This chapter examines the relationship between myth and colonial history and how they impact a community’s quest for self-definition and coexistence amid ideological narratives of colonialism. It establishes the conceptual and analytic strategies used in this book, identifying the New Historicism as a critical approach that brings literary, historical, archival, and socio-political voices into an analytic bond. This is the vantage point on which to stand to look from life to art and from art to life in our analysis of myth, its origin in colonial history, and its influence on ethnic identities. It builds on Roland Barthes’s idea of myth as a construct of a social value system and Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry to establish the background and strategies for understanding the dynamics of postcolonial myths in different African cultural settings.