http://dspace.ewubd.edu:8080/handle/2525/2784 2026-04-03T21:56:38Z http://dspace.ewubd.edu:8080/handle/2525/2855 Authorized Honesty: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul Idris, Farhad Bani No acquaintance of V. S. Naipaul could possibly imagine that during the scattering of Pat Naipaul’s ashes, the Quran was recited, but the author, highly acclaimed for both his fiction and non-fiction but also known for his hostility towards Islam, allowed the lapse and was even grateful. The recitation of Sura Fatiha in Arabic was performed by Naipaul’s newly-wed wife Nadira, a Muslim woman from Pakistan with links in Kenya. Naipaul was too distraught to accompany her into the woods on Cooper’s Hill; he stood by the car, crying the entire time. The location, near Gloucester, had memories for him, memories of Pat, wife of a forty-one year long marriage. Months earlier, the funeral at Salisbury Crematorium was austere and frugal. Curiously enough, Naipaul defended the minimalism to someone in Islamic terms: “’It was chaste, it was Quranic in its purity’” (480). There was no decent interval between the first wife’s death and the second wedding. Naipaul had met Nadira in Pakistan while collecting materials for a new book on Islam (Beyond Belief) and had proposed to her when Pat was still alive but dying of cancer. She passed away in February of 1996; the wedding occurred in April; Pat’s remains were dispersed in October. 0001-01-01T00:00:00Z http://dspace.ewubd.edu:8080/handle/2525/2854 The Powerlessness of Cameroon’s Reunification Monuments NFI, Joseph Lon PhD This study attempts to investigate the symbolism and popularity of the Reunification Monuments constructed in Yaounde and Mamfe some years after the political reunification of the two Cameroons. These monuments were constructed to commemorate the reunification of Cameroon, considered by many as the most significant event in postcolonial Cameroon history. This study intends to investigate why the monuments became victims of neglect, indifference and even scorn from Cameroonians only a few decades after reunification. An analysis of the data collected from interviews and secondary sources reveals that the monuments remain unpopular like the reunification history itself largely due to the failure of the powers that be to project this aspect of Cameroon history. The monuments have, therefore, remained powerless, as they have not immortalized the reunification of Cameroon, as is the case with reunification monuments elsewhere 0001-01-01T00:00:00Z http://dspace.ewubd.edu:8080/handle/2525/2853 Western Democracy in Africa as a Failed Project: Which Way Forward? Nkwi, Walter Gam PhD The role of democracy in societal transformation and nation-building in Sub-Saharan Africa has been compromised by political and social strictures created during more than three decades of autocratic rule of most countries that still underline the practical and moral workings of the state today. Western democracy remains mired in rigging cleavages that find expression in parochial tendencies ranging from divide and rule to ethnicism and to regionalism being orchestrated by the state’s political elites and those loyal to the ruling regime in a neo-patrimonial manner. As a result, the ability to mobilize all and sundry towards a meaningful democratic culture and development is limited. In this context good governance has remained, for the vast majority of Africans, illusory. With the end of the Cold War which characterized world politics since 1945, the United States of America and Europe have descended on the continent and re-launched a crusade for democracy without paying any attention to the structures which could harness meaningful democratic culture and development. This essay focuses on the dynamics that have impeded the development of western democracy in Africa. It interrogates even the raison d’etre of such a western buzzword with regard to meaningful development in most African countries. Does Africa really need western democracy to cure her developmental malady? This essay, while working on the argument that western democracy has botched woefully in most parts of the continent, attempts to proffer some suggestions, which if implemented would launch most African countries towards meaningful democratic culture. 0001-01-01T00:00:00Z http://dspace.ewubd.edu:8080/handle/2525/2852 Homologizing Accident: Notes on Warhol’s Car Crashes Sarkar, Abhishek This paper focuses on some paintings by Andy Warhol depicting car crashes to demonstrate how he uses them not only to underscore the commodity fetishism of contemporary capitalism but also subversively to undermine such traits in contemporary American culture. It also explores the connection between the ambivalence reflected in the paintings and Warhol’s sexuality. In the process, it connects the paintings to the category Susan Sontag has famously categorized as “Camp” and Warhol’s own facetiousness and love of surfaces and mixed modes as well as gimmick and parody. 0002-01-01T00:00:00Z