Résumé:
ABSTRACT
Ngugi wa Thiong‘o‘s The River Between is a significant milestone in the African literary canon. It has essentialised a cluster of salient issues and realities of African societies during and after the colonial epoch. The novel sheds light on the cultural clash not only between the native and alien realms, but also amid the natives; and how it leads to coin an ambivalent cultural identity in Kenya. It also explores how the arrival of the White man results in rising displacement and alienation among the indigenous people. The novel portrays the disruption of the Gikuyu cultural fabric embodied in the role of the main character Waiyaki and his aborted struggles to fight the colonial meddling in traditional life. Therefore, the novelist employs a Postcolonial counter discourse to protest Eurocentrism and to reclaim, celebrate and even restore the native cultural heritage of his people. The research, hence, aims at investigating the attitudes, actions, and thoughts of the colonized. The first chapter will be devoted to the theoretical framework of the work. The second chapter examines cultural displacement in the novel. While the third chapter examines how Ngugi depicts a new type of African traditional hero in his community, the tragic hero‘s characteristics and how his motivation led to his downfall. All in all, this research highlights the issue of cultural identity in postcolonial Kenya, and focuses on how the African culture is evolved and shaped in Ngugi‘s thinking through The River Between.