Veronica

Mohammed Salman
‘What View of African Culture is portrayed in ‘Veronica’ giving a personal view’?

‘Veronica’ is the story of two Africans who were brought-up together in a rural Africa. The narrator is a man called Okeke, he speaks from his own experience of his local village where he was born, bred and cared for before being ‘released’ into the city to experience its life, Most essentially he remembers the tragic story of a women called Veronica, who he was friends with since their early childhood.
The story shows how two lives can grow up to become completely different people
Because one of them is lucky enough to be a male.
This is because, as the story shows how women’s lives are hidden and broken and how their lives rot and weaken day after day due to the ‘backward’ society and culture of African unease. The heroine of Adewale Maja-Pearce story is not a tragic isolated case, but represents the sexism and pain suffered by countless other African women.

As a child, Veronica was beaten by her father for trivial matters, and she, as so many girls do, inherited the responsibility of bringing up her brothers, due to her mother’s weakness. ‘Her father was a morbidly suspicious man’ who ‘apart from his drinking companions’, showed the door to guests and visitors. This point touches on two important thoughts, the first is the relation between alcohol and poverty, and the second is the fact that if ‘visitors’ are not allowed the quality of life will be extremely diminished.

Veronica also had physical responsibilities one would connect with a man, in chopping firewood. Therefore what is being hidden as only taking over her mother’s responsibilities is untrue. She is isolated and unable to live her own life, because she has become virtually the guardian and servant of the entire family. This state can be expanded to the whole country’s state to uncover the author’s biased direction. Where Veronica symbolises the broken and mistreated people, her father may...