Anglophone African poetry

In 1957, in Ibadan, the review Black Orpheus was founded to publish together anglophone African poets and translations from francophone négritude. Around it and the Mbari club a generation formed: Soyinka, the future first African Nobel laureate, Okigbo, a learned poet killed in combat during the Biafra war at thirty-five, Okara who bends English syntax onto that of Ijaw, Mphahlele exiled from South Africa. These poets write in the coloniser's language while bringing into it the rhythms and images of their own.

works 4

• NarrativeDown Second AvenueEs'kia Mphahlele · 1959A Black youth in Pretoria in the 1920s to 1950s, told by the man who lived it, at the beginning of his exile.Literature
• PoetryLimitsChristopher Okigbo · 1964The country's English-language poetry is then written in the universities and published in very small print runs, three years before the secession of Biafra scatters this generation.Literature
• NovelThe VoiceGabriel Okara · 1964Ijaw, the language of the river mouths, is hardly written at all; the novels of the country then appear in London, in the English of the mission schools.Literature
• NovelSeason of AnomyWole Soyinka · 1973The country is emerging from a thirty-month civil war whose dead number in the millions, and the writers who lived through it are all writing then about what they saw.Literature