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Thematic Cluster: Black African Literatures and Cultures

Abstract

In his article "The Father's Power in Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Achebe's A Man of the People" Amechi N. Akwanya analyses Joseph Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease in order to lay bare the underlying processes of these texts. Undoubtedly the patterns of struggle in the two texts are political, but reading them in exclusively political terms has the consequence that the works are of no further interest once the putative political agenda is identified and described. Akwanya's analysis discloses shared features in the two texts published within two years of each other. In Report on Bruno, there is a democratic system, where the people have their say but in A Man of the People they are kept in the dark about what is really going on and are manipulated and abused by those in power. Their resemblance is at the level of symbolism and this is what Akwanya attempts to unlock using René Girard's theory of mimetic desire.

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