Cyprian Ekwensi Research Articles

Cyprian Ekwensi's Burning Grass: A Critical Assessment

Cyprian Ekwensi's Burning Grass: A Critical Assessment

The Other Audience: Children and the Example of Buchi Emecheta

In traditional Africa stories belong to everyone. The story-tellers, griot or grandparent, repositories of wisdom, speak to the village. Children are there. Children participate. Furthermore, the art of storytelling is not confined to specialists. Although a griot may study for years to leam long, complicated epics and extensive genealogies, the villagers will know from childhood their tribal legends, and they can follow their own lines in family traditions. They can interact spontaneously with the song, dance, or dramatic recitation of the singer-narrator. It was natural that when Western literary genres featuring the imposed European languages were integrated with the African oral tradition the narrative took on new form and expression. Some of today's internationally known African writers have created new forms of novels and short stories (not tales). In doing so they have used their own linguistic creations: “Nigerian” or “Ghanaian” English and “Negritude” French. Although Western readers were reluctant to accept such variation, many readers today find excellence in literature from Africa. Nigeria's anglophone writers led the way in gaining international acclaim for their prose fiction. Chinua Achebe's landmark Things Fall Apart (1958) is still predominant, often the only novel written by a contemporary African novelist familiar to a general readership. Cyprian Ekwensi, a prolific writer of all varieties of prose fiction, got his start with Onitsha market literature. He wrote People of the City in 1954 and it was reissued in Britain in 1963. Hans Zell (Zell, Bundy and Coulon, 1983:383) considers it to be “the first contemporary African novel.”

The Chronicler and the New Generation: A Review of Cyprian Ekwensi's Recent Writings

Cyprian Ekwensi is well known for his concern with busy city life with its attendant carefree love life and the inevitable violence that results from city vices. His pictures of the problems of independence are well presented in his earlier novels (Jaqua Nana, Lokotown and Other Stories, etc.). It should be pointed out at the onset that in these earlier stories, Ekwensi rarely passes judgment on his characters. In his recent writings as exemplified by the works listed above, Ekwensi appears to have changed considerably with respect to both his character portrayal and his attitude towards them. He is no longer content to be the literary historian who faithfully records all he sees as best as he can; he appears to be tired of sitting back indulgently watching his characters do evil and get away with it. In short there appears to be a sense of moral mission in these new works. Two of the books are especially addressed to the younger generation of Nigerians. They are the two books in which Samankwe, a young delinquent, appears. The books are written in simple, straightforward English and there are no complex plots. Pidgin English is reduced to a minimum and the heroes are young school children. In Samankwe in the Strange Forest, a shy young schoolboy, Samankwe, decided to be a truant for a day simply because he feared punishment for being late to school. The story concentrates on his adventures in a strange forest in the company of the master truant, Nikode, and a couple of palm wine addicts. Strange things happened after Samankwe was forced to drink palm wine. He became mixed up with highway robbers, was apprehended by the police, met the governor of the forest, and, finally was shot by someone who mistook him for an antelope. At the end of his adventures he landed in the police station only to be persuaded to believe that he had

Interview with Cyprian Ekwensi

Interview with Cyprian Ekwensi

Popular Literature for an African Elite

The emergence of a literature in English in Nigeria is usually described as a rapid post-war phenomenon, an unexpected flowering of creative energy which took scarcely more than two decades to produce rich, ripe fruit. According to most published reports, this literature was born suddenly in 1952 out of the pregnant thumb of Amos Tutuola; was nursed through a wobbly infancy by Cyprian Ekwensi, T. M. Aluko, and Onuora Nzekwu; was guided through a magnificent adolescence by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo, and their numerous university-trained followers; was tested by a civil war which left several casualties but no diminution of the will to write; and was later restored to normal prolificacy by the assiduous application of old and new talents.

African Novelists and Social Change

the social sciences call Social Change, and give a non-literary judgment of how this phenomenon has been treated by a handful of African novelists writing in English. Briefly, my aim is to show how these writers reflect the nature of the society in which they live, with emphasis on changing values, customs, ideas and way of life in general. I would not want any of my readers to get the impression that I regard the books I mention, or, for that matter, any other novels by contemporary African authors, as documentary sources for sociological data. Novelists are not, of course, ethnographers; but if they happen to be, they are creative artists first. What they do as such is to represent, portray and enact the emotions, actions and reactions of their characters in different human situations, at different times and perhaps in different social settings. Hence, when writers such as Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and James Ngugi place their heroes and heroines within the changing structures of their various societies today, what they essentially present to their audience is the personal conflict, emotional or/and intellectual, that emanates from the rapid social transformation characteristic of the continent of Africa as a whole. I stress this

Behaviour and Cultural Value in West African Stories: Literary Sources for the Study of Culture Contact

Opening ParagraphIn much modern West African literature in English and French the authors depict problems concerning the relationship between the socio-cultural background and the particular experiences and behaviour of the characters portrayed. Investigation and analysis of such stories to ascertain the authors' ‘solutions’ of the characters' problems can aid our understanding of values and attitudes among modern Africans and in turn contribute to the growing corpus of knowledge about culture contact. As Cyprian Ekwensi, the Nigerian novelist, has claimed: ‘African writing is writing which reveals the psychology of the African.’ Obviously it reveals the psychology of both the author and the characters whom he portrays, and even though stories are written by individuals who are ‘modern’ Africans, strong opposition to any consideration of African literature as individualistic ‘art for art's sake’ has been manifested by Africans, including the Society of Nigerian Authors in their reply to Martin Tucker's 1962 argument that African novelists are over-communal and insufficiently individualistic in what they portray. In making such a response, the Nigerian authors in effect reasserted a traditional African attitude towards art as socially functional rather than merely aesthetically pleasing. One is thus justified in pursuing the study of modern literary works by Africans as expressions of attitudes and values related to tradition, contact, and change.

Jagua Nana

Jagua Nana Get access Jagua Nana. Cyprian Ekwensi. Hutchinson. 15s. Mercedes Mackay Mercedes Mackay Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 60, Issue 241, October 1961, Page 549, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a094930 Published: 01 October 1961