ADJUSTED LIVES: Stories of Structural Adjustments

Description

Adjusted Lives is a completed short story cycle which is divided into three parts, each of which contains three stories. The nine stories altogether constituting the collection propose a unified thesis: the now infamous Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) is not really a contemporary manifestation of a four-century-old phenomenon. African lives, the stories depict, have systematically been adjusted in the interest of, and by the merchants, priests, politicians, soldiers, and economists of the Western World since the seventeenth century; the only changes observable being int he external forms of the packaging, and not in the inner essence of the adjustment.

Part one, subtitles The Philosophy, presents images of African lives adjusting tot he brutal realities of slavery, colonialism, and post-independence external exploitations in three respective stories. The next three stories in part two, The Heresies, oppose the philosophy of adjustment in part one with images of heroes who uphold African traditional philosophy of existence, heroic leadership, and self-reliance in the pursuit of development. The last division, The Restoration, shows how African lives are once more being violently adjusted by external agencies during the contemporary era of SAP. A housewife, a student, and a university professor are respectively the representative victim-protagonists in the three stories in this section. The collection ends optimistically, envisaging a final end to the centuries-old external adjustments of African lives.

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