ABSTRACT
Attempting to define ‘African literature’ is a problematic exercise. Does one include ‘Arabic’ North Africa alongside ‘black’ sub-Saharan Africa? Does one include writing in both ‘European’ and ‘indigenous’ languages? How does one compare under a single heading texts by authors from Muslim, Christian and animist backgrounds? What does a writer from the desert-like landscape of Mali have in common with an author from the coastal, urban landscape of Lagos? In light of this diversity, the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, has written that ‘you cannot cram African literature into a small, neat definition. I do not see African literature as one unit but as a group of associated units’ (1975:91). Achebe’s call to examine African literature in terms of both its specificities and its generalities is a sensible one. Consequently, rather than attempting to provide an overarching explanation of postcolonial Africa, this chapter has the more modest ambition of examining certain dominant features of postcolonial literature from north and sub-Saharan Africa partly as a way of discerning a number of prevalent historical and cultural issues at large.
