ABSTRACT
In this chapter I interrogate the creative process of African children’s literature in order to evaluate the invariably complex and ambivalent role by which the African writer endeavors to assist juvenile audiences negotiate colonial and postcolonial conditions. Various factors influence a creative process in which the transposition and/or revival of the African oral tradition and its blending with modern literary strategies has become the dominant creative aesthetic trend. Within a context fraught with cultural tensions such as the African and Western cultural interface, African society expects its writers to engage with the endlessly dynamic and ever complicating African modernity and interpret it for children. Writers therefore aspire to use literature to teach, inform and entertain children relative to the social turbulence of their audience’s world of experience. In order to fully conceptualize such a creative process located in a socio-historically volatile political and cultural context, in which both a multiplicity of scores with imperial centers are still to be settled and intra-postcolony complexities attended to, a multi-theoretical perspective is required. I therefore situate my analysis within Afrocentric and postcolonialist frameworks. I argue that whereas African writers have tended to strategize their social commitment around the aesthetic technique of blending African and Western literary traditions in order to negotiate coloniality and postcoloniality, a multitude of complex questions relating to language of expression, the use of oral literary styles and themes and audience may impede the accomplishment of their purposes. If any success is to be measured, it is limited and paradoxical.
