Ken Saro-Wiwa Research Articles

Voices From the Fringes: The Eco-Poetics of Niger Delta Women

To say that the Niger Delta literature or the poetics of extraction in the Delta has attracted numerous scholarly engagements is an understatement. However, most of the critical works written about the Niger Delta have been by male writers such as Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Tanure Ojaide, Ogaga Ifowodo, Nnimmo Bassey and others who are known for drawing attention to the environmental despoilment and the suffering of the various Indigenous communities of the Delta. In this article, I am interested in the framing of the Delta by female poets from the region. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, I ask, are Niger Delta women writing? And if so, how do they contextualise women and nature in their poetic imagination? Mindful of the complexities in the region, what literary devices do they employ to aid their navigation of the murky confluence of state power, multinational corporations, and environmental degradation that abounds in the region unabated? This work applies the theoretical positions of ecofeminist scholars to the close reading of select poems from Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket (2005), Ekaete George’s Saints and Scoundrels (2018), and Iquo DianaAbasi’s Coming Undone as Stitches Tighten (2021).

Mining from the pipeline: Artisanal oil refining as a consequence of failed CSR policies in the Niger Delta

Oil production in the Niger Delta first attained global prominence after the 1995 hangings of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogonis. In the face of horrible publicity and credible allegations that international oil companies were complicit in systematic human rights violations against local host communities, corporate social responsibility (CSR) was embraced. CSR in the Nigerian oil industry has evolved from non-existent to limited community development programs to today's Global Memorandum of Understanding model. Yet, concomitant with CSR's growth has been a devastating increase in artisanal oil refining or “bunkering.” In this article, we do not focus on industrial scale bunkering, which clearly requires high-level political support. Instead, we focus on the growth of small-scale artisanal refining in the rural Niger Delta. We situate this sector's growth in failed government and CSR policies, highlight its devastating environmental impacts, and advocate a shift away from flawed and limited CSR to legal and regulated modular refineries that, with fewer negative developmental and environmental externalities, could serve as a vital source of job creation and wealth generation.

Counter-conducting environmental injustices and (un)accountability: Ken Saro-Wiwa’s accounts of the Ogoni’s struggle for emancipation

PurposeThis paper explores the historical roots of environmental accountability in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria by focusing on the campaigns for social and environmental justice by writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and the indigenous Ogoni people.Design/methodology/approachThe methods consist of an analysis of books, diaries, letters and poems written by Ken Saro-Wiwa as well as books, reports and audio recordings of panel discussions which capture the Ogoni struggle, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s activism and its impacts. The authors’ approach to the data is sensitised by Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct as it enables the authors to better grasp the creative agency of Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni as they struggle and campaign for political autonomy, environmental justice and accountability.FindingsThe authors’ findings illustrate how Ken Saro-Wiwa’s books, letters, poems, diaries and articles provide early accounts of environmental injustices and the absence of accountability in the Niger Delta. They highlight how Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni movement deploy counter-conduct to subvert existing power and accountability structures through innovative strategies, effective mobilisation and communication at local and international levels. The authors’ findings also highlight how these have led to specific forms of accountability for human rights and the environment at local and global levels. They also show how Saro-Wiwa’s activism and the Ogoni struggle have inspired a new generation of environmental activists and new ways of demanding accountability.Originality/valueThis paper presents, for the first time, an account of the historical roots of environmental accountability practices from an African and developing country context. Its focus on the historical roots of environmental accountability is also unique as it expands the view beyond the origins of environmental accounting to look more broadly at the origins of environmental accountability practices.

A Rich Inheritance: An Ecocritical Reading of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Short Stories and Poetry

ABSTRACT This article examines Ken Saro-Wiwa’s (1941–1995) vision for the Ogoni people through an ecocritical interrogation of his short fiction and poetry. Academic analyses of the Ogoni struggle have been unfailingly anthropocentric in their approaches. This article challenges this dominant epistemology by centring the non-human world. I examine Saro-Wiwa’s collection of short stories ‘A Forest of Flowers’, the poetry anthology ‘Songs in a Time of War’, and his final poems written in prison in the 1990s. An ecocritical reading of these texts will reveal how Saro-Wiwa invokes pastoral tropes and romantic portrayals of a pre-oil ecological paradise to articulate a primordial eco-nationalist Ogoni identity. Throughout his fiction, the fate of the people and the natural world are intertwined, and notions of home and community expand beyond the human to incorporate the ecosystem of the bioregion.

A Mighty Cooperative

A Mighty Cooperative

African Ecocriticism, Interspecies Relationship, and Kyuka Lilymjok’s Twilight for a Vulture

Ecocriticism in Africa, often framed by the postcolonial problem, appears to have a lot of focus on the notion of environmental justice. This kind of ecocriticism, rooted in protest aesthetics, aligns with the eco-activisms of the likes of Wangari Mathai of Kenya and Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria who have, in different ways, contributed immensely to the literary awareness and the physical confrontation against the institutional powers that cause environmental degradation in Africa. These environmental writers expose the business of extractive capitalism responsible for harmful practices like gas flaring, oil spills, oil bunkering, water and air pollution, tree felling, and other activities that are inimical to the biodiversity of the continent. Considering the general degradation that reduces the postcolonial societies to what Frantz Fanon calls the wretched of the earth, it could be agreed that these writers’ focus on the environmentalism of the poor is not out of place. However, this rubric deemphasizes the nonhuman implication of the environmental tragedies, leaves untapped the full potentials of those literary genres that aestheticize relations across species, and expands the vision for ecological sustainability. To change the narrative, this article uses Kyuka Lilymjok’s Twilight for a Vulture to highlight the roles of nonhuman beings of the environment by analyzing the interspecies relationships that occur when species are brought closely together in the Nigerian environment. Both humans and nonhuman species found in Nigerian environment do not exist in isolation; they relate to each other. These relationships or interactive moments open contact zones of proximity and provide opportunities for contrasting various forms of human relationship with the nonhuman world. This is not to privilege nonhumans over humans, but rather to emphasize the ways these nonhuman life forms are linked with humans.

The Nigerian Civil War and the Politics of Creative Remembrance: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy

Through a discussion of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (2005) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), this article argues that the creative remembrance of the Nigerian Civil War and the re-visioning of the nation state has tended to focus on the Hausa and Igbos, excluding other ethnic minorities, especially the Ogoni of the Niger Delta. Adichie and Saro-Wiwa remember and creatively evoke the war differently, and this difference facilitates the production of more complex histories. This, in turn, enables us better to comprehend the conflict’s historical wounds; it reveals that a refashioning of this history through minority narratives can produce deeper understanding. Through such historical reconstruction, the tragic past is evoked without losing sight of current realities or indulging in misplaced optimism regarding the future. Moreover, I argue, to create narratives that enable genuine healing, engagement with both peripheral and central viewpoints is crucial; what is needed are narratives that assist in the dismantling of ethnic hegemonic structures.

Niger Delta Literature: Emerging Thematic Preoccupations in Nigerian Literature

The Nigeria Delta region has long been a hotbed of literary activity, producing writers of international repute such as Tanure Ojaide, Chris Aban and Ken Saro-Wiwa. However, in recent years, there has been an emergence of new voices from the region, which is bringing to the fore new thematic preoccupations that reflect the changing socio-political realities of the region. Thus, the paper provides an overview of the emerging thematic preoccupations in Nigeria Delta literature, drawing from a range of contemporary literary works from the region. The paper identifies three key themes that are increasingly becoming central to the discourse of Nigeria Delta literature: environmental degradation, political corruption, and youth restiveness. The first theme, environmental degradation, reflects the devastating impact of oil exploration and exploitation on the Niger Delta region. The second theme, political corruption, is a recurring motif in Nigeria Delta literature. The third theme, youth restiveness, reflects the increasing frustration and anger of young people in the Niger Delta region. Overall, this paper argues that the emerging thematic preoccupations in Nigeria Delta literature reflect the changing socio-political realities of the region. By engaging with these themes, Nigeria Delta writers are providing powerful critiques of the problems facing the region, as well as offering new visions for a more just and equitable future.

Homecoming, Trauma, and Identity in Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) by British-Nigerian writer Noo Saro-Wiwa is part travelogue and part memoir. The book chronicles Saro-Wiwa’s return to Nigeria, the country in which her father, the activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed in 1995 and which she had not visited for more than ten years, except for two brief visits. Saro-Wiwa deploys trauma as a narrative strategy to show her grappling with her painful memories in relation to her family history and socio-political conditions in Nigeria. The effect of the deployment of the thematic motif of trauma in the structure of the narration is that the return, which explicitly sets out to resolve the past traumas, seemingly comes to re-enact those traumas instead. The paradoxical dramatic effect of being traumatised and being healed reveals the complexity of her diasporic identity and the ambivalence in both her travelling and her writing.

Ken Saro-Wiwa as Symbol of Environmental Activism in Niger Delta Poetry

Since the martyrdom of prominent Nigerian writer and environmental activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa by the then military government of Nigeria, the slain activist has attained the status of a symbol of activism in literary works. This paper seeks to explore how selected Nigerian poets engage the name and actions of Ken Saro-Wiwa in representing resistance and in sensitising and rallying the people to demand their rights to basic amenities and safer environments to live in. This is the cause for which Saro-Wiwa lost his life. Three collections of poems have been purposively selected for a qualitative and sociological investigation of the deployment of Ken Saro-Wiwa as a symbol of environmental struggle and of selflessness for the advancement of the common good. The collections are Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Homesongs, Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta, and Ogaga Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp. This study finds that while Ken Saro-Wiwa is deployed as a symbol of environmental activism, poets extend what his life and name represent to advance the agitation against the mismanagement of the environment and people of the Niger-Delta region. The study also reveals that Saro-Wiwa is an inspiration for writers to critically commit to advocacy that advances not just the good of society, but their art. This paper concludes that Ken Saro-Wiwa has become a source of inspiration for writers’ commitment to the Niger-Delta environment and a symbol to encourage activism against the continued despoliation of the region.

Characterization of Bacteria Isolates from Surfaces of Corroded Zinc and Copper Coupons

This research characterized bacteria isolates from surfaces of corroded zinc and copper coupons. Corroded zinc and copper materials were collected carefully, from two different locations in Ken Saro-Wiwa Polytechnic Campus and were put in sterile McCartney bottles. Bacteriological analysis such as Gram staining, motility test, catalase test, indole test, oxidase test, methyl red test, Voges-Proskauer test, and citrate utilization test were carried out t o ascertain the bacteria responsible for the corrosion. Two bacteria were isolated; Enterococcus which was seen to be responsible for the corrosion of zinc and Escherichia coli; which was responsible for the corrosion of copper. It is recommended that materials that can inhibit biocorrosion should be used to control or treat metallic substances of corroded materials.

Nollywood: A Dark Horse Dreams of Becoming the Black Swan

NollywoodA Dark Horse Dreams of Becoming the Black Swan Tade Ipadeola (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Named after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood—Nigeria's motion-picture industry—began on VHS tapes, literally gained altitude as in-flight offerings in the 1990s, and now has films streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Nigerian poet and lawyer Tade Ipadeola traces this rise of the industry, along with its rising scrutiny. To begin where we are, as the poet Czesław Miłosz exhorts, is a great piece of advice when it comes to Nollywood. Born ostensibly on the wrong side of the tracks and named after more famous cousins, Hollywood in the United States and Bollywood in India, Nollywood stubbornly climbed into some reckoning as a motion-picture industry. When the word "Nollywood" began to gain currency in the early 1990s, it was as some kind of insider joke. At the time, the motion pictures from Nigeria were not big-budget celluloid affairs but VHS home videos. They were produced daily. The quality, for the most part, was so abysmal that purists could not but object to their description as films. The Nollywood "films" nevertheless began to sell, and soon the African diaspora began to patronize them. Nostalgia has its uses. And then, by and by, the world took notice. When King of Boys, a film by Kemi Adetiba, premiered in 2018, it went on to win a brace of awards at the Africa Movie Academy Awards. It was a modest commercial success and was followed by a sequel, King of Boys 2, in 2021. There is something of the je ne sais quoi of Nollywood in the story [End Page 30] of those works and in the story of their producer. Very few movies from Nollywood have mastered social topics in the way that the film and its sequel did. The works held a serious mirror to the face of Lagos—and Nigeria—deftly navigating the power blocs of a vibrant and protean society. All these things the film did in the guise of a thriller with a vixen at its heart. The first films in Nigeria were made and directed by men, but women have more than made up for starting out of the block late. And they are leveling up as actors and producers every passing day. King of Boys is available on Netflix. Living in Bondage, produced by Ken Nnebue in 1992, followed by a sequel in 1993, is widely regarded as the first true Nollywood blockbuster. In the way that serendipity often finds its moments, Nnebue happened upon a glut of magnetic media that was soon to be superseded by superior digital technologies and capitalized on his moment. One remarkable thing about the work today, when compared with contemporary productions, is how basic and rudimentary the production was. The grain and texture of these pictures are somewhat quaint and can be sampled on YouTube. Coming after the age of celluloid film productions had ground to a halt in Nigeria, Living in Bondage, made in the Igbo language (with subtitles in English), was distributed mainly as VHS tapes to a worldwide audience. The story, not the technique, was the ultimate magnet. Between 1996 and 1998, Tade Ogidan produced Owo Blow, a Yoruba Nollywood trilogy. The cast of that production, most of them making their cameo appearances at the time, are now big-time actors and central figures in Nollywood. The production was a critical success, and the ambition it demonstrated has since been imitated in innumerable films from Nollywood. Nigeria at the time was the subject of many economic sanctions due to the peculiar barbarity of Sani Abacha, the military ruler in charge. Abacha ran death squads, hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa, a notable Nigerian writer and screenwriter—alongside eight of his Ogoni brothers—for protesting the oil pollution and ill treatment of Ogoni land. The shoestring budget of Tade Ogidan for the production dictated a number of decisions he made to get the script unto the screen. If James Agee made films, some of them would be in the mold of Owo Blow. Swallow, a film by...

“To See Things in His Time”: Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sense of Place in Sozaboy

Ever since Ken Saro-Wiwa published his novel Sozaboy in 1985, it has attracted and received tremendous critical attention. However, literary scholars and critics mostly explore either the author’s use of language or his representation of the Nigerian Civil War in Sozaboy. Deploying theories of ecocriticism and regionalism, this paper shifts that focus by examining certain ways Saro-Wiwa articulates his sense of place in Sozaboy and the place, as is well-known, is Dukana – his narrative locus. At the centre of this paper is the contention that Dukana, Saro-Wiwa’s fictional world, is replete with certain characteristics which shape a writer’s vision of place and these include the landscape, culture, beliefs, habits and mannerisms or ethos of a place. Accordingly, I shall analyse Saro-Wiwa’s sense of place in Sozaboy in terms of his perceptions of these characteristics of Dukana. In this way, I propose to locate Saro-Wiwa in the regionalist or place-sense writer’s tradition. I shall further argue that Saro-Wiwa derives his sense of place from what he has seen and known about the Niger Delta region and its people in lived experience. The paper finds that in addition to Saro-Wiwa’s experimentation with language and his concern with the civil war, what also informs his writing of Sozaboy is his desire to articulate rural sensibilities. Drawing from his preoccupation with regional life and events that live on in the pages of his fictional works, the paper concludes that Saro-Wiwa is, for the most part, a regionalist or place-sense writer.

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature By Ato Quayson

Reviewed by: Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature by Ato Quayson Mahruba T. Mowtushi Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature BY ATO QUAYSON Cambridge UP, 2021. 346 pp. ISBN 9781108921992 paper. Ato Quayson's Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature opens with lamentations for the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian government in 1995 and ends with the murders of Treyvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012 and George Floyd by the American police in 2020. These events, separated by thousands of miles, and twenty-five years of social injustice, are not dissimilar in their tragic magnitudes for history repeats itself in real life as it does on stage and the pages of literature. The search for collective freedom and individual agency in the face of colonial hegemony, sociopolitical turmoil, and cultural oppression informs Ato Quayson's latest book. The volume reconsiders postcolonial writing vis-à-vis the history of literary tragedy from the Greek and Renaissance traditions to contemporary multicultural examples from around the world. In doing so, Quayson reassesses Western tragedy through a postcolonial paradigm. In order to comprehend Aristotelian anagnorisis, Quayson argues that we need to read Chinua Achebe and take into consideration the Akan concept of musuo, which translates as taboo or "harms to the soul." Quayson is concerned with examining questions on ethics by linking them to representations of pathos and suffering in postcolonial writing where suffering is defined as the experience of the impending annihilation of the self or the perception of imminent dangers to the self from external forces. Quayson arrives at a distinct hermeneutical interpretation of suffering, and thereby of tragedy, by way of an eclectic range of references from Eric J Castell's The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, Cicero's Disputation on Grief, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and to Akan musuo. In the second chapter on "Ethical Cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare's Othello," the author resorts to a "postcolonializing of Shakespeare" (44) that assesses how Elizabethan social ideas about race, cultural identity, and "cosmopolitan contradictions" (45) reflect on contemporary critical debates on multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. The conditions of colonial modernity in Chinua Achebe's "rural narratives" (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God) inform the third chapter that considers whether Okonkwo, a character imbued with ethical contradictions, is a tragic figure and if so, how does the reader evaluate ethical choice-making concerning his actions. The "dialectical assimilation of opposites" (115) in the tragic characters in Death and the King's Horseman and The Road informs [End Page 198] chapter four that interrogates elements reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy such as anagnorisis in Wole Soyinka's dramaturgy. In Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, which is the focus of chapter five, Quayson identifies the novel's scrupulous intertextuality and "literary echoes" as enacting a mirroring effect with the tragic parameters that govern key texts in the Western literary canon. The "melancholic introjection" of Mustafa Sa'eed and his "self-authorship" (185) as a colonized self and subject enable Quayson to classify thematic and ideational parameters that make Salih's novel postcolonial but also tragic. Chapter six turns to the "terrible beauty" of Toni Morrison's Beloved where the "tragic vision" of Sethe killing her daughter incites a moment of "split anagnorisis" in the character of Baby Suggs (187). For Quayson, the rationale (if it can be called that) behind Sethe's terrible action should be interpreted in light of the novel's brutally honest delineation of the history of slavery in the United States. The case of infanticide in Beloved must be read alongside other literary examples of infanticide from sources as diverse as "the Bible, Aeschylus, Euripides, George Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Sam Shepherd, Chinua Achebe," and others (187). The absolute certainty that governs the choices made by the tragic figures in Morrison, Soyinka, and Achebe is dissipated when one comes to J. M. Coetzee's fictional characters who, according to Quayson in chapter seven in the book, labor tragically under the constraints of ethical challenges and second thoughts, a situation that is both ontologically and epistemologically problematic. The torturous cogitations of the adult world of "Big Things" in Arundhati Roy's...

Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century

Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century

The media turn in African environmentalism: the Niger Delta and oil’s network forms

African ecologies and the various media forms devoted to them remain marginal in the bourgeoning discourse of ecomedia studies despite the implication of the continent in mineral extraction, wildlife conservation, and the dumping of toxic wastes, just to mention a few examples. Turning to media focusing on Nigeria’s Niger-Delta region, the author argues that African cultural forms are crucial for extending the frontiers of ecomedia studies and for apprehending the perversities of oil culture. His analysis of a mural in Ireland’s Mayo County featuring the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (2005), the music video for Timaya’s ‘Dem Mama’ (2006), and Victor Ehikhamenor’s art installation, The Wealth of Nations (2015), shows that they deploy the visual in protesting the commodifying logic of oil extraction. This article adopts an infrastructural approach toward media as it underscores how oil consecrates the selected cultural objects as network forms. Focusing on African materials extends the geography and archive of ecomedia studies, but it has methodological implications too. The author orients scholarship in the environmental humanities toward working across media, encouraging the field to adopt ecological relationality as both the matter and the method.

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Concept of Erectism: A Paradigm for Sustainable National Development and Unity in Nigeria

Nigeria has had a civil war and repeated frequent ethnic and communal wars in virtually all parts of the country ever since it became an independent republic in 1963. It has also witnessed many religious clashes and insurgency. These and other related factors have combined to make the country very unstable, both politically and economically, and disunited. Many scholars regard the multi-ethnic character of the State as its major undoing. On the other hand, political leaders at the national level see the country's amazing ethno-cultural diversity as a social condition for national growth. The politicians have, however, failed to provide the necessary ingredients that would promote national development and unity. This work seeks to examine the appropriateness of Ken Saro-Wiwa's concept of ‘erectism' as a paradigm for sustainable national development and unity in Nigeria. Adopting a constructivist approach in the pursuit of that objective, this work critically analyses the systemic anomalies of the Nigerian state vis-í -vis its multi-ethnic structure and concludes that Saro-Wiwa's theory of erectism is a workable formula for promoting national development. The concept entails ethnic autonomy, ethnic ownership and control of resources as well as ethnic control and management of environment.

Nnimmo Bassey: The Activist and His Poetry of Environmental Activism

Nnimmo Bassey’s poetic oeuvre projects environmental concerns, as presently occupying prominent place in Nigerian literary sphere, thus, twining this literary voice with the momentum of the ongoing global ‘greening’ campaigns. However, in the Nigerian situation, a sustained undertone of anger, protestation and ethno-political activism remains pronounced in the contemporary context of environmental literature. After the brutal execution of the prominent Ogoni-born ethnic nationality rights activist, environmentalist and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, by the Sani Abacha military dictatorship in 1995, Nnimmo Bassey’s environmental watch persists and vehemently echoes in his poetry. His voice has come to serve as a veritable instrument that re-echoes the passionate outcry and activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa. This poetic voice thus reverberates most vociferously in the Nigerian literary firmament and in global environmental action project. This paper, therefore, examines the social import of the convergence of artistic endowment and ecological consciousness in Bassey’s poetry, using ecological postcolonialism as analytical tool. Thus, the conclusion of this work is that artistic talent could be harnessed to advance the cause of socio-political re-engineering of society.

Out of Africa: Ecocriticism beyond Environmental Justice

This essay is an attempt to present a broader view of ecocriticism in Africa. Ecocriticism, in theory and practice, appears to have limited itself to the notion of environmental justice, with the aim of raising consciousness against institutional powers behind ecological crises. The reason for this is not far-fetched. International scholarship on African ecocriticism tends to focus on the activism of the Kenyan Wangari Mathai and the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa; and on the fiction of a few writers concerned with environmentalism and conservation. This kind of ecocriticism, under the rubric of postcolonialism, is, in my view, narrow, too human-centred, and should, in fact, be decentred for an all-inclusive mapping of African ecocriticism. I attempt to shift this paradigm by foregrounding a narrative that stages the role and agency of nonhuman and spiritual materiality in practices that demonstrate nature-human relations since the pre-colonial period. I argue that for a proper delineation of the theory and practice of ecocriticism in Africa, attention should be paid to literary and cultural artefacts that depict Africa’s natural world in which humans sometimes find themselves helpless under the agency of other-than-human beings, with whom they negotiate the right path for the society. I conclude by making the point that a recognition of this natural world, and humans’ right place in it, is crucial to any ecocritical project that imagines an alternative to the present human-centred system. 
 Keywords: African ecocriticism, natural worlds, spiritual materiality, nonhuman agency

Effect of Problem-Based Learning on Students’ Academic Achievement in Digital Electronics in Ken Saro-Wiwa Polytechnic, Bori, Rivers State, South-South, Nigeria

The study investigated the effect of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on Students’ Academic Achievement in Digital Electronics in Ken Saro-Wiwa Polytechnic, Bori, Rivers State, South-South, Nigeria. Quasi-experimental pre-test post-test control design was used in the study. The sample of the study comprised 84 Higher National Diploma (HND) final year students of electrical and electronic engineering (Telecommunications and electronics option). Three research questions and one hypothesis were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The instrument used for data collection was a 20-item Digital Electronics Achievement Test Questionnaire (DEATQ) designed by the researcher and validated by two experts in electrical and electronic engineering from Federal Polytechnic, Nekede, Owerri, Imo State. Kuder-Richardson formula was used to obtain the instrument’s reliability coefficient as 0.87. Mean and t-test were used to answer the research questions and test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed among others that problem-based learning enhances students’ academic achievement in Digital Electronics. Consequently, it was recommended among others that engineering technology lecturers in Nigerian polytechnics and universities should use more of PBL and other student-centred teaching strategies in instructional delivery in order to boost students’ achievement in technology-based courses.