The Dangerous Potency of the Crossroads: Colonial Mimicry in Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Bottled Leopard and Chike Momah’s The Shining Ones: The Umuahia School Days of Obinna Okoye

Abstract

Nigerian school stories were first written against the backdrop of the cultural nationalism and contestatory poetics described above. And yet, no scholar has analyzed the connections between this children’s genre and the novels of the colonial theme that preceded them in the Nigerian literary imagination. I argue that Nigerian boarding school stories by first generation writers represent a special case of colonial mimicry: they simultaneously replicate and subvert the colonial ethos and generic conventions of their direct ancestor, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays and most importantly, they illustrate the Nigerian school boy subject’s complex negotiation of self-identity at the crossroads of cultures. To this end, I will focus on Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Bottled Leopard and Chike Momah’s The Shining Ones: the Umuahia Schooldays of Obinna Okoye , both of which are set at Government College, Umuahia (Eastern Nigeria), an elite colonial boarding school