This study explores, in an overview, the development of postcolonial Anglophone African literature and how African writers engage with the intricate textual writing practices that disrupt postcolonial binaries. The exploration brings forth the excruciating colonial memory that cannot be subdued by present-day challenges. In fact, it is a lingering memory that intersects with the present matrices of coloniality, or what could be regarded as colonial recursivity. As this study demonstrates, colonial experience remains relevant in debating current responses, logics and practices that are expressed in postcolonial African Anglophone literature. The study contributes to provocative prisms of postcolonial, decolonial and translingual conceptual frameworks that are intricately interrelated, especially when discussing what Boaventura de Sousa Santos conjectured as abyssal thinking or an imperial reason that privileges whiteness as a universal model of being. Located in this troubling discursive terrain, this study contends that it is scandalous to propose that postcolonial African Anglophone literature should cease addressing exclusionary experiences and denigration of the indigenous people. Such an insensitive call is not only meant to enforce silence on colonial victims, but it also sustains regimes of domination and the current framing of difference. The ugly colonial encounter reminds us about the need to genuinely make efforts towards creating new spaces for common habitation. In other words, colonial memory is the primary reason that validates the search for a truly decolonial postcolonial urgency. This entails an ongoing resistance to the lingering rigid boundaries and imperial practices as Africans seek to regain their lost humanity.