"Once upon a time the continent of Africa hosted the largest reservoir of varieties of unique traditions and rich literature.”

This sentence brings to me a nostalgic memory of the old day’s stories told by our elders.  At the end of each day, it was custom that good stories had to come from grannies or grandpas. 

Riddles, metaphors and oral narrative entertained and informed us of many unknown fairytales, like how a community named rivers, mountains and other landmarks, and why they performed certain practices normally left to nature, like rainmaking.

Although these stories had more about the message than facts, they tried to give reasons for things in life that the community could not really explain. It could be something serious, like what happens when people die, or something less serious like how a leopard got his spots. 

The folklore were drawn from collective wisdom of the forefathers who vividly expressed their structures of meaning, feeling, thought, and expression, and thus served as very important social fabrics.

They were used to pass on knowledge, cultural and social values and collective memory, and played a crucial part in keeping cultures alive.

Young ones were taught manners, customs and were imbued with the attitudes and values basic to their culture. This was through animal stories, in which virtues and vices were attributed to particular species.

Thus, one was then left with no choice but to associate with that character with admirable attributes.

The stories went a long way including proving the significance of rational thinking application rather than use of strength. For instance, the tale about Elephant and Hare demonstrated that "brain is superior to brawn.’’ 

People then grew up as responsible men and women, and all round members of the society.

For instance, our Rwandan culture and oral literature such as folktales and everyday language use such as idioms were used to teach good virtues.

A proverb like ‘Akarênze impinga karushya ihámagara’ was used to warn against speculations or using bad words against someone. It meant that when what is said reaches the top of the hill, it cannot be taken back!

However, with the diminishing practice of all these amongst us, a considerable decline in the transmission of culture from one generation to another is being experienced. 

And, any honest discussion of entire African literature today faces the question of its existence and identity.

It is seriously threatened by rapid rate of urbanisation, large-scale migration, industrialisation and environmental change. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert complex pressures on our rich cultural heritage.

 These pressures have often eroded expressive diversity and transformed our practices through assimilation to more dominant ways of life.

The relatively lower lifespan compared to the yesteryears is another lifestyle change that has impacted negatively on the African literature.

Elders die and livelihoods are disrupted at early age leaving no vehicles for the transmission of unique and indigenous cultural knowledge leading to continuity of oral and written African literature. 

An example is in the book by African Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz, called Children of Gebelawi.

He did not hide the fact that his story was based on oral folktales which he used to listen to when he was young, that is, from ‘professional story tellers who learnt them in cafés or from their fathers.’

Other great authors like Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Ayi Kwei amah and Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, among others, contributed widely to promoting this distinctively African literature through bold, creative infusion of rhetorical, lexical, and metaphoric features from their respective native languages.

Where are the Achebes’ of today? Seemingly, the generation has declined to carry on the legacy of African literature.

I remember words whispered to me by the late Professor Francis Davis Imbuga back then while he was lecturing at KIE, seated in a corner at a small Kimironko pub with a pen and a paper trying to scribble a few lines for his then new book, The Green Cross of Kafira, published in 2013.

"This generation has become ‘allergic’ to writing,” the playwright and literature scholar sadly observed.

True to his words, we are at the edge of losing our rich African literature and something has to be done. 

Majoring in science is more predominant with our universities more than literature and the trend continues to rise across the continent.  

We no longer tell stories to our children and instead stuff them with laptops, ipads and smartphones. Unlike the curiosity we had to hear more of our past, the generation’s attention is fully immersed into the devices.

Though suffering, however, our rich African Literature is far from demise. It continues its existence in a transformed and still recognizable state, the books, archives and from a few remaining scholars we can take the mantle.

Even if it might be almost indelibly altered, we have to carry on the flame!

oscar_kim2000@yahoo.co.uk