Global Journal of Human Social Science, G: Linguistics and Education, Volume 21 Issue 4

resultant effect they extend to life.” And in the words of Mahmud (2016:10), “Kamal is a writer whose novels aim at giving meaning to life by exposing the problems of the society and its progress or otherwise, with a view to drawing attention to measures to be taken for a better society.” So far, Kamal has published fourteen novels in addition to a collection of short stories – The Starlet and Other Short Stories and an anthology of poetry – The Freshman . His novel – Fire in My Backyard won the ANA/Chevron Prize in 2005. His fifteenth novel – The Upper Level and its Hausa version – Kwamacala is Press as the author stated in an interview. Professor Ibrahim Bello Kano, who wrote the forward of the novel and posted it in his twitter page expresses that, “Kamal’s latest novel, The Upper Level (2020) promises to be more interesting than Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) in its literary handling of political satire.” Since then, critics of Kamal eagerly wait for it to give their big critical round of applause. It is against this background that this paper, deploying postcolonial theory as a reading technique, reads Somewhere Somehow and examines the issue of skin bleaching, one of the heartbreaking effects of colonialism on northern Nigerian ladies, who blindly aspire to shed their black skin and metamorphose to white. They consider black skin as evil and old fashioned which prevents them from getting rich suitors. Habi and Jiniya, the central young female characters, who bleach their skins and totally ignore the Hausa admonishing proverb that, “Borrowed cloths do not cover one’s thigh” meet a catastrophic tragic end as expressly discussed in the paper. II. P ostcolonial T heory as a R eading T echnique As a theory, post-colonialism is chosen to depict that the colonized nations are still held in bondage of colonialism. Gomba (2020: 35) explains that: Africa has contributed immensely to the postcolonial world and to the world. African literatures provide some of the most impressive sites of articulation for postcolonial studies. All indices of post-colonialism have been enunciated in African writings: slavery, displacement, colonialism, race, resistance, independence, dependent independence, postcolonial disillusionment and conflicts, hybridity and mimicry, migration, etc. Just name it. In general, contemporary African Literature can be approached from the context of postcolonial studies since post-colonialism investigates the experience of societies, including Nigeria, which experienced conquest and domination by imperial powers, in this case Britain. This implies that the development of the country has been significantly affected by its history and experience as a colonized nation previously. Agofure (2016) explains that: Post-colonial theory always intermingles the past with the present and how it is directed towards the active transformations of the present out of the clutches of the past. What needs to be kept in mind is that trying to grasp the contemporary and social impact of colonial history entails tracing the profound transformations and dissemination colonialism has undergone in a supposedly decolonised world (240). Defining post-colonial theory, Dobie (2006:207) states that “It is a theory which investigates the class of cultures in which one culture deems itself to be superior one and imposes its own practices on the less powerful one.” Postcolonial literature, therefore, reacts against colonialism in all its ramifications. It is concerned with the need to understand the complex ways in which people were brought up by and within the colonial system with a view to raising awareness for national consciousness. According to Bressler (1994:199): Post-colonialism is an approach to literary analysis that particularly concerns itself with Literature written in formally colonised countries. It usually excludes Literature that represents either British or American viewpoints and concentrates on writings from colonised or formally colonised countries in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America and other places that were once dominated. The assumption of Post-colonial discourse is premised around a form of critique that is concerned with the social-cultural criticism of the processes of representation by which the West has framed and formed the identity, experience and history of once- colonised non-Western societies and peoples. Bressler further argues that: Many English people believed that Great Britain was destined to rule the world. Accompanying the belief in the supposed destiny grew the assumption that Western Europeans, and in particular, the British people were biologically superior to any other ‘race’... Such beliefs directly affected the ways in which the colonisers treated the colonised. Likewise, Bertens (2001:324) defines post- colonialism as a theoretical and practical-political position in opposition to the oppressive conditions of the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and the conditions of post-coloniality (the historical facts of de- colonization and the realities of the new global context of economic and political domination). As this shows, post-colonialism is concerned with the diverse effects of colonialism on the colonised and their reaction to these diverse effects. In essence, this paper evaluates the pervasive influence of Western culture on northern Nigerian young girls, who aspire to shed out their black skin and replaces it, preferably with white skin. Volume XXI Issue IV Version I 65 ( G ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - © 2021 Global Journals Year 2021 Literature, Modernity and Cultural Atavism in Aliyu Kamal’s Somewhere Somehow of Hausa cultures and traditions and the clear and