African Literature In English Research Articles

Stylising agency, identity and solidarities in South African English language classrooms

In a call for papers, the English Academy of Southern Africa (EASA) problematises what we perceive as the challenges of stylising agency, identity and solidarities in South African literature in English and English Language classroom encounters. The academy argues that speaking of literature and literacy in a single breath is to take for granted a linear relationship between literature and literacy. In interrogating ways of reading, this article contends that such proficiency is itself unstable and shifting, subject to different contexts and approaches inasmuch as these diverse ways are contingent upon material and technological changes. Literacy is a contested term: while it denotes the ability to read and write, a more nuanced understanding recognizes its capacity to confer value and influence aesthetic judgment. Already implicit in such an understanding is the mutually reinforcing relation between literature and literacy: the cognitive skillset which enables us to read is constantly being modified by what we read, and by the material forms which our reading takes. The entanglement of literature and literacy is embedded in cultures, compelling us to ask how particular teachers, writers and critical literary approaches shape our reading practices, our ways of seeing. The same entanglement generates questions about social justice, access to education, and material affordances.

CHINESE TRANSLATION OF CULTURE-LOADED WORDS IN AFRICAN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ECO-TRANSLATOLOGY: A CASE STUDY OF GURNAH’S BY THE SEA

African English literature is the most influential branch of African literature, carrying the history, culture, and politics of African countries, so the translation research of culture-loaded words in African English literature is of great practical significance. This paper takes Eco-Translatology as the theoretical guide to analyzing the strategies and methods adopted by the Chinese translator of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea in the process of adaptation and selection of culture-loaded words in the three dimensions of language, culture, and communication, with a view to providing insights for translation studies in African English literature.

AFRICAN WOMEN’S QUEST FOR MOTHERHOOD IN FLORA NWAPA’S NOVELS EFURU AND IDU

The African classical tradition finds its development in African novel as African novels deals with variety of themes such as art, religion, apartheid, culture, tradition, ironies of life, colonial and post-colonial realities etc. African and Caribbean writing often celebrates black womanhood in a move towards a specifically African feminism. Mother is a person who nurtures and protects. African Literature in all ages celebrates motherhood and gives prime focus to motherhood in women’s’ life. Flora Nwapa, the Mother of female African Literature in English also treats motherhood as her main theme. Nwapa through her works portrays Igbo culture and Igbo Tradition. The lead characters in Efuru and Idu log for motherhood in their life and suffer in life because of it. Though successful in life in all other aspects they are considered incomplete because they are barren. Both the works deals with Motherhood and marriage as its prime focus and suffering of a woman and her quest for selfhood in the family and in society at large.

Resituating ‘African-language’ literatures in African literature: The case of BW Vilakazi

In this article, a concern is expressed about the marginal place of African literatures written in African languages in the field of African literary studies. The first fictional novel to be published in isiZulu by one of the most notable writers in South Africa, BW Vilakazi’s Noma Nini, is looked at. It is disturbing that the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958 is said to have marked the birth of African literature, while many African writers had been writing way before Achebe wrote his novel. However, not only is Vilakazi’s novel and others like it relegated to being inferior to the literature written in English, but they are excluded from the field of African literature, so that when one speaks of African literature, it is taken for granted that they are speaking about the literature written in English. It is argued that Vilakazi’s Noma Nini anticipated novels like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between, to mention just two novels of the so-called canons of African literature that engage with Africa’s encounter with the West. It is suggested that the literatures written in African languages are part of African literature as much as those written in English, and that if we have to qualify and add ‘African languages’ for novels like Noma Nini, then we need to qualify that Things Fall Apart is African literature in English.

The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership by M?koma wa Ng?g?

Reviewed by: The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership by Mũkoma Wa Ngũgĩ Abdelkader Ben Rhit The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership BY MŨKOMA WA NGŨGĨ U of Michigan P, 2018. 228 pp. ISBN 9780472053681 paper. The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership explores the identity of African literature or rather the lost identity of African literature. In this book, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ raises the question, “What is African literature?,” which he answers with “African literature is a question to itself.” (188) He strongly disagrees with the canonization by the writers who gathered in Kampala for the first Makerere African Writers Conference, dubbed the “Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” His book raises some pertinent questions regarding African literature’s unending battle with the language issue, which has been a matter of disagreement between Ngũgĩ’s father, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Chinua Achebe. Ngũgĩ argues that writing in African languages is a necessary step toward cultural identity and independence from centuries of European exploitation, and it is part and parcel of the project of decolonization. However, Achebe argues that African identity can be expressed through English, the colonizer’s language. Although the language question features prominently in The Rise of the African Novel, Ngũgĩ’s main argument is that African literature predates the Makerere generation. He takes issue with “the elision of earlier African writings such as the South African examples” (Cajetan 228) and the longstanding assumption—cultivated by publishers and literary critics over the decades—that the “African novel” began with the Makerere generation. This, Ngũgĩ believes, is the critical issue. “What does it mean for the African literary tradition when there is an absence of sustained critical readings of African writing before the Makerere writers?” (106). In his book, the younger Ngũgĩ reiterates the vital importance of writing African literatures in African languages because writing in English has contributed to the ascendancy of English and the thriving of African literature in English at the expense of literature written in African languages, like the earlier African writings from South Africa that Ngũgĩ highlights in his book. He states, “In The Rise of the African Novel I am exploring the question of why African literature means writing in European languages” (9). To this end, Ngũgĩ proposes the reconstruction of the history of the African novel, taking into consideration the writings of those who predated the Makerere generation. [End Page 209] The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. The introduction highlights the major issues to be discussed throughout the book, namely the identity of the African novel, the Makerere writers, and questions of language, identity, and ownership. In chapter one, “No Shrubbing in the English Metaphysical Empire, Please: A Question of Language,” Ngũgĩ explores the “various ways Makerere and post-Makerere African writers have responded to the language question in African writing” (26). In chapter two, “Amos Tutuola: Creating the African Literary Bogeyman,” Ngũgĩ considers the “aesthetic costs and opportunities of noninterventionist editing” (26). His analysis of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) reveals a poor command of English, arguing that editors did the author an injustice by leaving grammatical errors in the text. In chapter three, “Africa’s Missing Literary History: From A. C. Jordan’s Child of Two Worlds to NoViolet Bulawayo’s Fractured Multiple Worlds,” Ngũgĩ traces the genealogy of the African novel and African literary criticism beyond their conventional beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. He takes issue with critics who “chronicle African literature commencing from the “wrong literary epoch” (qtd. in Muchiri 1), showing that Africa’s body of fictional texts is enriched by reaching “back in time … and across space” (107). In chapter four, “Manufacturing the African Literary Canon: Costs and Opportunities,” he argues that the binary between what is literary and what is popular is “a false opposition” (154) because this has led to the canonization of the African political novel at the expense of other forms and genres in African writing. His creation...

Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity by Russell West-Pavlov

Reviewed by: Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity by Russell West-Pavlov Mahruba T. Mowtushi Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity BY RUSSELL WEST-PAVLOV Oxford UP, 2018. xix + 219 pp. ISBN 9780198745716 paper. Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity opens with the relentless rap rhythm of the Kenyan poet, journalist, and eponymous “literary gangster” Tony Mochama, whose work communicates a “politics of agency, community and connectiveness” (viii). For Russell West-Pavlov, Mochama’s gangster diction and performance exemplify what the book sets out to accomplish, called an “aesthetics of proximity,” by presenting a compelling diagnosis of the field of contemporary East African literary production. The book offers an exciting insight into East African literary and cultural history since at least the middle of the twentieth century by demonstrating a discerning command of the regional politics, identities, and (hi)stories extant in its literary landscape in English. In exploring how this literary landscape asserts a characteristic regional distinctiveness, the book invites us to appreciate the nuanced implications of “proximity” as an aesthetic category in “East African” writing in English. The book is divided into three parts that consider three definite but flexible understandings of the term “proximity” vis-à-vis East African literature in English. Each part is subdivided into three chapters. The first part, titled “Territories,” is devoted to the geopolitical categories of “Coast,” “Land,” and “Cities,” which interrogate how the region’s history and territorial immediacy have generated rich narratives of proximity. Land, ocean, and metropolises have been central literary issues in the region’s historical engagements with cartographic histories and post/modernist mappings of colonial cities and littoral zones. From looking at geopolitical proximities in part one, part two of the book, aptly titled, “Histories,” delineates the proximity of historical pasts and the various usages of the past in East African writings. [End Page 218] The second part is chronologically arranged around chapters that survey “Precolonial,” “Colonial,” and “Postcolonial Histories.” In particular, the chapter on “Colonial Histories” offers a compelling read on how anticolonial conflicts like the Maji-Maji Revolution and the Mau-Mau Rebellion, as well as post-independent nationalist projects, are variously appropriated in the fiction of the region to render these “usefully proximate to a post-independent national narrative” (xiii). The spatial and temporal renderings of proximity in parts one and two of the book pave the way for communal and relational proximities in part three. The third part, called “Communities,” calls attention to three axes of proximity by considering the role of “Gender,” cross-border “Migratory Identities,” and the trans-regional space of “Eastern Africa in the Global South” in its discussion of the region’s literary production. The chapter on “Gender” is especially illuminating for its attention to East African women’s generative agency explored through the fictional depictions of the topoi of feminist consciousness, sexuality, and maternal reproduction. The discussion revisits the much-debated issue of female circumcision (also labeled “genital mutilation” by its critics) as a signifier of the region’s patriarchal control through the works of Rebeka Njau, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Nuruddin Farah. However, it is the chapter’s exploration of African masculinities, the regenerative possibilities inherent in East African feminine selfhoods, and LGBT self-assertions stressed by Susan Kiguli and other women writers that offer innovative and alternative forms of proximate selves evident in the region’s literary experimentations. Correspondingly, the chapter on migration is commendable for its evaluation of intra-regional migration and the movement of multi-ethnic peoples, as opposed to oceanic and intercontinental voyage that is nonetheless a crucial vector of the region’s historiography. If there is a critique to be made of West-Pavlov’s indispensable study, it is that it neglects to mention the role played by Asian-Ugandans, such as the poet and editor of Transition magazine, Rajat Neogy (1938–95), in the development of the region’s literary consciousness in the 1960s. As pointed out by Transition’s later editors, Anthony Appiah et al., in the aftermath of independence in Africa, intellectuals found Neogy’s magazine a powerfully provocative and stimulating platform from which to debate literary, artistic, and political issues of...

Educational Practices on Ethnic-racial Relations and the English Language Teaching through Image and Literature in an EFL Classroom

The article analyzes the unfoldings of the teaching project Introducing Literatures in English, held in 2018 at the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo (IFES), based in Alegre-ES, Brazil. The project aimed at promoting the improvement of reading, writing and speaking skills of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, departing from African Literature in English and photography, so that they had the opportunity to improve their language skills while developing a broader discussion on Africa’s ethnic-cultural and linguistic diversity, building a viewpoint about the African continent less tied to colonialism, slavery, apartheid and victimization.For reading and written analyses, the students took into consideration the photo-book Another Africa (1998), with photographs by Robert Lyons and poems by Chinua Achebe (1930-2013). Based on the poems and photographs brought to light in Another Africa, I analyzed 1) the students’ multimodal reading process, by connecting images generated by poems and photographs and written and oral texts the students produced around them; 2) the students’ reception of the poems, considering Achebe’s constant use of code-switching and 3) the construction of new viewpoints around Africa elaborated by the students, bearing in mind the importance of the role of language, memory and history, oral and literary traditions when it comes to African writers and a new perspective concerning the colonial legacy and its impact on English language.

Cavafy, Vos, Dangor: A belated reply to Phil van Schalkwyk

The influence of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantin Cavafy on South African literature in English has received some attention, but his impact on Afrikaans letters merits further investigation. The present article partly fills that gap by examining a small body of poetry and fiction by Cas Vos and Achmat Dangor. It draws on an article by Phil van Schalkwyk to show what it might mean to write in the manner of Cavafy. Thereafter, it discusses Vos’s translations into Standard Afrikaans within his context. Achmat Dangor wrote his Cavafian poetry in a Vernacular Afrikaans. The article considers how writers and poets such as Mark Twain, David Dabydeen, Richard Rive and Adam Small have responded to the challenges and implications of writing in non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans. Because irony and parody characterise Dangor’s initial debt to Cavafy, this piece also considers these devices. It then moves to a detailed analysis of the relevant poems by Dangor, including comparisons with the poems by Cavafy they evoke, and then to work by Dangor on Cavafy in Standard English in which he reflects on why Cavafy has influenced him. It argues that Dangor discarded a literary vernacular medium for Standard English because of the former’s implicit distinction between ‘ordinary’ (inarticulate, authentic) and ‘extra-ordinary’ (articulate, unauthentic) patois speakers. It concludes that Dangor’s switch to Standard English may have resolved a personal dilemma, but leaves unanswered many questions about the literary use of a patois.

Heinemann African Writers Series

From its launch in 1962, the African Writers Series (AWS) enabled the dissemination of African literature worldwide and contributed to the creation of a critical sensitivity among readers and critics alike to its distinct qualities and values. It is difficult to imagine the existence of a solid ‘tradition’ of African literature in English without the African Writers Series. What is more, Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) made it possible for African authors writing in Arabic or French to be part of a larger literary phenomenon. The works varied from creative to biographical writings and echoed the rich multilingual and multicultural African voices then in the making. This article seeks to shed light on various aspects of publishing the AWS. It offers a survey of the rise and development of the series and the crisis that eventually befell it.

A Colonial Affair: Heinemann Educational Books and the African Market

This article attempts to provide historical explanations for the role which Heinemann Educational Books (henceforth HEB) played in the emergence of an African literature in English. Whereas the reluctance of British companies to publish for Africa was in a large measure determined, albeit indirectly, by contemporary colonial policies and interests, the open, wholehearted encouragement of African writings in the 1960s and 1970s suggests a radical shift in the attitudes of British publishers. This shift arguably occurred at a time when the entire publishing industry in England witnessed a profound readjustment following the war years. Yet, more importantly, the full-scale ‘decolonization’ process in Africa, as in the rest of the empire, forced British publishers, such as HEB, to adopt new strategies to keep their businesses going in Africa. This article seeks to shed light on Alan Hill as the architect of HEB and his publishing projects in the African continent.

Magical Realism Revisited: The Intimate Relationship between Reality and Fantasy in African Literature in English

Magical realism as an artistic genre has been specified principally as a literary genre in its development. It is generally thought to have originated in South American folklore and literary writing, but this is a creative style that is quintessentially African. Defying a neat definition, magical realism is understood in this article as about human beings interacting with their environment. Characterised by elements of the fantastic woven into a narrative with a sense of presentation, magical realism is controversial. The controversy ranges from political undertones where critics have thought the term a postcolonial label employed by colonisers to marginalise the fiction of the colonised to express alterity. In African oral literature, magical realism is a genre that has serves to reveal the intimate relationship between reality and fantasy. The focus in this article is therefore on the use of magical realism as a device in selected African literary works in English to show that this device is not only employed by third world writers to cover up their lack of artistic merit, but also to instill cultural values and norms. The intention is also to indicate the often subordinated grandeur of African oral and literary classics.

Indigeneity in modernity. The cases of Kgebetli Moele and Niq Mhlongo

The study of South African English literature written by black people in the postapartheid period has focused, among others, on the so-called Hillbrow novels of Phaswane Mpe and Niq Mhlongo, and narratives such as Kgebetli Moele's Book of the Dead (2009) set in Pretoria. A number of studies show how the fiction of these writers handles black concerns that some critics believe to have replaced a thematic preoccupation with apartheid, as soon as political freedom was attained in 1994. However, adequate analyses are yet to be made of works produced by some of these black writers in their more rounded scrutiny of the first decade of democracy, apart from what one may describe as an indigenous/traditional weaning from preoccupation with the theme of apartheid. This study intends to fill this gap, as well as examine how such a richer social commentary is refracted in its imaginative critique of South African democratic life beyond its first decade of existence. I consider Mhlongo's novels Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007); together with Moele's narratives reflecting on the same epoch Room 207 (2006) and The Book of the Dead (2009). For the portrayal of black lives after ten years of democracy, I unpack the discursive content of Mhlongo's and Moele's novels Way Back Home (2013) and Untitled (2013) respectively. I probe new ways in which these postapartheid writers critique the new living conditions of blacks in their novelistic discourses. I argue that their evolving approaches interrogate literary imaginaries, presumed modernities and visions on socio-political freedom of a postapartheid South Africa, in ways deserving critical attention.  I demonstrate how Moele and Mhlongo in their novels progressively assert a self-determining indigeneity in a postapartheid modernity unfolding in the context of some pertinent discursive views around ideas such as colourblindness and transnationalism. I show how the discourses of the author's novels enable a comparison both their individual handling of the concepts of persisting institutional racism and the hegemonic silencing of white privilege; and distinguishable ways in which each of the two authors grapples with such issues in their fiction depicting black conditions in the first decade of South African democratic rule, differently from the way they do with portrayals of the socio-economic challenges faced by black people beyond the first ten years of South African democracy.

Lateral texts and circuits of value: Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Wer pa Lawino

African writers are increasingly producing literary texts that appear almost simultaneously in two languages – an indigenous African language and English. One of these texts is often considered a translation while the other is said to be the original. As Harry Garuba has argued, this model does not adequately capture the relationship between these texts for several reasons, not least of all because this conventional description assumes a vertical relationship between the original and translation. To adequately deal with texts such as Song of Lawino and Wer per Lawino, we need to work with a model of lateral textuality that recognises each text as being inserted into a specific circuit of value that may not be identical with the circuit of value through which the other travels. Taking the idea of lateral textuality and Gikandi’s identification of the different value accorded to Song of Lawino in East African literature in English in relation to the value accorded to Wer per Lawino within the tradition of “African writing in African languages,” as our point of departure, this paper explores the different circuits of value in which these two texts have been inserted and the manner in which they have acquired value with each of them.

Post-apartheid transnationalism in black South African literature: a reality or a fallacy?

The quest of this paper is to probe whether globalising post-nationalism impacts on post- apartheid black South African English literature in a manner that suggests a blurring of distinctive African identities. This is done against the background that black South African literature right from its written beginnings in the early 19th century has coalesced into a taxonomically distinct entity forming a non-negligible component of South African literature written in English. I first analyse two post-apartheid novels written by the black writers Niq Mhlongo (Dog Eat Dog, 2004) and Sindiwe Magona (Beauty’s Gift, 2008). Secondly, I consider three post-apartheid novels by the black writers Phaswane Mpe (Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 2001), Kgebetli Moele (Room 207, 2009) and Kopano Matlwa (Coconut, 2007). I approach an examination of the five post-apartheid novels by separating them into two categories, as a way of indicating that black South African literature of this era remains as stylistically varied as that of earlier periods, albeit broadly within a mould continuing to characterise it as black. In order to justify an underlying common allegiance to localised identity cutting across the two categories in which I place these five post-apartheid novels, evidence of such a pervasively black feature is explained inter-categorically, even as intra-categorical affinities are demonstrated. I trace these two levels of typology within the conceptual framework of two main groups of theorists. The first group consists of commentators such as Carrol Clarkson in her assertion that the identity of black Africans in the post-apartheid era as portrayed in the fiction of writers such as Phaswane Mpe is such that “educated and urbanised individuals should no longer identify” with and share beliefs having to do with African identity and “a common and accountable response to that which the community represents.” The attitude of these critics has led to Leon de Kock seeing both black and white post-apartheid literature warranting interpretation with a “sense of a post-national configuration—indeed, now a transnational constellation.” I demonstrate in this paper that post-apartheid fiction written by blacks not only defies theorists’ subordination of imaginative writers’ centrality in social discourse, but goes further specifically to chafe against normative characterisation as transnational. The second main category constituting the theoretical matrix within which I examine the discourses of the five selected novels includes theorists such as Rob Gaylard, in his observation that Es’kia Mphahlele “can be seen as the founder of a tradition of black writing that runs through writers like Miriam Tlali, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda to Phaswane Mpe,” with the thread splicing them together being a grounding of these authors’ writings in the philosophy or worldview of Afrikan Humanism.

Oral literature and the evolving Jim-goes-to-town motif: Some early Northern Sotho compared to selected post-apartheid novels written in English

The continuation of the discourses of apartheid era African language literature characterised by the makgoweng motif in post-apartheid English literature written by black people has not been studied adequately. In this study I explored ways in which characters of Northern Sotho linguistic and cultural groups represented the same consciousness in both categories of novels across time. I used the qualitative method and analysed some Northern Sotho primary texts, written before democracy in South Africa, as well as selected post-apartheid English novels written by black people. I focused on the mokgoweng motif to examine the nature of continuity in theme and outlook. I found that the novels considered pointed to a sustainable consciousness, transcending linguistic boundaries and time. The social function of such characterisation representing the formerly oppressed black people, is a revelation of their quest towards selfdefinition in a modern world. The portrayed characters significantly point to resilience among black people to appropriate modernity by making sense of the world in a manner sustaining their distinctive outlook. In this way, the Northern Sotho-speaking cultural groups display a consistent consciousness enabling them to manage properly their adaptation to an evolving modern or globalising environment across time. The implication was that a comparison of South African English literature written by black people with indigenous language literature enriched the study of black South African English literature.

Achieved Professionalism: <i>The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English and The Cambridge History of South African Literature*</i>

On May 31 1910, Professor John Purves of the Transvaal University College in Pretoria would use the coming into being of the Union of South Africa as an occasion to address South African literature, treating his subject with a mixture of regard and regret. literature of South Africa, he observed, not yet attained, like that of Canada and Australia to the dignity of a formal history. The number of books published yearly in the four Provinces of the Union form a paltry and inconsiderable total compared with the records of the other Dominions, and South Africa cannot yet be said to have developed a literary consciousness. Yet the books that have come out of South Africa and the books South Africa has inspired are neither few nor wholly insignificant, while the literary associations of the great sub-continent are probably richer than those of any other of the great Colonial territories (South African Cape Times, Commemorative Number, 31 May 1910, qtd. in Gray English South African Literature, 6).

By Way of an Introduction: A Memoir of Douglas Livingstone

My own campaign to advertise the interest of Douglas Livingstone's poetry, and by extension the value of contemporaneous South African English literature, involved me in a long, rewarding haul and the resultant fervent friendship. My Douglas Livingstone collection I have deposited with the Humanities Research Center at the Austin campus of the University of Texas, where it has joined their holdings like those of British periodicals such as the archives of London Magazine. It includes the typescript of an unpublished play called The Crusaders, as well as two revised texts of his radio drama, Sea My Winding Sheet (which became one of the five playscripts in Theatre One, the anthology of New South African Drama, which I edited for Ad. Donker in 1978, though the collection was carried by Herman Charles Bosman's long-lost Street-woman, and then current stage-plays by Fatima Dike, Athol Fugard and Pieter-Dirk Uys). There is the typescript of the much corrected foreword he had written for my debut slim volume, It's About Time of 1974, justifying his selection for the Mantis Poets series. One of the poems I submitted to him and rather liked had to go extinct like its subject, the Blue Whale, because he would let through no superficial double entendres which he reckoned I might later regret. Also included were various talks he had passed on. correspondence part of the collection, comprised mainly of letters in his characteristic inky scrawl, with a few postcards and notes covering the period of over two decades, runs to more than ninety items.

“[T]he origin of Charles:” Robert Semple’s Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope (1803)

This article examines Robert Semple’s Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope (1803), a largely forgotten early colonial text which intriguingly blends the genres of travel writing and the sentimental novel. My analysis seeks to place the text within the longer genealogies of South African literature in English by arguing that it anticipates a number of the central concerns this literature, among them sympathy for the suffering of others, the representation of racial and social difference, and the fracturing of metropolitan literary protocols in the colonial context.

Ben Okri’s The Famished Road in the Context of Post-War West African Literature in English

On publication in 1991 Ben Okri's 'The Famished Road' was considered as a new departure in West African Anglophone fiction. This paper will seek to establish the novelty of the work by relating it to the literary and socio-political context out of which it emerged. This will lead to an examination of the evolution of the African writer's role against the swiftly evolving and increasingly conflictual background of contemporary postcolonial studies.

The Afterlife of Oyono's Houseboy in the Swahili Schools Market: To Be or Not to Be Faithful to the Original

Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).