
Abstract: This research work is on the Dispossessed and Dispossed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s purple Hibiscus and Ngugi Wathiongo’s Petals of Blood. There are three forms of dispossession which are identified in these two selected novels. They are psychological, political and cultural dispossession. In Purple Hibiscus for instance, the author writes about the obnoxious cultural issues affecting the female folks. She also explores other issue that other African female writers writes in their novels such, gender-based violence, cultural discrimination, sex abuse and patriarchal domination affecting the female folks in African society as seen in Beatrice Eugene’s wife.
From the forgoing, one can see some elements of displaced and dispossessed these characters go through. The author also presents to the entire African society on the fact that the relationship between the white colonialists and the black indigenous population threw up a myriad of socio-political cross fertilization in Africa. According to him, the way and manner the Whites related with the Black people, the levels of reactions and response of the black population to the invading socio-political values and standards during the colonial era has been the subject of interesting writings in African literature.
The Dispossessed and Dispossed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s purple Hibiscus and Ngugi Wathiongo’s Petals of Blood
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ngugi WaThiongo are famous West and East African writers whose writing portrays, dramatic, displaced, dispossessed, violence, discrimination and disillusionment in the Nigeria, Kenya and Africa at large. For instance, the displaced and dispossessed in the two novels under investigation how Adichie recreates African history in the frictional word of Purple Hibiscus and Ngugi’s Petals of Blood. She revisits the like of Chinua Achebe, the bequest of colonization in the lives of her frictional characters in the two novels under investigation.
Unlike in Chinua Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart and Arrow of God, which Achebe portrays colonization and its appendages as being planted by the white administrator who name missionaries and their black collaborators. This statement make Homi Bhabha to say that, “if a reader want to find out the reasons for Eugene Achike in Purple Hibiscus of being a religious fanatic and home tyrant or the case of the Nigerian civil war in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood, one must go back to British colonization with its terrible vestiges on the psyche of the once colonized characters and group “(63).
In order to present the displaced and dispossessed in these two novels, Adichie uses her characters Eugene Achike, Beatrice Achike, Zara, Kambili and Adecoker’s daughter in Purple Hibiscus, while and Ugwu, Olanna, Kaime, Richard, Odenigbo and Biafra in Half of the Yellow Sun, these characters experienced various ways of trauma, economic and political dispossession as their means of livelihood and leadership are taken from them. Ngugi is no doubt primarily concerned with “restoring the African character to his history,” to enable him to find an “identity in an essentially colonial situation” and discover a source of pride in his people’s past accomplishments. They are other stories of a past…these stories are when the “African controlled its own destiny”, of “heroic resistance,” which Karega, in Petals of Blood, goes to such trouble to impart to his students: they are found only in legends passed from generation to generation.
Adichie and Ngugi make it clearly for the entire African societies to understand that, colonization is the major cause of displaced and dispossessed in the two novels in this research work.
The Dispossessed and Dispossed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s purple Hibiscus and Ngugi Wathiongo’s Petals of Blood
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Displaced and dispossessed do not occur in a vacuum and it effects are not vacuous, but tangible and real which is consequently seen in these two novel as portrayed by the author which also manifest in the lives of the characters in their fictional novels.
1.3 Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this research work brings to light the adverse effect of displacement and dispossession in the social and political lives style of the people in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Ngugi’s Petals of Blood.