Abstract: | It is absurd to assume that colonialism and its effects is the continuing dynamic behind African literature. The basic tension at the heart of African literature is in fact a paradox: a westernised African elite has mastered modern printed writing, which is a foreign technology, and uses it to proclaim the value and nature of African culture, although it is often foreign to or only partly at home with such traditions. The writer himself as part of the western educated elite is separate from the masses he claims to represent. Discussions of dominant myths and recurrent patterns in African literature, and the continuing search for an African aesthetic, with each new generation and ideology attempting to create an aesthetic of authenticity, imitating something which it claims to be traditional and more African than the literary forms used by previous generations. French abstract. |