In a classroom at University College, Ibadan, a young man rebelled against the tyranny of colonial literature. It was the early 1950s; Britain’s rule over West Africa was on the wane, but its hold on the Faculty of Arts at Nigeria’s oldest university remained unchallenged. Milton, Tennyson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Conrad among others were the pillars of the curriculum.
But then, this young man stood up and told his teacher that the only moment he enjoyed Irish writer Joyce Carey’s Mister Johnson , which had been featured on the cover of Time magazine on October 20, 1952, and described as ‘the best novel ever written about Africa,’ was when the Nigerian hero was killed by his British master.
At the time, Chinua Achebe — considered by many to be the patriarch of African literature in English — was a student in that class. He and his colleagues shared the young man’s “exasperation at this bumbling idiot of a character whom Joyce Carey and our teacher were passing off as a poet when he was nothing but an embarrassing nitwit!” Recalling the incident in Home and Exile , Achebe writes, “It was a landmark rebellion. Here was a whole class of young Nigerian students, among the brightest of their generation, united in their view of a book of English fiction in complete opposition to their English teacher…”
For Achebe, who died in 2013, literature was not a luxury, but a life and death affair. Nearly 60 years after his masterpiece Things Fall Apart challenged the colonial depiction of Africa — in the language of its colonisers — the literary voices emerging from Nigeria have never been more urgent. Drawing from their ethnic roots, be they Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, among others, a new generation of novelists is rebelling against the country’s broken promises, and its failure to live up to its potential. Men and women born in the 1970s and 80s, whose formative years were shaped by dictatorship under General Sani Abacha, and later by the transition to democracy under President Olusegun Obasanjo. Their stories reflect their anger, betrayal and despair, but also hope for a peaceful Nigeria.
While Chimananda Adichie and Teju Cole are the more recognised names of this new wave of novelists, authors such as Chigozie Obioma, Lola Shoneyin and Elnathan John have exploded onto the international literary scene with stunning debuts in recent years.
Obioma’s The Fishermen , shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year, begins in 1993, when Nigeria was attempting to wrest democracy from a military regime for the second time. We see the upper-middle class dreams of the Agwu family unravel after four brothers defy their father and go fishing in the Omi-Ala River, once worshipped but now a “cradle besmirched” by bracken water, black magic and carcasses. There they encounter the village mad man who foretells the death of the eldest brother at the hands of another. Their father, a banker by profession, had mapped out his son’s careers. They would be professors, doctors, lawyers, he predicted. But his dreams putrefy under the stench of the mad man’s prophecy.
Key political events, including Yoruba businessman Moshood (MKO) Abiolo’s bid for presidency serve as a backdrop. “M.K.O.’s election campaign was vivid in my memory,” says Obioma in an email correspondence with The Hindu . “I recall often singing his campaign song, only a refrain of which I now remember: ‘MKO, you be the one oh! MKO, you be the one! Abiola, Abiola, power!’”
MKO represented the dreams of a nation that could almost taste the sweet promise of democracy. But it was a failed bid. As the madman’s prophecy, like an “angered beast”, destroyed the eldest brother Ikenna’s peace of mind, Nigeria’s hope of freedom dissolved into another regime, this time under General Abacha. It was only in 1999 that it again attempted a civilian administration under President Olusegun Obasanjo.
But this new democracy did not bring about the nation that Nigeria is capable of being, says Nigerian novelist Chika Unigwe. “With every election since 1999, things seem to have got increasingly worse. All the elections since 2009 have been marked, to varying degrees, with controversies. Whatever hope the populace had in democracy is being steadily squashed.”
This sentiment finds voice in Chika Unigwe’s 2012 novel, On Black Sisters’ Street , which follows the lives of four women who pay a businessman for the opportunity to leave Africa and work in Antwerp’s red light district. “For a certain group of people who see no future in Nigeria, that desperation will never disappear,” she says.
In the novel, the lead protagonist Sisi, who studied finance and business administration, but fails to find a job, feels as if her resumes were being swallowed by the many potholes on Lagos roads. She resents President Obasanjo and blames him for her family’s inability to enjoy the trapping a middle-class life. “We thought we were suffering under Abacha. This is worse! At least a military dictatorship did not hide under cover of democracy.”
According to Unigwe, this was a popular and much vocalised sentiment. “He (Obasanjo) banned the import of lace, and Sisi and many Nigerians believed it was because his wife wanted exclusivity even though the official reason given was different. Often times perception is more ‘authentic’ than reality,” says Unigwe, who has noticed an increase in the number of Nigerian authors and the diversity of their publishers.
Another novel to have garnered international recognition is Born on a Tuesday by Elnathan John who situates his story in the religious extremism that’s sweeping through present-day northern Nigeria. But the violence does not overpower this coming-of-age novel set between 2003 and 2010. Dhantala Ahmad — the English translation of his name is ‘born on a Tuesday’ — studies in a Sufi Quranic school, but is swept in a tide of violence. His is a world where boys kill for money and are later tortured for it. “The man with the pliers is here again…You cannot prepare for pain… I can only faint, again.”
But Dhantala refuses to die, and we leave him on a hopeful note. “I think of all the things I must do: cut my hair, wash with hot water, start writing out my story. Then take a bus and go wherever it is headed.”
If there is hesitant optimism in the fictional real, there is hope in the real world. “I’d be an incurable optimist to see anything other than chaos and a continued ride on the failure train,” says Obioma. “There is no basis for success for the Nigerian state as is. Yet, I wish for it to succeed, desperately. I pray for it to succeed.”
