Literatures in West African Languages

Abstract

As suggested in Chapter 1, the choice of a script has always been somehow linked with the broader problems of cultural, ideological and religious affinities in Black Africa, as elsewhere. It appears, however, highly probable that these affinities operate to some extent in one direction only; whereas the choice of the script is always linked to the above-mentioned factors, the importance of these factors in the sphere of literacy and literature is by no means limited to the texts written in the script connected with the respective culture or ideology. One might find sufficient evidence of a certain interaction between the cultural and ideological systems, which extend their influence far beyond the formal (and always superficial) limits of the graphical form of the particular literacy. The more a particular literacy develops towards literature in the true sense, the less is it apparently culturally restricted by its respective origin and the limits of the script connected with it. From this standpoint, the relationship between literacy and literature in the various languages of West Africa provides a certain paradox. Though graphically unimportant or certainly less important, the local, pre-Islamic and pre-colonial cultural traditions appear to have influenced all types of literacies and literatures in that area. The other two types of literacy (i.e. those in the Arabic and Latin scripts), though culturally and ideologically heavily influenced by their original, external roots, have actually been transformed through a gradual process of adaptation towards West African “oral civilizations” (the term is used in this sense by M. Houis, 1967, p. 279).