From Generation to Generation: Historical change in African Literature
Neil ten Kortenaar

In African literature, white and black, historical change is usually imagined in terms of generations (rather than, say, in terms of national history).  The conflict between tradition and modernity demands to be figured as a conflict between generations, one of which has been to school.  Less obviously, the break between colonization and decolonization is also frequently  regarded as a question of age groups.  In a tradition that spans from Achebe to Ndebele, we have a younger generation that hearkens back to a precolonial generation as part of its rebellion against the intervening colonized generations.

Dan Jacobson, the South African writer, has commented on the fact that most literature in English is concerned with children's relations to their parents and shows little interest in the parents' relations to their children.  African literature, however, is the exception in this regard.  Many are the lonely King Lear figures in African literature from Achebe's Arrow of God to Coetzee's Disgrace whose meaning derives for their relation to children whom they cannot understand.

We can distinguish two approaches to the question of generation: one in which the younger generation threatens to abandon its inheritance and one in which the younger generation brings the older generation back to its true inheritance.  The former would include texts as diverse as Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Gordimer's Burger's Daughter.  The latter would include texts such as Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country and Mungoshi's Waiting for the Rain.

The significance of imagining historical change in terms of generation is that identity is regarded as a matter of blood, with all that means for notions of hybridity.  But inheritance in African literature is as often as not a question of finding descendants rather of finding ancestors.  These narratives about legacy and family are future-oriented.