Historical Context

The Color Purple is set in the early twentieth century USA and parts of Africa which are characterized by racial discrimination, western encroachment into Africa, and human rights violation, all of which set the background for the events in the plot.

Racial Discrimination

The Color Purple is set in the early twentieth century when the racial divide between whites and blacks was more palpable. For instance, public trains had separate sections for white people into which black people were not allowed.

Racial discrimination is one of the key issues in the story of The Color Purple, and the sad realities of the time are depicted aptly in the story. For instance, Sofia was tortured, sentenced to prison, and later to eleven and half years of laborious servitude for the mayor’s household are injustices meted out on her because of her race.

Celie’s father and uncles being lynched by white competitors in the neighborhood is also a clear example of the racial discrimination prevalent at the time.

Western Presence in Africa

The early twentieth century saw a continuation of the presence of western countries, mostly from Europe and America, in Africa under various pretexts. The entire continent of Africa was a locus of attraction for missionaries, explorers, capitalists, and colonialists from the western world.

Some of the activities of the western countries in Africa were philanthropic, while many others were exploitative. Alice Walker shows in The Color Purple the different ways the encroachment of Western countries into Africa affected the people of Africa in the twentieth century. We see the people of Olinka who are forcefully evacuated from their homes and farms to make room for a western company that wanted their lands for rubber cultivation.

Slavery

Although slavery had been abolished in the twentieth century in which The Color Purple is set, it still comes into the conversation of the novel with some thought-provoking perspectives.

The origin of African-Americans in the United States of America is traced back to Africans who were sold into slavery to work in plantations for Americans. Some of these slaves were sold into slavery by their fellow Africans. The role of Africans in the distasteful success of the slave trade is something Alice Walker talks about in The Color Purple.

Through the character Nettie, a reader feels an inquisitiveness to know how Africans in Africa feel about their African-American brethren who were victims of betrayal by their own brothers and cruelty by strangers. But from Nettie’s observations, we see that the Africans in Africa are indifferent to African-Americans and their fate, there is no remorse and no contrite acceptance of blame for what happened to African-Americans.

Human Rights

Human Rights in the setting of The Color Purple is not as well implemented in the USA as it is in the twenty-first century. While we cannot rightly say that Human Rights protection and implementation is perfect in the present day, it is still an improvement on what was obtainable in the early twentieth century.

Characters from The Color Purple, like Celie, might have been empowered by Child Rights to continue their education and not drop out of school if it had been in present-day America. And the cruel Alphonso would more likely have gone to prison for raping a minor. But the system was not structured to see the struggles and the rights of a child such as Celie as a priority in that era.

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