The magistrate who heard the case ofRegina v. Kenyatta and otherswas no doubt speaking the simple truth when, in exasperation with the African defendants and in a tone of fellow feeling with the British prosecutor, he muttered, “I cannot follow the African mind.” That was most assuredly not the first time the remark had been made by a European, probably not even the first time by that particular judge; and neither—again most assuredly—was it to be the last time that someone from the Western world would express similar sentiments. But here a curious paradox insinuates itself...

Autobiographies from Africa are plentiful in their number, diverse in their motives, revealing in their implicit, inherent psychologies, and (if I may be allowed to define autobiography, as I intend to do in the chapters that follow, in the very general way that I believe African literature demands) very varied in the forms they assume. But they are also, all of them, African. The interesting and, I think, very important paradox about African autobiographical literature is that while it can be extremely diverse in apparent motive and in manifest form, it also displays, especially for the non-African reader, an underlying...

Few people in the Western world, although everyone has no doubt heard of Adam and Eve, can confidently trace their ancestry back, as the Gikuyu do, in an unbroken line to the first man and the first woman: Gikuyu and Mumbi. Described geographically and linguistically as “Kenya Highland Bantu,” the Gikuyu¹ are a people who know where they have been and have come from, a people who are secure in their ancestry because it is kept alive in their legends, preserved in their land, revitalized through successive incarnations, and embodied in their traditional way of naming; and, if the ancient...

The word “nostalgia,” according to the dictionary, is derived from two words, both of them Greek in origin:nostos(“a return”) andalgos(“pain”).Algosis the symptom of a sickness or a disease, the sign of some disorder, some disharmony, some illness in the organism;nostosprovides evidence of the nature of the illness and a clue to its diagnosis, if not always to its cure, by specifying the kind of pain and its provenance. The pain, which is presumably to be cured by a return of some sort or in some form, is psychological and apparently is caused...

The life of the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria—a very highly unified and closely integrated community life, as one can gather from all the various accounts of it—has been described from within, preserved for later generations, and transmitted to the Western world in a number of autobiographies and quasi-autobiographies, including among them one of the first from an African born south of the Sahara: Olaudah Equiano’sThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African(published in 1789). Like the A-Gikuyu autobiography, the Ibo portrait of experience seems to be fashioned after a prototypical...

They order this matter differently in Francophone Africa. Whether one judges that they order it better, as Laurence Sterne declares is the case in France herself, or order it worse, will depend no doubt on the observer’s sensibilities; that they order it differently, however, is beyond dispute. The fiction that borders on sociology and anthropology, the novel that describes for us a people, their traditions and their culture, and recreates the traditional, coherent community for us in representative figures—as Chinua Achebe does for the Ibo and James Ngugi for the Gikuyu, even as Ezekiel Mphahlele does for the alienated...

Autobiography, as a number of observers have remarked, has been, over the past twenty years, the finest literature to come from creative writers of South Africa. For various reasons—social, political, and psychological—South African writers of our time have found autobiography to be the form best adapted to expressing, recreating, or reacting to their experience. In what is no doubt a corollary to this preeminence of autobiography as a literary form in South Africa, “African” and “Colored” writers from that nation have produced a body of autobiographical writing that is the most vital, the most intense and energetic that...

A few weeks ago (as I write these words in December 1972), Heinemann published a book of essays in London calledHomecomingby a writer named Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and from this simple event in the publishing world, which in itself was not very important, can be drawn some implications of considerable significance for a book about African literature. The writer ofHomecomingis not, of course, someone new on the scene but the same Gikuyu novelist whom we have encountered as James Ngugi, now writing under a name that, while different, is less new than it is old: a...