Cyprian Ekwensi Research Articles

Ngugi Wa Thiang’o’s Early Studentship: The Role of Education in the Making of a Great African Literary Writer

Do you know that most prolific or acclaimed writers the world celebrates have detected their talent since their prime? Do you also know that some renowned writers taught themselves or were taught by their masters at home prior to when they began to write? Do you know that some of them have not acquired profound formal education up to the university? Yet, it should be known that there are innumerable others, who greatly vary, for they have deeply studied instead. Writing is a natural prodigy; hence it requires no profound literacy to blossom. Take some immediate common instances in mind: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Sembene Ousmene, Wole Soyinka, Aye Kwei Armah, Naguib Mahfouz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o to name just but a few. At any rate, education is the fulcrum and the nucleus to writing no matter how little it is acquired. This is the focus of which this paper is concerned about. Its prime goal is to unveil how Ngugi’s early educational sojourn from the primary school through to the university has rolled out the writing carpet for him to step on as a novice writer, and to keep striding on it with varying degrees of artistic, strength and vigour, which subsequently cleared the challenging path for him to emerge as a legendary and dynamic African writer.

Colonial Resistance and Cultural Revival: Insights from African Postcolonial Writings

The impact of colonization on native cultural life, modernization, and anticolonial nationalism led African writers to reflect on colonial encounters and their effects on social, economic, and cultural aspects. They felt tension between traditional and colonial values, seeking to re-discover cultural roots. Through a critical evaluation of the significant works by key African postcolonial writers such as Cyprian Ekwensi, D. O. Fagunwa, J. P. Clark, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, this article seeks to explore how these African authors have dealt with the issue of colonial encounter in their writings. The focus is also on highlighting how these African authors have voiced their opposition to colonial legacies and have actively engaged in the resuscitation and celebration of local customs and cultural heritage through their writings in the postcolonial era. This research highlights the significant role that literature has in creating and expressing postcolonial African consciousness by analysing topics such as resistance, identity, tradition, and cultural pride. The study also examines how these literary contributions have actively questioned and dismantled colonial narratives, creating an opportunity for the genuine voices of African nations to emerge and thrive.

Hayat kadınlığına giden yol: Ngugi’nin Wanja’sı ve Ekwensi’nin Jagua Nana'sı

Every individual has to make decisions that will significantly affect their destinies/futures at certain periods of their lives. Sometimes they take these decisions in line with their own wishes, and sometimes have to take it because of external factors and against their own wills. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wanja and Nigerian writer Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, who are the subject of this study, also make decisions that will change the course of their lives in the end and they begin to live by means of prostitution. Both characters choose this profession for separate purposes/reasons, however, the profession they want/have to do is the same. In general, prostitution, which is perceived as inappropriate for the moral codes, beliefs and lifestyles of the society in most regions, is carried out professionally and systematically in today’s Kenya and Nigeria. Prostitution, mostly preferred for economic reasons, has even become a tourism sector. The major factor behind is the colonial past, which seriously affected the African continent and left deep scars in the lives of the people living in the region. Therefore, in the light of these elements, while examining the preferences of Wanja and Jagua Nana, the condition of women in the colonized lands, how colonialism affected these native women as well as the relationship between colonialism and prostitution will also be examined in this study for they are the background forces that have triggered such choices.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 By Katherine Isobel Baxter

Reviewed by: Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 by Katherine Isobel Baxter Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 BY KATHERINE ISOBEL BAXTER Edinburgh UP, 2019. viii + 205 pp. ISBN 9781474420839 cloth. The opening claim of Katherine Isobel Baxter’s Imagined States is that we can locate a crucial continuity between Nigeria as colony and as postcolony in “the state of exception” or “the suspension of the rule of law” (1). Even as Baxter evokes Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, her book challenges Agamben’s lack of interest both in colonial contexts and in the role of the imagination. By contrast with Agamben, Baxter aims “to show how British and Nigerian fiction writers … attended to and made visible the inventive force of the law [in Nigeria], not least in the suspension of the rule of law” (5). There’s a dialogic relation, then, between the law and literature of the book’s subtitle: on the one hand, Imagined States shows how narrative genres—“popular, middlebrow, and literary fiction,” along with memoir and newspaper journalism (6)—portray the law and related concerns from corruption to treason; on the other hand, the book demonstrates “the role of invention and imagination not only in the representation of the law but also in its operation and in its suspension” (11). At stake is a question that is both theoretically intriguing and politically urgent: “at what point does such invention become an exception to the law—an action with the force of law which nonetheless is no longer within the bounds of the law?” (24). Across seven chapters, beginning with the formation of the protectorates of Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria in 1900 and ending with the fall of the First Republic in 1966, Imagined States examines texts that include Edgar Wallace’s Sanders adventure series, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Onitsha market literature, journalism covering the trial of Obafemi Awolowo and other Action Group members in 1962–63, and especially early novels by Cyprian Ekwensi and Chinua Achebe. I found much to appreciate in Baxter’s literary analysis, from the explication in chapter 2 of District Commissioner fiction as a distinct subgenre of colonial adventure fiction, which casts the colonial officer as synonymous with civilization and thus with the law, through the virtuosic reading in chapter 7 of Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), in which varieties of violence repeatedly displace the law. Reading the book in a year when critical race theory had become a political football in the United States, I also found myself interested in how Baxter handled race in law (most often common law, though she mentions customary and Islamic law) and literature. While earlier chapters tend to treat the racism of [End Page 198] colonial governance and British fiction in the register of caustic irony, chapter 4, focusing on Achebe, more directly acknowledges “the racist representations of West Africa found not only in popular fiction, like Wallace’s, but also in middle-and highbrow fiction, such as that of Cary and Conrad” (86). How do we decide when to ironize and when to call out racism in literature? The fourth chapter suggests a potential third option by analyzing the protagonist of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Obi, in terms of “deracination” (103). Rather than judging Obi for his moral failing, writes Baxter, “we must attend to the way Obi is deracinated by the systems of privilege and exception introduced by colonialism” (103). It is not entirely clear, however, whether the author is referring to the way Obi is caught up in the racial hierarchies imposed by colonialism or just the (etymologically warranted) sense of “deracination” as uprooting. In order to compare numerous forms of prose narrative, Baxter reasonably brackets drama and poetry. Still, Baxter’s lens offers insights beyond the selected genres. In Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, set in the 1940s though written in the 1970s, one of the most famous District Officers in Nigerian literature, Simon Pilkings, tries to prevent the titular horseman, Elesin, from committing ritual suicide. Although Soyinka insists that his play is not a “clash of...

Urban Literature and the Nigerian Challenges

Literature has been used and is still being used as a tool for solving societal problems in different nations at different times. Urban literature is a good example of literature that addresses and analyses societal problems. The European novel developed simultaneously with Western urban civilization (Ihekweazu 1992). Some critics argue that modernity finds adequate expression in the city novel as in novels like Zola’s Paris (1898), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1921), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Alfred Döbblins Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) among others. Several of Cyprian Ekwensi’s urban novels also fall within the above list. This paper is more of a proposal on the achievement envisaged in the use of urban literature to solve some of our national problems. We, therefore, conclude with the proposition that if literature was used to solve societal problems in different places in the past, urban literature could be used to solve many of the problems in Nigeria today, particularly if targeted to address the problem of poor reading culture among Nigerians.

African Folklore: A Catalyst in Contemporary African Fictions

African folklore which are said to be active traditions have had immense influence on the growth and development of African literature. This claim is aptly demonstrated in the works of successful early African writers as in the case of Amos Tutuola and Daniel O. Fagunwa of Nigeria, Violet Dube in Zulu, S.E.K. Mghayi in Xhosa and a host of them. These literary artists draw their inspiration from the oral tradition by translating their structures and images to literary mode. It is on this platform that the article seeks to examine this claim in the light of the state of African literature today. This paper adopts Cyprian Ekwensi’s African Night’s Entertainment as a case study to demonstrate how present African writers build on that trend to success. Ekwensi is considered one of the pioneers of African literature and writing fiction in English in West Africa. Ekwensi’s works observed oral conventions in terms of themes, style and other motifs; but literary in its form. The book adopts tales from African cultural background. This article establishes that contemporary African writers owe much to African oral tradition in their various domains of literary inspirations.

Gender (Re)configuration in Nigerian Literature through Time and Space

SummaryThis article underscores how time and space have influenced the question of gender – its construction, representation and re-interpretation – in contemporary Nigerian literature. It examines various positions of male writers, such as Cyprian Ekwensi and Chinua Achebe, whose works entrenched a conservative, patriarchal perspective of gender that valorises masculinity at the expense of femininity. On the other hand, women writers such as Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa and Zaynab Alkali produced fiction which countered the stereotypical representations of women pervasive in early Nigerian literature. Contemporary Nigerian women writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lola Shoneyin and Chika Unigwe, writing from an unapologetically feminist point of view, have built on the work of the pioneer womanist writers to produce works of art that underline social transformation in Nigeria where gender hierarchy is constantly questioned and challenged. This discussion of the evolution of gender representation in Nigerian literature is pursued against the backdrop of theoretical understandings of time and space as intrinsically linked to re-imaginations of history and society.

From Empire to Independence: Colonial Space in the Writing of Tutuola, Ekwensi, Beti, and Kane

Abstract This article examines the production of space in four early Anglophone and Francophone West African novels, reading Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Nigeria, 1952), Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (Nigeria, 1954), Mongo Beti's Mission terminée (Cameroon, 1957), and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë (Senegal, 1961) alongside broader social, political, and economic spatial discourses from the 1950s and 1960s. By so doing, the article unpacks the articulated correspondences between literary space and its wider materiality in ways that are both explicit and implicit. Drawing on insights from human geography, this essay explores the extent to which the distinct spatial programs of the British and French empires manifest within Anglophone and Francophone West African writing in the years leading to independence, ultimately arguing that the latter displays a range of discrepant, horizontal formulations in contrast to the more monolithic, vertical spatiality of the latter.

Cyprian Ekwensi as a National, Urban or Pan-African Writer

Cyprian Ekwensi is, by any standard a major figure in African literature of the mid-twentieth Century. From its birth to date, Nigerian literature witnessed a tremendous growth and development with the early publications of the literary works of Chinua Achebe and those of Wole Soyinka respectively. However, despite the publication of about eight major novels by Cyprian Ekwensi, some literary critics still refuse to acknowledge the contribution and the importance of this popular Nigerian author. This paper attempts therefore to shed more light on the literary career of the author, his literary ideology as well as why some critics tag him to be a National, Urban or Pan-African Writer.

Home, Sweet Home; The Portrait of A Nation in the Miasma of Corruption and Social Decadence

The scene of the 21st century Nigerian and by extension African literature has witnessed tremendous and drastic changes with the emergence of new talented and prodigious writers. These are writers who have shown beyond every reasonable doubt that they are gifted with the creative grandeur and ingenuity to move African literature to the next height. They have successfully filled the void created by the absence of the older generation writers, the likes ofChinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka, Ferdinand Oyono, Mongo Beti among many of our 20th century writers. Among the crop of these new generation writers is our own Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Chimamanda is the star of our 21st century literature and her literary works continue to lead the way and blaze the path, setting a standard and yardstick with which the achievement of 21st century writers will someday be measured and assessed. She is the author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of Yellow Sun. Americanah is the third full length novel from the award winning writer. The story is a mature epic, a moving tale which examined life in its layered dimensions. Written in chapters and divided into seven parts, the novel, Americanah cuts across human lives from different continents of the world, mainly America, Europe and Africa. The novel exposed corruption, insecurity, bad governance and social malaise in their high and low places in Nigeria. These are crucial issues that are pivotal in the rate of Nigerian emigrants whose seek succor and better living abroad. The novel depicts our society in its multi-faceted nature but it is not devoid of a message that could help to salvage the nation and make it better for the generation yet unborn. This paper examined the portrayal of the image of the nation in the miasma of corruption and social disorder as depicted in Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah. The study concludes with her message of hope and goodwill and on how best we can foster and build the great society and nation of our dream.

Africa south: viewpoints, 1956-1961

This selection of essays comes from Africa South, a remarkable magazine which, for five years in the early days of South Africa's apartheid, presented a principled but non-partisan opposition to the National Party government's policies and practices. Africa South was unique in coupling its reportage of South Africa with attention to the rest of Africa, at a time when many colonies were attaining independence from colonial rule. The essays speak to contemporary readers interested in issues beyond nationalism (transnationalism and globalization), and to those interested in the historical trade and other networks which crossed both the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, holding Africa at their center. The essays' strongest common focus is on people. As individuals and in groups, people's lives are central to all analyses of political, economic, and legal developments. Ronald Segal, the prescient founder-editor of Africa South, attracted as his contributors men and women who could write with clarity and potent, youthful intensity. Most of these writers would, later in their careers, become famous in their own right. Some of the contributors in this collection include: Basil Davidson, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ruth First, Lionel Forman, Helen Joseph, Nelson Mandela, Z.K. Matthews, Fatima Meer, Phyllis Ntantala, Alan Paton, and Walter Sisulu.

Anthologizing Africa: Langston Hughes and His Correspondents

The fascination of these two texts lies in the coming to light of a probably unsuspected transatlantic link between the United States and emergent independent Africa in the 1950s–60s. Thanks principally to the Beinecke Library at Yale and other well-preserved American holdings, researchers like David Chioni Moore and Shane Graham have been enabled to uncover and make accessible much of the background documentation of a general effort that goes far beyond the revelation of biographical minutiae and chit-chat: this was the Hughesled project simply to put African literature in general, as he saw it, on the postwar English-language map worldwide. Possibly known is that Hughes’s sprawling effort, stretching over the last fifteen years of his industrious life (1902–1967), resulted in two keynote anthologies: An African Treasury of 1960 (which with his introduction included his selection of articles, essays, stories, and poems), and then Poems from Black Africa of 1963 (with his own foreword and items ranging from traditional oral pieces in English translation through to samples from the written English, French, and Portuguese). These pioneering assemblies had been beaten to it, however, by Cullen Young’s African New Writing of 1947, from which Hughes in the usual anthologizer’s cannibalistic fashion took up Mabel Dove-Danquah of Ghana (“Anticipation”) and the prolific Cyprian Ekwensi. Soon enough Ulli Beier in turn would lift over many of Hughes’s contributors for his Black Orpheus anthology of 1964, and so the compiling instinct would proliferate as African literature as a category may be said to have arrived in the West. Hughes’s first anthology, as appears from these extraordinary backstage records, occupied him from his base in New York City particularly through

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

Conditions of production for writing, publishing and studying literature in africa: the Nigerian situation

Text of contribution to a panel discussion on “Conditions of Production for Writing and Publishing in Africa” at a postgraduate seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, 1 February 2006, revised for a SCOLMA seminar with the present title at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 21March, 2006.Quite apart from claims made for Cyprian Ekwensi as the first Nigerian to publish a full-length novel in “modern English” (that is his 1954 novel, People of The City), it is generally accepted that Amos Tutuola's The Palm-wine Drinkard was the first novel in any variety of English to be published by a Nigerian. That novel was incidentally published in 1952 by Faber and Faber in the UK. Perhaps this has not after all turned out to be a good omen for publishing in Nigeria.

Francophonie et production littéraire nigérienne en traduction française : dialogue des cultures

This paper examines from the viewpoint of comparative literature the interaction between the French version of Nigerian literary production in English (source language) and Francophone African literature. It comprises two parts. The first part presents a critical appraisal of the French version of novels, poems and plays written by Nigerians, mostly those of the Nigeran pioneer writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi and Amos Tutuola. The study shows that translation into French (target language) makes it possible not only to promote the interaction between cultures within the framework of Francophonie in the global village, but also to project the Nigerian authors concerned and their writings on Francophonie's international literary scene, as well as to make significant contributions to the advancement of studies and research in comparative literature. The second part narrows down the discussion on cultural interactions to the relationship existing between two different African novels: Le Monde s'effondre,French version of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and L'Aventure ambigue,Cheikh Hamidou Kane's original text written in French. Emphasis is placed on the symbiotic relationship that should exist between traditional African and modern European cultures, as portrayed in a peculiar manner in both literary texts.

THE IGBO TRADITION IN THE NIGERIAN NOVEL

This study aims to establish the Igbo tradition in Nigerian literature through the use of English language. The language of the writers of Igbo literary tradition is an ethnic variety of Nigerian English, which is characterized essentially by lexical innovation, transla- tion and linguistic and cultural transfer. Chinua Achebe stands out in this direction in view of his contributions to Nigerian literature through his peculiar and creative use of language. This effort is not peculiar to Achebe, but an Igbo tradition which emanates from Igbo lan- guage and culture as has been demonstrated in the works of some of the most prolific Igbo English writers, precisely John Munonye, Buchi Emecheta, Chukwuemeka Ike, Cyprian Ekwensi, Nkem Nwankwo, and Elechi Amadi. This literary tradition has become a signifi- cant stylistic device in that it grants writers the freedom to use the English language cre- atively.

From a Colonial to a Postcolonial African Voice:Amkoullel, l'enfant peul

In our broad use of the term to characterize contempo? rary African culture, there is an implicit understanding that the colonial experience played a critical role in shaping the identity of societies that emerged from extensive periods of European rule. We can trace such an impact directly through a great variety of written African documents pro? duced under colonialism as well as through various reflections on this expe? rience by African historians and other thinkers after the attainment of independence. However, among the fictional works that have entered into the canon of modern African literature, the topic of colonialism is conspicuous for its relative absence. This hiatus can be explained in part by the chronology of colonial rule, which did not last long enough for the first generation of major writers in English and French to reach their full powers much before its demise.2 Some of these early figures?most notably Chinua Achebe, Mongo Beti, and Ferdinand Oyono?have written on colonial themes. Others, like Camara Laye, describe situations in the colonial era with virtually no refer? ence to European rule. More commonly, the focus of African writing is upon decolonization and its postcolonial aftermath, since these are the experiences the authors know at first hand. Amadou Hampate Ba stands out in this context, first of all because he is older than even such senior francophone figures as Leopold Sedar Senghor and Birago Diop (who also grew up in the far more established colonial confines of the Senegal coast) and is considerably older than the Nigerian literary pioneers, Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi. Yet it is Hampate Ba, with his rather limited formal French education, who pro? duced probably the richest literary account of colonialism in L'etrange des? tin de Wangrin (discussed elsewhere in this issue). In the memoir of his own childhood, Amkoulkl, Hampate Ba provides us with not only another classic account of the lived colonial experience, but also an insight into the process by which an African scholar and verbal artist could find a voice: first as a contributor to the colonial project of recording (and even creating) tradition and then to the rendition of his own life through a particularly effective form of European-language literature. The title of this book comes from a nickname that Hampate Ba acquired in his childhood and continued to use later in life.3 It translates as

Gabriel Okara: A Poet and His Seasons

seventy last year. He grew up in the same formative years as the two well-known Nigerian novelists Cyprian Ekwensi (first and best known in Nigeria for his People of the City and Jagua Nana) and T. M. Aluko (One Man, One Wife). Still, how very unlike those two works is Okara's novel The Voice (1964). Indeed, in that respect, as O. R. Dathorne was the first to notice, Okara belongs more with the pioneer fictionalist Amos Tutuola than with the so-called

The Structure of the Modern Nigerian Novel and the National Consciousness

The Structure of the Modern Nigerian Novel and the National Consciousness Viney Kirpal (bio) In "Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Oral Traditions," Bernth Lindfors makes the following observation: The Palm-Wine Drinkard's neat cyclical superstructure rests on a very loosely coordinated inner structure. The hero is involved in one adventure after another but these adventures are not well integrated. Like boxcars on a freight train, they are independent units coupled with a minimum of apparatus and set in a seemingly random and interchangeable order. . . . Tutuola appears to be improvising as he goes along. . . . To search for an orderly system or well-developed artistic pattern in the chain of disjointed episodes in The Palm-Wine Drinkard is to search for symmetry in chaos, for deliberate design in chance. (46) Thus does Lindfors highlight the novel's "neat cyclical superstructure" resting on "a very loosely coordinated" structure and relate Tutuola's art wholly to the African storyteller's improvisation of technique and material. Tutuola is a storyteller as well as a novelist—that is, a conscious craftsman of the novel as a genre. It is my purpose here to show that the "very loosely coordinated inner structure," the episodic, digressive, cyclic plot structure is characteristic of modern Nigerian fiction in general. This complex inner structure is to be found, for example, in the works of almost all the major Nigerian novelists—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, T. M. Aluko, Gabriel Okara. [End Page 45] When Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958 and explained the creation of his novel as an African artist's contribution to the act of decolonization ("Novelist" 185), the novel was classified as a nationalist achievement (Thiong'o 44). His use of oral techniques such as episodicity, proverbs, folktales, and digressions seemed to be of a piece with it. His other novels—No Longer At Ease and A Man of the People —use the oral techniques of song, proverb, and folktale to suggest the erosion of native values in Westernized Nigeria. Although Arrow of God is more obviously traditional in its theme and form than the earlier novels, it displays the same episodic and digressive mode of narration. Likewise Okara, Soyinka, Ekwensi, and Aluko, writing novels on a variety of themes not to be categorized as "nationalist" or nostalgic about past African glory and culture, have all borrowed from the oral structures of traditional African literature in the creation of their fiction, fictions that like most modern Nigerian novels are structured around the native African storytellers' technique. As examples of this technique, I propose to discuss Okara's The Voice (1964), Soyinka's Season of Anomy (1973), and Aluko's Wrong Ones in the Dock (1982). My choice is determined by two factors: the chosen novels are "successful" novels, and they represent novels written in three different decades: the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. The form of these novels, however, appears to be no different in structure from the novels of Achebe and Tutuola written in the 1950s. The aim of this paper, then, is to show that the "loosely coordinated inner structure" of the modern Nigerian novel differentiates it from the modern Western novel. It is not a defect of form as is generally alleged but a technical innovation inspired by the African oral structural mode and by the national world view and consciousness. In the Preface of the revised edition of Arrow of God, Achebe says that he modified the novel because of certain "structural weaknesses." The major revision is the deletion of the four-and-a-half page story told in Chapter Sixteen by Ugoye, Ezeulu's junior wife, to her children reflecting her bitterness with the behavior of Metefi, the senior wife. The story has, as Robert Wren has pointed out, no "associative connection" with the rest of the chapter (53). Achebe himself supports the view that the story has been deleted because of its irrelevance to the priest's state of mind and because, although it is a well-told and interesting folktale, it is out of place (quoted in Wren 54). Somehow, I find Achebe's explanation for the revision not very convincing, for it seems...