Arican Literature

-What does literature mean to Africa?

- For Africans, literature is art. It is full of beauty, unfolds mysteries, and improves the relation
between communities

-Africans rarely used paper for literature and used oral techniques in telling stories. This is what they
call Orature

Storytellers in Africa sometimes use call-and-response techniques to tell

their stories.

Praise singers, bards sometimes known as "griots,” tell their stories with
music

Pre-colonial Literature

1.  Epic of Sundiata

-composed in medieval Mali 

2. Epic of Dinga

- from the old Ghana Empire.

3. Trickster

- One popular form of traditional African folktale

- A story in which a small animal uses its wits to survive encounters with larger creatures. 
Colonial Literature

Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman)

- published the first African novel written in English, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race
Emancipation

Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo

-published the first English-language African play , The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqause the
Liberator in 1935.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

- wrote the first East African Drama, The Black Hermit – a cautionary tale about “tribalism”
( discrimination between African Tibes)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

- Published in 1958, late in the colonial era

-  analyzed the effect of colonialism on traditional African society.[9]

Post Colonial African Literature

Ali A. Mazrui and others mention seven conflicts as themes:

1.the clash between Africa's past and present

2.between tradition and modernity

3. between indigenous and foreign

4. between individualism and community

5. between socialism and capitalism

6.between development and self-reliance

7. between Africanity and humanity.

- African writers in this period wrote both in western language and in traditional language

1986- Wole Soyinka became the first post-independence African writer to win the Nobel
Prize in literature.
The Leopard
A Folklore From Central Africa

The Two Brothers