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Although he is known primarily as a novelist, between 1959 and 1982 Amos Tutuola wrote at least three plays—The Pupils of the Eyes, Ajaiyi and the Witch Doctor, and Sword of Vengeance—of all which remain unpublished. After an introductory account of the circumstances that appear to have led Tutuola to develop an interest in dramatic literature, this paper explores the thematic concerns of the plays and relates these to the thematic territory of Tutuola's fiction, in particular to the novel Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty. All three plays are shown to provide further evidence of Tutuola's preoccupation with conditions of isolation and marginalization, with the vulnerability of the individual to the schemes of the unscrupulous and greedy, and with the problematic nature of trust. In addition, the paper highlights Tutuola's attempts to develop his craft as a dramatist and in particular the difficulties he appears to have faced in handling the conventions of the dramatic text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christoper Okigbo thought highly enough of his "Lament of the Silent Sisters" to revise it and submit it to Poetry magazine in May 1963. "I have already been heard in Africa and in Europe, and would want, if possible, to have an audience in America," he wrote to the editor. The poem was not published, not least because of the magazine's policy of not publishing material previously published … "anywhere, in any form." This article examines the revisions which Okigbo made to the earlier version of the poem both for the submission to Poetry and for Labyrinths. The revision show Okigbo working and re-working his themes, generously incorporating material from other writers, and changing the argument and direction of his poem along the way. The paper draws attention to the complex processes that produced the poems and that are required to understand and evaluate them. Much more will be known about these processes when Okigbo's papers (such as survived the Biafra War) became available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigeria's postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as "arrested decolonization"--the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid state; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evolution is to be found in its literature, particularly in poetry, that most nationalist of genres, but significantly also, in the form of the novel, which constitutes much of the narrative of nation. Modern Nigerian literature can now be categorized in three to four movements, or generations, starting with the Azikiwe/ Osadebe generation of nationalist poets, to the late modernists Achebe, Okigbo, Soyinka, etc., to the current generation or category of writer whose writings encompass the new attitudes, desires, values, and anxieties of the postcolonial nation. In this paper, I specifically examine the intriguing presence or overwhelming prominence of Igbo novelists writing in the English language, whose works, I argue, are currently defining the canon of contemporary Nigerian national literature. I claim the implicit value of Igbo traveling identity in the formation of the modern state as providing the cultural and historical factors, stimulus or circumstances that animate this literature. The nature of the Igbo traveling identity--its cosmopolitanism, transborder claims, and new metropolitan tropes--permits us therefore to fully comprehend the nature of Nigeria's contemporary cultural production as well as its implication or significance in shaping modern, postcolonial Nigerian identity and the direction of its narrative of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a checklist of the works of Okot p'Bitek. The emergence of Okot p'Bitek as one of Africa's most prominent poets has long been recognized in literary circles. Literature had existed before the advent of Europeans and the adoption of Western education and literacy in East Africa. This checklist includes p'Bitek's published books, essays, fiction, poetry, translations, and interviews. His poetry includes; "Song of Lawino: A Lament," and "Song of a Prisoner." Some of his studies include: "African Religions in Western Scholarship," "Religion of the Central Luo," and "Africa's Cultural Revolution."

Daniachew Worku's The Thirteenth Sun is a pilgrimage narrative with a father-son conflict at its core, offering a complex and loosely allegorical depiction of a conflicted Ethiopian society at the close of Haile Selassie's reign. Daniachew was already well known for his Amharic writing when he published The Thirteenth Sun in English, in Heinemann's African Writers Series (AWS) in 1973. Drawing on a range of contextual information including records from the AWS and from the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP), this essay invites a reconsideration of this important Ethiopian text. Despite the ubiquitous decadence and violence of the narrative, the essay asserts that reconciliation emerges as a dominant theme, and that the novel thus offers a noteworthy instance of a writer's moral imagination at work at a time of conflicted transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the ways in which poets and novelists mediate the act of social imagination. The emergence of undifferentiated public based on ideas of human interchangeability acts as the basis from which infinite audience can be addressed. Novelists and poets have reached out to their audience through inscribing their text with imaginings of larger social formations. Poets have also turned towards imagining larger, less knowable audience.

A quick glance at the development of the Swahili novel reveals that a number of Swahili novels written from the 1990s to date, have detached themselves in various ways from hitherto Swahili novels written following the mainstream realist mode. This "new" novel seems to "pervasively" adopt the fantastic, magical, and postmodernist tendencies that, according to the writer of this essay, adequately capture the cacophony and decay of the East African societies. The aim of this essay is not to trace the Swahili novel historically, but mainly to show it as "changing" conditioned by external or societal factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My essay attempts a revisionary reading of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between. The first work by a leading African/postcolonial novelist, this novel has generally been read in terms of an "English aesthetic" that Ngugi would come explicitly and decisively to repudiate in his later writing, most notably Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross. Along with Ngugi's second novel, Weep Not, Child, The River Between is thought to display a certain simplicity, if not naivete, in terms of its aesthetic ideology. My argument is that critics have overlooked the depth and complexity of Ngugi's early fiction. Ngugi's apparent embrace of "Englishness" in his earliest fiction is riddled with ambivalence, ambiguity, and slippage. Undoubtedly, The River Between and Weep Not, Child draw on aesthetic models from Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hughes. But these texts are colonial mimics that critique even as they seem to imitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features short story author Adelaide Casely Hayford. Family background; Influences; Education; Highlights of career; Titles of short stories wrote.

Discusses the Muslim women-based novel 'La voyeuse interdite,' by Nina Bouraoui. Self-governing theory of melancholy; Importance of continuity; Relationship between a symptom and the trauma.

Discusses the postcolonial novel 'Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman's Journey Toward Independence,' by Valerie Orlando. Homogenizing effect of the spatio-temporal semantics of the term postcolonial; Material life of postcolonial subjects; Male-dominant ideology.

This article focuses on Tayeb Salih's novel "Season of Migration to the North." This book depicts a village at a bend in the Nile River in the years after the independence granted by the British when they finally leave and the problems of reseparating life into black and white. The novel offers a stunning critique of cultural segregationist moods by exposing in Sudanese culture the oppression that predated the British intrusion. Some groups mistakenly view this book as an attempt to reestablish the dominance of the emasculated, colonized male by attacking the women of the colonizers.

This article focuses on various novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo. Ng&;utilde;g&aitilde;'s novels and essays reflect an earnestness and an understandable seriousness, given what he sees as the betrays of African aspirations following political independence, and his fiction chronicles immense human suffering and tragedy. Those few critics who recognize his use of the comic chastise him for discrepancies between his political ideology and the narrative structure of his novels. Specifically, Lisa Curtis argues that the book "Petals of Blood" is unable to sustain the collective narrative voice.

The article focuses on the language and space in Assia Djebar's novel Vamour, "L'amour, la fantasia" and Leila Sebbar's "Fatima ou les Algériennes au square" and Shérazade." Djebar's works are set in Algeria. Her novels depict Algerian women, some like herself, women who have moved into the modern world, and others who are cloistered, physically and/or psychologically confined to closed spaces. Sebbar's geographical setting is France, specifically the urban ghettos. She focuses on the North African diaspora with which she shares the common bond of Maghrebian ancestors.

This article focuses on archetypes of female experience in African fiction. In a study of fiction by African women, attention should be paid to the strong historical sense that explicitly marks their work, as it does that of their African male colleagues. The historical elements are functionally integrated with the theme of female experience. Integration occurs on two levels. One is the sociological in that writers seek an explanation in history for the thralldom of the women portrayed. The other level of integration is symbolic in that a symbolizing analogy is frequently created between the condition of women and that of the state.

This article focuses on depictions of politics and community in South African novels. Following the renewal of black cultural activity around drama and poetry in South Africa since the early 1970s, a resurgence of the use of prose fiction has recently begun to take place. Events of 16 June 1976 marked the onset of a period of massive and ongoing political confrontation in South Africa and several of novels, appeared in the recent years, deal directly or indirectly with this event. The three novels which deal directly with June 1976 are "Amandla," by Miriam Tlali; "The Children of Soweto," by Mbuleio Mzamane and "A Ride on the Whirlwind," by Sipho Sepamla. One more novel related to this event is "To Every Birth Its Blood," by Mongane Serote.

This article focuses on black South African short fiction since 1976. The central tension in black South African writing is between the violence of the society and the sense of communalism in the black communities. There are hardly any work of black fiction in which these issues and this tension do not arise. It is rare to find works that dwell exclusively on one or other of these factors, but the tension between them brings much of the value and dynamism to the fiction. One of the crucial ways in which black writers have offered insight into their community in their works is by setting it in contrast to the white society. Most often writers have attempted to reveal qualities of humanism in black society that are noticeably lacking in the white communities.

The article focuses on Ayi Kwei Armah's book "The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." The book, which is couched as a voyage of discovery, is preeminently a dialectical work. Its reciprocity is first heralded in the resonant "not yet" of its title and is most clearly demonstrated in the complex relationship between the affirmative vision that is implicit in man's search for authentic values and the blasted landscape within which the novel's action is staged. Critics of the novel have not found it easy to describe this relationship between affirmative vision and degraded reality. There is, however, at least one interpretation of the novel that seems to have succeeded handsomely in its own terms. This is the interpretation advanced by writer Wole Soyinka.

The article concentrates on the Swahili novels, novellas, and collections of short stories and plays published over the past decade, in an effort to identify their most prominent thematic concerns. Author has tried to limit himself to what is generally called "adult fiction and drama," though it is not always possible to distinguish between fictional and nonfictional works, or between children's and adult literature. Many of the examined plays and fiction titles involve a conflict between young people in love who face some kind of impediment to their relationship; there is also misunderstanding and distance between parents and children.

Explores the influence of colonialism in the novels of J. M. Coetzee. Allusion of his novels to an actual historical reality; Subjugation of a territory by alien people; Concentration on the ambiguities and cruelties.

The article presents a critical analysis of one of the Voute tale. Out of the three versions of this tale, only the shortest, collected in 1969 from author Martin Djawa of Nguila (an important chiefdom on the periphery of Voute country) is the tale of reference. The two others, both collected from much older persons are composed of much more elaborate motifs than the Djawa tale and develops the analysis. The tale's initial situation is reduced to its most simple form of expression: a young man wants to be married; a young woman accepts him; the parents proclaim the prohibition their daughter must respect.

This article focuses on Chinua Achebe's book "No Longer at Ease." Obi Okonkwo, the antihero of "No Longer at Ease," is preeminently a man of words and books, a product of mission-house upbringing and European education. Throughout the book, Okonkwo is presented both in terms of his relation to particular books, especially the canon of literary modernism he studied in England and to which, as antihero of an ironic and allusive novel, he himself belongs. Achebe's literary allusions and Okonkwo's literary sensibility combine to provide a counterpoint of subtle and invariably ironic commentary on Okonkwo's behavior.