Mandela S Earth And Other Poems

The strength of Mandela the Spear and other Poems lies in Okai's burning desire to celebrate the black experience and culture, through the iconic figures who symbolize those struggles and triumphs. Thus, not surprisingly, one encounters names like Mandela, Nadine Gordimer, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, to name a few. Okai has long established himself as one of the towering figures in the field of modern African poetry in English. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of a vigorous reinvention of the poetic genre that revolutionized the poet/audience relationship, changed the mode of expression from scriptography to narratology, and the role of the audience from that of passive reception to active participation.

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Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people’s lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide’s Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics. Ojaide’s contribution brings to the table the perspective of what is now recognized as a “second generation” writer, a poet, and a concerned citizen of Nigeria’s Niger Delta area.

Nelson Mandela is one of the most revered figures of our time. The essays in this Companion, written by experts in history, anthropology, jurisprudence, cinema, literature, and visual studies, examine how Mandela became the icon he is today and ponder the meanings and uses of his internationally recognizable image.