Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901–1991), a
Malian writer and ethnologist, and
Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939) from
Ghana, author of
Two Thousand Seasons have tried to establish an African perspective to their own history. Another significant African novel is
Season of Migration to the North by
Tayib Salih from the
Sudan.
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) from
Southern Rhodesia, now
Zimbabwe, published her first novel
The Grass is Singing in 1950, after immigrating to England. She initially wrote about her African experiences. Lessing soon became a dominant presence in the English literary scene, frequently publishing right through the century, and won the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) was an author from Zimbabwe. Her novels are known for their poetic prose, difficult subject-matter, and their strong women characters, and are firmly rooted in Zimbabwe's difficult past.
Tsitsi Dangarembga (born 1959) is a notable Zimbabwean author and filmmaker.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (born 1938) is a
Kenyan writer, formerly working in English and now working in
Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal
Mũtĩiri.
Stephen Atalebe (born 1983) is a Ghanaian Fiction writer who wrote the Hour of Death in Harare, detailing the post-colonial struggles in Zimbabwe as they navigate through sanctions imposed by the British Government under George Blair.
Bate Besong (1954–2007) was a
Cameroonian playwright, poet and critic, who was described by
Pierre Fandio as "one of the most representative and regular writers of what might be referred to as the second generation of the emergent Cameroonian literature in English". Other Cameroonian playwrights are
Anne Tanyi-Tang, and
Bole Butake.
Dina Salústio (born 1941) is a
Cabo Verdean novelist and poet, whose works are considered an important contribution to Lusophone postcolonial literature, with a particular emphasis on their promotion of women's narratives.
Nigeria Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) gained worldwide attention for
Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s. Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture "
An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" featured a famous criticism of
Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist". A titled Igbo
chieftain himself, Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He also published a number of short stories, children's books, and essay collections. ,
Nigerian playwright and poet and Nobel laureate in 1986
Wole Soyinka (born 1934) is a playwright and poet, who was awarded the 1986
Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored in that category. Soyinka was born into a
Yoruba family in
Abeokuta. After studying in
Nigeria and Great Britain, he worked with the
Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from
British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the
Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General
Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the
Mugabe regime in
Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it".
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) is a novelist, nonfiction writer and short story writer. A
MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Adichie has been called "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [that] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature".
Flora Nwapa (1931 – 1993) was an Igbo novelist, often considered the mother of modern African Literature , was a prolific novelist whose works focus on the lives of women within Igbo society. Her first novel "
Efuru (1966) was the first novel written in English by an African woman, and she worked with Chinua Achebe to get the work into print. She published numerous novels as well as volumes of short stories and poetry. In 1974, she founded Tana Press. In 1977, she founded the Flora Nwapa Company, both of which worked to further the voices of African women writers.
Buchi Emecheta OBE (1944–2017) was a Nigerian novelist based in Britain who published more than 20 books, including
Second-Class Citizen (1974),
The Bride Price (1976),
The Slave Girl (1977) and
The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education won her considerable critical acclaim and honours.
South Africa Elleke Boehmer writes, "Nationalism, like patriarchy, favours singleness—one identity, one growth pattern, one birth and blood for all ... [and] will promote specifically unitary or 'one-eyed' forms of consciousness." The first problem any student of
South African literature is confronted with, is the diversity of the
literary systems.
Gerrit Olivier notes, "While it is not unusual to hear academics and politicians talk about a 'South African literature', the situation at ground level is characterised by diversity and even fragmentation".
Robert Mossman adds that "One of the enduring and saddest legacies of the apartheid system may be that no one – White, Black, Coloured (meaning of mixed-race in South Africa), or Asian – can ever speak as a 'South African. The problem, however, pre-dates
Apartheid significantly, as South Africa is a country made up of communities that have always been linguistically and culturally diverse. These cultures have all retained autonomy to some extent, making a compilation such as the controversial
Southern African Literatures by
Michael Chapman, difficult. Chapman raises the question: [W]hose language, culture, or story can be said to have authority in South Africa when the end of apartheid has raised challenging questions as to what it is to be a South African, what it is to live in a new South Africa, whether South Africa is a nation, and, if so, what its mythos is, what requires to be forgotten and what remembered as we scour the past in order to understand the present and seek a path forward into an unknown future. South Africa has 11 national languages:
Afrikaans, English,
Zulu,
Xhosa,
Sotho,
Pedi,
Tswana,
Venda,
SiSwati,
Tsonga, and
Ndebele. Any definitive literary history of South Africa should, it could be argued, discuss literature produced in all eleven languages. But the only literature ever to adopt characteristics that can be said to be "national" is Afrikaans. Olivier argues: "Of all the literatures in South Africa, Afrikaans literature has been the only one to have become a national literature in the sense that it developed a clear image of itself as a separate entity, and that by way of institutional entrenchment through teaching, distribution, a review culture, journals, etc. it could ensure the continuation of that concept." Part of the problem is that English literature has been seen within the greater context of English writing in the world, and has, because of English's global position as
lingua franca, not been seen as autonomous or indigenous to South Africa – in Olivier's words: "English literature in South Africa continues to be a sort of extension of British or international English literature." The African languages, on the other hand, are spoken across the borders of Southern Africa - for example, Tswana is spoken in Botswana, and Tsonga in Zimbabwe, and Sotho in Lesotho. South Africa's borders were established during the
colonial era and, as with all other colonies, these borders were drawn without regard for the people living within them. Therefore: in a history of South African literature, do we include all Tswana writers, or only the ones with South African citizenship? Chapman bypasses this problem by including "Southern" African literatures. The second problem with the African languages is accessibility, because since the African languages are regional languages, none of them can claim the readership on a national scale comparable to Afrikaans and English. Sotho, for instance, while transgressing the national borders of the RSA, is on the other hand mainly spoken in the
Free State, and bears a great amount of relation to the language of
Natal for example, Zulu. So the language cannot claim a national readership, while on the other hand being "international" in the sense that it transgresses the national borders. Olivier argues that "There is no obvious reason why it should be unhealthy or abnormal for different literatures to co-exist in one country, each possessing its own infrastructure and allowing theoreticians to develop impressive theories about polysystems". Yet political idealism proposing a unified "South Africa" (a remnant of the plans drawn up by
Sir Henry Bartle Frere) has seeped into literary discourse and demands a unified national literature, which does not exist and has to be fabricated. It is unrealistic to ever think of South Africa and South African literature as homogenous, now or in the near or distant future, since the only reason it is a country at all is the interference of European colonial powers. This is not a racial issue, but rather has to do with culture, heritage and tradition (and indeed the constitution celebrates diversity). Rather, it seems more sensible to discuss South African literature as literature produced within the national borders by the different cultures and language groups inhabiting these borders. Otherwise the danger is emphasising one literary system at the expense of another, and more often than not, the beneficiary is English, with the African languages being ignored. The distinction "black" and "white" literature is further a remnant of colonialism that should be replaced by drawing distinctions between literary systems based on language affiliation rather than race. The first texts produced by black authors were often inspired by missionaries and frequently deal with African history, in particular the history of kings such as
Chaka. Modern South African writing in the African languages tends to play at writing realistically, at providing a mirror to society, and depicts the conflicts between rural and urban settings, between traditional and modern norms, racial conflicts and most recently, the problem of AIDS. In the first half of the 20th century, epics largely dominated black writing: historical novels, such as
Sol T. Plaatje's
Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (1930),
Thomas Mofolo's
Chaka (trans. 1925), and epic plays including those of
H. I. E. Dhlomo, or heroic epic poetry such as the work of
Mazizi Kunene. These texts "evince black African patriarchy in its traditional form, with men in authority, often as warriors or kings, and women as background figures of dependency, and/or mothers of the nation". Female literature in the African languages is severely limited because of the strong influence of patriarchy, but over the last decade or two society has changed much and it can be expected that more female voices will emerge. The following are notable white South African writers in English:
Athol Fugard,
Nadine Gordimer,
J. M. Coetzee, and
Wilbur Smith.
André Brink has written in both Afrikaans and English while
Breyten Breytenbach writes primarily in Afrikaans, though many of their works have been translated into English.
Dalene Matthee's (1938–2005) is another Afrikaner, best known for her four
Forest Novels, written in and around the
Knysna Forest, including
Fiela se Kind (1985) (''Fiela's Child''). Her books have been translated into fourteen languages, including English,
French, and
German. and over a million copies have been sold worldwide. ==The Americas==