Abstract
Language serves as a multifaceted tool in African literature, embodying cultural heritage, facilitating communication, and challenging colonial legacies. It often reflects the diversity of Africa’s linguistic landscape, incorporating indigenous languages alongside colonial tongues like English, French, and Portuguese. African writers employ language to preserve oral traditions, express cultural identities, and convey the complexities of post-colonial experiences. Moreover, language acts as a medium for resistance against hegemonic narratives, enabling writers to subvert stereotypes and reclaim narratives previously dominated by Western perspectives. Through linguistic innovation and experimentation, African literature continues to evolve, asserting its significance on the global literary stage while celebrating the richness of Africa’s linguistic heritage. This paper attempts to delineate the diverse paradigms that can emerge about the connotations of colonial African society, apartheid and its portrayal due to alternate discourses of language in texts. By examining the use of language as a tool in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) and Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days (1953), this paper delineates how language can portray the same story with different levels of consciousness.
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