Soro-Soke Polemic & the contemporary African Female Revolutionary Trend: An Ngugian Perspective

Abstract

A video revealing the assault of two men who were pulled out of a hotel and the execution of one of them by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) became viral on October 4, 2020 spurring random protests across Nigeria. The protests which began as pockets of pickets snowballed into crowded rallies in the major cities comprising mainly, the youth shortly after the outbreak of a virtual protest with the hashtag #EndSARS littering the social media, and eventually, the print media, and banners. Christened, Soro-Soke, these protests can be linked with a certain history - the actuality of the #EndSARS protests against police brutality by Nigerians must have been predicted three decades ago by Ngugi wa Thiong’o whose late fictions prophesy palpable female intolerance of government ineptitude and a growing female revolutionary tendency in Africa; a fervor which is spread from Kenya through the entire continent. Ngugi’s present affinity to strong female characters can be regarded as archetypal of his late fictions and nonfictions published from the 1980s. Matigari, Wizard of the Crow and Devil on Cross will be interrogated as predictions of the #EndSARS protests from an Ngugian perspective, while Ngugi’s strongest nonfiction heroine, Me Katilili in his 2018 nonfiction, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir will be synchronically analyzed alongside his imaginary heroines. Cultural Ecofeminism and Jungian Theory of archetypes interrogate the roles assigned by nature to Ngugi’s most outstanding women in his late fictions, as part of a collective unconscious which is urgently typical of mankind.