Arielisation: Silencing and Servitude in Victor Epie’Ngome’s What God has Put Asunder

Abstract

Much of the research that has been carried out on Victor Epie’Ngome’s What God Has Put Asunder situate the play, and rightly so, as an Anglophone Cameroon play that allegorises the situation of the marginalisation of Anglophones by the Francophones in Cameroon. This paper attempts to shift from this seemingly dominant view of the play and argues that Epie’Ngome represents the post-independent Cameroonian in the state of servitude without the necessary tools to reconstruct and define self from what the colonialists had constructed. The paper assesses how Epie’Ngome in What God has put Asunder represent the relationship that exists between the colonised and the ex-colonised and the different reactions presented as a result of this encounter. Guided by the tenets of the postcolonial theory, the paper contends that Weka, Emeka like Garba (major characters in the play) are colonial victims that very well fit as figures of brainwash and dependency on the colonialist ideology.