Language In African Literature

"[T]he modern African writer is to his indigenous oral tradition as a snail is to its shell. Even in a foreign habitat, a snail never leaves its shell behind."

- Solomon Iyasere

The African community has thrived on and is determined by the transmission of traditional legends and stories by word of mouth from generation to generation. It is through these tales that African children learn from their elders the “virtues that constitute the bedrock of African social, political, religious and ethical morality” (Pinto 52). “Orature,” to use Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s term, in Africa, therefore, becomes a means of explaining all phenomena, of explaining the universe through indigenous folktale and myth that found the very basis of African culture.

An important moment in the history of the African civilization, including the evolution of African literature, generally, and

The first and most obvious speculation in this regard is whether the African novel is one written only in a native African language. Though a much debated issue, Wole Soyinka’s response, in an interview, to being criticized as a Europhile should suffice here:

“I was colonized in English. The common language out of about three hundred languages in Nigeria happens to be the colonial language, English. Language for me is just a tool. […] The important thing for me is to be able to communicate in whatever is the most convenient manner. […] The language of coups is English. The language of the markets is a kind of English- broken English, twist English- use it whichever way you want.”

Therefore, to reiterate the Bakhtinian nature of the ‘African novel,’ it is not contained by language unlike the European novel wherein language itself becomes an integral aspect and preoccupation of the work. What becomes more significant, instead, is the ‘Africanization’ of language, whichever the root language may