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“Reclaiming the Past”: Decolonization in the Early Novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

“The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past”, says Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in “The AfricanWriter and his Past” (Heywood ed., 1971). This paper explores tentative points ofconvergence and contrast between the early novels of Ngugi Wa Thiong’oi and ChinuaAchebe, on the basis of their treatment of the “past”, their attitude to language and…

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Interrogating the Meta-narrative of Religion: The FictionalOeuvre of Ngugi wa Thiong’o

This Paper attempts a critical reading of Christianity in colonial times as captured in the early novels from Kenya. We specifically refer to Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967) to show the author’s disquiet with Christianity as a cog in the wheel of colonialism. We focus…