“The accident of the accent”: satiric reflections of contemporary Nigeria in Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata

The accident of the accent is the hilarious and artistic device Wole Soyinka employs to portray the societal failings and ways to ameliorate them in Alapata Apata as a writer of national consciousness and global realities. Previous critical studies on this text have focused on the avalanche of satirical elements and their societal manifests in the play with little or no consideration for the accentual mistake (the accident of the accent) and its satirical implications. This is the critical lacuna that this study attempts to fill. The primary text shall be Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata which will be subjected to critical textual analysis. Inspirations are drawn from Gerard Genette’s model of Narratology as the theoretical framework to allow for the investigation of the intrinsic visual and auditory images in the text and to undergird the analysis of the findings. It is discovered that there are three prominent strands of accentual representations and their corresponding interpretations of Alapata Apata: Alapata Apata (the butcher on the rock), Alapata Apata (rock spliter) and Alapata Apata (the ruler of the rock domain). This paper concludes that Soyinka’s artistic talent in the play lies largely in the presentation of Yoruba, his mother tongue accent marks to sift out the socio- political faults in his society and by extension in the entire nation of the world.

Cultural Representation in Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and The Jewel

This article attempts to pinpoint the interaction of Cultural Representation in Wole Soyinka’s play The Lion and the Jewel. Culture can be perceived as a bunch of regular convictions that hold individuals together, these normal convictions lead to social practices, and practices that are instilled with significance. Culture is to incorporate every one of the aspects of human experience that stretch out past our actual truth, culture alludes how we comprehend ourselves both as people and as member of the society incorporates stories, religion, media, ceremonies, and even language.The Europeans colonization in African made many changes in their culture, some people thought that they are reformed by the European, but some thought that their culture was changed by them. The play sets in the village named Ilujinle in West Africa, and it has the characteristics like comedy, love, myth, folklore, dance, music, and cultural conflict between old culture and new culture, because the old culture was followed by uneducated people, they were led by Baroka and the new culture was followed by Lakunle, who works as a teacher in that village. Wole Soyinka presents the custom and traditions of Yoruba in the play The Lion and the Jewel and he created significant characters, who defends the modernity because they are deeply rooted with old custom and tradition of their culture.

Deconstructing the terrible gift of postcolonial African lives: An intertextual reading of Martin Egblewogbe’s Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories.

This paper situates Martin Egblewogbe’s short story collection Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories (2008) within intertextual discourses as they relate to the tri-generational canon of Ghanaian, and by extension, African literature. It argues against the easy temptation of reading the work via uncontextualized metaphysical or existentialist paradigms, or what Wole Soyinka (1976) refers to as the undifferentiated mono-lenses of “universal humanoid abstractions,” and instead situates it within the Ghanaian tradition by pointing out the collection’s filiation to the specific trope of madness-as-a subversive-performance-of-resilience against the oppressive socio-political status quo in that tradition. The paper excavates the works of first generation postcolonial Ghanaian authors such as Armah, Awoonor and Aidoo, and reads Egblewogbe’s relatively recent debut oeuvre against them in a grounded epistemic manoeuvre that fractures assumptions about the work’s uniqueness and places it in on-going trans-generational dialogic exchanges about how to negotiate the fractious crucible that is postcolonial Ghanaian experience.