Representations of Political Power in African Writing

At the beginning of a new millennium, and almost half a decade after the first African nation became independent, issues of politics and questions as to the role of the writer in the political realm are still prominent. Especially in the context of what is called post-colonial writing, the role of the writer will continue to be almost inseparable from politics and related questions of power and representation. It is indeed a defining characteristic of post-colonial writing that it accompanies, comments on, and criticizes colonial hegemony and the process of decolonization. With no end of neo-colonialism in sight, post-colonial writing and criticism will retain a special responsibility for political involvement, which finds its cause in the specific political situation of the formerly colonized nations. Yet, the logic of politics and its textual representations are far from homogeneous within the post-colonial text corpus, especially when fictional and non-fictional writings are compared. Out of such a comparison of some African writers arises legitimate questions as to the function of politics in their fictional writing, as well as the kind of political engagement the same authors subscribe to in their non-fictional texts. The intersection of the politics of writing with the writings of politics raises the central question of this essay, namely: how the representation of political power differs in fiction and non-fiction. The authors investigated in this paper, chosen both for the influence of their literary work and their political engagement, are Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'O. (The Journal of Cultural Studies: 2001 3(1): 138-151