An overview of occultism in the literary works of Unity Dow and Emmanuel Mbogo

Abstract

Although modernity as evidenced by formal education, urbanization, globalization and an ICT-driven age has resulted in tremendous social-cultural changes in Africa, the practice of occultism, often considered as belonging to a primitive age: persists. On the other hand, and despite the challenges that occultism poses to humanity, African writers have shunned and not written much about it. This paper underscores the challenge of regional literature in addressing the important theme of occultism by analyzing the few voices on the occult as demonstrated in the literary works of Unity Dow and Emmanuel Mbogo from Botswana and Tanzania respectively. The books, comprising three novels and a play, are deliberately selected as being representative writings on the subject of occultism as a cross-border theme within the SADC region. The paper is guided by the theory of power as manifested at various levels in the texts.