A STYLISTIC STUDY OF THE MOTIVATED LOCAL METAPHORS IN NIYI OSUNDARE’S VILLAGE VOICES

Abstract

Since its formal inception at the historic 1962 conference at Makerere University in Kampala where the language of African literature was extensively discussed, the debate on which language is the most effective communicative medium for the African literary writer has generated different submissions from scholars. While a set of these scholars believe that the only choice for African writers is to dump foreign tongues for their respective indigenous ones, others seek to explain the reasons for African writers’ sustained use of colonial language. However, through those arguments, a fact has been established: African writers have found a way of bending the foreign tongue to accommodate African values, customs, thoughts, and viewpoints in a way that they are no longer the ancestral languages of the coloniser. It is based on this background that the analyses in this paper are embarked on. Using Leech’s (2014) approach to the analysis of metaphor, the paper seeks to analyse some locally motivated metaphors in Osundare’s Village Voices and then establish that they are a stylistic device by which Osundare expands the frontiers of English to accommodate his African viewpoints.