Corporeality as Trope in African Drama

George D. Nyamndi
There can be no end to the discussion of the African encounter with Europe, because the
wounds inflicted touched the very springs of life and have remained unhealed because they
are constantly being gashed open again with more subtle, more lethal weapons.
Ngugi wa Thiongo, Homecoming, XII
1One of dramas basic missions, especially within its African matrix, is to convey in dialogue
and action the urgency of the playwrights deeper intention, but also of the characters driving
motivations. These informing currents are pivotal in a continent brimming with issues of basic
survival.
2Like practically all the other art forms within the traditional African context, drama is called
upon to join with truculence in the bout pitting the continent against the outside world, but
more tragically, and more immediately, against its own very self ; for the truth of the matter is
that African drama either makes a statement of relevance to the African experience or it is no
drama at all. The need for therapeutic insights remains at variance with the luxury of
speculative aloofness. Defamiliarisation, structuralism, formalism, new historicism, yes, but
only in so far as they are seen to be enhancing comprehension of vital issues ; seen to be
making the stone stony, that is. We thank Shklovsky. But feminism, oh yes. Anything that
sounds like woman is cherished in Africa. To the African man, feminism is structuralism
stood on its head ; it is content, not device, it is matter, the woman herself, not outer form. Its
theoretical flights are of no moment. We now see that all theory is culturally determined and
serves an essentially cultural ideology.

The body as stage

3One event that finds a privileged stage both on and in the (African) body is without doubt the
black mans meeting with the white man. However long ago and wherever this meeting took
place, it did not generate partial consequences and its effects were integral to the essential
condition of the black man. They have since continued to be so.
4Left to itself, that encounter remains a normal act of human intercourse inscribable within
the context of migratory fluidity characteristic of all animate beings. But subsumed in Ngugis
particular metaphorical choices, it is transformed into a field of battle objectified in a new
rapport of verticality between those on top, who inflict and perpetrate wounds, and those
below, on whom the wounds are inflicted and kept alive.
5Ngugis recourse to the wound as commanding metaphor in the encounter keeps the
analytical discourse permanently alert to corporeality as the organizing trope. For him, as for
Marx, the central category of analysis is humankind, given concrete form in the human body.
Fanon sharpens the focus further in maintaining that the whole question of imperialism is
buried in the bones of the native1. The sensory effect of this statement one has a raw feel of in
Wole Soyinkas The Man Died when the detainee Seinde Arigbede concedes that unlike
others, he did not undergo the agony of having broomstick switches driven up his penis !2.
All men clutch their own thing in gendered agony here, dont they ?

6The analytical tool for writings of this kind therefore lends itself admirably to the language
of anatomy in which different parts of the body are raised to vectors of ideology, made to
keep alive, that is, the consciousness of an experience whose effects continue to be felt even
more dramatically today across the continent.
7Ngugi construes the legacy of the black/white encounter essentially in terms of continuity
and intensification. Whether labelled colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, postcolonialism or any other one, the event and its offshoot have never gone away. They are here,
in subtler and deadlier forms.
8In the prototype raw material, men are locked in a relationship of oppression and resistance,
of exploitation and denouncement, situations in which the liberation struggle by the oppressed
peoples, mainly the African masses, comes across as the dominant motif. This liberation
effort assumes a triangular dynamics of other, self, and again other, resolved into colonialism,
self-rule, and neo-colonialism.
9The prime source of conflict on the continent, it would seem, is land and the wealth
generated by it. The settler, attracted and even fascinated by the potentials of the black mans
land, swoops in and takes possession in a defiant act of substitution and estrangement. This
originating transgression sparks a cycle of repression and resistance in which the psychology
of human guile comes under creative scrutiny. The existential tensions arising out of
land /man relations are constitutive of the dominant matrix of discourse, land being pretext
and man the primary focus.
10Ngugis plays provide some of the best illustrations of how these conflicts operate. The
Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and I will marry when I want (1982) both constitute two sides
of the same (colonial) coin, the former depicting the struggle to free Kenya from colonial
occupation and the latter to free the Kenyan man from neo-colonial oppression. All the drama
in both plays is acted out on and in the human body. By aid of the anatomical discourse, the
playwright imbues his subject matter with symbolic dimensions that extend its relevance to
the entire continent. As he and Mugo say in the Preface to The Trial, one of the main spurs to
writing this play was the realization that the war Kimathi was leading was being waged with
even greater vigour all over Africa and in all the other parts of the world where imperialism
still enslaved the people and stole their wealth. Kimathis war thus takes on a symbolic status
to become not only a struggle for freedom from colonial oppression but a struggle for
liberation from all forms of oppression.
11In Lake God, the Cameroonian playwright Bole Butake, for his part, uses the 1986 Lake
Nyos disaster3 to chart the cupidity of a reckless body politic that takes delight in
misappropriating relief aid where it should be helping victims to overcome the trauma of loss.
Interestingly enough, the central figure in this play is a white priest.
12The white priest in Lake God and the other white characters in African plays form part of
an octopus dubbed colonialism, a phenomenon that Kimathi, the central personage in The
Trial views as a jungle of exploitation where one will find creatures of prey feeding on the
blood and bodies of those who toil : those who make the earth yield4. The same Kimathi
calls Shaw Henderson, the British Prosecutor, an imperialist cannibal5. Whether creatures of
prey feeding on the blood and bodies of those who toil, or land-grabbing oppressors,
colonialists are viewed by the native in essentially destructive terms.

13But the colonial man, for his part, sees himself as animated by a wider logic of Darwinian
determinism in which all acts are defendable, justifiable, so long as they guarantee their
authors survival. We should indeed be saying ascendancy. Henderson tells Kimathi :
Nations live by strength and self-interest6. This ideological contradiction between black
and white is echoed in Fanons concept of a world divided into compartments, a motionless,
Manichaeistic world7, and receives further epistemological warrant in the Marxist dialectics
that sees all matter in motion and development based on internal contradictions8. Reality by
the terms of this dialectic vision is not just perceived event but the coexistence of
incompatible forces verifiable in such oppositional dualities as master/slave, lord/serf,
bourgeois/proletariat.
14What Henderson calls strength and self interest, Kimathi calls cannibalistic exploitation.
The latters recourse to predatory imagery only fixes the black/white question more firmly
within the anatomical matrix : the settlers do not stop at seizing the land of the natives ; they
do a lot worse than that, for they eat up the native as well, body and all. The ethical
boomerang at work here shatters the moralistic pretensions of colonialism to pieces and in the
process exposes its substantial ugliness.
15But in its dialectical intentions, much of the drama of the continent is not so much
concerned with colonialism made in Europe as with its neo-manifestations in the daily lives of
the African people. It is for this reason that in the plays white agents assume only marginal
roles. The dominant characters in these plays are Africans ; and even when they interact with
white men, initiative is exercised predominantly by the natives themselves. There is a clear
message here for the African masses : look within yourselves for solutions to your own
problems.

A matter of blood
16The African dramatic universe is washed in blood. In fact, this liquid seems to be a
cherished metaphor in the entire artistic design and a privileged vehicle for the
conceptualization and articulation of dominant ideologies. We have seen in The Trial that
colonialism is nothing but a jungle of exploitation where creatures of prey feed on the blood
and bodies of those who toil. In the neo-colonial situation of I will marry, the permanence of
this evil is conveyed still in blood imagery : The rich only want to find ways of continuing to
drink peoples blood9. This bizarre milieu where human blood is a sought-after delicacy
smacks of Swifts 18th century England portrayed with such mouth-watering sarcasm in A
Modest Proposal. Interestingly enough, in this piece Swift calls the English savages
devouring the Irish10. In I will marry, the protagonist Kiguunda and his wife Wangeci get
into a scuffle in the course of which she cries out : Let him now kill me so he can have meat
for supper11. Apparently, this outrage is levelled at her husband ; but the real monster in the
mirror is the business magnate Kioi. He and his American, German and Japanese capitalist
accomplices have transformed Kiguunda, once a prosperous landowner, into a wretched
alcoholic. First they throw him out of his poorly-paid job as labourer on Kiois farm, then
they mastermind the seizure of his land by the bank headed by the very same Kioi. As
synecdochic tool, blood is effective in a way that no other part of the human body is. That is
why the ideological battle between the two opposing worldviews is steeped primarily in it.
17The capitalist venture may be and certainly is driven by material interests that all too
easily blind the settlers to the blood(y)-dimension of their act. But then, recognizing the

central to the preoccupations of the imperialists ; at least not as far as the natives were
concerned. In The Trial, for instance, the white police officer, Waitina, calls Kimathi a black
bastard12, and the Old White Dame calls the same Kimathi and his fellow fighters wild
savages13. These insults are not particular ; they are racial. To Waitina and the old white lady,
Kimathi and his ilk are vexatious accidents in history, creatures just good enough to till the
white mans soil. And just in case these white ones thought they were alone in their disdain,
Fanon steps in to provide greater depth to their judgment : [] torpid creatures, wasted by
fever, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating
dynamism of colonial mercantilism14.
18This animalization of the black man, though modelled on colonial Kenya, is still too vividly
familiar in todays Africa. A journey through the continent, even as its wretched flags of
independence flap proudly in the harsh winds, brings home the unremitting permanence of
suffering and disease, and a gnawing sense of exploitation. This continued consciousness of a
malignant force at work informs the continents basic dramatic thrust and validates the feeling
that nothing much has changed between the colonial times and the neo-colonial present. In
fact one finds it difficult at times to fight back the conclusion that if things have changed, they
have done so only for the worse.

From thing to man

19The pessimism that all too often overwhelms views of the continent is relieved somewhat
by the stated mission of the continents drama tradition.
20Much of the drama we are dealing with is not only a drama of combativeness ; it is also a
drama of didacticism, the basic tenet of which is objective identification. The dramatist allies
with the people, identifies with them, in their fight for recognition. In the Preface to The Trial
Ngugi and Mugo say : We believe that good theatre is that which is on the side of the people,
that which, without masking mistakes and weaknesses, gives people courage and urges them
to higher resolves in their struggle for total liberation.
21It has just been seen that colonialism did not recognize the natives as human beings. To
Ngugi, Africas encounter with Europe inflicted wounds that touched the very springs of life.
Marx, for his own part, looked at the masses in a money-driven society, and all he saw was
alienated, fragmented human beings. He then sought, through his theory of alienation, to show
the destructive physical and psychological effects of capitalism on human beings15. But it is
Fanon who best profiles the damages of colonialism on the African psychology. He says :
At times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to
speak plainly it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions
the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow mans reptilian motions, of the stink
of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. [] Those
hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those
distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those
children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative
rhythm of life all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary16.
22This pathologizing discourse, to use Saunders nice coinage17, reduces the African to a
faceless backdrop to imperialist action. Before the liberation struggle proper can be launched,

this basic denial of identity must first be corrected, the native de-alienated, shadow given
essence. Once the natives blood has been put back in his veins, he becomes a principal actor
in the dynamics of change. The thing which has been colonized becomes man during the same
process by which it frees itself, says Fanon18 ; for, as the Kenyan saying goes, a man brags
about his own penis, however tiny19 ; penis, that is to say manhood, life-force.
23And yet man, the African man, had not always been thing. There had been times, in the
pre-colonial days, when, as Kiguunda tells his wife Wangeci, breasts were full and
pointed20, times of cultural and ritual integrity when the natives humanity was not called in
question. The damage of colonialism has put paid to cultural continuity : breasts have fallen,
as Kigunda laments21. And so too has the native. This is the intervening point of the
playwrights redemptive mission. It is here that they employ the invigorating power of drama
to expose the bad effects of colonialism.
24The native thing, now become a full-blooded man thanks to the education and
encouragement of the playwright, discovers how bloodied he has been in the colonial jaws of
death22. He discovers that wives and daughters have been raped before his own eyes, natives
have been crippled through beating, and men have been castrated23 ; backs have been flayed
by whips24, and poverty has dug trenches on his face25, poverty that is like poison in the
body26.
25Fanon reminds the African that colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body
endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state27. That is why the Maumau guerrillas make blood the central symbol of their struggle. Their entry into the cause is
marked by a blood oath and they are encouraged to shed their blood for their country so that
when victory is achieved, they can proudly say we were not given freedom. We bought it
with our blood28.
26In this scheme of things, independence is only a fleeting transition to neo-colonialism. As
Gicaamba muses rhetorically, The same colonial church survives even today. Did a leopard
ever change its spots ?29 It is here that African drama assumes the other of its dual
functions, namely to rescue the African from colonialism and its surrogate structures. To cite
Ngugi once again, It was crucial that all this be put together as one vision stretching from the
pre-colonial wars of resistance against European intrusion and European slavery, through the
anti-colonial struggle for independence and democracy, to post-independence struggle against
neo-colonialism (Preface, The Trial). This resolve wins the plays their badge of topicality,
for it shows colonialism to be a continuing evil that cannot be held within any specific
temporal or spatial boundaries and that, like good wine, gains in refinement the older it gets.
That is why the colonial man and his neo-colonial successor are treated with the same spite.
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi thus becomes an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the
collective will of the [] peasants and workers in their refusal to break under [] years of
colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued
determination to resist exploitation, oppression and new forms of enslavement (Preface, The
Trial).

The Lesson
27One of the questions Njooki asks amidst the ethical aridity overwhelming his native Kenya
is ; What happens to the herd when the leader has broken legs ?30 This question raises

another urgent one of progress. Broken legs negate the dynamism required to move forward.
The leader is not absent. He is there, visible, but unable to surge forward and spur the masses
in his wake. His inability to provide inspiring leadership is symbolic in more ways than one,
and prompts us to ask a basic question : is he living with his time ? Kimathi tells Henderson :
If you are a fighter, unfetter me now. Let us face each other. Man to man. Let us see which
wrestler fells the other, you coward31. One cannot suppress an ironic chuckle at Kimathis
clumsy backwardness. That he should term Henderson a coward is revealing of how
thoroughly ignorant he is of the structures of power in modern society. By all indications he
has mistaken his neo-colonial polity for the traditional milieu governed by the likes of
Okonkwo and Amalinze the cat in Things Fall Apart. It is certain that he will throw
Henderson in a wrestling bout, but such a victory will be utterly ridiculous at a time and age
that admits only of scientific and technological wrestling. Every attempt to break colonial
oppression by force, Fanon says, is a hopeless effort, an attempt at suicide, because in the
innermost recesses of their brains the settlers tanks and aeroplanes occupy a huge place32.
28Fanon cautions further that colonialism is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield
when confronted with greater violence. Whatever colonialism is, therefore, it can only be
defeated by its venom. If it is capitalism, it can only be defeated by a higher degree of
capitalism. If it is technology, only a more refined technological culture can overcome it.
29Gicaamba provides the winning formula when he says : The blood of the worker led by
his skill and experience and knowledge is the true creator of the wealth of nations33. This is
the quintessential weapon in the battle pitting native against settler. Skill, experience and
knowledge, not the colour of the skin or the shape of the nose : such are the weapons in the
battlefield of cultural supremacy. Armed with them, any race, anywhere on earth, will rise to
Aryan status.
30In a masterful finale to the basic principle of racial equality Fanon says : The native
discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He
finds out that the settlers skin is not of any more value than a natives skin ; and it must be
said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner34.
31In my own play, The Will, Robert Libongs exhortations to Dr Tayong Egbe stress a similar
universal humanism. The business mogul tells the newly-arrived, London-trained physician :
I will give you charge over my hospital. Run it, not for me, but for the blood that runs in all
human veins. Run it knowing that blood has but one colour. Prove to mankind that blood and
breath are one at all times and in all places35.
32Dramatic realism in Africa consists in x-raying society without masking mistakes and
weaknesses. To be effective, such drama need not engage in any puerile romanticization of
the freedom struggle, nor in the saint/devil dichotomy between native and settler so common
in anti-colonial apologia. It should point out weaknesses where they are found ; after all, the
continents bourgeoisie provides more than enough material for any critical machine, as does
the Church. Fanon says, The Church in the colonies is the white peoples Church, the
foreigners Church. She does not call the native to Gods ways but to the ways of the white
man, of the master, of the oppressor36.
33For Feuerbach, God was simply human beings worshipping themselves37. Even though in
his distress the native has cried out : Jesus your blood cleanses me38, this supplication has
fallen on the ears of a white man of God with Bible in left hand, gun in the right39 ; a white

man of God whose avowed mission is to soften our hearts, cripple our minds with
religion40. Gicaamba remembers how, during their liberation struggle, the religious leaders
used to be sent to them in detention camps to tell them, Surrender, surrender, confess the
oath, thats what Jesus tells you today, and how, in an anecdotal but revealing moment, a
priest trails Patriot, son of Njieri, into his cell pressing resignation calls on him, only for the
prisoner to shoot saliva into his priestly mouth41.
34Returning to the black bourgeoisie, Ikuua wa Ndikita, Kiois business partner, is described
as a man with a belly as huge as that of a woman about to deliver42. As for Kioi himself,
Kiguunda tells him : It is said that the fart of the rich never smells. But yours Kioi stinks all
over the earth43. Not only does Kiois fart smell, it stinks ; and not only in Kenya, but all
over the earth. The mans malodorous emission is easily identified as the by-products of
imperialism, captured most vividly in this lament by Gicaamba :
What did this factory bring to our village ?
Twenty-five cents a fortnight.
And the profits, to Europe !
What else ?
An open drainage that pollutes the air in the whole country ! An open drainage that brings
Diseases unknown before !
We end up with the foul smell and the diseases.
While the foreigners and the local bosses of the company live in palaces on green hills, with
wide tree-lined avenues, where theyll never get a whiff of the smell or contract any of the
diseases !44
35It is interesting that the foreigners and the local bosses are bonded in the same
neighborhoods, away from the stench of the open drainages. If there is anything the African
dramatists hold against the African man, it is this attitude of joining the foreigner to exploit
his own people. Since a house divided within itself cannot stand, this double oppression
suffered by the African masses makes the liberation struggle twice as difficult. Such is the
basic plight of todays African countries where the leaders and the local bourgeoisie delight in
sojourning in European countries either for holidays or health checks, in the process, of
course, squandering the essence of their countrys resources.
36Even when the wealthy invest locally, the action is driven more by egoistic reasons than by
any real nationalist feeling. For instance, when they build good hospitals, it is not to provide
healthcare to the needy and beleaguered masses but just so that when they get heart attacks
and belly ulcers, their wives can rush them to the hospitals45. The heart and belly as mirrors
flash at us the dynamics of imperialism and the remains of its action in, on, and around the
African man. There is no relieving intention here. All is harm and disease.
37By these extended corporal metaphors, African dramatists state with dogmatic clarity that
neo-imperialism eats up both makers and victims, either through diseases for the masses, or
heart attacks and belly ulcers for the compradors.
38On the whole, however, it is not wealth as such that the playwrights condemn, but its
greedy accumulation and the anti-social causes it is made to serve. Whereas the rich suffer
from heart attacks and stomach ulcers, obviously the fruit of over-indulgence and anxiety,
what do the poor get fortnight after fortnight ? Something for the belly ! just for the
belly ! But its not even enough for the belly !46

39So what are the lessons ? No play is there just for its own sake, given that every dramatic
production is an exercise in dialectical and/or ideological persuasion. The Preface to The Trial
of Dedan Kimathi has it that good theatre is that which is on the side of the people. In this
dramatic manifesto, masking mistakes and weaknesses emerges as the ultimate enemy of any
liberation struggle. Mistakes and weaknesses are expressions of human vulnerability, and they
manifest themselves first at the individual level before fanning out to engulf groups and
societies. That is why Ngugi burns the consequences of colonialism into the flesh of the
African, the better to dramatize and apportion causality : if the African, the black man, really,
is where he is, that is to say on the bottom rung of the human ladder, he only has himself to
blame for it. His body thus becomes at once symptomatic and emblematic of his failures, and
the repository of their consequences. As Fanon says, I admit that all the proofs of a
wonderful Songhai civilization will not change the fact that today the Songhais are under-fed
and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes.47 And so
colonialism, ever compassionate, returns, in its fresh post-colonial garb, this time to protect
her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own
unhappiness which is its very essence.48
40Colonialism, in whatever hue, cannot improve the essence of the African condition ; such is
not and has never been its mission. The onus of such a task lies primarily, not to say
exclusively, with the victim. If the African body feels the effects of colonialism, as Ngugi and
the other African dramatists demonstrate it does, then the mind propelling that body must do
what it takes to rise to the challenge. The final lesson for the African mind, all African minds,
indeed all black minds, is served in the following exposition by Engels in his now-famous
exchange with that epitome of puerility, Monsieur During :
In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well
suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand,
and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed : Man Friday gives the orders
and Crusoe is obliged to work [] Thus the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the
most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a
simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions,
and in particular the implements of violence ; and the more highly-developed of these
implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to
produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly-developed weapons, in everyday
speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it
briefly, the triumph of violence depends on the production of armaments, and this in its turn
depends on production in general, and thus [] on economic strength, on the economy of the
State, and in the last resort on the material means which that violence commands49.
41As Engels demonstrates in this disputation, violence is not a race issue, but one of ability :
the ability to produce the weapons for its propagation and sustenance. If violence is construed
in its less abrasive sense of life-force, we see that every human category has within its specific
context the means for the production of its own violence. In this connection, Aim Csaire
postulates : I believe that our particular cultures contain within them enough strength,
enough vitality, enough regenerative power to adapt themselves to the conditions of the
modern world and that they will prove able to provide for all political, social, economic or
cultural problems, valid and original solutions, that will be valid because they are original50.
And so by way of rhetorical fillip, the African dramatists join Fanon to ask the African man :
with what are you going to fight colonialism ? With your bows and arrows ? With your
spears ? Your shot-guns ? Or with your loaded, self-made revolvers ? The answer, we think,

lies not in the arms that till the settlers fields, but in the mind that makes it possible to save
the land of the ancestors for the full enjoyment of its rightful owners. To borrow from a
lament by Malcolm X, if the conked black men and white-wigged women gave the brain in
their heads just half as much attention as they do their hair, they would be a thousand times
better off51. For sure, and true to type, Malcolm here sets his gem in a crust of insult, but it
is the duty of the black race to break that crust open and free the gem in it, free the black mind
so that it can set to work and make the black race a thousand times better off.
42Let me end by saying this: Africa cannot win as a continent unless it wins as a race. And
you are Africa !

Bibliographie
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Haut de page

Notes

1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Middlesex : Penguin Books, 1967, 40.
2 Wole Soyinka, The Man Died, Ibadan : Spectrum Books, [1972] 1993, vii.
3 In mid-1986, toxic gas emissions in the lake claimed the lives of some 1600 villagers.
Although the official statement attributes the happening to natural causes, there is a seething
feeling that chemical weapons were tested in the lake by a foreign power. Whatever the real
causes, this latter suspicion maintains the ideological implications of the disaster at a high
level.
4 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, London :
Heinemann, 1976, 26.
5 Ibid., 35.
6 Ibid., 34.
7 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 40.
8 Charles Funderburk and Robert Thobaben, Political Ideologies, New York : Harper &
Rowe, 1989, 23.
9 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, London : Heinemann,
1982, 56.
10 Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2181.
11 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 110.
12 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, op. cit., 7.
13 Ibid., 29.
14 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 40 (my emphasis).
15 Charles Funderburk and Robert Thobaben, Political Ideologies, op. cit., 24.
16 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 32-33.
17 Rebecca Saunders, Decolonizing the Body : Gender, Nation, and Narration, in Tahar
Ben Jelloun, Lenfant de sable, Research in African Literatures, 37: 4, 2006, 140.
18 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 27.
19 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 4.
20 Ibid., 22.
21 Ibid., 29.

22 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, op. cit., 73.
23 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 28.
24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 40.
25 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 29.
26 Ibid., 41.
27 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 48.
28 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 72.
29 Ibid., 59.
30 Ibid., 63.
31 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, op. cit., 40.
32 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 49.
33 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 37-38 (my
emphasis).
34 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 35.
35 George D. Nyamndi, The Silver Lining, Limbe : Design House, 2004, 16-17.
36 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 32.
37 Charles Funderburk and Robert Thobaben, Political Ideologies, op. cit., 21.
38 Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, I will marry when I want, op. cit., 46.
39 Ibid., 56.
40 Ibidem.
41 Ibid., 59.
42 Ibid., 75.
43 Ibid., 102.
44 Ibid., 39.
45 Ibid., 38.
46 Ibidem.

47 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 168.

48 Ibid., 170.
49 Quoted in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 50.
50 Quoted in Pio Zirimu and Andrew Gurr (eds.), Black Aesthetics, Nairobi: East African
Literature Bureau, 1973, 193.
51 Ibid., 185.
George D. Nyamndi, Corporeality as Ideological Trope in African Drama , Revue
LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], crivains, critures, Literary studies Varia, mis en ligne le
02 mars 2015, consult le 18 mai 2015. URL : http://lisa.revues.org/7179 ; DOI :
10.4000/lisa.7179

George D. Nyamndi
Buea, Cameroun. Author of the celebrated study The West African Village Novel, George D.
Nyamndi holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is
currently Lecturer in African and English Literature, and Head of the Department of English,
University of Buea, Cameroon. He has authored four plays, two forthcoming novels, and has
written extensively on African literature.