112. Mary Susan

Abstract 112

Mary Susan                                                                                                                                                                       

The Traditions of dissent and Alternative History in African Fiction:
A Reading of Ngugi wa Thiongo's 'Wizard of the Crow'.

Abstract

The tradition of dissent which I would like to address through a reading of Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow is an attempt to trace an alternative history to the Greek rational philosophy of the past two thousand years. And I prefer to share this theme in the back drop of a set of postmodern discourses on which the micro politics of all cultural and anthropological subtexts are centered. The discourses posited in the process are postmodern perspectives which denounce the rational philosophy through which Europe dominated and ‘civilized’ Africa.

   Since postmodernists have argued that the contemporary society is highly fragmented and diverse, a new politics, which can be termed as micro-politics is taking shape. This politics takes the form of class conflicts. Foucault has also used his thesis of power-knowledge relationship to explain micro-politics as practices or discourses. It is the politics of regions and sub-culture. The cultural materialists of Briton namely Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and E.P.Thomson have also underlined the growth of micro politics as a feature of postmodernism. For them the decline of party politics, parliament  and trade unions have been substituted by struggles at the institutional and local levels. So an emphasis on local factors related to specific discourses have given the postmodern social theory an edge for the narratives of people at the grass roots. The Dalit writing in India, African writing, ethnic writing, native literatures, folklores are all part of such language games.  

Social theorists have identified two streams of post-Marxist politics – 1)those that reject universalism and are more explicit 2) those that try to salvage universalism while admitting that universalism cannot have an essentialist basis. The first category is represented by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics of 1985 is today widely discussed as a prospectus for a postmodern politics. The best attempt to defend an ungrounded, anti-essentialist universalism is formulated in Steven Best and Douglas Kellner’s Postmodern Theory: Critical interrogations (1991) Best and Kellner suggest that: ”The postmodern emphasis on disintegration and change in the present situation points to new openings and possibilities for social transformation and struggle.”

Wa Thiong’o alone is capable of bringing together so many strands of the marginalised peoples towards a centre by decentering the language, religion, beliefs and culture of the white man. He achieves this by concocting the different value systems of the white elites into a nihilistic outbreak thus forcing the white man to revalue his own value systems and leave the black man to himself.