Development of Modern African Literature

Introduction: Colonial Origins of Modern African Literature

 From the outset, it would be important to emphasize the fact that

literary output in Africa did not strictly begin with the colonial
encounter
 If literature is seen as expressive use of language, then literary
output in Africa predates Africa’s encounter with Europe and Asia.
 The difference is that the African literary expression was wholly
verbal.
 What colonialism introduced was writing. Therefore, modern
written African literature may be attributed to the colonial/
missionary/influence.
 It is the product of the need that was felt at the time to train
Africans in literacy skills in order for them to help meet the
colonial/ missionary objectives.
 The Africans were to later appropriate the skill to their own
purposes. Thus, African writing in all its manifestations has its
germ in the events that were set in motion by the
colonial/missionary desire to teach Africans literacy skills to assist
them in their outreach goals.
 The earliest writing in Africa generally addressed the following
functional purposes:
 Protest against foreign interference in Africa. Thus, literature
served the function of protest against colonial occupation and
oppression.
 A self-assertion process – to prove that Africans had their
own culture/literature even though it may not have been
written. Since in colonial justification narratives possession
of literature was a marker of civilization, part of the objective
of African writing was to signify an Africa that was
consistently suppressed in the colonial narrative. The purpose
of writing was therefore to contest the colonial myth of
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colonial occupation as merciful enough to rescue Africa from
a bottomless cultural abyss.
The need for self-assertion was particularly urgent because of
the necessity at the time to contradict the negative
representation of Africa in colonial/setter literature and
attitude.
 Writing also served the objective of signifying to the
colonizer about their ability to write and in the white man’s
language.
The significance of this objective becomes apparent when it
is understood that the ability to read and write in the
colonizer’s language was perceived as a panacea because it
was seen as the language of class.
 However, a good part of the writing was deliberately meant to
respond to expatriate/setter writers about Africa.
 Joyce Cary wrote Mister Johnson, a story about Africans and
Africa. It was this novel which prompted the writing of Things
Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
 According to Achebe, Mister Johnson contained distorted pictures
of the African society which he tried to correct in Things Fall
Apart.
 A number of writers similarly wrote to respond to Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness which was judged to be deliberately aimed at
deliberate misrepresentation of Africa and the African People.

The Development of Modern African Literature

 Colonial occupation steadily devalued the griot, the traditional

African poet as the custodian and mediator of history and
important traditions that held the community together.

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 The griot soon found himself becoming largely irrelevant because
colonial order caused a paradigm shift that rendered his role as the
conscience and historian of the royal courts. This was partly
because the royal princes whom he would usually teach the history
of the royal court steadily shifted to western education and cultural
orientation.
 The consequence of that was that traditional culture and its
custodians were steadily watered down and replaced by the
emerging literate culture among the youth who perfected their new
skills away in the metropolis.
 If we are interested in the origin of the first writing in Africa, it is
from this group of young people that the pioneer writers emerged.
 However, writing by black emerged a few centuries before the
emergence of this group in the form of writing by those who had
been taken from African and taken to Europe, America and other
slave holding regions of the world where black captured from
Africa were sold as slaves.
 Some of the earliest slave writers include:
 Juan Latino (1516-1594) who was stationed in Spain as a
court poet.
 Phillis Wheatley, who was taken to America as a slave.
Wheatley mainly wrote poetry.
 Olaudah Equiano (born 1745) who was taken as a slave to
America, West Indies and finally ended up in England. Like
with most slave writing, Equiano’s most famous writing is
his autobiography entitled The Interesting Narrative of the
Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
the African (1789)
 But modern African writing began in earnest with pioneer verse
and biographies during the colonial period.
 One of the earliest writing during the colonial period was by
Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman) of

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the Gold Coast (now Ghana). He published what is probably the
first African novel written in English, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies
in Race Emancipation (1911).
 Although the work moves between fiction and political advocacy,
its publication and positive reviews in the Western press mark a
watershed moment in African literature.
 The difference in intensity and feeling can be explained by the
colonial policies of Britain and France.
 Whereas the British taught their language and culture in schools
and discouraged certain African indigenous customs as pagan, they
did not, in a formal and systematic way, tamper with the cultural
identity of the Africans in keeping with their colonial policy of
indirect rule (Okpewho 1983).
 However, in the French colonies, apart from teaching the French
language and culture in schools, they degraded the African cultural
identity by representing the French culture as the highest level of
human attainment.
 This thrust in the representation of the French culture was
institutionalized under the French colonial policy of assimilation.
 This policy was most effectively applied in Senegal. Not
surprisingly, a good number of Negritudists came from Senegal.
 As part of the implementation of the policy in Senegal, those born
in towns were classified as French citizens while those born
elsewhere were classified as indigenes, therefore inferior.
 Two trends emerged in African writing at the time.
 The first was writing by Africans educated at home.
 Some of these writers tried to write both prose and verse, e.g. Jean-
Joseph Ribearivelo (Madacascar) and published in newspapers. In
Nigeria, such newspapers and magazines as The African
Messenger, The Nigerian Advocate, The Yoruba News, and The
Dawn served the purpose.

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 The Onitsha Literary Club formed by Namdi Azikiwe and others
created a circle of writers which encouraged members to write and
published in magazines that emerged for the purpose in Onitsha
market in Nigeria.
 That is what came to be referred to as Onitsha Market Literature.
 Satisfaction was mainly derived from the mere ability to express
oneself in the newly acquired colonial language (French/ English
etc.), hence originality was not the main objective of the writing.
 Satisfaction was derived from the merely imitating European
writers they had opportunity to be exposed to.
 The second trend emerged among Africans who returned from
studies in abroad started to become more available and noticeable.
 Such writing was clearer in its objection to colonial rule, which
they often represented as an insult to African identity and dignity.
 Whereas Anglophone and Francophone writers generally showed
hostility towards colonial occupation, the level of hostility was
arguably heightened in Francophone Africa.
 On the surface the French colonial policy was based on the ideals
of the French Revolution of 1789 of equality and brotherhood,
upon which modern France was founded. The colonial policy
recreated the French culture as the ideal and the height of
excellence.
 However, the Africans who went to school in France with the
promise that they were going to equal beneficiaries of those ideals
soon discovered the emptiness of the colonial policy that had
promised them a chance to become equal participants as citizens of
France.
 They soon saw through the dream of enjoying a cultural
brotherhood with fellow European intellectuals they had interacted
with at the universities in France.
 The discovery that their European colleagues were not prepared to
treat them as social and intellectual equals became a common bond

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among the black people from diverse backgrounds and continents
living in Paris, France.
 They soon started regarding themselves as negro exiles in France
rather than as citizens as they had been promised.
 It is this feeling that inspired Aime Cesaire from Martinique in the
Caribbean to write Return to My Native Land (1939), which
concretized the feeling of exclusion and the desire to embrace their
African/black identity that they had abandoned with the promise of
brotherhood and equality when at the time they had arrived in
Paris.
 That feeling of rejection inspired the others to follow suit and write
about the culture they had abandoned behind in Africa. That
movement that came out of this is what was called the Negritude
Movement and the writing that was inspired by it is the Negritude
writing or literature.
 The notable names behind the writing/movement are Leon Damas,
Aime Cesaire, Lepold Sedar Senghor, David Diop, Birago Diop,
etc.
 The term Negritude was coined by Cesaire in his book Return to
my Native Land as an ideology for those committed to the project
of the return to the native land through reaffirmation of the cultures
and traditions that they had abandoned with the promise of French
citizenship through embracing of the project of the black
personality and black culture that they once thought they had left
behind through acquisition of the French citizenship.
 These writers and Negritude ideologists started to deliberately
identify aspects of the black culture to admire and place on the
pedestal in their writing.
 They particularly started to identify what they considered as beauty
in African identity and culture to counter the racist devaluation of
the African experience and culture.

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African Fiction in African Languages
 Many critics of African literature consider literatures written in
African languages as ethnic literatures since they serve the interest
of the ethnic group that uses the language of the literature.
 Most novels written in African languages have not been accessible
to non-users of such languages unless the work is translated. Since
Africans have thousands of languages, it becomes more
appropriate using Western languages such as English, French and
Portuguese as the language of fiction in order to reach out to
millions of people with diverse language forms.
 Some critics of African literature believe that English Language is
an imperial language representing colonialism in all its facets.
 They assert that African writers should use their native languages
in writing literatures.
 When it looked as if there was no compromise in this direction,
most of the critics began to suggest the evolvement of an African
lingua franca.
 Some suggested Kiswahili while others suggested some other
language forms like Hausa, Yoruba and Acoli languages.
 Most of these critics undermined western audience for African
literatures because they believed that African novels are for the
consumption of African people alone.
 Many writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Okot
P’Bitek, Wole Soyinka amongst others practiced writing in their
native dialects but these have not yet yielded as wider acclaim as
their writing in English.
 The advocates of this theory believe that African fiction will truly
be identified as African if written in African languages and
expressing African ideas and philosophies.
African Fiction by Africans in the Diaspora

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 Many African writers write abroad. For sure, the society and
environment they write in influence them a lot.
 Many of these writers left the continent out of protest while some
left for economic reasons.
 Most of them write novels about the experiences of the western
world with nothing African in their writing because often the
African style, culture, environment and society are not reflected in
the stories.
 However, many African writers have also made impact even
though they wrote from outside Africa.
 Many of them were already known in Africa before they left the
African shores.
 We have such names as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa
Thiong’o, Ben Okri, Niyi Osundare, and recently Chimamanda
Adichie, Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans etc.

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