Page 92 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 10

COMMUNITY

Ejuchegahi A. Angwa is an interdisciplin- The era of identity crises is that of longer fit in comfortably into the
ary scholar of African descent. He holds the ‘bat man’. The socio-political society of the traditional Nigerians.
degrees and a postgraduate diploma in condition in the country at this These characters became black-
Journalism, Education, Philosophy, The- period bred characters that were like white men and found themselves in
ology, Sociology and Religious Studies. the bat, neither bird nor mammal. a most contradictory situation. The
The encounter with colonialism and
writers of these eras incidentally
He believes in the advancement and re- the attendant introduction of the were members of this class and their
making of post-colonial Africa and that western culture molded men who works depicted the psychoanalytical
Africa can and should take her rightful were culturally neither Africans nor consciousness of the members of
place in the 21st century. He can be Europeans. For example, in the their class.
myth about white superiority began
reached at: to wane in the mind of the average They presented characters who were
ejuchegahiangwa@gmail.com Nigerian citizen. Nigerians had at a crossroad, characters afflicted
gone to the world war and come with cultural conflict and whose
back with experiences and stories identities were in crises. Chidi Amu-
of their interactions with the white ta summed up the literature of this
man. These ex-soldiers began to age: “This is the expression of the
educate other Nigerians at home on infancy of socio-cultural dissonance.
the fallibility of the white man. Yet The naïve, having swallowed the
these people came back with relics bitter pill of alien values, suffers cul-
of their interactions with the white tural indigestion. The hero is a bat,
man which they inadvertently shared neither a mammal nor a bird. He is a
with their people. Their sojourn black-white man. A living contradic-
only helped to fire in them the zeal tion! The characteristic world of the
to be like the white man or even to novel reaffirms, with diminishing
surpass him in his culture. confidence, the hegemony of tradi-
tional values now under siege. The
Ngozi Chuma-Udeh in her ‘Trends novelist has begun, unconsciously,
and Issues in Nigerian Literature’ to psychoanalyze himself and his
sums this up: “…at the same time, class in the light of new realities and

n examining aspects of identity Nigerians began to travel to Europe truths. We can see him in the charac-
and survival in ‘Foreign Gods, for the acquisition of knowledge. ters he creates.”
Inc.’, Okey Ndibe’s latest novel These people got trained up to the
Iand ‘On Black Sisters Street’ university level in different areas of Okey Ndibe in ‘Foreign Gods Inc.’
by Chika Unigwe, these intellectuals specialization. This gave them ample tries to use fiction to demonstrate
show new trends in post-colonial time to interact with the white man the ills in Nigerian society. The
African Literature. Both works pres- in his natural domain. Here, they novel captures the issue of brib-
ent a succinct portrayal of characters imbibe to the fullest, the white ery and corruption in the Nigeria
in search of individual identities man’s culture. When they come Customs Service and Police Force,
but against a new and interesting back, they come back as different who resort to these for survival. He
perspective, a perspective that is in persons.” also captures corrupt practices in
line with the political transformation This means that the Nigerian, America to a little extent. Oxford
of post-colonial Africa. Moreover, having imbibed without adultera- Advanced Learners Dictionary de-
these themes are extremely relevant tion the western culture, strove to fines corruption as “a dishonest or
in the twenty-first century with its be like the Europeans. The chagrin illegal behavior especially of people
increased emphasis on place and then was that no matter how much in authority, allegations of bribery
globalization. We are examining they tried, achieving the dream of and corruption.”
the quest for identity and survival, being a complete European with
first against an African background black skin was a mirage. It was an Mulinge and Lesetedi define corrup-
and then against the backdrop of a unrealistic fantasy and an effort in tion as: “A form of antisocial behav-
foreign land. futility. Meanwhile, these characters ior by an individual or social group
had lost grip of the cultural values which confers unjust or fraudulent
of their people. They could no benefits on its perpetrators is likely

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