Why Nigeria’s Literature is the best in Africa
By NWAGBO NNENYELIKE, Ilorin
Sunday, April 9, 2006

•Yerima Photo: Sun News Publishing

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Left to the Western world, they would continue to insist that the black race has no history, culture tradition, literature, philosophy, religion and arts. Even when the whites tend to believe that Africans have all these, they describe them as crude, barbaric, raw, and inferior to that of their race, which they see as refined.

But Dr. Ahmed Yerima, the General Manager of National Arts Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos, who takes pleasure in studying African writers and literature, especially Nigerian literary tradition, has descended on the white race for sticking to that that opinion.
The moment you mention African literature to him, he cuts you short and asks, "Does African literature exist?"

He would not allow you to answer as he immediately asserts: "That is the mentality of the white man," adding, "they forget that there is culture, and that since culture is a way of life of a people, literature is the literary form of expression, the way of life of any given people, whether white or black.''

Yerima, who is also the Artistic Director of the National Troupe of Nigeria, affirms that African literature, oral or written, must have existed, and does exist to date. "It still serves as the basis for the sensibilities of black race, no matter what processes of depersonalization must have taken place," he says.
Tracing what constitutes African literature, he said all Africans can tell stories, sing and dance and "these are the realities of African tradition, culture and invariably the root of African literature and life."

Besides, "African literature is mingled with African politics. It has remained that part of the history of the people that has assisted with the documentation of African experience or story. African is known for her tales of struggle, myths, resistance, story telling, heroes, wars, slavery, political and often psychological reconstruction. African socio-political history look at the issues of colonial dislocation and introduced the dichotomies of good and bad persons, white and black colours, minority culture and predominant ones, encroachment and defence of territories."

As Africans fought for the colonial domination, Dr. Yerima enlightens us that "it dovetailed into the period of reconstruction of the collective dented experiences of the African people which is the challenge against the spirit of imperialism and the search for a new meaning. Most times, these process were captured in the poetry of symbolic images, or narratives of pain and cries of characters which walk the stage as symbols and metaphors of the painful experience of the African struggles.

However, even with the ambition of the Western world to rule African, the culture administrator observes that not all African countries had the same strenuous experience at the hands of the colonial masters, citing Nigeria, where, after the colonialist left, national literatures helped to create this sense of common destiny. As he says, "Though civil war, long drawn military rule, religious uprising and problems of having a grasp of democratic system followed the colonial rule, the national literatures still found a level of freedom for individual consciousness."

The playwright, who is also a university scholar, is of the view that the colonialist, through his formal education, helped the Nigerian writers to use his English language to mould the country’s literature. This has made Nigerian literature outstanding in Africa. "The Nigerian colonial experience can be said to be different in the area of inter-relationship, especially as it concerns the first generation of writers. Sometimes, I wonder if the first generation of writers was not too young to experience the bitterness of the colonial experience. Maybe this is why they were less angry than their counterparts in some other African countries.

From his observation, the colonial experience served two major functions for the first generation Nigerian writers: "First, the colonial education equipped them with the voice and the language of the narrative genre they were to choose. Second, because the period of transition between the colonial to post-colonial and invariable self-rule was relatively peaceful, the first generation writers had the time to ‘master’ the art of story telling in the English language, be it in poetry, drama or prose forms. The genius of J.P.Clark, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Christopher Okigbo, Amos Tutuola, T.M. Aluko, Cyprian Ekwensi and Wole Soyinka in the art of using the English language as tools for communication confirms this observation.

"Again, the first generation of Nigerian writers were quick to realize that there was a need to concentrate on the new ‘word’ of the white masters. In schools, which they attended, they learnt how to string these words together so that they told story of their people and also signified new meanings for the stories which grew from either the old traditional mind of their people, or new experiences which they picked up in the process of interaction with the new experiences."

In addition, all the literature that emerged from Nigeria, even though by different writers from different cultural background, he says, were in the same language, and these made Nigerian literature, easily accessible to the Western press. These include Oxford University Press, Longman, Macmillan, among others. Another factor is the heritage of Nigerian cultural folklore, myths, which meant that the first generation writers could draw immensely on the rich palm pest of the fundamental traditional sources of the Nigerian people. Yet the beauty was the very fact that the writers did not think within the capsule of their cultural sensibilities such as Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa writers.

He said that some even accused Wole Soyinka of deliberately thinking more as a writer of the world, and this was proclaimed when he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Thus, opening the floodgate for other African writers. "This meant that a national literature both as subject and as object and as a product of national consciousness was the foundation of Nigerian literature," he emphasizes.

Continuing, he notes that "despite the internal cultural diversity of the Nigerian people, the capacity for the first generation writer to see himself as the story teller, or as a citizen within the socio-political reality of a new developing world, the appraisal of his society in the emerging works, such as the early drama of Wole Soyinka in The Lion and the Jewel or Kongi’s Harvest and the ability and capability to submit oneself to self-criticism and the attention of the international distinguished scholars and literary bodies, made Nigerian writer in the first twenty years after independence, win all the major international prizes the world had to offer of prose, drama or poetry, and more recently, Dele Olojede, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Yerima remarks further that "the retention of the position of leadership is a difficult task, especially in a fluid subject as literature which grows on the organic nature of the developing human consciousness which takes into cognizance the uncontrollable influence of hegemony on the culture of the people .By the time the second generation came, Africa as a literate continent was in full swing. The other African countries had created their own first generation writers who, writing in both French and the English languages, were also as dominant and relevant to their immediate cultures taking the issues of their immediate environment into consideration.

"Writers, such as Sembene Ousmane, Ayi Kwei Armah, Leopold Senghor, Camera Laye, Barnard Badie, Ferdinand Oyono, Mongo Beti, Peter Abrahams, Atukwei Okai, also became champions of the development of African literature. The issue of leadership no longer existed. Each country produced writers who expressed their own immediate socio-political problems. Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful

Ones Are Not Yet Born and James Ngugi's Weep Not Child revealed the post-colonial problems of both Ghana and Kenya. In the late fifties and sixties and different epistemologies of the anti-colonial movements in northern African widened the discourse of African cultural theory and literature. Intellectuals, like Frantz Fanon, Cabral, Edward Said, Foucault, Derrida and Amin, had started to open up discourses on the temperament of a people, culture of resistance, liberation, and dynamics of resistance and development," he says.

Dr. Yerima adds that "In Nigeria, the new generation of writers were learning fast from the first generation. Through plays such as J.P Clark’s, Song of a Goat, and novels like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the new generation of writers: Ola Rotimi, Zulu Sofola, Wale Ogunyemi, Femi Osofisan, Olu Obafemi, Tunde Fatunde, Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimum, Femi Fatoba, started to redefine the position of the modern artist in the developing African society. In essays such as: "The Fourth Stage", "Toward a Theatre", "The Writer in a Modern African State", Soyinka was the first to begin to articulate his ideology of tragedy, drama and the writer as tool for social change. The second-generation writer started to write novels, poems and plays which took his fancy or which he felt were thematically relevant to his society at the time.”