In traditional Africa stories belong to everyone. The story-tellers, griot or grandparent, repositories of wisdom, speak to the village. Children are there. Children participate. Furthermore, the art of storytelling is not confined to specialists. Although a griot may study for years to leam long, complicated epics and extensive genealogies, the villagers will know from childhood their tribal legends, and they can follow their own lines in family traditions. They can interact spontaneously with the song, dance, or dramatic recitation of the singer-narrator.

It was natural that when Western literary genres featuring the imposed European languages were integrated with the African oral tradition the narrative took on new form and expression. Some of today's internationally known African writers have created new forms of novels and short stories (not tales). In doing so they have used their own linguistic creations: “Nigerian” or “Ghanaian” English and “Negritude” French. Although Western readers were reluctant to accept such variation, many readers today find excellence in literature from Africa.

Nigeria's anglophone writers led the way in gaining international acclaim for their prose fiction. Chinua Achebe's landmark Things Fall Apart (1958) is still predominant, often the only novel written by a contemporary African novelist familiar to a general readership. Cyprian Ekwensi, a prolific writer of all varieties of prose fiction, got his start with Onitsha market literature. He wrote People of the City in 1954 and it was reissued in Britain in 1963. Hans Zell (Zell, Bundy and Coulon, 1983:383) considers it to be “the first contemporary African novel.”