This book is about Nigeria's oil and gas-rich Niger Delta region: --how its peoples: the Igbo, Ijaw, Ibibio, Efik, Ogoni, Annang, etc evolved over the years; with the Igbo, as the main ingredient in the evolution process --how ethnic and regional rivalry, occasioned by petty jealousies and envy threatened their very existence in1966-1969, and led to Biafra --how greed and the gross abuse of state power by Northern Nigeria-controlled military dictatorship in 1966-1999 turned the once prosperous region into a living nightmare. The peoples are emasculated, communities/villages sacked, perceived freedom fighters persecuted and killed, including the writer/environmentalist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in 1995. This book reminds Nigeria and the world of Biafra, and calls for fundamental changes in respect of the Niger Delta, to avoid the mistakes that led to Biafran secession in 1967. It is also a Unity call to the East.

This book is about Nigerias oil and gas-rich Niger Delta region: --how its peoples: the Igbo, Ijaw, Ibibio, Efik, Ogoni, Annang, etc evolved over the years; with the Igbo, as the main ingredient in the evolution process --how ethnic and regional rivalry, occasioned by petty jealousies and envy threatened their very existence in1966-1969, and led to Biafra --how greed and the gross abuse of state power by Northern Nigeria-controlled military dictatorship in 1966-1999 turned the once prosperous region into a living nightmare. The peoples are emasculated, communities/villages sacked, perceived freedom fighters persecuted and killed, including the writer/environmentalist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in 1995. This book reminds Nigeria and the world of Biafra, and calls for fundamental changes in respect of the Niger Delta, to avoid the mistakes that led to Biafran secession in 1967. It is also a Unity call to the East.

The Igbo are one of the most populous ethnic groups in Nigeria and are perhaps best known and celebrated in the work of Chinua Achebe. In this landmark collection on Igbo society and arts, Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku have compiled a detailed and innovative examination of the Igbo experience in Africa and in the diaspora. Focusing on institutions and cultural practices, the volume covers the enslavement, middle passage, and American experience of the Igbo as well as their return to Africa and aspects of Igbo language, society, and cultural arts. By employing a variety of disciplinary perspectives, this volume presents a comprehensive view of how the Igbo were integrated into the Atlantic world through the slave trade and slavery, the transformations of Igbo identities and culture, and the strategies for resistance employed by the Igbo in the New World. Moving beyond descriptions of generic African experiences, this collection includes 21 essays by prominent scholars throughout the world.

Exuberant storytelling full of wry comedy, dark history, and devastating satire—by the celebrated and original author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Say You’re One of Them. From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly—callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the “other” consumes Ekong’s daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories. Akpan’s prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.

These essays attempt to focus the light of history,on Nigeria, Nigerians and their contemporary,condition. The root idea here is that fundamental,to all historical works - that when the mind,interacts with the past, the result is something,like a torchlight whose beam is focused on the,present, thus enabling us to achieve a better,understanding of the problems which face us.,Afigbo has probed deep into Nigeria's pastbringing out all the facets, all the elements and,all the issues that are necessary to improve the,present.

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Attempts to Import Weapons

The book traces the history of writing about Nigeria since the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the rise of nationalist historiography and the leading themes. The second half of the twentieth century saw the publication of massive amounts of literature on Nigeria by Nigerian and non-Nigerian historians. This volume reflects on that literature, focusing on those works by Nigerians in thecontext of the rise and decline of African nationalist historiography. Given the diminishing share in the global output of literature on Africa by African historians, it has become crucial to reintroduce Africans into historicalwriting about Africa. As the authors attempt here to rescue older voices, they also rehabilitate a stale historiography by revisiting the issues, ideas, and moments that produced it. This revivalism also challenges Nigerian historians of the twenty-first century to study the nation in new ways, to comprehend its modernity, and to frame a new set of questions on Nigeria's future and globalization. In spite of current problems in Nigeria and its universities, that historical scholarship on Nigeria (and by extension, Africa) has come of age is indisputable. From a country that struggled for Western academic recognition in the 1950s to one that by the 1980s had emerged as one of the most studied countries in Africa, Nigeria is not only one of the early birthplaces of modern African history, but has also produced members of the first generation of African historians whose contributions to the development and expansion of modern African history is undeniable. Like their counterparts working on other parts of the world, these scholars have been sensitive to the need to explore virtually all aspects of Nigerian history. The book highlights the careers of some of Nigeria's notable historians of the first and second generation. Toyin Falola is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Saheed Aderinto is Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University.

A rich and accessible account of Yoruba history, society and culture from the pre-colonial period to the present.