Dimensions of African Discourse

Abstract It is now more than two hundred years since, as Africans, we have been using the European languages for self-expression. The circumstances in which these languages (English, French, and Portuguese, in particular) became available to us are too well known to require elaboration. What needs to be recalled for my theme is the fact that they bear the stamp of a tragic irony that, with remarkable prescience, William Shakespeare dramatized in the antagonistic relationship between Prospero and Cali ban in The Tempest. An important component of this relationship, as the play stresses, is the question of language, that is, of the modes of perception and of representation that govern the master/slave dialectic. These circumstances, in their real historical manifestations, have determined the contours of modern African expression in the European languages. The themes and preoccupations that are central to the development of this expression and the uses to which the acquired literacy upon which it is grounded has been consciously put point to an imperative of the African consciousness: the intensive exploration by our writers, both at the imaginative and conceptual levels, of a peculiar and singular historicity. Whether in the form of imaginative literature or in directly ideological terms, writing has served us as a means of appropriating the European languages in an endeavor to transcend the vicissitudes of a problematic experience, in an effort toward an expressive grasp of the world in which that experience unfolds.