PREDATORY POLITICS AND THE METAPHOR OF CONSUMPTION IN SELECTED CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN NOVELS

Abstract

This paper examines the figuration of political predation through the metaphor of consumption in four selected contemporary African novels: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow (2006), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013), and Teju Cole's Open City (2011). Drawing on Jean-François Bayart's theory of the politics of the belly, Achille Mbembe's postcolony framework, Frantz Fanon's critique of the postcolonial bourgeoisie, and Marxist literary criticism, the paper argues that these novelists deploy consumption not merely as a rhetorical device but as a structuring epistemology through which the violence of postcolonial governance is rendered legible. The selected texts reveal a persistent African literary imaginary in which political power manifests as an insatiable appetite, and the citizen body is perpetually figured as edible matter. The paper contends that this metaphorical architecture constitutes a form of narrative counter-politics, a sustained literary indictment of the devouring state that exposes the predatory logics underlying postcolonial authoritarianism, ethnic chauvinism, imperial nostalgia, and neoliberal dispossession.