L’afrique de l’ouest entre colonisation et indépendance: Formation de la nation et genèse du roman

Abstract

Chinua Achebe, from Nigeria, and Ahmadou Kourouma, from Ivory Coast, locate their major novels in temporal breaks which, nevertheless, offer the possibilities of constructing a new discourse on Africa. The main break is the shift from colonialism to independence, from the colonial system to a postcolonial situation. Exiled by the colonial culture and alienated from their ancestral tradition, Achebe and Kourouma claim to reconnect Africa to its cultural heritage and find narrative to be a crucial instrument of reinventing a new community of language and culture. Whereas new nations were built in Africa, Achebe and Kourouma take up a challenge : creating an African novel in spite of the indebtedness of this literary genre to an alien tradition and its absence of a native genealogy. Narrative strategies have to go together with questions of national identity and the African novel must not be a genre in exile.