Clash of Cultures and Resistance in Selected African Plays

Protest African drama that appeared in Kenya and other African countries was due to the bad conditions that Africans lived during the period of colonization. This paper uses the post-colonial theory to explore how resistance in all of its armed and unarmed forms succeeded in awakening the African continent after long years of marginalization. It also tackles the clash of cultures which represents another kind of resistance, dealing with clash of cultures between the European and the African. Moreover, it will focus on the colonial discourse the colonizer relied on to assert the inability of Africans to express themselves without this discourse which the Europeans (colonial powers) invented and deliberately used to establish and deepen their domination over the black continent even after their departure. For this purpose, the researcher will analyze two different plays written by the Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiongo, The Black Hermit and The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. The clash of two cultures will be studied in The Black Hermit, while resistance and armed resistance will be examined in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi.