Introduction

In his "Choice of Language and African Literature: A Bibliographic Essay," published in "The Language Question," a previous special issue of Research in African Literatures (23.1 [1992]), David Westley makes an interesting parenthetical comment with respect to African literature in Portuguese, observing that "courses on African literature began being offered in American and European universities as it became almost by definition literature in English or French (Lusophone Literature being more esoteric)" (162). Although African literature in Portuguese may not have been, nor continues to be, as abstruse or recondite as the label "esoteric" implies, over the decades it certainly has been less accessible and thus not as well known as its anglophone and francophone counterparts.

In several of the other articles included in the "The Language Question" special issue, we note that whenever those three languages of European origin are mentioned with respect to either their colonial past or their postcolonial present, they consistently appear in the following sequence: English, French, Portuguese. Although some might assume that such a sequence is merely a matter of alphabetical order, it is more likely that the sequence is based on how the three rank as world languages. According to current estimates, among the top eleven languages in terms of the approximate number of primary and secondary speakers world-wide, English ranks second, with 480 million, French is third, with 265 million, and Portuguese comes in eighth, with 188 million. But despite being the official language of eight nation-states on four continents and having a relatively large number of primary and secondary speakers worldwide, including immigrants and their descendants residing in any number of countries, Portuguese has not attained the status of an international language widely included in the curricula of secondary schools and universities in Europe and North America. English is, of course, the quintessential world language, and because of globalization it is in fact contributing to the demise of many of the 6,500 tongues currently spoken around the globe.

Ironically, with regards to its "esoteric" standing vis-à-vis English and French, because in the early fifteenth century the Portuguese reached sub-Saharan Africa, their language was the first European tongue to make a social, commercial, and cultural impact on the continent. Moreover, Portuguese-based pidgins, some of which eventually became creoles, were the first to emerge in West Africa. At this juncture we might note that the word creole is a French derivation that then became a loan word in English. But both creole and the Spanish cognate criollo derive from the Portuguese crioulo. Based on the Portuguese verb criar, which besides meaning "to create" can also be translated as "to breed," crioulo was coined in Africa and originally referred to the slave "raised in the master's house." In the emerging Portuguese Empire crioulo eventually came to refer to the slave born in Brazil. Another interesting result of a number of Portuguese's lexical influences in parts of Africa is the well-known term "griot," which is a creolization of criado, a Portuguese word meaning "domestic servant." Moreover, there are place names of Portuguese origin in several African countries, including former British and French colonies. Many people throughout the world might not be aware that Lagos, the name of a major Nigerian port city, is the Portuguese word for "lakes." The city received this place name because it became a major port for Portuguese slave traders.

Along with the propagation of Portuguese-based pidgins and creoles, as early as the sixteenth century there were assimilated, acculturated, or transcultural Africans who spoke and were literate in standard Portuguese. One intriguing example is that of Memba-a-Nzinga, a sixteenth-century king of the Bakongo, an ethnic group of the Congo- Angola region. It is documented that around the year 1520, the Bakongo monarch, using his adopted name Afonso I, wrote, in standard Portuguese, a number of letters addressed to Dom Manuel, the king of Portugal. Said letters, although strictly speaking not literary works, do have a stylistic form and a dramatic content, particularly with respect to the Bakongo king's written condemnation of the slave trade.

Turning...