Volume 9, Number 3

Overlapping Ideologies and the Politics of Repression in Selected Plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka Bate Besong and Bole Butake

  Authors

Emmanuel Nchia Yimbu, The University of Buea, Cameroon

  Abstract

This paper examines the weaknesses of leadership politics in some postcolonial societies. It also argues that the inability of some postcolonial leaders to accommodate divergent views and the excessive use of force as a leadership tool are the greatest problems faced by these societies today. The paper further stresses the fact that the plays of Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Bate Besong and Bole Butake, project their societies as those that continue to witness a deliberate and systematic betrayal of the hopes and aspirations of the citizenry by both the colonialists and their neo-colonial counterparts. Marginalization, alienation, oppression, dictatorship, corruption, exploitation and tribalism amongst other autocratic tactics have become leadership political ideologies that have continuously subjected the masses to perpetual servitude. From a Marxist and Postcolonial theoretical paradigms, the analyses in this study reveal that the plays of Walcott, Soyinka, Besong, and Butake, can be read as metaphorical and satirical renditions of the gruesome realities in the Caribbean, Cameroonian and Nigerian societies and a critical exploration of the wrongs that colonial and postcolonial leadership have constantly inflicted on the pauperized masses. The vast inequality that exists between colonial and postcolonial leadership (Self) and the masses (Other) is the underlying motivation behind the sustained resistance in the plays of Walcott, Soyinka, Besong, and Butake,

  Keywords

Ideology, Politics, Repression and Postcolonial Drama.