1. Introduction 2. Language and education in Africa under mission and colonial influence 3. Language choices in independent African states 4. Opportunities for policy change: ideas, materials, and advocacy networks 5. Incentives for policy change: ruler strategies for maintaining power 6. Language, education, and 'democratization' in Cameroon 7. Language and contention - violence and participation in contemporary African politics 8. Conclusion Appendix A Appendix B.

State-Building and Multilingual Education in Africa

Is it possible to speak of island literatures in global, comparative terms? Are geography and colonial history both so influential that we can say that they have produced an identifiable body of postcolonial island literatures? This chapter explores methodologies for comparing island writing by turning to contemporary literature in English from the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific archipelagoes, foregrounding the important contributions made by island writers to postcolonial discourse and literature. Although one might arguably define every land mass on the globe as an island, this chapter focuses on the literary production of former European colonies in the global south, particularly tropical islands with plantation, diaspora and creolization histories, as well as indigenous literatures in white settler nations. Although the concerns explored here are not restricted to island contexts, this chapter suggests that the collusion of geography and history has made these particular issues more prevalent in contemporary island writing than in other bodies of postcolonial literature. Colonial narratives and the tourist industry have long depicted island space as remote, isolated and peripheral to modernity. Yet island writers have demonstrated the ways in which centuries of transoceanic diaspora and settlement have rendered island spaces as vital and dynamic loci of cultural and material exchange. Contrary to the assumption that the privileged sites of history and modernity are continental (or generated from the British archipelago), many scholars have demonstrated that tropical islands and peoples were integral to the development of anthropology, botany, environmentalism, plantation capitalism, nuclear weapons and even the English novel.

Island writing, Creole cultures

In his landmark study in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson opens what has become a continuous debate on the idea of the nation and nationalism by defin? ing the nation as "an imagined political community?and imagined as both inherentiy limited and sovereign" (15). He explains: "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation never know most of their

The Nation as a Contested Construct

Introduction There was a knock on the door. I haven’t done this to you too often, have I, Ganapathi? Stretching the limits of coincidence unacceptably far? I mean, it’s not always in this narrative that a character has said, ‘It would be really convenient if the sky were to fall on us right now’ – and the sky has fallen on the next page. Fair enough? So do you think you can excuse me now if a sweat-stained despatch-rider bursts into the room and announces that Manimir has been invaded by Karnistani troops? Since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) South Asian postcolonial literature in English has not merely become a major publishing success, but it has also acquired the hallmark of academic respectability owing to its exuberant intertextual playfulness, self-reflexive toying with the narrator–reader relation, its sheer inventiveness and expansive magic realist fabulation. Two labels helped to place Rushdie and his followers like Shashi Tharoor, Sunetra Gupta or Arundhati Roy among the literary elite: the affinity to the already canonized magic realism of South American provenance (Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes) and the postmodernist narrative techniques employed by Rushdie and others (selfreflexivity, parody, extensive use of analepsis, metalepsis and paralipsis, montage, subversion of ontological distinctions, metafiction). In fact, in hindsight, Rushdie’s (and Tharoor’s) works can now, more specifically, be categorized as historiographical metafictions, a prominent subcategory of postmodernist writing.

The narrative forms of postcolonial fiction

Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Edouard Glissant are three creative thinkers who share something of a common Weltanschauung . Without taking the more extreme definition from Freud that the latter is the unified solution as generated from a particular perspective of all the problems of the universe, certainly the centrality of the colonial encounter with otherness forms the overt structuring factor for the worldview of each of these formidable intellectuals. However, their creative paths would take different form. The themes that stage the encounter and the timbre of the voice of otherness in the texts of these intellectuals prove to be quite different in each case. In this chapter I will consider the oeuvre of these thinkers as together forming an aesthetic corpus that anticipates the transnational aspirations of a range of postcolonial francophone writers of encounter. A defining moment: literary history and the theme of encounter In considering this material historically I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s idea that: Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking crystallizes into a monad… In this structure [the historicist materialist] recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.

Fanon, Memmi, Glissant and postcolonial writing

Independence generated the promise of a better future for the ethnically diverse populations of African countries, but during the past thirty years economic and political crises have called into question the legitimacy of speaking about nationhood in Africa. Richard Bjornson argues here that a national consciousness can indeed be seen in the shared systems of references made possible by the emergence of literate cultures. By tracing the evolution of literate culture in Cameroon from the colonial period to the present and by examining a broad spectrum of writing in its social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, Bjornson shows how the concepts of freedom and identity have become the dominant concerns of the country's writers, and he relates those themes to the history of Cameroon's as a complex modern state. Bjornson also analyzes in detail works by writers such as Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, Marcien Towa, Guillaume Oyono-Mbia, Rene Philombe, and Francis Bebey."

Richard Bjornson

Papers

The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience