10th U6+ Consortium of African Universities International Conference

The term he-goat exit, borrowed from Themne lore, dovetails with Homi K. Bhabha’s (1999) third space theory together with its sub-theoretical trappings: hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence. Themne lore has it that, if a he-goat is locked up in a room for a whole night and released later, its odour will remain in that room for a very long time, such that one would think it is still lurking in the corner. The empire builders claimed to have exited the colonized political spaces, but the study challenges that they have not, and that their invisible presence still constitutes an obstacle to the political and economic well-being of African youths, but particularly the female among them, as is revealed in Devil on the Cross and. The paper shall foreground, on the one hand, attempts made by Ngugi to torment the tormentors of the grassroots and establish social justice; and on the other hand, it shall explore the pathways suggested by Ngugi for both male and female youths to acquire ractical liberational education in an ungendered manner. This paper, which is a postcolonial review of Wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross, shall borrow a reading from Marxism and supported by Achilles Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, among other postcolonial pronouncements, as trusted theoretical tools to critique the relationship between the colonial replacements and the marginalized indigenous populations. The paper concludes that the study of Devil on the Cross should be made compulsory in high schools across Africa so that both present and future generations will understand how to deal with the main problems impeding the actualization of their potentials.