INTRODUCTION
In this unit, we shall examine the beginning of written literatures from the contributions of Nigerian nationalists. Many African nationalists, that is, those who fought for the independence of their countries were mostly educated Africans who were trained abroad as there were no universities in Africa to produce graduates then. They used everything at their disposal in the fight. They used propaganda, journalism, literature etc. They used literature mainly to sensitize the Africans about their personality and the destruction of inferiority complex. They contributed in the development of African literature. Many of these African writers present the African society, culture and personality in such manners that reveal the totality of African values. The issues of equality, cultural values and social mores are presented in manners that show the placement of attitudes and societal requirements for greatness. The values of leadership are also examined using the African leadership parameters as yardsticks. In Nigeria, most of the nationalists used literature as tools for their nationalistic messages.
3.1 General Overview
Early Nigerian poetry in English was an anticolonial, mobilisational poetry. It was one of the weapons used by nationalists to fight the British colonial administration in Nigeria and sensitized the people to the injustices of colonialism. This anti colonial poetry movement was West Africa wide. R. E. E. Armattoe, Michael Dei-Anang and Benibengor Blay, all of Ghana; Crispin George of Sierra Leone; and, Roland Tombekai of Liberia, are the prominent names. In Nigeria, the important names are Dennis Osadebay and Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Literary arts were part of the colonial educational structure which had as its basic end, the incorporation of Africans into the orbit of Western Civilization. In the European Colonization of Africa, commerce, Christianity and civilization were a three-legged relay in which Christianity was always either first or second baton (after commerce). Both combined to produce colonialism and the sum total of all three was the imposition of Western civilization on Africa. Of all the contacts with the Europeans, the most decisive of them all is the evolution of the modern Nigerian state as a colonized entity in the late 19th century. Although Africans had been writing in Portuguese as early as 1850 and a few volumes of African writing in English and French had been published, an explosion of African writing in European languages occurred in the mid-twentieth century.
In the 1930s, black intellectuals from French colonies living in Paris initiated a literary movement called Negritude. Negritude emerged out of “a sudden grasp of racial identity and of cultural values and an awareness of the wide discrepancies” (Gerard 39) which existed between the promise of the French system of assimilation and the reality. The movement's founders looked to Africa to rediscover and rehabilitate the African values that had been erased by French cultural superiority. Negritude writers wrote poetry in French in which they presented African traditions and cultures as antithetical, but equal, to European culture. Out of this philosophical/literary movement came the creation of Presence Africaine by Alioune Diop in 1947. The journal, according to its founder, was an endeavour "to help define African originality and to hasten its introduction into the modern world" (Owomoyela 39). Other Negritude authors include Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Leon Damas.
In the mid-60s, Nigeria replaced French West Africa as the largest producer and consumer of African literature, and literary production in English surpassed that in French. Many Nigerian nationalists, like Dr.
Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Denis Osadebey and Chief Enahoro among others were products of Western Education and they recognized the power of literature in the achievement of their goal for Nigeria’s independence. They constituted the nationalist writers. Their literary motive was akin to that of negritude. They emphasized African culture, personality and value system. They believe that giving attention to everything Africa is one of the basic tools of their agitation. Large numbers of talented writers in Francophone Africa came to occupy important political and diplomatic posts and gave up creative writing.
The vastness in size and population of Nigeria gave it an advantage over smaller countries. In the 1950s, a large readership made up of clerks and small traders and a steadily increasing number of high schools students developed in Nigeria, and this readership enabled the emergence of market literatures. Even Ibadan University College, founded in 1948, produced some of the writers that came to the forefront in the 60s. The encounter with Europe through trade relationships, missionary activities, and colonialism propelled the wave of literacy in Nigeria. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary activity in the British colonies was conducted almost entirely in vernacular languages. Missionaries found it more useful to translate the Bible into local languages than to teach English to large number of Africans. This resulted in the production of hymns, morality tales, and other literatures in African languages concerned with propagating Christian values and morals. All these helped in the propagation of nationalism which culminated in the independence of the country.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Explain the importance of Nigerian literature in Nigerian nationalism
3.2 Nationalism and Early Nigerian Literature
Nigerian literature of the early 50s and 60s were more of journalistic and nationalistic. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was a journalist and a nationalist. He, like his peers, wrote poetry and other forms of literature to express his Africanness as a way of killing the inferiority complex always expressed by the Africans. Most of these nationalists suffered much racism in their studies abroad. It was these racial experiences that sparked off their agitation for independence. However, their creative works were not allowed in the curriculum of schools. The same western education
curriculum prevailed in the British colonies. The curriculum of western education was largely made up of European texts and authors. Admittedly, at the inception of tertiary education in Nigeria in the 1950s, authors of African origin had not written many texts. But neither literature written in the indigenous African languages, nor the traditional artistic practices were considered of significance enough to merit attention in scholarly investigation of literary experience, presumed when convenient, to be universal. Thus, until the postcolonial agitation for artistic and cultural decolonization impacted on the academia, African literature was like an inconceivable possibility or at best, a shocking novelty. Given the above, it is not surprising that the curriculum of literary studies in Nigeria as it obtained in many parts of colonized Africa was fashioned in the image of metropolitan derivation. Primary texts and authors studied, the critical and theoretical approaches adopted in textual interrogations were largely Euro-American. Where the continent features as subject, it is done with a view to underscore its significance as we see in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Othello and Tempest , Sir H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine, etc. No indigenous poet had presumably emerged to rival Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Blake, and T.S. Eliot among others.
The indigenous imagination was seen as incapable of producing such epical compositions with the rhetorical grandeur exhibited in Beowulf by the Anglo-Saxons or works of arresting suspense and didacticism as exemplified in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. In terms of drama, African ritual performances and festivals, myths, legends and other narratives of the people wherein lie the seedbeds of African drama earned no place in the curriculum fashioned in the main and ab initio from the metropolitan centres. Thus, the historical trajectory of literature in Nigeria shows that it was part of the embracing marginalization of the colonies.
By the 1960s, there was a gradual legitimation of African oral literature as a worthy subject of literary inquiry. Thus, traditional rituals, festivals and indigenous poetic chants became worthy subjects for learning. Nationalism had the conscious drive to put Nigerians on the self- appraisal of their personality and culture. These works, mainly poetry, are written in simplified syntax with the aim of communicating ideas. The poems read as discourse projecting the need for understanding and appreciating the black race.
By its very nature, this poetry had a public tone. It was confrontational and defamatory, and was meant to be hurled at the white opponent as a counter to his negative assumptions about African culture. It was also a highly affirmative poetry, often taking Africa as a monolithic entity and singing her praise to the high heavens. This posture must have been justifiable at the time, given the sustained denigration of Africa by whites who were either ignorant of the real situation in Africa or were simply malicious.
Dennis Osadebay was the leading Nigerian poet of the mobilization era. In 1952, he published a book of poems entitled Africa Sings which, in many ways, is typical of the mobilisational mode. In the poem "Who Buys My Thoughts", for example, the emphasis is on the throbbing soul of Africa, an Africa that is still hungry, naked and sick, but whose youth are already awake, restless and questioning and who by this very fact are going to make significant achievements in the future. But Osadebay was also a poet with an ambivalent disposition towards the West; for, while he may condemn the West for some of the cruder features of colonialism, he nevertheless sang the white man's praise unabashedly for what he called the benefits of western civilization, namely schools, hospitals and the like.
Perhaps the poem that is most typical of him is "Young Africa's Plea" in which he seeks a synthesis of black and white values especially in the following lines:
Let me play with the Whiteman's ways
Let me work with the Blackman’s brains
Let my affairs themselves sort out
Then in sweet rebirth
I'll rise a better man
Not ashamed to face the world.
This consciousness of Africanness elevates the thought-system of the Africans and creates a superior sense of their existence among mankind. Nationalism was seen as a way of asserting their integrity and modified to carry the tones of Anglo Nigerian experiences.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Many Nigerian nationalists believe that our literature should dominate our education. Explain why it should be so.
3.3 Literatures of Identity and Personality
The 50s in Nigeria were also the time when the ferment for freedom was at its highest. India was independent, so it was only a matter of time for West Africa to be free. The Second World War was fought for freedom as they told Africans. They were asked to collect palm kernels for the war effort. They were told that each one would put a nail on Hitler's coffin. Nigerians returning home from the war asked, 'where's the freedom we were told about?' So the two issues were together: the political ferment and the revolution in the classroom. The Nigerian elites were angered to see that they were deceived into fighting a war they never knew how it began. They never knew Hitler and were amazed that a man they never knew and who never offended them turned out to be their enemy. The enlightenment from those ex-servicemen, who actually fought in the battle front with the whites, discovered that they were stronger than their white counterparts at the warfront. The myth about white superiority began to wane in their mind. They began to teach Nigerians at home on their return from the war that the colonial masters were not superior to them. This resulted in the publication of pamphlets and papers on the need for African independence. In Nigeria, many of these ex-servicemen who later joined the Nigerian armed forces began to spread information on the possibility of self-governance in the country.
For the elites, the educated Nigerians at the forefront of the battle for self -governance, the need to implant the consciousness about the superiority of the black person over the whites began as a necessary independence slogan. They wrote poems, short stories and historical account of their encounters with the whites. They painted gory pictures of racism and instilled in the educated few, the need for their self- aggrandizement in the face of all odds. Unfortunately, most of these nationalist works were never in complete books as most of them were products of the immediate necessity or the situation that that gave rise to them. They were usually published in newspapers like The West African Pilot which had the late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe as the editor at the time Nigeria’s agitation for independence was at its peak.
In most of these literary works, the nationalists emphasized national unity, identification with the struggle for independence, the elevation of the African personality and the destruction of inferiority complex.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Discuss the factors that led to the realization of African identity and personality during the struggles for independence
4.0 CONCLUSION
Nationalism paved the way for the appreciation of African oral arts. Apart from the significant interests shown in indigenous oral literary and artistic traditions, by independence, the nation had produced writers who were significant in many ways. The literary field 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 in Nigerian culture. These were writers whose mastery of poetic, theatrical and narrative skills were acclaimed beyond the shores of Nigeria. These writers include Gabriel Okara whose collection, The Fisherman’s Invocation, was and is still regarded as the trailblazer in true poetic expression in Africa. Okara uses indigenous materials in capturing his ideals while painting the metaphors of truth using his environment as proper poetic tool in his craft. His novel, The Voice, an experimental work written with the transliteration of Ijaw language into English makes a case for the appreciation of the linguistic beauty in African languages. The Voice, apart from its linguistic properties carried more message of nationalism as it examines Nigeria beyond Independence. Independence is a goal but he believes that the success of independence rests with the individuals who must work with clear conscience in order to pilot Nigeria towards worthy ends.
5.0 SUMMARY
The little literary products of the nationalists paved way for the arrival of serious literatures attacking the excesses of colonialism and neocolonial mentalities in Nigeria. The arrival of Chinua Achebe’s novels (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease andA Man of the People) strengthens the nationalistic themes in Nigerian literatures. Achebe’s novels cleared certain complexities about the African continent and personality. His first novel Things Fall Apart was a reaction to the distorted pictures of Africa by the Europeans. More so, Wole Soyinka’s plays (A Dance of the Forests, The Strong Breed, The Lion and The Jewel, Kongi’s Harvest and The Road) use the theatre as another avenue for the same nationalistic ventures; even J. P. Clark- Bekederemo in his Ozidi, Song of A Goat, The Raft, among other plays elevated the African personality and redirected the Nigerians adrift. On the feminine angle, Nigerian women contributed to the nationalistic consciousness. Writers like Flora Nwapa, Mabel Segun and Zulu Sofola towed the lines of the men in the same nationalistic concern. They rested their art on the need to embrace openness in the society by avoiding sexual segregation. Though many people saw their works as European ideals but others believe that African culture like every other is dynamic and must follow change. Their works fuse elements of the indigenous and Western literary traditions. Although, many of the works of the early nationalists like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dennis Osadebey among others were not really published as books because they appeared as pamphlets and in newspaper; but some of them have been collected recently in anthologies such as West African Verse edited by Donatus Nwoga who categorized their works under pioneer poetry.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
Answer these questions:
1. Discuss the importance of literature in Nigeria’s struggle for independence
2. Nigeria’s nationalists were products of western education. How did that aid them in writing literature?
3. What are the major thrusts of nationalist literatures in Nigeria?
4. Relate the concern of Negritude literature with those of Nationalist literature in Nigeria
5. Explain the major factors that led to the emergence of nationalist literatures in Nigeria.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
Gerard, Albert (1990). Contexts of African Literature. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.
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Harrow, Kenneth (1994). Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition. Portsmouth and London: Heinemann and James Curry.
Owomoyela, Oyekan (1979). African Literatures: An Introduction. Waltham, Mass, African Studies Association.
Nwoga, Donatus (1980). (ed.) West African Verse. London: Longman.
Senanu, K. & Vincent T. (1977). A Selection of African Verse. London: Longman.
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