Questions:

 Why are songs and chants indispensable in the daily lives of the African people?
 How do chants become a vehicle for propagating the culture of a group of
people?

Week One: Introduction/An Overview of African Literature

African literature did not start with the coming of Europeans to Africa because a
people’s literature is as old as the people themselves. Africans had an indigenous literature
before Europeans came to colonize the continent and the tradition continues to thrive to this
moment. The indigenous literature was (and still is) oral because of the non-literate nature
of the traditional culture and society. African oral literature manifests in the following forms:
folktales, folksongs, specific types of songs and chants, myths, legends, epics, proverbs,
riddles, and tongue-twisters. There is no clear-cut division of genres of narratives, poetry,
and drama as in modern Western literature. It is very integrative in the sense that a good
narrative involves poetic songs and chants, with the minstrel wearing a mask and a special
costume and performing to the accompaniment of music supplied by drums or other musical
instruments. Oral literature, as practiced by Africans, can be described as a multi-media
event.
This oral/traditional literature is committed to memory and is passed by word of
mouth from generation to generation. The reliance on memory makes this literature to
continue to evolve with time and so an oral “text” changes with every performance because
of factors that include the mood of the performer or minstrel, the place, and time of its
performance. As a result of its orality, there is much improvisation and spontaneity in the
performance because each rendition is a “text” of its own or a variant.
African oral literature was and still is integrated into the daily lives of the people. It
was in the songs that men and women sang at home or to farms, fishing, hunting, or while
traveling on lonely roads. A woman sang as she weeded her yam or cassava farm; she also
sang while pounding her millet, as she lulled her baby to sleep with poetic lullabies. At the
same time, a man clearing a farm, planting, or preparing palm oil in the palm oil press sang
songs to revive his energy. Unlike modern Western literature that demands leisure and
formal education, traditional African literature is a people’s literature woven into the
different stages of the people’s lives with specific songs for birth, naming ceremonies,
initiation into different age grades, marriage, and death, among others. The people’s
festivals and social gatherings also had literature performed to the accompaniment of drums
or other musical instruments.
African oral literature is a very functional literature which catered to the needs of the
traditional society. In the communalistic society, literature in various forms helped to
maintain a healthy social ethos that bound people together. One of the advantages of
traditional African literature is that it is cohesive in bringing people together to share verbal
imaginative expressions in the forms of poetry/songs/chants, narratives, and performances
in a very live atmosphere. It is a literature which has its own aesthetics. Traditional Africa
had no schools as modern Africa has (after interaction with the West). However, there were
avenues for teaching young ones about ethics, morality, life, society, the environment, and
language and literary skills, which the oral tradition brought about. Usually, at the end of
the day’s work, parents and elders gathered their young ones by the fireside to tell them
stories. Such sessions were a part of the growing process of young boys and girls and they
looked forward to these informal fireside “schools” with enthusiasm. They were not only
entertained but also learned lessons and how to tell such stories and sing the songs
themselves.
Written or modern African literature is relatively young compared to Western literary
traditions which date to hundreds of years back. While some forms of writing existed in
traditional Africa, writing as we know it today started in the colonial period when colonialists
and missionaries built schools to advance their colonial administration and Christianity. The
products of those schools became the writers of modern African literature. While aware of
Juan Latino, the only black Latinist, scholar, and writer at Granada, Spain, and also of Saint
Augustine, Olaudah Equiano, and Phillis Wheatley, this course on African literature will focus
on modern African literature since colonization. In other words, the course deals with
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African literature as a postcolonial literature. This is so in the sense of a modern literature
that blends together both borrowed Western literary and indigenous African oral traditions.
While also aware of Arab literature by Africans and related Swahili literature in Africa, we
will be dealing with literary works by Africans that started to emerge in Africa from the
1950s.
Modern African literature is conditioned by four major factors: traditional oral
literature, African history, the African environment, and the influence of Western languages
and literary conventions. Oral traditions give modern African literature a cultural identity.
Modern African literature adopts many oral traditional forms and tropes. Many writers
(poets, novelists, and dramatists) use indigenous folklore such as folktales, myths, legends,
epics, folksongs, and proverbs, among so many others. In the literary works to be studied,
Chinua Achebe uses the folktale of the greedy tortoise in Things Fall Apart. There are
proverbs in the epic Sunjata, the novels, plays, and poems. The writers also adopt oral
techniques in the poetry, fiction, and plays. Many poems are modeled on satiric abuse
songs, dirges, and praise chants. Ngugi wa Thiongo, among others, uses a traditional
minstrel, the Gicaandi player, to tell the tale in Devil on the Cross, and dramatists, including
Femi Osofisan, use the traditional storyteller to present the drama. In fact, Abiola Irele has
described modern African literature as “a written oral literature” (16).
Many critics, including Irele, Jaheinz Jahn, and Emmanuel Obiechina, have
emphasized the point of African literature responding to the continent’s history. As Irele
puts it, the “historical experience serves as a constant reference for the African imagination”
because of colonialism and Europe presenting Africa as the “other” to enforce its “selfaffirmation as the
unique source of human and spiritual values.” Even later, African writers
will respond to the post-Independence experience in their respective nations and societies.
The imperative of history in modern African literature is affirmed by the fact that in many
African nations such as Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa, the writers are divided into
generations or periods. In Egypt, there are poets of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In Nigeria, there
are Pioneer Poets as well as poets of the Second, Third, and Fourth generations. South
Africa has apartheid and post-apartheid writings.
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The form of oral poems is not limited to set patterns of lines or rhythms. A good number of them are
literally songs containing poetic elements such as rhyme, assonance, and alliteration. However, when
transcribed and printed in European languages, oral poetry resembles free verse. Repetition is a
common device of the praise poem, whose rhythm can reflect the tonal qualities of certain African
languages. Written poetry of the colonial era borrows from oral poetry and European style; there is a
modernist quality to the body of twentieth century African poetry—most notably the absence of rhyme.
The Hausa oral poem “Ali, Lion of the World!” uses repetition effectively, as does modernist Cheney-
Coker in “The Hunger of the Suffering Man” (1980).
A functional art, African poetry in its oral and written forms has addressed a variety of themes, including
worldview, mysticism, values, religion, nature, negritude, personal relationships, anticolonialism, pan-
Africanism, neocolonialism, urbanism, migration, exile, the African diaspora, and patriarchy, as well as
such universals as valor, birth, death, betrayal, and love. Religious poetry is exemplified by Islamic
influences in such languages as Arabic, Hausa, and Swahili and in Ifa oral verses. A primary motif is the
spiritual world, often reflected in a praise or evocation of ancestors.
Imagery in African poetry frequently evokes the natural environment, as in Brutus’s “Robben Island
Sequence,” in which the poet alludes to “the blood on the light sand by the sea,” ironically blending
imprisonment and seascape. Neto implies the hardships of colonization in “The African Train” through
the image of “the rigorous African hill,” and another lusophone writer, Sousa, suggests pan-Africanism in
“Let My People Go,” with references to “Negro spirituals,” Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson.
Negritude is observable in U Tam’si’s “Brush Fire” (1957): “my race/ it flows here and there a river.”
Furthermore, the sometimes problematic experience of westernization is echoed in Macgoye’s
“Mathenge” (1984), which juxtaposes cultural memory and Western modernity: “the neon light, the
photo flash.” Similarly, Zimunya contrasts the urban and rural in “Kisimiso,” which describes a son
“boastful of his experiences in the city of knives and crooks.” African poets have also mined their
experiences outside the continent, suggested in Anyidoho’s “The Taino in 1992” (1993), which
remembers “a hurricane of Arawak sounds” in the Caribbean.
Gender themes appear in a line from a Zulu woman’s oral self-praise poem, “I am she who cuts across
the game reserve,” and in the straightforward poem “Abortion,” by an Egyptian poet born in the
1960’s,...