Literature, like other semiotic regimes such as sculpture, painting photography and film, can and has been used to present individual and group experiences. Artists have utilized all of the modes mentioned above, with varying degrees of success, to engage with such social and political issues as colonialism, politics, religion, corruption and underdevelopment. Thus, the role of art, besides its traditional functions of entertainment and education, includes the provision of a critique of the life and experiences of participants involved in social interaction. The postcolonial African literary text has been used to provide an appraisal of ideology, identity, power relations and inter-group relationships in Africa. Literary and linguistic analysts have also tried to explore whether the resources of art can be harnessed to provide a good interpretation of life situations and function as an instrument for shaping and reshaping of the socio-political direction of the society.

Colonialism is one historical experience the full impact of which generations of African scholars have yet to fully unravel. Besides the physical balkanization of the continent to serve imperial interests, there are issues of economic and human exploitation, cultural and linguistic distortions, negative representation/presentation of Africa, its people, and its values by the West. The West invented reasons to justify its acts of aggression as a rescue mission that was in the best interest of Africa. To them, Africa should be grateful for their timely intervention because it was a dark continent – without language, culture, system of government, philosophy or human dignity, prior to its colonization. Even when the colonialists and their apologists acknowledge the existence of these basic forms of humanity in Africa, they still downgrade and fetishize the peoples as barbaric, primitive, crude and evil. This epistemic assumption which forms the basis of Western configuration of the other has been contested by African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ben Okri.