African Languages and Societies Commons^™

Christopher Okigbo’S Intentions: A Critical Edition Of A Previously Unpublished Interview By Ivan Van Sertima, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

This is a critical edition with emendations of lacunae from indelible inkblots and termite activity of an interview with Christopher Okigbo conducted in the mid-1960s by Ivan van Sertima, the distinguished Caribbean-American anthropologist, linguist, literary critic, Afrocentric historiographer, and founding-editor of The Journal of African Civilizations (New Brunswick, NJ), who passed away on May 29, 2009, at the age of 74. It was discovered in January 2006 among Okigbo’s unpublished papers, which I catalogued at the invitation of the Christopher Okigbo Foundation, in Brussels, Belgium, now part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

‘The Mystic Drum’: Critical Commentary On Gabriel Okara’S Love Lyrics, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Structurally, Okara’s love lyric, “The Mystic Drum,” evinces a tripartite ritual pattern of initiation from innocence through intimacy to experience. By comparison to the way of Zen as manifested in the experience of Zen Master, Ch’ing Yuän Wei-hsin, this pattern resolves itself into an emotional and epistemological journey from conventional knowledge (born of innocence) through more intimate knowledge (born of closer apperception of reality) to substantial knowledge (born of experience). The substantial knowledge born of experience empowers the lover to understand that beneath the surface attractiveness of what we know very well (such as the women we love) may lie …

‘Up These Hills To The Mountain Top’: Memories Of 'The Golden Sun' In Michael Echeruo's War Poems (Distanced), Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

One of the leading voices among the first generation of post-independence African modernist poets of the twentieth-century, Michael J. C. Echeruo's second collection of poetry, Distanced (1975), is, unlike his better-known first collection, Mortality (1968), characterized by direct phrasing and open accessibility—in terms of imagery and other signifiers—to the general reader. Composed within the first four years (1970-74) after the end of the Biafran war of independence of 1967-1970, the nineteen lyrics that make up this collection look back with extraordinary candor and passion into the future of the Biafran experience, especially with regard to the problems of reintegration into …

African Language Books For Children: Issues For Authors, Viv Edwards, Jacob Marriote Ngwaru

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

Growing interest in bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa has highlighted an urgent need for reading material in African languages. In this paper, we focus on authors, one of several groups of stakeholders with responsibility for meeting this demand. We address three main issues: the nature and extent of African language publishing for children; the challenges for authors; and the available support. Our analysis is based on interviews and focus group discussions with publishers, authors, translators, educationalists, and representatives of book promotion organisations from nine African countries and documentary data on children's books in African languages in South Africa. Although there …

African Language Publishing For Children In South Africa: Challenges For Translators, Viv Edwards, Jacob Marriote Ngwaru

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

The commitment to multilingualism embedded in the 1996 South African Constitution has wide ranging implications for many aspects of education. This paper focuses on the dearth of teaching and learning materials in African languages required to deliver effective bilingual education, and on the potential role of translation in offering solutions for this problem. Drawing on an analysis of currently available African language books for children and interviews with educators, writers, publishers, translators and organisations concerned with book promotion, it explores issues which have emerged as critical for both the quality and availability of translation. Attention is drawn to the ways …

Ferdinand Oyono, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Ferdinand Oyono was a Cameroonian statesman and a Francophone novelist of the first generation of African writers who became active after World War II. He entered the literary scene at a time when writers such as his fellow Cameroonian Mongo Beti and the Senegalese Sembene Ousmane and Leopold Sedar Senghor were at their peak. Oyono and Mongo Beti are known as "the forefathers of modern African Identity" for their anticolonial novels.

The Bandi Of Northwestern Liberia: A Study Of Change And Continuityin Bandi Society To 1964, Samuel Benedict Ngovo

Dissertations

Relying on oral accounts and archival and published sources, this dissertation employed interdisciplinary methodology to examine change and continuity in traditional Bandi systems to 1964. It focuses on traditional Bandi social, religious, economic and political systems that changed and those that persisted as a result of contacts with neighboring ethnic groups, Islam, Christianity, and the Liberian state.

The Bandi of northwestern Liberia are divided into six subgroups. Nevertheless, the six subgroups of Bandi share common traditional values. The Bandi people belong to the Mande-linguistic group and share common traditional values with neighboring Mande speakers such as the Loma and Mende. …

Effects Of Solids Loadings And Particle Size Distribution On Siphon Ceramic Candle Filters, Danielle Renzi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the rural areas of Madagascar only 29% of the population has access to clean water and 10% has access to improved sanitation. It has been estimated that environmental risk factors, such as inadequate access to clean drinking water and proper sanitation, are responsible for 94% of the diarrheal disease burden. This study was focused on testing a point-of-use technology called the Tulip filter, which is a siphon ceramic candle filter impregnated with silver. The purpose is to assess its feasibility for implementation in rural regions of Madagascar through a laboratory study performed at the University of South Florida.

The …

Multilingual Education In South Africa: The Role Of Publishers, Viv Edwards, Jacob Marriote Ngwaru

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

The South African constitution and related legislative tools provide a supportive framework for multilingual education. Successful implementation, however, requires appropriate learning materials and questions remain as to the vision and commitment of publishers to producing them. Based on an analysis of currently available books for children and interviews with publishers and key figures in the book value chain, this paper explores both the educational rationale for African language publishing and the issues that constrain expansion. These issues include the heavy dependence on the schools market in a society where the majority of the population cannot or do not buy books, …

Small Flowerings Of Unhu: The Survival Of Community In Tsitsi Dangarembga's Novels, Dana Rine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Tsitsi Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.

Adolescence Is An Ocean: A Biocultural Investigation Of Youth Food Consumption In Tanzania, Elizabeth J. Danforth

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates adolescents' relationships with food and other community and household members' perceptions of youth and their food consumption to understand the multifactorial dynamic processes which create nutritional outcomes among urban and rural youth in central Tanzania. Youth are an important and demographically large population in developing countries. The identities created during this distinct stage of cultural production can be reflected in youths' food consumption and relationships with food. Nutrition likely affects how youth transition through a variety of states, including their growth and development stages, primary to secondary to higher education, child to parent, or unemployed to employed. …

At The Edge Of The Modern?: Diplomacy, Public Relations, And Media Practices During Houphouët-Boigny's 1962 Visit To The United States, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the first decade after the decolonization of most African countries, there emerged a scholarly polemic about the weight of bureaucratic politics in the making of foreign policy in the Third World. A mirror of the reigning modernization paradigm that informed most postwar area studies and social sciences, the discussion unintentionally indexed the narcissism of a hegemonic discourse on political development and statecraft. Graham Allison and Morton Halperin—the original proponents of the bureaucratic model—implied in their largely U.S.-centric model that such a paradigm was not applicable to non-industrialized countries since the newly decolonized countries, for the most …

Haitian Creole For Health Care (On Cd), Marc Prou

Marc E. Prou

Haitian Creole for Health Care on CD Haitian Creole for Health Care is a a thematic course in Haitian Creole, especially designed for health care personnel at the beginning-to-intermediate levels. The complete course consists of twenty-four lessons, depicting situations in the context of hospitals, clinics, and health care needs.

‘The Mystic Drum’: Critical Commentary On Gabriel Okara’S Love Lyrics, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

Structurally, Okara’s love lyric, “The Mystic Drum,” evinces a tripartite ritual pattern of initiation from innocence through intimacy to experience. By comparison to the way of Zen as manifested in the experience of Zen Master, Ch’ing Yuän Wei-hsin, this pattern resolves itself into an emotional and epistemological journey from conventional knowledge (born of innocence) through more intimate knowledge (born of closer apperception of reality) to substantial knowledge (born of experience). The substantial knowledge born of experience empowers the lover to understand that beneath the surface attractiveness of what we know very well (such as the women we love) may lie …

'Clearing The Forest': Critical Commentary On Gabriel Okara’S Postwar Ode, ‘The Dreamer’, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

The present essay is essentially a preliminary exploration of a previously unexplored territory of postcolonial, modernist African poetics—Gabriel Okara’s venture into the appropriation of the signs of the classical and latter-day European ode as a vehicle for both a satirical interrogation of the performance of the postcolonial civilian and military elite the dysfunctional Nigerian federation after its war against Biafra and for an understanding of the possibility of heroic regeneration in the face of the depth of , bordering on existentialist , into which the nation has been reduced by the post-civil war triumph of disorder in the hands of …

The Quest For Fulfillment: A Study Of The Organic Unity Of Christopher Okigbo’S Poetry, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

A comprehensive and systematic close-reading of Okigbo’s poetry from Four Canzones and other early poems to Path of Thunder and the unfinished “Anthem for Biafra’, this book unveils the narrative and dramatic continuity underlying Okigbo’s claim, in his preface to Labyrinths, that “although these poems were written and published separately, they are in fact organically related.” Using the traditional tools of explication du textes and assiduously rebuffing all obscurantist theoretical models, Azuonye delineates the character of the vicarious selves of the poet-protagonist through the labyrinths of his quest for fulfillment and brings powerful evidence of recurrent tropes and images from …

The Burden Of Several Centuries: Papers From The 2007 Christopher Okigbo Conference, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

A major landmark in the history of modern African letters, the 2007 Christopher Okigbo Conference, co-sponsored by Harvard, Boston University and UMass Boston, attracted scholars, intellectuals and artists from Africa, Europe and the Americas, including Achebe, Adichie, Brutus, Echeruo, Mazrui, Echeruo, and several writers of the younger generations. In vigorous debates over three packed days, Okigbo’s life and poetry were revisited from a wide diversity of perspectives framed by the theme, “Postcolonial African Literature and the ideals of the Open Society.” This book brings together the fruits of these explorations—50 poignant papers which represent an attestation of the centrality of …

Christopher Okigbo: The Critical Groundwork, 1962-2007, Edited With A Critical Introduction, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

This collection of essays covers the entire spectrum of Okigbo criticism from the earliest reviews of Heavensgate and the celebrated interviews of 1962-65 to criticism anticipating the 2007 international conference on the poetry and life of Africa’s leading transnational modernist poet of the 20th century, Christopher Okigbo (1930-1967). Divided into two parts, Part I presents biographical essays and essays offering general surveys of the Okigbo corpus or its themes from comparative and other perspectives while Part II offers focused studies of individual works from Four Canzones to Labyrinths and Path of Thunder. The collection concludes with the most comprehensive bibliography …

Christopher Okigbo: Complete Poetry, Edited With A Critical Introduction, Commentary And Notes., Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

This is the first ever collection of the complete poetry of Africa’s foremost transnational modernist poet of the twentieth-century, Christopher Okigbo (1930-1967), edited with a Critical Introduction, Commentary and Notes. Includes previously unpublished poems, among them the first drafts of early poems in Igbo and fragments of an unfinished Anthem to Biafra. Labyrinths is presented as prepared for publication by Okigbo himself side by side with Elegies for Thunder (including Path of Thunder) as conceived by the poet. Currently in press.

‘The Monstrous Anger Of The Guns’: Critical Commentary On The War Poems Of Gabriel Okara, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

Throughout the Biafran War of Independence from Nigeria (1967-1970), Gabriel Okara remained a committed Biafran. But he was neither an iconoclastic secessionist (determined to wantonly wreck any well-founded order, including the subaltern state of Nigeria) nor a romantic revolutionary (dreaming of a postcolonial African utopia rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the failed postcolonial state of Nigeria), he was a Biafran at a higher level of philosophical and humanist reasoning as eloquently argued throughout his war lyrics discussed in the present paper, whose themes include: commitment, nationalism and pacifism as they pertain to his Biafran experience; modern warfare …

Christopher Okigbo’S Intentions: A Critical Edition Of A Previously Unpublished Interview By Ivan Van Sertima, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

This is a critical edition with emendations of lacunae from indelible inkblots and termite activity of an interview with Christopher Okigbo conducted in the mid-1960s by Ivan van Sertima, the distinguished Caribbean-American anthropologist, linguist, literary critic, Afrocentric historiographer, and founding-editor of The Journal of African Civilizations (New Brunswick, NJ), who passed away on May 29, 2009, at the age of 74. It was discovered in January 2006 among Okigbo’s unpublished papers, which I catalogued at the invitation of the Christopher Okigbo Foundation, in Brussels, Belgium, now part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

African Teachers On The Colonial Frontier: Tswana Evangelists And Their Communities During The Nineteenth Century, Stephen Volz

Stephen Volz

'The White Man Laughs': Commentary On The Satiric Dramatic Monologues Of Gabriel Okara, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

Examined in the present article are two early satiric lyrics of Gabriel Okara—“Once Upon a Time” and “He Laughed and Laughed and Laughed”—which are the products of the postcolonial cultural war environment in which the issues of modernity, alterity (otherness or difference) and afro-authenticity implicated in Achebe’s ripostes on the bigotry of the colonialist critic were central. The tone of this discourse amongst leading African intelligentsia was set in the 1930’s and 1940’s by four fellow south-eastern Nigerian writers in their semi-autobiographical blueprints for African cultural emancipation—Renascent Africa ((1937)) by Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996); British and Axis Aims in Africa (1942) …

Heart Of A Lion, Mind Full Of Pride: The Paradox Of Teaching E-E As A Heuristic For Homegrown Change In Rwanda, Sarah E. Ryan

Sarah E Ryan

No abstract provided.

The Dilemmas Of Post-Identity Organizing: Unmaking Feminist Ties In Southern Rwanda, Sarah E. Ryan

Sarah E Ryan

No abstract provided.

‘Up These Hills To The Mountain Top’: Memories Of 'The Golden Sun' In Michael Echeruo's War Poems (Distanced), Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

One of the leading voices among the first generation of post-independence African modernist poets of the twentieth-century, Michael J. C. Echeruo's second collection of poetry, Distanced (1975), is, unlike his better-known first collection, Mortality (1968), characterized by direct phrasing and open accessibility—in terms of imagery and other signifiers—to the general reader. Composed within the first four years (1970-74) after the end of the Biafran war of independence of 1967-1970, the nineteen lyrics that make up this collection look back with extraordinary candor and passion into the future of the Biafran experience, especially with regard to the problems of reintegration into …

Waterstone’S And The Changing Bookselling Environment In The Uk: The Journey So Far And Prospects, Uzoechi Nwagbara

Dr Uzoechi Nwagbara

This study investigates the market environment of the United Kingdom high street bookselling business with emphasis on Waterstone’s. In doing this, stress shall be placed on a brief exploration of the global outlook of book retailing venture as it relates to the United Kingdom. Another focus of this paper is the micro"environment and macro"environment of book retailing business in the United Kingdom and the internal environment of Waterstone’s – that is a look at the PESTEL, SWOT, consumer behaviour, and Porter’s Five Forces as well as strategies for a re"invented Waterstone’s. Finally, marketing and management strategies for improved services and …

Homing In On Paradigm Shift: Ryanair Leadership In The Age Of Expensive Air Trave, Uzoechi Nwagbara

Dr Uzoechi Nwagbara

This investigation borders on a critical evaluation of the leadership style of Ryanair in the age of expensive air travel. Another thrust of the paper is a critical look at the organizational model in place at Ryanair which has made it one of the world’s most successful airlines. In doing this we shall be exploring the leadership model and paradigms as well as leadership style that Michael O’Leary, the CEO of this airline has brought to bear in the organization, which have made it an airline of choice in Europe. Also, the study will be evaluating the transformational change occasioned …

The Nigerian Press, The Public Sphere And Sustainable Development: Engaging The Post Amnesty Deal In The Niger Delta, Uzoechi Nwagbara

Dr Uzoechi Nwagbara

The coalescence of effective media and the public sphere is a synergy that brings about democracy, sustainable development and good governance. Irrespective of its shortcomings, the Nigerian media has been described as a bastion of people’s agitation, which impacts on the public sphere, a realm where private individuals meet to address societal questions with the state. This is the case with the Nigerian press, whose duties and ideals have been called to action in the wake of the amnesty deal in the Niger delta. In order to achieve peace and good governance in the region, serious grassroots and national information …