Blog Post #5 - Post Colonialism

While there are multiple possible criticisms one could apply to The Book Of Negroes, a main one  that strikes me as an important one, is the post colonialism criticism. Throughout this book there are multiple examples of this. Starting with the most obvious, American people versus the African American people.  African Americans were taken from their homelands and forced to work overseas as slaves for American citizens. They were forced out of their religions, beliefs or ways of life, in order to fit in to America's views on how people should be and act. A deeper example of this was Aminata's lack of rights to have a family. Being prohibited to marry Chekura, and having her child taken from her show the extent of oppression between the two groups. As well as her forced religion change, taking away her right to pray or practice muslim religion, and forcing her to dress a certain way.

Another issue was when Aminata did return to her homeland, it was not like she remembered. She had been exposed to the American lifestyle for so long that returning to her life that seized years and years previous, was incredibly different. People from her homeland did not even believe that she was once from there. When a Aminata tries to prove that she was, in fact born in Bayo, she is greeted back with "You have the face of someone born in this land, but you come with the toubab. You are a toubab with the black face." (Hill, 2007, p. 551) This shows how different salves became when they were forced from their raised lifestyles, and how difficult it would have been to return to said lifestyles after the length of time they spent under American control.

Even when they start to feel like they are no longer influenced by another minority, they find themselves still feeling like they are not free. When they all return back to Sierra Leone, they depend heavily on the aid from British colonies. But as Britain begins to minimize their aid that they send, people in the country start to realize that they are still not living freely. They still depend on the governing and assistance from another country. 

Though the most obvious example of post colonialism is the enslave African Americans at the hands of Americans, there is also issues between the British's power over America. As post colonialism can simply be described as a dominant cultures imposition on a local culture, impacting the local culture forever due to the long term exposure of the dominant culture, this is apparent in British versus American issue. Americans felt as though they were "slaves" to the British colonies, they complain heavily about it throughout the novel, which is strange considering their entire culture at this time was based around the slave trade of African Americans. However, because black people were considered to be significantly lower than white people on the social levels, this hypocrisy was not clear to the Americans at this time. In conclusion, a war eventually concluded Britain's ties to America, and America was no longer under British colony rule.