Salman Rushdie's One Hundred Years Of Colonialism

Improved Essays
Up to this day, most of the people still keep a little amount of food on the road prior to their journey, so that the King of the Road will eat their sacrifice and let them travel safe and sound. Some say people make sacrifices to the road to recall that the monster is still there and that he can grow at any time and start to eat up human beings again. Others state that it is a type of prayer that his form should never come back again to frighten our lives.
In this story everything is fictitious but Okri tries to visualize every minute details of the scene with the help of narrative technique. This is African culture which Okri has incorporated in this novel with the help of his imagination .This is part and parcel of their tradition and culture.
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In this novel, we see a story of change from colonialism to freedom told through the eyes of a child from a working class family combating with poverty. The geographical location addressed in the novel is a moderately trivial area, limited to the neighbourhood where Azaro and his family live and journeys on foot taken by Azaro to diverse parts of the city on endless roads.
Okri makes an effort to depict the stark reality of the compound people with the help of realistic situations in which he presents natural actuality of Azaro
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The compound people endeavour to know the actual history and then determine to root out the white people from their geographical region. For that matter, Azaro asks his mother to tell him a story about white people. She said nothing at first. And then she said:
‘I will tell you a story another time.’
We were silent. It seemed she changed her mind.
‘When white people first came to our land...we had already gone to the moon and all the great stars. In the olden days they used to come and learn from us. My father used to tell me that we taught them how to count. We taught them about the stars...We welcomed them. But they forgot all this…They took our lands, burned our gods…They are greedy. They want to own the whole world and conquer the sun. Some of them believe they have killed God...They are not all bad. Learn from them, but love the world.’
I was surprised with what Mum said. I was struck by the gentleness of her voice when she spoke next.
‘Do you know what my mother said to me in a dream?’

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