This paper questions how African writers in the age of independences referred in their texts to social identities fashioned upon nation, race, ethnicity and class, in order to define, explain and influence collective action in the frame of particular nation-building projects.
Finally, a small comparative sketch of the divergent possibilities of writing about identities on different scales is presented, drawing upon an illustrative corpus of African writers. In its title, this article uses two formulations which are not very usual in debates about African literature, whether in the field of history or of literary studies.
Another tactic consensus is the assumption that the principal and sometimes only historical aspect to determine the thematic and stylistic transformation of literature produced in Africa, and as a result its various phases, was European colonial domination. Generally speaking, it is acknowledge that there exists a colonial literature about Africa written by Europeans or settlers, in which the exoticization of African peoples and landscapes constituted the backdrop for Promethean adventures, while white protagonists persevered against an extensive range of adversities to achieve a greater moral objective, often involving saving Africans from themselves and their supposed barbarity, justifying en passant the need for the colonial game.
This phase, which corresponds historically to a silence imposed on Africans by the theft of their political sovereignty represented by European domination, would be followed by an anticolonial literature, now written by Africans and characterized by the reiterated denunciation of colonialism, focusing especially on the acute contradiction between its metropolitan representation as a disinterested civilizing effort and the empirical brutality of the exploitation of the African labor force and natural resources to the advantage of the Europeans.
Another characteristic was a strong nativist impulse, oriented towards the celebration of African realities from the past and their recovery as alternatives for social and civilizing values to counterpoise the unscrupulous and cynical predation which summarized the European contribution to the development of the continent. In relation to what came afterwards, there are controversies. Other authors reserve the term for a meaning with a thematic orientation, locating it at a later moment, in which writers, a little all over the continent, were abandoning the euphoria of independence and beginning to critically portray the political regimes and the societies of new countries leaving European domination Appiah, ; Mata, , As in all macro-explanatory frameworks, there are numerous problems which can be pointed to in these periodization efforts.
