“Reclaiming the Past”: Decolonization in the Early Novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
“The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past”, says Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in “The AfricanWriter and his Past” (Heywood ed., 1971). This paper explores tentative points ofconvergence and contrast between the early novels of Ngugi Wa Thiong’oi and ChinuaAchebe, on the basis of their treatment of the “past”, their attitude to language and…