Category: Literature – General
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Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library; Conceived in 1988, the idea to set up the library remained just an idea until 10 years later when the man in whose honour the project is being put together was released from incarceration ostensibly for planning a coup against General Abacha. When President Obasanjo rode from prison to the State…
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The Ozidi Saga; Play by J.P. Clark, a revenge tragedy based on an Ijaw myth about treachery and vengeance. Ozidi being a festival play and plucked from mythology, brims with African performance elements such as mime, music, dance/poetry and ritual. But behind the facade of myth, Ozidi packs a potent number of relevant socio-political comments…
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Mabel Segun; Novelist, one of Nigeria’s first generation writers. Mabel Segun is the author of My Father’s Daughter, The First Corn, Olu and The Broken Statue, Youth Day Parade, The Twins and The Tree Spirits, and Sorry, No Vacancy[i]. Her last work before her comeback in 2010 was in 1998. And before that, she had…
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John Pepper Clark; Nigerian folklorist, poet, essayist and playwright who draws on his graphic experience to empower the poetry, the songs and, indeed, the grandest engagements of his Ijaw people. He is described in biography by Femi Osofisan as the main animating force of African poetry. Clark’s vocation as a poet commenced with Juuenillla, part…
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ADEMOLA Kofoworola, educationist and children books author, known later in life as Lady Ademola, being wife of Adetokunbo Ademola, the first indigenous Chief Justice of Nigeria. Kofoworola was an early 20th Century symbol of educated elite, born 1914 to a lawyer father, Eric Moore, who was a member of the Colonial Legislative Council and who…
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Latunde Odeku, physician and poet,who was one of Nigeria’s most distinguished medical scholars, was born in 29 June 1927 in Awe, near Oyo. He schooled at Methodist Boys’ High School in Lagos from 1940-46. He was a probational officer for one year at the Nigeria Customs and Exercise Department from where he joined the Howard…
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Ajisafe Kayode Ajayi was an historian and poet born in 1875 as Emmanuel Olympus Moore. The patriotic zeal and cultural renaissance in him prompted the change of his name to a fully African one in 1921. A.K. Ajisafe is the author of The Laws and Customs of the Yoruba People published in 1924. As one…
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Mojola Agbebi is the native name of the poet and advocate of Ethiopianism, who was born April 10, 1860 as David Brown Vincent in Ilesha. Mojola repudiated his European name in 1894, the year he was ordained as a Baptist minister in Liberia. He frequently used his pulpit to deliver anticolonial sermons, which was also…
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Oba Koso is one of Duro Ladipo’s most important plays, also the best-known work in the repertory of Yoruba operatic tradition. It was with this play that Ladipo marked the first anniversary of the Oshogbo Mbari Mbayo Club. The play, published in Three plays by Duro Ladipo in 1964, was translated by Ulli Beier. Oba…