ABSTRACT
The emphasis on writing as an essential feature of modernisation is also bound up with the access written forms give to the 'world languages' of the ex-colonial powers. Thus even the work of the consciously nationalistic and decolonising African critics such as Chinweizu in Nigeria or Ngugi in Kenya are concerned not with the recovery of the oral but with its transmission into the contemporary forms of African writing. Language in the form of writing, literacy and modern mass-media communication.
