Old and New ways of living life in Africa - Swamp Dweller

1. Department of English
Topic Name :- Old and New ways of
living life in Africa – Swamp Dweller
Prepared By :- Mansi Upadhyay
Alisha Vaghasiya

2. About Wole Soyinka
▰ Born :- 1934
▰ Awarded the Noble prize in Literature.
▰ He was one of the few African writers
to denounce the slogan of Negritude
as a tool of autocracy.
▰ The Swamp Dweller published in 1958
▰ Plays :- Poems :-
▰ 1) The Invention 1) The immigrant
▰ 2) The lion and the Jewel 2) My next door Neighbour
▰ 3) A Dance in the forest
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3. Old and New ways of living
life in Africa – Swamp Dweller
▰ Old
▰ Tradition
▰ Cultural, Social,
Conventional
▰ Non-western attitude
▰ Join family
▰ Village struggles to connect
myth and actuality
▰ New
▰ Modernity
▰ Encompasses various elements
so called South African tradition or
any tradition
▰ A change in society
▰ It is all about accepting Western
ideas, Culture and forgetting
tradition of one’s own
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4. Village
▰ “A village in the swamps. Frogs rain and other
noises. The scan is a hut on stilts, built on one of the
scattered semi firm island in the swamp. The walls
are march stakes plaited with hump ropes. Near the
left down stage are the baskets he makes from the
rushes which are strewn in front of him.”
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5. City
▰ “ its lie all the young man go into the big town to
try their hand at making money only some of
them remember their Falk and send word.”
▰ “ The city is a large place. You could live there
all your life and never meet half the people in it.”
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6. The Swamp Dwellers city
 The Swamp-the city is the result of colonialism,
capitalism, industrialization, the shift from
tradition to “Modernity”.
 Flood is not only reason.
 Makuri explains, “not a grain was saved, not one
tuber in the soil... And what the flood left behind
was poisoned by the oil in the Swamp Water”.
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7. ▰ Enormous ecological and human waste due to
greed.
▰ Economy/money is not the reason of corruption
in the play.
▰ In the opening scene, “a hut on stilts”, in the hut
“is a barber’s swivel chair”. This strange, part
comic, part pathetic icon of modernity was a gift
to Makuri from Igwezu, when he was in the city.
▰ It is modernity or a change?
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