The Linguistics of Literature in Education: African Literature in African Universities

Abstract

Teaching African Literature - the English text - would seem to be a replicable skill across continents and countries. Experience shows that understanding texts depends less on the lecturer’s skills and more on student perceptions. Since the inventions of the Gutenberg Press and subsequently of “Oral Man” the story of Africa has been the story about Africa. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) speaks of deliberate attempts “to destroy every last remnant of alternative ways of knowing and living, to obliterate collective identities and memories and to impose a new order” on the colonized. Education has been one of the chief instruments in this process, systematically alienating students from their cultural roots. Today as African writers learn to tell the story of Africa, African students are less able to relate to these literary texts than for example students in a German university. Even though texts reflect their own culture, they resist the “other ways of knowing” Tuhiwai Smith speaks about and force internalized perceptions of their own selves on to narrative texts. Careful linguistic analysis provides students with the opportunity to re-connect with the cultural values a foreign-based education system has attempted to abolish from their cultural memory. The tools provided by critical discourse analysis are invaluable in helping students understand differences in approach in literature; they become a means for students to hear the extent of cultural and personal alienation from their own selves, and to re-connect. This paper explores what happens when students are almost totally alienated from the culture as reflected in their own literature written in the colonizer’s language. It seeks an approach that makes fruitful learning possible as African students study the works of South African novelist Zakes Mda; Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah and Malian filmmaker Cheik Oumar Sissoko.