An enduring sense of deep historical time continues to anchor and guide writing by African novelists, no less so as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. One of the most powerful of such fictions lately is the debut novel by South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni, whose The Broken River Tent plays out as a psychic drama in which Maqoma, the nineteenth-century Xhosa chief who fought the British as they tried to settle the Cape Colony, is in dialogue with Phila, a young South African negotiating the disappointments of his country after the demise of apartheid. Ntabeni is in touch, imaginatively, with a long line of historical novelists which begins with such iconic figures as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, who in the early twentieth century revisited historical episodes of 100 years previously. While The Broken River Tent follows Chinua Achebe’s example in taking some reference points from European modernism, it does so without interpreting the colonial encounter through the paradigm of classical tragedy. Instead, following a recent revival of the militancy of South Africa’s Black Consciousness era, Ntabeni’s invocation of Maqoma implies a renewed emphasis on anti-(neo)colonial vigilance.

This chapter explores the significance of Lagos as a repository of memory for Nigerian writers. It brings works of contemporary writers such as Sefi Atta and Teju Cole in conversation with older representations of Lagos. While the more recent novels destabilize earlier binaries, they institute other dualities through their relationship to time. The chapter pays attention to how versions of Lagos – past and present – are contrasted to make the cityscape a template for measuring temporal effects. Crucially, the nation-state is the point of reference and the ultimate objective of progress. Lagos is no longer measured against the village but situated in transnational competition with European and American cities where Nigerians commute in person or imaginatively. Through a comparative and diachronic reading, the chapter offers an archive of Lagos representation while arguing that the authorial emphasis on national time as homogeneous often rests on a corresponding de-emphasis of the subaltern times signaled by narrative polyphony.

The chapter considers anti-colonial liberation to be a generative archive for African literary imaginaries, by zoning in on literary engagements with anti-colonial liberation struggles across Africa. The chapter suggests that literary texts and liberation struggles co-constitute each other in an ongoing dialogue on the meanings of freedom for post/colonial African societies. Using examples from different genres and regions, this chapter tracks the ebb and flow of key perspectives in this dialogue; and the role this archive has played in African literary thought, as a dynamic imaginative frame that poses important questions. The chapter suggests that literary engagements with anti-colonial liberation movements allow us to track shifting conceptualizations of freedom, from the optimistic cultural nationalism of the anti-colonial struggles, to the brief euphoria of flag independence, to the disillusionment that follows the betrayal of liberation struggle ideals. Secondly, the chapter reveals how these literary reflections on liberation struggles wrestle with the tensions between freedom as the pursuit of full humanity and philosophical questions posed by violence as a tool for liberation. Lastly, the chapter examines questions of memory, representation, contradictions, and the silences that haunt anti-colonial liberation movements.

Scholars such as Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui, and V. Y. Mudimbe have pointed out that the idea of Africa was designed to legitimize Western imperialism. This raises the question as to whether or not this idea can metamorphose into a liberating concept. Nevertheless, between the 1950s and 1980s, numerous creative writers almost invariably wrote poems, plays, and novels that focused on the identities of their various peoples, while taking the African identity as a given in their formal academic ruminations contained in their essays. Consequently, this chapter explores the extent to which the portrayals of the cultural identities of the peoples of Africa in numerous literary works by creative writers from the continent, and the African identity taken for granted in the bulk of the theoretical works by the same authors, point to a discrepancy in their presentations of the nature of postcolonial reconstruction. The thesis of the chapter is that foregrounding the names of the continent’s various peoples in scholarship would acknowledge their rich and highly diverse cultures, thereby significantly mitigating baseless continent-wide generalizations. We can then still talk of “African literature,” “African philosophy,” and “African history,” among others, but in a highly circumscribed manner.

This chapter explores the transformations of Christianity in African novels. While it is clear from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that Africans believed in a supreme God before the intervention of missionaries, most postcolonial novels describe the role played by the advent of the “new” God in the consolidation of colonialism. The collusion between church, capitalism, and colonial administration is well illustrated by several authors from different linguistic backgrounds. However, with the rise of theologies of liberation, novelists like V. Y. Mudimbe and Pius Ngandu Nkashama have revisited the role and function of the church in postcolonial settings. They put God’s name to task in order to challenge the inconsistencies and disillusionments born out of independence. With the proliferation of Pentecostal churches, God has remained a key plot driver in postcolonial narratives. From domination to liberation, the African religious and spiritual landscape has shifted significantly over the decades. This chapter uses postcolonial scholarship to investigate the ways in which the name of God has shaped narratives in various geographies of the African continent. From colonial priests to liberation leaders, the face of missionaries is totally transformed in African novels.

This chapter considers how colonialism (and its legacy in the postcolonial period) has influenced the articulation of the geographical space of Algiers as a lieu de mémoire in works of fiction written by contemporary Algerian authors of French expression. “Under what historical conditions is a city, and a postcolonial city at that, transformed into a ‘site of memory’?” asks scholar Réda Bensmaïa referring to Algiers. Is Pierre Nora’s les lieux de mémoire framework valid for the colonized as well as the colonizer? From 1962 forward, Algerian authors of French expression have sought to identify spaces that they thought necessary for the progress of the postcolonial nation. For authors such as Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, and Assia Djebar, remembering and memory are essential to building national postcolonial identity. These authors were born post-1962 and reside for the most part in Algeria. The chapter studies Samir Toumi’s Alger, le cri (2013) and Kaouther Adimi’s Nos richesses (2017) for what they say about the legacies of colonialism, the Revolution, and the more recent civil war of the 1990s to early 2000s.

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of selected works by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Legson Kayira, Charles Mungoshi, Aldino Muianga, Miriam Tlali, and Yvonne Vera to foreground the historical and material presence of migrants from other Southern African countries in Johannesburg’s literary archive. Tracing trajectories of change and continuity in the post-apartheid migrant city, the chapter shows how South African texts have shifted from employing intra-African migrants as marginal figures or metaphors for post-apartheid urban precariousness and/or multiculture toward more nuanced depictions of migrants as embodied urban agents post-2008. While Johannesburg at best serves as a fragile home for migrant and diasporic characters who often remain dislocated or temporary sojourners in the city, the urban imaginaries by intra-African diasporic authors bring into focus narratives obfuscated by a narrow linguistic and national literary history of Johannesburg, reclaiming the continent’s long-standing place in the city’s literary archive.

The past is freighted for queer Africans. Because of the ubiquitous accusation of being “un-African,” envisioning historical existence for same-gender-loving and gender-diverse Africans offers the promise of establishing cultural authenticity in the present. Queer pasts, however, tend to be elusive, complex, and contested – as recent novels explore. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea gives readers glimpses of a queer relationship from the past through two unreliable witnesses recounting their differing versions of what happened many years later, underlining the inevitable mediation of memory and narration. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing places a more straightforwardly “gay” character in the 1790s, but this biracial, culturally hybrid figure entangles homosexuality with the history of slavery. Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu and Nakisanze Segawa’s The Triangle take on a queer past that has been leveraged for homophobic ends, rather than leading to an acceptance of gay people – the story of late nineteenth-century Bugandan leader Mwanga II. Mwanga’s execution of Christian pages has been represented by missionaries then and Ugandan politicians now as the result of demonic homosexual desire. Kintu’s and The Triangle’s counter-interpretations of this historical nexus show the past and present to be linked sites of political struggle, rather than seeing the past as the source of an authenticated belonging.

Writers in African literature who address the thematic of transatlantic slavery either write historical narratives, mythic narratives, or “narratives of return” to an imagined homeland. The literature explored in this chapter include The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) by Pepetela, who fictionalize the earliest period of the trade. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Season of the Shadow (2013) by Leonora Miano, and the play Slave (1981) by Mohammed Ben-Abdallah mythically revision the past. A play like Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) by Ama Ata Aidoo and the novels Comes the Voyager at Last by Kofi Awoonor (1992) and Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004) by Isidore Okpewho, as narratives of return, focus on diasporic subjectivity. These texts, this chapter further argues, exemplify an “embodied archive” where the past and present and the ancestral and psychical bond entwine in bodily, experiential memory seen in how the characters approach common thematics such as African collusion in the slave trade intertwined with the colonial encounter, resistance to domination, diasporic subjectivity in relation to Africa, and the formation of Pan-African unity.

This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, speeches, music, and the ideas these texts embody in creating an alternative archive to that established by European thinkers. By focusing on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Drum Generation, political icons like Nkrumah, Garvey, Fanon, and Mandela, with odd pairings like Mugabe and Marley and a sampling of West African plays, I trace how the African diaspora shifted understandings of an imagined community on the African continent, while African thinkers changed how its diaspora understood the continent itself in terms of those imaginings. I am arguing for a vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary production as a repository of cultural strategies with material effects, which centralize how Pan-Africanisms imagine modernity.