The outline:

I- Introduction
II- Synopsis of the chapter
III- The post-colonial need of Tigritude:
asserting aboriginal history and culture.
IV- Conclusion
 Decolonizing knowledge

• Africans were taught to hate being black and to love to be

white. that’s what caused the postcolonial shake of identity.
• During the colonial era the black colonized was deemed to be
washed white.
• The postcolonial subject started from the construction of self
knowledge as the first step to debunk the limiting
representation of the colonial era: starting from the semantic
implications of terms like barbarism and tribalism…ect.
• For the postcolonized such terms do not only promote racist
conception of African ethnicities as primitive and savage, they
prevent coming to accurate understanding of the African self
and reflect intellectual laziness , which slips to filling in the
vacuum rather than probing real African identity.
African Literature: Achebe’s and Amos Tutola’s double
register

• While Tutola and Achebe are considered as pioneers

of African litarature in English medium, many other
literary instances date back to two centuries: Ignatius
Sancho as an example.
• The African literary legacy exhibits a hybrid
vernacular culture and society conveyed in non-
African media.
Celebrating the Past: facing the
Future.

• «I talk about his (the author’s) past mainly

because actually I am interested in the present,
and I also talk about his past because I find on
the whole that African novelists especially are
quite good when they are dealing with the Past
»
Ngugy Wa Thing’o
The African novel haunts one’s memory because of the
overwhelming sense of emptiness…. The African has
been completely severed from his roots.
« The novel is often an attempt to come to terms with
a thing that has been; has struggled, as it were, to
register [the] encounter with history » Ngugy Wa
Thing’o.
The critcism of Modern African Literature

« I personally take the view that the African is being

transformed not into something or somebody else, but
into something or somebody new, and similarly I tend
to look upon our literature as tending towards the
transposition of an old scale of feelings and attitudes
into a new key of expression » Abiola Irele
 The problematic of language

• Their significance resides, apart from the human

interest of their work, in the fact that from the basic
dissociation of the realities they express and the
language in which they express themselves, they
create a unity.
Contrasting Tutola’s experience to his successors’

• Amos Tutola: • His followers:

• The finality was literature per • Studied literary genres.
se. • Their adaptation was
• Little care about The novel as rather away from than
a genre. towards Tutola’s ‘norms’.
• Makes use of Oral tradition. • Their ends were usually
national.
Achebe’s cultural assertiveness: resurrecting oral tradition

• « Africans did not hear of culture for the first time

from Europeans… their societies were not mindless
but frquently had a philosophy of great depth and
value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all,
dignity »
• Proverbs are the palm oil with which all words are
eaten.
Reality in African Aesthetics and Literary Criticism

• « African art is conceived as inherently committed

because it is intrinsically social and communal, as
opposed to the individualism of European art.
"Emotion is [Black], as reason is Greek. »
 The Lion and the Jewel
We’ll buy saucepans for all the women
Clay pots are crude and unhygienic
No man shall take more wives than one
That’s why they are impotent too soon.
The ruler shall ride cars, not horses
Or a bicycle at the very least
We will burn the forest, cut the trees,
Then plant a modern park for lovers
We must be modern with the rest
Or live forgotten by the world
We must reject the palm-wine habit
And take to tea, with milk and sugar.
Works cited
• Carina Ray ˝ The Racial Politics of Writing African History˝. NewAfrican.
May 2008.
• Ngugy, James ˝The African Writer and His Past. ̋ Studies in African
Literature. Ed.Christopher Heywood. London: Heinemann, 1979.
• Oyin Ogunba ˝The Traditional Content of the Plays of Wole Soyinka.˝
African Literature Today. Ed. Elder. D. Jones. New York: African
Publishing Corporation, 1971.
• Solomon,O.Lyasere ˝ African Critics on African Literature: A Study of
Misplaced Hostility.˝ African Literature Today: Focus on Criticism. Ed.
Elder. D.Jones. London: Heinemann, 1982.
• http://science.jrank.org/pages/10995/Realism-Africa-Reality-in-African-
Aesthetics-Literary-Criticism.html