The Coloniser-Colonised Relationship in C. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and T. Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

The British Empire was undoubtedly one of the biggest empires in history. It prospered greatly from the second half of the eighteenth century to the 1920s. It is generally accepted, however, that the period from 1815 to 1914 is referred to as Britain’s “imperial century”. The Empire expanded over nearly one fourth of the globe, with a land mass of twenty-six million square kilometers of the earth’s surface. The ways colonialism reverberates carve their indelible scars and traces in the traditions of different nations turn out to have certain similarities, and sometimes differences, that are important to investigate and study. The Nigerian Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) and the Sudanese Tayeb Salih (1929-2009) are two important novelists in this respect. The two of them took British colonialism of their native countries and the impacts of such colonialism to their focal interest.
This paper has two sections. Section I is an introductory one that paves the way to Section II. The section highlights some important issues including: the aim of the study, a literature review that sheds light on the studies that have been conducted in relation to the proposed topic and the research questions. Section II of this study provides a postcolonial reading of the two novels. This come to grips with a plethora of postcolonial concepts as explored in the two novels. The section will discuss a number of concepts through investigating the coloniser-colonised relationship. Key postcolonial concepts, such as hybridity, hegemony, stereotyping and othering will be explored discussed. Some of the important ideas discussed in this context are the tight grip of the coloniser, education, religion, the colonised’s reactions to the coloniser, the arrogance of the coloniser, the coloniser’s dwarfing of the colonised and the Obi-Mr. Green relationship as an example of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised and Mostafa Sa’eed’s outlook on the coloniser will be considered.
This paper aims at investigating the postcolonial aftermaths as revealed in C. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) and T. Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966). Despite the importance of the shared grounds underlying both novels, the protagonists and the authors, the reactions of the protagonists to the coloniser’s dominance and arrogance are significantly different. While Achebe’s Obi is all-submissive to Mr. Green, representing British colonization, of Nigeria, Salih’s Mostafa Sa’eed never lowers his head to the coloniser. The paper will avail itself of the views and ideas of such paramount figures of postcolonial studies as Franz Fanon and Homi Bhabha.