Abstract
Being interested in African literature one seems to swim from the very beginning in a terminological maelstrom. What is African literature? Is it literature written by any African author in any language? That would mean approaching the question from a purely racial basis. It would imply the art of demonstrating that any piece of such literature could infallibly be recognised as African, a thing which, as far as I know has never been done. Or is African literature strictly bound to traditional African culture?
Highlights
Being interested in African literature one seems to swim from the very beginning in a terminological maelstrom
Jahn thought in terms of race when he excluded from the range of African literature African Whites such as the Afrikaners, but included South African Coloured writers
Jahn’s starting point was the litera ture of the American and West Indian Negro. From there he looked to Africa in much the same way as the poets of the Negritude had done, and he tried to standardise African literature according to a scheme of cultural values — “ Wertkategorien” — taken from Alexis Kagame’s Bantu philosophy and from the linguistic structure, that is to say, the noun clas ses of Bantu languages
Summary
Being interested in African literature one seems to swim from the very beginning in a terminological maelstrom. Is it literature written by any African author in any language?
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