Cyprian Ekwensi was a man whose palate is prose.
Nigerians still love Ekwensi. School children read his colourful sketches of life in Africa’s most populous, and complicated country. For a one-time Biafran propagandist, whose work was often broadcast on the radio, he was prolific, versatile and suitably attuned to the voice of his people. Ekwensi is arguably the greatest influence on the generation leading a surge in global sales of African literature, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. ‘He was a joy to read; his glorious imagination captivated ours,’ the author of Half of a Yellow Sun wrote after Ekwensi’s death in 2007.
A Magnificent Writer
A fellow Nigerian and Igbo, Chinua Achebe, born nine years after Ekwensi, is rightly recognised as the ‘father of modern African literature’. Things Fall Apart, which charted the collapse of the old rural order under pressure from colonialism, has been translated into more than 50 languages. Professors pore over Achebe’s work. Students still hum around him. Google honours him. His Wikipedia page is a thesis of almost 10,000 words. It is considered a surprise he never won the Nobel prize.
Now search for Ekwensi on Wikipedia. The rich, history-spanning life of an international public intellectual who produced more than 40 books, as well as plays, television scripts and children’s tales, is reduced to 587 words, including bibliography. When he does get a canonic title, which is mainly on dusty-looking Nigerian websites, it is the comparatively diminishing ‘father of the modern Nigerian novel’. Outside Nigeria he has been almost totally forgotten. That is in part because he was dismissed as a salacious hack.
Some Of His Works Sprawl From Ingenuity
Nothing in Ekwensi’s early life suggested he would become the enfant terrible of African city literature. Ekwensi grew up in the middle-belt town of Minna, where his father, reputedly a great elephant hunter, was working as a carpenter. He was born in 1921, seven years after Lord Frederick Lugard stitched two British colonial possessions together to create Nigeria, using a name coined by his wife. After studying in southern Nigeria and Ghana, Ekwensi found his first great life experience in the dry north of then country, where he was dispatched as a forestry officer to do battle with the sickness-causing tsetse fly. There, in the open wilds planting trees and clearing riverine areas, he began to write adventure stories, and met the characters who would inspire his third novel, Burning Grass, ‘the wandering cattlemen of northern Nigeria who pursued green grass where it is’.
In the late 1940s Ekwensi arrived in Lagos, then Nigeria’s capital, now Africa’s largest city, which had grown up from a gaggle of villages to amass around the lagoons that give it its name. ‘Everyday the trains bring more and more people from the provinces’, moths to light who discover a place where ‘people . . . live ten to a room’, Ekwensi wrote later.
As Nigeria stuttered through years of military rule and faltering peacemaking, Ekwensi, Achebe and others like Wole Soyinka, who became Africa’s first Nobel prize winner for literature in 1986, assembled a literary culture Ekwensi hoped could unify the nation. When it came he took aim at politics, which Jagua Nana had lamented as a ‘game for dog… roughest game in de whole worl’. He travelled across the country, setting his works in every region in reflection of his peripatetic upbringing. He had nine children, with one wife, Chinwe, and had started writing an autobiography when he died. ‘A creative writer I think should be able to show the people to themselves…’, he said once. ‘And in seeing this they will then be able, it is hoped, to look at themselves critically and adjust themselves.’
The Enduring Legacy Stays
But his most enduring legacy lay in tying down Lagos in prose. Under his influence, Nigerian authors have put the city next to New York, London and Paris as one of those most fictionalised. The Lagos of writers like Adichie, Teju Cole or Chibundu Onuzo is recognisably the Lagos of Ekwensi: twisted; depraved; growing too quickly for its infrastructure; full of suffering; yet exciting; glamorous; dripping with opportunity.
It is there, too, in the contemporary fiction of Nairobi, Addis Ababa or Johannesburg. If Achebe wrote the definitive account of things falling apart, Ekwensi captured them as they were built anew.
