Survival Roads and Narrative Strategies: Some Comments on African Writing

Abstract

Summary This article attempts to highlight a few notable features of African writing which formulate themselves into survival and narrative strategies not only on the parts of fictional personages and milieus but also those of literary traditions, conventions, and the story‐tellers themselves. Different aspects of the landscape, such as the road, river, forest, etc., are often of metaphysical and aesthetic value in the writing, and these elements are handled in an exciting manner by romantic, realist and magic‐realist writers such as Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ben Okri. This article draws attention to some of the general trends by illustrating with specific examples from a few of the authors mentioned above and others.