African Englishes and Creative Writing

Research on the structure of African varieties of English (African Englishes, or AfrE) has made dramatic progress since the early 1970s, when it was difficult to find more than two or three article length studies on the topic. This chapter begins the exploration of African Englishes by African creative writers in the hopes of discovering interesting structural characteristics and also rhetorical devices they utilize in creating such Africanized linguistic structures. It represents an expansion of the author’s research on African Englishes that began under Braj Kachru’s mentorship and strong encouragement. The chapter analyzes the creation and transcreation of narratives in the depiction of literary characters to ascertain not only what Kachru terms the “contextual” and “functional appropriateness, " but also the rhetorical devices employed by the authors to portray or invoke certain cultural imageries.