Authors : Abhijeet Dawle
DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.16928150
Volume : 2
Issue : 12
Year : 2015
Page No : 11-16
Ayi Kwei Armah’s third novel Why Are We So Blest? presents the distinction between the white and the black, the oppressor and the oppressed through the husband-mistress relationship. In Why Are We So Bleast? Africa has only a mute secondary presence, consistent with its focus on Africans spirited away from native culture by Western education. The novel records no family ties and few memories of home. Imperialism which began as an exploitative system motivated by economic gains, led to the transformation of black Africa from one cultural mode to another. Contact with the Western systems of administration, education and social, economic and religious control disrupted the pre-colonial agrarian communities and their system of values. Western administration strongly believes that economic and political control of Africa cannot be possible without cultural control. It is the slavery of the mind and the body. As a postcolonial novelist Ayi Kwei Armah has presented the project of decolonization through his novel. Colour is the main cause for marginalizing the blacks. It establishes his inferiority and powerlessness, so Ayi Kwei Armah reverses the colour symbolism and associates positive values with black and evil with white.