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The argument of this essay is that in our historical behavior, we the people of African have tended to regard the continent - all of it - as our home; that regimes imposed by invaders, from Europe to Arabia, have attempted to configure African space and in ways beneficial to themselves, cutting off important portions of our space and time, in the expectation that only a residual portion could be acknowledged as ours that under the European fragmentation of African space and time formalized in Berlin in 1885, the residual fragment was further subdivided into separate plantationstyle colonies, the same truncated units we are now invited to identify with, rebranded as our nation-states; that these divisive units, the colonial states, based on the dismemberment of Africa, serve purposes that invariable degrade African life while enhancing European wellbeing; and that the completion of the unfinished business of our political, social, economic, and cultural emancipation depends on our scrapping the Berlin design in favor of unitary African design; that this task is complicated because of physical, military and administrative dismemberment of Africa was consolidated by a colonial culture that programmed our ruling elite to recognize the divisive configuration of African space and time as its sole reality, with the result that we identify with our divisions in our actual behavior, even while proclaiming in rhetoric our undying attachment to Pan-African unity; that this behavior is deeply anchored in a lethal indoctrination alias formal education that hooks African intellectuals on the false but incessantly repeated notion that Africa has no intelligent history, no rational philosophical culture, and that therefore, to progress into modernity, Africa must keep stroking the psychic strings tying us to Europe by borrowing something called Western rationality; that this colonial ideology, quite apart from being demonstrably false, is also soporific, mentally sedative, and lethal; that if we are to wake from its spell and remake our society and our continent, Africans will have to retrieve our suppressed ability to conceive of our wholeness in both spatial and temporal terms; that we can begin doing this by articulating our dismembered society and remembering our suppressed history, philosophy, culture, science and arts; that for this awakening, all necessary intellectual information exists here and now, though in scattered form; that it required the work of groups of determined researchers to bring it together, to process it, and to make it widely available in forms accessible to all - these being the requisite preparations for African's intellectual awakening.

This is a seminal work that discusses the validity of the perception that the new generation of African novelists is remarkably different in vision, style, and worldview from the older generation. The contention is that the older generation novelists who were too close to the colonial period in Africa had invariably made culture-conflict and little else their dominant thematic concern while the younger generation novelists are more versatile in their thematic preoccupations, and are more global in their vision and style. Do the facts in the novels justify and validate these claims? The 13 papers in this volume have been carefully selected to consider these issues. Brenda Cooper a renowned literary scholar from Cape Town writes on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, while Charles Nnolim writes about Adichie's more recent novel Half of a Yellow Sun; Omar Sougou of Universite Gaston Berger, Senegal discusses 'ambivalent inscriptions' in Buchi Emecheta's later novels; Clement Okafor of the University of Maryland, addresses the theme of 'racial memory' in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name, juxtaposed between the world of the old and the realities of the present. Joseph McLaren, Hofstra University, New York, discusses Ngugi's latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, while Machiko Oike, Hiroshima University, Japan looks at a new theme in African adolescent literature, 'youth in an era of HIV/AIDS'. There is abundant evidence of the contrasts and diversities which characterize the African novel not only geographically, but also ideologically and generationally. ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. Nigeria: HEBN

Armah tells how Africans trained in literature the colonial way find it embarrassing to discuss such central issues as slavery in their works. He stresses that the study of African social realities in which political, economic, and social processes in Africa, under the surface appearance of senseless chaos, are actually part of a deliberate kind of structuring, set in place at tremendous human cost, and thereafter maintained through the imposition of numbing doses of suffering on the continent's population.

Armah discusses why should democratic Americans find democratic Africans so threatening. Among other things, he mentions that if democracy meant other peoples in the world getting control of their own resources and improving their lives instead of remaining poor to make Europeans and American corporations richer, then America was unequivocally anti-democratic in its behavior, whatever it might call itself in its rhetoric.

Armah recounts his university days in America and how he had to discontinue receiving largesse from a British multi-millionaire who had business interests in South Africa who was funding his studies. Among other things, he discusses the reason why Europeans were not subjected to the same standards, and was immediately aware the he had fouled a congenial atmosphere.

An excerpt from Ayi Kwei Armah's memoir \"The Eloquence of the Scribes\" is presented.