The Impact of Globalization on the African Culture in Helon Habila’s <i>Measuring Time</i>

Abstract

Globalization is a phenomenon of the postmodern era which accommodates the shrinking of the world into a small functional community. As a result of this, geographical distance and socio-cultural divergence are no longer constraints to aggregating the entire human race into one global family. The term is used to describe transnational relationships, engagements, cooperation and the sharing of human, material and ideological resources across regions. Discourse on the subject has become so relevant across previously unrelated fields that their definitions have now converged on a consensus theoretical concept understood as “universal homogeneity.” The primary material, Helon Habila’s novel, Measuring Time is studied in the context of globalization and hybridity of cultures. The paper asserts that no human community should be isolated from the dynamic engagements of the wider society. This paper avers that globalization should not be advanced as an imposition of foreign cultural values; rather it should be seen as a practice that reflects mutually beneficial contact amongst people of divergent cultures. In the current dispensation, the cultural consumption and uncritical assimilation of Western values by African colonized people do not reflect the underlying objective of Globalization. This paper projected the need for a revision of the concept and to promote a symbiosis of unions where ideological, material and human capital flow across cultures in such a manner that all the actors in the ‘shrinking’ borderless world are mutual beneficiaries.

Key words: Globalisation, African, Culture, Hybridity, Post-Colonialism