Narrating social decay: satire and ecology in Ayo Akinfe's Fuelling the Delta Fires
Date
2017
Authors
Opuamah, Abiye
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Abstract
This research report conducts a critical examination of Ayo Akinfe’s Fuelling the Delta Fires
by paying attention to the writer’s use of satire to highlight social problems such as
corruption, deception and exploitation in Nigeria. The focus is on how Akinfe’s novel
represents exploitation, waste, and excess that have become normative in a country on the
brink of collapse. The work also seeks to identify and critique how Akinfe employs satire to
interrogate the syndrome of the ‘big-man’ in Nigeria, showing how their actions contribute to
social decay and violence.
The research will also examine issues of ecology in the Niger Delta. Ecology has often been
construed as a Western ideology that has little resonance within the framework of the African
novel. However, this work, tries to show that as the scholarship on ecological humanities has
evolved over the years, African alternatives which take account of the unique challenges of
the continent have also being developed. Akinfe draws from these proposed models of
ecology to focus attention on the ecological issues that are a direct outcome of the exploration
of oil in the Niger Delta and by so doing, brings attention to the transgressions of government
and multinational corporations who go to great lengths to extract oil in the region. Applying
ecocritical examples suggested by scholars like Anthony Vital, Byron Caminero-Santangelo
and others, the research report demonstrates how literature has been used as a medium to
expose greed that facilitates ecological degradations and how the culture of consumerism
affect the daily lives of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta.
Description
A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University
of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of Master of Arts, 2017
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Citation
Opuamah, Abiye (2017) Narrating social decay: satire and ecology in Ayo Akinfe's Fuelling the Delta Fires, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <https://hdl.handle.net/10539/25727>