107 research outputs found
Myth and Social Consciousness in Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata
No full textThe study of myths—their relevance and importance—has always generated interest among scholars over the ages. After the initial engagements before the twentieth century when most interventions, from scholars such as Xenophanes, Plato and Euhemerus, pronounced myths as intangible, many writers today have continued to use myth as an anchor of their works. In Africa, writers like Wole Soyinka have deployed myths in the interrogation of crises in the postcolonial space. Since the publication of his seminal work, Myth, Literature and the African World (1992), which laid out the essences of primordial forms in his Yoruba tradition, Soyinka has continued to deploy the capacities of those primordial “literary” forms, particularly Ogun, in his interrogation and interventions on diverse conditions in the African landscape. Using Alapata Apatata, Soyinka’s latest play, where the issues of culture and its renaissance, survival and politics in his home country generate great concern, this article re-examines the playwright’s ambivalent attraction to myth and its use to intervene in the diverse social contradictions in the postcolonial space. The author, after establishing the link between Ogun and Alaba, the protagonist in the play, identifies Soyinka’s paradigm shift in a new twist that sees Ogun in the comedy terrain. The conclusion of the paper draws on Soyinka’s “mythmaking” or “mythbreaking” in the play in a way that conceptualises the evolutionary trend in the playwright’s exploration of Ogun
Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants and King Baabu: The crises between ideology and (social) vision
No full textAny valid inquiry into the meaning of any imaginative writing will lend itself to the salutary credentials of its content and form. This recourse has always created a divide that seeks on the one hand the aesthetic value of the art and on the other its functional or social values. The social themes discernible in the works of many African writers have provided the impetus for an assessment that digs up the social relevance and the ideological slants of such works. For Wole Soyinka, many critics, building on the ideas of Chinweizu, Madubuike and Jemie, have identified a gap between social responsiveness and ideology in his works. This paper, using Soyinka's A Play of Giants and King Baabu, re-examines the centrality of ideology to texts of social engagement in the postcolonial space. Within the context of the humanistic values that the playwright esteems, this essay scrutinizes the social conditions in the plays and the dramatist's "vision". The conclusion asserts the social relevance of the texts but queries the lack of absolute prescription in Soyinka's work under scrutiny. 
Religious Meditations and Mediation in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka
No full textMajor critical inquiries into the theatre of Wole Soyinka agree that his plays draw inspiration from two basic levels. One, which is a purely mythic consciousness perceptible in his early plays such as such as The Road and A Dance of the Forests, presents his etherealisation of African spiritualities and their interpolations with modern existence. The other is a social or political consciousness which deploys those mythic forms from ancestral memory (especially that of Ogun) as intervening tools on the conditions of dystopia in the postcolonial Nigerian landscape mirrored in his plays. By focusing on his plays The Trials of Brother Jero, Death and the King’s Horseman, Requiem for a Futurologist and Alapata Apata, this article argues that these two thrusts are harmonised in Soyinka’s mimesis on spiritualities or religion in his dramaturgy. The article locates the ambivalences in Soyinka’s refractions on spiritualities which anchor on the polarities of meditation and mediation and recognises that while meditation gives allowance for the playwright to engage on the locus of spiritualities, mediation is inspired by the crises of “modern” spiritualities which is one of the malaises in Soyinka’s hybridised postcolonial space. The conclusion of the article is sceptical about Soyinka’s prescription of hybridised spiritualities as panacea to the crises of religion but sees the need for continuous dialogue as precursor to mutual understanding and cohabitation between adherents of diverse spiritualities in the pluralised communities
Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants and King Baabu: The crises between ideology and (social) vision
No full textAny valid inquiry into the meaning of any imaginative writing will lend itself to the salutary credentials of its content and form. This recourse has always created a divide that seeks on the one hand the aesthetic value of the art and on the other its functional or social values. The social themes discernible in the works of many African writers have provided the impetus for an assessment that digs up the social relevance and the ideological slants of such works. For Wole Soyinka, many critics, building on the ideas of Chinweizu, Madubuike and Jemie, have identified a gap between social responsiveness and ideology in his works. This paper, using Soyinka's A Play of Giants and King Baabu, re-examines the centrality of ideology to texts of social engagement in the postcolonial space. Within the context of the humanistic values that the playwright esteems, this essay scrutinizes the social conditions in the plays and the dramatist's "vision". The conclusion asserts the social relevance of the texts but queries the lack of absolute prescription in Soyinka's work under scrutiny. </jats:p
Religious metaphors and the crisis of faith in Wole Soyinka’s poetry
No full textMost commentaries on Wole Soyinka’s works across genres engage with his constant invocation of cultural tropes, most of which revolve around Ogun, his self-proclaimed muse. In this article, I highlight the centrality of religious myths and metaphors in a selection of Soyinka’s poems, namely, “Idanre” in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Ogun Abibman (1976), “Joseph”, one of the “Four Archetypes” poems in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), “Mandela’s Earth” in Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1989), and selected poems under the sections “The Sign of the Zealot” and “Elegies” in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). While identifying the limitations of the poet’s Ogun trope, I dissect the centrality of faith issues in Soyinka’s poetry into two slants. The first, which is seen as encompassing his widely explored Ogun trope, is his use of religious metaphors to intervene on the dystopias in his postcolonial space. The second is his concern with the crisis of faith, a menace that has continued to threaten global peace. After drawing copious examples of religious tropes from Soyinka’s selected poems, I focus on the attention given by the poet to crisis in faith relationships. The copious examples of Soyinka’s use of religious metaphors lead to the conclusion, at the end of the paper, that access to Soyinka’s poetry is best achieved by paying attention to his religious metaphors. I also identify Soyinka’s antidote for the crisis of faith which lies in his prescription of tolerance and respect for humanist ideals
Solid Verifiable Credentials
No full textThis electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-66).Credentials are an integral part of our lives, as they express our capabilities and enable access to restricted services and benefits. In the early 2010s, the Verifiable Claims Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proposed a specification for what is now the Verifiable Credentials Data Model. This living specification, which is still in development, outlines a cogent framework for the issuance, storage, presentation, and verification of credentials on the Web. Many of the leading Verifiable Credentials projects leverage Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), potentially compromising Web interoperability and sometimes exposing otherwise personal data. SolidVC is a decentralized Verifiable Credentials platform built with the open protocols of the Web. It is implemented on top of Solid, a Web framework developed at MIT in 2016 that allows decentralized applications to interact with personal user data to provide services in an access controlled environment.by Kayode Yadilichi Ezike.M. Eng.M.Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc
Soyinka’s archetypal triad and the dialectics of terror: Soyinka’s archetypal triad and the dialectics of terror
No full text
There is doubt that the search for global peace in the world today is receiving attention unprecedented in history. Perhaps, the turning point, which opened up fresh security challenges, was the infamous 9/11 attacks on the United States of America by Al-Qaeda. Since this horrific incidence, similar carnage of the Al-Qaeda has continued with the activities of the ISIS in the Middle East, Al-Shabaab in the eastern corridors Africa, and other groups in the western part of Africa. Rightly or wrongly, ‘terrorism’ is always used as label for the activities of these groups. This paper examines the subjective nature of the term, using selected poems from Wole Soyinka’s Idanre and Other Poems (1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), Ogun Abibiman (1976), Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1989) and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have known (2002), as basis of analysis. The writer, drawing a compelling link between terrorist actions and the interventions of Ogun, Atunda, Shaka and Mandela in the selected poems, establishes, from the perspective of Soyinka, the causes of and antidote to terrorist acts. The conclusion of the paper emphasizes that the easiest route to the much needed global peace lies in mutual respect of boundaries by all.
 
Performance, Haematological and Serum Biochemical Profile of Cockerels Fed Diets Supplemented with Fermented Moringa oleifera Seeds
No full textOf Divination Tray and the Search for Utopia: A Postcolonial Reading of Okinba Launko’s Selected Poems
No full textPrimordial oral literary forms have always been very central to the evolution of modern African literature. Arguably, these forms have impacted on modern African poetry, not only on account of their recurrence in the works of poets, but also as important indices in current poetry studies and criticism. Contemporary African poets have since stretched the limits and aesthetics of these forms to emphasize their relevance in the postcolonial space, following after the Negritude poets who set the antecedent in the use of Africa’s primordial forms,. This paper, using selected poems from Okinba Launko’s Dream-Seeker on Divining Chain (1993), Commemorations (2007) Seven Stations Up the Trays Way (2013), discusses the different tropes and manifestations of oral forms in modern African poetry. The writers isolate the poet’s use of Ifa, the Yoruba divinity muse, to comment on the dilemmas of the postcolonial space. The paper concludes that the dialectic prism of Okinba Launko’s poetry exteriorizes a neo-negritude template that sustains the relevance of primordial forms in African poetry.
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