| dc.description.abstract | Post-independence Africa has faced many governance problems chief among them being dictatorship. Citizens of various African countries have committed to a host of responses to counter despotism. The despots have equally reengineered the craft of despotism into a sly and manipulative form of leadership where countries have a hoodwinking facade of democracy while the masses remain oppressed. Although the conflict between the despots and the masses has attracted widespread media and literary coverage, the role of the committed literary artists in unveiling the shifting face of despotism remains largely unexplored. Ethiopia is one of the African countries which have been run by dictators yet she has steadily exhibited a backcloth of democracy. This study intended to explore commitment to dissidence in Hama Tuma's works. The research was driven by the need to investigate the contribution of Ethiopian literary writing in engaging the rampant and evolving phenomenon of despotism in the continent so as to unpack the new face of despotism. It explores the socio-political issues that enhance authoritarianism in Tuma's short stories; evaluates the use of symbolism in curving out the portrait of the despots in Tuma's short stories, and appraises the responses of the subjects under dictatorship. The research was navigated by an eclectic theoretical approach. The concepts of commitment and hermeneutics of suspicion were used for the critical reading and analysis of the selected short stories. Through the guidelines of commitment formulated from Sartreian principles on the role of the writer and a collection of views from an array of literary scholars, the commitment of the author has been tested and mapped out. Hermeneutics of suspicion was handy in the decoding of language use and the historical and cultural underpinnings of the selected short stories. Hermeneutics of suspicion was further used to examine aspects of the Freudian unconscious and the Marxist class struggles in the texts. This study employed the analytical research design in the collection and analysis of the data. The selected texts for this study, arrived at through purposive sampling, were twenty short stories from the anthologies: The case of the socialist witchdoctor and other stories and The case of the criminal walk and other stories. In depth library research was conducted and relevant secondary data used to enhance the grounding of the study's arguments and discussions on concrete critical and intellectual premises. Ethiopian fiction in English is one of the lesser known participants in the African fiction scene because many Ethiopian writers have a strong background in Amharic hence this study bears the onus of unlocking the works of Tuma and the larger Ethiopian literary discourse. This study also gives a deeper understanding of the shifting face of despotism in Africa in addition to demonstrating the potency of integrating different theoretical approaches in studying literary texts. | en_US |