ABSTRACT
This book started out as a revision and expansion of my Seven African Writers, first published in 1962. At that time, the concept of African literature was for many readers a new one. There was a general failure to connect literary activity which expressed itself in writing, with the immense riches of African oral culture. And this failure of connection could be found as often among Africans -owing to the peculiar nature of colonial education - as among Europeans. Much of the exaggerated surprise which greeted the flood of African novels and poems published in the years from 1956 onwards would have been avoided if critics had paused to reflect that their authors were not starting from scratch, even if the activity of writing, or of writing in a foreign language, was relatively new. Writing is in any case only the record of a work of literature, not the work of art itself. The researches of Albert Lord and others have made it clear that the Iliad and the Odyssey, those twin pillars of classical Western culture, were works of oral art until some scribe (probably not ‘Homer’ himself) had the happy idea of recording them in writing. The problems of establishing a vital connection between a rich and ancient oral tradition, expressed in languages which have special tonic and sonic qualities of their own, and the activity of writing for the page in the new languages of colonialism, are complex and daunting enough. But this does not warrant the assumption that the first generation of African writers were doing something intrinsically new. Rather, they were performing a function as ancient as African cultures themselves, but for a new market and under new conditions.
