By Mursi Saad El-Din Little is known in Egypt about what has come to be called African American literature. Consequently, when we talk about or read American literature we think only of writers such as Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck. And yet, there is a treasure of literary works by African American writers. This is why I was particularly happy to receive a copy of a PhD thesis by a young Egyptian lecturer at the 6th of October University. Naeema Ali Abdel-Gawad's thesis is on the struggle of the African American people in the plays of Le Roi Jones and Ed Bullins -- names of two leading playwrights in America who are unknown to us. This is not the place to discuss the plays of the two writers, such as In the Wine Time, The Gentleman Caller, and Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam by Bullins, and Slave Ship and Dutchman by Jones. Instead, I shall concentrate on the first chapter of the thesis on the postcolonial struggle of African Americans which sums up the core of this quite new and important piece of research. Here the researcher links the struggle of African Americans with the national liberation fight of Africans for their freedom. The scholar starts the chapter with a quotation from WEB DuBois' "Declaration of Principles". DuBois, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Accra during the All African Peoples Conference, is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the concept of Pan-Africanism. In this quotation Dubois writes that "[t]he Negro race in America, stolen, ravished and degraded," struggling with innumerable difficulties, "needs help and is given hindrance, needs protection and is given mob- violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone." The researcher then goes on to expound the views of intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Alain Locke, Malcolm X, Martin Luther, underscoring the importance of DuBois' political struggle and aesthetic attitudes which as a source of inspiration for almost all black artists. He was a great believer in the role of education in realising an authoritative image and powerful economic structure. He warned against "sham integration" and was of the opinion that the African Americans will always be deemed as dependent second-rate citizens who would never be able to share equally in the American dream. The researcher goes on to give an account of various African American movements, not least the Harlem Renaissance for which race became the fundamental incentive behind the creative artistic works of the blacks, and traces their influence on the works of the two playwrights. It was during this era of radical change that Jones and Bullins came and asserted themselves as notable African American writers whose fame, in Abdel-Gawad's words "reached an apex during the sixties and the seventies." Jones calls for liberty, egalitarian treatment, race pride, solidarity and the search for an identity. To this end, the playwright helped in developing a number of organisations such as the Black Art Theatre and School (1965), Spirit House (1966), the Black Community Development and Defence Organisation (1968) and the Congress of African Peoples (1970). Bullins, on the other hand, was a pioneer of the revolutionary black theatre. He introduced a new vein in the anti-white theatre. In his plays, he intentionally ignores white society by focussing on his black people in the urban ghetto. He portrays their agonies, problems, aspirations and frustrations which, as the scholar puts it, are "in fact his because he is originally a ghetto dweller." As cited in the thesis, Bullins states his aim of "working towards something entirely different and new that encompasses the soul and the spirit of black people which is our whole experience of being here in this oppressive
