Nigerian Writers Research Articles

The African Writers Series: a chronology with notes

1956 Publication of Mongo Beti Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, Ferdinand Oyono Une Vie de Boy, Sembene Ousmane Le Docker Noir, Bernard Dadie Climbie, David Diop Coup de Pilon (all were to appear in translation in AWS) The AWS policy was to introduce the best writing from Africa through the medium of English. Translations of novels in foreign languages such as French and Portuguese often sold far more copies than in the original language. There were to be novels, stories, plays and poetry translated from African languages such as Zulu, Sesotho, Swahili, Gikuyu and Yoruba. Egyptian and Sudanese titles translated from Arabic also appeared after 1970 in parallel Heinemann series, Arab Authors. 1958 Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (and No Longer at Ease 1960) published in hardback by William Heinemann. 1960 Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) set up as separate company in the Heinemann Group of Publishers. Nigerian independence. 1961 Mbari Club founded. (17 titles published before 1964. Several reprinted in AWS). Heinemann was far from alone in publishing work by Africans; there were also several active rival British publishers such as Andre Deutsch, Collins Fontana, Hutchinson, Faber and Longman. Some of their authors such as Gabriel Okara, Cyprian Ekwenesi, and Buchi Emecheta were sub-contracted to the AWS. These authors later chose first publication by Heinemann. 1962 Foundation of the African Writers Series. Alan Hill and Van Milne at HEB published the first four titles. Only cautious 2,500 copies of each title were printed to see if there was market. Chinua Achebe appointed Editorial Adviser. Chinua Achebe, with quiet determination, got Heinemann Educational Books to publish the very best books without any inhibitions of sex, religion or politics. These subjects would in the sixties have kept them out of British schools. In Africa some of the titles were selected as set books by the new examination councils (WAEC and EAEC). These unexpected prescriptions led to substantial sales which allowed Chinua Achebe to encourage editors in Heinemann to experiment. His name was, as Alan Hill said, a magnet which attracted new writers to the AWS. The photographs on the back of the orange covers gave Africans the idea that they too might get published. Chinua Achebe and Van Milne went to the 'Mbari' meeting of African Writers at Makerere University College, Uganda and were offered manuscripts of The River Between and Weep Not, Child by Kenyan student, Ngugi. The publication of these two novels was the moment of take off. An educational company began to publish new writing in paperback as well as in hardback; in British publishing at the time this role was traditionally performed by general hardback publishers and paperback publishers selected titles to reprint. British publishers did not believe that there was general market for books in Africa. 1963 Keith Sambrook came from Nelson to Heinemann Educational Books to develop the list for Africa, Caribbean and South-East Asia. He had been an editor at the Manchester University Press, worked in Ghana and founded Ghana Universities Press. (Van Milne had returned to Nelson). Keith Sambrook and Alan Hill shared Chinua Achebe's confidence that new writers would emerge if they had the encouragement of knowing that they could get published and sold. He set up Heinemann sales offices in Nairobi and Ibadan primarily to sell textbooks. He built on the success of the first four titles to the Series with canny choice for the first thirty titles, including translations and representative anthologies. 1964 Sales office opened in Nairobi with Bob Markham as Manager. 1965 Aig Higo, poet and headmaster, had been, like Chinua Achebe, at the University of Ibadan and was active in the Mbari Club. Their work together ensured that the series developed with the first time publication of distinguished new Nigerian writers such as John Munoye, Flora Nwapa and Elechi Amadi. …

Challenges to a new generation of Nigerian writers in English

THIS PAPER recounts the challenges faced by young Nigerian writers in a climate that is hostile to new authors. The experience presented and discussed here epitomises both the dilemma and the experiences of the new generation of creative writers. The problem of language choice – English or a mother tongue – is re-examined, while exploring the various reasons, noble and not so noble, behind such matters as: choice of genre, the new writer’s response to democracy and globalization, the problem of audience recognition, and the failure of do-it-yourself publishing and marketing.

Winging Words: Interviews with Nigerian Writers and Critics

Winging Words: Interviews with Nigerian Writers and Critics

From Past to Present and Future: The Regenerative Spirit of the Abiku

This article investigates the representation of the famous West African abiku phenomenon in three works by three Nigerian writers, namely, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo's poem (1965), Wole Soyinka's poem also entitled (1967) and Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road (1991). The article offers a socio-political reading of the abiku (the myth of a child dies to be reborn) as handled by the three writers and based on a traditional West African world view. The article investigates how the abiku motif has attracted many writers are engaged in various agendas of cultural nationalism and identity formation, and how a close reading of their work points to their aesthetic and ideological concerns. ********** Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit child, it keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong. --Okri, Infinite Riches Modern African literature, written in European languages, is characterized as being a literature that is extremely culture-specific as it relies heavily on local cultures, on African cosmology, and on oral tradition. This cultural specificity, in most cases, projects a political intention that is hard to disregard in any attempted interpretation of a literary text. On the other hand, these two characteristics of African literature have for the past fifty years or so created a kind of literature that is not quite accessible to the Western reader who, first of all, is not well versed in African local cultures and, second, is unable to perceive the political intentions of African writers. Ultimately modern African literature has come to be regarded as an exotic kind of writing but not really serious literature. The Nigerian writer, Ben Okri, sarcastically comments on the way the West perceives African literature: '[t]hey say, 'oh dear, I'm reading an African novel. Ooh dear it's bound to be a bit strange--there are bound to be rituals and things' (Taylor 34). What the West fails to understand, in fact, is that culture specificity in this case is part of the national agenda of many African writers are keen on promoting an exclusively African literary identity despite their awareness of the problematic and implications of writing in a foreign language as in the case of writers like Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Aye Kei Armah, among others. Indeed, Anthony Appiah explains that African intellectuals are always seeking to develop their cultures in directions that will give them a role and that, unlike the European writer, the African writer asks not who am I? but who are we? (76). Thus, the resort of African writers to their oral tradition is not simply an act of anthropological retrieval of a culture that has been intentionally confiscated by the colonizer, as Western criticism is fond of pointing out (see Cooper's discussion on this point 51-60). On the contrary, it is more of a socio-political agenda. For even though the anthropological project may have been true at a very early stage of African literature (especially West African literature) at the hands of some writers like D. O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola's literary production of folkloric material during the 1940s and 1950s, yet the intentions of such writers have attempted to document African folk culture remain to a great extent debatable. In fact, it could be argued that such anthropological projects had their own socio-political agenda since the historical documentation of folkloric material has indeed contributed to the process of building up the African collective memory, which the colonial power had tried earnestly to eradicate. The Abiku Phenomenon This article will investigate the use of the African oral tradition to promote the socio-political agenda of African writers by focusing on the famous West African abiku phenomenon and its representation in three literary texts by three Nigerian writers namely, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo's poem (1965), Wole Soyinka's poem also entitled (1967) and Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road (1991), where the protagonist is an abiku child (see the two poems in the appendix at the end of this article). …

Decolonizing the Female Sexuality: What Nigerian Female Writers Don't Write

This paper queries the phenomenon of the dominant mode(s) of knowledge production from the angle of how sexualities are captured in such manners that depict the partisanship of the producers of knowledge and their products. It posits that knowledge as a universal phenomenon is a human construction, which is essentially subjective and which expression often disrepresents or misrepresents the other. Women's experience of oppressions in the sphere of sexuality, it argues, is central to the issue of a liberal existence, and such oppressions are largely premised on traditional epistemologies which are basically patriarchal. Drawing upon various female-authored literary texts from Nigeria, it illustrates how Nigerian feminist writers still pander to the dictates of patriarchal epistemologies in the sphere of sexuality by their lack of capacity or interest in creating female characters whose sexuality and, by extension, general development are intrinsically male-dependent. Finally, it states the need for Nigerian writers, the female ones especially, to reconstruct women's sexuality in an overwhelming atmosphere of real freedom and gender equality. (The Journal of Cultural Studies: 2001 3(1): 152-167)

Limits of Transliteration: Nigerian Writers' Endeavors toward a National Literary Language

The multiethnic and multilingual character of Nigeria compelled the country's writers to use some form of English, but standard imperial English was not long acceptable to patriotic Nigerians. So Nigeria must develop for its literature an English whose norms were created by Nigerians in response to the special circumstances in their country. Such an English (Nigerian Pidgin) existed at the time of independence, but because it was maligned, the first generation of Nigerian writers sought a more respectable English literary medium. Hence they devised the strategy of “transliteration”—introducing ethnic-language tropes and idioms into the English text. But transliteration was a flawed approach, and its literary output, in a language only marginally different from imperial English, remained inappropriate in Nigeria. Even so, the strategy served the desired goal by demystifying standard English. As a result, Nigerian Pidgin is coming into its own as a literary medium, and Nigerian writers are taking greater liberties in their reconstitution of English.

Close Encounters: Margaret Laurence and Chinua Achebe

Experience is necessary for growth and survival. But experience is not simply what happened. A lot may happen to a piece of stone without making it any wiser. Experience is what we are able and prepared to do with what happens to us. Chinua Achebe In 1974, seven years after Margaret Laurence had published Long Drums and Cannons, her study of Nigerian writers, she and Chinua Achebe first met. Ten years later, in May of 1984 they met again, on two consecutive evenings. Those three occasions were the only ones when these two writers, whose ideals of the purposes and practices of fiction were so close, actually met. I was present on all three occasions, able to observe and enjoy their sibling-like rapport, an instant empathy that made them almost oblivious to those around them and that obviously renewed in them a mutually supportive creative energy. On the first occasion in May of 1974, as a past president of ACCUTE and member of the current programme committee I had arranged an evening session at the Royal Ontario Museum Theatre during the annual meetings of the Learneds, that year held in Toronto. Douglas Killam, a former colleague at York and already an Achebe friend, both personal and scholarly, had added his influence to my invitation and was to chair an informal conversation between Achebe and Laurence (one of my most lasting regrets is that neither I nor anyone else thought to make a tape recording of the proceedings). Margaret had been back in Canada from England for increasing lengths of time since accepting a writer-in-residence post at the University of Toronto in 1969. That first year back, she bought her shack on the Otonabee, and that year she also began writing the novel that was to be published in the spring of 1974. When she and Achebe met at the museum that novel, The Diviners, had just been published by Knopf, Macmillan and McClelland and Stewart; at that time Achebe was serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts, one of the first of several such posts that he was persuaded to accept. He had little choice -- as a prominent Igbo who had already published four novels and was the respected head of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, when the Civil War following the secession of Biafra broke out in 1967-68, he and his family narrowly escaped the demolition (by bombing) of their home in Enugu, the Biafran capital, and suffered the massacre of friends and relatives. He was and would remain persona non grata in Nigeria, an exile until 1976. From the opening sentences of their dialogue, Laurence and Achebe spoke to each other from positions of trust and admiration in an exchange that lives on in my memory as the most memorable writerly exchange I have ever witnessed. Margaret wore one of the colourful long gowns that I loved to make for her, Achebe a brilliantly patterned and coloured African shirt. This choice of costume underscored the prevailing mood, one of dear friends who had just picked up a recently unfinished conversation. No one who watched and listened was unaffected by the passionate joining of ideals and practices in these two major writers of our time. Margaret had come back to Canada in the midst of the great nationalist surge of the late 1960s, and she speedily became appalled at the lack of teaching of Canadian literature in our schools and the neglect of our writers throughout the country. Starting with an article written in the course of a brief visit to Canada in 1966, in which she came down strongly against the taint of parochialism in Canadian literary criticism and for the treatment of Canadian as one of the many. Commonwealth literatures, she had by 1973 become one of our most vociferous literary nationalists. One of the founders of The Writers' Union of Canada, she carried into all her proselytizing activities the naming of all Canadian writers as a tribe, her tribe, the recipient of her deepest loyalty. Achebe's strong sense of social responsibility spoke to her never entirely dormant Social Gospel conscience, so very much a part of her Manitoba upbringing and her education at Winnipeg's United College, and she quoted often his most famous dictum against a colonial mentality: What we need to do is to look back and try to find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us. …

The Cassava Song and Rice Song

The Cassava Song and Rice Song

Language transfer and the Nigerian writer of English

ABSTRACT: This study discusses the processes of language transfer as used by Nigerian writers in English. These processes are illustrated with examples from the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and word formation. The primary focus is on two Nigerian creative writers, i.e. Chinua Achebe (Arrow of God) and Amos Tutuola (The Palm‐wine Drinkard). It is shown that the two writers represent two distinct attempts to cope with the problem of expressing a native cultural experience in a non‐native language, through the transfer of linguistic structures and sociocultural concepts expressed in the first language. Such a transfer—conscious or unconscious—is thus a valuable strategy for a creative writer. The examples show that the search for translation equivalents for culture‐bound items and form in Nigerian English is a necessary stage in the process of nativization of an institutionalized variety of English.

Anglophone Writing from Africa and Asia

Nigeria: There is little doubt that, until the outbreak of the Biafran war in mid-1967, Nigerian writers dominated the African literary scene. With the Civil War, writing from Nigeria all but came to a standstill. Now, more than three years after the end of the war, these voices are beginning to be heard once again. Ibo writer, Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart (1958) and three other highly successful novels, has recently published a volume of poems, Christmas in Biafra, and a collection of short stories, Girls at War. Achebe refers to both of these works as stopgaps the only kind of writing he was able to complete during the war years when most of his energies were consumed trying to gain international sympathy for Biafra. Achebe, who has been teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst this year, is once again working on another novel. Wole Soyinka, a Yoruba from Western Nigeria, has published or scheduled for publication a quartet of works which clearly distinguish him as the most versatile writer in Anglophone Africa. (Soyinka has been most widely known as a dramatist.) The first of these works, Madmen and Specialists (see BA 46:3, p. 533), a drama, focuses on the aftermath of the war in Nigeria. The second, a volume of poetry, called A Shuttle in the Crypt (see this issue, p. 407), includes a number of poems directly related to Soyinka's war experiences. The third work, The Man Died, a brilliant personal, and often brutal, narrative of Soyinka's twenty-seven-month imprisonment during the war is certain to win wide critical acclaim abroad and animosity at home. The fourth work which deals even more directly with the war than the other three is a novel (Soyinka's second) called Season of Anomy, scheduled for publication late this year or early in 1974. Other works which have dramatized the recent Nigerian unrest include a first novel by S. Okechukwu Mezu, titled Behind the Rising Sun (see this issue, pp. 406~ 407), a roman a clef, describing the activities of a group of Ibos in Europe who are trying to raise money for the purchase of military equipment for Biafra. Another novel about the war has been published by the Kenyan writer, Ali A. Mazrui. This work, called The Trial of Christopher O\igbo (see BA 47:1, p. 211), is set in After-Africa and attempts to argue, intellectually, against Okigbo's involvement in the fighting. Christopher Okigbo, who was killed in an early battle of the war, fighting for Biafra, was one of Anglophone Africa's most promising poets.

Bernth Lindfors, ed.dem‐Say, interviews with eight nigerian writers.African and Afro‐American studies and research center, Austin, Texas, 1974

(1976). Bernth Lindfors, ed. dem‐Say, interviews with eight nigerian writers. African and Afro‐American studies and research center, Austin, Texas, 1974. World Literature Written in English: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 73-76.

Nigerian Writers and Political Commitment

Nigerian Writers and Political Commitment

Anglophone Writing from Africa and Asia

Nigeria: There is little doubt that, until the outbreak of the Biafran war in mid-1967, Nigerian writers dominated the African literary scene. With the Civil War, writing from Nigeria all but came to a standstill. Now, more than three years after the end of the war, these voices are beginning to be heard once again. Ibo writer, Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart (1958) and three other highly successful novels, has recently published a volume of poems, Christmas in Biafra, and a collection of short stories, Girls at War. Achebe refers to both of these works as stopgaps the only kind of writing he was able to complete during the war years when most of his energies were consumed trying to gain international sympathy for Biafra. Achebe, who has been teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst this year, is once again working on another novel. Wole Soyinka, a Yoruba from Western Nigeria, has published or scheduled for publication a quartet of works which clearly distinguish him as the most versatile writer in Anglophone Africa. (Soyinka has been most widely known as a dramatist.) The first of these works, Madmen and Specialists (see BA 46:3, p. 533), a drama, focuses on the aftermath of the war in Nigeria. The second, a volume of poetry, called A Shuttle in the Crypt (see this issue, p. 407), includes a number of poems directly related to Soyinka's war experiences. The third work, The Man Died, a brilliant personal, and often brutal, narrative of Soyinka's twenty-seven-month imprisonment during the war is certain to win wide critical acclaim abroad and animosity at home. The fourth work which deals even more directly with the war than the other three is a novel (Soyinka's second) called Season of Anomy, scheduled for publication late this year or early in 1974. Other works which have dramatized the recent Nigerian unrest include a first novel by S. Okechukwu Mezu, titled Behind the Rising Sun (see this issue, pp. 406~ 407), a roman a clef, describing the activities of a group of Ibos in Europe who are trying to raise money for the purchase of military equipment for Biafra. Another novel about the war has been published by the Kenyan writer, Ali A. Mazrui. This work, called The Trial of Christopher O\igbo (see BA 47:1, p. 211), is set in After-Africa and attempts to argue, intellectually, against Okigbo's involvement in the fighting. Christopher Okigbo, who was killed in an early battle of the war, fighting for Biafra, was one of Anglophone Africa's most promising poets.

Wole Soyinka: Two Nigerian Comedies

The plays of Wole Soyinka are becoming well known to readers abroad and even finding ready production. Besides numerous university presentations Soyinka' s plays have been performed professionally in London and New York. The latter off-Broadway production was actually reviewed in Time, which is always ready to spot a trend. These productions are a high compliment to the quality of the plays and to the immediacy of the appeal they have to an audience bound essentially by cultural boundaries other than the writer's own. Wole Soyinka' s plays, though deeply committed to the African experience which makes their setting, do have a ready appeal. Two particularly, The Trials of Brother Jero and The Lion and The Jewel, have been especially popular. Wole Soyinka was one of a group of young Nigerian writers who a decade or so ago initiated a new literature an African literature, written not in the vernacular, but in English, the second language of their education. These young men, of whom Chinua Achebe the novelist and J. P. Clark the poet are best known abroad, were a new phenomenon. They were not the simple story tellers that popular ignorance expected from Africa but serious and cosmopolitan young men, well read in literature formally through their university studies, and more generally through their recognition of themselves as part of a much wider view of contemporary English language literatures across the world. Their sensitive and sophisticated works are now commonly studied in schools in many African countries and are also becoming well known in this country. Since the work of a dramatist needs stage presentation, he is in a position different from that of the novelist and poet who can expect publication. A publishing house may be willing to present a small volume of poetry or a new novel where even a financial loss may be set against the prestige of the initial intention, but dramatic production is a much more expensive and complicated matter and far greater caution is apparent. The plays of a dramatist may be published, but he must make his name initially in production, for printing will represent his success and not be the cause of it. Since the dramatist's original audience will be African, one might expect a greater difficulty in making the plays meaningful to a foreign audience, yet Wole Soyinka has solved this problem by being widely eclectic. His plays,

Out of the Irony of Words

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.