The African cityand existentialism in Sefi Atta’s <i>Everything Good Will Come</i> and Zakes Mda’s <i>Ways of Dying</i>

Abstract

A close reading of African fiction reveals that there is a substantial body of city writing in Africa. However, critical materials on the city as a subject of its own in the African novel are scarce. This study, therefore, focuses on how the city is previewed as a subject of its own with specific attention on how the city‘s decadence creates psychological dislocation in Sefi Atta‘s Everything Good Will Come and Zakes Mda‘s Ways of Dying. This study adopts postcolonialism and existentialism as its theoretical framework. Since space, place and location are significant factors in literary studies, the study examines how place functions and is recreated through text and how the urban environment affects the characterization of the story. There is also a relationship between the themes of contradiction, diversity and creativity in the portrayal of the survival of the characters in the African city. This study is significant in its proposition of an alternate view of appraising African city narratives whereby the city is treated as a subject throwing up myriad issues that define its existence and human relationships. The city, therefore, becomes an important item in the negotiation of both individual and national identities and recreates how the depiction of decadence affects existentialist alienation and psychological dislocation in African fiction. In other words, the city affects every facet of society in terms of how we appraise interaction, space and urban development in African fiction.