Hidden Literary Gems in Africa: Classic Authors You Should Explore

African Literature embodies souls and ordeals, sounds and poetry, elegy and panegyrics. However, some souls for their immense contributions to the body of this divine-like artistry. Exploring varied themes, from the rural imaginings to the concerns of metropolitan demands that spread thin, the agency of an individual, who grinds and fights unending battles at multiple fronts in hope and hopelessness, in triumphs and scars, in trials and remedies. This article shall explore the depths of African muses and stories from special authors with corporeal despairs and inherent beauty. 

1. Amos Tutuola 

Amos Tutuola

Amos was a Nigerian author with Egbá roots, a historical and significant Yoruba tribe. His grandfather was the Odafin, who is also known as the lawgiver of the Egbá land. Although Amos’ parents were Christians, and as a product of his environment or prevailing circumstances in a town that was more traditionally aligned, he honed his muse in storytelling skill in folklore literature of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town (published in 1952). The book was highly praised and well-received in the U.S. by elite poets such as Dylan Thomas and Taban Lo Liyong. In this work, known as his magnum opus, he went on a mythical journey to revive a dead palm wine “tapster” to bring back the dying traditions of Africa. In some way, this brought Africanism to the crux of the novel. Although it was the first African Novel to be internationally published in English, beyond that, its thorn-ed and folklore narrative unveiled a magic that had yet to be discovered by the outer world that was oblivious to Africa’s mythical artistry. 

2. Bessie Head

Bessie Head

Bessie Head is known as Botswana’s most influential writer. She was born into what anyone would describe as twin-parallel worlds. The black father and a white mother, when racial tensions were prevalent, when colonialism was still deeply entrenched in Africa’s problems. Bessie lived but had to bear insufferable existential crises from birth to death. At her birth, she was first adopted by a white community and later given back to the local government because her color became more obvious as she grew. She was then kept by a strict stepmother who deeply resented her, so she could only find her resolve and peace in books and intellectual pursuits. Her life was topsy-turvy — in a way, she told her story through her book,  A Question of Power. A book that hosts a compendium of delirium and paranoia of an imaginary figure and an erratic relationship with men and her identity. She followed a similar thematic preoccupation of autobiographical explorations in her other books, like Maru and When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) were deeply introspective and womanistic in their narratives and despairs. 

3. Buchi Emecheta 

Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta was an Igbo novelist and a woman who wrote and weaved herself into her stories, especially in her highly acclaimed novel, The Second Class Citizen. Much of her personal life is written; the aggressive predilections of her husband and his narcissism hinge on her waylaid spirit. In her general works, she permeates between a disadvantaged girl-child, an educated and repressed wife, a body that endured pleasure and pain, and a mother who suffered as a badge of destiny and her death was a lived pathos and slow atrophy, inevitable entropy, and final decay, even though her ideas burned bright and altered the course of repressed voices in African literature, especially for women. Since her parents died early, she resorted to literature. This was targeted by her husband, who once burned a book she had to rewrite it years later, The Bride Price.  Other works, such as The Joys of Motherhood, The Slave Girl, In the Ditch, and others, combine the themes that haunted her into the allure of hope and the fatality of existential despair. 

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher was a Nigerian Igbo poet who went to war with his poems. Not in a literal sense but in an existential sense, he breathed his last breath through his poem Elegy for Alto, where he pleaded for the earth to “unbind him” and used other symbolic words such as the stars, and other expressions as the prodigal. He was groomed by the intellectual family circles around him, especially by his brother Pius Okigbo, who was an accomplished economist. Okigbo was a profound poet and had been accused of pursuing a Eurocentric style that obscures the simplicity of African poems, but this also coincides with his stance on the banality of negritude or the futile call for pride in inherent blackness when they hold no existential weight. One cannot, however, oversimplify the whole thing for a poet who, despite his Christian upbringing, inherited his maternal grandfathers’s deity and worshiped it. This is evocative in the Heaven’s Gates poem where he says, “Before you mother Idoto,/ Naked I stand / Before your watery presence.” Although he tragically died while fighting for Biafrans' emancipation from Nigeria, his spirit in the poems embodied the mind of a warrior who was one with the gods and ancestors. 

Marima Ba

Marima Ba

Marima Ba was a Senegalese author born in Dakar and raised as a Muslim. Her grandparents disapproved of her education beyond primary school, but her father’s insistence allowed her to excel academically.  Her work, Une si longue lettre, translated as So Long A Letter, was an epistolary that caught the wind of prominence by its profound quality and pull that told the story of a woman who was coerced to grovel before the conditions of patriarchal norms that treated women as chattels and regarded their contributions as nothing – for the main character, Ramoutulaye. It tells of a writer of the letter, a widow writing to her friend who lived in the United States and had a husband that just died. She told her story of how circumstances and conventions forced her to serve the mourners and well-wishers of her husband, who married a second wife after twenty-five years and discarded her in the wind. While his second wife benefits from the gifts of the mourners, she suffers this amidst other imbroglios. Her work spans themes of loneliness, forced submission, discriminatory culture, and the struggles of women and their agency. Her other book, Scarlet Song, brooded upon the need for women to collaboratively support themselves so they are not perpetually deemed the “weaker sex.” This highlights her passion and thoughts shaped by the turbulent life of love and the lived experience of injustices. 

This list of authors projects different motivations onto their works. They are not well pronounced or known in the literary world, the worlds they’ve created with words bleed fecundity and velocity of experiences. They have also influenced other writers, an example is the correlation between Amos Tutuola’s works to D. O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons or Wole Soyinka’s Dance of the Forests. Reading them with an open mind would unveil the underpinnings, the societal concerns that guide the affairs of the state without consent by the minority, or perhaps, the myths that preserve our identity or the ancestors we remain true to as offspring of African Literature.