APQ - APPON PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

With Africa considered the poorest continent in the world, the subject of poverty is at the core of how the continent confronts its challenges, meets the sustainable development goal mandate, and manages its future hopes. This study takes its basic theoretical starting point from the notion of behavior as it is influenced and directed by poverty, implying also, and including, its varieties and multiplications. To be able to understand poverty in all its dimensions, especially as it relates to mind set, internal fixations and mental acquiescence require conceptual tool that will capture its varieties. It is for this reason that this study employs the philosophical method of dialectics. This study looks specifically at Uwem Akpan's 'An Ex-Mas Feast.' By reflecting the life of people, literature helps to show the links between poverty and behaviour and how this touches every facet of all our actions. Philosophy with its reflective, critical and analytic bent is needed to review the ideas extracted from the story in order to gauge their suitability or otherwise in rendering the African experience. This study finds out that resolving poverty in Africa is tied to the extent leaders are living up to their mandate to guide society to a good life. It also discovered that poverty is the basic element influencing progress, achievement, and, even, how gender roles are balanced, interpreted and executed. This paper concludes that there is need to integrate all societal strata in building a progressive and sustainable society.

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