Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift as a Postcolonial Text: A Semiotic, Linguistic and Onomastic Analysis

This essay analyses Namwali Serpell’s seminal novel The Old Drift from a postcolonial perspective. In pursuing this goal, the essay utilises some aspects of postcolonial theory, semiotics, onomastics and linguistics. In particular, it looks at how Serpell reinterprets the history of colonial Zambia as projected and interpreted by colonial writers. The findings suggest that the novel epitomises a new drift in Zambian literature. The novel problematises the views of the imperial centre as exemplified in colonial literature and suggests that the colonisers used the gun, fraud, deception, language and names as some of the means of subjugating the local people and dispossessing them of their land. Therefore, the whole colonial enterprise was pursued for the benefit of the white settlers at the expense of the local people and was motivated by greed, selfishness and self-aggrandisement.