism is an
implicit rejection of the Marxist sociology of literature as a reflector of
T-HE CRITICISM OF AFRICAN LITERATURE
67
underlying .imper~o.nal forms, whether these be the mode of production or
the culture It~elf; It ISthe authorial unconscious that it focuses on. Clearly,
the tr~t~ of Itterature as defined by Marxist sociology, the parent doctrine
of Williams's theory of cultural production, cannot coexist with that of
~eminis~l; mucl~ .less may one discourse subsume the other. They are
lffeconclla~le Crltlca! practi.ces because even though they both emphasize
the role of Ideology 111 reading and writing, they differ as to the nature of
ideology.
To the neo-Aristotelians and Humanists, however, critical interest.
focuses on the writer's consciousness. But the one grasps literature with
other forms of human cultural activity, without being able to draw a line
clearly between them, while the other assigns to literature tasks which
historically, it has never been able to fulfil. The critical practices the;
generate necessarily reflect their drawbacks. On the other hand, Formalism,
and the post-structuralist approaches that have further elaborated it for
instance, hermeneutics, appear altogether unassailable on the criteria of
adequacy and internal coherence. The questioning of this approach has
been habitually on the ground that literary art must needs have a practical
application, otherwise it wouldn't be worth studying. The answer supplied
by hermeneutics, that literature and criticism are concerned with deepening
and widening the field of knowledge, will seem to place these activities
entirely in the institutions of learning, leaving nothing for the non-scholar ..
But this won't seem such a bad thing, if taken together with the Scholastic
principle, that whatever is received is received in relation to the capacity of
the receiver. If, as we have shown, literature is quite different things to
different schools of critics, it must be allowed that it can mean different
things to the non-specialists as well. But the latter are not the audience of
criticism, and there is no need for criticism to behave as if it must address
them. For the very form of its discourse places this sort of writing squarely
within the institutions of scholarship; its care is to be faithful to its theory
and to the literary work, and to supply a new theory if the first is in conflict
with a work established in the canon as literary, or if it is undiscriminating
in the placing of writings in the canon.
Conclusion
It bears emphasis that literature, criticism, and literary theory are inter-
connected activities, and criticism is not a specialist area within literary
studies. Not even literature is possible except there is some general notion
68 MAJOR THEMES IN AFRICAN LITERATURE
what literary art consists of, and except it is a re-writing o~that theory; that
i , its criticism. As to the discussion of a work of ~rt, t~IS can only. be. b~
way of a theory, if not, it must be by way of some fas~lOnable prejudice
(Frye, 1957-1965,9). But the great interest that the Afn~an scholars have
been taking in criticism since the 1970s seems to have laid to rest tl~~once
fashionable prejudice that the Africans are bo~n.d to be better cntics of
African literature than the critics from other traditions. J.u.st.ast~lere a.re no
theories which apply exclusively to African literature, cr.ltlclsm Itself ISnor
to be seen exclusively as analysis. Hence a structuralist approach to. an
African work need not limit itself to identifying a sequence, and showlI~g
how it has been followed through to the denouement, or how the breach 111
the sequence proves the rule. We should also like to know ifthe c~reer of
the Speaker in Heavensgate or of the Interpr~ter Egbo constltu~~s a
structure different in kind frem the ones known 111 the Western ~radltl?n.
Th is and many another theory of Iiterature may be viable for the discussion
of African literature, but they need constantly to be interrogated and
rethought. To forget that every last one o~them is a ~onstruct, and not the
truth of literature, is to succumb to the blindness of Ideology.
Bibliography
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Aristotle, 1965, On the Art of Poetry, trans. T.S. Dorsch,
Harmondsworth
Awoonor, K. 1975, The Breast of the Earth, New Y rk
Barthes, R. 1977, Image - Music - Text, London
Cook, D. 1977, African Literature: A Critical View, London
Derrida, J. 1978, Writing and Difference, London
Eagleton, T.J 983 ,Literary Theory: An Introduction, ~xfor~
Egejuru, P.A.1978, Black Writers: White Audience, H~cksvllle . in Modern West African Culture, ed. D.I. Nwoga, Benin
Emenyonu, E. 1971, African Literature: What does It take to be ItS
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Foucault, M. 1970, The Order of Things, London
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Irele, A. 1981, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology,
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lyasere, S.O. 1975, African Critics on African itera re, African
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THE CRITICISM OF AFRICAN LITERATURE
69
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Izevb.aye, D. 1988, Literary Criticism in the Nigerian Context,
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