Bourgeois Politics and Ideology in Vincent Egbuson’s Womandela

With few exceptions, African countries have suffered perennial bad governance, bloody civil wars, and coups-d’état. The continent suffocates in the grip of political elites and military juntas. Capitalism as an economic system empowers a few who lord it over the weak majority. The ruling class also contributes to the suffering of the masses by flagrantly looting the nation’s treasury and flaunting it while the majority of the populace wallow in abject poverty. African writers problematize and diagnose this scenario and the Weltschmerz bedevilling African socio-political life, in a bid to offering lasting solutions, in the process experimenting with ‘home-made’ as well as ‘imported’ ideologies in the struggle for the African utopia. Vincent Egbuson, a ‘new-generation’ African writer, is indubitably a committed writer. In confronting the African socio-political malady in Womandela , he has adopted divergent ideologies to sharpen his social vision. The purpose of this study is, accordingly, to scrutinize the ideological bent of Egbuson’s novel and to determine its efficacy against the backdrop of the socio-political reality of contemporary Africa.