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Journal articles on the topic 'African prose literature'
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1
Casimir, Komenan. "Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Seminal Novel in African Literature." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 4, no. 3 (June 27, 2020): p55. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v4n3p55.
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Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an influential novel in African literature for three reasons. First, it is a novel meant to promote African culture; second, it is a narrative about where things went wrong with Africans; and third, it is a prose text which contributed to Achebe’s worldwide recognition. It contains Achebe’s rejection of the degrading representation of Africans by European writers, and fosters Africa’s traditional values and humanism. The excesses of Igbo customs led the protagonist to flagrant misuse of power. The novel’s scriptural innovations bring fame to Achebe who is considered as the “Asiwaju” (Leader) of African literature, the “founding father of African fiction”, or again the “Eagle on Iroko”.
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Nkechinyere, Eze Mabel, and Nnani Henrietta Nonye. "Prose literature as a Means of Expressing African Culture a Study of Chinua Achebes things Fall Apart." Indonesian Journal of Applied and Industrial Sciences (ESA) 3, no. 1 (January 30, 2024): 67–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.55927/esa.v3i1.7375.
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This study examines prose literature as a means of expressing, African culture as presented in Buchi Emecheta’s “The joys of motherhood and Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart respectively. The researcher looked at the history of African culture in Nigeria. A number of critical essays in which some of the realities that portray African culture were reviewed. It came to lime light that there is African culture among Africans as opposed to the notion being portrayed to the outside world by the Europeans. The conclusion is that these works, Things fall apart and The joys of motherhood continue to be a demonstration to show that there is an African culture. This is the main outlook of the novels in this research.
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Etyang, Philip, Justus Siboe Makokha, and Oluoch Obura. "Picaresque narrative techniques and popular literature in African prose fiction." Journal of Languages, Linguistics and Literary Studies 2, no. 4 (December 31, 2022): 187–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.57040/jllls.v2i4.341.
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The Picaresque tradition is a mode of writing that began in Spain in the 16th century and flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries throughout the rest of Europe. It is a literary tradition that has continued to influence modern fiction writing to date. The current paper examined the picaresque and popular African literature narrative techniques through conducting an in-depth analysis of the following texts; Kill Me Quick, Mission to Kala, The Angels Die, and A Sport of Nature. To effectively address the task, the study examined narratives and narrative techniques in the prose fiction under study. The paper then deployed the Structural Literary Theory in an effort to decode the intertextuality between the texts. The study established that the texts under study are interconnected through the main characters, especially the picaro/picara. An examination of Gustav Freytag’s narrative structure was conducted and similarities and differences in the narrative structures of the texts under study was observed. The Postcolonial Literary Theory was also consulted where specific strands of the theory as propounded by Vorn Gorp, and Frantz Fanon were blended to furnish the study with the necessary theoretical backbone to exhaustively study picaresque narratives in popular literature. In conclusion, the study established that the Picaresque and Popular Literature writing modes are interconnected through the use plot and main characters. The study also established that the non-linear and episodic plot structures are the most commonly used techniques in picaresque and popular writing modes.
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Aboubakar, Gounougo, and Saran Cissoko. "Prose poétique africaine et philosophie de la création verbale." Elyra, no. 19 (2022): 41–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/21828954/ely19a3.
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The question of mixing genres or generic hybridization does not necessarily arise for African literature whose nature is to be hybrid at the origin. The African creator does not choose to make of the mixture of the kinds, it is the mixture of the kinds which offers itself to him through the total word which it uses. To speak then of poetic prose is to speak of African written literature as a whole. This is the heritage of the first black artists of the emancipatory struggles, among others the negritudians, insofar as they are the manatees who drank from the source of Simal, that is to say here the African orality. This African culture has as its “dogma” this “old principle” of African classical philosophy: “everything is in everything; the unity in the multiple, the multiple in the unity... everything is interaction and mutual influence. This is our law of one universal movement” (Zadi Zaourou 1978: 216). It is to this monistic philosophy of the aesthetics of verbal creation that we will focus in this contribution devoted to African poetic prose. With the help of examples of texts in poetic prose, we will see how, through the poetic andstylistic analyses of the genres that we will apply to these texts, the literarity of the latter derives from the holistic character of the word that founds them.
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Dick, Angela Ngozi. "Adichie’s Commitment to Female Biological Experiences in African Literature." English Linguistics Research 11, no. 2 (August 3, 2022): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/elr.v11n2p1.
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Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1987) challenged African women writers to be committed about women and their biological experiences in wife repudiation and widowhood in her article entitled “The Female Writer and Her Commitment”. In view of this challenge, this article examined Adichie’s portrayal of female biological experiences in Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, the short story entitled Imitation and The Visit. The theoretical framework used in this article is African Feminism. It is established that in Purple Hibiscus, adolescent sexuality is expressed within the ambience of Igbo socialization in which sexual matters are discrete and respected. The expression of female sexuality in Half of a Yellow Sun is audacious, portraying cohabitation which has no merit in Igbo culture in spite of the ravaging civil war setting. The representation of sexual expression in Americanah through the adolescent peering between Ifemelu and Obinze is too detailed for the emotional health of the Igbo adolescent because it disrupted a legal family. Imitation and The Visit negotiated the African family so that the husband and the wife will complement each other while female sexuality is not compromised. It could be concluded that through her prose fictions, Adichie has responded adequately to Molara Ogundipe- Leslie’s challenge to African female writers. Finally, this article recommends that woman’s biological experiences should be fundamental and respected in romantic and family love relationships.
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Munslow Ong, Jade. "Decolonizing the English Literature GCE A-Level via the South African Ex-Centric." English: Journal of the English Association 70, no. 270 (September 1, 2021): 244–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/english/efab009.
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Abstract In this snapshot article, I outline the background and context for the development of research-led teaching activities aimed at students pursuing the WJEC Eduqas GCE A-Level English Literature qualification. The aims of these activities are threefold: first, to assist students’ learning and preparation for the exam component ‘Unseen Prose’ (worth 10% of the overall qualification); second, to extend the impact of AHRC-funded research on South African literature to 16- to 18-year-old learners; and third, to mobilize the first two aims in support of decolonizing efforts in English Studies.
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Porter, Abioseh Michael. "Post-Civil War Literary Fiction: A Catalyst for Understanding Sierra Leone's Recent Past, Present, and Future." African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review 13, no. 1 (March 2023): 129–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/acp.2023.a900893.
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ABSTRACT: Until very recently, it seemed that a major difference between the literature of Sierra Leone and the literatures of its other West African neighbors was the absence, especially in prose fiction, of a sustained body of work by Sierra Leonean authors. This situation might seem mystifying to scholars of Sierra Leone's social and intellectual history because, after all, that country had played a major and pioneering role in the development and spreading of Western education in West Africa. This fundamental narrative of the inability of Sierra Leone's creative writers to produce high quality literature, in current times, has been seriously challenged by several new authors. This article analyzes the ways in which Sierra Leonean literature has moved from a space in which its earliest writers failed to understand fiction writing as a major outlet to express the dreams, nightmares, hopes and desires of a people to one in which high quality fiction is flourishing. It highlights how the civil war and its dreadful aftermath changed the literary landscape in Sierra Leone in many positive ways.
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Glover-Meni, N. Glover-Meni. "Orality in Ghanaian Newspaper Narratives: An Analysis of Yankah’s Woes of a Kwatriot." Pentvars Business Journal 10, no. 2 (June 30, 2017): 77–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.62868/pbj.v10i2.138.
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The study explores the influence of orality on Ghanaian prose by explicating the verbal art strategies utilized by Yankah (1990) in his newspaper writing, Woes of a Kwatriot, and, by so doing, illustrating how the interaction between literature and journalism help in bringing about a vector of expression that reveals indigenous literary values. Yankah foregrounds tensions in the Ghanaian society using the medium of orality in a newspaper format, showcasing how indigenous literary modes can facilitate and enhance the quality of the journalism prose. In other words, Yankah saw the emergence of experimental writing as crucial in bringing Ghana, at the margin, to the centre of not only literary production but to the global arena where the writer can play a big role in shaping the fortunes of the people. Yankah is making the case that the African writer should not only mimic what obtains in the established Western canons. Rather, he or she must consciously facilitate the creation of new forms, an example being combining African elements with the Western long form such as lodging orality in journalism prose in a bid to mediate “the forces of modernity”.
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Obiajulu, Eziechine Augustine. "Protest and Conflict in African Literature: The Nigerian Experience Expressed in Selected Plays by Zulu Sofola and Tess Onwueme." CLAREP Journal of English and Linguistics 4 (October 10, 2022): 199–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.56907/g2t5zr7s.
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The prevailing social situation in a society at any given time determines the temperament of its literature. African literature of the post–independence period is generally reactive in temperament. This emergent trend in African literature is as a result of the prevailing economic, social and political situations in most African nations. In Nigerian society, for instance, there is inequality, injustice, unemployment, hunger, marginalization, environmental degradation, corruption, political instability, socio-economic ills and religious violence. Obviously, these suffocating experiences are bound to generate protests and conflicts arising from people who are dissatisfied. Drama and prose have been mostly deployed to confront these unjust and inhuman situations. However, this paper focuses mainly on the selected plays authored by Zulu Sofola and Tess Onwueme. The study is basically a survey of Zulu Sofola and Tess Onwueme’s selected plays which explore the thematic concern of this paper. Content analysis of the plays reveals that protest can be used to resist and protest all oppressive structures in society.
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Gadomska, Katarzyna. "Between the real and the supernatural, between Africa and the West: Anna Swoboda on the trail of Ken Bugul." Romanica Cracoviensia 22, no. 3 (November 30, 2022): 317–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20843917rc.22.029.16194.
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The article discusses the main premises of Anna Swoboda’s monograph La Prose de Ken Bugul : entre le réel et le surnaturel. Swoboda assumes that the key to deciphering the characteristics of Ken Bugul’s prose is the interpenetration of the two dimensions present in the work of this contemporary Senegalese writer: the real and the supernatural. The book analyzes the fantastic, marvelous and uncanny elements that constitute the supernatural aspect of Bugul’s hybrid prose, as well as examines the fragmentation and multifaceted identity of the autofictional female protagonist (in the part devoted to the real elements). The eclectic methodology combines Western and African research on non-mimetic fiction with postcolonial and feminist theories.
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Gavristova, T. M. "Noo Saro-Wiwa: in Search of Africa." Asia and Africa today, no. 5 (December 15, 2024): 71–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s032150750030863-1.
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The turn of the 20th–21st centuries was marked by the flourishing of African and especially Nigerian literature. Among those who became famous in the 21st century are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Chigozie Obioma, etc. Noo Saro-Wiwa, a British writer of Nigerian origin, author of the best-selling books “Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria” (2012) and “Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China” (2023), can be considered the Queen of contemporary travel writing. The special appeal of her works lies in the masterly combination of travel literature and memoirs. A detailed description of events’ chronicle, travel impressions, air and nature, people and conversations with them turns her books into a real testimony of the era and tends to be documentary prose. She gives preference to it due to the fact that “truth is more important than fiction”. The daughter of the famous Nigerian poet and publicist, political activist and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–1995), the writer focused the readers’ attention on many of the most pressing political, economic, social, environmental, and demographic problems. These include colonialism and decolonization, racism and gender inequality, emigration and the history of Diaspora. The writer is of particular interest in the amazing mobility of the Chinese, internal and external migration, their activities in Africa. She admires the nature, ancient and medieval culture of China and at the same time records manifestations of racial hostility of the Chinese towards Africans, considering them unacceptable. She compares Chinese and Africans, identifying similarities and differences. And if addressing Nigeria’s past and present is her Mission, China is an option, one of many. Currently, she is one of the most engaged authors and most famous African women, winner of a number of prestigious literary awards.
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John, P. "Die Afrikaanse prosa, 1918 - 1926: brandpunt van die geboorte van ’n nuwe bewussyn." Literator 12, no. 2 (May 6, 1991): 107–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v12i2.765.
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This study looks at a selection of Afrikaans prose texts from the period 1918 to 1926 in an attempt to establish a relation between the rapid industrialisation which South Africa was being subjected to and the literature produced during this time. Georg Lukács’ argument that "nature is a social category" is used to show that a preoccupation with certain desires and emotions with which these texts are marked is an indication that a massive intervention into ‘nature’, in the form of the emotional lives of especially white Afrikaans workers, was either on the way or being proposed through the medium of literature during this time. This intervention is seen as part of an attempt by the white Afrikaans ruling class to draw Afrikaans workers into its fold in its struggle for political power. A contiguous concern of the study is to propose this kind of approach as a basis for the study of South African literature as a whole.
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Reddy, Vanita. "Femme Migritude." Minnesota review 2020, no. 94 (May 1, 2020): 67–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00265667-8128421.
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This article examines the queer feminist Afro-Asian poetics and politics of spoken word and performance artist Shailja Patel’s 2006 onewoman show and 2010 prose poem, both titled Migritude. Patel’s migritude poetics resonates with and departs from much contemporary migritude writing, particularly with respect to the genre’s focus on a global-North-based, black Atlantic African diaspora. The article draws attention to a “brown Atlantic,” in which Africa is the site both of diaspora and of homeland. More important, it shows that Patel’s queer femininity unsettles a diasporic logic of racial exceptionalism. This logic aids and abets a (black) native/(South Asian) migrant divide in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Patel’s femme migritude, as I call it, draws on nonequivalent histories of black and Asian racialized dispossession to construct a mode of global-South, cross-racial political relationality.
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Aiello, Flavia. "La memoria coloniale nella narrativa swahili contemporanea." Annali Sezione Orientale 76, no. 1-2 (November 28, 2016): 102–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24685631-12340005.
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The memory of the colonial experience is a recurrent topic in the Swahili prose produced after the independencies. The present article investigates how East African writers creating in the Swahili language reconstructed and preserved the local reminiscences of the colonial trauma, sometimes in reaction to the solicitations of the political leaders. The textual analysis is contextualised by taking into account the historical, cultural and linguistic specificities of the two countries where post-independence Swahili literature developed, namely Kenya and Tanzania.
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Srika, M. "A Critical Analysis on “Revolution 2020” - An Amalgam of Socio- Political Commercialization World Combined with Love Triangle." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 7, no. 10 (October 31, 2019): 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v7i10.10255.
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Literature is considered to be an art form or writing that have Artistic or Intellectual value. Literature is a group of works produced by oral and written form. Literature shows the style of Human Expression. The word literature was derived from the Latin root word ‘Litertura / Litteratura’ which means “Letter or Handwriting”. Literature is culturally relative defined. Literature can be grouped through their Languages, Historical Period, Origin, Genre and Subject. The kinds of literature are Poems, Novels, Drama, Short Story and Prose. Fiction and Non-Fiction are their major classification. Some types of literature are Greek literature, Latin literature, German literature, African literature, Spanish literature, French literature, Indian literature, Irish literature and surplus. In this vast division, the researcher has picked out Indian English Literature. Indian literature is the literature used in Indian Subcontinent. The earliest Indian literary works were transmitted orally. The Sanskrit oral literature begins with the gatherings of sacred hymns called ‘Rig Veda’ in the period between 1500 - 1200 B.C. The classical Sanskrit literature was developed slowly in the earlier centuries of the first millennium. Kannada appeared in 9th century and Telugu in 11th century. Then, Marathi, Odiya and Bengali literatures appeared later. In the early 20th century, Hindi, Persian and Urdu literature begins to appear.
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Allagbé, Ayodele Adebayo, Yacoubou Alou, and Ibrahim Sanusi Chinade. "A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Tropes of (Sexually) Objectified or/and Oppressed Men in Selected Contemporary African Prose Works." Journal La Sociale 2, no. 5 (December 13, 2021): 12–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.37899/journal-la-sociale.v2i5.487.
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This paper examines the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men in selected contemporary African prose works. Drawing on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth, FCDA) for theoretical underpinnings, Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth, SFL) for grammatical tools and the qualitative research method, this study seeks to analyze how contemporary feminist writers like Amma Darko, Daniel Mengara, and Lola Shoneyin employ language in their fictional texts The Housemaid (1998), Mema (2003) and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2015) respectively to represent the phenomenon of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed male characters. This article cogently argues that the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men, as enacted in the aforementioned prose works, encode a form of gendered experience which irrefutably has a given recondite function or meaning which only a critical linguistic analysis of the writers’ language can uncover. The findings reveal that the three authors intentionally use language to depict their male personae as (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed individuals with a view to challenging the established social order in social life and establishing a certain balance in the representation of gender or/and power relations in African literature.
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Dick, Angela Ngozi. "The Househelp in African Literature and Its Implication for Identity Representations: Evidence from Adichie’s Select Prose Fictions." English Linguistics Research 8, no. 3 (September 12, 2019): 35. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/elr.v8n3p35.
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Househelps are usually boys and girls who go to live with other families to serve as domestic workers. They are usually not paid but their services are converted training them in school or in entrepreneurial empowerment. Their place in African Literature has been explored in Oyono’s Houseboy to portray colonialist policy of assimilation. In Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana’s Daughter, the househelp takes over the home as the protagonist combines the search for her mother and her carrier as a lawyer. Adichie’s prose fictions are inundated with househelps. This article probes the roles of househelps in the development of the plot and finds out that they are portrayed as human beings with rights and privileges. Such portrayal is determined by the attitude of their Masters or Madams. In Purple Hibiscus, the househelp shares in the subjugation of the family because of the harsh treatment of their father. In Half of a Yellow Sun and “Imitation”, the househelps participate in the decision making around food and emotional problems of their Masters and Madams. The author’s portrayal of the househelps brings into focus the need to accept this category of people as human beings to be valued. The literary theory that will inform the analysis of the texts is New Historicism propounded by Stephen Jay Greenbalt.
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Marais, R. "Vrouwees: perspektiewe in die meer onlangse Afrikaanse poësie en prosa." Literator 9, no. 3 (May 7, 1988): 29–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v9i3.853.
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This article investigates the views on woman and womanhood that are expressed in the poetry and prose of several contemporary women writers in Afrikaans. The study is conducted against the background of certain tendencies in feminist movements in Europe, Britain and the United States of America as well as views pronounced in the writings (both literary and feminist) of a number of feminist writers in Europe, Britain and the USA. For the purposes of this investigation a short exposition is given of what feminism entails, as well as of a number of the different views and approaches which it accommodates. Subsequently different views on womanhood as expressed in the creative writings of a number of women writers who have written extensively on this topic are discussed at the hand of their poetry and prose. Specific attention is paid to the South African woman’s views on men, marriage, her own sexuality and motherhood as revealed in the writings of these women.
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Avery, Tamlyn. "“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature." American Literature 92, no. 4 (October 6, 2020): 623–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8780863.
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Abstract As Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).
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Patrick, Charles Alex. "Stylistic analysis of Nigerian prose: A reading of selected novels of Chukwuemeka Ike." EJOTMAS: Ekpoma Journal of Theatre and Media Arts 8, no. 1-2 (March 11, 2022): 295–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ejotmas.v8i1-2.16.
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This paper examined the language, style and other narrative devices in Chukwuemeka Ike’s novels. The diagnostic objective of the paper is based on the interpretative analysis of Ike’s linguistic medium to determine how they aide in giving expressions to his vision as a writer. It reveals that colloquial and evocative language layered with oral resources provides the fertile medium through which Ike portrays the absurdities and decadence inherent in his society. His craftsmanship and talent glistens from effective and efficient deployment of literary style like the third person narrative point of view, dream motif, flashback, songs, metaphor, proverbs, adjectival density in which Ike piles up superlative and superficial adjectives while describing his characters which often make his language genial and turgid, etc. The paper explored some aspects of language in Henri Bergson’s theory of humour which sheds some light on Ike’s use of language. It concludes that contrary to the popularly held view that Ike belongs to the popular tradition in African literature; Ike is a consummate writer whose utmost concern is the propagation of a healthy society.
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Skansgaard, Michael. "The Virtuosity of Langston Hughes: Persona, Rhetoric, and Iconography in The Weary Blues." Modern Language Quarterly 81, no. 1 (March 1, 2020): 65–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7933089.
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Abstract Previous historical studies of The Weary Blues have focused on the racial symbolism of Langston Hughes’s technique, which (as the consensus goes) authenticates the voice of the persona through its deliberate simplicity. This orthodox view is wrongheaded from the outset. The essay uses a new system of rhetorically driven scansion to identify elaborate rhetorical symmetries and polyrhythms that shape the cognition of Hughes’s persona and the recognition of his readers in ways that prose language cannot. Hughes employs rhetoric and iconography as alternative modes of historical narration. This recuperation of his persona intervenes in an ongoing dispute in the field of historical poetics about the value of formalism and cognitivism. The essay aims to show that the concept of thinking in verse is valuable where it has been least applied: in reclaiming the value of traditionally marginalized literatures such as those of the African American vernacular tradition.
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Du Toit, P. A. "Tradisie en vernuwing - Hierdie lewe van Karel Schoeman." Literator 17, no. 1 (April 30, 1996): 43–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v17i1.578.
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Tradition and renewal – Hierdie lewe by Karel Schoeman Since the sixties generalizations have frequently been made regarding the difference between old (older, traditional) and new (newer, "modem") Afrikaans prose. Karel Schoeman’s novel Hierdie lewe (1993), however, shows the relativity of the dichotomy old vs. new prose. The theme of this novel is fairly traditional: a reminiscence of a life of hardship and loneliness in the South African platteland. Nevertheless the formalization of this theme is not that of the "gemoedelike lokale realisme" (a genial local realism) which N.P. van Wyk Louw referred to. The on-going process of “making strange/making unfamiliar” (Victor Shklovsky) is achieved by a specific style of writing. The novel’s merit lies in the fact that Schoeman, within the linguistic options available to him, within the focus of the chosen narrative perspective, and within the time frame of the 19th century, exhibits considerable creative mastery of the language - despite the constraints presupposed by each of these contexts. It is an outstanding achievement that Schoeman could find so many parallels and synonyms and integrate them in a diffuse but systematic way in his comprehensive novel.
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Adeniyi, Emmanuel. "Ṣàngó’s Incest, Oxala’s Equanimity and the Permanence of African Myth-Legends in Atlantic Yorùbá Dramaturgy." Afrika Focus 34, no. 2 (December 14, 2021): 213–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2031356x-34020003.
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Abstract This article discusses the permanence of Yorùbá myth-legends in Atlantic Yorùbá dramaturgy. The dramaturgy is conceived as a genre of Atlantic Yorùbá literature produced by the scions of Yorùbá slaves in the New World and some òrìṣà worshippers in the Americas who claim an affiliative relationship with continental Yorùbá. I argue in favour of a myth-legend taxonomy of oral prose narratives as against the Western classification of traditional tales into myth, legend and folktale. Yorùbá traditional tales, also called pataki by the Atlantic Yorùbá, are dubbed myth-legends due to the shared features of myths and legends immanent in them. The article examines these traditional tales, drawing insights from psychoanalytic and postcolonial models to foreground the Ọbàtálá–Jesus parallelism, primeval rivalry between Ṣàngó and Ògún, and the paraphilia of certain Yorùbá hero-gods. It affirms the Euhemerisation of these deities to accentuate their apotheosis and possession of human attributes.
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Diegner, Lutz. "Metatextualities in the Kenyan Swahili novel: A case study reading of Kyallo Wamitila’s Dharau ya Ini." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 58, no. 1 (May 21, 2021): 127–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i1.9151.
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Contemporary Swahili novels transgress the boundaries of the novel text itself. They employ metatextualities of different categories in order to fulfil a variety of functions. In this essay, I explore metatextualities in the Kenyan Swahili novel, and provide a case study reading of one of the novels by the prolific and award-winning writer Kyallo Wadi Wamitila. My reading of Wamitila’s novel Dharau ya Ini (Contempt of the Liver, 2007) concentrates on metanarration and metareference. I analyse how narration, especially point of view, is used and how it is discussed and reflected upon by the text and in the text itself (metanarration). Another focus will be put on instances of metareference, especially on references to oral literature and to the literary genres of drama and poetry, as part of a work of prose. These analyses are done by a close reading informed by current research on metatextualities, and, in one of the examples, by phonostylistics. A general purpose of this study is to show how Swahili novel writing as African language writing participates in global discourses on, and practices in, literature and the arts. In a perspective of East(ern) African literature, it argues that Swahili literature and literary studies provide stimuli to literary theory and practice otherwise still dominated by its Anglophone counterpart in the region, and beyond. As regards Swahili literature, it reflects the crucial impact of Kenyan writing since about the turn of the millennium, in a sphere hitherto dominated by writers from Tanzania. The study is part of a research project I am undertaking in analysing metatextualities in contemporary Swahili novels by both Tanzanian and Kenyan writers.
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Jenkins, Elwyn. "ROY CAMPBELL’S CHILDREN’S NOVEL, THE MAMBA’S PRECIPICE." Mousaion: South African Journal of Information Studies 34, no. 2 (October 26, 2016): 83–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/0027-2639/895.
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Roy Campbell’s The mamba’s precipice (1953), a novel for children, is his only prose work of fiction. This article examines three aspects of the book, namely its autobigraphical elements; its echoes of Campbell’s friendship with the writers Laurie Lee and Laurens van der Post; and its parallels with other English children’s literature. Campbell based the story on the holidays his family spent on the then Natal South Coast, and he writes evocative descriptions of the sea and the bush. The accounts of feats achieved by the boy protagonist recall Campbell’s self-mythologising memoirs. There are similarities and differences between The mamba’s precipice and the way Van der Post wrote about Natal in The hunter and the whale (1967). Campbell’s novel in some respects resembles nineteenth-century children’s adventure stories set in South Africa, and it also has elements of the humour typical of school stories of the ‘Billy Bunter’ era and the cosy, mundane activities and dialogue common to other mid-century South African and English children’s books.
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Afolayan, Adeshina. "Fálétí’s Philosophical Sensibility." Yoruba Studies Review 3, no. 2 (December 21, 2021): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v3i2.129978.
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Let us begin with an unfortunate fact: Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí is one major writer that is hardly anthologized. The problem could not have been that he wrote in Yorùbá because Fágúnwà is far more anthologized than he is. Simon Gikandi’s edited Encyclopedia of African Literature (2003) has an entry and other multiple references to Fágúnwà. There is only one reference to Fálétí which is found in the index without any accompanying instance in the work. In Irele and Gikandi’s edited volumes, The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004), Fálétí only managed an appearance in the bibliography that featured four of his works—Wọn Rò Pé Wèrè Ni ́ (1965), Ọmọ Olókùn Ẹṣin (1969), Baṣòrun Gáà (1972) and Ìdààmú Páàdì Mínkáílù (1974). In the preface, Irele and Gikandi write: The scholarly interest in African orality also drew attention to the considerable body of literature in the African languages that had come into existence as a consequence of the reduction of these languages to writing, one of the enduring effects of Christian evangelization. The ancient tradition of Ethiopian literature in Ge’ez, and modern works like Thomas Mofolo’s Shaka in the Sotho language, and the series of Yorùbá novels by D. O. Fágúnwà, were thus able finally to receive the consideration they deserved. African-language literatures came to be regarded as a distinct province of the general landscape of imaginative life and literary activity on the African continent (2004, xiii). Essays 60 Adeshina Afolayan In fact, the publication of Fágúnwà’s Ògbójù Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Ìrúnmalẹ (The ̀ Intrepid Hunter in the Forest of Spirits, 1938) made the chronology of literary events in Africa, and it misses out Fálétí’s 1965 work. In her “Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama,” in the same volume, Karin Barber seems to redress this imbalance when she gives a place to Fálétí in her discussion of post-Fágúnwà writers. According to her, In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s there was an explosion of literary creativity, with many new authors emerging and pioneering new styles and themes. Among the most prominent were Adébáyọ Fálétí whose ̀ Ọmọ Olókùn Ẹṣin (1969) is a historical novel dealing with a revolt against the overlordship of Ọyọ, and Ọládèjọ Òkédìjí, author of two brilliantly innovative crime thrillers (Àjà ló lẹrù, 1969, and Àgbàlagbà Akàn, 1971), as well as a more somber tragic novel of the destruction of a young boy who is relentlessly drawn into a life of crime in the underworld of Ifẹ (Atótó Arére, 1981). Notable also are Akínwùnmí Ìsòlá, whose university campus novel Ó le kú (1974) broke new ground in social setting and ambience; Afọlábí Ọlábímtán, author of several novels, including Kékeré Ẹkùn (1967), which deals with the conflicts arising from early Christian conversion in a small village, and Baba Rere! (1978), a contemporary satire on a corrupt big man; and Kólá Akínlàdé, prolific author of well-crafted detective stories such as Ta ló pa Ọmọ Ọba? (Who Killed the Prince’s Child?). These authors were all verbal stylists of a high order; they transformed the literary language, moving away from Fágúnwà’s rolling cadences to a more demotic, supple prose that successfully caught the accents of everyday life (2004, 368). While it may be misplaced to draw a comparison between Fágúnwà and Fálétí, there is a sense in which Fálétí’s demonstrates a more robust literary sensibility that goes beyond the allegorical into a realistic assessment of human relationship and sociality within the context of the Yorùbá cultural template. While Fágúnwà could not resist the influence of Christianity, and especially the allegorical motif of the journey in which humans encounter spiritual challenges (which John Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress made popular), Fálétí is fundamentally a cultural connoisseur; a writer with a most intimate and dynamic understanding of the Yorùbá condition, especially in its conjunction with the political and sociocultural contexts of contemporary Nigeria. And we have Ọlátúndé Ọlátúnjí to thank for the deep exploration and interrogation of the fundamental poetic and literary nuances that Fálétí has left for us. In this essay, I will attempt to unearth the philosophical sensibility that undergirds Fálétí’s literary prowess, especially as demonstrated by his poems. Fálétí’s Philosophical Sensibility 61 Both the poets and the philosophers have always had one thing in common— the exploration of the possibilities that ideas and visions yield: As theoretical disciplines concerned with raising social consciousness, philosophy and literature engage in similar speculation about the good society and what is good for humanity. They influence thoughts about political currents and conditions. They can, for instance, lead the reader to critical reflections on the type of leaders suitable for a given society and on the degree of civic consciousness exercised by the people in protecting their rights. Philosophy and literature, equally, offer critical evaluation of existing and possible forms of political arrangements, beliefs and practices. In addition, they provide insights into political concepts and justification for normative judgements about politics and society. They also create awareness of possibilities for change (Okolo 2007, 1). Compared to Ọlátúnjí’s exploratory unraveling of Fálétí’s poetry, my objective is to enlist Fálétí as a poet that has not been given his due as one who is sensitive to the requirements of political philosophy and its objective of ensuring the imagination of a society that is properly ordered according to the imperatives of justice.
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Bourgeus, Camille, and Yves T'Sjoen. "Breyten Breytenbachs poëzie in Raster." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 54, no. 2 (September 4, 2017): 26–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.54i2.435.
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From 1969 until 1972 the South-African writer and graphic artist Breyten Breytenbach published 29 poems, prose texts and three drawings in the Dutch experimental periodical Raster (first edition: 1967). H. C. ten Berge, writer, poet and Raster's main editor, attributed Breytenbach an unusually prominent position in his magazine. In the Dutch language area of the late sixties and early seventies, Breytenbach was mostly known for his political engagement within the anti-apartheid movement. Ten Berge, however, also praised his work for its formal and experimental aesthetic qualities. According to Ten Berge experiment and engagement are related to one another in a very unique way. By examining the position of Breytenbach in Raster, the paper presents a documentation of the exceptional literary relationship between Breytenbach and Ten Berge, as well as their shared interest in certain motifs in poetry, the use of a specific metaphoric language (e.g. perception of nature and body) and a common belief in the power of poetic language.
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Carpenter, James. "The Paranormal Surrounds Us: Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis by Richard Reichbart." Journal of Scientific Exploration 34, no. 3 (September 15, 2020): 614–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.31275/20201799.
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The Paranormal Surrounds Us is a tied-together collection of essays by Richard Reichbart, a practicing psychoanalyst whose several strong interests and lifelong love for the mystery of psi, and sense of adventure and ethical sensibility, give the collection several points of focus. In addition to his current analytic practice of many decades, he has also been a student of literature, a playwright, a Yale-trained attorney, and an activist for Native American and African American rights. The book is as scattered as he has been, but it is so full of insights and pleasing prose, that it doesn’t lose much for that. In this time when we prefer our intellectual material in bite-sized chunks, like sparky TED Talks and internet articles, this may feel especially friendly to many. If there is an implicit, underlying focus to the work, it may be implicitly biographical: one curious man’s study of, to paraphrase Freud, the vicissitudes of psi – its expression in our finest literature, in our private and shared unconscious processes, in our different subcultures, in the deepest privacy of intensive psychotherapy, and in the legal and cultural presumptions that implicitly structure our thinking and behavior. There are three main sections to the book: Psi Phenomena in Western Literature, Psi Phenomena and Psychoanalysis, and Psi Phenomena and Culture.
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Van Coller, H. P. "'n Boer in beton: "Hierdie huis" deur Kleinboer." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 55, no. 2 (August 30, 2018): 148–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i2.4766.
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This review article is an attempt to interpret and evaluate the novel Hierdie huis within a specific context, namely that of urban writing. This is done first and foremost with reference to Afrikaans literature, but also in a wider context with reference to English South African literature (e.g. Ivan Vladislavic) and to relevant theories like that of the city dweller (flâneur) in the critical writings of Walter Benjamin. In recent Dutch literature several novels have been published (amongst others by Marc Reugebrink and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer) that share certain motifs and strategies with Kleinboer’s trilogy and they are discussed in greater detail. In this article the focus is on this third novel in what ostensibly is a coherent trilogy or prose cycle and not primarily a rejection of the traditional Afrikaans farm novel as often is asserted by literary critics; in actual fact it is a creative renewal of this genre, although often in a parodical fashion. In conclusion this novel is described as typical of “metamodernism” in its quest for meaningful moral and philosophical “master” narratives, rejected in postmodernism. In this novel the main character recognizes The Other as a fellow human-being and his etymological quests stresses hybridity which implies that linguistic (or racial) purity is a farce. Postcolonial métissage is central in this novel and the conclusion is that the forming of new identities has seldom (or never) been described in Afrikaans literature as in this trilogy.
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Stokes, C. "Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible; Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction; Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible." American Literature 83, no. 2 (January 1, 2011): 443–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1266117.
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Esamagu, Ochuko. "Towards Environmental Justice: An Ecopoetical Reading of Ikiriko and Otto’s Poetry." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 2, no. 4 (December 26, 2020): 243–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v2i4.449.
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Ecology is a study that transcends disciplinary boundaries. It has roots in the sciences but enjoys a number of representations in the humanities, specifically through literature. Several African writers have in their imaginative works, portrayed the devastating condition of the environment in a 21st century technological-driven world and also proposed solutions to this malady. In fact, environmental degradation has become a global issue, hence, the pressing need for a lasting panacea. Attempts at literary ecocriticism in Nigerian literature have largely focused on prose fictional works and the poetry collections of older and second generation poets like Tanure Ojaide. Consequently, little research has been carried out on the representation of environmental degradation in the poetry of more contemporary poets like Ibiwari Ikiriko and Albert Otto. This paper therefore, is a critical, close reading of Ikiriko and Otto’s poetry engagement with environmental degradation. The paper adopts the notion of ecopoetry from the ecocritical theory, which accounts for poetry foregrounding questions of ethics in relation to the environment. It acts as a reminder to humans of their responsibility towards the earth and challenges the existing status-quo that has the environment and the common people at the mercy of the ruling class. In this paper, Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta and Otto’s Letter from the Earth are subjected to literary and critical analysis to examine their preoccupation with the destructive onslaught on nature, and the traumatic experiences of the marginalised. Amidst the environmental depredation, the poets express hope and revolutionary fervour towards the rejuvenation of their society.
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Kuznetsova, V. A. "Folklore Motifs in Contemporary Short Fiction of Mozambique." Cuadernos Iberoamericanos 11, no. 3 (October 5, 2023): 131–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.46272/2409-3416-2023-11-3-131-145.
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The article explores the role of folklore tradition in the short prose of modern Mozambique. The symbiosis of the European cultural matrix, inseparable from the language in which the work is written, and the oral heritage of the Mozambican people is analyzed on the material of one of Aldino Muianga’s short stories. The story «Rosa Maria» is included in the author’s debut collection «Xitala Mati», the main material for which became the folklore «scary stories» about witchcraft and the living dead. And while in his later works Muianga focuses on acute social plots of the colonial past and post-colonial present, in the world of «Xitala Mati» there is practically no place for white people: it is not colonizers and the colonized that interact there, but it is people and spirits. The text of «Rosa Maria» is filled with numerous «conventional signs» by means of which, in the paradigm of the traditional culture of the peoples of Mozambique, the world of the dead communicates with the world of the living. These signs are intuitive to the African reader, while the European must identify and decipher them. At the same time, «Rosa Maria» shows motifs and imagery characteristic of the Gothic novel, albeit reinterpreted and modified to suit African realities. Such components of the poetics as the encounter with the infernal in the image of a beautiful woman, the gloomy colouring supported by the landscape and ominous animals, and the interest in the emotional reactions of the characters, typical of Gothic literature, allow us to see in «Rosa Maria» a hybrid genre, the roots of which should be sought both in the European literary tradition and in the folk tales of Mozambique.
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Altschuler, Sari. "“Picture it all, Darley”." Nineteenth-Century Literature 70, no. 1 (June 1, 2015): 65–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2015.70.1.65.
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Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.
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Bańska-Szuba, Anna. "O czym śni Filipowicz? – próba analizy opowiadania Kornela Filipowicza „Gdy przychodzą we śnie” w perspektywie szeroko rozumianej filozofii egzystencjalnej." Tematy i Konteksty 16, no. 11 (2021): 472–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.15584/tik.2021.30.
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The purpose of the article is to interpret the story “Gdy przychodzą we śnie” (When they come in a dream) by Kornel Filipowicz using the category introduced to literary studies by Michał Januszkiewicz – the so-called existentialist point of view. It is a procedure aimed at discovering the meaning of the exceptional text, as it does not fit into the typical themes of Filipowicz, the eulogist of the Polish province, and the bard of everyday life. The work was written in 1979 and was published in the collection “Koncert f-moll i inne opowiadania”, published in 1982. This story, making a great impression on today’s reader because of the exceptional topicality of the topic, which is the phenomenon of mass immigration from African countries to Europe, evokes the desire to ascribe to author of prophetic abilities. This is the source of many misunderstandings, which in turn leads to the conclusion by researchers of this prose that it is not easy to reach its essential meanings. Hence, an interesting proposal is to look at it from the perspective of broadly understood existential philosophy, in particular the thoughts of Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Camus, thinkers who cannot be ignored when discussing contemporary literature. From this perspective, this unique story takes on new content. It leads, if not to a full understanding of its meaning, then at least to the discovery of previously hidden meanings.
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Cruz, Joelle. "Following traces: an organizational ethnography in the midst of trauma." Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal 11, no. 4 (November 14, 2016): 214–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/qrom-02-2016-1366.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it brings forth a methodology of “traces” for organizational ethnography of the shadow, also understood as the realm of the repressed. Second, it highlights the emotional disconnect that organizational ethnographers encounter in traumatized communities and provides suggestions to bridge them. Design/methodology/approach The paper – drawing on autoethnography – incorporates the author’s fieldwork experiences conducted with market women in postconflict Monrovia, Liberia. In the tradition of “confessional tales,” it includes vignettes from fieldnotes and in-depth qualitative interviews. Findings The paper highlights three types of traces for research on the shadow: memorial, interactional, and material. Research limitations/implications The paper is important because it provides a methodology to recover information pertaining to the organizational shadow, where silence, absence, and suppression dominate. It extends existing literature focused on visuality to consider alternative and holistic epistemologies in line with African worldviews. Practical implications This paper will help practitioners working with traumatized communities as it suggests the use of memory as a more indirect route to recover information rather than direct questioning. Originality/value The paper juxtaposes poignant stories with academic prose and is valuable in terms of content and form. First, it addresses the topics of emotion and discomfort, seldom incorporated in organization studies. Second, it is valuable to scholars wishing to experiment with more intuitive forms of writing.
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SABER, YOMNA. "Langston Hughes: Fringe Modernism, Identity and Defying the Interrogator Witch-Hunter." Journal of American Studies 49, no. 1 (January 21, 2015): 173–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002187581400190x.
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Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.
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Okeugo, Oluchi Chris, Obioha, and Jane Onyinye. "African Prose Fiction and the Depiction of Corruption in Islamic Society and Religion: A Critical Study of Abubakar Gimba’s Witnesses to Tears and Sacred Apples." International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 9, no. 1 (January 31, 2020): 61. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.9n.1p.61.
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African prose fictions have written on a whole number of ideas and perception, but have conspicuously paid little or no attention to what is predominant in the Islamic society and religious world. For Gimba, the intrigues and contestation over power, especially within the civil service, assume a metaphoric significance in unraveling social contradictions in society. Gimba thus, evaluates the various dimensions of power and how it is used to subjugate or oppress people. In most of his works, Gimba pillories the repressive nature of power and the conflicts it engenders are graphically illustrated. In his articulation of this disabling environment, Gimba evokes a consciousness, concerned with Manichaeism and alienation. Gimba is sensitive to his characters as they adjust to the uncertainties of a postcolonial society with all the indices of underdevelopment, greed, corruption, bureaucratic tardiness, indiscipline, political instability etc. These characteristics of modern Nigeria form the background from which Gimba’s characters are drawn. However, drawing from their Islamic background, the characters in Gimba’s works express their morality, conviction and thought through the ideals of the religion. This leads to a remarkable blending of social and moral concerns with the supervening influence of Islam without sermonization. The outcome of this fusion is a balance between aesthetics and spiritual interests in a way that captures the essence of Northern Nigeria with vividness and freshness. Gimba, like Tahir, therefore relates the traditional and cultural values of the people to their response to the dilemma of new experiences and their interpretations of them. Gimba draws his sources from The Holy Qur’an in the delineation of setting, action and character. As a liberal feminist, he chooses urban heroines through whom he restructures our visions. This article attempts to investigate Gimba’s works using Neo-humanistic theory in evaluating his inclusion of religion and the techniques used conspicuously in the novels, Witnesses to Tears and Sacred Apples. This scholarly work equally argues that the writer’s creativity in religion can best be appreciated through an analytical study of the novel.
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Salmon, Claudine. "Ernst Ulrich Kratz: A bibliography of Indonesian literature in journals: drama, prose, poetry/Bibliografi Karya Sastra Indonesia dalam majalah: drama, prosa, puisi. v, ixpp. 901pp., plate. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press; London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1989. £30." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55, no. 2 (June 1992): 383–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0041977x00005243.
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Teixeira da Silva, Jaime A., Kwabena Osei Kuffour Adjei, Christopher M. Owusu-Ansah, Radhamany Sooryamoorthy, and Mulubrhan Balehegn. "Africa’s challenges in the OA movement: risks and possibilities." Online Information Review 43, no. 4 (August 12, 2019): 496–512. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/oir-04-2018-0152.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the status of the open access (OA) movement on the African continent, and if there is any financial or moral exploitation by dominant “foreign” world powers. OA provided the African intellectual community with a tool to prove its academic prowess and an opportunity to display cultural and intellectual independence. OA publishing is prone to abuse, and some in Africa have sought to exploit the OA boom to profit from non-academic activity rather than use this tool to glorify Africa’s image and diversity on the global intellectual stage. These issues are explored in detail in the paper. Design/methodology/approach The authors broadly assessed literature that is related to the growth and challenges associated with OA, including the rise of OA mega journals, in Africa. Findings African OA journals and publishers have to compete with established non-African OA entities. Some are considered “predatory”, but this Jeffrey Beall-based classification may be erroneous. Publishing values that African OA publishers and journals aspire to should not equal those published by non-African publishing entities. Africa should seek solutions to the challenges on that continent via Africa-based OA platforms. The budding African OA movement is applauded, but it must be held as accountable as any other OA journal or publisher. Originality/value African scholars need to reassess the “published in Africa” OA image.
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Adegoju, Adeyemi. "Autobiographical Memory, Identity Re/Construction, and Stylistic Creativity in Tayo Olafioye's." Matatu 40, no. 1 (December 1, 2012): 123–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-040001008.
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This essay attempts a deconstructive reading of Tayo Olafioye's by stylistically analysing the autobiographer's linguistic inventiveness in evoking memories that revolve around the culture of naming in Africa vis-à-vis the protagonist's identity, which inexorably raises socio-cultural and philosophical issues about the fe/male figure in a typical African society. Further, the essay interrogates the autobiographer's invocation of the archetypal maternal figure in Africa as epitomized by his grand/mother's apprehensions about his well-being and prospects, on the one hand, and his mother's struggles in a patriarchal African world, on the other. Given the motif of identity-construction that underlies the autobiographer's narrative imagination, the article considers autobiographical fiction as a rich literary resource for the African writer not just to project individuality but also to locate it in a universal realm in a bid to probe and appreciate communal experiences as well.
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El-Shamy, Hasan M. "Twins/Zwillinge: A Broader View. A Contribution to Stith Thompson’s Incomplete Motif System—A Case of the Continuation of Pseudoscientific Fallacies †." Humanities 10, no. 1 (December 29, 2020): 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h10010008.
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Explaining the rationale and main objectives for his motif system; Stith Thompson declared that it emulates what “the scientists have done with the worldwide phenomena of biology” (Thompson 1955, I, p. 10). In this respect; the underlying principles for motif identification and indexing are comparable to those devised by anthropologists at Yale for “categorizing” culture materials into 78 macro-units and 629 subdivisions thereof used to establish “The Human Relations Area Files” (HRAF). By comparison, 23 divisions (chapters) make up the spectrum of sociocultural materials covered in Thompson’s Motif-Index system. Thompson’s cardinal themes are divided into 1730 subdivisions permitting more specificity of identification (El-Shamy 1995, I, xiii). Historically; the disciplines of “anthropology” and of “folklore” targeted different categories of the human population; with “folklore” assigned to populations stratified into “social classes” (Dorson 1972, pp. 4–5: For details, see El-Shamy: “Folk Groups” (1997b, pp. 318–322, in: T.A Green, gen. ed. 1997c, p. 321); El-Shamy 1980, p. li; compare El-Shamy (1997a), p. 233 (“African hunter”). The limitations Thompson placed on the goals of his motif system (along with its tale-type companion) were triggered by the fact that “folklore” was; then; primarily interested in literature (prose and verse). The sociocultural milieu surrounding the creation of the literary forms occupied minor roles. Considering that a folktale is a “description of life and/or living” including all five universal culture institutions; the relevance of the contents of folktales are of primary significance for understanding the community in which they were born and maintained (El-Shamy 1995, I, p. xiii). Consequently; for the present writer; a folktale is considered a sixth (universal) culture institution. Also; because Thompson’s Motif-Index sought global coverage; many regions and national entities didn’t receive adequate attention: significant fields of human experience are missing or sketchily presented. This article offers two cases as examples of: (1) How editors of folklore publications ignore novel ideas incompatible with established trends; and (2) Samples of the spectrum of current psychosocial issues addressed in an expanded Thompson’s System (with more than 26,000 new motifs and 630 tale-types added).
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Thobejane, Tsoaledi Daniel. "Human mobility, Covid-19, and survival in Africa: revisiting the coronavirus pandemic as the Russia-Ukraine war rages." IKENGA International Journal of Institute of African Studies 23, no. 3 (September 30, 2022): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.53836/ijia/2022/23/3/008.
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Africa has seen some changes pertaining to human mobility in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The continent has also witnessed a dramatic reduction in cross-border movements, especially along the Zambezi River (Zimbabwe and South Africa, Botswana, and South Africa, as well as Mozambique and South Africa). These changes have been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic which decimated tourism and business travel and severely curtailed labour migration and stifled the movement of all stripes, from that of international students to intellectual exchanges in all fields of studies. While the overall picture of human mobility from 2020 to 2021 was dramatically stifled, the experience of this curtailment is different when juxtaposed with other regions. Also, the war between Russia and Ukraine has not been helpful to Africa either. This paper endeavours to probe the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ravages of the war between Ukraine and Russia in Africa and illustrates that while Africa is yet to fully recover from the socio-economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, this conflict poses another major threat to the global economy with many African countries being directly affected. The article uses the lens of Pan-Africanism as a theory that very well encapsulates the yearnings and frustrations of Africans who are overwhelmed by the onslaught of globalisation that only looks at development from a skewed western paradigm that is more about enriching the already wealthy countries that thrives by a continuous siphoning of the wealth of the marginalised countries. The article uses an archival method of collecting the data that is documented in books, articles and other sources to seek mitigating factors to the COVID19 Pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The paper recommends a drastic change of leadership in Africa to usher in a new crop of leaders who are more driven by the development of the continent in areas of economics, governance, and self-reliance.
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Thomas, Mair L. H., Andrew A. Channon, Robert E. S. Bain, Mutono Nyamai, and Jim A. Wright. "Household-Reported Availability of Drinking Water in Africa: A Systematic Review." Water 12, no. 9 (September 17, 2020): 2603. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/w12092603.
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Domestic drinking water supplies prone to interruptions and low per capita domestic water availability have been frequently reported among African households. Despite expanded international monitoring indicators that now include metrics of water availability, the range of methods used for measuring and monitoring availability remains unclear in Africa. Few household surveys have historically assessed water continuity and per capita availability, and both pose measurement challenges. This paper aims to examine the methods used to measure availability and synthesise evidence on African domestic water availability by systematically reviewing the literature from 2000–2019. Structured searches were conducted in five databases: Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, GEOBASE, Compendex and PubMed/Medline. A total of 47 of 2406 reports met all inclusion criteria. Included studies were based on empirical research which reported the household’s perspective on a water availability measure. Most studies had methodological problems such as small sample sizes, non-representative sampling and incomplete reporting of methods and measures of uncertainty. Measurement of drinking water availability is primarily reliant on quantifying litres/capita/day (LPCD). Only four (9%) of the included studies reported an average water availability over the international benchmark of 50 LPCD. This pattern of water insufficiency is broadly consistent with previous studies of domestic water availability in Africa. The review highlights the need for high-quality and representative studies to better understand the uncertainties and differences in household water availability across Africa, and the methods used to measure it.
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Van Coller, H. P. "Between nostalgia and parody: The representation of childhood and youth in Afrikaans literature of the nineties." Literator 19, no. 2 (April 30, 1998): 47–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v19i2.521.
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White Afrikaans literature of the sixties can be seen as typically modernist, work of the later part of the eighties and of the nineties clearly shows all the characteristics of postmodernism. Against this backdrop recent Afrikaans prose writing dealing with the representation of childhood and youth can be discussed on the basis of a few of the best and most representative texts. A tentative conclusion is that Afrikaans writing in the nineties focuses on the individualized past, an approach Linda Hutcheon calls "historical metafiction". The authorial stance in these texts fluctuates between what can be termed nostalgia and parody, and should be seen as part of a traumatic psychological process facing white South Africans in particular, namely having to deal with the past. In Afrikaans prose writing the nostalgic stance is especially prevalent in the (traditional) prose writings of authors on the right of the political spectrum. In contrast the parodic stance (dominant in recent Afrikaans prose writings) not only leans toward postmodernism - the prevailing paradigm in the Afrikaans literary context - but can almost without exception be termed "leftist" and "progressive".
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Modiba, Maimela Maxwell, Mohammed Ibrahim Hanaa Tharwat, Igor Dekemati, and Barbara Simon. "A talajkímélő művelési rendszerek áttekintése az éghajlatváltozás hatásához alkalmazkodni képes talajok kialakítása és fenntartása céljából a szubszaharai Afrikában." Journal of Central European Green Innovation 11, no. 3 (December 11, 2023): 91–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.33038/jcegi.4535.
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Change in hydrological intensity in the form of rainfall is predicted to worsen in Southern Africa. Compounded by consequences of higher global temperatures such as heatwaves, may render many Southern African regions prone to drought. The agricultural sectors of the latter regions are faced with a greater threat. In view of such concerns, the aim of this study is to review the available literature to evaluate climate-smart agricultural practices suitable for the mitigation of climate change challenges faced by farmers. Climate-smart agriculture practices are advocated as alternatives for mitigating and managing climate change problems, increasing food production, and improving rural people's livelihoods. This review paper is aimed at the bestowed benefits of climate-smart agricultural practices on soil physical, chemical, and biological and its association to mitigate or manage predicted climate change effects in SSA.
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Carsamer, Emmanuel. "Volatility transmission in African foreign exchange markets." African Journal of Economic and Management Studies 7, no. 2 (June 13, 2016): 205–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ajems-05-2015-0056.
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Purpose – The concept of volatility transmission and co-movement has witnessed a resurgence in the international finance literature in recent years after the black swan events which gave evidence of financial market linkages. The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic sources of volatility transmission in the foreign exchange market in recent financial market integration in Africa. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework was adapted from the extant literature and was used as the basis of modeling exchange rate volatility transmission. This paper adopts a quantitative research approach and opts for augmented DCC model to empirically unearth the sources of exchange rate volatility transmission. Findings – The key findings of the study are that, the African market is more prone to shock from outside than in the region. Macroeconomic news surprises influence volatility transmission and co-movements. Robust support is found for trade balance, interest rate and gross domestic product. These findings clearly demonstrate the low level of financial development and challenges that sometimes exist in exchange rate-policy implementation by policy makers. Research limitations/implications – Interested academics and practitioners working in the area might incorporate bilateral investment into the model of exchange rate correlation in future research. Originality/value – Unilaterally considering exchange rate volatility transmission and subsequent augmentation of the DCC model, this study makes a modest contribution to the examination of exchange rate correlations in Africa. This study makes an important contribution in not only addressing this imbalance, but more importantly improving the relative literature on exchange rate volatility transmission.
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Ngcamu, Bethuel Sibongiseni, and Felix Chari. "Drought Influences on Food Insecurity in Africa: A Systematic Literature Review." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 16 (August 14, 2020): 5897. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17165897.
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African countries continue to be prone to drought, caused mainly by unfavorable weather patterns and climatic variations which have an adverse impact on rural households and agricultural production. This literature review article accounted for the aforesaid drawbacks and attempted to assess the effect of drought on food insecurity in African countries. This article further sought to dissect the resilience and climate change adaptation strategies applied by African countries to mitigate the adverse effects of drought on food insecurity in rural livelihoods. The hermeneutic framework was adopted in this study, where the secondary data sources were searched from credible bibliographic and multidisciplinary databases and organizational websites. Thereafter, it was classified, mapped, and critically assessed using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo to generate patterns and themes. The NVivo program is a qualitative data analysis software package produced by QSR International and which helps qualitative researchers to organize, analyze, and find insights in qualitative data; for example, in journal articles where multilayered analysis on small or large volumes of data are required. This article has the potential to contribute in theory, concept, policy, and practice regarding best practices, resilience, and climate change adaptation strategies that can be harnessed by rural people. Furthermore, this article has the potential to shed light on the role played by traditional leadership and policy improvements in ensuring there is sufficient food during periods of drought.
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Zander, Horst. "Prose-Poem-Drama: ?Proemdra???Black Aesthetics? versus ?White Aesthetics? in South Africa." Research in African Literatures 30, no. 1 (March 1999): 12–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/ral.1999.30.1.12.
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Woldemariyam, Fanos Tadesse, Christopher Kinyanjui Kariuki, Joseph Kamau, Annebel De Vleeschauwer, Kris De Clercq, David J. Lefebvre, and Jan Paeshuyse. "Epidemiological Dynamics of Foot-and-Mouth Disease in the Horn of Africa: The Role of Virus Diversity and Animal Movement." Viruses 15, no. 4 (April 14, 2023): 969. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/v15040969.
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The Horn of Africa is a large area of arid and semi-arid land, holding about 10% of the global and 40% of the entire African livestock population. The region’s livestock production system is mainly extensive and pastoralist. It faces countless problems, such as a shortage of pastures and watering points, poor access to veterinary services, and multiple endemic diseases like foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). Foot-and-mouth disease is one of the most economically important livestock diseases worldwide and is endemic in most developing countries. Within Africa, five of the seven serotypes of the FMD virus (FMDV) are described, but serotype C is not circulating anymore, a burden unseen anywhere in the world. The enormous genetic diversity of FMDV is favored by an error-prone RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, intra-typic and inter-typic recombination, as well as the quasi-species nature of the virus. This paper describes the epidemiological dynamics of foot-and-mouth disease in the Horn of Africa with regard to the serotypes and topotypes distribution of FMDV, the livestock production systems practiced, animal movement, the role of wildlife, and the epidemiological complexity of FMD. Within this review, outbreak investigation data and serological studies confirm the endemicity of the disease in the Horn of Africa. Multiple topotypes of FMDV are described in the literature as circulating in the region, with further evolution of virus diversity predicted. A large susceptible livestock population and the presence of wild ungulates are described as complicating the epidemiology of the disease. Further, the husbandry practices and legal and illegal trading of livestock and their products, coupled with poor biosecurity practices, are also reported to impact the spread of FMDV within and between countries in the region. The porosity of borders for pastoralist herders fuels the unregulated transboundary livestock trade. There are no systematic control strategies in the region except for sporadic vaccination with locally produced vaccines, while literature indicates that effective control measures should also consider virus diversity, livestock movements/biosecurity, transboundary trade, and the reduction of contact with wild, susceptible ungulates.
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Rafapa, Lesibana. "Indigeneity in modernity. The cases of Kgebetli Moele and Niq Mhlongo." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 55, no. 1 (February 2, 2018): 90–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i1.3038.
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The study of South African English literature written by black people in the postapartheid period has focused, among others, on the so-called Hillbrow novels of Phaswane Mpe and Niq Mhlongo, and narratives such as Kgebetli Moele's Book of the Dead (2009) set in Pretoria. A number of studies show how the fiction of these writers handles black concerns that some critics believe to have replaced a thematic preoccupation with apartheid, as soon as political freedom was attained in 1994. However, adequate analyses are yet to be made of works produced by some of these black writers in their more rounded scrutiny of the first decade of democracy, apart from what one may describe as an indigenous/traditional weaning from preoccupation with the theme of apartheid. This study intends to fill this gap, as well as examine how such a richer social commentary is refracted in its imaginative critique of South African democratic life beyond its first decade of existence. I consider Mhlongo's novels Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007); together with Moele's narratives reflecting on the same epoch Room 207 (2006) and The Book of the Dead (2009). For the portrayal of black lives after ten years of democracy, I unpack the discursive content of Mhlongo's and Moele's novels Way Back Home (2013) and Untitled (2013) respectively. I probe new ways in which these postapartheid writers critique the new living conditions of blacks in their novelistic discourses. I argue that their evolving approaches interrogate literary imaginaries, presumed modernities and visions on socio-political freedom of a postapartheid South Africa, in ways deserving critical attention.  I demonstrate how Moele and Mhlongo in their novels progressively assert a self-determining indigeneity in a postapartheid modernity unfolding in the context of some pertinent discursive views around ideas such as colourblindness and transnationalism. I show how the discourses of the author's novels enable a comparison both their individual handling of the concepts of persisting institutional racism and the hegemonic silencing of white privilege; and distinguishable ways in which each of the two authors grapples with such issues in their fiction depicting black conditions in the first decade of South African democratic rule, differently from the way they do with portrayals of the socio-economic challenges faced by black people beyond the first ten years of South African democracy.