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In Herding South, Peter Omoko spotlights the dispossessed and dystopian fate of minority groups in Nigeria, and the fractured social equilibrium that pervades the land, with its polarising and destructive effect on the people’s psyche. Writing essentially as a troubled witness, the poet navigates through the horrifying pains and trauma of a people, instigated by the ineptitude and narrow-mindedness of their leadership. Omoko’s intention in this collection – to speak home-truth to power in order to reclaim the people’s humanity – is well delineated in the sardonic and emotive metaphors used in the poetry and the rhetorical force of its lines.
The Mudskippers dramatises the socio-political malaise that constitutes the political bedrock of Nigeria and other African states. The play illuminates a significant contemporary Nigerian predicament, which is the problem of unexecuted contracts in its bloody propensity. The play reveals the complicit roles played by the government officials in the unending crises bedevilling the infrastructural decay that have become entrenched in all sectors of the Nigerian social and political space. It can also be read as a morality tale which seeks to restrain politicians from dispossessing the people they are meant to govern.
Professor Darah turned seventy on Wednesday November 22, 2017 and to celebrate his very productive career, his colleagues and many of those he has mentored thought it appropriate to mark his official exit from the university in a dignified way by commissioning for publication, in the now acceptable festschrift tradition, the highly compelling and outstanding collection of essays titled: Scholarship and Commitment: Essays in Honour of G.G. Darah. The book is a ground-breaking collection of essays; some are couched as tributes to the ebullient celebrant, there are others on more serious discourses in the areas of literary theories and criticism, language and linguistics, popular literature and politics, the African woman, identity and contemporary realities, oral literature, the news media and cultural studies. The essays, on their own, attest to the vivacity and liveliness as well as the encouraging state of health of publishing in the Nigerian academia, which in this collection alone, parades forty-two essays in different fields or discourses.
This handbook offers the most comprehensive, analytic, and multidisciplinary study of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the African Diaspora to date. Preeminent scholars Akintunde Akinyemi and Toyin Falola assemble a team of leading and rising stars across African Studies research to retrieve and renew the scholarship of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the Diaspora just as critical concerns about their survival are pushed to the forefront of the field. With five sections on the central themes within orality and folklore – including engagement ranging from popular culture to technology, methods to pedagogy – this handbook is an indispensable resource to scholars, students, and practitioners of oral traditions and folklore preservation alike. This definitive reference is the first to provide detailed, systematic discussion, and up-to-date analysis of African oral traditions and folklore.
In April 1927, the British colonial government introduced a “head” tax to the former Warri Province. On July 1927, the people of the Province revolted against the imposition of the tax. The decision for the mass uprising was taken at a Joint Congress of all the ethnic groups - the Urhobo, Itsekiri, Ijaw and, Isoko, and Ukwuani - held at Igbudu Quarters of Warri township. The introduction of “head” tax by the British colonial oppressors, represented by Major Walker, Deputy Inspector-General of Police in the Province, turned out to be an incendiary fuse, and conflagration followed. How would one pay tax on one’s God-given head? The 1927 Anti-Tax Movement in Warri Province spread across the River Niger to Owerri Province in 1929 where women led the revolt in what is generally known as “Aba Women Riot” in colonial records. When studied against the backdrop of contemporary Nigeria/Niger Delta politics, the 1927 revolt was a landmark in the “resource control” struggle of the oppressed, marginalized, and exploited people of the oil-rich Niger Delta.
In Global Yorùbá, renowned scholar Toyin Falola covers the history, people, traditions, environment, religion, spirituality, cosmology, culture, and philosophy of one of Africa's largest cultural groups, the Yorùbá, all while considering the people's relationship with their immediate and distant neighbors. Falola examines how the Yorùbán people have adapted to their environment and tapped it to (re)invent their civilization, shape their culture and traditions, and inform their socioeconomic relations with their neighbors. These interactions have guided the Yorùbá philosophy that developed over time, expressing their conviction regarding society's evolution and the place that humans occupy within it. This web of knowledge can present a more coherent account than any other text yet produced regarding Yorùbá civilization. This volume demonstrates how global dynamics have been adopted in the creation of a Yorùbá community across different times and spaces.
Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867 -- Paul Schauert, Staging Ghana: Artistry & nationalism in state dance ensembles -- Maëline Le Lay, 'La parole construit le pays': Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo) -- Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong & Christopher Olsen, Myth Performance in the African Diasporas: Ritual, theater, and dance -- S.A. Kafewo, T.J. Iorapuu & E.S. Dandaura (eds), Theatre Unbound: Reflections on Theatre for Development and Social Change - A festschrift in honour of Oga Steve Abah -- Hakeem Bello, The Interpreters: Ritual, Violence and Social Regeneration in the Writing of Wole Soyinka -- Five plays: Ekpe Inyang, The Swamps -- Augustine Brempong, The King's Wages -- Denja Abdullahi, Death and the King's Grey Hair and Other Plays -- Books received and noted
Jokes have always been part of African culture, but never have they been so blended with the strains and gains of the contemporary African world as today. Joke-Performance in Africa describes and analyses the diverse aesthetics, forms, and media of jokes and their performance and shows how African jokes embody the anxieties of the time and space in which they are enacted. The book considers the pervasive phenomenon of jokes and their performance across Africa in such forms as local jests, street jokes, cartoons, mchongoano, ewhe-eje, stand-up comedy, internet sex jokes, and ‘comicast’ transmitted via modern technology media such as the TV, CDs, DVDs, the internet platforms of YouTube, Fa...
History of The Urhobo People of Niger Delta is the most comprehensive compilation and study of various aspects of the history of the Urhobo people of Nigeria's Niger Delta. It begins with an examination of the prehistory of the region, with particular focus on the Urhobo and their close ethnic neighbour, the Isoko. The book then embarks on a close assessment of the advent of British imperialism in the Western Niger Delta. History of The Urhobo People of Niger Delta also probes the arrival and impact of Western Christian missions in Urhoboland. Urhobo history is notable for the sharp challenges that the Urhobo people have faced at various points of their di?cult existence in the rainforest an...