KENTE - Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts

BETWEEN MOTHER FIXATION AND COLONIAL ATTRACTION: DERACINATION, ILL-FATED MIGRATION, AND REDEMPTION IN KEN BUGUL’S THE ABANDONED BAOBAB

Augustine ASAAH — 2023-12-19

The Abandoned Baobab, Ken Bugul’s brutally sincere autofiction, is the prototypal model of African postcolonial, feminist, and psychological narrative built around the post-traumatic stress disorder, self-flagellation, and “excesses” of a speaking female/colonial subject in desperate need of love. The paper analyzes the protagonist’s alienation, identity crises, and ill-starred sojourn in Europe against the backdrop of maternal attachment and absorption of colonial codes. The study is eclectically anchored on Hendrika C. Freud’s reconstruction of the Electra complex and postcolonial theory. Its major finding is that notwithstanding the protagonist’s anguish at maternal abandonment and her subsequent colonial assimilation, she still employs repressed norms and values associated with the mother/the land/Africa to berate (neo-)colonialists, Westerners, and herself. The paper concludes that the protagonist-narrator redeems herself somehow through the willful adoption of the appellation Ken Bugul, the admission of her errors, and the return to the motherland.

A RHETORIC OF CHINA’S EXPLOITATION OF RELIGION IN WEST AFRICA

Wincharles Coker — 2023-12-19

This paper attempts to deconstruct Chinese business agents’ exploitation of religion as an economic resource in West Africa. Focusing on three cases from Ghana sampled on YouTube, the paper argues that China’s religion project in Africa involves three rhetorical strategies. These are reverse proselytization, repackaging of African/Ghanaian Christian gospel songs, and enstoolment of Chinese as African chiefs. The analysis reveals that Chinese foreign workers employ this capitalist model based on the working hypothesis that the average African of the postcolonial/neocolonial epoch is economically vulnerable and yet passionately religious, and, thus, would look to religion for solutions. Implications of the findings are reported in the paper.

EXPLORING HYBRID MASCULINITIES OF THE MALE CHARACTERS IN OKPEWHO’S THE LAST DUTY

NII OKAIN TEIKO — 2023-12-19

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of failed hegemonic masculinity to exact its full benefit from the assumed patriarchal privileges that African men ascribe to with intent of subjugating femininity. The failure of both patriarchy and masculinity to accentuate their hold unto these privileges results in a cataclysmic disfigured form of subordinated masculinities that manifest in a hybridism of masculinities. Utilizing Okpewho’s novel, The Last Duty, this paper examines how the novelist’s portraiture of the male characters in the novel reveals a bastardized patriarchy strangled to the point of suffocation; its relevance to society is seen in the infirmary of hopelessness and nothingness. The salvaging element, the paper argues, is to view the male characters through the lenses of hybrid masculinities which interpret the diverse identity projects of patriarchy in gender studies as ephemeral.