Abstract
This chapter engages with Toyin Falola’s 2014 memoir Counting the Tiger’s Teeth, which revolves around the author’s participation in the 1968–1970 Agbekoya rebellion. The Agbekoya was a peasant revolt driven by the impoverishment, high taxation and violence suffered by cocoa farmers in west Nigeria, which led to a violent upheaval against the postcolonial government. Falola’s memoir, however, refuses to reduce living history to historiographical document. Drawing on the author’s personal involvement in the rebellion as a young boy, Falola’s book presents a non-synchronous logic wherein different temporal orders coexist in dialectical antagonism: the time of history, the time of memory and the time of myth. The intersection between these different temporal registers vividly emerges through a recurrent figure of speech: peripeteia, which is adopted as important stylistic device in the memoir.
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Menozzi, F. (2020). Written Out of History: The Agbekoya Rebellion at Temporal Crossroads. In: World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_5
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