Well said Toyin!
There are many ways to be Nigerian... To be African!
There are millions of young urban Africans growing up with the urban cultures of Sheng and our various urban local languages. They are producing literatures and art. The Kwani! Group in Eastern Africa is a literary movement of that multi-generations. These are people's who are Yoruba, Igbo, Kikuyu, Luo, Wolof, Swahili, Hausa, Efik and Edo not because of claims to some kind of origin but rather claims to places and times they live and lived in. They are re-making and re-working identities and consciousness. Theirs is the future beyond any of our own attempts to fossilize or and refrigerate their social beigns. It is an emerging situation...
Sent from my iPad
Sent from my iPad
'We are Nigerians because we are first and foremost Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa.Fulani, Efik, Ibibio etc.'
What will people like me do then?
Has a Yoruba name- Toyin Adepoju- but is not Yoruba.
Schooled in different parts of Nigeria and can speak and read some Yoruba, knows even less of of the Okpameri language of his village, became an adult in Benin but is not Bini and cannot speak the language but is fluent in Pidgin English.
What is he?
Tony Umez, Nigerian actor, as a fellow youth corper in Uniben he told me he was Igbo but could not speak Igbo.
His Yoruba and pidgin English were flawless.
He was steeped in the culture and lore of urban Lagos.
What is he?
Perhaps we need to acknowledge that there are different kinds of Nigerian identities.
Not all are predicated on an ethnic centre.
What is the percentage of those whose primary identification is ethnic and those who social identity is primarily Nigerian, that conglomerate of cultures in whose urban centres ethnic differences are undergoing synthesis?
thanks
ToyinOn Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 1:59 PM, <shina73_1999@yahoo.com> wrote:Nkolika,
Thank you so much for this statement. You just spoke my mind on the matter.
Adeshina AfolayanSent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTNFrom: Nkolika Ebele <nkolikae@yahoo.com>Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:38:48 -0700 (PDT)ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comSubject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ISAH YUGUDA SACK 200 LECTURERSIt beats my imagination that many of us have decided to continue this comparison between Achebe and Soyinka even when Achebe has passed on to the great beyond. How do you compare two things that cannot be compared. Achebe never set out to write because he wanted to win any prize less the the nobel peace prize, so also Soyinka. If other persons read the works of these two gentlemen and decided to attach a prize to it, so be it. Achebe is Achebe and could not have been any other thing except Chinua Achebe. His life and enviroment moulded his perceptions and views about the World. Achebe is a Nigerian because he is Igbo. He cannot renounce his Igboness in order to suit the feelings of persons who want him to be something else. He drew most of his inspiration from his local enviroment, which is Igbo. Why do you want to mould him into something else before he can earn your respect as a writer. If you disagree with him, that is in order because you are not expected to agree with his views. But to keep on this unfair comparison between two persons that cannot be compared is unbecoming of .... We are Nigerians because we are first and foremost Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa.Fulani, Efik, Ibibio etc. Being any of these does not make you less a Nigerian. Achebe has fulfilled his life ambition of communicating to the world that which lies buried deep in his soul, and he did it successfully. His stories made positive impact in the lives of many and for that we are grateful to him.NkolikaFrom: Segun Ogungbemi <seguno2013@gmail.com>
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 12:14 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ISAH YUGUDA SACK 200 LECTURERS
--Those who give the award are people with sound minds who are not emotional or carried away by praise singers of a particular author. If Achebe deserved it in their own judgement they would not hesitate to give him. Now that is dead nothing can be done about it.The pride we have for now is that Nigeria is lucky to have someone with the prize, Wole Soyinka. He won it without any praise singers because he merited it. Achebe did not merit it in spite of his praise singers and there is nothing anyone could do about it. Perhaps in the next existence, Achebe might be lucky. Who knows?Prof. Segun Ogungbemi.
Sent from my iPhoneIsa yuguda bauchi state governor in northern Nigeria sack 200 academic lecturers of College of education Azare after he sack more than 300 secondary school teachers last month--
On Mar 27, 2013 11:20 AM, "Olu Abejide" <mystock@ymail.com> wrote:
>
> Now that he is gone, he cannot win it anymore. The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded posthumously. Achebe won almost everything except the mother of all literary prizes. Many people think he should have won it. But he did not. Why?
>
> The Nobel Prize in Literature has had a chequered 110 years history. Between 1901 and 2012, it has been awarded 105 times to 109 Laureates (no prizes were awarded during the War years). Many of the world's best writers were honoured with the prize. But there have also been a few remarkable omissions. Many people, especially Africans, think the late Chinua Achebe is one such serious omission. But Achebe is in good company. Great writers who did not win it include Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Anton Chekov, Ezra Pound, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luiz Borges. Like Achebe, all these writers are dead and can no longer win the prize. There are some writers alive now whom many people believe are being constantly bypassed. These include Philip Roth and Milan Kundera. But there is still hope for them.
>
> Some people think some writers who received the prize of late are not really deserving of it. These are Dario Fo (Italian, 1997), Elfriede Jelenik, (Austrian, 2004) who, herself, thought she didn't deserve it (a member of the academy resigned in protest of her award), and Herta Muller (Romania, 2009). If these people won it, how could Chinua Achebe not win it?
>
> It is difficult to say who deserves the prize and who does not. It is both a "judgement" and a "quota" prize. It is judgement because a group of people (even if experts in the field), based on their subjective judgements, decide who to give it to. It is not like giving it to a person who first crosses the finishing line in a marathon. It is a quota prize because every year, someone must win it. There can be no year in which nobody is found worthy to win it. But this disadvantage, perhaps, does not matter so much since the prize is awarded for a body of work unlike the yearly ones like the Booker or the Pulitzer which are given to books published in specific years with the danger of a book winning in a year in which none of the entries was particularly good. For the Nobel Prize there is enough time to weigh an author's life time production rather than what he achieved in a particular year. The net is wide enough to capture the best in the world. An author who does not win this year can still win next year without producing anything new – if he does not die before then.
>
> Sometimes, the prize can come late in a writer's life. Tomas Transtromer won it when he was 80. A brilliant poet, rumours had it that he had been long on the committee's shortlist but the committee denied him the prize because he was one of their own (a Swede) and they didn't want to be seen to be favouring their own countryman. By the time they gave him the prize in 2011 he was old and crippled and could hardly walk to receive the award from his sovereign's hands. Doris Lessing remains the oldest winner of the Prize when it was awarded to her when she was 88. Perhaps if Achebe, too, had lived longer, he may have made it. But given the fact that his last major work, ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH, was published more than 25 years ago, and he had not won the prize around that time, it was unlikely that he would have won it if he had lived longer without producing anything new. Read More
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
CompcrosComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
No comments:
Post a Comment