Africa's Literature Beyond Politics

Abstract

The literature of contemporary Africa is more than a response to the politics of Africa. It is an aspect of the political debate, of course, but it is also an intrinsically important element in the total African renaissance of our times. True, the earliest beginnings of literature in contemporary Africa are rooted in politics and political protest. (I exclude the African writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the simple reason that most of them did not see fiction, poetry or drama as possible vehicles for their anti-colonial and antislavery protests.)Négritude, the literary movement of the French African and Antillean deracine, was created as a literary response to European cultural imperialism (defined by Gallicism) Its prophets, Césaire of Martinique, Damas of Guyana, and L. S. Senghor of Sengal, expressed the anguish of their delirious alienation, frustration, protest against European culture, and against that romantic glorification of Africa, the Sartrean imaginary continent.