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Irony In The Case Of The Socialist Witchdoctor

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This paper will consider the positionality of Tuma in relation to the post-colonial Ethiopian state and his use of stereotypes in the prologue and stories in The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor (Tuma: 1993). The book is divided into two sections, the former highly satirical and the latter rather serious. The paper will consider a quote by Ogude: “If in the prologue Hama Tuma introduces us to a variety of stereotypes about Ethiopians as survivors with the endurance of a beast, in the court trails the stereotypes are revised if not altogether subverted” (Ogude 2000:95). The paper starts off with a dissection of Tuma’s mockery of the state in a brief look at the satire in “The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor” and further draws on a Freudian understanding of the unconscious and the role it plays in the novel, based on the critique of the state in “The Case of Criminal Thought. …show more content…

Tuma, through a series of cases that are recounted by an unemployed male narrator, ridicules the nature of the trails noting, through these recounts, lack integrity and a scrutiny of real social malaise that are so prevalent in the proceedings. His accounts of the proceedings seem to mock the proceedings by merely titling them with names, which imply their disingenuous nature i.e. “The Case of the Illiterate Saboteur” (7), “The Case of the Professor of Insanity” 82) and so on. While each case is preceded by a prologue, which in itself undermines the trail, it also provides an account of the framing of each case from a lay perspective. While most of the cases are amusing to the layperson, the prosecutors, highlighting a disjuncture between citizens and the state, take them very

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