The Irony of a Handshake of Friendship with the West: A Reflection on Oyono’s HouseBoy and The Oldman and the Medal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The African proverb that ‘a set of white teeth does not indicate a pure heart’ aptly illustrates the relationship that exists between the Africa and the West. Colonization which is the image of friendship with the White man turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing. The Africans in their brotherhood temperament happily offers a handshake with the White man with the hope fostering a good relationship only to discover that the kind gesture is tampered with bad omen by his guest. The advancement of the White man was a happy thing to the Africans who assumed it to usher in good relationship between the West and the Africans. But it rather turned out to be a curse. Though belaboured in literary criticism, this paper attempts to look at the irony of the handshake as a symbolic image, exposing the White man’s wicked impressions as against the good intentions of the Africans. To do this Oyono’s Houseboy and The Old Man and the Medal are used for this study. The paper examines the degree of acceptance by the Africans and the humane acceptance of the White man and his eventual exploitative attitude toward the same people who happily accepted them. The White man’s use of violence to oppress, subjugate and assault his hosts. The paper explores the ridiculing nature of colonialism and providing the insight to view the psychology of both the White man and his African host. Allusion is also made of other texts that express the same themes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".