The African Novel and Conflict Management

Abstract

The novel is a very distinct sub-genre of literature, in fact, the most popular in terms of use of all the literary forms in African literature. The form is not only graphic and elastic in deployment to reflect and portray conflict situations among people, classes and institutions involved in political and syndicalist contestations, for example, it is the most encyclopaedic in recording momentous instances of revolts and revolution arising from conflicts among classes and peoples. Thus, literature has been and still is a handy tool to African writers in portraying the colonial and neocolonial emasculation of the masses of the African people during and after the European imperialist subjugation of the African continent and its peoples. The unremitting and continuous deployment of the novel to address such issues by African writers has led to what I have characterized in another study as the “rise of the proletarian novel in Africa” (Agho 2012: 53-64). This paper discusses the portrayal of conflict situations in Africa through the agency of the African novel.