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One Long Crisis: the Synopsis One Long Crisis is the story of how a certain community in Igbo land, named Awgbu – unstable from time – is torn apart by the emergence of colonial rule. Their encounter with the colonialism ultimately shatters their collective consciousness, as it continues to thaw persistently at the mainstay of the religio-cultural memory of the people. Hence in this novel, what we see is how a people are steered through, as Akwanya would have it, “[such] great events by which a society may lose its self- identity”. The story starts, ironically, in the dimension of a romance, with Otika – who does not appear to have survived his career as a tragic hero – striving, through heroics and daring exploits, to distinguish himself amongst people. Otika’s gallantry and trappings for prominence are to the degree that Ikenga, his immediate rival in the community’s wrestling championship, futilely wearies his soul, through desperation and diabolism, to death as he finds himself utterly incapable of knocking the former both out of the championship and out of life. And also to the degree that the air of his (Otika’s) exploits eventually blows across realms to provoke the envy of some gods. But just like the archetype of Ojadili, he soon over-reaches himself as he sees in the advent of colonialism in his community the potentiality to bring to fruition his lifelong knack for absolute power, his hitherto silenced craving to exercise power over his people. Unfortunately, the said potentiality, which here hems in the warrant-chieftaincy position, is to end up a mirage for him as his people feel that he has bitten more than he can chew, and therefore slay him at the very heart of his coronation. This is precisely where the story overtakes Otika, and quite unprecedentedly continues without him: not only because he dies out of this movement of tragedy (for such is not unprecedented in tragedy, there is the case of Julius Caesar for instance), but, even more essentially, because he is thereafter forgotten and every trail of his existence is done away with. But that is perhaps only symphonic with the unleashing of anarchy and other such psycho-social breakdown that accompany the advent of colonialism and Christianity in the Awgbu society.
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Emmanuel Ifediata, One Long Crisis, Synopsis, Chidiebere Ekere, Eze Sochima Leonard,
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