Colonialism and the Culture of Non-European Cultures

[Added by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University]

This sixteen-inch wood statue of Queen Victoria, which a member of the Ibo created in the nineteenth century, raises central questions about the effects of colonial powers upon the culture of the colonized and upon the effects of the colonizer itself. This Ibo image of Victoria can strike the twentieth-century eye as many things: a naive tribute of the colonized to the colonizer, a re-vision of the colonial ruler in terms that the indigenous populace can accept, a colonization of the colonizer as the Yoruba present the British ruler in the guise of a traditional cultural or religious object, and even a sort of political caricature. On what grounds and using what evidence can you justify any of these interpretations?

• What parallels can you find between this statuette and the writings of Soyinka, Achebe, Rushdie, and Desai?