African Literature 
African literature refers to the literature of and for the African peoples. As George Joseph notes on the first page of his chapter on African literature in Understanding Contemporary Africa, while the European perception of literature generally refers to written letters, the African concept includes oral literature. As George Joseph continues, while European views of literature often stressed a separation of art and content, African awareness is inclusive: "Literature" can also imply an artistic use of words for the sake of art alone. Without denying the important role of aesthetics in Africa, we should keep in mind that, traditionally, Africans do not radically separate art from teaching. Rather than write or sing for beauty in itself, African writers, taking their cue from oral literature, use beauty to help communicate important truths and information to society. Indeed, an object is considered beautiful because of the truths it reveals and the communities it helps to build.
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 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.
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