African literature

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African literature was mainly oral until the 20th century and oral traditions of proverbs, mythological narratives, and poetry persist and influence contemporary writing. There exists a wide variety of narrative, dramatic, and lyric forms. In prose narrative, the folk tale, often featuring an animal hero, is one of the most common genres; stories of a trickster-hero (in the form of a spider, a tortoise, a rabbit, a human, or a god) are particularly popular. There are also many religious myths, and stories that preserve in legendary form the history and world view of particular groups.

Oral literature
Poetic forms are often tied to particular occupations or cults, for example, the ijala performed by Yoruba hunters, or the songs of the Ewe fishing communities. Religious poetry includes hymns to the gods and allusive (making indirect references) and highly symbolic oracular, prophetic poems, such as the Ifa used by the Yoruba for divination; and didactic, instructional pieces in Hausa or Swahili, sometimes revealing Islamic influence. In most African languages there are numerous laments or dirges, love songs, children's chants, war poems, and poems of praise (such as the praise poem of southern Africa) and attack. Drums and horns are often used to communicate or emphasize the tonalities in some African languages, and transmission of poetry by drums is widespread in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Ghana, and Nigeria. The epic is not typical of African culture, although the Mwindo epic of the Bantu-speaking Nyanga people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), which intermingles prose and verse, has been collected and published, and the long Swahili utenzi have been compared to epics.

Traditional African drama, often associated with ritual and social events, tends to emphasize mime, dance, music, costumes, and masks rather than verbal art. Its influence on contemporary African drama is particularly significant. New oral literary forms continue to be developed for radio and popular song.

Written literature in African languages
Some Swahili and Hausa literature, religious in direction and influenced by Arabic, dates from the 16th century. The didactic 18th-century Inkeshafe, a poem of 79 stanzas, describes ancient Swahili culture and moralizes on the transitory nature of power and riches. There are numerous narrative poems in Swahili, ranging from 100 to 6,000 four-line stanzas, generally recounting episodes from the early struggles of Islam. East Africa has been the source of much contemporary political and lyrical poetry in Swahili; Shaaban Robert (1909–1962) is a well-known Swahili poet.

In western and southern African languages, the first written works are associated with Christian missionary activity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hymns and didactic tales analogous to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and rejecting non-Christian practices and beliefs are typical. For example, Thomas Mofolo's (1875–1948) Chaka (1911), written in Sotho and later translated into English, is a powerful portrayal of the Zulu leader Shaka as a kind of Macbeth figure led astray by a demonic shaman. Another significant vernacular writer (working in commonly spoken dialects) is the Yoruba novelist, Chief D O Fagunwa (1910–1963). The most famous of his six works, Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale/The Brave Hunter in the Forest of the Four Hundred Gods (1938), recounts the adventures of Akara-Ogun, the son of a witch and a well-known hunter, and belongs both in form and content to the traditional Yoruba folk tale.

Poetry and plays
Most vernacular compositions tend to be in the form of drama or poetry rather than fiction. F Kwasi Fiawoo's (1891–1969) Ewe play, Toko Atolia/The Fifth Landing Stage (1937), has become a modern classic. Ghanaian poet J H Kwabena Nketia (1921– ) writes in Twi, his native language. In addition to a Luo novel, Okot p'Bitek (1931–1982) from Uganda wrote three long satiric poems in Acholi, Song of Lawino (1966), Song of Ocol (1970), and Song of a Prisoner (1971), all translated into English by the author.

African literature in European languages
Individual African-born writers have made sporadic contributions to European letters since the Renaissance, mainly in English, French, and Portuguese. Early works include those of the classical scholar Juan Latino, an enslaved African who later became a professor at the University of Granada in 1557, the 18th-century Sengalese-American poet Phyllis Wheatley, and the Nigerian Olaudah Equiano, whose vivid account of his early life in Africa, his enslavement, his later adventures as a freed man, and his involvement in the abolitionist movement (which fought for the ending of slavery), went into eight editions in 18th-century England.

Among the earlier landmarks of African writing are the South African historical novel of pre-colonial times Mhudi (written in 1917, published in 1930) by Sol Plaatje (1877–1932) and the plays and poetry of H I E Dhlomo (1905–1945), recreating African landscapes and the achievements of heroes such as the Zulu leader Shaka. Later writing, including autobiographies such as that by Es'kia Mphalele (1919– ), has paid more attention to the themes of urban deprivation and political oppression and violence, particularly in South Africa. This has energized the poetry of the exiled Dennis Brutus (1924– ) and the novels of Alex La Guma (1925–1985), and features in the work of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Nigerian novelist Cyprian Ekwensi (1921– ). The reassertion of pre-colonial communal life, myth, and tradition, associated with condemnation of the cultural disruptions caused by colonists or Christian missionaries, has been a significant concern of the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor (1935– ) and of Nigerian writers such as Chinua Achebe, the Ibo poet Christopher Okigbo (1932–1967), and the novelist Amos Tutuola (1920–1997), who wrote The Palm-Wine Drunkard (1952).

Afro-American literature
The considerable body of writing by Afro-Americans, especially in the 1920s, in turn influenced French-speaking writers from Africa and the Caribbean. Chief among these were the black American writer W E B Du Bois who became a citizen of Ghana, the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire (1913– ), and Senegal's president, Léopold Senghor, who were advocates of the concept of Negritude (blackness, belonging to a black culture), affirming a growing sense of African personality and political and cultural identity in the colonial and postcolonial period. Senghor's resonant poems, often annotated for musical accompaniment, imitate the modes of Wolof and Serer ceremonial praise songs. Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), with its preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, remains a monument to the Negritude movement, which is also associated with Camera Laye's (1928–1980) autobiographical Enfant Noir/The Dark Child (1953, Birago Diop's (1906–1989) recreations of the subject and style of griot tales in Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba/Tales of Amadou Koumba (1947), the work of the Zairean poet Tchicaya U'Tam'si (1931–1988), and the journal Présence Africaine. However, more recent Francophone novelists, such as Mongo Beti (1932– ) and Ferdinand Oyono (1929– ), while critical of colonialism, have satirized what they feel to be a tendency in Negritude to over-romanticize traditional African society.

Literature in English
Africans who write in English have generally rejected Negritude as an unrealistic idealization of the African past. Chinua Achebe's widely acclaimed novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) draw on the language and forms of oral culture to recreate the conflicts within traditional Ibo society and to show how those conflicts were exacerbated by colonialism. The plays of the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka also reject attempts to glamorize the past. The Road (1965) interweaves Yoruba and Christian metaphysics and rituals. In South Africa, drama has been an important instrument of political protest, particularly in the work of Athol Fugard.

Writing in Portuguese
The struggle for independence in Angola produced revolutionary poetry, written in Portuguese, by Veriato da Cruz (1928–1973), Angostino Neto (1922–1979), and Alda do Espirito Santo (1926– ). Kulungano (Marcellino dos Santos) (1929– ) and Noemia de Sousa (1927– ) write of despair and oppression among the poor of Mozambique. Mozambique poet José Craveirinha (1926– ) has won European literary awards.

Important women writers include the South Africans Bessie Head (1937–1986) and Miriam Tlali (1933– ), the Nigerian Flora Nwapa (1931– ), and Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) from Senegal.

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