African Literature, as a broad conceptual category, covers a broad array of discourses flung across the continent’s various sub-cultures and its multiple language heritages. Given that wide and far-reaching background, we shall set ourselves a modest and researchable goal for the semester: we shall imagine the course as a survey course meant to offer a formal introduction to African literature in its broadest historical and cultural contexts. We shall interrogate some popular debates within African literary discourse (colonialism and cultural imperialism; the possibility of an “African” literature in non-African but Europhone languages; cultural nationalism and the independent nation-state; and gender, sexuality and African cultural traditions) and also invoke the peculiar historical, socio-cultural and cultural contexts that inform our selected texts.