In 1965, Chinua Achebe, in his classic essay "The Novelist as Teacher," declared that the "African past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the early Europeans acting on God's behalf, delivered them." That assertion included a still reverberating sentiment shared by many of the first generation of African writers that it is possible to reclaim that distorted past creatively in order to show and understand "where and when the rain started beating Africa." Many genres and forms of literary and cultural production have recalled and recorded and...