Assignment paper number 14

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Name                 : Namrataba Zala

Semester           : 4

Roll No.             : 19

Enrollment No. : 2069108420170033

Batch                  : 2016-2018

Email Id             : namratazala2707@gmail.com

Paper No.          : 14 African Literature

S. B. Gardi Department OF English

Bhavnagar University

African Writers

Africa has a long and complex literary history. Indeed, to suggest that one historical account can represent all of the literatures, across time, from all of the regions of Africa is misleading. Deciding when African literature first appears, or when the tradition begins, are questions that are ultimately unanswerable, and determining which literary forms originate in Africa and which are borrowed from elsewhere are issues over which literary critics continue to debate. Nevertheless, scholars of African literatures have put forth a general historical overview that allows readers, listeners, and students to gain a sense of the literary history of Africa.

post-independence African writers, and provided texts that African universities could use to address the colonial bias then prominent in the teaching of literature. The books were designed for classroom use, printed solely in paperback to make them affordable for African students. They were published by Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) in London and in various African cities.
The idea of the series came from Heinemann executive Alan Hill, who "recognised that the nascent post-colonial publishing industry was not supporting the growth of original African literature". The first advisory editor to the series was the Nigerian Chinua Achebe – who became one of Africa's most famous writers. Achebe focused first on West African writers, but soon the series branched out, publishing the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in East Africa, and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa. Achebe left the editorship in 1972. James Currey, the editorial director at Heinemann Educational Books in charge of the African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984, has provided a book-length treatment of the series entitled Africa Writes Back.









Chinua Achebe:

Early Years

Chinua Achebe (pronounced Chee-noo-ah Ah-chay-bay) is considered by many critics and teachers to be the most influential African writer of his generation. His writings, including the novel Things Fall Apart, have introduced readers throughout the world to creative uses of language and form, as well as to factual inside accounts of modern African life and history. Not only through his literary contributions but also through his championing of bold objectives for Nigeria and Africa, Achebe has helped reshape the perception of African history, culture, and place in world affairs.

The first novel of Achebe's, Things Fall Apart, is recognized as a literary classic and is taught and read everywhere in the English-speaking world. The novel has been translated into at least forty-five languages and has sold several million copies. A year after publication, the book won the Margaret Wong Memorial Prize, a major literary award.

Achebe was born in the Igbo (formerly spelled Ibo) town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, the fifth child of Isaiah Okafor Achebe and Janet Iloegbunam Achebe. His father was an instructor in Christian catechism for the Church Missionary Society. Nigeria was a British colony during Achebe's early years, and educated English-speaking families like the Achebes occupied a privileged position in the Nigerian power structure. His parents even named him Albert, after Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. (Achebe himself chose his Igbo name when he was in college.)

Education

Achebe attended the Church Missionary Society's school where the primary language of instruction for the first two years was Igbo. At about eight, he began learning English. His relatively late introduction to English allowed Achebe to develop a sense of cultural pride and an appreciation of his native tongue — values that may not have been cultivated had he been raised and taught exclusively in English. Achebe's home fostered his understanding of both cultures: He read books in English in his father's library, and he spent hours listening to his mother and sister tell traditional Igbo stories.

At fourteen, Achebe was selected to attend the Government College in Umuahia, the equivalent of a university preparatory school and considered the best in West Africa. Achebe excelled at his studies, and after graduating at eighteen, he was accepted to study medicine at the new University College at Ibadan, a member college of London University at the time. The demand for educated Nigerians in the government was heightened because Nigeria was preparing for self-rule and independence. Only with a college degree was a Nigerian likely to enter the higher ranks of the civil service.

The growing nationalism in Nigeria was not lost on Achebe. At the university, he dropped his English name "Albert" in favor of the Igbo name "Chinua," short for Chinualumogo. Just as Igbo names in Things Fall Apart have literal meanings, Chinualumogo is translated as "My spirit come fight for me."

At University College, Achebe switched his studies to liberal arts, including history, religion, and English. His first published stories appeared in the student publication the University Herald. These stories have been reprinted in the collection Girls at War and Other Stories, which was published in 1972. Of his student writings, only a few are significantly relative to his more mature works; short stories such as "Marriage is a Private Affair" and "Dead Man's Path" explore the conflicts that arise when Western culture meets African society.

Career Highlights

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a producer of radio talks. In 1956, he went to London to attend the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Staff School. While in London, he submitted the manuscript for Things Fall Apart to a publisher, with the encouragement and support of one of his BBC instructors, a writer and literary critic. The novel was published in 1958 by Heinemann, a publishing firm that began a long relationship with Achebe and his work. Fame came almost instantly. Achebe has said that he never experienced the life of a struggling writer.

Upon returning to Nigeria, Achebe rose rapidly within the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. As founder and director of the Voice of Nigeria in 1961, Achebe and his colleagues aimed at developing more national identity and unity through radio programs that highlighted Nigerian affairs and culture.

Political Problems

Turmoil in Nigeria from 1966 to 1972 was matched by turmoil for Achebe. In 1966, young Igbo officers in the Nigerian army staged a coup d'ètat. Six months later, another coup by non-Igbo officers overthrew the Igbo-led government. The new government targeted Achebe for persecution, knowing that his views were unsympathetic to the new regime. Achebe fled to Nsukka in eastern Nigeria, which is predominantly Igbo-speaking, and he became a senior research fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In 1967, the eastern part of Nigeria declared independence as the nation of Biafra. This incident triggered thirty months of civil war that ended only when Biafra was defeated. Achebe then fled to Europe and America, where he wrote and talked about Biafran affairs.

Later Writing

Like many other African writers, Achebe believes that artistic and literary works must deal primarily with the problems of society. He has said that "art is, and always was, at the service of man" rather than an end in itself, accountable to no one. He believes that "any good story, any good novel, should have a message, should have a purpose."

Continuing his relationship with Heinemann, Achebe published four other novels: No Longer at Ease (the 1960 sequel to Things Fall Apart), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). He also wrote and published several children's books that express his basic views in forms and language understandable to young readers.

In his later books, Achebe confronts the problems faced by Nigeria and other newly independent African nations. He blames the nation's problems on the lack of leadership in Nigeria since its independence. In 1983, he published The Trouble with Nigeria, a critique of corrupt politicians in his country. Achebe has also published two collections of short stories and three collections of essays. He is the founding editor of Heinemann's African Writers series; the founder and publisher of Uwa Ndi Igbo: A Bilingual Journal of Igbo Life and Arts; and the editor of the magazine Okike, Nigeria's leading journal of new writing.

Teaching and Literary Awards

In addition to his writing career, Achebe maintained an active teaching career. In 1972, he was appointed to a three-year visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and, in 1975, to a one-year visiting professorship at the University of Connecticut. In 1976, with matters sufficiently calm in Nigeria, he returned as professor of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, with which he had been affiliated since 1966. In 1990, he became the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., professor of literature at Bard College, Annandale, New York.

Achebe received many awards from academic and cultural institutions around the world. In 1959, he won the Margaret Wong Memorial Prize for Things Fall Apart. The following year, after the publication of its sequel, No Longer At Ease, he was awarded the Nigerian National Trophy for Literature. His book of poetry, Christmas in Biafra, written during the Nigerian civil war, won the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. More than twenty universities in Great Britain, Canada, Nigeria, and the United States have awarded Achebe honorary degrees.

Achebe died on March 21, 2013. He was 82.

Nadine Gordimer:

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa in 1923.

She remained in South Africa, living in Johannesburg from 1948 onwards. She was educated at a convent school and spent a year at Witwaterstrand University. Since then, her life was devoted to her writing. She travelled extensively, wrote non-fiction on South African subjects and made TV documentaries, collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak. She was responsible for the script of the 1989 BBC film, Frontiers, and for four of the seven screenplays for a television drama based on her own short stories, entitled The Gordimer Stories 1981-82. She also published, in forty languages, fifteen novels and many short story collections.

Her first short story was published at the age of fifteen in the liberal Johannesburg magazine, Forum, and during her twenties, her stories appeared in many local magazines. In 1951 the New Yorker took one of her short stories. Her short story collections include A Soldier's Embrace (1980); Something Out There (1984); and Jump and Other Stories (1991).  Loot (2003) is a collection of ten short stories widely varied in theme and place.

Nadine Gordimer's subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), was based largely on her own life and set in her home town. Her next three novels, A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), which focuses on an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman, and The Late Bourgeois World (1966), deal with master-servant relations in South African life. In 1974, her novel The Conservationist, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction. Burger's Daughter (1979) was written during the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, and was banned, along with other books she has written. The House Gun (1998) explores, through a murder trial, the complexities of violence-ridden post-apartheid South Africa. The Pickup (2001) is set in South Africa and Saudi Arabia, and its theme is the tragedy of forced emigration. Her last novel to appear in her lifetime was No Time Like the Present (2012). Nadine Gordimer died in 2014.

Nadine Gordimer has been awarded honorary degrees from universities in USA, Belgium, South Africa, and from York, Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK. She was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), Vice President of International PEN, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was also a founder of the Congress of South African Writers.

In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2007, the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France).

Ngugi wa Thiong’o:

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a writer of Kenyan descent. One of the foremost living African novelists, he has also developed a reputation as a post-colonial theorist, and has taught at universities around the world.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born James Thiong’o Ngugi in Limuru, Kenya in 1938. He studied at Makerere University in Uganda; as a student there, he published his first short stories. After graduating, he pursued a second bachelor’s degree at Leeds University in England. He eventually became a professor of English, and has taught around the world. As an adult, he dropped his Western first name and adopted his current Bantu name to emphasize his cultural pride. This is why some editions of his early books – including Weep Not, Child and The River Between – are published under the name "James Ngugi."
Ngugi is best known for his novel Weep Not, Child, which he wrote while studying at Leeds. However, he has had a prolific career as a novelist, and his style has changed over time. He initially wrote mostly realistic works, but he in recent years has explored a more experimental, magical realist aesthetic. Some of his other well-known novels include Petals of Blood (1977), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Wizard of the Crow (2006). In 2012, his memoir In the House of the Interpreter was published.
Despite his stylistic shifts, Ngugi's interest in the legacy of colonialism has remained consistent. In 1977, Ngugi publicly announced that he would no longer write in English, and campaigned for other African writers to do the same. Since then, he has published most of his novels in Giyuku, his native language, before translating them himself for English-speaking audiences abroad.
Ngugi’s work is often highly political, which has caused much controversy for him in Kenya. He was imprisoned in 1977 for a year of solitary confinement after his politically provocative play I Will Marry When I Want was first performed. In his theatre, Ngugi attempts to involve the audience directly, which makes his political messages more threatening to authorities. After a decades-long exile from Kenya, Ngugi and his wife returned in 2004, and were assaulted in their home, in what is believed to have been a political attack. However, the couple recovered and has continued to travel and promote Ngugi’s books in Kenya. In recent years, he has been considered a frontrunner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ngugi currently holds a post as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine.