Locating The Mythical Sites Of Decolonization In Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Matigari

Résumé: Neocolonialism is the last stage of imperialism that was rooted in Africa after most countries took their independence. Colonialism took a new shape that kept exploiting lands, people and raw materials. It even moved deeply to control people's minds. The implications of neocolonialism contain the economic, political, and the cultural domains of the African countries. In this regard, many Committed writers, like Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, attempted to decolonize the African mind by revising history. Ngugi relies on his mother tongue, the Gikuyu language, to enhance the novel's level of orality and gain more readers and listeners. This study aims to discover the path he went through to decolonize the Kenyan mind by exploring his outstanding novel, Matigari. The novel is rich in myths, which are retrieved from the Gikuyu oral culture. They give agency to the marginalized Kenyan majority by creating different modes of resistance and subversion. More importantly, they reconstruct African identity and create a positive, liberating response to the ideological codes of imperial history and its legacy of oppression and fragmentation.

Publié dans la revue: