Yet there is no doubt that now, a century later, an African identity is coming into being. African identities are diverse and pluralist. This contradicts the assumptions of both Pan-Africanist ideology and much Western ethnology. The heterogeneity of all identities, lies in the ways in which subjects inhabit the various locations of those identities. Appropriation Nevertheless, the problems African intellectuals have with the location of knowledge within power is real.
African identity seems beset by ambivalence and contradiction.
I believe there is and it is the example of literary writing which provides the key. The problem with inherited African institutions, and perhaps, with the African state, is not that these are culturally alien, but they have become fossilized. Post-colonial scholars, becoming proficient in this subject were often surprised to think that Literature, the repository of Universal values, the revelation of the deepest aspects of the human condition, should be required to have some relevance to local societies. The emergence of post-colonial literature changed this, but not without considerable argument. They appropriated the techniques and the genres of literature and made them work for African forms of representation.