Protest in the poetry of Dennis Brutus and Ogaga Ifowodo
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2022
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Abstract
This study examines how the poetry of Dennis Brutus of South Africa and Ogaga Ifowodo from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria has embodied protest literature by fostering the political and social struggles of their times. The study discovers parallels in the work of these two poets, despite the distance between them in region and period. It offers fresh insights into the notion of protest literature in different societies. This is achieved through a postcolonial and analytical evaluation of selected works by both poets. Brutus began to protest against apartheid in the late 1950s and continued until the mid-1990s, while Ifowodo started his protest against the military interface in politics in the late 1980s and continues today. The research examines the works of these poets not only critically, but also in the light of the different socio-political and historical conditions which engendered them. A deepened knowledge of postcolonial poetry in the related literature showsthat protest is the meeting point between these two important postcolonial regions (South Africa and Nigeria). The study reads the key prison poetry of the two poets in dialogue as several aspects of their struggle with solitude and other types of suffering offer insights into each other that have not been observed before. Furthermore, their versification and responses to the people’s plight through poetry demonstrate many parallel themes concerning the oppression, deprivation and unjust arrest and detention that people experienced in the apartheid era as well as in recent times in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. This work, apart from undertaking a comprehensive study of the poetry of Brutus and Ifowodo from an analytical point of view, has also been instrumental in contributing robustly to the ongoing discourse on postcolonial literature in Africa.
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A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2022.