Category: Literature
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Duro Ladipo was a playwright of international renown born in 1931 to a clergyman. Ladipo spent his childhood in Osogbo, acquiring primary and middle school education in a mission school. Through in-service training he qualified as a teacher in 1958; a considerable educational achievement in his time. Shortly after getting into trouble with his church…
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Samuel Johnson was an historian and Anglican minister known for his authorship of the standard reference for the History of the Yorubas. Born in 1846 to Yoruba Sierra Leonean returnees in the lineage of the one of the Alaafin of the Oyo Empire, Abiodun. The Johnsons moved to Ibadan when Samuel was eleven years old. Three…
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Sanusi Olusi was the Oba of Lagos who came to the throne in 1928 upon the death of Ibikunle Akitoye whose path he trailed in discontinuing with paganism. Eleko Esugbayi, his predecessor who made enemies among British officials was still in exile around this time. Sanusi bowed out peacefully when Eleko Esugbayi won the legal…
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Emmanuel Gladstone Olawale Rotimi is one of the best known Nigerian playwrights. He was born April 1938 in Sapele to a Yoruba radical Lagos trade-union activist father and an Ijaw mother. His artistic life commenced in 1942 when he performed in a play adapted and produced by his father. In his secondary school days at…
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Opera is a staged dramatic work enlivened with inclusion of songs, dance, and drum beats. In western Nigeria, this is spiced with the demonstration of the beauty and melody that abound in the specially selected words of the various genres of Yoruba traditional poetry. Drama has always been part of the local African philosophy in…
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The Gods Are Not To Blame is a classic play by Ola Rotimi set in 15th Century western region of Nigeria, in which Odewale, a man destined to kill his father and marry his mother finds himself in a mill of events that brings about the very thing that was meant from his birth to…
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Bible is the Christian Holy book, containing together with the canonical collection of Jewish texts, the good news of the gospel of Christ and of the hope of the saints. The Bible was first translated into the Yoruba language in 1862. Until the 1887 Education ordinance of the Lagos colony, education was the exclusive concern…