Early African Language and Literature

Because Africa is such a big place, people who lived in different parts of Africa spoke different languages. There are hundreds of different African languages. In North Africa and Egypt, people spoke languages related to Arabic and Hebrew, called Egyptian and Berber. Under Roman rule, some people also spoke Latin or Greek. Then when North Africa was conquered by the Arabs, many people there began to speak Arabic (although others continued to speak Berber).

In West Africa, people spoke languages related to Bantu (BAN-too), like Yoruba. This language gradually spread across Africa, east and south, so that now people in many parts of Africa speak languages related to Bantu. We aren't sure whether Bantu-speaking people moved all over the place, or just new people began to speak the Bantu language.

In East Africa, people spoke a Bantu language called Swahili (swah-HEE-lee), which had so many Arabic words in it that it was almost a mixed language.

And in South Africa, people spoke languages which used a lot of clicking sounds and are often called click languages, which sound different and are not closely related to any other known languages. One of these languages is !Kung. These may be like the earliest human languages. They are different because the people who lived in South Africa were isolated, and didn't speak to outsiders very often.
Around 500 AD, when Bantu-speaking people moved into South Africa, they began to mix a lot of local !Kung words into their own language, and that created new languages called Xhosa and Zulu.

While people who spoke these languages all made up stories and told them to their children, only a few groups of African people began to write these stories and ideas down on paper. Some of the stories Bantu people told were about a spider called Anansi.

In Egypt, people began writing very early, about 3000 BC, using hieroglyphs. They wrote stories, official inscriptions, and prayers. South of Egypt, in Aksum, people also began to write.

In the rest of North Africa, people began to write about 800 BC, when Phoenician invaders brought the alphabet with them. We don't have any long stories from ancient Carthage, but we do have inscriptions and tombstones.

When the Romans conquered North Africa, people there began to write in Greek and Latin. Some famous African writers from this time are Tertullian, Perpetua, Cyprian, and Augustine (who were all Christians).

And when the Arabs conquered North Africa, people continued to write - the most famous of these is Ibn Battuta, who came from Morocco and wrote a history of his travels in Africa and all over the world in the 1300's AD.

To find out more about African languages and literature, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your local library:

Xhosa
!Kung
Yoruba
Swahili
African languages and literature
Main Africa Page
Main language and literature page
African Literature books, games and movies
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