Great Boys: An African Childhood [Hardcover]

Tanure Ojaide (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 086543574X | ISBN-13: 978-0865435742 | Publication Date: March 1998

This is a coming-of-age self account by Nigerian poet and literary scholar, Tanure Ojaide in which he recalls his humble but happy childhood days during the 1950s and 60s in his homeland in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. The childhood memoirs portrays the traditional African setting of pre-colonial times and ponders over the social transformations, mostly negative, which have since taken place in the country as a result of "modernization."

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The author writes, "This book is my personal account of a happy African childhood, of a lost idyll as a result of modernization, politics, oil exploration; and above all of changes in morality and ethics and human relationships. The mechanisms of traditional culture for environmental conservation, morality, respect for others, and working have been discarded without new ones in their places to keep society cohesive. The current agitation of the Ogun people, also of the Niger Delta, makes more relevant this story of how things used to be and how they have turned to the present condition.

"I consider myself fortunate to have experienced traditional African culture firsthand before its transformation by modernity"

"My experience of following my drunkard grandfather to fish, following my uncles to the farm and to tap and to tap rubber indicates the opportunities then available to the very young. The story ends when at seventeen I completed my high school and was preparing to do the higher school certificate program in distant Sokoto when the first military coup in Nigeria on January 15, 1966 delayed my education"

About the Author

Tanure Ojaide was educated in Nigeria and the United States and has published six collections of poetry and two books of literary essays. A Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa, Ojaide has won major international awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region, the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry, and twice won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize. In 1996-97 he was the NEH professor of Humanities at Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania. He is currently a professor of African American and African Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 209 pages
• Publisher: Africa World Press (March 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 086543574X
• ISBN-13: 978-0865435742
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,643,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #40 in Books > History > Africa > Niger

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars Augustine's Feedback on the Purchase of 'Great Boys: An African Childhood', September 27, 2010

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