ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the role of the modern nation state in the demise of culture as laid down by Friedrich Nietzsche. In this chapter, I seek to investigate the role of the modern nation state in the elevation of corruption, autocracy and immorality through unethical manoeuvres, such as war, military coups, ethnocentrism and prostitution, of which vices were prohibited in traditional African forms of governance. As much as the feminist conversation is postmodernist, the chapter demonstrates how the modern nation state has hijacked and taken it to the guillotine. The chapter has five sections, which give a satisfactory interrogation of the merits of the modern nation state as laid out by Friedrich Nietzsche. These sections focus on the nation state’s propensity to murder in Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City (1969) and Ruganda’s Shreds of Tenderness (2005), the inclination towards negative ethnicity in Farah’s Close Sesame (1983) and Abdi’s Offspring of Paradise (2004) and the propensity to preserve political power through paranoia and genocide in Faye’s Small Country (2016) and Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali (2012). Section 2.5 demonstrates how the modern nation state accentuates theft and sexual immorality in Thiong'o's Petals of Blood (1977) and Devil on the Cross (1980). Finally, Section 2.6 shows how the modern nation state has hijacked the gender conversation in Kulet’s Blossoms of the Savannah (2017).
