Post-Colonialism: Trying To Regain Ethnic Individuality :: essays research papers fc

Indeed, the oddish has unusual customs. The white man held the paper like a sacred thing. His hands shook, and we mistrusted him... For how many moons will the stranger be among us? (Vera 43)The stranger still lives among the people of Zimbabwe, though the colonial political authority has left. Yet I wonder if the town elder utterance in the above passage from Yvonne Veras Nehanda would recognize current Zimbabwean authorities as strangers or countrymen. Could he relate to todays government officials and understand the languages which they speak? Would he feel at home in an African country with borders defined by European imperial powers without regard to the various ethnic nations involved? Post-colonial theory attempts to explain problems such as these, yet it does so almost exclusively in the languages of the European colonial powers. Europeans even created the word Africa. "To name the world is to understand it, to cut it and to have control over it" (Ashcroft 283). Because knowledge is power, and words, whether written or spoken, atomic number 18 the medium of exchange, using words incurs responsibility.One must use special lot with broadly defined words and terms, such as post-colonial. Post-colonial literature describes a wide array of experiences set in the contexts of heterogeneous societies which themselves represent many contrastive ethnic groups. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin define post-colonial theory as discussion of "migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and responses to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe... and the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these cut into being" (Ashcroft 2). The wide-ranging nature of the term post-colonial threatens to weaken its usefulness by "diffusion... so extremethat it is used to refer to not only vastly contrastive but even opposed activities" (Ashcroft 2). Post-colonialism enc ompasses many of the issues encountered in the work we have discussed thus far in the semester. Yet because vague and generalized theories have limits and hunt to oversimplify, clouding over real problems, one must handle the term with care.Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin suggest that we should restrict the term post-colonial to signify after colonialism. "All post-colonial societies are still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination, and independence has not solved the problem" (Ashcroft 2). later on colonialism, new elites, often in the form of dictators, frequently rose and still rise to power in post-colonial countries.