Bernth Lindfors

Dennis Brutus in the dock

ABSTRACT An account of the testimony of Dennis Brutus in court in South Africa.

Ira Aldridge's Africanness

Abstract Ira Aldridge, the African American actor popularly known as the ‘African Roscius’, was one of the greatest thespians of his day. No other performer in the nineteenth century won so many prestigious international awards and honours. No other toured so widely, enacting the plays of Shakespeare throughout Europe and as far East as Constantinople, Moscow, Kiev and St.Petersburg. Yet even after establishing his reputation in every corner of the British Isles and in many of the major cities on the Continent, Aldridge was seldom invited to perform in London, and he never returned to the United States to perform on the American stage.

African literature criticism and the post‐colonial curriculum

Summary Who are the most important black authors in anglophone Africa and which are their most significant writings? One way of answering such questions is to examine which authors literary critics choose to write about and which texts teachers of literature choose to teach. Since those who are professionally engaged in interpreting African literatures discriminate when selecting what to comment on, a canon (or canons) can be said to exist. This paper seeks to identify canonical authors and canonical texts by employing statistical methods based on empirical research in Africa and the West. The results are presented comparatively and diachronically.

Additions and Corrections to Chris Dunton's "A Bibliographic Listing of Nigerian Plays in English: 1956-1992":

Chris Dunton has performed a valuable service in documenting the existence in print of 314 Nigerian plays in English (see JCL, 29, 1 [1994], 103-113), a bibliographical feat never before attempted. Given the difficulties of collecting such data, it is not surprising that he missed a number of titles, nearly all of which were published by small presses in Nigeria. To supplement his pioneering effort, I am recording here 75 additional plays, including a few that appeared in 1994 and 1995 as well as a few that were published before 1956. Numbering takes up where he left off. Except for Alex Obiorah Okeke’s I’ll Rather Break My Sword and Die (item 143), Dunton deliberately &dquo;omitted titles that have been categorized elsewhere (for example, in Obiechina) as Onitsha pamphlets, since these

Africa: Western (1978-81:

The bibliography by Dan Britz covers materials published between 1978 and 1981 so this may be an appropriate moment to make a few retrospective remarks as well as to call attention to significant recent developments. Certainly the most striking feature of the bibliography is its extensive list of critical books and essays eloquent evidence not only of the growth of scholarly interest in African literature but also of

Amos Tutuola and D. O. Fagunwa

When Amos Tutuolas first book, The Paltl/-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads tw« was published by Faber in 1952., it set the London literary establishment on its ear. No one had ever seen a book quite like it before, and critics were disarmed as much by its exotic subject matter (a round-trip journey from the land of the living through an African spirit world to the land of the dead) as by its comically fractured English. As the Times Literary Supplement pointed out some years later, the book became a literary sensation because