The document discusses the literary background of African literature. It covers several key points:
1) African literature captures the struggles and lives of the African people and serves as a tool for social healing.
2) Traditional African languages became vehicles for cultural expression as genres like poetry, drama, novels and short stories flourished. Works documented the changing experiences of native populations.
3) Oral traditions like myths, epics, dirges, praise poems and proverbs were important forms that had flourished for centuries in Africa.
4) The Negritude movement looked to rediscover and rehabilitate African cultural values that had been erased by French colonialism. Writers presented African traditions as equal to European
The document discusses the literary background of African literature. It covers several key points:
1) African literature captures the struggles and lives of the African people and serves as a tool for social healing.
2) Traditional African languages became vehicles for cultural expression as genres like poetry, drama, novels and short stories flourished. Works documented the changing experiences of native populations.
3) Oral traditions like myths, epics, dirges, praise poems and proverbs were important forms that had flourished for centuries in Africa.
4) The Negritude movement looked to rediscover and rehabilitate African cultural values that had been erased by French colonialism. Writers presented African traditions as equal to European
The document discusses the literary background of African literature. It covers several key points:
1) African literature captures the struggles and lives of the African people and serves as a tool for social healing.
2) Traditional African languages became vehicles for cultural expression as genres like poetry, drama, novels and short stories flourished. Works documented the changing experiences of native populations.
3) Oral traditions like myths, epics, dirges, praise poems and proverbs were important forms that had flourished for centuries in Africa.
4) The Negritude movement looked to rediscover and rehabilitate African cultural values that had been erased by French colonialism. Writers presented African traditions as equal to European
The document discusses the literary background of African literature. It covers several key points:
1) African literature captures the struggles and lives of the African people and serves as a tool for social healing.
2) Traditional African languages became vehicles for cultural expression as genres like poetry, drama, novels and short stories flourished. Works documented the changing experiences of native populations.
3) Oral traditions like myths, epics, dirges, praise poems and proverbs were important forms that had flourished for centuries in Africa.
4) The Negritude movement looked to rediscover and rehabilitate African cultural values that had been erased by French colonialism. Writers presented African traditions as equal to European
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Literary Background of the African Literature
The most notable literary selections are those that capture
the life and struggle of the African people. There have been significant struggles that could have been left untouched, but writers choose to face courageous task of answering the call of pen, and begin the process of social healing through literature. Perhaps, it is this brilliant characteristic of African literature that enables it to shine and fulfill one universal function of literature. The literary tradition of Africa became richer than ever as it gained artistic and sophisticated expression in different languages. Traditional languages became vehicles of cultural thoughts. Poetry, drama, novel, and short story flourished as the literary genres. The people’s struggle to cope with – or oppose – the changing atmosphere of their homelands was dramatically recorder in what is known as African literature. NEGRITUDE
“A sudden grasp of racial identity and of cultural values and an
awareness of the wide discrepancies which existed between the promise of the French system of assimilation and the reality.”
The movement's founders looked to Africa to rediscover and rehabilitate
the African values that had been erased by French cultural superiority. Negritude writers wrote poetry in French in which they presented African traditions and cultures as antithetical, but equal, to European culture.The journal, according to its founder, was an endeavor "to help define African originality and to hasten its introduction into the modern world.” ORAL LITERATURE
• Oral literature, also called as “orature,” have flourished in Africa
for many centuries and take a variety of forms including folk tales, myths, epics, funeral dirges, praise poems, and proverbs. 1. MYTHS • Myths usually explain the interrelationships of all things that exist, and provide for the group and its members a necessary sense of their place in relation to their environment and the forces that order events on earth. 2. EPICS
• Epics are elaborate literary forms, usually
performed only by experts on special occasions. They often recount the heroic adventures of ancestors. 3. FUNERAL DIRGES • Dirges, chanted during funeral ceremonies, lament the departed, praise his/her memory, and ask for his/her protection. 4. PRAISE POEMS
• Praise poems are epithets called out in reference to an object
(a person, a town, an animal, a disease, and so on) in celebration of its outstanding qualities and achievements. • Praise poems have a variety of applications and functions. Professional groups often create poems exclusive to them. Prominent chiefs might appoint a professional performer to compile their praise poems and perform them on special occasions. 4. PRAISE POEMS
• Professional performers of praise poems might also travel from
place to place and perform for families or individuals for alms or a small fee. 5. PROVERBS
• Proverbs are short, witty or ironic statements, metaphorical in its
formulation which aim to communicate a response to a particular situation, to offer advice, or to be persuasive. • It is often employed as a rhetorical device, presenting its speaker as the holder of cultural knowledge or authority. 5. PROVERBS
• Yet, as much as the proverb looks back to an African culture as its origin
and source of authority, it creates that African culture each time it is
spoken and used to make sense of immediate problems and occasions.