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The Allegory of the Cave: Language, Democracy and a New World Order!
My Kenyan compatriot Ali Mazrui gave his 1966 inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Science at Makerere on the tantalizing subject of ancient Greece in African political thought. He could as well have talked about the same antiquity in African literary practice. Classical Greece was as integral to English studies as it was to political science and philosophy. Three of the most frequently used texts were Plato's The Republic and Aristotle's Politics and Poetics. In another book, Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa, Mazrui has quoted Ugandan sources as claiming that when Milton Obote, Uganda's first Prime Minister, was in high school, his headmaster used to read The Republic with the top class every Tuesday. Okot p'Bitek titled his book of essays Artist, the Rider, an obvious echo of Plato's philosophers as rulers. And in his 1957 Autobiography, Kwame Nkrumah tells us that when he returned to Ghana from his studies in the USA, his subject for his first talk to his old school of Achimota, after twenty-two years of absence, was "The Politics of Plato." He does not disclose what he told the students, but if we go by what he said of The Republic in his Consciencism, published in 1964, he must have taken a critical look at what he regarded as Plato's betrayal of the egalitarian ideas of Socrates, as manifested for instance in the Meno, where Socrates takes a slave boy to illustrate the innate abilities of everyone. The teacher, an Englishman, who had taught him the same text years before and who happened to be in the audience, was quick to disclaim any responsibility for the interpretation that Nkrumah had now given to Plato. As for Aristotle, the language of his Poetics is to be found in much of contemporary literary criticism. In many English departments, the Poetics and a number of Greek plays were offered as separate courses or as part of the general study of the development of Western drama. Sophocles's Oedipus trilogy, particularly King Oedipus and Antigone, have attracted the most attention and intertextual dialogue, most likely because of their themes of fate and defiance. It is not surprising that Oedipus, challenging fate,...