Nigerian literature
Nigerian literature is a literary writing in Nigeria often by her citizens. It encompasses writers in a number of languages spoken in Nigeria including Igbo, Urhobo, Yoruba, Hausa and Nupe.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is one of the milestones in African literature. Other post-colonial authors have won numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Wole Soyinka in 1986, and the Booker Prize, awarded to Ben Okri in 1991 for The Famished Road. Nigerians are also well represented among recipients of the Caine Prize and Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.
Nigerian literature in English
Nigerian literature is predominantly English-language. Literature in the national languages Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa plays only a minor role. Most of the important English-language authors in West Africa come from Nigeria.Under British rule
Among the first modern Nigerian authors was Amos Tutuola. In his magnum opus The Palm Wine Drinkard the author follows a man befuddled by palm wine in a fairy-tale atmosphere that leads him to the city of the dead. There he discovers a magical world populated by ghosts, demons and supernatural beings. The book contradicted all realistic narrative conventions and was written in flawed English. For this very reason, the book later became stylistic and highly regarded, although it was criticised at the time for maligning Nigerians as barbaric, perpetually drunken people and provoking racist fantasies.In 1957, Black Orpheus magazine became the main forum for many Nigerian poets and writers.
Independence
A number of writers, members of the Mbari Club of Prof. Ulli Beier, became popular in the immediate aftermath of independence.The Arts Theatre of the University of Ibadan developed into a touring theatre from 1961, but mostly performed plays by European authors. Thus, as a critical reaction to the emerging alienation of theatre from everyday African life in Ibadan, the Mbari Club emerged as a literary centre for African literary figures. Playwright John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo staged his first play Song of a Goat here in 1962, a synthesis of forms of ancient theatre and a theme always relevant in Africa - fertility and motherhood - for the European-educated young generation. In 1966, he documented the festival of a hero of the Ijaw people, which is celebrated every 25 years in the Niger Delta, in the original language in his drama Ozidi, adapted it dramatically and translated it into English. He turned the folkloric symbolism into the psychoanalytical.
The only representative of négritude in Nigeria was considered to be the essayist and literary scholar Abiola Irele, who became the director of the journal Black Orpheus in 1968. He criticised the overemphasis on ideological differences between the English- and French-speaking writers of Africa.
As early as the 1950s, popular metropolitan literature based on the American model emerged in Nigeria, published in booklets distributed in the market, the so-called Onitsha market literature, of which Cyprian Ekwensi was probably the most important representative. Ekwensi, the son of an African storyteller, wrote hundreds of short stories as well as 35 novels and children's books. His best-known work is Jagua Nana, a description of the life of an ageing sex worker that is not free of stereotypes.
Considered the most important founding figure of English-language literature in West Africa, Chinua Achebe, winner of the 2002 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, made his debut as a novelist and poet with Things Fall Apart, which, along with No Longer at Ease, is his magnum opus. His novels place African heroes at the crossroads of two worlds: a Western world with an abstract rationality devoid of justice and an Africa whose outmoded traditional values handicap its subjects for the new age. He is one of the best-known English-language African authors. That is why he has been considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Things Fall Apart describes an Africa before the arrival of Europeans and which carries old values that Achebe wants to emphasise. The book reached a circulation of 400,000 copies in 1969 and three million copies in 1987. It has been translated into 45 languages. In Anthills of the Savannah, he describes an Africa gripped by corruption and the false position of intellectuals, where women are the future. Chinua Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International prize in recognition of his entire career as a novelist and author in 2007. In awarding the prize, Nadine Gordimer referred to Achebe as "the father of modern African literature". In the early years of the new millennium, some Nigerian writers have also repackaged the folk tales of the past to suggest relevance to modern circumstance such as the reimagining of African trickster stories around the tortoise avatar.
After the Biafra war
Flora Nwapa began her career as a writer while teaching at Queen's School in Enugu. Two of her novels, Efuru and Idu, are set in her native village and acquaint readers with local customs. They depict the workings of the patriarchal and age-grouped society that enables the resolution of problems and conflicts, and the role of the kola nut in all family ceremonies. They address the themes that will run throughout their work: the role of children in the family, the consequences of female infertility, the position of women in Nigerian society and their vital need for economic independence. Never again recalls the terrible years of the Biafra war and the devastating effects of propaganda that banned all critical thinking. In 1966, when 25 titles had already appeared in the publisher's African Writers Series, Flora Nwapa became the first woman to be included in the series. It was to take another 30 titles before another woman appeared in the series.Wole Soyinka is a screenwriter and director. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 and is the first black author to be honoured in this way.
Soyinka was awarded the prize for writing "...in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence". A prolific and versatile artist, he has written numerous plays, as well as autobiographical stories, poetry collections and short stories, novels, and political and literary essays. Known for the richness of his poetic imagery and the complexity of his thought, he counts among his masterpieces the anti-colonialist tragedy Death and the King's Horseman.
Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian living in London, dealt with themes such as motherhood, social contrasts and independence and freedom for women. The tragic-romantic novel The Bride Price reflects the social conventions in Nigeria around 1970, namely those of arranged marriages, bride kidnappings and the bride price mentioned in the title. The heroine Aku-nna finds the husband who returns her feelings through cleverness and courage. However, she does not have much time to enjoy her happiness. Second Class Citizen follows a Nigerian woman who moves in with her children to live with her husband, who already lives in Britain. She encounters racial resentment and domestic violence before she can realise her dream of a writing career.
Ben Okri first wrote short stories about social and political problems, some of which were published in women's magazines and evening newspapers. Okri found success with the publication of his first novel, Flowers and Shadows. From 1983 to 1986 he worked for West Africa Magazine, where he served as editor of the poetry section. In 1991, he won the Booker Prize in the fiction category for The Famished Road, a magical surrealist novel about Azaro, a "spirit child".
Dealing with dictatorship
The main themes of the 1980s and 1990s were the democratisation movement and the critique of military dictatorships. Criticism of the Nigerian military dictatorship cost the novelist, screenwriter and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa his life: he was sentenced to death in 1995 under Sani Abacha's regime. Helon Habila's Oil on Water dealt with the victims of the military dictatorship and the ongoing oil spill in the Niger Delta.The new millennium
Sefi Atta is a writer and playwright. Her Everything Good Will Come is a bildungsroman that follows the lives of two women. After a series of dramatic events, tensions between different ethnic groups, rebellion against a male-dominated society and societal expectations, the heroine finds shelter and understanding with a group of political activists.Femi Osofisan uses surrealistic stylistic devices and traditional African forms of expression with an educational purpose in his approximately 60 plays. He often adapted European classics. His themes are the change of traditions, gender and sexual repression. Women of Owu is a retelling of Euripides' Trojan Women.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary career took off with the publication in 2003 of Purple Hibiscus, an initiation novel in which a brother and sister finally find their voices again. The critically acclaimed debut novel was nominated for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2004 and was named Best Debut in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2005. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, was published in 2006, set before and during the Biafra war, in which we follow the lives of two sisters separated by war. The book won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her third work, the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck was published in 2009. In 2013, she published her fourth book, the novel Americanah, which tells the story of a young Nigerian woman named Ifemelu who has emigrated to the US and a young man who has emigrated to the UK. Ifemelu faces poverty, discrimination and racism until she becomes a star of the blogosphere. She becomes the "first blogger on race". The novel was selected by the New York Times as one of the "10 Best Books of 2013".