African Literary Topoi in Modern African Texts and the Problematics of Europhone Forms

Abstract

This article treats selected oral poems whose topoi or motifs have transcended time and space to play out themselves in modern African fictions where colonial languages and their consequent habits of thought serve as media of enunciation. Thereafter, it beams attention on African scholars and writers who have attempted, presumably, to translate the oral medium of expression into indigenous and/or colonial written form(s) while maintaining the navel-strings that linked them, through the transfer of topoi and from the local and indigenous language to the Europhone form which, though, has led to international recognition, also serves to affirm a classic consequential illustration of the zero sum game

Keywords

• african oral literature
• african novel
• african poetry
• europhone forms
• topoi