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104-580: A common theme during the colonial period is the slave narrative, often written in English or French for western audiences. Among the first pieces of African literature to receive significant worldwide critical acclaim was Things Fall Apart , by Chinua Achebe , published in 1958. African literature in the late colonial period increasingly feature themes of liberation and independence. Post-colonial literature has become increasingly diverse, with some writers returning to their native languages. Common themes include

208-446: A Western model, or, in fact, subverts or confronts it. Achebe continued to defend his decision: "English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it. Also, in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language of colonization itself. It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway." Achebe

312-406: A boy taken as a peace settlement between Umuofia and another clan after Ikemefuna's father killed a woman from Umuofia. The boy looks up to Okonkwo as his second father. The Oracle of Umuofia eventually pronounces that the boy must be killed. Ezeudu, the oldest man in the village, warns Okonkwo not to associate himself with the murder but he disregards the warning and proceeds with the killing. After

416-424: A cautionary tale about " tribalism " ( discrimination between African tribes). Among the first pieces of African literature to receive significant worldwide critical acclaim was the novel Things Fall Apart , by Chinua Achebe . Published in 1958, late in the colonial era, Things Fall Apart analysed the effect of colonialism on traditional African society. African literature in the late colonial period (between

520-562: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

624-472: A convert commits the crime of unmasking an elder as he embodies an ancestral spirit of the clan, the village retaliates by destroying a local Christian church. In response, the District Commissioner representing the colonial government takes Okonkwo and several other native leaders prisoner pending payment of a fine of two hundred bags of cowries. Despite the District Commissioner's instructions to treat

728-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

832-406: A debtor unable to support his wife or children, and who preferred playing his flute over conflict. Okonkwo works independently to build his own fame and wealth from a young age, as his father left him with no inheritance. Obsessed with masculinity, and non expression of his emotions if not anger, he often beats his wives and children. Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna,

936-1077: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

1040-520: A fascinating story while The Observer praised it as an excellent novel which is "well worth reading." Things Fall Apart depicts the cultural roots of the Igbos and refers them as a universal principle, which revives the lost dignity of the people during the Colonial Nigeria . one general point...is fundamental and essential to the appreciation of African issues by Americans. Africans are people in

1144-483: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

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1248-677: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

1352-678: A missionary by the name of Dennis. Archdeacon Dennis. He was a scholar. He had this notion that the Igbo language—which had very many different dialects—should somehow manufacture a uniform dialect that would be used in writing to avoid all these different dialects. Because the missionaries were powerful, what they wanted to do they did. This became the law. But the standard version cannot sing." Achebe's choice to write in English has caused controversy. While both African and non-African critics agree that Achebe modelled Things Fall Apart on classic European literature, they disagree about whether his novel upholds

1456-528: A narrative poem based upon a short and a ribald anecdote and is often sung, through: narrative epic , occupational verse , ritual verse, praise poems of rulers and other prominent people. Praise singers, bards sometimes known as " griots ", tell their stories with music. Also recited, often sung, are love songs , work songs , children's songs , along with epigrams , proverbs and riddles . These oral traditions exist in many languages including Fula , Swahili , Hausa , and Wolof . In Algeria , oral poetry

1560-576: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1664-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

1768-412: A separation of art and content, African awareness is inclusive and "literature" can also simply mean an artistic use of words for the sake of art alone. Traditionally, Africans do not radically separate art from teaching. Rather than write or sing for beauty in itself, African writers, taking their cue from oral literature, use beauty to help communicate important truths and information to society. An object

1872-465: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

1976-779: A spider in the folklore of the Ashanti people of Ghana ; Ijàpá, a tortoise in Yoruba folklore of Nigeria ; and Sungura , a hare found in central and East African folklore. Other works in written form are abundant, namely in North Africa, the Sahel regions of west Africa and on the Swahili coast . From Timbuktu alone, there are an estimated 300,000 or more manuscripts tucked away in various libraries and private collections, mostly written in Arabic but some in

2080-624: A theatrical production of Things Fall Apart adapted by Biyi Bandele was performed at the Kennedy Center . In September 2024, a television adaptation was announced to be in development at A24 with Idris Elba set to star as well as act as executive producer alongside David Oyelowo . Arabic language Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] )

2184-503: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

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2288-499: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

2392-416: A verse of the poem, " The Second Coming " by W. B. Yeats . It was part of Achebe's African trilogy; No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God . The Guardian has called the novel, "one of the great novels about the colonial era". Okonkwo is a famous man in the village of Umuofia. He is a wrestling champion and leader of a clan. He is characterized as a different person from his father Unoka, who had been

2496-470: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

2600-727: Is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

2704-585: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2808-542: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

2912-469: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

3016-461: Is considered beautiful because of the truths it reveals and the communities it helps to build. Oral literature (or orature, the term coined by Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu ) may be in prose or verse. The prose is often mythological or historical and often includes tales of the trickster character. Storytellers in Africa sometimes use call-and-response techniques to tell their stories. Poetry describes

3120-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

3224-468: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

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3328-405: Is introduced to the new religion by a missionary, Mr. Brown. In the last year of his exile, Okonkwo instructs his best friend Obierika to sell all of his yams and hire two men to build him two huts so he can have a house to go back to with his family. He also holds a great feast for his mother's kinsmen. Returning from Mbanta, Okonkwo finds his village changed by the presence of the white men. After

3432-566: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

3536-604: Is noted for his inclusion of and weaving in of proverbs from Igbo oral culture into his writing. This influence was explicitly referenced by Achebe in Things Fall Apart : "Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." Achebe, who was assigned to his former duties in the Talks Department at NBS, had time to revisit and review his manuscript. He removed

3640-836: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

3744-559: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

3848-584: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

3952-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

4056-516: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

4160-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

4264-486: The Booker Prize . The Caine Prize for African Writing , an award for short stories, was established in 2000. There have been many literary productions in Africa since the beginning of the current decade (2010), even though readers do not always follow in large numbers. One can also notice the appearance of certain writings that break with the academic style. In addition, the shortage of literary critics can be deplored on

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4368-525: The Maghreb , North Africans such as Ibn Khaldun attained great distinction within Arabic literature . Medieval North Africa boasted universities such as those of Fes and Cairo , with copious amounts of literature to supplement them. The African works best known in the West from the periods of colonization and the slave trade are primarily slave narratives , such as Olaudah Equiano 's The Interesting Narrative of

4472-561: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

4576-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

4680-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

4784-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

4888-562: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

4992-812: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

5096-551: The Europeans allow men to fight over religion but the Igbo tradition forbids the killing of each other. Achebe presents some standard for the Igbo culture while not idealizing the past, like the troubling culture for modern democrats is the law that says Ikemefuna should be killed for the sins of his clans. Although Achebe shows the treachery, ignorance, and intolerance of the British, he doesn't present them as evil people. Instead he uses

5200-484: The Head of Talks, Achebe sent the typescript of the novel to the literary agent of Gilbert Phelps in 1958. Several publishing houses rejected the typescript with the reason that the fiction by African writers possess no financial potential. It was eventually taken to the office of William Heinemann, where it was presented to James Michie and through him, came to the attention of Alan Hill, a publishing advisor. Things Fall Apart

5304-625: The Life of Olaudah Equiano ( 1789 ). In the colonial period, Africans exposed to Western languages began to write in those tongues. In 1911 , Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman) of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) published what is probably the first African novel written in English, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation . Although the work moves between fiction and political advocacy, its publication and positive reviews in

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5408-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

5512-580: The New Black and Malagasy Poetry in the French Language ), featuring a preface by the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre . For many writers this emphasis was not restricted to their publishing. Many, indeed, suffered deeply and directly: censured for casting aside their artistic responsibilities in order to participate actively in warfare, Christopher Okigbo was killed in battle for Biafra against

5616-539: The Nigerian movement of the 1960s' civil war ; Mongane Wally Serote was detained under South Africa's Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967 between 1969 and 1970, and subsequently released without ever having stood trial; in London in 1970, his countryman Arthur Norje committed suicide; Malawi 's Jack Mapanje was incarcerated with neither charge nor trial because of an off-hand remark at a university pub; and, in 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa

5720-567: The Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger . Achebe was born in 1930, in Ogidi , Anambra State, where Igbo -speaking people lived together in groups of independent villages ruled by titled elders. Within the forty years of the colonization of Nigeria , and by the time of his birth, the missionaries were already established. Written in English, Achebe felt that the written standard Igbo language

5824-672: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

5928-512: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

6032-556: The Western press mark a watershed moment in African literature. During this period, African plays written in English began to emerge. Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo of South Africa published the first English-language African play, The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberator in 1935 . In 1962 , Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o of Kenya wrote the first East African drama, The Black Hermit ,

6136-500: The agency for many months. Towards the end of the year, Angela Beattie, about to relinquish her post as Head of Talks at NBS, was going to London for her annual leave, and Achebe asked her to check the status of his manuscript which he sent to the typing agency. Beattie's intervention forced the agency to retrieve the manuscripts already covered with dust in a corner of the office, and sent only one typed copy to Achebe in Lagos. After becoming

6240-422: The battle alone and his tribe had given up. Among his own people, Okonkwo's actions have tarnished his reputation and status, as it is strictly against the teachings of the Igbo to commit suicide. Obierika struggles not to break down as he laments Okonkwo's death. As Irwin and his men prepare to bury Okonkwo, Irwin muses that Okonkwo's death will make an interesting chapter for his written book, The Pacification of

6344-658: The book was made into a very successful miniseries directed by David Orere and broadcast on Nigerian television by the Nigerian Television Authority . It starred several established film actors, including Pete Edochie in the lead role of Okonkwo and Justus Esiri as Obierika, with Nkem Owoh and Sam Loco Efe in supporting roles. In 1999, the American hip-hop band the Roots released their fourth studio album Things Fall Apart in reference to Achebe's novel. In 1999,

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6448-509: The both cultures—British and Igbo—to represent two mixture of human beings as seen in Okonkwo and Mr. Smith, who will not compromise when their cultures are threatened. Things Fall Apart is regarded as a milestone in Anglophone African literature , and for the perception of African literature in the West. It is studied widely in Africa, Europe, India, and North America, where it has been

6552-646: The clash between Africa's past and present, between tradition and modernity, between indigenous and foreign, between individualism and community, between socialism and capitalism, between development and self-reliance and between Africanity and humanity. Other themes in this period include social problems such as corruption, the economic disparities in newly independent countries, and the rights and roles of women. Female writers are today far better represented in published African literature than they were prior to independence (see Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby , 1992). In 1986 , Nigeria's Wole Soyinka became

6656-615: The clash between past and present, tradition and modernity, self and community, as well as politics and development. On the whole, female writers are today far better represented in African literature than they were prior to independence. The internet has also changed the landscape of African literature, leading to the rise of digital reading and publishing platforms such as OkadaBooks . As George Joseph notes in his chapter on African Literature in Understanding Contemporary Africa , whereas European views of literature stressed

6760-632: The continent nowadays. Literary events seem to be very fashionable, including literary awards , some of which can be distinguished by their original concepts. The case of the Grand Prix of Literary Associations is quite illustrative. Brittle Paper , an online platform founded by Ainehi Edoro , has been described as "Africa's leading literary journal". Bhakti Shringarpure notes that "the dynamic digital impulses of African creativity have not only changed African literature but have also fundamentally altered literary culture as we know it." The increasing use of

6864-567: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

6968-527: The death of Ikemefuna, Okonkwo feels depressed and had occasional nightmares. During a gun salute at Ezeudu's funeral, Okonkwo's gun accidentally explodes and kills Ezeudu's son. He and his family are exiled to Mbanta, his motherland, for seven years in order to appease the gods. While Okonkwo is in Mbanta, he learns that the white men are living in Umuofia with the intent of introducing their religion, Christianity . As

7072-442: The debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe . It portrays the life of Okonkwo, a traditional influential leader of the fictional Igbo clan, Umuofia. He is a feared warrior and a local wrestling champion who opposed colonialism and the early Christian missionaries. Upon publication in 1958 by William Heinemann Ltd , the novel gained positive reviews and has been translated into fifty languages. The novel takes its title from

7176-577: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

7280-455: The end of World War I and independence) increasingly showed themes of liberation , independence, and (among Africans in francophone territories) négritude . One of the leaders of the négritude movement, the poet and eventual president of Senegal , Léopold Sédar Senghor , published in 1948 the first anthology of French-language poetry written by Africans, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française ( Anthology of

7384-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

7488-593: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

7592-519: The first post-independence African writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Previously, Algerian -born Albert Camus had been awarded the prize in 1957. Other African Nobel laureates in literature are Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) in 1988, Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) in 1991, J. M. Coetzee (South Africa) in 2003, Doris Lessing (UK/Zimbabwe) in 2007, and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania) in 2021. In 1991, Ben Okri 's novel The Famished Road won

7696-453: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

7800-579: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

7904-452: The internet has also changed the way readers of African literature access content, which has led to the rise of digital reading and publishing platforms like OkadaBooks . Inaugurated in 1980 and operating until 2009, the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa was presented for outstanding African writers and scholars published in Africa. Things Fall Apart Things Fall Apart is

8008-608: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

8112-599: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

8216-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

8320-424: The leaders of Umuofia with respect, the native "court messengers" humiliates them, doing things such as shaving their heads and whipping them. As a result, the people of Umuofia finally gather for an uprising. Okonkwo, a warrior by nature and adamant about following Umuofian custom and tradition, despises any form of cowardice and advocates war against the white men. When messengers of the white government try to stop

8424-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

8528-400: The meeting, Okonkwo beheads one of them. Because the crowd allows the other messengers to escape and does not fight alongside Okonkwo, he realizes with despair that the people of Umuofia are not going to fight to protect themselves. When the District Commissioner, Gregory Irwin, comes to Okonkwo's house to take him to court, he finds that Okonkwo killed himself because he saw that he was fighting

8632-493: The native languages (namely Fula and Songhai ). Many were written at the famous University of Timbuktu . The material covers a wide array of topics, including astronomy, poetry, law, history, faith, politics, and philosophy. Swahili literature , similarly, draws inspiration from Islamic teachings but developed under indigenous circumstances, one of the most renowned and earliest pieces of Swahili literature being Utendi wa Tambuka or "The Story of Tambuka" (dated 1728). As for

8736-768: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

8840-419: The number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people grows and a new government is introduced. The village is forced to respond with either appeasement or resistance to the imposition of the white people's nascent society. Okonkwo's son Nwoye becomes curious about the missionaries, and after he is beaten by his father for the last time, he decides to leave his family behind to live independently. Nwoke

8944-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

9048-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

9152-601: The radio in the native language Booma. Examples of pre-colonial African literature are numerous. In Ethiopia , there is a substantial literature written in Ge'ez going back at least to the fourth century AD; the best-known work in this tradition is the Kebra Negast , or "Book of Kings." One popular form of traditional African folktale is the "trickster" story, in which a small animal uses its wits to survive encounters with larger creatures. Examples of animal tricksters include Anansi ,

9256-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

9360-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

9464-462: The same way that Americans, Europeans, Asians, and others are people. Although the action of Things Fall Apart takes place in a setting with which most Americans are unfamiliar, the characters are nor-mal people and their events are real human events. The necessity even to say this is part of a burden imposed on us by the customary denigration of Africa in the popular imagination of the West. Historians focuses on past African Empires in order to improve

9568-536: The second and third parts of the novel, leaving only the story of Okonkwo, the main character of the novel. He also restructured and added new chapters and paragraphs until 1957. After he has seen an advertisement in The Spectator , he sent the copies of his handwritten manuscripts to a typing agency in London by ordinary mail. The agency requested a fee of £22, which Achebe sent by British postal order. He heard nothing from

9672-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

9776-556: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

9880-444: The status of African history, but Achebe ignores the pattern by portraying Igbo people as isolated with an established tradition. He cleanses the picture of Africa in order to create a true meaning of the people's dignity. For example, when the missionaries enters Mbanta, they expects a king but seeing none, they set up their ruling system. In Things Fall Apart , there is a contradiction between different cultural practices; for example,

9984-400: The subject of secondary and tertiary analytical works. It has been translated to over 50 languages. Time listed the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 . Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka described Things Fall Apart as "the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of the African character, rather than portraying the African as an exotic, as

10088-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

10192-506: The white man would see him." During the 60th anniversary of the novel, it was read at the South Bank Centre in London on 15 April 2018 by Femi Elufowoju Jr , Adesua Etomi , Lucian Msamati , Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi , Chibundu Onuzo , Ellah Wakatama Allfrey , Ben Okri , and Margaret Busby . On 5 November 2019 BBC News listed Things Fall Apart on its list of the 100 most influential novels . A radio drama called Okonkwo

10296-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

10400-511: Was an important part of Berber traditions when the majority of the population was illiterate. These poems, called Isefra , were used for aspects of both religious and secular life. The religious poems included devotions, prophetic stories, and poems honoring saints. The secular poetry could be about celebrations like births and weddings, or accounts of heroic warriors. As another example, in Mali , oral literature or folktales continue to be broadcast on

10504-589: Was hanged by the Nigerian junta. With liberation and increased literacy since most African nations gained their independence in the 1950s and 1960s, African literature has grown dramatically in quantity and in recognition, with numerous African works appearing in Western academic curricula and on "best of" lists compiled since the end of the 20th century. African writers in this period wrote both in Western languages (notably English , French , and Portuguese ) and in traditional African languages such as Hausa. Ali A. Mazrui and others mention seven conflicts as themes:

10608-541: Was made of the novel in April 1961 by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation . It featured Wole Soyinka in a supporting role. In 1970, the novel was made into a film starring Princess Elizabeth of Toro , Johnny Sekka and Orlando Martins by Francis Oladele and Wolf Schmidt, executive producers Hollywood lawyer Edward Mosk and his wife Fern, who wrote the screenplay. Directed by Jason Pohland. In 1987,

10712-528: Was published in hardback on 17 June 1958 with around 2000 print copies. Although the publishers didn't reedit or copyedited the manuscript, it achieved instant acclaim in the British Nation Press. The Times Literary Supplement said that the novel "genuinely succeeds in presenting tribal life from inside while patterns of feeling and attitudes of mind appear clothed in a distinctive African imagery, written neither up nor down." Time and Tide called it

10816-461: Was stilted, which he connected to the fact that the standard was deliberately created by combining various dialects. In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review , Achebe said, "the novel form seems to go with the English language. There is a problem with the Igbo language. It suffers from a very serious inheritance which it received at the beginning of this century from the Anglican mission. They sent out

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