Dr Conrad s Heart Of Darkness And Salih s Season Of...

The unpleasant and painful experience of colonialism in Africa has great effects on almost all faces of life such as language, education, religion, popular culture and the like. Colonial and post-colonial novels in Africa have therefore become unusual weapons used to change the European idea about the third world peoples and to illustrate how the European colonizer could create unequal relations of power, based on binary oppositions such as â€Å"First–world† and â€Å"third–world†; â€Å"white† and â€Å"black†, â€Å"colonizer† and â€Å"colonized†, etc. This duality can be seen clear in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. Conrad’s novel is filled with literal and metaphoric opposites: the Congo and the Thames, black and white, Europe and Africa, good and evil, purity and corruption, civilization and triumphant bestiality , light and the very heart of darkness . It is therefore true to say that the primary concern of most post-colonial African novelists, like Al-Tayyib Salih, Chinua Achebe and others, is to change for better the history of their people which colonialism has taken off or manipulated. The African novel occupies a central position in the criticism of colonial portrayal of the African continent and its people. It grew, in part, from a history of active resistance to the colonial encounter. It has been crossing boundaries and assaulting walls imposed by History upon the horizon of the continent whose aspirations it has been striving to