Sammy Oke Akombi’s The Raped Amulet and the Colonial Ideology

Abstract

Abstract

Colonialism continues to affect and influence creative production in much of the ex-colonised world. Like Edward Said (1999) argues, creative works, especially the novel, have been instrumental in the representation of ideologies that affect relations between cultures and races. Our reading of Sammy Oke Akombi’s The Rape Amulet (2008) reveals that the novel continues to adopt the colonial ideology though set in postcolonial times. Akombi represents the African whose into coming to contact with the European is silent and erased. In this case, the ex-colonised individual remains the “other”. In this paper I argue that The Rape Amulet is a novel of encounter between Cameroon and Britain. Furthermore, that in this encounter, the British is represented as the master that has silenced the Cameroonian. I hinge these arguments on the views of George Lamming and Frantz Fanon who have both attempted to understand the psyche of the ex-colonised and come out with the conclusions that the idea or the myth of Europe remains enshrined in the mind-set of the ex-colonised individual.