Overview

Francophone Africa south of the Sahara includes some seventeen different countries and stretches across almost a thousand miles of territory from the desert landscapes of Mauritania in the north-west to the equatorial forests of Congo in the south. Such diversity in climate, landscape, population and traditions argues against any attempt to present the region as a single unit when considering its literature. Even when approached as individual countries each with a supposedly ‘national’ literature, the question of diversity remains problematic. The countries granted independence by France or Belgium from the late 1950s onwards exist within boundaries that often reflect arbitrary colonial administrative habits and ignore pre-colonial patterns of tribal settlement. The border between francophone Togo and anglophone Ghana, for example, traverses the territories inhabited by Ewe-speaking tribes splitting communities down the middle. So in many cases the notion of nationhood began as an aspirational label rather than as an accurate description of any underlying political unity. Moreover, the linguistic, ethnic and tribal diversity that exists within national boundaries has proved to be one of the key reasons why French has continued to enjoy such a prominent role as the official language of government, the judicial system and education. In many countries no single African language is spoken by sufficient numbers of people to allow it to serve as the national language, but even where dominant African languages exist, promoting any one of these to the status of national language could be seen as politically divisive since it could appear to be a way of promoting the interests of a particular tribe to the detriment of others.