Tag: Sunny Awhefeada

What Is The Meaning Of Independence

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By Sunny Awhefeada I must begin by confessing that the title of the present discourse is not my invention. It was what I thought was an innocent question from Isio, my eight years old daughter. The day was Monday, the eve of this year’s Independence Day anniversary and the time was morning just before seven o’clock. As has been the norm since 2008, I already had the key to the car in my hands waiting as my wife dressed Isio up for school so I could take her on school…

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Analysis: The Unfortunate Major

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  By Sunny Awhefeada There is a video of the story of the execution of a brilliant army officer, Major Daniel Bamidele circulating right now. My wife drew my attention to it two days ago and I told her that I was familiar with the story. Many news magazines had written about it in the 1980s when the tragic incident took place. The 1980s was the decade when the genre of news magazine flourished in Nigeria. The magazines carried reports and stories which were well researched, deep and detailed. It…

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An Olympian Shame! By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada As literature students at the University of Benin, we played with words as we honed our poetic and oratorical skills. One of the many superlative words we deployed in those hungry, but starry eyed days was “Olympian” which in our context meant “exceptional” or “superhuman”. We deployed it to foreground traits that we found extraordinary, lofty and outstanding. So we had such turns of expression such as “Olympian height”, “Olympian achievement”, “Olympian attainment” to describe feats that awed our impressionable minds. As counter to such positive acclaims…

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Let us Return to Olden Times

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By Sunny Awhefeada, Time does fly and circumstances for good or bad contribute to how swiftly time runs. Growing up, our parents and grandparents spoke in Urhobo about oke awanre which in its literal sense meant “olden days” and we would be so enraptured listening to them and wanting to know what happened in the olden days they so much idealized. The olden days for them constituted an ideal era when everything was perfectly in order in a way that looked like utopia. In fact, our grandparents’ idea of the…

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Opinion & Analysis: Okuama Is No More!

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By Sunny Awhefeada   The above title reechoes a significant statement in the understanding of the disruptive essence of colonialism in Africa as depicted in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a novel which is crucial to the understanding of the African predicament. It was Obierika who told his audience including his great friend Okonkwo, “Abame is no more”. The village of Abame was wiped out because her people killed a Whiteman the very symbol of the colonialism in Africa. The colonial enterprise left in its wake a series of punitive…

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Opinion: Tales Of Many Woes

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  By Sunny Awhefeada   Charles Dicken’s perception of the Victorian world defines how humanity apprehends that era more than one hundred years after it elapsed. The Victorian era eponymously christened after the phenomenal Queen Victoria also saw Britain attaining the peak of greatness. Britain ruled the waves and the world, and she was not just a significant factor in the colonial enterprise, but she was very wealthy through the unsympathetic plundering of her rich colonies. Despite the fortunes she enjoyed, the citizens were afflicted by grave misfortunes and that…

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The Tragedy Of Our Independence

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By Sunny Awhefeada The notable Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o dedicated his novel A Grain of Wheat to “the peasants who fought the British yet who now see all that they fought for being put on one side.” African independence didn’t meet the aspirations of the people. It did come with betrayals of tragic proportions. The decades of nationalism from around 1920 to the late 1950s were not just about the struggle for freedom, but were years of hope anchored on Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah’s admonition, “seek you first the political…

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News Features: A Conversation With Two Millennials

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By Sunny Awhefeada   A recurring experience of a columnist is the practice of readers doing rejoinders, verbal or written, to his/her views. Not every reader will agree or feel good about a piece of writing. That is why readers come with either kudos or knocks and a columnist should be large hearted enough to receive both in whatever measure. A great deal of the responses are conditioned by sentiments defined by ethnic, religious, political, age, class and other factors that the writer probably didn’t consider as something that will…

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Analysis &Opinion: Is This Another Season Of Omen For Africa

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By Sunny Awhefeada, J. P. Clark in one of his poems “Seasons of Omens” poetizes Nigeria’s first military coup which occurred on 15th January 1966. Deploying metaphors to adumbrate the tense political situation that led to that tragic episode in Nigerian history, Clark uses the tropes of parallelism and refrain to underscore the poem’s thematic preoccupation in the line, “Then came the five hunters” as well as the clincher “Then the five hunters struck”.   Observers of Nigerian history do not need the literary critic’s exposition to understand that the…

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News Features: Let Us Rescue Our Africa?

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  By Sunny Awhefeada There is a video that has been making the rounds. It has been forwarded to me again and again to the extent that I have lost count of how many times I have received it. Part of the message contained in the video by a White speaker to a European audience reads, “sub-Saharan Africa has been fundamental to the global prosperity of the advanced countries and Africa has a role to play as a raw material producer. We will not allow sub-Saharan Africa to escape that.…

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