Depictions of Africa and Africans in Audrey Thomas’s Fiction
Depictions of Africa and Africans in Audrey Thomas’s Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines depictions of Africa and Africans in Audrey Thomas's fiction. Her Africa is a landscape peopled with "primitive savage"Africans, as perceived by anxious white female expatriates, and fraught with dangers as evidenced time and again in her writing. Audrey Thomas employs traditional images and narrative conventions to describe Africa and Africans, conventions of the sort disparaged by critics such as Dorothy Hammond, Alta Jablow, China Achebe, Christopher L. Miller, Edward Said and others. I shall take to task several critical reviews of Thomas's work that either gloss over or entirely neglect to address the issue of what constitutes Thomas's Africa. The Africa, specifically the Ghana, of Thomas's stories is the setting for psychological investigation, a place where people and events are stripped raw, where madness is not only given free rein but exacerbated. But this Africa is a symbolic place, not a real one.

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