The Signification of African Spirituality in Selected Short Stories of Tanure Ojaide

Abstract

African writers’ cultural settings are often reflected in their artistic creations. In his writings, Tanure Ojaide constantly re-affirms his identification with, and indebtedness to, his Urhobo traditional heritage. The short story seems to afford him the opportunity to interrogate the visible (physical) and invisible (spiritual) in the lives of his people which he reflects through his fictional characters. This paper therefore, adopts a pragmatic approach as it examines Ojaide’s preoccupation with the place, representation, and implications of spirituality through some stories selected from his four collections of short fiction. The writer projects ideas around African spirituality mainly through the relationship between the living and the dead, the importance of the final resting place for the dead, the existence and operations of supernatural forces capable of oppressive and sexual attacks, and the efficacy of bewitchment on the living. This study will assist in exploring the continued spirituality of Africans as expressed through Christian beliefs and traditional mysticism.

Keywords

• african spirituality
• mysticism
• signification
• tanure ojaide