THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

*

This history offers new perspectives on African and Caribbean literature. It provides the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history. Chapters address the literature itself, the practices and conditions of its composition, and its complex relationship with African social and geopolitical history. The book provides an introduction to the entire body of productions that can be considered to comprise the field of African literature, defined both by imaginative expression in Africa itself and the black diaspora. It also accounts for the specific historical and cultural context in which this expression has been manifested in Africa and the Caribbean: the formal particularities of the literary corpus, both oral and written, that can be ascribed to the two areas, and the diversity of material and texts covered by the representative works. This magisterial history of African literature is an essential resource for specialists and students.

PROFESSOR F. ABIOLA IRELE is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His publications include an annotated edition of Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977), The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981; reprinted 1990), and an annotated edition of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1994; second edition 1999), as well as numerous articles and reviews and a recent volume of essays, The African Imagination (2001). He is a contributing editor to the new Norton Anthology of World Literature and is currently editor of Research in African Literatures. He is general editor of the series Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature.

SIMON GIKANDI is Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Reading the African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature.

THE CAMBRIDGE
HISTORY OF

AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN
LITERATURE

*

VOLUME 1

*

Edited by
F. ABIOLA IRELE
and
SIMON GIKANDI

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Dante MT 10.5/13 pt     System LATEX 2_e  [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloging in publication data

Irele, Abiola.
The Cambridge history of African and Caribbean literature / edited by F. Abiola Irele and
Simon Gikandi.
p.  cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 59434 0 (hardback)
1. Literature – Black authors – History and criticism. I. Gikandi, Simon II. Title.
PN841.174    2003
809′.8896 – dc21    2003046121

ISBN 0 521 59434 0 hardback

Contents

Notes on contributors    ix
Preface    xi
Acknowledgments    xxi
Chronology    xxii
Maps    xxxvii

Volume 1

1 · Africa and orality    1
LIZ GUNNER

2 · The folktale and its extensions    19
KWESI YANKAH

3 · Festivals, ritual, and drama in Africa    35
TEJUMOLA OLANIYAN

4 · Arab and Berber oral traditions in North Africa    49
SABRA WEBBER

5 · Heroic and praise poetry in South Africa    71
LUPENGA MPHANDE

6 · African oral epics    98
ISIDORE OKPEWHO

7 · The oral tradition in the African diaspora    117
MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS

8 · Carnival and the folk origins of West Indian drama    137
KEITH Q. WARNER

9 · Africa and writing    153
ALAIN RICARD

10 · Ethiopian literature    164
TEODROS KIROS

11 · African literature in Arabic    178
FARIDA ABU-HAIDAR

12 · The Swahili literary tradition: an intercultural heritage    199
ALAMIN M. MAZRUI

13 · Africa and the European Renaissance    227
SYLVIE KANDé

14 · The literature of slavery and abolition    238
MOIRA FERGUSON

15 · Discourses of empire    255
ROBERT ERIC LIVINGSTON

16 · African-language literatures of southern Africa    289
DANIEL P. KUNENE

17 · Gikuyu literature: development from early Christian writings to Ngũgĩ’s later novels    306
ANN BIERSTEKER

18 · The emergence of written Hausa literature    329
OUSSEINA ALIDOU

19 · Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama    357
KARIN BARBER

20 · African literature and the colonial factor    379
SIMON GIKANDI

21 · The formative journals and institutions    398
MILTON KRIEGER

22 · Literature in Afrikaans    408
AMPIE COETZEE

Volume 2

23 · East African literature in English    425
SIMON GIKANDI

24 · Anglophone literature of Central Africa    445
FLORA VEIT-WILD and ANTHONY CHENNELLS

25 · West African literature in English: beginnings to the mid-seventies    472
DAN IZEVBAYE

26 · South African literature in English    504
DAVID ATTWELL

27 · African literature in French: sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial period    530
MILDRED MORTIMER

28 · North African literature in French    552
PATRICIA GEESEY

29 · Francophone literatures of the Indian Ocean    569
BÉNÉDICTE MAUGUIÉRE

30 · African literature in Spanish    584
M’BARE N’GOM

31 · African literature in Portuguese    603
RUSSELL G. HAMILTON

32 · Popular literature in Africa    626
ODE S. OGEDE

33 · Caribbean literature in French: origins and development    643
NICK NESBITT

34 · Caribbean literature in Spanish    670
LIZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT

35 · Anglophone Caribbean literature    711
ELAINE SAVORY

36 · The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement    759
F. ABIOLA IRELE

37 · Postcolonial Caribbean identities    785
J. MICHAEL DASH

38 · African literature and post-independence disillusionment    797
DEREK WRIGHT

39 · “Postcolonial” African and Caribbean literature    809
ADELE KING

40 · Modernism and Postmodernism in African literature    824
ATO QUAYSON

Index    853

Notes on Contributors

FARIDA ABU-HAIDAR is with the Institute of Linguists in London.

OUESSINA ALIDOU is a professor in the Department of Africana Studies of Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey.

DAVID ATTWELL is Chair of the Department of English in the School of Language, Culture, and Communication of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

KARIN BARBER is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, England.

ANN BIERSTEKER is a professor with African and African American Studies at Yale University.

ANTHONY CHENNELLS is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Zimbabwe, in Mount Pleasant, Harare.

AMPIE COETZEE is Senior Professor of Afrikaans Literature at the University of the Western Cape, Bellville (near Cape Town), South Africa.

J. MICHAEL DASH is Professor of French at New York University.

MOIRA FERGUSON is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

PATRICIA GEESEY is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Florida.

SIMON GIKANDI is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

LIZ GUNNER is a member of the Department of English at the University of Natal, Scottsville in South Africa.

RUSSELL G. HAMILTON is Professor Emeritus of Lusophone African, Brazilian, and Portuguese Literatures at Vanderbilt University.

F. ABIOLA IRELE is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

DAN IZEVBAYE is a professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa.

SYLVIE KANDÉ is an independent scholar residing in New York.

ADELE KING is Professor of French at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

TEODROS KIROS is Professor of Philosophy at Suffolk University in Boston.

MILTON KRIEGER is with the Department of Liberal Studies of Western Washington University in Bellingham.

DANIEL P. KUNENE is a professor in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

ROBERT ERIC LIVINGSTON is Associate Director of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

BÉNÉDICTE MAUGUIÉRE is Professor of Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

ALAMIN MAZRUI is a professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

MILDRED MORTIMER is Professor of French at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

LUPENGA MPHANDE is with the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

NICK NESBITT is a professor in the Department of French at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

M’BARE N’GOM is Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

ODE S. OGEDE is a professor in the Department of English at North Carolina Central University in Durham.

ISIDORE OKPEWHO is a professor in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies at the State University of New York-Binghamton.

TEJUMOLA OLANIYAN is with the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

LIZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT is a professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

ATO QUAYSON is with the Department of English in Pembroke College, Cambridge.

ALAIN RICARD is with the Centre d’Etude d’Afrique Noire of the Universités de Bordeaux, France.

ELAINE SAVORY is Director of the Literature Program at the New School University, New York City.

FLORA VEIT-WILD is a member of the Philosophische Fakultät III, Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften of Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin.

KEITH Q. WARNER is Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS is Professor of African-Caribbean Language and Orature in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

SABRA WEBBER is an Associate Professor, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Comparative Studies in the Humanities at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

DEREK WRIGHT is Professor of English at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

KWESI YANKAH is a professor at the University of Ghana in Legon.

Preface

In her inaugural lecture as Professor of English at University College, Ibadan, Molly Mahood justified the formal study of English literature in an African university on the grounds that the English language was uniquely placed to play a significant role in the emergence of new national literatures in the African territories under British rule, as part of the process of their transformation into national entities that the colonial situation had inevitably set in motion. Invoking the precedent established in the early part of the twentieth century by the signal contribution of Irish writers to the renewal of English, Mahood envisioned a parallel development in which creative writers in Africa would function as effective bearers of an original imagination, rooted in the local culture, and forging out of the common experience a new and compelling expression in English. Her intimation of a literary renaissance in Africa based on English was further premised on a sociological observation that took account of the progressive rise of a national elite educated in a common language, that of the colonizer, and from whose ranks would arise not only the creative writers but also a new reading public, and in particular a cadre of informed critics, responding to their work in terms familiar to both writer and public and thus serving as the primary audience for the new literature. In her view, the university in Africa could thus be regarded as the enabling environment for the formation of a new literary culture, in what Stanley Fish was later to call “an interpretive community,” for which the colonial language stood to function as the determining cohesive element (Mahood 1955).

  The main point of Mahood’s argument which has to do with the potential for the rise of a new literature in English was soon to be fully verified in the Nigerian context that was the immediate focus of her attention. Although Cyprian Ekwensi and Amos Tutuola were already published writers by the time she delivered her lecture, the significance of their work as harbingers of a new literary culture was to be heightened by the appearance in 1958 of Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, a work that has since established itself as one of the master texts of modern African literature. The fact that Achebe himself was an alumnus of Ibadan thus gave point and effect to Mahood’s argument, for Achebe’s achievement was soon to be mirrored in that of other alumni of Ibadan, notably Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and John Pepper Clark, whose work began to appear in the immediate aftermath of Nigerian independence. With other writers who had no direct connection with the university but who began their careers in the early sixties, such as Gabriel Okara and Onuora Nzekwu, they represent the first generation in the full emergence of literature in English as a major component of Nigeria’s cultural history in modern times.

  It is of particular interest, fifty and more years since Molly Mahood’s inaugural lecture, to evoke the Nigerian case, which has been in many ways emblematic of the cultural transitions that accompanied the political process on the African continent in the second half of the twentieth century, for similar developments were taking place in other parts of colonial Africa, with varying degrees of achievement and interest. The developments in which the European languages began to be employed effectively as means of the expression of African responses to the historical, social, and cultural implications of the colonial dispensation, for the representation of indigenous modes of life and the articulation of a new sense of identity, derived from the traditional, precolonial folkways and heritage of cultural values. This new literature of African assertion, in many ways the culmination of an earlier discourse going back to the eighteenth century concerned with exploring the historic encounter with Europe, helped to define a new historic profile of Africans and black people as part of the human community, a status they had been denied by an accumulated history of slavery, colonialism, racism. The writer assumed a prophetic role as the vanguard of the African revolution – the “voice of vision in his own time” as Wole Soyinka was later to proclaim – and literature an intense valuation as the mode of expression of a new consciousness. For reasons having to do with this thematic focus related to African self-definition, as well as its accessibility in the European languages, it is this tradition of African letters that has come to be regarded as the central reference in the general conception of African literature.

  The emergence in the years after the Second World War of the African writer as a cultural icon also helped to direct attention to other areas of African imaginative life, in particular that represented by the oral tradition, obscured by the emphasis upon literacy as the mark of modernity. The oral texts that infused with life the institutional framework of precolonial African societies and cultures featured in western scholarship largely as ancillary documents in such disciplines as anthropology and ethnohistory. The emphasis on structure and orientation toward expressive values in literary scholarship occasioned by the so-called “oral-formulaic theory” associated with Parry and Lord helped to foster a renewed attention to African orality and a recognition of its purely literary articulations. Two major collections initiated in the sixties helped to provide the wealth of primary material on various aspects and genres of African oral literature that sustained this interest. These collections, the Oxford Library of African Literature and the “Classiques Africains” series in France have furnished the main reference texts on which scholarship on African oral literature continues to rely. The concern with the indigenous heritage of literature culminated in the rediscovery of the great oral epics, Sundiata, Ozidi, Mwindo, and others, a result that has been due as much to the diligent research of scholars as to the enterprise of both academic and trade publishers in Europe and America, which has enabled the texts to become available in workable editions. The collections, monographs, and detailed studies produced by African and European scholars have thus contributed immensely to our understanding of the modalities and procedures of African orality, so that the oral literature came to assume a new significance as elements of Africa’s cultural capital. At the same time they presented theoretical and methodological interest for academic areas such as discourse analysis and performance theory (via the pioneering work of Victor Turner, 1967, on ritual) as well as for comparative poetics, for example, with respect to parallels between the modes of literary creation in Africa and in medieval Europe: parallels which have been pursued in the work of scholars like Jeff Opland (1983) and, in the later phase of his career, Paul Zumthor (1983; 1990).

  The scholarly interest in African orality also drew attention to the considerable body of literature in the African languages that had come into existence as a consequence of the reduction of these languages to writing, one of the enduring effects of Christian evangelization. The ancient tradition of Ethiopian literature in Ge’ez, and modern works like Thomas Mofolo’s Shaka in the Sotho language, and the series of Yoruba novels by D. O. Fagunwa, were thus able finally to receive the consideration they deserved. African-language literatures came to be regarded as a distinct province of the general landscape of imaginative life and literary activity on the African continent (Jahn 1961 and 1966; Gérard 1971 and 1981).

  These were the circumstances that gave impetus to the academic study of African literature as a discipline, focused on the two modes of existence, oral and written, in which this literature has been manifested. We have endeavored in the present work to provide an account of the entire body of productions that can be considered to comprise this broad field as defined both by imaginative expression in African itself, and aspects of the continuum as represented by literature in the Caribbean and to some extent in North America. The work has been designed to take account of the specific historical and cultural context in which this expression has been shown in the two areas of human experience concerned by the project, the formal particularities of the literary corpus, both oral and written, that can be ascribed to the two areas and, in particular, the diversity of material covered by the representative texts.

  This observation raises the question of delimitation of the field designated by the term “African literature.” We are aware of the fact that the extensive scope and the heterogeneous character of the material covered by this history raise the problem of definition in an acute way. However, we have not attempted to provide an unqualified answer to the question as to what qualifies as African literature, either in terms of intrinsic features of theme and cultural reference, or of stylistic modes and formal conventions, and ultimately, of extrinsic factors related to conditions of production, performance and transmission of the texts, oral and written. The question of definition arises from the peculiar historical pressures that have attended the development of modern African expression, and their implications for the academic study of African literature. As Dan Izevbaye has shown, in the various efforts to define African literature, it has not been possible to apply the standard criteria such as language (as, for example, with French literature) or that of a unified territorial/national reference (as with the literature of England/Britain) (Izevbaye 1968). The political and ideological background to the emergence of modern African literature – pan-Africanism and African nationalism – has thus determined the recourse to the term now in common usage, which the present work has not only adopted but seeks to endorse in its reference to the entire field of imaginative expression in Africa.

  In conformity with accepted practice, therefore, the term “African literature” has been taken here to mean the literature that has been produced on the African continent, whatever the specific provenance of the oral or written text and of the corpus being considered, and whatever the language of expression of the text in question, the particular modes it employs, or the conventions to which it conforms. Africa is viewed here in geopolitical terms, covering both the sub-Saharan regions habitually associated with black populations, as well as North Africa, including Egypt, inhabited today predominantly by Arab people. This explains the inclusion of literature in Arabic, despite the inevitable overlap with the Middle East. The project’s working definition is especially important for literature by Africans of European descent, notably South Africans writing in English and Afrikaans, who are being located within the social and cultural history and the literary traditions of a continent with which they have often maintained an ambiguous relation in the past, but to which they have become aware of being irrevocably bound. In this perspective, Afrikaans is considered an African language, comparable to Ki-Swahili in its emergence on African soil as recognizably a new language, and in its development as a significant communicative and expressive medium.

  The literary area defined by the geopolitical conception of Africa that underlies this work embraces a wide variety of languages, each serving to ground a cluster of literary forms. As already noted, imaginative expression in Africa can be identified in two broadly distinct modes: on one hand, that associated with an indigenous oral tradition, and on the other, that deriving from the conventions of the literate cultures with which the continent has been in contact for the best part of the preceding millennium. However, this primary division soon begins to yield a multiplicity of categories determined by the considerable range of languages and literary conventions to be found on the African continent. Given this diversity, a literary history of Africa, consisting of a coherent and linear narrative of its development over time, and valid for the entire continent, is neither feasible nor even meaningful. These considerations have compelled an approach that departs in important respects from the conventional literary histories, which typically consist in a progressive narration of distinctive periods and movements in the evolution of a national literature, with appropriate emphasis on the great figures and works that have determined this evolution. This work has therefore been conceived as essentially a comprehensive survey of the field, structured along generic lines as regards the oral tradition, and along linguistic/regional lines as regards the modern literature in both the African and European languages.

  The term “African literature” has also been taken to refer, albeit in what may be considered a secondary sense, to the “colonial literature” produced by metropolitan European writers for whom Africa has served as the setting either for a complete cycle of works (Pierre Loti, Rider Haggard, Joyce Cary) or for single/specific works (as in the case of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and Castro Soromenho). It needs to be stressed that the discourse of power either elaborated by this literature or implicit within it represents the principal symbolic channel of the colonial ideology, with which Africans and black people in the African diaspora have had to contend.

  This prompts a consideration of the thematic and formal links between African literature and Caribbean literature, links that make it convenient to consider them together in a single project. The early forms of expression by blacks in the New World, either in the oral mode (the folktales, songs, and chants, as well as the textual content of ritual practices) or in the literate mode (as exemplified notably by the slave narratives) not only reflect an African response to the novel historical circumstances of Atlantic slavery; they also bear the stamp of a distinctive African sensibility. The slave narratives in particular mark the common origins of modern literary expression by blacks in Africa and the New World; they began as African texts, evolving later into a distinctly American genre (Woodard 1999; Andrews and Gates 2000). They represent the earliest texts in which the implications of the historic encounter between Africa and Europe are documented in factual terms and explored in imaginative terms, and inaugurate a modern awareness arising out of this encounter, an awareness that is bound to a new sense of the black racial community, defined as much by its objective situation of historical adversity as by the cultural continuities which bind the black populations of the African diaspora to the mother continent. The postulate of a fundamental African sensibility conditioned by common forms of social experience and cultural practice is strengthened by the evident vitality in the New World of African-derived forms of folklore and religious expression. This awareness informs such concepts as pan-Africanism and Negritude, and provides the keynote to the most significant literature by black writers in the twentieth century.

  Despite its connection to Africa, literature in the Caribbean has developed along specific thematic and expressive channels related to the charged historical drama of the region and its complex racial and cultural composition. This makes it imperative to take account of the double reference of Caribbean literature: as both the reflection of a global African experience and as testimony to a process of collective self-fashioning in a new environment. Although unified by reference to a common experience (slavery and its colonial sequel), literature in the Caribbean exhibits some of the diversity remarked upon in the case of Africa, not least as regards the literary traditions associated with the three languages of expression in the region: English, French, and Spanish. It is thus important to stress the contribution of the Caribbean region to contemporary literary culture. Contemporary West Indian literature in English can be considered as one of the focal areas of literary modernism (Gikandi 1992). The award of the Nobel Prize to Derek Walcott in 1993 has been regarded not only as a consecration of the work of Walcott himself but of West Indian literature in general: of a literary renaissance represented by the work of such eminent figures as George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, up to and including Lorna Goodison (perhaps the most eloquent poetic voice today in the region). It is also of interest to note the current revival of interest in the work of Jean Rhys, whose work and career appear to confirm the connection between European modernism and the perception of the Caribbean as an area of literary reference. This connection is even clearer in the French West Indies, where the work of Aimé Césaire, to whom we are indebted for the term “négritude,” was hailed from the beginning by André Breton as an outstanding demonstration of the moral and aesthetic principles of the Surrealist movement. Edouard Glissant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé, and, more recently, Patrick Chamoiseau (Prix Goncourt, 1992) have been able to sustain in their own work this innovative thrust of francophone Caribbean literature, within which we locate the Haitians: René Depestre, Jean Métellus, and Frankétienne. Finally, as regards the Caribbean, it needs to be recalled that Alejo Carpentier (the originator of the concept of “magic realism”), Nicolás Guillén and Pales Matos spearheaded a literary renaissance in Cuba that gave a powerful impulse to modern literature in other parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

  As can be seen, apart from the cultural continuities they represent, a major point of interest is that both modern African literature in the European languages and Caribbean literature provide powerful testimonies to the colonial experience, which, thanks to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, has come to be regarded as a crucial factor in the constitution of the present global system (1974). We might remark in passing that the discourse of modernity these literatures propose is central to Paul Gilroy’s formulation of the concept of “The Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993). It is of interest at the same time to draw attention to the comparative perspective that African and Caribbean literatures provide on western canonical texts and the literary conventions associated with them, a perspective that illuminates the relation of these literatures to the various metropolitan traditions from which they derive not merely their language of expression and standard forms, but also, as J. P. Clark has averred, much of their fundamental creative impulse (Clark 1970). Conversely, there is a growing recognition of the impact of African and African-derived forms of expression on European modernism. Thus, along with writers from Latin America and other parts of the Third World (notably India, in the case of English), African and Caribbean writers have contributed in very important ways to the expansion of the expressive field of European languages. The dynamics of this “Euro-African intertextuality” (Irele 2001) may be said to lend further theoretical density to the concept of the “postcolonial,” a concept that, since its inauguration by the work of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989) has stood in need of rigorous theoretical formulation and textual exemplification.

*

The remarks above serve to indicate the direction of the present work. We need to say a word of explanation concerning the structure of the book. We have designed the work as a succession of self-contained chapters focused on specific areas, with a bibliography of primary and secondary works provided at the end of each chapter. This arrangement involves the inevitable overlap between chapters; however, we do not consider this a serious problem, conscious of the fact that, confronted with such a large work, readers can be expected to go to topics in which they are interested.

  The early chapters are devoted to an extensive overview of the oral tradition in Africa and the New World. This is followed by accounts of representative instances of the written literature in the African languages. The transition to modern experience signaled by literary and intellectual response to the encounter with Europe, in all its tragic dimensions, provides the keynote of the latter chapters, devoted largely to the literature in the European languages, marked by its engagement with the problems of racial emancipation and of decolonization both in Africa and the New World as well as with the aftermath in the post-independence period. Against this general background, the chapters have been organized as a series of surveys along linguistic and regional lines, in order to reflect the coherence they lend to the material and to allow in each case for a certain measure of chronological ordering in the presentations. These survey chapters are complemented by “thematic” chapters that take account of convergences across linguistic and regional categories. The very nature of the project dictates that the presentation in each area should incorporate a historical perspective wherever possible. This is especially the case with the modern literature, where the major thematic preoccupations that have attended the genesis and evolution of literature by black people require to be presented in close relation to the ideological and intellectual concerns by which African and Caribbean expression has been driven since the eighteenth century.

  It is believed that the structure outlined above has the methodological advantage of focusing attention not only on the intrinsic aspects of the various bodies of texts and literary productions examined here, but also on the correlations between them. For example, the continuity that binds the oral tradition to modern expression in African literature has been convincingly demonstrated by Leroy Vail and Landeg White in their study Power and the Praise Poem (1991), a study that has the special merit of indicating the possibility of arriving at a unified vision of the entire field of African literature by proceeding from structural analysis of formal features to the conventions they enjoin and the apprehension of the world they entail.

  As regards the extrinsic aspects, the particular problems that arise from the guiding conception of the project happen in fact to form an integral part of the history of the literature. We have highlighted a number of factors such as the colonial situation and the role of formative journals, in the rise of modern African literature. One other issue that pervades the volume is that of the question of language, which has constantly featured in discussions of African literature, and whose cultural dimension and implications for the creative process have been highlighted by the pronouncements of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his shift from English to Gikuyu for his own creative work (Ngugi 1986). Another issue that arises from a consideration of the corpus is the question of “national” literatures in Africa being increasingly raised by African scholars, notably the Beninois critic Adrien Wanou, who has argued for the “territorial imperative” as a determining factor in the development of new literary traditions in contemporary Africa, a question that assumed prominence with the publication of Richard Bjornson’s pioneering study of Cameroonian literature (1991).

  This brings us to a final point regarding the character of this work as a reference. Although questions of value have not been be excluded (they are already implicit in the choice of authors and texts), contributors have had to bear in mind that the emphasis of the publication has had to be a factual account of the development of each aspect of the corpus, rather than on evaluative discussion of texts and works or critical appraisal of writers, a function we leave to the judgment of scholar critics and ultimately to history.

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Bjornson, Richard. 1991. The African Quest for Freedom and Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clark, John Pepper. 1970. The Example of Shakespeare. London: Longman.

Gérard, Albert. 1971. “Black Africa.” Review of National Literatures 2. 2.

      1981. African Language Literatures. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press.

Gikandi, Simon. 1992. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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      1966. A History of Neo-African Literature. London: Faber and Faber.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Ruthmarie H. Mitsch, of the Ohio State University, for editorial assistance with this project, and to Anne Mischo, a graphic designer with the Ohio State University, for her preparation of maps for this volume. Adeline Koh at the University of Michigan provided assistance with the proofreading of the project.

Chronology

Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature