“I was a little boy playing around in my father’s hut. How old would I have been at the time? I cannot remember exactly. I must have been very young: five, maybe six years old. My mother was in the workshop with my father, and I could just hear their familiar voices above the noise of the anvil and conversation of the customers.” / Camara Laye, The Dark Child (1954) / “Here I was, in the home of Mr. Ibara – one of those high-and-mighty types who would drive past us in their luxury cars and sneer at us, ignoring the misery around them. One of those bigshots who embezzled state funds to build their villas and support their mistresses; who had no need to build hospitals or schools in this country, because as soon as they felt the first twinge of a headache they could hop on a plane to America or Europe and get medical care. Yeah, I was in the home of one of those bigshots. I’d parked my ass in the armchair of a bigshot. I’d drunk from the glass of a bigshot. In a minute, I was going to take a piss in the toilet of a bigshot. And then, as I gazed at Mr. Ibara’s wife sprawled on the floor, I had the urge to fuck the wife of a bigshot.” / Emmanuel Dongala, Johnny Mad Dog (2001) / In determining what might come under the rubric “new” in such an immense field as African literature, one has invariably to confront a plethora of structural issues pertaining to questions of history and thematics. In other words, should the defining criteria for inclusion be provided by such factors as the year of publication or the author’s age, or rather should these classificatory modes be ignored in favor of broader concerns pertaining to the esthetic and historical subject matter of the works concerned?