Magic realism and its afterlives in African Literature: Between the marvellous and the oral tradition
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Abstract
This paper re-examines the role of the marvellous in African fiction, tracing its narrative displacement under dominant realist paradigms and its aesthetic resurgence through myth-infused literary forms. It argues that while early postcolonial works—most notably Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart—strategically embraced realism to assert African cultural agency, this alignment with Eurocentric narrative conventions marginalised indigenous oral and metaphysical traditions. Against this backdrop, the fiction of Ben Okri, Mia Couto, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reclaims the marvellous not as imported magical realism but as epistemic continuity rooted in African cosmology, communal voice, and ritual cadence. Through the lens of orature realism—a genre framework proposed by this study—the paper explores how these authors structurally embed ancestral rhythm, mythic temporality, and spiritual presence. It concludes that the marvellous in African literature is neither aesthetic ornamentation nor symbolic excess, but the ontological ground of African storytelling and a sovereign mode of world making.
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