AustLit

'It's the turn of the nineteenth century and a small contingent of British colonialists has been dispatched to a (fictitious) African country, their mission: to establish colonial dominion over an 'unclaimed territory'. While some of colonialism's cruelties have by this stage been realised, the 'Scramble for Africa', under the auspices of Darwinian theory, Christian charity & Eurocentrism, has assumed the guise of philanthropy. Colonialism's 'noble duty', the 'white man's burden', is 'to save the savages from themselves'. Told with a dry, caustic humour that lampoons the era's language & sensibilities, Bisulo's Pig aims to situate the reader in the colonial mindset, typical of the time, that fictionalised Africa and rendered its native inhabitants as pitiful, barbarous or sub-human and to reveal that a great many of us might not be quite as free of an imperialistic outlook as we may fancy.'(Publication summary)