The rising horizon: A post-colonial reading of Ayikewi Armah's osiris rising and :in the house of life

Abstract

This thesis sets out to investigate how Ayi Kwei Armah, as a post-colonial African writer, in Osiris Rising and KMT: In the house of life re-tells the history of Africa as a way of “writing back” to assert the African Identity as his way of responding to Hegel’s (1957) claim that Africa prior to European colonization had no civilization of note to boast of. Thus, through a study of the setting, plot and characters in the two novels, this work reveals how Armah artistically uses the Egyptian mythology of Osiris and Isis in the texts to validate his claim to a pre-colonial African civilization. The work also discusses how the two novels build on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade experience to fictionally contextualize the Pan-African renaissance; an artistic move that results in a physical, cultural and intellectual re-unification of Africans living on the continent with their brothers and sisters in the African diaspora. In view of this, the study suggests to all Africans not to, in the era of globalization, idealize their common past but critically engage it, rise up and embrace the hybrid nature of their post-colonial cultures and in the light of lessons learnt from it, work together as a people with a common destiny to guard against a further erosion of their cultural values and identity.