AFRICA

THE DARK CONTINENT

SAMBAY P. MLA
Instructor
Facts
◦ Consists of 54 countries
◦ Covers one-fifth of the entire land surface of the
globe.
◦ Contains 98% of the diamond mines of the world
and 55% of the gold mines.
◦ Produces two-thirds of the world’s supply of
palm oil
African Art
❖For many years African art has been copied
and imitated by western nations.
❖African masks are made with fantastic
intricate carvings; government museums and
private collectors have competed in acquiring
primitive African ceremonial masks.
❖African music is characterized by short
rhythm based largely on drumbeat; bound
up with religious ceremonies; prayer for rain
and success in hunting and war.
❖The invention of drums was related to the
ritual of driving the spirits of the dead away
❖“drum message can be sent a hundred miles
away in astonishing speed.
African Literature
◦ body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic
and African languages together with works written by Africans
in European languages
◦ Africans often tell stories using call-and-response technique.
◦ The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the
audience are in the presence of
history.
◦ And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes
for the audience a collapsing of time.
◦ Poetry is often sung or recited in a singsong voice.
◦ African poem types; narrative epic, occupational verse, ritual
verse and praise poems.

◦
The Rise of Africa’s Great Civilization
◦ New Kingdom of Egyptian Civilization flourished between 751 and 664 B.C.
◦ Smaller civilization also; Fasa of the northern Sudan, whose deeds are recalled
by the Soninka oral epic, The Daust
◦ Aksum (3rd century A.D.), a rich kingdom in eastern Africa arose in what is
now Ethiopia. It
served as the center of a trade route and developed its own writing system.
◦ The Kingdom of Old Ghana (A.D. 300) the first of great civilization in
western Africa
succeeded by the empires of Old Mali and Songhai
◦ Africa’s Golden Age (between A.D. 300 and A.D. 1600) marked the time
when sculpture, music, metalwork, textiles, and oral literature flourished.
Foreign influences came in the 4th century
❖The Roman Empire had proclaimed Christianity as its state religion and
taken control of the entire northern coast of Africa including Egypt.
❖Around 700 A.D. Islam, the religion of Mohammed, was introduced into
Africa as well as the Arabic writing system. Old Mali, Somali and other
eastern African nations were largely Muslim.
❖European powers created colonized countries in the late 1800s. Social
and political chaos reigned as traditional African nations were either split
apart by European colonizers or joined with incompatible neighbors.
❖Mid-1900s marked the independence and rebirth of traditional cultures
written in African languages.
Negritude
❖Means “blackness”
❖literary movement of the 1030s-1950s that
began among French-speaking African and
Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest
against French colonial rule and the policy
of assimilation.
❖Its leading figure was Leopold Sedar
Senghor, who along with Aime Cesaire from
Martinique and Leo Damas from French
Guina, began to examine Western values
critically and to reassess African culture.
Negritude
❖ The basic ideas behind Negritude include:

✓ Africans must look to their own cultural heritage

to determine the values and traditions that are
most useful in the modern world.
✓ Committed writers should use African subject
matter and poetic traditions and should excite a
desire for political freedom.
✓ Negritude itself encompasses the whole of
African cultural, economic, social, and political
values.
✓ The value and dignity of African traditions and
peoples must be asserted.
African Poetry
a. Paris in the Snow swings between assimilation of
French, European culture or negritude, intensified by the
poet’s catholic piety.
b. Totem by Leopold Senghor shows the eternal linkage of
the living with the dead.
c. Letters to Martha by Dennis Brutus is the poet’s most
famous collection that speaks of the humiliation, the
despondency, the indignity of prison life.
d. Train Journey by Dennis Brutus reflects the poet’s
social commitment, as he reacts to the poverty around
him amidst material progress especially and acutely felt
by the innocent victims, the children.
e. Africa by David Diop is a poem that achieves its
impact by a series of climactic sentences and rhetorical
questions
African Novels
a. The Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono points out the
disillusionment of Toundi, a boy who leaves his parents
maltreatment to enlist his services as an acolyte to a foreign
missionary.
b. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe depicts a vivid picture
of Africa before the colonization by the British. The title is an
epigraph from Yeats’ The Second Coming: ‘things fall
apart/the center cannot hold/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world.
c. No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe is a sequel to Things
Fall Apart and the title of which is alluded to Elliot’s The
Journey of the Magi: ‘We returned to our places, these
kingdoms,/ But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation.’
African Novels
d. The Poor Christ of Bombay by Mongo Beti begins en medias
res and exposes the inhumanity of colonialism. The
novel tells of Fr. Drumont’s disillusionment after the
discovery of the degradation of the native women
betrothed but forced to work like slaves in the sixa.

e. The River Between by James Ngugi shows the clash of

traditional values and contemporary ethics and mores.

f. Heirs to the Past by Driss Chraili is an allegorical, parable-

like novel. After 16 years of absence, the anti-hero Driss
Ferdi returns to Morocco for his father’s funeral. The
Signeur leaves his legacy via a tape recorder in which
he tells the family members his last will and testament.
African Novels
g. A Few Days and Few Nights by Mbella Sonne Dipoko deals
with racial prejudice. In the novel originally written in
French, a Cameroonian scholar studying in France is
torn between the love of a Swedish girl and a Parisienne
show father owns a business establishment in Africa.

h. The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka is about a group of young

intellectuals who function as artists in their talks with
one another as they try to place themselves in the
context of the world abouth them.
Major Writers
A. Leopold Sedar Senghor (1960) is a poet and statesman who was cofounder
of the Negritude. His works include: Songs of Shadow, Black Offerings,
Major Elegies, Poetical Work.
B. Okot P’Bitek (1930-1982) Among his works are: Song of Lawino, Song of
Ocol, African Religions and Western Scholarship, Religion of the Central
Luo, Horn of My Love
C. Wole Soyinka (1934) is a Nigerian Playwright, poet, novelist, and critic who
was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1986. Among his works: plays- A Dance of the Forests, The Lion
and the Jewel, The Trials of Brother Jero; novels – The Interpreters,
Season of Anomy; poems – Idanre and Other Poems, Poems from
Prison, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems.
Major Writers
D. Chinua Achebe (1930) is a prominent Igbo novelist acclaimed for his
unsentimental depictions of the social and psychological disorientation
accompanying the imposition of Western customs and values upon
traditional African society. His particular concern was with emergent Africa
at its moments of crisis. His works include, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God,
No Longer at ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of Savanah.

E. Nadine Gordimer (1923) is a South African novelist and short story writer whose
major theme was exile and alienation. She received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1991. Her works include, The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Burger’s
Daughter, July’s People, A Sport of Nature, My Son’s Story.
Major Writers
F. Bessie Head (1937-1986) described the contradictions and shortcomings of
pre- and postcolonial African society in morally didactic novels and
stories. She suffered rejection and alienation from an early age being born
of an illegal union between her white mother and black father. Her works
include, When Rain Clouds Gather, A Question of Power, The Collector
of treasures, Serowe.

G. Barbara Kimenye (1940) wrote twelve books on children’s stories known as

the Moses series which are now standard reading fare for African school
children. Among her works are: Kalasandra Revisited, The Smugglers,
The money game.
AFRICAANS’ HALL OF FAME