“The accident of the accent”: satiric reflections of contemporary Nigeria in Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata

The accident of the accent is the hilarious and artistic device Wole Soyinka employs to portray the societal failings and ways to ameliorate them in Alapata Apata as a writer of national consciousness and global realities. Previous critical studies on this text have focused on the avalanche of satirical elements and their societal manifests in the play with little or no consideration for the accentual mistake (the accident of the accent) and its satirical implications. This is the critical lacuna that this study attempts to fill. The primary text shall be Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata which will be subjected to critical textual analysis. Inspirations are drawn from Gerard Genette’s model of Narratology as the theoretical framework to allow for the investigation of the intrinsic visual and auditory images in the text and to undergird the analysis of the findings. It is discovered that there are three prominent strands of accentual representations and their corresponding interpretations of Alapata Apata: Alapata Apata (the butcher on the rock), Alapata Apata (rock spliter) and Alapata Apata (the ruler of the rock domain). This paper concludes that Soyinka’s artistic talent in the play lies largely in the presentation of Yoruba, his mother tongue accent marks to sift out the socio- political faults in his society and by extension in the entire nation of the world.