Integrity Journal of Arts and Humanities

This study explores the manifestation of political disenchantment and emotional disintegration in Alioum Fantouré’s influential novel, Tropical Circle (Le Cercle des tropiques). This is the result of a vicious political tyranny and state-sponsored terror experienced in the records of African post-colonial history. Thus, the principal objective of the study is to investigate how political power is reinforced through paranoia, successfully shifting the post-independence African state into a metaphorical circle of madness. Exploring the novel through the lens of a “circle of madness”, this reading avers that autocratic governance in post-colonial Africa aggressively launches a psychopathic reality in addition to debasing social institutions. Bari Kouli, the imaginary dictator, creates paranoia that extends beyond a mere clinical anomaly into becoming the prime machinery of citizen survival and state control. This paper probes the political repression that ruptures both personal and collective psyches, exposing the clogged sphere of horror and treachery amid state-sponsored brutality, which is represented by the emblematic construct of the “Circle”. It is anchored in the theoretical framework of post-colonial psychoanalysis and Marxist literary theory. Questioning the vicious cycle of psychological collapse of dictatorship on both the oppressor and the oppressed under Bari Kouli’s despotic government, the reading reveals that paranoia is a deliberate political strategy used to produce panic, contain opposition and regularise communal agony. In conclusion, the reading shows that the novel remains a sarcastic critique of the early post-colonial African ruling class, exposing how they institute paranoia as a systemic malady that subverts national well-being. This study, thus, accentuates the imperative need for dismantling psychopathic power structures to break the cycle of socio-political degeneration in post-colonial Africa.