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From: A MASK DANCING: NIGERIAN NOVELISTS OF THE EIGHTIES, first
published in the UK in !992 by Hans Zell.
Introduction
The language in we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master
on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and
so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds
them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The decade of the 1980s saw a renewed outburst of creativity on the part of the English-language Nigerian
novelists. The reason for this was simple enough, coinciding as it did with the country’s second attempt at
democracy when the military finally relinquished power after thirteen years to an elected civilian government. As
I suggest in the course of the book, the process of democratization itself – ‘the abandonment of this denigration
of our popular will’ – both reflected and released a wider creativity within the society. A similar outburst had
previously occurred at the time of independence in 1960, when a different but no less invidious denigration was
finally jettisoned
This book deals only with the Nigerian novel in English. This is not to imply that the increasing number of
novels being written in the older languages of the continent are less worthy of our attention; on the contrary, I
am sympathetic to the argument that African writing in the ‘European’ languages constitutes something of a
dead end, and that ‘any true African literature must be written in the African languages…’ Obi Wali’s statement,
first formulated in 1963, has since been refined by other African writers, notably Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan
novelist and playwright. In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (‘my farewell to
English as a vehicle for any of my writings’), he argues that the continued use of the ‘European’ languages
perpetuates the colonial dependency that has brought the continent to the present state of collapse. An
alternative vision of the African world, a prerequisite for true liberation, can only be achieved through the
medium of those languages that contain the ‘collective experience’ of the African people.
This is a seductive argument but it misses the point. The problem is not with English per se (or French or
Portuguese), which is no less African than Hausa, Swahili or Zulu, but with those for whom English is not a first
language, but who nevertheless insist on writing novels in a language they effectively consider an alien import:
The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether they ought to. Is it right that a man
should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty
feeling.
No, it is not right that a man should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else’s, but then the answer is
already implicit in the way that Chinua Achebe, ‘the father of the Nigerian novel’, has phrased the question. It
also begs the related question: Why should a man (or a woman) want to abandon his mother-tongue in the first
place, especially when he himself perceives the exercise – rightly enough – as a ‘dreadful betrayal’. In other
words, if English is not your first language; and if, further, using English makes you feel ‘guilty’, then it is simply
perverse to insist on writing novels in English. The solution would seem to be obvious enough; however:
The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the
language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will not be lost. He should aim at
fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry out his peculiar experience.
The idea that one writes in a language simply because it happens to be ‘a medium of international exchange’, a
‘universal’ language, is not a reason, only a conclusion; but the fact that Achebe can advance such a spurious
argument as though it were perfectly reasonable points to a deeper confusion concerning why one writes and
who one writes for, and never mind the competing audience – ‘universal’ on the one hand, local (presumably)
on the other – that Achebe is attempting to satisfy at one and the same time. It’s hardly surprising, given such a
functional notion of literature, that he should pour scorn on the notion of art for art’s sake, which he considers
‘just another piece of deodorised dog shit’; or that he should declare, somewhat defensively, that, ‘Perhaps
what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I
have in mind!’ Unfortunately for such a view, there is all the difference in the world between a work of art and a
manifesto.
In this Achebe is not alone. All Nigerian novelists in English share his ambiguous response towards the
language, which is why their novels are less interesting as literature than as a record of the dilemma of the
Nigerian intellectual in the modern world. This is to be expected. It is one thing to attempt to appropriate the
language of the former colonial power; it is quite another to do so at the expense of your own. The first is the
predicament of, say, the Caribbean and Australian writer; the second is peculiar only to the African writer, who
alone among the peoples of the world has rejected their heritage, that is, language, for reasons which have
everything to do with the fact of colonisation, and recognised as such by Achebe himself:
I know the source of our problem, of course, ANXIETY. Africa has had such a fate in the world that the very
adjective African can still call up hideous fears of rejection. Better to cut all links with this homeland. This
liability, and become in one giant leap the universal man.
Which is precisely what he does while pretending to do something else. ‘But running away from myself seems to
me a very inadequate way of dealing with anxiety,’ he adds, somewhat disingenuously. All that is then left is to
divorce literature from language, and pretend that novels should be ‘good and useful’, as though literature
served a purely didactic purpose. One might even paraphrase Achebe himself and say that the trouble with
Nigeria is simply and squarely the failure of the Nigerian intelligentsia to meet the demands of their
predicament, proof of which is to be found in the books they write.
This, of course, flies in the face of received opinion, but the pretence that their novels do constitute a
genuinely exciting literary tradition worthy of extended critical exegesis is the result of a collusion between
African and European commentators with all manner of neurotic responses to the African predicament. So, for
instance, the apparently endless articles, books and theses dedicated to proving, amongst other things, that a
write like Amos Tutuola, who can hardly write a grammatical sentence, ‘is speaking strongly and directly to our
times’; is, in fact, a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. One may or may not wish to question the authority of
the Nobel committee in such matters; one may even generate a fever – hardly a passion – denouncing the
‘pathological longing for European validation of who we are and what we do’, but literary excellence is literary
excellence, and no amount of ink has yet managed to turn bad books into good ones. Of all the critical works I
consulted in the course of my researches – and all of which are included in the bibliography for reasons of
‘academic respectability’ – only two proved worthwhile: Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World
(1976), and Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (1980) by Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and
Ihechukwu Madubuike.
My debt to Soyinka is probably implicit in much of what follows, but in this I am hardly alone; as Femi
Osofisan once put it: ‘the dialogue with Soyinka has hardly begun. He represents strength and versatility in our
artistic life and for me I can’t but respond to that.’ Conversely, my opinion of Chinweizu et al’s ‘radicalism’ (or, as
they prefer, bolekeja criticism, ‘come down, let’s fight’), is contained in the relevant section. Suffice it to say
here that although I disagree completely with what the troika have to say, one is at least grateful for the manner
in which they dispense with the bogus academicism of their more strait-laced colleagues; in their own words:
…we would like to make it quite clear…that we are bolekeja critics, outraged touts for the passenger lorries of
African literature, and that we are administering a timely and healthy dose of much needed public ridicule to the
reams of pompous nonsense which has been floating out of the stale, sterile, stifling covens of academia…
Quite so; but their subsequent call for a truly indigenous literature, written in English but eschewing all ‘foreign’
traditions, is both self-defeating and an offence against the spirit of literature itself. The point about a truly
indigenous literature is that it possesses the self-confidence to draw sustenance from wherever it is to be
found. In any case, the term ‘foreign literature’ is a misnomer, at least as far as the practitioner are concerned.
There are no boundaries in literature, only shifting centres of excellence. We all look forward to the day when
Nigeria becomes just such a centre.
This book is divided into two parts. The first – and shorter – deals with a cross-section of novels published
before the 1980s which seemed top me representative of the major themes that occupied the Nigerian writer in
the aftermath of decolonisation; the second part concentrates exclusively on the decade of the eighties, a
period when the high hopes of independence had given way to a sense of despair at the manner in which the
country’s enormous potential was being squandered by reactionaries who wished only to perpetuate
themselves and their kind in power. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of overlap between the two, but the
shift in attitudes which I attempt to chart is more significant than the similarities. Some themes are dropped
altogether, for instance the need to re-create a pristine past in order to prove the right of Africans to walk upon
the earth; other themes, in particular the scale of the corruption that was jeopardising the very existence of
Nigeria as a going concern, are dealt with in a much more serious manner.
Finally, it ought to be said that the touchstone of this study is the books themselves. I have simply read the
novels and responded to them as directly as possible, but then this can be the only justification for such an
enterprise; as D. H. Lawrence one put it, ‘Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the
feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.’ It’s a pity that the majority of our critics seem
unable to cope with this simple truth, in itself a comment on the crisis of the Nigerian intellectual whose activity
is only validated, it seems, by one or other of the ideological-critical schools – but always foreign – to which
they feel the need to subscribe.
More...
published in the UK in !992 by Hans Zell.
Introduction
The language in we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master
on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and
so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds
them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The decade of the 1980s saw a renewed outburst of creativity on the part of the English-language Nigerian
novelists. The reason for this was simple enough, coinciding as it did with the country’s second attempt at
democracy when the military finally relinquished power after thirteen years to an elected civilian government. As
I suggest in the course of the book, the process of democratization itself – ‘the abandonment of this denigration
of our popular will’ – both reflected and released a wider creativity within the society. A similar outburst had
previously occurred at the time of independence in 1960, when a different but no less invidious denigration was
finally jettisoned
This book deals only with the Nigerian novel in English. This is not to imply that the increasing number of
novels being written in the older languages of the continent are less worthy of our attention; on the contrary, I
am sympathetic to the argument that African writing in the ‘European’ languages constitutes something of a
dead end, and that ‘any true African literature must be written in the African languages…’ Obi Wali’s statement,
first formulated in 1963, has since been refined by other African writers, notably Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan
novelist and playwright. In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (‘my farewell to
English as a vehicle for any of my writings’), he argues that the continued use of the ‘European’ languages
perpetuates the colonial dependency that has brought the continent to the present state of collapse. An
alternative vision of the African world, a prerequisite for true liberation, can only be achieved through the
medium of those languages that contain the ‘collective experience’ of the African people.
This is a seductive argument but it misses the point. The problem is not with English per se (or French or
Portuguese), which is no less African than Hausa, Swahili or Zulu, but with those for whom English is not a first
language, but who nevertheless insist on writing novels in a language they effectively consider an alien import:
The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether they ought to. Is it right that a man
should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty
feeling.
No, it is not right that a man should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else’s, but then the answer is
already implicit in the way that Chinua Achebe, ‘the father of the Nigerian novel’, has phrased the question. It
also begs the related question: Why should a man (or a woman) want to abandon his mother-tongue in the first
place, especially when he himself perceives the exercise – rightly enough – as a ‘dreadful betrayal’. In other
words, if English is not your first language; and if, further, using English makes you feel ‘guilty’, then it is simply
perverse to insist on writing novels in English. The solution would seem to be obvious enough; however:
The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the
language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will not be lost. He should aim at
fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry out his peculiar experience.
The idea that one writes in a language simply because it happens to be ‘a medium of international exchange’, a
‘universal’ language, is not a reason, only a conclusion; but the fact that Achebe can advance such a spurious
argument as though it were perfectly reasonable points to a deeper confusion concerning why one writes and
who one writes for, and never mind the competing audience – ‘universal’ on the one hand, local (presumably)
on the other – that Achebe is attempting to satisfy at one and the same time. It’s hardly surprising, given such a
functional notion of literature, that he should pour scorn on the notion of art for art’s sake, which he considers
‘just another piece of deodorised dog shit’; or that he should declare, somewhat defensively, that, ‘Perhaps
what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I
have in mind!’ Unfortunately for such a view, there is all the difference in the world between a work of art and a
manifesto.
In this Achebe is not alone. All Nigerian novelists in English share his ambiguous response towards the
language, which is why their novels are less interesting as literature than as a record of the dilemma of the
Nigerian intellectual in the modern world. This is to be expected. It is one thing to attempt to appropriate the
language of the former colonial power; it is quite another to do so at the expense of your own. The first is the
predicament of, say, the Caribbean and Australian writer; the second is peculiar only to the African writer, who
alone among the peoples of the world has rejected their heritage, that is, language, for reasons which have
everything to do with the fact of colonisation, and recognised as such by Achebe himself:
I know the source of our problem, of course, ANXIETY. Africa has had such a fate in the world that the very
adjective African can still call up hideous fears of rejection. Better to cut all links with this homeland. This
liability, and become in one giant leap the universal man.
Which is precisely what he does while pretending to do something else. ‘But running away from myself seems to
me a very inadequate way of dealing with anxiety,’ he adds, somewhat disingenuously. All that is then left is to
divorce literature from language, and pretend that novels should be ‘good and useful’, as though literature
served a purely didactic purpose. One might even paraphrase Achebe himself and say that the trouble with
Nigeria is simply and squarely the failure of the Nigerian intelligentsia to meet the demands of their
predicament, proof of which is to be found in the books they write.
This, of course, flies in the face of received opinion, but the pretence that their novels do constitute a
genuinely exciting literary tradition worthy of extended critical exegesis is the result of a collusion between
African and European commentators with all manner of neurotic responses to the African predicament. So, for
instance, the apparently endless articles, books and theses dedicated to proving, amongst other things, that a
write like Amos Tutuola, who can hardly write a grammatical sentence, ‘is speaking strongly and directly to our
times’; is, in fact, a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. One may or may not wish to question the authority of
the Nobel committee in such matters; one may even generate a fever – hardly a passion – denouncing the
‘pathological longing for European validation of who we are and what we do’, but literary excellence is literary
excellence, and no amount of ink has yet managed to turn bad books into good ones. Of all the critical works I
consulted in the course of my researches – and all of which are included in the bibliography for reasons of
‘academic respectability’ – only two proved worthwhile: Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World
(1976), and Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (1980) by Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and
Ihechukwu Madubuike.
My debt to Soyinka is probably implicit in much of what follows, but in this I am hardly alone; as Femi
Osofisan once put it: ‘the dialogue with Soyinka has hardly begun. He represents strength and versatility in our
artistic life and for me I can’t but respond to that.’ Conversely, my opinion of Chinweizu et al’s ‘radicalism’ (or, as
they prefer, bolekeja criticism, ‘come down, let’s fight’), is contained in the relevant section. Suffice it to say
here that although I disagree completely with what the troika have to say, one is at least grateful for the manner
in which they dispense with the bogus academicism of their more strait-laced colleagues; in their own words:
…we would like to make it quite clear…that we are bolekeja critics, outraged touts for the passenger lorries of
African literature, and that we are administering a timely and healthy dose of much needed public ridicule to the
reams of pompous nonsense which has been floating out of the stale, sterile, stifling covens of academia…
Quite so; but their subsequent call for a truly indigenous literature, written in English but eschewing all ‘foreign’
traditions, is both self-defeating and an offence against the spirit of literature itself. The point about a truly
indigenous literature is that it possesses the self-confidence to draw sustenance from wherever it is to be
found. In any case, the term ‘foreign literature’ is a misnomer, at least as far as the practitioner are concerned.
There are no boundaries in literature, only shifting centres of excellence. We all look forward to the day when
Nigeria becomes just such a centre.
This book is divided into two parts. The first – and shorter – deals with a cross-section of novels published
before the 1980s which seemed top me representative of the major themes that occupied the Nigerian writer in
the aftermath of decolonisation; the second part concentrates exclusively on the decade of the eighties, a
period when the high hopes of independence had given way to a sense of despair at the manner in which the
country’s enormous potential was being squandered by reactionaries who wished only to perpetuate
themselves and their kind in power. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of overlap between the two, but the
shift in attitudes which I attempt to chart is more significant than the similarities. Some themes are dropped
altogether, for instance the need to re-create a pristine past in order to prove the right of Africans to walk upon
the earth; other themes, in particular the scale of the corruption that was jeopardising the very existence of
Nigeria as a going concern, are dealt with in a much more serious manner.
Finally, it ought to be said that the touchstone of this study is the books themselves. I have simply read the
novels and responded to them as directly as possible, but then this can be the only justification for such an
enterprise; as D. H. Lawrence one put it, ‘Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the
feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.’ It’s a pity that the majority of our critics seem
unable to cope with this simple truth, in itself a comment on the crisis of the Nigerian intellectual whose activity
is only validated, it seems, by one or other of the ideological-critical schools – but always foreign – to which
they feel the need to subscribe.
More...