Cultural Conflict
Comparisons between African and Caribbean writers
Texts used: A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiongo; Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe; An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English, edited by John J. Figueroa; Collected Poems, by Derek Walcott.[i]
The very first words in Things Fall Apart describe the character of the hero, Okonkwo, as someone who is admired by his fellows. They read: ‘Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.’[ii] Early in the story another example of Okonkwo’s integration and acceptance by his people is given. He is chosen as an emissary for his tribe, and the event is described as follows: ‘And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honour and respect, and two days later he returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin.’[iii]
Yet despite this popularity and integration with his countrymen, Okonkwo is shown in the text as a man with deepening conflicts. In fact one of his major contentions is shown as occurring precisely because he tried to live so fully as a male in the traditional way of his people. This is portrayed in the text in the scenes where Okonkwo is expected to take part in killing Ikemefuna the adopted ‘lad of fifteen’ he had fostered for three years. In killing his adopted son, Okonkwo not only cuts asunder the bonds of feeling that connected him with the boy, but also sunders the connection with his own natural son. He does this because, as the narrator says: ‘He was afraid of being thought weak.’[iv] The weakness being that it was the long custom of the tribe to kill slaves such as Ikemefuna. To avoid the custom could have been taken as a sign of fear and disagreement with custom. In the text, Okonkwo represents the stance of attempting to retain tribal custom as it is – or to be more precise, tribal custom as it was.[v]
An opposite polarity to this is provided by Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. When Okonkwo returned home after having killed Ikemefuna, the text says that: ‘Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry, he just hung limp.’[vi] In fact this is the beginning of Nwoye’s move away from his father and his own traditional culture. This move shows the inherent discontent within the tribal people themselves with some of their traditional ways of doing things, such as the killing of a twin. Such discontent is a part of the complexity of attitudes readying some members of the tribal society for an alliance with an alien culture such as that presented by the ‘whiteman’ and Christianity.
This conflict with ones own people is also reflected in A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Once more the first words of the novel give a clue to much of its contents. They are: ‘Mugo felt nervous.’[vii] Mugo’s internal conflict also pertains to guilt he carries because of his part in the death of a fellow tribesman. But Mugo’s conflict has somewhat different circumstances attached to it than that of Okonkwo. The rebel, Kihika, seeks Mugo’s help because he has killed an important white-man. Mugo’s struggle is expressed in the words:
‘If I don’t serve Kihika he’ll kill me. They killed Rev. Jackson and Teacher Maniu. If I work for him, the government will catch me. The whiteman has long arms. And they’ll hang me. My God, I don’t want to die.’[viii]
The message in this text is clear. Mugo is torn by his own fear, a fear played upon by the power wielded by a foreign power ruling the country by force. He is terrified that Kihika will ask something of him that he is terrified of giving. Mugo is led by his fear of two external forces, to have allegiance to nobody – not his own culture, nor that of the white-man. But the text of A Grain of Wheat is not simply about a conflict of that nature. It, like Things Fall Apart, deals with the complexities arising out of change within the tribal people themselves, and change and opportunity created by an imperialistic and technologically advanced power dominating a tribal nation. The major difference between the two texts is that A Grain of Wheat deals with the period when Kenya is struggling to be free of the white mans rule, and achieves this. Things Fall Apart, on the other hand, deals with the period when white rule is just beginning, and Christianity is only starting to encroach on tribal beliefs. As bad as some aspects of white rule were, and as determined as some tribes were to resist it, there were nevertheless factors which acted against resistance. As the narrator says in Things Fall Apart:
… the leaders of the land in the future would be men and women who had learnt to read and write. If Umuofia failed to send her children to the school, strangers would come from other places to rule them. They could already see that happening in the Native Court, where the DC was surrounded by strangers who spoke his tongue.[ix]
The change was happening as inexorably as the movement of a tide. It could not be stopped, but working with it one might be able to direct it a little this way or that. Although the situation described in the two texts mentioned so far is one in which the native communities are ruled by an alien culture, the native peoples still inhabit their own land, and eventually drive out the aliens. This does not underlie the texts dealing with the history and culture of the Caribbean. The Caribbean black people were slaves from the beginning, and over a long period of time. They did not drive out their masters, and were not in their own native country. Haiti of course has a slightly different history. Jaques Stephen Alexis writes in African Literature Today that there is: ‘… evidence in some new literatures of a vital longstanding literary tradition which does not depend on anti-colonial polemics for its survival. The Haitian peasant novel is one such example.’[x] Despite this exception much of the writing from black Caribbean authors is deeply influenced by the history of slavery and the colonial influence. A metaphor of this is expressed in Martin Carter’s poem So That We Build:
I wish this world would sink and drown again
So that we build another Noah’s ark
And send another little dove to find
what we have lost in floods of misery.[xi]
The ‘world’ Martin Carter is writing about here is not simply an island. It is an inheritance of a social situation created by many generations of slavery. It is an inheritance of a self-image that comes from being the heir of conquered forebears. Carter invokes in the poem a call for a new world cleansed of the past and of its mistakes and tragedies. The phrase ‘So that we’ marks the poem as one not dealing with an individual or personal issue, but a collective one. That Carter uses the image of the ark also suggests a mistake or a transgression prior to deliverance. But some of the issues expressed by Caribbean writers do have strong links with the difficulties faced by native Africans. One such issue is clearly expressed in Claude McKay’s I Meet an English Gentleman. Having been told that the Jamaican dialect had never been put into literary form by a ‘native boy’, the hero says:
I was not very enthusiastic about the statement, because to us who were getting an education in the English schools the Jamaican dialect was considered a vulgar tongue. It was the language of the peasants. All cultivated people spoke English, straight English.[xii]
Poverty is a thief of self-esteem no matter what race one belongs to, or what the colour of ones skin. Even so, to consider oneself ‘vulgar’, and uncultivated is a great disadvantage. McKay’s story particularly emphasises this difficulty because it is about the relationship of a young black man with a cultured member of the English upper-class. Other aspects of this type of personal or social conflict, which arises out of a comparison between an impoverished or technologically inferior race with a dominant one, are shown in the African writings. A particularly poignant example of this appears in Things Fall Apart. A great social crime has been committed by one of the Christian community in Umuofia. The leaders or ‘fathers’ of Umuofia deal very wisely and gently with the priest and the criminal. In return the white authorities humiliate the ‘fathers’:
The six men ate nothing throughout that day and the next. They were not even given any water to drink, and they could not go out to urinate or go into the bush when they were pressed. At night the messengers came to taunt them and to knock their shaven heads together.[xiii]
Until that time the tribe had an illusion of power and ability to determine their own way of life. After it Okonkwo in desperation kills one of the district commissioner’s messengers who was ordering the Umuofians to end a meeting they were attending. Okonkwo’s death represents the end of self determination as a culture. Death at ones own hand is an awful metaphor for what black tribal people were faced with when they recognised their powerlessness, their vulgarity, and were made to feel uncultivated. The reverse side of this is also illustrated by the text dealing with the imprisonment of the Umuofian ‘fathers’. Their imprisonment illustrates the obdurate attitude of superiority expressed by most white authorities. It is the attitude that native people are of no account, are ignorant, are superstitious. These many layered walls of difference were important parts of the conflicts which grew within both African and Caribbean black communities.
Some black writers, like Walcott and Figueroa, begin to find their way through these old barriers and pains. In Walcott’s case he does so by a global view of things – by standing above his own background and looking beyond it. We see this in the lines: ‘Ablaze with rage I thought, / Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake, / But still the coal of my compassion fought / That Albion too was once / A colony like ours, “part of the continent, pieces of the main …”’[xiv]
This standing above ones own culture is a form of internationalism. Walcott has taken on aspects of the information, historical perspective and wider viewpoint of other cultures. Or at least, he has taken on these aspects of the culture that dominated his own native background.
Looked at in this light there is much in all of the texts pointing to this same process of integration. If we look at the characters in the text as representing the different ways of relating to change, then many of the primary or secondary characters present a stand of taking on information and power from white domination. Karanja, in A Grain of Wheat for instance, stops resisting white supremacy and becomes an official working for the white men. Mumbi says: ‘Karanja always pointed out to me that my faithfulness was vain. The government forces were beating the Freedom Fighters.’[xv] When Thompson, the white commissioner is returning to England, Karanja realises he will lose the power he has gained through his association with the commissioner. On hearing confirmation of this news, the narrator tells us: ‘Panic seized Karanja. He played with his fingers behind his back. He would have loved to suddenly vanish from the earth rather than bear the chill around.’[xvi] Karanja’s conflict is therefore not one of overt aggression toward the colonial forces, but one that leads him to fear his fellow Africans because of his relationship with them. So once more the texts are showing the complexity of relationships to the central theme of white dominance.
But the fear Karanja feels comes late. At first there is power and its use. Karanja had gradually eroded Mumbi’s confidence in the return of her husband, Gikonyo from the prison camps of the white government. He had pushed Mumbi until she allowed him to have sex with her. This and the fact that Gikonyo had been demoralised emotionally and physically by his years in the prison camps, led to his hatred yet fear of Karanja. The meeting between the two men that occurred when Gikonyo had just been released from a prison camp is particularly expressive of these different roles and feelings. In this scene Karanja is the official dealing with someone with less power:
‘Come right in,’ Karanja said. Gikonyo was shaken with bitter incomprehension – Karanja, a Chief, Karanja sitting erect behind a table, now lowering his eyebrows, the frown adding severity to his face.
‘I said come in,’ Karanja repeated in a voice unnecessarily loud
Gikonyo walked in, gingerly, conflicting thoughts passing through his mind. He sat on a chair and bit his lower lip to steady a bitterness close to tears … And he saw Karanja, his old friend, was watching his every reaction, Karanja, who now talked to Gikonyo coldly as if he did not know him, as if Gikonyo was a criminal.
Comparing this officious Karanja with the one who faces Thompson, we see him as a metaphor for what can happen, what probably did happen, to many Africans who gained some sort of official power under white rule. This aspect of Karanja is obviously not as ease with the servile, Karanja who is dependent upon Thompson yet resents and fears him. Gikonyo on the other hand, is a symbol for men robbed of their tribal status through the intervention of a system that does not take into account the culture it dominates. This loss is shown in the manner Karanja speaks to his old friend and tribal brother and equal.
Olaudah Equiano states a clear example of this direct dominance, in its most gross form, in Equiano on his Way to Slavery:
In a little time after, amongst the poor chained men I found some of my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to my mind. I inquired of these what was to be done with us; they gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people’s country to work for them. … I had never seen among my people such instances of brutal cruelty, and this not only shown toward us blacks but also to some of the whites themselves.[xvii]
Equiano gives such vivid description of the horrors and pain of life on board a slave ship that one can see that the conflict faced by a slave might not even be one toward his captors, but with the fact of remaining alive:
… with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat … I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.[xviii]
Equiano does not suggest that slavery was something unique to the white men who were his captors. He, as the persona of the text, was already a slave to black people before he was sold on to the whites. Nevertheless, the treatment given by the whites was horrific compared with that meted to him by his own countrymen. The cultural differences were so huge he felt terrified of being killed by what he felt must be demons, or at the other extreme, wanting to die due to being treated like an object and separated from people he knew, or from his own language group.
For the children of those who survived such appalling journeys and changes, there were different problems to face. Generations grew and only knew slavery as their situation, and another country as their home. In fact even their new home becomes the home for others. Chinese and Indian immigrants shared the land with them. The mix of races, still deeply influenced by Anglo/American culture, had to find their own balance with each other. V. S. Naipaul, himself from Indian stock, writes about the subtleties of the attitudes to be dealt with in this cultural mix. In The Baker’s Story, he says:
When black people in Trinidad go to a restaurant they don’t like to see black people meddling with their food. And then I see that though Trinidad have every race and colour, every race have to do special things. … I myself, when I was getting my place in Arouca fix up, I didn’t employ Indian carpenters or masons. If a Indian in Trinidad decide to go into the carpentering business the man would starve. Who ever see a Indian carpenter? I suppose the only place in the world they have Indian carpenters and Indian masons is India. Is a damn funny thing[xix]
In a slightly different way, what Naipaul is describing here is very much the same as mentioned in McKay’s I Meet an English Gentleman. In the latter, the attitudes are to do with what is seen as cultivated language and what is vulgar. In Naipaul’s story, the attitudes are reflecting who is skilled at what. The black community, according to the story, does not see black cooks as skilled, but feel good about themselves as carpenters. Chinese are seen as good bakers and launderers, but the first-person storyteller explains to us: ‘If a black man open a laundry, you would take your clothes to it? I wouldn’t take my clothes there.’[xx]
The conflict is not all on the side of the black communities though, whether in Africa or in the Caribbean. The texts also point out conflicts experienced by the white characters in the stories. The texts are at pains again not to give stereotypical characterisation to whites however. In A Grain of Wheat a scene is described where Thompson the district commissioner witnesses a bull-mastiff belonging to a white woman attack Karanja:
Suddenly the dog started barking as it bounded across the compound towards the group of Africans. … One man could not run in time. The dog went for him. The man tried to edge his way out, but the dog fixed him to the wall. Suddenly he stooped, picked up a stone, and raised it in the air. The dog was now only a few feet away.[xxi]
The dogs owner arrives at this point and calls the dog off, but blames the African, Karanja, for threatening the dog. Watching this scene, Thompson was: ‘relieved and vaguely disappointed that nothing had happened.’[xxii] He then stops the woman, Dr. Lynd, from accusing the Africans of attacking her dog. But the text says: ‘He wanted to tell her about the dog but somehow felt it difficult.’[xxiii] In these short pieces of text Thompson is shown as having a mixture of feelings about the Africans he is the authority figure for, and also a conflict about how to relate to a white colleague. ‘He wanted to tell her the truth – but he would have to tell her about his own paralysis – how he had stood fascinated by an anticipation of blood.’[xxiv]
Why does Thompson want to see an African torn by a dog? Why is it difficult to tell his colleague directly that she must control her dog? This is gradually revealed in other parts of the text. The narrator explains the history of this as if it is Thompson’s thoughts or memories:
The silence. Sudden. Like Rira. There the detainees had refused to speak. They sat down and refused to eat or drink. Their obduracy was like iron. Their eyes followed him everywhere. The agony, lack of sleep, thinking of how to break the silence. And in the dark, he could see their eyes. In the men at the library, he had recognized the eyes, the same look.[xxv]
So Thompson’s struggle is with power, with those who resist his authority and the system he represents. The text above, in describing his ‘agony’ in connection with trying to break the will of the prisoners he was in charge of, depicts Thompson as deeply identified with his role and the authority it gave him. That helpless tribesmen in fact had so much power over him; that they could be so strong against him and all the forces he wielded, cut him deeply – deeply enough to want to hurt back. But how can he, Thompson, be seen to enjoy the discomfort of one of his black staff? The human Thompson and the Thompson as a representative of and symbol of the British Government are in conflict.
Is there an even deeper and widespread symptom underlying Thompson’s personal responses, underlying the white race’s drive for dominance? The text already quoted above portrays a race who are brutalised and brutalising: ‘… such instances of brutal cruelty, and this not only shown toward us blacks but also to some of the whites themselves.’[xxvi]. Later in the story Equiano compares the actions of the whites, with their stated religion of love: ‘Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you.’[xxvii] His descriptions of treatment are particularly interesting, as they are an eyewitness account of his own experiences as a slave.
Equiano was one of the very first black African/Caribbean and black American writers. Turning to look more fully at more recent Caribbean writers, the areas of conflict expressed within their text is less dramatic, less horrendous. A community life and a culture have developed beyond slavery. The dialectics of these modern texts has more to do with tensions within a more established yet obviously still changing group of people who have at least a sense of nationality and history, even if that history is productive of regrets. There is more humour and more irony in these texts. A particularly good example of this, and the more subtle conflicts expressed, is found in RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall.[xxviii] The overall theme of the story, or at least one of its themes, is the relationship that exists between the black/brown community and the white upper class in modern Barbados. Areas of difficulty in this relationship are early expressed in the passage in which Mrs. Bush-Hall, the main black/brown character, is looking at her daughter and her presumed future white son-in-law:
At an old-fashioned desk littered with sheets of writing paper and envelopes, were bent two heads, one of them, her future son-in-law’s, pure Nordic gold, the other, her daughter’s – and here a transient frown ruffled her sleek brow – well, she wished it didn’t remind her so much of molasses froth. But never mind that, she thought, ever mind. It could pass for blonde …[xxix]
By comparing the two hair colourings, and by using positive suggestion in ‘pure Nordic gold’, and negative suggestion in the worry connected with ‘molasses froth’, the introduction of concerns over ‘blackness’ as compared to ‘whiteness’ is introduced. Mrs. Bush-Hall, who has risen socially from working as a prostitute in her youth, to the heights of wealth and social acceptability, is thereby depicted as having a conflict about her ethnic background and its effect socially. Even so the language, in such phrases as ‘But never mind that, she thought, never mind. It could pass for blonde,’ has a touch of humour and irony.
The use of certain registers and language is also cleverly used to suggest Mrs. Bush-Hall’s origins and the amusing side to her ambitions towards social climbing:
‘Her bosom rose and fell again. This time the sigh reverberated.
Two heads were raised in enquiry.
‘Was only thinkin’, pet. You got down that master at the College? The one that does write poetry?’[xxx]
The use of colloquial grammar in her language, helps the reader to create an image of Mrs. Bush-Hall as belonging to a less educated class than her daughter, Pyrlene, who replies: ‘Lucas isn’t impressed mamma. He thinks it is much too derivative.’[xxxi] The struggle to attain a different class, or perhaps to have a self-image or self-esteem that Mrs. Bush-Hall assumes the white gentry and ladies have, is also presented in other parts of the text. The ‘gentry and ladies’ of her circle, to whom she aspires, are presented in a comic way to illustrate perhaps the foolishness of her own aspirations. They have names like Dr. Dooms, Mrs. Celestial Barker, Miss Eurine Potts, and so on.[xxxii] So the text highlights not only the struggle a black/brown woman has in finding some sort of self-respect, and the conflict she suffers regarding her social origins, but also laughs at this struggle. In fact the story illustrates how the desire to better oneself can easily lead to being vulnerable to trickery. She was so enamoured of the fact that her future son-in-law came from an aristocratic background, that she falls into the trap of trusting him, enabling him to run off with her jewels. He also left her daughter pregnant. But the text looks at this betrayal of trust in an unusual way. When Mrs. Bush-Hall realises Lucas, the escaped son-in-law, has gone, the narrator tells us:
It was strange, he had made a complete fool of her, and yet … she bore him no malice. She had lost out. Lost maybe six or seven thousand dollars, lost the son-in-law of her dreams, every thing she had planned, had hoped for, had boasted about … and yet. … She liked Lucas. She had enjoyed those months of his stay more than any other period of time she could remember. He was the only man she had really ever liked.
This is an interesting piece of text, because instead of feeling betrayed and belittled by the cheat, she feels she had received something good, even if it was taken away from her. Is this a metaphor that the white race, having cheated the black race out of their land, their liberty, their labour, nevertheless gave them something of value? In Mrs. Bush-Hall’s case, she possessed a form of wealth and economic independence she might never have had as a native black woman. She was emancipated as far as needing a man to ‘look after’ her. She had realised her own capacity to be smart and capable with money. She had an easy acceptance of her own type of sexual and reproductive needs. In a gentle way, with humour and irony, the story says that this untutored black woman has many things a tutored and cultivated white woman might lack. She is free of the complicated and deadly guilt about her own sexuality. Having married an ageing but wealthy man who is suggested to be sterile, she has an affair with a white man, and with no sense of social shame, keeps the resulting daughter. Even promotes her socially:
Not unnaturally harsh things were said, but as Mr Hall made no comment (indeed he had lost the power of speech some time previously) and as there was no one to dispute the child’s claim to legitimacy, Mrs Hall was quite pleased with the affair, assuring all and sundry that the arrival of an heir, though female, was the long deferred answer to her husband’s prayer, and that now she would not be at all surprised if he departed in peace. Which he did shortly afterwards.[xxxiii]
Therefore, although this text does in fact show the conflict a black woman might have about her skin colour in a white dominated society, and about her standing in that society, it also shows what has been gained, what has been achieved. It shows the strengths a black/brown woman has inherited from her own culture and from white culture.
In summary, the texts examined present a wide range of different responses to the social, political and cultural situations described in the books. The texts do not attempt to stereotype the characters or oversimplify the problems faced. As with Things Fall Apart, the book does not offer any simple answers to the conflicts between cultures, or those within the one culture. Mugo in A Grain of Wheat, and Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, both kill themselves. Both these books are thereby suggesting that important aspects of personal and cultural life died in the struggle to meet the changes and the dominance by another very different culture.
The Caribbean writers however, impart much more of an overall – or what I have called ‘international’ – view of themselves and their situation. Stories such as The Baker’s Story, and RSVP for Mrs Bush, suggest this is through being more exposed to many different cultures, and finding a place within them. There is certainly a great deal more humour and pleasure expressed in these works. The conflicts expressed are not enormous in that the texts are not about political and social revolution. The revolution for black Caribbeans was in the long past. It was a bloody and tragic revolution. It cost a lot. But from the perspective of Mrs. Bush and the ‘Baker’, the survivors have gained a lot too.
This does not come out in the African texts. Both the books end with much uncertainty, with much lost and no sureness about what might now come. This in itself is a point of conflict.
|
|
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1958.
African Literature Today 7 – Focus on Criticism, Edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1975
African Literature Today 9 – Africa America and the Caribbean, Edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1978.
An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Heinemann International. Oxford, 1982.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1983.
Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM.
Infopedia UK Ltd. Hutchinson New Century Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM.
The Post Colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Routledge, London, 1995.
Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1967.
Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems. HarperCollins (Noonday Press). 1986.
Ways of Reading. Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss and Sara Mills. Routledge, London, 1992.
[i] See bibliography for full publication details.
[ii] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 3.
[iii] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 9.
[iv] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 43.
[v] The past tense is used here because change was already under way through colonial dominance.
[vi] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 43.
[vii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 3.
[viii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat P. 169.
[ix] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 128.
[x] African Literature Today No. 9 – Africa America and the Caribbean, Edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Pg. 90.
[xi] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 233.
[xii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 159.
[xiii] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 138.
[xiv] Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems. Pg. 20.
[xv] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 131.
[xvi] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 140.
[xvii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 85.
[xviii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 85.
[xix] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 111.
[xx] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 111.
[xxi] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 38.
[xxii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 38.
[xxiii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 39.
[xxiv] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 39/40.
[xxv] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 42.
[xxvi] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 85.
[xxvii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 87.
[xxviii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall.
[xxix] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 117.
[xxx] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 117.
[xxxi] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 117.
[xxxii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 119.
[xxxiii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 121.