|
|
Article: History and the novelist's design: a reading of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Education
- Article date:
- September 22, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Project Innovation (Alabama). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
The Healers is a fiction set in late 19th century Gold Coast, the time of the fall of the Ashanti Empire to the British forces. It maintains a fidelity to written African history as there is no question of the fall of the empire to the British. It, however, addresses the African audience from a chosen viewpoint that sees the African royal class, through characterization, as too irresponsible, selfish, wicked and superstitious to even begin to see the physical challenges to the empire as their final undoing. The empire was doomed as long as the African royal class, in its insatiable greed for those materials offered by the west, remained an ally of the greedy white ...