Violence, the language of the oppressor and the oppressed: Alex La Guma’s The Stone Country (1967)
Violence, the language of the oppressor and the oppressed: Alex La Guma’s The Stone Country (1967)
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Date
2022
Authors
Essuman,Jonathan
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Publisher
Crewe,England by Steadfast OA
Abstract
The 19 th century invasion and domination of Africa by Europe
was informed by capitalism and the quest for economic
domination. Thus, European colonization of Africa is better
described as a surrogate of capitalism. In order to achieve
economic domination in South Africa, colonial authority
institutionalized different methods of discrimination and
oppression thus racism became an important weapon for the
colonization of the country. This paper sought to investigate
the very element of violence that colonizers perpetrated
on the natives of South Africa and to bring to the fore how
the protest writer—Alex La Guma—skillfully uses his style
of writing to protest the oppressive system. This was done
by adopting a critical content analysis of the primary text;
The Stone Country. However, other secondary materials
were consulted to aid in the analysis of the text. It was
discovered that the minority whites used violence in two
main forms; political and social. This paper concluded that
the marginalized were mainly maltreated not because they
offended the whites but for the purpose of socio-political and
socio-economic domination, they became victims of violent
oppressions and hence recommended that such atrocities
could only be fought against if more and more writers use
their skill of writing to protest against such system.
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Citation
Essuman, J. (2022). Violence, the language of the oppressor and the oppressed: Alex La Guma’s The Stone Country. Steadfast Arts and Humanities, 2(1). Retrieved from https:// steadfastoa.com/index.php/ sfah/article/view/9