African Authors And The African Diaspora

Gomez magnifies the untold history of the African people throughout the book. The initial three chapters of this work are referred to as “Old World Dimensions” bring Africa’s independence, strength, and significance to the forefront. The remaining five chapters examines what he refers to as the “New World Realities”. In the beginning of the book he explains the grounds and power Africans possessed in the early Eastern (Mediterranean) world. Gomez stressed two key matters throughout the book. He makes prominent that the arrival of the Europeans in the fifteenth century and the transatlantic slave trade that followed, unfortunately resulting in African Diaspora, was but the tip of the iceberg of who the people and their story. Africa and its citizens did, in fact, have a strong history prior the European’s arrival. Gomez turns to acknowledge Africa(ns)

Africa’s Discovery of Europe, written by David Northrup and much as its name implies, is a monograph detailing Sub-Saharan Africa, starting from 1450 to 1850. This broad timespread starts just before Columbus sailed the ocean blue and ends just beyond the Industrial Revolution. Originally published in 2002, Northrup intended for readers to see Europe from a different perspective; from the lense of African people. The title, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, is interesting within itself. In many cases, majority of people believe it was Europe that opened up the world and conquered the Americas and discovered all this new land, and a sliver of that is true, so many countries surrounding Europe were already major, active players in the modernizing world already. In this case, as Europe was discovering Africa, Africa was also discovering Europe. It switches the mind of the reader from a Eurocentric role to an African one. Northrup discusses how contact was not one-sided, and depicts accurate descriptions of African interactions amongst other Africans and Europeans. Northrup shows the reader that African people were discovering Europe very actively, not passively; African people physically go to European countries and have first-hand experiences with European people and lifestyles.

“We have albinos among us” (Achebe 141). The words vocalized by Uchendu, a wise African villager and Uncle of Okonkwo in the novel Things Fall Apart by author Chinua Achebe. Achebe does an excellent job at giving the reader an insight of life before and during the beginning of English imperialism over Africa in the 1800’s. This essay will identify and explain the effects imperialism had on the African villages.

For many Africans, dreaming is a way of life. In Fatou Diome’s novel “The Belly of the Atlantic” she delivers a clear message that things aren’t always what you expect them to be, proving that people's dreams could easily turn into their nightmares. ‘Diome points out the flaws in both France and Senegal, but her main concern is with the people of her home-country, both their false expectations regarding France and Europe as lands of easy opportunity as well as their domestic failures’. This novel is persuasive and successful at bringing awareness to its readers because of the real life examples regarding racism, discrimination, and immigration. This piece will discuss the efforts of African immigrants as well as the similarities and differences between Fatou Diome’s “The Belly of the Atlantic” and Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” characters.

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is a tale of an African prince and victorious general, Oroonoko, who loses his heart to the lovely Imoinda. First published in the year 1688 when African slavery through the barbaric trans-Atlantic slave business became established as an economic, transcontinental system. This tale draws on the popular literary themes of aristocratic romance, social censure and travel narrative. It indicates a few ways in which the British were starting to view cultural and racial differences and their personal contribution to the slave business and colonialism. Behn’s tale, somewhat broadly, is one text that demonstrates the way European literature on the subjects of slavery, colonisation and race evolved in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Anderson starts out the book by introducing the reader to her interest in African culture,and relates how she sent essays to an anthropological board so she could go to Africa to do her graduate study. She soon realised that she would be unable to do so because

Question one is what is the African diaspora? (Who should be considered in the African diaspora? How is this like the black Atlantic and how is it different?). Students should use the Colin Palmer piece to answer this question.

In Derek Walcott’s From in a Green Night: A Far Cry from Africa, the author explains and dives into the topic of colonialism and self-reflection through his own experiences of being trapped between his Kenyan and British descent. Similar to Fanon’s concept of complicity, Walcott also understands both sides of the story in an unbiased manner. In his poem, he uses imagery to describe the violent past in which Kenyans and British people have committed to each other, the ‘savage’ nature of humans during colonization, and his own internal speech where he himself is confused of his cultural and social identity. This paper will explore the core concepts of Walcott’s writing and further explain it through Fanon’s lens to amplify the meaning of the poem.

In simple terms, the Diaspora as a concept, describes groups of people who currently live or reside outside the original homelands. We will approach the Diaspora from the lenses of migration; that the migration of people through out of the African continent has different points of origin, different patterns and results in different identity formations. Yet, all of these patterns of dispersion and germination/ assimilation represent formations of the Diaspora. My paper will focus on the complexities of the question of whether or not Africans in the Diaspora should return to Africa. This will be focused through the lenses of the different phases in the Diaspora.

It is this dignity that many African people's all but lost in the colonial period...The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost." (Achebe/Killam Eds. Pg. 159.)

This chapter in Africans and Their History by Joseph Harris presents some of the roots of the stereotypes and myths about Africa in the past and for the most part are still held today. Harris discusses how the “greats” of history, geography, and literature starting a path of devaluation of Africans that writers after their time followed. Harris also denounced the language that these “greats” used to describe and talk about Africans. He asserts that this language inherently painted Africans as inferior and subhuman.

The author’s effort to display oral literature, including expressing Ghanaian English speaking and non-English speaking society, in her work reflects her own persona as a contemporary writer resembling the African oral traditions and art work. “Shall I go to Cape Coast, or to Elmina I don’t know, I can’t tell. I don’t know, I can’t tell,” (Aidoo) Language, mainly English, is promoted to throughly capture various backgrounds and events of the play. Aidoo tries to distinguish Eulalie’s American-English speech that instantly alienates her from the rest of the characters. The author also quite succeeds in reflecting Ato’s educated language with a hint of lecturing that proves he has been indeed abroad, as oppose to his Ghanaian family. It crucially exposes the impact of colonialism on communication between Africans with distinctive educational and social situations, as for instance, the married couple’s complexed struggle to not only fully accept their cultural differences but also keep and hold onto their own identities. Aidoo also catches the inflections and outcomes of oral literature by using simple songs, traditional proverbs and imagery, such as the interesting ones in the dialogue between the two old Ghanaian women. “1st W.:But you know, my sister, That my name is Lonesome. I

Elisabeth says then there will never be any solution to the problem of novel in Africa if the Africans wanted a ‘living voice’. The main problem faced by them was because the African writers unlike the French and the English were not acting as writers but were actually behaving like interpreters of their exotic cultures and that the root of their problem was ‘ Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write.’

This paper reflects the novel “Things Fall Apart” written by Chinua Achebe in 1958. Achebe gives an overview of pre-colonialism and post-colonialism on Igbo, detailing how local traditions and cultural practices can “fall apart” in some scenarios through some introduced, externally created hassles elevated because of colonization. The protagonist named Okonkwo mentioned in the story is a proof showing the lifestyle of the tribe. My main objective and focus is to lay emphasis on Africa specifically the Igbo society, before and after the arrival of the Europeans in Umuofia community; the results of their arrival concerning Igbo culture, thus leading to the clash of cultures between the two categories. I will also draw on post-colonialism with respect to globalization.

One remarkable observation from her first extract is when Noxolo (2009) opines that “Ghanaians make it very clear, though not in an unfriendly way, that this is not your home, not permanently anyway… I have always taken the unity of all Black people as self-evident but I have found it disturbing sometimes that on the whole Ghanaians do not” (p.58). Personally, I got amazed to read this because a Ghanaian myself, we as a country in Africa is one of the few countries that has enviable track record of political stability with its attendant hospitality, sociability and free society. Noxolo being black like Ghanaians themselves to depict Ghanaians in such light is worrisome because even whites are accorded the same hospitality and how much same black colour as Noxolo. For me this brings back to multiple identities that a researcher has to struggle with, and coupled with the inherent power relation between Noxolo and the community in which she found herself. Noxolo also examines materiality in her work. According to her and regarding postcolonial geography, at least three distinguishable ways of understanding matter is identified. These she labels as the "lived realities of economic inequality, in terms of the material production of power and in terms of tangible aspects of cultural and geographical practice" (Noxolo, 2009, 60).