De-Constructing African Politics via the Grotesque Body in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow

Siaka FOFANA

Volume 16 – Septembre 2021 : Le corps dans les productions artistiques et culturelles : entre esthétique et signification (2021) Page(s) 88 - 102 ISSN 2076-6130

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2007) can be read as a work of dictatorial and dystopian fiction. In the novel, the writer uses human body to lay bare political appetite, dictatorship and dystopian reality in a fictitious society called Aburĩria. Accordingly, he devises a work of art made up of the grotesquely puffed-up human body which is evocative of excessive political drive, dystopia and dictatorship in the Kenyan political arena and in Africa in general. Indeed, dictators may have a variety of strategies and objectives lurking behind their domination: power, position, wealth and political drive that re￾shape the society and its constituents. A plethora of African writers and scholars have fictionalized and addressed the issue of dictatorship in the African literary sphere. Among them, M. Isegawa’s Snakepit (1995) and A. Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (2004) can be listed. Isegawa’s opus covers the last moments of the reign and dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada Oumee in Uganda. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to vote by Kourouma narrates the story of another prototypic figure of African dictator named Koyaga. This dictator rules over the republic of the gulf. The novel depicts figures of various African dictators through animals used as symbols. An overview of literary works that address dictatorship also suggests some scholars’ outputs. C. Baker’s and H. Grayson’s collective work entitled Fictions of African Dictatorship: Cultural Representations of Postc

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Siaka FOFANA. « De-Constructing African Politics via the Grotesque Body in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow ». Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères, Numéro 16, 2021, p. 88. ISSN 2076-6130.