This edited collection explores how African artists use their art to articulate the need for a return to the traditional African vision of communal solidarity, hospitality, and respect of humanity. The collection highlights the artists’ exposure of the catastrophic effects of the abandonment of African humanism on African culture and life.

A broad range of cultural works produced in traditional and modern African communities shows a fundamental preoccupation with the concepts of communal solidarity and hospitality in societies driven by humanistic ideals. African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism is an inaugural attempt to focus exclusively and extensively on the question of humanism in African art and culture.

This collection brings together scholars from different disciplines who deftly examine the deployment of various forms of artistic production such as oral and written literatures, paintings, and cartoons to articulate an Afrocentric humanist discourse. The contributors argue that the artists, in their representation of civil wars, massive corruption, poverty, abuse of human rights, and other dehumanizing features of post-independence Africa, call for a return to the traditional African vision of humanism that is relentlessly being eroded by the realities of postcolonial nationhood.

Introduction: The Crisis of Humanism in Contemporary Africa

Lifongo Vetinde and Jean-Blaise Samou

Part I: Foundational Visions

Chapter One: Humanist Thought in African Oral Literature

Adrien Mbar Pouille

Chapter Two: Ritual and Humanism in Zakes Mda’s She Plays with the Darkness

Thomas Spreelin MacDonald

Chapter Three: “Through the Eyes of Dogs”: Reflections on Misanthropy and Humanism in a Senegalese Novel

Lifongo Vetinde

Part II: Power, Dystopia, and Postcolonial Violence

Chapter Four: “Remember the Children”: Humanism in Contemporary East African Fiction

Marie-Thérèse Toyi

Chapter Five: André Brink and the Politics of Humanism

Hervé Tchumkam

Chapter Six: Of Painting and Politics: Postcolonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Feymania in Cameroon

Jean-Blaise Samou

Part III: History, Trauma and the Pedagogy of Human Rights

Chapter Seven: Ojukwu’s War Speeches and the Rhetoric of Humanism

Uchenna David Uwakwe

Chapter Eight: Drawing (on) the Past in Histories of the Present: Dialogues and Drawings of Women's Organized Resistance to Forced Removals in South Africa's Past and Present

Koni Benson

Chapter Nine: Remembering the Past and Building the Future in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones

Mohamed Kamara

Chapter Ten: An Exploration of Human Rights in the Postcolonial Text: “The Conspiracy” by Henri Lopes

Janice Spleth