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

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.