Klíma Vladimír, Růžička Karel František, Zima Petr. Black Africa: Literature and Language

D. Reidel, 1976. — 310 pages. — ISBN13: 978-94-010-1761-9.This publication by three authors, differs from most contemporary introductions to the study of African literatures in a threefold way:The authors attempted to cover various literacy and literary efforts in the area roughly delimited by Senegal in the west, Kenya in the east, Lake Chad in the north and the Cape in the south. the includes both the literacies and literatures written in the Indo-European linguae francae (English, French, Portuguese) and in at least several of the major African languages of the area.
As two of the authors were linguists and one was a literary historian, the analysis is not limited with the developing literacies and literatures to the purely cultural and literary aspects. The process of African literary development was dealt with where it was relevant and also the simultaneous, complementary process of literary language development as well as the standardization of languages for literary and other cultural purposes.
Neither ideological, cultural or religious barriers nor such external symptoms of these barriers as the usage of particular scripts were neglected within the area in question; rather, a tendency to analyze African literatures as entities within the areas delimited was one of the leading criteria.