African literature, the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic

and African languages together with works written by Africans in European

languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area
than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have
participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written
literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now
northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature.
There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages
of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long
enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date
primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africain English and
Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature. See
also African theatre.
The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and
modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple
evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed
by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African
traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these
literatures.

Oral Traditions
The nature of storytelling
The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the
presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with
explosive emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask
the past, making it mysterious, seemingly inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to
one’s present intellect; it is always available to one’s heart and soul, one’s emotions.
The storyteller combines the audience’s present waking state and its past condition of
semiconsciousness, and so the audience walks again in history, joining its forebears.
And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes for the audience a
collapsing of time. History becomes the audience’s memory and a means of reliving
of an indeterminate and deeply obscure past.

Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the

past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe
the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of
a culture’s experience of the past. These ancient fantasy images are the
culture’s heritage and the storyteller’s bounty: they contain the emotional
history of the culture, its most deeply felt yearnings and fears, and they
therefore have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from
members of audiences. During a performance, these envelop contemporary
images—the most unstable parts of the oral tradition, because they are by
their nature always in a state of flux—and thereby visit the past on the
present.
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It is the task of the storyteller to forge the fantasy images of the past into
masks of the realistic images of the present, enabling the performer to pitch
the present to the past, to visualize the present within a context of—and
therefore in terms of—the past. Flowing through this potent emotional grid is a
variety of ideas that have the look of antiquity and ancestral sanction. Story
occurs under the mesmerizing influence of performance—the body of the
performer, the music of her voice, the complex relationship between her and
her audience. It is a world unto itself, whole, with its own set of laws. Images
that are unlike are juxtaposed, and then the storyteller reveals—to the delight
and instruction of the members of the audience—the linkages between them
that render them homologous. In this way the past and the present are
blended; ideas are thereby generated, forming a conception of the present.
Performance gives the images their context and ensures the audience a ritual
experience that bridges past and present and shapes contemporary life.
Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not
meant to be temporally frozen; they are always responding to contemporary
realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized
art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with
the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world.
Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in
that way the past regularly shapes an audience’s experience of the present.
Storytellers reveal connections between humans—within the world, within a
society, within a family—emphasizing an interdependence and the disaster
that occurs when obligations to one’s fellows are forsaken. The artist makes
the linkages, the storyteller forges the bonds, tying past and present, joining
humans to their gods, to their leaders, to their families, to those they love, to
their deepest fears and hopes, and to the essential core of their societies and
beliefs.

The language of storytelling includes, on the one hand, image, the patterning
of image, and the manipulation of the body and voice of the storyteller and, on
the other, the memory and present state of the audience. A storytelling
performance involves memory: the recollection of each member of the
audience of his experiences with respect to the story being performed, the
memory of his real-life experiences, and the similar memories of the
storyteller. It is the rhythm of storytelling that welds
these disparate experiences, yearnings, and thoughts into the images of the
story. And the images are known, familiar to the audience. That familiarity is a
crucial part of storytelling. The storyteller does not craft a story out of whole
cloth: she re-creates the ancient story within the context of the real,
contemporary, known world. It is the metaphorical relationship between these
memories of the past and the known images of the world of the present
that constitutes the essence of storytelling. The story is never history; it is built
of the shards of history. Images are removed from historical contexts, then
reconstituted within the demanding and authoritative frame of the story. And it
is always a sensory experience, an experience of the emotions. Storytellers
know that the way to the mind is by way of the heart. The interpretative effects
of the storytelling experience give the members of the audience a refreshed
sense of reality, a context for their experiences that has no existence in
reality. It is only when images of contemporary life are woven into the ancient
familiar images that metaphor is born and experience becomes meaningful.
Stories deal with change: mythic transformations of the cosmos, heroic
transformations of the culture, transformations of the lives of everyman. The
storytelling experience is always ritual, always a rite of passage; one relives
the past and, by so doing, comes to insight about present life. Myth is both a
story and a fundamental structural device used by storytellers. As a story, it
reveals change at the beginning of time, with gods as the central characters.
As a storytelling tool for the creation of metaphor, it is both material and
method. The heroic epic unfolds within the context of myth, as does the tale.
At the heart of each of these genres is metaphor, and at the core of metaphor
is riddle with its associate, proverb. Each of these oral forms is characterized
by a metaphorical process, the result of patterned imagery. These universal
art forms are rooted in the specificities of the African experience.

African literature, literary works of the African continent. African literature consists of a body of work in
different languages and various genres, ranging from oral literature to literature written in colonial
languages (French, Portuguese, and English).
See also African languages ; South African literature .
Oral literature, including stories, dramas, riddles, histories, myths, songs, proverbs, and other
expressions, is frequently employed to educate and entertain children. Oral histories, myths, and proverbs
additionally serve to remind whole communities of their ancestors' heroic deeds, their past, and the
precedents for their customs and traditions. Essential to oral literature is a concern for presentation and
oratory. Folktale tellers use call-response techniques. A griot (praise singer) will accompany a narrative
with music.
Some of the first African writings to gain attention in the West were the poignant slave narratives, such
as The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the
African  (1789), which described vividly the horrors of slavery and the slave trade. As Africans became
literate in their own languages, they often reacted against colonial repression in their writings. Others
looked to their own past for subjects. Thomas Mofolo, for example, wrote Chaka  (tr. 1931), about the
famous Zulu military leader, in Susuto.
Since the early 19th cent. writers from western Africa have used newspapers to air their views. Several
founded newspapers that served as vehicles for expressing nascent nationalist feelings. French-speaking
Africans in France, led by Léopold Senghor , were active in the négritude movement from the 1930s,
along with Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire , French speakers from French Guiana and Martinique. Their
poetry not only denounced colonialism, it proudly asserted the validity of the cultures that the colonials
had tried to crush.
After World War II, as Africans began demanding their independence, more African writers were
published. Such writers as, in western Africa, Wole Soyinka , Chinua Achebe , Ousmane Sembene , Kofi
Awooner, Agostinho Neto , Tchicaya u tam'si, Camera Laye, Mongo Beti, Ben Okri, and
Ferdinand Oyono and, in eastern Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o , Okot p'Bitek , and Jacques Rabémananjara
produced poetry, short stories, novels, essays, and plays. All were writing in European languages, and
often they shared the same themes: the clash between indigenous and colonial cultures, condemnation of
European subjugation, pride in the African past, and hope for the continent's independent future.
In South Africa, the horrors of apartheid have, until the present, dominated the literature.
Es'kiaMphahlele , Nadine Gordimer , Bessie Head , Dennis Brutus , J. M. Coetzee, and Miriam Tlali all
reflect in varying degrees in their writings the experience of living in a racially segregated society.
Much of contemporary African literature reveals disillusionment and dissent with current events. For
example, V. Y. Mudimbe in Before the Birth of the Moon (1989) explores a doomed love affair played out
within a society riddled by deceit and corruption. The Zimbabwean novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove
(1956–2015), wrote vividly in English and his native Shona of the hardships experienced during the
struggle against British colonial rule, and later of the hopes and disappointments of life under the rule of
Robert Mugabe . In Kenya Ngugi wa Thiong'o was jailed shortly after he produced a play, in Kikuyu,
which was perceived as highly critical of the country's government. Apparently, what seemed most
offensive about the drama was the use of songs to emphasize its messages.
The weaving of music into the Kenyan's play points out another characteristic of African literature. Many
writers incorporate other arts into their work and often weave oral conventions into their writing. p'Bitek
structured Song of Iowino  (1966) as an Acholi poem; Achebe's characters pepper their speech with
proverbs in Things Fall Apart  (1958). Others, such as Senegalese novelist Ousmane Sembene, have
moved into films to take their message to people who cannot read.

Bibliography
See R. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (1970); R. Smith, ed., Exile and Tradition: Studies in
African and Caribbean Literature  (1976); W. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African
World  (1976); A. Irele,The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981); B. W.
Andrzejewski et al., Literature in African Languages (1985); S. Gikandi, Reading the African
Novel  (1987).