Don Veta’s novel Guerrilla of the Niger Delta (2016) foregrounds the embedded realities of extractive capitalism in the Niger Delta. The novel, framed as an investigation, illustrates how petroculture, shaped by petrocapitalism and neocolonial governmental oppression, serves as a hegemonic mechanism that undermines the socio-political, epistemological, and existential rights of individuals. As implied by the title, guerrillas, primarily from Nigeria’s disadvantaged Indigenous communities, engage in combat against the repressive governmentality and the persistent corruption of the oil magnates who represent the ruling elite of the region. This study involves a critical analysis of the novel, interpreting it as a discourse on the violent political economy of the Niger Delta. Hence, the focus is on examining the political and existential ramifications of extractive capitalism in the Niger Delta, as exemplified by physical violence, insurgencies, and militancy. The article underscores the intricate relationship between ecology and militancy in Nigeria, accentuating their role in perpetuating structural violence and triggering radicalism. Finally, this article asserts that these types of literary fiction serve as essential narratives in unmasking the consequences and societal toxicities associated with environmental violence and injustice, and in underscoring the associations between radicalism and ecological justice. In so doing, I contend that the struggles of guerrillas in the Niger Delta can be related to the ideologies of decolonial activism against petrocolonialism and its varied hegemonic manifestations.

Ahmed Yerima has convincingly argued in his plays that drama constitutes a reliable alternative to historical narratives that enables a focus on Nigerian political discourses. Close readings of Yerima’s plays probe into the country’s socio-political problematics. Arguably, while memory has remained significant and relevant in the crafting of the dramaturgies in Yerima’s plays, politics has continued to be used broadly as a device of thematic deconstruction. Recurringly, Nigeria often features as an over-arching (political) setting in most of Yerima’s plays. Based on the playwright’s demonstrated understanding of the specific problems associated with each geopolitical region, expressed in a different dimension, the country’s political and cultural history are usually interrogated from the multi-ethnics’ perspectives and grievances as can be seen from the inclusions of characters and scenes from the Niger Delta’s political agitations in Hard Ground and the Fulani characters, and their idea of power relations with other Nigeria’s ethnic groups in Hendu. A scrutiny of Yerima’s plays reveals that tension in post-colonial Nigeria is explained not only by the peculiarity of the geopolitical area or people affected, but also by a reaction to the perceived marginality or neglect in terms of government’s (non)distributions of economic and political privileges.

This article proposes the episteme of the Shona concept of dariro as a reading strategy for Dambudzo Marechera’s drama. Dariro is a Shona word for “performance space” or “zone of performance.” Traditionally, dariro is a normatively inclusive performance space that is often harnessed in the very moment of enunciation. Unlike traditional forms of reading and writing that separate the encoder and the decoder in both space and time, dariro brings together the artist/performer and the reader/spectator within the same realm or sphere all at once. Sometimes this happens in ways that may shock the spectator as reader via in-the-moment presentations of what may be deemed as transgressive. Dariro is therefore an appropriate lens through which to read dramatic writings of the alternative kind such as those by Dambudzo Marechera. Dariro demonstrates Marechera’s trademark penchant for creating transgressive spaces of alterity, which are harnessed in the very moment of enunciation. Therefore, dariro’s performative inclusivity allows a reading of Marechera’s works as spaces of alternative realities where Marechera’s iconoclastic protagonists seize the opportunity to step up “in the moment” and play out outrageous behaviours in ways that demonstrate the constant tension between normative values and their deliberate transgression.

Various critics have spoken of similarities between Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head, and Head herself was pleased to find herself called Schreiner’s “reincarnation,” however startling this may seem (to some) in face of their racial difference. She also insisted, again surprisingly, that if she were indeed to be compared with Schreiner, she should be called the “Schreiner of South Africa,” not “of Botswana.” Her direct acquaintance with Schreiner was limited to The Story of an African Farm (1883) and a selection from her writings compiled by Uys Krige in 1968, and this only after Head had published her first three novels. Nonetheless, in an earlier essay on their relation, I explore a virtual connection between Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) and Head’s second published novel Maru (1971), arguing that the former text represents an act of dreaming “passed on” from an older to a younger generation, and even specifically from a storyteller identifying as “white” to one identifying as “black,” and that this storyteller reappears in the latter text. If we allow ourselves to see Schreiner’s writing as a precursor to Head’s, we may then see an interactive line between the two writers, running back and forth, as it were, in both directions: “passing it on” segues, crucially, into the younger writer’s unconscious “writing back” but also invokes a reassessment of Schreiner: does she “pass” over the test of social responsibility, ignoring it where she should have responded to it? Drawing from this earlier essay, though focusing far more on Head than on Schreiner, the present essay rehearses some of Head’s comments on the felt similarities and differences between herself and Schreiner, but now does so in order to scrutinise more closely the younger writer’s redefinition of “blackness” and her reincarnative relation to place, a relation strongly informed by her self-identification as “black” rather than “coloured” or “white.” Re-reading Schreiner through Head invites us to ponder how each writer conceptualises these categories and the extent to which their writing takes account of or ignores the specific material histories that typically divide “black” and “white.”