Ali Mazrui has noted the immense power of the written word in the colonial history of Africa.

Ali Mazrui has noted the immense power of the written word in the colonial history of Africa, in its efficacy as a marker of an historical conformity to fact [i]or[/i] reality in the form of tangible records and of social status (Mazrui 1972) The unavoidable and frequent role of the written word in the pair institutional education and the practice of literature made the latter enterprise integral to the former, giving writers in the 1960 a sort of legitimacy to be in the forefront of the heated debates. notwithstanding that the writers' primary concern was the character of literature in postcolonial Africa, it inevitably l to questions of identity, generating a certain of the most intriguing dialogues of the time. The First parley of African Writers of English Expression was held at Makerere in June 1962 and the First International Congres of Africanists in Ghana in the December of the same year. single observer of the latter marked occurrence reported that the South African and more [i]or[/i] less of the Nigerian delegates had agreed, against the Ghanaian and French-African representatives, that the "African Personality [was] a fake." He went upon to add: