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Unveiling African Narratives: Challenging Historical Biases through Contemporary Fiction

Explore how African writers reshape perceptions of Africa and challenge colonial narratives through fiction. Delve into the cultural and historical contexts of African literature, particularly focusing on Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and the shift in storytelling perspectives.

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Unveiling African Narratives: Challenging Historical Biases through Contemporary Fiction

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  1. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. … This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story." -- (Chinua Achebe, "An African Voice")

  2. Guiding Question: How does Achebe see the role of the writer/storyteller? In what ways does he use fiction as a means of expressing and commenting on history?

  3. Guiding Question: To what extent is Things Fall Apart successful in communicating an alternative narrative to the dominant Western history of missionaries in Africa and other colonized societies?

  4. Learning Objectives: • Become familiar with some African literature and literary traditions • Become familiar with elements of African and Nigerian culture • See how historical events are represented in fiction Be able to differentiate between historical accounts and fictionalized accounts of history • Understand narrative perspective as culturally-positioned (Afrocentric versus Eurocentric perspectives)

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