Academic literature on the topic 'Nigerian literature'

This project highlights the role of locally produced children's written literature for ages six to fourteen in postcolonial Nigeria as a catalyst for national transformation in the wake of colonial rule. My objective is to reveal the perceived possibilities and pitfalls contained in Nigerian children's literature (specifically books published between 1960 and 1990), for the promotion of a new national consciousness through the reintegration of traditional values into a contemporary context. To do this, I draw together children's literature written by Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and Mabel Segun in order to illustrate the emphasis Nigerian children's book authors writing within the postcolonial moment placed on the concepts of nation and national identity in the aim to 'refashion' the nation. Following from this, I examine the role of the child reader in relation to the adult authors' intentions and pose the question of what the role of the female is in the authors' imagining of a 'new nation'. The study concludes by reflecting on the persistent under-scrutiny of children's literature in Africa by academics and critics, a preconception that still exists today. I move to suggest further research on the genre not only to stimulate an increased production of children's literature more conscious in content and aware of the needs of its young, (male and female) African readership, but also to incite a change in attitude toward the genre as one that is as deserving of interest as its adult counterpart.

Since the early 1960s, Afrocentrism has been developed as a theory that resists forms of marginalisation of African peoples, places African culture at the centre of inquiry, and promotes African peoples as subjects rather than objects of humanity. However, as this thesis sets out to show, this theory has gained more ground as an anti-Eurocentric theory that liberates Africans from the margins of western domination and colonization. This project intends to challenge this limited critique of Afrocentrism. In ‘Afrocentrism: The Argument We’re Really Having’ [American Historical Review, 30 (1996), 202-39], Ibrahim Sundiata, a leading Afrocentrist, argues that ‘any theoretical move directed at erasing inscriptions of inequality, marginalisation and subjugation of any kind among African peoples could be classified as a version of the Afrocentric impulse.’ Extending Sundiata’s argument, this thesis situates the criticism of three insidious Nigerian traditions which marginalise and subjugate fellow Nigerians as Afrocentric discourse: i) the marginalisation of women, ii) the Osu caste system, and iii) the Oro festival and the tradition of ritual suicide. This project will redefine the theoretical concept of the Afrocentric discipline as a discourse that challenges both external and, importantly, internal forces of oppression in Africa. The study is divided into three chapters. The first examines and situates the discourse of Womanism in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu as an Afrocentric discipline. It exposes the sufferings and marginalisation of women in patriarchal Nigerian society. Through a critical evaluation of Nwapa’s use of myth, meta-fiction and, borrowing from Siga Jajne’s study, what I call ‘voice-throwing’ [‘African Women and the Category ‘WOMAN’ in Feminist Theory’ Proceedings at the Annual Conference of the African Literature Association, Ohio, March, 1995], I demonstrate how Nwapa creates a new world and an escape route for Nigerian women. If Afrocentrism is a discourse that offers a space to eradicate inequality of any kind within the African community, the critique of the subjugation of women in Nigeria, I argue, might be understood as a part of Afrocentrism. The second chapter attempts to critically analyse Chinua Achebe’s challenge of the Igbo tradition of the Osu caste system in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease as an Afrocentric discourse. It analyses Achebe’s use of the literary technique of dualism and the critical engagement with questions of ‘form’ in his challenge of the Osu system. Through a close reading of these texts, I analyse Achebe’s position of the role of the intellectuals, the ‘voiceless’ situation of the Osu in Things Fall Apart, and the ‘voice-consciousness’ of the Osu in his short story, ‘Chike’s School Days.’ From the outset, this chapter maintains that Achebe’s first and second novels are criticial to the challenge of the Osu system. This is what makes these texts Afrocentric. The final chapter analyses Afrocentric interventions into the debilitating traditions of the Oro festival and ritual suicide in Adaora Ulasi’s Many Thing You No Understand, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Duro Ladipo’s Oba Waja (The King is Dead). While there are continued practice of some traditional customs and social structures that oppress, marginalise and displace Africans, this thesis shows that there is need to redefine and extend the Afrocentric paradigm as a theory that critically challenges any internal system of oppression in Africa. Theorizing Afrocentrism in this way will therefore address the challenges of twenty-first century Africa.

Ancestor, Book, Church reinserts into Nigerian literary history the texts generated by the nineteenth-century Anglican missionary incursion into Yorubaland, in the southwest of today’s Nigeria. I demonstrate how these early texts – in Yoruba and in English, written by Europeans and by Africans – and the histories and modes of thought that they reflect can be used as resources for understanding contemporary African literatures. Thus I argue against those who would dismiss the missionary text as absolutely foreign to and the missionary encounter as strictly an interruption of an “authentic” African cultural history. In much of Nigeria during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries the first literacy training was provided by missionaries, whose goal in teaching the ABCs was typically to lead indigenous people away from ancestral beliefs, through books, to the church. Yet this ideal linear sequence is inadequate as a description of what was in practice a complex, dialogical process. Sometimes the education and technologies associated with books enabled writers to reconfigure and revivify ancestral beliefs, to incorporate them into a revised form of Christianity, or to turn towards secularity. In all cases, I argue, literature in Nigeria engaged and engages with the legacy of missionary Christianity. I find evidence for this engagement not only in the contextual and thematic dimensions of literary texts but also, and especially, in a mode of signification exemplified by the English missionaries’ favourite fictional text, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a translation of which was also the first work of extended fiction to be written in Yorubaland. Ancestor, Book, Church reads nineteenth-century missionary texts and twentieth-century literary texts together as instances of the ways that Nigerians think and believe. It builds therefore upon research by anthropologists and scholars of religions, which it presents in the first chapter, and then moves into a literary analysis, informed by postcolonial theory, of the Nigerian writers Samuel Ajayi Crowther, D. O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, and Wole Soyinka.

No exercício de comparativismo literário entre as obras Things fall apart, do escritor nigeriano Chinua Achebe (1958), e Terra morta, do angolano Castro Soromenho (1949), é possível estabelecer aproximações e distanciamentos que dialogam entre si e podem trazer reflexões relevantes para o estudo das literaturas africanas. Enquanto a primeira oferece uma visão inédita a respeito do funcionamento interno da sociedade Ibo na Nigéria diante da situação colonial, a segunda transparece as frágeis relações dos colonos portugueses nas instituições políticas, econômicas e sociais do império na região da Lunda em Angola. Já por esse aspecto, os romances convergem para um panorama em comum ao apresentarem tanto o colonizado em Things fall apart quanto o colonizador em Terra morta de maneira distante dos estereótipos retratados pelas figuras coloniais, justamente por problematizarem questões internas e clivagens sociais e históricas. Assim, ao evidenciaram as fraturas internas, contribuem com a crítica sobre o sistema colonial ao mesmo tempo em que ajudam a construir outras visões históricas sobre o tema. Desse modo, as duas obras distanciam-se abertamente quanto aos contextos coloniais, que exigem, diante de uma leitura comparativa, um arcabouço teórico-crítico múltiplo que abarque as diferenças existentes nas dinâmicas coloniais e em seus contextos africanos específicos. O fato de os dois romances trazerem à cena regiões específicas na Nigéria habitada pelo povo Ibo e em Angola determinada como o espaço Lunda - e apresentarem uma multiplicidade de questões étnicas, raciais, sociais e identitárias, acaba distanciando os dois livros em perspectiva comparatista. Em termos aproximativos, no entanto, a problematização dos espaços e personagens retratados nas narrativas e a figura do narrador que assume posições políticas que se aproximam da categoria do autor implícito (BOOTH, 1983), permitem também uma leitura analítico-comparativa entre os romances. Se, por um lado, os contextos sociais e históricos distanciam os escritores e seus produtos literários; os romances se aproximam não apenas pelas categorias narrativas de personagens e espaço, mas também pela posição político-ideológica assumida por seus narradores. A consciência histórica e o compromisso político diante dos fatos narrados estão presentes na representação literária como uma tentativa de entender o funcionamento e apresentar uma crítica aos diferentes processos coloniais.<br>In the exercise of literary comparison between the novels Things fall apart, of the nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1958), and Terra Morta, of the Angolan writer Castro Soromenho (1949), its possible to establish similarities and differences that interact with each other and can evoke important reflections for the african literatures study. While the first novel offers an unprecedented vision concerning the inner functioning of the Ibo nigerian society on the colonial situation, the second exposes the fragility of Portuguese settlers in the political, economic and social institutions of the potuguese empire in the region of Luanda, Angola. About this last aspect, the novels converge into a common panorama when presenting an image of the settler that does not fall into a stereotypical perspective of that category, precisely by problematizing inner questions and social and historical cleavages. By exposing the inner fractures of the Angolan society, both novels contribute by criticizing the colonial system and, at the same time, helping to construct other historical visions about the issue. Therefore, both novels deviate from each other when presenting different colonial contexts that require, in terms of a comparative reading, a multiple theoretical and critical framework able to contemplate the differences observed in the colonial dynamics and in its african specific contexts. The fact that both novels bring into discussion two specific regions the Nigeria inhabited by the Igbo people and the Angola established as the Lunda space and present a multiplicity of social, racial and ethnic issues result in a detachment of the novels by comparative means. However, in approximate means, the problematization of spaces and characters portrayed in the narratives and the role of the narrator, who assumes political positions similar as the implied author category (Booth, 1983), also permit an analytical-comparative reading between the two novels. If, in one side, the social and historical contexts set apart the writers and its literary products, the novels are get closer not only by means of space and narrative categories, but also in terms of political and ideological positions assumed by its narrator. The historical conscience and the political commitment concerning the themes addressed in the novels are shown in the literal representation as an attempt to understand and present a critique to the different colonial processes.

No romance The Famished Road (1991), o autor nigeriano Ben Okri dá uma nova dimensão à figura da criança-espírito ou abiku, que é um motivo recorrente entre os iorubás e em diversas outras culturas da África ocidental. Como um fenômeno da crença dessas culturas, o abiku é um tema característico da narrativa oral africana, tendo sido usado também em várias obras da literatura africana de língua inglesa. Okri realiza, contudo, uma inovação ao transformar o abiku no narrador de seu romance. Uma vez que essa criatura é um in between, vivendo permanentemente na intersecção entre o mundo dos vivos e o dos mortos, a estrutura da obra literária é alterada pela realidade vista pelos seus olhos. A sua visão é composta pelas imagens da simultaneidade entre esses mundos. Na construção de seu romance, Okri tenta traduzir essa visão para um público leitor ocidental, utilizando ao mesmo tempo paradigmas da oralidade africana e da literatura ocidental. O romance se coloca, assim, num espaço de transição entre a cultura africana e a ocidental. São utilizados métodos e estratégias narrativas de ambas as tradições e o próprio fenômeno do abiku é investido por outras concepções mais ocidentais a respeito da ressurreição da alma. O objetivo desta dissertação é mostrar, de acordo com uma perspectiva crítica pós-colonial, como esse romance se constrói como uma obra híbrida entre os modos de se perceber e de se retratar a realidade característicos de cada uma dessas culturas.<br>In the novel The Famished Road (1991) Nigerian author Ben Okri gives a new dimension to the spirit child or abiku\'s image, which is a recurrent motif among the Yoruba and many other cultures from West Africa. The abiku is a characteristic subject of the African oral narrative and is also present in some African literature in English as the abiku is part of the belief of those cultures. However, Okri undertakes an innovation, turning the abiku into the narrator of his novel. Since this creature is an in between, living permanently in the intersection between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the structure of the literary work is altered by the reality as it is seen through his eyes. His vision is made up by the simultaneous images of those two worlds. In the construction of his novel, Okri tries to translate this vision to a Western reading audience, using paradigms from both the African orality and Western literature. Thus, the novel is placed in a transitional space between African and Western cultures. Narrative methods and strategies from both traditions are used and the abiku phenomenon itself is invested by other more Western conceptions about the soul\'s resurrection. This dissertation aims to reveal from a postcolonial theoretical perspective how this novel is constructed as a hybrid work between the modes of perceiving and depicting reality characteristic of each one of these cultures.

This thesis is a research into the growth in Nigeria of Modern Arabic Literature, from the impact of modern secular thought on the medieval Arabic-Islamic literary tradition. In chapter one the spread to Nigeria of Islam and the growth within its cultural context of Arabic literature are discussed in the light of the classical Arabic literary theory. Cultivated as an integral part of Islamic traditional sciences, Arabic literature throughout its development in Nigeria had remained the function of Islamic religion. All the literary men were essentially Muslim jurists (al-fuqaha') writing in a sacred medium. The various aspects of this religious literary tradition, al-taqlid, are described with illustrations in chapter two. In chapter three the process of how modern European literature had given birth in Egypt and Greater Syria to Modern Arabic Literature, and its major currents are described. Thus inspired, Modern Arabic Literature is not Islamic but Arab nationalist oriented with very little to offer the non-Arab Muslims in the name of the Islamic Commonwealth. The non-Arab Muslims have accordingly embarked on developing their own national literature in English, French or a vernacular. This phenomenon, seen in Turkey, Iran and Senegal is also demonstrated in Nigeria by the birth of modern Hausa literature instead of Arabic. This development is discussed in chapter four within the context of the Western cultural impact on Islamic Nigeria. But the study of Arabic and Islamic religion in secular institutions imposed by modern political order has begun to challenge the existing religious literary tradition. Nigeria has now produced some Arabists, including Christians, in whose literary innovations Arabic language and literature is no longer an exclusive function of Islamic culture. Influenced by neo-classical Arab writers, the most outstanding contribution to this new trend is the diwan (anthology) of 'Umar Ibrahim, the literary exposition of which is made in chapter five. In conclusion, the scope of the literary innovations introduced into Nigerian Arabic literature is highlighted with an attempt to determine its prospect.

Over the last few decades, adult education literature has indicated an increasing interest in the topic of national development. However, in general this literature's conceptualization of "development" is unclear, since it rarely analyses the concept within any explicit frameworks. One purpose of this study was therefore to bring more clarity to the discussion of development as it relates to adult education. An examination of literature on development thought and on the development/education relationship indicated some reflection by the latter of shifts in development perspectives, though the coincidence was by no means exact. Overall, a shift away from the advocation of a linear, Eurocentric development model focussed on economic growth towards more indigenous-based conceptualizations and a greater emphasis on equality was noted. However, this was by no means complete or universal. Because of the suggestion that indigenous approaches to development are likely more relevant, a second purpose was to deepen understanding of the development/adult education relationship through an examination of its conceptualization in the adult education literature of a specific context—that of West African and Caribbean English-speaking nations. A hermeneutic approach was used to interpret selected literature from Nigeria and Jamaica (considered exemplary of the two regions of the context). The four main questions addressed to the literature were concerned with the emphasis on: literacy education; consistency of national and adult educational goals; reducing inequality; and the need for structural change. It was found that literacy education was accorded much importance, as was the necessity of harmonizing adult educational with national objectives. Neither inequality nor structural change was emphasized, and consideration of both was most often indirect. Little autonomy for adult education was indicated. Since the differences between the two sub-contexts seemed as numerous as the similarities, and since none of the existing development or development/education frameworks seemed totally adequate to either, the importance of indigenous approaches seemed to be confirmed. However, the persistent influence of Western development values and goals (particularly modernization) was also very evident in the literature. This suggested a tension between the more recent trend to indigenous approaches and the continuing pervasiveness of Western models. Further exploration of the nature and effects of this tension was therefore suggested.<br>Education, Faculty of<br>Educational Studies (EDST), Department of<br>Graduate