what are the themes of The Man by E.B Dongala?
Answers
The Man,” E.B. Dongala presents a fictional country in which a totalitarian regime dominates and controls the minds of its subjects. It has a tone reminiscent of many Western dystopian classics, but is influenced by Dongala’s observation of the Congolese struggle for independence from Belgium. In Dongala’s story, an unnamed character known simply as “the man” somehow manages to break into the impenetrable fortress of a seemingly all-powerful dictator and kill him, yet this figure is kept hidden from the government, the public, and even from the reader. The use of social constructionism at the hands of the dictator’s government is used to perpetuate political and cultural myths that keep the dictator in power, seeming to hide “the man” and his rebellious ideologies while magnifying the dictator’s reality in the hopes of projecting that reality onto his subjects. However, this endeavor by the dictatorship fails, revealing that the leader’s reality is not, in fact, realistic.