ABSTRACT
From the quasi-oral form, African Literature has cascaded through systemic phases in less than two hundred years of contact with the Western written form. It has migrated from that dark romance portrayed by western writers to contemporariness of self-reappraisal. The primary inclination of these texts has been the ultimate question. What have we achieved with our independence? The unsavoury verdict is that we have not fared well in human metrics. It is a story of agony as the majority of the people feel betrayed by the government due to mediocrity. Internal resistance has supplanted liberation. Since literature is an index of life, it …show more content…
Ecocriticism thus severely criticizes all domineering and hierarchical attitudes that man has assumed and might assume towards the natural environment, considering it a separate, external entity that one can control. In this sense, ecocriticism indicts and condemns this instrumental view in order to grant the same respect to all natural entities. Entities at large, according to that branch of ecocriticism called «deep ecology», are thus given an attention that was previously only devoted to human beings. For deep ecology, animals and plants are considered fellow creatures that, like us, have intrinsic, and not merely instrumental, value, and, perhaps, one day, even inorganic matter, such as stones, will be comprised in this species range …show more content…
Again she notes ‘Somewhere out there were marvellous government scholarships from the oil companies, but they are useless to us because no one in my village knew how to get them’ (p.11).The government megaphone of propaganda echoes emptiness and psychological destruction of communities through void promises, sowing the eternal seed of destruction through the media. As a result, lack of jobs, create prospect for the moral decay and lawlessness. The immediate consequences divide families and communities, thereby engendering conflict. Zilayefa confronts her mother as she desires to go to town, Port Harcourt because of lack of engagement in the village. This orchestrated encounter extends to the youths and women in the community who antagonize the leadership of their purported alliance with the oil companies’ interest to make sure we are all fighting.The Ijaws, Urhobos, Itsekiris and the Ogonis.The government is supplying different groups with weapons Rocket Launchers! I heard some are hiring the weapons from the government and police and paying for their hire! This is genocide!’(122).The policies of oil companies generate internal banditry by local militias as they engage themselves in a fight over financial lucre surreptitiously paid to collaborators to provoke an internal insurrection. Such payoffs have