Autocracy and Poetic Resistance in Tanure Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures and Delta Blues and Home Songs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary African poets either consciously or unconsciously utilize their art in scrutinizing the consequences of the actions of state operators on their societies. This essay explores the imaginative configuration of the trauma, civil violations etcetera visited on citizens by corrupt politicians of Nigeria’s Second Republic and the succeeding autocratic military rulers. Tanure Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures and Delta Blues and Home Songs are therefore scrutinized in their depictions of the chicanery of politicians and the tyranny of military rulers in a postcolonial African State. This study adopts a contextualist template that locates the poetic constructs within Nigeria’s recent experiences. It highlights the corruption, violations of human rights, and muffling of critical voices by the rulers. It equally notes the poet’s celebration of the heroic acts of some citizens who defied the draconian rule. Also the study stresses the poet’s deployment of satirical devices in embellishing his art as he seeks to highlight the deleterious activities of both regimes. The essay concludes that the poet’s optimistic vision distinguishes his generation from the preceding one that had been less optimistic in its artistic works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".