Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Note: The following article was written by Malek Owera L6 ( 20oweram@students.watfordboys.org) The colonial literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had a profound impact on Chinua Achebe’s future literary output. At his secondary school, Government College Umuahia, also known as the “Eton of the East”, he encountered the works of Rudyard Kipling (a “champion” of the British Empire) and Joseph Conrad (author of ‘Heart of Darkness’), among others. Decades later, he would write that during his education, he “did not see [himself] as an African”. He also added that when reading stories such as Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, a novella with various critical responses regarding colonialist and racist attitudes, he “took sides with the white men against the savages”. Achebe’s 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ is considered one of the first * novels to be written from the perspective of colonised, rather than the coloniser. By writing ‘Things Fall Apart’, Achebe intended to disma...