THE REPRESENTATION OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES IN SELECTED AFRICAN FICTION
ABSTRACT
The concept of disability as an entity worthy of study in African literature is hardly ever considered, yet it an engaging issue. Disability means different things to different people at different times and that is what the research work sought. The four works under study: Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Drummerboy, and Gabriel Okara’s The Voice looked gat the subject of disability and depicted persons with disabilities in these three dimensions. They achieved this through the use of some key literary devices that served as a medium to efficiently carry out the assignment of depicting persons with disabilities and their experiences. The research work looked at the following as it discussed the subject of disability in these four texts: how disability is viewed in the selected works; the imagery that is recurrent in these works; how disability is connected to traditional, moral and ethical norms and what disability means for the subject. This was achieved by doing a Marxist analytical study of some characters with disabilities in the texts in order to show the relationship between the disabled characters and society. This work discovered three ways disability has been portrayed in literature – positive portrayal, negative portrayal and ambivalent portrayal.