AFRICAN

LITERATURE
Accountancy, Business and Management
Global City Innovative College
• African Literature focuses on
Oral literature or Orature
• Understanding Contemporary
Africa
 More about Orature
• Prose or Verse
• Call-and-Response
• Often Sung
• Griots
• Isefra
• Berber Traditions
PRE-COLONIAL LITERATURE
• Fourth century AD, Kebra Negast or "Book Of Kings"
• "Trickster" story
• Anansi
• Ijapa
• Sungura
• Earliest piece of Swahilli literature, Utendi Wa
Tambuka or "The Story of  Tambuka"
COLONIAL AFRICAN LITERATURE
• Slave narratives
• Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano (1789)
• First African novel written in English, Ethiopia Unbound:
Studies in Race Emancipation (1911)
•  African plays written in English began to emerge
• The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse The Liberator
(1935)
• The Black Hermit (1962), a cautionary tale about "tribalism"
(discrimination between African tribes).
• Things Fall Apart (1958)
• Anthologie de la
nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de
langue française (Anthology of the New Black
and Malagasy Poetry in the French Language)
(1948)
POST COLONIAL AFRICAN
LITERATURE
• African writers wrote both Western and African language
• Seven conflicts as themes
• The clash between Africa's past and present
• Between tradition and modernity
• Between indigenous and foreign
• Between individualism and community
• Between socialism and capitalism
• Between development and self-reliance
• Between Africanity and humanity.
• Social problems
• Corruption 
• The economic disparities in newly independent
countries
• The rights and roles of women.
• Wole Soyinka and Albert Camus
CONTEMPORARY
DEVELOPMENT
• Lot of literary production
• Shortage of literary critics
• Fasionable literary events