Environmental Issues in Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike: An Artist Impression of an African Social Problem

Abstract

This study reveals how Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike uses the elements of event and discourse to communicate a message on the current topical issue of the environment. The message is that the culture of mendicancy and the mendicants themselves constitute an environmental health hazard in biological and psychological terms.  The study reveals that the cultural and religious beliefs  which have produced and sustained mendicancy and mendicants have had such a powerful grip on the individual and collective psyche of the people who now see government efforts to put an to mendicancy and the resultant social problems for reasons of national development, as an attempt to destroy their very existence. In this context then, one of Sow Fall’s messages in The Beggars’ Strike is that some of our cultural beliefs and practices are inimical to our national developmental efforts.

Keywords: The Beggars’ Strike, social problems, environment, beggars, cultural beliefs, national development.