A battle cry against depravity: Lamenting generational dispossession in Tanure Ojaide’s Labyrinths of the Delta and the endless song*

Abstract

Themes of despoliation of fauna and the ecosystem of the oil rich Niger-Delta in Nigeria are often embodied in the works of Tanure Ojaide. Notably, the economic pillage of the region constitutes a major focus of his poetry which draws inferences from his Urhobo oral history and tradition in order to articulate the disturbing effect of this devastation. Nevertheless, Ojaide in Labyrinths of the Delta (1986) and the endless Song (1989) devoutly criticises the deprivation and dispossession of the common men and women of the pre-colonial Niger Delta by the Ogiso and Orodje – the dreadful Bini and Urhobo traditional rulers who were eventually defeated by the masses. The paper’s overarching focus lies in its engagement with the poetic narrative of abuse of power constructed against the background of deprivation and within the context of a juxtaposition of the pre-colonial dispossession of the Niger Delta by her vicious traditional rulers against the postcolonial siphoning of her oil resources by the country’s successive political leaders. The paper adopts New Historicism as a theoretical framework to illustrate three discursive planks: to establish that tyranny is associated with the wielding of political power in pre-colonial Africa – and specifically in the Niger Delta; an effort to establish that the current economic dispossession in the Niger Delta is grounded in the faulty colonial administrative system and further reinforced by the neo-colonial forces of multinational companies. Finally, the paper succinctly states that resistance culture is inherently rooted in the African psychology, and that the transformation of post-colonial society resides in the resolve of the masses to effect a political change during a given period.