Africa (South of the Sahara)
1. Oral Literature
The ‘Dark Continent’, the terra incognita of 18th- and 19th-c. European explorers, invaders, and colonizers, was believed to have no indigenous culture. Inhabited at best by the bons sauvages of the philosophes, at worst by the barbaric savages of the Positivists, Africa could have no ‘literature’. When abbé Grégoire published his De la littérature des nègres (1808), he could illustrate it only with verses written by freed slaves in America. In fact, despite the lack of written languages (in French West Africa, Arabic was reserved for Koranic studies), there was, throughout what we conveniently call ‘Black Africa’, a rich reservoir of oral literature transmitted by professional chroniclers, praisesingers, and story-tellers known as diéli (diali) or griots. This collective lore is now sometimes known as ‘orature’. The borderline between different genres is often blurred, but we can roughly distinguish the following:
a. Sacred texts. Prayers, invocations, religious songs, initiatory texts, which from part of the social, political, religious organization of peoples and regions, reflecting caste systems, nomadic or sedentary habits, presence of a king, growth of an empire or development of territorial groups under a local chief (e.g. songs for the enthronement or death of priests, chiefs, and kings). Invocations associated with agrarian rites, fishing, hunting, and annual renewal; stages in individual and social life: birth, baptism, circumcision or excision, marriage, death, epidemics, migrations, war or peace; those for practice of traditional crafts: weaving, forging, wood-carving, leatherwork; spells and magic incantations to make oneself invisible, overcome enemies or wild beasts, seduce women or conjure demons. (See
b. Praise songs, associated with social and personal ceremonies, addressed, usually by the court or household griot, to a king, chief, warrior, or any individual who could pay for the service, recounting his exploits and ancestry.
c. Chronicles of the great empires (e.g. Ghana, Mali), their civilizations and warrior princes, from medieval to more recent times (e.g. El Hadj Omar, Lat Dior, Sundiata, Almamy Albouri). The mixture of heroic legend and historical fact makes these the chansons de geste of Black Africa.
d. Fable and folk-tale, popular ‘science’, didactic, supernatural, humorous, ribald, and romantic tales. While chronicles and praise-poems are specific to certain regions, most of the fables and folk-tales, with variants, are common to all parts of Black Africa, the animal protagonists varying according to geographic locality. Spider tales emanate from forest regions, the Hare is the hero in the savannah, the Tortoise and Antelope along the coast. (See M. Kane, Essai sur les contes de Birago Diop; F. V. Equilbecq, Contes indigènes de l'Ouest africain—NB the term ‘Black literature’ is used for the first time by Equilbecq to refer to the authentic oral heritage, which he transcribed and translated into French.) Many of the myths, fables, and legends have their counterparts elsewhere; the sacrifice of Iphigenia or Isaac can be compared with the legend of the Baoulé, in which Queen Abra-Pokou is called upon to sacrifice her only son to save the Baoulé tribe, whereupon the baobabs form a bridge over the River Comoé. We also find tropical equivalents of the Andromeda legend, in which a monster, usually a many-headed serpent, exacts the annual sacrifice of a virgin.
e. Myth and legend (e.g. cosmogonic, ethnic, heroic).
f. Popular wisdom: axioms, maxims, proverbs, riddles. These are mostly anonymous, but we may note the name of Kotje (or Cothe) Barma, the 18th-c. Senegalese sage, author of dits faits, mentioned by abbé Boilat in his Esquisses sénégalaises. Birago Diop contributed ‘Kotje Barma ou les Toupets apophthègmes’ to L'Étudiant noir.
2. Written, Published Literature
a. The Colonial Era, 1850-1960. The first tentative efforts at literary composition by indigenous authors, during the period of French colonization, were for the benefit of the colonial powers: accounts of travels, missionary or military expeditions, and descriptions of tribal life and customs by mulattos. The most important of these are Panet and Boilat. Early Black writers of original works of fiction were often influenced by the cultural and administrative domination of France, directly or indirectly extolling the benefits colonization brought to the indigenous peoples and expressing respect for Christian and Western values. Ahmadou Mapaté Diagne's Les Trois Volontés de Malic (1920), an African version of the ‘Three Wishes’ theme, is an uplifting reader for use in primary schools in Senegal. Bakary Diallo's more ambitious Force Bonté (1926) exalts the ‘cardinal virtues’ of France.
By the inter-war years, the revival of interest in African folklore taking place in Europe, combined with the growth of racial and cultural consciousness among Black intellectuals in Paris, eventually baptized as the négritude movement, resulted in the birth of an authentic Negro-African literature. One of the earliest calls was for the preservation in writing of traditional material transmitted by the old chroniclers and story-tellers. From 1935 to 1960 we find versions of folk-tales, myths, legends, and chronicles, from every region of West and Equatorial Africa, transcribed, translated, and retold with varying degrees of originality, the most important being Birago Diop's Contes d'Amadou Koumba. There followed full-length works of fiction based on chronicles transmitted by the local griots. Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1935) was the first African historical novel, a monument to Dahomey tradition. Twenty-five years later, the historian D. T. Niane published his epic novel, Soundiata, the life of the legendary 13th-c. Mandingo warrior. Historical and legendary subjects, the repertoire of the griots, also formed the material, and provided heroes and heroines (e.g. Lat Dior, Shaka, Queen Pokou), for much dramatic literature during the colonial period (see particularly drams by Dadié, Cheik Aliou Ndao, and Senghor's dramatic poem Chaka).
Apart from works inspired by oral tradition, regional novels began to appear, depicting the existence, customs, and passions of rural, mainly animist, communities. Of these, Félix Couchoro's first novel L'Esclave (1929), appearing when African literature was still embryonic, must be considered a pioneering work in theme, inspiration, and treatment. In the 1950s the outstanding regional novel was Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir (1953). Émile Cissé's Faraloko, roman d'un petit village africain (1958) and Ananou's Le Fils du fétiche (1955) also depict the customs of rural societies, the former, like L'Enfant noir, with nostalgia for the lost innocence of the author's childhood in Guinea, the latter casting the reformer's condemnatory eye on ‘primitive’, animist beliefs in rural Togo.
Novels with urban protagonists, pioneered by Ousmane Socé's Karim (1935), begin to portray the dilemmas and vicissitudes of young people, influenced by contact with the West and caught at the crossroads of two cultures. Although depicting the clash of cultures resulting from colonization, sometimes with the heroes' unhappy experiences as student or worker in France, social-realist novels by Sadji and Naigiziki, like Socé's, are implicitly rather than explicitly anti-colonial. But in the immediate post-war decade, novelists, under the influence of Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre and Césaire's Discours sur le colonialisme, felt committed to using their literacy in the fight against colonialism, racism, and missionary subversion of African culture. They expressed their engagement in satirical, polemical novels. The bitterest, most powerful expression of militant négritude is found in Dadié's autobiographical Climbié and the fiction of Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, and Ousmane Sembène, as well as of lesser writers such as Matip, Malonga, Badian, and J. Ikelle-Matiba.
Poetry, too, was committed to act as a war-cry. The traditional Romantic, Symbolist, and Parnassian models adopted for early verse in the Caribbean were unacceptable in Africa, were taboo. Descriptions of nature, individual melancholy, personal experience, art for art's sake, were to be eschewed in the face of the need to proclaim the dignity of Black peoples, awaken them to an awareness of their alienation, extol the culture and traditions of Africa, and guide them in the search for their own identity. Verses dedicated to ‘la femme noire’ are less personal love poems than eulogies of ‘Mother Africa’. Militant poets, following the example of Césaire, Damas Dadié, and David Diop, sing of past and present oppression—the indignities, violence, and brutalities of slavery and colonial rule. Formally, the impact of the négritude movement, combined with the fact that this coincided with the Surrealist school of poetry in France, caused a liberation of verse from classical rules of prosody. Under the influence of Senghor and Césaire, there is a widespread use of free or liberated verse patterns, and imagery, deliberately African in source, begins to reflect a telluric spirit and all aspects of the African landscape, while often exhibiting a sensuality and obsessive sexuality—not the eroticism of the West, but rather a preoccupation with the sources of life. Rhythms often echo the cadences of the African dance or the beat of the tom-tom (Senghor actually prescribing the indigenous musical instruments which should accompany his verses).
b. Post-Independence. The date when the French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa gained independence [see Decolonization] is not only a political watershed but also a convenient point from which to assess new developments in creative writing from these regions. Changes, naturally, did not occur overnight. For one thing, many works published in the 1960s had been written in the previous decade. So, for some years poetry and social-realist novels still reflect a preoccupation with aspects of colonialism, although the edge of anti-colonial acerbity is generally blunted.
In poetry, Senghor's voice continues to dominate for another two decades, with his Lettres d'hivernage (1973) and Élégies majeures (1979). These still pay lipservice to négritude, which he redefines to include the expression of his personal mission to his homeland: ‘Ma négritude est truelle à la main, est lance au poing | Récade … | Ma tâche est d'éveiller mon peuple au futurs flamboyants | Ma joie de créer des images pour le nourrir, ô lumières rythmées de la Parole!’ Certain committed poets continue to militate in the name of suffering Africa and the search for Black identity (e.g. Diakhate, Joachim), or devote their talents to expressing national reconstruction or denouncing misery and oppression elsewhere in the world. Some make common cause with their ‘brothers’ in Chile, Angola, Vietnam, South Africa. But many of the new generation of poets, notably Tchicaya U Tam'si, Malick Fall, Tati-Loutard, and Kine Kirama Fall, are liberated from the commitments of négritude and take up universal themes of personal experience: solitude, exile, nostalgia, jealousy, pity, existential anguish, love and death. Bernard Nanga ironically sums up his emancipation from commitment to an outdated loyalty: ‘Qu' on ne me dise pas que je n'ai pas chanté | Ma vieille négritude. | Je la vis, | Il suffit. | Je hais les habitudes. | Nègre d'un temps nouveau, d'autres rêves hantés, | Je veux en homme libre | M'épanouir et vivre’ (Poèmes sans frontières, 1987).
An important trend in the fiction of the first postcolonial decade is satirical, cynical, and lewdly picaresque social comedy (e.g. Oyono's Chemin d'Europe). Other novelists use their gifts to analyse the social and psychological problems of adapting to a changing world (Ake Loba's Kocoumbo, 1960; Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë, 1961). Bhêly-Quénum's Un piège sans fin (1960) and Camara Laye's Le Regard du roi are both in different ways existential treatments of a search for identity in a hostile world. Another striking example is Malick Fall's allegorical La Plaie (1967). Some didactic fiction offers a blueprint for the future, illustrating how dignity, prosperity, and independence can be attained through a people's corporate efforts—physical toil hand in hand with education (e.g. Nokan's Le Soleil noir point, 1962).
By the 1970s two new trends in prose writing reflect post-colonial social and political changes. One is the emergence of women writers. The other is the replacement of the evils of colonialism, as the satirists' target, by attacks on bureaucratic, corrupt, or dictatorial regimes in African republics. It did not take long to realize that independence did not bring the promised utopia, and the resultant disillusionment forms the theme for much satirical fiction, sometimes sombre, sometimes relieved by irony and savage humour. Such is Kourouma's first novel, Les Soleils des indépendances (1968), denouncing the injustices, corruption, and inhumanity of the ‘New Order’. Ousmane Sembène now uses the cinema, as well as the printed word (e.g. Xala, 1973), to illustrate the nepotism, exploitation, unscrupulous arrivisme of the new masters, the ever-increasing moral and economic gulf between the have-nots and the newly privileged black bourgeoisie. Aminata
A reflection of the change in target from the colonial masters to indigenous tyrants is the fact that some writers have been imprisoned and many forced into exile by the uncompromising nature of their works and their implicit or explicit political stance. The repressive regime of President Sekou Touré in Guinea is the overt subject of a disillusioned Camara Laye's Dramouss (1966), and is thinly disguised in Fantouré's fictional, pessimistic Cercle des tropiques (1972). Sekou Touré is again the model for Tierno Monénembo's sinister, cruel tyrant ruler in Les Crapauds-Brousse and Williams Sassine's Le Jeune Homme de sable (both 1979). Mongo Beti broke a 16-year silence with novels virulently attacking President Ahidjo's oppressive rule in his native Cameroon: Remember Reuben, Perpétue ou l'Habitude du malheur (both 1974), and La Ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979). The litany of violence and suffering in prison and concentration camps, accounts of plots and coups d'état which punctuate contemporary African politics, is taken up in Dongala's short stories in Jazz et vin de palme (1982). But by the 1980s African writers were beginning to transcend the limitations of social-realism, using scatology, Rabelaisian farce, Ubuesque mockheroics, and surreal fantasy in novels and plays to express their exasperation with neo-colonialism, totalitarianism and corrupt dictatorships. Tchicaya U Tam'si, the Congolese poet from an older generation, turns his hand to farce in his play Le Destin glorieux du maréchal Nnikon Nniku, while Sony Labou Tansi heads the new generation of satirists with a series of savage surreal novels of contestation.
Finally, in the 1960s women writers begin to find their voice, mainly in prose. The tone and themes of their poetry are lyrical, both personal and universal, rather than militant. Annette M'Baye, the pioneer of African women poets, expresses a frank sensuality in her love poems and a strong feminist note in all her verses, reminding us that there is suffering, revolt, and love that is specifically feminine as well as specifically African. Much of the verse of the new generation of women poets is undistinguished, but the young Senegalese Kine Kirama Fall brings a freshness, economy, and spirituality to the expression of human loves and torments, her religious faith, and her love for the natural scenes of her birthplace. Véronique Tadjo and Werewere Liking both break new ground: Tadjo with prose poems original in theme and imagery drawn from her femininity, and arcane in their discreet personal references; Werewere Liking in hybrid creations, combining poetry, novel, and drama, as daring, violent, and provocatively feminist in theme and expression as they are innovative in form. Apart from Werewere Liking, who directs and writes for a theatre workshop, and Joséphine Kama-Bongo's play Obali (1974) about tribal customs in Gabon, there is little evidence of women's interest in dramatic writing.
The earliest prose works by women tend to be autobiographical, either histories from a variety of regions and backgrounds (e.g. Pélandrova, 1975, the eponymous author's story of her life as a Malagasy sorcerer, and Nafissatou Diallo's account of a Muslim girl growing up in Dakar, De Tilène au plateau, 1976) or thinly disguised as fiction (e.g. the Cameroonian Thérèse Kuoh-Moukouri's Rencontres essentielles, 1969, and the Ivoirian Simone Kaya's Danseuses d'Impé-éya: jeunes filles à Abijan, 1975), two accounts from a woman's viewpoint of the clash of cultures resulting from a Western education in a traditional society. Ken Bugul's Le Baobab fou (1982), a strikingly honest autobiographical novel, tells of a lonely, traumatized childhood and adolescence in rural Senegal, followed by the author's encounter with the permissive society and subculture of urban Europe.
The works of Aminata Sow Fall, the most prolific and versatile of French-African women writers, are not specifically feminist, but rather ironical, sociopolitical comments on false values in contemporary Senegalese society, perpetuated from tradition or resulting from Western influences. Mariama Ba led the way in novels treating moral, psychological, and emotional dilemmas specifically affecting women, particularly problems of polygamy, social and religious constraints, and mixed marriages. Powerful works by the young novelists Calixthe Beyala and Ananda Devi, depicting the lives of women trapped in the bleak purgatory of Africa's urban slums, indicate that the future of African literature in French is safe in the hands of African women as well as men.
The post-colonial era has also seen moves towards ‘linguistic decolonization’ by fiction, poetry, newspapers, and films in indigenous languages. Wolof, spoken by the majority of Senegalese, with a grammar and orthography early drawn up at the University of Dakar, has proved the most widely adopted. Boubacar Boris Diop and Cheikh Aliou Ndao have been at the forefront of this movement, the latter having written his first novel, Buur Tileen, in Wolof in 1963, before translating it for publication in French. B. B. Diop has written a play, as yet unpublished, and launched a newspaper in Wolof. Guinean poets are also beginning to publish locally in the vernacular. The practical and financial problems of publishing in a minority language do not apply to films, which can break out of a linguistic ghetto by the use of subtitles for international distribution. Ousmane Sembène, the pioneer African film-maker, first made both Wolof and French versions of his novel Le Mandat, and then original films such as Ceddo and Camp Thiaroye. In 1987 appeared Kaddu Beykat / Lettre paysanne / Letter from my Village by Safi Faye, the only African woman film-director to date. Souleymane Cissé (Mali) made the acclaimed Yeelen in the Bambara language, while Idrissa Ouedraogo, from Burkina Faso, the second poorest African country, which so far has produced no published literature in French, has three record-breaking features to his credit, filmed with local people and using the minimum of dialogue: Yam daabo / The Choice, Yaaba, and Tilai / The Law.
[Dorothy Blair]
Bibliography
- R. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (1970)
- L. Kesteloot, Les Écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature (1975)
- D. S. Blair, African Literature in French (1975)
- C. Wauthier, L'Afrique des Africains (1977)
- J.-P. Makouta-Mboukou, Spiritualité et cultures dans la prose romanesque et al poésie négro-africaine (de l'oralité à l'écriture) (1983)
- A. Rouch and G. Clavereuil, Littératures nationales d'écriture française (1987)
