African Women Culture

The usual means of establishing colonial hegemony was by conquest. However, in the case of Nigeria, it was a mixed bag of persuasion by way of treaties and ‘pacification’ which, in actuality, signified resort to the Maxim gun, a weapon which was no match for the bows and arrows of the natives. Accordingly, the British, by brute force, extended their power and authority to far-flung parts of the world, thereby creating the much celebrated empire over which the sun never set.

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The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs. As well as being one of South Africa's best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a

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culled from VANGUARD Thursday, May 20, 2004

The source of Yoruba from Benin is very authentic.

THE statement credited to Oba Erediauwa Omonoba Uku
Akpolokpolo, that the Yoruba race originated from
Benin Kingdom, was very rich in details and calls for

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Following the myths to their source in history is a labyrinthine pursuit. It takes more than education and hardwork -  it takes some element of luck - to pluck the gem out of mushy mythology. It is such luck that I think is not pressed home in the book AFRICAS OGUN:Old World And New  edited by Sandra T. Barnes(Indiana University Press, 1989). In  a chapter Ogun, the Empire Builder, Sandra T. Barnes and Paula Girshik Ben-Amos, traverse the mytho-historical landscape of the Edo, Fon, and Yoruba in order to locate the god and to solve the riddle of the deity in terms

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In order to get a handle on it, I find it necessary to look with some closeness at Wole Soyinka�s disposition as a writer especially the ways in which he has embroiled himself in the discourses of his patron deity. Squarely, this requires grappling with the larger picture of the crisis of Western intervention in African history and the unequal argument that has existed between the scribal culture of Europe and  the basic orality of African traditions. There is no way of seriously engaging Soyinka�s disposition as a writer without considering, for instance, that he was one of the  pioneers in the bid to correct the hegemony of narrations with which Europe had overawed our nations and peoples.  Simply, one has to begin

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I must say that I persisted in my quest because I discovered I was in very good company. I have met too many people, old, young, African, non African, who were quite bemused by Soyinka�s identification with his patron deity. They preferred to view it as one of those zany things that artists and geniuses do to distinguish themselves from us poorer mortals. In a world in which Christianity and science have worked out a coalition against traditional religions, only artists, assumedly, can move in the opposite direction while still having groundings with the rest of us. Many scholars rightly situate Soyinka�s commitment to his patron god within its natural habitat in Yoruba metaphysics; but, beyond mere metaphor, they

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Because of the fairly aggressive Christian evangelism of my immediate environment, I could not come to grips with Ogun as a god until I encountered the writings of Wole Soyinka. Soyinka�s assertive animism, especially his unabashed adoption of Ogun as a patron god, was what first fascinated me about his writings. This was where it all came together for me when I encountered those artful lines of his in Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier�s collection of Modern Poetry for Africa

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