Failed Post-Independence Unity: Violence, Trauma and Exile in Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore

Although contentions between and among different communities sharing the same place and time are a general sociopolitical phenomenon plaguing human society, they are more endemic and dynamic in the post-independence society. It is the case of Africa which continues to suffer from the legacies of European colonialist encroachment. Since the imperialist balkanisation of the African society by the Western superpowers following the provisions of the Berlin conference, Africa, notwithstanding her independence and the pan-Africanist discourse held by postcolonial luminaries, is still riven owing to socio-political and economic instability ignited by identity foreclosure, intertribal and enter-ethnic squabbles and civil wars and subregional conflicts which bread mass killings, genocides and exile. In A Distant Shore, Caryl Phillips lays bare such evils blighting Africa. The book captures the failed unity of post-independence Africa wherein different ethnic communities, sharing the same country or the same continent hitherto fail to hold peaceful dialogues leading to absolute reconciliation and rehabilitation of the broken bonds of brotherhood. They cannot be reconciled as one people and one community, united by ancestry and history. Instead of fostering peace and brotherhood after centuries of slavery, colonialism and colonisation, many African ethnic communities prefer ethnic pride to the continental union of Africa. This paper which uses postcolonial theory in the analyses argues that this failed post-independence unity and its inherent violence not only stakes the true African spirit of Ubuntu and its inherent communitarian living style but also causes some of the traumatised victims, the survivals of the fratricidal pogrom to take to other countries, especially to Europe in search for stability, only to expose their lives to other troubles prompted by European racism.