Mary Stella Okolo

" E raison d'être of Okolo's book, which forms her core thesis and which she defends through comparisons of the context, the content and intellectual discourses of the two writers vis-à-vis each other and in relation to other writers of international recognition, is that an imaginative and conscious writer who bases his/her writings on a critical appraisal of social reality is a critical political. [...] " e beauty of o! ering such a comparison lies not in the recounting of simplistic factual events but in the multi-disciplinary interpretation of events of the here and now with the there and then and bringing to bear the raptures, continuities and discontinuities and in this manner locating and giving meaning to social action and interaction. [...] In my view, this is one way of the how of engaging in a comparative and/or multidisciplinary methodological stance and which also lies at the core of making sense of everyday realities with the aim of searching for a new and better order of things. [...] " e second captivating aspect of the book is the desire that Okolo, the young generation writer, creates in us in seeing how she transcends and harmonizes the scienti$ c foundations of the West and the rest of us and us in comparison to ourselves. [...] In resurrecting ideology as a debatable theoretical stance for the realisation of a new order, one is at once reminded of the debates of the late 80s and early 90s among a group of scholars whether ideology is indeed fruitful for Africa (we have to bear in mind that this is when some of the political ideologies like Ujamaa where beginning to show their ugly faces).