WHAT AFRICAN WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM CHEIKH ANTA DIOP
In a country that “obstinately clings to its francophone ‘roots’”, on a continent where success as an African writer depends, in part, on the use of a colonial lexicon – stories spun in the tongue of the French, the English, the Portuguese – the idea of a black African transitional literature sits uncomfortably with those […]
WRITING AS AN ACT OF GENEROSITY
MAMADOU DIALLO All of our current texts in English or French were, according to an idea dear to Cheikh Anta Diop, only a simple transitional literature. – Boubacar Boris Diop The debate on national languages is at least as old as independent Senegal. Léopold Sédar Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop represented, respectively, two opposite poles: […]
Kaveena
In Catherine Anyango’s adaptation of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Kaveena, the boundary between nightmare and reality unravels when Colonel Asante Kroma stumbles upon the corpse of the head of state in a bunker. The discovery sends the police chief on a quest to untangle the dark secrets of a political system in which he was once a well-oiled […]