Culture as Reflected in Achebe’s Works and Ao Naga Literature

Emergence of African Literature
Africa, the second largest continent on the globe, is home to a host of tribes each with its own language, history, culture, religion and food habits. But all these differences have been resolved to a certain extent in their fight against the effect of colonialism on Africa. The Christian missions and the colonial school, backed by the coercive force of the colonial state, were the primary agents of the transformation. The civilized, western-educated, Africans were the targets of the worst form of colonial racism. This led to a desire of reformation and re-orientation of consciousness among the educated Africans through their writings, which saw the origin of movements like Negritude, African Aesthetic, and political nationalisms that led to independence:indigenous artistic traditions, long maligned and suppressed by colonialism, became the source-pool of inspiration for many writers. This cultural-artistic decolonization, this fashioning of creative originality from both indigenous and borrowed materials, became phenomenal in its success and is worthy of mentioning. (Schwarz 2000:273-274) Many critics have misunderstood African literature. More recently Ernest Emenyonu has asserted that “what many western critics issue on African literature is a reflection of a profound lack of knowledge about African cultural traditions coupled with an ignorance of the existence, nature and depth of the heritage of African oral literature. In most cases some vague literary background or a landing on an African soil has not been enough to correct this intellectual imbalance.” (Lindfors 1973:10).