title: Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance
author:  Ngugi wa Thiong'o 
description: African scholarThiongo examines the collateral damage of colonization, focusing on the erasure of indigenous peoples cultural memoryalong with the renaming of people, places, and objects to reflect the culture of the colonizer. Africans in the diaspora as well as those who remained on the continent were treated to the same erasure of all that preceded European conquest and colonization.Thiongo sees similar patterns among other cultures, whether the conquered people were Irish or Native American. But his specific concern is Africa, where European colonialism has left the continent fractured and searching for wholeness. He points to a long tradition of Africandisaporic writers longing to reconnect to African culture. Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices, andThiongo argues for a re-membering of indigenous African culture and language and ponders whether an African renaissancesure to happen following the dark ages ofcolonialismwould be expressed in European languages. Memory resides in language, he asserts. A slim volume with a very impassioned discussion of the impact of colonialism and hope for cultural recovery. --Vanessa Bush
zlib_text: NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE 
  TRENT UNIVERSITY 
  LIBRARY 
  
  Digitized by the Internet Archive 
  in 2019 with funding from 
  Kahle/Austin Foundation 
  https://archive.org/details/dandaOOOOnwan 
  
  AFRICAN WRITERS SERIES 
  Editorial Adviser ■ Chinua Achebe 
  67 
  DANDA 
  
  AFRICAN WRITERS SERIES 
  1 Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart 
  2 Cyprian Ekwensi: Burning Grass 
  3 Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease 
  4 Kenneth Kaunda: Zambia Shall be Free 
  5 Cyprian Ekwensi: People of the City 
  6 Peter Abrahams: Mine Boy 
  7 James Ngugi: Weep Not Child 
  8 John Reed and Clive Wake (Editors): 
  A Book of African Verse 
  9 Richard Rive (Editor): Modern African 
  Prose 
  10 Paul Edwards (Editor): Equiano's Trave/s 
  11 T. M. Aluko: One Man, One Matchet 
  12 William Conton: The African 
  13 Mongo Beti: Mission to Kata 
  14 Richard Rive, Alex La Guma, James 
  Matthews and Alt Wannenburgh: Quar¬ 
  tet 
  15 David Cook (Editor): Origin East Africa 
  16 Chinua Achebe: Arrow of God 
  17 James Ngugi: The River Between 
  18 Obotunde Ijimere: The Imp