Texts From Africa

The outline: I- Introduction II- Synopsis of the chapter III- The post-colonial need of Tigritude: asserting aboriginal history and culture. IV- Conclusion

Decolonizing knowledge

• Africans were taught to hate being black and to love to be • •

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white. that’s what caused the postcolonial shake of identity. During the colonial era the black colonized was deemed to be washed white. The postcolonial subject started from the construction of self knowledge as the first step to debunk the limiting representation of the colonial era: starting from the semantic implications of terms like barbarism and tribalism…ect. For the postcolonized such terms do not only promote racist conception of African ethnicities as primitive and savage, they prevent coming to accurate understanding of the African self and reflect intellectual laziness , which slips to filling in the vacuum rather than probing real African identity.

African Literature: Achebe’s and Amos Tutola’s double register

• While Tutola and Achebe are considered as pioneers

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of African litarature in English medium, many other literary instances date back to two centuries: Ignatius Sancho as an example. The African literary legacy exhibits a hybrid vernacular culture and society conveyed in nonAfrican media.

Celebrating the Past: facing the Future.

• «I talk about his (the author’s) past mainly because actually I am interested in the present, and I also talk about his past because I find on the whole that African novelists especially are quite good when they are dealing with the Past » Ngugy Wa Thing’o

The African novel haunts one’s memory because of the overwhelming sense of emptiness…. The African has been completely severed from his roots.

« The novel is often an attempt to come to terms with a thing that has been; has struggled, as it were, to register [the] encounter with history » Ngugy Wa Thing’o.

The critcism of Modern African Literature « I personally take the view that the African is being transformed not into something or somebody else, but into something or somebody new, and similarly I tend to look upon our literature as tending towards the transposition of an old scale of feelings and attitudes into a new key of expression » Abiola Irele

The problematic of language

• Their significance resides, apart from the human interest of their work, in the fact that from the basic dissociation of the realities they express and the language in which they express themselves, they create a unity.

Contrasting Tutola’s experience to his successors’

• His followers:

• Amos Tutola: • The finality was literature per • se. • • Little care about The novel as •

a genre. Makes use of Oral tradition.

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Studied literary genres. Their adaptation was rather away from than towards Tutola’s ‘norms’. Their ends were usually national.

Achebe’s cultural assertiveness: resurrecting oral tradition

• « Africans did not hear of culture for the first time

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from Europeans… their societies were not mindless but frquently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, dignity » Proverbs are the palm oil with which all words are eaten.

Reality in African Aesthetics and Literary Criticism

• « African art is conceived as inherently committed because it is intrinsically social and communal, as opposed to the individualism of European art. "Emotion is [Black], as reason is Greek. »

The Lion and the Jewel We’ll buy saucepans for all the women Clay pots are crude and unhygienic No man shall take more wives than one That’s why they are impotent too soon. The ruler shall ride cars, not horses Or a bicycle at the very least We will burn the forest, cut the trees, Then plant a modern park for lovers We must be modern with the rest Or live forgotten by the world We must reject the palm-wine habit And take to tea, with milk and sugar.

Works cited • Carina Ray ˝ The Racial Politics of Writing African History˝. NewAfrican. • • • •

May 2008. Ngugy, James ˝The African Writer and His Past. ̋ Studies in African Literature. Ed.Christopher Heywood. London: Heinemann, 1979. Oyin Ogunba ˝The Traditional Content of the Plays of Wole Soyinka.˝ African Literature Today. Ed. Elder. D. Jones. New York: African Publishing Corporation, 1971. Solomon,O.Lyasere ˝ African Critics on African Literature: A Study of Misplaced Hostility.˝ African Literature Today: Focus on Criticism. Ed. Elder. D.Jones. London: Heinemann, 1982. http://science.jrank.org/pages/10995/Realism-Africa-Reality-in-AfricanAesthetics-Literary-Criticism.html