الخلاصة:
The guiding principle underlying this dissertation is to cast a critical eye on
the politics of irony and satire prevailing in three famous African novels: Chinua
Achebe’s A Man of the People, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross, and
Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters. These highly satirical texts expose, through
different techniques of derision, the evils of authoritarian power that followed
the departure of the white man from Africa.
The tree novels mentioned apply derision to some of the contemporary
power elites for betraying the promises of independence. Politics is kept by
Machiavellian power-despots from being an arena of meaningful social relations
and practices and becomes instead a hermetic ivory-tower where they have
locked themselves and proved to be more corrupt, absurd, grotesque and brutal
than their predecessors – the departed imperialists.
My intention in this dissertation, via the three outstanding fictional works
and other related texts, is to probe the game of politics and the way it is
deconstructed in African literature.
Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka employ diverse techniques of the satiric
spectrum ranging from irony to ridicule through laughter and cynicism in order
to blow the whistle on the growing crisis which is inflicted by the body politic.
They exploit the gap between the exploiting “haves” and the exploited “have
nots” which widens and bring to light uncertainty, dejection and bitter cynicism.
Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka claim that African literature exists in a
historical continuum. Neo-colonialism infected post-colonial Africa as a cancer or
a severe form of imperialism where the neo-colonial hegemony assume a kind of
power without responsibility or exploitation without restitution owing to the
continuation and perpetuation after independence of economic, political and
social practices established by the old-fashioned colonialism.
It will be shown that the language of irony and satire is skilfully employed
by Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka to express their bitter disillusionment and that of
most African peoples and to denounce the shortcomings and flaws of
contemporary Africa in its dealing with neo-colonialism.
For this purpose, I shall resort to a variety of theoretical notions that will
support my analysis of satire and show how this particular writing strategy has
informed and enriched the post-colonial African novel. It has also provided a
wealth of insights in what it means to write satire, to be ironic, and to surmise to
satire’s social or political purpose.
The three canonical texts of African literature selected, share a number of
affinities at the linguistic, aesthetic, and ideological levels, as I will attempt to
demonstrate.
Chapter One will be devoted to the discussion of Achebe’s techniques of
irony and satire in A Man of the People. In this novel, Achebe draws humorous
and grotesque portraits of post-colonial Nigeria through his witty foreshadowing
of the crisis of leadership facing it. His satire derives from the duality intrinsic to
the Igbo world view and best illustrated in the Igbo proverb that advocates the
idea that whenever something stands, something else will stand beside it, and
6
The Politics of Irony and Satire in Achebe’s MOP, and Ngugi’s DOC
traditional modes of representation of derision constitute the essence of Achebe’s
satiric spectrum, and in each of these, a norm is transgressed and a gap is
constructed to strengthen the satiric intent.
Chapter Two follows on with Ngugi, who introduces Religious Allegory,
grotesque body and satire in Devil on the Cross as potential threats to Kenya’s
mundane reality and most significantly to capitalism in a totalitarian state. In his
ritual of anatomizing the monster capitalism in his novel, Ngugi’s satire is
didactic and polemical to the point of transgressing the boundaries of
conventional creative writing. He is particularly mocking the gullibility and
insatiable envy of those members of Kenya’s capitalist bourgeoisie, thus he enters
into a brutal and savage satiric exposure to disclose their inanities and immoral
actions.
Chapter Three will focus on the use Satiric Humor and Laughter in Wole
Soyinka’s The Interpreters. The novel is, without question, a linguistically rich
and sharp satiric representation of the new, hybridized culture of post-colonial
Nigeria. In this polyphonic and highly rhetorical work of art, Soyinka juxtaposes
existentialist philosophy and indigenous myths, creating thus memorable satiric
passages fused with humor, sophisticated wit and memorable laughter.
The ultimate objective of this dissertation is to study the discursive
strategies stressed by Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka based on irony and satire, in
order to generate an opposition to despotic abuses of power. Their crucial
purpose is to move the African audience to scrutinize and denounce the flaws and
shortcomings of post-independence politics.