| Expatriate works of fiction on Africa fall into two categories: some bring racial prejudice and Eurocentric biases to bear on their portrayal of Africa and Africans; others manage to transcend racism and Eurocentrism. The first category diminishes the humanity of Africans and presents them as inferior human beings compared to Western man. The impulse behind the works in that category is pro-imperialist. The second category counters the racist mental attitude which conceives of the African as the embodiment of the unregenerate side of Western man. The impulse behind these works is progressive and humane. The African works of Joseph Conrad, C. S. Forester, Joyce Cary, and Hugh Hood fall into the first category, whereas those of Herman Melville, Margaret Laurence, Saul Bellow, and John Updike fall into the second category.; On the evidence of the works studied in this dissertation and those studied in other books, particularly that of Professor D. G. Killam, author of Africa In English Fiction, British writers face tremendous difficulties in offering the portrait of Africa and Africans that is objective and free from racial prejudice. On the other hand, the most perceptive of American and Canadian writers manage to do justice to the complexity of Africa and Africans. Their ability to transcend racial prejudice and Western biases is arguably bound up with their memories of America's and Canada's own experience of colonial domination. These memories serve as a catalyst in fostering in those writers the progressive and humane attitude to the fictional portrayal of Africa and her people. |
