African Novels Research Articles

Examining the Contribution of Selected African Novels to the Naming Rites

In the African context, a new-born baby receives his or her names during the naming ceremony. After receiving all the names, these names play a very important role in the existence of an African family. But with colonization, the way Africans received names has drastically changed because of the interference of the new cultures that were brought by the colonizers. One of the main factors that are part of the changes is Christianity. It is this regard that African writers in the quest of African dignity try to depict through the various novels in this article in which circumstances names are given, and how the naming ceremonies are affected with colonization until in this era of Globalization. These naming ceremonies have great importance in the existence of Africans and that is why they have been painted vividly in African literature.

The African Human Rights Perspectives Through the Lense of Oral Narratives

Human rights existed in African tradition for societal order and for community responsibility of success and failures. People enjoyed freedom and preserved freedom according to community beliefs and customs. Advocacy was expressed through singing, drama, storytelling and assignment of roles based on age gender and ability. This paper unfolds human rights advocacy oral narratives. Hausa dated as far as BC 14th or 15th Century Arabic writing with the first poets Ibn al- Sabbagh and Muhammadual- Barnawi, other writers of the time were Abdullahi Sikka and Shekh Jibril ibn Umar. The first novels written in Hausa were the result of a competition launched in 1933 by the Translation Bureau in northern Nigeria. One year later the bureau published Muhammadu Bello’s Gandoki, in which its hero, Gandoki, struggles against the British colonial regime. Bello does in Gandoki what many writers were doing in other parts of Africa during this period: he experiments with form and content. His novel blends the Hausa oral tradition and the novel, resulting in a story patterned on the heroic cycle; it also introduces a strong thread of Islamic history. Didactic elements, however, were awkwardly interposed and severely dilute Gandoki’s aesthetic content (as often happened in other similarly experimental African novels). But Bello’s efforts would eventually give rise to a more sophisticated tradition of novel writing in Hausa. His experimentation found its most successful expression in Amos Tutola’s English-language novel The Palm-Wine Drunkard (1952). The Oral narratives understudy Include: Falsehood is More Profitable than Truth (translated from Hausa) One cannot Help an Unlucky Man (translated from Hausa) Wacici and her Friends (translated from Kikuyu). The selected oral narratives experiences displayed injustice of belief in telling lies and trickery, jealousy against the natural beauty and the bad lack aspect due to ignorance and inability to make right judgment for personal benefit. The study was aimed at unfolding antisocial behaviour that existed in in Africa as portrayed in the selected oral narratives. The expression of reaction and action taken to bring social order were represented in the Hausa selected narratives. The study used qualitative method and textual analysis to arrive at the injustice and measures used to condemn injustice as a means to preserve social order

The permeable reader: queer metalepsis and the novels of Barbara Trapido

ABSTRACT This article considers how contemporary women’s writing manipulates the novel form in order to represent reading and its effects. I propose that specific novels represent a potential permeability of readers – a latent capacity for an ambiguous yet hyperbolic overwhelming or undoing through reading. Focusing on work by Barbara Trapido, a UK-based South African novelist, I argue that such keen effects of reading are represented through transgressions of narrative boundaries, which are in turn tied to acts of reading linked to sexuality and gender. In order to make these arguments, I draw on and develop Michael Lucey’s concept of ‘queer metalepsis’, which involves a blurring of narrative levels that results from modes of queer reading in and of literary texts. In my development of the concept, queer metalepsis not only raises questions of how writing can represent the impacts of reading, but also questions of how – as readers and as literary critics – we approach our own responses to texts. I consider the variously theorised ‘inappropriate’, ‘attached’, ‘bad’, or ‘too close’ acts of reading celebrated in queer literary criticism and query my own attachments to Trapido’s novels throughout my analysis. The article seeks, finally, to emphasise reading as connective, and argue for the value of generous, invested acts of interpretation.

Modernity as Disruption to Nature, People, and Culture in Things Fall Apart, Burung Kayu, and Isinga

Environmental degradation has become an important issue in the 21st century. Environmental destruction has never been free from exploitation, oppression, and marginalization. Through Indonesian and African novels Burung Kayu, Isinga, and Things Fall Apart, this paper attempts to reveal two research questions; first, how people, nature, and culture are interconnected with each other in the three novels, and second, how modernity becomes a disruption to the Mentawai, Aitubu, and Igbo. By comparing and contrasting the three novels, this paper uses library research. The research questions will be revealed through descriptive qualitative data. The approach used to analyze is postcolonial ecocriticism. The findings of the research are two. First, there is a connectedness of nature and people of the three communities manifested in ritual tradition, livelihood, social systems and values, and land ownership system. Second, the power dominance of the First World toward the Third World through modernity results in environmental destruction and cultural disruptions of the Mentawai, Aitubu, and Igbo indigenous. Humans are inseparable from living with other communities and over time, they will experience modernity. However, not all forms of modernity fit for a community. Therefore, they have two choices regarding modernity: to reject or accept it.

The Arrival from Abroad: Train Travel and Mobile Ideas of Race in Pre-Apartheid South African Literature

ABSTRACT This article identifies and explores an inciting incident in two pre-apartheid South African novels: the trope of an ‘arrival from abroad’. This trope centres on a character arriving by train from a place figured as foreign, whether that is Cape Town or London, to the rural South African setting of the story, bringing ideas of interracial togetherness with them that challenge local racial hierarchizations. Two novels are used as case studies, one from the beginning of the 20th century – Perceval Gibbon’s Margaret Harding (1911) – and one written on the eve of apartheid – Peter Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder (1948). The traveller from abroad is either a black South African who has been educated in Europe or Cape Town and arrives home to effect change, or the traveller is a white character from Europe whose values are pitted against those of white South Africans. In both cases, the ‘arrival from abroad’ is a destabilizing force to the local community, bringing often unwelcome ideas from outside. Together, Gibbon’s and Abrahams’s novels allow me to explore the interrelations between the mobility of ideas from one place to another, ideologies of race, the figure of the outsider, and train travel in South African literature from the first half of the 20th century. Comparing Gibbon and Abrahams enables me to trace differences and continuities over time and in diverse uses of the trope. This article argues that the ‘arrival from abroad’ trope is used to embody a notion of mobile ideas at a time when trains served to shift both goods and people to radical effect on society.

The Child Protagonist: Children’s Agency in International Children’s Rights Law and in Four Francophone African Novels

In this article, I explore how the contested notion of children’s agency is represented in international children’s rights law and in four novels by francophone African authors. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child establish children as rights holding subjects within a framework of adult care, while the fictional texts position children as protagonists, deprived of adult protection amid conflict and social upheaval. In both, children are understood as acting and acted upon, forming and formed by their environment. Through the utopian vision of children’s rights law and the damaged child narratives of the fictional texts, children’s agency can be read as a critique of adult society. At the same time, children are recognized as active participants in history, their choices and actions, however determined, shaping their own future selves and society.

Otherization and Identity Distortion in Dangarembga’s Writing

In spite of the fact that most African novelists, penning stories in English language by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, were graduates of the British colonial missionaries and universities, they had yet been able to escape the suppressive ideology of colonization and become genuine mouthpieces for their native communities’ struggles and adversity. Amongst whom, the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga rose to the fore as representative of her fellow countrywomen during the British colonization. Henceforth, concomitant with the rise of postcolonial criticism in the literary arena, this paper aims to address the European colonial mechanism of otherization and its impact on the identity construction of the otherized subject in Dangarembga’s novels, Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. Dangarembga foreshadows the main thematic realm of her semi-autobiographical trilogy, through her first novel’s title which is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s preface in the book of The Wretched of the Earth. To unravel the intricate complexities of the colonizer/colonized contact, this study pinpoints the psychological confusion of the protagonist, Tambuzdai, as an exemplar of the colonized Black individual’s distress. To fathom the depth of Tambu’s psyche during those encounters, this paper relies on Elke Boehmer’s attribution of otherization as a Western self-projecting process that seeks to produce self-soothing and “dark mirror-images” of the other. In addition, Du Bois’s analysis of double consciousness seems to account for the protagonist’s identity crisis and self alienation. In conclusion, Dangarembga does not seem as an opponent of cultural exchanges in general or hybridity in particular, but she simply advocates cautious adaption that does not decentre and disregard one’s native-ness and cultural origins.

Writing AIDS, Deconstructing Politicized Discourses on the Body: AIDS in Post-apartheid South African Novels by Mpe and Mhlongo

Writing AIDS, Deconstructing Politicized Discourses on the Body: AIDS in Post-apartheid South African Novels by Mpe and Mhlongo

Political Push Factors of African-Western Migration as Depicted in Selected African Novels

This article looks at political factors in African countries that are pushing Africans to move to Western countries in search of greener pastures, as they are demonstrated in African novels. The novels to be considered for this discourse are Dirie and Miller’s Desert Flower, Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Cole’s Open City. While the discussion is on political issues pushing Africans to Western countries, when and where necessary, reference will be made to emigration to other countries, even within the Africa continent as well. The concepts of push factors, politics and African-Western migration are defined as part of the introductory section of this discourse. The subheadings of this discourse are introduction, analysis, and conclusion.

Revolutionist’s View of African Fiction as a Protest Literature: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat

Protest in African literature developed out of the misrule, marginalisation, exploitation, deprivation, forced labour, slavery, and subjugation perpetrated by inept, colonialist and neo-colonialist governments in Africa. In South Africa, it is a protest against apartheid;in East Africa, it is a protest against colonial domination of the land; and in West Africa, the protest is centred on the marginalisation and subjugation of the natives by the British colonialists. Aside from these, there is a general protest that spreads the entire continent against blacks’ inhumanity to fellow blacks at the corridor of power – the neocolonialist forces. Hence, there is the African struggle for decolonisation in African novels as evidenced in A Grain of Wheat. Therefore, this paper explores the elements that constitute protest in the novel. In its findings, it is discovered that characteristics such as environment, socio-political, religious and cultural situations prevalent in Africa are the factors that necessitated protest in the novel and African literature generally. This paper concludes that the protest in A Grain of Wheat is a struggle for decolonisation of an African Nation – Kenya and by extension the African continent. The paper recommends the sustenance of the commitment (which has made African fiction a protest literature) of African writers towards liberating African nations from the shackles of neo-colonialism in the 21st century.

A Study Of Health Consequences Due To ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ In African Novels With Special Reference To Abraham Verghese’s Cutting For Stone And Alice Walker’s Possessing The Secrets Of Joy

The nations should be put to an interrogation whether women in their provinces are surviving safe? The discursive readings will fail to deny the fact that women in each nation have always been considered secondary or being subjugated by several modes. The existence of women has been restrained by the male strategists who exploit them to imposing the prerogative of their dominion and masculinity. Masculinity does not believe in mere exploiting women, it also imposes upon women to represent themselves as commodities to be served to men, be it to getting their genitals circumcised to prove that they are ‘untouched’ and ‘virgins’. Female Genital Mutilation is a long- existing brutal practice which forces women to undergo their genital mutilation at their early ages. They are asked to get their genitals circumcised because it is an obligatory practice imposed by the supercilious imaginary customs of the males, in most of the communities. To understand the condition of women in this context, this paper analyzes the African history of enforcing the native women to undergo their genital mutilation (FGM), as being made as mandatory. To understand this locus, this paper dwells in the reading of the historical process of the female genital mutilation (FGM) being practiced worldwide, especially in Africa. To bring light in a more concentrating manner, the paper reads Abraham Verghese’s first novel Cutting for Stone (2009) that is almost set in Ethiopia during the 1960s and the 70s and Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Besides, many other African novels are also discussed in brief.

Towards an Inclusive Society: De-Centering Heteronormativity in Tendai Huchu’s the Hairdresser of Harare and Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

The portrayal of queer sexuality in African literature is something that is getting more and more attention, as a way of highlighting what happens in various societies in the world. This paper explores the portrayal of queer individuals in two African novels: Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare and Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. Having observed that in the two novels queer individuals are forced to mask their sexuality and adopt heteronormative public personae in order to fit into mainstream society, this paper observes the two authors have used diaries and letters to accord agency to their repressed queer characters. The paper argues that diaristic and epistolary writing, in which individuals of queer sexuality reveal their intimate feelings for each other, are strong tools which the authors have used to accord agency to their repressed queer characters. The paper also uses Andy Alaszewski’s idea of “social suffering versus the diary.” Alaszewski (2006) observes that diaries provide a way of avoiding some of the moral dilemmas created when researchers solicit narratives of suffering and represent accounts which contextualize suffering within a personal biography. This study also observes the authors’ representation of heterosexual characters who accept the presence of queer individuals in their societies. It is in this line that this paper argues that the two authors offer a glimpse into a possibility of an inclusive society which accommodates people’s sexualities that are considered non-normative.

Bleeding Stubs and the Evolution of African Writing: Navigating Standard English and Uncertain Linguistic Futures

Several African novels and short stories have been analysed linguistically. The authors of those analytical articles found that some of the stories employed the linguistic style set by the authors Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa. A major characteristic of this writing style is the use of African English or a blend with standard English. Language evolves regionally, so for this article, standard English refers to any English used by the VOA, BBC, British Royal Family, or even Brits in a pub, including UK and US slang relevant to the novel’s setting. It excludes English spoken by learners. The researcher considers this definition broad and lenient. African English refers to varieties of the English language spoken and written across Africa, often influenced by local languages and cultures, resulting in unique expressions and idiomatic usage. It encompasses different forms, including Nigerian English, Kenyan English and South African English, reflecting the diverse linguistic landscape of the continent. African literary researchers often show a strong interest in novels written in African English because these works reflect the linguistic diversity, cultural identity, and lived experiences of African communities. Nevertheless, many African authors write in Standard English. The academic discussion reveals that the debate on language choice in African literature is ongoing. This paper provides an overview of the English styles used by African authors and highlights the uncertainty regarding the future of African literature due to a lack of credible sources on current trends. The paper then analyses the style of African works in standard English alongside African English. For the purposes of this article, the researcher chooses Donald Besong’s Bleeding Stubs, which has not been analysed previously, to represent standard English works. The selection of Bleeding Stubs is based on its brevity, recent publication, and its setting in Cameroon—a country with limited representation in fiction. The paper concludes that the preferred language style for African authors remains fluid. Finally, it recommends fostering improved reading habits on the continent, encouraging greater engagement with the global reading community. This would lead to better career progression in various fields, create more internationally marketable writers, and enable them to use their incomes to support the development of African languages, reducing the reliance on English for expressing African pride.

The discourse of ecological proximity in The Famished Road and Wizard of the Crow: A postcolonial ecocritical analysis

This study explicates the discourse of ecological proximity embedded in two postcolonial African novels. It employed ecocritical theory informed by posthumanism, ‘aesthetics of proximity’ (Iheka, 2018) and postcolonial ecocriticism as critical venture to undertake analysis. The novels targeted in the study, The Famished Road, and Wizard of the Crow, were purposely selected owing to their thematic preoccupation and stylistic convergence pertinent to proximity of ecological entities. The study reveals that both novels present discourses that critique hierarchy in the relationship among ecological entities and promote harmonious interaction. The proximity discourses are revealed through foregrounding ecological diversity in portrayal of settings, depicting harmony in interspecies interaction, conferring power of agency to the nonhuman entities, and through blurring anthropocentric boundaries. Through distributing agency to non-human nature and endowing human figures the capacity to step out of anthropocentric confines, the novelists have foregrounded a discourse of proximity among ecological entities in their narratives.

Figurations of Returning to the Community in Léonora Miano’s African Novels

Abstract This article examines figurations of returning to the community in two of Léonora Miano’s novels. These novels offer an opportunity to broaden the notion of returning to community that, in philosophical debates, tends to be essentialist and abstract. In Les aubes écarlates and La saison de l’ombre, two clans find themselves confronted with the abduction of community members who become child soldiers or slaves. The physical or spiritual return of those abductees to their communities is at the core of the novels, and it is closely linked to questions of memory. Understanding the dynamics of return as a figuration—both in the literary sense and in Norbert Elias’s process sociology sense—helps us look at the concrete interactions that make up a community. This article analyzes the physical, mnemonic, and spiritual dimensions of returning to community and looks at the significance of inventing new rituals and forms of community.

The Difficulty of Reintegration: Examining the Child Soldier’s Post-War Life in Selected African Novels

Many research works on the child soldier phenomenon seem to focus largely on the war-time experiences of the child soldier. Consequently, great attention is given to the life of the child soldier during the war. This paper, through qualitative content analysis and the trauma theory (Cathy Caruth’s concept of belatedness and Dominick LaCapra’s concept of acting-out) pays particular attention to the child soldier’s life after the war and his preparedness towards reintegration. The difficulty that accompanies this exercise is what makes obvious the loss of the child soldier. Even though he is far away from the war, he becomes a troubled and lost child who struggles futilely to erase his war-time memories. The paper finds that the child soldier’s loss is often manifested in the form of extreme violence, post-traumatic stress disorder, identity crisis and the lack of trust. Also, the paper subtly questions rehabilitation as an absolute curative measure for the child who was once a vicious perpetrator of violence and chaos. The paper finds that although rehabilitation provides a serene environment for the former child soldier and attempts to normalize his difficult and painful memories in his present world, it does not completely heal him of his psychological pain and wound.

African Literature and The Protest Novel: Neo-Nationalism in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child

Every literary writer belongs to a particular society; he writes to reflect the conditions of that society. Therefore, African literature captures the African temperament. This paper attempts an analysis of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child. Colonisation turns people into objects in order for the colonialists to facilitate their manipulation and the handing over power to Africans with a hope that this group of Africans will change the cause of events. The inability of these leaders to perform to expectation leading to a period of transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism necessitated the protests in most African novels. This paper explores the African literature written from the African point of view. It explores what inspires the Africans to protest through their literary works. The origin and trends in African literature from the ancient to the stage of protest is also discussed. The paper uses the eco-criticism framework to focus on the protest element in Ngugi’s Weep Not Child. It exposes the forceful acquisition and abuse of power on the social and political life of the entire citizens. It looks at Ngotho who protests against the inhumanisation and exploitation from the white counterpart, turning them into slaves. It further examines the critical analysis of the novel, viewing the elements that make the novel a protest fiction. Finally, the paper pins down the work of this great African writer as a protest based on its contents.

Colonialism and a history of oppression in Africa: Scenes from selected African novels

Examining the African suffering during the colonialism period and describing the different miseries of the African people have been the core theme of almost all African and Western writers during the colonial age and post-colonial time. Undoubtedly, all of these writings fluctuate considerably between exaggeration and degrading the human sacrifices of those countries during this period. Then, the African writers started taking the responsibility of narrating their history and describing their suffering to correct many false ideas and assumptions, many false conceptions which were established in the minds of consecutive generations. Chinua Achebe is one of the prominent authors and thinkers who has received international recognition due to his creative style of telling the African story and has impacted African literature in different ways. Through his books, he exposed many of the negative colonial impacts on the African communities and how they did their best to invade these countries politically, economically, and culturally. Achebe tried to uncover their claims, like linking Christianity and commerce together, and the only way to African progress should be through the European gates. In his novel Things Fall Apart, he tried to expose the side effects of the colonizers’ intentions to redesign the African communities up to Western standards. He assured that all colonial actions resulted in the colonizers’ good interests and were against African people. On the other hand, Ngugi Thiogn’o is interested in examining the post-colonial impacts on the African nations and how the Western colonizers succeeded in producing loyal followers adopting their beliefs and concepts. Those followers replaced the foreign occupation with another type of occupation where the people’s acceptance should be evaluated by their adaptability to the Western criteria in all life aspects. In his novel, Pedals of Blood, Thiog’o narrated the impacts of using foreign languages to diffuse the indigenous culture and lose the African identity. Throughout the novel, he examined the political elite’s corruption in African countries during the post-colonial period and how they continued colonial suppression of their nations.

Discourse of culture and ideology in two African novels: Evolving a proto-literacy model

This sociolinguistic study focuses on the discourse of culture and ideology in developing a proto-model of literacy development. The language-literature interface approach was used to analyze the ideological discourse in two African novels, The Texture of Dreams by Yitbarek and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Mengestu. The study targets non-participant college freshmen in Benguet, Philippines, using a proactive approach to language curriculum renewal based on reflective practice. The study adopted both a priori and a posteriori principles of language curriculum renewal, identifying and re-classifying literacy skills from baseline data and professional practice. The study emphasizes the importance of critical reading in analyzing the discourse of ideology and culture, as well as noting cultural load in literary language.The study recommends using CDA of transitivity processes among college students to examine the discourse of culture and ideology, promoting effective reading comprehension. Language curriculum enhancement can also benefit from a sociolinguistic case study anchored on reflective practice of the language-literature interface.

The Treatment of Women in Selected Works by Bessie Head

The role of women in Africa is one of the most notable issues in modern African literature. African novelists focus on roles held by women in the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods, alongside the effect of colonization on African women. This study is a serious attempt at providing a comprehensive analytical investigation of the role of women in Bessie Head’s selected works: When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), The Collector of Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977). It demonstrates how traditional societies and colonizers treat African women and the influence of Head’s personal life and background on her literary works. Various studies focus on the issue of women using the feminist approach. This study, however, concentrates on women's issues using feminist and post-colonial theories.