TRADITION AND LEADERSHIP IN ELECHI AMADI’S THE GREAT PONDS

Abstract

Explorations of indigenous African traditions in pre-colonial and colonial African societies in imaginative literatures have historical and aesthetic values. Historical for the great insights they offer on the human condition and social experience in pre-literate communities; and aesthetic for the refreshing and exciting images of the African world recreated through the human imagination and the genius of gifted writers. Elechi Amadi’s The Great Ponds is a quintessential novel that imaginatively recreates an authentic African community totally regulated by its tradition to the exclusion of any Western or foreign influence. This paper explores tradition as a central motif in the novel with an aim to highlight its centrality in regulating social existence and communal harmony in the society depicted in the text. It also interrogates leadership and the models reflected in the novel on political and military planes. The study is a qualitative and library based one limited to content analysis of the novel in focus. It therefore contributes to criticism on the nexus of history and literature. It highlights supernatural and mythical social experiences through analyses of traditional world-views about gods, ancestors, the dibia, and leadership in traditional Igbo societies. New historicism is the theoretical perspective deployed in the paper.