You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search. Ken Saro-Wiwa Writer and defender of the Ogoni cause, was unjustly imprisoned and hanged on November 10, This article is dedicated to him. Yet, to escape the prison-house of language will prove difficult, since the concept of ethnicity is itself heir to a tumultuous etymological history. The Oxford English Dictionary lavishly dwells on "gentile" linguistic observations across the centuries: from the "gret distruccione Of ethnykis " through "all ethnike dooynges" to "the Tracherie of these rude aethnickes " or " Ethnysh Epicures" on to "the fury of the Ethnical Dragon" After being duly "reinvented" Fischer, , or "imagined" Anderson, , 62 , the concept of ethnicity is now threatening to become obsolete.
Werner Sollors thus concluded his Invention of Ethnicity Sollors, , 62 with the sophisticated weariness that late twentieth-century vanguard geneticists have displayed towards the receding concept of "race" Also, America has become wary of "as-a" criticism e. In his groundbreaking, self-published novel, Sozaboy , Ken Saro-Wiwa may be said to represent such a voice. Zabus, , ; Schnukal, These markedly different policies may in turn be responsible for two almost irreconciliable critical trends.
Our critical preoccupation with "post-ethnicity" in Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa can thus be set against contemporaneous criticism of Francophone literature, i. Miller's latest book rehabilitates not only the notion of ethnicity in an immutable, stable sense but also meta- anthropology as the ideal mode of intercultural critique.
Here, the concept of ethnicity is rooted in the tangibly African mother tongue and, behind it, an identifiable ethnic group here extended to an aire culturelle that can trace its heritage to a common ancestry i. Typically, the spoken word among the Mande is said to inchoate as an air bubble, which is then taken through the body's organs to the bladder where urine beautifies it before it is spewed forth by the mouth and thus enters the world Zahan, If anybody beautified it, it was the Liberian dockworkers of Kru origin or the students at Legon who identified with the Ghanaian lumpenproletariat and spoke Pidgin as in a defiant speech-act, out of protest.
The origins of Pidgin, whether monogenetic or polygenetic, 5 are essentially pragmatic and mercantile. Originally an auxiliary trade language born out of the first contacts between English and various other African languages, Pidgin has become a non-official lingua franca which has currency along the West Coast of Africa and, as such, illegitimately triumphs over the cacophonous Babel house of West African languages from to for Nigeria alone.
