scholarly journals Literatura, Linguagem e Descolonização em Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Quênia) e Chinua Achebe (Nigéria)

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Bruno Ribeiro Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
African Languages ◽  
African People ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The Many

A história de literatura africana contemporânea está repleta de debates que tratam de sua utilidade frente aos povos de África e a natureza dessa literatura. Através das ideias de dois escritores africanos, Chinua Achebe e Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, este artigo revisita a história das ideias desses autores em respeito à literatura africana e sua linguagem de escrita. Tratamos de perceber como dois autores da mesma geração, porém de locais diferentes, Nigéria e Quênia, respectivamente, pensaram a produção literária e sua função em África no período pós-colonial.Palavras-chave: Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-), Literatura Africana, Línguas Africanas AbstractThe history of African contemporary literature is full of debates that deal with its utility to the many African people and the nature of this literature. Through the ideas of two African writers, Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, we revisit the history of the ideas of these authors in relation to African literature and the language in which this literature is written. We try to perceive how authors from the same generation, but from different locals, Nigeria and Kenya, respectively, thought their literary production and its function in Africa in the post-colonial period.Keywords: Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-), African Literatures, African Languages

The Afterlife of Oyono's Houseboy in the Swahili Schools Market: To Be or Not to Be Faithful to the Original

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (1) ◽  
pp. 178-184
Author(s):  
Ken Walibora Waliaula
Keyword(s):  
Italian Literature ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
African Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
False Proposition ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Asian Languages

Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).

scholarly journals Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-361
Author(s):  
Regie Panadero Amamio
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
African Literature ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
Dark Continent ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The Many

Hybridity is argued as an intricate combination of attraction and repulsion that describes the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This combination creates a challenge to and disruption of the monolithic power exercised by the colonizers of Africa who (mis)represented the land as a Dark Continent. Such monolithic power underpins the portrayal of the colonizers’ patriarchal tradition within which women characters in creative works by Africans are commonly situated. The inclusion of women as part of the many subjects of power strengthens the discourse on hybridity in African literature. To question power is to see men and women both apart and together as ambivalence that defines the idea of hybridity in the African literary tradition. In this paper, the employment of deconstruction in the  analysis of women characters in five selected stories by African writers reveals a new consciousness in African literature using the Dark Continent metaphor as a mirror of  the female aesthetics. In this sense, the use of women’s bodies in the short stories does not only point to the issue of gender oppression but also to a power that is disrupting and slowly dismantling the long-entrenched patriarchal stance forcing the male characters to question their current worldview and position. Overall, this paper has established that contemporary African literature on women recognizes the hybridized identity and shape of the new woman, consequently proving that the so-called Dark Continent is nothing but a myth.

Acquiring and Studying African Literature

PMLA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (5) ◽  
pp. 1225-1227
Author(s):  
Mette Shayne
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Third World ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
African Writers ◽  
National Languages ◽  
Buying In

martin cohen's “developments in foreign approval buying,” in the march 2001 issue of pmla, lists some of “the foreign language bibliographer's […] tricks” (393) for stocking collections. Acquiring African literature, however, is largely a different matter. The approval plans Cohen mentions, whereby “the vendor allows you to see the book [or a description of it] before you decide whether or not to add it to the collection,” would be applicable to the presses in England and France specializing in Third World literature (e.g., Heinemann in England, L'Harmattan in France), which publish primarily the most established African writers (see Maja-Pearce; Ruppert). But when it comes to publishing on the continent of Africa, even books by well-known writers (like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o), when written in the national languages, can only be obtained locally. And certainly all other literature has to be bought in the country of origin.

scholarly journals Literature as a Medium for Social and Political Activism: The Case of Mashingaidze Gomo’s A Fine Madness

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodwell Makombe
Keyword(s):  
Political Activism ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
African Context ◽  
African Writers

Abstract:Over the years, literary scholars have engaged in heated debates on the role literary artists should play in society. In the African context, this debate has been championed by scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, and Okot p’ Bitek, among others. The central bone of contention has always been the question of self-narration. How should African writers narrate the African story (-ies) against the backdrop of slavery, colonialism, and neoliberal imperialism? In the context of these debates, this article seeks to read A Fine Madness by the Zimbabwean writer Mashingaidze Gomo (2010) as a socially and politically engaged text.

scholarly journals The True Face of Pre-Colonial Africa in “Things Fall Apart”

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (30) ◽  
pp. 96-104
Author(s):  
Ecevit Bekler
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Western World ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Important Place ◽  
History Of ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Authentic Environment ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The One

The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is known to be one of the most influential African writers and holds an important place in postcolonial studies. His main aim was to reconstructthe wrongly established beliefs, ideas, and thoughts of the Western world regarding Africa. To realize his aim, he made careful selections in his choice of language, which contributed greatly to sharing his observations, ideas, and beliefs with the rest of the world. He wrote his novels in English, believing that doing so would be more powerful in conveying the true face of pre-colonial Africa, rather than in Nigerian, which could not be as effective as the language of the colonizers. Achebe’s complaint was that the history of Africa had mainly been written by white men who did not belong to his continent and who would not judge life there fairly. With his novels, he changed the prejudices of those who had never been to Africa, and he managed to convert the negative ideas and feelings caused by the portrayal of his continent to positive ones. Things Fall Apart is a novel whose mission is to portray Africa in a very realistic and authentic environment, contrary to the one-sided point of view of the colonizers. The novel presents us, in very authentic language, with many details about the customs, rituals, daily life practices, ceremonies, beliefs, and even jokes of the African Igbos. Chinua Achebe thus realizes his aim in revealing that African tribes, although regarded as having a primitive life and being very far from civilization, in fact had their own life with traditions and a culture specific to themselves.

A Premise for Precolonial Nuba History

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 369-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Spaulding
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Current State ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Focus

Near the center of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan lies a tract of broken, elevated terrain about the size of South Carolina. The region, by common convention, is called the Nuba Mountains, and the people who live there, through a familiar if misleading generalization, the Nuba. The inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains have long attracted the attention of students of African languages and cultures, for in these respects they exhibit very great diversity among themselves as well as distinctiveness in relation to the Arab and Nilotic cultural traditions that dominate the surrounding lowlands on every side. No scholar has yet deliberately undertaken to write a history of the Nuba, but many have found themselves constrained to make tangential statements or assumptions about Nuba history in the course of constructing studies with some other primary focus. The sum of these tangential comments and assumptions may read as the current state of Nuba historiography. The present study addresses a stimulating clash of opinion among those whose interests have led them to comment peripherally on the more remote Nuba past. The issue at stake is the existence, or non-existence, of a state form of government among the Nuba in precolonial times.Students of the Nuba during the colonial and post-colonial periods have seldom failed to assign considerable importance to the role of successive Sudan governments in directing the destiny of the Nuba, however they may differ in assessing the quality of this intervention.

scholarly journals Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the History of African Literature: A Critical Analysis of a Landmark Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Kone Klohinlwélé
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of

This study shows the central position held by Ayi Kwei Aramh’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the African literary world. It tries to prove that the publishing of this work was a landmark in the early post-colonial context of African literature. Through a series of breaks from still prevailing colonial and neocolonial literary discourses, it has initiated an innovative aesthetics which has left a tremendous legacy which is being continued by subsequent generations.      

An African knowledge of ethnosystematics and its application totraditional medicine, with particular reference to the medicinal use of the fungus Engleromyces goetzei

Bothalia ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. O. Kokwaro
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
African People ◽  
Medicinal Use ◽  
African Flora ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
First Time ◽  
Botanical Classification

Botany and medicine have been closely related fields of knowledge throughout the history of man's development. Consequently a folk knowledge of botanical classification (ethnosystematics) is often rooted in traditional medicine. Four factors have contributed to ethnosystematics being particularly well developed in Africa. They are: the continuing importance of traditional medicine; the importance of the spoken word in handing down traditional botanical and medical knowledge; the richness and diversity of the African flora; and the many different languages and dialects used by the African people. Some of the plants used in African traditional medicine are being investigated as sources of antibiotics and other useful substances. An example is the investigation of the fungus  Engleromyces goetzei P. Hennings, whose medical use is described for the first time.

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