Coming into what I believe is my last guest appearance on Brecht's Books go Boom! series, I decided to push the envelope, this time combining a pair of responses I'd been meaning to write forever on two important African writers, to create a single intertwined book review in order to provide a better perspective to new readers of African literature.
Colonization and its aftermath play major roles in the modern history of Africa and their textual representation supplies an excellent resource for studying the processes at hand that impacted economies as well as social and personal histories across an entire continent. Contrasting the fictional work A Man of the People by the late Chinua Achebe with Frantz Fanon’s nonfiction dialectic The Wretched of the Earth allows for a broader exploration of the techniques of fiction and for the display of differing methods of discourse on the colonial experience and its consequences. These two works propagate—through different methods—a similar theme: that violence inflicted on the psyche is internalized and begets further violence as a manner of curing the damage.
