The degradation of the Niger Delta environment through pollution has constituted challenges and concern for the people of the oil rich region. The ecosystem has completely been violated and destroyed.
This article examines the communicative significance and sociolinguistic import of deathprevention names in Mbube, Ogoja Local Government Area of Cross River State, Southeastern Nigeria. Naming in the Mbube cultural context reveals deep insights into the relationship between the name-giver and the cultural framework of the Mbube people. This study is an attempt to identify death-prevention names Mbube people bestow and what they communicate in terms of ideology, spirituality and social solidarity. The study relies on Leech’s (1983) socio-pragmatic paradigm on meaning processes, which interrogates social perceptions underlying participants’ interpretation and performance of communicative action (Kasper and Rose, 2002:2). Data for the study were sourced from givers and bearers of death-prevention names in the study area. Interviews and participants observations were the key elicitation techniques with respondents who have in-depth knowledge of the history, language and culture of the Mbube people. The study gains sufficient insights from Mbube religious beliefs, cosmology and history, which resonate in the Mbube naming system generally and death-prevention names in particular. Findings reveal that Mbube death-prevention names confer honour on both the past (ancestors) and the present (living beings), and serve as symbolic resources that encode deep cultural meanings, construct identity and reinforce the notion of personhood.
The contemporary Nigerian novel is much about the accentuation of the theme of despair, drawing on issues of unemployment, harsh economic realities, political crises, insurgency and corruption. It also explores this despondence and the search for a better life. The choice of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance illustrates this point. The paper explores the despair that the youths encounter in the face of changing times and the struggle to scale through the despair. The critical textual analysis undertaken in this article reveals that lack of gainful employment has caused the youths in On Black Sister’s Street to flee the country in search of greener pastures where they are forced to work as prostitutes. The protagonists of the two novels are caught in one web of despair, but have the hope of leading a better life. The novels illuminate how despite the characters’ predicament, they are ready as well as willing to press on in order to change their precarious situations. This tenacity of hope serves as the novelistic vision of the authors.
This paper seeks to explore the New Historicist dimensions in the Nigerian novel with a focus on Helon Habila's Measuring Time. The Nigerian history as seen by Habila has not validated many assumptions and needs to be revised .This revision of history by Habila puts the Nigerian history in proper perspective. The new historicist dimensions in this novel include: history, culture politics and the military. It is the position of this paper that the Nigerian writer should begin to write about Nigeria's most recent history. It is the exploration of this most recent history in Habila's Measuring Time that this paper sets out to examine using the tenets of new historicism. This theory examines primarily the historical as well as cultural aspects of the text. It also sees the text as an associate unit of other texts and it is in the network of these texts that meaning is realized. This most recent history as seen in this novel includes religious crises, corruption, the military usurpation of political power and electoral fraud.The paper reveals that if Nigeria would get her elections right and put right leaders in place, there would be a multiplier effect on other sectors of the polity and the wellbeing of the citizenry would be improved. The paper opines that the failure of Nigerian leaders to manage their affairs should not be blamed only on colonialism. Both the leadership and followership have a duty not to fail.
The Western voice is one of the pioneering voices in the early development of the feminist criticism of the Nigerian novel. As a result it constantly deploys Western critical methods into the criticism of the Nigerian Novel .This paper therefore re-examines these issues using meta-criticism in order to put the feminist ideology in proper perspective in the Nigerian Novel. The feminist ideology in the Nigerian Novel tends to reduce Africa to cultural satellite of Europe. The attempts by the practitioners of feminist theory to define and align themselves with the theory have produced many strands of the same theory. Among these strands are: feminism, motherism, womanism among others, all in an effort to remain African and still relevant within the global perspectives. The paper discusses Western feminist critics' views on the Nigerian novel. The paper concludes that though the theory is gaining wide acclaim in Nigeria, what this paper advocates is womanism which is accommodative, complimentary and non-radical in its approach
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