Postcolonialism - Africa

Africa

The interior of Africa was not colonized until almost the end of the 19th century, yet the impact of colonialism was even more significant to the indigenous cultures, especially because of the Scramble for Africa. The increasingly efficient railway helped European powers to gain control over all regions of Africa, with the British particularly emphasizing goals of conquest. The British Empire sought to build a single railway through the continent and succeeded in building tracks from Egypt to Cape Town.

Many African empires existed in the pre-colonial era, such as the Empires of Ashanti and Benin, and the Kingdoms of Dahomey, the Buganda Kingdom, and Kongo. Nigeria was home to the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo cultures and Chinua Achebe was among the first to take up this history in the construction of a postcolonial identity, as in Things Fall Apart.

Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was educated at the British University of Leeds and wrote the first postcolonial East African novel, Weep Not, Child, in 1964. The later The River Between addresses postcolonial religious issues. His essay Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature is considered one of the most important pieces of African literary criticism.

Africans and non-Africans both live in a postcolonial world of "genders, ethnicities, classes and languages, of ages, families, professions, religions and nations. There is a suggestion that individualism and postcolonialism are essentially discontinuous and divergent cultural phenomena.

Professor Amina Mama is an active postcolonial theorist, who has spoken against Western militarization of Africa (particularly through AFRICOM) as a new form of colonial resource extraction. Mama, a feminist, also studies the influence of militarism on gender identities in Africa.