Decolonizing the Legacies of Western Ethnocentrism in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Something Torn and New: A Post-Colonial Perspective

Abstract

Postcolonialism traces European colonialism of many regions all over the world, its effects on various aspects of the lives of the colonized people in general, and its manifestations in Western literary and philosophical heritage in particular throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth century. The outreach of Western hegemonical ideology of superiority is well entrenched in the one-upmanship ethnocentric attitude of the West. The arbitrary promulgation of Western superiority jeopardized the growth of African Continent. Accordingly, the men of letters of the Continent wish to express their forms of cultural production with the belief that it should reflect the native reality of experience. Hence, a deeper critique of colonialism’s legacies of insular ethnocentric attitudes should be revisited. The present paper examines the modalities devised by the African writers to decolonize ethnocentrism of the West and assert their indigenous identity in Something Torn and New. The paper also explores Africa's historical, economic, and cultural fragmentation by slavery, colonialism through the theoretical framework of Postcolonialism. Throughout this tragic history, a constant and irrepressible force was Europhonism: the replacement of native names, languages, and identities with European ones. The result was the dismemberment of African memory.