Amadi’s masterpiece of African literature captures village life and practices not yet touched by the white man. The novel’s beautiful, hardworking protagonist, Ihouma, is admired by all in her village. Yet those who express their love for her meet with mysterious tragedy, leaving her devastated. This enticing odyssey, where exemplary attributes go unrewarded and the boundaries between myth and reality are muted, outwits readers with unexpected twists that make them want to keep turning the page.

This piece articulates in a theological manner African earth-based spiritual traditions and innovative spiritual practices that are emerging in response to the painful realities of climate change, mass extinction, biodiversity loss, and the disruption of local and global ecosystems which have for long not received the attention that it deserves. It is in this sense that this Book of Readings titled African Eco-Theology: Meaning, Forms and Expressions will become one of the greatest ornaments and lights in the world of eco-theology as it responds to fundamental questions looming at the corridors of ecological discourses.

Beyond the critical examination of Isidore Diala’s award-winning poetry and drama, the essays in this collection offer fresh insights on the complex methodological and theoretical patterns underlying the readings of African literary landscapes. This is the first book to devote considerable attention to the study of Diala’s creative works The Pyre (drama) and The Lure of Ash (poetry). The majority of the contributors here are selected from among the finest of Diala’s former teachers, colleagues and students who know him very closely. The collection addresses fertile areas of African literary expression, such as the relationship between literature and national history, African ritual aesthetics; affirmation, denial and ambivalence as products of social constructions; and exile, migration and home-coming. Contributions also explore poetry and poetic truths; semiotics; anticolonial revolutions and postcolonial implosions; oil politics; discontent and militancy; and feminism and gender politics. The book stands out among its peers, and offers great insights to scholars, researchers and teachers working in the fields of African literature, cultures and aesthetics.

When the 1945 Allied invasion took its toll on Hanover Germany, no one had imagined a backlash traced to Africa. No one had imagined St Judkin’s College a sequestered Secondary School overlooking a tea plantation where many Cameroonians under the German and British colonialists, had cut their teeth on forced labour. No one had imagined a Hanover in Saint Judkin’s College. No one imagined it a Teutonic colonial relic. No one imagined it a sacred cow; a reprehensible tradition of campus brutality. The Hanover, a time-honoured, tinderbox jinx, would break suddenly on the crossroad of a little boy’s destiny. Chinagorom’s death is a living stone to kill two evil birds. In the light of the moment’s tragedy, the school, for the very first time, was awakened to the shocker of an age-old chink in the ark of the nation’s prestigious first Secondary School.

Esiaba Irobi (1960-2010) was one of Africa's most innovative and productive younger playwrights. Deeply rooted in the indigenous performance traditions of his Igbo ethnic group, Irobi's drama, in the tradition of Wole Soyinka, is a hybrid production involving an iconoclastic reconceptualisation of the heritage he appropriates, its fascinating conflation with other performance traditions, and their projection onto the arena of contemporary Nigerian politics. This study by Isidore Diala is the first book-length examination of Irobi's work. It portrays a highly creative individual who was literally driven by the creative urge. The five chapters of this study illuminate different aspects of Irobi's oeuvre and include a vivid portrayal of Irobi the actor in his dream role of Elesin Oba, the eponymous King's Horseman in Wole Soyinka's drama. Diala highlight's Irobi's fascination for African festivals, which feature prominently in the earlier plays.He also demonstrates that although he is rooted in his Igbo culture, Irobi draws on different ethnic groups, pointing to conceptions of pan-Africanism that include the African diaspora.

The study of African philosophy, like all great philosophical enquiries around the world, is fraught with the wrecks of words, wrenched from their original meaning, widened or narrowed, and forced into a bewildering variety of vessels that chum their ways in seas of semantic confusion. African philosophical studies has acquired and added to the many philosophical verbal transmogrifications that came originally from the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria. In its turn, it has produced its own eccentric philosophical etymology, of which, perhaps the most striking example is Igwebuike philosophy. A reflection on Igwebuike philosophy reveals that it is a product of a meticulous and critical study of African philosophy. It is in this light that the scrupulous researcher would dissect the profound thinker behind the Igwebuike philosophy. In this book, scholars of different hues and academic endeavours have made excursus into the origin, originator, meaning and relevance of Igwebuike philosophy to contemporary African philosophical scholarship and African societies. Research shows that the brain behind Igwebuike philosophy that is gradually becoming a major part of African philosophical engagement is incontestably Prof Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu, O.S.A. Igwebuike itself is a philosophical principle that is drawn from African primordial practice of solidarity and complementarity; the works of professional African philosophers, African proverbs, African folk tales, African mythology, African symbols, African names and African songs. — Kanayo L. Nwadialor, Ph.D Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

Ethnosensitive Dimensions of African Oral Literature: Igbo Perspectives is a collection of nineteen essays spanning all genres of African Oral literature, from the poetic genre to the rhetorical genre. Part One of the book is introductory, and includes three essays that are of a general kind, touching all aspects of the genres, while Part Two includes six essays concerned with the poetic genre. Part Three, made up of two essays and concern the prose genre while Part Four, of two essays, examines the drama genre. Part Five, made up of three essays, addresses the rhetorical genre, and Part Six has three essays that cut across all the genres. The contributions examine the implications of ethnocentric imperatives of oral literature in relation to nationalistic demands.