AFRICAN

LITERATURE
Situations in Africa
OVERVIEW

• Personal view/perception about Africa and its

people
• Colonized by France, Netherlands, Great Britain,
Belgium, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Germany.
• Darkness in the continent’s history reflects in the
color of their skin
• Much more than a place of darkness and
oppression
• Home to many diverse and rich cultures
• Africans have stood up to oppose injustice and to
express their experiences as Africans in front of
the world.
Important Facts about the African continent

• Second to Asia in size

• 12 million square miles
• Humans originated in
Africa
• 1,000 languages are
spoken by hundreds of
ethnic groups
• 5,000 years ago, earliest
civilization developed in
Egypt
African Literature

• Stands proud with the American and

European literary cannons with the likes of:
A. J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
B. Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
C. Derek Wallcott (Saint Lucia)
D. Naguib Mafouz (Egypt)
E. Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
F. Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) father of African
Literature
G. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Kenya)
African Literature

• Those writers created a body of

literature that reflects the reality of
their countries from a native
perspective, rather than a Western or
Colonial Perspective
• They articulated their own experience
of oppression and liberation, they
were able to decolonize the African
past, and place to the fore the Africa
that they themselves have imagined
and mapped onto the world
African Literature

• African literature has origins dating back

thousands of years to Ancient Egypt
and hieroglyphs, or writing which uses
pictures to represent words.
• Africa experienced several hardships in its long
history which left an impact on the themes of
its literature.
• One hardship which led to many others is that
of colonization. 
African Literature

• Colonization led to slavery.

• Millions of African people were enslaved and
brought to Western countries around the world
from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
• This spreading of African people, largely
against their will, is called the African
Diaspora.
African Literature

• Sub-Saharan Africa developed a written

literature during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
• This development came as a result of
missionaries coming to the area.
• The missionaries came to Africa to build churches
and language schools in order to translate
religious texts.
• This led to Africans writing in both European and
indigenous languages.
Major Themes of African
Literature

• Colonialism/ discrimination/ slavery

• Liberation
• Nationalism
• Tradition
• Displacement
• Rootlessness
 David Léon Mandessi Diop

• was born in 1927 in Bordeaux, France, to a Senegalese father and a

Cameroonian mother
• he was a proponent of Negritude
• This was a political philosophy/literary movement whose scholars included
statesman-poet Leopold Sedar Senghor.
• Negritude was a reaction to the French colonial administrative policy of
assimilation;
• this policy was predicated on the belief that Africans possessed neither culture
nor history and therefore French culture could be used to civilise them.
• Negritude desired a deep and almost essentialist re-grounding of Africans in
the history, values, cultures of the Black people, while being open to
friendship with other civilisations.
• The poem below by Diop reflects those values.  David Diop died in an airplane
crash in 1960. He was 33.
Africa My Africa

• Africa of proud warriors in ancestral Savannahs

Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
• This back that never breaks under the weight of
humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun?
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.