Nature, and a Social Revolution in Wole Soyinka’s "Alápatà  Àpáta"

Authors

  • John Olorunshola Kehinde Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai
  • Sule E. Egya Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2025.16.2.5523

Keywords:

Wole Soyinka, Alápatà Àpáta, nature, agency, African ecocriticism, social revolution

Abstract

This essay attempts to emphasise the agency of nonhumans and its use to achieve a social revolution in Wole Soyinka’s play Alápatà  Àpáta. In Soyinka’s dramatic aesthetics, anthropocentrism is reconsidered to demonstrate the posthuman world as a sphere where nature and culture are no longer dichotomous but entangled. Using ideas of material ecocriticism, we argue that the play presents nonhumans as the protagonist in the revolution against political oppression.  The shift from the human to the nonhuman, in the context of social revolution, suggests that such ecocentric readings can give us an alternative dimension of African literature that foregrounds the roles of African natures in societal progress – roles that have been hitherto marginalized in reading practices that have privileged humans over nonhumans. This study will extend the focus of African literary studies from one that is human centred to one that discusses the complexities of human-non-human relations.

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Author Biographies

John Olorunshola Kehinde, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai

John Olorunshola Kehinde is a Nigerian scholar and researcher who earned a PhD in Literature-in-English in 2023. His work focuses on environmental literature and decolonial ecocriticism. His recent publications in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Postcolonial Studies, and Human Ecology Review critique human tendencies toward environmental abuse, species exclusion, and human exceptionalism. Dr. Kehinde has also presented his research at notable international seminars and colloquia, including the Balzan Colloquium on “Literature and Environmental Crisis” at Harvard University, and the workshop on “Decolonial Ecology: Literary and Cultural Representations in the Global South” at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities, Essen, Germany.

Sule E. Egya, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University

Sule Emmanuel Egya is professor of African Literature and Environmental Humanities at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. His research interests include literature and environment, African migration writing, knowledge production in Africa, and decolonial discourse. He is the author of many articles that have appeared in journals in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. His monographs include Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English (2014); Niyi Osundare: A Literary Biography (2017); Power and Resistance: Literature, Regime, and the National Imaginary (2019); and Nature, Environment and Activism in Nigerian Literature (2020). He has co-edited Studies in Scientific and Cultural Ecology (2021), and Orality, Textuality, Society: New Perspectives on Nigerian Literature and Culture (2023). He also writes fiction and poetry under the pen-name E. E. Sule. He is the author of the novels Sterile Sky (winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize Africa Region, 2013), and Makwala (ANA Prose Prize, 2019); and the poetry collection What the Sea Told Me (winner of the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize, 2009).

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Published

2025-10-30

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2025): Vegetal Humanities in the Amazon

Section

Articles: General Section

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