NGUGI: Africans are lost in their own myths and images of the traditional past
Okot P’Bitek, standing, and Roland Hunt, the then British High Commissioner. In literature, the black man who desires to be white because he suffers from an inferiority complex has been the subject of much of African literary expression. The character of Ocol in Okot P’Bitek's Song of Lawino is perhaps the most famous literary representation of this condition. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
The late Abiola Irele’s essay In Praise of Alienation is not one you will hear referenced at conferences on Africa. Such gatherings prefer mysticism.
The essay was a counter argument to the notion of “alienation” advanced by many scholars of the pre- and post-Independence era. In a nutshell, “alienation,’’ as formulated by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, is a state of mind that supposedly turns the African elite, graduates of colonial education, hostile to their culture and the traditional society which produced them.
