In the traditional Nigerian village where this play is set, custom demands that the King's chief horseman accompany his ruler into the afterlife by committing suicide when the King dies. When the King in this play dies, his horseman is relieved when he is barred from his traditional role by the colonial powers that have taken control of his ...
Nigerian writer Soyinka, the first Nobel laureate (1986) from black Africa, reflects on the state of the continent at the end of the 20th century, as Africans try to come to terms with their past and to clarify their relationship to the rest of the world. The book is based on three lectures Soyinka delivered at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at ...
On November 10, 1995, the Nigerian military government under General Sani Abacha executed dissident writer Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other activists, and the international community reacted with outrage. The response was quick, decisive, and nearly unanimous: Nigeria is an outcast in the global village. The events that led up to Saro-Wiwa's ...
This is one of the best-known plays by Africa's major dramatist, Wole Soyinka. It is set in the Yoruba village of Ilunjinle. The main characters are Sidi (the Jewel), 'a true village belle' and Baroka (the Lion), the crafty and powerful Bale of the village, Lakunle, the young teacher, influenced by western ways, and Sadiku, the eldest of Baroka's ...
'"The Lion and the Jewel" alone is enough to establish Nigeria as the most fertile new source of English-speaking drama since Synge's discovery of the Western Isles.' - "The Times". The ironic development and consequences of 'progress' may be traced through both the themes and the tone of the works included in this second volume of Wole Soyinka's ...
The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has been hailed as 'one of the finest poetic playwrights who have ever written in English' (Martin Esslin) and 'a writer of genius' (Irish Times). The five plays in this collection are linked by their concern with the spiritual and the social, with belief and ritual as integrating forces for social cohesion. A ...
AKE is the first volume of Wole Soyinka's acclaimed series of autobiographical works. This vivid, exuberant book is Soyinka's record of his childhood in colonial Nigeria. In rich and evocative prose he tells the tales of his schooldays and adventures in a captivating narrative, sometimes recollecting fears and dangers but always sensitive to the ...
This elegant, haunting novel takes us deep into the world of bookstore owner Boualem Yekker. He lives in a country being overtaken by the Vigilant Brothers, a radically conservative party that seeks to control every element of life according to the laws of their stringent moral theology: no work of beauty created by human hands should rival the ...
In this new book developed from the prestigious Reith Lectures, Nobel Prize--winning author Wole Soyinka, a courageous advocate for human rights around the world, considers fear as the dominant theme in world politics. Decades ago, the idea of collective fear had a tangible face: the atom bomb. Today our shared anxiety has become far more complex ...
A bitterly ironic portrait of Nigeria after Biafra Madmen and Specialists is one of Soyinka's most excoriating portrayals of abusers and abused in the new Nigeria ushered in by Biafra. Set in the 'surgery' of a doctor, the play is populated by mendicants and the 'insane' all fodder for 'experimentation' by a shape-shifting doctor whose experiments ...
The first full-length collection of poems by Wole Soyinka to appear since "A Shuttle in the Crypt" in 1972; it includes many works that are available in paperback in the UK for the first time. Soyinka, author of "The Jero Plays", is an essayist, poet and playwright and Nobel Prize-winner.
The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Soyinka now follows his modern classic "Ake: The Years of Childhood" with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland.
AKE is the first volume of Wole Soyinka's acclaimed series of autobiographical works. This vivid, exuberant book is Soyinka's record of his childhood in colonial Nigeria. In rich and evocative prose he tells the tales of his schooldays and adventures in a captivating narrative, sometimes recollecting fears and dangers but always sensitive to the ...
Never less than profound, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multiculturalism brings together 19 iconoclastic essays on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics. "Unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer".--New York Times
"Unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably one of her finest." (New York Times Book Review) When the Military decrees that a crime carrying a prison sentence now retroactively warrants summary execution, confusion and fear permeate a society where the brutality and injustice of military rule is parodied by life inside prison. ...
Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the foremost living African writers, here analyses the interconnecting worlds of myth, ritual and literature in Africa. The ways in which the African world perceives itself as a cultural entity, and the differences between its essential unity of experience and literary form and the ...
A collection of poems by the distinguished Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate. Part of this collection, "A Shuttle in the Crypt", was written during Soyinka's imprisonment for speaking out on behalf of the Biafran secessionists in the late 1960s.
Theatre, in a variety of forms and contexts, can make, and indeed has made, positive political and social interventions in a range of developing cultures across the world. In this book a distinguished team of theatre historians and dramatists explores how theatre has a dynamic and often difficult relationship with societies and states, arguing ...
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.