Failed Independence and the National Middle Class: A Psycho-social Reading of Three Post-colonial Texts

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue X, October 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186

Failed Independence and the National Middle Class: A Psycho-social Reading of Three Post-colonial Texts

Egehiza Eric Edward*, Dr. Felix Ayioka Orina, Dr. Joseph Musungu
Department of English, Journalism, Literature and Mass Communication Kibabii University -Kenya
Corresponding Author*

Abstract
Many critics have discussed failure of independence evident in dehumanized existential conditions in African and Diasporic writing. This failure has been placed at both the door step of colonial powers and the post independence leadership. This leadership has variously been described as the ruling class, political elite, ruling elite. The net effect of this typing has been a limitation of the proper analysis of the notion of middle class in post independence Africa and her Diaspora. As a critical structural aspect of capitalism within the colonial process, the middle class has received limited critical attention in contemporary post-colonial analyses. Using the Marxist and psychoanalytic prisms, this study descriptively deviates from the general depictions of class. By focusing on the middle class, this study argues that post-independent challenges have a correlation with the nature of the defective middle class that fails in its historical mandate of humanizing the dehumanized post-colony. It fails the test expected of the ‘new men’ in rehumanizing the diseased post-colonial spaces. By taking over most of the critical socio-political institutions between 1956 and 1986, the emergent middle class as reflected in The Beautiful Ones(1968) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Breath, Eyes, Memory(1994) by Edwirge Denticat and The Invincible Weevil(1998) figuratively shrinks and deviates from the ‘ideal’ as conceptualized by sociologists. Members of this class mutate into criminality and entrench a subculture of deviance driven by an instinct of primitive ‘colonial’ accumulation. These three writers fictively make a statement on the reciprocity between individual psychological predisposition and material social conditions in which the struggle for mental and social liberation is waged by the neo-colonial subject.

Keywords: Middle class, bourgeois(ie), capitalism, embourgeoisement, subaltern

1. INTRODUCTION

The crises facing the colonized societies have largely been externalized. Many critics have blamed the twin forces of colonialism and slavery and their debilitating psycho-social impact on the colonized/oppressed victims. However, with the end of formal colonialism, there has been a need to focus on what happens within the post-colony to establish the subsisting impact of slavery and colonial legacies. Slavery and colonialism were driven by the profit motive as conceptualized within the capitalist ideology, the spirit of colonialism. Capitalism is more than an economic system; it is an ideology that principally structures society in terms of capital and labour engendering social inequalities due to what Marx considers its exploitative and oppressive nature. It is one of the key defining colonial forces that have shaped the post-independence representation of post–colonial nation state. It was expected that the colonized would rehumanize his society as advocated within the spirit of the utopian nationalist ideologies. These ideologies advocated for complete change in the structure of society in which a perfect egalitarian system is envisioned evident in the struggle against colonial oppression. However, what has been, and continues to be experienced is a failure of independence in Africa and her Diaspora. This raises key questions on the validity of continued blame for these crises on the twin forces because the human being is not only affected by nature but has the capacity to affect social order and transform human psychology as well(Hook,2004) by consciously transcending his base motivations . Since most of the post-colonies were run on a capitalist structure with social hierarchies actuated by capital and labour, it becomes important to have an understanding of how capitalism functions. As Aihie (2014) acknowledges that “the nation is a creation of the modern capitalist state” (p. 10; Mbembe,

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