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Although a staunch supporter of French colonialism, Paul Hazoume's narrative captures the customs and traditions of Dahomey. This novel, set in the first half of the 19th century, depicts a pattern of war, slave trade and human sacrifice - practices that earned Dahomey a reputation for brutality.
This 1976 book provides both a historical survey and a critical analysis of the literature in French from West and Equatorial Africa. Professor Blair begins by discussing the social, educational and political influences which led to the formation of the Negritude movement and to a flowering of French-African creative writing. This historical approach is then complemented by a study of the different literary genres. She traces the evolution of the first manifestations of literary activity in French by African writers, the written folk-tale, fable and short story, from the oral tradition of the indigenous culture, and the eventual appearance of the novel with a legendary or historical theme. The origins of French-African drama are considered for the first time, and the work of the minor poets analysed. Finally, Professor Blair attempts a definition of the French-African novel, and studies examples from three major periods from the 1930s onwards.
An historical overview provides new insights into the literatures of Africa, both oral and written.
On pourrait dire qu'il se développe, depuis les années 1960 et singulièrement ces dernières années, un véritable mythe au sujet de la littérature de langue française produite par des Africains. Celle-ci serait " africaine ", c'est-à -dire qu'elle n'aurait rien à voir avec la littérature française, et pour l'expliquer il faudrait forcément recourir à la tradition orale africaine. Cette idée nous paraît désastreuse au plan pédagogique puisqu'elle conduit à donner aux élèves et aux étudiants une vue étriquée et tronquée de la réalité et de l'histoire de la littérature africaine de langue française. On pourrait affirmer au contraire que la littérature de langue franÃ...
The Republic of Benin struggles to find its way into socio-political modernity. The Christian churches have played various roles in this struggle. This book is an account of both the historical difficulties of state formation and the role the Churches have played in this process.
From the Pharaohs to Fanon, Dictionary of African Biography provides a comprehensive overview of the lives of the men and women who shaped Africa's history. Unprecedented in scale, DAB covers the whole continent from Tunisia to South Africa, from Sierra Leone to Somalia. It also encompasses the full scope of history from Queen Hatsheput of Egypt (1490-1468 BC) and Hannibal, the military commander and strategist of Carthage (243-183 BC), to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909-1972), Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1918 -).
Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book Award Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of no...
In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of...