CHAPTER FOUR

Modern African Literature

Introduction
Dear learner, as you may recall from your memory, in the last four chapters of this material, you
have dealt with different issues in African literature. Accordingly, in the first chapter, you have
read about the difficulty of defining African literature. In the second chapter, you have seen the
different historical, geographical, linguistic and generic classifications of African literature. In
the third chapter, you have seen oral African literature: its genres and functions. You have also
read about the literature of Africa in vernacular languages in chapter four.

With the conviction that you have obtained some useful insights on the issues discussed so far,
the present chapter will take you to a consideration of an overview of modern African literature,
and in the fourth chapter. Hence, in this chapter, you will look into African literature from 1920s
onwards. Since the next module will present you a detailed analysis of modern African literature,
this chapter is intended to give you a general idea on the subject, including the works of the
major writers of each sub-period and their themes.

Unit Objectives

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

 Distinguish the dominant features of African literature between 1920s and

1940s
 Spot the dominant features of African literature between 1940 and 1960s
 Recognize the main features of African literature between 1960s and the
present
 Explain the major themes of modern African literature
 Recognize the contribution of writers and movements to the development of
modern African Literature
4.1. Modern African Literature between 1920s and 1940s

4.1.1. Harlem Renaissance

Dear learner, before you embark on reading this section, attempt the following questions and
check the answers to the question as you read the section.

1. Who are the African Americans? Where do you think is their origin?

2. What is Harlem Renaissance? Where did the movement start?

3. What possible historical factors led to its appearance?

4. Why was it established?

5. Who are the proponents of the movement?

6. What were its contributions?

Harlem Renaissance (HR) is the name given to the period from the end of World War I and
through the middle of the 1930s, during which a group of talented African –American writers,
thinkers and artists produced a sizable contribution to American culture. It was a period of time
in the early 20th century, particularly the 1920s, when African American thought and culture was
redefined. African heritage and roots were embraced by the movement’s young writers, artists
and musicians, who found in Harlem a place to express themselves. The Harlem Renaissance
was a flowering of African American social thought which was expressed through painting,
music, dance, theater and literature.

Important Features of the HR

 It became a symbol and a point of reference for everyone to recall. The name, more than
the place, became synonymous with new vitality, black urbanity, and black militancy.
 It became a racial focal point for Blacks the world over; it remained for a time a race
capital.
 It encouraged a new appreciation of folk roots and culture. Peasant folk materials and
spirituals provided a rich source for racial imagination.
  It continued a celebration of primitivism and the mythology of an exotic Africa that had
begun in the 19th century.
 Common themes began to emerge: alienation, marginality, the use of folk material, the
use of the blues tradition, and the problems of writing for an elite audience.

4.1.2 The Harlem Renaissance in African-American Literature

According to Langston Hughes, Harlem during the 1920s was like a magnet for the Negro
intellectual, pulling him from everywhere. Aspiring writers flocked to the community. Jessie
Fauset from Philadelphia, Rudolph Fisher from Washington, Zora Neale from Florida;
Wallace Thurman from Utah and California; Claude Mackay from Jamaica, West Indies;
Hughes himself from Missouri and Kansas: all came to Harlem to make their fortunes.

The growth of community of writers in Harlem marked an important development in

African American literary history. Black writers had begun publishing their work in the
United States in the eighteenth century. Several such as the poets Philip Wheatley and
Paul Laurence Dunbar, the autobiographer and orator Frederic Douglass, and the novelist
Charles Chesnutt, had achieved considerable fame. But never before had there been a real
community of black writers-men and women who read and encouraged one another’s
work. Soon, in addition to being their home, Harlem became a rich source of material
for these writers. Numerous novels and short stories were set against the backdrop of
Harlem, and a school of Harlem fiction and poetry involved. Even though writers moved in
and out of the community, and several did their most significant work in other places, Harlem
retained a hold on black writer’s immigrations.

Not only the Harlem Renaissance important to literature, but also in different artistic
fields. Black people were innovators in music, theatre, and art as well. Although blacks had long
been active in each of these fields, never before had their work had been so widely known or so
influential. In theatre, almost every Broadway season from 1921 to 1929 saw the opening
of a new black production, beginning with the legendary musical Shuffle Alone, which
introduced Josephine Baker, a singer and actress who would later become an international
star. Chocolate Dandies, a second musical written by the same team of Noble Sissle and
Eubie Blake, introduced the Charleston, which became the most popular dance in
America. Serious dramas were black life were less popular, but significant. White playwrights
seemed eager to explore black themes. Eugene O’Neill, perhaps the greatest American
dramatist, featured black subjects in two of his plays: The Emperor Jones (1920) and All
God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924).

There were different dilemmas and questions of the black artist. Writers and intellectuals
welcomed these developments, even as they analyzed their meaning. What was distinctive about
black American art? What gave it such a broad appeal? Could the arts popularity be used to
uplift the conditions of the people, most of whom continued to suffer poverty and
oppressions? Where black artists obliged to make their art a means of protest against racism?
The questions troubled serious writers more than it did popular performances. As Countee Cullen
wondered in his poem Yet Do I Marvel, could a black artist be devoted to beauty and protest at
the same time?

Even more fundamental questions arose, some of which echoed issues that black writers
had raised for centuries. The issue of identity remains central. Who were black Americans?
W.E.B Du Bois had defined the dilemma of the black American identity in The Souls of
Black Folk in 1903. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois identifies “One ever feels his
twoness-an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two
warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder.” During the renaissance, writers again voiced this dilemma. They explored their
relationship to Africa. They questioned what it meant to be black in America. If, on the one hand
they protested the cruel treatment blacks suffered on account of their race, on the other, they
proclaimed the beauty of blackness. Blackness was, however, not just a color. It was a state of
mind, the reflection of that determined strength to which Du Bois preferred.

4.1.3 Major Harlem Writers

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of
African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In
the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of
Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Liberty of Congress. Since
the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet
life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, the first
time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove’s
Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her
exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African Americans
individuals.

As one of the most significant literary movements of the twentieth century, the Harlem
Renaissance (1900-40) reflects the significance of African-American cultural expression
during the modernist period. Nonetheless, critical discussion of African-American literature
typically treat modernism as a movement separate and distinct from the Harlem
Renaissance. As Houston Baker notes, 'traditionally in discussions of Afro-American
literature and culture, “modernism” implies the work of British, Irish, and Anglo-American
writers and artists of the early twentieth century.' While this may stem from a tendency among
critics to view African-American literature as separate and distinct from Anglo-American,
British and Irish literature, the Harlem Renaissance's relationship and connection with the
modernist movement reflects the conceptualization of racial identity and consciousness during
the early to mid-twentieth century. Consequently, poetry of the Harlem Renaissance attempts to
capture the perspective of African-American writers within the context of the modern world.
African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon
Johnson, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Helene
Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Angelina Weld Grimkè explored central themes
such as history, identity, community, race, class, gender and heritage, which continue to
influence contemporary African-American poetry and its rendering of the human experience.

In the following section, you will read about some of the works and contribution of the most
influential writers: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.

A. Langston Hughes

The Harlem Renaissance was a time of new thought and revolution in the African American
population of the Unites States. At the head of the African American literary movement in the
United States was Langston Hughes, an enormously influential writer who had a very optimistic
view of America and its people. During his time period, there was still much racial prejudice
against African Americans, and segregation was heavily enforced. Langston Hughes wrote much
about the inequality and racism he saw in America and the way he felt it should change. Hughes
is known for his insightful, colorful, realistic portrayals of black life in America.

He wrote poetry, short stories, novels, and plays, and is known for his involvement with the
world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing. His life and work were enormously
important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlerm Renaissance in the 1920s. He
wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both
their suffering and their love of music, laughter and language itself. The following poem is one
of his works.

I, too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

 But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed-

I, too, am America.

B. Claude McKay

Claude McKay is regarded as one of the first significant writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Born
in Jamaica, he arrived in the United States in 1912 at the age of 21 and had already gained
recognition as a poet with his book Songs of Jamaica, published in 1911. He attended Tuskegee
institute and Kansas State University, then traveled to New York and participated in the literary
movements there, both in Harlem and in Greenwich Village. His sonnet If we Must Die is his
most popular poem. His book of poems, Harlem Shadows, published in 1922, was a precursor to
the Harlem Renaissance. Other books by Claude McKay include Banjo, Harlem Negro
Metropolis, and his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, Home to Harlem. Published in the
spring of 1928, became the first novel by a Harlem writer to reach the bestseller list.

If We Must Die

By Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C. Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer formed a strong emotional attachment to the rural people and their values,
including a sense of kinship with nature. Toomer believed that rural life had an integrity
missing from urban areas dominated by the corrupting, materialistic values of whites.
Toomer, born in 1894, in Washington, D.C., claimed a mixed ancestry that included French,
Dutch,Welsh, African American, German, Jewish, and Native American. Toomer’s father
abandoned the family less than a year after his birth. Toomer’s mother died when he was
fourteen and he went to live with his maternal grandparents. Soon after the publication of
Cane, Toomer sought to leave racial tensions behind him and dropped out of the movement
with which he would remain so closely associated (African American Literature 84-86.
Beehive

By Jean Toomer

Within this black hive tonight

There swarm a million bees;

Bees passing in and out the moon,

Bees escaping out the moon,

Bees returning through the moon,

Silver bees intently buzzing,

Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees

Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,

And I, a drone,

Lying on my back,

Lipping honey,

Getting drunk with silver honey,

Wish that I might fly out past the moon

And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

4.1.4. Negritude Literary Movement

Dear learner, in the previous section, you have read about the Harlem Renaissance, its beginning,
inspirations, the pioneers of the movement and its contribution to the development of literature.
In this section, you will be learning about another movement, which was in some way inspired
by the Harlem Renaissance, called the Negritude movement.

Brainstorming Questions

Before you read the following note on Negritude Literary Movement try to answer the following
questions.

What do you think is the word negritude?

Where did the movement begin first?

Who were the founding members of the movement?

What is the aim of the movement?

Is it a worldwide phenomenon or a movement limited to Africa?

As you read the following short briefing on the topic, you can check the answers to these
questions.

La Négritude was a literary and ideological movement led by Francophone black

intellectuals, writers, and politicians. The founders of la Négritude, known as les trois pères
(the three fathers), were originally from three different French colonies in Africa and the
Caribbean but met while living in Paris in the early 1930s. Although each of the pères had
different ideas about the purpose and styles of la Négritude, the movement is generally
characterized by:

 Reaction to colonization: Denunciation of Europe's lack of humanity, rejection of

Western domination and ideas
 Identity crisis: Acceptance of and pride in being black; valorization of African
history, traditions, and beliefs
 Very realistic literary style, and
 Marxist ideas

Etymology: The word Négritude was coined by Aimé Césaire, from the French word nègre,
which was equivalent to "black" or "Negro" in France but "nigger" in Martinique. Césaire
deliberately and proudly incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his ideological
movement.

There are so many conceptions of Negritude that it might open up a controversy.

Negritude embodies a Black literary movement and a sociopolitical ideology towards the
emancipation of Black people. It is the equivalent of Anglophone Basic Personality. Although its
precursors are almost all African Americans of the Harlem Renaissance like W. du Bois,
Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey, etc., it mostly developed in France
and the Francophone areas. The word “Negritude” is originally attributed to the
Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire who published in 1939 his surrealistic masterpiece
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) considered as
the ethnic anthem of Blacks all over the world.

United in a revolutionary action seeking the liberation of the Blacks from Whites and
colonial power, the recognition of the Negro-African culture and civilization, Black
students from the Caribbean and Africa started their movement in France in the late 1920s-
30s. They were backed and encouraged by progressive Europeans from various horizons.
Africanists like Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse or Georges Hardy Archeology
contemporaneously proved that Africa is the birthplace of Humanity.

The leading figures of Negritude were: Aimé Césaire (1913- ), Leon Damas from French
Guyana (1912-1978) and its major theoretician Léopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001). Others who
belong to the movement are: the Haitians Jean PriceMars, Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen
Alexis, René Depestre; the Guadeloupean Guy Tirolien; the Martiniquan René Maran,
Frantz Fanon,; the Senegalese Birago Diop, David Diop, Ousmane Socé, Diange, Sembene
Ousmane, Cheikh Anta Diop; the Guinean Camara Laye; the Ivorians Bernard Dadié, Ake
Loba, Keita Fodeba; the Cameroonians Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono; the Malagasies
Jacques Rabemananjara, Jean Joseph Rabearivelo, etc. They all were activist poets and they
contested the White oppressive domination over people of African descent. Therefore their
involvement in anticolonial issues and in political action became inevitable.

Black poets claimed to re-write the Black history falsified by the West, explore the Black
culture and past, and redefine the sensitive values of the cosmos. They protested against all
forms of exploitation of Africa and the Caribbean. By proudly affirming their African cultural
and racial heritage, by celebrating the beauty of Africa and the enchanting charm of the Black
woman, by singing the fights and by reminding the cruel tragedies of all Blacks, the poets of
Negritude had a prophetic mission and a mystical vision of/in the New World. Their
voices echoed complaints, hopes, and deep feelings of the Black people denouncing the
imperialistic western ethnocentrism.

The poetic collections beside Césaire’s Notebook are: L. Damas’ Pigments(1937),

Senghor’s Chants d’ombre (1945). Of great importance is Senghor’s anthology entitled
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre (1948) preceded by « Black Orpheus » a
forword of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1947, Alioune Diop created the
cultural journal Présence Africaine committed to spread ideas of freedom and
emancipation, to act for a better life for all Blacks. Two international conferences of Black
writers and artists were organized in 1956 (Paris) and 1959 (Rome).

Negritude played an important role in the struggle for African independence. After 1960,
the younger generation of writers and philosophers –Wole Soyinka, Ezekiel Mphahlele,
Stanislas Adotevi, and Marcien Towa; René Depestre, Tchicaya U Tam’si – virulently
criticized the movement, contesting many debatable ideas especially diffused by Senghor’s
Negritude. The fact that many figures of Negritude were active in politics, acted and ruled
like the colonial agents and therefore, did not succeed in bringing the promised welfare,
disappointed their fellow citizens. The movement became irrelevant. According to specialists
of African and Caribbean Literature, the conference of Alger, held in 1969, signed officially the
end of Negritude movement. Despite this controversy, Negritude remains the most important
literary and philosophical movement of the Black Francophone world. In the 1980s
emerged concepts of “national literatures” on the Continent, “creoleness” in the Caribbean.

During the negritude literary movement, the history of African literature in European
languages resumes. During the early 1930s, a small group of French speaking blacks who were
studying in Paris coined the term Negritude for their determination to affirm the dignity and
values of African culture. Three students were the principal architects of this concept:
Aime Cesaire of Martinique, French West Indies; Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal,
West Africa; and Leon Damas of Guyane, French Guiana, South America.

Cesaire, Senghor and Damas shared feelings of isolation from the citizens of France.
Africans and West Indies blacks under French rule were expected to develop into citizens
of France. In dress, speech and manners, they were expected to reflect the culture and
customs of the French people. Their education was French. This means that history is
taught from the perspective that colonialism was a blessing to blacks fortunate to have
the French for colonial masters. Furthermore, the French colonies like their British
counterparts tried to convince blacks that they did not have a great culture or a history prior to
colonization.

Also in Paris at that time were African American students who had brought with them
collections of poetry by Steling Brown, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude
McKay. The Africans and West Indies were immediately attracted to this body of literature
because it dealt with themes related to black life. They had been taught that poetry should deal
only with themes related to European culture and thought. African American poetry reflected an
interest in Africa (Cullen and Hughes), concern over the life of the southern farmer
(Brown), and a fascination with life in Harlem, New York City. The language of these poetry
reflected African American speech as well as its various forms of music, especially blues and
jazz. The images in African American poetry mirrored the multicultural life style of black
America. Some of it celebrated the beauty of the black woman. This poetry, as well as fictions
by such writers as Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer and Eric Walrod inspired Africans and
West Indies to reclaim the black African and black West Indian cultures they had been
taught to despise.

4.1.4.1. Prominent writers of the movement

The most important figures in negritude literary movement were Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar
Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas and David Diop

I. Léopold Sédar Senghor

Leopold Sedar Senghor was one of the originators of the concept of Negritude, defined as the
literary and artistic expression of the black African experience. In historical context, the term has
been seen as an ideological reaction against French colonialism and a defense of African culture.
A confounder of the Negritude cultural movement, he is recognized as one of the most
significant figures in African literature. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, contrasts the
lushness and wonder of Africa’s past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation
into European culture.

Leopold Sedar Senghor’s unforgettable poems proclaimed a world view that, in his eyes and
mind, characterized all the black people of African and of African descent.

The situation of black man in America is, for Senghor, an important part of his conceptions of
negritude which embraces the black race throughout the world. The historical relationship of
black and white is strikingly illustrated by the place of the black man in America. Senghor also
sees the black man in America as a living part of African heritage sharing an essential African
quality. The city of New York presents an image of pressures of industrial civilization which the
black man is confronted in his contact with the white man, yet in which he maintains his identity
and brings the promise of a new mode of life. New York is contrasted to the simple natural world
of traditional society with whose value the black man is identified.

II. Léon-Gontran Damas

A French Guyanese poet and National Assembly member, Léon-Gontran Damas was the
enfant terrible of la Négritude. His militant style of defending black qualities made it
clear that he was not working toward any kind of reconciliation with the West.

III. David Diop

David Diop was one of the most promising French West African young poets, whose short
career, however, ended in an air-crash off Dakar in 1960. Diop lived an uprooted life, moving
frequently from his childhood onwards between France and West Africa. In Paris Diop joined
the negritude literary movement, which championed and celebrated the uniqueness of black
experience and heritage, Diop’s work reflects his hatred of colonial rulers and his hope for an
independent Africa. David Diop was born in Bordeaux, France, of a Senegalese father and a
Cameroonian mother. After his father died, he was raised by his mother. Diop had his primary
education in Senegal, and then he attended the Lycee Marcelin Berhelot in Paris during World
War II. At home, Diop read the works of Aime Cesaire and debuted as a poet while still at
school. Several of his poems were published in Leopold Senghor’s famous Anthologie de la
nouvelle poesie negre et malgache (1948), which became an important landmark of modern
black writing in French. He is considered as the poet of African Revolution (Moore, 1968:18).
4.2 African Literature between 1940s-1960s

Introduction

Dear learner, do you remember what you have read about in the previous section? Yes, you have
learnt about the literature of African between 1920s and 1940s. The primary focus of the lesson
was on two literary/cultural movements that laid a ground for the development of African
Literature: Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Literary movement. As you have seen some of
the works in this period, the writers dealt with historical encounters of the black people in Africa
and all over the world. Writers of Harlem Renaissance dealt with the racial discrimination and
traced their African roots in their poems, short stories, novels, music, art, etc. In the same way,
the pioneers of the Negritude movement expressed in their works, the issue of African people:
the fact that the African people were departed from their culture, identity and self-respect by the
historical injustices which they passed through. As a result, the negritude poets aimed at
regaining the pride and exalting the identity of the African people. In the next section, you will
learn about the literature of Africa after the Negritude movement up to the time of independence.

Section objectives:
By the end of this section, you will be able to:

 Identify the dominant features of African literature between 1940s and 1960s
 Recognize the contribution of the writers of the period to the development of modern
African literature
 Mention works of writers of the period

4.2.1. Literature of Africa as a Counter Narrative

Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among
other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern
African writing, both in European and indigenous languages, were products of the institutions
that colonialism had introduced and developed in the continent. Not only were the founders of
modern African literature colonial subjects, but colonialism was also to be the most important
and enduring theme in their works. Among the issues presented in the literary works of African
writers (e.g. Achebe) was correcting the negative images of Africa portrayed in the literary
works of western writers.

Activity

Dear learner, before you read the next section, attempt the following questions

What do you know about the image of Africa in the literary works of western writers?

How do you think the colonizers of Africa depict the image of the people in their literary
works?

Before the African themselves started to narrate their own stories, the stereotypic ideas presented
in the writings of Western world popularized the negative image of the African people across the
world as a means to justify the civilizing mission of colonialism. The following quotation from
an interview with Chinua Achebe by a certain magazine on the literature of Africa reflects this
issue. Read it and relate what you read with your answers to the above questions.

“The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of
literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason
for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery … This continued until the
Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling
of their story.” (Chinua Achebe,”An African Voice”)

The literature of Africa immediately before independence and at the daybreak of independence
was mostly a counter narrative to the colonial views of the “native people”. In an interview in the
1994-95 issue of the Paris Review, Chinua Achebe states that he became a writer in order to tell
his story and the story of his people from his own viewpoint. He explains the danger of having
one’s story told only by others through the following proverb, “Until the lions have their own
historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Critics and Achebe’s own
essays have portrayed Things Fall Apart as a response to the ideologies and discursive strategies
of colonial texts such as Jouce Caruy’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Achebe’s first novel is an early narrative about the European colonization of Africa told from the
point of view of the colonized people. Published in 1958, the novel recounts the life of the
warrior and village hero Okonkwo, and describes the arrival of white missionaries to his Igbo
village and their impact on African life and society at the end of the nineteenth century. Through
his writing, Achebe counters images of African societies and peoples as they are represented
within the Western literary tradition and reclaims his own and his people’s history.

4.2.2. Prominent Writers of the Period

In the period between, 1940s and 1960s there appeared the first generation of writers with the
appearance of the colonial novel. The prominent writers of the period include, Camara Laye,
Amos Tutuola, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe, Alan Paton, etc. As there are many writers
across the continent in the time period, it is difficult to deal with each of them in this section. As
a result, we shall deal with only some of the writers.

I. Camara Laye ( 1928-1980)

Guinean novelist, short story writer, and essayist, who first gained fame in the 1950s with his
novels LiEnfant noir (1953,The African Child), a poetic re-creation of the author’s childhood
days, and Le Regard du roi ( 1954, The Radiance of the King). The latter work with its theme, a
frustrating quest for an unattainable authority, has been compared to Franz Kafka’s novel the
Castle (1926).

In his first novel Laye portrayed nostalgically his happy childhood, his parents, education
initiations of Malinke culture, ritual circumcision, and the end of his youth. The protagonist,
called Fatoman, observes his surroundings and people, without always fully understanding them.
Laye uses simple language, leaving much to the imagination of the reader. When the young
Fatoman pulls Fata’s hair and she asks why he does it, the answer is indisputable: “Why, I said,
shouldn’t I pull it. You are a girl!” Laye’s idyllic portrayal of the daily life of an African child
was not accepted by politically orientated critics, who saw that it refused to confront the problem
of Africa’s collision with Europe. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe considered the book “too
sweet” for his tastes.
Le Regard du roi, which appeared in France in 1954, is generally regarded Laye’s most
fascinating work. It tells of Clarence, a shipwrecked white man. He is thrown on the coast of
Africa, and wants to see, the king. However, the king of the unnamed territory is an inaccessible
figure, who has just left for the south. On his journey after him, Clarence becomes a different
kind of person, more able to answer to the king’s call when it comes.

II. Amos Tutuola ( 1920-1977)

Tutuola was a Nigerian writer, who gained world fame with his story The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
“I was a palm-wine drunkard since I was a boy of ten years of age,” Tutuola started the novel.
The book was based on Yoruba folktales, but in his own country Tutuola was accused of
falsifications and uncivilized language. The novel is a transcription in Pidgin English prose of an
oral tale of his own intervention. It recounted the mythological tale of a drunken man, who
follows his dead tapster into “Deads’ Town”, a world of magic, ghosts, demons, and supernatural
beings. According to the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Tutuola’s works can also be read as
moral tales commenting on Western consumerism: “What happens when a man immerses
himself in pleasure to the exclusion of all work?” (G. Moore, 2000)

The Palm-Wine Drunkard was published in 1952 in London by a major British publisher, Faber
and Faber, and next year in New York by Grove Press. Dylan Thomas wrote in The Observer (6
July, 1952) in his review “nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put down in this tall, devilish
story. “ The work was praised in England and the United States, but Tutuolas most severe critics
were his own countrymen, who attacked his imperfect English and presenting a disparaging
image of Nigeria. In the 1950s Tutuola wrote My Life in a Bush of Ghosts (1954), an underworld
odyssey, in which an eight-year-old boy, abandoned during a slave raid, flees into the bush, “ a
place of ghosts and spirits”.

III. Ferdinand Oyono

Ferdinand Leopold Oyono (born 1929) is one of the most renowned anticolonialist novelists of
Africa. In his novels he deals with the place of Africans and their cultures both in African and in
the world. In 1956, while a student in Paris, he published his first two novels, Une vie de boy
(Houseboy) and Le Vieux Negre etla medaille (The old Man and the Metal). In 1960 his third
book, Chemin d’Europe (Road to Europe), was released. He is recognized as one of the first
Francophone novelists and classified with the writers of the Negritude movement.

In Houseboy, Perhaps the most widely read of the three novels, Oyono tells the story of Toundi
Joseph, a boy from French Cameroon who flees his father’s brutality to become the houseboy of
a priest at a Catholic mission in a nearby town. Toundi grows up serving the priest and learns to
read and write. After the priest dies suddenly, Toundi becomes the houseboy of the French
Commandant of the area. When the commandant’s wife arrives, Toundi is smitten with her
grace and beauty, but she soon commences a tawdry affair with the colonial prison director,
something Toundi cannot help but discover. Later the African mistress of the French
agricultural engineer steals the engineer’s money and runs away. As Toundi, an innocent
acquaintance of the mistress is taken away in connection with the theft, the commandant’s wife
smiles and looks away, happy to triumph over someone who knows of her immorality. Toundi
becomes the colonials’ scapegoat in the theft, someone with compromising knowledge of the
prison official’s affair and whom they can punish to disguise their inability to deal effectively
with the crime Toundi’s untimely death is the result of their mistreatment. The story is told in
the form of Toundi’s diary of his years among the French colonials. Although it is sometimes
described as humorous, it is really an indictment of colonial rule.

His novels are very representative of the period in which he wrote, since they largely focus on
the injustices of the colonial system. What is fresh about his approach, however, is the reliance
on comic effect to underline his message. The three novels all highlight the hypocrisy and the
bad faith which characterize the behavior of the whites and the relationships which they
establish with the blacks. The promises implicit in the whole colonial enterprise, the so-called
civilizing mission of the colonizers, and the religious evangelism which accompanied it are all
exposed as mere sham. They are shown to be myths which colonizer and colonized alike may
choose to believe either through self-interest or stupidity. The chief source of the comedy lies in
the constant juxtaposing of pious ‘myth and the harsh reality of colonial life. Hence, it serves
Oyono’s purposes to present naïve and rather credulous characters as his protagonists. Toundi in
Une vie de boy, Meka in Le Vieux Negre et la medaille, and Aki Barnabas in Chemin d’Europe.
All to a greater or lesser extent take the whites at face value and experience a rude awakening.

IV. Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe, poet and novelist, is one of the most important living African writers. He is a
prominent Igbo (Ibo) writer, famous for his novels describing the effects of Western customs
and values on traditional African society. Achebe’s satire and his keen ear for spoken language
have made him one of the most highly esteemed African writers in English.

Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, appeared in 1958. The story of a traditional village “big
man” Okonkwo, and his downfall has been translated into some 50 languages. It was followed
two year later by No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God (1964), which concerned traditional
Igbo life as it clashed with colonial powers in the form of missionaries and colonial
government. Among Achebe’s later works is Anthills of the Savannah (1987) a polyvocal story
with multiple narrators. Set in an imaginary west African state, its central character is Sam, a
sandhurst-trained military officer, who has become president. Chris Oriko and Ikem Osodi, his
friends, die when resisting brutal abuse of power. A military coup eliminates Sam.

Things Full Apart (1958), an unsentimental novel, depicts the life of Okonkwo, ambitious and
powerful leader of an Igbo community, who counts on physical strength and courage.
Okonkwo’s life is good: his compound is large, he has no troubles with his wives, his garden
grows yams, and he is respected by his fellow villagers, when Okonkwo accidentally kills a
clansman, he is banished from the village for seven years. But the vehicle for his downfall is his
blindness to circumstances and the missionary church, which brings with it the new authority of
the British District commissioner. The story is set in the 1890s, when missionaries and colonial
government made its intrusion into Igbo society. In this process, Okonkwo is destroyed, because
his unwillingness to change sets him apart from the community and he is fighting alone against
colonialism. Achebe took the title of the book from William Butler Yates’s The Second
Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

No longer at Ease was published in 1960, the year of Nigeria’s independence from England
This is significant because it is a novel that pertains to a trend of literature called post-colonial
literature that still survives. There are many issues that arise out of post-colonialism, issues that
authors and writers around the world have had to deal with. Some of the problems in post-
colonial regions concern language, education, the conflict between traditional ways and Western
or European ways, the presence of the English, and corruption. Those who later moved into the
land of the colonizer (for instance, Obi, while studying in England) experience an entire set of
new problems such as nostalgia for home, memory, and the desire for the homeland. Obi
Okonkwo is a young man, about twenty-six years old, who returns to Nigeria after studying in
England at a university for four years. No Longer at Ease begins with a trial against Obi that
takes place a while after his return, and the novel then works its way backward to explain how
Obi has come to be charged with accepting a bribe.

Arrow of God (1964) is set in the 1920s. The central character is Ezeulu, priest, who sends one
of his sons to missionary school and gains in some respect the approval of the English district
superintendent. However, Ezeulu is doomed, because when defending the traditions of his
people he is unyielding, unable to reach a compromise, and afraid of losing his authority.

A Man of the People (1966) is a satire of corruption, and power struggles in an African state in
the 1960s. The central characters are the Minister of Culture, Nanga, and The man of the people,
and teacher Odili an African lucky Jim, who tells the story. Odili stands against the government,
but not because of ideological reasons. He has personal interests: Nanga has seduced his
girlfriend. Their political confrontation becomes violent. Nanga’s thugs inflict havoc and chaos,
and the army responds by staging a coup.

Anthills of the Savannah (1987) raise questions about power and military rule in Nigeria after
independence from Britain. It attempts to explore Africa’s contemporary political situation. the
reason why military government ultimately fail, the issue of the purpose of political power, the
implications of its use or abuse for achieving a genuine liberation and the ideology most likely to
record contemporary African societies.

4.3 Post- independence African Literature

Introduction

Dear learner, in the preceding section you learned about the dominant features of African
literature between 1940s and 1960s. Likewise, you saw the emergence of the colonial novel as a
counter narrative to the negative image of Africa in the literary works of western writers. To use
Achebe’s own words, the writers of this period focused on telling the people when the rain
began to beat them. They praised the glorious past and condemned the westerners for causing
disruptions through slavery and colonialism. In the current section, we will focus on literature of
Africa since independence. Hence, we will see the literature of independent Africa in relation to
the first generation of writers who dealt with the consequence of colonialism on the life of the
African people.

Section objectives

By the end of this section you will be able to:

 Identify the dominant features of post-independence African literature

 Indicate the main themes of neo-colonial and post-colonial African literature
 Recognize the contribution of writers of the period to the development of modern African
literature
 Cite representative works of writers of the period

4.3.1 Dominant Themes and Patterns in Post-colonial African Literature

During the years of anti-colonial struggle, Africa’s nationalist leaders had a better idea of what
they were fighting against than of what they wanted to replace it with. Beneath the heady
euphoria of independence, there were few framing political principles or social visions with
which to navigate the difficult years of nation building that lay ahead. Instead of the specific
restructuring programs there were only vague gestures towards economic self-reliance,
democratic modernization, and detribalization. For the majority of Africans, independence did
not bring unity, social justice, peace, or prosperity, but division, inequality, political violence,
and economic stagnation.

At the end of the independence decade it was clear to African writers and intellectuals that
national liberation had been a selective affair, mainly consolidating the power of indigenous
professional elites with whom the colonial regimes, in former administrative colonies like those
of British and French West Africa, had maintained a long-established political dialogue. The
writers exploited the situation and presented in their works the multifarious issues of the time in
their literary works. We will see some of these themes as follows.

4.3.1.1Alternatives: contrasting Themes and Patterns

Many accounts of African English writing begin with Achebe, Toutola, Ngugi and other writers
of the 1950s and 1960s ( Griffiths, 2000:109). As we have already seen, many of the earliest of
the new African texts published in English reflected a burning desire to supplant the biased
colonialist account of African societies and the African past. The new writers set out to celebrate
and recover the African past on its own terms and from the perspective of Africans themselves.

These writers actually, were neither the first writers to celebrate African societies, nor the first to
deny the superiority of the European viewpoint to that of the African. The process of abrogation
of the European has suffused African literature in different ways from its inception. What makes
the current writers different is the fact that they approached this task with the new, enthusiastic
spirit created by political independence.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Full Apart (1958) was one of the first texts to be published by the new
wave of publishers in the period immediately before and after independence. Together with
Amos, Tutola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), it was one of the two texts cited in African
writing. Achebe’s purpose in writing the novel, as he stated in 1964, was to show that “African
peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not
mindless, but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty; that they had
poetry and above all, they had dignity”.

The first generation of novels such as Things Fall Apart, strove to dramatize the complex
“moment of contact” and the implication of this for the African societies or they tried to show
the consequence of this moment for the generation. The novel remains one of the earliest and
best of the colonial contact novel. It tells the story of an Ibo community already raven with
internal tensions. These tensions center on the psychological and social struggle of the
protagonist Okonkwo to compensate for the perceived failure of his father, the economically
unsuccessful and impractical musican Unoka (Griffiths, 2000:125).

Achebe absolves the while invaders from their share of responsibility for the destruction of the
societies they encountered. But he is at pains to show that the society of Umofia was itself a
complex and evolving entity, with in its own agendas and internal contradictions. Whose
interactions with the mysterious new forces of the white man produced a volatile and finally
irresistible set of changes? The same theme of self-division at the precursor of the successful
control of the white man features in Achebe’s later account of the interaction of the society and
white colonial power in Arrow of God(1964), which is set in 1920s.

Ngugi’s, the River Between (1965) also deals with the moment of contact with the outside
colonial forces. The novel dramatizes the encounter between an isolated part of the Gikuyu home
land, the ridges of kameno and Makuyu, laying either side of the Honia river, and the outside
world the ridges indicate the struggle between forces of tradition and the new influences of
mission education and Christianity.

Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966), a powerful portrait of a society changing as the result of
the new values brought by European colonization, and the increasing level of settlement
following the First World War. For P’Bitck, the work becomes a means of defining both the
tensions resulting from the clash of values brought by the white colonization, and the degree for
which these values, internalized by the colonized, have been destructive of the lament of Lawina,
a traditional Acoli wife, for her husband Ocol’s migration to European values and finally to a
new mistress:

Activity

Dear leaner, before you read the next part, answer the following questions

What contrasting themes can you observe in Achebe’s Things Full Apart?
What alternative themes can we get from Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino?
Discuss the theme of contrast in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between?

4.3.1.2. Self-Criticism and Post-independence Disillusion

In the mid to late 1960s, a period of what has often been called disillusion set in reflecting the
sense of dismay with which writers confronted corruption and divisions in the new post-
independence regimes ( Gnffiths, 2000). Achebe Produced one of the earliest of the texts of post-
independence self-criticism. In his examination of corruption amongst the young Nigerian been-
to ’s in No longer at Ease (1960), and followed this with a strong condemnation of post-
independence political culture in A Man of the people ( 1966), exemplifying how the work of a
single writer may embrace different agendas at different times.

In No Longer of Ease, Achebe presents a vision of a Nigerian in transition to independence,

struggling to address the clash of old and new cultural imperatives. The protagonist, Obi
Okonkwo’s grandson of the protagonist in Things Fall Apart (1958), strives, unsuccessfully, like
his grandfather, to reconcile the claims of the changes between the modern and traditional
worlds. In No Longer at Ease, the writer places the weight of blame squarely on the shoulders of
colonialism, especially on its inability to recognize and accommodate African differences. But
six years later, in A Man of the people (1966), a stranger disillusionment with post-independence
politics is apparent. There is a big difference in the treatments of the post-independence issues
between the two novels. In No Longer at Ease, the examination of the clash of moral imperatives
complicates its condemnation of post- independence corruption. But in A Man of the people,
Achebe is far less compromising of where the blame lies. Writers who emerge in the wake of
these early figures do not show the same urge to celebrate the past before beginning the task of
self-criticism. Notable among these was the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, one of the most
controversial and disputed figures to emerge in post-independence African English writing.
Armah’s novel, the Beautiful ones are not yet Born (1968), created an immediate controversy.
Challenging as it did, their predominant themes of celebration and recovery, and persecuting
instead a harsh and uncompromising picture of corruption and self-interest in Nkurmahist Ghana
the choice of an anonymous hero reflected the influence on Amah of French existential fiction.

In the Beautiful one Are Not Yet Born, Armah deals very explicitly with the theme of corruption
and with disillusionment which many ‘Ghanaians felt by late 1960s with the Nkurma
government. The anonymous hero, a clerk in the administration is suborned by his ambitious
wife, and by powerful friends, such as the minister Koomson, to pursue the search for the ‘shiny
thing’ which wealth can bring, and to use his position to aid their crooked get-rich schemes. The
collapse of the regime sees, Koomson fleeing into exile with the help of the protagonist. The
novel works through powerful chains of imagery involving human waste Eating, digestion and
excretion are used metaphorically to represent the processes of social corruption and effect of the
new elite’s hunger for consumer goods. The ending when Koomson is forced to escape arrest by
squeezing himself through the toilet hole, from which the night-soil men extract the household
waste, creates a vivid and reversed image of birth. This graphic image emphasizes the novel’s
Message, that the new world of post-independence Ghana is essentially uncreative, mistaking the
pangs of consumption and excretion for the productive labour of creation and birth.

Armah extends this critical vision on his next novel Fragments (1970), to deal with the effects on
the newly returned foreign-educated intellectuals, or a been to ‘s’, of this universal demand for
goods obtained, from others and not generated by the society’s own efforts. The post-
independence elite see their role simply as mediators between the owners of these goods and
their own people, transmitters of these gifts from the foreign ‘gods’ Not makers of their own
right.

Armah argued in his other novels that the failure of the new elite, and of the young foreign.
Educated intellectuals, was rooted in false and idealized representations of the past. The
misrepresentation of history allowed the new elite to use colonialism as a convenient stalking
horse, and as an excuse for every current ill. In two highly controversial texts Two Thousand
Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1978), Armah offered radical re-readings of African history,
which laid much of the blame for Africa’s historical woes at the feet of its own practices. In two
Thousand Seasons, Armah tells the story of the long and often brutal pre-colonial past his
account of involvement of African in the slave trade, and in internal wars and struggles, caused a
good deal of criticism by those who saw this as colluding with Eurocentric anti African histories.

Ngugi’s later fiction also mirrors that of Achebe’s. A Grain of wheat (1967) celebrates the
freedom fighters of the Mau Mau liberation struggle. But it also records the disillusionment
which mars that struggle, even before the independence celebrations with which the novel ends

In Petals of Blood (1977), the theme of corruption and betrayal in A Grain of Wheat has become
the dominant theme of Ngugi’s work and there are many echoes of this earlier work. Petals of
Blood marks the shift from Ngugi’s early work to the later, more overtly decolonizing functions.

In East Africa, from the 1970s on wards, a number of writers employed the classic social realist
novel to record the injustices and social disruptions which followed the post-independence drift
to the cities. The earlier and most influential of these was Leonard Kibera’s Voices in the Dark
(1970). In this novel, the stories of the dispossessed Kenyan city dwellers were heard for the first
time, Kibera gave urban Kenya a tongue. For all his political force, Ngugi was, and remains a
predominantly rural writer.

III. Opposition, Resistance and Decolonization

Opposition and dissent in African writing in English have been directed outwardly against the
external forces of neo-colonialism, and inwardly against the governments and social processes of
the post-independence regimes, many of whom have been accused of acting simply as agents for
those external forces (Griffiths, 2000).

Shift from a concern with the impact of colonization and the historical past towards an
examination of current socio-economic problems characterized the writing from the late 1970s.
the writers who addressed these new issues were generally born a decade or so later that the first
generation of writers. The sift of concern can be discerned across the continent and to most of the
genres, suggesting that the disillusionment with the post-independence regimes it reflects was
very wide spread (ibid).

A number of prose writers who emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s addressed the issues facing
contemporary Africa from a radical perspective. Novelists like Festus lyayi, Isadore Okpewho
and others took the theme of the gaps which had opened up between rich and poor in many parts
of post-independence Africa, gaps which would no longer be blamed simply on colonial history
but which needed to be sheeted home to the greed of a new elite working hand in hand with
international multi-capitalism. Iyayl’s novel Violence (1979) presents a harsh view of the
exploitation of peasant workers by the new rich class. His second novel, the contract (1982),
shows how the foreign-educated and idealistic Ogie is introduced, on his return, to the corruption
which has become endemic in Nigeria, at first, he believes that he can resist the trends and
remain honest, but soon becomes sucked into the world of corrupt business practice. The novel
concentrates on the world of the new contractors, and shows how difficult it is for anyone to
resist these practices in a society where corruption has become endemic.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been pre-eminent amongst those recent African writers seeking actively
to decolonize African cultures. Ngugi’s project involves a decisive shift of language regime from
the ex-colonial languages to indigenous languages, as the principal means of expression. Other
writers before and since such as Anta Diop, Ayi Kwei Armah, Obi Wali, Wole Soyinka and
Taban to Lyong, have also called for a return to African languages for writing. Wole Soyinka
and Ayi Kwei Armah have both, at times, called for the use of Kiswahili as an international
lingua franca for Africa. But, unlike Ngugi, these writers did not wholly reject the use of English,
and continued to write their own works in that language.

Ngugi’s novel Devil on the Cross (1982) represents his attempt to address the task of
decolonizing the African mind. It is his first text in which Ngugi implemented his belief that the
use of European languages perpetuates the neo-colonialist domination of Africa by consolidating
hegemonic cultural power.

4.3.2. Neocolonialism and Post-colonialism

Dear leaner, do you know what neocolonialism is? What about post colonialism? How are these
reflected in modern African literature? Well, what follows is a discussion of these points. After
reading the theoretical section, you should try to look at the literary works of African writers
since independence from these points of view.

I. Neocolonialism

A central issue in African culture and politics on the moment of independence was the continued
influence of colonialism and its institutions in the newly independent states. Amidst the euphoria
surrounding independence and the production of a literature that celebrated the coming into
being of the new community of the nation, intellectuals and politicians alike were beginning to
realize that, in structural and economic terms. Decolonization had not led to the liberation of all
spheres of political and especially economic life. Within the sphere of economics relationships

Between the inetropolitan European powers and the former colonies remained uneven and
unequal. So much so that Kwane Nkurumah, who had heralded the independence of Ghana as
the dawn of a new era, coined the term “neocolonialism” to refer to the political economy of the
new nation. This is how Nkrumah explained the neocolonial relation in his book. Neo-
Colonialism the last stage of imperialism (1965: NewYork): “ The essence of neocolonialism is
that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of
international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus political policy is directed from
outside. ”Nkrumah’s view Developed during the first few years of Ghanaian independence, was
that the state was a victim of international capitalist relations and that political autonomy did not
lead to the transformation of global forces such as commodity markets, which were still
dominated by interests located in Europe and the united States, political self-assertion appeared
meaningless when confronted by economic paralysis ( Simon Gikandi, 2003).

But in his analysis of this situation, Nkrumah seemed to have missed the role played by African
elites including many in his own circle-in the enforcement of the situation. One that is
dramatized vividly in the early novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, including The Beautiful Ones Are
Not Yet Born(1968) and Fragments (1970), one of the most influential discourses on the political
culture of neocolonialism. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) tended to represent
the failure of national consciousness as much as an effect of the continued dominance of colonial
institutions and the nationalist’ implication in the continuation of this relationship. In Fanon’s
discourse, neocolonialism was essentially the betrayal of the narrative of national liberation.
National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes
of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization
of the people, will be an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.

Most of the literature produced in Africa in the late 1960s and 1970s took up the themes
valorized by Nkrumah and Fanon from two directions, First, the language and structure of the
novels of neocolonialism was predicated on one powerful motif-that nationalism was a narrative
and experience caught between its promise and betrayal. This is evident in works such as
Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (1966),”Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood (Les Bouts debois
de Dieu) (1960),” Ahmadou Kourouma’s Suns of Independence (Les Soleils des independences)
(1968), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to mention just a few,
Second, the literature of neocolonialism was driven by the need to provide a critique of
neocolonial economic relations. The persistence of imperialism in the fields of economics, and to
imagine an alternative political economy based on the ideology of African socialism. This theme
is dominant in works published in the 1970s and 1980s by radical writers, including Ngugi’s
Petals of Blood (1977), Sembene’s Xala (1973) and The last of the Empire (Le Dernir de I
empire) (1981), and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1979), (ibid).

II. Post-colonialism
According to Gikandi (2003), by the late 1970s the discourse of neocolonialism was losing most
of its steam; and by the 1980s it was no longer defining the field of African literature and its
interpretation. There are no easy explanations for the dissipation of a term that had held so much
sway in the period immediately following colonialism, but by the 1980s it had become
increasingly apparent that the situation in Africa was much more complicated than the opposition
between political sovereignty and economic dependence proposed by Nkrumah, a simple case of
national betrayal, or even the failure of national consciousness as Fanon had proposed. Several
reasons account for this rethinking of the nature of colonialism after independence. For none, in
the 1980s many African states found themselves in perpetual political and economic crisis, one
marked by the unexpected collapse of the modern institutions inherited from colonialism, with
the collapse of the economic infrastructure and liberal political practices, it was hard to make the
argument that the basic problem of African society was the existence of political freedom
without economic power-none existed strongly enough to be contrasted. The post colony was
now posited as a state of crisis.

At the same time the paradigms an which the neocolonial argument had been built-the notion of
progress. Development and ideology-were themselves being questioned by new post structural
theories. In these circumstances, as the term “neocolonial” appeared inadequate a new
term-“post-colonialism” emerged as a possible alternative. Where neocolonialism had
emphasized the continuity of colonial institutions and ideas after independence, postcolonial
theorists were calling attention to the discontinuous and dialectical nature of this relation,
arguing that while unequal economic relationships had perhaps survived decolonization, there
were other spheres of social lite. Like culture, for example, where the culture of colonialism had
been radically transformed indeed. Postcolonial theory proposed a rethinking of colonialism
itself instead of seeing colonialism as the imposition of cultural practice was by the colonizer
over the colonized. Postcolonial theorists argued that the colonized had themselves been active
agents in the making and remaking of the idea of culture itself. In effect postcolonial theory
posited the colonized and the subjects of the decolonized polity as active agents not simply in
the constitution of the culture of the former colonies but also in the metropolitan world of the
colonizers.
In the 1990s, postcolonial theories spread quickly in Europe and North America and became the
basis of organizing the literature produced in the former colonies, including those in African. But
in Africa itself there was strong resistance to many postcolonial theories, which were seen as
essentially products of the European and American academy being imposed on local cultural
practices. Part of this resistance emerged from what was seen as the transcendentalism implied
by the notion of the “post”- the suggestion. As Ama Ata Aidoo complained loudly. that
colonialism had been posted anywhere. There was a general feeling among African intellectual
circles that postcolonial theory was premised on a critique of notions (history. Nation, and
consciousness) that were still central to subjects and citizens faced with the ctisis engendered y
the collapse of modern institutions. There was also a feeling that the issues pricileged by
postcolonial theory (difference, hybridity, and performativity ) were not necessarily liberating in
societies in which the invocation of these terms has been the basis of war are, violence, and
genocide postcolonial theory was however, to become most influential in the works if the may
African writers who live in the metropolitan centers, where it has opened up new ways of
rethinking the geography of colonialism after empire and decolonization. This is evident in the
works of a whole range of writers from Ben Okri in Britain to Teila Sebbar to France.