Books published by Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria)

These poems from one of Africa's most highly acclaimed poets and the winner of the 1991 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, are an ironic celebration of collective aspirations, failures, guilts and hopes. They call for change in a society wracked with problems. The poet sets out to produce a collection that captures the significant happenings of the time in a tune that is simple, accessible, topical, relevant, and artistically pleasing and, as he puts it: 'to remind kings about the corpses which line their way to the throne, to show the rich the slums which fester behind their castles, to praise virtue, denounce vice, to mirror the triumphs and travails of the downtrodden, to celebrate the green glory of the rainy season and the brown accent of the dry, to distil poetry from the dust and clay of the vast, prodigious land - songs plucked from the lips of my land in its manifold laughters and sorrows.'

The origins and development of Pidgin in Nigeria are exhaustively examined. The study's perspectives are historical, theoretical, ontological and sociological. Nigerian Pidgin is identified as a language in its own right, with all the characteristics and potentialities of a natural language, its comparatively recent origins nothwithstanding. The authors treat the structure of the language as such; and make the distinctions between Nigerian Pidgine and a range of pidgin-like forms in Nigeria. Professor Ben Elugbe and Dr. Augusts Omamor are both linguistics of repute, and teach in the Department of Linguistics and African Languages at the University of Ibadan.