6.24 Words from Nigeria Pt 2: Soyinka’s Tiger & Brother Jero

 

My White Mythology

Well, we’re going to get into some more complicated material, today, because to understand the great Wole Soyinka (WOL-ay SoYINKah) requires us to know a little bit about ourselves, I think.

I’ve mentioned a few times how Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart and many other novels, is a favorite of mine, and I’ve cited him frequently enough on how all art is for or against the Emperor, how art cannot separate itself from the political context around it. It’s easy enough to see in his own work, which points at the corruption around him, from power-hungry rulers, from white colonialists and missionaries. 

And it’s easy enough for folks like me to love that. I used Achebe’s novels and essays in my classroom to offer a needed counterpoint to the history and literature of colonization. Folks like Rudyard Kiping (The Jungle Book), H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines), Joyce Cary (Mister Johnson), and R. M. Ballyntine (Coral Island) were hugely popular writers in their day whose backdrops always managed to explain how primitive the natives were. Achebe sets them straight, and pretty easily.

For myself, I grew up reading Jules Verne, and re-reading him now shows why I loved his science-adventure stories, but it also reveals why his work was so dangerous to my mythic sensibility. 

Let me start, then, by naming a few lessons–or better, mythologies–I picked up in meeting these writers, and I’ll bet maybe you discovered these same lessons at some point, too, from any number of writers that made their way into mainstream English-language literature.

The first is the Myth of “Terra Nullius” (Empty Land), the idea that all this great frontier is out there to be discovered, that it was a great open place just waiting for a white guy to name it and give it purpose. Haggard’s books did this with Africa often enough, playing it as some kind of natural treasure chest to be opened; and Verne covered the skies and seas with techno-craft to make the conquest of the world complete. And of course, this is nonsense: all of the European “discovered” lands were filled with other people, civilizations, which for a variety of reasons were rendered invisible or irrelevant by our stories.

But if we did meet people, then we could enact the Myth of the Civilizing Mission. Ah, these dark lands of discovery needed us. Without Christianity, modern trade, and civilization, the people we met were mere children, and our duty was painful but selfless. If you’ve never read Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden,” I’ll drop a link in the Show Notes. No need to read it here. I’m just trying to help us see why we likely never read Soyinka.

There’s also the Myth of Orientalism, a term coined by Edward Said who we’ll meet in more detail later. Here we look to Asia and the Near East as strange, exotic, mysterious, sensual, irrational, and stagnant; the West on the binary opposition’s other hand, is open and rational, progressive. Think of Kipling’s Kim and maybe Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. 

But, seemingly on the other side of all these we could call the Myth of the Noble Savage. Here the indigenous peoples (or some individuals among them) are flawless and idealized, connected deeply to nature, pure and unspoiled. Of course, civilization will still run them over, but . . . And the number of stories that fit this are countless, aren’t they? Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the term “Noble Savage, but we see it in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (Pathfinder, Last of the Mohicans), The Lone Ranger, Disney’s Pocahontas, and the dozen or so Avatar films James Cameron keeps creating, thinking we haven’t yet understood how subtle he is. 

To all of these I’ll just add Jules Verne and H.G. Wells who managed to add what I’ll call the Jules Verne Myth: that technology will seem like magic to these primitives and that this proved the superiority of the Western mind. Good chemistry and engineering guaranteed Western Man’s place as god-like masters of the physical world. And Verne, an early James Cameron, made this subtle message obvious in titles like The End of Nana Sahib and Master of the World. 

Okay. So maybe these myths stayed with me a little longer and deeper than I care to think about. I’d certainly read a lot of those books, so too my love of early science fiction which was as often about the conquest of primitive planets: Princess of Mars, Starship Troopers, Enemy Mine, Planet of the Apes, and the more liberal colonizing of Star Trek. (Come at me!) 

So when it came to demythologizing myself, I looked for more global literature, finding works of local communities. Kawabata and Murakami in Japan, Gandhi in India, Marquez in Colombia. . . and Achebe in Africa. 

And I am not critiquing Achebe at all by saying that his novels worked me over, and I welcomed them. He made the Igbo people of Nigeria human and real, dignified. He used straightforward and standard English but with a healthy helping of proverbs along the way to, you know, give him authenticity. Everyone loved him, this Father of African Literature, and with millions of copies of his books sold, he was easy to find. What he did is offer me a direct and simple response to the myths I already held. The land was full of people who were hardly mysterious or exotic, not at all superhumanly noble or pure, and who did not need civilizing. 

In other words, Achebe wrote directly–directly and precisely–to what my reading had taught me. He fit quite neatly as that counterpoint to the colonial narrative and mythologies of Manifest Destiny. Perfect. And . . . maybe that’s the problem. Because here we are again, a writer who delivered me “comforting myths,” stories that made me uncomfortable with my privileged complicity in white history, but, you know, not too uncomfortable. Yeah. These are the stories that would get printed. Published. Marketed.  Popular. 

Ah, and that last point. Because you and I both know by now that my experience is not so unusual. Sure, you might not have read as many Robert Heinlein novels as I did, you might not have met as many stories by Burroughs or E. E. “Doc” Smith as me, and hopefully you have saved yourself from as many blue alien movies as I have. 

But my experience is not unique because Chinua Achebe has fit the mythological niche so many readers have needed (around 20 million or so just of Things Fall Apart) and Wole Soyinka? He . . . didn’t.

Let’s fix that.

 

Intro Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and let’s suppose that writers of Nigeria have more than one story for us, okay?

 

Tigritude

So if your point of entry into Nigerian literature are folks like Achebe and Adichie, you’re hardly alone. And I’m going to set up Achebe as a point of comparison for us to start. And it’s true, my quick summaries of him do make me shudder a bit in their simplifications—truly, I may do an entire season’s Journey on him alone some day—but for now, let’s say this of him for contrast. Achebe wanted to restore the dignity of African history after the colonial mess Europe had made of it, he wanted to do it through his own acquisition or Africanization of the English language because his work was directed outward to white readers; he used the colonizer’s language to tell his own stories. He wrote directly back to us white aggressors, then, building responses to  imperialist literature into his own works. Things Fall Apart is partly written against Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and as a response to Cary’s Mister Johnson. He also kept his work fairly grounded, using proverbs to exemplify Igbo culture.

Wole Soyinka is a contemporary of Achebe’s, and while they respected each other’s works, they often found disagreements. Achebe saw himself as a teacher/writer; Soyinka wants to challenge power directly. While Achebe used standard English, much of Soyinka’s work is thicker, more poetic, and even academic or literary English. We might call him the “intellectual revolutionary.” If Achebe was Nigeria’s teacher, Soyinka is its conscience. 

Once, when talking about the Negritude movement made popular among blacks in France, an effort to idealize or romanticize Africanism, he said, “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, he pounces.” Yeah. Let’s take that idea. Achebe is the teacher; Soyinka the Tiger.

Soyinka writes plays more than novels or poems. His goals are to expose the corruption of the present day, his 1960s and 1970s up to today. As I talk about him here in 2026, he’s 91 years old and just wrote his most recent novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, in 2021. But the classic era of Soyinka, his most prolific, was in the 1960s and 1970s. We call him part of the First Generation of Nigeria writers, in that first era of independence. 

And what a fascinating time it was. Most writers then were about the same things Achebe was: a reclaiming of culture from old colonial rule, a “writing back” to the West, and the conflicts between early tradition and progress towards modernization. But not Soyinka, exactly. If Nigeria and its writers were imagining some kind of utopia ahead of them, Soyinka saw its illusion. 

His short play, The Trials of Brother Jero, is a terrific place to start looking at his work, because unlike so much of what else he wrote, it offers simpler language as it attacks the fancy words and clothes of Nigerian politics and especially religion. He writes to us in the West, true, but he also writes to and for his people, to those in power who work to deceive. Soyinka doesn’t have to proclaim he is an artist, he writes. The tiger doesn’t romanticize or reflect; it pounces.

 

Frictions and Flux

Now last week, I suggested that Nigerian literature was a canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More of work in constant flux, change. It’s an arena of voices in competition and engagement, entangled and in friction. So anything I say about it to try to define it will likely change soon enough. I used the word “transculturality” to describe how we might understand it: culture is constantly moving, transforming, coming across and back, absorbing and rejecting. We get writers like Adichie recommending that we keep beautiful parts of Igbo culture, for instance, but abandoning the parts that are not beautiful, like sexism. We get writers like Teju Cole, who was born right across the street–er, state–from me in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and writes a novel like Open City, which is largely about a Nigerian immigrant wandering around New York City and thinking to himself and having philosophical conversations with people he meets. Is that an African novel? Does it depend on what those conversations are about? Culture is hard to nail down, and we should remember this every time we try.

In Nigeria, this has become more challenging because we have those Four Generations of writers I mentioned earlier. At least, that’s how we’re categorizing them right now. Tomorrow, we’ll add a fifth generation or an anti-generation or a Nigeria X-gen or something. 

I’ve already mentioned the First Generation of that independence era Nigeria. And we should probably add Flora Nwapa to that group, perhaps the Mother of Nigerian Literature, who wrote some of the earliest feminist works of that country.

The Second Generation is probably the least known outside of Africa itself, writing in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1967-1970, Nigeria’s civil war shook up that utopia dream that many had. And so writers turned to post-colonial critiques of their own local corruption, writing about military dictatorships, and other political themes. Authors you may have heard of would be Ken Saro-Wiwa and his book Sozaboy, or maybe Festus Iyay and his novel Violence.

By the 1990s and 2000s, globalization and migration became the themes of the Third Generation of Nigeria writers and with it, a change of topic and theme: exile, domestic trauma, and identity. We also start to see writers really experimenting with form and genre, with animist magic and the surreal. Here is where we see the rise of writers like Adichie, like Ben Okri, and Chris Abani. Some of Teju Cole’s work is here, and some of Nnedi Okorafor’s. 

After 2010, we are now in what everyone is calling the Fourth Generation, novels of social media and the digital world, individualism, gender and sexuality, and future speculation. We get more popular writers today like Akwaeke Emezi (Freshwater), Cole (Known and Strange Things), Okorafor (Binti), and Oyinkan Braithwaite (My Sister the Serial Killer). Most of these folks are in their 40s and 50s now, just babies, but there are younger innovators right behind them. 

And of course, I’m placing a couple of these folks across different generations because they don’t write in one way for a set period and stop. Everything is in flux. Adichie is still writing now, of course. So is Soyinka. Achebe died in 2013, but wrote right up to his death with a collection of poems, a collection of essays, and a memoir. 

All this is to say that categories and binaries fail us. Culture and time are porous. But still, to keep us thinking about these frictions and changes, let me offer a couple more before we slip into Soyinka’s play, because, you know, they may help us understand him better.

The first friction I want to lay out today is between Nativists and Nomads, creating a question of “where” Nigerian literature actually exists. Is it in Achebe’s small village of Umuofia? Or could it be in Cole’s streets of New York? Nativists make local culture the center of their literature, the African aesthetic and experience. Nomadists, the Japa group, are Nigerians (some writers) who have left the country for education and work opportunities, and what they have taken with them from the local culture varies. Some have suggested that the nomadic nature of younger Nigerians means the end of Nigerian literature. 

But let me suggest that this debate is hardly new, hardly representative of the last two writing generations. Soyinka, for instance, did not come by his dense and academic grasp of English anywhere but The University of Leeds in England. We might call him deeply Native in his use of Yoruba mythology in his works, that African aesthetic, but critics have attacked him for being a “Euro-modernist” and using English to obscure meaning, not like Achebe did. So this idea of how Nigeria reconciles itself to its colonial history and the rest of the world remains; but we cannot claim, still, exactly what is Nigerian and what is not so easily.

And speaking of language, that use of English is another friction itself. Many writers of Nigeria write in the local languages of Igbo, of Yoruba, or of Hausa. But readers of English will not meet them. So what, then, is the choice for a broader readership (necessarily a global one) if not English? Achebe said that he had no choice; it was the tool he had to work with, and he too studied abroad. But he worked to imbue his English with Nigerian thought and wisdom, inserting names and proverbs that jarred native-English readers from their comfort. Soyinka? He goes further still. Layering in Yoruban mythology, a metaphysical sensibility beneath the political plots. Readers have to wrestle with the language to understand how it creates meaning, and are often left with ambiguity and contradictory themes. 

More, Soyinka uses a Nigerian pidgin language. That’s pidgin spelled p-i-d-g-i-n. It’s a language that appears as broken English to me, but it’s a language used by the general population, a little bit of Igbo or Yoruban mixed in, a kind of urban bridge language between the two. Pidgin languages are mergings, compromises between two formal languages, and they appear always where people meet, on the streets to do business. Now, here’s the point I want us to carry forward: the strategies for using English in Nigerian literature are rarely happenstance. They are calculations, tools, for meaning as potent as any metaphor. So why would a graduate of Leeds who writes thick and poetic prose use pidgin? For a first idea, Soyinka’s street language at points in his play The Trials of Brother Jero, signals a kind of class warfare at work.

 

III. The Text: The Trials of Brother Jero 

I don’t mind telling you the entire story of the play here, because frankly, you’ve had over 60 years to read it now, and more, because knowing the plot isn’t half what the reading or viewing experience is about. Besides, I suspect I’ll focus on a few points that are particular to our discussions, anyway.

At the center of the play is, unsurprisingly, our “protagonist,” a term I use advisedly. Let’s better call him just the main character, a “Beach Divine,” a prophet, but also a rogue and trickster. Brother Jero is a charlatan who wants to keep his customers dissatisfied. Importantly, he begins the play alone on stage and confesses pretty much everything directly to us, his audience. He describes his role as a prophet as a trade, one of exchange. Later still, he will call his followers “customers.” And then he admits, 

“Strange, dissatisfied people. I know they are dissatisfied because I keep them dissatisfied. Once they are full they won’t come again.” 

This play is not just a comedy of errors, though it has plenty of slapstick moments: foolish stake-outs, dubious misunderstandings, evasions and tricks. But here, we also have to see it as a comedy of control. 

One of his followers–er, customers–is Chume, also his assistant. Chume wants permission to beat his wife to relieve his stress because she will not mind him. Brother Jero forbids it, because this will keep Chume unhappy and dependent upon his possible future blessing. Jero is managing Chume’s sexual and social frustration to maintain his profit–er, prophet–um, status as a prophet, I mean. Yeah.

But there is another plot, that of a market woman named Amope who keeps staking out Jero’s house because he owes her money. There are a few scenes here where we misidentify people, escapes through the window, and the like, as Jero moves back and forth from a comfortable apartment to his beach job where he appears to have taken a vow of poverty. 

Now we’ve talked about utilitarian exchange before, of morality as transaction. One of the real challenges in Le Guin’s Omelas story is this idea that the people of Omelas sustain their happiness entirely upon the suffering of a child. We’ve called it a Hideous Bargain.  Jero is already trading morality–in terms of spiritual absolution and salvation–for donations, all of which are clearly a scam. But then in the play, we have his discovery. He discovers that Amope, the lady trying to catch him to collect payments, is actually the wife of Chume who he is asking for permission to beat. 

And so, as a theology of convenience, this play’s hideous bargain is struck. Jero realizes that if he gives Chume permission to domestic violence, it will likely solve his debt problem; Chume’s violence will save Jero. And so he flips his theology. He says to Chume:

“I wonder really what the will of God would be in this matter. After all, Christ himself was not averse to using the whip when occasion demanded it.” And so Amope’s safety is sold. 

Now I want to go back a little bit to a couple of things Jero says. Early on, he names himself above the others, “Immaculate Jero, Articulate Hero of Christ’s Crusade.” It is, in part, his powerful language which sets him apart: he is articulate, poetic, renowned. And he says later of his follower, 

Only Brother Chume reverts to that animal jabber when he gets his spiritual excitement. And that is much too often for my liking. He is too crude, but then that is to my advantage. It means he would never think of setting himself up as my equal. 

Well, he thinks so. But soon enough, as we all predict, Chume discovers that Jero is a fraud, that he sleeps in a house, that he has been leading people on, deceiving them. And his language changes. He chases Jero with a cutlass, screaming 

“Adulterer! Woman-thief! Na today a go finish you!”

He even suspects his wife has, all this time, been giving Jero “chop,” which means food, but could also be understood to mean favors or sex.

What I want to point out here is that the very language Jero despises is this street language, this pidgin tongue. But that the language changes when the power shifts. What Jero calls a trait of low character is actually a language of resistance and truth-telling. It is Jero’s standard educated English which is the language of lies, the words of Jero, the words of power, of Emperor. 

Now, this might be the end of any other play, but Soyinka is hardly done. At first, it appears that Jero runs away, is vanquished. But he is hardly defeated. Instead, he finds his next customer—er, follower—in an MP (Member of Parliament) who is uncertain of the meaning of his work. And once hooked, Jero sets him upon Chume, convincing the MP that Chume is dangerous and must be locked in a lunatic asylum. This is especially insidious because Chume confessed privately to Jero once that he believed he was going mad. And, Jero’s plan succeeds.

Putting the lower class truth-teller away in a closet to suffer allows Jero and the State to maintain power as they always have, each using higher standard English. They have the power to define reality and label truth “crazy.” 

But not so fast. Jero opens and closes the play and frequently throughout talking directly to the audience, breaking the Fourth Wall. Making them confidants, even complicit by their inaction, in his schemes. Every time we might laugh at his observations or close escapes or madcap comedic gestures, we laugh with Jero at his victims, lured by the entertaining spectacle of the rogue prophet while ignoring the suffering Chume and Amope. Let the utopia of Nigeria’s new independence continue.

 

The Trickster and the False Omelas

We like to think of power, especially political power, as something held by those above us, held by means of status or wealth or even inherent ability. In any event, it is too often not ours. At first glance, too, Soyinka’s play seems to verify that view. It’s not that Jero and the parliament deserve power—they’re corrupt—but they inevitably possess it, and inevitably the poor lose. 

And it’s true, too, that anyone who tells the Emperor that he has no clothes on more often gets whacked than rewarded, no matter what the fairy tales say. Soyinka punishes his Chume, true, but he also, like the tiger, himself pounces. We can see that while the play is a warning of tragedy, of the failures of people, of government, even of entire cultures, it is also a play which is being watched in theaters. 

In other words, as someone like Michel Foucault might remind us, power is hardly absolute. Instead, it moves, circulates, shifts, requires active work to maintain, and, as often as not, depends upon a contract requiring suffering. We subscribe to that contract or we do not. That’s our story.

How easy it must be for Soyinka’s audience, his readers, for us listening today, to nod along with Jero’s nonsense and con games. We recognize that he is naked, that his high English is a mask for emptiness of purpose or principle. 

But isn’t this, too, what Le Guin does in Omelas? Her narrator wheedles up to us and asks, “Now do you believe? Do you accept?” And, to our horror, we find the tragedy of the Omelas hideous bargain more believable than that a utopia could exist, that a society might be happy.

It’s our choice, of course. To accept Omelas and Brother Jero’s bargains, that’s easy, because it means simply that we must do nothing except continue to live at that cost. Some people will leave, some will disappear into jails and asylums, and so others will remain quietly, accepting the bargain. 

The only difference, maybe, is that Jero’s Nigeria is not happy, at least not like Omelas appears to be, as Le Guin’s narrator claims it is. In Nigeria, people are kept dissatisfied, unhappy, because to give them what they want or need completely is to lose them as customers, as devotees. Soyinka’s society is not a utopia, but dystopia which promises a better future down the road. “Just wait.”  The government will build a better future life; religion will promise a better afterlife. 

Jero, obviously, is a Trickster figure. We know this archetype, this literary character, someone who lives on the edges of society, not completely in it or outside of it. They are changeable, dynamic, shifting: in stories they change form or gender or nature. Nothing is too sacred. And so the Trickster is a breaker of rules and morals, usually self-centered, but as often as not, what they do benefits humanity. 

In African traditions, the Trickster is quite powerful, as much philosophical as entertaining. Very often, they’re smaller creatures like the spider Anansi or the tortoise Mbe, set up to defeat elephants and lions and gods. In the US, the African diaspora created Br’er Rabbit who also has an offshoot named Bugs Bunny. Tricksters are key figures to show how common people can stand against power. And, of course, they also show the hypocrisy of those in power; they work against the Emperor. 

But let’s take a look at how Soyinka uses his Trickster. He isn’t the common people at all. He’s the authority, and he uses the chaos and uncertainty of this new urban independent city of Lagos as his hunting ground. Soyinka has inverted the archetype, re-versed it. Said a little differently, he has re-versed it, in order to create his satire and educate all of us about our leadership, warning us about our gullibility in signing that contract with power. 

It’s hardly the only play where he’s done it. Brother Jero exploits his poor followers. In the play Kongi’s Harvest, the trickster is a dictator using propaganda. And in The Lion and the Jewel, he’s a traditional ruler who tricks a more modern schoolteacher. Soyinka turns his powerful into con men, and he basically pulls the curtain away from Oz, another Trickster in power, by doing so. Leaders are not gods with power; they’re just schemers, motivated by greed and selfishness. 

And Soyinka isn’t just writing stories. He is, in the tradition of his country and his compatriot Chinua Achebe, himself writing back to the Emperor. In his play, A Play of Giants, for instance, he has one of his dictator tricksters named Kamini play all kinds of wicked games with Western media and our stereotypes of Africa while persecuting his people. Those who know African politics understood that this character was based directly on Uganda’s 1970s dictator Idi Amin. The leader is pretty much a psychopath concerned only with his image, a Monster Trickster figure. 

And as far as image is concerned? Remember I said that Brother Jero owed Amope money. And what for? A velvet cape that he might wear to complete his stand-out prophet costume.  And isn’t Amope herself a feminist figure whose clear-sightedness Adichie would be proud to know? On her own, she knows Jero is a cheat, besieges him in his apartment, and is basically the only character who sees through him.  But she’s gaslit by the men around her and ends up a victim.

And so yes, we can ally with the power contract, the hideous bargain which places us the common folk in prisons and asylums while keeping us unhappy, or we can see our complicity in our own oppression, our gullibility which never seems to end. Don’t be a Chume; don’t be a chump. Because we won’t be saved by anyone if not by ourselves and our own resistance. 

V. From Satire to Ontology 

Jero is confident in his villainy and success by the end of the play–well, at least for now. The system protects the con artists and monsters as they ally to crush the common people. And in Soyinka’s world, we laugh at the monsters while we let them rule. 

Our next Nigerian writer is going to change the strategy a bit. Akwaeke Emezi is a writer of Nigeria’s fourth generation, and her 2019 book Pet decides to hunt the monsters down. A YA novel, it is nonetheless a thoughtful read and approach to our utopia building, what we understand about history, and how Nigeria has turned its traditional archetypes to new uses. 

Nativist Soyinka has shown us a con-man building walls of power; Nomadic writer Emezi will show us how to break them down. 

For now, work on your own Letters Back to Humanity, point out the fraudulence and absurdity of power that works to oppress, and go read something. 

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

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Feuser, Willfried F. “Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 22, no. 3, 1988, pp. 555–75. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2904315. 

Mireku-Gyimah, Patricia Beatrice. “Soyinka as satirist: A study of The Trials of Brother Jero.” International Journal of English and Literature, vol. 4, no. 6, 2013, pp. 269-282. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325295145_Soyinka_as_satirist_A_study_of_The_Trials_of_Brother_Jero 

Obilade, Tony. “The Stylistic Function of Pidgin English in African Literature: Achebe and Soyinka.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 9, no. 3, 1978, pp. 433–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3818334. 

Olorounto, Samuel B. “Modern Scheming Giants: Satire and The Trickster in Wole Soyinka’s Drama.” Callaloo, no. 35, 1988, pp. 297–308. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2930965. 

Olorunnisola, Kanyinsola. “Nigerian Literature and the Era of the Nomadists.” Open Country Mag, August 17, 2023. https://opencountrymag.com/our-literature-has-died-again-nigerian-writing-in-the-era-of-the-nomadists/

Soyinka, Wole. The Trials of Brother Jero. In The Jero Plays. London: Methuen, 1964.