COLONIALISM AND RACIAL SUPREMACY IN THE CARIBBEAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURES: A CRITIQUE OF GEORGE LAMMING’S IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN AND ALEX LA GUMA'S A WALK IN THE NIGHT

Abstract

The history of the West Indies, as well as South Africa, will remain incomplete without reflecting on issues of colonialism and racial injustice. These colonized territories had peculiar, unpleasant experiences as they wallowed in racial abuse, both in physical, psychological or spiritual terms. The issues of racial supremacy, therefore, are a general phenomenon in the Caribbean Islands and South Africa and have been and still are the key component of these regions' experiences. This paper, therefore, examines this issue with its attendant effect on the shaping of the Caribbean and South African Literatures, since literature to some extent responds to history, social reality and individual reactions to those realities. This research primarily aims at examining the depth of social disharmony and disillusionment prevalent in an atmosphere of inequality and injustice as portrayed by popular West Indies and South African writers, specifically by George Lamming and Alex La Guma, by using Edward Said’s essay “Reflection on Exile”. This paper builds on his theory of Exilic Experience, which shows the struggle for survival in the face of oppression and alienation in various Caribbean and South African colonies. Furthermore, colonialism is naturally surrounded by iron walls of racism, hence the feelings of loss, nostalgia, despair and loneliness. In the end, it found out that Caribbean and South African Literature is anchored on a sad portrait of animosities arising out of a history of fear or abuse of one group by the other and concludes that propagation of harmonious racial co-existence is the only true panacea to the problem of racism in human society and by extension, global conflict, using George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin and Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night as sign posts.