SOURCE: “African Literatures and Postcolonialism: Projections into the Twenty-First Century,” in Canadian Review of Literature, Vol. 22, No. 3-4, September/December, 1995, pp. 569-85.

In the following essay, Na'Allah examines the themes permeating African postcolonial writing, noting that in addition to its continued focus on issues of protest on maintaining African values, recent African postcolonial literature also indicts native people perceived as perpetrators of African's own imperialism.

What the [African] writers see around them as they survive their political and social environment since independence is a recurring cycle of misrule, mismanagement, corruption, violent upheaval and general misery.

(Jones, “Myth and Modernity: African Writers and Their Roots” 6)

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of “minorities” within...