Soyinka Research Articles

Beyond Juvenile Mental Narrative: Social Justice and Redemptive Vision in Wole Soyinka’s Autobiography, Ake: The Years of Childhood

Beyond Juvenile Mental Narrative: Social Justice and Redemptive Vision in Wole Soyinka’s Autobiography, Ake: The Years of Childhood

Oral Poetic Techniques as Decolonial Creative Strategies in Osundare’s The Word is an Egg

Modern Nigerian poetry in English was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the writing of Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, and Christopher Okigbo. The trio, regarded as pioneers and the first generation of Nigerian poets, succeeded largely with their adoption of modernist techniques to convey African material. By the 1970s, their writing came under scrutiny with the call to decolonise African literature and, by extension, Nigerian poetry in English. In this article, I demonstrate how Niyi Osundare demystifies the form and language of Nigerian poetry in English by the creative deployment of oral techniques in selected poems. I argue that Osundare, as a Nigerian second-generation poet, decolonises and democratises modern Nigerian poetry by delinking from his predecessors’ Eurocentric conception of poetry. The article is in five parts. The first part provides an introduction, the second is a background review of the development of Nigerian poetry in English from which the research problem, purpose, and aim are identified. The third part is on the structure of The Word is an Egg. The fourth part analyses the oral poetic techniques employed by Osundare as decolonial creative strategies, and the fifth provides a concluding attestation of the transformative nature of Osundare’s poetic art.

An Overview of Caribbean and African Literary Theories

As it is believed, Africa is the cradle of humankind, where humans also left for other parts of the world during the slave trade and also during World War I and II. At the abolition of the slave trade, many African descendants settled where they could call home, like in the Caribbean islands and other parts of the world, as a result of the ancestral and cultural attachment between Africa and the places where the descendants of the slaves where we could see some similarities in their ways of life. We can see these facts also translate into the African and Caribbean writers' literary works, among other spheres of life. The analyses show that while both literatures share common concerns related to colonial legacy and the quest for identity, they are distinguished by unique historical and socio-political contexts that influence their narrative perspectives. For example, African literature tends to focus more on the effects of colonization and decolonization on the African continent, while Caribbean literature often emphasizes the dynamics of the diaspora and the multiple facets of Caribbean identity. In addition, this study examines the use of language and literary techniques specific to each region, as well as the contributions of major literary figures such as aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Monique Ilboudo, Werewe Liking, Wole Soyinka, Maryse Condé and many others. Finally, this comparison offers a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of postcolonial literature while highlighting the unique voices and shared experiences of African and Caribbean writers.

The Nexus of Literature and the Environment: An Exploration of Wole Soyinka's Alapata Apata

This paper explores the nexus of literature and the environment in Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata. The study adopts ecocritical theory to bring out the playwright's concern for the environment. By employing close reading strategy technique, the study aims to elucidate the interplay of relationship between nature and humans. We intend to show the aggressive exploitative tendency of humans to pillage and desecrate the earth thereby thwarting the intended original harmony of the flora and fauna. The overall aim is to evince the playwright’s ecological leitmotifs.

War, Cannibalistic Atrocity, and the Illusion of Patriarchal Absolutism in Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists

War, Cannibalistic Atrocity, and the Illusion of Patriarchal Absolutism in Wole Soyinka’s <i>Madmen and Specialists</i>

Sociopolitical Oppression and Suppression in Soyinka’s A Play of Giant

The concept of oppression is one of the most vital concepts in contemporary political discourses in the literary works. This concept has some interdisciplinary characteristics which are associated with culture, religion, sociology and politics. Therefore, this paper critically explores various sociopolitical oppression and suppression of Africans by their leaders (fellow Africans) in most parts of the continent as portrayed by Wole Soyinka. The paper reveals how African leaders misuse power, serve their personal interest instead of the citizens who voted them to power. In the Play of Giant, Soyinka uses satire to depict the attitude of many African leaders towards their citizens. It shows that the leaders have less sympathy towards the masses. It also shows inferiority complex, dictatorship, abuse of power, intolerance, immorality, and insensitiveness of African leaders which are all against the African cultures but inherited from colonialism.

Ngugi Wa Thiang’o’s Early Studentship: The Role of Education in the Making of a Great African Literary Writer

Do you know that most prolific or acclaimed writers the world celebrates have detected their talent since their prime? Do you also know that some renowned writers taught themselves or were taught by their masters at home prior to when they began to write? Do you know that some of them have not acquired profound formal education up to the university? Yet, it should be known that there are innumerable others, who greatly vary, for they have deeply studied instead. Writing is a natural prodigy; hence it requires no profound literacy to blossom. Take some immediate common instances in mind: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Sembene Ousmene, Wole Soyinka, Aye Kwei Armah, Naguib Mahfouz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o to name just but a few. At any rate, education is the fulcrum and the nucleus to writing no matter how little it is acquired. This is the focus of which this paper is concerned about. Its prime goal is to unveil how Ngugi’s early educational sojourn from the primary school through to the university has rolled out the writing carpet for him to step on as a novice writer, and to keep striding on it with varying degrees of artistic, strength and vigour, which subsequently cleared the challenging path for him to emerge as a legendary and dynamic African writer.

Biblical Names in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka: A lexico-semantic Study

This study interrogates the use of biblical names as charactonyms in selected plays of Wole Soyinka, the first Nobel laureate in Africa, with the aim of unearthing their morphological process and sociolinguistic imports in relation to the Holy Bible. The primary data from which extracts were made to illustrate the discussion were four drama texts: The Strong Breed (1963), The Road (1965), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), King Baabu (2002)- all tragedies, by the same author. The theoretical frameworks adopted were Yule’s (1985) morphological taxonomy and Said’s (1978) postcolonialism. Ten names inundated with biblical elements were purposively selected across-the-board and analysed using the theoretical frameworks. Findings indicated that Soyinka inundated his works with analogy (60%) by deploying six names (Ifada, Sunma, Samson, Simon Pilkings, Olunde, Joseph) patterned after the Holy Bible to illustrate didactic lesson and messianic scapegoatism theme(s). Furthermore, the study revealed that the playwright deployed clipping (20%) through the names Maariya and Tikim, to indicate popular culture among African youth. Finally, the playwright uses biblical names in his works to blend his Christian and traditional background, and as a means of taking indirect swipe at the issue of African complex dispositions to the colonial encounter and its legacies. The work is a contribution to onomastic scholarship in relation to the Holy Bible and African-contact literary texts.

Musings and Meditations on the Edginess and Hatred of Forgiveness

Heeding Frantz Fanon's thoughts on colonialism and forgiveness alongside his call for us to “turn over a new leaf . . . work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man,” this text-mediated meditation on the hatred of forgiveness contends with the question/quest of forgiveness and its relevance to our idea of Africa today. To attend to these ethical questions, the author assembles a textual montage by juxtaposing Wole Soyinka's The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness lecture series (1997), with some reflections on for/giving from Nathalie Etoke's Melancholia Africana (2019), Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of forgiveness, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's (2004) attempt to imagine and inhabit a postapartheid South Africa where forgiveness acts as an infinite responsibility to the other. As such, this text-mediated meditation engages the newness, closure, eruption or interruption of violence, and forgiveness characteristic of the African present alongside discourses on African memories of grievances and speculations about the Africa that is yet-to-come.

Style as the Man Itself: Focus on Language Strategy in Five Selected Nigerian Dramas

Style as the Man Itself: Focus on Language Strategy in Five Selected Nigerian Dramas’ namely Charles Okwelume’s Babel of Voices, Diet of Violence, Toni Duruaku’s Cash Price, Femi Osofisan’s Midnight Blackout and Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy. It also examines the playwrights’ emerging trends on the stylistic peculiarities of the selected texts. The impacts focus on the linguistic tongue of these three major ethnic tribes in Nigeria (Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba) as reflected in the playwrights’ choice of words or diction. The findings review the relevance of exposing audience to other native languages/dialects of the peoples of Nigeria. These x-ray prospects and challenges of these ethnic languages/dialects not going into extinction as envisaged. The research method leans on literary works to interpret these dramas while Stylistic approach is deployed to unraveled the intent of these works built in theoretical framework that are subjected to empiricism, criticism and writers’ lenses to the society where these texts originate meant to communicate these topical issues that are controversial.

Exploring Post-independence African Identity and Sociopolitical Realities through Wole Soyinka’s Interpreters

This paper researches into the intricate layers of post-independence African identity and sociopolitical realities as portrayed in Wole Soyinka’s seminal work, The Interpreters. Through a close examination of Soyinka's novel, we explore how the characters grapple with the complexities of nationhood, cultural heritage, and individual agency in the wake of colonialism. By analyzing the intersecting narratives and ideological conflicts within the text, we uncover the tensions between tradition and modernity, indigenous beliefs and Western influences, and the quest for authentic self-expression amidst political turmoil. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of African literature and the multifaceted discourses surrounding postcolonial identity formation.

Explication of Ogba Proverbs as a Tool for Conflict Resolution

Proverbs originated orally based on the oral literature history of storytelling passed down from generation to generation through stories and sayings. However, some believed that they originated from written scripts. Proverbs are words of wisdom used to impart knowledge to people. In Ogba, proverbs are used predominantly by the elders to warn, advice, instruct and educate on issues of paramount importance to the society. Proverbs elu are epigrammatic in nature and usually misunderstood as idiom olu-eknurnu. Proverbs elu often use figures of speech, such as metaphors, similes or allusions to make a point. In the literary parlance, renowned African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi and others adopt the use of proverbs in their works. This paper analyses the Ogba proverbs as a tool for conflict resolution in Ogba land of Rivers State, Nigeria. It is discovered that proverbs are used in major types of discourse involving the elders as evidenced in their use in palaces of chiefs to settle issues of marriage, land, chieftaincy, accusations of witchcraft and wizardry and other cases that are settled locally according to Ogba tradition and custom. This paper adopts the qualitative approach propounded by Isidore Okpewho. It concludes that proverbs are a veritable tool used by the elders to settle disputes in their homes, families and kindred.

Wahala dey like wetin?: theorizing crisis in Nigerian cultural forms

As a peculiarly Nigerian valence of crisis and disorder ubiquitously referenced within cultural forms, the term Wahala offers an important vantage point for understanding contemporary narrativizations of crisis. This article takes the phrase Wahala dey like Bicycle, a slang expression popularized in the country in 2020, as a starting point from which to rethink crisis, chaos, and adversity as narrated in the Nigerian social imaginary. I argue that Wahala provides the conceptual hinge with which to theorize crisis, not only as a condition of social debilitation that pivots between disorder and agency, but also as an instrument of social mobility that derives from endemic disorder as its propellant. Placing this discursive idiom and its echoes in the Nigerian slang-scape in conversation with Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, I trace how it illuminates debilitations of endemic crisis, as well as the juncture of incapacitation, spatial contingencies, and agentic action that Nigerian subjects navigate within and transcend in their everyday lives through modes of improvisation. In mapping a geography of crisis, Soyinka’s novel demonstrates how endemic disorder and social unease manifest across the landscape in a conflict-prone social environment, allowing us to understand the itineraries of subjects who must invent meaning, control, and survival within such social geographies.

POSTCOLONIAL READING OF WOLE SOYINKA’S THE LION AND THE JEWEL AND JEAN PLIYA’S LA SECRÉTAIRE PARTICULIÈRE

In literary criticism, both the context and the content of a given text; speech, graph, image, or picture are essential. It is the totality of these two elements that pave the way for a better understanding of any given text. Hence, since the purpose of every communication or speech act is comprehension, this study examines the stylistic profile of Wole Soyinka and Jean Pliya in The Lion and the Jewel (1964) and La secrétaire particulière (2001) respectively. The study adopts the French ‘explication de texte’ technique as its methodology to carry out a textual analysis of the two selected plays. As a theoretical framework, the study uses Edward Said and Homi Bhabha’s Postcolonial theory which interrogates the effects of the interactions between the centre and the margin with the view to reconstructing the worldview on matters of history, race, identity, and culture. Findings reveal that in resisting colonial domination and imposition, the two African playwrights take advantage of linguistic manipulations in the composition of their literary texts. With the application of transliteration, direct translation, proverbs, figures of speech, allusions, lexical borrowing, and grammatical and phonemic corruption, the writers are able to foreground their intention to post-colonialize and africanize their literary works.

A Systemic Functional Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

This paper is about the systemic functional analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, on the basis of the postulate that African classical literary works connote some significant functions. The methodology used in this analysis is the mixed method approach, which is a combination of both quantitative and qualitative linguistic data. Two extracts are therefore selected from the play on a qualitative basis, taking into account the relevance of the exchange in terms of information and the characters involved in the exchange. These are split into numbered and analyzable units referred to as clauses in which the various mood components are meticulously and quantitatively identified. The results reveal that the extracts are essentially concerned with propositions, that is, the exchange of information about the rite. Some services are realized through proposals. Modal variables are profusely used in the extracts under consideration, highlighting interlocutors’ various attitudes and judgments regarding the traditional ritual of the king’s horseman death. The analysis of the exchange has uncovered the pecking order defined by the colonial administrators whose behaviors are profoundly marked by prejudices regarding the rite. Thus, Soyinka’s play functions as a tool for information and education about the African worldview.

The Pulse of Africanness in African Drama: A Study of Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka and Tewfik Al-Hakim

Most African drama is built on the religion, myths and oral culture of the African people, depicting their traditional ways of life passed down through generations. African drama, like other forms of African art, reflects the unique cultural, social and political identity of the African continent and people. This serves as a vehicle to convey the experiences, struggles and triumphs of the African people. Various playwrights have emerged from the African continent and each of these playwrights highlight the uniqueness of Africa through different perspectives in their plays. This paper explores the striking features that define African consciousness in African drama. Hence, it examines the pulse of Africanness in African drama using textual illustrations from Wole Soyinka and Tewfik AlHakim’s plays as well as highlighting the similarities and differences in their methods of storytelling from the African perspective. Keywords: Africa, Culture, Oral Traditions, Socio-political identity, Drama

Cultural Pluralisms: Neo-Nollywood and Biyi Bandele’s Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022)

ABSTRACT In Biyi Bandele’s last feature, Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022), adapted from Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Bandele registers an awareness for the multiple film cultures that have shaped filmmaking in Nigeria. Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba is structured as a homage to the legacies of Yorùbá traveling theatricalities, while retaining the visual codes of contemporary cinema, including in the ways it co-opts traits of Western and neo-Nollywood filmmaking. In this analysis of Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba, I map the visual awareness it establishes of the legacies of filmmaking in Nigeria, while also centering the film’s thematic registers of colonial politics, cultural abjection, and gendered representations as constitutive of the colonial world in which the story is situated. I frame Bandele’s pluralistic approach as a spirited engagement with the unstable category that colonization produces for the erstwhile colonized person. That is, it is not only the characters in Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba who are forced to interplay between Yorùbá and British intellectual and cultural practices; Bandele, too, is placed in this complex interrogation, as embedded in his stylistic approach.

The Function of Classical African Literary Works: A Systemic Functional Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

This paper is about the systemic functional analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, on the basis of the postulate that African classical literary works connote some significant functions. The methodology used in this analysis is the mixed method approach, which is a combination of both quantitative and qualitative linguistic data. Two extracts are therefore selected from the play on a qualitative basis, taking into account the relevance of the exchange in terms of information and the characters involved in the exchange. These are split into numbered analyzable units referred to as clauses in which the various mood components are meticulously and quantitatively identified. The results reveal that the extracts are essentially concerned with propositions, that is, the exchange of information about the rite; while some services are realized through proposals. Modal variables are profusely used in the extracts under consideration, highlighting interlocutors’ various attitudes and judgments regarding the traditional ritual of the king’s horseman death. The analysis of the exchange has uncovered the peck order defined by the colonial administrators whose behaviors are profoundly marked by prejudices regarding the rite. Thus, Soyinka’s play functions as a tool of information and education about African worldview.

The Quest for Cultural Renaissance in Wole Soyinka’s &lt;i&gt;Childe Internationale and Alápatá Àpáta&lt;/i&gt;

Critics of Wole Soyinka’s works have always identified the cultural impulses of his Yoruba origin in his dramaturgy. This engagement can be segmented into slants that seek a renaissance of his culture through his use of its tropes to intervene in the social malaises mirrored in his works and through a commitment that seeks the survival of his culture in the postcolonial milieus. This paper focuses on Soyinka’s engagement with the subject of cultural renaissance through a postcolonial reading of Childe Internationale and Alápatá Àpáta. While underscoring Soyinka’s commitment to the survival of his culture in the hybridised contexts presented in the plays, the paper points out that Soyinka’s dominant discussions on cultural renaissance have been primarily associated with his ‘Children plays’. The paper exhibits some of the critical aspects of culture that the playwright has isolated to validate his quest for a cultural renaissance. The paper’s conclusion gives accreditation to the playwright’s concerns about the dwindling fortunes of his Yoruba culture and language but doubts if there is any remedy in sight on account of some other overwhelming adverse social conditions in the plays.

Environmental Nexus with Social Disconnect: The Trajectory in Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers

The paper examines the interaction between humans and the environment and how they affect each other. It delves into the dynamics of life between the rural and city environments. It upholds that a dislocation from the natural environment transcends into a disruption of the family bond and life. This is because it causes sterility, since there will be no root. The paper takes as a base The Swamp Dwellers by Wole Soyinka, which it looks at from the environmentalist connection as a new model, especially as it concerns its effect on family tie as well as the dislodgment of youths from the rural area to the city. It is true that some critics may have examined the play, taking some look at it from the environmentalist perspective. They may not have taken cognisance of the influences and affinity between the neglect and abuse of the earth and the destruction of character and humanity with modernity, which these elements cause. This is a major trajectory of this paper. In all, the paper employs library research method with direct references to actual occurrences in the society. This is to expose the implications of the abuse of the environment on humanity, as well as implicate them.