- Title
- Distorted, Relegated and Colonised: Reconceptualising Ogun as the God of Justice in Sunnie Ododo’s Hard Choice
- Creator
- Enongene Mirabeau Sone
- Creator
- Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji
- Subject
- Ogun; coloniality; decolonial turn; Yoruba mythology; Nigeria
- Date
- 2019
- Type
- Journal Article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/11260/2648
- Identifier
- vital:42308
- Description
- The effort to name and ascribe duties to African gods using Eurocentric knowledge can lead to violence, hence causing them to be tagged negatively. Due to the imperial distortion of African history, the people were made to believe that they need civilisation, salvation, and reconstruction. The colonisers had to convince Africans that all that emanated from the continent was filled with ‘darkness’ and therefore needed to be civilised, reconstructed and humanised by Europe. African myths and religions suffer from this deceptive move by the Europeans and the gods are often relegated to being wicked and unjust. In this paper, which attempts to correct such erroneous beliefs, the focus is on Ogun, the Yoruba god of war, who has been subjected to mistaken identity by scholars, researchers and critics. It is against this backdrop and misrepresentation of Ogun that the authors delink from the notion that the god is a vengeful and obstinate god. They conclude that Ogun is not a god who engages in reckless devastation of life, as is commonly argued in literature criticisms of the Ogun figure, but a god who seeks justice when wronged. Decolonial thought and its view on ‘unthinking’ Eurocentric epistemologies on Africa are used to unpack Ogun’s characteristics as a god of justice in Ododo’s Hard Choice.
- Format
- Publisher
- Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.11 No.4 December 2019
- Language
- English
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