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Culture & Arts Entertainment Featured Literary Arts Maxim Uzoatu Notes

Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa @ 82

Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa, famously known as Ken Saro-Wiwa, would have been 82 today, October 10. My lionised friend packed too many lifetimes into one life. His hanging by the General Sani Abacha regime on November 10, 1995 was a universal cause célèbre. It can be all too easy for many to give Ogoni activism the Read More…

Anambra Culture & Arts Entertainment Featured Literary Arts Maxim Uzoatu Nigeria Notes

An Airport for Achebe

There is a Chinua Achebe International Airport in Anambra State. It was a spectacular masterstroke from Governor Charles Chukwuma Soludo when he renamed the Anambra Airport at Umueri after Chinua Achebe. The ovation that Soludo got when he made the announcement in his speech at the 63rd Nigerian Independence Anniversary, which took place at Dr Read More…

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Featured Government Maxim Uzoatu Nigeria Notes

The Federal Republic of Fiction @ 63

Nigeria is fiction. The country’s Constitution has been transferred to a new shelf in the library: the shelf containing fictional works. The latter-day patriots of Nigeria can cry all they want against me, but in this instance, I only choose to stand solidly in solidarity with the words that Samuel Johnson uttered on the evening Read More…

Culture & Arts Entertainment Featured Maxim Uzoatu Notes

How JP Clark Led Achebe and Soyinka To IBB

Writing is fighting. That is the dictum of the fiery African-American writer Ishmael Reed who wrote a book entitled Writing is Fighting.  Whether taken literally or otherwise writers fire bullets with words, and in some instances actually take up guns to go shooting. A landmark example was Nigeria’s most influential poet, Christopher Okigbo, who died Read More…

Culture & Arts Entertainment Featured Maxim Uzoatu Notes

The Writer in Kole Omotoso Never Dies

The news that came from Johannesburg, South Africa on July 19 was heartrending: Kole Omotoso is dead! The lionized writer, Kole Omotoso, was my teacher at the then University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, for four years of my study there in the Dramatic Arts Department with Professor Wole Soyinka as Head of Department. Read More…

Featured Maxim Uzoatu Notes Reviews Theatre

Re-Reading the Sacred Suicide of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

In picture above: The author with Folake and Kongi (Wole Soyinka) Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka is an acknowledged classic of world theatre. It has been staged across the continents to wide acclaim. The drama has in the course of time garnered critical and popular plaudits from the literati and the general Read More…