african literature review

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Research in African Literatures

Edited by Kwaku Larbi Korang

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• Keywords: African Culture, African Literature, African Studies, Arts & Culture, Literary Studies, Modern Literature, Narratives, Poetry, Secularism, Theology

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Research in African Literatures , founded in 1970, is the premier journal of African literary studies worldwide and provides a forum in English for research on the oral and written literatures of Africa. In addition to thought-provoking essays, reviews of current scholarly books appear in every issue, often presented as critical essays, and a forum offers readers the opportunity to respond to issues raised in articles and book reviews. Thematic clusters of articles and frequent special issues reveal the broad interests of its readership.

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Editorial Office Contact Information

• Kwaku Larbi Korang (The Ohio State University)

Associate Editors

• Adélékè Adéèkó (The Ohio State University)
• Cheik Thiam (The Ohio State University)

Managing Editor

Past Editors

• Bernth Lindfors (The University of Texas, Austin, 1970-89)
• Richard Bjornson (The Ohio State University, 1990-92)
• F. Abiola Irele (The Ohio State University, 1992-2003)
• John Conteh-Morgan (The Ohio State University, 2003-08)

Advisory Board

• Yaw Agawu-Kakraba, Pennsylvania State University Altoona, United States
• Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania, United States
• Gaurav Desai, University of Michigan, United States
• Isidore Diala, Imo State University, United States
• Chris Dunton, Independent Scholar
• Sule Emmanuel Egya, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Nigeria
• Olakunle George, Brown University, United States
• Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, United States
• Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester, United States
• Ruthmarie H. Mitsch, Managing Editor, RAL, 1989-2012
• F. Fiona Moolla, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
• Mildred Mortimer, University of Colorado Boulder, United States
• H. Adlai Murdoch, Penn State University, United States
• Gichingiri Ndigirigi, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States
• Stephanie Newell, Yale University, United States
• Christopher N. Okonkwo, Florida State University, United States
• Ato Quayson, Stanford University, United States
• Nathan Suhr-Systma, Emory University, United States
• Ann Elizabeth Willey, University of Louisville, United States

Interested in submitting to this journal? We recommend that you review the  About the Journal  page for the journal’s section policies, as well as the  Author Guidelines .

Authors may view the journal’s style guide and submit manuscripts for consideration via the journal’s online submissions portal . Registration for the site can be found  here . A tutorial for registering with the site can be found  here . Inquiries concerning manuscript submission should be directed to the editorial staff at  [email protected] .

Research in African Literatures (RAL) is dedicated to following best practices on ethical matters, errors, and retractions. The prevention of publication malpractice is one of the important responsibilities of the editorial board. Any kind of unethical behavior is unacceptable, and RAL does not tolerate plagiarism in any form. Authors submitting articles to RAL affirm that manuscript contents are original.

The following duties outlined for editors, authors, and reviewers are based on the AACE guidelines, which are in turn based on the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Editors. Editors, authors, and reviewers will also adhere to the AACE and SITE submission guideline policies.

Duties of Editor

Publication Decisions : Based on the review report of the external evaluators, the editor can accept, reject, or request modifications to the manuscript.

Review of Manuscripts : The editor must ensure that each manuscript is initially evaluated for originality. Following desk review, the manuscript will be sent out for blind peer review, which the editor will use to determine whether to accept, reject, or request revisions for the manuscript.

Fair Review : The editor must ensure that each manuscript received by RAL is reviewed for its intellectual content without regard to sex, gender, race, religion, citizenship, etc. of the authors.

Confidentiality : The editor must ensure that information regarding manuscripts submitted by the authors is kept confidential.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest : The editor of RAL will not use unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own research without written consent of the author.

Duties of Authors

Reporting Standards : Authors should present an accurate account of their original research as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Manuscripts will follow the submission guidelines of the journal.

Originality : Authors must ensure that they have written entirely original work.

Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Publications : Authors should not submit the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently. It is also expected that the author will not publish redundant manuscripts or manuscripts describing the same research in more than one journal.

Acknowledgement of Sources : Authors should acknowledge all sources of data used in the research and cite publications that have been influential in the research work.

Authorship of the Paper : Papers should include the names of all authors at the time of submission. Authors also ensure that all the co-authors have agreed to the submitted version of the manuscript and their inclusion of names.

Data Access and Retention : Authors should provide raw data related to their manuscript for editorial review and must retain such data.

Fundamental Errors in Published Works : If at any point of time, the author(s) discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in submitted manuscript, then the error or inaccuracy must be reported to the managing editor.

Duties of Reviewers

Confidentiality : Information regarding manuscripts submitted by authors should be kept confidential and be treated as privileged information.

Acknowledgement of Sources : Manuscript reviewers must ensure that authors have acknowledged all sources of data used in the research. The reviewer should notify the managing editor if the paper under consideration bears strong similarities to other published papers of which the reviewer has personal knowledge.

Standards of Objectivity : Review of submitted manuscripts must be done objectively and the reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Promptness : In the event that a reviewer feels it is not possible for him/her to complete review of manuscript within stipulated time then this information must be communicated to the managing editor, so that the manuscript could be sent to another reviewer.

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• Introduction

The nature of storytelling

• The proverb
• Heroic poetry
• History and myth
• The influence of oral traditions on modern writers
• Southern Sotho

African literature

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• African literature - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
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• Table Of Contents

African literature , the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional written literature , which is limited to a smaller geographic area than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now northern Nigeria , and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature. There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia , which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africa in English and Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature . See also African theatre .

The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures.

Oral traditions

The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context . This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seemingly inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to one’s present intellect; it is always available to one’s heart and soul, one’s emotions. The storyteller combines the audience’s present waking state and its past condition of semiconsciousness, and so the audience walks again in history, joining its forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes for the audience a collapsing of time. History becomes the audience’s memory and a means of reliving of an indeterminate and deeply obscure past.

Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of a culture ’s experience of the past. These ancient fantasy images are the culture’s heritage and the storyteller’s bounty: they contain the emotional history of the culture, its most deeply felt yearnings and fears, and they therefore have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from members of audiences. During a performance, these envelop contemporary images—the most unstable parts of the oral tradition , because they are by their nature always in a state of flux—and thereby visit the past on the present.

It is the task of the storyteller to forge the fantasy images of the past into masks of the realistic images of the present, enabling the performer to pitch the present to the past, to visualize the present within a context of—and therefore in terms of—the past. Flowing through this potent emotional grid is a variety of ideas that have the look of antiquity and ancestral sanction. Story occurs under the mesmerizing influence of performance—the body of the performer, the music of her voice, the complex relationship between her and her audience. It is a world unto itself, whole, with its own set of laws. Images that are unlike are juxtaposed , and then the storyteller reveals—to the delight and instruction of the members of the audience—the linkages between them that render them homologous. In this way the past and the present are blended; ideas are thereby generated, forming a conception of the present. Performance gives the images their context and ensures the audience a ritual experience that bridges past and present and shapes contemporary life.

Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not meant to be temporally frozen; they are always responding to contemporary realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world. Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in that way the past regularly shapes an audience’s experience of the present. Storytellers reveal connections between humans—within the world, within a society, within a family—emphasizing an interdependence and the disaster that occurs when obligations to one’s fellows are forsaken. The artist makes the linkages, the storyteller forges the bonds, tying past and present, joining humans to their gods, to their leaders, to their families, to those they love, to their deepest fears and hopes, and to the essential core of their societies and beliefs.

The language of storytelling includes, on the one hand, image, the patterning of image, and the manipulation of the body and voice of the storyteller and, on the other, the memory and present state of the audience. A storytelling performance involves memory: the recollection of each member of the audience of his experiences with respect to the story being performed, the memory of his real-life experiences, and the similar memories of the storyteller. It is the rhythm of storytelling that welds these disparate experiences, yearnings, and thoughts into the images of the story. And the images are known, familiar to the audience. That familiarity is a crucial part of storytelling. The storyteller does not craft a story out of whole cloth: she re-creates the ancient story within the context of the real, contemporary, known world. It is the metaphorical relationship between these memories of the past and the known images of the world of the present that constitutes the essence of storytelling. The story is never history; it is built of the shards of history. Images are removed from historical contexts , then reconstituted within the demanding and authoritative frame of the story. And it is always a sensory experience, an experience of the emotions. Storytellers know that the way to the mind is by way of the heart. The interpretative effects of the storytelling experience give the members of the audience a refreshed sense of reality, a context for their experiences that has no existence in reality. It is only when images of contemporary life are woven into the ancient familiar images that metaphor is born and experience becomes meaningful.

Stories deal with change: mythic transformations of the cosmos, heroic transformations of the culture, transformations of the lives of everyman. The storytelling experience is always ritual, always a rite of passage; one relives the past and, by so doing, comes to insight about present life. Myth is both a story and a fundamental structural device used by storytellers. As a story, it reveals change at the beginning of time, with gods as the central characters. As a storytelling tool for the creation of metaphor, it is both material and method. The heroic epic unfolds within the context of myth , as does the tale. At the heart of each of these genres is metaphor, and at the core of metaphor is riddle with its associate, proverb. Each of these oral forms is characterized by a metaphorical process, the result of patterned imagery. These universal art forms are rooted in the specificities of the African experience.

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• Research in African Literatures

About this Journal

Research in African Literatures , the premier journal of African literary studies worldwide, serves as a stimulating vehicle in English for research on the oral and written literatures of Africa. Reviews of current scholarly books are included in every number, and a forum offers readers the opportunity to respond to issues raised in articles and book reviews

published by

Available issues, table of contents, volume 54, 2023-2024.

• Volume 54, Number 3, Autumn 2024
• Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2024
• Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 2023

Volume 53, 2022-2023

• Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2023
• Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2022
• Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2022

Volume 52, 2021-2022

• Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2022
• Volume 52, Number 3, Fall 2021
• Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 2021
• Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2021

Volume 51, 2020

• Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2021
• Volume 51, Number 3, Fall 2020
• Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2020
• Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 2020

Volume 50, 2019

• Volume 50, Number 4, Winter 2019
• Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2019
• Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2019
• Volume 50, Number 1, Spring 2019

Volume 49, 2018

• Volume 49, Number 4, Winter 2018
• Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2018
• Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2018
• Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2018

Volume 48, 2017

• Volume 48, Number 4, Winter 2017
• Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2017
• Volume 48, Number 2, Summer 2017
• Volume 48, Number 1, Spring 2017

Volume 47, 2016

• Volume 47, Number 4, Winter 2017
• Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2016
• Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2016
• Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2016

Volume 46, 2015

• Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2015
• Volume 46, Number 3, Fall 2015
• Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2015
• Volume 46, Number 1, Spring 2015

Volume 45, 2014

• Volume 45, Number 4, Winter 2014
• Volume 45, Number 3, Fall 2014
• Volume 45, Number 2, Summer 2014
• Volume 45, Number 1, Spring 2014

Volume 44, 2013

• Volume 44, Number 4, Winter 2013
• Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2013
• Volume 44, Number 2, Summer 2013
• Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2013

Volume 43, 2012

• Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2012
• Volume 43, Number 3, Fall 2012
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Volume 42, 2011

• Volume 42, Number 4, Winter 2011
• Volume 42, Number 3, Fall 2011
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• Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2011

Volume 41, 2010

• Volume 41, Number 4, Winter 2010
• Volume 41, Number 3, Fall 2010
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• Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 2010

Volume 40, 2009

• Volume 40, Number 4, Winter 2009
• Volume 40, Number 3, Fall 2009
• Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2009
• Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2009

Volume 39, 2008

• Volume 39, Number 4, Winter 2008
• Volume 39, Number 3, Fall 2008
• Volume 39, Number 2, Summer 2008
• Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 2008

Volume 38, 2007

• Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 2007
• Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 2007
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• Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2007

Volume 37, 2006

• Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2006
• Volume 37, Number 3, Fall 2006
• Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2006
• Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2006

Volume 36, 2005

• Volume 36, Number 4, Winter 2005
• Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2005
• Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2005
• Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2005

Volume 35, 2004

• Volume 35, Number 4, Winter 2004
• Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2004
• Volume 35, Number 2, Summer 2004
• Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2004

Volume 34, 2003

• Volume 34, Number 4, Winter 2003
• Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2003
• Volume 34, Number 2, Summer 2003
• Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2003

Volume 33, 2002

• Volume 33, Number 4, Winter 2002
• Volume 33, Number 3, Fall 2002
• Volume 33, Number 2, Summer 2002
• Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2002

Volume 32, 2001

• Volume 32, Number 4, Winter 2001
• Volume 32, Number 3, Fall 2001
• Volume 32, Number 2, Summer 2001
• Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2001

Volume 31, 2000

• Volume 31, Number 4, Winter 2000
• Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2000
• Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2000
• Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2000

Volume 30, 1999

• Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 1999
• Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 1999
• Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 1999
• Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 1999

Additional Information

Additional materials.

Additional Issue Materials

• Editorial Board -- Volume 50, Number 4, Winter 2019
• Editorial Board -- Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2019
• Editorial Board -- Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2019
• Editorial Board -- Volume 50, Number 1, Spring 2019
• Editorial Board -- Volume 49, Number 4, Winter 2018
• Editorial Board -- Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2018
• Editorial Board -- Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2018
• Editorial Board -- Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2018
• Editorial Board -- Volume 48, Number 4, Winter 2017
• Editorial Board -- Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2017
• Editorial Board -- Volume 48, Number 2, Summer 2017
• Editorial Board -- Volume 48, Number 1, Spring 2017
• Editorial Board -- Volume 47, Number 4, Winter 2017
• Editorial Board -- Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2016
• Editorial Board -- Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2016
• Editorial Board -- Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2016
• Editorial Board -- Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2015
• Editorial Board -- Volume 46, Number 3, Fall 2015
• Editorial Board -- Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2015
• Editorial Board -- Volume 46, Number 1, Spring 2015
• Editorial Board -- Volume 45, Number 4, Winter 2014
• Editorial Board -- Volume 45, Number 3, Fall 2014
• Editorial Board -- Volume 45, Number 2, Summer 2014
• Editorial Board -- Volume 45, Number 1, Spring 2014
• Editorial Board -- Volume 44, Number 4, Winter 2013
• Editorial Board -- Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2013
• Editorial Board -- Volume 44, Number 2, Summer 2013
• Editorial Board -- Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2013
• Editorial Board -- Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2012
• Editorial Board -- Volume 43, Number 3, Fall 2012
• Editorial Board -- Volume 43, Number 2, Summer 2012
• Editorial Board -- Volume 43, Number 1, Spring 2012
• Editorial Board -- Volume 42, Number 4, Winter 2011
• Editorial Board -- Volume 42, Number 3, Fall 2011
• Editorial Board -- Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2011
• Editorial Board -- Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2011
• Editorial Board -- Volume 41, Number 4, Winter 2010

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Research in African Literatures

studies worldwide, serves as a stimulating vehicle in English for research on the oral and written literatures of Africa. Reviews of current scholarly books are included in every number, and a forum offers readers the opportunity to respond to issues raised in articles and book reviews.

Published by: Indiana University Press

Research in African Literatures

Research in African Literatures , founded in 1970, is the premier journal of African literary studies worldwide and provides a forum in English for research on the oral and written literatures of Africa. In addition to thought-provoking essays, reviews of current scholarly books appear in every issue, often presented as critical essays, and a forum offers readers the opportunity to respond to issues raised in articles and book reviews. Thematic clusters of articles and frequent special issues reveal the broad interests of its readership.

Announcements

Call for papers: maryse condé (1934-2024): what is africa to me.

Special Issue of Research in African Literatures

In graduate school, while I was working as Research Assistant on Ambroise Kom’s Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires négro-africaines de langue française , 1970-1990 (Dictionary of Negro-African literary texts, 1970-1990), a proposal submitted by Robert Pageard stood out. This critic proposed to write an entry on Maryse Condé’s Segu , arguing that “l’auteur est certes guadeloupéenne mais cette œuvre paraît significante pour la littérature africaine” [the author is certainly Guadeloupean, but this novel seems significant for African literature]. Pageard’s argument was rejected without discussion. French anthropologist Anne-Marie Jeay, a reader of the same Segu , casts doubt on Maryse Condé as an authoritative voice capable of speaking about Africa. She introduces Condé as “Noire mais guadeloupéenne” [black but Guadeloupean]. She further claims that “comme s’il suffisait d’avoir la peau noire et quelque expérience de l’Afrique pour être capable d’écrire un roman historique se déroulant au Mali durant le XIXe siècle” [As if being black and having lived in Africa was enough to qualify one to write a historical novel set in Mali during the 19 th century]. Blackness was not enough to consecrate Maryse Condé as a credible speaker on Africa, if we were to believe Jeay.

Maryse Condé’s Segu —and this could be said to many of her works--ignites many controversies involving mostly the defense of entrenched presumptions (or assumptions) of literary frontiers and categories. Black, despite being Guadeloupean or Black, but Guadeloupean, these two stances call attention to Condé’s enduring engagement with the African continent, in her work and her personal biography. Condé, in typical fashion, does not provide stable and reassuring answers to these controversies. The title of the English translation of her last autobiography comes in the form of a question: “Maryse Condé: What Is Africa to Me?” The title comes from a passage in the book in which Condé challenges the exotic temptation (“le frisson douteux de l’exotisme” [the dubious thrill of exotism] that may drive the return of some to Africa: “What did Africa mean to these African American tourists? An exotic change of scenery from a harsh daily existence defined by racism and shackled by the slow progress of their civil rights?”

This special issue invites Condé’s readers to continue the conversation. Beyond what may be termed, for lack of a better expression, her African cycle ( Heremakhonon , A Season in Rihata , Segu , The Children of Segu ), Condé has continued to weave Africa in the black diasporic tapestry through novels such as The Last of the African Kings , History of the Cannibal Woman, Who Slashed Célanire’s Throat , The Fabulous and Sad Destiny of Ivan and Ivana , Waiting for the Waters to Rise . We invite contributions that may consider some of the following aspects:

• Maryse Condé and her African critics: controversies surrounding
• What Is Africa to Maryse Condé?
• African traces in Maryse Condé’s novels and thinking.
• Maryse Condé in conversation with African writers: Intertextual networks.
• Maryse Condé’s oeuvre in conversation with African orature.
• Africa in Maryse Condé’s global and diasporic tapestry

Send abstracts by August 1, 2024, to Cilas Kemedjio ([email protected]). After the submission stage, we anticipate that contributors will gather for a workshop (with advanced drafts of their papers) in the Spring of 2025.

African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, ed.

with Tejumola Olaniyan

This is the first anthology to bring together the key texts of African literary theory and criticism.

Brings together key texts that are otherwise hard to locate

Covers all genres and critical schools

Provides the intellectual context for understanding African literature

Facilitates the future development of African literary criticism

About the Author

Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English. He studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and took his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature in the Faculty of English from 1995-2005. He was also Director of the Centre for African Studies (1998-2005) and a Fellow of Pembroke College while at Cambridge (1995-2005). Prior to Stanford he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University (2017-2019) and Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2017). In 2016 he was appointed University Professor at the University of Toronto, the highest distinction that the university can bestow. 

Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 10 edited volumes. His monographs include  Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing  (1997),  Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?  (2000),  Calibrations: Reading for the Social  (2003), and  Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation  (2007).  Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism  (2014) was co-winner of the Urban History Association's 2015 Best Book Prize (non-North America) and was named in The Guardian as one of the 10 Best Books on Cities in 2014. His most recent book is  Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature  (Cambridge University Press, 2021), winner of the Warren-Brooks Prize in Literary Criticism for 2022. Edited volumes include  Relocating Postcolonialism  (with David Goldberg, 2001),  African Literary Theory: An Anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory  (with Tejumola Olaniyan, 2007),  Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration  (2008),  Labor Migration, Human Trafficking, and Multinational Corporations , (with Antonela Arhin, 2012),  The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature , 2 volumes (2012),  A Companion to Diaspora and Transnational Studies  (with Girish Daswani, 2013),  The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel  (2016), The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature (with Jini Kim Watson, 2023),  and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (with Ankhi Mukherjee, 2023).  He also wrote a new Introduction and Notes to Nelson Mandela’s (2003). Works-in-progress include Accra Chic: A Locational History of Fashion in Accra (with Grace Tolequé; Intellect Books and Chicago University Press) and Exile and Diaspora in African Literature. 

He curates Critic.Reading.Writing, a YouTube channel on which he discusses various topics in literature, urban studies and the humanities in general: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjoidh_R_bJCnXyKBkytP_g  and is the host of Contours: The Cambridge Literary Studies Hour ( https://www.cambridge.org/core/browse-subjects/literature/contours-the-cambridge-literary-studies-hour ), where he holds dialogues with various scholars to address pressing issues, themes, and concepts in 21st century literary studies from medieval literature to the present day and from all areas of global literary studies from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Professor Quayson has served as President of the African Studies Association (2019-2020) and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006), the Royal Society of Canada (2013), the British Academy (2019), and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023).

Department of English

The Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.

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On the Complex Historical and Contemporary Terrain of African Literature

Jessica powers talks to kwasi konadu, trevor getz, lizzy attree, wendy urban-mead, holly y. mcgee, and siphiwe gloria ndlovu for #readingafrica.

For five years now, on the first full week of December, readers and writers and educators and librarians and publishers join together to celebrate the diversity of literature in Africa, using the hashtag #readingAfrica. This year, we asked a panel of historians to discuss some of the issues around history, politics, and literature in and of Africa, and this is the result.

It seemed like a simple task at first. I sent off a list of questions and everybody would be engaged in writing responses and responding to each other in a sort of asynchronous, virtual “discussion.” But quickly, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, someone who is both a friend as well as an author that I publish at Catalyst Press, said she might need to decline participation, respectfully pointing out that my questions were absolutely framed from the standpoint of being an “outsider” looking in to Africa.

My questions, she wrote, were “for people positioned in the Global North. There is a framing of Africa and African Literature that is limited and full of certain assumptions and I understand that the reason for this is to “educate” or provide information to an audience that may not be at all familiar with the continent and its literatures. While I think that the Q&A will accomplish what you want for the audience you have in mind, I think that if I took part I would necessarily have to problematize and argue against a lot of the assumptions inherent in the questions, which ultimately may serve to confuse rather than elucidate the topic.”

I was instantly reminded of the time, a few years ago, when I wrote an essay about why I think Americans should read “global” literature. I argued that to gain a better perspective on our own cultural and political problems, Americans need to read books written by people who didn’t grow up here; don’t live here; have perhaps never lived here; have been shaped by cultural, social, economic, historical, linguistic and political forces entirely outside of the U.S.; and who are not writing about the U.S. The editor’s response was (and I’m paraphrasing), “Well, if people want to read diverse literature, and want a different perspective, they can just read Mexican-American writers; or African-Americans; or Chinese-Americans.”

She had missed my point entirely . I didn’t want to miss the point that Dr. Ndlovu was making. I wrote to all of the panelists: “Even though, as publisher of African writers, I am engaged with Africa and with ‘African literature,’ I am shaped by and informed by my location, which is very much in the U.S., and also shaped by and informed by my time in academia at Stanford.” I suggested we re-engage and problematize the questions and our responses to them, that I was open to it all, to a reframing. I may have been engaged with African culture, language, history and literature for half my lifetime—but that doesn’t mean I know anything at all, as Dr. Urban-Mead suggests below, that despite her 25 years of learning about and teaching about Africa, “I still don’t think I know very much about that part of the world, after all that.”

While I don’t think we transformed the conversation as much as I would have liked, or as Dr. Ndlovu rightfully insisted we should, I hope this conversation is a step forward.

–Jessica Powers, publisher, Catalyst Press

If we look at the history of literature in Africa, what are some of the trajectories that we can name and see to understand its path through to modern-day publishing?

Kwasi Konadu : One of the trajectories is the production of “African” literature outside of Africa through “Western” presses, large and small. In recent years, these publishing houses have independently or through agreements with Africa-based publishers taken striking notice of writers of African origins—whether they live in Nigeria, Ghana, England or the United States. I’m thinking of Chimamanda Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, among others.

The commercial success of these individuals, often writing as part of a diaspora, for an audience outside of a land of birth or parentage strikes me as a trend to watch with caution. Modern forms of publishing and achieving international success remain tethered to the global academy (for scholars) and multinational presses (for literary writers) housed in the United States and the UK. African literature, if we follow the logic of this trend, will remain dependent on English and on external circuits of knowledge production and valuation. Written literature requires reading publics and an infrastructure to sustain both—here lies the challenge and opportunity for Africa-based publishers and writers.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we try to ignore colonialism’s impact or legacies, but rather I’m interested in how African writers are affirming their sovereign selfhoods and communities.

What are common themes in African literature related to the historical time-period as we trace a path through the last century or two of literature by Africans and/or about Africa?

Trevor Getz: I think there’s a real question about how to deal with colonialism.  It is appropriately a central subject in the texts of those writing during the colonial era such as the poetry of Okot p’Bitek, the allegorical folktales of Haddis Alemayehu, the novels of Chinua Achebe. Its cultural and linguistic legacy is long, enduring, and deep, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and others would have us remember.

But I think contemporary writers push back a little bit on the centralizing of colonialism as entirely dislocative and as a dominant theme in histories of Africa.  For me, one of the most exciting trends has been the literary exploration of Africa before and without colonialism, whether Zakes Mda’s The Sculptors of Mapungubwe or Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Hundred Wells of Salaga . Conversely, Afrofuturism’s promise of an African future, and not necessarily an idyllic one, that is not centrally colonial––I’m thinking here of writers like Suyi Davies Okungbowa or Nnedi Okorafor.  Of course, I’m not suggesting we try to ignore colonialism’s impact or legacies, but rather I’m interested in how African writers are affirming their sovereign selfhoods and communities.

Lizzy Attree : I agree, Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu is a brilliant example of a Ugandan novel that completely de-centers the colonial encounter.

The oral tradition is strong across the African diaspora, so what are the ways that tradition has been made visible in written form? Is there a particular way of writing that signals/honors its roots in the oral?

Trevor Getz: Personally, I think that the oral lends itself to representation in comic form—a medium that allows for empathic engagement with the subjects of study, and that also allows for seamlessly moving between the past and the present visually and textually.  But I am deeply impressed by Dr. Kwasi Konadu’s deep and respectful engagement orality in  Our Way In This Part of the World . In his communography of Nana Kofi Dɔnkɔ. Working with orality is tough for historians, because while we have developed methods like the oral history interview to gather information, these are often quite far removed from oral culture as it is lived as an embedded practice.  Kwasi, and some other scholars, push for us to understand these practices on their own terms.

Kwasi Konadu : I do think there are ways to communicate the oral in written form. Look no further than codified or written versions of the Sunjata epic. But I wonder, whether in scribal or graphic form, if either escape the mere transcribing or translation of the oral into fixed forms. The oral is performed in a textured moment, in an ecology of living and immaterial beings; I’m not sure the best ways of writing can or should capture these experienced parcels of the oral.

In either case, authors such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in A Grain of Wheat and Amos Tutuola in The Palm-Wine Drunkard have been successful in using so-called oral traditions in crafting their stories. And historians of Africa have profited from the oral not only toward understanding the societies which they study but also in communicating their lifeways to readers living in different cultural and political contexts. An ongoing challenge for writers, historians included, revolves around oral literature produced in non-European languages in written form, and how these should figure into the global lore. While we can and should celebrate African writers whose written work in French or Portuguese finds an outlet in English translation, what about African writers working with oral materials and producing in African languages?

Wendy Urban-Mead : Thinking about orality and trying to render it in written form, a couple of things come to mind. When Joshua Nkomo died in July of 1999, his praises were sung by Pathisa Nyathi. Nyathi is imbongi— a praise singer. He is also a historian, educator, cultural heritage keeper, journalist, and more. One can read the printed praise poem for Nkomo. But listening to it with the ears was an entirely different matter—a different medium. The message enters consciousness not through the eyes. There is resonant nuance and power. It becomes possible to begin to perceive the enormity of the man being praised.

Then I think back in time and northward, to Malawi, and the recorded songs of men who were in the Carrier Corps (Kariakor) during the First World War. Melvin Page worked with several others to interview a host of veterans. In each interview, they asked, “Do you have a song from your time in the war that you remember?” Many of them did, and sang them for the recorder. One can read them in The Chiwaya War Stories , volumes 1 & 2. But what did those songs sound like ? I am tantalized and frustrated by reading those verses on a paper book page.

Bwerani ku Manda Nya Banda zanga uzindito Nya Mbewe zanga uzindito Ndabwera ku Manda Come to Manda Miss Banda come and get me Miss Mbewe come and get me I’ve come from Manda [1]

One of the sayings we tend to emphasize during #readingAfrica is “African literature is not a genre.” What are some of the problematic ways people around the globe understand “Africa” and what are the historical roots of that?

Holly Y. McGee: Africa is erroneously stigmatized in the global imaginary as a backward and benighted monolith, and the diverse and extensive histories of the Continent have been based on oversimplified, fixed assumptions justified with inequitable social systems that aid in the perpetuation of widespread, false information. The racist speculations, examinations, postulations and perceptions of English and Anglo-American explorers that influenced Western intellectual traditions regarding Africa from the moment of initial contact are detailed in Winthrop Jordan’s seminal work White Over Black , which was first published in 1968 and is still recognized as a “classic” in the field of colonial slavery.

Sadly, hyperbole and outright fiction supplanted the truths of the Continent and obscured its realities (i.e. thriving ancient empires, advanced weaponry, extensive trade networks and complex bureaucratic systems) from the trans-Atlantic world, paving the way for generations of subjugation and continued exploitation.  What is more important than the past roots of the polemic ways in which people understand Africa, however, are the ways in which we must commit to re-educating ourselves and future generations in an effort to make ignorance of Africa history.

Can you probe the use of “African” as a descriptor or adjective. The whole point of this event is to point out that African lit isn’t one thing, but as you all know, “Africa” and “African” often gets flattened into one thing. What are some of the ways that you’ve seen writers and illustrators push back against this?

Holly Y. McGee: Well-known children’s book authors like Margy Burns Knight, Margaret Musgrove, Page McBrier, and Muriel Feelings, have undertaken efforts to highlight the very regional and linguistic diversities which belie generalizations of “Africa,” displaying the myriad traditions, images, and cultural patterns unique to the locales about which they craft their stories. The incredible diversity of the 50+ independent nations of the Continent is unmistakable in their work and that of other authors and illustrators determined to encourage knowledgeable distinctions between that independent work and needs of African nations.

Beyond language, what does it mean to decolonize African Literature?

Wendy Urban-Mead . I have spent 25-plus years reading about, visiting, writing about, talking with people from, South Africa and Zimbabwe. I still don’t think I know very much about that part of the world, after all that. Why does the American academy think I am an Africanist , and can teach about Ghana or Nigeria? I’ve done it, of course. Because the “Modern Africa Survey” requires it. But every time, I feel irritable, and shoehorned into a category that did not come from “Africa” itself.

Some African writers (like Ngūgī wa Thiongo) choose to write only in an indigenous language. This may limit their audience worldwide but provide political and cultural satisfaction for the writer and perhaps their audience. Can you talk about the historical and cultural desire to decolonize literature? How about in the academy?

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: First of all, I would like to state that I will be answering most questions not as an erstwhile academic but as someone who lives and writes in the global South because I think that how we think about Africa and African Literature has everything to do with not only our personal positionality but also with where we are positioned in the world.

While I understand the multiple viewpoints expressed in the decades-old “the language of African Literature debate” between Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe et al., I often think there are nuances that go unexplored when people think through this issue. For instance, if, on some parts of the continent, people first encountered their languages in written form through translations of the Bible, that is, through a tool of colonization, does writing in an African indigenous language automatically mean that one is decolonizing literature? Beyond language, what does it mean to decolonize African Literature?

Lizzy Attree: I think the answer Siphiwe has given to the age old Ngugi language question is perfect. There are so many issues around languages that were not only learnt in written form through the bible, but also transcribed in written alphabets and phonemes through western interlocutors in the former colonies in the first place. This has been fruitful in many ways (I’m thinking of isi-xhosa newspapers which have since sadly disappeared in the Eastern Cape in the 1900s).

But what do we do then with orality, or as Charles Mungoshi said to me once (when a song in one of his short stories was transcribed in English as ‘nonsense song’), “These are songs my grandmother sang to me—I cannot explain to you what it means in English directly.” He then sang to me (he was a little drunk). I still have the recording and the transcription was published in the JRB recently, but I cannot explain or understand his words, only naively remember what I felt hearing him sing. As Mukoma wa Ngugi says of the Tizita, it contains an archive of 200,000 years of human emotion. Do we even need to access these things intellectually? Are there other ways in which we can share orality?

Do we even need to access these things intellectually? Are there other ways in which we can share orality?

At the Kiswahili Prize I can talk of how we are trying to re-center African languages as part of African literature and make Kiswahili a world language (UNESCO has just announced there will be a world Kiswahili day in July 2022), but decolonizing African literature is another exercise altogether.  A man I met at a literary event in London last week said he’d reviewed plenty of manuscripts by white writers writing about Kenya and considered Kiswahili a “lingua-franca” as he put it and was shocked when I said it has hundreds of years of history dating back to the Omani caliphates on the east coast of Africa and is akin to Arabic as well as of course Bantu languages in so many ways.  Why was this man even reviewing Kenyan manuscripts?!!? Of course I couldn’t say this directly to him, but I hope he went away and looked into what Kiswahili really is, the dialects, the kimvita poetry, etc. etc.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Lizzy, I really love the Charles Mungoshi anecdote, there is so much personality that comes through in that story. I also like the idea of a “nonsense song” because for me it points towards Eduoard Glissant’s idea of opacity. While the word “nonsense” is derogative, the real question is for whom does this song not make sense? Obviously for Mungoshi, his grandmother and the ‘Shona’ language (Karanga, Zezuru, Korekore, Manyika or Ndau etc) group they belonged to, the song made plenty of sense.

For example, I know that within the isiNdebele oral tradition in which I grew up, some of the songs our grandmothers taught us were to give us a certain facility with the language, for instance, to teach us how to make q, x and c sounds. The songs were constructed in order to be memorable and fun and not necessarily to make “sense” beyond that point. Given the context within which these songs were created, I believe they have “the right to opacity” beyond that context. Let translations into English call them “nonsense” if they must, we (those of us who speak the language) know what those songs are, what they “mean” and what they are used for and that is ultimately what matters most and is important.

All this speaks to the point that Kwasi Konado made earlier when he said, “I’m not sure the best ways of writing can or should capture these experienced parcels of the oral.”

To my mind there is something inherently, perhaps not “decolonial,” but definitely “uncolonial” and “uncolonizable” about this ability of the song to make itself untranslatable into English. When we think of how determined the colonial project was to order things, render everything knowable, and ascribe meaning to things then, perhaps, this opacity can also be used productively within a decolonization project.

Trevor Getz:   I may be wrong, but, to me, this question reflects the recognition of the necessary division between the decolonizing projects of global north and south (to be approximate). Decolonizing in the global north is a project wrapped up heavily in the specific racial supremacy problem we have created.  As such, we struggle to conscientize an audience that is broadly ignorant of Africa, aware of African livelihoods, perspectives, lived experiences, hopes and dreams, creativities, intellectualisms. We do so in part, we probably must admit, to hold a mirror up to our own society and push resolutions for our own problems. This project, however, would probably not be meaningful (in truth) to decolonization in Africa, where of course everyone is an expert in being African and does not need us to inform them.

Again, I offer this submission with humility, but I see the divide frequently in efforts to “decolonize the curriculum” in the US/UK, efforts that are only very loosely connected to African decolonization efforts that have in their focus the much more everyday presence of colonial legacies.

I’m not rejecting the commonalities, of course, and I recognize US settler colonialism.  But in the case of “African history and literature,” the north and south decolonizing projects are not really the same.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: Although I do not particularly like labels, to be honest, when I stepped away from academia a few years ago I did so as a postcolonialist invested in the histories (mostly cultural and social) of Africa and its diasporas and so I am responding to your response from that vantage point. I struggle to understand why there has to be a “necessary division” between the decolonizing projects from the global south and north and why in the always already globalized world in which we live these projects cannot be one project that speaks to a global audience about both “racial supremacy” and the “everyday presence of colonial legacies,” especially since these things are obviously linked.

I understand that you are saying that the specific racial supremacy problem has led to a lack of knowledge not only about other parts of the world and other communities within the zones of that racial supremacy and that it is then the work of the decolonizing project in the global north to educate the inheritors of that supremacy and those who have lived under it about what that supremacy has done beyond the pervasive narrative of its greatness and to begin to right some of the many wrongs of that idea of supremacy.

However, I don’t understand why this decolonizing project cannot be connected to the one that seeks to expose the “everyday presence of colonial legacies,” legacies which are very rooted in the idea of white supremacy. I don’t understand why in this decolonizing project, the world needs to continue to be divided along the very lines created by the very thing (white supremacy) that it is trying to move beyond.

I am not being intentionally obtuse, I am genuinely trying to understand how the “necessary division” leads us forward productively.

The trend away from postcolonial fiction to everything from Afropolitanism, historical fiction and African futurism has broadened the range of stories that are considered “African”—can you comment on this diversification and its benefits for African writers? Along those lines, many African writers are now frequently indulging in genre-specific fiction—crime, romance, etc. How can these genres allow for a greater and broader understanding of the continent’s history and culture and diversity?

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu: I particularly like these two questions because they help illuminate one of the central issues within discussions about African literatures. The questions are posed as though African writers are doing things that they have not done before or moving into more global trends or moving away from more “traditional” forms of storytelling (usually the oral tradition) when really what is happening is that the people who categorize and label literatures (who are usually never the writers themselves) in order to publish/sell books and teach literatures are the ones who determine how they will label the literature. In other words, like most writers in the world, African writers write, and their work gets categorized by others.

Therefore, when looking at what is currently happening within the world of African literatures, I think we need to flip the focal point of the questions. Was this diversification not always there? Haven’t African writers been writing genre-specific fiction for decades now? If the answer to both questions is, yes, then the question is why did the people who publish/sell books and teach literatures not provide these categories or explore them more fully before? Why did they not see them and/or why were they not invested in showcasing these categories? What made some categories more difficult to sell and/or teach? Why was it necessary (at a certain moment in history) to not present the full diversity of African literatures? How can this help us think productively about ways to move beyond the power structures within these institutions (publishing and academia) that not only limit what African literatures are, but, all too often, also what they can do?

Wole Talabi et al have shown that African speculative fiction can be traced all the way back to the oral tradition. Some writers writing in colonial or indigenous languages were very much aware that they were writing genre-specific literature because they had been inspired by genre-specific writers. For instance, some crime writers were influenced by the works of Agatha Christie etc., and those who wrote thrillers, by the works of James Hadley Chase etc. Macmillan’s popular, pan-African Pacesetters series that began in the late 1970s exposed readers to all kinds of genres. All of this is to say that 21st-century African writers, although forging ahead into previously uncharted territory, are often traveling down familiar roads and all that is really changing now is how certain institutions are coming to understand and depict that journey.

In short, I think these questions and concerns tell us more about the industries and institutions in which African literatures circulate than they do about the writings and efforts of the African writers themselves, which is also very illuminating.

Literacy in Africa is always a challenge, though some organizations seek to solve it through book donations and/or use of digital technologies for book access. What are some of the inherent challenges to these approaches? What are ways we could improve current approaches?

Lizzy Attree: The inherent problem with donating books is the same as donating clothes. Outdated and unwanted books that flood the African market firstly means that people only get access to low quality materials that have been cast off by someone else. This is not always the case, but when the books are current, the donations also take the bottom out of the book market. How can booksellers and publishers afford to compete with free books? The altruistic intention is admirable but resources might better be spent elsewhere. Investing in African publishers and selling rights separately into African markets so that books can be produced competitively locally rather than imported.

Digital access is a slightly different issue, and Worldreader and others have made some good donations, I think, getting solar powered e-readers to school children. I do worry however that authors are not best served by cheap access to their work—royalties are small at the best of times—ensuring authors are paid for their creative work is another issue to be addressed, as is the production and translation of books in local languages so that mother tongue education can thrive. Otherwise donated books in English simply contribute to further colonization of minds.

What’s a book by an African writer that you regularly recommend people to read?

Trevor Getz:   I have recommended Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s David Mogo Godhunter to a dozen friends and colleagues. I don’t know what genre to place it in—fantasy? Science fiction? Afrofuturism? Crime?—thus proving the inappropriateness of genres. It is, however, a fantastic adventure in a well-conceived world built de novo by the author.  The characters, whether gods or mortals or in-between, are compelling, and it’s ridiculously unobtainable in the US in particular.

Lizzy Attree: I always recommend Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera but also now add Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift , as well as Marlene van Niekirk’s Agaat . Plus The Rosewater Trilogy by Tade Thompson.

Kwasi Konadu : I often recommend Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers and T he Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born . Set within newly independent Ghana, the latter is well-known and brings the sounds and smells of corruption and so-called postcolonial life into sharp view, while The Healers is an under-the-radar book and perhaps Armah’s best work, because of its intimacy of details and because its themes hinge on confronting the tyranny of empires—both local and global—as well as power people have within and in unity.

Wendy Urban-Mead : I have assigned Ngugi’s Dreams in a Time of War several times now. My positionality is in the U.S., in North America, teaching future secondary school history teachers, and undergraduates taking history classes. Nearly all are *not* majoring in Africana Studies. The lack of knowledge about anything from Africa is enormous. It’s an ocean of not-knowing. We have to start somewhere. I am thankful that there are texts in English, that let us get started. They read Dreams in a Time of War, alongside the letters of “Lily Moya,” which appear in Not Either an Experimental Doll . Students ask outstanding, penetrating, painful questions about language, text mediation, audience, colonialism, the impact of missions, and gender. They can’t emerge from reading these two texts with a unitary, uncomplicated tale of “colonial schooling” and “Africa.” They realize that “traditional” means a host of things. They cannot help but see that learning to read can be mind-closing, an extension of hegemonic suffocation—or mind-opening, world-opening, and somehow also all of a piece with the orally rendered stories heard around the fire at night from grandmothers, older siblings, and aunties.

_______________________________________

Dr. Lizzy Atree is the co-founder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London and Blood on the Page , her collection of interviews with the first African writers to write about HIV and AIDS from Zimbabwe and South Africa, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2010. She is a Director on the board of Short Story Day Africa and a trustee of Wasafiri magazine. She was the Director of the Caine Prize from 2014 to 2018. In 2015, she taught African literature at Kings College, London and has since taught at Goldsmiths College and now teaches World and Contemporary London Literature at Richmond, the American International University in London. She is the Producer of ‘Thinking Outside the Penalty Box’, an African Footballers project partnering with Chelsea and Arsenal, funded by Arts Council England and supported by the Poetry Society, and a freelance writer, reviewer and critic, recently featured in Africa Is A Country and The Conversation Africa.

Dr. Trevor Getz is a historian of Africa and the world whose interests include history education, comics in history, and other popular ways of thinking about the past. Most of Getz’s work revolves around issues surrounding gender and slavery in West Africa. He is the principle content manager for the World History Project, series editor for the Oxford University Press’s Uncovering History series, and collaborating on the history for the 21st Century Projec t.  Intensely interested in the possibilities of participatory research and the democratic classroom, he also collaborates on depicting West African pasts in video, Lego, and comics.

Dr. Kwasi Konadu is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair and Professor at Colgate University, where he teaches courses in African history and on worldwide African histories and cultures. With extensive archival and field research in West Africa, Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America, his writings focus on African and African diasporic histories, as well as major themes in world history. He is the author of Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation (Duke University Press, 2019), (with Clifford Campbell) The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2016), Transatlantic Africa, 1440-1888 (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Akan Diaspora in the America s (Oxford University Press, 2010), among other books.A father and husband first and foremost, Konadu is also a healer (Tanɔ ɔbosomfoɔ) who studied with his grandfather in Jamaica and then in Takyiman (central Ghana) as well as a publisher of scholarly books about African world histories and cultures through Diasporic Africa Press.

Dr. Holly McGee specializes in U. S. History and African American History, with an emphasis on black women’s intellectual history, comparative political activism in the United States and South Africa, and popular culture in the twentieth century.  Her secondary specialties include local histories of the American South, South African women’s history, and oral histories.  Currently, Dr. McGee teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. McGee’s first manuscript, Radical Antiapartheid Internationalism and Exile: The Life of Elizabeth Mafeking is a biographical oral history of Elizabeth Mafeking—a recognized South African women’s leader and trade union president identified by white civic and political leaders in 1959 as the head of “the most militant trade union in the country.” As a case study of radical, working-class consciousness in Apartheid politics, the manuscript demonstrates how Mafeking and others helped to craft a language of activist rights for black women in South Africa, and advances discussions regarding women, gender, and family in South Africa while exploring banning and exile as lost spaces of historical analysis and inquiry.  Dr. McGee’s most recent article, “Before the Window Closed: Internationalism, Crossing Borders, and Reaching Out to Sisters Across the Seas,”  reflects a return to and expansion of her earlier comparative work, which was focused on the radical social and political activism of black women in the United States and South Africa in the mid-twentieth century.  The article posits four women—two South African and two American—whose ideological and organizational connections extended far beyond their own national borders and helped to change contemporary ideas regarding the supposed place of black women in national and international protests.

Dr. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a writer, filmmaker and academic who holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, as well as master’s degrees in African Studies and Film from Ohio University. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, published in North America by Catalyst Press in 2021, won the 2019 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in South Africa. She is also the author of The History of Man , which will be published in North America in January 2022.

Wendy Urban-Mead is an educator and a historian of southern Africa. After teaching high school history for five years, she acquired a PhD in African History from Columbia University. She teaches Global and African history for the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College, and with the Bard Prison Initiative. She is the author of several scholarly articles and of The Gender of Piety: Family, Faith and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press, 2015.) She is working on a curriculum on Africans and the First World War for use by advanced secondary and college teachers, to be published with 21st Century Project .

[1] Sam Kamanga, interview with Melvin page, translated by C. M. Manda, 4 August 1973, Chirungulu Village, Malawi, in Melvin Page, ed., Chiwaya War Voices: Malawian Oral Histories of the Great War in Africa , vol 2 (The Great War in Africa Association, 2021), p. 539.

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Aas 101: research methods for african american studies: writing a literature review.

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• Conducting a Literature Review by Ann Glusker Last Updated Apr 25, 2024 1818 views this year

Literature review

A literature review surveys the scholarship on a particular topic, issue, or theory and provides a critical assessment of this literature.  The purpose of a literature review is to provide a written argument that supports the thesis by giving a succinct overview of previous research published on a topic. 

The Literature Review in four steps:

1. Identify the topic

• Usually based on research interest

2. Find important works of scholarship related to the topic

• seek advice from noted experts in the field
• search article database 
• search library catalogs
• review works cited pages - is there an author(s) consistently present

3. Evaluate and analyze the literature to determine which is most valuable to the topic

• preview(skim and scan), select, and organize the data

4. Write the review

For a more in-depth guide to writing a literature review, please refer to the following site

Learn How to Write a Review of Literature

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Literature by Africans in the diaspora can help create alternative narratives

Lecturer in English, Rhodes University

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I have previously received funding from the Mellon and Rhodes Foundations for my academic research.

Rhodes University provides funding as a partner of The Conversation AFRICA.

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Celebrated Ghanaian writer and academic Ama Ata Aidoo has no time for “Afropolitans” . This is a notion popularised by the self-described “multi-local” author Taiye Selasi. Afropolitans are a current, cosmopolitan generation of “Africans of the world”.

But Aidoo believes that Afropolitanism is “evidence of self-hatred”. Its proponents, she charges, use it as a “fancy moniker” that tries “to mask the terror associated with Africa”.

Her objections speak to widespread, global calls for the decolonisation of institutionalised cultures. This is of particular interest to university communities at large right now. In South Africa, one crucial and complex aspect of this process is a call to Africanise university curricula. This is certainly necessary. But, as ongoing debates around African literature reveal, it must be done cautiously.

One element of this “Africanisation” debate involes assessing the value of contemporary literature written by Africans who live in the diaspora. Its critics complain that current Afrodiasporic literature is not in tune with everyday life on the continent. They see its versions of Africa as sanitised and Westernised.

I disagree. These works take students beyond their national and personal borders. This is crucial in these times of global cultural flux.

Beyond national and personal borders

The notion that contemporary Afrodiasporic fiction is socially and culturally inapplicable is typically couched in racialised and nativist interpretations about what is or who isn’t African. This highlights the ideologically safe and unimaginative spaces that many still occupy. It also reveals something about how deeply ingrained colonising structures are.

The question of who writes, and what is written, about Africa is both pre- and over-determined. The emphasis on ethnic and cultural distinctiveness risks reestablishing exclusionary inter- and intra-racial hierarchies.

Contemporary black African writers in the diaspora are contesting precisely this imposition of culturally representative literature. Some examples include Maaza Mengiste’s cynical article “What makes a ‘real African’?” and Binyavanga Wainaina’s sarcastic instructions on “How to write about Africa”. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, “ Americanah ”, is a fictive caution about an issue she first raised in her 2009 TED Talk , “The Danger of a Single Story”.

As novels such as Selasi’s “ Ghana Must Go ” reveal, contemporary Afrodiasporic writing expresses less explicitly politicised, ambiguous versions and visions of Africa and the African diaspora. In doing so, it transgresses what Helon Habila describes as “pass-laws” that seek to restrict where “African literature can go”.

No need to reinvent the wheel

Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, recently organised a conference at which concerned scholars gathered to reexamine established ideas about African literature and philosophy.

We weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. This issue is not new, after all. The first African Writers’ Conference was held at Uganda’s Makerere University in 1962. There, scholars debated the significance and place of African literature written in English for nation states on the cusp of independence. More than five decades on, the conference offers valuable lessons to universities trying to critically reconceptualise educational curricula for post-colonial subjects.

But the wheel must be modified. It needs to reflect and engage South Africa’s own post-traumatic, post-apartheid landscape. In this respect, two recurring challenges emerge: first, what exactly is (black) Africa(n) in this fragile, shifting global village? Second, how does a university “Africanise” its curricula in the face of different ideologies and realities?

Global cultural flux

I teach contemporary Afrodiasporic literature to undergraduate students. In my experience, these works speak to their encounters with subjectivities beyond their national and personal borders. We exist in a time of profound global cultural flux. Against this backdrop, inflexible and insular readings of both Africa and Africans do not adequately interpret the diversity and complexity of their own subjective realities.

Contemporary Afrodiasporic literature’s worldly reinterpretation of Africa and Africans presents imaginatively inclusive visions. In its responsiveness to ever-shifting contexts and realities, it is committed to revealing what author Ben Okri calls the “strange corners of what it means to be human”.

Universities envisaging getting closer to what writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o called “ decolonising the mind ” could stand to take current Afrodiasporic literature seriously. These works can help in the push to realise genuinely transformed, revitalised and reflective, alternative narratives of Africa.

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Africa No Filter

Literature review: academic writing on african narratives.

In 2018 the fictional country Wakanda from the film Black Panther was the fourth most mentioned African country on Twitter, after Egypt, South Africa and Kenya. 

The fact that Africa’s 4th most talked-about country doesn’t exist tells us two things: pop culture is a powerful tool for narrative work and we need to do more to make Africa’s 51 remaining real countries more compelling.

We discovered this fact during a literature review to understand what insights already exist about narrative in Africa in the media. 

We analysed 56 documents of literature published after 2000 including research reports, books, chapters, and academic journal articles.

Although by no means comprehensive, the literature review does provide a snapshot into the narrative space.

So, what did we find? A few surprising facts like the one about Wakanda, but admittedly nothing we didn’t already suspect.

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Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature

Hope wabuke considers the future of afrofuturism and africanfuturism., by hope wabuke august 27, 2020.

Around the World

AFROFUTURISM, AS MANY KNOW, is a term created in 1993 in the essay “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” by Mark Dery, a white American critic. Wrote Dery:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism.”

The term “Afrofuturism” was further explained in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Dr. Alondra Nelson, a seminal scholar on the intersections of race, technology, and health, and has continued to be pummeled into a shape that can hold a wider concept of Blackness by leading scholars. Others, however, have decided the genesis of the term is too flawed to be revivified, and that we need to move away from it and toward more accurate language altogether . “I started using the term Africanfuturism (a term I coined),” writes acclaimed Naijaamerican author Nnedi Okorafor, because “the term Afrofuturism had several definitions and some of the most prominent ones didn’t describe what I was doing.”

As is common with the white Western imagination, Dery’s conception of Blackness could only imagine a “one down” relationship to whiteness — a Blackness that begins with 1619 and is marked solely by the ensuing 400 years of violation by whiteness that Dery portrays as potentially irreparable. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he writes.

Here, Dery’s operating question dismisses, firstly, the resilience, creativity, and imagination of the Black American diasporic imagination; secondly, it lacks room to conceive of Blackness outside of the Black American diaspora or a Blackness independent from any relationship to whiteness, erasing the long history of Blackness that existed before the centuries of violent oppression by whiteness — and how that history creates the possibility of imagining the free Black futures that Dery deems impossible.

Okorafor defines Africanfuturism as “a sub-category of science fiction” that is “similar to ‘Afrofuturism’” but more deeply “rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.” Africanjujuism, Okorafor continues, “is a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualties and cosmologies with the imaginative.”

In a definition that is created by a Black diasporic writer rather than a white American, Africanfuturism gets to a greater specificity of language, ridding itself of the othering of the white gaze and the de facto colonial Western mindset. Writes Okorafor: “Afrofuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in Oakland, CA, USA. Africanfuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in a neighboring African country.”

By not centering themelves around the concept of “American” in their definitions, Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism are freed from the white Western gaze. Indeed, this becomes the main defining difference between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. And while some texts can hold aspects of both Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism — an Afrofuturist text and an Africanfuturist text are quite different indeed.

Unlike Black Panther’s post-credit scenes that take us from the condescension of whiteness at the European UN to the dispensing of a particularly recognizable American style of billionaire philanthropy in an American city, in Okorafor’s  Lagoon , the aliens land in Lagos, Nigeria — and Nigeria is where the narrative remains for the development of the plot. There is no move to undercut the Africanfuturist gaze with a location change to a city such as New York or Los Angeles, or any other place in the United States and the West that aliens are usually depicted as landing. Immediately and thoroughly, it is the Africanfuturist gaze, rather than the Afrofuturist — which would still privilege a Western and American locale — that is present.

Here, too, the philosophical and cultural framework depicted through Africanfuturism is different as well. The point of the alien arrival in Lagoon is not deception, colonization, and violence as it is in nearly all Western/American science fiction and alien encounters — Mars Attacks , War of the Worlds , Alien , Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Independence Day , Men in Black , etc. The alien in Lagoon has come to share enlightenment to help humanity stop violence, war, and colonization.

In Okorafor’s characterization, the figure of the alien or outsider is not a threat because of the Blackness has been othered and been made into the alien outsider in the real world. Thus, here in the text as well, the “alien other” is not portrayed as a threat, but as a visiting force for good, enlightenment, and social “change.” The alien, named Ayodele, is powerful, yes, and uses that power when necessary — but not out of a gleeful and omnipresent destruction. Her use of force is tied to a strong ethical code and defense of self and others.

It is worth noting here how the concept of “change” in the recent century and a half has opened up more positive developments relating to safety and opportunity for Black individuals, who started off the 20th century being denied basic rights all over the world. Conversely, the concept of “change” and social progress that has created some tenuous rights as well as tenuous safety for Black people around the world has also brought extreme anxiety to whiteness in fear of losing the long-held white privilege seen as an inalienable right. Equality does not put anyone on the back foot, it puts us all on equal footing. But fear of equality, we see very clearly, has now led to overt white supremacy and fascist leadership around the globe, beginning at home here in the United States with President Trump’s many actions to repress American freedoms, support white supremacy, and encourage anti-Black violence.

We see that Africanfuturism has a different philosophy and outlook on these ideas and life than mainstream Western and American science fiction and fantasy — and thus even Afrofuturism, which is still married to the white Western gaze. Consider the literary genius of Octavia Butler: it was not any of her prior and successive novels which were so thoroughly sunken in the Black American diasporic gaze that made her a national best-selling success, but 1979’s Kindred , her book tied closest to the white gaze, that is her best-selling novel. It is Kindred , the uncomfortable narrative of legacies of racial violence in America that makes the saving of one’s white rapist ancestor necessary in order to save one’s Black self. It is Kindred that provides the reader’s white gaze with Black forgiveness and the absolution of white guilt without holding whiteness culpable for its legacy of violence or demanding accountability and reparations. It was Kindred that was then most palatable to the white American audience and championed as Butler’s first, and still most visible, mainstream success.

One of the clearest examples of Africanjujuism is seen in Okorafor’s Who Fears Death , in which Onyesonwu, a young woman who is the product of violent rape, must come into her own spiritual leadership powers to defeat evil and fulfill her destiny. Here, the rhythmic percussive structure of the narrative mirrors the repetition of the heartbeat rhythm of the drum that is used to induce a spiritual invocation or communication with the ancestors in many African spiritual traditions. Often the figure who would be conducting or centering this experience would be the figure of the shaman. Fulfilling this structural expectation, the narrative plot and characterization of Onyesonwu leans into the figure of the shaman as characterized in many African and diasporic cultures: Onyesonwu’s ability as the seer, to travel between the real, spiritual, and ancestral planes, to use these energies as physical power to defend herself and others, are characterizations of the shamanic gifts often depicted in works of Africanjujuism.

While directly inspired by a story Okorafor read about rape in the Sudan, this concept of the rape of the Black woman’s body is an uncomfortable and troubling part of Black woman’s global history. It functions not just as an act of physical violence against the individual woman, but as a political act to decimate a culture and a people in the cycle of trauma and inherited trauma.

Thus,  Who Fears Death  also works as an Africanfuturist text not just in the creation of a sustained and specific south-Sudanese imaginative space for the novel's duration similar to Okorafor's imaginative Lagos in Lagoon, but also in how we see the representation of the rape of Black women as a political tool throughout history here in Africa by the African patriarchy and elsewhere in the global African diaspora by the white Western patriarchy — indeed, with the interjection of the Western white gaze this theme of sexual violence against Black women becomes a characteristic of Afrofuturism as well. (Again, see  Kindred .) Even before the theft and shipping of Black bodies was outlawed by Great Britain in the 1807, the new white Americans had turned to raping Black women or forcing enslaved Black men to rape Black women to breed an unpaid labor class that built the economic and political power of the United States, Great Britain, and to a large degree the modern world. “By 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2014 Atlantic article “Slavery Made America: The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography.” “In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”

Other happier Africanfuturist texts by Okorafor are  Zahra the Windseeker , set in the fictional African kingdom of Ooni and deeply based in West African ecology, philosophy and hair culture and  Binti , the story of an African girl, deeply set in Southwest African mythology, who goes to boarding school in space. The care with which Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism center Blackness, while engaging with the ability of science fiction and fantasy to speak about the oppression of marginalized individuals, makes the consistent erasure of Blackness in Western American- and European-authored science fiction and fantasy that much more glaring. For Okorafor, to center Blackness also means to center Black women because of the respect and space traditionally held for Black women as leaders and elders in a majority of African communities. Indeed, African local governments have long been known for the leadership of women elders in the community, a cultural tradition that is reflected in the presence — albeit still not large enough — of women in politics in African countries. In Rwanda alone, 61.3 percent of the seats in the lower house are held by women, making it the country with “the highest number of female parliamentarians worldwide” reports UN Women.

Okorafor’s work shows that if Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism are to center Blackness, they must also center Black womanhood and nonbinary LBGTQ identities. The figure of Ayodele, as the alien, is held within a female body, but Ayodele is in reality a nonbinary, androgynous figure whose queerness extends beyond the body and into the theoretical understanding of “queerness” as a destabilizing of fossilized norms. Ayodele “queers” the notion of an established individual identity and leans into the African concept of collective community, fluidly transforming into other forms of life, matter, and energy.

Another fascinating author in this space is Igbo and Tamil author Akwaeke Emezi; they work with a different balance of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism in their work with a greater focus on concrete LGBTQ themes: one example is the figure of Jam, the young Black trans girl who is the main character of Emezi’s recent YA novel, Pet .

Although Nnedi Okorafor would not define the term until much later, when reading African literature through an Africanfuturist lens, The Rape of Shavi , published in 1983 by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, considered one of the most important African writers of the 20th century, becomes a seminal Africanfuturist work. Here, Emecheta constructs the fictional nation of Shavi, an idyllic, free Black African utopia that is irrevocably changed for the worse when stumbled upon by a band of European scientists and civilians fleeing the imminent nuclear destruction of the Western world that white Western nations have wrought.

Shavi was a utopia that “prided herself on being the only place in the whole of the Sahara, where a child was free to tell the king where it was that he had gone wrong,” writes Emecheta. “And the child knew that not only would he not be punished but also that he would be listened to and his suggestion might even be incorporated into the workings of the kingdom.” It is a place steeped in African cultural traditions of respect for the ancestors, hospitality, and community — where guests are offered the best house in the village and waited on by the future queen; a stark contrast to when the Shavian Crown prince visits Europe and is imprisoned as an illegal immigrant.

Set in 1983, The Rape of Shavi interrogates the nuclear destruction of the planet because of Western excess and violence, and how this then becomes yet another violence that whiteness inflicts upon Blackness; the novel positions itself within the dystopian science fiction literature that interrogates the nuclear anxiety of the 1980s. This centering of Blackness is unlike the usual representations of nuclear anxiety on the world that fills Western consciousness, and a unique and necessary representation to apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction.

Emecheta explores these ideas in a novel set in a fictional Black country from a Black perspective drawing from the Black experience in history: Black empires, Black agency, the sustainment of free Black communities, the targeted white violence against these free Black communities, exploitation, slavery, and colonialization, among others. But because Emecheta, writing from an Africanfuturist lens, is aware of the existence of Black empires before 1619, and of Blacks as global leaders in technology and science, she can envision Blackness before the violation of whiteness. Africanfuturism creates the possibility of imagining the Black futures that Dery’s Afrofuturism presents as impossible.

Thus, in The Rape of Shavi , we see the consistent centering of Blackness throughout — a representation of Africanfuturism which, like in Okorafor’s work, highlights the valuing of Black women lives as a cultural value of the Black African diaspora, to the point that an elder in the community says that to rape the Black woman is “to rape Shavi” itself.

The work Emecheta does here in this 1983 publication in the science fiction and fantasy space to imagine Black futures is vital to the field, and yet the work of this extremely important African voice was erased from Dery’s 1993 essay on Blackness and science fiction. This, however, should not be surprising given the fact male African authors are absent as well; there is no mention of South African author Thomas Mofolo’s 1920 fabulist novel Chaka nor Cameroonian author Jean-Louis Njemba Medou’s 1932 novel Nnanga Kon , the latter being the clear forerunner of Emecheta’s Rape of Shavi , in that Nnanga Kon details another first contact story between white colonists and indigenous Africans. It is the white male science fiction writers who are included in the canon of serious “classic” literature: Wells, Verne, Heinlein, Tolkien, Lewis. Emecheta, Jemisin, Hopkinson, Due, and Okorofor, however, are not.

It is very compelling that that The Rape of Shavi came at the end of Buchi Emecheta’s career, when Emecheta moved from writing realistic fiction to seeing that free Blackness could only be represented through a speculative imagining of a future Africa free of the contemporary ravages of colonialism. Emecheta, often cited by Okorafor as an influence upon her work, opens up the exciting possibility of reading earlier works of literature by African women through an Africanfuturist lens to explore the imagining of free Black futures within this rich literature that contemporary scholarship is beginning to unpack today — in large part because of the work done by many Black writers and scholars to insist that the value of this work no longer be erased.

The Africanfuturism written by Emecheta and Okorafor, like radical Black feminism, requires us to see fossilized systems of oppression and representation and reenvision the use of characters, narratives, themes, structures, forms, archetypes, mythos, languages, and perspective — and center Blackness in all of these ways. Just like we know it is not enough to invite one Black person into the boardroom and shut the door behind them, Africanfuturism tells us it is not just enough to plop one Black character down into a white world — or even a whole cast of Black characters — and end our work there after congratulating ourselves for embracing Afrofuturism and diversity in literature. This is tokenism, which we are past, both on and off the page.

As conversations about Blackness, science fiction, and fantasy push toward greater nuance and clarity, there is potential for the term “Black Speculative Literature” to become the language that encompasses Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism for the ease of handling. This term grows out of the 1947 definition of “speculative literature” attributed to the problematic Robert Heinlein, whose racism in Farnham’s Freehold is backed by his assertion that “the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved,” later articulated by Mark Dery in his 1983 essay, and now reenvisioned by contemporary critics, scholars, and writers.

Black Speculative Literature is literature that centers the lineage and myriad diversity of Black creative thought and culture, a literature deeply rooted in representations from Black perspectives from Africa and the Black diaspora, a literature that aims to imagine Black futures. Black Speculative Literature is science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate realities centering Black African and diasporic cultures, mythologies, and philosophies. It must not center the white Western gaze. However, if we widen the operative “must” to a continuum of degree on a timeline, then Black Speculative Literature has the room to hold Africanfuturism, which is defined by centering the non-Western Black gaze, and also Afrofuturism, which is defined by retaining space for the Western and/or the white gaze.

No matter what we call it, however, it is understood that the impetus of Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and Black Speculative Literature is to center African and African diasporic culture, thought, mythos, philosophy, and worldviews. Black Speculative Literature looks not to the past and its violent oppression of Blackness, but rather to the future, to imagine alternate possibilities of Blackness that can be lived in safety, creativity, and freedom.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer, and an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please .

LARB Contributor

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer, and an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please ; she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, Cave Canem, VONA, and elsewhere.

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Ethiopia Population 2024 (Live)

Ethiopia ’s current population is about 115 million and is expected to surpass 200 million by the end of 2049. Ethiopia’s population is growing about 2.7% annually with no projected peak year or period of decline.

The birth rate in Ethiopia is 36 births per 1,000 people. The fertility rate is 4.1 births per woman. Religion plays a major role in Ethiopia’s high birth rate, as well as the lack of contraceptives.

The disproportionate population increase has hindered the economy’s ability to grow and develop at a more rapid pace due to the increased need for more resources. Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in the world due to its rapid population upsurge.

Ethiopia Population Growth

Ethiopia is a nation that has been beset by hunger and poverty for most of its long history. A land where child starvation and subsequent death have been prevalent for such a long time requires assistance from the more privileged and prosperous nations of the world. It is the responsibility of all members of the peaceful international community to step in with more rigor and determination to empower the Ethiopians. This population has proven to be one of the strongest on the face of the earth, having endured massive hardships. If it is given a little assistance, Ethiopia will be able to build on the strength of its inhabitants in order to increase the strength of the nation itself.

Ethiopia Population Projections

Ethiopia is currently one of the fastest growing countries in the world, with a growth rate of 3.02% per year. If Ethiopia follows its current rate of growth, its population will double in the next 30 years, hitting 210 million by 2060. Most of the world's population growth in the next 40-50 years is expected to come from Africa , and Ethiopia will be a large part of the growth.

Ethiopia Growth Rate

Ethiopia population clock.

Net increase of 1 person every 9 seconds

Population estimates based on interpolation of data from World Population Prospects

Components of Population Change

Ethiopia Population Density Map

Ethiopia Area and Population Density

The surface area in Ethiopia is currently at 1,104,300 km² (or 426,372.6137 miles square). Ethiopia has a population density of 83 people per square mile (214/square mile), which ranks 123rd in the world.

Largest Cities in Ethiopia

The largest city and capital of Ethiopia is Addis Ababa , or Addis Abeba, which has an estimated population of 3.6 million in the city proper and a metro population of more than 4.6 million. Being as old as two millenniums, its cultures and traditions hold family as a significant part of Ethiopian life, sometimes even surpassing the significance their careers or businesses might have.

Other major cities include Adama (324,000), Gondar (324,000), Mek'ele (324,000), and Hawassa (302,000).

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Ethiopia Population by Year (Historical)

Ethiopia Population by Year (Projections)

Ethiopia population pyramid 2024, ethiopia median age, ethiopia population by age.

There are people over age 18 in Ethiopia .

Census Years

Ethiopia Population Pyramid

With one of the highest poverty levels in the world, Ethiopia is considered by many to be one of the most under-developed nations in the world. But within its African boundaries lies a nation filled with a rich culture and heritage. Bordered by Kenya , South Sudan , Sudan , Djibouti , Eritrea , and Somalia .

Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the continent of Africa and the second-most populous country of Africa after Nigeria . This estimate of how many people live in Ethiopia is based on the most recent United Nations projections, and makes Ethiopia the 14th most populous country in the world. The most recent census in 2007 found an official population of 73.7 million.

Ethiopia Demographics

Ethiopia is home to various ethnicities, predominantly the Oromo at 34.4% of the country's population and the Amhara, who account for 27% of the population. Other major ethnic groups include the Somali (6.2%), Tigray (6.1%), Sidama (4%), Gurage (2.5%), Welayta (2.3%), Afar (1.7%), Hadiya (1.7%), and Gamo (1.5%).

In 2009, Ethiopia had an estimated 135,000 asylum seekers and refugees, mostly from Somalia (64,000), Eritrea (42,000) and Sudan (23,000). The government requires refugees to live in designated refugee camps. According to a 2013 report, the number of refugees hosted by Ethiopia has grown to 680,000.

Ethiopia Religion, Economy and Politics

Ethiopia has close ties with all three major Abrahamic religions, and it was the first in the region to officially adopt Christianity in the 4th century. Christians account for 63% of the country's population, with 44% belonging to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Ethiopia has the first Hijra in Islamic history and the oldest Muslim settlement on the continent. Muslims account for 34% of the population.

Despite its wealth in culture, Ethiopia, unfortunately, does not suffer the same fate economically. With a significantly agriculture-based economy, it is not surprising that in today's technologically thriving world, Ethiopia has one of the lowest incomes per capita. Its reliance on domestic investment restricts foreign investment, which could otherwise account for a comparatively successful economy. However, improvement in agricultural practices has shown a decrease in the level of starvation that the country had been previously accustomed to. The GDP is also increasing, showing a 7% increase in 2014. The composition of the labor force is almost 40%, accounting for another step toward progress. However, only if the conditions of the average Ethiopian get better will the country be able to witness a better tomorrow.

The median age in Ethiopia is approximately 17.9 years of age. 60% of the population in Ethiopia is under the age of 25.

In terms of access to clean drinking water and sanitation, the numbers are still quite grim in this country. According to the World Factbook, only 57% of the country has improved access to clean drinking water, while 42% still struggle to find clean water. Only 28% of the population has access to improved sanitation services, while 72% struggle to maintain sanitation. This likely contributes greatly to the very high degree of risk with transmittable diseases and illnesses in the area.

Only 49% of the population over 15 years of age is literate and many children only attend school for 8 or 9 years.

Ethiopia Population History

The conditions of poverty entail deterioration in health for many of Ethiopia's inhabitants. The most common diseases that cause mortality among many Ethiopians are AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and various communicable diseases that occur due to improper sanitation and malnutrition. Most women give birth to children outside of the vicinity of hospitals. Often the mothers are only attended to by an elderly midwife. The mortality rate of mothers while giving birth is high. Various organizations, governmental and non-governmental, seek to improve the deplorable health conditions in Ethiopia. The World Health Organization is working to initiate a healthy Ethiopia. Low literacy levels also support the inferior health conditions. Therefore, it is important to provide the Ethiopians with adequate knowledge regarding common diseases and their appropriate medication and cure. The empowerment of women could also help achieve improvements in the circumstances pertaining to the well-being of Ethiopians.

• National Bank of Ethiopia
• World Population Prospects (2024 Revision) - United Nations population estimates and projections.

  Annals of African Surgery Journal / Annals of African Surgery / Vol. 21 No. 3 (2024) / Articles (function() { function async_load(){ var s = document.createElement('script'); s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true; var theUrl = 'https://www.journalquality.info/journalquality/ratings/2408-www-ajol-info-aas'; s.src = theUrl + ( theUrl.indexOf("?") >= 0 ? "&" : "?") + 'ref=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href); var embedder = document.getElementById('jpps-embedder-ajol-aas'); embedder.parentNode.insertBefore(s, embedder); } if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent('onload', async_load); else window.addEventListener('load', async_load, false); })();  

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Article Details

Authors submitting articles to The Annals of African Surgery do so on the understanding that if accepted, they will retain the copyright and allow the journal to publish and archive the article under the CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution License) 4.0 International.  See details on the  Creative commons website . All authors will be required to sign an Author Agreement form detailing the agreement with the journal prior to the article being published. Download the form  here

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Main Article Content

Successful retrograde intrarenal surgery for a large kidney stone in a pelvic ectopic kidney: a case report and review of literature, afdal afdal, aditya akbar latief, steven steven.

An ectopic kidney is a condition in which one or both kidneys are located outside of their normal anatomical position, typically lower than  usual, and are prone to stone disease. In the past, most patients required open surgical treatment, but nowadays, laparoscopy-assisted percutaneous nephrolithotomy and multisession retrograde intrarenal surgery (RIRS) facilitate minimally invasive approaches. A 42-year- old male presented to the urology clinic with complaints of intermittent lower midabdominal pain near the suprapubic area for a year. A  computed tomography scan evaluation of the abdomen without contrast was then performed, showing incomplete staghorn with multiple calyceal stones in the ectopic kidney, with the largest stone measuring 2 × 1.2 cm and mild hydronephrosis. A single-session RIRS  was performed which successfully disintegrated the stone. This pelvic kidney, although situated within the retroperitoneum, has the  bowels positioned between the front wall of the abdomen and the kidney. The successful navigation of the flexible ureteroscope  through the deformed urinary tract made RIRS applicable in the presence of a urinary tract deformity. This case was managed with RIRS, which offers advantages in visualization and is considered a safer option compared to other methods.     

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