MANILA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY

EDSA, Caloocan City

Basic Education Department
SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

HANDOUT FOR LPW 012 – 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE OF THE

PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD

Lesson 9: AFRICAN LITERATURE

African literature consists of a body of work in different languages and various genres, ranging from
oral literature (orature) to literature written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and
English).

Brief History
 It all started in Egypt (3000 – 343 BC)
 The Golden Age (300 – 1600 AD)
 Oral traditions, epics, praise poems, fables, proverbs
 Middle Ages - Arabic was introduced to Africa
 1800s – coming of the alphabet
 1934 – the birth of Negritude movement; writers committed to look into their own culture,
traditions and values that can be applied to the modern world
African literature is divided into three (3) parts:
 Pre-colonial Literature
 Colonial Literature
 Post-colonial Literature
Pre-Colonial Literature
• Epic of Sundiata – composed in medieval Mali
• Epid of Dinga – from Old Ghana Empire
• Kebra Nagast or The Book of Kings – best known work in this tradition
• Trickster Story – One of the popular form of traditional African folktale
Colonial Literature
• Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford – published Ethiopia Unbound, the first African novel
written in English
• Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo – published The Girl Who Liked to Save, the first African
play in English
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o – wrote Black Hermit, the first east African drama
• Chinua Achebe – published Things Fall Apart, which received significant worldwide critical
acclaim
Post-Colonial Literature

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 • Ali A. Mazrui – Mention the 7 Conflicts as themes of African literature
– The clash between Africa's past and present
– Between tradition and modernity
– Between indigenous and foreign
– Between individualism and community
– Between socialism and capitalism
– Between development and self-reliance
– Between Africanity and humanity
Types of African Literature
• Oral Literature – griot (storyteller or historian)
• Call-and-response – spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between the speaker
and the listener
• Prose – Mythological or historical, written or spoken
– Proverbs
– Epics

Short Biography of Chinua Achebe

 Alert Chinụ alụ mọ gụ Achebe

 Born on Ogidi, Eastern Nigeria in 1930
 A Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic
 Educated in English at the University of Ibadan
 He became a professor of English at the University of Nigeria
 Most famous work is “Things Fall Apart”—led to his being called the “patriarch of the African
Novel”
 In 2007, he received the Man Booker International Prize for his contributions to world
literature
 He made a splash with the publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958. Renowned
as one of the seminal works of African literature, it has since sold more than 20 million copies
and been translated into more than 50 languages. Achebe followed with novels such as No
Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), and served
as a faculty member at renowned universities in the U.S. and Nigeria. He died on March 21,
2013, at age 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.

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