Michael Andindilile

The project examines the relationship between English and African indigenous languages in literary discourse. Extending Derek Bickerton’s pioneering study, it argues that the role of English, a former colonial language, serves as an arbiter in the re-imagining of diverse African communities. This Anglophone African literary-linguistic continuum exists in the relationship between literary English and the indigenous languages and cultures that it imaginatively and concretely embodies in traditionally non-native universes of discourse. By acknowledging the local and national peculiarities as well as the effects of English as a shared former colonial language, the study establishes that a continuum extends across the fiction of four of Africa's most prominent Anglophone novelists: Chinua Achebe of Nigeria in West Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya in East Africa, Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, and Nuruddin Farah of Somalia in the Horn of Africa.