Pius Adesanmi

Pius Adesanmi, poet and critic, was born in 1972 and obtained a First Class Honours degree in French Studies from the University of Ilorin (1992). He subsequently obtained a Master’s degree and a PhD in the same discipline from the Universities of Ibadan and British Columbia respectively. He has since pursued a career as a scholar of Francophone and Anglophone African and Black Diasporic literatures and cultures. He is a two-time Fellow of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and has guest-lectured widely in Universities in Africa, Europe, and North America. He has contributed essays on literature and culture to several learned journals, literary reviews, newspapers, and edited books. He regularly serves as a manuscript reviewer for literary publications. His poetry collection, The Wayfarer and Other Poems won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize in 2001. He is currently an Associate professor of Literature at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada, and Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL).

“Ara Eko, Ara Oke”: Lagos, Culture, and the Rest of Us

Never mind Wole Soyinka’s dissing of his own generation as a wasted one. In the nature of things, your generation always just happens to be the last best generation before whatever value systems or institutions you are discussing collapsed irredeemably, hence the tendency to dismiss the generation after you...

The Voice of Mutallab, the Hands of the Dead

It must be said that the complicity and guilt of the northern establishment finds comfort in the attitude of the Nigerian media and intelligentsia. The imperative of naming names and ascribing responsibility for these things to specific people and fragments of Nigerian society – where evidence abounds – has always given way to clever demission and political correctness...

Dewdrops of Memory: Isanlu and the Islam that I knew

The Islam that I knew was already in full swing decades before my head kissed the earth of Isanlu, my home town in Yagba East Local Government Area of Kogi State. As is the case all over Nigeria and Africa, life in Isanlu was suffused in colourful forms of traditional spiritual expression until Christianity arrived...

Dewdrops of Memory: Isanlu and the Islam that I knew

The Islam that I knew was already in full swing decades before my head kissed the earth of Isanlu, my home town in Yagba East Local Government Area of Kogi State. As is the case all over Nigeria and Africa, life in Isanlu was suffused in colourful forms of traditional spiritual expression until Christianity arrived...

Religious Intolerance: Lessons from Yoruba ‘Paganism’

Chances are, growing up, you partook – as audience or celebrant – in a very colourful tapestry of ancestral liturgies: Ogun festival, Sango festival, Imole festival, Egungun festival, and, of course, Oro festival, the fear of which is the beginning of wisdom for Yoruba women...

The American South as Warning to the Nigerian North

Nigeria’s northern elite are clinging to a vocabulary of oil at a time when the national budgets of the oil states in the Arabian Gulf are evolving towards oil independence; at a time when Moloch Yaddie is in Brazil, a country that has left oil behind and now runs on ethanol; at a time when President Obama’s main agenda in office is to secure America’s independence from oil; at a time when China and India have also joined the race to a future without oil...

Wole Soyinka, Igbo Cyber-Discourse, and the Myth of the Good Yoruba

What Winterbottom and the ignorant Europeans in Arrow of God do to Ezeulu is exactly what some of Soyinka’s Igbo admirers online are doing to him! What part of Arrow of God have they not read? What on earth do they imagine Achebe is saying about the production of otherness?

And it Came to Pass!

And it came to pass that there was great rejoicing over the solomonic wisdom of Iborilech, son of Ahimelech the Jebusite. And Moloch Yaddie said unto Iborilech: “verily verily I say unto thee, today you will be with me in my Paradise on the Rock”. And it came to pass that Beelzebub granted unto Moloch Yaddie and his children their request of a heavier yoke...

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