SOURCE: "The Precarious State of the African Writer," in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 409-13.

In the following essay, Larson examines the effects of governmental corruption on African writers.

These are not good times for African writers—or Third World writers almost anywhere, for that matter. Political and economic factors (determinants even in the best of times) have become so unstable in recent years that the African literary scene has begun to resemble a barren wasteland, unprecedented at any time since the early 1960s, the era of independence. What can be more ironic than to glance back to the final days of colonialism and regard them nostalgically as the golden days of African literature—stifled by the increasing political instability across the continent once Africans shook off their colonial shackles? African writers, it appears, have paid for their independence with their creativity.

Before I begin my...