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The Ozidi Saga is one of Africa's best known prosimetric epics, set in the Delta region of Nigeria. Blood on the Tides examines the epic -- a tale of a warrior and his sorcerer grandmother's revenge upon the assassins who killed her son -- both as an example of oral literature and as a reflection of the specific social and political concerns of the Nigerian Delta and the country as a whole. In addition the book considers various iterations of the saga, including a performance of the entire saga in 1963 in Ibadan by the folk artist Okabou Okobolo, which was subsequently transcribed, translated, and edited by the renowned Nigerian poet, playwright, and scholar John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. The study concludes with a look at the work of contemporary Nigerian creative writers and their connection to the powerful literary and historical currents of the Ozidi story. Isidore Okpewho is Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY). He is the author of The Epic in Africa, Myth in Africa, African Oral Literature, and Once upon a Kingdom. An award-winning novelist, he has published four titles: The Victims, The Last Duty, Tides, and Call Me by My Rightful Name.
Organized by major themes—such as creation stories, and resistance to oppression—this collection gather works of imagination, politics and history, religion, and culture from many societies and across recorded time. Asante and Abarry marshal together ancient, anonymous writers whose texts were originally written on stone and papyri and the well-known public figures of more recent times whose spoken and written words have shaped the intellectual history of the diaspora. Within this remarkably wide-ranging volume are such sources as prayers and praise songs from ancient Kemet and Ethiopia along with African American spirituals; political commentary from C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Joseph Nyerere; stirring calls for social justice from David Walker, Abdias Nacimento, Franzo Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Featuring newly translated texts and ocuments published for the first time, the volume also includes an African chronology, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. With this landmark book, Asante and Abarry offer a major contribution to the ongoing debates on defining the African canon. Author note:Molefi Kete Asanteis Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Temple University and author of several books, includingThe Afrocentric Idea(Temple) andThe Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans.Abu S. Abarryis Assistant Chair of African American Studies at Temple University.
Using stories he collected from narrators from the old West African kingdom of Benin, the author shows how the present mirrors the past in both folklore and political reality, suggesting that African states fail to create a level playing field for the plural identities within their borders, leaving marginalized peoples uncertain of their place in an uneven socio-political landscape.
Set in Nigeria in 1975. When their Delta homeland is threatened, two journalists join forces in a project which brings them into tragic contact with security forces and dissidents alike.
The Izon of the Niger Delta is a global history of the Izon, Ijo, or Ijaw people from their homelands in the Niger Delta, through Nigeria, the West and Central African coastlands, and in the Africa diaspora into Europe, the America's and the Caribbean. It is a preliminary study which raises questions and opens ground for further research. The book provides chapters that take an overview of issues on the environment of the Niger Delta, an analysis of the Ijo population, the language, culture, resources, history and linkage to the rest of Nigeria and the world. In effect these chapters provide a synopsis of the Ijo in the past and their situation in the present.
A novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history—a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formation Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them. Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.
Africa's strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka and J. M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa south of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical status - an entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebe - or can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures.
". . . its pages come alive with wonderful illustrative material coupled with sensitve and insightful commentary." —Reviews in Anthropology " . . . the scope, breadth, and lucidity of this excellent study confirm that Okpewho is undoubtedly the most important authority writing on African oral literature right now . . . " —Research in African Literatures "Truly a tour de force of individual scholarship . . . " —World Literature Today " . . . excellent . . . " —African Affairs " . . . a thorough synthesis of the main issues of oral literature criticism, as well as a grounding in experienced fieldwork, a wide-ranging theoretical base, and a clarity of argument rare among academics." —Multicultural Review "This is a breathtakingly ambitious project . . . " —Harold Scheub " . . . a definitive accounting of the evidence of living oral traditions in Africa today. Professor Okpewho's authority as an expert in this important new field is unrivaled." —Gregory Nagy "Isidore Okpewho's African Oral Literature is a marvelous piece of scholarship and wide-ranging research. It presents the most comprehensive survey of the field of oral literature in Africa." —Emmanuel Obiechina " . . . a tour de force of scholarship in which Okpewho casts his net across the African continent, searching for its verbal forms through voluminous recent writings and presents African oral literature in a new voice, proclaiming the literariness of African folklore." —Dan Ben-Amos "This is an outstanding book by a scholar whose work has already influenced how African literature should be conceived. . . . Professor Okpewho is a scholar with a special talent to nurture scholarship in others. After this work, African literature will never be the same." —Mazisi Kunene Isidore Okpewho, for many years Professor of English at the University of Ibadan, is one of the handful of African scholars who has facilitated the growth of African oral literature to its status today as a literary enterprise concerned with the artistic foundations of human culture. This comprehensive critical work firmly establishes oral literature as a landmark of high artistic achievement and situates it within the broader framework of contemporary African culture.