“For us African writers, writing is also a matter of survival”

For my final project, I chose option #3, to develop a plan for my own further study of Africa. Since I am a social work major and a French minor (and everyone says, "what the heck are you going to do with those two?"), I decided to look at African francophone countries and discover how different cultures and the colonization and decolonization of African countries by the French affect Africans' lives today.

I found four francophone authors that interest me very much:

Ahmadou Kourouma- he wrote a novel called The Suns of Independence that has earned reviews in Europe as a masterpiece, but is largely unknown outside Europe and Africa.

Tanella Boni- she writes poems, novels, essays, and plays, and is very involved in philosophy prgrams and humanitarian efforts.

Marie-Charlotte Mbarga Kouma- she is a playwright, actor, and dancer.

Yolande Mukagasana- she survived the 1994 Rwanda genocide and published 3 books to raise awareness and in memory of the events.

I decided if I could, it would be very interesting and beneficial from a social work perspective to be able to talk to these authors or their contemporaries, families and children, and officials in francophone African countries. One idea I discovered while writing this paper is that in order for cultures to have defining characteristics, they need to have other cultures to distinguish themselves from. I think it is an interesting idea that the colonizing countries neither withheld their culture from the people whom they were colonizing, but neither did they willingly allow the colonized population to have full access to all the colonizer's culture. One thing I would be interested in exploring is how the combination of cultures, French and traditional African societies, resulted in the characteristics of today's African countries.