English Literatures Across the Globe

A Companion
Wilhelm Fink Verlag
IV. West Africa
Katrin Berndt
1 . Introduction
The phrase 'West African Literature in English' is a general term
introduced to categorise literary traditions within an area covering five
countries with a tradition in anglophone writing: Gambia, Ghana, Liberia,
Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Together, these states have a population of
about 140 million. Each of the five countries is inhabited by a number of
peoples. Some of these, like the Ogoni in the Niger Delta, count only half
a million members, others, like the Igbo in South Eastern Nigeria, amount
to 20 million. Their narrative traditions are as manifold as their cultural
heritages. In Gambia, oral literature is still much more popular than written
texts, and the number of published anglophone authors is small. In
contrast, Nigeria, whose population consists of more than 200
linguistically heterogeneous peoples speaking about twice that many
languages and dialects, has produced a highly diversified literary tradition.
A recurrent problem in any overview of African literature is that of
structure and emphasis: Should a survey privilege general ideas and
characteristics of the writing of the region, thus perpetuating the notion of
a fairly coherent body of West African writing? Or should an account
respect national boundaries and, consequently, treat the texts chosen for
analysis as representatives of their respective national literatures ? All of
the nations in question are a product of colonialism — as is anglophone
writing. Since the main body of texts was published after the countries'
political independence, and since many writers specifically refer to and
discuss problems of post-independent status, a national approach would
seem to be justified. Such an approach clearly stresses the heterogeneity of
the countries themselves and their literary traditions. But there are shared
features as well, which will be dealt with at the beginning of each section.
A twofold strategy will thus be pursued: both historical context and
literary overview first discuss common aspects and comparable
developments in these five countries. Then, separate portrayals outline
distinctive characteristics. As the majority of anglophone West African
writing was produced by Ghanaian and Nigerian authors, their work is
given greater prominence and will feature in the analyses of key texts.
Within the field of world literature written in English, West African
writing as it exists today has diversified into various genres and styles, and
has yielded a number of accomplished, and acclaimed, writers — a fact,
however, that needs to involve awareness of the whole question of
language (after all, given the nature of the present book, literatures in
vernacular languages are not discussed). In contrast to anglophone authors
from settler colonies such as Australia, or from countries with an
established writing tradition in nonEuropean languages, such as India,
African writers, when they write in their respective mother tongues, face
the problem that their work is hardly recognised, not even in their own
countries. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an African debate, mainly
between Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya), about
the appropriate mode of expression for an African writer. Achebe
acknowledged anglophone literature as a consequence of colonialism,
which incorporates its ambiguous legacies, but is also fit to challenge
them.
Ngugi, on the other hand, criticised this attitude and has since advocated
African writing in African languages (somewhat inconsistently, as he
himself keeps translating his writing from Kikuyu into English). Ngugi's
and Achebe's varied approaches reflect the different functions of English
in Africa: While East African states use Swahili as a lingua franca,
pidginised English is the language of daily usage in anglophone West
African countries. Non-standardised versions of English were already
introduced during colonial occupation — e.g., for trading purposes (the
contact pidgins), or, via the Bible, when West Indian and African
American missionaries spread the Christian gospel. Anglophone writing
has thus become a genuine mode of West African expression — a
consequent complement to texts both in the vernacular and in linguistically
hybrid poetry and prose.
2. Historical and Political Contexts
The first contacts between European envoys and West African people took
place as early as the 15th century. In the 1440s, the Portuguese established
a trading post on the West African coast and began to traffic in slaves.
Two hundred years later, the British built their first trade fort on St. James
Island in the Gambia River. Although they had initially traded with gold
and spices, the need for labourers in the Americas promised to become a
much more profitable business. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade
(roughly 1500 to 1850) between 12 and 20 million people were either
abducted or sold, and brought to the Americas. Fragmented political
conditions on the West African coast, as well as hostilities between the
then existing countries, worked in favour of the slave traders. Part of the
region of present-day Ghana, for example, was occupied by numerous
chiefdoms, each one an independent political unit. At the end of the 16th
century, the kingdom of Benin, situated in the south-western part of
today's Nigeria, had risen to great political power and was thus able to
prevent slave traders from abducting its citizens. States such as Asante and
Dahomey played a more active role in the slave trade. In order to protect
their own population and to gain a share in the profits, they agreed to
capture citizens of other communities, and to sell them to slave traders. In
return, they received firearms and other goods, both to defend themselves
and to guarantee the stability of their states (Mabe 2001, 557). From 1750
onwards, sub-Saharan Africa's partition in the world economy consisted of
the 'export' of human beings. As a centre of the slave trade, the West
African coast witnessed such consequences as the rise of warrior chiefs
profiting from the trade, the distribution of firearms, and an increasing
influence of European powers on African affairs — consequences that
have shaped African politics until the present. Another, albeit indirect,
result of the slave trade was the British abolitionist movement, which
pursued the settlement ('re-settlement', in their view) of former African
American slaves on the African coast. These creolized 'repatriates' formed
the first urban, literate elite of West Africa. Anglophone literature has
repeatedly taken up the issue of the slave trade: Authors like Olaudah
Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789;
see chapter 3, Britain), Ayi Kwei Armah (Two Thousand Seasons, 1973),
and Syl CheneyCoker (The Last Harmattan ofAlusine Dunbar, 1990) offer
autobiographical, historical, and subjective accounts of the era of the slave
trade, thus introducing African perspectives on its course and its effects.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain concentrated its efforts on profitable
trade relations. In 1880, around 80% of the African continent was still
ruled by African kings,
2. Historical and Political Contexts
queens, lineage rulers and community representatives.
European influence was restricted to a few trading posts on the
coast. Political systems indigenous to the region covered
acephalous societies (e.g., Nigeria's Igbo communities), town
and city states (e.g., those founded by the Yoruba in Nigeria),
people with tribal structures (e.g., the Ewe of Ghana), and large
empires, such as Asante and Dahomey. Missionary activities
that entailed the promotion of formal education, such as the
founding of Fourah Bay College in 1827 in Sierra Leone, and
the establishment of elementary and secondary schools in
Nigeria and the Gold Coast, were welcomed by African rulers
(Boahen 1985, 6). In the second half of the 19th century, the
new, formally educated elite began to send their children to
European universities; economic structures had started to
recover after the abolition of the slave trade, and Africans had
successfully switched to an economy based on the export of
cash crops (Boahen 1985, 6). Between 1880 and 1930,
however, European powers conquered and divided the whole of
Africa, with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia. Despite
African peoples' often ferocious resistance, colonial powers
appropriated political rule to guarantee themselves the means to
control and exploit the continent's rich natural resources, which
had become essential for the further technological advancement
of European nations. After three centuries dominated by trade
relations with Europe, Africans found themselves subjected to
foreign rule.
Since the emergence of anglophone writing is closely
connected to the introduction of British institutions of formal
education, it is remarkable to note that the British colonial
administration confined itself to the building of primary
schools. The first secondary school for African pupils was
opened in 1927 in the Gold Coast. The gap between the first
appearance of anglophone writers at the end of the 19th
century, who belonged to the Creole elites of their respective
countries and had access to singular institutions such as Fourah
Bay College, and the growing number of English publications
in the years prior to independence, thus becomes
comprehensible.
During the few decades of occupation, traditional British
aversion to centralised rule led to the promotion of local and
regional authorities, who collaborated with the colonial power
within the indirect-rule system. This method created loyalty
towards the Empire and helped to establish administrative
structures — modelled, of course, on British ideas — but also
supported the emergence since the 1930s of autonomous
organisations such as trade unions and political parties. In
Nigeria, the first parties were founded in the 1920s, and local
institutions participated in government as early as 1922;
Ghana's 'The Gold Coast Youth Council', founded in 1937, was
entirely devoted to the achievement of political independence;
in the famous 'women's war' of 1929, Igbo women protested
against the government's taxation plans and against the corrupt
warrant chiefs appointed by the indirect rule system. In the
wake of World War Il, more nationalist parties were founded
and independence movements flourished, boosted by African
soldiers' contribution to their colonisers' freedom. In 1957,
Ghana was the first African colony to gain independence, soon
to be followed by other former British colonies.
Although Britain's former West African territories share a
number of similarities, their distinctive features, which have
also shaped their national literatures, should not be neglected.
The following passages give a brief survey of these nations'
individual developments, including the post-independence
period during which the majority of anglophone West African
writing was produced.
Founded by freed African American slaves in 1847, and a
formally independent country since that time, Liberia is now
one of the most prominent examples of what is called
a collapsed state. From the establishment of the state up until 1989,
Liberian politics were dominated by the descendants of the African
American founders, called Americo-Liberians, who controlled the
country's resources and the profits gained from mining (iron ore,
diamonds, gold), extensive rubber plantations, and the export of
tropical timbers. In 1980, a group of soldiers seized power in a coup
d'état and shot members of the government and the Americo-Liberian
elite on Monrovia beach. The new rulers redistributed positions and
wealth among the members of their people and transformed the
militia into an elite force that committed human rights abuses against
Liberians of other ethnic groups. Henceforth, the economy collapsed
and state institutions were reduced to mere facades. In 1989, another
attempted military coup turned into an atrocious civil war, which cost
200,000 lives and forced hundreds of thousands to leave their
country. A peace agreement in 1996 and elections in 1997 brought
only two years' rest, since the ruling army forces and rivalling
warlords continued to plunder Liberia. In 2003, another peace treaty
brought an armistice. However, after two decades of civil war, which
left the country exploited and devastated by military troops and
warlords, the majority of the civil population has left the country. At
present, the census counts an estimated population of about 2.9
million people (Mabe 2001, 347). The continuing outbreaks of
violence, uprisings and lootings, and the fact that most resources are
still controlled by former warlords, have not supported the
development of a literary scene. l
Gambia has a population of 1.3 million people (Mabe 2001, 206).
Named the 'groundnut colony' in colonial days for its main export
article, the land plays, compared to the literary giant Nigeria, only a
minor role in West African literature. The country became a British
crown colony in 1843, and a British protectorate in 1894.
Subsequently, power was transferred to local rulers. Following World
War Il, new political parties emerged, and in 1965 Gambia was
granted political independence. Between 1982 and 1989, the country
formed a confederation called Senegambia with its neighbour
Senegal, which was supposed to lead to a union of currency and of
customs, but this broke apart due to diverse political disagreements.
Gambia's current president, Yayah Jammeh, was elected as both Head
of State and Head of Government in 1997 after he had successfully
led a bloodless coup against the former ruler. The elections saw no
violent outbreaks or irregularities, yet the present political situation
can hardly be described as peaceful: During a student demonstration
in 2000, for instance, 16 people were shot by security forces.
Opposition party members and journalists were harassed, imprisoned,
and tortured. In 2002, President Jammeh was re-elected and has since
attempted to tackle corruption and to further the country's economic
development.
The founding of Freetown by former African American and
Caribbean slaves and British prostitutes in 17871 marked the first step
towards the development of the state Sierra Leone. The so-called
'repatriation' of freed slaves and the Black British proletariat was
initiated by the abolitionist movement. The British government hoped
to establish
In 2005, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became Liberia's new president and
Africa's first elected female head of state. She has promised to
maintain peace and to fight corruption.
2. Historical and Political Contexts

1 During the US-American war of independence, a considerable number of slaves had fled to
Nova Scotia to demonstrate their loyalty to the British crown. They were
brought to England after the end of the war, where their accommodation soon
became a problem. Under the influence of the Abolitionist movement, the government
decided to settle these people on the West African coast. Together with British
prostitutes, who were meant to become their wives, the African Americans were brought
to the coast of today's Sierra Leone and occupied the Western Province in and around
Freetown (Ki-Zerbo 1992, 247).
trading posts which, after the official abolition of the slave trade in
Britain in 1807, would further the shift from traffic in human beings
to trade in goods. The region's various local peoples, however, reacted
with hostility to this arbitrary establishment of a new colony. With
British support, the descendants of the new settlers, now called Krio,
soon gained political dominance over the indigenous population. The
colony was administered by the Sierra Leone Company, founded in
1791, until the country became a crown colony in 1808. In 1896, the
hinterland was also declared a British protectorate, but the main
settlement of industry was concentrated in the regions inhabited by
the Krio, who also controlled the profits gained from the trade with
gold and diamonds. Following World War Il, the British government
introduced an election system based on the Westminster model and
initiated the first elections for the legislative council. In 1961, Sierra
Leone was granted independence. Six years later, the country faced
its first coup d'état, which resulted in military rule and, in 1978, was
followed by the establishment of a one-party state. Responding to the
demands of the population, one-party rule was declared to be
abolished with free elections in 1992, yet the years of autocracy had
already turned Sierra Leone into a failed state where mismanagement
and corruption were rife. Taking advantage of the deteriorating
living conditions, army rebels seized power and overturned the
government. The 1990s were shaped by continual conflict, interrupted
only by failed peace negotiations and changes of government, all of
which proved unable to stop the violence. During the civil war, about
one-third of the population fled the country, and thousands of children
were forced to join the militia. The year 2002 finally saw the official
end of the war and free elections. In the same year, a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission was established to identify those
responsible for the atrocities committed during the civil war. Today,
Sierra Leone is among the poorest countries in the world — its 4.3
million people have an average life-expectancy of only 38 years
(Mabe 2001, 553).
Beginning in the late 15th century, several European powers, such as
Portugal, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France, built trading posts
on the Gold Coast, later Ghana. Slaves, cocoa and gold served as the
main export 'goods', and states such as the Asante kingdom were
profitably involved in selling both prisoners of war and capturing
citizens of neighbouring chiefdoms. In 1874, however, the Asante
kingdom was conquered by the British, and in 1896, Britain
integrated its territory into the Gold Coast colony. The resistance of
the educated middle class, who had already developed their own
political institutions, to the 'indirect rulers' appointed by the colonisers
was immense, because the representatives installed by the colonial
power were perceived as collaborators who had profited from slave-
trading. They were thus believed to be unfit to represent civil society
(Ki-Zerbo 1992, 486). In the first half of the 20th century, however,
the Gold Coast witnessed an economic upsurge. Living standards
were comparatively high, attracting immigrants from both
anglophone and francophone West African countries. Trade centres
like Kumasi were seen as an African El Dorado. Nationalist
movements arose soon after World War Il. A prominent figure was
Ghana's later president Kwame Nkrumah, who was mainly supported
by youth and women's organisations and the urban population.
Nkrumah organised marches, demonstrations, and boycotts against
European trade goods to force price drops; he also sent music groups
singing slogans and propaganda into the remotest regions of the
country. In 1957, the Gold Coast became independent and re-
christened itself Ghana. Nkrumah, who was elected prime minister,
followed a socialist pan-Africanist policy, turned the country into a
one-party state and declaring all opposition activities illegal. He was
overthrown in 1966 in a military coup. His downfall

marked the beginning of a period of alternating military and civil rule

that was to last three decades. In 1991, Ghana re-established both its
multi-party system and its civil government, which has since
managed to build an extensive infrastructure and a functioning
communications system for the country's 18.9 million citizens (Mabe
2001, 226, 228).
Because of its size and economic strength, Nigeria has become West
Africa's leading political power. The ethnic heterogeneity of its 110.8
million inhabitants (Mabe 2001, 449), however, has repeatedly
displayed potential for self-destruction. Nigeria hosts about 200
different peoples, among whom the Igbo, the Yoruba, and the
Hausa/Fulani are the major nations. Nigeria was founded by the
British colonisers as an administrative unit in 1914: The colony then
comprised Lagos, the Southern Protectorates, and the Northern
Protectorate (whereby the Islamic feudalism of the Hausa/Fulani
remained largely intact during colonial occupation). This extremely
heterogeneous combination has since been responsible for a number
of regional and religious conflicts, and for one of the numerous
African civil wars of the post-independent era.
The beginning of the Nigerian struggle for independence was shaped
by two organisations: In the 1930s, Nnamdi Azikiwe founded the
Igbo Nigerian Youth Movement, while in 1945 Obafemi Awolowo
established the Yoruba culture organisation Egbe Omou Oduduwa.
The latter fought for an autonomous Yoruba state within a Nigerian
federation. The objective of these parties revealed the problem of
culturally centred regionalism, which was to become the reason for a
number of attempts to re-structure the country into an increasing
number of federal states. At the time of its independence in 1960,
Nigeria was still divided into three main regions: the Northern
Region, inhabited by the Islamic Hausa/Fulani, the South Western
region of the Yoruba, who had a history of self-reliant city states, and
the Christianised South Eastern region of the Igbo. Since the central
government was dominated by the Islamic North, the Igbo declared
themselves and their region, rich in oil resources, independent, a step
that caused the Biafra civil war (1967-1970) and resulted in an
estimated two million victims. After the defeat of the Igbo, a fourth,
so-called Mid Western region, was formed. Up until today, the
number of counties has increased to thirty-six in order to prevent
further secessionist attempts.
Since its independence, Nigeria has enjoyed only relatively brief
periods of civil government. Military coups have alternated with
efforts to restore the republican system. In 1979, the military ruler
Olusegun Obasanjo did a most extraordinary thing: he voluntarily
returned power to an elected civil government. The short period of
civil rule was, however, like others before, marked by corruption,
mismanagement, and rigged elections. In 1983, another military coup
overthrew the government. In 1999, Obasanjo became elected
president of a civil government. At present, the country is still
divided: ethnic and religious conflicts between the wealthy southern
and eastern regions and the poorer, Islamic north continue to threaten
the existence of the state.
3. West African Literature in English
The emergence of an anglophone literature in various regions of West
Africa is a direct result of African peoples' colonisation by the British
empire. Missionaries introduced an education system modelled on
British institutions in a region whose only contact with literacy had
been through Islam, and whose only literate elite were Muslim
clerics. The
 West
Christian confessions mainly attracted African women and young
men who had the most to gain from this new belief; in the early
colonial period, Christianity was associated with a new generation,
cultural change, and with a new way of acquiring knowledge (Iliffe
1995, 224). Subsequently, the English language was to become the
medium of the educated, usually urban, elite who had concrete
material interests in co-operating with the coloniser's system of
indirect rule. In the first half of the 20th century, however, English
was transformed into a means of furthering African nationalism
beyond ethnic boundaries. It also established a pan-Africanist link
between African American and West Indian intellectuals such as
W.E.B. Du Bois and George Padmore, and African leaders such as
Kwame Nkrumah, Obafemi Awolowo, and Jomo Kenyatta, who
propagated a somewhat idealised vision of African unity. This idea
inspired the struggle for independence. Apart from its adaptation as
a literary language, English has also always served a political and
cultural function. And while Africans found creative ways to
integrate their polytheistic past into Christian practise, they also
used the coloniser's language to found newspapers that supported
their struggle for political self-determination; in a similar way,
African literature in English adopted European narrative genres and
adapted them to African needs.
African literature in English is largely a phenomenon of the second
half of the 20th century, although sporadic publications came out
before the former colonies' independence. Literary criticism usually
divides African literature into three phases: first, the period of
cultural nationalism, where publications support independence
movements and attempt to 'write back' to colonial misconceptions
of African cultures. The second phase is characterised by a rising
post-independence disillusionment that criticises abounding
corruption and mismanagement. This period is further distinguished
by the emergence of women writers who complete the literary
fabric with female perspectives. The third, and present phase,
comprises a growing variety, both of narrative styles — such as
magical realism, distorted plots, hybridised subjectivities, self-
reflexivity, irony and satire — and of thematic concerns, such as
exile/immigration experiences, modernist individualism,
postmodern portrayals of the construction of history, values, and
knowledge, intra-generational conflicts, and the critique of the neo-
patrimonial state.
The following brief survey of anglophone publications from
Gambia, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is aimed at providing an integral
account of West African literature in English. In contrast to their
smaller neighbours, Nigeria and Ghana have, since independence,
produced a considerable amount of anglophone writing, depicted in
greater detail here.
Orature has long surpassed the cultural importance of written
fiction in Gambia. Its bards and storytellers, the griots/griottes, are
highly respected members of their communities, and function as
living keepers of cultural memory. Since the break up of the
confederation of Senegambia in 1989, however, Gambia has been
trying to stress its political independence from its larger neighbour
Senegal. While, in 1989, the Gambian author Lenrie Peters could
still claim that the English language "isn't in the country to any
depth" (Peters 1989, n.p.), the past 15 years have seen a turn
towards anglophone writing, in contrast to Senegal's francophone
orientation, as part of the creation of a national identity. Although
the number of Gambian publications is small, and many texts have
a distinctively didactic character, the importance of English as a
unifying lingua franca is beyond question, and as long as it is
"employed in the service of an African sensibility" (Sallah 2005,
n.p.), anglophone writing is perceived as a contribution to the
Gambian nation-building process.
The first author who can be called Gambian, Phillis Wheatley
(1753-1784), gained a reputation as an African American writer
after she was abducted at the age of eight and taken to North
America as a slave. At a time when the intellectual capacities of
Black people were a subject of serious speculation (Sallah 1992,
27), Wheatley's wit and talent triumphed over adverse
circumstances. Her poems dwelled on religious piety, but also
recalled romantically memorialised notions of Gambia, which is
evoked as a heavenly place: "Charm'd with thy painting, how my
bosom burns! / And pleasing Gambia on my soul returns / With
native grace in spring's luxurious reign / Smiles the gay mead, and
Eden blooms again [...l" (Wheatley 1786, 13). Although Wheatley
never openly condemned slavery, an omission which has provoked
sharp criticism of her work in recent times, her artistic genius has
always received critical acclaim. Permeated with Biblical and
Greek references, Wheatley's neoclassical poems are somewhat
influenced by an attitude of cultural superiority that is also often
found among the Krio and Americo-Liberian elite, who adapted
colonial ideas of civilization and thus believed themselves to be
more advanced than the indigenous population of Sierra Leone and
Liberia. Despite Wheatley's devout acknowledgment of having
being saved "from my Pagan land" (Wheatley 1786, 18), her
implicit insistence on human equality proves to be extraordinary for
an African woman brought up in an era that hardly supported the
development of Black self-confidence (see ch. XII, United States of
America).
Wheatley's success has long remained a singular phenomenon in
Gambian writing. Subsequent publications did not appear until
around the time of independence in 1965. In 1960, William Conton
published his semi-autobiographical novel The African, which
became a bestseller in many African countries. It was among the
first literary texts to deal with the psychological impact of European
colonialism. In 1971 Lenrie Peters, often referred to as the
"paterfamilias of Gambian literature" (Brown 1992, 2), became
founding editor of the literary magazine Ndaanan, which provided a
forum for Gambia's budding writers. Gambia also featured
indirectly on the literary and cultural scene in 1976, as the setting of
Alex Haley's novel Roots.
British culture has left a deep imprint on Gambia; its emerging
national literature relies heavily on English literary forms and
genres, but enhances these epigones with local and regional cultural
allusions, references to Gambian history and typically Gambian
concerns. It also uses the Gambian landscape as a literary setting. In
a recently published online article, Tijan M. Sallah stresses the fact
that a national literature "must of necessity be [...] written in
English" because "ethnic texts have not broken parochial
boundaries to permeate the understanding of other ethnic groups in
the Gambian nation" and, thus, "they cannot be called national
literature" (Sallah 2005, n.p.). Historical novels like Ebou Dibba's
Chaff on the Wind (1986) and Nana Grey-Johnson's I of Ebony
(1997) have laid the foundations for a reinvention of history from a
Gambian point of view, and collections of poetry like The Repeal
by Juka Fatou Jabang et al. (2005) discuss social imbalances
between the sexes. Lenrie Peters' poems (Katchikali, 1971) seek to
explore the mysteries of the country's spiritual legacy, thus paving
the way for a distinctively national Gambian literature.
An early representative of Sierra Leonean writing is Adelaide
Casely-Hayford (18681960). Born to English and Fanti parents, she
belonged to the aforementioned Krio class and committed herself to
the empowerment of African education in general, and that of
African women in particular. Her short story "Mista Courifer,"
published by Langston
Hughes in his collection An African Treasury (1960), portrays an
African 'mimic man'
who is anxious to copy his English role models. Casely-Hayford's
ironic distance from Krio culture, which had always emphasised its
British heritage, also becomes visible in her autobiography
Reminiscences (1953), which demonstrates an unusual degree of
confident self-awareness rooted in her role as an African woman.
The first decades of independence witnessed the emergence of national
writing by authors like Syl Cheney-Coker, Abioseh Nicol, Yulisa
Amadu Maddy, Sarif Easmon, Aminatta Forna, and Gladys May
Casely-Hayford. The double heritage of the Krio, who have always felt
a strong attachment to the culture of the British colonisers and played
down their African roots, has significantly shaped post-independent
writing, as has the exile's point of view (Izevbaye 2004, 498). Another
distinguishing feature of Krio writing is its disapproval of ethnic
loyalties. Compared to, for instance, Wole Soyinka's writing — which
is imbued with his Yoruba culture — and the novels of Chinua Achebe
— which are committed to a portrayal of the history and society of the
Igbo — the descendants of 'repatriated' slaves usually distance
themselves from ethnic engagement but stress a panAfricanist,
cosmopolitan attitude. A typical example is Abioseh Nicol (1924-
1994), who also published under his pseudonym Davidson Nicol and
was one of the most versatile Sierra Leonean writers. The trained
physician became the first Black person to be elected a fellow at
Cambridge University. His writings consist of short stories (The Truly
Married Woman, 1965; Two African Tales, 1965), which draw a
picture of the customs of Krio society, and poems. Gladys May Casely-
Hayford (1904-1950), the daughter of Adelaide Casely-Hayford,
published poems in both English and Krio (Take 'um So, 1948), while
Yulisa Amadu Maddy (born 1936), a critic, writer and playwright, uses
pidgin English and adapts African proverbs and ritualistic theatre forms
to problematise corruption and intricate social structures (Killam and
Rowe 2005, n.p.). Another expatriate Krio poet and critic was Lemuel
A. Johnson (1941-2002), whose poems in Highlife for Caliban (1973)
follow the rhythm of traditional Krio songs in order to catch the spirit
of Krio life in Freetown. Aminatta Forna, born to a Sierra Leonean
father and a Scottish mother in 1964, belongs to the younger generation
of writers. Her novel The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002) is an
autobiographic account of her country's transition from post-
independent democracy to dictatorship. By far the most accomplished
Sierra Leonean writer is Syl Cheney-Coker. Born in 1945, he belongs
to the group of West African writers who have made magical realism a
central technique for telling stories of abduction and 'repatriation', for
illuminating the connections between the spiritual and the mundane,
and for tracing subjective experience beyond chronologically narrated
history. His Krio heritage displays a recurrent motif in his poems; it
provides access to European art and culture and liberates him from local
intricacies, but also prevents emotional attachment to his roots, which
causes an identity crisis: "Go on laugh / at my ancestry / which put the
sickness / in my head beautiful / like the sea / which vomited me out! / I
think of Sierra Leone / and my madness torments me / all my strange
traditions / the plantation blood in my veins / my foul genealogy! "
(Cheney-Coker 1980, 7). Cheney-Coker has published several
collections of poetry, but his main literary work is the magical-realist
novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990), in which he
creates a mythical past for the settler community of Sierra Leone.
Spanning the era of slave trade, life on the American plantations, and
the return to African soil, where the estranged 'repatriates' soon find
themselves in conflict with the local population, the novel is set in a
space in between the realms of the ancestors and the living. The
supernatural is employed to evoke contemporary society's
psychological complexities.
Liberia has so far produced only a small number of anglophone writers,
all of whom presently live in exile. Among them is the novelist, poet
and playwright Bai T. Moore, whose poems (Ebony Dust, 1963) are
informed by the rhythm of Gola folk songs. The former head of state
Wilton Sankawulo's novel Sundown at Dawn (2005) explores the
devastating impact of Liberian corruption, deceit and political self-
service, and emphatically demands a return to responsible leadership
and ideals of public welfare. Sakui W.G. Malakpa's novel The Village
Boy (2002) uses social satire and elements of the Bildungsroman to
discuss social problems. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's poems (Before the
Palm Could Bloom, 1998; Becoming Ebony, 2003) won her the Crab
Orchard Award in Poetry in 2002, and are typical exile writings
inflected by reminiscences of a lost home. At the same time, they are
blunt portraits of the atrocities of war, telling of rape, murder, and loss.
Wesley, however, confronts death: her poems create lyrical spaces
where suffering is turned into a strength that proclaims "to be alive still
is such a matter for dancing" (Wesley 2003, 54).
Ghanaian writing in English begins with the publication of Ottobah
Cugoano's slave narrative Thoughts (1787), a testimony reaching from
the author's childhood experiences to his eventual liberation and life in
Britain. Much like the writings of Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs,
his account represents an act of empowerment in a dehumanising
situation. Joseph Casely-Hayford's (1866-1930) novel Ethiopia
Unbound (1911) is another work that bears strong autobiographical
inflections and presents a characteristic piece of early African literature.
Influenced by the writer's own experiences, the novel subordinates
narrative and aesthetic concerns to an urgent, emancipatory emphasis
on moral and political messages. Casely-Hayford propagates a syncretic
African culture which combines Western technological developments
with African communal institutions and a welfare system based on the
extended family (Lodge 2003, 8). His didactic impulse, however,
represents another constant trait in African writing (and its vernacular,
proverbial discourse generally), while his insistence on the equality of
Africa's cultures broke the ground for the most distinctive feature of his
country's literature.
Ghanaian writing has always been distinguished by strong cultural self-
confidence. By contrast, the first Nigerian texts were still mainly
informed by the endeavour to re-write the colonial past. Its
paterfamilias, Chinua Achebe, once claimed that an African author had
to write to "teach his readers that [...l precolonial days were not one
long night of savagery" (Achebe 1975, 45). Prior to independence,
Ghanaian authors had already developed a somewhat casual attitude
towards European influences, which they undogmatically integrated
into their idea of cultural identity. Ghanaian writing has been directed
less at convincing a Western readership of African qualities than at
creating a literature for the Ghanaian people that did not seek to provide
comfort by way of recalling precolonial glory. Thus, historical novels
such as Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1973) are entirely
devoted to Ghanaian issues rather than offering an 'other' or 're-written'
perspective on European colonialism for the sake of self-reassurance.
The cause for Ghanaian confidence probably lies in the early
dissemination of pan-Africanist ideas, which sprouted their "most
tenacious roots" (Izevbaye 2004, 476) in the former Gold Coast.
Africans' active involvement in the Atlantic slave trade has mainly been
challenged by Ghanaian authors, who discuss the responsibility of
states like Asante, which profited from traffic in human beings. It
seems safe to assume that Ghana did not need to mature beyond a
colonised 'other' identity, since it has always been acting as a 'Self'.
A prominent example of the uninhibited literary appropriation of
various traditions is the work of the grand dame of Ghanaian theatre,
Efua Theodora Sutherland (1924-1996).
Sutherland co-founded the cultural journal Okeyame in 1951, set up the
Drama Studio in Accra in 1960, established diverse theatre groups and
writers' workshops, and founded the Ghanaian Society of Writers. Her
most successful play, The Marriage ofAnansewa (1967), features the
trickster figure Ananse, the spider, a cultural hero of the Akan people of
Ghana. The morally ambiguous trickster inhabits folktales and proverbs
of various peoples, and also appears in several pieces of anglophone
West African writing, such as Nkem Nwankwo's Danda (1964), Martin
Owusu's The Story Ananse Told (1971), and Mohammed ben
Abdallah's Ananse and the Golden Drum (1994). Embodying character
traits such as greed, cunning, and ambition, Ananse "appears to
represent a kind of Everyman, artistically exaggerated and distorted to
serve society as a medium for self-examination" (Sutherland 1987, 3).
His eventual failure affords the audience an opportunity for cathartic
laughter about human vices. Sutherland's artistry, however, lies in her
modification of oral techniques designed to provoke community
participation: The Marriage of Anansewa features a storyteller who
stands outside of the dramatic plot and mediates between the actors and
the audience, as well as Mboguo songs initiated by the storyteller and
sung by people from the audience.
In Ghana, as well as in other African countries, the optimism that had
inspired writers in the years around independence soon gave way to
postcolonial disillusionment. The failure of the pan-Africanist vision to
build a strong, independent state soon became evident within the first
decade after independence. Kwame Nkrumah's attempt to establish a
socialist state resulted in the country's economic decline, and abetted
corruption, bribery, and mismanagement. Acclaimed Ghanaian writers
such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor, and Ama Ata Aidoo
denounce the incompetence of Ghana's political elite and translate the
broken dreams and disappointments of the post-independence period
into a literature both psychologically complex and stylistically
innovative. One of the most bitter texts about the post-independence
climate of resignation was written by Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939).
His novel The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born (1968) presents a main
character, Teacher, who is a typical incarnation of the alienated African
intellectual (Booker 1998, 106). He suffers from his society's moral
depravity and their political leaders' deceit: "How long will Africa be
cursed with its leaders? We were ready here for big and beautiful
things, but what we had was our own black men hugging new paunches
scrambling to ask the white man to welcome them unto our backs"
(Armah 1968, 89). Teacher's contempt for contemporary Ghana, whose
leaders simply mimic the rapacious manners of their former colonial
rulers, finds expression in a dystopian narrative style similar to George
Orwell's in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) (Gakwandi 1992, 102-3).
Armah's Ghana is painted in images of decay; it wastes away in a
hypocritical climate of oppression and sexual violence. The
ramifications of a morally shattered society have remained the
dominating theme of Armah's fiction. Fragments (1970) contains parts
of scripts and diary entries and thus echoes the distorted perception of
its 'been-to' protagonist. In Two Thousand Seasons (1973), Armah
travels back into Ghana's past to learn about the causes of its present
desolation. Told by a communal we-narrator who privileges collective
experiences, the historical novel resists the 1970s trend in African
writing to idealise precolonial cultures in an attempt to counter colonial
epistemologies. Instead, it critically investigates the mythical
beginnings of the region's first kingdoms, the period of Islamic
intervention, and the slave trade. The novel is one of the few African
texts to deal with the active involvement of Africans in the trade that
enslaved their fellow countrymen and -women.
Ama Ata Aidoo (born 1942) is another leading figure of contemporary
Ghanaian writing. One of the most prominent feminists of African
literature, Aidoo has published novels, plays, short stories and poetry
that feature women's perspectives on various issues of society, including
the experimental novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977) (dealt with in more
detail later). Her play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) — in which she,
like Sutherland, adapts techniques of Greek drama as well as African
oral forms, such as proverbs — dramatises the story of love between a
Ghanaian and his African American wife, who fails to understand the
customs of an extended family. Anowa (1970), based on a folk legend,
tells the story of a young woman who refuses to marry the man chosen
for her and runs away with her lover. Her lover-husband, however, turns
out to be an impotent, dominating, and materially ambitious character.
Aidoo's latest novel, Changes (1991), again portrays a woman trying to
establish an independent life. Her persistent refusal to accept help and
advice from her family results in despair. Aidoo's narratives do not deny
the right to personal fulfilment, but they also refuse to endorse
uninhibited individualism.
Kofi Awoonor (born 1935) has gained a reputation as one of Africa's
leading poets. As versatile as many other African writers, and as
experienced in living in exile, he has written plays, novels, and works of
literary criticism. He engaged in "early adaptations of traditional dirges
into the major poetic statements on the colonial experience and the
neocolonial condition of Africa" (Izevbaye 2004, 493), while his
experiments with verse forms of praise and abuse from his Ewe culture
"bring the African experience of America into focus and heighten the
sense of alienation and nostalgia that are inherent in the condition of the
exile" (Izevbaye 2004, 477). In his novel This Earth, My Brother (1972),
which can be situated among the texts lamenting post-independence
disillusionment, the central characters display a cynical fatalism in the
face of the sorry state of the nation.
Nigeria has produced the vast majority of anglophone West African
writers, and its cultural variety is reflected in the works of such
distinguished authors as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Buchi
Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali, Flora Nwapa, Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Ben
Okri, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Amos Tutuola, to name but the most
prominent. Its anglophone tradition was also launched by a slave
narrative: Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano was published in London in 1789 and became a
bestseller, going into eight British editions and translated into several
European languages. Equiano supported the abolitionist cause, giving
speeches in which he demanded the end of slavery throughout Britain.
He belongs to the small but remarkable group of anglophone African
intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century whose personal fate and
engagement laid the foundations not only for their literary descendants,
but for a reversal of the image of Africa(ns) in Europe (see ch. Ill,
Britain).3
In all of the countries considered here, there is a noticeable gap between
the earliest publications and the emergence of an anglophone writing
tradition in the years surrounding independence. The anglophone
Nigerian work of fiction that followed Equiano's narrative was Amos
Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), a recounting of the travels of
a chronic drinker who tries to find his palm-wine tapster and, on his
quest, meets several fantastic characters and pays a visit to the
underworld. The novel is rooted in
In 1999, the critic Vincent Carretta claimed that Equiano was not born in
Africa but, as a slave, in South Carolina. He further suggested that
Equiano's detailed descriptions of life in an African village were inspired
by his readings of European authors of his time who had visited the
continent. Whether his conclusions are true is still a matter of debate.
However, Equiano's singular position as one of the first African voices
in European abolition discourse remains unchallenged.
Yoruba folk-tale traditions; Tutuola had directly transferred some
popular Yoruba stories into written English narrative form. A further
early publication, the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (born
1930), went on, after its publication in 1958, to become the most widely
read work in African literature. It is distinguished by its cultural
nationalism and an attitude of 'writing back' to the colonial centre. The
novels by Achebe that followed, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of
God (1964) and Man of the People (1966), depict subsequent periods of
Igbo history, including the dramatic impact of colonisation on political,
economic, and social structures. His heroes are tragic figures who
perceive the transformation of their societies as a personal downfall.
Throughout his writings, Achebe's professed goal is to counter European
representations of African cultures: The chief impulse behind his fiction
is to "give a voice to an African conception of history, culture and
humanity from a strictly African perspective, and to redress the
misconceptions and distortions of the African image by colonial writers"
(Breitinger 2002, 50). Achebe's masterly translation of Igbo proverbs
into English has inspired numerous African writers, who adopted his
mode in order to create a hybrid, modern, anglophone African tradition.
With Wole Soyinka, Nigeria has produced the only Black African
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. A modern Renaissance man,
Soyinka, born in 1934, has demonstrated his versatile talents as poet,
novelist, playwright, critic, actor, politician, publisher and lecturer. His
plays' "cyclical plots, sparse narrative content, large number of
characters, characterisation that hardly elicits sympathy, cryptic
language, symbolic music, [and] oracular dance, sometimes by masked
figures" (Ukala 2001, 135) derive from Yoruba cosmology, which
provides a fertile source for Soyinka's artistic explorations of both his
people's way of life and of global contexts. Born into a Christian family,
but initiated into Yoruba culture by his grandfather, Soyinka was raised
in a climate that did not perceive European and African concepts as
dichotomous but as naturally integrated, and he respected both traditions
in a transcultural manner (Breitinger 1987, 69). Consequently, his works
are not determined by a 'writing back' attitude, nor do they seek
consolation in some romanticised African past. Also, the author is not
interested in exploring the first encounters between members of
coloniser/colonised cultures: "Who remembers much of these reactions
now? I realise they were luxuries — the emotional responses I mean.
Who cares ultimately how those stupid master races reacted to you and
me. The problem now is to answer what is happening here" (Soyinka
1980, 233). Soyinka's heroes are liberal individuals who struggle to
uphold a humanist world-view. Their moral principles are presented
tacitly as inspiration for social change. The author does not believe in
mass movements, but in the responsibility — and in the capacities — of
Africa's intellectual elite (Stoll 2003, 209). Among his numerous
publications are the plays Death and the King's Horseman (1975), which
fictionalises a historical event — the ritual suicide of the Oyo king's
horseman after the death of the king — and Opera Wonyosi (1977), an
adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera; his autobiographical
account Aké — Years of Childhood (1981), where Soyinka portrays the
'ideal fusion' of different Yoruba and Christian traditions that have
determined his life; and the novel The Interpreters (1965), which
features five young Nigerian intellectuals whose view of Nigerian
society in the 1960s presents a nation that still has to establish its
prospective norms and values.
In terms of the total number of editions of her works, Buchi Emecheta,
born in 1944, is the most successful writer of sub-Saharan Africa.
Married at an early age, Emecheta accompanied her husband to London,
where she gave birth to five children, and started to write: The first
manuscript, however, was burned by her husband. Emecheta left him to
raise her children alone, and has, to date, published twenty novels. Her
seminal work, The Joys ofMotherhood (1979), echoes Achebe in dealing
with the impact of colonialism on African cultures. Her approach,
however, bears no trace of a 'writing back' poetic: her work is feminist in
its emphasis on female perspectives and empowerment, and in her
successful exploration of women's roles and concerns in Nigerian
history. Some of her novels, including Kehinde (1994) and The New
Tribe (2000), contribute to the emerging African-British literature and
its focus on Black British identity, questions of belonging, and cultural
transgressions. The Joys of Motherhood nonetheless remains her most
popular work. The novel is a brilliant and subtle analysis of the slow but
permanent deterioration of the status of women in Igbo society during
colonial occupation. It is somewhat representative for other African
cultures in a period when women's economic independence, and their
familial and social means of exerting influence, were eroded because the
new economic system offered them no participation and thus excluded
them from making profits. Women's economic role soon became
perceived to be irrelevant, a change of perception that devalued their
social status. Emecheta demonstrates this impact of economic and social
transformations through the story of her protagonist Nnu Ego. In rapidly
changing conditions, she clings to the one thing in her life that seems to
have remained the same — her objective of devoted motherhood. But
the circumstances in which she is expected to live up to this task have
changed, and she fails to adapt the customs of her rural Igbo childhood
to the dictates of a capitalist economy.
Zaynab Alkali is, to date, the only female Nigerian writer with a
Northern, Muslim background. Born in 1955, she has published two
novels (The Stillborn, 1984; The Virtuous Women, 1987) and a book of
short stories (The Cobwebs and Other Stories, 1990). A mother of six
children, she thematises the situation of women in Islamic society, yet
refuses to confirm Western notions of female oppression. Alkali's
writing aims to demonstrate women's means of empowerment and to
emphasise and do justice to both female objections and female
objectives. As outlined in the collection of short stories Vultures in the
Air: Voices from Northern Nigeria (1996), which was edited by Zaynab
Alkali, the author has also committed herself to supporting the growth of
a generation of writers into narrators of the history and stories of
Northern Nigeria (Ehling and Ripken 1997, 14-5). Her contribution
complements the heterogeneous texture of Nigerian literature, whose
manifold themes, narrative modes, and artistic devices correspond to its
various cultural and religious roots.
A satirical mode of writing shapes the works of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a
writer whose creative use of pidgin English earned him international
repute. The author of novels, poems, short stories, and scripts for TV
shows, Saro-Wiwa was born in 1941 as a member of the Ogoni people
of the Niger Delta. Starting in the late 1980s, Saro-Wiwa was also
politically engaged: He sought to draw attention to the environmental
devastation of his people's land, caused by reckless oil extraction, which
destroyed the subsistence basis of Ogoni life. The alliance of corrupt
politicians and international oil companies felt threatened by his non-
violent protest: In 1995, Saro-Wiwa and several of his followers were
executed after a fake trial. Political consciousness also shapes his
literary legacy, and his anti-war novel Sozaboy (1985) gained him wide
acclaim. Set in the Biafra war (1967-1970), it explores the psychological
impact of violence on an anti-hero protagonist, Mene, a modern
Simplicissimus who joins the army expecting an adventure, but finds
himself
exposed to death, torture, disdain, and despair. The novel is completely
written in what the author himself called 'rotten English' — a creative
fusion of Pidgin, indigenous Nigerian vocabulary and metaphors, and
Standard English. Saro-Wiwa's experiments with English have
predecessors in Nigerian literature: Amos Tutuola (The Palm-Wine
Drinkard, 1954) and Gabriel Okara (The Voice, 1964) also incorporate
pidginised English, yet only partially apply dialect in their novels.
Saro-Wiwa's innovation employs linguistic variation as a mimesis of
his young protagonist's naivety: He invites his readers to laugh about
'sozaboy', but also with him. Mene's often simple-minded observations
neither gloss over the atrocities of war, nor place them in an
intellectual perspective. Thus, his experiences provoke immediate
emotional response.
This section concludes with a brief survey of the works of Ben Okri,
certainly one of the most innovative of contemporary Nigerian story-
tellers. Along with the Ghanaian Kojo Laing and the Sierra Leonean
Syl Cheney-Coker, the British-based Okri belongs among those writers
who have made prominent a distinctively West African version of
magical realism. In his Booker prize winning novel, The Famished
Road (1991), Okri tells the story of a so-called abiku child — a child,
according to Yoruba belief, who is born only to die again.
Representing an unfulfilled destiny, this spirit child follows an eternal
circular path of birth and death. In his novel, Okri creates an
individualised abiku named Azaro who decides to break the cycle:
"But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world
and the Living, I chose to stay. [...S]ometimes [I] think it was a face
that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy the bruised face of
the woman who would become my mother" (Okri 1992, 5). Okri's
mythopoetic approach connects the world of the living to that of the
spirits. He weaves a tapestry of Nigerian past and present, thus
creating "a reality in its own right, a fantastical actuality where the
dead are still alive, the marvellous takes place in the ordinary, and the
supernatural is an accepted part of everyday life" (Wright 1997, 182).
This spiritually enhanced reality is set in the time around Nigeria's
political independence. In multifarious tableaux, the sparse plot
describes the onset of modernity, a population suffering from poverty,
and politicians whose ambitions, directed entirely at increasing their
own power and wealth, fail dramatically to contribute to the
construction of an independent nation. Eventually, Azaro realises that
his nation shares his abiku-state: it also inhabits an interspace, being "a
spirit-child nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth
come blood and betrayals, and the child of our will refuses to stay till
we have made propitious sacrifice and displayed our serious intent to
bear the weight of a unique destiny" (Okri 1992, 494).
4. Readings of Key Texts
Colonial Legacies: Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson (1939) and Chinua
Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), one of the first West
African novels in English, not only enjoys classic status — it is still
one of the most widely read texts of African literature — it also
encompasses the dominant themes of the first phase of West African
writing. Achebe's novels accompany Nigeria's political independence
in 1960, an attempt to build a country on a preposterously
heterogeneous foundation, to forge over 200 different peoples and
twice as many languages and dialects into one postcolonial nation. In
Europe, the rise of the novel was closely connected with the birth of
the nation-state and, concomitantly, with the creation of national
identity. As a literary genre, the novel is perhaps the most foreign to
African oral narrative traditions. Here, we find one of the reasons for
Achebe's persistent predominance: his seminal status in African
literature
lies precisely in his ability to have realized that the novel provided a
new way of reorganizing African cultures, especially in the crucial
juncture of transition from colonialism to national independence, and
his fundamental belief that narrative can indeed propose an alternative
world beyond the realities imprisoned in colonial and postcolonial
relations of power. (Gikandi 1991, 3)
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe not only dramatised the first encounter
between Igbo and British missionaries — he wrote an Igbo version of
these events which centred on the impact of foreign domination on
social, legal, political, and economic structures. Furthermore, Things
Fall Apart is a direct response to the British writer Joyce Cary's novel
MisterJohnson (1939), whose African characters stand in the long
tradition of European travel writing and colonial reports drawing on
misconceptions of the 'exotic' and 'other' (read odd) Africans. Cary's
four "foreign novels of Africa" (Echeruo 1973, 1) reflect to a certain
extent the ambivalences and paradoxes of colonial conquest, but fail to
challenge the condescending and decidedly arrogant persuasion that
lurks behind such benevolent phrases as "the white man's burden" and
"civilizing mission". In MisterJohnson, Cary portrays a young African
clerk who is employed in the colonial administration and builds his
hopes for the future on imaginative interpretations of artefacts of
colonial culture such as "store catalogues, their fashion notes" and
trashy romance novels. The "savage girl" whom Bama Johnson
marries and tries to introduce into a Europeanised mode of life belongs
to this naive vision, which the omniscient narrator mocks as being "a
compound of romantic sentiment and embroidered underclothes" (Cary
1975, 13). Fada, the northern Nigerian district where the story is set,
provides the location for both British attempts at modernisation —
exemplified in the construction of a railway — and Mr. Johnson's
delusive ambitions. To achieve a prominent position among his people,
he runs into debt, embezzles the railway company's money, and
betrays those whom he had called his friends. Eventually caught in the
act of stealing, he kills a colonial officer, and is sentenced to death.
Mister Johnson illustrates the tragic impact of a colonisation that fails
to keep the promises of social and material promotion it made to those
who were willing to adapt to colonial ideology, and who thus
participated in the degradation of their culture. The protagonist is
depicted as a somewhat childish character who is unfit to absorb
foreign ideas and customs. While Johnson and his tragic death
epitomise a schizophrenic colonial reality that claims to pursue a
civilising mission but is actually occupied with the brutal exploitation
of both colonised peoples and their natural resources, the general
image of Nigerians created in the novel has provoked much criticism.
Africans are depicted as lethargic, fatalistic, and driven by their
attempt to fulfil transient desires which lack the ostensible moral depth
of European aspirations. The text is rife with pejorative descriptions
employed to create an image of the colonised which purports to justify
European conquest; "a dirty child with a large sore on its chin is sitting
on the largest rubbish heap and holding a goat, " for example, while
two African men " are dawdling towards the shore, holding themselves
with crooked languor as if just out of hospital. Infinite boredom and
disgusted resignation are expressed in their languid, crippled progress"
(Cary 1975, 25). The attitude of the British officers toward their
subjects reads as follows:
It is the bush pagans who have never been outside the village before
who are most eager to show off their feats of acrobatic dancing and to
drink the most beer. They have already, in five hours, forgotten their
dread and contempt of the stranger and their resolve to keep
themselves to themselves. In one afternoon they have taken the first
essential step out of the world of the tribe into the world of men. (Cary
1975, 160)
It is thus — according to the observation of the 'lenient' British officer
Rudbeck — contact with European colonisation that introduces
African people to humanity. It is this dehumanising attitude, and the
arbitrary construction of African peoples as inferior 'Others' to
Europeans, that Chinua Achebe angrily challenges. Through the main
character of his novel Things Fall Apart, an Igbo elder named
Okonkwo, as well as through the novel's minor figures, Achebe
unfolds the cosmology of his people. His figures personify the various
aspects of Igbo society, hence lending both an individual and a
communal voice to their culture, as well as an insider perspective on
the events inaugurating its final destruction. Achebe's novels have
always had an underlying didactic purpose, which the author manages
to combine with impressive literary quality. He seeks to perform a
'decolonisation of the mind' as demanded by the Kenyan writer Ngugi
wa Thiong'o, a process intended essentially to erase the distorted
images of Africa and its people implanted in African minds through
missionary education. The 'things' that 'fall apart'2 are therefore not
only the precolonial legal and political structures of the Igbo; the
reader also witnesses how the alleged superiority of the British Empire
and its moral concepts slowly dissolve, even becoming manifestations
of ignorance, when confronted with the subjective perceptions of the
'Others'.
The novel is set in the Igbo community of Umuofia around 1900 — at
a time when the British Empire was about to consolidate domination
over its colonies of occupation. The Empire enforced administrative
and legal power over the Igbo, and installed colonial officers and local
representatives according to their 'indirect-rule' policy. Since these
local leaders were not necessarily congruent with those actually

2 The title of the novel alludes to prophetic lines in the poem "The Second Coming" (1920), by W.B.

Yeats: "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold: / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
responsible within the communities, British policy relied both on those
willing to collaborate, and on those eager to adapt to the new way of
life. Okonkwo, a village elder, belongs to neither of these categories.
He is a traditionalist whose qualities — physical and mental strength,
industriousness, pride, and the will to succeed — correspond to Igbo
notions of masculine virtue. While his father was a poor musician who
never cared for his family, Okonkwo has become one of the wealthiest
and most respected men of his community, thanks solely to his own
efforts. Achebe employs his story to demonstrate the flexibility of Igbo
hierarchies. Okonkwo's son Nwoye, a contemplative and sensitive boy,
represents the other side of acephalous community life: strict rules of
behaviour. Nwoye suffers under the intransigence of Igbo rules, best
revealed when his friend Ikemefuna, a war hostage, is killed by
Umuofia's village elders, among them his father. Nwoye becomes one
of the first to convert to Christianity, a decision which only reinforces
Okonkwo's fierce resistance to the intruders.
Achebe uses storylines such as the exchange of war hostages to present
the values of Igbo culture: Reparation, not confrontation, is the
preferred means of settling conflict; Igbo judiciary consists of several
branches, such as the council of the elders and the Oracle of the Hills
and Caves; and religion is founded on a deep respect for the earth,
whose
well-being, in an agricultural economy, guarantees survival. After
Okonkwo accidentally kills a village member, he is forced into exile
and only returns after seven years. Upon his arrival, he finds
conditions in Umuofia dramatically changed: The community now
possesses a church, and has accepted the new laws of the colonisers.
Okonkwo cannot understand the ease with which the new order has
been established, while his friend Obierika has realised that fighting
back would be futile:
It is already too late Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks
of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold
his government. If we should try to drive out the white men in
Umuofia we should find it easy. There are only two of them. But what
of our own people who are following their way and have been given
power? (Achebe 1994, 176)
When an Igbo convert dares to unmask an elder during a public
ceremony, he provokes mayhem in the community, which finally
results in a visit of the village elders to the district commissioner's
office. It is at this location of victorious British occupation that the
elders finally face their fading authority: the commissioner insults and
imprisons them, and they are whipped and treated like animals. At
their return to Umuofia, an assembly is held, which is interrupted by
messengers from the commissioner: In an act of desperate
determination, Okonkwo kills one of them. He has expected the
villagers to follow his example and, finally, begin to resist foreign
domination. When they let the other messengers escape, he realises
that the old days are over. He hangs himself, thus committing a
terrible crime against the earth, and against the beliefs he strove to
protect.
While the story development leads towards a final confrontation
between the colonisers and Igbo society's most fundamental defender,
Okonkwo, the actual plot revolves around Umuofia's economy,
culture, and legal system. The community is the real hero of the
novel, a collective protagonist (Breitinger 2002, 51) whose values are
directed at the maintenance of the status quo — thus serving as a
contrast to Britain's policy of exploration and conquest. The final
paragraphs of the novel repeat the inner monologue of the colonial
commissioner, whose ideas on "the pacification of the primitive
tribes" (Achebe 1994, 209) demonstrate a colonialist discourse which
invents 'savage others' to justify its own policy of conquest. Achebe,
however, has enabled his readers to decide for themselves who acts in
a civilised way, and who does not.
Postcolonial (Re)visions: Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy or
Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977)
Quite a few postcolonial African authors discuss the condition of
post-independence nation-states, denounce neo-patrimonial corruption
and mismanagement, place female issues at the centre of literary
inquiry, or critically revise the relationship between former colonisers
and the former colonised in a situation of exile. Ama Ata Aidoo's
experimental novel Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-
Eyed Squint (1977) manages to problematise all these issues in one
comparatively small volume. What the author terms an "African prose
poem" is a satirical exploration of the hearts and minds of both
Europeans and Africans in Europe in the early 1960s, the first decade
of independence. ConSisting of four separate parts, the novel
combines pamphlet components, lyrical reflections, verse, a novella, a
letter, stylised use of language, and passages of prose narrative.
The works of Ama Ata Aidoo display a strong historical and political
consciousness, yet the author does not describe political actions but,
rather, the psychological consequences of colonial legacies and
postcolonial realities. Her heroines struggle to find love, female
solidarity and meaning in a chaotic and contradictory world. Aidoo
submits these conditions to close scrutiny, and her observations are
sometimes honest beyond endurance. Her writing is suffused with
what I earlier called a distinctively Ghanaian self-confidence. Aidoo
belongs to the Fanti people, who were, in her words, judged by the
British to be "ungovernable," while "the Fanti unashamedly boasted
of their recalcitrance, their rudeness, their contempt for the imperial
set-up, and for the white man" (Aidoo 1998, 88), a characterisation
which offers another explanation for Ghanaians' persistent refusal to
act as a colonial 'Other'. Aidoo's feminism, however, is strengthened
by her people's matrilinearity and their legal structures, which
recognise female property and women's economic independence.
Aidoo's heroine Sissie, who is sent as an angry young woman to
Germany and Britain as an exchange student, embodies the blunt
scepticism of Fanti culture. Sissie's visits are labelled as a reverse
journey into Europe's 'heart of darkness' — a Bavarian provincial
town. Here, the protagonist is confronted with Europe's gaze at the
'Other'; she feels categorised and misjudged because of racial
(mis)conceptions. She returns these looks by 'squinting': although her
gaze is directed straight into the former colonisers' eyes, her view
maintains a focus on her African identity.
During her stay in Germany, Sissie's observations are inflected by
sarcastic overstatements and polemic exaggerations, which the author
recites from an ironic distance. These narrative strategies not only
enable the postcolonial resistance mode of 'squinting', they underscore
the fact that, although Sissie accepts her position as 'Other' in
European society, she also refuses to submit to this concept's
degrading and marginalising implications. Sissie separates both her
self-perception and her assessment of Ghanaian culture from
European acknowledgment. Through her biased look at European
culture, she acts within the colonially constructed limits of the
'Self'/'Other' dichotomy but, concomitantly, escapes from the
condescending patronage of Europe's racial stereotypes. She
"becomes the eye of her community in the land of the exiles" (Wilentz
1999, 164).
The novella "The Plums" forms the major part of the book. Its central
motif is the friendship between Sissie and Marija, a German
housewife who feels attracted to Sissie because she is a "crowd-
getter" (43), the "African miss" (44) who is seen as a showpiece in
Lower Bavaria. Through their friendship, inconspicuous Marija does
not only achieve the status of a local celebrity, it also offers her an
exotic escape from ordinary life. Sissie, however, remains distant. Her
entire surroundings remind her of Europe's colonial past and of the
Third Reich, and her conversations with Marija are suffused with
misunderstandings and Sissie's reflections on Marija's psychological
condition. They never actually develop intimacy; on the contrary,
provoked by Marija's obvious solitude, Sissie fantasises about being a
man, a position which would entitle her to have an affair with her
German aquaintance. Marija, however, eventually approaches Sissie:
Sissie felt Marija's cold fingers on her breast. The fingers of Marija's
hand touched the skin of Sissie's breast while her other hand groped
round and round Sissie's midriff, searching for something to hold on
to.
It was the left hand that woke her up to the reality of Marija's
embrace. The warmth of her tears on her neck. The hotness of her lips
against hers. (Aidoo 2003, 64)
Marija's attempt to seduce Sissie has been read as a somewhat
sympathetic portrayal of lesbianism, nevertheless condemned as a
perversion caused by isolation arising from loveless Western family
life (Wilentz 1999, 167). Although Marija's move to overcome her
isolation is described in sexual terms, I would hesitate to call her
desire lesbian. It represents a helpless translation of her longing for
tenderness into terms she is familiar with, rather than actual erotic
passion. In the prudish German culture of the early 1960s, caresses,
hugs, and cuddling were restricted to either parent-child relationships
or romantic involvements. Tenderness that bore no sexual
connotations, whether among women, men, or between the two sexes,
did not conform to either of these categories. Marija certainly behaves
according to the norms within which she has been socialised.
Although Sissie shakes herself free of Marija's embrace, she realises
the underlying motive of Marija's desperate advance. Recalling
childhood memories, she remembers her mother's warmth, and, given
their intertwined histories of domination and racial hatred, develops
an ambiguous mixture of compassion for the German woman, and
rage.
The third and fourth part of the book include cynical and bitter
observations about African intellectuals who have decided to stay in
Europe and have thus, according to Sissie, become traitors to their
native countries. Acting like a true 'killjoy', she denounces them as
"[o]ppressed multitudes from the provinces [who] rush to the imperial
seat because that is where they know all salvation comes from" (87).
Here, the programmatic nature of Sissie's name once more becomes
obvious: She is 'our sister', the 'eye' and the 'voice' of all those who
have remained in Africa, waiting for a return of their investments in
the 'been-tos' who were to become the hope of their independent
nations.
Our Sister Killjoy investigates issues of migration, dislocation,
cultural estrangement, and the question of the exile's loyalty to her/his
culture of origin. Through ironic overstatements, Sissie angrily
distances herself from both postwar German society and Britain,
Ghana's former coloniser. She portrays cultural contact zones as
minefields contaminated by racist and patriarchal stereotypes that also
permeate more intimate interpersonal relations. Her 'squinted' look at
European culture passionately attends to the interests of her Ghanaian
community and separates her from other exiles who have turned their
backs on postcolonial African problems.
Transcultural Perspectives: Biyi Bandele-Thomas, The Sympathetic
Undertaker and Other Dreams (1991)
Biyi Bandele-Thomas' novel The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other
Dreams (1991) is an outstanding example of postmodernist African
fiction. The author, born in 1967 in Kafanchan, belongs to the
younger generation of Nigerian writers, who are often based abroad.
He has written four novels, a collection of poetry, TV scripts, and
diverse plays. Since 1990, he has been living in Britain, where he
received several prizes both for his own plays and for his stage
adaptations (among others, he has staged Aphra Behn's Oronooko and
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart). His first two novels, The Man
Who Came in from the Back ofBeyond (1991) and The Sympathetic
Undertaker, are set in contemporary Nigeria and depict a chaotic and
insane society whose "morbid symptoms" not only indicate an
interregnum, but a constant state of flux devoid of direction, meaning,
and morality.
The Sympathetic Undertaker is a self-conscious, reflexive, and
satirical trip into the absurdities of neo-patrimonial Nigeria. A parable
of the state of the nation, the story exposes greedy and unscrupulous
politicians, depicts brutal actions of the military against civilians, and
draws a picture of a country in which every would-be dictator has the
chance to live up to his greed for power. To call this 'Nigerian
condition' neurotic would imply
the existence of a cure. Bandele-Thomas, however, seems to suggest that there
is no such thing: his conclusion is both angry and sad, his 'remedy' a retreat into
the world of dreams, fantasy, sex, and hallucinations. His protagonist Rayo is a
rebel who mimics the behaviour of a school vice-principal, and, after a failed
attempt to convince the headmaster to grant the school's old night-soil man his
deserved pension, attacks him on the toilet with a broomstick. While at
university, Rayo leads a group of students in a protest against the policy of the
government. At an assembly, he openly condemns the hypocrisy of Nigeria's
leaders, denounces his country's incredibly high external debts, and criticises the
growing tendency to reduce the state's institutions to mere fagades. He also,
however, insists on his disapproval of violent measures: His weapon is the
word, and he calls up prominent precursors, from Aristarchos to Galileo, to
support his idea of civil disobedience:
'We've got neither [guns nor the economy to back us up]. All we've got on our
side is truth, history, suffering. All we've got on our side is the bitterness, the
anger in our hearts.
'Now, what shall we do?
'I propose, not that we go into the streets to face armed soldiers and policemen
with stones and bottles. That would be mere suicide. The Chinese would
educate you on the folly of that.
'What I propose is that through peaceful means we should render this country
ungovernable ' (Bandele-Thomas 1991, 92)
It is this last sentence that causes his imprisonment. Tortured for weeks by the
State Security Service, whose fear of a sponsored conspiracy reveals their
paranoia, Rayo is released as a broken man. He moves to Lagos, where he
manages to make a living as a freelance writer.
The second half of the book consists mainly of passages titled "Rayo's Notes,"
and stories of the confrontation of minor characters with the injustice of the
state, told by his brother Kayo, the narrator of the novel. The protagonist's
notes, written in the streamof-consciousness mode, disclose his growing
schizophrenic tendencies: He imagines his penis has been cut off, and he sees
only holes where his eyes should be. Another night, he wakes up to realise that
his mind,
stuck in a groove like the stylus of a cracked record, was suddenly stuck mid-
thought, to one sentence: I am. Try as I did, I found, to my horror, that I could
think no further than that: I am. At first I tried to think it was a joke All that I
could see, in the halogen lucidness of my brain, were the two words I am
scribbled in a million colours on my cells. I felt like a human lavatory wall
(Bandele-Thomas 1991, 94)
Rayo's panic attacks announce the increasing fragmentation of his mind and
body. His just idealism has to face an anomic society in which "illusion is
preferred to reality" (Kehinde 2003, 179). Whereas Rayo's satirical parodies
start out as funny tricks, his growing despair at the meaninglessness and moral
corruption of his society eventually drives him into madness. His notebook
writings contain a story within the story, about the "dream land of dream
people" (Bandele-Thomas 1991, 143) of Zowabia, whose dictator Babagee is
obviously modelled on Nigeria's dictator Babangida, and whose social manners
are conspicuously similar to those reigning in Nigeria's climate of corruption
and bribery. Zowabia is a mirror world in which righteous behaviour is
considered obscene, and where bribery, oppression, and murder are regarded as
sound means of governing a country. The dictator sings "I wish I were Idi
Amin" to the tune of "When the Saints Go Marching in," critical journalists are
thrown through glass doors, political prisoners are used for

target practice, and when the First Lady suffers a stillbirth, Babagee calls out a
week's holiday to mourn "the greatest leader this country never had" (Bandele-
Thomas 1991, 162). The more the reader learns about the 'dream land' of
Zowabia, the more obvious its nightmarish character becomes. The "deeper
Thomas's fable ventures into 'dream' territory, the more preposterously real its
world becomes; the more the reader has to swallow, the more sickeningly true it
is" (Wright 1997, 192).
Bandele-Thomas wrote the novel when he was only twenty-four years old. His
text thus creates an image of contemporary Nigeria as perceived by young
people who have neither experienced colonialism nor are stuck in 'precolonial
traditions'. Linguistic, cultural, and religious hybridity, even syncretism, are
what they perceive as normal. This merged and multi-layered postmodern
reality is not, however, as one might imagine, made responsible for the moral
decay denounced by the author. It is not the optional variety of value systems
and social customs that leads to indifference towards righteous behaviour, but
the ruling elite's disrespect for every value system available. Bandele-Thomas
expresses a political message: There's something rotten in the state of Nigeria.
The author has written a dystopian novel which recalls the post-independence
disillusionment of African writing in the 1960s and 1970s. This disenchantment
was caused by political leaders whose behaviour mimicked, and even outdid,
the disdain towards ordinary people's concerns displayed by the former
colonisers. Authors like Ayi Kwei Armah and Chinua Achebe have
empathically criticised this attitude, which gave way to unrelieved exploitation
of the country's resources to the detriment of the majority of the population. The
Sympathetic Undertaker, however, lacks the disappointment that still permeated
earlier texts of disillusionment. The novel presents a society that has matured
beyond expectations of righteous behaviour. Its characters' reactions are neither
irritated nor disenchanted when confronted with everyday corruption, bribery,
and brutality. What remains is Rayo's angry righteousness, which eventually
turns out to be a mere projection of a fearful and disturbed mind.
Realist narrative modes are defamiliarised through an innovative use of
"stylistic promiscuity" (Kehinde 2003, 185): The author allows introspective
explorations into Rayo's mind, employing dreams and nightmares,
hallucinations, scatology, pornographic language, pidgin English as well as
vocabulary from Igbo and Yoruba, and intertextual references, such as a
quotation from Camara Laye's novel The African Child (Bandele-Thomas 1991,
7). While his use of scatological imagery serves "as an artistic weapon used for
satirizing the filthy nature of Nigerian cities" (Kehinde 2003, 187), his
pornographic passages fulfil an ambivalent function. When applied to
characterise a petty tyrant like Toshiba, the boy who terrorises younger pupils at
school, obscene images indicate his moral decay, and the way human beings,
especially women, are objectified. When used in the description of Kayo's affair
with Tere, a student who makes her living as a habitual prostitute entertaining
'sugar daddies', Bandele-Thomas' sexual language displays a tenor of desperate
tenderness. The relationship provides Kayo with a place of refuge. He actually
refers to their intercourse as "making love" (Bandele-Thomas 1991, 24), a
surprisingly sentimental statement given the usually cynical mode of narration,
and the existence of Tere's sugar daddy, who also has claims on her body. Tere
symbolises Kayo's hope for intimacy, his yearning for emotional fulfilment. In
between moral corruption, growing unease about a government looting the
country, the senseless brutality of soldiers, and administrative arbitrariness, their
encounters are peaceful, secluded moments.
5. Conclusion

When Tere dies after an illegal abortion, the boundaries between Kayo's and
Rayo's worlds break down: At the end of the novel, the reader is shocked to
learn that rebellious Rayo never actually existed: He is neither Kayo's brother,
nor does Kayo exist. The 'real' Rayo — who calls himself, in his function as (an
unreliable) narrator, Kayo — has created a schizophrenic other self: the
protagonist, the fearless Rayo, who demonstrates the courage and intrepidity the
real Rayo was never able to summon up. All events recounted were part of an
act of imagination which hesitates to reveal who is the dreamer and who the
dream. Rayo diminished his real self, and re-invented himself as a more
confident personality. Through this outcome, madness is again emphasised as
Bandele-Thomas' leitmotif. According to the moral of the novel, only the
madman can survive in a society in which insanity is the norm. The author's
Nigeria is "a society devoid of purpose, a society cut off from its religious
metaphysical and transcendental roots. In this society, man is lost; all his actions
become senseless, absurd and useless" (Kehinde 2003, 180). Nigerian society
breeds a reality that is intelligible neither emotionally nor rationally. It is thus
portrayed through surreal and absurd images, an inconsistent story
development, digressions, fragmented character portrayals, and fictitious
intertextualities. The Sympathetic Undertaker employs postmodernist narrative
techniques to create a disturbingly realistic representation of modern Nigeria.
5. Conclusion
The close reading of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy,
and BandeleThomas' The Sympathetic Undertaker ranges from the periods of
anticolonial 'writing back' attitude and post-independence disillusionment to
postmodernist parables of the condition of the nation-state. The stylistic features
and thematic concerns of these novels give testimony to the heterogeneous
nature of contemporary West African literature in English, which will continue
to prevail. It seems safe to assume that Bandele-Thomas' characters, who do not
stand for a specific culture but act as individual subjects and thus echo
postmodern processes of dissolution as well as transcultural loyalties, embody a
persistent feature of English writing in Ghana and Nigeria, both countries with
an established literary tradition in English writing. Authors from Liberia and
Sierra Leone, after decades of civil war, as well as Gambian writers, who wish
to stress their cultural and linguistic independence from Senegal, will possibly
continue to prefer a more mimetic representation of political and social
processes.
Works Cited
Primary
Achebe, Chinua (1975). Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann.
Achebe, Chinua (1994). Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor.
Aidoo, Ama Ata ([1977]2003). Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-
Eyed Squint. Harlow, Essex: Longman.
Armah, Ayi Kwei (1968). The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born. London:
Heinemann.
Bandele-Thomas, Biyi (1991). The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams.
London: Bellew. Cary, Joyce ([1939] 1975). MisterJohnson. London: Michael
Joseph.

Cheney-Coker, Syl (1980). The Graveyard also has Teeth. London: Heinemann.
Okri, Ben (1992). The Famished Road. London: Vintage.
Soyinka, Wole (1980). Season ofAnomy. London: Collins.
Sutherland, Efua Theodora ([1967] 1987). The Marriage ofAnansewa. Harlow:
Longman.
Wesley, Patricia Jabbah (2003). "Small Desires. " Becoming Ebony.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 54-5.
Wheatley, Phillis (1786). Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Joseph Cruikshank.
Secondary
Aidoo, Ama Ata (1998). "Male-ing Names in the Sun." In: Challenging
Hierarchies: Issues and Themes in Colonial and Postcolonial African Literature.
Ed. Leonard A. Podis and Yakubu Saaka. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 87-
97.
Boahen, A. Adu. (1985). "Africa and the Colonial Challenge." In: General
History ofAfrica. Vol. VIl: Africa under Colonial Domination 1880-1935. Ed.
A. Adu Boahen. London: Heineman, 1-18.
Booker, M. Keith (1998). The African Novel in English. Oxford: Heinemann.
Breitinger, Eckhard (1987). Leben und Werk von Wole Soyinka. Zürich: Coron.
Breitinger, Eckhard (2002). "Sub-Saharan African Literature." In: Companion
to the New Literatures in English. Ed. Christa Jansohn. Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
47-82.
Brown, Stewart (1992). "Gambian Fictions." Wasafiri 15, 2-7.
Carretta, Vincent (1999). "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on
an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity." Slavery and Abolition 20.3
(December), 96-105.
Echeruo, Michael J.C. (1973). Joyce Cary and the Novel ofAfrica. New York:
Africana.
Ehling, Holger, and Peter Ripken, ed. (1997). Die Literatur Schwarzafrikas.
Munich: C.H. Beck.
Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur (1992). "Freedom as Nightmare: Armah's The
Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." In: Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei
Armah. Ed. Derek Wright. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 102-15.
Gikandi, Simon (1991). Reading Chinua Achebe. London: James Currey.
Iliffe, John (1995). Africans: The History of a Continent. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Izevbaye, Dan S. (2004) "West African Literature in English: beginnings to the
mid-seventies." In: The Cambridge History ofAfrican and Caribbean Literature.
Vol. 2. Ed. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 472-503.
Kehinde, Ayo (2003). "A Parable of the African Condition: The Interface of
Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Biyi Bandele-Thomas's Fiction." Revista
Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 16, 177-90.
Killam, Douglas, and Ruth Rowe (2005). "Yulisa Amadu Maddy main page."
<[Link] (11
October 2005).
Ki-Zerbo, Joseph (1992). Die Geschichte Schwarzafrikas. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer.
Lodge, Tom (2003). "Introduction." Joseph Casely-Hayford. Writings of Ekra-
Agiman. Bristol:
Thoemmes Continuum, 1-20.
Mabe, Jacob E. (2001). Das Afrika-Lexikon. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.
Peters, Lenrie (1989). "Interview with Stewart Brown." Broadcast on BBC
Africa Service's "Arts and Africa" programme (June).
Sallah, Tijan M. (1992). "Phillis Wheatley: a brief survey of the life and works
of a Gambian slave/poet in New England America." Wasafiri 15, 27-31.
Sallah, Tijan M. (2005). "The Dreams of Katchikali: The Challenge of a
Gambian National Literature." The Gambia Post.
<[Link] html> (6
October 2005).
Stoll, Karl-Heinz (2003). Die Interkulturalität afrikanischer Literatur. Münster:
LIT.
Sutherland, Efua T. (1987) "Foreword." The Marriage of Anansewa and Edufa.
Harlow, Essex: Longman, 3-5.
5. Conclusion
Ukala, Sam (2001). "Impersonation in Some African Ritual and Festival
Performances." Okafor, 133-47.
Wilentz, Gay (1999). "The Politics of Exile: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister
Killjoy." In: Arms Akimbo: Women in Contemporary Literature. Ed. J.L. Lidell
and Y.B. Kemp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 162-75.
Wright, Derek (1997). "Postmodernism as Realism: Magic History in Recent
West African Fiction." Contemporary African Fiction. Bayreuth: Eckhard
Breitinger, 181-207.
Further Recommended Reading
Irele, F. Abiola, and Simon Gikandi, ed. (2004). The Cambridge History
ofAfrican and Caribbean Literature. Vols. 1 & 2. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.