ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a great rise in scholarly work on African children’s literature. Finding its roots in folklore and oral tradition, children’s literature in Africa not only promotes literary and cultural appreciation to children and young adults but at the same time development of moral values. This chapter will discuss the rise of African children’s literature as key to African scholarly attention and then further explore how literary perceptions created within children’s psyche or imagination by African children’s literature tend to serve aesthetic purposes, creating tensions with and contradictions to the representations of the figure of the child. There is a troubling inconsistency between, on the one hand, the fictional and scholarly work intent on representing or dismantling former stereotypes in African children’s literature and, on the other, a continuous mis-representation of conditions and social relations in Africa.
