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[[percussion music playing]]
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{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
The Literary Corner: Black Writers of the World,
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a series of analyses and interpretations of black world literature.
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I'm Brooks Robinson and today an introduction to African fiction or prose,
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beginning with the initial African prosaic or fiction writers,
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in closing with some of the more contemporary ones.
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Inhabitants of the African continent were some of the last to actually sit down
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and write literature.
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In particularly, it was not until 1790, the turn of the 18th century,
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before the first African sat down and finished and hand published a book.
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He was Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
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and he wrote "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The African"
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Olaudah Equiano's, or Gustavus Vassa's, book
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told the story of an 11-year-old West African
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from the areas we now know as Sierra Leone or Eastern Nigeria
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and how he was kidnapped, enslaved and ultimately brought to America.
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Now Gustavus Vassa–and I'll refer to him in that way–
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he ended up in Britain as a sailor and did a great deal of traveling
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in what was in the British Empire.
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He travelled as a sailor
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and he pulled out interesting incidents that depicted the epitome of pain and suffering
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of Africans who were then slaves in the British Empire,
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to write that first interesting narrative,
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"The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African".
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But from the beginning of civilization,
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