Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence by Neil ten Kortenaar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence by Neil ten Kortenaar Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (bio) Neil ten Kortenaar. Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence. McGill-Queen's UP, 2021. Pp. 282. CAD $34.95. In several of his essays and public engagements, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe underscores the power of literature to re-educate people and revamp the maligned identities of marginalised social groups or colonised nations. In his book Hopes and Impediments (1988), the chapter on "The Novelist as Teacher" articulates his stance on the pedagogic role writers can play in society, stating that literature should be applied to the re-education of Africans. Neil ten Kortenaar's Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence illustrates this point in engaging prose, delineating how African writers attempt to project their vision of the state and society shortly after their countries emerged out of colonial rule. The literary scholar and academic extols Achebe as a pedagogue, framing his novels as invested in political education and citizenship formation in pre-independence Nigeria. Kortenaar stages his arguments through ten chapters, demonstrating a firm grasp of African literary traditions. The introduction presents methodological and theoretical contexts and prefaces how Achebe and his fellow African writers conceive of and contend with the emergence of the modern state, a colonial inheritance. Kortenaar's methodology is framed by the question of faith, or more precisely, trust, which he contends is political—and economical, I should add. The principle of trust organizes his careful reading of novels by African authors. Kortenaar explains trust in terms of credit, debt, and reciprocity, showing how it is central to the imagined relationship between the writer and the reader and between the citizen and the modern state. Achebe and his cohorts recognize the need to gain their readers' trust in literature and its potential to imagine a new nation, one founded more on interpersonal reciprocity and less on total submission (a characteristic of the colonial regime). As Kortennar argues, the first generation of Nigerian novelists embraced realist fiction because it illuminated "the connection between that genre and political formation, between readers and citizens, and they were concerned with creating citizens" (8). Kortenaar's choice of novels set in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods shows how African writers have been thinking about questions of trust, power, succession, legitimacy, and sovereignty. Moreover, he demonstrates that the idea of the state was never absent from the cultural imaginary of African writers, regardless of the period in which they lived. [End Page 157] The first three chapters of the book focus on the characters of Unoka and Okonkwo, father and son, in Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). In Chapter One, "Crediting African Literature," Kortenaar argues that Achebe created Okonkwo to show that trust and creditworthiness underpin moral character. Chapter Two, "Reciprocity," states that the precolonial Igbo democracy was built on a relational structure of gifts and debts, underlining how reciprocity can function to ensure social justice. And Chapter Three, "Sovereign Debt," considers the subject of sacrifice, especially if an individual is indebted to a sovereign authority symbolized by the gods or the state. The preceding chapters, thus, reveal how the establishment of the modern state in Africa changed the notion of debt and social relations. In a stateless or village society, such as the precolonial Igbo nation, debt was based on reciprocity, and individuals were expected to repay their debt as a matter of faith. Therefore, an interpersonal debt system shaped the relationship between the creditor and the debtor. However, the modern state supplanted this system with its rule of law and instituted itself as an "impersonal creditor" to whom every citizen was indebted infinitely. This form of debt was unrepayable so long as the individual was living within the state's territory. While Chapter Four, "Of Confidence and Markets," explores how tricksters undermine trust and the social order, tracing the contrast between Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) in their narratives of market exchange, Chapter Five, "Women and the Cowrie Zone," identifies Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966) as an example of the market...