 and I'm sorry that I probably bored half your audience to death no it's good sorry reading the warriors it's good it's good to learn about these things back to another video and I'm here because we have a special guest hello my name is Brennan I'm Laura's husband here's my husband yay so as you can probably tell by the title of this video we are gonna talk about African literature yeah so Brennan why are you in this video well so I was born in Nigeria just Nigeria to be specific and I moved to America when I was 13 West Africa in particular has a very meaningful history to me and I think that African literature is too often ignored and that should be fixed I completely agree especially with February being Black History Month we want to celebrate it not just with Valentine's Day or extend Valentine's Day to show the love to all people all cultures all backgrounds etc and so forth so and it's a conversation we should be having more than just on February definitely definitely and that's why this video is coming out at the end of February so that we can see it at the end of February and continue to think about it through March and hopefully April and honestly hopefully just through the rest of the year yeah so let's get started tell us about literature in Africa the history of it where it comes from where it's at today give us a brief overview of the yeah so a few caveats here before I begin firstly I'm not an expert I'm just a college student so I know a few things but not everything secondly I'm going to be speaking in generalities here Africa is not a country it is a diverse continent full of different regions different climates different people groups different languages in Nigeria alone where I was born over 400 languages are spoken so spread that out across the continent yeah if you know me and if you've seen my video booktube about me if you haven't seen it I'll link it up top here and also in the video description below I talk about the importance of translation and the importance of translating books and so just hearing like how many different languages can be spoken in one country out of an entire continent it blows my mind and so I think it's very important for us to learn about it and to also think about translating these books so that we can read all of the knowledge through creativity and all these different things that could come out of Africa just like we do with other countries so today what I want to talk about is um African history and and its literature so we when we read western texts um we already have the connotations and the history and the knowledge the cultural knowledge to understand the tropes but with Africa we have because of colonialism and uh other reasons we have uh we're very unfamiliar with the histories and the African um storytelling and its tropes so I'm just going to give a quick overview of um some African uh storytelling methods and some uh tropes Africans are rich storytellers um before colonialism they had a long oral tradition um with a lot of gods um lots of storytelling moral storytelling so stories that would tell lessons that would pass on lessons to the next generation um oftentimes uh anthropologists would look at these stories and um authors would look at these stories with disregard because they weren't written down um but through these stories they're incredibly important because through these stories we've been able to learn a lot of ancient history if you look at the Bantu migration we've been able to piece together the movements of um entire population group over 5 000 years ago um based solely on stories um and that that's frankly incredible passed down from generation to generation and these stories are incredibly creative um please look for like Ashanti the trickster spider um I grew up on stories of how he would outwit people um and and there are just numerous numerous tales um though this again um not every part of Africa follows this trajectory um Egypt for example uh was one of the first um uh areas to ever have written a language um uh in the form of hieroglyphics uh and Ethiopia has a long literary tradition um checkouts uh Zera Yocab um he he was in the he was a theologian in the 1600s who um predated Descartes um with ideas of uh think I think therefore I am and uh beautiful ideas of uh and reasonings for uh faith and why we we must believe in um God while still being incredibly progressive he argued against polygamy um as well as uh other um accepted practices of the time um unfortunately then we come to a rather terrible part of African history that has really shaped what African literature is today you can't understand African literature unfortunately without understanding colonialism and imperialism colonialism took away um many of the storytellers took away a lot of freedom from Africans and two stories emerged out of colonialism one coming from the white man and the other coming from uh the agency of African actors fighting to express their own narrative and um bring freedom to their people so the uh white man's story uh was often tied in self-interest um and economic interest it argued that um they were liberators they came to Africa as heroes so you'll see a lot of these um authors like Cecil Rhodes um and even the more considered progressive authors like Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness still use Africans as a foil um and as props for their own stories and so uh we see this archetype of the um at either the white savior or the a big white hunter yeah i remember reading Heart of Darkness in high school and just the way that the natives in Africa were painted they was they're savages they don't know how to live life they can't do anything without the white man and oh i just hated reading it it's a terrible book well it it was good at recognizing that we are all kind of a little bit insane but it used Africans as the point and case of look at Africans they're so primal wait a second i'm primal too my god and Joseph Conrad does a good job of that and he's one of the first authors to also recognize he has a chapter in there where he talks about just how bad it is in the Congo for Africans but and that's one of the first times that a white author is like hey maybe we shouldn't be beating slaves and African senseless um just a suggestion but still white authors of colonial periods were still very much tied to their ideas of uh self grandeur and self importance but then we see African resistance so we see authors like Kwame Nukrumah, Franz Fanon um and they create a pan-African literature and an anti-colonial literature that takes um ancient African storytelling and unites it with uh modern literature but then we see African resistance Africans take the tools provided by western education and turn it against their colonial oppressors so Kwame Nukrumah and like Franz Fanon they write prolifically and brilliantly um and form a pan-African movement calling for independence and um calling for the abolishment of colonialism and this is where this time period um around independence and after independence is we where we see some of the most brilliant um African lines at work this is where we get Chinua Chebe and I know many of you probably recognize that name from Things Fall Apart but I highly encourage you to check out his other works including his poetry and also check out his daughter as well she is a professor at the um Michigan State uh where she uh is a expert at um uh African queer identity and exploring that area and you actually got to meet her I did I was it was very interesting he totally fangirled it was great I got I got her signature on um my copy of Things Fall Apart wait you mean my copy of Things Fall Apart our copy of Things Fall Apart guys I have a exciting book yeah yeah no but definitely do check her out I didn't even realize so then so with with these movements of um anti-colonialism you see these really powerful books um but then we and these um books come in tandem with um outside help um such as Malcolm X we have a book we have a book um this this is more of an educational book so I don't know how how many of you will be interested in it there will be more other books later on in the video Laura Laura takes it back takes it back to more fun books I'm a little bit more of a heady uh kind of academic he's an intellectual reader I'm a creativity reader we have discussed both are good I do enjoy a good fun read every once in a while just true but this one so this book um Black Star Crescent Moon um analyzes um the alliance between third world countries thank you third world countries and muslim countries uh so uh Kwame Nkrumah and like Malcolm X meet together and talk about uh alliance scenes and um allyship uh with each other um and so this this documents some of that history um unfortunately as the years go on in the 1980s 1990s we see neoliberalism rise and structural adjustment occur um and so what this does is it's um at home in the U.S. the back to Africa movement um was suppressed by the CIA and FBI who were afraid that the Black Panthers um and Black uh pride um and oppressed local leaders and in um Africa neoliberalism and structural readjustment um hindered African expression in literature and forced it into more of a commodity-based economic situation um so all those dreams um of uh independent Africa and Pan Africa um were slowly crushed under debt and um structural adjustment um so where does that leave us with African literature today so now it's I'm actually fairly optimistic about African literature um because I'm seeing uh revival of um creativity um and I'm what we're seeing is a bottom up movement of authors um and people are becoming more interested in um Africa and African stories which they should because Africa tells a unique story it's one of the story oh it Africa has such beautiful people um their stories come from a place of pain but they're still able to express and experience such creativity and joy so there are there are a couple books that Laura has read um yes that so I may have talked about these books a little bit before my channel but just in case you haven't heard of them one that I recently read is a song of massive ruins and this is by Rosanne A Brown she immigrated from Ghana and so there's a lot of West African kind of Ghanaian mythology in this book this book is about a competition so it follows two different main characters one is the princess and the other is a boy who is an immigrant and he has two sisters and one sister ends up being taken by a deity and he needs to get her back and the way that he does this is by killing the princess and the only way that he can kill the princess is by getting close to her through competition and the competition is all about different contestants represent their deity and whoever wins that deity gets to be like the ruler of the next year so whether it's the sun or the water or life all different kinds and so it's about his journey trying to get with the princess and the princess kind of sitting there like I also may need to kill someone we'll see um so it's a very fun competition book with West African mythology and then another book that I want to quick talk about that I've also read are the Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adayemi there are actually two books out so far a third one is coming out soon and I'm so excited oh my word I love both of the first two books um again she so she is actually from Nigeria as well represent and um but they always refer to Nigeria as Orisha so Children of Blood and Bone is about so there are some people with magic and you tell if they have magic if your hair is white and you're called a magi but not everybody has magic and so the royal family was super afraid of all those with magic and so they decided to oppress them and be jerks and not treat them equally so sad and so it is about the main character and her brother who go on a quest to try and bring back magic so that they can take back their rightful place within the kingdom and live in harmony with those without magic rather than try and retake the land which I thought was really cool so if I may interrupt you of course so the both of these books you can read on your own and they're still really enjoyable really fun but if you learn about the history of Nigeria or learn about the history of Ghana um and its mythology it it unlocks like another level they're like easter eggs um like when I watch Black Panther I would be like oh oh oh that's can't take clock can't take clock and like or or I'd see something that just get me excited because uh it's a little nod to something and it helps you understand the book better as well because you're understanding the culture where it comes from so Brennan actually has another book that he's going to talk to us about this is a book that neither of us have read but we both have on our tbrs we're super excited to read it so this is called Homegoing by Yaggyasi it starts in the 18th century in Ghana with two sisters one is uh taken and is married to an Englishman and while the other is taken in a raid and sold into slavery and shipped off so I'm particularly excited for this book because it analyzes and kind of puts into story um the sort of historical and generational impacts of slavery um I actually got to visit Elmina castle um and got to see uh where um thousands of thousands of slaves were sold and it's a very humbling and humbling experience um and I think this book is going to be really it's going to be a tear trip oh for sure it's going to be one heck of a tear trip um and it's not that long of a book either no like it's really only not even 300 pages and it's recommended by npr so yeah it's got a lot of different endorsements here on the back and on the front so we're really excited for this one and I'm sorry that I probably bored half your audience to death no it's good it's good it's good to learn about these things thank you guys so much for joining us on this history lesson as well as book recommendation um if you have any questions either for Brennan or for me or both of us either about history or african literature even the books that we mentioned comment them down below we'll get back to you on that give this video a thumbs up if you want more videos like it talking about like the history of literature or just giving more specific recommendations about african authors and not as well as african american authors that will be coming up in another video soon as well we'll talk about some african american literature woot woot um and if you're from like east africa south africa central africa north africa anywhere but west africa anywhere but even west africa i'd like to meet a friend yeah feel free to put down a book recommendation i've been meaning to expand and we'll just we'll find an author and we'll just read all of their books but yeah no just seriously guys put things down below any kind of question comment recommendations and uh we hope that you have a wonderful rest of february and until we see you guys in the next video we both wish wish you a happy reading