ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns future postcolonial approaches to the languages of African literatures. The case of South Africa will serve to present the emerging area of postcolonial studies dealing with linguistic aspects of literary production in the postcolony, such as the linguistic phenomena of indigenization of Europhone languages and the creolization of language in literature. The right to sovereign languages has a place among today's new anti-colonial struggles. Postcolonial studies, focusing mainly on literature in the European languages of imperialist hegemony, has barely contested the anomalous colonialist construct of "African" literature, which reduces over two thousand languages and cultures of that vast continent to what has been conveyed in metropolitan languages for the consumption of Western and local but Western-educated minority readerships. Note that many African languages are spoken by larger numbers of mother-tongue speakers than the colonial language within a given country.
