BOOK REVIEW: Niyi Afolabi.The Golden Cage: Regeneration in Lusophone African Literature and Culture, Trenton: Africa World P, 2001.

Abstract

Scholarly studies of lusophone African literature in English are few and far between, which is why Niyi Afolabi's monograph should be welcomed. Its main claim to originality lies in the theoretical framework within which it analyzes the fiction of four writers: Luís Bernardo Honwana, Manuel Rui, Mia Couto, and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. To the theories of Freyre on Portuguese colonialism and Slotkin on the American frontier, Afolabi adds a Yoruba theoretical strand in his discussion of regeneration and degeneration as being intertwined concepts that somehow underlie the corpus of texts he has chosen, and which either focus on the deleterious effects of colonialism in Mozambique and Angola, or on the re-emergent societies in lusophone Africa after political independence in 1975.