Out of the Irony of Words

Abstract

NIGERIAN WRITERS IN ENGLISH feel that they have been and are being read for the wrong reasons. The first generation of African writers, in the later colonial period, were anxious merely to speak to the West, to make themselves known in mitigation of the standard European stereotypes and misconceptions. To "sympathetic" observers of the African scene as to enthusiastic readers of "authentic" African literature, this generation was genuinely grateful. Now the situation has so far changed that the liberal European mentality has become suspect (of neo-colonialism, among other things) and so indeed have those earlier African writers who interpreted their own cultures to Europe under colonial conditions. Now is the time for European readers to follow suit, to become more sophisticated in their understanding of just what it is that African writers are about. One way of doing this is to consider the historical and intellectual situation in which the African writer finds himself determining the protean forms his self-consciousness will take. Since independence,'for example, among the elite, the whole business of how to go about being an African reincarnate has been a tremendously stimulating affair. It has unearthed untold treasures to the imagination and tightened the intellect as well: forcing ingenuousness into irony, it has made African literature exciting because complex.