Emergent Tradition And The African Poetry, A Case Study Of Tanure Ojaide’s The “fate Of Vultures” And “endless Song”

This work looks into the themes and central ideas of emergent tradition and the African poetry.  It aims at examining the message of Ojaide’s as on emergent writer and his opinion about political themes and cultural themes in relation to literary tradition in African poetry.  Used in this research work is the writer’s realist ideas, background, experience and the themes preoccupying the emergent tradition and African poetry in relation to literary tradition as represented in this work by Tanure Ojaide.

Certification    ………………………………………………………………….          2         

Dedication      ………………………………………………………………….           3

Acknowledgement ……………………………………………………………             4       

Table of Content ………………………………………………………………            5        

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….            7           

CHAPTER ONE                                                                                                              

Introduction  ………………………………………………………………….             8                          

Purpose of study ……………………………………………………………...            11                            

Scope of the study ……………………………………………………………            11                            

Justification of the study ……………………………………………………..            12                                  

Methodology …………………………………………………………………            12                                 

Structure of Thesis ……………………………………………………………           13

CHAPTER TWO                                                                                                                         

Literature Review ……………………………………………………………..          15                                      

CHAPTER THREE                                                                                                               

Emergent writers and social issues, examples from Ojaide’s “The Fate of Vultures” and “The music of pain”. ………………………….           23

CHAPTER FOUR

Emergent writers and the Question of tradition, A study of “The Endless song” in Ojaide’s poetry. …………………………………….            32 

CHAPTER FIVE                                                                                                               

Summary ……………………………………………………………………         38

CONSLUSION                                                                                                                    

BIBLIOGRAPHY  ……………………………………………………….           41                                                                                                                

 

The word ‘emergent’, means something new and still developing, while ‘tradition’ is a belief custom or way of doing something that has been in existence for a long time among a particular group of people.  Therefore, emergent tradition is a new development in literary works.  Also some certain writers have come  up with  new traditions and these writers can be referred to as emergent writers in which the havereinuented the aesthetics traditions they inherited from old writers (dominant writers) and came out with some new forms of writings Oyeniyi Okunoye (2004) said that “The term ‘emergent’ is very much misunderstood.  He said that we must not confuse what is historically and materially emergent from the loose sense of emerging or the new”.  Therefore, an emergent aesthetic tradition is that which departs from the old in terms of authorial ideology mode of literary ‘Production and aesthetic’ ideology.

The writers in Africa are moved to write because they are constrained to respond to the call of their inner selves to express their though feelings and ideas about their environments, societies and cultures.  The African writers therefore, captures their existential experiences through their literary creativities through their innermost feelings.  Emergent tradition and African poetry is therefore a product of the modern poets and poetry as a tool for social change

and it marks an important development of political consciousness and also, there is a common ideology uniting poets like Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide and Kofi Anyidoho of Chana.  All these poets share the idea that literature can be employed to mediate in socio-political formation.

Apart from this they deploy literary language pattern that communicates to an average reader because most of their works are not entangled with the kind of syntactic obstacles and abstractors found in the so called dominant poets or writer like Wole Soyinka and early Christoper Ohigbo. 

For instance some of these emergent poets even find popular language variety like pidgin to be a useful means of aesthetic communication.  There is the light-hearted impact of Ojaide’s pidgin rendition of the Image “Mami Wata” (sea goddess).  The mere fact that foreign languages are used could occasionally create disagreement, but modern African poetry attempts to reflects indigenous rhythms.  They believed that black poetic imagination must be differentiated from the western tradition of poetry as long as the artistic philosophy of African writers is rooted in literary tradition. The artistic practices and principles shared by various Black African Societies  provide the common bases for modern African poets in African descents.

military class for its coercion, corruption, lawlessness, injustice and class segregation.  These key problems are revealed through his specific poetic devices.  Ojaide’s  pattern of literary writings portrays  him as a poet of African poetry whose works are based on what is happening in his environment.