COURSE CONTENT

Module 1: African and Arabic Literatures

Topic 1: African Literature

Activity:

Thoughts to Ponder

1. Have you ever been a victim of discrimination? How did you deal with that situation?
2. What are your biggest fears? How do you address your fears?
3. What cultural practice do you think needs to be changed? Why?

Lesson Proper:
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African Literature

African literature refers to the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-
Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European
languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area
than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have
participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written
literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now
northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature.
There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages
of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long
enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date
primarily from the 20th century onward. 

The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and
modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple
evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by
colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But
the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures.

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Representative Works

Africa

By David Diop

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.

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About the Author

David Diop (1927-1960) was one of the most promising French West African young
poets in the 1950s, whose short career 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. While in Paris, Diop joinded the négritude 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.

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Once Upon A Time

By Nadine Gordimer

Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for

children. I reply that I don't write children's stories; and he writes back that at a recent
congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least
one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don't accept that I "ought" to
write anything.
And then last night I woke up or rather was awakened without knowing what had
roused me.
A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious?
A sound.
A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along
a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration.
Again: the creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were
moving from room to room, coming up the passage to my door. I have no burglar bars,
no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these
precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A
woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away,
last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique
clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual laborer he had dismissed
without pay.
I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the
dark. I lay quite still a
̶ victim already ̶ the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking
this way and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out of
rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that in the distractions of the day, I was
reading every faintest sound, identifying and classifying its possible threat.
But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no
human weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of
stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined
ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and
passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles,
detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing
uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that
hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled
flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga1 migrant
miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The
stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured
veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.
I couldn't find a position in which my mind would let go of my body̶̶ release me to
sleep again. So I began to tell myself a story, a bedtime story.

In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each
other very much and were living happily ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved
him very much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much. They had
a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming-pool which was fenced so that
the little boy and his playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who
was absolutely trustworthy and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended by
the neighbors. For when they began to live happily ever after they were warned, by that
wise old witch, the husband's mother, not to take on anyone off the street. They were
inscribed in a medical benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were insured
against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to the local Neighborhood Watch,
which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was
black or white, and therefore proved the property owner was no racist.
It was not possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or the car against riot
damage. There were riots, but these were outside the city, where people of another
color were quartered. These people were not allowed into the suburb except as reliable
Chopi and Tsonga: two peoples from Mozambique, northeast of South Africa
housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet
she was afraid that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the
plaque YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and open the gates and stream in... Nonsense, my
dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and guns to keep
them away. But to please her for he loved her very much and buses were being burned,
cars stoned, and schoolchildren shot by the police in those quarters out of sight and
hearing of the suburb he had electronically controlled gates fitted. Anyone who pulled off
the sign YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and tried to open the gates would have to
announce his intentions by pressing a button and speaking into a receiver relayed to the
house. The little boy was fascinated by the device and used it as a walkie-talkie in cops
and robbers play with his small friends.
The riots were suppressed, but there were many burglaries in the suburb and
somebody's trusted housemaid was tied up and shut in a cupboard by thieves while she
was in charge of her employers' house. The trusted housemaid of the man and wife and
little boy was so upset by this misfortune befalling a friend left, as she herself often was,
with responsibility for the possessions of the man and his wife and the little boy that she
implored her employers to have burglar bars attached to the doors and windows of the
house, and an alarm system installed. The wife said, She is right, let us take heed of her
advice. So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily
ever after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy's pet cat
tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it
customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.
The alarm was often answered it seemed by other burglar alarms, in other
houses, that had been triggered by pet cats or nibbling mice. The alarms called to one
another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became
accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the
croak of frogs and musical grating of cicadas' legs. Under cover of the electronic
harpies' discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi
equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing,
and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused
audaciously to drink the whiskey in the cabinets or patio bars. Insurance companies
paid no compensation for single malt2, a loss made keener by the property owner's
knowledge that the thieves wouldn't even have been able to appreciate what it was they
were drinking.
Then the time came when many of the people who were not trusted housemaids
and gardeners hung about the suburb because they were unemployed. Some
importuned for a job: weeding or painting a roof; anything, baas, madam. But the man
and his wife remembered the warning about taking on anyone off the street. Some
drank liquor and fouled the street with discarded bottles. Some begged, waiting for the
man or his wife to drive the car out of the electronically operated gates. They sat about
with their feet in the gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a green tunnel of the
street for it was a beautiful suburb, spoilt only by their presence and sometimes they fell
asleep lying right before the gates in the midday sun. The wife could never see anyone
go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread and tea, but the trusted
housemaid said these were loafers and tsotsis, who would come and tie her and shut
her in a cupboard. The husband said, She's right. Take heed of her advice. You only
encourage them with your bread and tea. They are looking for their chance. .. And he
brought the little boy's tricycle from the garden into the house every night, because if the
house was surely secure, once locked and with the alarm set, someone might still be
able to climb over the wall or the electronically closed gates into the garden.
You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher. And the wise old
witch, the husband's mother, paid for the extra bricks as her Christmas present to her
son and his wife the little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy tales.
But every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad daylight and the
dead of night, in the early hours of the morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight a
certain family was Single malt: an expensive Scotch whiskey at dinner while the
bedrooms were being ransacked upstairs. The man and his wife, talking of the latest
armed robbery in the suburb, were distracted by the sight of the little boy's pet cat
effortlessly arriving over the seven-foot wall, descending first with a rapid bracing of
extended forepaws down on the sheer vertical surface, and then a graceful launch,
landing with swishing tail within the property. The whitewashed wall was marked with
the cat's comings and goings; and on the street side of the wall there were larger red-
earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen
on the feet of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.
When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the
neighbourhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that
perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences,
walls and devices. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there
was the low-cost option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the top of
walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at reconciling
the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink)
and with the plaster urns of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like zigzags
of lightning and painted pure white). Some walls had a small board affixed, giving the
name and telephone number of the firm responsible for the installation of the devices.
While the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife found
themselves comparing the possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance;
and after several weeks when they paused before this barricade or that without needing
to speak, both came out with the conclusion that only one was worth considering. It was
the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style,
no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil
of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of
climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs.
There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and
sharper hooking and tearing of flesh. The wife shuddered to look at it. You're right, said
the husband, anyone would think twice... And they took heed of the advice on a small
board fixed to the wall: Consult DRAGON'S TEETH The People For Total Security.
Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round
the walls of the house where the husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat
were living happily ever after. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off the serrations, the
cornice of razor thorns encircled the home, shining. The husband said, Never mind. It
will weather. The wife said, You're wrong. They guarantee it's rust-proof. And she
waited until the little boy had run off to play before she said, I hope the cat will take heed
. . . The husband said, Don't worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap. And it
was true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boy's bed and kept to the garden,
never risking a try at breaching security.
One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the
book the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the
Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping
Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just
wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his
knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The
trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the
first to see and to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to
get at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some
reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the
bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-
cutters, choppers, and they carried it the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid
and the weeping gardener into the house.

ONCE UPON A TIME First published in 1989. Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in a
small town near Johannesburg, South Africa, and graduated from the University of
Witwatersrand. She has taught at several American universities, but continues to reside
in her native country. A prolific writer, Gordimer has published more than twenty books
of fiction (novels and short story collections). In addition to England's prestigious Booker
Prize for Fiction, she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991.

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DVkZjIyNzIyZA

About the Author

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was a South African novelist and short-story writer, who
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer's works deal
with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was
a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the
apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile.

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Anticipation

By Mabel Dove-Danquah

Nana Adaku II, Omanhene of Akwasin, was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of his ascension
to the stool of Akwasin. The capital, Nkwabi, was thronged with people from the outlying towns and
villages.

It was at the night on the cocoa season, money was circulating freely, and farmers were spending
to their hearts’ content. Friends who had not seen long time were renewing their friendship.
They called with gifts of gin, champagne, or whiskey, recalled old days with gusto and, before
departing, having imbided, were happy. Coast costumes. The men had tokota sandals on, their feet,
and rich multicolored velvet and gorgeous, hand woven, kente cloths nicely wrapped round their
bodies. The women with golden earrings dangling with golden chains and bracelets, looked
dignified in their colorful native attire.

The state drums were beating paeans of joy.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon and people were walking to the park where the
Odwira was to be staged. Enclosures of palm leaves decorated the grounds. The Omanhene
arrived in a palanquin under a brightly patterned state umbrella, a golden crown on his head, his
kente studded with tiny golden beads, rows upon rows of golden necklaces piled high on a chest.
He wore bracelets of gold from the wrists right up to the elbows. He held in his right hand a
decorated elephant tail which he waved to his enthusiastic, cheering people. In front of him
sat his “soul”, a young boy of twelve, holding the sword of office. After the Omanhene come
the Adontehene, the next in importance. He was resplendent in rich green and red velvet cloth; his
headband was studded with golden bars. Other chiefs came one after the other under the brightly
colored state umbrellas. The procession was long. The crowd raised cheers as each palanquin was
lowered, and the drums went on beating resounding joys of jubilation. The Omanhene look his seat
on the dais with his elders. The District Commissioner, Captain Hobbs, was near him; Sasa, the
Jester, looked ludicrous in his motley pair of trousers and his cap of monkey skin. He made faces of
the Omanhene who could not laugh; it was against custom for the great Chief to be moved to
laughter in public

The state park presented a scene of barbaric splendor. Chiefs and their retinue sat on native
stools under state umbrellas of diver’s colors. The golden linguist’ staves of offices
gleamed in the sunlight. The women, like tropical butterflies, looked charming in their multicolored
brocaded silk, kente, and velvet, and Odaku headdress, black and shiny, studded with long golden
pins and slides. Young men paraded he grounds, their flowing cloths trailing behind them, their
silken plaited headbands glittering in the sun. The drum  beat on……

 The women are going to perform the celebrated Adowa dance. The decorated calabashes make
rhythm. The women run a few steps, move slowly sideways and sways their shoulders. One dancer
looks particularly enchanting in her green, blue, and red square kente, moving with the simple,
charming, grace of a wild woodland creature. The Chief is stirred and throws a handful of loose cash
into the crowd of dancers. She smiles as the coins fall on her and tinkle to the ground. There is a
rush. She makes no sign but keeps on dancing. The Omanhene turns to his head linguist.

“Who is that beautiful dancer?”

 
“I am sorry, I do not know her.”
 
“I must have her as a wife.”

Nana Adaku II was a fifty-five and he already had a forty wives, but a new beauty gave him the same
thrill as it did the man who is blessed - or cursed  with only one better–half. Desire again burned
fiercely in his veins; he was bored with his forty wives. He usually got so mixed up among them that
lately he kept calling them by the wrong names. His new wife cried bitterly when he called her Oda,
the name of an old, ugly wife.
“This dancer is totally different,” thought the chief, she will be a joy to the palace.” He
turned round to the linguist:
“I will pay one hundred pound for her.”
 
“She might already be married, Nana.”
 
“I shall pay the husband any money he demands.”

 The linguist knew his Omanhene: When he desired a woman he usually had his way.
“Get fifty pounds from the chief treasurer, find the relatives, give them the money and
when she is in my palace tonight I shall give her the balance of the fifty pounds. Give the linguist staff to
Kojo and begin your investigations now.”

 Nana AdakuII was a fast worker. He was like men all over the world when they are stirred by feminine
charm, shapely leg, the flash of an eye, quiver of a nostril, the timbre of a voice, and the male species
become frenzy personified. Many men go through this sort of mania until they reach their dosage. The
cynics among them men with a little flattery, blend tolerance, and take fine care not to become
seriously entangled for life. Women, on the other hand, use quit a lot of common sense; they are not
particularly thrilled by the physical charms of a man; if his pockets are heavy and his income sure, he is
good matrimonial risk. But there is evolving a new type of hardheaded modern woman who insist on
the perfect lover as well as income and other necessaries, or stay forever from the un-bliss of
marriage.

By 6 p.m. Nana Adaku II was getting bored with the whole assembly and was very glad to get into his
palanquin. The state umbrella danced, the chief sat again in their palanquin, and the crowd cheered
wildly, the drums beat. Soon the shadows of evening fell and the enclosures of palm leaves in the
state park stood empty and deserted. The Omanhene had taken his bath after dusk changed into a
gold and green brocaded cloth. Two male servants stood on either side and fanned him with large in
his private sitting room. An envelope containing fifty golden sovereigns was near him. He knew his
linguist as a man of tact and diplomacy and was sure that night would bring his wife to help him
celebrate the anniversary of his accession to the Akwasin Stool. He must have dozed. When he woke
up the young woman was kneeling by his feet. He raised her onto the settee.
“Were you pleased to come?”
 
“I was pleased to do Nana‘s bidding.”
 
“Good girl. What is your name?”
 
“Effua, my lord and master.”
 
“It is a beautiful woman, too. Here are fifty gold sovereigns, the balance of the rage
dowry. We will marry privately tonight and do the necessary custom afterward.” Nana
Adaku II is not the first man use the technique. Civilized, semi-civilized, and primitive men all over the
world have said the same thing in nearly the same words.

“I shall give the money to my mother,” said the sensible girl. “She is in the corridor. May
I?” the Chief nodded assent.

 Effua returned.

“Nana, my mother and other relatives want to thank you for the hundred pounds.”
 
“There is no need, my beauty,” and he played with the ivory beads lying so snugly on
her bosom.
“They think you must have noticed some extraordinary charm in me for you to have
spent so much money,” she smiled shyly at the Omanhene.
 
“But, my dear, you are charming. Haven’t they eyes?
 
“But, Nana, I cannot understand myself.”
 
“You cannot, you modest woman. Look at yourself in that mirror on there.”

 The girl smiled mischievously, went to the mirror, looked at herself. She came back and sat on the
settee and leaned her head on his bosom.

“You are a lovely girl, Effua.” He caressed her shiny black hair, so artistically plaited.
 
“But my master, I have always been like this, haven’t I?
 
“I supposed so, beautiful, but only saw you today.”
 
“You only saw me today?”
 
“Today.”
 
“Have you forgotten?”
 
“Forgotten what, my love?”
 
“You paid fifty pounds…..and married me two years ago.

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ditions

About the Author

Mabel Dove Danquah (1905–1984) was a Gold Coast-born journalist, political activist

and creative writer, one of the earliest women in West Africa to work in these
fields. Entering politics in the 1950s before Ghana's independence, she became the first
woman to be elected a member of any African legislative assembly.

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