CHAPTER ONE
A GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Introduction/Background to Study
This is a B.A. long essay written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an award for a Bachelor’s degree in English. This paper is a comparative analysis of language and society inAchebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.
Establishing the nexus between language and society which is the focal point of this long essay is one whose importance cannot be over emphasized. This is with regard to the concepts of African and post-colonial literatures which are the umbrella concepts that define most of the literatures written in this part of the world, including Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. This paradigm begins to take meaning when one begins to interprete these literatures according to Tyson (1999) with respect to the struggle for individual and collective cultural identity and the related themes of alienation, homeliness, double consciousness, and
hybridity; and the need for continuity with a pre-colonial past and self definition of the political future (374) which defines these literatures including Purple Hibiscus and Anthills of the Savannah.
The African experience is one that is basically conveyed in African literature. This is an experience that has been defined by the totality of the influences on the African society; past, present and future including colonialism. The African people and society in the process of this contact are altered significantly such that it can no longer be said to be wholly African or European as a result of the cultural imperialism of the Africans by the colonial masters.
With society being altered thus the language also alters. This is because the people of necessity must communicate the complexity of their new reality or experiences which are foreign to their indigenous language. The foreign language becomes according to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989) the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which the conceptions of “truth”, “order” and reality become established (7). Importantly; Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (19890 also acknowledges that this power of the colonial language is rejected in the emergence of an effective post-colonial voice (7). Thus the use of the indigenous languages in literature is not only an effective post-colonial voice but also according to Mazisi Kunene (1992) an instrument for the re-assertion of African values, African history and a whole ideology justifying the existence of the African world against “their world” (26). Hence the focus of the post-colonial literatures with regard to the above becomes a discussion by which language with its power has been wrested from the dominant European culture.