In addition, it captures the dilemma and hopes of the postcolonial African nation. Ways of Dying bridges the millennial gap between the works named above it exemplifies not only the raw violence that characterized works of the past century, but also the moral visions of those in the new. Indeed, they ultimately issue a moral challenge by drawing attention to 'damaged lives' in hopes of eliciting responses from readers. Quite the contrary, their narratives represent violence for cathartic reasons. It is therefore clear that these authors do not represent violence in their works for its own sake.

Violence in African narratives is necessarily a consequence of the writers' engagement with their reality it is a reflection of African writers' attempts to come to grips with the loss of order or hierarchy in African socio-political and economic situations.

This violence is, as Rene Girard argues about that of societies in general, always a result of a loss of hierarchy and differentiation among people. The prevalence of violence in such societies is an expression of the people's desperate search for meaning and for solutions to the particular postcolonial dystopia to which history and various African governments have subjected them. We cannot think of violence in African literature without thinking of the same in African societies, and to say that violence is rife in many African societies would be an understatement. Ouloguem and Armah were not immediately successful as writers however, their efforts seem to have been replicated in the new millennium, in works that include, among others, Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying. The same could be said of Ayi Kwei Armah's Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

Kwame Anthony Appiah asserts that this work sought to create a new narrative trajectory away from the excessive and apologetic obsession with the past, and to challenge Africans to embrace the complex nature of truth and the postmodernist nature of African societies (152-57). Ouologuem's Bound to Violence is arguably the African novel of violence par excellence. Priebe points out that some of these works achieve more of a Medusa-like effect on the reader than their authors might have anticipated, but he also acknowledges that 'we need a rhetoric of motives, and perhaps a grammar of motives,' for their representations (48). The new millennium has its own share of texts in that genus: Nega Mezlekia's Notes from the Hyena's Belly, Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah is Not Obliged, and Asia Djebar's Algerian White. Engagement with violence characterizes most works of African fiction published in the twentieth century, as Richard Priebe shows with such works as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Yambo Ouloguem's Bound to Violence.

Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda