Hybridity and Christopher Okigbo's Poetry

Dr. Kirunda’s thesis is the most ambitious and comprehensive study yet produced on the work of the major Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo. His impressive scholarship and fine critical readings of the poems demonstrate how Okigbo draws on both African and European traditions to express and explore post-colonial African experience. There can be no return to an idealised African past, and there can be no satisfactory adoption of the culture of the colonisers as a substitute for it. The post-colonial world is one in which new uses are made of available cultural resources, European and African, and a hybrid identity takes shape in the tensions between them. Dr Kirunda has demonstrated a theoretical command of the debates around Okigbo, a scholarly understanding of Okigbo’s poetic strategies and use of other traditions, and an independent and generous critical grasp