Prospective Commitment in African Literature

Abstract

African literature’s close, even organic link with the society that generates it settles a pathfinder role on that literature: Africa goes where its literature takes it. This fact does not seem to have been the object of enough awareness on the part of the writers themselves as they have tended to construe their role mainly in terms of rescuing their past from oblivion and/or denigration. And yet a more urgent mission awaits them: that of providers of constructive alternatives susceptible not only of cleansing the continent’s image but even more importantly of moving the society forward in the right direction. Retrospection in the service of prospection ought to be the new creative order.