ABSTRACT
The African literature can only be written in the African languages of the peasantry and working class, the major alliance of classes in each of our nationalities and the agency for the coming revolutionary break with neo-colonialism. As English spread into Africa through trade, missionary work and education, it developed close ties with religion, intellectual work and politics. Colonialist education already bore the seeds of joint oppositional action by providing a common education and language. Useful concepts though these are, they still seem to leave the inscribing of these new meanings as a process internal to the language, as a question of opposing only the ways in which English itself is constructed and used. Despite the limitations of dealing with literature, it has the advantage of sometimes illuminating an issue far more vividly than any other domain of language use.
