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1
Harlin, Kate. ""One foot on the other side": Towards a Periodization of West African Spiritual Surrealism." College Literature 50, no. 2-3 (March 2023): 295–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902220.
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Abstract: For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern worldview as fantasy or "Magical Realism." "West African spiritual surrealism," as defined in this essay, offers a generic rubric that both attends to the literalization of Igbo and Yoruba cosmology in fiction as well as the ways these cosmologies can give rise to literary devices that resist hegemonic, Anglo-American centric literary interpretation. Through close readings of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018), this article historicizes West African spiritual surrealism as a geographically and ideologically diasporic genre that cannot be properly understood through frameworks of globalization alone. This genre and its writers require critics to read both deeply and widely in order to understand how West African spiritual surrealism places African cosmologies and people always already at the center of literary production.
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Ofoego, Obioma. "Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, « that now-classic manifesto of African cultural nationalism »." Études littéraires africaines, no. 29 (November 26, 2014): 28–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1027493ar.
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Ce texte se propose d’analyser la problématique de la construction d’un sujet collectif (noir, africain, pan-africain), qui est au centre du manifeste littéraire Toward the Decolonization of African Literature : African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics (1980), de la troïka igbo Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie et Ihechukwu Madubuike. Il s’agira de réfléchir sur la compatibilité entre l’ambition de ce projet et les stratégies prescriptives du manifeste, dont découle une esthétique « africaine ».
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Abigail, Nzoiwu, Azuka, and Mmaduabuchi, Obinna Chekwubechukwu. "African Identity and Christian Faith in Igboland: A Critical Evaluation of EGWU IMOKA Masquerade Festival." International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology 11, no. 5 (May 31, 2023): 368–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2023.51450.
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bstract: Christianity as a way of life among Africans (The Igbo people precisely) is believed to have shaped and influenced African Culture. African religion and culture according to Okoro, "stand a better chance to offer an alternative method awareness, which is imbedded in different indigenous languages, myths, folklore, cultural heritage and rites and rituals of African traditional faith" (Cultural globalization: 26-37). The identity of the African can be clearly seen in their cultural, anthropological features. The cultural, anthropological features of the Igbo people is influenced by both Christianity and African Traditional Religion. In an attempt to further understand the values behind this cultural influence as it is manifesting itself in the life and thought of the Awka people through Egwuimoka in the contemporary time, the searcher became interested in this- study. However, the influence of culture on Christianity is seen in the attitudinal disposition of the Igbo people towards the Christian faith. Now the question is does Christianity support the Igbo culture which is emerging in the modern time? Does the comparative study of Igbo traditional morality and Christianity ethical concepts clarify a bit of this confused background? if this work helps to answer these and other questions, in any small way, and further helps in clarifying the confused background of our morality today, then, it is not useless effort after all. Our culture is fluid today, because it is rapidly changing. Therefore, this work tries to point to some aspects of the Igbo peoples basis of traditional cultural patterns and beliefs, that can be applied from the values and the beliefs of the past so that the change in culture may not continue on a speed lane and, therefore becoming e confusing as to moral basis of worthwhile existence.
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Kanu, Ikechukwu Anthony. "The philosophical operative conditions of healing shrines in Igbo-African worldhood." Journal of Religion and Human Relations 14, no. 1 (November 16, 2022): 187–206. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jrhr.v14i1.10.
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This paper has studied the philosophical operative conditions of healing shrines in Igbo-African societies. The concept of philosophical operative condition is introduced into the study of Igbo-African healing shrines with the purpose of pointing out the philosophical principles behind the activities in these shrines. This philosophical dimension of African healing shrines is possible because of the nature of the relationship between religion and philosophy. This work, therefore, studied healing and healers in traditional African societies and the place and nature of healing shrines in Igbo societies. Though so much has been written about healing shrines and sacred places in traditional African societies, there is a seeming insufficiency of documents or literature on the Igbo-African healing shrines and the roles they played in restoring well-being to the people. More so, there is hardly a literature that focuses on the philosophical spirit behind the activities in Igbo-African healing shrines. This is the gap in literature that this present work fills. For the purpose of this study, this piece adopted the phenomenological, hermeneutic and historical approaches. This study is a qualitative research that has used both primary and secondary sources of data. It discovered that there is an inescapable element of philosophy in every dimension of African religion.
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Casimir, Komenan. "Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Seminal Novel in African Literature." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 4, no. 3 (June 27, 2020): p55. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v4n3p55.
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Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an influential novel in African literature for three reasons. First, it is a novel meant to promote African culture; second, it is a narrative about where things went wrong with Africans; and third, it is a prose text which contributed to Achebe’s worldwide recognition. It contains Achebe’s rejection of the degrading representation of Africans by European writers, and fosters Africa’s traditional values and humanism. The excesses of Igbo customs led the protagonist to flagrant misuse of power. The novel’s scriptural innovations bring fame to Achebe who is considered as the “Asiwaju” (Leader) of African literature, the “founding father of African fiction”, or again the “Eagle on Iroko”.
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Islam, Momtajul. "The Role of Native Weaknesses and Cultural Conflicts in Escalating Colonial Supremacy in the Igbo Society, as Perceived in Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe." International Linguistics Research 4, no. 2 (April 27, 2021): p19. http://dx.doi.org/10.30560/ilr.v4n2p19.
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The colonial invaders and their repressive means of governance in Africa were not the only reasons that could be solely held accountable for the fall of indigenous African society during the colonial invasion. Native weaknesses, socio-cultural conflicts and hegemony were equally responsible for the falling apart of native social setups when confronted with colonial alternatives. Native people had had their own covert religious and cultural limitations long before the colonizers entered their soil. The colonial powers cleverly used such inherent societal flaws of African people as excuses to impose European religion and traditions on them. Chinua Achebe does not blindly idealize native African traditions in his writings. He frequently narrates his doubts on flawed socio-cultural practices and moral dualities in the native society, too. This paper is an attempt to explore how innate weaknesses of native Igbo people, socio-cultural conflicts and domination in the native society have also made it easier for the colonial administration to prolong their supremacy in the Igbo land, as depicted in Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. It also elaborates how Ezeulu, the chief priest of god Ulu, falls from dominance in his society because of his intent to execute personal desires which jeopardize his societal role in the Igbo land.
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Nnebedum, Chigozie. "Empirical Identity as Dimension of Development in Africa: With Special Reference to the Igbo Society of South-east of Nigeria." Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (March 1, 2018): 195–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/mjss-2018-0039.
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Abstract Identity, as discussed in this paper, is seen as a phenomenon which is constantly changing under certain circumstances. From empirical point of view, the identity of man is influenced by the environment through experience and unconscious socialization; it is continually modified by the individual’s encounter with the world. The aim of this work is to analyse the intricacies involved in understanding the situation and mentality of the Igbos as far as identity is concerned and to determine how this hampers or helps in the development of the Igbo/African society. In this work ‘identity’ as a means of development with regard to the Igbo people of South-East Nigeria is treated. The work is methodically qualitative. It analyses literatures and different views on identity and tailors the discussion of development along the lines of hermeneutical approach to subjective experiences. The Igbos and Africans find themselves sometimes in the danger of a mixture of identity. This is the case with most of the Igbo people who are scattered all over the world and who are becoming more foreign in their trends and ways of life. Being unable to maintain a definite identity, one is lost in the politics of development. Those who still hang on to pure imitation of the western life are jeopardizing their autonomy and by extension, frustrating development of the African society. Rediscovering the Igbo/African Identity and putting it to the service of development in the African continent is the task of the Africans themselves.
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Nwauwa, A. O. "The Dating of the Aro Chiefdom: A Synthesis of Correlated Genealogies." History in Africa 17 (January 1990): 227–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171814.
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Precolonial African historiography has been plagued by historical reconstructions which remain in the realm of legend because events are suspended in almost timeless relativity.Igbo history has not been adequately researched. Worse still, the little known about the people has not been dated. It might be suggested that the major reason which makes the study of the Igbo people unattractive to researchers has been the lack of a proper chronological structure. Igbo genealogies have not been collected. The often adduced reason has been that the Igbo did not evolve a centralized political system whereby authority revolved round an individual—king or chief—which would permit the collection of regnal lists. Regrettably, Nigerian historians appear to have ignored the methodology of dating kingless or chiefless societies developed and applied elsewhere such as in east Africa. In west African history generally, there has been an overdependence for dating on external sources in European languages or in Arabic, and combining these with the main regnal list of a kingdom. Even within kingdoms, genealogies of commoners and officials have rarely been collected or correlated with the regnal lists. Among the Igbo, the external sources are rare and the regnal lists few. Even the chiefdoms—Onitsha and Aboh, Oguta and Nri—were ignored for a long time after modern historiography had achieved major advances elsewhere. Arochukwu has been another neglected Igbo chiefdom. Most of these states with hereditary leadership were peripheral to the Igbo heartland. Nevertheless, they were important because of their interactions with the heartland and the possibility of dating interactive events from their genealogies.
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Majeed Kadhem, Suhaib. "Conflict between Tradition and Change in Chinua Achebe's postcolonial novel Things Fall Apart." Al-Adab Journal 1, no. 124 (September 15, 2018): 81–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.31973/aj.v1i124.115.
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In studying the history of Asian and African countries, the colonial period plays an important role in understanding their history, religion, tradition and culture. Things Fall Apart is an English novel by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, published in 1957, which shows the African culture, their religious and traditions through the Igbo society. This novel captures the colonial period and its effect on Igbo society. It is a response and a record of control of western colonialism on the traditional values of the African people. This paper treats the novel as a postcolonial text, by focusing on the clash between occupied and colonizers, the clash between tradition and change, and the clash between different cultures, The Europe Empire and the African natives
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria: On How G. T. Basden became an Expert." History in Africa 33 (2006): 433–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0006.
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Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council. In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no “suitable” African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative. This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a “suitable” African candidate.In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples. On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.
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Chuks, Madukasi, Francis. "Ozo Title: An Indigenous Institution In Traditional Religion That Upholds Patriarchy In Igbo Land South-Eastern Nigeria." International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention 5, no. 5 (May 3, 2018): 4640–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.18535/ijsshi/v5i5.02.
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In Igbo land, the institution of Ozo title has underpinnings of male chauvinism and often used by men to remind those who appear to be very forward of their subordinate place in the society. Among the Igbo people, the Ozo title is an indigenous institution that is regarded as a central aspect of African indigenous religious practice through which they engage questions about the meaning for life. Through an ethnographic study conducted in recent years, I propose to explore the origin of the Ozo title and the symbolic significance of this indigenous sacred institution with specific reference to its religious, cultural, political, ethical and social significance, a method by which the indigenous communities keeps in constant religious communication with their deities and ancestors. However, I propose to not only examine the various ways in which Ozo title as a sacred institution has been used by their initiates to mediate religious beliefs and practices in African religion, but to specifically focus on its members as agents or ambassadors of different communities. Through an evaluation of significant Igbo religious practices involving Ozo title as a sacred institution performed by initiated men only which upholds patriarchy, I wish to suggest that the Ozo title as a sacred institution has two significant and related functions. The first one is that it enables the initiates to bridge the gap between the visible and unseen world of the ancestors and thus making possible an Igbo understanding of those forces that are believed to control the destinies of man. Secondly, Ozo title as a sacred institution of the Igbo is believed to uphold and sustain the Igbo religious system, and a complex of traditional religious rituals which uphold the privileges of those men who have been initiated into the ancestral cult. This paper point to particular understandings of Ozo title as integral to African religion, and proposes to illustrate this through an examination of Traditional Igbo Religion through the mediation of Ozo title as a sacred institution as part of the broader socio-sacral order.
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Samuel, Osipeju, Babasola. "Pragmatic Analysis of African Proverbs and Idioms in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." CLAREP Journal of English and Linguistics 4 (October 10, 2022): 247–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.56907/gc8q9sut.
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Africans don’t just talk; they have a way of saucing their sayings with ‘pepper’ to make what they say appealing and interesting to the ear. This is exactly what Achebe achieved in his first novel: Things Fall Apart. Proverbs, he said, is the palm oil with which words are eaten; and he allowed his characters to utilise them to show the wisdom in African culture, beliefs and tradition. What we did in this work was to consider those proverbs and idioms identified in the novel and subject them to the context of their usages, as well as examine the meanings these proverbs and idioms have among the people; in other words, their communicative relevance, meaning and implications. We adopted speech acts theory and pragmatics to aid our analysis and also did direct translations of the idioms from their original Igbo dialect to Achebe’s localised English translation. Our conclusion from the study shows that proverbs and idioms reveal the characters as deep thinkers; people who do not just talk, but talk only to achieve results. That aside, our findings also reveal the characters, represented by the Igbo people as thinkers, philosophers, rich in wisdom and experience. We see them as people who beautify conversations with words.
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Zahid, Sazzad Hossain. "Cultural Diversity in Igbo Life: A Postcolonial Response to Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God." International Journal of Social Sciences 5, no. 23 (June 20, 2021): 69–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.52096/usbd.5.23.5.5.
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In his book Chinua Achebe, David Caroll (1980) describes the novel Arrow of God as a fight for dominance both on the theological and political level, as well as in the framework of Igbo philosophy. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1990), famous Achebe critics C. L. Innes and Berth Lindforts consider Arrow of God as a novel with conflicting ideas and voices inside each community with the tensions and rivalries that make it alive and vital. Another profound scholar on Achebe Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu (2001) in Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels assesses Arrow of God, which depicts a community under imminent danger of cultural genocide unleashed by agents of Western imperialism who have recently arrived in the indigenous society. However, the author in this study attempts to see Arrow of God as a postcolonial response to cultural diversity that upholds its uniting and cohesive force in Nigerian Igbo life. The goal is to look at how Achebe, in response to misleading western discourses, develops a simplistic image and appreciation that persists in Igbo life and culture even as colonization takes hold. This paper also exhibits how the Igbo people share their hardships, uphold their age-old ideals, celebrate festivals, and even battle on disagreements. This study employs postcolonial theory to reconsider aspects of cultural diversity among the African Igbo people, which are threatened by the intervention of European colonialism in the name of religion, progress, and civilization.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "Creating ‘Union Ibo’: Missionaries and the Igbo language." Africa 67, no. 2 (April 1997): 273–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1161445.
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AbstractThe literature of ethnicity in Africa indicates a major role for Christian missionaries in the creation of languages in Africa. It has been argued that certain African ethnic groups owe their existence to the ‘invention’ of their language by missionaries who created a written dialect—based on one or more vernacular(s)—into which they translated the Bible. This language came to be used for education in mission schools and later also in government schools. The Bible dialect consequently became the accepted standard language of the ethnic group and acquired the function of one of the group's prime identity markers.In the case of the Igbo language, the history of the CMS missionaries' efforts at creating a written standard Igbo shows that the process was not always straightforward. The article describes the problematic process of creating a written language. The missionaries undertook continual attempts on the basis of several dialects, but it was half a century before they produced the first translation of the Bible. They complicated matters by working in different dialects, but eventually created a standard dialect which they named Union Ibo, a mixture based on several Igbo dialects.The missionaries were also confronted with resistance from at least part of the Igbo population, who contested their choice of dialect. However, it appears that the majority of the Igbo were simply not interested. The Igbo population were far more interested in education in English, and although the CMS missionaries forced some vernacular education upon the people, actual interest remained limited. It is thus not surprising that the Bible language did not become the accepted standard language of the Igbo ethnic group. The spoken Igbo language does nevertheless function as one of the prime identity markers of the group. The article argues that the importance of the Igbo language to Igbo identity is partly the result of the missionary activity.
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Agbetuyi, Olayinka. "Authority and Moral Conflicts in the Films of Adébáyọ Fálétí: Àfọ̀njá, Gáà, Ṣawo Ṣẹ̀gbẹ̀rì and the Yorùbá Cosmopolis." Yoruba Studies Review 3, no. 2 (December 21, 2021): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v3i2.129990.
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In this piece, I examine the role of authority in Yorùbá society and how au[1]thority is subverted by moral conflicts generated in the political evolution of the Yorùbá state from city state to empire, leading to disastrous consequences in the society at large as presented in the films of Adébáyọ Fálétí, specifically in Àfọnjá (2002), Basọrun Gáà (2004) and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì̀ (2005). I argue that such pains and pangs of transformation are not unique to Yorùbá society but mirror similar political evolutions in other societies such as Rome and Greece. Such political upheavals led to the celebrated assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome and Alexander the Great of Macedonia. In particular Àfọnjá ̀ and Baṣọrun ̀ Gáà dramatize evocatively the poignancy of the attendant confrontations. In addition, I evaluate Adébáyọ Fálétí as a Nigerian and African foundational practitioner in the global field of cultural studies and his use of cultural post materialism in his work. Adébáyọ Fálétí can be regarded as the father of modern Nigerian Cultural Studies and in Africa in general in line with the way that the discipline is understood the world over standing, as it were, on the cusp of traditional Nigerian and African drama and modern drama in African mother tongues. In addition, Fálétí epitomizes what modern cultural studies world-wide represent as a cross between the traditional discipline of drama and the television 172 Olayinka Agbetuyi industries as well as filmic industries, along with advertisements, which together constitute what is today known as the culture industries. As defined in the words of Chris Barker, “Culturalism focuses on meaning production by human actors in a historical context.”1 Fálétí’s historical drama and films fall within such category. Barker added that Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of understanding meaning.”2 These are the hallmarks of the historical drama that formed the basis of two of the films by Fálétí being examined here. In addition, he stated that cultural studies deal with subjectivity and identity or how we come to be the kinds of people we are. Fálétí’s Afọnja and Gáà’s thematic preoccupation is how the Yorùbá subjectivity has been constituted over time through its political evolution. The three films also demonstrate what Stuart Hall considers to be the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to matters of power and cultural politics.3 With regards to the role of Fálétí as pioneer in the area of radio-vision cultural industries the broadcasting mogul narrated the manner in which he pioneered the phone-in radio broadcast in Nigeria on the programme “Ѐyí Àrà” at the Broadcasting Corporation of Ọyọ̀ ́ State, Ibadan (BCOS) after pioneering Yorùbá broadcasting on Africa’s first television station Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) twenty years earlier.4 Fálétí’s career spanning close to seven decades dovetails public services with private engagement with drama production. He was one of the earliest organizers of a drama performing company in 1949 to produce his own plays. His career development can be divided into three phases: the formative traditional drama performance phase, the literary drama phase which dovetails into his career as a public servant in a symbiotic relationship and his post public service movie production phase which coincided with the efflorescence of the Nollywood. The three works examined here straddle Fálétí’s second and third phases of engagement in drama production. Both Basọrun Gáà (to be hereafter referred to as Gáà) and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ were first staged in the second phase of Fálétí’s development as a theatre practitioner. In addition to being staged in the theater, Gáà and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì̀ were produced for tele[1]vision audiences as dramatic thrillers and became household favourites in the ‘70s and ‘80s at the time of his career as a radio/television broadcaster. Fálétí’s retirement from public service provided the opportunity needed to build on the experience gained in the television industry to launch a full-blown film production career for which his earlier experience seems to have been a tutelage. Àfọ̀njá (2002), Gáà (2004) and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ (2005) are part of the products of this final phase. Although Àfọ̀njá preceded the other two in movie 1 Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2012. 2 Barker. 2012, 17 3 Barker, 5. 4 Nigerianfilms.com. February 17, 2008. Accessed Aug 10 2018. Authority and Moral Conflicts in the Films of Adébáyọ Fálétí 173 production, it was the last to be written among the three and is organically a prequel which builds on the success of Gáà and extends a thematic continuum in the Fágúnwà-esque manner of the novels Ògbójú Ọde Ninu Igbó Irunmọlẹ and Igbo Olódùmarè. While Àfọ̀njá and Gáà are historical drama based on actual events in the history of the Yorùbá Empire, Ṣawo Ṣegberi is purely fictional and is based on a postcolonial Nigerian setting. The movies therefore take a reverse order to the chronology of writing and stage performance while Ṣawo Ṣẹ̀gbẹ̀rì, which was the first to be staged among the three, was not written for stage and television performance until it was script-written for film production.5 Àfọ̀njá, Gáà and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ are each set in a cosmopolis where the Yorùbá citizens have to deal with other nationals in the context of Yorùbá mores within a broader cosmopolitan ethos. In Àfọ̀njá and Gáà that context is provided by the empire phase of Yorùbá civilization in which Yorùbá civilization was the dominant point of reference; in Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ the drama is situated in the context of postcolonial Nigerian city, in a nation that boasts large ethnic nationalities of which the Yorùbá are only one and in which Yorùbá culture is mediated by the postcolonial state with its symbol of the English language as the means of communication and its cultural spin offs. Fálétí demonstrates the mastery of dramaturgy in Àfọ̀njá and Gáà by juxtaposing the dynamics of running a state originally built on a confederation of city state structure very much like the Greek city state structure, at the latter’s comparative stage of political evolution, with a new imperial structure and the conflicts generated by the flux of the two systems; whereas in Ṣawo Ṣẹ̀gbẹ̀rì moral conflict is generated by interpersonal amatorial clashes as well as models of expertise.
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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.
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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.
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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.
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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.
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Afigbo, A. E. "The Spell of Oral History: A Case Study from Northern Igboland." History in Africa 33 (2006): 39–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0003.
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My case study is taken from the northern Igbo of Nigeria and focuses on the village-group of Ihuwe, which name is today rendered as Ihube— thanks to its Anglicization during the period of colonial rule. This not-withstanding, the people still call themselves “Ihuwe,” the form I use in this paper. The Northern Igbo area, especially the area around Awka, Orlu, and Okigwe, is commonly regarded as the heartland of Igbo culture and civilization. Ihuwe, in that portion of old Okigwe Division known today as Okigwe Local Government Area (LGA), lies in a region of southern Nigeria that has been identified as having witnessed human activity from very early times, at least from the period of Acheulean culture. It also lies on the geographically and historically prominent Nsukka-Udi-Okigwe cuesta, which archeology tells us entered the Iron Age quite early in African history, no later than about the eighth century BCE. We are thus dealing with one of the areas of ancient human occupation, as well as an area known for its dense demographic profile. It is these features–early human settlement and occupation with its attendant consequence of severely attenuated oral history, dense demographic profile, and being the cradle land of Igbo culture—that help to define the Northern Igbo and mark them out from the Western, Eastern, Southern, and North-Eastern Igbo, believed to be relatively more recent descendants from them.Perhaps another feature that calls for mention here is their political culture. Although, like their other Igbo kinsmen, they could boast of having evolved only micro-, and therefore weak, states (what social anthropologists of the colonial period refused to refer to as states), they had their own special model of these micro-states.
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Densu, Kwasi. "Omenala: Toward an African-Centered Ecophilosophy and Political Ecology." Journal of Black Studies 49, no. 1 (September 7, 2017): 29–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934717729503.
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This article seeks to contribute to the reconstruction of an African-centered ecophilosophy and political ecology. Employing Cheikh Anta Diop’s theory of African cultural unity, it considers the Ndi Igbo philosophy Omenala, its paradigmatic implications for Africana studies, and its capacity to demonstrate the continuity of indigenous African socioecological praxis cross culturally. In addition, it explores the relevance of Omenala to the development of an authentic social history of African people and as a theory to analyze contemporary problems in the African world. Three key issues are addressed. First, the article accounts for the absence of ecological theory within Africana studies. Second, it explicates the cultural and philosophical basis for an African-centered ecophilosophy and political ecology. Third, it envisions new approaches and areas of inquiry within Africana studies.
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Brzostek, Dariusz. "Constructing African future: Africa and African people in Polish science fiction of the socialist era." Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, no. 3 (49) (2021): 479–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20843860pk.21.033.14353.
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The paper’s main objective is to analyse the visions of an African future in the Polish Socialist Era science fiction. Speculative fiction played an important part in the cultural landscape of socialist Poland, being integral to the popular culture as well as to communist propaganda. The image of a communist future was a major motif in the early Socialist Era science fiction narratives and also the impressive political forecast of the final worldwide triumph of the Communist Party. These narratives also included some interesting examples of the African future and the African people in the futuristic communist world: the Black communist and astronaut, Hannibal Smith, as the main character of The Astronauts [Astronauci, 1951] by Stanisław Lem; the African astronauts in The Magellanic Cloud [Obłok Magellana, 1955] by Stanisław Lem and the story of the African slaves’ rebelion against the capitalists on the space station Celestia in the novel by Krzysztof Boruńand Andrzej Trepka The Lost Future [Zagubiona przyszłość, 1953]. Lem’s novels were also adapter into films: The Magellanic Cloud as The Voyage to the End of the Universe (Ikarie XB-1, 1963, directed by Jindřich Polák), The Astronauts as First Spaceship on Venus (Der schweigende Stern, 1960, directed by Kurt Maetzig) – in which the Nigerian actor, Julius Ongewe, appeared as a very first African astronaut in the history of cinema.
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Nwafor, Matthew Ikechukwu. "The living-dead (ancestors) among the Igbo-African people: An interpretation of Catholic sainthood." International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 9, no. 4 (April 30, 2017): 35–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.5897/ijsa2017.0719.
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Ihejirika, Cardinal Chinanu. "An Epistemic Survey of African (Igbo) Notions of Knowledge in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." Journal of Law and Social Sciences 5, no. 3 (2023): 37–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.53974/unza.jlss.5.3.1086.
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This study undertakes an epistemic survey of the notions of knowledge among Igbos of Nigeria as couched in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In this work, Achebe relives the vibrant world of Igbo people before the advent of colonialists in Nigeria. The study therefore unveils the roles and significances of knowledge among the Igbos, the beauty and depth of the people’s values system as enshrined in their culture and traditions. It also exposes the place of elders and oral tradition as both purveyors and repository of knowledge hence, their relevance in Igbo knowledge acquisition process. The work showcases that life among the Igbos was chiefly communal. Knowledge in this society, was acquired through collective experience and wisdom by individual persons’ participation in the community’s rituals, myths and folklores. However, the researcher adopted the hermeneutical and textual analysis methods of inquiry which enabled us to interpret and analyse the Novel, Things Fall Apart. In line with our hermeneutical method, we clarified the meaning of Omenani (traditions) of the people and its’ influence on the epistemology of the people. Our study found that any strongly held beliefs or cultural values which bring only crises when people of different cultures interact necessitates the need for the cultivation of proper epistemological modesty instead of a tenacious attachment to customs and traditions. Lastly, our study recommends a relevant epistemic change as panacea to cultural and social rifts. This more balanced knowledge system being recommended has the capacity of engendering inter-cultural interactions and ensuring social harmony even in the face of the challenges of cultural globalization. This novel problem-solving system is located in our idea of epistemic inter-culturalism.
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Aniga, Ugo. "Cultural Sentinels: Ọkọnkọ Society's Watchdog Role in Conflict Resolution and Cultural Preservation in Umuahia Community." Journal of Contemporary Rituals and Traditions 2, no. 1 (January 24, 2024): 19–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.15575/jcrt.348.
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Purpose of the Study: This study investigates the diverse roles of the Ọkọnkọ Society in Umuahia, Nigeria, particularly its use of Igbo language and cultural practices in conflict resolution and cultural preservation, challenging the conventional view of the society as merely a secret male cult. Methodology: The study employs qualitative, ethnographic methodologies including in-depth interviews, FGDs, and non-participant observations in Umuahia, supplemented by scholarly literature, with analysis grounded in hermeneutics, semiotics, and conflict management theories to emphasize the role of language and culture in the Ọkọnkọ Society's practices. Main Findings: The research uncovers the crucial role of the Ọkọnkọ Society in Umuahia as a guardian of peace and cultural sentinel. Key findings include the society's use of Igbo proverbs and semiotics (e.g., ọmụ palm frond, uhie drum) in conflict mediation, and the societal respect and trust they command. The society's conflict resolution role extends beyond mere mediation, effectively acting as an appellate court within the community, especially in land disputes. The study also highlights society's role in preserving and enforcing cultural norms and practices. Applications of this Study: This research has practical implications for understanding indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms in African communities. It offers insights for policymakers and social workers in designing culturally sensitive conflict management strategies. Additionally, it contributes to preserving the cultural heritage of the Igbo people by documenting traditional practices and societal structures. Novelty/Originality of this Study: This study is original in its comprehensive examination of the Ọkọnkọ Society, linking Igbo language and culture with conflict management practices. It fills a significant gap in academic research by shedding light on the societal and cultural dynamics within the Umuahia community, thus providing a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between language, culture, and social governance in an African context.
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Nnaemeka Onwuatuegwu PhD, Ignatius. "AN OVERVIEW OF THE IGBO COSMOLOGIC-ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPTION AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD: A PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION." International Journal of Advanced Research 9, no. 5 (May 30, 2021): 25–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.21474/ijar01/12803.
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Practically speaking, the way people understand reality (ontology) cuts across the nexus of their thought pattern, belief system and consequently their general attitude to life. Hence, ontology and cosmology are at the basis of Igbo conception of reality and also the spiritual and physical operations of the human world. It is an established fact that a traditional Igbo would like to hold tenaciously to the already established concepts by the Igbo forebears. Hence, any attempt at a critical analysis of these accepted concepts are quickly waved off with such statements as: it has been so and has to remain so. For the Igbo, it is morally wrong to question the wisdom of the ancestors. The wisdom of the ancestors is to be cherished, preserved and propagated to the future generations and not to be questioned or criticized. But materiality is part of reality. As such, neither the created beings nor the universe in general are static but rather dynamic. Dynamism is the natural condition of existence in the world of the moving and sensible reality. Hence, peoples concepts of reality should be necessarily subjected to constant evaluation and re-evaluation in order to ascertain their validity. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to challenge and encourage Igbo-African scholars to delve into many traditional concepts as to critically evaluate them either to discover the truth hidden in them or to make possible the attainment of certainty. However, the research adopts primarily the method of philosophical appraisal to reach to the goal of the research.
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Calilhanna, Andrea. "Amapiano music and a psychoacoustic approach to analysis through the Ski-hill graph." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 153, no. 3_supplement (March 1, 2023): A40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0018079.
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Local artists in African countries' use of computer technology to produce work is inevitable. The effect of popular commercial music on traditional musicians increases the genuine possibility of further extinction of local music, particularly in regional areas. The importance of preserving this music is underacknowledged as, like language, music is an essential form of communication and part of a person's identity. New developments can cast shadows over everyday music during modernisation, and young people seek new sounds. For others, especially those who have witnessed the slow disappearance of cultural practices unique to regions, the loss and damage are akin to whitewashing and theft. In many parts of the world, scholars and locals are scrambling to preserve music and transmit accurate cultural heritage accounts for future generations. Amapiano music, like so much music of the Nigerian diaspora, owes its traditional heritage to the ancient roots of the Igbo people of Nigeria. Through the psychoacoustic approach of mathematical music theory of the Ski-hill graph (Cohn, 2020), it is now possible to produce accurate, inclusive, and ethical representations of Amapiano and traditional Igbo music.
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Tembo, Nick Mdika. "Ethnic Conflict and the Politics of Greed Rethinking Chimamanda Adichie's." Matatu 40, no. 1 (December 1, 2012): 173–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-040001011.
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The African continent today is laced with some of the most intractable conflicts, most of them based on ethnic nationalism. More often than not, this has led to poor governance, unequal distribution of resources, state collapse, high attrition of human resources, economic decline, and inter-ethnic clashes. This essay seeks to examine Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's through the lens of ethnic conflict. It begins by tracing the history and manifestations of ethnic stereotypes and ethnic cleavage in African imaginaries. The essay then argues that group loyalty in Nigeria led to the creation of 'biafranization' or 'fear of the Igbo factor' in the Hausa–Fulani and the various other ethnic groups that sympathized with them; a fear that crystallized into a thirty-month state-sponsored bulwark campaign aimed at finding a 'final solution' to a 'problem population'. Finally, the essay contends that Adichie's anatomizes the impact of ethnic cleavage on the civilian Igbo population during the Nigeria–Biafra civil war. Adichie, I argue, participates in an ongoing re-invention of how Africans can extinguish the psychology of fear that they are endangered species when they live side by side with people who do not belong to their 'tribe'.
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Friday, Akporherhe, Udi Peter Oghenerioborue, and Esemedafe Emmanuel. "Folk Medical Practices and Treatments in African Fiction." Health Economics and Management Review 3, no. 4 (2022): 92–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.21272/hem.2022.4-10.
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This paper examines the enactment of cultural medical practices in the narratives of African writers. It aims at promoting the application of folk medicines in addressing the health problems of patients as enacted in artistic productions of fiction writers. It will celebrate, propagate and preserve these approaches to preventive and curative medical practices, which are indigenous to the African people. The study will be beneficial to health caregivers, researchers, health educators, health agencies and policy formulators, who are determined to promote the cultural healthcare system in society. It will reawaken and strengthen medical practitioners, patients and researchers, who may which to apply folk medical practices as an alternative treatment for health problems in socio-cultural settings. This research is field survey and library-based, with the literary texts carefully and purposively selected according to their thematic thrust and qualitatively analysed. Oral interviews were conducted to gather first-hand information and data on traditional medical practices from respondents, who have profound knowledge of the topic. The respondents were elderly men and women with profound knowledge of traditional medical practices, and they were drawn from various Urhobo communities, such as Ughelli, Akperhe-Olomu, Orogun, Okparabe, Edjekota-Ogor, and Agbarha-Otor. Among those interviewed were traditional medical practitioners, diviners, and patients, who often apply trado-medicines as alternative and supplementary treatments. Apart from the primary materials, scholarly works that are relevant to the current study were also consulted by the researchers. Findings showed that African societies are endowed with diverse forms of folk medicine, including the use of herbs, hydrotherapy, heat therapy, use of ointments, hot food as an intervention, talk therapy, etc. The study concluded that African writers are conscious of the utilitarian functions of their indigenous healthcare interventions, and so they integrate some of the practices into their artistic works, not only for the documentation but also to activate the awareness of readers on the efficacy of the traditional medicines. The various folk medical practices can serve as alternative and complementary treatments for people who cannot afford western healthcare interventions in contemporary societies.
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Macheso, Wesley Paul. "Fiction as prosthesis: Reading the contemporary African queer short story." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 58, no. 2 (August 16, 2021): 8–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i2.8633.
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In this article, I read contemporary African queer fiction as a tool employed by writers to represent and rehumanise queer identities in Sub-Saharan African societies. In these societies, heteropatriarchal authorities strive to disable queer agency by dehumanising queer subjects. I argue that African queer identities, desires, and experiences are controlled and restricted under the heterosexual gaze, which strives to ensure that human sexuality benefits patriarchy, promoting heterosexual desire as ‘natural’ and authentically African and pathologising homosexuality. African writers then employ fiction as a means of rehumanising queer subjects in these disabling heteronormative societies to grant voice and agency to identities that have been multifariously subjugated and/or deliberately erased, and fiction acts as a type of prosthesis, a term I borrow from disability studies. Rewriting such lives in fiction does not only afford discursive spaces to queer identities, but also reconstructs the queer person as a human subject worth the dignity that they are often denied. In the article, I analyse a selection of six short stories from the collections Queer Africa 2: New Stories and Fairytales for Lost Children to demonstrate how these stories function as prosthesis for queer people in disabling societies.
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Wakota, John. "Tanzanian Anglophone Fiction: A Survey." Utafiti 12, no. 1-2 (March 18, 2017): 51–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26836408-0120102004.
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Tanzanian Anglophone fiction is extant and bustling. The invisibility of Tanzanian fiction in English is not due to the country’s inability to produce good- quality Anglophone novels but is related to the challenge in accessing the texts both within and outside Tanzania. Studies about East African fiction tend to ignore the contribution of Tanzanian Anglophone writers in the region. In Tanzania people know more about other canonical African novelists than their very own Anglophone writers. This article explores the emergence and development of Tanzanian Anglophone fiction, paying particular attention to the emergence of Tanzanian Anglophone literary canons and how these canons have inspired and continue to inspire the production of Tanzanian fiction. Starting with the novels produced by the inaugural Tanzanian Anglophone writers in the sixties, and continuing with the most recent works, the paper examines the interface between Swahili and English, translation and self-translation, diasporic writers, universities’ and researchers’ contributions to the definition of the canon and to the visibility of the fiction in general.
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Tuaderu, Yohanes. "Reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart from Césaire’s Perspective on Anticolonialism." Lire Journal (Journal of Linguistics and Literature) 8, no. 1 (February 29, 2024): 71–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.33019/lire.v8i1.239.
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This research aims to obtain a deep notion of what stands beyond one of Achebe’s prominent African trilogies – Things Fall Apart – from the concept of anticolonialism promoted by Aimé Césaire. It examines two main subject matters i.e.; the reason why African people struggle so hard to oppose the oppression of the colonizers and what efforts they develop to react to the bad treatment. The harassment of human values - what Césaire called "thingification", trampled culture, damaged socio-cultural foundations, destroyed native religions, and confiscated ancestral inherited lands have apparently become the trigger for the struggle against colonialism. Meanwhile, the real way and effort made to fight the arrogance of the colonialists was to strengthen cultural identity and maintain the noble values that had united all tribes. In this way, the Igbo tribe and the Nigerian people finally gained their independence on October 1, 1960 - 2 (two) years after the novel Things Fall Apart was published.
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Alexander, Josephine Olufunmilayo. "Exploring Nnedi Okorafor's decolonial turn in the Binti Trilogy." Image & Text, no. 37 (November 1, 2023): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a29.
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Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best-known speculative fiction writers who has centred African perspectives and delinked from Western models. In her trilogy, Binti (2015), Binti Home (2017) and Binti the Night Masquerade (2017a), Okorafor disrupts the dominant white-masculine supremacist convention and traditions for a more diverse and inclusive narrative. In this article, I use decolonial thinking and the lens of Sankofa, a decolonial and African knowledge philosophy and worldview, to explore how Okorafor uses settings, characterisation, and ancient African traditional knowledge to achieve a decolonial turn in speculative fiction. By centring Sankofa, Okorafor sets her fantastic stories in Namibia among the indigenous and marginalised Himba people. She creates strong female characters who embody a multiplicity of beings operating intricately in a complex earthly, spatial and spirit world, and she exploits ancient African traditional culture and knowledge systems to create her 'organic fantasy' and a world of speculative fiction that transforms Western understandings of the genre.
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Newell, Stephanie. "Remembering J. M. Stuart-Young of Onitsha, Colonial Nigeria: Memoirs, Obituaries and Names." Africa 73, no. 4 (November 2003): 505–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/afr.2003.73.4.505.
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AbstractColonial Onitsha provided the stage for John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939), a Manchester trader and poet, to perform the role of an educated gentleman. In his autobiographical writing, Stuart-Young created a host of famous metropolitan friends and constructed for himself a past through which he invited African readers to remember him. The extent to which Onitsha citizens accepted his version of his life is explored in this article, for during the period of Stuart-Young's residence in town, from approximately 1909 until his death in 1939, different sectors of Igbo society observed him closely, read his publications, worked with him and witnessed his patronage of young men. Local people, including the children, studied his behaviour over time and produced a range of African names and watchwords by which they remembered his life.
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Obiechina, Emmanuel. "Parables of Power and Powerlessness: Exploration in Anglophone African Fiction Today." Issue: A Journal of Opinion 20, no. 2 (1992): 17–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047160700501504.
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African writers in English have done much to enlarge the image of Africa in the world. The novelists among them have contributed most to the understanding of the African points of view and perspectives on life, politics, culture and history. In their roles as chroniclers, custodians of the collective heritage, social critics, teachers and visionaries of their people, the novelists have illuminated the African situation and the forces that have kept the continent in an endemic state of crisis.
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Kanu, Ikechukwu Anthony. "Igwebuike theology of Omenani and the missionary bifurcation of horizons." OGIRISI: a New Journal of African Studies 16 (October 2, 2020): 127–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/og.v16i1.8.
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African theology points to the fact that every particular situation or context calls for a particular theological reflection, that is, if the theological reflection is to make meaning within that unique circumstance. It is within this context that Igwebuike theology of Omenani emerges in relation to the understanding of culture as the Seed of the Word of God, which already pre-existed in Africa even before the emergence of the Western missionaries. The purpose of adopting this idea of culture as the Seed of the Word of God is to enhance the reconciliation between the African and Christian/Western ’worldhoods’. This piece presented the African culture as an important element in evangelization in Africa, as it is the spirit that animates the African people. It, therefore, located the Seed of the Word of God in the Omenani (the law of the land) of the African people through which they were able to achieve holiness even before the advent of the gospel. It observed that the failures of the missionary enterprise were majorly because of their lack of openness to the African religion and culture. The purpose of this study is to bridge the bifurcation created by the missionaries between the Christian and African ‘worldhoods’. The theoretical framework employed in this research is the Igwebuike sympathetic and non-derogatory framework, which emphasizes evangelization with a sense of understanding.
Keywords: Omenani, Logos Spermatikos, Culture, African, Igbo, Evangelization, Igwebuike
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Siddique, Rumana. "“WO”man of the People:." Crossings: A Journal of English Studies 8 (August 1, 2017): 179–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.59817/cjes.v8i.143.
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Gendered assumptions of nationalism have been an integral part of liberation and post-liberation theory and fiction resulting in the construction of disempowered national identities for women in the modern African states. The narratives of idealization and mythologizing sketch women in the developing literary canvas as symbolic or biological figures who had no active social or political roles or voices. This paper focuses on how gender roles in national identity and nation-building have evolved in the works of the major male African writer Chinua Achebe. It examines the narratives that have reinforced or challenged Achebe with particular focus on how the portrayal of women in his final novel stands him as a progressive in terms of a new vision of the role and space of women in modern Africa.
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Adebayo, Akanmu G. "Currency Devaluation and Rank: The Yoruba and Akan Experiences." African Studies Review 50, no. 2 (September 2007): 87–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/arw.2007.0077.
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Abstract:Jane Guyer has clearly demonstrated in Marginal Gains (2004) that the ranking of people historically was linked to quantitative scales of money. Guyer's study focuses on the Igbo and Ibibio, two societies in which ranking was by achievement rather than ascription. How do ranking and money interface in other African societies with strong monarchical or centralized social systems? What impact does currency instability have on rank in such societies? This paper examines these questions. Focusing on the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Akan of Ghana, it evaluates the degree to which ranking has been affected by currency devaluation and economic instability since the mid-1980s.
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Rankine, Patrice D. "Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox (review)." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 2 (2004): 483–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2004.0042.
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Pinto, Cristina Ferreira. "Things Fall Apart de Chinua Achebe — texto orgulhosamente negro." Cem, no. 17 (2024): 25–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/2182-1097/cem17a2.
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Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author, has been considered by critics as one of the most impor-tant founders of African literature, in reaction to the literature that until then had been produced on Africa. In the sequence of the most diverse colonial literary texts and the arguments that validated colonialism in Africa, always in a dimension of affirmation of white superiority and black savagery, and in which any value, history, or notion of culture was denied to African peoples, Achebe begins a mission to show the western world that pre-colonial Igbo culture had beauty, philosophy, dignity and viable social, political and judicial structures, and that it was by no means an example of the «blank slate» that many Europeans wanted people to believe. In this sense, Achebe publishes his first novel, Things Fall Apart, still in a colonial context (1958), to make his culture known, realistically and based on internal knowledge, in a counterpoint to this prejudiced and racist European devaluation.
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LAW, ROBIN. "Ali-Ogba: A History of Ogba People. By FRANCIS J. ELLAH. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing Co., 1995. Pp. xiv + 226. $18.00; £9.95 (ISBN 978-156-400-8). (Distributed by African Books Collective, The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HU.)." Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (March 1997): 123–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853796496906.
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The Ogba are an Igbo-speaking group, situated in the extreme south-west of the Igbo area, in the modern Rivers State of Nigeria (though the maps in this book, which depict only the Ogba country itself, do not convey a very clear sense of its location). This history of the community, written by its current Eze (king), sets out to cover the entire sweep of its history, from ‘the origin of the Ogbas’ (attributed to the fourteenth century) to the colonial period (post-independence history being treated only cursorily). It is based mainly on local oral traditions, taken partly from colonial Intelligence Reports, but also including extensive new material collected by the author; some use is also made, for the colonial period, of contemporary documents from British and Nigerian archives, and for prehistory, of archaeological evidence.
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Kuznetsova, V. A. "Folklore Motifs in Contemporary Short Fiction of Mozambique." Cuadernos Iberoamericanos 11, no. 3 (October 5, 2023): 131–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.46272/2409-3416-2023-11-3-131-145.
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The article explores the role of folklore tradition in the short prose of modern Mozambique. The symbiosis of the European cultural matrix, inseparable from the language in which the work is written, and the oral heritage of the Mozambican people is analyzed on the material of one of Aldino Muianga’s short stories. The story «Rosa Maria» is included in the author’s debut collection «Xitala Mati», the main material for which became the folklore «scary stories» about witchcraft and the living dead. And while in his later works Muianga focuses on acute social plots of the colonial past and post-colonial present, in the world of «Xitala Mati» there is practically no place for white people: it is not colonizers and the colonized that interact there, but it is people and spirits. The text of «Rosa Maria» is filled with numerous «conventional signs» by means of which, in the paradigm of the traditional culture of the peoples of Mozambique, the world of the dead communicates with the world of the living. These signs are intuitive to the African reader, while the European must identify and decipher them. At the same time, «Rosa Maria» shows motifs and imagery characteristic of the Gothic novel, albeit reinterpreted and modified to suit African realities. Such components of the poetics as the encounter with the infernal in the image of a beautiful woman, the gloomy colouring supported by the landscape and ominous animals, and the interest in the emotional reactions of the characters, typical of Gothic literature, allow us to see in «Rosa Maria» a hybrid genre, the roots of which should be sought both in the European literary tradition and in the folk tales of Mozambique.
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Fall, Alioune Badara. "Distant homelands: Mobility, exile and (trans)nationalism in contemporary African fiction." Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 14, no. 2 (October 1, 2023): 197–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00083_1.
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In this article, I argue that Bulawayo’s representation of precarity in her novel helps us decolonize representations of mobility in African literature. In Bulawayo’s novel, mobility undergirds the global presence of Africa and frames African identities in a cosmopolitan purview. Yet, the cultural trajectory of African migrants unveils practical realities within the nation state that shape expressions of cultural belonging in Afrodiasporic contexts. The novel’s presentation of poverty, abjection and dislocation limits the possibilities of an Afropolitan engagement with Darling’s experience in the diaspora. Her joyful, yet, precarious childhood in Zimbabwe and the illusion of an abundant life in the United States show that the postcolonial nation state and the US racial state remain unprecedented forces that constraint the fluidity of people of African descent’s identities. The metaphoric representation of her condition as a prisoner not only questions her mobility but also her difficult experience as a migrant in the United States underscores her struggles to belong in a racialized American society. Thus, the protagonist’s precarious position in her homeland and her host-land reveals the restrictive power of the state and challenges a romantic description of life in both the Global North and the Global South.
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Cutter, Martha J. "When Black Lives Really Do Matter: Subverting Medical Racism through African-Diasporic Healing Rituals in Toni Morrison’s Fiction." MELUS 46, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 208–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac001.
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Abstract Toni Morrison spent much of her career detailing the unpredictability of African American existence within a racist society, with a special focus on patriarchal violence and medical apartheid against women’s bodies. Yet Morrison also limns out alternative modes of healing within a Black metacultural framework that moves between Nigeria, Brazil, and Egypt. As we move forward from the COVID-19 crisis, research has suggested that training more African American doctors, nurses, and physician assistants might curtail medical racism. Morrison’s fiction looks to a more basic level in which love of the bodies of African American people is at the center of healing. This article therefore discusses medical racism and applies Morrison’s lessons to the COVID-19 moment that her writing trenchantly foreshadows. It focuses on three healers who elide the medical establishment to embody a metacultural ethics of healing: Baby Suggs (in Beloved [1987]), Consolata Sosa (in Paradise [1997]), and Ethel Fordham (in Home [2012]). Morrison fuses an African-diasporic framework with embodied new knowledge that allows individuals to gain insight and agency in a white-dominant medical world that still refuses to endorse the idea that Black people’s bodies and psyches really do matter. An examination of these healers’ practices therefore sheds light on the COVID-19 moment by suggesting ways that African American people can stay “woke” and have agency when encountering and navigating traditional health care systems, which even today view the bodies of African Americans as fodder for medical experiments, immune to disease, and not in need of ethical and humane medical care.
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Hosseini, Maryam, and Hossein Pirnajmuddin. "Historiography in “Beginnings: Malcolm” by Amiri Baraka." International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 40 (September 2014): 22–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ilshs.40.22.
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This article discusses Aimiri Baraka‘s concern with the history of black people in his poem ―Beginnings: Malcolm‖. The writers try to shed some light on the way Baraka‘s historiography challenges the white supremecist discourses through a rewriting of the African American past that blurs the boundaries of myth and history, fact and fiction, in a postmodern manner. It is argued that through the use of the central African myth of Esu/Elegba and drawing on traditions of Christianity and Western literature/culture, Baraka‘s poem offers an uncanny insight into the past.
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Orock, Rogers. "Chinua Achebe’s postcolony: a literary anthropology of postcolonial decadence." Africa 92, no. 1 (January 2022): 71–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972021000838.
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AbstractCan the African novel work as interlocutor for anthropologists studying Africa’s postcolonial politics today? Conversely, is there a role for the African literary imagination in our renewed efforts to decolonize anthropology? This article draws on Chinua Achebe’s fictional representations of the postcolony in two novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites, corruption and postcolonial decadence in the early postcolony. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Achille Mbembe’s critique of power in the postcolony. Here, I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers such as Achebe mobilized fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.
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Okafor, Eddie E. "Francophone Catholic Achievements in Igboland, 1883-–1905." History in Africa 32 (2005): 307–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0020.
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When the leading European powers were scrambling for political dominion in Africa, the greatest rival of France was Britain. The French Catholics were working side by side with their government to ensure that they would triumph in Africa beyond the boundaries of the territories already annexed by their country. Thus, even when the British sovereignty claim on Nigeria was endorsed by Europe during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the French Catholics did not concede defeat. They still hoped that in Nigeria they could supplant their religious rivals: the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the other Protestant missionary groups. While they allowed the British to exercise political power there, they took immediate actions to curtail the spread and dominion of Protestantism in the country. Thus some of their missionaries stationed in the key French territories of Africa—Senegal, Dahomey, and Gabon—were urgently dispatched to Nigeria to compete with their Protestant counterparts and to establish Catholicism in the country.Two different French Catholic missions operated in Nigeria between 1860s and 1900s. The first was the Society of the African Missions (Société des Missions Africaines or SMA), whose members worked mainly among the Yoruba people of western Nigeria and the Igbos of western Igboland. The second were the Holy Ghost Fathers (Pères du Saint Esprit), also called Spiritans, who ministered specifically to the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria. The French Catholics, the SMA priests, and the Holy Ghost Fathers competed vehemently with the British Protestants, the CMS, for the conversion of African souls. Just as in the political sphere, the French and British governments competed ardently for annexation and colonization of African territories.
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Stulov, Yuri. "The Cityscape in the Contemporary African-American Urban Novel." Respectus Philologicus 24, no. 29 (October 25, 2013): 65–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/respectus.2013.24.29.5.
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This paper discusses the cityscape as an essential element of African American fiction. Since the time of Romanticism, the city has been regarded as the embodiment of evil forces which are alien to human nature and radiate fear and death. For decades, African-Americans have been isolated in the black ghettos of major American cities which were in many ways responsible for their personal growth or their failure. Often this failure is determined by their inability to find their bearings in a strange and alien world, which the city symbolizes. The world beyond the black ghetto is shown as brutal and terrifying, while the world inside is devoid of hope. Crime, vandalism, poverty, overcrowding, and social conflicts turn out to be the landmarks of big cities, because the people who migrate to them and make up most of their population are also the poorest and least adapted to urban life: they have lost their roots, and feel displaced in the anonymous urban society. A number of African-American novels depict protagonists who are unable to adapt to life in a big city, and end in degradation and misery. James Baldwin’s novels are among the most representative. His disordered and dislocated characters are products of the external world of the city of the machine age, and as such they are characteristic of all African-American fiction. This paper analyzes some of the recent black novels that reverberate with Baldwin’s ideas.
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López, Marta Sofía. "Border gnoseology: Akwaeke Emezi and the Decolonial Other-than-Human." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 13, no. 2 (October 29, 2022): 77–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2022.13.2.4669.
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The underlying assumption when speaking about the postcolonial nonhuman is that the other-than-human refers to what could be called, broadly speaking, the “natural world,” as opposed to “the human-as-Man,” but still usually understood in (Western) secular terms. Nevertheless, from the perspective of African onto-epistemologies, the nonhuman can also refer to the spiritual world, or to the diverse assemblages between the “natural,” the human and the sacred. Freshwater (2018) and Dear Senthuran. A Black Spirit Memoir (2021), by Akwaeke Emezi, open up a space of “border gnoseology,” where contemporary Anglo-American discourses on transsexuality intersect with African ontologies and epistemologies, specifically with the well-known figure of the ogbanje and the sacred python as an avatar of Ala, the Earth goddess in Igbo culture, to produce a radically subversive embodied subjectivity. The ideas of movement, transing, tranimalcy and (transatlantic) crossing conspire to dismantle conventional Eurocentric humanist views on selfhood and identity. Reading Emeke on their own terms also requires revisiting alternative notions of temporality beyond secular, cisheteronormative, modern time, as well as an understanding that the sacred and the spiritual are indeed essential to the worldview and the processes of subjectivation of millions of people across the globe.
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Echeverri Zuluaga, Jonathan. "Tropes of Social Becoming Along a History of Circulation Within West Africa and From There to Latin America." REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 31, no. 67 (April 2023): 37–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-85852503880006704.
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Abstract Since the turn of the 21st century, the circulation of people from West Africa in and out of the African continent has intensified, turning Latin America into an emergent destination and transit zone. Drawing both from scholarly works and fiction, this article reflects on tropes of social becoming within a history of West African human movement that precedes present day circulation. By tropes of social becoming, I mean narratives around people realizing aspirations, in which scholars, storytellers, literary persons, and the media bring it into existence. While some of the tropes this article addresses seem to stretch to pre-colonial times, others are the product of colonial rule, and yet others emerge in times of structural adjustment. These tropes offer an entry point to understanding how present circulations of Africans in West Africa and Latin America relate to continuity and change.
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Martirosian, G. E. "AFRICANFUTURISM IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIAN LITERATURE: THE CASE OF ‘PET’ BY AKWAEKE EMEZI." Bulletin of Udmurt University. Series History and Philology 32, no. 5 (October 14, 2022): 1104–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2412-9534-2022-32-5-1104-1109.
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This article is devoted to the literary analysis of Akwaeke Emezi’s ‘Pet’, the novel, as an Africanfuturist artifact of the contemporary literature of the Nigerian diaspora in the United States. Africanfuturism is considered in both political and methodogical opposition to Afrofuturism, and is understood as a critical artistic method that, within the framework of Black science fiction, recounts an alternative version of the future of African people. The scientific article describes the features of the implementation of science fiction subgenres in the literature of Nigerians, residents of Nigeria, and representatives of the Nigerian diaspora, and also substantiates their differences from traditional (European) fantasy narratives. By the case of ‘Pet’ by A. Emezi, which at many artistic levels goes against both the Nigerian and pan-European canons of science fiction, the markers of Africanfuturist criticism of the culture, the correlation between the magical (mythogical) and futurological as the main difference between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism are shown.
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Tine, Pierre Malick. "Sentence Versus Redemption and the ‘Spiritual World’ in Osiris Rising, Fragments, Why Are We So Blest? KMT: In the House of Life by Ayi Kwei Armah and Mama Day by Gloria Naylor." South Asian Research Journal of Arts, Language and Literature 5, no. 04 (August 15, 2023): 157–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.36346/sarjall.2023.v05i04.008.
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This paper attempts to evaluate the different characteristics in the spiritual world that act on human destiny in blacks ‘cosmology in Ayi Kwei Armah and Gloria Naylor’s fiction while justifying the awareness of black intellectuals in their different approaches to sentence and redemption for African cultural revival. It also exposes black people facing acculturation phenomena and the deconstruction of the ancestral home. However, it argues that the achievement of the struggle for African cultural revival will be possible if they take the initiative in finding out specific strategies that would culturally, socially and politically reconnect black with their indigenous cultural reality. Some of these stratagems include good cultural references, rootedness, unity, teaming work, and rationality. To examine blacks’ spirituality in its double vocation of sentence and redemption, this study uses theories of anti-colonialists and Afro-centrists that advocate total liberation and empowerment of black people while assessing the issues of the disgrace of both African and African-American people. Similarly, the insights and commitment of thinkers like Afro-centrists are well considered as additional elements in this work. Ultimately, the novels contend that in African spirituality there is a divine will owed to the ancestors that have the mission of watching over their people and judging them in several ways when they are satisfied through rituals or recognition. As the authors of the three books suggest, the appreciation of ancestral legacy and cultural advancement is an effective means of ensuring blacks ‘social welfare in their communities and elsewhere.