Harmattan Special Issue - Sept./Oct. 2026

Since the evolution of the Nigerian literary tradition in the 1950s, itself a successor to orature, numerous writers have consistently opted to make society the epicentre of their enterprise. In fact, a handful have even effectuated their literary aspirations through direct interventions in society. From Wole Soyinka’s epic militant-styled seizure of Western Nigerian Broadcasting Service’s facility in 1965 to obstruct the announcement of questionable election results, through Christopher Okigbo’s active participation and death in the Nigerian civil war in 1967 to the more placid Chinua Achebe who became an emissary of the seceding Biafran State during the Civil War (Obafemi, 17), these literary icons project the nexus between art and society as both sacrosanct and iron-clad. In recent memory, Festus Iyayi’s artistic disdain for the maleficence of the postcolonial state spilled over from his literary canvas unto the political domain, as he actively held the government to account for the welfare of university professors. Iyayi, sadly, lost his life in a road accident in Kogi State in 2013 enroute to an avoidable Academic Staff Union of Universities’ (ASUU) meeting (Premium Times). Regardless of the fatal cost that the ilk of Okigbo and Iyayi had to pay, Achebe is resolute that “an African creative writer, who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant” (qtd. in Okoye, 14). Soyinka, in his typical satirical verve, derides such writers as “post-mortem surgeon[s]” (ibid, 14). Without extenuating the foray into the speculative realms in literature, the philosophy of a socio-politically fused creative engagement has broadly reinforced the culture of literary praxis across Nigeria and the Niger Delta in particular.