Politics of Remonstrance in African Discourse: Comparative Critique of Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike, Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead and Ngugi’s Devil on Cross

This article is a comparative critique of Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike (1979), Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead (1988) and Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross (1980). The works examine how the selected texts vary in time and place across Africa, focusing on exploitation and resistance using Postcolonial and Marxist hermeneutics. This article delineates the thematic preoccupations, narrative format and sociopolitical context of the works. Against the different socio-cultural contexts of the selected texts and the genres, the texts show points of intersection in the exploration of their thematic concerns, such as social injustices, corruption, oppression and remonstrance. The Beggars’ Strike is a satirical piece about a society that enjoys certain spiritual advantages from the physically challenged poor. But, they are despised by the same elite for their overt lack of economic value. The elite are hypocritically disposed to the beggars. Similarly, Hopes of the living Dead is a dramatic work that reveals the collective struggles of the leprosy patients to assert their dignity against institutional neglect. In a different but related context, Devil on the Cross examines the attitude of the middle class elite on corruption and exploitation perpetuated as a postcolonial tendency at the detriment of the larger segment of the society constituted by the peasants and working class. A comparative reading of the texts reveals how together they have criticized the social ills in the society, and created the consciousness of resistance in the “wretched of the earth,” Their deplorable condition is the machination of the elite, not the natural order of human existence. As much as the society is still replete with social injustices and exploitation, the political commitment of literary writers to the development of the society should still be work in progress