Captives of Empire: Early Ibadan Poets and Poetry

Abstract

African universities have always been acknowledged as unrivalled cetres of literary creation. However, literary historians engaged in the construction of contemporary African literary history have not paid adequate attention to the contribution by the writers' communities in these institutions in the development of the African literary tradition. This paper draws attention to the influential Ibadan literary tradition, as Ibadan has been the breeding ground for Nigerian poets, and the poets associated with the cultural awakening at the University of Ibadan in the fifties and sixties deserve being seen as constituting a literary movement.