Literature

The interpreters, written by Wole Soyinka in 1965, divided into two parts, is a social realism which major theme centres on the post-independence moral decadence that plagues the Nigerian society, up-till date, attempted to be solved by the Nigerians who had just returned from studies abroad. Each of the main characters is engaged in the enterprise of interpreting himself in relation to the society in which he lives, in an attempt to discover the right way to live. The narrative is, as a result, multi-stranded and employs a shifting, subjective time-scale, and in some aspects, the narrative situation used is figural, sometimes resulting in flashbacks; rendered with an intense use of language somewhat complex and metaphorical. The novel has its settings in Lagos and University of Ibadan. There is a range of character types in The Interpreters in that each of the main personae has an individual way of interpreting the world, though of course, due to their association with each other, there is a degree of commonality in some respects, both in the sense of shared experience and of quality of experience as intellectuals, though with some exceptions. However, their interpretations tilted towards the same thought stemming from shared experiences as intellectuals, except Kola. They bear the burden of the author’s worries and emphasis on indecision. They collectively and helplessly search for self-identity as a way out of the identity crisis and lack of moral stance.

The Adventures of Souza: A rascally village boy goes hunting, enrolls in a secret cult, meets a magician and engages in other adventures. What were his experiences?

The Late Kola Onadipe had a career both in education and business.

Ralia is missing from home under mysterious and unfortunate circumstances. Therefore, sh goes through ordeals, one after the other: First in the hands of a wicked witch and then a hunter.

Will she survive these ordeals and return home...... and under what circumstances?

The Boy Slave. Shettima was born near the edge of the Sahara in 1865. He was captured by slavers and sold into a strange new life.

Koku. one of a set of twins is customarily abandoned and left to perish. Is it right to do that? What about our "Human Rights" to live?

Did he survive the ordeal, ........ and what was the result of his experience?

The Return of the Boy Slave: In Kola Onadipe's book, The Boy Slave, Shettima grows up in slavery. This is the story of how, having won his freedom, he uses it to fight against the slave traders.

Hailed by The Washington Post as "a definitive synthesis of the best editions" and by The Times of London as "a monument to Shakespearean scholarship," The Oxford Shakespeare is the ultimate anthology of the Bard's work: the most authoritative edition of the plays and poems ever published.

Now, almost two decades after the original volume, Oxford is proud to announce a thoroughly updated second edition, including for the first time the texts of The Reign of Edward III and Sir Thomas More, recognizing these two plays officially as authentic works by Shakespeare. This beautiful collection is the product of years of full-time research by a team of British and American scholars and represents the most thorough examination ever undertaken of the nature and authority of Shakespeare's work. The editors reconsidered every detail of the text in the light of modern scholarship and they thoroughly re-examined the earliest printed versions of the plays, firmly establishing the canon and chronological order of composition. All stage directions have been reconsidered in light of original staging, and many new directions for essential action have been added. This superb volume also features a brief introduction to each work as well as an illuminating General Introduction. Finally, the editors have added a wealth of secondary material, including an essay on language, a list of contemporary allusions to Shakespeare, an index of Shakespearean characters, a glossary, a consolidated bibliography, and an index of first lines of the Sonnets.

Compiled by the world's leading authorities, packed with information, and attractively designed, The Oxford Shakespeare is the gold standard of Shakespearean anthologies.

Spirited and intelligent, Morayo grows up surrounded by school friends and family in Ibadan. There is Eniayo, her adoring little sister—for whose sake their middle-class parents fight stigmatising superstition—and a large extended family of cousins and aunts who sometimes make Morayo’s home their own. A shameful secret forced upon her by Bros T, her cousin, thrusts Morayo into a web of oppressive silence woven by the adults around her. Morayo must learn to fiercely protect herself and her sister as young women growing up in a complex and politically charged country.

Life becomes tough when you are faced with difficult circumstances, societal hindrances and the drive to fulfill your purpose on earth. Then it becomes difficult to understand the reason for your pain when placed on a scale with God’s word and the intent for your life. The question is, what do you do in those times?

So, are you torn between the height you have attained and the dark secrets that keep threatening your light? Are you caught in a web of confusion with no idea why you are created? Are you struggling with the pain you feel as you strive to actualise your purpose in life? Have you tried everything possible to ensure you step out of the dark and let the world see your light? In Understanding Power and Accomplishing Purpose, Debby critically highlights those ups and downs using scriptural teachings with poetry pari pasu life experiences of individuals shared in the book to explain how difficult - but easy – it is, actualising God’s purpose on earth.

Understanding Power & Accomplishing Purpose is an eye opener to purpose in pain. Everyone seeking an explanation to their pain and suffering should get a copy of this book.

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today–written as a letter to a friend.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response.
Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can “allow” women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

Early Soyinka endeavors to reveal Wole Soyinka’s precocious talent as a writer of stories, dramas, essays, letters, humorous sketches and jokes, by presenting a collection of essays on writings by Soyinka composed prior to publication of his first books in 1963. The underlying argument in the book appears to be that Soyinka’s early works cannot be considered as “juvenilia or immature scribblings” for they already display a high command of language and acceptable formal structures.

The introduction lays out the background of the book when Bernth Lindfors attempts to settle a score with Biodun Jeyifo and Soyinka. Lindfors first retells Jeyifo’s position in Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (2004), in which the latter identified Lindfors as one “who, almost alone among students of Soyinka’s writings, has been obsessed with his literary juvenilia, hoping therein to find materials to prove Soyinka was once a rookie writer, a neophyte artist, even if his rise to fame seemed instantaneous and meteoric.” Then, Lindfors reveals Soyinka’s misunderstanding of his efforts to demonstrate that Soyinka’s earliest writings were not the “awkward fumblings of a neophyte artist but the handiwork of a skilled craftsman who could articulate original ideas with fluency, precision and persuasiveness.” Soyinka had apparently taken issue with Lindfors in his essay “The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies,” by branding the latter as a “hagiographer extraordinary, who re-creates my juvenilia, in the old University College of Ibadan; every page of his essay contains at least one inaccuracy of time and place and a series of absurd attributions.” Lindfors’ probable purpose in bringing out these two misinterpretations of his interest in that early expressive body of work is to show the reason why many critics have refrained from studying Soyinka’s writings prior to publication of A Dance of the Forests, The Lion and the Jewel, and Three Plays in 1963. By considering these first published works as the starting point for an exploration of Soyinka’s talent and personality, those critics have been “studying the growth of a tree without examining its roots.” Early Soyinka aims then at putting things right by studying the growth of Soyinka from a close examination of his roots.

"Unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably one of her finest." (New York Times Book Review) When the Military decrees that a crime carrying a prison sentence now retroactively warrants summary execution, confusion and fear permeate a society where the brutality and injustice of military rule is parodied by life inside prison. Based on events in Nigeria in the early 1980s Wole Soyinka's stage play From Zia with Love and radio play A Scourge of Hyacinths, were produced in the early 90s when the writer was exiled by Sani Abacha's notorious and unjust military regime.

Previously unpublished, Salutation to the Gut is an essay Soyinka wrote more than forty years ago. The essay is a celebration of Yoruba culture, in particular Yoruba food and gastronomic culture. Its witty and whimsical style foreshadows the kind of writing that would become Soyinka's hallmark, and for which he would subsequently win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After an exceptionally successful career as a butcher; Alaba, the protagonist of this play decided that he deserves a life of quite retirement. Unfortunately beneath the rock on which he has chosen to make his abode are precious mineral deposits. Soon, both Alaba and the rock become a place of more than passing interest to everyone – from the lowly, to denizens of power: The outcome of this rollicking drama is more than anyone, least of all, Alaba himself, bargained for:

Wole Soyinka’s latest play, is a powerful satire of the idiosyncrasies and excesses of our contemporary Nigeria society; the corruption of power; opportunism and cultural alienation.

Nigeria as a country is bedevilled by myriads of paradoxes. These unite to dwarf its stature and hence there have been popular calls for a National Conference. Yet the powers-that-be oppose its convening with overt recalcitrance prompting Soyinka at Emeka Anyaoku's 70'" Birthday to articulate his position once again and ask "Will the National Conference open up a Pandora's Box?"

Death and the King's Horseman is a play by Wole Soyinka based on a real incident that took place in Nigeria during British colonial rule: the ritual suicide of the horseman of an important chief was prevented by the intervention of the colonial authorities. In addition to the British intervention, Soyinka calls the horseman's own conviction toward suicide into question, posing a problem that throws off the community's balance.

BOMBOY is a story about Leke, a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. BomBoy is a well-crafted, and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding of both the smallness and magnitude of a single life.

The Lion and the Jewel is a play by Wole Soyinka first performed in 1959. It chronicles how Baroka, the lion, fights with the modern Lakunle over the right to marry Sidi, the titular Jewel. Lakunle is portrayed as the civilized antithesis of Baroka and unilaterally attempts to modernize his community and change its social conventions for no reason other than the fact that he can. The transcript of the play was first published in 1962 by Oxford University Press. Soyinka emphasises the theme of the corrupted African culture through the play as well as how the youth should embrace the original African culture.

The Strong Breed is one of the best known plays by Wole Soyinka. It is a tragedy that ends with an individual sacrifice for the sake of the communal benefit. The play is centered on the tradition of egungun, a Yoruba festival tradition in which a scapegoat of the village carries out the evil of the community and is exiled from the civilization. Eman, the play's protagonist, takes on the role of "carrier", knowing it will result in beating and exile. He does this to spare a young simpleton the same fate. The ritual takes an unexpected turn as Eman flees. His pursuers set a trap for him that results in his death.

The Jero Plays by Wole Soyinka consist of two short plays re-released as a collection in 1973. The Trials of Brother Jero first came out in 1964, while Jero’s Metamorphosis was published two years later in 1966. Both plays satirize Christianity and religious hypocrisy, particularly, the unquestioning devotion that many converts display towards their spiritual leaders, often exposing themselves to manipulation in the process.

As the title suggests, The Trials of Brother Jero is about a charlatan preacher, Brother Jero.  Brother Jero is a cunning beach diviner who woos customers (penitents) to his church by using Christian superstition for his own salvation. For him, the church is a business. He says:

 ‘I am glad I got here before any customers-I mean worshipers..  l always get a feeling every morning that am a shopkeeper waiting for customers.’

Brother Jero is suave while his followers are gullible. He lures people to his church by promising them material gains and promotions through prayer. Chume his assistant often seeks for permission to beat his arrogant wife Amope but Brother Jero disagrees:

‘ I keep my followers dissatisfied because if they are satisfied, they won’t come again..’

This was Soyinka's first collection of poems after winning the Noble prize in literature in 1986 and it is like a political collection as well as a poetic work.

Poems of Black Africa is a poetry anthology edited by Wole Soyinka, and published in 1975 (see 1975 in poetry) as part of the Heinemann African Writers Series. It was arranged by theme.

A savage, stabbing inquiry, not into human nature proper, but into human nature viewed through the concave mirrors of solitary confinement and human evil, stretched and warped into horrible familiarity. Soyinka is hard to read, if you read him straight -- this book is most effective when you enter into its twisting, doubling corridors and let Soyinka transform your mind and introspection into a prison of your own. Like most great books, this one works on several levels: an indictment of political injustice, a pyschological study of the prisoner, and (pardon the cliche) a metaphor for the human condition. Brilliant and haunting.

During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) Wole Soyinka was arrested and incarcerated for twenty-two months, most of it spent in solitary confinement in a cell, 4ft by 8ft. His offence: assisting the Biafran secessionists.

The Man Died, now regarded as a classic of prison literature, is a product of this experience. What comes through in the compelling narrative is the author's uncompromising, principled stand on the universality and indivisibility of freedom and human rights.

The Nobel Laureate's reputation as a dramatist tends to cloud his poetic achievement, and in modern African literature, poetry lives in the shadow of fiction. The criticism of Soyinka's poetry has so far centred on his themes of individuality and death, his imagery, and on the controversy over his authenticity, obscurity and difficulty. Here, in a new approach, an academic himself and one of the leading younger generation of African poets, discusses critically the voice and viewpoint of the poet with the object of establishing Soyinka's persona. The book covers the personality and world view of the man, as revealed in his poetry.

Zak Biko is a good looking, black South African born in Soweto, who has become famous for his prowess as an ace detective with the FBI in New York City. 124pp, UK. MACMILLAN EDUCATION.

1982 0333332555 Paperback

This Volume consists of African Proverbs I, II, and III

Bitter Leaf is a richly textured, poetic and evocatively imagined tale about love and loss, parental and filial bonds, and everything in between that makes life bittersweet.

…..a poetically evocative story, rich in texture and vivid descriptions…emotionally accessible and moving…an impressive debut novel.

Okereke’s greatest skill lies in her avoidance of moralising  while telling this engaging, modern-day morality tale.
- Financial Times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chioma OkerekeChioma Okereke was born in Benin City, Nigeria and moved to London at the age of seven. She started her writing career as a poet before turning her hand to fiction. Her work has been shortlisted in the Undiscovered Authors Competition 2006, run by Bookforce UK, and in the Daily Telegraph ‘Write a Novel in a Year’ Competition 2007. Bitter Leaf is her first novel.

The love between Makalay and Yankuba is fiery and unpredictable. Yankuba has caught the attention of the unscrupulous village priest, who sees a way of making himself a very wealthy man. Can the two young people thwart Pa Adekali and manage to live their lives for better - or will they find matters turn out for worse? 153pp, UK. MACMILLAN EDUCATION.

1995 0333631056 Paperback

The contents of a tin box – a handful of letters; old journals with marked pages and annotations; school reports; notebook jottings; tax and other levy receipts; minutes of meetings; and programme notes of special events – which belonged to his father, S. A. (“Essay”) Soyinka, a school teacher during the colonial period in Nigeria, provide the grist for Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, the second instalment of Wole Soyinka's memoirs – a son's fictionalised “voyage” into the life and times of his father.

A well written account of childhood in pre independence Yorubaland. Although it is probably not typical, it illustrates the essence of the Yoruba parenting style, a style that makes every adult a parent and every child dutiful. I recommend it.