Igbo village life is nostalgically evoked in Nkem Nwankwo's first novel, Danda (1964), in which the trickster-like title character evades the grasp of Western educational, economic, and religious forces. Danda not only acts irreverently toward ascendant Western cultural influences, but, in keeping with the equivocal nature of the trickster figure, he also trangresses some of the traditional sanctities of the rural West African village he loves. The resources of African oral culture, including the disruptive tendencies of the folk trickster figure, are thus deployed by Nwankwo to depict certain enduring social and political dilemmas without resolving them. While one is engaged and moved by Danda's portrait of an Igbo village, one also finds that few desirable prospects are available to its inhabitants in the wake of colonizing process, for tradition is irrevocably altered and modernity disrupts the communal bonds that gave the village its vitality, integrity, and beauty.
In Ousmane Sembène's novel and film, Xala, the winding currents of equivocal past, deplorable present, and contested future in relation to Africa intersect when a dramatic encounter occurs between two tricksters: El Hadji, the story's corrupt businessman, and a blind,
unnamed street beggar who seeks revenge against him. Traits associated with two different types of tricksters of oral tradition may be discerned, respectively: the insatiable rogue on the one hand (El Hadji), and the avenger and culture hero on the other (the beggar). The invocation of oral
narratives in creating modern literary works is a means by which African authors reinterpret and revalidate narrative resources that are part of their heritage. Contemporary writers have drawn on trickster figures of oral tradition partly to amplify the human qualities of their fictional characters,
partly to draw on the insights about human nature that tricksters of folklore can offer, and partly to affirm the treasures of indigenous oral traditions.
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