Module 6 THE AFRICAN

LITERATURE

Objectives:
At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
3. Name the literature in East Africa, West Africa, South Africa and
Russia.
4. Differentiate literature in East Africa, West Africa, South Africa and
Russia.
5. Recall the writers East Africa, West Africa, South Africa and
Russia.

Introduction
African literature consists of a body of work in different languages and various
genres, ranging from oral literature to literature written in colonial languages. 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
callresponse techniques. A griot (praise singer) will accompany a narrative with music.

Literature of East Africa

The literature of the people of East Africa, who speak the Swahili language and
live in Kenya, Uganda, the United Republic of Tanzania, and Malawi and on the island
of Mafia, have long maintained trade and cultural relations with Arabia, India, Iran, and
Indonesia, so that the influence exerted by the cultures of these latter countries on
Swahili literature is appreciable. There is a rich Swahili-language folklore, the spiritual
heritage of all Africans speaking that language. Twentieth-century Swahili-language
literature has become fragmented because of the rise in national consciousness and
the formation of independent states in East Africa.
The oldest forms of folklore include mashaira songs, now firmly established in
the literature. Folk stories combine African motifs, motifs from the Arabian “Thousand
and One Nights” tales, and motifs from the Panchatantra legends in an intriguing way.
The earliest known literary productions in Swahili are the Liongo songs (dating to the
ninth through 14th centuries; Liongo was a hero from the Lamu region, a historical
personage).
 Later historical chronicles (habari) and epic poems with a historical and religious
content (tenzi) have been preserved in fragmentary form. Poems of a religious nature
are associated with the propagation of Islam in East Africa. The early 20th century saw
the appearance of the poem “Majimaji” by Abdel-Kerim bin Jamaldini, centered on an
episode in the resistance of the African peoples to European colonizers.
The first newspapers, Habari and Kiongozi, appeared in the early 20th century.
The periodicals Tazama and Mambo leo appeared in East Africa after World War II as
vehicles for translated and original literature.
Hadisi fupi (short stories) and hadisi ndefu (tales) are among the most popular
genres in original literature. Works in these genres attest to a lack of professionalism in
East African literature. The usual short-story plot has two people in love, elements of
the detective story, and sometimes religious moralizing. One characteristic tendency is
to remain within the scope of minor topics and intimate life experiences.
A special place is reserved in Swahili literature for sketches and travel notes
compiled by individual African travelers—for example, Swahili Travels, notes of three
natives of Dar es Salaam providing detailed information on the customs and mores of
inland tribes. There are also works in larger genres in Swahili that depict life realistically
—for example, Liberation of Slaves, a novel by James Mbotela.
Poetic works still preserve forms characteristic of folklore. Both narrative poems
and short poetry are written in accentual verse with an equal number of accented
syllables. Versification exhibits the ghazal structure.

East African Writers

1. Nuruddin Farah. A Somali writer who was known for his rich imagination
and refreshing and often fortuitous use of his adopted language, English. He
was widely considered the most significant Somali writer in any European
language.

In his next novel, A Naked Needle (1976), Farah used a slight tale of interracial
and cross-cultural love to reveal a lurid picture of postrevolutionary Somali life in
the mid-1970s. He next wrote a trilogy—Sweet and Sour
Milk (1979), Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame (1983)—about life under a
particularly African dictatorship, in which ideological slogans barely disguise an
almost surreal society and human ties have been severed by dread and terror.

2. Jomo Kenyatta. Early in his life penned a book on the cultural and
historical traditions of the Kikuyu people of central Kenya, then known as the
Gikuyu people.
 3. Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi. A Somali-Canadian scholar, linguist, writer,
translator and professor. Abdullahi is fluent in Somali, Arabic, English and
French.
His research interests include the study of the Afro-Asiatic languages in general
(particularly its Cushitic branch), as well as Somali history and culture.

He has also written numerous books, notably Culture and Customs of Somalia
published by Greenwood Publishing Group in 2001, where he addresses the
obscure origins of the Somali people, among other topics.

4. Brian Chikwava. A writer and musician from Zimbabwe who currently

lives in London. He was the first Zimbabwean to win Caine Prize. He continues
to write in England and put out an album titled Jacaranda Skits. His works
include Hare North and Seventh Street Alchemy.

Literature of West Africa

The roots of English-language literature in West Africa may be traced to the
formation of various cultures in reaction to external contacts during successive
overlapping historical periods. The literary traditions of the region have been shaped by
these interlocking cultural histories, just as the cultural identities of the region are
products of its many-layered history.
These cultural strata have had such a strong influence, and writers borrow so
freely across cultures that it is not always possible to determine the essential African
element from the invasive or the syncretic product. Each of the major literatures is the
product, not of any one tradition – not even of one as dominant as English colonial
culture – but of live traditions that are always available to creative writers even when
they are inactive: as Wole Soyinka puts it, “the past exists now” (1988: 19).
The dominance of English as a linguistic medium has tended to obscure this
fact. Only the colonial connections of the culture are implied in categories like
“Common wealth literature” – where the literature is seen as an extension of the
English tradition, or “postcolonial literature” as a product of European cultural
imperialism to which it is a counter discourse. Femi Osofisan sees in the latter category
a revival of the “grand myth of [precolonial African] Absence” (1991: 1). The exclusion
of indigenous traditions is inherent in such language-based classifications of
Europhone African literatures. The continuing influence of the different traditions is an
essential part of the literary history.
West African Writers
1. Chinua Achebe. A Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental
depictions of the social and psychological disorientation accompanying the
imposition of Western customs and values upon traditional African society. His
particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of crisis; his novels
range in subject matter from the first contact of an African village with the white
man to the educated African’s attempt to create a firm moral order out of the
changing values in a large city.

Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe’s first novel, concerns traditional Igbo life at
the time of the advent of missionaries and colonial government in his homeland.
His principal character cannot accept the new order, even though the old has
already collapsed. In the sequel No Longer at Ease (1960) he portrayed a newly
appointed civil servant, recently returned from university study in England, who
is unable to sustain the moral values he believes to be correct in the face of the
obligations and temptations of his new position.

2. Kwame Nkrumah. A Ghanaian nationalist leader who led the Gold

Coast’s drive for independence from Britain and presided over its emergence as
the new nation of Ghana. He headed the country from independence in 1957
until he was overthrown by a coup in 1966.

3. Teju Cole. Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, Teju Cole is a

writer, art historian, and photographer. Although soon after he was born his
family moved back to Nigeria, he later returned to the US at the age of 17 to
study at Western Michigan University. He currently resides in Brooklyn and is
the author of four books. His novella, Every Day is For The Thief, was named a
book of the year by the New York Times, while his novel, Open City, won the
PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the
Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the
Internationaler Literaturpreis.

Cole also went on to write an essay collection, Known and Strange Things, and
his most recent work, Blind Spot (published in 2017), is a photobook named as
one of the best books of the year by Time magazine.

4. Chinelo Okparanta. Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, before

moving to the US with her family at the age of 10. She has a BSc degree from
Pennsylvania State University, MA from Rutgers University, and an MFA from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut book was a collection of short stories,
Happiness Like Water, which was listed on The Guardian’s Best African Fiction
 of 2013 and was also nominated for the Nigerian Writers Award. Her second
book, Under The Udala Tree, published in 2015, is a riveting tale about a young
lesbian woman’s coming of age during Nigeria’s civil war.

5. Chika Unigwe. The sixth of seven children born in Enugu, Nigeria, where
she obtained her BA in English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Following
her marriage to a Belgian engineer in 1995, she moved to Turnhout, Belgium,
where she resided until 2013 when she emigrated to the US. While in Europe,
she earned an MA in English from the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), and
then a PhD from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. She has written four
books, two children’s books published by Macmillan, and many other short
stories and essays.

Unigwe’s first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch in September 2005 and
is the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin. Her
second novel, On Black Sisters’ Street, was first published in Dutch as Fata
Morgana, and won the 2012 Nigeria Prize for Literature valued at $100,000.

She is creative director of the Awele Creative Trust, and was a judge for the Man
Booker International Prize in 2016.

Literature in South Africa

South African literature, the body of writings in either Afrikaans or English
produced in what is now the Republic of South Africa. The rest of African literature is
treated in African literature.
South Africa was colonized by Europeans against the resistance of Africans and
was for some time afterward a battlefield between Briton and Boer. Although South
Africa became independent in 1910, the nation’s varied ethnic constituents have not
yet been unified in a harmonious whole, and the tension arising from the unequal
relations between blacks and whites is the authentic note of much South African
literature. Indigenous South African literature effectively began in the late 19th century
and became fairly copious in the 20th century. Much of the work by persons born in
South Africa was limited in its viewpoint; often these writers only dimly apprehended
the aspirations, perceptions, and traditions of South Africans belonging to a people
other than their own. English-speaking South African writers are mainly urban and
cosmopolitan; their culture is English, and they often have a wider audience among
English-speaking communities abroad. By contrast, Afrikaans writers belonged for
many decades to a close-knit community—born of a defensive posture—with shared
experiences (including rural roots), shared aspirations and religion, and a strong sense
of nationhood. Only in the 1960s did a major break with this tradition become apparent.
The twin 20th-century phenomena of urbanization and apartheid greatly affected
the psychological makeup and thus the literary expression of English- and
Afrikaansspeaking whites, as well as of indigenous Africans. The moral and artistic
challenges inherent in South Africa’s situation stimulated writing up to a point, but the
South African preoccupation with “race” problems may ultimately have proven inimical
to the creation of an authentic national literature.
Although Afrikaans had diverged sufficiently from its parent Dutch by about 1750
to be considered a language on its own, the first Afrikaans texts were not published
until more than a century later. In 1875 a group of nationally conscious men
established the Association of True Afrikaners, which eventually published the first
newspaper, the first magazine, and the first literary texts in Afrikaans. The leader of the
so-called First Afrikaans Language Movement was S.J. du Toit, a Dutch Reformed
pastor and a versatile and prolific author. The writings of the First Language Movement
were propagandist, aiming to break down prejudice against the new language and to
prove that it could be an effective means of communication.
Afrikaans prose writing made important strides in the 1920s and ’30s. In the
genre of local realism, two novelists achieved success with their delineations of the folk
of farms and villages—Jochem van Bruggen and Jan van Melle. The two foremost
Romantic novelists were D.F. Malherbe, who wrote numerous prolix narratives on
Biblical themes and South African pioneering history; and C.M. van den Heever, whose
work is based mostly on the Afrikaner’s conflicts in the transition from a rural to an
urban society and implies a natural bond between the farmer and the soil. Toon van
den Heever was the outstanding new poet of the 1920s, and his anticonformist verse
foreshadowed the great upsurge of “new” Afrikaans poetry in the 1930s.
The supreme event in Afrikaans literature was the appearance of a group of
talented poets, the Dertigers (“Poets of the ’30s”), begun by W.E.G. Louw with Die ryke
dwaas (1934; “The Rich Fool”). This sensitive poet, with his searing conflicts between
God and Eros, exemplified qualities soon to become the new generation’s hallmark. He
was followed by his elder brother, N.P. van Wyk Louw, the principal creative artist and
theoretician of the new movement. Van Wyk Louw achieved mastery in every form,
writing the finest odes, sonnets, modern ballads, and love lyrics in Afrikaans. His
dramatic monologue “Die Hond van God” (1942; “The Hound of God”) was
unsurpassed in the Dutch literatures, his epic poem Raka (1941) became a classic,
and in the poetry collection Tristia (1962) he mourned the exile of the individual
searching for signs of God in earthly existence.
South African Writers
1. Nadine Gordimer. A South African novelist and short-story writer whose
major theme was exile and alienation. She received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1991.

Gordimer’s first book was Face to Face (1949), a collection of short stories. In
1953 a novel, The Lying Days, was published. Both exhibit the clear, controlled,
and unsentimental style that became her hallmark. Her stories concern the
devastating effects of apartheid on the lives of South Africans—the constant
tension between personal isolation and the commitment to social justice, the
numbness caused by the unwillingness to accept apartheid, the inability to
change it, and the refusal of exile.

2. Alan Paton. A South African writer, best known for his first novel, Cry,
the Beloved Country (1948), a passionate tale of racial injustice that brought
international attention to the problem of apartheid in South Africa.

Paton studied at the University of Natal (later incorporated into the University of
KwaZulu-Natal) and then taught school from 1925 to 1935. In 1935 Paton left his
teaching position to direct Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent urban African
boys, near Johannesburg. The success of Cry, the Beloved Country, which he
wrote during his tenure at the reformatory, led him to resign his post for full-time
writing. The book vividly portrays the anguish suffered by an elderly black
minister who must come to terms with his faith when his son is convicted of
murdering a white man. Paton wrote the screenplay for the 1951 film adaptation.

Both Cry, the Beloved Country and Paton’s next novel, Too Late the
Phalarope (1953), exhibit a characteristic balanced, economical, rhythmic prose,
which has, especially in dialogue, a singing psalmodic tone. The Diepkloof
period provided additional material for some short stories. During that period of
his life, Paton became involved in South African politics. In 1953 he helped
found the Liberal Party of South Africa to offer a nonracial alternative to
apartheid; Paton was its national president until its enforced dissolution in 1968.
His active opposition to the policy of apartheid led to confiscation of his passport
from 1960 to 1970.
3. Olive Schreiner. The writer who produced the first great
South
African novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883). She had a powerful intellect,
militantly feminist and liberal views on politics and society, and great vitality that
was somewhat impaired by asthma and severe depressions. Her brother William
Philip Schreiner was prime minister of Cape Colony from 1899 to 1902.
 4. Lewis Nkosi. A South African author, critic, journalist, and broadcaster.
The Rhythm of Violence (1964), a drama set in Johannesburg in the early
1960s, handles the theme of race relations. Nkosi produced the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio series “Africa Abroad” from 1962 to 1965
and worked from 1965 to 1968 as literary editor of The New African.

Nkosi’s later works included essays on South Africa in The Transplanted Heart
(1975) and the collections Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African
Literature (1981) and Home and Exile and Other Selections (1983). His first
novel, Mating Birds (1983), brought Nkosi to the attention of a wider audience
for its subtle examination of an interracial affair.
5. Bessie Head. African writer who described the contradictions and
shortcomings of pre- and postcolonial African society in morally didactic novels
and stories.

Head’s novels evolved from an objective, affirmative narrative of an exile finding

new meaning in his adopted village in When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) to a
more introspective account of the acceptance won by a light-coloured San
(Bushman) woman in a black-dominated African society in Maru (1971). A
Question of Power (1973) is a frankly autobiographical account of disorientation
and paranoia in which the heroine survives by sheer force of will. The Collector
of Treasures (1977), a volume of short fiction, includes brief vignettes of
traditional Botswanan village life, macabre tales of witchcraft, and passionate
attacks on African male chauvinism.

Literature in Russia
Russian literature, the body of written works produced in the Russian language,
beginning with the Christianization of Kievan Rus in the late 10th century.
The unusual shape of Russian literary history has been the source of numerous
controversies. Three major and sudden breaks divide it into four periods—pre-Petrine
(or Old Russian), Imperial, post-Revolutionary, and post-Soviet. The reforms of Peter I
(the Great; reigned 1682–1725), who rapidly Westernized the country, created so
sharp a divide with the past that it was common in the 19th century to maintain that
Russian literature had begun only a century before. The 19th century’s most influential
critic, Vissarion Belinsky, even proposed the exact year (1739) in which Russian
literature began, thus denying the status of literature to all pre-Petrine works. The
Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik coup later in the same year created
another major divide, eventually turning “official” Russian literature into political
propaganda for the communist state. Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to power in
1985 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 marked another dramatic break. What is
important in this pattern is that the breaks were sudden rather than gradual and that
they were the product of political forces external to literary history itself.
The most celebrated period of Russian literature was the 19th century, which
produced, in a remarkably short period, some of the indisputable masterworks of world
literature. It has often been noted that the overwhelming majority of Russian works of
world significance were produced within the lifetime of one person, Leo Tolstoy (1828–
1910). Indeed, many of them were written within two decades, the 1860s and 1870s, a
period that perhaps never has been surpassed in any culture for sheer concentrated
literary brilliance.
Russian literature, especially of the Imperial and post-Revolutionary periods, has
as its defining characteristics an intense concern with philosophical problems, a
constant self-consciousness about its relation to the cultures of the West, and a strong
tendency toward formal innovation and defiance of received generic norms. The
combination of formal radicalism and preoccupation with abstract philosophical issues
creates the recognizable aura of Russian classics

Russian Writers
1. Leo Tolstoy. The Russian novelist and moral philosopher (person who
studies good and bad in relation to human life) Leo Tolstoy ranks as one of the
world's great writers, and his War and Peace has been called the greatest novel
ever written.

The first portion of War and Peace was published in 1865 (in the Russian
Messenger ) as "The Year 1805." In 1868 three more chapters appeared, and in
1869 he completed the novel. His new novel created a fantastic out-pouring of
popular and critical reaction.

Tolstoy's War and Peace represents a high point in the history of world literature,
but it was also the peak of Tolstoy's personal life. His characters represent
almost everyone he had ever met, including all of his relations on both sides of
his family. Balls and battles, birth and death, all were described in amazing
detail. In this book the European realistic novel, with its attention to social
structures, exact description, and psychological rendering, found its most
complete expression.

From 1873 to 1877 Tolstoy worked on the second of his masterworks, Anna
Karenina, which also created a sensation upon its publication. The concluding
section of the novel was written during another of Russia's seemingly endless
wars with Turkey. The novel was based partly on events that had occurred on a
neighboring estate, where a nobleman's rejected mistress had thrown herself
under a train. It again contained great chunks of disguised biography, especially
in the scenes describing the courtship and marriage of Kitty and Levin. Tolstoy's
family continued to grow, and his royalties (money earned from sales) were
making him an extremely rich man.

2. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. He was born in Moscow in 1821. His

debut, the epistolary novella Poor Folk (1846), made his name. In 1849 he was
arrested for involvement with the politically subversive 'Petrashevsky circle' and
until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Omsk, Siberia. From this experience
came The
House of the Dead (1860-2). In 1860 he began the journal Vremya (Time).
Already married, he fell in love with one of his contributors, Appollinaria Suslova,
eighteen years his junior, and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. After the
death of his first wife, Maria, in 1864, Dostoyevsky completed Notes from
Underground and began work towards Crime and Punishment (1866). The major
novels of his late period are The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871-2) and The
Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881.

3. Alexander Pushkin. Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin was

born into one of Russia’s most famous noble families. His mother was the
granddaughter of an Abyssinian prince, Hannibal, who had been a favorite of
Peter I, and many of Pushkin’s forebears played important roles in Russian
history. Pushkin began writing poetry as a student at the Lyceum at Tsarskoe
Selo, a school for aristocratic youth. As a young man, Pushkin was immersed in
French poetry and Russian Neoclassicism. His early output was generically
diverse and included elegies, songs, and epistles.

At the end 1823, Pushkin began work on his masterpiece, Evgeny Onegin
(Eugene Onegin). Written over seven years, the poem was published in full in
1833. In it, Pushkin invented a new stanza: iambic tetrameter with alternating
feminine and masculine rhymes. The poem is also notable for its inventive and
exuberant language and social critique. And while Pushkin played with
autobiography, the verse novel turned out to be more autobiographical than
even he knew: like Pushkin himself, Onegin gets involved in a duel, though
Onegin survives by killing his opponent, while Pushkin would die at the hand of
his own. In general, Pushkin’s life was marked by political and romantic scandal.
Though Nicholas I eventually released him from exile, Pushkin’s work was
frequently censored, his letters intercepted, and his status with the court
remained tenuous until his death.
4. Vladimir Nabokov. Russian-born American novelist and critic, the
foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and
English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish, intricate
literary effects.

Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two

Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family made their way
to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship
provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. While at Cambridge he first
studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature; he
graduated with first-class honours in 1922 and subsequently wrote that his
almost effortless attainment of this degree was “one of the very few ‘utilitarian’
sins on my conscience.” While still in England he continued to write poetry,
mainly in Russian but also in English, and two collections of his Russian poetry,
The Cluster and The Empyrean Path, appeared in 1923. In Nabokov’s mature
opinion, these poems were “polished and sterile.”

5. Maxim Gorky. Alexander Peshkov (later known as Maxim Gorky was

born in Nizhny Novgorod on 16th March, 1868. His father was a shipping agent
but he died when Gorky was only five years old. His mother remarried and
Gorky was brought up by his grandmother.

In 1891 Gorky moved to Tiflis where he found employment as a painter in a

railway yard. The following year his first short-story, Makar Chudra, appeared in
the Tiflis newspaper, Kavkaz. He story appeared under the name Maxim Gorky
(Maxim the Bitter). The story was popular with the readers and soon others
began appearing in other journals such as the successful Russian Wealth.

Gorky also began writing articles on politics and literature for newspapers. In
1895 he began writing a daily column under the heading, By the Way. In this
articles he campaigned against the eviction of peasants from their land and the
persecution of trade unionists in Russia. He also criticized the country's poor
educational standards, the government's treatment of the Jewish community and
the growth in foreign investment in Russia.