ABSTRACT
It was obviously vital
that African should be treated for culture preservation. This research
attempted the exposition of Camara Laye’s The African Child and The
Radiance of the King with a view to appreciate the African Aesthetics in
the novels. Formalism approach is used to critically study the
aesthetics in the selected African novels and we made wide consultation
of books on African aesthetics. We observed that with all rapidly
changing conditions of life today, African aesthetic such as
circumcision, rituals and rites, sacrifices are in a very grave danger
of getting lost forever, unless something is done to redeem this
situation. Aesthetics of any society should not be taken with levity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title page i
Certification ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgement iv
Abstract vi
Table of Contents vii
CHAPTER ONE
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Purpose of the study 6
1.3 Scope and limitation of the study 7
1.4 Justification of the study 7
1.5 Methodology of the study 7
1.6 Structure of thesis 8
CHAPTER TWO
2.1 Literary critic’s view about the author 9
CHAPTER THREE
3.1 Introduction 20
3.2 Ritual of passage in The African Child 20
3.3 Tom-Tom and Rice Harvesting in The African Child 24
3.4 African Totemism in The African Child 25
3.5 Traditional music and dance in The African Child 30
3.6 Respect in The African Child 30
3.7 Traditional Occupation in The African Child 31
3.8 Religion and rituals in The African Child 32
3.9 Traditional occupation in The African Child 33
CHAPTER FOUR
4.1 Cultural Rainbow in The Radiance of the King 35
CHAPTER FIVE
5.1 Introduction 45
5.2 Summary 45
5.3 Findings 45
5.4 Conclusion 47
Bibliography 49
INTRODUCTION
Literature
always depends on human reality, thus all literary works depict human
actual situations. So, Literature is a mirror which reflects man’s
actual life in the society where he is found. Literature also borrows
from history and relies on everyday events. Awotunde (1999:7) asserts
that literary critics, poets, authors and playwrights are engaged in the
process of adapting, inventing and recreating certain life situations
to sustain the make belief and the suspense that are part of the key
ingredients of literature. Literature is characterized by its aesthetics
or pleasure and its edification.
Literature, like all other
art forms, draws on human experience and tries to reflect the same and
communicate it to man in an order and artistic form. It can also imply
an artistic use of word for the sake of art alone. Omotayo Oloruntoba
Oju (1999) observes that
The term literature may be used to
refer to any material in written form or any other material whose
features tend themselves to literary appreciation or appraisal… The term
in a specialized sense refers to work of art in any of the established
literary genres, prose, poetry and drama.
Any
good definition of literature therefore, cannot do without the oral
composition of a community from which the written and established genres
and still emanates according to society changes.
Also, Akande and Ibrahim define Literature as
Any
creative imagination which uses a specialized form of language and
style for effective communication in prose, poetry and drama.
A modern definition of Literature by Terry Eagleton (1973) says:
Literature
is a liberating force, freeing us from inherent shackles placed upon us
by the society. Literary criticism is therefore born out of the
struggle against a loss of culture and its feature becomes defined as a
struggle against the foreseen bourgeois state and it has no
predetermined future.
Aesthetics refers to the
appreciation or appraised of value. Whenever a judgement is made about
the nature, worth or significance of a phenomenon, an aesthetic
appreciation is being made. In a more narrow sense, aesthetics refers to
the philosophical contemplation of a work of art. Thus, a discipline,
aesthetics is concerned with the appropriate modes of evaluation of
works of art. An unending debate in aesthetics is: which aspect of the
object, or phenomenon being evaluated should be assigned a great weight
of appreciation. The two main elements involved in any such appreciation
are the form or appearance of the object or phenomenon on the other
hand. Correspondingly, there are two extreme aesthetic attitudes:
aestheticism and utilitarianism or functionalism.
Africaness
refers to elements in works of art that express themes, ideas or
notions, aesthetic features and objects relating to Africa. Africaness
is predominant in the literature of the diaspora in foreign languages.
Africaness include the deliberate infusion of African linguistic and
non-linguistic elements into literature to give a natural touch. At a
moderate level, such Africaness is seen as representing the African
aesthetic matrix. At the extreme, such Africaness may be an expression
of cultural nationalism. In Literature of Africans in Diaspora,
Africaness takes the form of the theme of the black beauty and of the
African homeland. It is often a romanticization of the African heritage.
According
to Oloruntoba-Oju (1999:213) similarities between African and Caribbean
aesthetics have been demonstrated at various levels because of the
numerous African elements preserved in several sectors of the diaspora.
One thing stands out when one reads a novel by an African on Africa.
It’s the fact that it is dominated by element that reveal not only the
cultural realities of its people but also the peculiarities of the
region the novelists dwells in furthermore, a particular ethnic
community’s belief and practice reflects in its actions and reactions to
issues and life generally.
Therefore, African Aesthetic
seldom appears in literature instead such words such as ‘Negritude’. The
African personality, the African outlook and more recently, the black
aesthetic. The African world views are more common. A large body of
literature has grown up around most of these terms, particularly
‘Negritude’
Susan Vogel from the New York
Centre for African art described an African aesthetic in African work as
having the following characteristics: youthfulness, other African
aesthetics include myth, legend, oral tradition, history, poetry,
folktales, folklores, riddles and jokes, song, performance narrative
etc.
From the above definition, it is clearly seen that
literature and aesthetics has a relationship, since aesthetics also has
it impact on African literature, therefore, these refers to element in
works of art that express theme, and ideas or notions relating to
Africa. In order to examine and know what exactly African literature is,
there are certain things one has to guide against and these according
to Achebe are known as common fallacies which we must avoid. Achebe goes
further to say: (Achebe:13)
The first is to see African
literature as so different and special and so removed from the realm of
other literatures that it can share no common approaches with them.
In
as much as one would not see African literature as different and
special, it is therefore logical to accept the fact that literature,
being a product of human culture, cannot develop in a vacuum, rather it
has to develop in a tradition or traditions.
So the emergence
of the writing culture in Africa and the foreign traditions on the
African literature, no doubt gave birth to the literature of colonial
experience, which eventually turned the Africa literature to a protest
against colonialism and its effects. These were literary works purely
concerned with cultural rehabilitation and thus grew in response to the
cultural values of Africa.
Example of such works include
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine
Drinkard (1952), Peter Abraham Mine boy (1946), Bayo Adebowale’s The
Virgin (1986), Camara Laye’s African Child (1953) and The Radiance of
the King (1954). These are the books written to show case the rich
cultural traditions of the Africans. According to Dada, they were
historical or ethnographical designed to explain African culture to the
foreign reader.
With these, it has become very difficult to
separate African literature from its root because day in day out, the
tradition of the past still continues to wield much influence on African
literature. No doubt then that Ngugi Wa Thiongo asserted in article on
“The African Writer and his Past” that:
The African in spite
of his modernity, has never been wholly severed from the cradle of a
continuous culture from folklore, tales, proverbs, riddles and all oral
components that made him what he is today.
Camara
Laye’s The African Child (1953) and The Radiance of the King (1954) for
example, can be conveniently classified into the volume of contemporary
African writings of the prose traditions, which is fully loaded with
the traditional value of the past.
It is clearly seen that
different scholars have tried to look at what African aesthetics is and
some uses fictional works to show this aesthetics value in his works.
Among this numerous authors, Camara Laye uses virtually all his novels
to portray this concept especially his African Child (1953) and The
Radiance of the King (1954).
Camara Laye as an African writer
uses this two novels to disengage the mind of the westerners who
believed that Africa is cultureless. His African Child (1953) reveals
the peaceful and happy childhood of the boy Laye. He traces the hero’s
life from about the age of six when he attended the Koranic school, the
time he graduated from the technical College to finish his studies in
France. The author laid special emphasis on love, respect and concern
for one another in the village community. He dwells on the communal
nature of African societies in a way to show the European reader that
Africa societies are very different from the individualistic societies
of Europe.
The Radiance of the King (1954) tells a long story
but straight forward story of a while man’s adventure in a particular
corner of Africa. The hero Clarence has gambled all his money among his
fellow Europeans. He owes money to all of them and he is thrown out of
the hotel
because he has no money to pay, therefore, action, it is seen that
Africans are very accommodating and they do not discriminate as the
while does.
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