African Literature

This paper examines the life of two women who are suppressed because of patriarchy. The novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns discusses the life of Mariam, the protagonist whose illegal beginning of life ends in a justifiable manner. This paper aims to expose the feministic perspective of the novel.

This article contends that African poetry cannot be contemplated without recourse to pain and that it has become a recurrent motif in African poetry. The pain motif in African poetry is brought about by the worsening socio-political situation of African society. Though the poets of the three generations that make up African poetry reflect both their private and public pain in their poetry, the level of pain contained in the poetry of the poets of the third generation has never been perceived in the poetry of previous generation of African poets. Unlike the poetry of preceding eras, those of the third generation embody a poetic motif that seeks to depict hearts steeped in deep pain and that are totally broken. Using poems selected from Hyginus Ekwuazi’s three collections, Love Apart, Dawn into Moonlight: All Around Me Dawning and The Monkey’s Eye, the persona’s experiences and the people’s ordeals are revealed. The paper concludes that the kind of pain which characterises the poetry of the poets of the third generation is overwhelming and reflects a people who have known so much pain and suffering.

The 15th century opened up “new” worlds to Portugal and Spain and saw the
start of colonialism, which became global from the 17th century onwards. With
Enlightenment, one can find the foundations of Eurocentric modernity that gave
rise to the dark side of capitalism and imperialism: Europeans brought millions
of slaves from Africa to carry out the construction of America and cultural epistemicide caused unnamable losses on both continents. The orature (oral literature)
is a weapon used nowadays by the former colonized peoples of Latin
America and Africa for the rescue and strengthening of cultures and traditions.
In Angola, the writer Manuel Rui is a model in that ability to retransform the
literary text.

Public Interest or Strategic Litigation (PIL) - by which term is meant court action that operates to vindicate the welfare or collective well-being of the general public, is fast gaining acceptance and popularity in the Ugandan legal context. Through it, public-spirited individuals as well as Civil Society Organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations have acted; and, continuously, are acting to challenge governmental lawlessness, administrative indiscretion and the exploitation of the poor by the rich. PIL is also being employed to engender the rule of law, promote noble notions of constitutionalism and democratic governance; and also, push back against retrogressive cultures and other bad tendencies like violation of human rights by State organs. More recently, PIL is also being used to promote social justice, precipitate policy and statutory reform as well as shine bright lights upon historical injustices suffered by minorities and other marginalized or disadvantaged sections of society with view to correction. It is also being used to advance or project such causes like environmental justice and public accountability.

In the Ugandan context, the legal framework in place for PIL is quite extensive and permissive.  It ranges from the supreme law of the land which is the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995 (as amended) to Acts of Parliament and other subsidiary rules and regulations which act to operationalize specific provisions of those Acts of Parliament.

The practice and procedure of PIL can also be gleaned from judicial pronouncements. In addition, the PIL tradition in Uganda has also borrowed heavily from progressive jurisprudence by judges and courts  in Kenya, South Africa, India and; as well, the wider Commonwealth.

However, despite its rising popularity, PIL has suffered some pitfalls which have acted to diminish its value as an effective weapon for social change. These are procedural and systemic. The paper, therefore, considers the state of PIL in Uganda; its history, practice and procedure. It evaluates its success and pitfalls and makes proposals for the future.

¿Qué relaciones literarias y culturales entre África y América pueden ser evidenciadas desde el pensamiento actual? El presente libro recoge algunas reflexiones presentadas en el coloquio “AfricAmérica”, realizado en el Instituto de Estudios Avanzados de la Universidad de Santiago de Chile en noviembre de 2011. Esto, según dos ejes. El primero, “África en América”, tiene que ver con representaciones de lo africano desde Latinoamérica en distintos momentos y lugares de la historia, y, sobre todo, trata del sujeto popular, la representación del cuerpo esclavo, negro o “afro” y los problemas del racismo, ligado a otras formas de discriminación. El segundo eje del volumen consiste en comparaciones, articulaciones, conexiones entre las literaturas de uno y otro continente desde el punto de vista más bien de cómo ha enfrentado el sujeto letrado las diversas problemáticas asociadas a la colonialidad del poder. El libro finaliza con dos entrevistas realizadas a María Nsué y Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, ambos escritores del único país hispanohablante del África subsahariana, Guinea Ecuatorial.

This article analyses the process of recuperation of social relations during the
colonial period in the work of a Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho.
The process is seen as a project of filling an empty space in the collective
memory of Mozambican nation that has emerged due to a violent rupture with
the past triggered off by the post‑independence
politics.

The original Bemba version of this little novelette was written in 1955 (1963) by Stephen A. Mpashi (Lusaka: Publication Bueau); the text was translated by Peter Chilufya. This story gives a snapshot of colonial, pre-independence life on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia in 1964). This is a time when some serious thoughts, discussions, and actions too were being devoted to the possibility of gaining political independence from Britain. "Federation" in the text refers to the colonially-imposed "Central African Federation," consisting of Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Nyasaland (now Malawi). Suspicions abounded in the country during these days with reference to informers and "Capricorns"--that is, alleged collaborators with colonial government officials. For some necessary historical background, see at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zambia (My apologies for the poor reproduction of the text--a spirit-duplication that dates back to 1974 and a course in Zambian literature that I was taking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.)

As many of the readers of this bulletin will know, there’s more than one variety of Swahili. They include a string of old dialects, some of them barely clinging to life in scattered locations on the Indian Ocean coast and islands, from Somalia in the north to Mozambique in the south. Some of these, especially those spoken at the extremes of this distribution, are so different that they warrant classification as separate languages. Others, like the village-based vernaculars of rural Unguja (Zanzibar) island, shade imperceptibly into one another. The differences between all them, meanwhile, are being eroded by the spread of Standard Swahili and speech habits that were originally based on the parlance of Zanzibar town.

The good news is that after a long period of postcolonial fallow, research and writing on the Swahili dialects has been picking up, especially in Tanzania. One of the beneficiaries of this has been Kikae, “the old language” of Makunduchi, the village in south-east Unguja which is best known for its gloriously photo¬genic, much-visited and now over-politicised Mwaka Kogwa or New Year festi¬val. Although Kikae is already the subject of a full-length linguistic description (by Odile Racine-Issa) and two printed vocabularies (by Haji Chum and the scholars at the Baraza la Kiswahili la Zanzibar, BAKIZA), I was very pleased to find a copy of this new locally-published book by Rukia Issa in the Masomo Bookshop in Zanzibar.

This article considers problems facing the African artist in the period shortly after independence, with a particular focus on the use of myth in Armah’s second novel, Fragments. It investigates the novel’s representation of the way myths are co-opted by the new bourgeoisie, specifically the ‘pariah literati’ in Nkrumah’s Ghana, while also suggesting the regenerative potential inherent in traditional myths that have retained their earlier force. It discusses three particular myths that are central to Fragments: the Akan myth of Mame Water and the Musician; the Melanesian myth of the cargo cult, a central myth for societies that have felt the brunt of colonialism; and what Joseph Campbell has referred to as the ‘monomyth’, the supposedly universal myth of the heroic journey. It defends Armah against the twin charges of pessimism and the ahistoricism that can arise when myth is used, in Roland Barthes’ words, as a form of cosmic conservatism. It examines the form of the novel, with reference to Modernism, Marxist ideology and socialist texts, such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which the protagonist Baako is reading shortly after he returns to Ghana.