Chinua Achebe’s Engagement with City Life in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People

In spite of the encomiums often poured on Chinua Achebe for inventing the modern African novel, his orientation of resuscitating a sense of pride in Africa’s own cultural achievement tends to overshadow his interest in city life. This paper offers a study of Achebe’s engagement with city life through No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People and foregrounds his demonstrable concern about the problems plaguing the modern African city. The paper uses the Postcolonial approach which focuses on the destructive effects of colonialism on traditional values to critically examine Achebe’s literary rendering of city experience. It pays particular attention to what seems to be Achebe’s conclusion that what happens in the city are a brain child of colonisation and that urban pollution is a result of the invasion and destruction of African values by colonial experience. The parochial attitude of ethnic groups in the city often rob city dwellers of confidence of citizenship; hence, they tend to regard the city as an entity that creates or exacerbates their misery and generally stand in their way of achieving true happiness. This unhelpful attitude has negative implication for the reading public since people act from perception rather than reality

Building Ibadan on Ake: Childhood Influence and the Making of Adult Activist in the Autobiographies of Wole Soyinka

That Wole Soyinka’s activism both nationally and internationally assumes an epic proportion  can as well be taken for granted, what with his roles in the making of Nigeria’s post-independence history, his poetic intervention in apartheid South Africa, and his unflinching fidelity to the cause of Pan-Africanism. But it is to his autobiographies one must turn in order to assess the great impact of his childhood influence on his activism, which sometimes almost inverts his status as first and foremost a writer and Nobel laureate. For, indeed beyond the derogation of autobiographies’ vulnerability to flutters of exaggerated emotions and mawkish romanticism, there definitely remains a validation of the truism that they more often than not reflect with profound acuity how much of adult configuration and accomplishment are extracted from the influence of innocent, impressionable childhood. This paper therefore seeks to explore first the representations of some adult activist characters in his autobiography of childhood, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981). Of deserved mention are his parents and their role in anti-colonial struggle. But perhaps more important are the duo of Reverend and Mrs. Kuti and their much more direct activism coupled with their revolutionary tendencies, especially by Reverend Kuti to initiate the little boy into the domain of global consciousness through analyses and debates of international news items and publications to the extent of alerting him to the subtle nuances of imperialism and racism on the global stage. On the other hand, the paper will consider the transmutation of the child in Ake into a remarkable adult political activist in Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (1994), arguing that his adult activism owes so much to the adult activist characters of his childhood autobiography

Feminine Melancholia in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day: A Kristevan Perspective

This paper is an interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism. As the principles of psychoanalysis reveals, many opinions often expressed about some literary works can be interrogated, and in this case, such opinions suggest that social factors exclusively are responsible for the behavioural traits of protagonists of the narrative investigated. Psychoanalytic principles have shown that for a better understanding, works of literature, which portray human actions, should also highlight the influences of unconscious factors on characters’ behaviour. Without this, the critical endeavour is incomplete. This paper investigates Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day with the intention of identifying the behavioural traits in the major protagonists of the narrative that establish them as victims of ‘melancholia’. The paper is a psychoanalytic critical reading of the novel in which Julia Kristeva’s postulations are utilized in determining the presence as well as the motivations for the psychological problems in the female protagonists of the narrative.&nbsp

A Critical Reflection on the Relevance of Philosophy in the Contemporary World

It was Karl Marx, who once said that philosophers have only succeeded in interpreting the world in various ways; what is left is for them is to change it. It is precisely this type of perception that is serving as a catalyst to this paper. The man who has never sought the truth or one who thinks that he or she already possesses it never feels upset or disturbed. If the former is deficient in ambition, the latter is lacking in foresight. The essence of philosophy is metaphysical - the metaphysical urge to penetrate reality not the task of changing the world! This paper is an exercise in philosophical inquiry and reflections on the contemporaneous and typical question of relevance of philosophy to society and development in the contemporary world. We show the importance of philosophy to other disciplines and bring out its importance as an intellectual enterprise and show its mutual cross fertilization of ideas as the search for truth, knowledge, reality and value, which are the driving forces behind intellectual inquiry

John Lyons’ Chomsky: A Review Essay

This paper is based on the account of Lyons (1970) on the exploit of one of the greatest linguistic scholars, Noam Chomsky, in the book titled Chomsky. Lyons critically examined Chomsky’s contribution and influence in the grammatical theories of Linguistics. He traced the development of Linguistics from the evolution of the Bloomfieldian school of linguistics, the famous and foremost American school of linguistics. Apart from the fact that the school serves as a springboard of some sort for early linguists before and after the Second World War, it is the same school that produced Chomsky, unarguably, the most notable figure in theoretical linguistics of our time

“No Text is an Island”: Intertextuality in the Drama of Hope Eghagha

Intertextuality is a persistent conceptual framework on which many Nigerian plays are constructed. Starting with Soyinka and ClarkBekederemo, playwrights in Nigeria tend to rewrite and hold dialogues with their predecessors’ works. As a concept, intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva to encapsulate issues of “re-writing”, re –visioning, confrontation, adaptation, processes of borrowing, reinterpretation, interrogation/debate with older texts. It lends credence to T.S. Eliot’s idea in “Tradition and Individual Talent”. Its focus is examining codes, themes, images of older texts found in new ones. Thus, Intertextuality features prominently in Eghagha’s Death Not a Redeemer. This paper focuses on this play by exploring some of the ways in which Eghagha rewrites the themes and motifs of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.The central point linking these plays is ritual death. Has this concept been challenged, modified and translated by the playwright? What has he taken or jettisoned in order to envision a certain cultural life? The paper concludes that Eghagha has reproduced and extended the dramatic situation by incorporating the dynamics of a postcolonial African state

ASSESSMENT OF LAND SUSCEPTIBILITY TO GULLY EROSION IN ORUMBA NORTH LGA, ANAMBRA STATE, SOUTH EASTERN NIGERIA

This study utilizes GIS techniques to determine land susceptibility to gully erosion in Orumba North LGA of Anambra State. Environmental variables of interest in the study include land use, slope (DEM), drainage and soil. The methodology also involves land use classification and reclassification in raster format. Weights are assigned to each raster cell of selected environmental variables according to their level of significance to soil erosion and the combination of individual variable layer susceptibility weight through overlay technique used Math Raster Calculator in GIS environment was used to determine the actual susceptibility of the land to gully erosion. The result showed that built-up land use which increased from 0.62% in 1986 to 4.43% in 2016, is the most dynamic variable that drives the development of gully erosion in the area. The 1 order streams drain about 60.58% of the study area with a total stream length of 192.65km. Over 40% of land area 0 has a slope higher than 50 and relief of 157m-203m and 203m-255m values which contribute to increase runoff velocity in the study area; thereby catalyzing erosion activities. Loamy sandy soil type covers about 51.47% and has the highest erodibility factor of 0.38. In all, the 'very high 2 susceptibility' land area to gully erosion constitutes 18.78km (5.12%). These are the 'Erosion Hotspot Areas'. The study recommends the provision of green belts infrastructures in the developmental strategies of the city planning authorities. This strategy will mitigate further development and expansion of gullies as the cities expand.&nbsp