A study of the late Keorapetse Kgositsile shows how the poet influenced black American culture. It also shows how his mother and his grandmother’s oral traditions in turn influenced him.
Crime fiction is the second most popular literary genre in Africa after romance. A reading of Kenyan author Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Black Star Nairobi reveals how it has disrupted the genre.
Despite Nigeria’s draconian laws against homosexuality, authors like the award-winning Akwaekwe Emezi are important new voices that add complexity to the question of identity.
It’s hailed as one of the greatest works of fiction to emerge from Africa. But Things Fall Apart was written in English, sparking debate about the colonisation of language.
Amos Tutuola has contributed significantly to the resilience of ways of life and worldviews that could easily have disappeared under the weight of colonialism, globalisation and the market economy.
Khanya College’s curriculum was quite different from the one taught at other universities of the time. Its students studied oral African literature and history alongside Western literature.
There is a thriving counter-current of transnational African literary life that confounds rather than caters to an international taste for “digestible” fiction.
Its critics complain that current Afrodiasporic literature is not in tune with everyday life on the continent. They see its versions of Africa as sanitised and Westernised.
There’s a fierce debate underway about changing university curricula in Africa and the UK to be less Eurocentric. Three academics offer their suggestions for a decolonised reading list.