Dialogical theology as politics in mongo beti, werewere liking, and chinua achebe

Abstract

"The postcolonial literature of sub-Saharan Africa has produced a powerful critique of Western discourses of domination by offering Francophone and Anglophone readers an analysis of religious discourse and its connection to political power. In such texts, hitherto silenced speakers—the voices of the colonized people—speak loudly through the technique first called “dialogism” by the Russian formalist M. M. Bakhtin. This essay will frame its analysis with the work of two Cameroonian writers, Mongo Beti and Werewere Liking. The Bakhtinian theoretical framework will then expand into a more detailed examination of a number of novels by Chinua Achebe. Religious discourse invariably, and necessarily, takes on a political dimension in postcolonial settings; at the same time, however, African fiction often displays the tensions inherent in any attempt to unite traditional, Muslim, and Christian ways of thinking. These conflicts may consistently fail to unify the ethnic groups or the cultures in question, but the dialogue thus produced often succeeds in limited ways by exposing complex interactions between language and human experience and by revealing the stakes whenever religious discourse takes on a powerfully political perspective."(pg 1)