Voices from Twentieth-Century Africa Griots and Towncries Chinweizu

This challenging anthology redraws the map of African literature in an even-handed treatment of its traditions: the popular and academic, the oral and the written, the folk and the elite; and we find both literature translated from indigenous African languages, and literature composed in the languages of Africa's alien conquerors.

There are short stories, extracts from novels and epics, fables, parables, songs, satires, dirges, boasts, laments, and epigrams. As to subject, it takes in all the diverse facets of African life: love, hate, war, affairs of state; Africa's flora and fauna; religion, death, birth, marriage and natural disasters.