![]() ![]() This essay illustrates how the author resorts to Malawian mythology to formulate a vernacular perspective on tragedy, and to valorize native African agency in the fight against imperial domination. Colonialism becomes a tragedy, the colonizer its tragic protagonist, while mythological heroes play the nemesis that brings down imperialism and its hubris. Exploiting the senses of the tragic event and the Western literary form, Steve Chimombo uses tragedy as a prism for interpreting colonial history in protest against imperialism. Tragedy is not a word that is common in African literary and critical parlance. But tragedy is "a precious word" reserved for precious suffering too often associated with Western aesthetic and literary. ![]() This essay settles on the first two senses of the word. But tragedy can also describe a conception of human existence, tragic existence. A tragedy can be an event or a literary piece of work understood to be tragic. ![]() Tragedy is a term that oscillates across three senses. ![]()
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