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We would like to cordially invite you to the Research Colloquium of the Master Program African Verbal and Visual Arts. There will be two presentations: 

• ‘Hunu ulimwengu bahari tesi’: Oceanic Writing on the Swahili Coast” by Minghuan Yu (MA AVVA)

Abstract: Swahili culture, as part of the broader Indian Ocean civilization, has been deeply shaped by maritime interactions, yet literary representations of the ocean along the Swahili Coast remain relatively scarce. In this presentation, I will outline my planned research on oceanic writing in the Swahili Coast region, focusing on both Swahili- and English-language texts such as The House of Rust by Mombasan novelist Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, selected poems by Zanzibarian poet Haji Gora Haji, and two Swahiliphone memoirs.

I will introduce the key research questions guiding the study, discuss the primary texts I plan to work with, and outline the theoretical and methodological approaches I intend to use, drawing on insights from Indian Ocean Studies and Blue Humanities. The presentation will also address the significance of this project in highlighting an underexplored aspect of Swahili literature and its contribution to the broader study of Indian Ocean literary cultures.

• “Rupture or Continuity?: Representations of Modernity’s Impact on Yoruba Society in D. O. Fagunwa’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard” by Gerd Tobin Richter (MA AVVA)

The nature of modernity and its impact on African societies remains highly contested in African Studies. My goal for the research which I describe here and which will be the subject of my MA thesis, is to contribute to this conversation by
analyzing the representations and evaluations of modernity in two pre-independence Yoruba novels – Daniel O. Fagunwa’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. I am particularly interested in literary representations of modernity from the first half of the twentieth century as these precede the consolidation of most contemporary schools of thought on modernity in Africa.

While both novels are highly fantastical and do not overtly address real world events, I argue that they nonetheless respond to and take stances on the transformations that took place in Yoruba society in the 19th and 20th centuries. For Fagunwa, modernity entails a change for Yoruba society, which, while not lacking elements of bitterness, allows it to develop in a direction that will benefit its people. This change does not entail a complete rejection of Yoruba tradition but rather an evaluation of which elements of the tradition are beneficial and which are harmful. By contrast, Tutuola presents a world in the process of being ruptured by an unidentified force (implicitly modernity) in which things of value are being lost, even as newly introduced technologies provide both opportunities and dangers to the novel’s human and spirit characters.