INTRODUCTION
In this unit, we will concentrate on the study of anti-colonial poetry. When we talk about anti-colonial poetry in Nigeria, we are referring to a vast collection of poetry dealing with anti-colonial themes in Nigeria. Anti-colonial themes occupy many streams of Nigerian poetry from the pioneer poets through to the journal poetry of the Ibadan school, the Mbari club and the other poetry groups within the colonial and the post- colonial times. Nigerian poetry is a complex phenomenon that began with the imitation of the western models down to the recapturing of the rich Nigerian orature in the poetic process. We will study the poetry of two Nigerian poets who have commented bitterly about the odds and effects of colonialism on Nigeria.
3.1 General Overview
Colonialism did more than corrupt the thinking and sensibilities of the Africans (Nigerians), it filled him/her with abnormal complexes which de-Africanized and alienated him/her from the needs of his/her environment. Colonial education thus dispossessed and put out the control of the Nigerian intellectual, the necessary forces for directing the life and development of his/her society. The European exploiters, oppressors and grabbers use Christianity as a tool to explain the manifest contradictions portrayed in African literature because of the working out of broader historical forces. The relationship between culture and colonialism, explores the relationship between culture and social class. Nigerian literature is understood by putting into its proper historical perspective the crisis of identity and its implications portrayed artistically by them. Culture as the result of economic and political activities as they appear on the ideological and idealist levels is perceived by Nigerian writers. Culture has its basis in a society's level of productive forces and in the character of the dominant mode of production. Culture may be dynamic, but only in the sense of being a continuing record of a society's achievements and an important element in sustaining resistance to foreign domination.
Colonialism, however, denied Nigeria the right to cultural development and self expression and set up a state of siege that it justified with theories about cultural assimilation. Liberation struggle rejects cultural domination by the foreign power by denying the culture of the oppressor. Thus, the tie between a people's identity and the reproduction and maintenance of the social system of a specific set of institutions affects both culture and the people's intimate sense of selfhood. Colonialism by denying to the dominated people their own historical process, necessarily denies their cultural process.
The 1950s was the decade of hope during which most African countries gained independence as anti-imperialist movements triumphed. Nigerian writers born in this decade had an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, yet hopeful mood, which explains the assertive and optimistic nature of the writing of the period. Colonialism had tried to justify its oppression and exploitation by resorting to claims of racial superiority. The new Nigerian writer countered such claims by producing artistic works that showed that Nigeria had its own history, culture, and civilization that were equal if not superior to that of the imperialists. The writers saw their societies, according to Achebe (1975) “put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self abasement imposed on them by colonialism"
The age of independence also witnessed the emergence of social classes and class contradictions- a development that disappointed and shocked many Nigerian writers, who created artistic works expressing disillusionment with postcolonial Nigerian society. At this time, writers therefore saw their role as that of transforming society (and its leaders) by means of moral enlightenment. The works of this period thus subscribed to a liberal humanist ideology that pleaded with the oppressed. The writers of this period intended the pathos and emotive power of their works to instigate the oppressors to initiate a political and economic reorganization of society in the interest of the oppressed. The despair that pervades these anti-colonial works, which portray the oppressed as trapped and helpless, arises in the writers' perception of the gloomy years ahead after the effects of colonialism.
Nigerian poets were among the most vocal in Africa; attacking all the odds of colonialism. The nationalist poets began the trend in Nigeria which poets like Okara, Okigbo, Clark-Bekederemo and Soyinka among others continued in their attempts presenting the odds of the past and need for a newer perception and development of the country.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Comment on the effects of colonialism on the sensibilities of the Nigerian elite and/or Nigerian writers.
3.2 The Poetry of Okara and Clark-Bekederemo-Bekederemo
Gabriel Okara and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo-Bekederemo are amongst the earliest anti-colonial poets from Nigeria. With them, Nigerian poetry in English has matured and taken a big leap forward. Gabriel Okara is a very unique writer. He has obviously brought himself up most creditably and his works show a close awareness of English Romantic and nature poetry as well as some modernist traits. An important theme in Okara's poetry is culture contact/culture conflict. It is expressed metaphorically in "The Snows Flakes" in the imagery of "uprooters" whose spades are dented in the process of trying to uproot traditional African culture. In "Piano and Drums", the poet expresses his perplexity and confusion at being caught between conflicting Western and traditional African cultures. And in "The Fisherman's Invocation", the argument is whether the Back (traditional African culture) should be taken along with the Front (the imported Western ways) to form the Child-Front, which is the new projection for our contemporary situation. Thus, although Okara expresses ideas and sentiments which are similar to those of the mobilisational poets, he does so in a totally different manner, cultivating a private tone and using fresh imagery of water, fishes, birds, uprooters and diggers, piano and drums instead of the clichés of his predecessors.
His kind of anti-colonial poetry is mixed in a manner that questions the suitability of western culture in Nigerian terrain. He celebrates Nigerian landscapes: rivers, mountains and forest. His poetry protests imperialists’ odds while painting beautiful scenes in his country and at the same time satirizing the ugly trends of colonialism.
John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo’s dark's poetic landscape is similar to that of Gabriel Okara. Both of them are ljaw and they use coastal and riverine imagery copiously in their poetry. Clark-Bekederemo has published three volumes of poetry, namely, Poems (1962), A Reed in the Tide (1965), and Casualties (1970). One of Clark-Bekederemo's achievements as a poet is that he directs our attention to the details of the physical environment, and his poetry has a ring of authenticity. Early poems like "Night Rain", "Streamside Exchange" and "The Year's First Rain" provide ample illustration of this point. He is, in this respect, a great scenic poet and his poems "lbadan", "Agbor Dancer" and "lbadan Dawn" provide further proof of his descriptive power. There is also evidence of great sensuality and compassion in his poetry. In the poem "Olokun", there is a play on the senses, especially the sense of feeling and touching, aroused by the seductive mask of Olokun, the goddess of the sea. And in "Abiku" based on the spirit-child who undergoes a perennial cycle of births and deaths, the poet's posture is one of compassionate appeal to the child to break the vicious cycle. By celebrating African landscapes, by romancing with Nigerian cities and dancers, by appreciating Nigerian culture and religion he totally abhorred imperialism and emphasizes the belief that Nigerian cultural space is better than any one being imposed on the people through colonial might. His poems are usually symbolic as each of his poems transcends beyond the immediate semantic realizations.
Clark-Bekederemo is also a poet of warfare and its dire consequences on the society. The poems in the volume entitled Casualties were inspired by the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70. In them, Clark-Bekederemo writes of particular events during the war, of friends lost in the war, of remote and immediate causes of the war, of trickery and broken promises, and of the moral and ethnical collapse of the citizenry who are the real casualties of the war. In this collection also, he emphasized the ugly hands of the imperialists in the inferno. He believes that the war a mastermind of the western powers.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Explain the identical anti-colonial themes in Okara and Clark- Bekederemo’s poetry
3.3 The Poetry of Okigbo and Soyinka
Christopher Okigbo (1932-67) wrote five sequences of poems entitled “Heavensgate”, “Limits”, “Silences”, “Distances” and “Path of Thunder”, respectively. They were published at different times between 1962 and 1968 and were later put together in one volume under the title Labyrinths in 1971. Okigbo has the reputation of being the most technically accomplished, the most tuneful, and the post eclectic and allusive of Nigerian poets. In the first four of the sequences, Okigbo is the poet of private sensibilities, par excellence, with a persona who has been a prodigal seeking re-entry, being initiated and then taking part fully in the ceremony of cultural and spiritual rejuvenation. Each sequence is a variation on that same theme. In “Path of Thunder”, on the other hand, the poet drops his private tone and goes public. He is a town-crier with a message of great importance for the survival of his community. The message is about imminent war and the great destruction that will come in its wake. All of this is worked out in appropriate imagery so that the dancer is referred to variously as thunder, iron-dream, and a 'nebula immense and immeasurable'; the country as the elephant; the combat machines as iron-birds; and the catastrophe itself as the elephant being struck by thunder (i.e. lightning) and falling. Poetry is conceived by Okigbo as ritual, or, as a sacred duty that demands total commitment. It speaks a cultic language that can be understood only by the initiate. This conception of poetry partly accounts for the arcane nature of his poetry.
Even the poetry of life is comprehended by only a tiny percentage of humanity! The poems themselves are conceived as sacrificial offerings to the poet's goddess or Muse in more or less the same manner that man is presented in Christianity as a living sacrifice to God. Okigbo disclosed that the 'new laid egg' and the 'white hen at midterm' in 'Lustra' were actually new poems that he had just written in his official capacity as the priest of Idoto. He is truly a visionary poet: a poet- prophet. Enhancing the ritual character of his poetry is the use of repetition and variation. One recurrent image or personage takes on diverse identities. ‘Mother Idoto’, for example, appears variously as a 'water-maid', as a 'white goddess', as a 'lioness', and as a 'white queen'.
The critical reception of Okigbo's poetry has been paradoxical: a mixture of condemnation and praise. The technical strategies that are most celebrated in the poetry, for example, the sacrifice of limpidity of meaning and style in an attempt to perfect form and achieve a rare lyricism, are ironically the most vilified. However recondite the poetry may appear to detractors, it is not bereft of human interest or meaning.
'Lament of the Drums', a song of exile, depicts the parlous state into which Nigeria has fallen. It thematizes the rape of democratic values by the military and their opportunistic civilian collaborators, the perversion of justice, the underdevelopment of the country through the wanton waste of her human and material resources, and the overall degeneration of the land. The neo-colonial African politician- civilian or military- continues with the structures of exploitation and privilege erected by the white conquerors in the colonial period.
Wole Soyinka's poetry is characterized by two related phenomena. First, early in his career, Soyinka adopted Ogun, the Yoruba god of metallurgy (iron), as his personal muse and the inspiration for his poetry. The presence of the god has given focus and coherence to a great deal of his poetry. Second, since Ogun is himself a heroic being, Soyinka has found himself writing, inter alia, epic poetry in celebration of his god, unlike most of his contemporaries. Soyinka's poetry is, thus, broadly of two kinds, namely, poems of various life experiences and Ogunnian poems. The poems of the first category include “Telephone Conversation”, (an early light hearted response to racial discrimination), some of the poems in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), and most of the ones in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), (his prison notes when he was detained during the Nigerian Civil War). The poems are a good index to Soyinka's humanity. They are about births and deaths (the most important being his "Abiku" poem) in which he dwells on the inscrutable nature of the spirit of death, about strange coincidences as in "A First Death Day", when a child dies exactly on her first birthday anniversary, about grey seasons as metaphors for rust, ripeness and decay, and about lone figures and the messianic plight of some of them. Many of the poems in A Shuttle in the Crypt are even more private in tone because of their genesis. They are the meditations of a man in confinement whose active mind wandered far and wide, about people in similar plight in history, about nature, and about the fragility and transience of life.
The Ogunnian poems include poems about death on the road and about the massacre in northern Nigerian in 1966. They also include the epic poems “Idanre” and “Ogun Abibiman” (1977). All these poems are celebrations in a contemporary context: of the mysteries of Ogun, the god of contraries, who is both destructive and creative and, therefore, whose unlimited resources can be used for good or for ill. The road and massacre poems showed Ogun in his most negative aspects that is, metaphors for man or man's weapons of destruction eating up fellow men.
They are Soyinka's way of commenting on the senseless slaughter and wastage of human life in moments of carelessness, hatred and ethnic intoxication. In “Idanre” and “Ogun Abibiman”, however, Soyinka goes beyond the merely negative features of Ogun. In the former, he seeks a new order that will further split the Ogun godhead and release the creative flint that will be used perpetually for man's benefit. In the latter, he enlists the co-operation of Ogun to commit his unlimited resources to the liberation struggle in South Africa. By celebrating and imbibing the Ogun myth in his works, he directly rejects the western god and their values.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
There are marked cultural/religious themes in the poetry of Okigbo and Soyinka. Discuss this consistent trend
4.0 CONCLUSION
Nigerian poetry, from the onset, has been in the vanguard of protesting against colonial odds in Africa. Even beyond colonialism, they have not failed pointing out those residues of colonialism which have impinged on the proper development of their societies. One way forward is for them to betray the colonial mission in Africa by speaking with the voice of a prodigal rejecting all the odds of imperialism. That is, colonial subservience to the bourgeoisie of Nigeria and the exploitation of the people leads to a psychic split. However, there is a gradual and consequent disappearance of this type of poetry which resulted from the individualistic nature of poetry, the declining attractiveness of anti- colonial themes and the increased emphasis upon the pursuit of sectional interests. In the light of this, there developed the formation of organic intellectuals and writers who are in touch with the masses as opposed to the traditional intellectuals of the ruling class who write from sequestration.
5.0 SUMMARY
The study of Nigerian literature has witnessed tremendous growth since its inception. Literature was a vital component of scholarship in colonial education. However, the point needs to be made that when it started, literary arts was part of the colonial educational structure which had as its basic end, the incorporation of Africans into the orbit of Western Civilization. Both combined to produce colonialism and the sum total of all three was the imposition of Western civilization on Africa. Nonetheless, the increasing call for the de-westernization of African literature expressed has been of a major concern to African writers. Apart from the significant interest shown in indigenous oral literary and artistic traditions, by independence, Nigeria had produced writers who have had the genuine interest of abhorring all the bad sides of colonialism. This theme witnessed expansion in the list of works written by educated Nigerians, whose sources of artistic influence were not only the classical European literature to which they were exposed in the course of their education, but also their indigenous oral and performance resources. These were writers whose mastery of poetic, theatrical and narrative skills were acclaimed beyond the shores of Nigeria. They include Gabriel Okara, Christopher Okigbo, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo and Wole Soyinka among others. Their works fuse elements of the indigenous and Western literary traditions. They were able to pin-point the ugly sides of colonialism, the effects of colonialism and the need to help Africa (Nigeria) build a viable society where natural African (Nigerian) laws and ways of life prevail. The poetry has the undertone of protest but with a focus on the avoidance of neo-colonial experiences.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
Answer the following questions carefully:
1. Explain the effects of colonial education on Nigerian writers
2. Gabriel Okara’s poetry is a comment on the confused Nigerians who are hesitant about which culture to follow. Discuss this
theme in his poetry
3. J.P. Clark-Bekederemo uses his locale as avenue for commenting on anti-colonial issues. Explain this aspect of his poetry
4. Perceiving the later effects of colonialism in Nigeria, Christopher Okigbo predicted the later story of Nigeria. Comment on Okigbo as poetic prophet
5. By embracing the Ogun myth, Soyinka outrightly discarded the European gods. Discuss the anti-colonial religious themes in Soyinka’s poetry.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
Achebe, Chinua (1973). "The Novelist as Teacher" in African Writers on African Writing. (ed) Killian, G. D. London: Heinemann.
Fraser, Robert (1986). West African Poetry: A Critical History. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
Lindfors, Bernth (1979). “Early Writings of Wole Soyinka”. In Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Literatures. Ibadan, London: Heinemann Educational Books. 165-190.
Obuke, Okpure (1978). “The Poetry of Wole Soyinka, and J.P. Clark- Bekederemo: A Comparative Analysis”. World Literature Today 52, 2 (Spring) 216-223.
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