Tanure ojaide biography channel

The events leading to the Nigerian Civil War and the war, which lasted from to , in spite of its tragic consequences were propitious for Nigerian literature in many ways. They altered the hitherto private sensibility of the Nigerian poet and pulled him into the national fray defined by political crises. The end of the war also became a convenient demarcating line signaling the emergence of a new generation of poets whose poetic afflatus was conditioned by the bloody feud. The next two decades after the war were to witness the beginning of the endless socio-economic and political contradictions that have almost wrecked the Nigerian nation. What follows in the poetry coming out of this experience is the motif of nationhood and its painful convolutions. If historians captured the essence of the Nigerian nation since the s, the poets in their appropriation of the events provide an alternative historiography with vivid imagery and d

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Tanure Ojaide: Literary activism and the beställning of merit

The historical experience which heralded the birth of modern Nigerian literature was defined by the hostile almost deprecating ambience which colonialism fostered. It was for that reason that the earliest echo of modern Nigerian poetry reverberated in protest. Having experienced the negation of the colonised, the harbinger-poets who were also nationalists championing the cause of Nigeria’s independence did not only rail against the ills of British imperialism and its avowed tendencies of cultural denigration, but they valourised an indigenous world view that was potent and dynamic before the advent of colonialism. The colonial experience in Nigeria was an assault on the socio-cultural and political configuration of the many ethnic nationalities which were cobbled into one political entity through the amalgamation of Socially, western education and Christianity disrupted the socio-cultural coherence which held the societies tog

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Tanure ojaide biography channel

Nigerian poet and academic (born )

Tanure Ojaide (born ) is a Nigerian poet and academic.^[1] As a writer, he is noted for his unique stylistic vision and for his intense criticism of imperialism, religion, and other issues.

He is regarded as a socio-political and an ecocentric poet. He won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa with his collection Songs of Myself: A Quartet ().^[2]

Biography

Tanure Ojaide was born to Urhobo parents from Okpara Inland in Agbon Kingdom of Delta State.

He credits his grandmother with having inspired his writing.^[3] He attended secondary school at Obinomba and Federal Government College, Warri, before proceeding to the University of Ibadan for his degree program in English.

He attended Syracuse University, where he earned an M.A. in Creative Writing and a PhD in English. He later taught at the University of Maiduguri, before being appointed as Professor at the University of