Literary indigenization in the novels of Nazi Boni, Ahmadou Kourouma and Patrice Nganang

This dissertation discusses the question of indigenization in the Francophone African novel. Analyzing the prose narratives of Nazi Boni, Ahmadou Kourouma and Patrice Nganang it argues that African literature is primarily a creative translation process. Recourse to European languages as media of expressing African imagination and cultures in fictional writing poses problems of intelligibility. Developed to express and reflect Western worldviews and cultural particularities, European languages are used by African writers to convey messages that seem to be at variance with European imagination. Thus, these writers find themselves writing in languages they wish to subvert through the mechanism of indigenization. The first chapter maintains that contemporary African literature is strongly influenced by oral traditions of the past. In other words, African writers tend to transpose the imprint of their cultural backgrounds into "written" literature with the intent of conveying African experience and sensibility. The second chapter focuses on the interface between "oral literature" and "written literature". It maintains that this interplay renders African fiction a literature of hybridity wherein cultural identity is expressed as otherness given that cultural syncretism often gives rise to something different, something new, a new area of negotiation of meaning and self-representation. The focus of the third chapter is an examination of the contemporary African novel as an offshoot of the traditional oral tale. It contends that the folktale is the antecedent of the novel in Africa. The fourth chapter views the Europhone African novel as the product of a creative process of linguistic abrogation and appropriation. African writers resort to various indigenization strategies for the purpose of endowing their texts with aesthetic and semantic value.;The significance of this study resides not only in its raising awareness to the problems that literary indigenization may pose to readers and translators who must be both bilingual and bicultural but also in its contribution to a deeper appreciation of cross-cultural communication, particularly the communicative functions of translation in literature.