The ‘Divide and Rule’ Policy as Revealed in African and South Asian Literature

Abstract

Abstract: In this paper, my objective is to examine Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel The River Between (1965), Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God (1988), and Manohar Malgonkar’s novel A Bend in the Ganges (1964) with the aim of exploring the literary impacts of the ‘divide and rule’ policy in the context of South Asia and Africa. In both regions, the colonizers shrewdly executed this policy despite the fact that Africa and South Asia are different in terms of geography, culture, and history. The colonizers quickly identified and manipulated the existing differences among the locals and introduced new agents of division which helped them rule by damaging the communal unity. In both regions, the colonizers followed similar principles which suggests that the sociocultural factors shared some significant features. In this paper, I will explore the aforementioned novels to discover what insight literature gives us into the various factors that helped the colonizers execute this policy in two different geographical and geopolitical contexts.

Keywords

• divide and rule
• colonization
• Africa
• South Asia
• communal division