Disrupting Hegemony, Anticipating the Future: A Nietzschean Reading of God Dies by the Nile and Purple Hibiscus

Abstract

El-Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus have been widely and independently explored from varied perspectives. Such liberated critique is however surprising since the two texts can be found to have ethical and political confluence – the motif of the death of God. Drawing on the notion of travelling theory, this paper argues that the death of El-Saadawi’s and Adichie’s protagonists is a contestation and a disruption of the norm and a signification of the novels anticipatory sensibilities. The paper also examines how the different textual utilization of the motif of the death of God contributes to our understanding of the circulation of motifs in literary production and contextual interpretations. The paper makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on El-Saadawi and Adichie.

Full text

Disrupting Hegemony, Anticipating the Future: A Nietzschean Reading of God Dies by the Nile
and Purple Hibiscus
Rogers Asempasah, Christabel Aba Sam*
Department of English, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast
*Corresponding Author: Christabel Aba Sam, christabel.sam@ucc.edu.gh
ABSTRACT
El-Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus have been widely and
independently explored from varied perspectives. Such liberated critique is however surprising
since the two texts can be found to have ethical and political confluence – the motif of the
death of God. Drawing on the notion of travelling theory, this paper argues that the death of El-
Saadawi’s and Adichie’s protagonists is a contestation and a disruption of the norm and a
signification of the novels anticipatory sensibilities. The paper also examines how the different
textual utilization of the motif of the death of God contributes to our understanding of the
circulation of motifs in literary production and contextual interpretations. The paper makes a
significant contribution to the scholarship on El-Saadawi and Adichie.
INTRODUCTION
Purple Hibiscus and God dies by the Nile confront the reader
with a certain female audacity that raises ethical questions.
This audacity revolves around the killing of important male
gures in the two novels. The question that arises is not sim-
ply ethical but one of interpretation that relates to agency and
anticipatory discourses. Nawal El-Saadawi remains an im-
portant voice as far as the experiences of women in the Arab
world are concerned. She forcefully contends with the issues
of religion and its potentially exploitative assumptions, espe-
cially as they disempower Muslim women in the Arab world.
Her contestations are profoundly intensied by disclosing
the intimate link between religion (i.e., Islam), patriarchy
and gender. Therefore, underlying El-Saadawi’s imagina-
tive works are subversive culturally and historically derived
paradigms which challenge such oppressive systems. Con-
sistently, her works are dialectical in their interrogation of
religious traditions and orthodoxies, as she seeks ways of
re-negotiating religious dogmas. God dies by the Nile is a
compelling narrative on the plight of women in a predomi-
nant Islamic setting- exposing how religion becomes an ex-
ploitative patriarchal tool of oppression. The story is told of
Zakeya, the protagonist, and how she comes to know and
understand the wild personality behind the ‘sacred’ image of
the despotic Mayor of Kafr El-Teen. While scholarly recep-
Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD.
Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.9n.3p.16
tion of her works are diversied in terms of how symbols are
deployed to expose the danger of the patriarchal class system
in Egypt (Islam, 2007); how fundamentalist Islamic ideals
are carefully subverted to discredit counterfeit assumptions
as well as how she uses theatrical guidelines to illustrate the
dynamics of repressive power (Reddy, 2017), other critical
commentary on Saadawi’s works chiey focus on the de-
structive temperament of trinities (Islam, gender and patri-
archy and politics, religion and sex) and how they succeed
in distorting reality and creating lasting imbalances. In all of
these readings, the signicance of the killing of the Mayor
has simply suced as consolidating female agency (Issaka,
2010; Kolphur, 2015; Nadaf, 2015; Reddy, 2017). While this
is relevant, the killing of the Mayor, as we argue, is symbolic
of the ethico-politics that lead us to engage with Nietzsche’s
idea of the death of God as an important motif.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on the other hand, is an im-
portant voice in contemporary African ction. Particularly,
her novels feature the complex weaving of history, politics,
gender and culture – a composite that denes the complex-
ities in postcolonial Africa. While several critics have as-
sessed Adichie’s novel along the lines of a coming of age
novel – chronicling the lived experiences of young Kambili,
from innocence to maturity and tabling the innite problems
of hegemonic patriarchal Africa, others have also looked at
International Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies
ISSN: 2202-9451
www.ijclts.aiac.org.au
ARTICLE INFO
Article history
Received: April 22, 2021
Accepted:July 23, 2021
Published: July 31, 2021
Conicts of interest: None
Funding: None
Keywords:
Nietzsche,
Adichie,
The death of God,
Purple Hibiscus,
Motif,
Saadawi

17
the ways in which her novel speak to issues of feminism and
womanism, deconstructing imbalances, identity politics and
a critique of western supremacy (Kivai, 2010; Emery, 2012;
Yohannes, 2012; Amartey, 2013; Bello, 2014; Martin, 2015;
Rackley, 2015). Particularly, Oha (2007), Kurtz (2012) and
Meher (2016) have looked at how the motifs of silence,
ower, palm and gurines become symbolic of tyrannical
times and a conscious awakening leading to freedom. While
these studies remain crucial in terms of Adichie’s artistic
dexterity - connecting history and arts, our understanding of
the new postcolonial nation becomes clearer if we engage
with the motif of the death of God.
Critical commentary on the two texts, as we have demon-
strated, suggest few attempts to compare the two texts al-
though they can be found to be operating on both ethical
and political grounds. This point of convergence has to do
with the motif of the death of God crystallized in the killing
of the two male protagonists. The objectives of the paper
are three-fold; the paper aims to shed light on how the cir-
culation of motifs contributes to our understanding of these
texts; to demonstrate that these two texts engage in a broad-
er dialogue with philosophical concepts in order to speak to
specic postcolonial situations; and also to show how the
motif of the death of God operates in dierent religious con-
texts. The paper is literary and it involves a re-reading of the
selected texts and library search support. The analysis is also
informed by the theoretical considerations of the paper. The
paper is structured into three parts; the first part deals with
Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God. In part two, the paper
explores how this concept functions in Saadawi’s God dies
by the Nile, and finally, how the concept operates in
Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.
Generally, motifs and what they signify in any literary
production and interpretation are important since they be-
come denotative of the ways in which writers draw crucial
associations between ideas and patterns that may not be
overtly observable. A motif according to Daemmrich (1985)
is a subject, a central idea, a recurrent thematic element used
in the development of an artistic piece. Motifs have dual re-
lationships by referring to the semblance of phenomena and
uctuating position in texts; series of relational patterns and
a selective principle that classies concordant phenomena on
the basis of frequency of occur (Daemmrich, 1985, p. 567).
In other words, motifs serve as signiers for particular phe-
nomena. In this paper, we engage with Nietzsche’s radical
motif of the death of God in connection with Said’s (1983)
idea of traveling theory, which presumes that:
cultural and intellectual life are usually nourished and
often sustained by this circulation of ideas and whether
it takes the form of acknowledgement or unconscious in-
uence, creative borrowings or wholesale appropriation,
the movement of ideas and theories from one place to
the another is both a fact of life and a useful enabling of
intellectual activity (Said, 1983, p. 157).
Said (1983) suggests that when an idea moves from one
geographical context to the other, there are bound to be
variations based on the particularities of that geography so
that the idea assumes new meanings; in terms of shifts and
constants, outside of the original. So that tracing from Ni-
etzsche, we engage with how the idea of the death of God is
used in other contexts. Nietzsche’s radical idea of the death
of God has attracted several critical debates particularly
with regards to its metaphysical assumptions and the fact
that it is a social rejection or cultural dismissal of the West-
ern, Judeo-Christian God (Beery, 2020; Grimhood, 2017 &
Ruprecht, 1997). To quote Grimhood (2017):
Nietzsche’s argument over the Death of God is far more
polemic than it is an exercise in close reasoning, and at
least one of its aims is to open our eyes to a world without
xed parameters of meaning and truth, and in its place,
a raw ux of energy and power. (Grimhood, 2017, p. 2)
In other words, operating within the logos of the idea of
the death of God as Nietzsche posits, our concern in this pa-
per is to demonstrate that there is the possibility of a new
world where ‘faith’ is vested in alternative realities. Indeed,
before Nietzsche’s radical concept of the death of God, truth
was located in the transcendent; it was the only objective
means for assessing morality and authentic selfhood. In-
deed, the supernatural was the absolute as far as solutions to
the world’s problems are concerned. Nietzsche’s concept of
the death of God was in reaction to the supposed ‘undemo-
cratic’ nature of Christianity which had become the leading
religion in Europe during the 1800’s. For him, Christianity
was simply a sect responsible for championing godly roles
despite the pioneering human factor. Therefore, there was
the need for a new paradigm which will replace Christiani-
ty or religious dogmas. For Nietzsche, the idea of the death
of God refers to a radical conception of a world in which
secular ideas rather than religious ideologies dene human
conducts, aspirations and values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Nietzsche (1966) postulates that:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all mur-
derers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world
has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who
will wipe this blood o us? What water is there for us to
clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred
games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this
deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods
simply to appear worthy of it? (Nietzsche, 1966, p. 125)
The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no
longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they
no longer recognize it existence. The death of God, as Ni-
etzsche posits, will lead not only to the rejection of a belief
in the cosmic or physical order but it will also lead to a re-
jection of absolute values and universal moral laws binding
upon all individuals. In other words, the death of God is the
collapse of the absolute and the birth of a desired solution
to misery as a result of Christian resentments. Nietzsche’s
argument therefore presupposes that the death of God is the
birth of innovation and a framework of possibilities which
favors humanistic values. Thus, everything is possible when
there is no ‘nal authority (God). In this paper, we deploy
Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God as a critique of mo-
dernity into the postcolonial context in order to show how a
re-reading of Nawal El-Saadawi’s God dies by the Nile and

18 IJCLTS 9(3):16-21
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus provide in-
sights into the re-staging of the motif of the death of God as
a radical destabilization of the structure and feeling of patri-
archy. Additionally, our overall objective is to argue that the
anticipatory apparatuses in these two texts are inseparable
from the motif of the death of God. Our analysis show points
of convergence and discontinuities in the way the two au-
thors deploy the motif of the death of God.
God Dies by the Nile: Nietzsche and the Islamic
Discourse
In El-Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile, we are confronted
with a dierent religious dispensation outside of what Ni-
etzsche presumed to be the negative eects of the supernat-
ural. Kafr El- Teen is a dominant Islamic community ruled
by the Mayor of Kafr El-Teen. The Mayor is both the spir-
itual and political head of the town and so he becomes the
peoples’ symbol of providence and protection; their creator
of values. The Mayor of Kafr El-Teen is accustomed to is-
suing his wishes with an assured hope that his subjects will
meet those demands – turning them into slaves of his will.
He is a brutal dictator because he uses his authority to op-
press the people under his watch. Interestingly, the sheikh
of the mosque, Sheikh Zahran, shares his conviction when
he declares that ‘we are God’s slaves when it is time to say
our prayers only. But we are the Mayor’s slaves all the time’
(El-Saadawi, 1997, p. 69) presupposing the extent to which
the Mayor becomes indispensable as far as life in Kafr El-
Teen is concerned; suggesting that even Allah’s power is re-
stricted compared to that of the Mayor. The Mayor’s power
becomes unopposed and total because he practically controls
the minutest detail of the day-to-day aairs of the people
with brutal sts.
In God dies by the Nile, the Mayor of Kafr El-Teen is
portrayed as the epitome of moral piety, the symbol of the
patriarchal class system in Egypt - he believes in the social
ordering of the society where the upper class and men are at
the apex with women, children and peasants at the bottom
and hence, he considers himself better than any other person
in his community since he has become their referent in all
things. He is indeed worshipped because he is infallible:
He was above suspicion, above the law, even above the
moral values which governed ordinary people’s behavior.
Nobody in Kafr El-Teen would dare suspect him of any
evil. They could have doubts about Allah, but about him,
it was impossible. (El-Saadawi, 1997, p. 98)
The image of the Mayor is unimpeded as far as sacred-
ness and truth are concerned. He and God shared a common
denominator. In fact, the people assume him more pious than
Allah so much that he becomes the acceptable standard for
moral piety. It is important to recognize that this exaggerated
sacred image of the Mayor is an indication of the extent to
which he has become ‘idolized’ as their preferred messiah.
Interestingly, the Mayor of Kafr El-Teen becomes the peo-
ples’ knowledge because outside of him exists no form of
truth despite the grave exploitative practices he sanctions.
He is not in the least suspected of being capable of such
evils. The enigma in this blind praise as far as the Mayor’s
sacred image is concerned is the problematic of religion. As
Saadawi observes, religion becomes a political tool with
which powerful groups justify injustice as a divine order
(El-Saadawi, 1997, p. 145). The minds of the people are
controlled and restricted into believing an aspect of reality
which is presumed to be the ultimate and therefore there is
little or no attempt to its precepts. This is why Zakeya (the
protagonist) is portrayed in the throes of a psychologically
unstable individual. Zakeya’s psychic trauma is prompted by
her struggles to make connections with the happenings in her
family and the possibility of the Mayor’s complicity. It was
inconceivable – a blasphemy of the truth that had dened her
life from time immemorial.
It is important to observe the extremist strategies the
Mayor and his minions used to get Zeinab and Zakeya (Ze-
inab’s aunt) to oblige the Mayor’s selsh demands (110)
because men like him did not know ‘impossibility’. They
(Zakeya and Zeinab) were brainwashed into believing that
Allah required them to ‘obey’ and ‘submit’ to the wishes of
the Mayor and therefore they had no choice than to reluctant-
ly agree to the Mayor’s selsh demands. While he succeeds
with Zeinab, the advent of Galal (Zakeya’s son) gradually
neutralizes the inuence of his (the Mayor) ‘omnipotence’.
When Galal returns from peace-keeping and subsequent-
ly marries Zeinab, he restricts her from any longer serving
the Mayor despite the countless eorts to compel him to
rescind his decision. His obstinacy eventually leads him to
prison – he is incarcerated because his audacity had become
a rebellion of the established order; a breach of the moral
values that governed the lives of the people of Kafr El-Teen
and consequently a disobedience to God. Arguably, Galal’s
‘disobedience’ lifts the veil of pretense and the divinity of
the Mayor so that Zakeya (his mother) discerns the true na-
ture of reality - She becomes conscious of the deception in
what had become their symbol of providence and morality
because she dares to imagine a better and safer life without
the Mayor.
‘Zakeya was sitting in her usual place listening to what
was being said. Suddenly another tiny star lit up in the
darkness of her head. She could not grasp anything at the
beginning but a slow movement kept going through her
mind, and once it started it went on slowly at rst, then a
little faster. For once she had started to think. It had to go
on. She had caught the top of the thread between her n-
gers and now the reel will keep turning and turning until
it reached the end, no matter how long… She whispered
in a strange voice. ‘Zeinab! Zeinab!
She whispered back, ‘what’s wrong Aunt?
‘I was blind, but now my eyes have been opened’.
(El-Saadawi, 1997, p. 171)
Zakeya and the rest of Kafr El-Teen were blind to alter-
native truths – they only knew of the Mayor’s truth which
was in the main patronizing, oppressive and limiting. It
had seized their self-consciousness so that reality was seen
through only the Mayor’s eyes. Zakeya’s discovery of the
potential of substitute realities signies the end of absolute-
ness and a regenerative mode of being. When Zakeya kills
the Mayor, she creates a free atmosphere where people are

19
no longer bound by restrictions and prohibitions suggesting
the potential of new modes of being. The killing of the May-
or is symbolic of the fact that there is no absolute reality and
that moral laws are contextual. When the Mayor dies, there
is the birth of alternative values because the people of Kafr
El-Teen will no longer be restricted by the hegemonized re-
ligious beliefs of the Mayor.
Breaking ‘Gods’: Eugene Achike and the Future
Horizon in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus
In Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, the image of God is charac-
terized in the character of Eugene Achike (Papa Eugene).
Eugene is an accomplished man who seeks to establish order
as he sees it onto his family. He embraces Western values
and imposes these values on his wife and children. Although
Eugene Achike is an Igbo, he has grown a distaste for his
culture so much that he forbids his children and any member
of his family from associating with paganism including his
father (Papa Nnukwu) because he had refused to be saved
(i.e., renouncing the Igbo traditions and becoming Western-
ized). He is a wealthy man – his factories and news papers
were favourites because of their Western quality and its free-
dom-oriented focus respectively. Eugene’s sense of power
and authority, no doubt, derives from his identication with
British Catholicism. Eugene is a complex character. Part of
this complexity is because he is both admirable and repul-
sive. He assumes that the needs of his children are the same
as his own and therefore he expects that they (his children)
live and appreciate life his own way and yet he loved them.
Like the Mayor, Eugene is considered the model of true reli-
giosity. Kambili tells us that:
During his sermons, Father Benedict usually referred to
the Pope, Papa and Jesus – in that order. He used Papa to
illustrate the gospels. (Adichie, 2004, p. 12)
It is important to recognize the signicance of the con-
nection the narrator strikes between Eugene, the Pope and
Jesus. Jesus is the son of God and the Pope, the supreme
leader of Catholicism on earth and therefore Papa Eugene
inadvertently takes the place of Jesus in the body of the Trin-
ity. Indeed, his immediate family and the society could not
think of any form of reality outside of him. He had practical-
ly colonized reality. Father Benedict testies to the fact that:
When we let our light shine before men, we are reecting
Christ’s Triumphant Entry. He said that on Palm Sunday.
‘Look at Brother Eugene, he could have chosen to be like
the other Big men in this country. He could have decided
to sit at home and do nothing after the coup to make sure
the government did not threaten his business. But no, he
used the Standard to speak the truth even though it meant
the paper lost advertising. Brother Eugene spoke out for
freedom. How many of us here stood upon for the truth?
How many of us have reected the Triumphant Entry?
(Adichie, 2004, p.13)
The metaphor of the standard divulges issues of model-
ing and acceptability in relation to religiosity and masculin-
ity. He had become the standard for moral piety and ghting
for freedom. As the epitome of hegemonic maleness, his
entire world is woven around self-assertion, power and ma-
terial success. These items in his agenda are strict and tight,
blurring the possibility of alternatives. It is important to rec-
ognize that Eugene’s children; Jaja and Kambili only appre-
ciated the world through their father’s eyes. They did not
have privilege for choices; the only thing permissible was
their father’s orders. He was the meaning of the world and
their reality presupposing that he had become their present
and future. Eugene’s children knew of only one reality until
their Nsukka experience. Their bond with Father Amadi and
their association with Ifeoma’s family carefully dissolved
the sticky silence that ruled their lives. Jaja and Kambili be-
gan to appreciate the dissimilar pattern of life in Nsukka and
Enugu. In Nsukka, there was no iconic gure of reality, up-
rightness and acceptability; everyone understood reality in
distinctive ways. There were no putative behaviours which
required ‘slave morality’ and self-denial. They had grown an
awareness that reality was relative and therefore they needed
to dene their own reality exclusive of their father’s. And
this reality was beyond their father’s redemption. When Eu-
gene’s children went to Enugu, everything including what
they considered usual had become unfamiliar, repressive and
intimidating with a continued insistence on his puritanical
principles in a postcolonial civilization. But Jaja could no
longer bring himself to conform to the restrictions imposed
on his being. He wanted to be.
Jaja’s deance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s
experimental Purple Hibiscus: are, fragrant with the un-
dertones of freedom, a dierent kind of freedom from
the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Gov-
ernment Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do
(Adichie, 2004, p.16)
Jaja’s deance is indeed dierent. It has been provoked
by an increasing desire to dene himself based on his own
experiences rather than the life he has been accustomed to.
Eugene’s wife is unable to cope with the slave morality that
her family is subjected to because it has become so suocat-
ing and overpowering and so she kills Eugene. When Eu-
gene is killed, life is no longer regulated, mechanical and
pretentious because ‘truth’ is disintegrated and it becomes
available in recognizable bits dierent from the universal
vacuum it initially occurred. It is also important to recognize
that Eugene’s family is no longer controlled, constrained
and repressed because they are now disconnected from the
absolute truth (death separates them from the inuence of
Eugene) and reconnected to collectivism.
The Death of God in two Postcolonial Contexts
It is interesting to note that the idea of the death of God op-
erates within three unities of religion, patriarchy and colo-
nialism. The complexities in the masculine performance of
the Mayor and Papa Eugene can be read in terms of the co-
operation of the vestiges of these unities so that the death of
God in the postcolonial context assumes dierent semiotics
outside of Nietzsche’s original contextualization. Contrary
to Nietzsche’s position that Christianity is the most fatal and
seductive lie ever created, this paper has shown that religions
in themselves impose limitations on reasoning and initiative
so that any such act is interpreted as corruption of faith.

20 IJCLTS 9(3):16-21
Quite apart from this, the postcolonial situation becomes
grave because of the support of colonialism and patriarchy
as negatively aecting the operations of will power – which
is why the agentic roles of Zakeya and Beatrice become eth-
ically crucial. In the postcolonial context therefore, the idea
of the death of God constitutes a de-emphasis of western su-
premacy as against black inferiority and accentuating posi-
tive male-female principle. There is a conscious attempt by
the authors to correct and overthrow colonial mental habits
that cripple the foundations of a new civilization. The death
of Saadawi and Adichie’s male protagonists demystify the
desire for cultural romanticism as ugly and camouage; the
contradiction between what such cultures profess and what
they actually seek to achieve; which is what becomes evident
in the character of Papa Eugee. The disconnect between his
strong Catholic Christian beliefs and his everyday treatment
of his family is absurd and ridiculous. Such posturing, as we
argue, creates a condition of cultural/human vulnerability,
degrading cultural authenticity and disallowing the possibil-
ity of newness. Thus, the future nation must be responsive
in abolishing colonial and religious ideologies and cultural
fantasies that lack clarity.
While we grapple with the treachery of colonial men-
tal habits, it is important to also recognize that the death of
God holds promise for communal redemption. Part of the
imperial nature of Enugu and Kafr El-Teen as political states
had to do with the autocratic leadership of Papa Eugune and
the Mayor. The monologue which characterized their lead-
ership is intrinsically Eurocentric – the individual focused
approach- because it cajoles the potential of their subjects
into a wedlock of inferiorities and self-repression; suggest-
ing an age of cultural crisis. The communal nature of African
civilization is carefully restricted by the conscious attempt to
silence ‘oppositions’ and in this case, muting alternative per-
spectives. The incarceration of Kafrawi, Elwau, Galal and
the regimental lifestyle of Kambili and Jaja are symbolic of
colonial governmentality which require a new renaissance.
Thus, the dignity of communalism is re-born in the death of
Eugene and the Mayor.
While we consider the foregoing as dierences in con-
textualization as Said’s (1983) travelling theory observes,
there are points of resonance. One of the key characteristics
of Nietzsche’s discussion is the tendency of religion to make
persons irrational; what he refers to as slave morality- where
values are ltered and enclosed in pretences so that will pow-
er becomes infamous. The religious notoriety of the African
equally prescribes such unfounded conformist attitudes which
become fatal for the progress of the nation. Zakeya’s mea-
sured realization of the pretentious image of the Mayor and
Beatrice’s cautious resolve to gradually poison her husband to
death exemplify the burden of how religion deect the need
for any progressive enterprise. The prominence of religious
fundamentalism in postcolonial Africa today contends with
the desire for plurality which is essential for newness.
CONCLUSION
Dwelling on Said’s travelling theory, this paper has
demonstrated that a re-contextualization of Nietzsche’s
idea of the death of God evokes critical issues that hing-
es on postcolonial futures. The paper has shown that
the unique ways in which Adichie and Saadawi disrupt
hegemony – muting absolutism, demystifying cultural
idealism and redefining vulnerability - by casting their
female protagonists in radically religious prejudiced
settings become significant in terms of prefiguring the
possibility of a free world. The paper has also revealed
that although the two writers may appear to be skeptical
about the emergence of a new African society because of
the complicated liberation that their women enjoy, their
belief in revisiting the oppositions of social hierarchies
is an important call as far as the psychology of colonial
subjects are concerned. Thus, the killing of Papa Eugene
and the Mayor remains a potential signification of en-
dorsing hope in liberality, delayering of social structures
and collectivity.
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