The Language Question and the Use of Paremiography in Modern African Literature: A Case Study of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

This paper endeavours to shed some light on the issue of language and the modern African writer. The core concern of this paper is not, however, whether it is significant for African writers to use European languages or African languages in their creative works. On the main, the paper wishes to explore the extent to which the use of transliterated proverbs in African writing contribute to the rekindling of African value systems as well as the affirmation of African indigenous knowledge systems. The analysis of the two texts will be confined to how Achebe and Soyinka abrogate the English language to infuse African speech acts as well as African cosmology through the extensive use of paremiography (proverbial language). The selection of these two texts is intentional in that they project African worldviews in a manner that can contribute to the current debate on the ‘decolonisation of education’ in South Africa as they negate the subordination of African values and cultures

Editorial

The papers in this special edition contribute to our understanding of African indigenous knowledge systems in mental health, African literature, and education. They also point towards an urgent need to engage critically with the knowledge-power matrix (Quijano 2007) and to introduce new epistemologies and worldviews into our curricula. This calls for an inclusive paradigm that not only recognizes the Other, with whom one needs to engage with on an equal basis (Nabudere 2011), but also the understanding that there are diverse ways to the market place, as Olawole (1997) teaches us. We hereby conclude by calling for an interdisciplinary approach towards the study of African indigenous knowledge systems, as it is evident that AIKS cannot be meaningfully pursued while one is located within one discipline. African universities and African communities in general have a major role to play in developing AIKS so that it becomes part and parcel of global world knowledge. Although AIKS is part of the global dialogue on what constitutes international knowledge, in the first instance, it needs to be salvaged from marginalization, so that it can enter the dialogue about universal knowledge, as an equal partner