Ideological prostitution as a bane of africa's development: a reading of the suns of independence and tribaliques

Abstract

One major concern which serves as raw material for literary production for most post-independence African novels is the phenomenon of ideological prostitution. This phenomenon is a direct product of ideological confusion resulting from the divergent nature of the interests of Western colonialists who scrambled over the African continent following the Berlin Conference in 1884. The colonial enterprise was driven by the sheer desire of Western capitalist countries to usurp, dominate and exploit occupied territories in Africa to feed Western industries in metropolitan Europe. In the wake of this adventure, conflicting ideologies such as capitalism, socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, Christianity, nationalism, fetishism, Islam, traditionalism, modernism, etc. which were generating a lot of debates in Western societies found themselves smuggled into Africa with the various agents of colonialism and imperialism. Be it through the British colonial policy of indirect rule or the French policy of direct rule and assimilation, the African people have been fully or partially socialized into these exogenous ideologies which they do not understand in any way, yet are expected to use in the conception of solutions to their ever-growing developmental challenges and socio-political, organisation. This paper is an attempt to provoke intellectual discourse and to generate critical debates on the need for ideological literacy informed by indigenous African realities and world views. It critically examines how Ahmadou Kourouma and Henri Lopès, combining symbolism, metaphor, irony and sarcasm, bring to the fore the ridiculous nature of ideological prostitution, otherwise confusion, and its nefarious developmental impact. The study is an empirical one supported with textual data gathered the two novels listed in the topic above. It is posited in the theoretical framework of Van Dijk's Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)