LIAS Lecture Grace Musila: “African Literature and Liberation Struggle Movements”
28. Oct
- Date: Tuesday, 28 October 2025, 6-8 p. m.
- Place: Campus, Lecture Hall 4
Introduction: LIAS Co-Director Susanne Leeb
My lecture proceeds from the premise that anticolonial liberation struggles have been a generative archive for African literary production and its scholarship. I suggest that African literary texts and liberation struggle co-constitute each other in an ongoing dialogue on the meanings of freedom for post/colonial African societies. Using literature from across the African continent, I track the ebb and flow of key perspectives in this dialogue to make three suggestions: first, that literary engagements with anticolonial liberation movements allow us to track shifting conceptualisations of freedom in Africa across different temporal frames. Secondly, I suggest that these literary reflections on liberation struggles wrestle with the tensions between freedom as the pursuit of full humanity, and ethico-philosophical questions posed using violence as a tool for liberation. These tensions are thrown in sharp relief by the silences and contradictions that haunted these movements, which African literary imaginaries have depicted with great nuance. I close with a reflection on the value of the principles of freedom and the pursuit of full humanity that underpinned these movements; as potentially enduring roadmaps for futurity that may have a lot to teach us in the present moment, when freedom and humanity are variously under siege in Africa and the world at large.