By Bate Besong, Ph.D (Dept. of English, University of Buea
Although Western intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt have explored the connections between the intellectual production of the colonial world and its growing global domination (Williams and Chrisman 1994:71), it is Frantz Fanon, described by his comrade and critic, Albert Memmi, “as a prophet of the Third World, a romantic hero of decolonization” (1973:39) who has emphasized the dehumanizing aspects of colonialism, thus pushing its analysis into the realm of the psyche and the subjectivity of colonized peoples, as well as their imperial masters.
Fanon demonstrates how the oppressed could not “cope” with what was happening because colonialism eroded his very being, his very subjectivity, it annihilates the colonized sense of self seals him into a crushing objecthood (quoted in Ania Loomba, 2001). Since his works are then discussed in the multiple contexts of gender, sexuality, nationalism and hybridity in Black Skins, White Masks, for example, Fanon defines colonized people as not simply those labour whose has been appropriated but those “in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its cultural originality” (1967:18). No where is this thesis more germane than in Alobwed’Epie’s The Death Certificate.
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