On African Literature

Extract

Welcoming the English translation of Bernard Dadié's Climbié-- some fifteen years after its publication in French--Ezekiel Mphahlele commented:

It has became a habit for us to complain that intellectuals--including writers, artists, politicians, and scholars--from French-speaking Africa do not work smoothly with those from countries of British influence in Africa. Somehow, when we are in conferences, we find ourselves talking along parallel lines, or we find argument entangled in fluent, passionate rhetoric, or else served up in a highly prosaic manner, lacking any kind of romance. In small groups, we say of one another, “Oh, those Francophones, they're the end!” and “Les anglophones, c'est véritablement la mentalité anglo-saxonne, ça.!” Yet, we keep coming to a meeting point somewhere: the times demand it, the ideals of pan-Africanism, however depressingly distant they often look, make it desperately necessary for us to understand one another, if only at the basic colour level (Dadié 1971, p. vii).

It is a fact that the artificial barriers erected throughout Africa by the colonial structure in the course of the nineteenth century are still in existence and the many works dealing with African literature published in the last ten years or so--ever since the emergence to independence--still reflect a situation which, one hopefully assumed, was to end with colonialism. The French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish “cultural” empires carved in Africa seem to have maintained their autonomy, and there does not seem to be much interpénétration between the various components of the African continent.