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The Herd Instinct and Class Literature in Nigeria Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

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Extract

Right from the period of colonialism the herd or cult of the national bourgeoisie has been consistent in its chicanery of reifying, alienating and approximating the social existence of the peasants, the working class and other oppressed social strata. They operate the political culture from various levels of fetishisms as politicians, businessmen, professionals, religious prelates, feudal oligarchies and cultic forces. Set against the masses is the conglomerate of the class referred to by Wole Soyinka as the “self-consolidating regurgitative lumpen Mafiadom of the military, the old politicians and business enterprises” (The Man Died, London, Andre Deutsche Ltd., 1972, p. 181). This class consists of those that Frantz Fanon refers to as the conduit pipes and errand boys of international monopoly capital.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1992 

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Footnotes

*

Bayo Ogunjimi attended the Universities of Nigeria—Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello—and the University of Essex in England. A Senior Lecturer at the University of Illorin, Nigeria, his research interests include African orature and sociology, alienation and social theory, literature, ideology and cultural pedagogy.

References

Notes

1. Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Making of a Military Ethnocracy, London, Sage Publications, 1975.

2. Imperialism and Under development: Dialectics of Mass Poverty, London, Zed Books Ltd., 1985, p 203.

3. The Rise and Fall of Nigeria’s Second Republic, 1978-1984, London, Zed Books Ltd., 1985, p. 229.