AFRICAN

WRITERS

oChinua Achebe
oNadine Gordimer
oAlon Paton
oBessie Head

Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinalmg Achebe

16 November 1930 in Ogidi, Anambra State, Nigeria
Worked at David and Marianna Fisher University Professor
and professor of Africana studies Brown University
Nationality: Nigerian
Ethnicity : Igbo
Period: 1958present
Notable work(s) "The African Trilogy": Things Fall Apart, No
Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People and Anthills
of the Savannah

As one of the most discussed African writers of his

generation, Achebe has inspired a substantial body of
criticism and scholarship about his writing and political
stances.
Achebe's inventive usage of Igbo proverbs and folklore in
his novels is the most studied feature of his art. Achebe's
literature also deals with the universal qualities of human
nature.
Achebe's writings have relevance beyond the borders of
Nigeria and beyond the anthropological, sociological, and
political concerns of post-colonial Africa.

Achebe has defined himself as a cultural nationalist with a

revolutionary mission "to help my society regain belief in
itself and put away the complexes of the years of
denigration and self-abasement.
Achebe has been active in Nigerian politics since the
1960s. Many of his novels deal with the social and political
problems facing his country, including the difficulty of the
post-colonial legacy.

CRITICISM
His fiction and criticism display nationalist contestation of
colonialist myths and distortions of Africans and Africa
The gender roles of men and women, as well as societies'
conceptions of the associated concepts, are frequent
themes in Achebe's writing.
Achebe's first central female character in a novel is
Beatrice Nwanyibuife in Anthills of the Savannah.
The Igbo society described by Achebe has definitive and
complex social systems, values and traditions. Achebe
presents customs such as the abandonment of multiple
birth babies, and the sacrifice of human beings as
conventions and not barbaric, inhumane rituals.

Nadine Gordimer

 Born in Springs, South Africa, 20/11/1923

Daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer.
Has lived all her life, and continues to live, in South
Africa.
From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the
white minority increasingly weakened the rights of the
black majority.
1932: at the age of 9, she starts to write.
1939: at the age of fifteen, her first short story is
published in a South African magazine.
1949: "Face to Face", a collection of short stories is
published.
1953: "The Lying Days", her first novel

 She has lived her whole life in the country and coped with
the apartheid set by South African government in 1948
Apartheid literally means separateness and was a
legal system to enforced racial segregation.
It was similar to the racial segregation in America but
much stricter for both sides. The apartheid lasted
until 1993.

 Nadine Gordimer was one of the main writers and public

figures to step out against the apartheid. (one of the
famous post-colonial writer)
She was writing by the age of 9 and published her first
story at age 15.
Her novels and short stories explore the effect of
apartheid on the lives of south Africans.
Novels and collections include the
conservationist (1974), crimes of
conscience (1991),contents and get a life (2005).
Gordimer won the 1991 nobel prize for literature.

Gordimer's post-apartheid work has continued to explore

the difficult issues of a society in transition from a tragic
past to an uncertain future, as well as the sorrows of her
own personal experience.
Her 1998 book, The House Gun, dealt with the increasing
level of violent crime in a newly free South Africa.
She has been a fervent campaigner against racism in
South Africa and has long held an iconic status there as a
champion of tolerance, free speech and understanding. She
has also displayed great conviction and self-belief in
refusing to become an exile, despite the banning of three of
her works by the South African regime.

ALON PATON

Birth:
Alan Stewart Paton ,South African author and antiapartheid activist was born in Pietermaritzburg, Natal
Province. His parents were: James Paton, a civil servant,
and Eunice Warder Paton.

Marriage:
While Paton taught at Ixopo High School, he met Dorrie
Francis Lusted. They married in 1928, and remained
together until her death in 1967. He married his secretary,
Anne Hopkins, in 1969.

Education:
He was educated at Maritzburg College and Natal
University College. As a child, he read Walter Scott,
Charles Dickens and Rupert Brooke.

Career:
He worked as a teacher at the Ixopo High School, and later
at a Pietermaritzburg High School. In 1935, he became the
principal of the Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent urban
African boys near Johannesburg.

Death:
He died of throat cancer on April 12, 1988 at Lintrose,
Botha's Hill in Natal.

CRITICISM
Patons writings focused on political and social criticism.
Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) is a social protest against
the structures of the society that would later give rise to
apartheid. (A system of racial segregation enforced by the
National Party governments of South Africa between 1948 and
1994, under which the rights of the majority non-white
inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white
supremacy and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained.)
During the time in which the novel is set, black workers were
permitted to hold only unskilled jobs and were subject to pass
laws that restricted their freedom of movement. In 1913, the
Natives Land Act radically limited the amount of land that black
South Africans were permitted to own.

In 1948 (four months after the publication of Cry, The

Beloved Country), the National Party gained power and
introduced apartheid. Under apartheid, every South African
was classified according to race, and the Group Areas Act
enforced the physical separation of blacks from whites. Every
aspect of South African life was racially segregated.
According to economist Walter E. Williams, apartheid
"maintained white power by denying political and economic
liberty to black South Africans.After decades of struggle and
bloodshed, the ANC prevailed, and South Africa held its first
free election in 1994.
List of works by Alan Paton:
1955 - The Land and People of South Africa
1956 - South Africa in Transition
1965 - South African Tragedy
1973 - Apartheid and the Archbishop: the Life and Times of
Geoffrey Clayton, Archbishop of Cape Town

BESSIE HEAD

Her real name is Bessie Amelia Emery.

One of Africa's most prominent writers, was born in South
Africa in 1937.
The child of an "illicit" union between a Scottish woman
and a black man, Head was taken from her mother at birth
and raised in a foster home until the age of thirteen.
Attended missionary school and eventually became a
teacher.
1953, passes Junior Certificate exam, chooses teacher
training
1955, finished 2-year teacher training course
a

1956-1958, teaches primary school in Durban

mid-1960 - mid 1961, publishes own newspaper, itThe
Citizimticisen; meets Harold Head
1961, marries Harold Head; the couple live in District Six
1986, died in Sekgoma Memorial Hospital, Serowe,
Botswan

CRITICISM
Head explored the effects of racial and social oppression
and the theme of exile throughout her short fiction.
Another defining subject of Head's short fiction is the
devastating impact Western religion and its monetary-based
economy and culture has had on traditional tribal and
village life in Africa.
Her works deal with issues of discrimination, refugees,
racialism, African history, poverty, and interpersonal
relationships
Head's stories focus on the profound impact of racism on
the people of South Africa.

Her work casts a distinctly feminine perspective on the ills

of societal injustice and the psychological costs of
alienation.
1951 writes a parable, "The Stepping Stones of Truth
1959 April, Bessie moves to Johannesburg, continues to
write for Drum publications, meets many leading figures.
Head's collection of short stories, The Collector of
Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977),
investigates several aspects of African life, especially the
social condition of its women.
The tales are rooted in oral storytelling traditions and in
village folklore and much of the material is derived from
interviews conducted by Head with the villagers of Serowe.

THANK
YOU !