On teaching African literature

This semester at University of Stirling I will be teaching an anglo-phone African literature course to third year undergraduates. This module explores some of the major writings from Africa of the period from independence from colonialism to the present. It will begin in the early period with our reading Amos Tutuola’s fantastical novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard, ‘transliterated’ from Yoruba myths and fables, and written in a unique form of English, and Chinua Achebe’s classic text, Things Fall Apart, of historical and cultural reconstruction of a pre-colonial Nigerian society on the eve of colonisation. The module will also look at three major African poets (the modernist experiments of Christopher Okigbo, Soyinka’s epic mythologies, and Senghor’s Senegalese negritude poetics), before examining an Ama Ata Aidoo’s play and one of Wole Soyinka’s major tragic drama. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s controversial novel Matigari will be examined as an overtly political response to the post-colonial betrayal of the ideals of the struggle for Kenyan independence, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions of a young woman’s coming of age mirrors wider issues in Zimbabwean society. The course will end with Ben Okri’s disturbing visionary narratives of an African postcolonial present.
The students will seek to examine the relationship between oral forms and literary texts, strategies of representing cultural histories, and the relationships between national and ethnic identities in emergent postcolonial states. The course will also encounter alternative and dissenting voices which express political and social discontent: insurgence, revolution, gender conflict, and the mythologies of the dispossessed. The aim of the course, first and foremost, is to introduce Scottish students to the vibrant, various, and accomplished literary culture of contemporary Africa. In addition, students taking this course will practise close readings of the set texts, engage with the critical positions within the field of postcolonial writing and theory, and encounter complex debates about how national and postcolonial identity is reflected in these writings.

Set Texts:
Amos Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard (Faber and Faber)
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Penguin)
Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa (Longman)
Poetry from: Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths; Wole Soyinka, Idanre; Leopold Senghor, Nocturnes
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (Methuen)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o Matigari (Heinemann)
Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Condition (Ayebia Clarke)
Ben Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (Vintage)