If for the period extending from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, Africa’s contribution to art, ideas, and especially world literature has been duly recognized, its contribution has yet to be acknowledged for preceding centuries, and in particular for the period from the decline of the Roman Empire up until the first European explorations along the continent’s great river highways.

It has not gone unnoticed that in effect this category of African literature was “invented” in circumstances that make it more accessible to Europe, since its written beginnings are substantially in European languages and it takes over from, and sometimes counterbalances, ethnographic studies. Just as African art was “discovered” at the turn of the twentieth century and studied for the answers it might bring to the questions of form posed by Cubism, so African literature – that which emerged at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries – seems to raise questions that concern Europe itself, which was engaged forcefully and improvisationally in the process of colonization that inevitably radically modified the relationships of colonizers as well as colonized to history, language, and identity.