| Popis: |
A study of African literature reveals that there are essentially two paths of successful access to the ruling elite. The first was described by the Ivorian novelist Charles Nokan in Violent etait le vent, where African students in Europe virulently criticised their political leaders, yet Once they returned home with their degrees, they forgot their recent indignation and had no trouble following in the footsteps of their fathers … They would become MPs, ministers or ambassadors and forget about the hunger gnawing at the people. All is well for those who have enough to eat.1 The same theme appears in anglophone literature. In Chinua Achebe’s words: A University degree was the philosopher’s stone. It transmuted a third class clerk on one hundred and fifty a year into a senior Civil Servant on five hundred and seventy with car and luxuriously furnished quarters at nominal rent. And the disparity in salary and amenities did not tell even half the story. To occupy a European post was second only to being a European. It raised a man from the masses to the elite whose small talk at cocktail parties was: ‘How’s the car behaving?’.2 |
