The Plight of the Child in Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Achakasara

Abstract

This paper examines the ordeal of the Victorian English and Postcolonial Cameroonian children through the lenses of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Achakasara. Child abuse cuts across universality, timelessness, racial and gender constructs. The child in these two societal backgrounds undergoes untold suffering perpetrated by adults and their fellow children. They are exploited for commercial purposes, at the expense of their education and wellbeing. They experience physical assault through undeserved beating under the guise of domestic correction with pending eventualities being psychological trauma. A continuity of intentional abuse consciously impacts the child to view his place of birth and development as a problem. That child sees the streets as a better option. Very high probability abounds that these streets are not suitable for the developmental processes of the child but at that point, his/her actions are shaped by convictions. Dickens and Nkengasong take interest what happens to a child, in their respective societies. They pen with certainty that conventional Victorian England and contemporary Postcolonial Cameroonian societies are fraught with different shades of injustices, jeopardising the future of the younger generations. This paper is vehiculated by the Psychoanalytic theory, with focus on Anna Freud’s dimension of Psychoanalysis. Anna Freud is a child psychoanalyst concerned with the upbringing of children. The purpose of this paper is to portray the various abuses experienced by the child as demonstrated in Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Nkengasong’s Achakasara.