BLENDING OF WESTERN AND AFRICAN LITERARY TRADITIONS IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN PROSE FICTION: TIMOTHY WANGUSA’S UPON THIS MOUNTAIN AND GORETTIKYOMUHENDO’S THE FIRST DAUGHTER

The intersection of African and Western aesthetic traditions, shaped by colonial encounters and subsequent cultural exchange, raises fundamental questions about identity, cultural inheritance, and creative agency in contemporary African prose fiction. While firmly rooted in oral traditions, indigenous values, and local realities, African prose also bears the imprint of Western literary conventions introduced through colonial education. This interplay destabilizes notions of aesthetic purity and instead generates a hybrid form that addresses both local and global audiences. This paper investigates aesthetic hybridity in Timothy Wangusa’s Upon This Mountain and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s The First Daughter. It examines how these authors merge African oral traditions with Western literary conventions to articulate contemporary African concerns. Specifically, the study identifies the Western conventions present in the texts, highlights the embedded African oral traditions, and analyzes how their interplay produces a distinct hybrid aesthetic. The research is theoretically anchored in Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, as reframed by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory (1970), and methodologically adopts a qualitative analytical design. Close reading serves as the primary method of data collection, while textual analysis provides the framework for interpretation. The two novels were purposively selected from the wider body of contemporary African prose fiction for their representative significance in portraying aesthetic hybridity. Findings reveal that contemporary African writers strategically blend Western narrative structures with indigenous forms, evident in both language practices such as indigenization and code-switching, and in the adaptation of oral traditions. The study concludes that hybrid aesthetic strategies are not only artistic choices but also ways through which writers assert their culture and negotiate their identity.