Catalysts of change: Foreignness and supernaturalism in African literatur

Scholarly engagement and deliberations on African cultures, exemplified best perhaps by Robin Horton's Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (1993), have often represented African social systems as impervious to universal changes which have been unfolding worldwide. This dissertation explores the depiction of foreigners and supernaturalism in contemporary writing as forces that promote change in modern Africa.;The works I examine include Daniel Fagunwa's The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1939), Birago Diop's "Maman Caiman" and "Sarzan" (1947), Wole Soyinka's The Road (1965), Daniel Biebuyck's The Epic of Mwindo (1969), and Nega Mezlekia's The God who Begat a Jackal (2002). Through detailed analyses of these texts that comprise epics, neo-traditional tales, a novel and a play, I argue that African literature presents an alternative model in which exposure to foreign influence and to disruptive manifestations of the supernatural is constitutive of everyday life and suggestive of receptivity to the new.;The narratives informing this argument were published at different historical moments, and for this reason respond to formal and thematic preoccupations in African literature differently. They are also selected from different geographic spaces in Africa: West Africa, Central Africa and East Africa. Despite the diachronic and geographic factors separating them, each of these narratives engages the encounters discussed in this dissertation, and this indicates that social change is a classic theme in African literature.;Drawing from postmodernist theories of "bricolage", creolization and hybridity and other conceptualizations of culture as a living organism, I examine these literary works in light of current interplays of modern economic processes and practices of the occult in modern Africa.;The formal depictions of encounter with the foreigner in these texts and of characters' engagement with the supernatural suggest that the influence of the foreigner on the characters and cultures is more consequential than the interactions with the supernatural. Through these narratives, I argue, modern African literature mirrors the cultural transformation unfolding in contemporary African communities.