The English Language and Afro Saxons: A Systemic Study of the Communicative Qualities of a Selection of African Prose Passages

Abstract

This paper studies the discourse strategies and communicative potential of the English language in a selection of Afro Saxon prose passages. The term ‘Afro Saxons’ was first coined by Kenyan scholar, Ali Mazrui, in 1975, by analogy with ‘Anglo Saxons’, to refer to the linguistic phenomenon in which the English language is increasingly becoming the ‘first language’ functionally of a great many black and African people. This study, therefore, enlarges upon this concept and undertakes to elaborate on the ways in which the communicative and expressive possibilities of English are exemplified in a selection of some of the most lyrical and dramatic prose extracts by some African writers. Mounted upon the theoretical platforms of Mazrui, and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar (SFG) with its contextual parameters of the ideational (field), interpersonal (tenor) and textual (mode) metafunctions, the research appraises the attitudes to the increasing global status of English. Then employing two Anglo Saxon prose passages as the control, it investigates in some detail the organic configurations of discourse such as transitivity, mood, thematic structure, cohesion and coherence in passages from Armah, Achebe and Soyinka, and concludes that, based on the effective use of the figurative and expressive metafunctions of the language, these authors may indeed be referred to as Afro Saxons.