Tanure Ojaide is an African poet from Nigeria with a unique voice that
sings about the condition of his Niger Delta people. The dire
environmental, ecological, as well as socio-economic, cultural, and
political conditions of his people have necessitated Ojaide appropriating the
poetic persona of the minstrel in its broadest meaning to reflect on the problems
that confront his Niger Delta people. This has also clearly placed him in the
limelight as one of the region’s activist writers since according to him “Literature
has become a weapon against the denial of basic human rights” (Ojaide, 1996).
He is often dubbed as “poet laureate of the Niger Delta,” because of his dogged
concern for his region, which, to him, is a reflection of global and human issues
and concerns. The writer, for him, is not an ‘air plant’ (Ojaide, 1999) but
somebody rooted; hence his connection to his region, people, heritage, and
destiny. His indigenous culture and western education have proffered him with
the integrated personality of the minstrel in all the traditional African and western notions of the art of minstrelsy. This study will focus on Tanure Ojaide’s use of
the minstrel persona to address the multifarious issues of his society with particular
attention to the Niger Delta and the wider Nigerian community. While he has
dealt with issues of the Niger Delta from the beginning of his writing career in
the early 1970s in both Children of Iroko and Other Poems (1973) and Labyrinths of
the Delta (1986), it is only in recent times that he has assumed the persona of
the minstrel to directly address issues that concern him as an individual and as a
singer of tales of his people.
The debacle caused by oil exploration and exploitation activities in Nigeria’s
Niger Delta region has attracted so much attention that now it is possible to
refer to the fast growing corpus of literary writings on this issue as Niger Delta
literature. Ojaide has written works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction describing
in literary terms the ongoing despoliation and degradation of the physical
environment of this region. The extraction of crude oil as well as gas flaring
activities has led to the pollution of the region’s land, water, and air. Apart from
resulting in the gradual annihilation of the region’s once rich bio-diversity, the
people of this region are subjected to sundry health hazards. In addition, the
physical landscape is fast losing its rich flora and fauna. Incidents of oil spillage,
mostly as a result of badly laid oil pipelines and equipment failure, have also
caused irreparable damage to the land. Farmlands are no longer rich in soil
nutrients and the people therefore contend with poor harvests annually. The
same condition affects those who eke their living from the rivers and other bodies
of water in the region. As a result, many have been compelled to abandon their
primary sources of livelihood, thus compounding further their limited resources
for survival. While the Niger Delta region provides the Federal Nigerian
Government billions of dollars from oil and gas with which to develop other
areas of the country, it is sad to note that the region continues to wallow in
penury as there are no developmental programs put in place to improve the lot
of the people. |
