Literature of Africa (review)

Douglas Killam's Literature of Africa is a basic introduction to its title subject, though its emphasis is on anglophone literature and its focus is almost exclusively on the African novel. The book includes four chapters describing the "basic histories" of regional African literatures, including "West African Literature," "East African Literature," "South-Central African Literature," and "South African Literature." These historical surveys are then supplemented by more detailed discussions of a total of ten individual novels (or sequences of novels by an individual author), including two francophone novels. A total of nineteen novels are discussed in these chapters. Each chapter includes a useful bibliography of texts for further reading. The book is written at an introductory level that would be accessible to high school students. It might also be useful in lower-level undergraduate classes, though the discussions of individual novels are quite brief. It assumes no prior knowledge of African literature or history.

The most extensive coverage is given to West African literature, which has, in fact, enjoyed a preeminent position in the development of the anglophone African novel. This section includes a chapter on Chinua Achebe (at seventeen pages, the longest chapter in the book) that presents brief discussions of all five of Achebe's published novels. It also includes chapters that discuss two novels by Buchi Emecheta, Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter, and Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood.

The discussion of South African literature is also extensive, including individual chapters on two novels each by Nadine Gordimer and Alex La Guma, as well as individual chapters on Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country and Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather. Coverage of other regions is a bit more sparse—largely for the very good reason that these regions have produced fewer texts with high visibility outside of Africa. The section on East African literature includes only a discussion of three novels by Ngugi wa Thiong'o as a treatment of individual texts, while the section on South-Central African literature offers no discussions of individual texts.

Killam is one of the pioneering scholars of African literature, and his extensive experience serves him well in producing a fine introductory survey that should be helpful to students encountering African literature for the first time. The book might have profited from more attention to newer texts (only one novel discussed in detail, by Gordimer, was published in the past fifteen years, and only four were published in the past twenty-five years) and broader coverage of francophone texts, but the overall coverage is already quite broad, perhaps making the book's major limitation the brevity of its discussions of individual novels. Compromises, however, are always necessary in a work of this nature, and the balance between breadth and depth achieved by Killam is not a bad one.