Any study of Kiswahili prose fiction shows that there is a wide spread portrayal of conflicts existing between the traditional and the modern culture in the East African societies. This thesis looks at the portrayal of these conflicts in the novels of Euphrase Kezilahabi, who is one of the most prominent contemporary Swahili fiction writers. In the thesis I have studied Kezilahabi's novels from a story structuralist point of view and a more stylistic point of view. In this case I was able to combine both the traditional literary analysis of plot, theme, character and language with more sophisticated approaches as well as with computational linguistic techniques. The whole thesis has eight chapters. The first chapter, which is the introduction, looks at how prose fiction has been used in many parts of the world to portray the social problems of societies at particular historical moments. Attention is paid to Commonwealth and African Literature as well as Swahili Literature. The second chapter is a structural approach to the content and meaning of Kezilahabi's novels. It is from this study that the underlying theme is perceived, characters and other minor themes identified. The relationship between characters and their place and role in the development of the story has been discussed in chapter three. This chapter also looks at the characters' contribution to the themes and their relationship with the semantic structure. In chapter four, the themes identified in the discussion above were then looked at in detail independently and in relation to themselves, the characters and the development of the story. Kezilahabi's use of language and imagery seemed to be very important in the study of his work. Chapter five dealt with his use of imagery and compared his story structure with that of folk tales in an attempt to see if he was influenced by the oral tradition. A computational analysis of the verbs he uses is done in chapter six while other grammatical devices like time relaters, place definers and connectives are discussed in detail in chapter seven. Chapter eight, which is the concluding chapter, discusses Kezilahabi's fourth novel in relation to the issues highlighted in the thesis.

Since its launch in 1962, Heinemann Educational Books' African Writers Series has played a crucial role in the dissemination of African literature worldwide, and contributed to the creation of critical awareness among readers and critics of its distinct qualities and values. While the creative works of celebrated African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have enjoyed a wide popularity, and elicited an important amount of critical attention, the role of HEB in promoting the literary careers of a whole generation of African writers has rarely been discussed and analysed.

Representations of domestic slavery and the trans-Saharan and transatlantic systems of the slave trade in Francophone West African literature incorporate remembering and forgetting through oral, corporeal and spatial narratives. With respect to the oral epic and the postcolonial novel, this thesis approaches the paucity of literature on slavery and the slave trade from the perspective of cultural memory and trauma theory. Through the presence of the slave voice in the West African oral epics of Segou, Macina, and the Songhay Empire and the use of this genre in the novels of Aminata Sow Fall and Yambo Ouologuem, this thesis explores the notion of the manipulation of oral memory through omission, invention, and fictionalisation, and examines the marginalisation of the slave past and the reclaiming of this record via an alternative slave narrative within the novel. Corporeal narratives of slavery and the slave trade in the novels of Timité Bassori, Ibrahima Ly, Yambo Ouologuem and Ali Zada depict the body both as a site and a memory of slavery. Through the body, slavery is re-enacted by the repetition of the corporeal wound as a manifestation of the physiological and psychological trauma of slavery, and the transmission of that memory through the reproductive capacity of the female body. The novels of M’Barek Ould Beyrouk and Ahmed Yedaly interrogate the concept of ex-slavery in the Sahara with reference to Mauritania, whilst Kangni Alem and Tierno Monénembo navigate transatlantic notions of departure and return within the context of Brazil, specifically Salvador de Bahia. By examining slavery from a geographical perspective, these authors highlight the significance of spatial remembering within a trans-Saharan and transatlantic memory of slavery and the slave trade.

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This thesis proposes an investigation of ethical issues within what I have termed 'hectorosexist' frameworks, which it asserts to be a prevalent global discourse in contemporary theory and practice in translation particularly in the English-speaking world. The research aims to investigate the theoretical and practical implications of issues around the subject locations of writers and translators as readers and writers in historical contexts. The thesis asserts that the wider context of culture, economics, politics and societal development impact on the translation process in general. The study seeks to ascertain how much is lost or gained through the subject location of translators and that of culture through texts and readers (Bhabha, 1994). This is done through a comparative study, analysis and re-translations of selected sections of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's, Matigari Ma Njirũũngi (1987) translated as Matigari (1989) and Caitani Mũtharabaini (1980), translated as Devil on the cross (1980). The thesis will conclude with a synthesis of the comparative studies and the impact of any shifts on the culture and subjects. It will ascertain whether translation can enable the relocation or re(dis)covery of 'hidden', 'lost', 'forgotten' or 'new' 'cultures' in narratives including such shifts, and indeed the 'migration' of the 'subjects' of writers, readers, and translators (Boyce-Davies, 1994).

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The thesis is a study in the poetics of the semi-oral, semi-written genre ofYoruba (WesternNigeria) written and radio poetry, encompassing the poetics of being poet and the poetics of being audience. Ewi emerges as a cultural practice that is discursively constituted by its practitioners. Its shared aesthetics is fonnulated around a cluster of concepts in which the "good" and the "beautiful" are intertwined. The study of the poetics of being poet highlights the imagination of ''-poetic beingness", of the art of poetry, and explores how poets create artful texts that are, through a poetics of addressivity, transposed into addressed utterances that provide inhabitable spaces for the reading and listening audience. Being audience of ewi is a generic fonn of cultural practice, reflected in shared ways of engaging with ewi as text, which encompasses strategies of focusing and expanding in making meaning out of poetry, moves of appropriating and re-employing ewi for own uses. The study of the text-ness of ewi epitomizes its being grounded in a poetics of "interface", in which its practitioners draw on all available, intersecting literary and non-literary sources, which they put to creative uses.

Issues of ethnicity and gender, neglected in the discourse of South Africa's national liberation struggle, manifest themselves as problems in a variety of cultural expressions. These I examine in David's Story, a fictional representation of the period of transition from apartheid to democracy, as well as in two critical essays which I published some years before. In 'Identity and Shame: the case of the coloured in South Africa', the textual construction, ethnographic self-fashioning and political behaviour of Cape coloureds are discussed through the modalities of space and the body. Using examples from a number of literary texts as well as the case of Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, I show how shame is imbricated in coloured ethnic identity, and how it constitutes a problem of representation. The failure, in coloured terms, of the grand narrative of liberation demands an interrogation of orthodox postcolonial theories of hybridity and the politics of location. The enquiry into identity necessarily intersects with gender. In 'To hear the variety of discourses', I question the notion of 'womanism' that is posited against the perceived inappropriateness of western feminist theories in the South African context. Textual analysis of Black women's writing shows how women have developed strategies for dealing covertly with gender issues that the dominant liberation discourse has disparaged in the interests of racial liberation. Whilst fiction is not simply a vehicle for expounding cultural theories, issues like gender struggles, the silencing of women, nationalism, and questions of shame and ethnicity are addressed in my novel, whether thematically or in terms of its structure and narrative strategies. The novel demonstrates how narrative as a generative system lends itself to fictionalisation, thus serving as an analogy for the narrative of nation-building and ethnicity. The postcolonial problem of representation expounded in the essays is a central concern.

This thesis explores four contemporary literary transformations of the topos of agbonrin and efon, antelope (woman) and buffalo (woman) respectively, in D.O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale and Igbo Olodumare, Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Mobolaji Adenubi's "The Importance of Being Prudent", and Ben Okri's three abiku narratives. The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches. The introductory chapter raises theoretical issues regarding the notion of a topos itself and examines how these resonate with central Yoruba concepts. Furthermore, it provides an overview of Yoruba cultural beliefs associated with the figures of antelope (woman) and buffalo (woman) and comments on contemporary literary transformations of this topos in general. Each of the consecutive chapters represents an in-depth analysis and interpretation of one contemporary author's literary transformation of the topos of antelope (woman) and/or buffalo (woman). By putting each writer's deployment of the motif of agbonrin and efon in a biographical, historical and socio-cultural perspective, I explore how he or she - more or less consciously - invests it with new meanings and, in the process, transforms it, and how the topos of antelope (woman) and buffalo (woman) thus comes to serve manifold symbolic or metaphoric purposes, reflecting on and expressing a whole range of issues. Not only is the topos as such continuous beyond the precolonial period but it also assumes a new relevance with respect to the socio-cultural and political anxieties generated in the colonial and post-colonial climates. The contemporary literary transformations explored in this thesis all mediate and negotiate personal, socio-cultural and political anxieties in the wake of sustained contact with the West, especially through Christian missionary activity and colonialism. The thematisation of gender relations plays an important symbolic, metaphoric and metonymic role in this respect, since the way in which each writer's literary transformation of the motif of agbonrin and efon relates to the issue of women and female agency in Yoruba culture, or, more generally, in Nigerian culture, is an important means of communicating and conceptualising change.

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