In order to make sense of literary texts, writers and readers require some common understanding of what happened and what matters in history, of what has already been written, and of where people and things are located in relation to other people and things. The academic study of African literature, too, relies on common notions of Africa, its past and its location in the world. We are calling these shared understandings, integral to imagining a work in the first place and necessary for it to be understood by those who receive it, the archive of African literature. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves in a tradition and center themselves in the world. Mental maps define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions to which producers of texts must respond: where stories are set, who writers write for, how texts have meaning. Writers need to imagine themselves contributing to a body of literature; readers need to understand the field in which texts are produced.

This chapter offers a reading of a range of anglophone East African novels from Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Comoros, and Madagascar to highlight the long history of multifaceted interactions between African and Arab communities in the region due to trade, migration, intermarriage, and the assimilation of cultural and religious elements into Swahili culture. The narratives mark conditions of possibility for capacious diversity, hospitality, and accommodation, while simultaneously attending to prevalent racisms and forms of oppression: notably the slave trade, labor indenture, and the cruelty against women and children in patriarchal environments. Traces of the diffusion of Arab peoples, the spread of Islam and associated ways of life, the cross-fertilization of material culture, and the circulation of ideas and things on the Swahili littoral are demonstrated to be narrativized as diverse and varying. The chapter concludes that the fiction points to the shifting, contingent meanings of the African–Arab encounter at different points in time and in different places along this vast coastline.

This chapter examines how francophone and anglophone fiction restages and archives women’s forms of resistance against colonial ideologies and practices. The Women’s War of 1929 in Igboland, the 1933 Togolese market women uprisings against taxation, the 1934 beer boycott in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1947 women’s demonstrations against taxation in Yorubaland, the 1949 women’s march in Côte d’Ivoire, the 1958 women’s mass protests in the Cameroon Grassfields, the 1959 beer hall riots and boycott in South Africa, and the 1971 Kono Women’s rebellion in eastern Sierra Leone were mostly sidelined in the then prevalent masculinist historiography, both colonial and local. Studying two novels, Echewa’s 1994 historical fictionalization of the 1929’s war, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1992), and Amondji’s restaging of the Ivorian women’s 1948 march in Sidjè ou la marche des femmes sur la prison de Grand-Bassam (2007), highlights women’s active participation in these aspirations for sociopolitical sovereignty. As part of their contestation strategies, the women in both events draw on socially sanctioned female forms of conflict management, genital shaming and cleansing. Departing from the emotionally deprived (post)colonial accounts and closely reading these fictional archives, we can discern the emotional landscape of thousands of social-political actors who provide moments of both empowerment and caution for present and future-oriented struggles for self-determination.

This chapter investigates the intricate intertextual discourse between African writers and their European counterparts, exploring their responses to the often distorted representations of Africa by European authors. From historical figures such as Luís de Camões and Joyce Cary to modern writers like Albert Camus and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, these encounters with Africa have had a significant impact on global literature. African writers, influenced by their European predecessors, navigate a nuanced relationship marked by both admiration and critique. They draw from similar literary traditions and styles while simultaneously challenging and subverting racist stereotypes. Through their narratives, they carve out a unique space, amplifying silenced voices and reclaiming agency over their own stories and identities. As agents of change, they reveal obscured truths and guide readers through the complexities of colonial and postcolonial histories. Ultimately, the African novelists discussed in this chapter demonstrate that just as imperialism is rooted in European history, modernism is an integral aspect of Africa’s narrative landscape, reshaping perceptions and reclaiming narratives for future generations.

This chapter revisits the enduring question of orality in relation to writing in the rendition of modern African literature since the advent of Western colonization. It argues that rather than affirming an artificial binary between orality and writing in the evaluation of African literature, a paradigm of complementarity is advocated. The discussion articulates with Eileen Julien’s formulation on the integrality of orality in written literature as a global phenomenon. The chapter additionally affirms a natural expressive process that begins with oral communication and orbits at scribal representation. It argues that literary traditions are invented following this complex of natural impulses that find primal expression in speech and on lithic natural surfaces. Invariably, instead of rendering writing as the transcendence of orality, both are conceived of as vital constitutive elements of language deployed in the production of literary traditions. Drawing on classical and contemporary African texts, the chapter offers a critical discussion in demonstration of the convergent values of orality and writing in the continual making and remaking of modern African literature.

The chapter examines how North African fiction in French has engaged with gaps in official history by foregrounding the stories of and about erased or forgotten events and actors, thus seeking to fill the factual and experiential lacunae of archival records. It first provides an overview of different generations of writers from the anti-colonial group who leveraged the symbolic powers of fiction to pave the way for independence to post-independence authors such as those who in the 1980s self-identified as “Beur” (first-generation French citizens born of parents who immigrated from North Africa) and the following generation of “banlieue” writers who emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The chapter then focuses on Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel L’Amour, la fantasia as a work that both exemplifies and exceeds the ethical stance and the aesthetic potential of the archival novel insofar as it mobilizes all the genre’s strategies of research, recovery, and representation while also questioning the very project of restoring the archive and thus revoking its presumed authority. The chapter admits to its own incompleteness, unknowing and linguistic partiality as it does not purport to account for the rich literary production in other languages such as Arabic, Tamazight, and English.

The chapter sets out to examine Nairobi as a site of cultural imagination. It argues that since its founding by the British colonialists, Nairobi has featured prominently as a site of “rest” for its many immigrant communities but also for the local Kenyans from its rural hinterlands. The chapter further examines how writers of African fiction have tapped into its rich tapestry, turning it into a powerful archive and a rich source of literary imagination. The chapter shows how Nairobi has become a site where the antinomies of the new nation-state play themselves out, as it gets mobilized by writers of fiction to figure a number of competing cultural and social imaginaries within Kenya and the East African region more broadly. By drawing attention to a set of fictional works on Nairobi, the chapter allows us to literally take a “walk” through the streets of Nairobi and to absorb its full significance as a layered site of archival imagination. It offers a glimpse of Nairobi as a bottomless resource for archive-building – a site of endless potential for literary imagination.

When Cheikh Anta Diop suggested, in 1951, that ancient Egypt had been a black civilization, this was the start of a lifelong commitment to researching, arguing, and defending this idea. His work has since opened up and provided contexts for discussions dating back to antiquity, controversially pushing back against long-held, sometimes wrong-headed imperial notions such as that Western philosophy began in Greece. He seeks to recenter and restore meaning to an Africa uniquely severed from precolonial origins.

The chapter explores the archive as a literary form in African literature that addresses civil strife. It emphasizes the fascination with the archive in fictional narratives that respond to mass violence in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. These conflict contexts and the literatures they have inspired provide some of the most thought-provoking yet challenging examples of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary engagements with the archives and examinations of the enduring cultural character of colonial and postcolonial archival productions. The literary fascination with the archive takes on two primary forms. Firstly, there is an examination of colonial archives to comprehend the structural preconditions of postcolonial violence. Secondly, there is a desire to create a new postcolonial archive that bears witness to mass atrocities, mobilizes robust aesthetic techniques to cultivate empathy and ethical reasoning, and deepens our understanding of civil strife in the post-independence era as an ongoing work of imperialism. By highlighting the archival impulse that permeates African literature about civil strife, the chapter underscores the underlying artistic anxieties and concerns over historical and cultural amnesia following mass violence.

If, as Roberto González Echevarría argues, all fiction is written in relation to the archive, African literature is written with an eye to the colonial archive. That archive reflected an imperial will to knowledge and was an information system collected in an attempt to define and so control Africans. Writers such as Achebe, Tutuola, La Guma, and Coetzee have imagined it as a prison, as hell, or as a great maw. The meaning of the colonial archive changed as it receded into the past. African writers seek to supplement the archive in order to correct it (Sleigh, Gappah, D. Diop); resurrect those suffocated in it (Achebe, Christiansë); find ancestors (Krog, Joubert); escape the archive’s surveillance by imagining an outside (Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer); or honor the dead (Samkange, Djebar). African literature resists and subverts the archive but is also haunted by it. The colonial archive is itself now a trope shared among African writers (Achebe and Adichie), becoming an element in the archive of African literature.

The geologic as an archive foments the naturalization of human conflict in African literature. African literature makes certain relations a natural property of the geological character of the land. It makes it impossible to think of social and political alterations without reflecting violent eruptions. Geological structures not only are presented as arenas for human activities but naturalize human perception and anti-colonial conflict mirrored through landscapes, which in turn become caches of resilient memories, rallying points for the imagination of new futures and struggles, and prompts and symbols of new archives. In the texts selected for study, geological metaphors allow a writer such as Geoffrey Ndhlala to locate individuals and societies in terms of larger patterns, such as strangers and hosts, and to relativize them. A contrast is also established between sedentary valley people, such as in The River Between, whose horizons are dangerously restricted, and walkers and travelers, such as in Cry, the Beloved Country and Long Walk to Freedom, who achieve a larger picture. These contrasts and comparisons are not meant to be exhaustive but are illustrative of how the geologic is deployed as shared politics and archives.