The Dark Continent: «African Tales by Shakespeare» and the Experience of Transitional Community

This text is an analysis of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s 2011 production, African Tales by Shakespeare, tracing the project of community taken up in the performance. The central thesis takes this to be neither a national community nor a dispersed, intersectional coalition, as Bryce Lease has formulated the difference between Polish political and traditional theater, but rather a transitional community—unstable, unsuccessful, and rooted in the experience of political transition. The author, by invoking references to the visual arts present in the performance, points to other community projects emerging from the experience of transition while showing how, when appropriated for the purposes of performance, their meanings change radically. In the masculine, phallic, and violent world of African Tales, art and philosophy born of the experience of femininity are lost, twisted, and forgotten. Among the most important threads of analysis, however, is the way racialization and racism function in the play. From this perspective, the problematic status of the community the play establishes is most clearly seen: as a community of phantasmic, aspirational, transitional whiteness

Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

Hybridity is argued as an intricate combination of attraction and repulsion that describes the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This combination creates a challenge to and disruption of the monolithic power exercised by the colonizers of Africa who (mis)represented the land as a Dark Continent. Such monolithic power underpins the portrayal of the colonizers’ patriarchal tradition within which women characters in creative works by Africans are commonly situated. The inclusion of women as part of the many subjects of power strengthens the discourse on hybridity in African literature. To question power is to see men and women both apart and together as ambivalence that defines the idea of hybridity in the African literary tradition. In this paper, the employment of deconstruction in the analysis of women characters in five selected stories by African writers reveals a new consciousness in African literature using the Dark Continent metaphor as a mirror of the female aesthetics. In this sense, the use of women’s bodies in the short stories does not only point to the issue of gender oppression but also to a power that is disrupting and slowly dismantling the long-entrenched patriarchal stance forcing the male characters to question their current worldview and position. Overall, this paper has established that contemporary African literature on women recognizes the hybridized identity and shape of the new woman, consequently proving that the so-called Dark Continent is nothing but a myth.

Melancholia in the Time of War: Analysing the Efficacy of Psychosocial Aid in Post-Conflict Liberia

The continent of Africa, since the advent of its colonial subjugation and beyond, has been replete with conflicts, be it intra or inter state. Such armed and violent hostilities not only disrupt the quotidian lifestyle of civilians, but also render them vulnerable to great levels of stress and severe mental trauma. This article, through pure qualitative research, attempts at investigating the mental health issues and disorders, individual or collective, prevailing among the inhabitants of such conflict settings in the Dark Continent. The article further stresses the importance of said mental illnesses as a direct consequence of the conflagrations and claims its stance to be at par with physical traumas sustained by the post conflict African society. By placing emphasis on the country of Liberia, which has been subjected to a myriad of brutal conflicts in the last century, the article seeks to understand the effectiveness of the resolution schemes across the post conflict regions with respect to the provisions made for the aid of such mental health issues and the viability of its awareness among the Liberian populace regarding its knowledge and treatment.

Misnaming Africa: Dehumanising Images of Africa in Twelve Years a Slave and The Good Lie

Since the advent of slavery and colonial rule, Africa has been portrayed as a dark continent, hence slavery and colonialism were said to be on a civilising mission. Colonial administrators were responsible for disseminating ideas that dehumanise Africa. Since the acquiring of freedom of Africans, including those in the diaspora, the media have been used to maintain dichotomies that existed prior to the liberation of Africa. Against this background, the total emancipation of the mind and spirit of Black people on the continent and in the diaspora becomes urgent and inevitable. Deploying Afrocentricity, this paper explores the portrayal of Black people in the movies, Twelve Years a Slave (2003) and The Good Lie (2014). It revolves around interrogating the various images of Black people in the two selected movies. The implications and agenda of such images are discussed. The paper establishes that the way in which Africans are portrayed in the movies is dehumanising. The images border on stultifying representations that seek to subjugate and subvert African humanity and agency. The representation of Africans in the movies is informed by the ideology of Eurocentrism, which maps Europeans as the superior race and Africans and other oppressed peoples of the world as a peripheral race. The movies aim to disempower and induce a sense of self-hatred in people of African descent. The paper concludes that movies can be agents of the miseducation of African people and may inadvertently valorise European people.

An Afrocentric Re-storying of Africa’s Struggle for Emancipation in Ngugi’s Selected Novels

The story of African liberation struggle has, over many years, been related in a colonial and neo-colonial manner by the imperial powers, with Africa delineated as a dark continent and Europe as a civilised one. This article, therefore, strives to disrupt this oppressive narrative by painting the correct version through Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat (1967) (AGW) and Matigari (1987). Kenya is used as a microcosm of the entire Africa in these novels. Furthermore, the study is a qualitative recounting of the African liberation struggle which is underpinned by Afrocentricity as an emancipatory theoretical strand. Purposive sampling, guided by exploratory research design, was employed to select the two texts by Ngugi because of their appositeness to the study. Narrative textual analysis was used to interpret the two novels as primary data. Ngugi conscientises Africans about their African liberation history in order for them to cultivate a true African identity (Biko,1978).

In the Shadow of (Mis)Understanding South African Dance by Some Tourists

This article will explore the (mis)understanding of African dance by some tourists. Visitors to South Africa often look for “traditional African dancing,” and discredit the African contemporary dance forms. To understand this misperception, the author will draw from different social theories including those proposed by authors such as Hegel and Maine. Rooted in Maine’s theory, the article will explain how the Western world still perceives Africa as a traditional society whose traditions are static, unchanging, and in need of protection from Western influence. In line with what Hegel said, the generalisation of the continent of Africa as the “Dark Continent” that does not produce knowledge or has no history still influences today’s perception of culture in its countries. This article states that there is a great need for education and a shift in people’s mentality regarding how Africa and Africans are viewed and thus how its cultural components such as dance are perceived.

AN AFRICAN BASKETRY OF HETEROGENEOUS VARIABLES DAHOMEYDAHALO-DANDI

— In terms of scientific systems approach to the knowledge of human origins, human organizations, human histories, human kingdoms, human languages, human populations and above all the human genes, unquestionable scientific evidence with human dignity flabbergasted the European strong world of slavemasters and colonialist-policy-rulers. This deduces that the early Europeans knew nothing scientific about the mankind beforehand unleashing their one-up-man-ship over Africa and the Africans except that they were the white skinned flocks and so, not the kith and kin of the Africans in black skin living in what they called the ‘Dark Continent’! Of course, in later times, the same masters and rulers committed to not repeating their colonialist racial geo-political injustices. The whites were domineering and weaponized to the hilt on their own mentality, for their own interests and by their own logic opposing the geopolitically distant African blacks inhabiting the natural resources enriched frontiers. Those ‘twists and twitches’ in time-line led to the black’s slavery and white’s slave-trade with meddling Christian Adventist Missionaries, colonialists, religious conversionists, Anglican Universities’ Missions , inter-sexual-births, the associative asomi , the dissociative asomi and the non-asomi divisions within African natives in concomitance . And yet, an indelible African Awe Era (AWE) prevailed in the African Continent. How is it made possible by the Africans? No people or no language or no kingdom exists without some kind of moral, social and political framework and when this is not written-down, it may be strongest as the unwritten-down. A number of early European-written-down accounts in respect of the European-called ‘Black Africans’ boomeranged when the European scientific researchers discovered that the genetic roots of mankind exploded in Africa proclaiming African commonality superimposed. The first woman of all human beings is an African Mother indeed as confir