The current
domain of cultural production in Nigeria can hardly be said to be
arid; it is rather in fact, fecund with new and vital ways of expression.
In the last decade or so, for instance, Nigerian film has altered
the landscape of filmmaking, with its own unique pageantry of images
and drama; so much that a new name has been attached to that phenomenon:
it is called “Nollywood.” Nollywood is assumed, though
we make much of the assumption, to form an intricate, even increasingly
important part of a triad of the industry in tinsel town, that include
Hollywood in Los Angeles, Bollywood in Bombay, and the Nollywood
in Lagos. The evidence of the health of this industry is rampant,
evidenced enough in the wide distribution of Nigerian images, values,
and desires, along the West African corridor, and as far up as the
horn of the continent, where one newspaper article reveals, that
Ethiopian girls now speak Igbo – a variant of it learnt from
the Nollywood movies: cheap, low budget, video productions, whose
technical as well as creative depths are still evolving, to say
the least. But the industry of film, an emergent tradition of Nigerian
films, is no doubt in the horizon, and the increasing presence or
influence of the industry has been aptly captured in a New York
Times article on the billion dollar value of Nollywood.
These dynamic activities are equally present in other sectors of
the culture domain – in the literature, in the fine arts,
in music, and even in architecture. In the last five years, a new
generation of Nigerian novelists, for example have attracted cross-border
attention: Helon Habila, with Waiting for an Angel, Chimamanda Adichie
with Purple Hibiscus, Chris Abani with Graceland, Helen Oyeyemi
(Icarus girl), Uzo Iweala (Beast of No Nation) and Segun Afolabi(Goodbye
Lucille). These new novelists have, if they have done anything extraordinary,
proved that contemporary Nigerian fiction still flows from the springs
of a vast complex drama and experience, whose dimensions are yet
to be fully marked. Indeed, these novelists constitute what I personally
call the advance guard of new or contemporary writers, who have
provoked the attention of a new international audience for contemporary
or current Nigerian writing. A vast archive of that domain is yet
to be unveiled, and may reveal an even richer harvest, especially
as such important voices like Maik Nwosu, Ike Okonta, Sanya Osha,
Akin Adesokan, Promise Okekwe, and many other individuals whose
works began to emerge and circulate especially from the middle of
the 1980s and 1990s in Nigeria, and who are central to a very important
movement of new Nigerian literature, begin to draw a deserved attention.
The current dominance of fiction equally belies the exciting presence
of a generation of highly talented Nigerian poets, whose works are
yet to attract the kind of wider, trans-national audience or attention,
which the new novelists currently enjoy. Yet indeed, the dominant
mode of creative expression in one generation was indeed the poetic
form, and an examination of the full range of Nigerian poetry from
the 1980s would reveal a texture of the imagination so diverse and
varied, and a richness of utterance so refractive of the mood or
temper of the society in a most turbulent, transitional moment in
Africa of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
It is true that the English critic of African literature of an earlier,
postcolonial generation, Gerald Moore, in his 1967 essay/talk, “Modern
African Literature and Tradition” published in African Affairs,
demonstrates a theory of African, particularly Nigerian poetry as
taking its roots generally from ritual, and the praise song, “in
which the attributes of the praised object, which the poet confronts
directly, are enumerated line by line. As the song progresses, the
energy of that –which-is-praised (a king, a god, a chief,
a bull, a beautiful girl) mingles with the poet’s own, so
that both are renewed.” This is a generalization, of course,
and indeed may today obscure the real nature of the transformations
that have occurred in Nigerian or even African poetry. From themes
of “divination, sacrifice, expiation, and atonement,”
– of Okigbo’s sacral pilgrim in search of his goddess,
or Soyinka’s fated carrier, or Clark’s scapegoat - all
bearing their tragic burdens of history – Nigerian poetry
entered the space of the secular, which deployed first, the “voice
of the marketplace” of an Osundare, or of the “deep
dance” of a Chimalum Nwankwo, and later the experimental,
fractal insouciance of Uche Nduka’s poetry, or the limpid
flourishes of Lola Shoneyin’s brash rhetoric. These transformations
have occurred in the elements within Nigerian poetic tradition,
from what Gerald Moore once described as poetry in “the approach
to the shrine” whose distinctly ritualistic manners speak
to “the fathers,” to a broader, more contemplative,
sometimes intensely metrical or formal systems, as a poet like Ogaga
Ifowodo is attempting to experiment with, in his current intimations,
or the intensely minimalist styles of either Uche Nduka, or an Ada
Udechukwu, who brings the spare and silent lines of her Uli art
or painting, to her poetry.
These examples indeed only speak to the inevitable evolution of
a tradition of poetry, distinctly fresh, contemporary, and Nigerian
in its feel. Nigerian poetry has demonstrated continuity rather
than disjunctions in the search for both individually authentic
voices, and the collective voice of the community, as the expression
or organizing principle in Nigeria’s poetic tradition. We
see the same manifestations in the visual arts, with the important
done today by the curator and theorist, Okwui Enwezor, to the installations
of Olu Oguibe, or the various works of increasingly internationally
renown Nigerian artists like Chika Okeke-Agulu, Victor Ekpuk, Syl
Ogbechie, Victor Ehikhemenor, Krydz Ikwuemesi, and so many more
who have energized the idiom of contemporary Nigerian art. I have
only tried to demonstrate, in these few examples, the varied energy
and power of contemporary Nigerian culture, whose implication or
significance will be the inevitable subject of very important discussions,
about the culture of these times, and this space in late modernity,
not too long from now.
An important aspect of cultural production however, is in the superstructure
– the infrastructure that girds the production of culture,
and its dissemination. About seven years ago, when it was launched
in London, I wrote a critique of the Caine Prize for African Writing,
principally from what I perceived in the implication of its gesture.
The validation of African cultural production from a presumed metropolis
of culture seemed to me to undermine the very basis of its production
and its meaning. I think that I have modified my stance over the
years, in recognition of some of the possibilities that have emerged
from the Caine prize; particularly the rather stark reality of the
power and the agency of the metropolis to either silence or make
writers visible. The curse of invisibility is the great fear of
the writer. But I’m still stirred by the spirit behind Chinua
Achebe’s 1985 letter rejecting an invitation to Sweden for
a conference o African Writers. “It is time,” Achebe
wrote, “that African writers begin to gather to discuss their
affairs in African cities” – or such words. Achebe’s
argument engages the question: what is the purpose of writing by
Africans, if these are never encountered, valued, discussed, or
validated by its primary audience.
It is true that the questions and implications of audience and location,
and the meaning of it all, challenges a new generation of African
writers, or writers who claim some African descent, but who see
in the very complexity of their identity, an impossible resolution
to the question: “who are you?” An answer to that question
used to be quite simple, these writers argue, but not any more in
a highly “globalized” world in which all shapes and
forms of new complex identities are manufactured, and assumed; and
in which the very reality of one’s location or (dis)location
makes the subject moot, and the self ambivalent. This particular
question cropped up one evening in a session at the African Studies
Association in New Orleans, chaired by Sarah Manyika, featuring
the novelists Chris Abani, and Helon Habila from Nigeria, and Partice
Nganang, from the Cameroon. The three argued, in very strong terms,
that they no longer recognize those boundaries of identity in their
conceptions of their writing: “I do not in fact write for
Africans, I write in the German and French languages, and I write
for whoever can read, or is interested in reading my stories.”
Patrice Nganang.
But Professor Abiola Irele threw an important question: “Is
there any such beast as African Literature?” From what indeed
does the writers experience flow? By what is it anchored. These
are questions that we ought to contemplate further as the debates
open, with the emergence of increasingly more “cosmopolitan”
writers, publishing, and circulating, not so much in Africa, as
in key western metropolitan centers. But it raises an important
question: what kind of literature is being published from and about
Africa? It goes back to that important question of representation.
Without dwelling too much on the subject, it seems that the collapse
of the economies, and the publishing infrastructure especially in
sub-Saharan Africa, has reshaped the context of narrative, or oversight
over the kinds of narrative that are valued and validated on its
behalf. The infrastructure of publishing and the dissemination of
textual or narrative authority prove to be sine qua non in the maintenance
of culture – literate culture. The absence of this important
industry in the cultural life of Nigeria is dangerous in the long
run, for it positions two potential scenarios: the rupturing of
canonical authority, validation of mediocre imagination, and the
silencing and obscuring of the experimental genius, which feeds
every culture with novelty. The second scenario is the possibility
of ceding our capacity for counter-narrative in the larger picture
of affairs: the control of the African imagination through publishing,
prizes, residencies, and other means of validation and valuation,
means that we must continue to live with the systematic “othering”
of the African, and the black world through the proxy of the “conditioned
imagination.”
The case I make therefore, in the final analysis, is for an understanding
of the important question of who must pay the African piper. Residences,
prizes and other forms of preferment, offered to African writers
or artists from abroad are indeed welcome, for they add to the source
of succour for a mostly lonely enterprise. The generosity of such
international endowments, however, must neither be taken for granted
nor without rumination. It so often happens that the unique history
of Africa and its relations to the world, must sometimes force the
African writer, artist or intellectual, to the occasional ungraciousness
of looking the gift horse steadily in the mouth. But much of this
may be settled, particularly in Nigeria, with the incredible resources
at its disposal, if a proper cultural infrastructure is built to
support the indigenous African imagination. This is happening in
a number of ways: recently the LNG endowed a prize for Literature
and Science to the tune of N1 million. A Trust was drawn to manage
the prize from a broad range of distinguished Nigerians. The Patrick
Utomi prize, just recently announced winners of its prize: the poet
Obu Udeozo, and the dramatist Emeka Nwabueze. All these are important
developments. They go now, to complement the ANA prizes, which have
been sustained since the 1980s, as a means of validating and recognizing
Nigerian literary production.
But while literature currently enjoys some significant attention
in terms locally endowed prizes, and while increasingly important
endowments have come to encourage literary activity, there is a
glaring dearth of such prizes in the fine Arts, or Music, or Architecture,
or even in the production of criticism. There is a general absence
of a National Arts Endowment, long proposed to promote Nigeria’s
cultural enterprise. The fundamental point to make is that supportive
cultural infrastructure in Nigeria is rather basic: there are very
few University libraries or bookshops currently stocking, or aiding
the dissemination of new books; independent bookshops are quite
few, and with the exception of places like Glendora bookshop in
Lagos, and a few others, the book life in Nigerian cities would
be barren; the ministries of Education and Culture are frequently
out of the loop of contemporary developments in Nigerian culture,
and so Nigerian children have neither access to the new authors,
nor are they even exposed to museums and galleries. There are no
writing programs in Nigerian Universities, no writer-in-residence
slots, or workshops, or residences, and such programs, which writers
elsewhere take for granted. These are fundamental absences, which
must be addressed.
There is also the issue of taking our local prizes seriously enough,
by the ways we organize them, for indeed, there can be no justification
in the Caine Prize taking the shine from say, the Okigbo prize,
or the ANA/CADBURY prize, if we properly locate these prizes to
reflect the seriousness of our enterprise. Above all, time has come
for an Africa-wide prize established within Africa, and supported
by a superstructure of African desires and values, as well as its
ways and means. The South Africans had proposed the Mandela prize
for African writing, but nothing came of that. There are many African
statesmen who were literary figures in the twentieth century for
whom an important African prize could be named: Nnamdi Azikiwe,
Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth
Kaunda, Nelson Mandela. Such great figures of the black world in
the 20th Century ought indeed to be memorialized, with a rallying
prize to in their names. That way, we may call African literature
by its proper name.
