The African novel of decolonization

Things Fall Apart opens on an Igbo village with its laws, its gods and its wrestling champion, before the missionaries and the administration settle there. That is the whole programme of these novels: to tell Africa from within, against the colonial library. Between 1950 and 1970, Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Sembène, Kourouma and Kane wrote the strike, the white man's school, the ambiguity of the divided man, and very soon the disappointment of independence. Many write a European language worked on by their mother tongue.

works 9

• NovelThe Dark ChildL'Enfant noirCamara Laye · 1953A young Guinean, a worker by day and a student in the evening in Paris, writes the story of his childhood.Literature
• NovelMission to KalaMission terminéeMongo Beti · 1957A schoolboy who has failed his exams among villagers of the interior, who take him for a learned man.Literature
• NovelThings Fall ApartChinua Achebe · 1958The country's independence is two years away, and the only novels Europe has read about this region were written by Europeans.Literature
• NovelAmbiguous AdventureL'Aventure ambiguëCheikh Hamidou Kane · 1961The country of the Diallobé, on the banks of the Senegal River, at the moment when the French school wins over the children of the families who hold to the faith.Literature
• TheatreThree Suitors: One HusbandTrois prétendants… un mariGuillaume Oyônô Mbia · 1964A Bulu village in the year of independence, where the dowry for a schoolgirl is received without asking her opinion.Literature
• NovelThe River BetweenNgũgĩ wa Thiong'o · 1965The story is set at the beginning of the twentieth century, when white settlers are establishing themselves in the highlands of central Kenya.Literature
• NovelThe Suns of IndependenceLes Soleils des indépendancesAhmadou Kourouma · 1968A Malinke prince ruined by independence, in a French bent to the syntax of his own language.Literature
• NovelSeason of AnomyWole Soyinka · 1973The country is emerging from a thirty-month civil war whose dead number in the millions, and the writers who lived through it are all writing then about what they saw.Literature
• NarrativeA Dakar ChildhoodDe Tilène au Plateau, une enfance dakaroiseNafissatou Niang Diallo · 1975A Dakar childhood of the forties and fifties, told by the woman who lived it, between the working-class district where she was born and the streets of the colonial centre.Literature