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Hypocrisy In Ferdinand Oyono's 'Houseboy'

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Topic: How does Ferdinand Oyono use satire to depict the hypocrisy of the whites in Houseboy? The Houseboy is a novel which sheds light on the brutality of European colonialism in Cameroon. Ferdinand Oyono’s work satirized the colonial experience through the eyes of ordinary Africans. The whites oppressed and exploited the blacks without giving a thought to the dehumanization they were causing them. One Michael Leunig once said: “The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we’re still also drive by primal urges like greed and power.” This essay aims to extrapolate the falseness of the whites and present the subjugation the blacks endured in those times. Through the employment of characterization fueled with situational irony, Oyono is able to point out the brutalization of the blacks. At the beginning of the novel, an ignorant and naive Toundi “refers to his ancestors as cannibals and says that since the white men came they have learnt other men must not be …show more content…

Toundi then run to the white man in an attempt to evade his father’s beating. The white man took him in and turned him into multipurpose labor machine; a boy who could: read, write, serve Mass, lay a table, sweep out his room and make his bed. When Toundi moved to the Residence, he faced an unpleasant experience which made realize that the whites were not nearly as good as he thought they were when he fled from his father which eventually led to him fleeing from the white man he had greatly adored because the white man wanted to torture and kill him for a crime he didn’t commit. Oyono shows the whites as hypocrites and portrays them relying on violence to exploit the blacks. Toundi learnt firsthand just how bad the whites can get because the whites he had run to had treated him as an

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