Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-01T22:30:31.010Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On African Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Georges J. Joyaux
Georges J. Joyaux*
Affiliation:
Department of Romance Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 1972 , pp. 307 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1972

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES CITED

Dadié, Bernard. Climbié. Trans, by Chapman, Karen C.. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971.Google Scholar
Etiemble, René. The Crisis in Comparative Literature. Trans, and with an Introduction by Joyaux, Georges J. and Weisinger, Herbert. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Larson, Charles R. The Emergence of African Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Nantet, Jacques. Panorama de la littérature noire d'expression française. Paris: Fayard, 1972.Google Scholar
Roscoe, Adrian A. Mother Is Gold: A Study in West African Literature. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Tarlet, Jean. “La présence culturelle française en Afrique Equatoriale.” Report presented at the Thirty-Second Meeting of the Federation des Professeurs française residant a l'etranger, 1970.Google Scholar
Wauthier, Claude. “France and Africa: ‘Long Live Neo-Colonialism’” Issue, A Quarterly Journal of Africanist Opinion, II (Spring 1972).Google Scholar