Hope Eghagha and the New Counter-Discourse in <i>Death, Not a Redeemer</i>

Abstract

This article identifies an inward rupture in the practice of counterdiscourse amongst African writers and critics. It reveals how a range of credos embedded in African literature, including drama and theatre, such as negritude, African personality, pan-Africanism, etc., and originated by African writers/literati, to both contest and reverse imperialism's depressing rhetoric against African civilization, now attains the locus of power and, co-instantaneously, conferred a certain hegemony which privileges pristine African values above all other alternate apprehensions of the universe in contemporary Africa. Drawing from content analysis as its research method, this article derives its theoretical foundations from the New Counter-Discourse, itself, an offshoot of Counter-Discourse, which assumes the moral gait of a faction that interrogates, from within Africa, the unwholesome perpetuation of African values as the dominant ideology in the activity of cultural production rather than situating them in a network or continuum of equitable or mutually accommodating discourses. The primary sources of information are derivable from Hope Eghagha's Death, Not a Redeemer and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman while its secondary sources are critical analyses of both theories and texts gleaned from the library.

Keywords: Hope Eghagha, New Counter-Discourse, Wole Soyinka, Death, Not a Redeemer