Nigerian Arts and Culture Directory



NACD Online News

Rediscovering Africa's greatest potentials through Arts, Culture and Tourism

Top Stories

T H E A R T S: What is Nigerian literature
(Vanguard online)

Story Tools

Print Story

The introduction last year of a $20,000 literature prize by the nation's apex gas company, the Liquefied Natural Gas elicited a lot of criticism as the several committees set up to administer the prize excluded Nigerian writers abroad. As the prize enters its second leg this year, the much argued exclusion clause appears to remain. In this essay, OBI NWAKANMA, frontline journalist, university teacher and writer with abundant energy reexamines the exclusion clause by contradicting it wth the canon of contemporary writing.

AT the Kampala Conference on African Literature in 1962, the Nigerian critic, the late Obi Wali raised what was to prove to be a profound, even if rhetorical question in his article, “Dead End of African Literature?” His concerns were around the language question. His theoretical position was that it was impossible for African writers writing in the European languages to create and extend the value of writing which carried the burden of the African experience.

Since language carried the burden of experience, Obi Wali contended that any definition of African literature would arrive at its cul de sac with the continued use of the European languages to regulate and denominate writing in Africa. Interestingly, Dr. Wali did not make any further statements on African writing, but the claims of that essay published in the Transition Magazine remains central to any discussion today about African literature. It entered the canon of discourse. It raised the problem between what was intrinsic and what was extrinsic.

I do not presume to be troubled by the same broad questions raised by Obi Wali, but I am compelled in this essay to ask: what is Nigerian literature? Is it only literature written by Nigerians living in Nigeria and published in Nigeria? Does this literature have to express itself idiomatically and ideologically as a Nigerian experience? What in fact is the Nigerian experience? In other words, if a Nigerian writer living in Nigeria writes lyrically about the streets of New York City with African-American characters realistically conveying a lived experience, and if such work is published in Nigeria by a Nigerian based publisher, would it be considered Nigerian literature? In other words, what has residency in Nigeria got to do with it? What qualifies a Nigerian writer to claim identity?

Literature itself is an identity marker, but it does seem that geography has upstaged consciousness and aesthetic perception in how we are beginning to define the new Nigerian literary canon. I ask because we already sense that the Nigerian writer living in Europe or America or Asia no longer qualifies to be known as a Nigerian writer by what I sense to be a blind criterium established by the Literature Committee of the LNG Prize. In other words, because Chinua Achebe, for example, is living in the condition of exile in the United States, he no longer qualifies to enter his work to be judged, were he to feel so, for the LNG prize. If Harry Garuba, currently living and teaching in Cape Town, South Africa, publishes a book of poetry issued by a South African press, by the warped criteria established by this committee, he would no longer be considered within the canons of Nigerian writing.

The exclusion clause denies him that right simply because, to quote the highly esteemed Professor Theo Vincents, critic, distinguished Professor of Literature and member of the Literature committee of the LNG prize, “Nigerian writers living here are living under terrible conditions.” This he said to the Guardian Newspaper in answer to these queries. Nigerian writers living in Britain or the United States have everything well made and oiled for them; they live free of existential needs, Professor Vincents said. So, what about the Nigerian writer living in Cotonou or Kpalime, Togo, just next door? By the stated criteria of this committee that writer has no rights.

Such a writer lives in splendour.
But of course, Professor Vincents is also absolutely wrong about the condition of the Nigerian writer in exile. Some live in even more terrifying conditions than the Nigerian writer living in Nigeria. Ben Okri was living in a terrifying situation in London until he was rescued by Wole Soyinka, and later on, by the fortunes of the Booker prize. Many people already know the story of the Zimbabwean writer, the late Dambudzo Marachera, who had to struggle with the loneliness, the homelessness, and the poverty and indignity of living on the streets of London. Many Nigerian writers exist in that condition today on the streets of London or New York or Brussels or Frankfurt. They live in a dual and complex dilemma: they are frightened of home, and they are unstable and marginal in the alien places they seek refuge. But that is in fact a different question.

All that Professor Vincents and the Literature committee have to do is simply enter London and New York and establish for themselves the material and psychological condition in which many of Nigeria’s writers exist in these alien places. But of course, I suspect that their decision to exclude them in the first place is merely an excuse to create a phalanx of causes and effects that would justify a blatantly retrograde culture of silencing the absent and the unrepresented.
This controversy arose last year.

It has continued to rage among Nigerian writers and critics of Nigerian literature since the maiden edition of the LNG prize. Two questions more or less were at stake about the purpose of the LNG prize. Is the LNG prize the Nigerian National Prize for Literature? Among the fierce opponents of that ascription was Mr. Odia Ofeimun, the poet and former president of the Nigerian writers body, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), who in my view, rightly argued that the Nigerian Liquefied Natural gas company (NLNG) cannot appropriate the terms of a national literature, or the terms of its final categorization.

The terms of a National Prize for Literature belongs to a properly constituted Ministry of Culture and a properly established instrument of endowment.

This endowment ought to be placed under the permanent trust of the Nigerian Academy of Arts whose fellows should be mandated to select and administer the National Humanities Prizes, among which must be the National Prize which will reflect the highest annual achievement in the broad fields of literature: poetry, the novel, drama, autobiography/Biography, and criticism by any living Nigerian writer irrespective of geography, age or gender.

The National Endowment itself ought to be funded by a government grant established by an act of parliament, as well as corporate grants, personal gifts, and tax. A long and varied case has been made for such an endowment. But with a ministry of culture that is in virtual coma, and a cultural policy that still sees national culture as largely expressed in the buttock dances of maidens who wiggle their frenzied bottoms and padded bussoms at every state occasion or the Police band, which unfailingly plays Bala Miller on every state function, we might not have the National Endowment for the Arts and a proper Nigerian National Prize for Literature soon.

But that said, it is important to note that it is within the corporate right of the NLNG to endow any prize and name it after itself. Part of its corporate image is hinged on such gestures. But here I pause a bit to ask: does the NLNG not presume too much to thus institute a narrow prize, especially one which limits the criteria of participation of Nigerian writers, and call itself the “Nigerian Prize for Literature”?
In what ways is the LNG prize different from the ANA/Cadbury prize endowed by another corporate organization in Nigeria? In fact, the Cadbury prize is a broader and more encompassing prize because its selection does not discriminate between Nigerians at home or abroad.

The best of Nigerian poetry is judged irrespective of location. The Cadbury prize is thus in fact a more important prize than the LNG prize. Nevertheless, every national literature prize aims at validating a national canon. Canon formation is itself part of an important narrative of culture. Cultural selection, like its Darwinian archetype, validates, and authenticates a species of cultural experience and expression which stands to speak down the ages about the work of each generation.

As far as many of us are concerned, the LNG prizes for Literature and Science are too narrow to carry the burden of this experience. The prize under-represents the achievements of the Nigerian imagination. Therefore, to endow it with such encompassing importance is to canonize rot and idiocy. It is not the Nigerian prize.

The Literature prize especially damages its own credence because it underestimates the nature of prizes as the basis of canon formation. To move to exclude an important and very active segment of the Nigerian literary community is a mortal sin, and speaks to the growing poverty of integrity in national discourse. If the LNG prize, as it says in its stated mission seeks to honour and promote Nigerian writing, upon what basis must the committee established for that purpose then enact an exclusion treaty?

Odia Ofeimun on account of this had cause to describe the LNG prize as tending towards becoming a “ghetto prize.” But I think it does worse: it is prefacing the beginnings of a Literary apartheid, and is thus consigning new Nigerian literature to Bantustanism, one which regards the Nigerian writer living outside Nigeria as an alien. This point has been made and echoed across the boundaries: it is a fundamentally flawed criterium. It is one which has in fact coloured the debate and obscured some of the more important questions which ought to have been raised by the NLNG endowment.

There have been suggestions that at the core of this is what people see as the size of the prize money. Twenty thousand dollars. But an important question about the NLNG prize which ought to have been entered as a caveat in all the flurry to promote its corporate generosity is also the important question of the massive corporate graft that rocked the Nigerian company in its dealings with the American company, Halliburton.

It seems that the managers of the NLNG quickly enacted an orchestra to deflect questions from itself by announcing “mouth watering” prizes to the most vocal and certainly the most impoverished of the Nigerian elite: the intellectuals, especially the writers. Their mouth watered so much from the prospects of twenty-thousand dollars that no question about the morality of that relationship was raised.

Given that the NLNG also was established following one of the most horrendous environmental damages in the world in the Niger Delta, Nigerian writers, often assuming the rights to speak about such matters, and to such concerns on other occasions, kept mute about a relationship with a company with one of the worst environmental histories in the world. Twenty years ago, this question would have been raised. But something has happened to the Nigerian psyche. It is an indicator of the damage done to the Nigerian psyche that we have not even found the voice to ask questions about this relationship with NLNG. The silence is worth twenty thousand dollars.

It is the “agbata –ekee” mentality which has slowly but inexorably crept into our most hallowed places. There is something in fact fundamentally dangerous, almost treasonable, in denominating a prize meant for Nigerian Literature in a foreign currency. The LNG is not an international prize. Its aim, it says, is to promote Nigerian literature and Nigerian writers.

What is then the justification in establishing the prize money for a local prize in the American currency? Yet, works by some of Nigeria’s best writers of this generation, are deemed too alien to be considered for the so-called Nigerian prize, because they currently live outside Nigeria. Not a lot of Nigerian writers or intellectuals have deemed it important enough to ask this very important question; this apparent contradiction.

The argument that the LNG prize aims at promoting Nigerian writing flies in the face of too many such contending truths. Most Nigerian writers living abroad still publish their works with Nigerian publishers.

An example: Akin Adesokan’s Roots in the Sky was recently published by a Nigerian publisher. Even Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, although originally published by a New York based publisher, (and the German edition of the book is due for release in a few weeks,) was released last year by a Nigerian publisher. You would think that this in itself would justify the claim to Nigerian authorship. But no, a jury blinded by something inexplicable – twenty thousand dollars – prefers to gate such writers and deny them their citizenship.

This was the central concern expressed as the prize was
announced last year: that a very important and significant population of Nigerian writers, and perhaps some of the very best of contemporary Nigerian writing now exist in a kind of diapsoric limbo, and that the criteria established for the LNG prize ought to take that fact into consideration.

In the end, no prize was awarded, because the same jury arose, and proclaimed that no such work produced in Nigeria merits the LNG prize money of twenty thousand dollars. But think, what could have happened to Nigerian literature if the prize were awarded to either Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus or Graceland by Chris Abani, two deserving books, arguably the two best works of fiction published by two very contemporary Nigerian novelists in 2004, who are currently enjoying international attention. One effect would have been the kind of international attention drawn to Nigerian writing.

It would have been enormous, and could have opened possible opportunities to more local Nigerian writers from international publishers who would have the inkling that an important prize, and an important audience, in fact, exists in Nigeria. For that has been the trouble with Nigerian writing: that very many international publishers have long assumed that no writing was going on in Nigeria after Achebe and Soyinka, until a new generation of Nigerian writers – Okey Ndibe, Ike Oguine, Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani and now Helen Oyeyemi among others, began to attract the attention of international publishers.

Much of the dilemma of Nigerian writing has also been because it had been consigned to the ghetto by the kind of patronage system which has made the big local subsidiaries of Longman, Macmillan and Heinemann among others, flourish without responsibility in Nigeria, and without competition from current international publishers. Many Nigerians hoped that this anomaly would be rectified by more judicious wisdom this year.

But the news before us speaks to the contrary. A board consisting of Theo Vincents, Ayo Banjo, Dan Izevbaye, Charles Nnolim, Abubakar Gimba, Zainab Alkali, and Ben Tomoloju, acting for Nigerian literature, have ruled to maintain the exclusion clause in its criteria for awarding the LNG prize. So, who is the Nigerian writer? What is Nigerian Literature? What use is the LNG prize in its current ruse to establish a skewered and problematic canon? Again, let me restate that the validity or importance of the LNG prize should not be defined by the size of the prize money. While the money is doubtlessly very important, given that the writer working as he or she does often in any environment, needs this kind of generosity as often as possible, there is however another point which needs to be made:

the money does not make the prize! Some of the most important Literary prizes in the Europe or America have very little prize money attached to them. The American Pulitzer Prize is just One thousand US dollars. The Prix Goncourt in France in fact, has no money attached to it. But the flurry of events around them enacts sales and preferment for the writers who win these prizes. I daresay that the LNG prize is not going to transform Nigerian Literature. Something more fundamental would.

The prize money might seem generous but the real issue in the development of Nigerian writing and literature still has to do with the absence of the structures that promote national culture.
That fundamental infrastructure is absent currently in Nigeria in the way it organizes its understanding of literature and other forms of the expressive culture – in the lack of perpetuation, canonization, and in the anachronism of its pedagogy. Now, they have added an obscure rule that says, living in the United states for instance, many of us no longer qualify to be validated by a Nigerian prize.

We no longer belong to Nigeria says the LNG committee. But it also means something quite odd: when those of us who do, teach Nigerian writing internationally, we should then restrict our choice or selection of books only to the books written by Nigerian writers living in Europe and America, because of this criteria which divides Nigerian literature as the homebound and the exiled? What exactly is Nigerian Literature? It has become a mystery inside a mystery.

Events Calendar

<< February 2017 >>