Encyclopedia of African Literature

Encyclopedia of African Literature Edited by Simon Gikandi

Routledge

London

2003

xv + 629 pp.

ISBN 0 415 23019 5

L95; $150

Keywords Literature, Africa

Review DOI 10.1108/09504120310473452

The oral tradition has been such a strong and pervasive culture across most of the continent that the development of an African literature has largely been a twentiethcentury phenomenon and this is reflected in the Encyclopedia of African Literature. During the previous millennium, the western world regarded African culture as a single entity emerging from the Dark Continent, in which noble savages created works of a crude, simple but beautiful grace. Since there were few scripted languages, it was assumed that there was no literary tradition and the small number of early twentieth-century writers such as Nigeria's Wole Soyinka...