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영어

The purpose of this paper is to analyze one of Africa’s most influential writers, Bessie Head, and her novel Maru, focusing on the phenomenon of internal colonialism in Africa. The South Africa-born and Botswana-exile writer expressed concerns about the fact that racial discrimination against Bushmen was committed not just by white people but also by black people. Among those concerns, Maru exposes the harsh prejudices of the Botswana tribes against the Marsarwa people, who are Bushmen. This paper, therefore, treats the problem of how black Africans inherited European colonialism and racism through their experience of being colonized. Maru describes how tribal violence prevailed even into postcolonial African society in the case of Botswana. The basic reason Head stressed this was because she was the daughter of a white woman and a black South African man. As she was the product of an illicit union in the apartheid era of South Africa, she was able to experience Afrikaner‘s racial prejudice against a colored woman and to closely observe tribalism as well. The main character of the novel, Maru, is a Bushman woman who suffers the same persecution by the Botswana people as the writer did. In this context, this paper intends to review that the reason that Head created her main character as a Bushman was to show the process of how Bushmen were excluded in history in light of her own experiences. With this in mind, this paper emphasizes that Head confronts the blacks’ irrational discrimination against Bushmen in the beginning and gradually changes the conflict between the two tribes into a harmonious situation, indicating an end to tribalism. (Chonnam National University)