Essays on Language, Communication and Literature in Africa explores language choice questions, together with domain-driven lingua-communicative and literary resources situated within the discourses of law, culture, medicine, visual art, politics, the media, music and literature in Africa. It identifies the distinctive African paraphernalia of these discourses, and foregrounds their real-world and mediated cultural and societal values, and highlights the Western presence through the inclusion of aspects of Shakespearean perspectives which bear universal tidings and speak to the African gender tradition. The chapters’ attention to verbal and visual artistic communicative mechanisms underlines such engagements as multilingualism policies, socio-political declension, social dynamism and cultural interventions that characterise the African setting. These realities are discussed in impressive detail, authoritative scholastic depth and effective stylistic tones that reflect the authors’ familiarity with the facets of African societies deducible from language, communication and literature.

Essay from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: B, University of London (Faculty of English Literature), course: Literature in History: Race and Subjectivity in South African Writing, language: English, abstract: ‘The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.’1 This quote by the Kenyan writer Ngugi expresses the exceedingly important relationship between language and the individual in general. This relationship is gaining even more importance for a continent such as Africa, in which large parts of the native population were oppressed by European colonial powers for centuries. One important instrument of oppression was definitely language and the feeling of European superiority resulting out of cultural traditions, such as literature. In South Africa, where two major colonial powers were fighting for supremacy and many different native ethnic groups were combined in one state, the question of language would almost naturally provoke conflicts and crisis. In this essay, I should like to have a closer look at this delicate relationship between language and power in South African literature with the example of a Black and a White African writer, Sol T. Plaatje and Nadine Gordimer. In his historical overview, Leonard Thompson already describes the South Africa of the 18th century as a ‘linguistic Babel’2. Afrikaans, a simplified form of Dutch and at first only used in oral communication, would gradually develop into the lingua franca of South Africa. Today, its greatest competitor among European languages is English and both languages, together with nine African languages, belong to the eleven official languages of the postapartheid South African State. The right of every South African to use the language of his or her choice is now embedded in the constitution. However, the situation of having eleven official languages is truly unique world-wide. One of the most pressing question is whether there is a necessity to agree on a single language as the official one, with the other ten languages receiving an equally high status, in order to support the current process of nation-building? If so, should it be English, Afrikaans or one of the African languages? [...] 1 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind, page 4

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

This text is devoted to studies of the languages and cultures of the Cushitic-speaking peoples of the Horn of Africa. It is concerned with linguistics in a technical sense, and analyzes the oral literature of the people of the area.

Even in this age of triumphal globalism, Africa still hangs on to a precarious existence in the margin, the zone of abysmal silence and disarticulation, stripped of agency and talk-back capability. It remains largely invisible on the map of the global village drawn by those who control the paper as well as the pencil. In an age of "travelling theories" and "travelling texts," externally generated ideas and prejudices travel with imperial ease and confidence in Africa while the "canon war" makes it extremely difficult for African texts to make it to the reading lists of European and American institutions. Related problems such as a grossly maladjusted economy with the myriad socio-economic injustices spawned by it, political instability, dictatorship, and intolerance have affected the literary and cultural scene in near apocalyptic proportions. This selection of essays addresses these and other issues from the author's perspective as an African writer, academic, social critic, and regular contributor to media discourse. Book jacket.