Well, the setting for this fiction, is it the colonial period? Who are the corrupt people? Are you not depriving the corrupt current politicians of responsibility for their own actions?

In my view, parts of the failure of Africa and other liberated colonies in the fifties can be blamed on the political division of the cold war. In a novel like The Quiet American, by Greene, and also some others, you can see that what should have been recognized by everyone as legitimate nationalist aspirations, was reinterpreted and sabotaged by big power politicians. Nkrumah, Allende, Lmumba, Ho Chi Mihn etc, could they not have been portrayed otherwise in a more peaceful political climate? Some of them were not evil, quite far from it? Not initially at least?

I also think that we have a wrong view of what corruption at a lower level really is in Africa. When a policeman, a teacher or a minor official cannot feed his family on his salary, can you really blame him for using the few methods he has to get food on the table? Those with jobs (remember the unemployment rate in some of these countries?) also feed a huge extended family, so a lot depends on the few breadwinners. Start at the top, those channeling billions to off shore accounts. Those billions could have helped many.

I have a Nigerian friend online. We once talked about the availability of social statistics in Nigeria. He claimed there would be very little. I disagreed. I told him Nigeria is a wealthy country, and that the government would dispatch a fleet of limousines to drive all over the country and count the poor.

Thank you for the answer

@samuel Arthur, by this statement, "I'm looking at the relationship between silence and corruption and how these are used to marginalize the Other," I think you mean the inability of the masses to raise their voices against corrupt leaders. Well, the instrument of silence can sometimes be used as a veritable weapon of re-silencing even the few agitators who attempt speak truth to power. In this case, leaders/the political class often deploy silence as a tool of frustrating the demands of the masses (silence by ignoring their agitation(s) or simply by death).

There seems to be a whole lot of issues, depending on the fictional work that you have chosen to analyze.

@Clara Osuji, thank you very much for the answer. Im actually looking at that and also how leaders are able to bring disunity within labour groups which may be demonstrating or threatening demonstration or strike action. The different corrupt strategies which are used in "silencing" and marginalizing such groups

Well, silence is quite a broad scope on critical discourse. It is an area of immense conversation in the home (domestic silence),

work place (occupational silence), society (cultural silence), etc. See Ephratt, M. (2008). The Functions of Silence. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, pp. 1909–1938. Ephratt, M. (2012). “‘We try harder’ – Silence and Grice’s cooperative principle, maxims and implicatures”. Language and Communication 32. 62–79.

Gurevitch, Z. (2001). “Dialectical dialogue: The struggle for speech, repressive silence, and the shift to multiplicity”. British Journal of Sociology 52(1). 87–104. Jaworski, A. (1993). The power of silence: Social and pragmatic perspectives. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Johannesen, R. L. (1974). The function of silence: A plea for communication research. Western Speech, 38, 25-35. Kurzon, D. (2007). Towards a typology of silence. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 16731688.

For all of these works, silence is constitutive of inexpressible speech, power unbalance, absence of speech as a result of powerlessness, hegemony, supreme authority, etc.

Coming to politico-geographic spheres, silence and corruption are in ambivalence. There's gagging to loot. There's keeping mute to operate unhindered. And there's silence to see and abnormal behaviour as though it were normal. Corruption is related to cheating, embezzlement, hoarding, manipulation, mischief etc. Silence under such acts reflects powerlessness to change the deed. Silence may also suggest shielding the wrong deed as an accomplice.

So, for most postcolonial writings, so long as silence in politics exists, run a rather subtle commentary on its relationship with corruption. You may infer from the references given above for a better under understanding.

Thank you very much