Nigeria is a damned hellhole

The fantastic view has been held by some writers who celebrate the historic resilience and future rise of Africa-even possibly, to becoming a world power. Though desirable, this post-independence wish has never witnessed the will of a responsible people exhibiting distinct goals and definite plans towards such an achievement. What has rather persisted over the years in most African countries including Nkrumah's home country Ghana, is the treacherous cyclical rhythm of hopelessness, hopefulness and disillusionment. This qualitative study is a research through art – a write up that laments and lambasts, based on a painting exploring the nature and space of Africa's accepted reality that could possibly lead to her doom if nothing is done about it. The challenging background question however is that, on account of how events have unfolded over the past, is it likely for Africa to rise and turn her situation around in the near future?

2011

Abstract: This essay considers the impact of the 1967-1970 Biafran War on ordinary people's lives, through a comparative study of Achebe's Girls at War (1972), Ofoegbu's Blow the Fire (1985), and Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).

in C.McGlynn, A.Mycock & J.W.McAuley (eds), Britishness, Identity and Citizenship: The View from Abroad, Oxford, Peter Lang pp.135-149, 2011

Since the early years of British contact with Nigeria, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, Nigerian literature has been reflecting on the changing persona of the British in the country through its frequent inclusion and handling of British characters. This chapter considers ten novels published between 1933 and 2006, to track changes in Nigerian writers’ perception of Britishness, from the prejudiced or accommodating colonial administrators and district officers of Omenuko to the city girl’s husband of People in the City, from the young female teachers of Emecheta’s school to the arrogant university professors sketched by Ike and the lonely journalist that dominates Adichie’s second novel. Focusing on the last of these novels, the study will then reveal a significant shift in the presentation of British attitudes and interests, with the central character of Richard Churchill, the young journalist from Shropshire, standing out as very different from his compatriots. He desired to see the country, and his move away from the partying Lagos to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka gradually leads to his transformation as he falls in love, learns Igbo and chooses to stay in Igboland through the war years. He ends up writing an essay to denounce the British stand on the civil war – The World Was Silent When we Died, embedded in the novel. This latest write-up, while echoing Achebe’s district officer’s monograph on The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, stands in sharp contrast with it, as its author now takes sides with the embattled Biafrans

New Perspectives on the Black Atlantic: Definitions, Readings, Practices, Dialogues, 2012

Humanities

This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege and prioritise realist literary expressions coming out of Africa. This, combined with the fact that the series was published by an educational company looking for a way to market its product in an environment that did not yet have a place for African writers when it was first launched, might also be regarded as having fostered a tendency within the publishing house to treat the works submitted to it more as socio-historical documents than as works of literary fiction and to lead to their framing in anthropological terms. The paper will investigate the precise terms in which this takes place in two case studies of some of the archival material relating to Heinemann’s interest in representing Northern Niger...

2011

Africa is a global concern even in 2011 in spite of her enormous economic and human resources. Between late 1950s when most former colonies, especially British dominions, began to obtain their independence one after the other and 2011 the “international Year for People of African descent, majority of these emerging African nations, though at various levels, have suffered socio-economic and political epilepsy, so much that Africa as a continent today is a global concern. Political instability, starvation, diseases, civil wars, corruption, etc are a common phenomenon in many African countries. The recent happenings in, Ivory Coast, Libya, Zimbabwe, and many others lend credence to this observation. In addition to these selfinflicted challenges is the flagrant and infamous enterprise of many of our leaders to maintain their holds on power indefinitely and at all costs at the expense of the lives and wellbeing of their people. There is no African country, which does not have its own sha...

2022

Migration and mobility stories have received scholarly attention in contemporary African literary criticism lately. Scholarship on African migration to the developed world has mainly focused on migrants' experience in the West with regards to race and identity and a continual propensity towards criticizing Western border closing policies. This paper, in a close reading and critical discourse analysis maneuver, explores two new generation Nigerian writers namely Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa within postcolonial theoretical framework. It purports to examine new immigration narratives in which migrants return 'home' to write about their place of origin as they have become transnationals calling attention on mayhem that this place experiences as opposed to nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideologies, of bygone era, expressed primarily in Negritude writings. Both considered narratives show that Cole and Saro-Wiwa use magical realism and travelogue form to depict the starkly mundane life condition in Nigeria with failed transportation system, socio-political corruption, and overwhelming fatalism due to not only the ruled but the ruler's failure to change their living conditions. Rather, they tend to surrender and participate in 'mutual zombification.' These writers' thematic inclination displays their pessimism and skepticism regarding Nigeria's improvement to become a place with acceptable living standards as they leave their readers to hopelessly contemplate the mess that the narratives aesthetically depict.

Before exile emerged as a major theme in African literatures, two landmark novels that paved the way for Nigerian literature from Igboland, Nwana's Omenuko (1933) and Achebe's Things fall apart (1958), provided a parallel reflection on the subject of exile within the confines of the same cultural and linguistic area, highlighting its different facets. The first novel, written in Igbo, presents the immigrant face of exile, a movement forward, while the second, written in English and published twenty-five years later, focuses on its emigrant face and the painful longing for home. The study reveals striking similarities between the two main protagonists, Omenuko and Okonkwo, from their background to their character and story, while highlighting how their character and circumstances shape their destiny.

While Chris Dunton has described Nigeria and South Africa as the two powerhouses of African fiction, their literatures have, for evident historical reasons, followed distinct trajectories. Thus far, little critical attention has been paid to comparing theorisations of contemporary South African and Nigerian novels. This article aims to contribute to re-enlivening the sorely lacking dialogue between the countries' literatures by providing a comparative reading of Mandla Langa's The Lost Colours of the Chameleon and Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel. I argue that Langa's allegorical novel dispenses with the idea of South African exceptionalism by exploring the lust for power in the postcolony. In particular, his representation of the postcolonial ruling class establishes an intertextual dialogue with writing from elsewhere on the continent. Waiting for an Angel, while engaging with postcolonial military dictatorships during the mid-1980s and 1990s in Nigeria, is also noteworthy for invoking a sense of placelessness and, therefore, offers itself for a comparative analysis. Relating the novels to their literary antecedents as well as to recent theorisations of third-generation Nigerian fiction and the post-apartheid novel, I suggest that their reflections on postcolonial leadership unsettle the boundaries of national literatures and invoke a sense of continental connectivity. ariel: a review of international english literature