ABSTRACT
Okonkwo, the male protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, took his own life for various reasons, including certain legal trouble and possible incarceration in the colonial prison for killing a court messenger, and perhaps because of shame. Shame has received limited attention in literary studies despite the high number of times the term ‘shame’ appears in African fiction. A quick keyword search on shame in Heinemann’s African Writers Series of about 250 texts yields the following results: novels, 170 entries; poetry, 57 entries; and drama, 15 entries. From ellipses to the grotesque, shame has taken many forms in African literature. These narrative strategies indicate the changes in depictions of shame since the emergence of Europhone literature to the current moment. If narratives that re-imagine the colonial period and its immediate era consider shame as worse than death, as in the cases of Mugo and Okonkwo, the post-independent and postcolonial periods chart a new cartography of shame.
