A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists Of The Eighties 0905450922, 9780905450926

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Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties

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New Perspectives on African Literature, 4

A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties

New Perspectives on African Literature

General Editor: Eldred Jones Emeritus Professor of English Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone Freetown, Sierra Leone No. 1: Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa: The Sources of his Fiction DEREK WRIGHT No. 2: The Quiet Chameleon: Modern Poetry from Central Africa ADRIAN ROSCOE & MPALIVE-HANGSON MSISKA No. 3: Achebe or Soyinka? A Re-Interpretation and a Study in Contrasts KOLE OMOTOSO No. 4: A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties ADEWALE MAJA-PEARCE No. 5: Make Man Talk True: Nigerian Drama in English Since 1970 CHRIS DUNTON No. 6: Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature FLORA VEIT-WILD No. 7: The Poetry of Dennis Brutus: A Re-Interpretation WOLE OGUNDELE

A Mask Dancing Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties ADEWALE MAJA-PEARCE

HANS ZELL PUBLISHERS London • Melbourne • Munich • New York • 1992

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans¬ mitted in any form or by any means (including photocopying and recording) without the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended) or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, WIP 9HE. The written permission of the copyright holder must also be obtained before any part of this publication is stored in a retrieval system of any nature. Applications for the copyright holder's written permission to reproduce, transmit or store in a retrieval system any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of any unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. © Adewale Maja-Pearce 1992 Hans Zell Publishers is an imprint of Bowker-Saur, a division of Reed Reference Publishing, 60 Grosvenor Street, London WIX 9DA, United Kingdom. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Maja-Pearce, Adewale Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties. - (New Perspectives on African Literature Series; No. 4) 1. Title II. Series 823 ISBN 0-905450-92-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maja-Pearce, Adwale. A mask dancing : Nigerian novelists of the eighties / Adewale Maja-Pearce. 207 pp. 22 cm. — (New perspectives on African literature ; no. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-905450-92-2 1. Nigerian fiction (English)—History and criticism. 2. Nigeria—Intellectual life—20th century. 1. Series. PR9387.4.M3 1992 823—dc20 92-26652 CIP

Cover illustration: Ben Okri (photograph by Douglas Brother, courtesy of Jonathan Cape); Festus lyayi (photograph by Caroline Austin, courtesy Index on Censorship); Kole Omotoso; Ifeoma Okoye (photograph courtesy of Longman International Education). Printed on acid-free paper. Typeset by VAP Publishing Services, Kidlington, Oxon, England Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd. Chippenham, Wiltshire.

APR 3 0 1S33

PR 9387.4 .M3 1992 Maja-Pearce, Adewale. A mask dancing

Contents Introduction

1

Part One I Through the Past, Darkly II The Fruits of Independence III Into the Abyss

9 35 57

Part Two IV Darkness Visible V A Woman's Place VI The Hunger for Wholeness

73 105 131

Conclusion

171

Notes

175

Bibliography

183

Index

195

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The world is like a mask dancing; if you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. Igbo proverb

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Introduction - The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The decade of the 1980's saw a renewed outburst of creativity on the part of the English-language Nigerian novelists. The reason for this was simple enough, coinciding as it did with the country's second attempt at democracy when the military finally relinquished power after thirteen years to an elected civilian government. As I suggest in the course of the book, the process of democratisation itself - 'the abandonment of this denigration of our popular will'^ - both reflected and released a wider creativity within the society. A similar outburst had previously occured around the time of Independence in 1960, when a different but no less invidious denigration was finally jettisoned. This book deals only with the Nigerian novel in English. This is not to imply that the increasing number of novels being written in the older languages of the country are less worthy of our attention; on the contrary, I am sympathetic to the argument that African writing in the 'European' languages constitutes something of a dead end, and that 'any true African literature must be written in the African languages. . Qbi Wali's statement, first formulated in 1963, has since been extended and refined by other African writers, most notably Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan novelist and playwright. In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature ('my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings'), he argues that the continued use of the 'European' languages perpetuates the colonial dependency that has brought the continent to the

2

A Mask Dancing

present point of collapse. An alternative vision of the African world, a pre-requisite for true liberation, can only be achieved through the medium of those languages that contain the 'collec¬ tive experience' of the African people.^ This is a seductive argument, but it misses the point. The problem is not with English per se (or French or Portuguese), which is no less African that Hausa, Swahili and Zulu, but with those for whom English is not a first language, but who nevertheless insist on writing novels in a language they effec¬ tively consider an alien import: The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether they ought to. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling."*

No, it is not right that a man should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else's, but then the answer is already implicit in the way that Chinua Achebe, 'the father of the Nigerian novel', has phrased the question. It also begs the related question: Why should a man (or a woman) want to abandon his mother-tongue in the first play, especially when he himself perceives the exercise - rightly enough - as a 'dreadful betrayal'? In other words, if English is not your first language; and if, further, using English makes you feel 'guilty', then it is simply perverse to insist on writing novels in English. The solution would seem to be obvious enough; however: The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will not be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.^

The idea that one writes in a language simply because it happens to be 'a medium of international exchange', a 'univer¬ sal' language, is not a reason, only a conclusion; but the fact that Achebe can advance such a spurious argument as though it were perfectly reasonable points to a deeper confusion concerning why one writes and who one writes for, and never mind the competing audience - 'universal' on the one hand, local (presumably) on the other - that Achebe is attempting to satisfy at one and the same time. It's hardly surprising, given such a functional notion of literature, that he should pour scorn

Introduction

3

on the notion of art for art's sake, which he considers 'just another piece of deodorised dog-shit'^, or that he should declare, somewhat defensively, that, 'Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind'^. Unfortunately for such a view, there is all the difference in the world between a work of art and a manifesto. In this Achebe is not alone. All Nigerian novelists in English share his ambiguous response towards the language, which is why their novels are less interesting as literature than as a record of the dilemma of the Nigerian intellectual in the modern world. This is to be expected. It is one thing to attempt to appropriate the language of the former colonial power; it is quite another to do so at the expense of your own. The first is the predicament of, say, the Caribbean and Australian writer; the second is peculiar only to the African writer, who alone among the peoples of the world has rejected their heritage, that is, language, for reasons which have everything to do with the fact of colonisation, and recognised as such by Achebe himself: I know the source of our problem, of course, ANXIETY. Africa has had such a fate in the world that the very adjective African can still call up hideous fears of rejection. Better to cut all links with this homeland, this liability, and become in one giant leap the universal man.®

Which is precisely what he does, while pretending to do some¬ thing else: 'But running away from myself seems to me a very inadequate way of dealing with an anxiety,' he adds, somewhat disingenuously^. All that is then left is to divorce literature from language, and pretend that novels should be 'good and useful', as though literature served a purely didactic purpose. One might even paraphrase Achebe himself and say that the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely the failure of the Nigerian intelli¬ gentsia to meet the demands of their predicament, proof of which is to be found in the books they write. This, of course, flies in the face of received opinion, but the pretence that their novels do constitute a genuinely exciting literary tradition worthy of extended critical exegesis is itself the result of a collusion between African and European commen¬ tators with all manner of neurotic responses towards the African predicament. So, for instance, the apparently endless articles, books and theses dedicated to proving, amongst other things, that a writer like Amos Tutuola, who can hardly write a

4

A Mask Dancing

grammatical sentence, 'is speaking strongly and directly to our times';i2 is, in fact, a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. One may or may not wish to question the authority of the Nobel committee in such matters; one may even generate a fever hardly a passion - denoundng the 'pathological longing for European validation of who we are and what we do';i3 but literary excellence is literary excellence, and no amount of ink has yet managed to turn bad books into good ones. Of all the critical works I consulted in the course of my researches - and all of which are included in the bibliography for reasons of 'academic respectability' - only two proved worthwhile: Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World (1976); and Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (1980), by Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. My debt to Soyinka is probably implicit in much of what follows, but in this I am hardly alone; as Femi Osofisan once put it: '. . . the dialogue with Soyinka has hardly begun. He represents strength and versatility in our artistic life and for me I can't but respond to that'!"^. Conversely, my opinion of Chinweizu et al's 'radicalism' (or, as they prefer, bolekaja criti¬ cism: 'come down, let's fight!'), is contained in the relevant section. Suffice it to say here that although I disagree completely with what the troika have to say, one is at least grateful for the manner in which they dispense with the bogus academicism of their more straitlaced colleagues; in their own words: . . . we would like to make it quite clear that . . . we are bolekaja critics, outraged touts for the passenger lorries of African litera¬ ture, and that we are administering a timely and healthy dose of much needed public ridicule to the reams of pompous nonsense which has been floating out of the stale, sterile, stifling covens of academia. . . .^^ Quite so; but their subsequent call for a truly indigenous literature, written in English but eschewing all 'foreign' tradi¬ tions, is both self-defeating and an offence against the spirit of literature itself. The point about a truly indigenous literature is that it possesses the self-confidence to draw sustenance from wherever it is to be found. In any case, the term 'foreign literature' is a misnomer, at least as far as the practitioners are concerned. There are no boundaries in literature, only shifting centres of excellence. We all look forward to the day when Nigeria becomes just such a centre. This book is divided into two parts. The first - and shorter deals with a cross-section of novels published before the 1980s

Introduction

5

which seemed to me representative of the major themes that occupied the Nigerian writer in the aftermath of decolonization; the second part concentrates exclusively on the decade of the eighties, a period when the high hopes of Independence had given way to a sense of despair at the manner in which the country's enormous potential was being squandered by re¬ actionaries who wished only to perpetuate themselves and their kind in power. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of overlap between the two, but the shift in attitudes which I attempt to chart is more significant than the similarities. Some themes are dropped altogether, for instance the need to re-create a pristine past in order to prove the right of Africans to walk upon the earth; other themes, in particular the scale of the corruption that was jeopardizing the very existence of Nigeria as a going concern, are dealt with in a much more serious manner. Finally, it ought to be said that the touchstone of this study is the books themselves. I have simply read the novels and responded to them as directly as possible, but then this can be the only justification for such an enterprise; as D.H. Lawrence once put it, 'Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing'.!^ It's a pity that the majority of our critics seem unable to cope with this simple truth, in itself a comment on the crisis of the Nigerian intellectual whose activity is only vali¬ dated, it seems, in terms of one or other of the ideologicalcritical schools - but always foreign - to which they feel the need to subscribe.

Part One

fct;; V

Vt I.

I

Through the Past, Darkly 'I merely say that the dead should be better tucked away. They should not be interfered with because then they emerge to thrust terrifying dilemmas on the living. They have no business to make impositions on us.' Wole Soyinka: The Interpreters

In an early and now famous essay. The writer in a modem African state', first delivered at a conference in Stockholm in 1967, Wole Soyinka criticised his contemporaries for ignoring what he termed 'the movement towards chaos' that was begin¬ ning to engulf the country: . . . the writer did not anticipate. The understanding language of the outside world, 'birth pains', that near-fatal euphemism for death throes, absolved him from responsibility. He was content to turn his eye backwards in time and prospect in archaic fields for forgotten gems which would dazzle and distract from the present. But never inwards, never truly into the present, never into the obvious symptoms of the niggling, warning, predictable present, from which alone lay the salvation of ideals.^

Soyinka's barb was aimed specifically at the then dominant school of Nigerian writing which had deliberately set itself the task of rescuing the African past from what it considered the distortions of the colonised present; this re-writing of history being, as always, the expression of a new kind of power arrangement, and symbolised by the end of colonial rule in 1960. This theme - put quite simply - is that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and beauty, that they had poetry and, above aU, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African people all but lost during the colonial period and it is this that they must now regain. 2

10

A Mask Dancing

The words are those of Chinua Achebe, Soyinka s most celebrated compatriot; and it is not enough to say, as Soyinka does in the same essay, that the writers of this school 'mistook [their] own personal and cultural predicament for the predica¬ ment of [their] entire society' in their attempt to 'give the society something that the society had never lost'.^ One has only to consider the popularity of Achebe's first novel. Things Fall Apart (1958), to understand the perceived extent of the damage to the Nigerian psyche after a century of colonial rule. Nigerians of all backgrounds responded to the book precisely as Achebe in¬ tended, and this despite the author's failure to resolve the problems he poses. Consider, for instance, the question of dignity, a suspect word in this context since it immediately begs the related question: dignity in relation to whom? The answer - to the European suggests that the definition of dignity which Achebe has in mind was relative, and was to be measured purely in terms of the other, that is, the European. So Africa was pitted against Europe, and the result, from the African point of view, was humiliation and defeat. How, then, did one begin to negotiate one's dignity in the face of what was, after all, a matter of historical fact? Achebe's response is to suggest that there are more ways than one of measuring the worth of a society, and that the spiritual values of pre-colonial Africa were in no way inferior to those of Europe, merely different. In Things Fall Apart, he goes to great pains to evoke the life of a discrete community in eastern Nigeria before the coming of the European. An important feature of the life of this community is the role of the gods within it. The people live in harmony with each other and with the natural world around them because they acknowledge the existence of powers which are greater than themselves and to whose dictates they willingly submit. Whatever conflict there is in the society is resolved by the appeal to the gods, who then determine the just punishment which alone will restore the harmony that has been ruptured. And these gods, it should be remembered, are not remote beings but living presences in the life of the community. They speak through the ancestors, who are themselves 'the dead fathers of the clan'.^ The ancestors, in turn, inhabit the bodies of the elders of the community, who will themselves become ancestors in their own turn. We learn, for instance, that Ani, the powerful earth goddess and the source of all fertility, 'was in close communion with the departed fathers of the clan whose bodies had been committed to earth' (p. 26).

Through the Past, Darkly

11

Consider, then, the fate of Okonkwo, the hero of the novel. He is a man haunted by the fear of failure who rises to greatness by hard work. But just as everything appears to be going his way he accidentally kills a fellow-clansman and is banished from his village for seven years. When he returns he discovers that in his absence the European missionaries have made great inroads, and that even one of his own sons, Nwoye, has been converted into the new religion. He is at a loss to explain why his people have permitted these strangers to establish their rival authority so quickly and so firmly. At a meeting of the elders following a transgression against one of their most deeply held beliefs, he urges war. His demand falls on deaf ears. Perplexed by their inability to act decisively, he shrugs his shoulders in contempt and kills one of the native clerks bearing a message from the District Commissioner. Then he retires to his hut and hangs himself. Because suicide 'is an offence against the Earth' (p. 147), his corpse is cut down by strangers and thrown into the Evil Forest. It is one of the novel's many ironies - irony being Achebe's stock-in-trade - that Okonkwo's father, a failure in life against whom his son continually measures his own successes, 'died of the swelling disease which was an abomination against the earth goddess' (p. 13), and was similarly disposed. Since Okonkwo is clearly meant to stand as a symbol for his community, the tragic flaw in his character which dictates his downfall is made to mirror that of the community which he embodies. We are told that his suicide is 'an offence against the Earth', who then rejects his corpse and thereby denies him a place among the ancestors, a terrible fate beside which his physical death is nothing. In fact, he offends against the earth goddess on three separate occasions in the course of the novel, as follows. First, he beats one of his wives during the Week of Peace because she is late with his evening meal. That same evening he is visited by Ani's priest, who reminds him of the consequences of such a transgression: The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish, (p. 22). Okonkwo, who is nothing if not a stickler for convention, atones by offering the prescribed sacrifices, but his repentance is less than whole-hearted. Even at the time of the beating he was well

12

A Mask Dancing

aware of what he was doing, but his knowledge of the evil he was committing did not deter him: In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace. His first two wives ran out in great alarm pleading with him that it was the sacred week. But Dkonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody halfway through, not even for fear of a goddess, (p. 21)

Okonkwo offends the goddess a second time when he par¬ takes in the ritual execution of a hostage, a young boy, Ikemefuna, whose death, ordained by the oracle, is an act of compensation for the killing of two members of the clan by the boy's village. Two years previously, Ikemefuna was entrusted to Okonkwo's care while the clan awaited the oracle's decision. During that time he not only became a brother to Nwoye but almost a son to Okonkwo. When the boy's fate is eventually decided Okonkwo, reasonably enough, is exempted from parti¬ cipating in the execution. However, he insists on being present, despite the contrary advice of an elder who points out, 'That boy calls you father' (p. 40). He ignores the advice, but at the fatal moment he is driven to carry out the deed himself as a result of his own conflicting emotions: As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, 'My father, they have killed me!' as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. (p. 43)

It is left to Obierika, his long-standing friend, to articulate the enormity of his action: You know very well, Okonkwo, that I am not afraid of blood; and if anyone tells you that I am, he is telling a lie. And let me teU you one thing, my friend. If I were you I would have stayed at home. What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families, (p. 46).

Okonkwo's third and final offence is the accidental killing of a clansman when his gun explodes in the course of a funeral. One hesitates to say that this accident occurs at the funeral of the elder who had previously warned him not to partake in Ikemefuna's execution, or that the unfortunate victim is none other than the dead man's son, but one can hardly ignore the

Through the Past, Darkly

13

use of such self-conscious irony. Accidental or not, however, Tt was a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it must flee from the land' (p. 87). So Okonkwo journeys with his family to his mother's village, where he counts the passing of the years until he can return home. The funeral scene is given a further, ironic twist by the fact that Okonkwo should have succeeded accidentally where he had previously failed intentionally. Some time before, in a fit of rage, he had shot at and missed one of his wives, the same wife he had beaten during the Week of Peace. How much is one to read into this? That the goddess shielded a woman from the masculine wrath? Ani, after all, represents the female principle in the cosmic life of the community just as surely as Okonkwo represents the male principle in the secular world. It is signifi¬ cant, for instance, that Okonkwo excels in the planting and harvesting of yam, because 'Yams stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed' (p. 23). Conversely, he despises weak¬ ness, which he identifies with the female: 'No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.' (p. 37) That such masculine activity should provide the basis of his prominence in the society is, of course, a comment on the society itself; and it is in this sense that his death is also the death of that same society, or so we are to believe. We shall return to this presently; in the meantime: The secular nature of [the novel] is actually poised on a very delicate ambiguity. Considerations of the authenticity of spiritual inspiration, or of manifestations which may be considered super¬ natural, or at least, ominous coincidences, are given alternative (secular) explications in the casual reflections of members of his Igbo community, coloured as always by individual problems or positions taken in sectional confrontations. In short, coloured by their humanity.^

Soyinka is referring here to Arrow of God, Achebe's other novel set in the more recent past, of which more later. As regards Things Fall Apart, the 'alternative (secular) explications' for the triumph of Christianity, and with it the end of pre-colonial Igbo society, are incorporated into the novel so completely as to render the position of the goddess entirely irrelevant.

14

A Mask Dancing

The first converts to Christianity are the rejects of the com¬ munity, those who, for personal or accidental reasons, are unable to find a place within it. Efulefu, Obierika calls them when he visits Okonkwo in exile: worthless, empty men. Then there are those, like Okonkyvo's 'womanish' son, Nwoye, who are disturbed by what they see as the degenerate values of Igbo society, such as the killing of twins and the ritual execution of the innocent. He is drawn by the contrasting gentleness of the new religion, which provides a sanctuary for his troubled soul: It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul — the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed, (p. 104)

And, finally, there is the missionaries' success in challenging the wrath of the indigenous gods and surviving the encounter. Specifically, the new converts accept a plot of land in the Evil Forest and do not, as expected, foam at the mouth and drop down dead when they proceed to build a church in the clearing they make: Every clan and village had its 'evil forest'. In it were buried all those who died of the really evil diseases. . . It was also the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine-men when they died. An 'evil forest' was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness, (p. 105)

All of this is carefully woven into the narrative so that Igbo society appears, at last, to have been doomed in part by its own harsh inflexibility, even if Achebe attempts to have it both ways by also suggesting, paradoxically enough, that Igbo society was sufficiently tolerant of alien customs to allow the missionaries to gain their foothold in the first place. Consider, for instance, the restraint of the elders when confronted with the second, less sensitive missionary, who encourages an over-zealous convert to openly challenge a sacred taboo. When the elders gather in his compound to set fire to the dhurch in retribution for the crime committed in his name, the spokesman confronts the missionary in the most placatory terms: You can stay with us if you like our ways. You can worship your own god. It is good that a man should worship the gods and the

Through the Past, Darkly

15

spirits of his fathers. Go back to your house so that you may not be hurt. Our anger is great but we have held it down so that we can talk to you. (p. 134)

This is a dignified response to an unnecessary provocation, but such levels of tolerance are belied elsewhere in the novel. 'The laws of the land must be obeyed,' (p. 48) Okonkwo says in another context, a comment not only on the rigidity of his own character, but on that of the society in which he succeeds. In fact, the closest we ever come to any deeper reflection on the nature of divine law is limited to one short paragraph following Okonkwo's banishment: Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi [hut] and mourned his friend's calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities, (p. 87)

Obierika must pass for the local intellectual, the Socrates of Umuofia, so to speak, and God (or the gods!) help him in his solitary endeavour. So much, in any case, for the much vaunted 'philosophy of great depth' (to say nothing of beauty), but which only underscores the question that is raised by Achebe's 'alternative (secular) explications' for the success of Christianity: were the Igbos - and, by extension, Africans ignorant heathens, or weren't they? This may or may not be a false dichotomy, but it is the one which the author himself poses. It is not enough, after all, to simply assert the dignity of pre-colonial African society on the spurious grounds that it had its own elaborate pantheon of gods, if these gods are then shown to be merely the objects of a degraded fetishism so easily unmasked for what they were by the very first European who challenged them. In short, do the gods have power or don't they; and, if they don't, where then does the dignity of the society reside? X-

The drums and the dancing began again and reached fever-heat. Darkness was around the corner, and the burial was near. Guns fired the last salute and the cannon rent the sky. And then from the centre of the delirious fury came a cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast. (p. 86)

16

A Mask Dancing

This is not taken from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel which Achebe himself singles out for its supposedly racist treatment of the dark continent ('The Horror! The Horror!'), even though the tone of the passage is remarkably similar to the one which he himself quote.s from Conrad's novel in support of his argument: 'But suddenly . . . there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping. . The delirious fury of stamping feet is the backdrop against which the gods enact their will on the community in Things Fall Apart, from which the above passage is taken; specifically, the scene in which Okonkwo inadvertently kills a fellow clansman, hence the presence of a dark god, in this case Ani, the deity 'who played a greater part in the life of the people than any other . . .' (p. 26). But this same earth goddess, who is able to effect Okonkwo's banishment, is yet unable to save the com¬ munity - and herself - from an unarmed stranger peddling an alternative (not to say fantastic: 'And on the third day He rose again') religion. But at least Achebe keeps the goddess firmly out of sight. Her presence is only inferred, never conclusively demon¬ strated. This is certainly a weakness in terms of the author's avowed intention, but the resultant ambiguity allows a variety of interpretations on the part of those critics, mostly foreign, who were only too eager to pounce on this welcome evidence that Africans were also capable of writing literature. What else is one to say about the countless critical articles which glibly inform us that Achebe's novel is a 'landmark ... in English fiction'7 an 'epic achievement'^ a 'classic book'^ never mind the even more fulsome praise for Arrow of God, a novel in which the nature of the gods' power is examined more directly and which, in proportion, fails more completely? Power, in fact, is the dominant theme of Arrow of God (1964; rev. ed. 1974). The central character, Ezeulu, is the Chief Priest of the god Ulu, whose will he is responsible for interpreting. As the novel opens, we find him already questioning the precise nature of his power: on the one hand, he alone names the day when the annual yam harvest can take place; on the other, he is only required to eat one of the thirteen sacred yams from the previous year's harvest at the sighting of each new moon, whereupon the new harvest can take place. In other words, he is only 'a watchman': 'His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that was said to be his . .

Through the Past, Darkly

17

The circumscribed nature of his power irks him, a fact which is thrown into greater relief when he discovers that his power in the secular life of the community is non-existent. It happened that a few years earlier Umuaro had gone to war with its neighbour, Okperi, over a land dispute. At the time, Ezeulu spoke out against the war and in the process invoked the authority of Ulu: 'Some people are still talking of carrying war to Okperi. Do they think that Ulu will fight in blame?' (p. 27). But his clansmen do not heed his advice; rather, it is Nwaka, an elder in his own right and a friend of Ezeulu's great rival, the priest of Idemili, who carries the day by calling into question Ezeulu's authority in the matter: My father did not tell me that before Umuaro went to war it took leave from the priest of Ulu . . . The man who carries a deity is not a king. He is there to perform his god's ritual and to carry sacrifice to him. But I have been watching this Ezeulu for many years. He is a man of ambition; he wants to be king, priest, diviner, all. (p. 27).

Nwaka goes even further and uses the opportunity to question the basis of Ulu's power: Let us not listen to anyone trying to frighten us with the name of Ulu. If a man says yes his chi [personal god] also says yes. And we have all heard how the people of Aninta dealt with their deity when he failed them . . . Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbours and set fire on him? (p. 28)

The reference to the fate of Aninta - the destruction of a god that had outlived its usefulness - is, of course, a direct warning that the same fate might very well befall Ulu. And if that were to happen then whatever power Ezeulu does possess will cease altogether. What, then, is the exact nature of Ulu's power, as distinct from the power of his priest? A clue is given in the genesis of the god. Ulu came into being 'in the distant past' (p. 14) to protect the six villages collectively known as Umuaro from 'the hired soldiers of Abam' who 'used to strike in the dead of night, set fire to houses and carry men, women and children into slavery' (p. 14). So the villages came together, 'hired a strong team of medicine-men' (p. 15), and made a deity which they called Ulu. Such was their success that they were never again troubled by the slave raiders. The power of Ulu, then, was manifested in his

18

A Mask Dancing

ability to protect the community from external danger. But this was before the Europeans came, before even the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade a century prior to the action of the novel. It happens that Captain Winterbottom, the District Commis¬ sioner, has meanwhile been charged by his superiors with finding a suitable candidate to appoint as Warrant Chief. This was part of a policy known as Indirect Rule, first formulated by Lord Lugard, Governor-General of Nigeria from 1912 to 1919, in which the colonial authorities sought to rule through native chiefs. But Winterbottom, who knows that this conflicts with the republican principles of the Igbos, is unable to convince his superiors that such a policy is doomed from the beginning. As with Ezeulu, there are strict limits to his power, made worse in his case by his deep-rooted conviction that all Africans are incurably mendacious. However, he recalls Ezeulu's probity during the trial which ended the war between Umuaro and Okperi. He decides to appoint the Chief Priest to this delicate position and summons him to his headquarters for that pur¬ pose. Ezeulu, who doesn't know why he is being summoned, refuses the call on the grounds that he is not in the habit of obeying anybody's orders. Then he calls a meeting of the elders, the people in whom secular authority is vested, and explains what has happened. As we shall see, there is no good reason why Ezeulu should convene this meeting, except that it enables the author to advance the plot of the novel. At any rate, it affords the ever-vocal Nwaka the opportunity of another set speech: But there is one thing which is not clear to me in this summons. Perhaps it is clear to others; if so someone should explain it to me. Ezeulu has told us that the white ruler has asked him to go to Okperi. Now it is not clear to me whether it is wrong for a man to ask his friend to visit him . . . The white man is Ezeulu's friend and has sent for him. What is so strange about that? (p. 143)

Stung to anger, Ezeulu decides to go to Okperi after all; but no sooner does he arrive than he is thrown into prison for his delay. In prison, apparently abandoned by his clan, he has a nightmare. There is a meeting of the elders of Umuaro. He tries to speak but they shout him down on the grounds that Ulu is a dead god: He saved our fathers from the warriors of Abam but he cannot save us from the white man. Let us drive him away as our

Through the Past, Darkly

19

neighbours of Aninta drove out and burnt Ogba when he left what he was called to do and did other things . . . (p. 159)

It is then that Ezeulu decides on the course of revenge to punish his people for their temerity. It has not escaped him that a new moon is due in a few days' time. As it turns out, he is incarcerated for two new moons when his subsequent refusal to accept the chieftaincy title which he is offered earns him a further spell in prison. This does not bother him unduly; on the contrary, it fits in perfectly with his plans. There are certain elements about this episode which are unsatisfactory, and they are part of the general problem of the novel as a whole. As we have already seen, it is unclear why Ezeulu calls the meeting of the elders to tell them of his summons since he really has nothing to say. The urgency of his action belies the trivial nature of his report; he simply does not know, at this point, what it is that Winterbottom wants of him. In any case, Nwaka's charge - that Ezeulu is the white man's friend - is entirely justified. Not only did Ezeulu testify against his clan over the war with Okperi, but his son, Oduche, was enrolled as a student at the mission school at Winterbottom's express request. Why, then, does Ezeulu take offence? And, having taken offence, why does he suddenly decide to obey the summons? His actions are out of proportion to the events that trigger them, as if the plot had been deliberately engineered in order that he should find himself in his predicament. Having decided that his people are against him, and that his power is threatened, power which is dependent on the con¬ tinuing existence of his god, Ezeulu proceeds to put his plan into motion. By refusing to eat the sacred yams he will dislocate the natural cycle and condemn the clan to starvarion. It is a momentous decision, of course, and one would like to know what the god himself thinks about it. However, Ulu's own feelings on the matter are left ambiguous (deliberately so, we must assume), even though Ezeulu justifies his decision with reference to the god: Leaders of Umuaro, do not say that I am treating your words with contempt; it is not my wish to do so. But you cannot say: do what is not done and we shall take the blame. 1 am the Chief Priest of Ulu and what I have told you is his will not mine ... It could not be my wish to make the smallest man in Umuaro suffer. But this is not my doing. The gods sometimes use us as a whip. (p. 208)

20

A Mask Dancing

But Ezeulu is a liar, a fact which the author has been at considerable pains to establish all along. This is most dramati¬ cally illustrated in the conflicting reasons he proffers for sending Oduche to the mission school. To his son, he pretends that his decision is purely pragmatic: "The world is changing," he had told him. "I do not like it... I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something you will bring home my share . . . My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow." (pp. 45-6)

Such commendable foresight is less than half the story. In fact, his real reason is more complex, as he tells his closest friend, Akuebue: If someone came to you and said that Ezeulu sent his son to a strange religion so as to please another man what would you tell him? I say don't make me laugh. Shall I tell you why I sent my son? Then listen. A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured by everyday herbs. When we want to make a charm we look for an animal whose blood can match its power; if a chicken cannot do it we look for a goat or a ram; if that is not sufficient we send for a bull. But sometimes even a bull does not suffice, then we must look for a human . . . And our fathers have told us that it may even happen to an unfortunate generation that they are pushed beyond the end of things, and their back is broken and hung over a fire. This is what our sages meant when they said that a man who has nowhere else to put his hand for support puts it on his own knee.' (pp. 133-4)

That is to say, Oduche is a deliberate sacrifice for the mainten¬ ance of his power, even though Ezeulu is fully aware of what it means to lie to his own child. Elsewhere, for instance, he tells another of his children that he should always believe what he tells him because, 'A man does not lie to his son ... To say My father told me is to swear the greatest oath.'(p. 93) And, to Akuebue: 'Before you came in ... I was telling that little boy over there that the greatest liar among men speaks the truth to his own son.' (p. 98) Ezeulu, then, is not only a liar, but 'the greatest liar among men'. That he is perfectly capable of lying about Ulu's instructions can be taken as given. But it turns out that Ezeulu has overreached himself, and his subsequent descent into madness is the result of his attempt to

Through the Past, Darkly

21

pit himself against the will of his clan and hope to emerge victorious. The native convert in charge of the parish, John Jaja Goodcountry, seizes the opportunity afforded by Ezeulu's deci¬ sion to advance the cause of his new-found faith. He assures the people of Umuaro that if they harvest the new crop in the name of the Christian God and bring their offerings to the church, no harm will befall them. They do not need to be told twice. Meanwhile, Ezeulu's favourite son, Obika, catches a chill and dies. In his anguish Ezeulu goes mad. The novel ends with the triumph of Christianity. The alacrity with which the people of Umuaro embrace Christianity is puzzling indeed. Since we have been told that the Igbos were not averse to destroying the gods which had failed them, and since we already have it on evidence that such was the fate of Ogba, the god of Aninta, why is Ulu not simply dispensed with and a new god created in his place? Why is it necessary for the people to turn to Christianity, an alien import, in order to do what is already sanctioned by tradition? This is even more perplexing since Ulu's prominence in the life of the society has already been called into serious question; it was the very precariousness of his hold, after all, that led to his Chief Priest's rash decision in the first place. And where is Nwaka in all of this? Vocal at the beginning, only too ready to advance the cause of his ally, the priest of Idemili, he is inexplicably removed from the scene as though, having served the purpose of putting into effect the train of events that lead to the death of the god, the author has no further use for him. Such obvious manipulation of plot points to a confusion on the part of the author. This is nowhere more clearly evident than in the treatment of the god himself. We have it on the author's word that he was able to save his worshippers from the slave raiders of Abam, yet he is unable to save himself from the folly of his own priest. It may be that Obika's death was the god's retribution on his wayward priest; if so, Soyinka is entirely right to point out that '(it) is too perfunctory a divine replyIt is too little too late. He has allowed his priest to destroy him first, and this despite his earlier warning contained in the god's only direct appearance throughout the entire novel: "Ta Nwanu!" barked Ulu in his ear . . . "Who told you that this was your own fight?" Ezeulu trembled and said nothing, his gaze lowered to the floor.

A Mask Dancing

22

"I said who told you that this was your fight to arrange the way it suits you? . . . Beware you do not come between me and my victim or you may receive blows not meant for you!. . . Go home and sleep and leave me to settle my quarrel with Idemili, whose envy seeks to destroy me that his python may again come to power." (pp. 191-2)

In other words, when the situation cries out for a demonstration of Ulu's power, the god is exposed as powerless. His own priest possesses more power than he does. Again, as in Things Fall Apart, there are 'alternative (secular) explications' for the otherwise divinely inspired outcome. In the end, it is perfectly feasible that Ezeulu was always insane. The 'casual reflection' which suggests this possibility is voiced by one of the elders, who suddenly informs us, at an opportune moment, that Ezeulu's mother had been a lunatic, and that the priest may have in consequence 'caught his mother's madness' (p. 212). At a stroke, everything is thrown into doubt, including Ezeulu's claim regarding his instructions not to eat the sacred yams. In other words, Ulu may be no more than the figment of an ambitious fetish priest's fevered imagination, hence the triumph of the true religion in the face of a genuine crisis. >«■

So it turns out that the African gods, part and parcel of the philosophy of 'great depth and beauty' which invests the African world with dignity, are really no more than proof of African primitivism. The bits of wood they worshipped, no matter how elaborate the carvings, were just that - bits of wood. This is presumably why they collapsed so quickly in the face of a superior Christianity, and why the people who worshipped them were so easily colonised by those who did not believe in fetish priests and Evil Forests. It would seem to be simpler to acknowledge this in a few short sentences than take the trouble to write an entire novel in order to arrive at the same conclusion; but the fact of that colonisation, the ease with which the African world fell apart, remains a problem for the modem. Chris¬ tianised African whose dignity has thereby suffered as a result. Unfortunately, the problem is posed but never resolved - and perhaps it cannot be - with the result that Achebe's novels only achieve the opposite of what they intend. In this Achebe is not alone, only the most accomplished of the novelists who explored this theme. Consider, for instance.

Through the Past, Darkly

23

Elechi Amadi's The Great Ponds (1969), which is set at the turn of the century and centres on a feud between two villages over the ownership of a pond that lies mid way between them. As with Achebe, Amadi goes to great lengths to establish the reality of the gods in the lives of the community. The central character, Olumba, a respected and fearless warrior, is careful to attend religiously to the well-being of his household gods. As he explains to a young friend and admirer: I fear no man. Rather I fear the gods on whom depend the results of any fight. But I have never failed to offer sacrifices to them. I am sure that they will always be by me.^^

And again: Never play with the gods, my soi*. They are powerful and should be respected. I would rather face a whole village in battle than have the weakest of the gods after me. At times I wish I were a dibia, for then I would be able to see the spirits myself, know their desires and minister to them properly, (p. 3)

This belief in the gods is reiterated throughout the novel. We are constantly presented with examples of the ways in which particular gods have acted in the affairs of individual members of the community, even to the extent of providing Olumba with a son: Few know what I suffered before he was born. My two wives died without children. A dibia said there was a curse in the family. I struggled and married two more wives. They produced females . . . But I could not die without an heir; my compound had to stand, my family had to be perpetuated. I married Oda hoping she would give me a son. I called one dibia after another and spent all I had in unheard-of sacrifices. When all attempts failed I was advised to consult the priest of Igwekala, the great god of Umunoha. Although I had no idea of the place I had packed, ready to go, when Anwuanwu, whom I shall never forget, proposed an alternative step which I accepted. I was obliged to cut off half of the little finger of my left hand for a sacrifice involving a walk to the Evil Forest at midnight. What I saw in that forest that night will forever be a secret between me and the gods. Look at my finger if you doubt my story ... I tell you, I snatched that boy right from the gods . . . (p. 158)

In an effort the resolve the ownership of the pond, Olumba agrees to swear an oath before Ogbunabali, 'the god of the

24

A Mask Dancing

night' (p. 161). If he dies within six months, his village will give up their claim; if he survives, the pond is theirs. Just before the time is up a strange sickness strikes the community, killing many. No one has seen the like before; even the medicine-men are at a loss to explain what is happening. Inevitably, Ogbunabali's name is invoked; but when a delegation is sent to the neighbouring village to sue for peace and thereby release Olumba from his oath, it transpires that the sickness is not confined only to their village: But it was only the beginning. Wonjo, as the villagers called the Great Influenza of 1918, was to claim a grand total of some twenty million lives aU over the world, (p. 21^

So the novel ends, and in the space of one short paragraph the entire edifice upon which it is constructed is swept away. The superstitious beliefs of a backward people, complete with elab¬ orate sacrifices to appease what turns out to be a simple virus, are revealed for what they are. As with Achebe, Amadi pays lip service to the authenticity of a vanished world, but the exercise is self-defeating because he himself is as doubtful as any of the early European missionaries about the nature of that world. The fact that the pre-colonial missionary and the post-colonial novelist begin from opposing needs - the one to denigrate; the other to elevate - is less important than the fact that they both arrive at the same conclusion. In the process, the claim to dignity to which these novels aspire is posited on a gigantic lie. The dignity, in any case, is exclusive: 'Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youn¬ gest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper' (p. 9); '. . . .when she returned he beat her very heavily. In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace' (p. 21); 'No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man' (p. 37). It is not enough to say, as Achebe does in Things Fall Apart, that pre-colonial African societies recognised the importance of the female principle in terms of that society's pantheon, or that Okonkwo's punishment is in part explained by his offence against Ani, the earth goddess; it is not even enough to say that Ani 'played a greater part in the life of the people than any other deity' (p. 26), if the position of women as human beings is then denigrated to the extent that Okonkwo's crime is not so much that he beats one of his wives, but that he

Through the Past, Darkly

25

does so at an unpropitious time: ' "Your wife was at fault, but even if you came into your obi and found her lover on top of her, you would have still committed a great evil to beat her" ' (p. 22). Beating a woman is not, in itself, unacceptable behaviour 'Without further argument Okonkwo gave her a sound beating. . . .' (p. 27) - given that their status is roughly akin to that of the children (male, preferably) which it is their function to produce:' "We are giving you our daughter today. She will be a good wife to you. She will bear you nine sons" ' (p. 82). At the egwugwu ceremony, for instance, in which the 'elders' (male, naturally) put on wooden masks and pretend to be 'the spirits of the ancestors' (p. 62) come to earth to give judgment in a dispute, the division between the sexes is made quite explicit: 'Then came the voices of the egwugwu, guttural and awesome. The wave struck the women and children and there was a backward stam¬ pede' (p. 62). Again: 'And then the egwugwu appeared. The women and children sent up a great shout and took to their heels. It was instinctive. A woman fled as soon as an egwugwu came in sight' (p. 63). One can understand well enough why the men, especially the elders, are anxious to pretend that a pantomime is more than it seems, but it is less clear why the women should willingly turn themselves into simpletons in the process: Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. But if they thought these things they kept them within themselves. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. (pp. 63-4)

But this is entirely in keeping with their status as chattel to be bought and sold in the manner of slaves awaiting transportation to the New World: 'She was about skteen and just ripe for marriage. . . . [They] surveyed her young body with expert eyes as if to assure themselves that she was beautiful and ripe' (p. 49). It goes without saying that the intended bride is entirely absent from the delicate negotiations in which her beauty and her ripeness are haggled over 'with sticks' (p. 51), a more dignified (or more enlightened) method of barter, it presently transpires, than that practised by a neighbouring clan who ' "haggle and bargain as if they were buying a goat or a cow in the market" ' (p. 51). The point is not that the practice itself may be corrupt - to call that into question would indeed smack of

26

A Mask Dancing

philosophy - only the variations employed to achieve the desired end; whereupon, satisfied with a good day's work, 'the men ate and drank palm-wine' (p. 51). The second-class status of women in the society which is portrayed in Things Fall Apart - and in Arrow of God and The Great Ponds, for that matter - is continually reinforced throughout the novel, even in ways which, at first sight, have little or nothing to do with the narrative itself: Anansi was a middle-aged woman, tall and strongly built. There was authority in her bearing and she looked every inch the ruler of the womenfolk in a large and prosperous family. She wore the anklet of her husband's titles, which the first wife alone could wear. She walked up to her husband and accepted the horn from him. She then went down on one knee, drank a little and handed back the horn. She rose, called him by his name and went back to her hut. The other wives drank in the same way, in their proper order [my italics] and went away. (pp. 14-15)

In fact, this passage is absolutely central, but only if the author's purpose is not so much the downfall of a vanished society than the nostalgic (and therefore uncritical) re-creation of a despised and defeated world, the better to unearth the dignity which was buried along with it, hence the relentless accumu¬ lation of anthropological detail that is the novel's overriding claim to authenticity: 'Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly' (p. 5); '. . . among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father' (p. 6); 'Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered' (p. 6). The 'alternative (secular) explications' for the downfall of that society then become an intellectual game for building academic reputations, the final irony being that the author is apparently so unconscious of his motives in writing the novel as to imagine a further irony in the District Conunissioner's own intention to write the book we have just been reading: The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was that District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In this book which he planned to write he would

Through the Past, Darkly

27

stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Everyday brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading, (p. 147)

Indeed; the Dictrict Commissioner's own book. The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, re-titled Things Fall Apart in keeping with our post-colonial sensibilities, would have pre¬ sented an equally static picture of a society which murdered children, abused women, and believed that men in fancy dress easily identified by their 'springy walk' - were really long-dead ancestors. 5f-

To understand the position of women in such societies one need only turn to the women novelists themselves. In Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966), for instance, the picture of a pre-colonial Golden Age so beloved by reactionaries, by those who cannot cope with the challenge of the modem world and seek instead the dubious (not to say tendentious) comforts of a bygone era in which men were men and women knew their place, is subverted to an extent that may or may not account for the hostility with which the novel was received when it was first published. The comparison, iron¬ ically enough, was with Things Fall Apart, the standard, appar¬ ently, against which all such novels were to be judged: We have only to contrast Achebe's technique with that of an inferior novelist. Flora Nwapa ... to see how skilful he is. Miss Nwapa's sociological descriptions, which are almost always irrelevant, are often prefaced by some comment like this: 'They organized themselves in groups and sang from door to door. Their song went like this . . .' And then follows an Ibo song or an elaborate recipe of some kind. The introductory comment . . . detaches the song or whatever follows from its context, and it becomes purely sociological information. Achebe's sociological passages always emerge quite naturally and unobtrusively out of the living situation of the novel.

The charge of anthropology - 'sociological descriptions' - is not only wrong-headed but misplaced. Such a charge is only tme if the purpose of these 'sociological descriptions' is an end in itself, for instance the desire to invest the society described with qualities which are not properly - or primarily - the concern of the novelist. The result, as in Things Fall Apart, is a novel in

28

A Mask Dancing

which movement is entirely absent. Okonkwo is the same man at the end of the novel as he was at the beginning. In effect nothing happens, and this despite the momentous events that the novel purports to describe. Efuru, in contrast, leaves the dignity or otherwise of the society to one side and concentrates instead on the people who inhabit that society. Efuru herself, the central character, is a woman of rare beauty and courage who has been chosen by the river goddess, Uhamiri, as one of her worshippers. The goddess confers wealth but denies offspring. In a society where it was 'a curse not to have children. Her people did not just take it as one of the numerous accidents of nature. It was regarded as a failure,' Efuru must learn to reconcile herself with her fate, which is the dominant theme of the novel. As one would expect, the female characters play a more central role than do their male counterparts, but the author does not thereby render 'the other' invisible, in the manner of Achebe or Amadi: her verisimilitude may, indeed, have dictated the responses of the (predominantly male) critics. Efuru's father apart, none of the men come off particularly well. Her first husband, Adizua, is a waster and a womaniser who is not even intelligent enough to know when he's on to a good thing: "But will his "wife" allow him to come home?" Ajanupu thought. "Men are such queer people. They are so weak that when they are under the thumb of a woman she does whatever she likes with them." (p. 85)

Ajanupu herself, the sister of Efuru's mother-in-law, Ossai, is a marvellous creation, a strong, forceful woman who acts as a foil to Efuru's almost superhuman goodness. When Efuru decides to leave her husband, for instance, it is Ajanupu who encour¬ ages her to do so, even to the extent of berating Ossai for her spinelessness in the matter, itself reminiscent of the way she had accepted her own husband's mistreatment of her: Ossai had always been a good younger sister. She was not impudent as younger sisters sometimes are. She did not have that fighting spirit which Ajanupu possessed in abundance. So when her misfortune came, instead of fighting against it, as Ajanupu would have done, she succumbed to it. She surren¬ dered everything to fate. [Ajanupu] would have played her own tune and invited fate to dance to it. Not Ossai. When Ajanupu and her mother wanted her to do something after her husband

Through the Past, Darkly

29

had left her, she did nothing. She merely folded her hands and waited for her truant husband to come back to her. (p. 96)

In the world of Achebe, Ossai would have passed as a virtuous woman who uncomplainingly accepts any nonsense her husband cares to dish out. Her reward is, precisely, her virtue, a contemptible commodity in Efuru's eyes: Perhaps self-imposed suffering appeals to her. It does not appeal to me. I know I am capable of suffering for greater things. But to suffer for a truant husband like Adizua is to debase suffering. My own suffering will be noble, (p. 73)

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IV

Darkness Visible The Nigerian society which is portrayed, without one re¬ deeming feature, is that oil-boom society of the seventies which every child knows only too well. The crimes commit¬ ted by a power-drunk soldiery against a cowed and defence¬ less people, resulting in a further mutual brutalization down the scale of power - these are the hard realities that hit every man, woman and child, irrespective of class as they stepped out into the street for work, school or other acts of daily amnesia. Wole Soyinka: Opera Wonyosi

Thirteen years of military rule came to an end in 1979, the year in which the army transferred power to the civilians. The same year also marked the beginning of a fresh outburst of literary creativity, as though the process of democratisation both reflected and re¬ leased a wider creativity within the society itself. Over the next decade a new generation of novelists appeared on the scene: Festus lyayi (Violence, The Contract); Ben Okri (Flowers and Shadows, The Landscapes Within, The Famished Road); Bode Sowande (Our Man the President, Without A Home); Lekan Oyegoke (Cowrie Tears); Ifeoma Okoye (Behind the Clouds, Men Without Ears); Zaynab Alkali (The Stillborn); Ernest Okolo (No Easier Road); and Eno Obong (Garden House). Additionally, there were new novels by established writers: Chukwuemeka Ike (Expo '77, The Chicken Chasers); Buchi Emecheta (The Joys of Motherhood, Double Yoke); Flora Nwapa (One Is Enough); T.M. Aluko (Wrong Ones in the Dock); Kole Omotoso (Memories of our Recent Boom); Elechi Amadi (Es¬ trangement); Cyprian Ekwensi (Jagua Nana's Daughter); and Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannah). Almost all these novels exhibited certain basic features in common. They were urban in setting; they dealt with the theme of corruption; and they were marked by the realization that twenty years of independence, in which Nigerians had been in charge of their own affairs, had resulted in failure at every level. Decolonisation had not solved anything; worse yet, civil war and military rule had only served to brutalise the society in ways

74

A Mask Dancing

that Soyinka had already predicted in his civil war quartet. The incredible good fortune of oil, which should have transformed Nigeria into a middle-ranking nation, had been squandered to little effect. To be sure, a new breed of Nigerian millionaires could be seen ordering gold plated bathroom suites in London shops, but this was hardly a source of consolation for the millions of Nigerians who still could not afford running water. This was the hard reality which writers now faced, and it was this that they tackled in the novels they wrote. They could not have been less interested in the African past; as for the present, they knew that it was a great deal more sinister than that portrayed by Achebe in A Man of the People. It is doubtful whether Chief Nanga existed even in the relatively innocent sixties, and it is at least arguable that the 'lovable' rogue portrayed by Achebe - 'The man's charisma had to be felt to be believed' (pp. 10-11); 'He had that rare ^ft of making people feel . . . that there was not a drop of ill-will in his entire frame' (p. 73) - only served to detract from the grimmer reality he was supposed to represent. Be that as it may, the novelists of the eighties knew very well that the Nanga they were dealing with would not have wasted much time arguing the toss with Odili, nor would their hired thugs have simply left him with a broken skull. In short, twenty years of independence had revealed the true nature of the beast. This new consciousness of evil is immediately apparent in Festus lyayi's Violence (1979), a long, sprawling, undisciplined novel which derives its power largely from the author's outrage at the injustices of a system that reduces human beings to chattel, and love to a commodity measured in terms of naira and kobo. The novel contrasts the lives of two couples: Idemudia and his wife, Adisa, who are poor; and Queen and her husband, Obofun, who are wealthy. One day, driving through a slum area of Lagos looking for cheap labour. Queen happens upon Ide¬ mudia and asks him if he would like a job unloading cement at her motel. Idemudia, unemployed and on the point of starva¬ tion, jumps at the opportunity, and so begins a relationship between both couples who symbolize either end of the social scale which is permitted to co-exist in the same city and which, having the fact of money in common - abundance on the one hand; none on the other - ultimately dictates a base level of sexual morality which flatters neither. For Queen it is a deliberate choice. She has got where she is by hardening her heart and opening her legs to any man who can

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help her make the money she craves. There is no tenderness in her: she is vicious, greedy, and utterly mercenary. When, for instance, she needs a large consignment of foodstuffs for a new hotel she has almost finished building, she simply gets in touch with a civil servant from the appropriate Ministry and sleeps with him. She feels nothing for him; she even finds him repellent; and when she has fulfilled her side of the bargain she drops him without a moment's hesitation and turns her atten¬ tion to the next challenge: Iriso spat again on the wall. "Keep your mouth dry. This is not a toilet!" She was angry. "Where else am I to spit? 1 am disgusted. Utterly disgusted." "With what?" Iriso swallowed his saliva. "With you," he said. "With you. How can you say this is the end, when it is only the beginning? Won't you need more eggs, or meat and milk? Are there no other things you will need? And er, I like you. Come to think of it, I really like you." Queen regarded him as he lay naked on the bed. She wanted to spit herself. But she checked herself. "Get dressed," she said earnestly. "Get dressed and let's go. You know I have a lot of things to do."i

But Queen's perverted morality carries its own price. By killing her capacity for love she damages not only herself but those around her. Lilian, her sixteen year-old daughter, is one such casualty. When a disturbed Lilian approaches her for help, just as she is about to go and bed down with Iriso, her only response is to dimiss her: "You are not well? Who did you tell? What is wrong with you? Not well? Liar! Liar!" Lilian fell silent. Queen stood up, then bent down again to put on her shoes. Without another word, she abandoned her daugh¬ ter in the large sitting room and went down the stairs. She went into the store at the side of the restaurant. The four cartons of milk and the egg containers were there. She picked up one of the eggs. It was big and heavy. 'Very good,' she said to herself. 'Very good', (p. 99)

So she goes off, leaving her daughter alone in the house. When she returns, she discovers that Lilian has been raped by three boys from her school. Or not raped, exactly: it transpires that she received the boys in her nightdress, that she was partially

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A Mask Dancing

drunk on the same whisky that her mother consumed night after night to dull whatever was left of her conscience, and that she failed to alert the servants downstairs. She had also acquired a reputation in her school for sleeping around. But all that is beside the point. Her self-destructive behaviour is an obvious cry for help, for the attention her mother is too busy to give her and which instead she finds where she can. The fact that Lilian is raped at more or less the same moment Queen is bedding down with one of her clients is hardly coincidental. The juxtaposition of the two events underlines the scale of Queen's debasement at the same time as it reinforces the truth about the prevailing sexual morality. It is Queen's abscence from home in search of the Great God which provides the opportunity for Lilian's rape; conversely, sex in both in¬ stances is reduced to an expression of power, to be bartered or seized according to one's relative position within the power stakes. Neither event has anything to do with love, and yet it is love, not money, which alone can save Lilian from the course she has embarked upon. Unfortunately, her father is no better, as he proves in his turn by raping Adisa, a woman who is the antithesis of Queen in every respect except beauty. It happens that it is raining on the day Idemudia works for Queen and he catches pneumonia. His condition deteriorates overnight and in the morning Adisa is forced to take him to hospital. The pitiful amount of money he has earned for his day's labour - five naira - is soon exhausted on drugs, and Adisa is left to fend for herself. She must also find the money for the hospital fees before her husband can be discharged. Obofun, who has desired Adisa from the moment he first saw her, is quick to seize his opportunity. He offers her money and promises to set her up in trade. At first she repulses him, but he is persistent and she is desperate and in the end she succumbs to him in the chalet of yet another hotel which he co-owns with his wife: She struggled once more and attempted to break free but it was no use. Obofun weighed down hea'^y on her and her fight was nothing but the last spasmodic movements of a dying animal. She gritted her teeth and her body was tense but cold and her eyes were vacant, as if she was not there but far, far away, (pp. 177-8)

In other words, Adisa is raped in much the same way that Lilian is raped: by default. She is merely a victim, as Obofun himself realizes afterwards:

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I must apologise to her. I have offended God and the earth. I was like a vulture picking at the flesh of a helpless prey. I must see her in the morning and tell her how sorry I am that I forced her against her wish. I will kneel down before her and say, "Adisa, please forgive and forget. Only God knows what entered my head. You are beautiful but helpless. 1 shouldn't have taken advantage of your piteous situation. Honestly I am sorry. Please forgive me." She will look at me and smile and then it will be over. My conscience will be cleared, (pp. 207-8)

So Obofun turns out to possess at least the semblance of a conscience, but such remorse, from such a man, is unconvincing in terms of the novel's own scale of values. Obofun, after all, has already been portrayed as every bit as corrupt as Queen, even to the extent of countenancing her numerous affairs in return for the material rewards: He twisted his mouth. He had gone over all this before. They had fought like this before. What was the use? He had come to learn to put up with the situation. It had been a shock when he had first found out but then he had found out too late. Too late, because by then he had established all his businesses in her name. Divorcing her would have meant losing all his businesses. (p. 200)

Obofun's remorse, in fact, which is purely sentimental, serves only to prove a rather dubious moral point: that Adisa, who must submit to him in order to eat, is nevertheless able to wield a certain measure of power over him, in this case the power of forgiveness. This is the central weakness of the novel, and it is not limited only to Obofun. Adisa's capitulation is equally unconvincing, at least in terms of the moral universe of the novel itself. Either goodness can be corrupted or it can't. The problem is not that Adisa succumbs to evil, but that her husband, faced with the same choice, refuses to yield to the same. It happens that Queen, who sees Adisa running out of the chalet on the fateful night, later employs Idemudia on one of her building sites where she is attempting to fulfil a government contract to build low-income flats. The work is already behind schedule because of recurring labour problems. Unfortunately, Idemudia also turns out to be a trouble maker, at least from Queen's point of view, as a result of a sudden insight he gains into the nature of the society and his own place within it, hence the title of the novel:

78

A Mask Dancing Not far off were the houses which sweat and labour had already erected. The property-owners lived in them already. Life there was ablaze where labour had left its positive mark, the labour of hundreds of thousands of workers, working either in the intense sunlight or in the biting cold or in the blinding rain, piling the blocks higher and higher artd wiping the salt and the sweat from their eyes and their foreheads with the backs of their hands, and all underpaid, underfed and treated no better than slaves - the highest form of violence maintained and jealously guarded by a greedy, unfeeling class of exploiters, greedy moneymakers, conservative and reactionary public officials who in the end took all the credit for the achievements of labour, just as the slavedrivers took all the credit for the achievements of the slaves, (pp. 255-6)

This revelation is translated into direct action when Idemudia leads the demand for better wages. But Queen, who is too mean to comply, decides instead to corrupt him in the only way she knows how: ' "Every man has a price," she told herself. She would buy him over now. In the future, she could do away with him . . .' (p. 260). She offers him one hundred naira. He refuses. She doubles the amount but he still refuses. Furious, she sends him away, but she knows that without him she won't be able to fulfil her contract on time so she sends for him again and attempts to seduce him. Once more, he turns her down: He did not want this woman. Having her would bind him to her as no other thing could ... It would be even worse than accepting the money. And it would be unfair to Adisa . . . "It would be adultery," he repeated, the foolish-sheepishdrunken smile in his eyes and lips. "It is wrong." (p. 307)

This is more than she can bear, and with typical vindictiveness she tells him about Adisa's infidelity. It is not only that Idemudia knows the difference between right and wrong, but that he refuses to do what his conscience cannot condone, even at the price of destitution. Idemudia, in short, is incorruptible: 'It is wrong,' he says, and there's an end of it. Adisa, by contrast, who also knows the difference between right and wrong, nevertheless succumbs to what her conscience cannot condone: My conscience torments me. Things will never be the same again. What I have done will always stand between us. He will not trust me any more. He will always doubt me! But he ought to understand. He will understand, (p. 217)

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So Idemudia becomes the measure by which the actions of the others are to be judged. But such an absolute standard con¬ demns everyone else. This includes Adisa who, by contrast, is made to occupy only a relative position in the novel's moral universe. She is to be judged alongside the conscience-stricken Obofun, even though her downfall is propelled by a necessity which is hardly comparable to that which impels her rapist. The fact that Idemudia finds it in his heart to forgive her only underscores the extent of her 'crime' by placing her in the same relation to her husband that the novelist has placed Obofun in relation to her: 'She will look at me and smile and then it will be over. My conscience will be cleared.' Poor is good; rich is bad: this is the message of Violence, which is why Idemudia is incorruptible, and why Adisa is granted a measure of power over Obofun. It also explains why Queen is portrayed without one redeeming feature which might otherwise have made her more recognisably human, lyayi, in short, like so many of the novelists discussed here, is an overtly didactic writer. The main protagonists of the novel are simplified to the extent that they themselves become the message that the novelist would ram home, hence Idemudia's sudden political insight into the true nature of the society which gives the novel its title. lyayi succeeds only to the extent that he is able to transcend the inherent flaws in the novel by communicating his passion at the injustices of the society. The reader is carried along by the rage which informs his work, and which seems to render any deeper criticism superfluous. It is difficult to deny the truth of his political vision, to which all else is subsumed, including what ought to pass for a plot. The plot is kept to the minimum necessary to move the story along. This is an advantage in a novel where characterisation is equally simplified for the greater purpose of the message. The real hero of Violence is society itself. Anything that obscures our direct apprehension of that society, including characterisation and plot, can only detract from the author's intention, which is what happens in The Contract, lyayi's second novel, where the mechanical nature of the plot only succeeds in blunting the power of the message. The Contract (1982) opens with the return to Nigeria of Ogie Obala, the son of a wealthy businessman, from his studies overseas. lyayi takes full advantage of his protagonist's initial shock of arrival, the frenzy he sees all around him, to introduce his theme. In the taxi bearing him home, Ogie is subjected to a

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A Mask Dancing

diatribe by the driver on the importance of money in the society to which he has returned: Money is King in this country. Everybody wants money. People are bought and sold. The armed robbers steal to make money. The politicians steal to make money, the police and the cream of the military and the establishment all steal to make money . . .^

Arrived home, his father is quick to confirm the driver's outburst, though without the former's bitterness and outrage: It's not the kind or even number of degrees that a person has that matters these days, it's the amount of money that he has in his pocket, how many houses, what kind of cars he has. And nobody cares how you get these things. It's the result, the end that matters, not the means. People want results because they can see them. (p. 13)

The key to lyayi's treatment of his theme is contained in the words of Ogie's girlfriend. Rose Idebale. When he visits her a week after his arrival he tells her that he will be joining his father's firm. His job will be to award government contracts. The whole issue of contracts is at the heart of large-scale corruption, if only because of the amounts involved. The commonly accepted practice is for the awarding firm to auto¬ matically demand ten per-cent commission of the value of the contract as a matter of course, and for the interested parties to bid against each other on that basis. Rose is only too well aware of the damage this is doing to the country: "Yes, you ought to know," she said. "There is nothing to hide about it. And it goes back to what I said before. People who award contracts, public servants, ask for percentages. They not ordy ask, they demand it. I think it is criminal. You think about it. Some money is voted to build a public hospital and because of these percentages and the general hunger of our contractors, the hospital never gets built. The money, public money, is shared out, stolen. They are worse than armed robbers." (p. 26)

Ogie protests that he will be different; that he won't be one of them; that he will single-handedly fight the percentage system ' "as others have done in the past" ' (p. 28). But she is unimpressed: "Well, it is not that I am worried about you. It is them that I am worried about, it is the everday, commonly accepted, believe-it-

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or-not practice that I am worried about. How can you singlehanded fight a vast organization, a government, the whole fabric of society? How could you fight it alone and hope to come out of it alive? No," she said, shaking her head "it is not that I don't believe in the principle of your alternative. It is that it is unrealistic." (p. 28)

Ogie chooses to disbelieve her. To prove his determination, he invites her to join him and a prospective client, Mr Oloru, over dinner at a hotel. This is his first real brush with the world of business, and he is anxious to use the occasion to prove his integrity in her eyes. His father, as a test of his son's abilities, has charged him with the handling of a particularly lucrative contract - or so at least Ogie thinks. On the commission alone he can expect to clear ten thousand naira. Mr Oloru offers him, in addition, a house of his own. Ogie refuses, but Rose is unim¬ pressed. She is far more hard-headed than he is. She knows that the matter is not settled as easily as he supposes, or that he has proved his case simply by turning down the first offer he is made. More urgently, he has not understood that the mere fact of being part of the system means that he is already contamin¬ ated. Later, over a drink, she explains the facts of Nigerian business life to him: How can you say you have forgotten about it, about the dinner, when the wine and the food are still warm and undigested in your stomach? How can you come this far and then persuade yourself that nothing really has happened? Can you really believe that? You accepted the job and from the time you accepted it, you joined them. You can't beat them after you have joined them. How many times do I have to tell you that? (p. 57)

The truth of her sentiments is quickly borne out. Mr Oloru is not the only one anxious to secure the contract. Chief Ekata, one of his great rivals, is also interested. But Ogie refuses to answer his phone calls; and in order to winkle him out so as to make him an offer he cannot refuse, he sends a young and beautiful woman, Eunice Agbon, to seduce him. This is no more than standard practice. Eunice is employed full-time by him for just that purpose. Like Adisa in Violence, she is poor but beautiful; unlike Adisa, she has fewer moral scruples. Or perhaps she just has more responsibilities. After she has been given her instructions by her boss - ' "Getting Mr Obala out to dinner must be considered the single most important assignment in your

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A Mask Dancing

career" ' (pp. 74-75) - she considers what she has been reduced to: "I ought to leave this work," she told herself. "The man uses me as he would any other instrument." But then she couldn't go right away. She had to put in three months' notice. And then there were her parents to consider. Her parents were unem¬ ployed, uneducated and poor. Since she had found this job, things had become easier all round. Before she had started worldng, they had always done without meat and had fed mostly on eba and pap. Could she leave this job now and throw away their chief means of support? (p. 75)

But what is so striking about this episode, in terms of the moral climate of the society, is not so much that such things are done, but the crudity with which they are achieved. Chief Ekata feels no brief moment of doubt or pity; he experiences no shame about exploiting Eunice's vulnerability for his own ends. He does not even feel the need to lie to himself, to pretend that what he is sanctioning is not as abhorrent as it really is. And if this means that he lacks hypocrisy, it also means that he lacks any notion of moral culpability: He always told women what he expected of them when he employed them . . . He had no second thoughts whatsoever about how he treated people. People were to be used. People were building blocks in the great house he wanted to build. All else counted for nothing, (p. 70).

This might even include one's wife. Mr Oloru, for instance, increasingly desperate that the contract might be slipping out of his grasp, is fully prepared to go the whole distance: Perhaps he would have to send his wife round again to the administrator and the others; but wasn't that really too high a price? Should they have his wife yet again just to swing the contract in his favour? Still, this contract was worth several million naira. So what were a few men's pleasures compared to five million naira? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, (p. 119)

And Mr Oloru - or his wife, for that matter - does not even have Eunice's excuse that he must humiliate himself in such a fashion out of necessity. His only excuse is greed. This is what Ogie is up against, and it is a measure of his weakness that he succumbs almost immediately to Eunice's

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charms. Having done so, he can hardly refuse an appointment with Chief Ekata, even though he continues to believe that he has not thereby begun his descent. But already his idealism is beginning to slip. After much heartache, his dark night of the soul, as it were, he decides to accept Chief Ekata's offer with the proviso that the money he receives will be invested at home, not abroad. He convinces himself that the problem is not the corruption per se but the practice of putting the money into Swiss bank accounts. Everybody exports as much money as they can because they fear political instability, but in the process they guarantee the very thing they fear. The cycle must be broken, and he will make a start. Rose was right. It was useless trying to fight the system. Far better to work within it, and in the process turn it to your advantage: There was nothing to do now but to go forward in his nakedness and wisdom. I am going to meet Chief Ekata, he said to himself. I am going to meet him, and from now on all the others too ... I am going to listen to his proposals and if they are good, accept them ... It is wrong to be idealistic. I have to work within the system. Nobody can change what is ... I have learnt a lot. The last time I went to Mr Oloru I had no ideas. My mind was open, naive. But now, I know better. I have eaten the apple, (pp. 87-8)

So he has dinner with Chief Ekata, who promises to arrange for him the controlling shares in a large supermarket that the government is selling off. In the meantime, however, the disposal of the contract is taken out of his hands. Unknown to him, the value of the contract has been creeping upwards and is now worth three hundred and twenty million naira. The other interested parties - his father, an army officer, the chief of police, and a government minister - have decided that the time has come to award the contract and deposit the proceeds in a Swiss bank. They already have a candidate, and it is not Ekata. Ogie has only been strung along by his father in order to increase the family share, and to introduce his son into the world in which he must now operate. Ogie's cut amounts to twenty million. When he tells his father what he wants to do with his portion of the proceeds, his father laughs at him. The night before his father is due to fly out of the country with the money, Ogie sneaks into his bedroom and extracts his share. He has almost effected his escape when his father is disturbed by the noise outside his bedroom window. He reaches for his gun and

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shoots at the fleeing figure. When he discovers his mistake it is too late. Ogie is dead. This ending is forced, even though the author has gone some way to prepare us for it. In an earlier scene, for instance, his father shows Ogie the gun that will loll him in the course of warning him what happens to the indecisive: "You have to make up your mind," Chief Obala said, quietly but seriously now . . . "You have to make up your mind which way to go. The undecided die first. Always. They die first because they are often caught in the middle of the firing. Look," he cried passionately and went to a comer of the room and seized the shotgun that stood there. "Look," he repeated and he brandished the gun and its full metre of metal gleamed in the half-light. "I am prepared to use this to defend the way of life I believe in." (pp. 125-6)

The fact is that Chief Obala does not believe in anything at all, but at least he is firm in his unbelief. Ogie, on the contrary, is chronically indecisive, as Rose tells him on more than one occasion, and as is proved from the very beginning when he allows himself to be bullied into joining his father's firm against his better judgement. But the question remains: what purpose is served by Ogie's death? The author's answer is contained in the words of the father; but if the whole point is merely to prove that 'the undecided die first', then it is entirely wasted. This is not the novel's theme; the theme of The Contract is corruption and it's corrosive effect on one man's soul: 'I have eaten the apple,' Ogie says, and so he has. In this context, Ogie's death is merely a diversion because it absolves the writer from the necessity of examining the full implications of the moral depths he has plumbed. But this is precisely what the novel demands. Physical death is by no means the worst thing that can happen to a person; far worse is the death of the soul that comes with eating the fruit of sin. This is what Rose meant, after all, when she declared, 'How could you fight it alone and hope to come out of it alive.' She meant that he was heading for a spiritual annihila¬ tion that she has daily witnessed in those around her, but which she firmly rejects as a possible option for herself. Rose, like Idemudia in Violence, is the person who will not be corrupted; who will hold herself aloof from the prevailing squalor and follow only the dictates of her conscience. It is for this reason that she rejects Ogie's proposal of marriage:

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Rose shook her head stubbornly. "I don't care about money. I don't care about the other things. I only care about the under¬ standing and tolerance which come with love." (p. 110)

This is not bravado for its own sake. Even when she discovers that she is pregnant by him, and that her pregnancy could easily be her passport out of the rat-hole to which her poverty condemns her, she remains faithful to her beliefs: I must be a fool, she thought, turning her miird to her own situation. Another girl would have used this pregnancy as an excuse, would have gone ahead and gone through with the marriage. But not I. (p. 82)

Rose is a more convincing portrait of goodness than is Idemudia, her true counterpart. She is less naive, more worldly; she has a firmer, more intimate grasp of the mores of the society than he does. This is partly because she is a woman and therefore - like Adisa, like Eunice - she is more vulnerable, as she herself explains to Ogie: Do not attempt to trivialise this thing. Let me give you an example. You finish from school and you want a job. So you pack your certificate and testimonials in an envelope and go into an office and look for a job. In the office, it is always a man that sits behind the desk. And what does the man demand in order to help you? He demands that you go to bed with him. It does not matter that he is already senile. He demands it all the same. And, of course, you refuse. You are shocked and you show it and the man laughs, then he becomes angry and he calls you a fool and asks you to leave his office. But thereafter, each man you come across places the same demand. And so in the end, you close your eyes and go with a man to a hotel, what they now call a "slaughter house", and in all it takes less than two hours and perhaps some fifteen naira. And after you have been "slaugh¬ tered", you ask him about the job and he tells you he is sorry . . . (p. 24)

The language is deliberately brutal and warlike, but then the Nigerian society which is portrayed is hardly a society at peace with itself. However, from the point of view of the Nigerian novel as it has developed since Independence, this was the first time that the male writer had even acknowledged the existence of women as full human beings. Women were no longer simply the objects of the male fantasy, in itself part of the wider

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brutalisation of the society which insisted that they were either mothers or whores, but always subordinate. This apprehension was not unique to lyayi alone but general to the novelists of the eighties, including Ben Okri, whose first novel, Flowers and Shadows, was published when the author was just nineteen. sfr

Flowers and Shadows (1980) deals with the familiar theme of corruption in an urban setting. The novel centres on the person of Jeffia Okwe, the only child of well-to-do parents, whose entry into adult life, a sort of rite of passage, is effected against the background of his relationship with his father, Jonan, a success¬ ful and (inevitably) ruthless businessman who meets his nemesis at the hands of a former partner he had wronged many years before. As Jonan himself explains to Jeffia: We are in a large entangled web of law and disorder, power, waste and misuse. And in this crazy society it is the power people that really count. All the rest are means to an end. My choice was wealth and power. I had my share of the people who passed through my fingers. But the price is an unsteady hand that trembles at every creak in the edifice, and a haunted mind that remembers the threats of life-long enemies.^

So Jonan has a premonition of his own end, but this is already foreshadowed by a series of events with which the novel opens, hence the title of the opening section, 'Presentiments'. The first occurs when Jeffia, returning home from a visit to a friend, comes across two boys torturing a puppy: One held the dog by the legs, while the other, it seemed, tried to stick a piece of wood up its anus. Indifferently they watched it struggle. The bigger of the boys held the dog's mouth to prevent it yelping, (p. 4)

Jeffia rescues the animal and takes it home with him. No permanent damage has been done. A few days later, his mother notices an advertisement by its owner in the local newspaper. Jeffia takes the puppy to the address and is confronted by an attractive woman in a well-appointed apartment. What he does not know is that the woman, Juliet, is his father's former mistress. This is the first of many coincidences in the novel. The second occurs when Jeffia, on his way back from a party late one night.

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happens upon an off-duty nurse tending a dying man by the side of the road. He helps the nurse, Cynthia, take him to the nearby clinic. When they arrive he recognises, beneath the battered skull, the figure of Gbenga, an employee at his father's factory, Afioso Paints Ltd. Gbenga dies before the night is out, and then it transpires that the thugs responsible for the beating had been hired by his father to teach the man a lesson: That goat knows too much about me and Afioso. That's all there is to it. . . Let me tell you before you begin to preach, if anything goes wrong because one fool wants to resign, everything I have been working for all my life would sink with me . . . There are some things about myself and my business that other people shouldn't know about, (p. 32)

Thus Jonan, seeking to justify his actions to his wife. But Gbenga's death was purely accidental. He had not wanted the man to be killed, merely taught a lesson. The fact that he dies is a commentary on the way that events are beginning to spiral out of his control; that once the forces of evil have been set in motion, he can only watch helplessly as his nemesis unfolds. It happens at the time that Jonan is having business problems: he suffers a heart attack; competition from rival firms is begin¬ ning to erode his profits; and certain of his colleagues are plotting his downfall; but if his action against an erring em¬ ployee is a comment on his desperation ('Now the time had come, with the cold inexorability of fate, when his authority and power had begun to wane' - p. 17), the method he chooses is typical of the ruthlessness with which he has behaved towards all those who have stood in his way in the past. Jonan is a man haunted by the fear of poverty and failure, both terms being synonymous - at least as far as he is con¬ cerned. It was poverty that killed his own father, and which has been the driving force behind his rise to power: From the day he was old enough to know what impossible things money could do, from the time his father died consumed by a mysterious plague, from the moment he realized the truth of his father's words that poverty was a curse, he always dreamt of the big time. (p. 11)

It is this dream - or nightmare - which makes his success possible. But hard work is not enough in itself to achieve the kind of success he craves. To really make it in the big time he

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A Mask Dancing

must dispose of his opponents by any means necessary. Hiring thugs to do his dirty work is only one method. It transpires - yet another coincidence - that Cynthia's father is also one of Jonan's ex-employees whom Jonan had once framed for conspiracy. As a result, Jonan had effectivejy ruined his life: a fortnight after his release from his two-year sentence, his wife, Cynthia's mother, died of spinal meningitis. 'It was all enough to make him insane' (p. 100), we are told, but this is not strictly true. In fact he is not mad, merely broken, as Jeffia discovers when, driving Cynthia home from the clinic on the fateful night, he almost kills a drunk who wanders in front of the car. The man turns out to be none other than Cynthia's father. Cynthia goes out to help him, whereupon Jeffia, watching her negotiate her burden, is afforded his first insight into at least one side of her character that will draw him to her: Somehow she didn't appear frail any more. There was a certain strength and self-reliance in the way she handled the situation. He didn't have to be told that here was a girl who had learnt to stand on her own feet. (p. 85)

But Cynthia's father is not the only person to have been framed in this way. Many years before, Jonan had done the same to his partner and half-brother, Sowho, in order to gain full control of the business and thereby double his profits. Sowho served six months in prison, was released on good behaviour, and then left Lagos to start all over again in another city. Jonan had assumed that this was the end of the matter, especially after the family had intervened to patch up their quarrel; but early one morning, soon after he leaves for the office, a telegram arrives from Sowho announcing his impending visit. This is followed by a series of anonymous phone calls concerning the existence of a compromising photograph of Jonan and Juliet in bed together. In a fit of rage, Jonan calls on Juliet and beats her up, and in the process he accidentally kills the puppy: The dog barked at his feet, pulled at his trousers, and bit him on the ankle. Jonan turned round and kicked it savagely. The dog howled, landing near the door. It gave a short sad whimper. Then fell stiU. (p. 156)

The murder of the innocent, already prefigured in the earlier death of Gbenga, is yet another premonition of the disaster which is to come when you sup with the devil. The disaster

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itself is prefigured in a nightmare his wife has on the day she receives the telegram: Then a car came hurtling towards her at top speed. She shouted but her voice was stuck in her throat. It was her husband's car, and he was behind the steering wheel, a fiendish look on his face. On seeing her, he swerved, hit the sidewalk and lost control. The car turned sharp right and headed for the edge of the cliff. She tried to scream, and ran towards it. But too late. It went over, bounced twice on some jutting rocks, and finally hit the ground below in a sinister explosion, (p. 11)

She wakes up 'trembling and sweating', realises that she has been dreaming, and has 'a vague premonition of disaster'. And so it happens. When Sowho finally turns up late one evening, Jonan attempts to kill him. Sowho flees, but Jonan pursues him in his car. As he is gaining on him he has a heart attack, both cars collide, and 'The next moment they burst into flames': And his tormented ghost struggled out of the reluctant wreck of nature and soared up . . . up . . . smiling contentedly at the final ruins it left behind. Two souls joined in one . . . and blood joined to the earth. (p. 226)

So the cycle of evil is broken, and harmony is restored. After the obligatory dark night of the soul, Jeffia and Cynthia realise their love for each other: I looked at Cynthia and she looked at me. There was no need for words. We just fell into each other's arms, as though that was where we both belonged. And the night soon seemed too short. (p. 252)

Equally important is the attitude of Cynthia's father. At first he is hostile ('He looked deeply at me and his face shadowed and crumpled' - p. 248), but even he is eventually won over: 'Cynthia told me the other day that her father wanted to apologize for the night I went there.' (p. 260). In certain respects, Cynthia is the key to the novel. Like Rose in The Contract, she is wide-eyed in Babylon but refuses to be corrupted: From experience she had discovered that the doctors were used to making passes at the nurses. The last time one attempted it on her.

90

A Mask Dancing she walked out and managed to get a lift home. . . For that she lost favour in the eyes of some of the doctors. Her progress was affected, and she was mostly picked on to do the nasty jobs. (p. 65)

The contrast is with Juliet, Jonan's former mistress, who, like Eunice is The Contract, partakes of the corruption only because she lacks Cynthia's strength of character: 'Through the years of turbulent survival she managed to keep her personality intact, and developed a detached philosophy towards men and their sexual demands' (p. 199). This does not make her evil, merely weak. Cynthia, by contrast, whose circumstances are equally desperate, keeps faith in the power of love to transform the world. And it is this love that pulls Jeffia through the ordeal he undergoes following his father's death: It's all happened already, Jeff. Nothing you can do will change things. You can't go on like this forever. Regardless of what has happened you must go on living, you must face your life for what it is, man. Reality is outside the door, you must stretch out and reach for it and adjust to it. (p. 240)

Putting words into practice, she takes him with her to her new place of work, a hospital for the poor, and shows him real suffer¬ ing. His recovery begins with the understanding of what she has shown him, and his passage into adulthood is completed. Flowers and Shadows is not a successful novel. This is hardly surprising when one considers the author's age at the time he wrote it. The problem begins with the prose itself. The descrip¬ tion of Jonan's motor accident is typical of the way in which the writing collapses whenever it strives for effect; worse still are those passages where nothing at all is being said, and which simply degenerate into an orgy of mixed metaphors, collapsed figures of speech and plain bad grammar: 'The sun beamed brightly like a proud mother in the sky, which was clear and open Uke the soul of a saint' (pp. 37-8); 'She felt a weight lift almost mystically from her mind. It was as though a metaphysi¬ cal lead had been removed from somewhere inside her' (p. 104). Such self-indulgence itself mirrors the narcissism of the main character, who in turn is insufficiently distanced from the author himself. Every event in the novel is ultimately validated only in terms of Jeffia, even when he is ostensibly absent from the scene of the action. One sees this most clearly in the secondary relation¬ ships, for instance that between Cynthia and her father. It is not

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enough, after all, for Jeffia to be the son of the man who ruined her father's life; nor is it enough that the unlikely coincidence of their meeting, designed as it is to keep Jeffia centre-stage, should strain even the writer's credulity {'Coincidences don't stretch so far, he said to himself' - p. 215; 'Things only happen like this in novels' - p. 232); but that his first reaction, when he learns the truth, is concern only for himself: For Jeffia that was enough. His father's strange reaction when Cynthia mentioned her name ... it was all clear. His thoughts coursed crazily, throwing back distorted, phantasmagoric reflec¬ tions of a soul troubled and confused. A son lives out the sins of a

father . . . What trick of nature had thrown them together. "Driver, stop!" he shouted suddenly. He turned to the sur¬ prised girl. "Cynthia, you must forgive me for stopping like this. But you wouldn't understand. You couldn't." He got out of the taxi, paid, waved sadly to her and ran off in the opposite direction. He had had enough of these shocks ... it was all too much. As he ran wildly ... he heard voices in his head, cruel, sharp voices, (pp. 161-2)

'. . . you wouldn't understand. You couldn't,' is all he can offer a woman who is otherwise 'resilient. And she had true courage. She had character' (pp. 164-5); and who, furthermore, proves her resilience, courage and character in the way that she does in fact handle the conflicting loyalties, and this despite the absence of any insight we are provided by the author concerning the nature of her struggle in this regard. In other words, Cynthia is both exalted and debased: exalted, because it is she who would demonstrate the creative power of love; debased, because the possibilities which this fundamental truth represent, and which is life itself, is only permitted to operate as an instrument of Jeffia's self-regarding will. The author's failure to understand the meaning of what he has inadvertently revealed is the point at which the novel finally breaks down. *

He brought his hands down, and licked the smear of blood and herbs and white chalk that were pasted on the floor in front of him. He muttered some more incantations to himself, shook his

92

A Mask Dancing head, and spat towards the idol that stood before him. He bent his head and repeated the motions. Then he proceeded to kill the chicken. He poured its blood over the three carvings, muttering and chanting, (p. 123)

Thus Jonan in Flowers and' Shadows, using every means at his disposal to harness the forces of evil in order to achieve the pow^er he craves. In Ben Okri's second novel. The Landscapes Within (1981), the central motif is the mutilated body of a girl in a park in Lagos which the hero, Omovo, and a friend accidentally stumble upon: They lit a match and covered the flickering flame with two cupped hands. It was a girl alright. She had been mutilated. Her hair had been roughly shaved. The eyes were half-open. Her small mouth pouted so that a small area of her white teeth gleamed. Her flowered cotton dress had been terribly ripped and was bloodstained. A white, strangely-smelling cloth had been used to cover her lower parts.^

This image haunts the novel and is returned to again and again. It is the dominant symbol of the depths to which the society has plunged, and the central unifying device of the novel itself. Everything that happens in the book is refracted through this image. Omovo is a painter. He paints what he sees, and what he sees is filth and squalor and decay. One of his paintings, of a 'large greenish scum' in the middle of the road outside his front door, is hung at an important exhibition to which a substantial number of prominent Lagos citizens have been invited, includ¬ ing, the director informs him, 'a celebrity from the army to grace the occasion' (p. 43). The painting does not please the as¬ sembled socialites. They want to be flattered, not reminded of the corruption they themselves have deliberately engineered in order to protect their standard of living. To cover up their uneasiness, they gather around the picture and snigger amongst themselves. But it is too much for the guest of honour. In a fit of rage, he confiscates the painting and turns on the artist: You are a reactionary. You mock our independence. You mock our great progress. We are a great nation. You mock us ... We are going to seize this painting. This is a dynamic country. We are not on some stupid scum-like drift - in some bad artist's imagination, you hear? The work will be returned to you at the proper time. You can go, but be warned, (pp. 50-1)

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It would doubtless be impertinent to ask what the 'proper time' would look like, unless we are to take the word of celebrities from the army, the very people who cold-bloodedly brought about the horror that dictates what Omovo paints. Between the inherited tradition and the contemporary reality, the Nigerian artist might be forgiven for sinking into despair, a condition which Omovo comes perilously close to embracing. He is rescued only by his commitment to his art. Others are not so fortunate. In a society which seeks to destroy everything that is good and noble and true, many perish. Such is the case with Ifeyinwa, Omovo's girlfriend. She is only seventeen but already married off to a man she loathes. Like the corpse in the park, she is also a sacrifice: Ifeyinwa's secret dream of growing up was being able to do respectable work and cater for her parents. Everything had shattered. She had married the man as a compromise and with the vague hope that she would learn to live with him. To her it was all a sacrifice, a sacrifice to some unknown force that was slowly ravaging her whole universe, (pp. 99-100)

Naturally enough, she is terrified by the prospect that awaits her if she remains with her husband, the daily evidence of which she sees all around her: She was revolted by the gradual decay of life about her. The local women aged so quickly. She did not want to become like them old-looking, flabby-breasted, prematurely wrinkled, absentminded, gross and servile, (p. 104)

Within this narrow, isolated community, theirs is the only relationship uncontaminated by the prevailing squalor. But the evil forces that pervade the society are far stronger than the love they nurture for each other. Such purity cannot be allowed to flourish in the cesspool that is Lagos. It is even denied consum¬ mation, however brief. They are frustrated at every turn by the unceasing vigilance of her jealous husband. Only once do they come close, but at the last minute they are foiled by an emmisary sent for that purpose. That same night her husband hires two thugs to beat up his rival. The following day Ifeyinwa packs a few of her belongings and flees back to her village. She has at least been shown that greater possibilities exist for her, as a woman and as a human being, and it is this that gives her the courage to act

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A Mask Dancing

decisively. But if she is thereby rescued from the nightmare of her marriage, it is only to be accidentally murdered by her own brother within sight of her destination: She ran through the bushes suffused with the deep joy of returning home. Then the night hazed over and the bushes came alive. Someone shouted "Stop there!". Then she remembered; her head teemed and clamoured with sounds magnified in icecold fear. A nightmare fled down upon her and seized her by the throat and she could not scream or even say "I am on your side ..." She saw her brother staring; sensations, thoughts, every¬ thing went wild within her. The sky crumpled and vanished; her whole life fled past her with the tramplings of fears and unut¬ tered explanations; confusions tumbled. Then the scream es¬ caped: "No . . . Noooooo . . (p. 265)

She is the inadvertent victim of a long-standing feud between two communities, ' and another senseless death was added to the land' (p. 265). The news nearly breaks Omovo. He turns to his canvas as his last refuge, and out of the painting that he works on with demented hiry appears the image of the girl in the park: Then the girl: looming in the foreground and dominating the painting. Mutilated. Bloodied. Tom dress. Shredded area of upper thighs. Her dangling chain with its glimmering cross. A face outlined but no features as yet emerged. Time ticks with the soulful flickers of the brush - with the annihilation of emptiness. (p. 281)

The painting is an attempt to understand the meaning of his several experiences which began with the body in the park. Between the sight of the corpse and the death of Ifeyinwa he must fashion something of the truth, of which he has already had a glimpse during a brief stay in an abandoned hut a few miles from the city. The vision is itself fleeting, nebulous, but of great beauty; and, like all spiritual experiences, beyond the comprehension of the intellect. He christens it The Moment: An idea came into his mind and he froze it thinking: The Moment. He had a vision of a face radiating pure, quivering, blinding light. Everything was sucked inwards into a vortex of primordial and volatile being. He gave his mind over to contemplating the wonder that had descended on him. (p. 272)

He tries to explain it to Kerne, his journalist friend who was with

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him in the park that night, but he himself has not properly assimilated it yet. He only knows that the experience has pointed to the path he must follow to the end: "You know, when I was in Badagry I had this idea about the Moment," "Did you? You know, I did not get out of town like I said I would. Somehow I could not get around to it . . . What did you say about the Moment?" "I thought I sensed the brilliant shadow of a god. I think I saw, instead, one of those rare, rare faces horribly mirrored in us . . . But I'm learning something else, though." "Yeah?" "It's about surviving, but it's more about becoming a lifeartist." "What's that?" "I just told you: I'm still learning." (p. 286)

Whatever the limitations in Kerne's understanding, it is right and proper that Omovo should confide in him. Kerne is the only other character in the novel who manages to keep faith and survive. He is one of those rare souls who, perhaps because of their limitations, is capable of selfless courage. After the experi¬ ence in the park. Kerne writes an article for his newspaper. The editor rejects it, claiming that he cannot run it without sufficient proof, even though he knows very well that whatever proof might still exist today will certainly not exist tomorrow. Sure enough, when Kerne reports to the police station he is briefly detained in order for them to dispose of the evidence.^ But Kerne refuses to allow such blatant examples of corruption to discourage him from fulfilling what he knows to be his respon¬ sibilities. He remains true to the simple idea that if the society is to be changed it will only be because a few people are prepared to pit themselves against its corruptions, however seemingly futile. In the last scene of the novel he relates a recent incident to Omovo: "Did I tell you what happened to my motorcycle?" "No." "I left my licence and things at home and on the way to work a policeman stopped me and seized the motorbike and then obliquely asked for a bribe." "Did you give him anything?" "No. He got fed up and gave me my machine back. He's all right." (pp. 284-5)

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A Mask Dancing

This is said by way of a reply to Omovo's cry of despair on the futility of attempting to change anything: Something threatens all of us. You try to ask questions and investigate and you can't. You are sterile. The system is sterile. The problem has become larger than all of us before we can even scream. Nobody listens. One cannot act properly any more. (p. 284)

There is a tinge of self-pity in Omovo, similar to that of Jeffia in Flowers and Shadows, whom he resembles in certain respects. Kerne lacks Omovo's egoism; and although his refusal to bribe the policeman might seem trivial in the face of the greater crimes that are daily perpetrated at all levels of the society, his refusal reverberates with the dignity of the man and might yet have profounder ramifications for the future of the country as a whole. Kerne is only one person; multiply him a hundredfold and one begins to see the first flicker of a greater hope. Kerne's courage and integrity are put into sharper perspective when set against the murderous despair of Omovo's father, for instance, whose gradual degeneration into drunkenness is charted with uncompromising fidelity. And murderous to the extent that he ends up killing his second wife's lover in a moment of madness when he catches them cheating on him in the (significantly) sordid surroundings of the communal toilet. Or there is Dele, another friend, who turns his back on all things African and runs away to America: ' "There is too much unnecessary struggle . . . You people can stay here and enjoy the struggle . . . But me, in the name of God, I must leave this place!" ' (pp. 126-7). But Dele is more fortunate than Okoro, yet another friend, who does not have a rich father to buy him a one-way ticket. Okoro, a veteran of the civil war, has long since given up; the society has sapped all his energy and discarded him: But the years came and went; and Okoro got various jobs, and gradually his flame died away . . . Growing up had been fraught with difficulties and shadowed by the hard knowledge that you had to struggle grossly for what amounted to a miserable compromise, (p. 123)

Now he spends his life, or what is left of it, chasing women. It is his only subject of conversation: how many, when and where. Round and round he goes in a hopeless pretence that this is

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what his existence amounts to. And it is against this background that Omovo understands something important about Kerne's courage: The new symbol of progress was going abroad, to America, London or Paris. Omovo had not the slightest desire to go out there. He sensed a solidity that belonged to people like Kerne: the solidity of having worked a fruitful and demanding piece of land. (p. 255)

His father's despair. Dele's flight, Okoro's obsessive lusting after women; these are merely different aspects of the society's prevailing neurosis, the refusal to engage in life at any but the most superficial level, in itself a strategy for avoiding the deeper recesses of the collective psyche; according to Omovo:' "One is too easily lost in this place . . . We do not seem to think any more; we only thrash about. In the end we mistake confused motion for progress" ' (p. 154). In other words, the more one is required to look inwards - 'into the obvious symptoms of the niggling, warning, predictable present' - the more one thrashes about, the better to avoid the internal scumscape which, exter¬ nalised in Omovo's painting ('I simply painted a scumscape as I saw it' - p. 139), scandalized the soldier-celebrity at the exhibition. This neurotic refusal to look inwards for fear of what might be revealed about the Nigerian psyche informs the way in which the writers have approached the novel. The dichotomy which is presented is between a communal (or 'traditional African') aesthetic, and an individual (or 'bourgeois European') one. But such a dichotomy, which is spurious to begin with, has never been worked out with any degree of subtlety, which is why it hardly qualifies as an aesthetic, properly defined. Even as 'sophisticated' a critic as Biodun Jeyifo, writing on African drama, assumes as a matter of course that the dichotomy is selfevidently true, and that those who are deemed to have strayed from the desired expression of the authentic African world-view (and desired, incidentally, not by 'the people' but by the Marxist and/or Afrocentric critic) have thereby betrayed the tradition out of which they write: For the greater number of our contemporary African playwrights, the individual is almost wholly self-determined, even when they pay lip-service to the force of African communalist custom and tradition. Soyinka is the greatest exemplar of this tendency and

98

A Mask Dancing his enormous talent apart, this is the main reason why he is so beloved of the Western liberal critics . . . They see in Soyinka's plays, with eminent jusHfication, Western bourgois individualism incarnate [my italics]

The only sustained attempt* to tackle this issue head-on is to be found in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980) by Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. The troika, so-called, attempt to define a specifically Afrocentric literature in terms of the inherited oral tradition, otherwise known as orature. According to their argument, the European novel, which has been allowed to parade itself as the ultimate standard of what constitutes the novel proper, is itself limited by the dominant bourgeois values of European society. These values are not only hostile to the very notion of orature . oral is bad; written is good. African narrative is oral, therefore bad; European narrative is written, therefore good'^ - but are diametrically opposed to the communal values that underpin the aesthetic of orature: When [Eurocentric] critics denounce what they consider didacti¬ cism, propaganda, or inconsistency of moral attitude, they usu¬ ally do so only when these things criticise or militate against European bourgeois values. In their concern with promoting the Western brand of individualism, they denounce as 'situaHonal' those presentahons in which some individual does not dominate or wilfuly tower over his social environment. And of course they do not want to hear or read 'protest literature' since the protest is, or has to be, over-whelmingly against what the bourgeois order ... is doing to the African, (p. 89)

It is ironic, of course, that Jeyifo, a Marxist, should find himself arguing out of the same corner as the self-styled Afrocentrists, but then both subscribe to a vision of society which is itself the product of the very same 'bourgeois order' they otherwise affect to abhor. Both, at any rate, would be perfectly well understood by their bourgeois liberal Western counterparts, who themselves continually agonise over the modern bourgeois condition. Euro¬ pean literature for the last century-and-a-half is replete with novels written 'against what the bourgeois order ... is doing to' those who find themselves trapped within its contradictions, i.e. the bourgeois order itself. And contradictory because it is this same bourgeois order - rational, sceptical, secular; in a word, enlightened - which has set the pace of the modern world; which is, indeed, the modern world we all inhabit. This, in turn, has

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given rise to the apparently intractable dilemma of the modem bourgeois condition; i.e., the fractured nature of experience, and with it the loss of the collective identity. Chinweizu et al are dead wrong. It is not the generalised 'Afri¬ can' who needs 'protest literature' in order to rediscover an identity he never lost in the first place, if only because the modem world, including literacy, has yet to arrive on his scene. On the contrary, it is the bourgeois African who is only too well aware that the bits and pieces of wood are not really gods at all (let alone ancestors), and who is then driven to fashion a substitute mythol¬ ogy to assuage his troubled soul. Those of a more political persua¬ sion find a resolution of sorts in Marxism, and then proceed, just like their European counterparts, to 'cover reams of paper with unceasing lament on the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when he himself assiduously engages, with a remorseless exclusivity, only the incestuous productivity of his own academic - that is, bourgeois-situated - literature'.® Those of a more sentimental - or more romantic - disposition cast their eye backwards in time and pretend that the modern world is simply a figment of someone's else imagination (proof to the contrary notwithstanding, including word processors and printed books), and that the modern world will go away if only they ignore it for long enough. Writing about the past had little to do with proving what was not susceptible of proof in the first place, since the dignity of the human being - African or European; black, white or any of the shades in between - is not a matter of opinion but an ontological fact. And in attempting to disprove a negative, which is what the entire exercise amounted to, Achebe & Co. were simply responding to an understandable if wrong-headed need for a specifically African aesthetic. To write about the present meant more than just writing about contemporary Nigeria; it meant understanding the modern world to which we all belong Nigerians no less than British; Africans no less than Europeans. This was the challenge that faced the Nigerian novelist. It was difficult to the extent that it was precisely the modern world which had annihilated the universe that these literary archeolo¬ gists sought to uncover, and annihilated so comprehensively that when they came to write their novels they were forced to do so in the very language that was responsible for their predica¬ ment. All that was then left was to erect a dichotomy - never closely examined because it couldn't bear too much examination - which attempted to rescue the African sensibility from the

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A Mask Dancing

European onslaught at the same time as it absolved the writer from engaging with the modern world and the complex person it had made him. The sole exception was Wole Soyinka; The Interpreters is a modern novel in the way that it attempts to explore individual states of mind against the background of a society that has been fractured beyond repair. The main characters in the novel represent only themselves, which is why they cut across the constructs of race and colour, and never mind the received view of the novel as contained, for instance, in the following: Soyinka, by analysing the prevalent mood, aimed to force society to recognize the true nature of its problems. Such recognition would be an indispensable step towards solving the problems. Here, Soyinka's conception of the writer's duty to his society is remarkably similar to that of the nineteenth-century European novelists with their exclusive concern for understanding their societies. Their novels show an obsession for 'interpreting' the nature of an absurd society. However, it is because Soyinka interpreted the novelist's duty in such conservative terms that The Interpreters has proved most inadequate to more revolution¬ ary African writers. Nadine Gordimer . . . finds that, in spite of its perceptive analysis of society, [the novel] 'does not suggest a reordering of society in political terms as a possible solution' . . . And Ngugi wa Thiong'o has more strongly criticised Soyinka for neglecting . . . 'the creative struggle of the masses' by not involving his characters in the dialectics of struggle . .

Perhaps Ms Gordimer is using Soyinka as cover, since her own novels hardly qualify as the political tracts she would have him write; but one is not surprised by Ngugi's criticism, which he has at least applied with characteristic thoroughness in his more recent work, with disastrous results. More baffling still, how¬ ever, is the charge of conservatism - in itself a dubious value judgement - for Soyinka's success in 'analysing the prevalant mood' in the society. One would have thought that such an analysis was, precisely, the whole point of the exercise, and in itself a revolutionary act; in Soyinka's own words: The 'causal-historical and socio-economic network of society' sought in every work of art by this particular school of criticism is, let it be understood clearly, only a further attempt to protect the hegemony of appropriation by the intellectual critic class especially, and this is especially true when such criticism chooses to ignore the received function as manifested in effect. Liberation

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is one of the functions of the theatre, and liberation involves strategies of reduction to the status and stature of the powerwielding class in public consciousness, exposing and de¬ mystifying its machinery of oppression . . . The mastering of reality and its transformation requires the liberation of the mind from the superstition of power, which cripples the will, obscures self-apprehension, and facilitates surrender to the alienating processes ranged against every form of human productivity. DEFLATING THE BOGEY - this is also socially valid and progressive art. It becomes seriously flawed . . . only when it attempts to pander to socio-historical causes, thereby explaining away oppressors in rational (including economic) terms.

The point need not be laboured. It is enough to say that The Interpreters is a modern novel in the sense which very much concerns us here, and that The Landscapes Within is its direct heir, beginning with the title itself. The changing landscape of Omovo's individuated consciousness is explored with an almost Joycean obsession; and, like Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a quotation from which prefaces his novel), the epiphany is a central part of Omovo's unfolding experience of the world. Here is a passage from Joyce's novel: He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him . . . They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be trans¬ figured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured.

And here is a passage from Okri's novel: Omovo's heart swelled and palpitated with a wild, bodiless joy; and his soul seemed to expand to include all that was beautiful and hidden and mysterious and whole and radiant and pure. The moment had come unexpectedly like a sudden revelation. A dark, mysterious face insinuated itself into his vision. A light flickered on the face for a long moment and then it was plunged into darkness. His soul experienced a certain shock . . . (p. 200)

To compare both passages is to reveal some of Okri's weak¬ nesses, above all a too-obvious striving for effect. But what is astonishing is that The Landscapes Within, which at least de¬ mands comparison with Joyce, should have appeared just a year after the publication of Flowers and Shadows.

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A Mask Dancing

Ironically, his latest novel. The Famished Road (1991), fails to live up to the promise contained in The Landscapes Within, the award of the prestigious Booker Prize notwithstanding. The story of a spirit-child, Azaro, who decides to break the cycle of birth and death and remain in the world of the living, the novel's debt to the (by now cliched) Latin American school of marvellous - or magical - realism is everywhere apparent, for instance: I watched the bright point of his cigarette in the dark and it eventually lulled me into Madame Koto's bar. Dad was there. The bar had moved deep into the forest and all her customers were animals and birds. I sat on a bench which was really the back of a goat and I drank off the back of a bull. A massive chicken without feathers strode into the bar, sat next to me, and ordered palm-wine and peppersoup.^^

Or again: More customers came into the bar. There was a man with a head like that of a camel, a woman with a terrible hip deformation, another woman with white hair, and a midget. The woman had a large sack on her back, which she gave to the albinos. The albinos unfurled the sack, shook it out, sending dust clouds into the air. They glanced at me furtively, and hid the sack under the table. (p. 108)

Both these passages, which are entirely typical, illustrate the central problem with the novel. It is not so much that one resists the manifestation of the fantastic as part of everyday reality, but that such manifestations are divorced from the language of the narrative itself. There is no organic connection between lan¬ guage and event. The descriptions of the marvellous which occur in almost every paragraph - talking chickens and camel¬ headed men — are incorporated into the body of the narrative purely for effect, which means that they possess only a spurious, random connection with the narrative proper. One can see this most clearly by comparing Ben Okri's use of language in The Famished Road with that of Kojo Laing, the Ghanaian writer. His seminal novel. Search Sweet Country (1986), which is certainly one of the most courageous books to have emerged from the continent, also provides proof, if proof were needed, that English as a language is entirely capable of carrying the weight of the African experience; i.e. that English is one of the languages of Africa, as follows:

Darkness Visible

103

To the disappointment of her flying crew of black and white sisters, Adwoa Adde did not do much with her grandmother's gift passed on so lovingly to her; she became a benevolent witch flying over Accra like an aerial sister of mercy. Her friend, Sally Soon, was in the distance. She was an English witch sent over on a secret assignment against Ghana, but she had now fallen in love with Ghanaians, and had thus almost neutralised her own powers: the weaker she became the more she became Sally Sooner, the weakest she became the more she became Sally Soonest. She usually travelled the degrees of her surname. But now she was huddling behind the moon, crying over her own contradictions.

As this passage demonstrates, there is no disjunction between language and content, which can be the only point of the exercise. The argument that African writers ought to copy the Latin American school as an alternative to the 'conventions and assumptions of European realism'll is ^lot only to define litera¬ ture in reductive terms but, worse, it is to miss the essential truth about literature itself, which is that it occurs in language; that literature is language. To divorce the one from the other, as is the case with The Famished Road (and, incidentally, the fables of Amos Tutuola), is to betray literature itself. The result can only be a tedious exercise in the fantastic for its own sake.

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Notes

Notes to the Introduction 1. Wole Soyinka, Tower and Creative Strategies,' an address delivered in Lagos on 2 May 1988, to the Conference on African Literature in honour of Wole Soyinka; reprinted in Index on Censorship, vol. 17, no. 7, August, 1988, p. 9. 2. Obi Wali, 'The Dead-End of African Literature?', Transition, vol. 4, no. 10, September 1963, p. 14. 3. Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey, 1986, p. xiv. 4. Chinua Achebe , 'The African Writer and the English Language', in Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1975, p. 62. 5. Achebe, p. 61. 6. Chinua Achebe: 'Africa and her Writers', in Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 19. 7. Chinua Achebe: 'The Novelist as Teacher', in Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 45. 8. Chinua Achebe, 'Africa and her Writers', p. 27. 9. Achebe, p. 24. 10. Achebe, p. 19. 11. In the opening sentence of his short book. The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1983), Achebe asserts that, 'The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.' This has since been repeated ad nauseam as though it was an established fact. 12. Chinua Achebe, 'Work and Play in Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard', in Hopes and Impediments, Oxford: Heinemann International, 1988, p. 75. 13. Chinweizu, 'What the Novel Prize is not,' Moto, no. 54, 1987. 14. Chris Dunton, 'Theatre as a Game,' (An interview with Femi Osofisan), West Africa, 24-30 April, 1989, p. 647. 15. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. xi. 16. D. H. Lawrence, 'John Galsworthy', in Anthony Beal (ed): D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1967, p. 118.

176

A Mask Dancing

Notes to Part One 1. Wole Soyinka, The Writer in a Modem African State,' in Per Wastberg (ed): The Writer in Modern Africa, Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1968, p. 17. 2. Chinua Achebe: 'The Role of a Writer in a New Nation,' in G. D. Killam (ed): African Writers on African Writing, London Heinemann Educational Books, 1973, p. 8. 3. Soyinka, 'The Writer in a Modem African State,' p. 8. 4. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann Edu¬ cational Books, 1981, p. 64. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 5. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 87. 6. Chinua Achebe, 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,' University of Massachusetts, Amherst, The Chancellor's Lecture Series, 1974-75, Amherst, 1976; and Massachusetts Review, vol. 18, no. 4, Winter 1977. Reprinted in Hopes and Impediments, London: Heinemann International, 1988, pp. 1-13. 7. Kate Turkington, Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, London: Edward Arnold, 1977, p. 3. 8. David Cook, African Literature: A Critical View, London: Longman, 1977. p. 65. 9. Bmce King, The New English Literatures, London: Macmillan, 1980, p. 65. 10. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980, p. 3. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 11. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 92. 12. Elechi Amadi, The Great Ponds, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1971, p. 3. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 13. Eustace Palmer, An Introduction to the African Novel, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, p. 61. See also: Solomon Ogbede lyasere, 'African Critics on African Literature: A Study in Misplaced Hostility', African Literature Today, no. 7. London: Heinemann Edu¬ cational Books, 1975, p. 26; Nadine Gordimer, The Black Interpreters, Johannesburg: Spro-Cas/Ravan, 1973, pp. 20-1; Bruce King, The New English Literatures, London, Macmillan, 1980, p. 66. 14. Flora Nwapa, Efuru, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976, p. 207. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 15. Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980, p. 71. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 16. See, especially, her two volumes of autobiography. In the Ditch, London Allison and Busby, 1972, and Second-Class Citizen London: Allison and Busby, 1974, both of which chart her failed marriage and her subsequent struggle to raise her five children on her own in London. 17. Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters, London: Fontana Books, 1980,

Notes

177

p. 122. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 18. T. Obinkaram Echewa, The Crippled Dancer, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1986, p. 106. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 19. Robert Serumaga, 'Interview with Chinua Achebe,' Transcrip¬ tion Centre, London, 1967, p. 1; quoted in G. D. Killam, The Writings of Chinua Achebe, London: Heinemann Educational Books, rev. ed., 1983, p. 85. 20. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People, London: Heinemann Edu¬ cational Books, 1969, p. 165; All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 21. Cyprian Ekwensi, fagua Nana, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987, p. 5. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 22. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease, London: Heinemann Edu¬ cational Books, 1987, p. 84. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 23. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 92. 24. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, '. . . a novel is a microcosm: if the only coward in it is a Jew, the only Jew a coward, an inclusive if not a universal relation is established between these two terms.' The author was referring to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. 25. George Orwell, 'Shooting an Elephant,' Inside the Whale and other essays, London: Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 91-2. 26. Kole Omotoso, The Edifice, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1971, p. 49. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 27. Consider, for instance, the opening paragraph from a recent article in a Nigerian weekly magazine: If you cross a goat with a horse, end product is neither baby goat nor baby horse. Same with mating a lion with a tiger; seal and dolphin; sparrow and hawk. Sex between Asian and European, European and African, or African and Asian did result in pregnancy and the end product is half-castes. Now these half-castes know their places in Europe and Asia. Only in Africa do these by-products of mixed-blood kids [sic] know that the place for them is the top. 'Irritants in my Blood,' African Concord, 1 July 1991, p. 50. 28. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986, p. 63; originally published in France as Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952. 29. But not necessarily the most uninhibited in the terms of the African novel, which prize must be divided between Ayi Kwei Armah's Why Are We So Blest? London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972; and Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds, London: Constable, 1986. 30. Eddie Irob, Forty-eight Guns for the General, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976, p. 13. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 31. Eddie Iroh, The Siren in the Night, London: Heinemann Edu¬ cational Books, 1982, p. 135.

178

A Mask Dancing

32. I use the term advisedly. Buchi Emecheta doesn't herself reject it, but qualifies it as follows: Being a woman, and African bom, I see things through an African woman's eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called a feminist. But if I am now a feminist then 1 am an African feminist with a small f. In my books I write about families because I still believe in families. I write about women who try very hard to hold their family together until it becomes utterly impossible. 'Feminism with a small "f",' in Kirsten Holst Petersen (ed): Criticism and Ideology, Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikaininstitutet, 1986, p. 175. 33. Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra, London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983, p. 45. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 34. Festus lyayi. Heroes, London: Longman, 1986, p. 143. All sub¬ sequent quotes are from this edition. 35. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy, Port Harcourt: Saros Intemahonal, 1985, p. 104. 36. Gabriel Okara, The Voice, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973, p. 34. 37. Wole Soyinka, The Man Died, London: Penguin Books, 1975, p. 234. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 38. The others are the play. Madmen and Specialists, London: Methuen, 1971, and a volume of poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt, London: Rex Collings, 1971. 39. Wole Soyinka, Season of Anomy, London: Arena, 1988, p. 137. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 40. Albert Hunt, 'Amateurs in Horror,' in James Gibbs: Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1981, p. 114. 41. Interview, 'Our Kangan Correspondent,' The Independent (London), 15 August 1987. 42. A third novel, Labo Yari's Climate of Corruption, Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1978, has pretensions to seriousness - hence the title - but is really just a sex-and-violence potboiler, a sort of hand-me-down James Hadley Chase: "Let's undress," she said in a warm voice, giving a sheet of wrapper to him. He grabbed it clumsily and wrapped himself while she stood up and began to take off her clothes one by one in a seductive manner. When Sule saw her firm, shining body just a foot away from him, he did not know when he threw away the wrapper and took off his trousers hurriedly, in the process pulling out most of his trousers' buttons. With his shirt on, he clung to her. They held each other tight, making amorous sounds, until their passion blended into fire." (pp. 34-5). The only other novel of this type which approaches any deeper

Notes

179

understanding of the climate of corruption is E. Okolo's No Easier Road, Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1985, which will be discussed at greater length in Part Two. 43. Ayi Kwei Armah ceased publishing abroad in 1979, after the appearance of The Healers, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978, his fifth novel. Unfortunately, Armah has not been able to find a suitable African publisher, as Osofisan himself discovered when he talked to him in Dakar, Senegal, in 1989; "Silent?" he asks, then shakes his head with a laugh. "No, I have not fallen silent. Tm writing all the time. It's just that I have not been publishing. In fact I have three completed novels, but I've not been able to find a publisher." I open my eyes in amazement. He, one of our best writers not being able to find a publisher. "It's true," he says. "Or would you have me continue to give my work to multinational companies? If we as writers denounce our politicians for their links with these foreign parasites, how can we in all honesty continue ourselves to patronize them?" Femi Osofisan, 'Reflections on a Fading Breed, Sunday Times (Lagos), 26 November 1989. 44. Femi Osofisan, Kolera Kolej, Ibadan; New Horn Press, 1975, p. 17. All subsequent quotes are taken from this edition. 45. Interview with Soyinka, New York Times, 20 July 1970, p. 22. 46. Kole Omotoso, To Borrow a Wandering Leaf, Akure: Olaiya Fagbamigbe Publishers, 1978, p. 22. All subsequent quotes are from this edition.

Notes to Part Two 1. Festus lyayi. Violence. Harlow, Longman, 1982, pp. 110-1. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 2. Festus lyayi. The Contract, Harlow: Longman, 1982, p. 9. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 3. Ben Okri, Flowers and Shadows, Harlow: Longman, 1980, p. 93. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 4. Ben Okri, The Landscapes Within, Harlow: Longman, 1981, pp. 589. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 5. What would seem to be a rather eccentric manner of conducting an investigation is, alas, all too familiar. The Nigerian writer has no need to indulge in 'poetic licence'. There are any number of examples of such behaviour extensively chronicled by the Nigerian press, for instance: When Mrs Christiana Ogunbula, an accountant with the Nigerian Postal Service detected a fraud in her department in March last year, she played the "obedient servant" by promptly calling in the police who arrested two suspects.

180

A Mask Dancing

Inexplicably, the table turned against her. The widow was detained at Alagbon. After months of detention without trial, Ogunbola's family went to the law chambers of Sam Ade Oshisanya who promptly filed a writ of habeas corpus. The judge, Mrs Moni Fafiade ordered that Ogunbola be brought to court; but the “police ignored the order. Mr Lai Oshisanya, Ogunbola's lawyer, consequently brought a contempt-of-court against the police. The police replied with a counter affidavit backed with a detention warrant under Decree 2. Justice Fafiade could not even hear the contempt case and Ogunbola who is said to be hypertensive, was sent back to jail. A family source told The African Guardian that Mrs Ogunbola was seen late in June, strolling along Queens Drive, Ikoyi Lagos, a police guard trailing her. 'Sound, fury . . . agony!'. The African Guardian (Lagos), 21 August 1989, pp. 13-14. 6. Biodun Jeyifo, 'Patterns and Trends in Committed African Drama,' in The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama, London & Port of Spain, New Beacon Books, 1985, p. 48. 7. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 32. 8. Wole Soyinka, 'The Critic and Society; Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies,' in Art Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, Ibadan; New Horn Press, 1988, p. 148. 9. Kolawole Ogungbesan, 'Wole Soyinka and the Novelist's Re¬ sponsibility in Africa,' in Kolawole Ogungbesan (ed); New West African Literature, London; Heinemann Educational Books, 1979, p. 4. 10. Soyinka, The Critic and Society, pp. 160-1. 11. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London; Penguin Books, 1971, p. 65. 12. Ben Okri, The Famished Road, London; Jonathan Cape, 1991, pp. 59-60. 13. Kojo Laing, Search Sweet Country, London; William Heinemann, 1986, p. 124. 14. Chinweizu, 'Beyond Western Realism', Okike, no. 14, Sept. 1978, p. 1. 15. The form of the thriller was not in itself unique. Kole Omotoso had already suggested its possibilities in Fella's Choice, Benin City; Ethiope Publishing Corporation, 1974. This, 'the first Nigerian detec¬ tive novel,' pits an Inspector of the Nigerian police force against the machinations of the South African Bureau of State Security determined to undermine the Nigerian economy by flooding the country with fake currency notes, but in the process the author misses the opportunity afforded by the form to pass oblique comments on the state of the society. The result is a rather 'thin' novel of limited interest.

Notes

181

16. Bode Sowande, Our Man the President, Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1981, pp. 175-6. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 17. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, p. 1: 'The touble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.' 18. Wole Soyinka, 'Power and Creative Strategies, Index on Censor¬ ship, vol. 17, no. 7, August 1988, p. 9. 19. Bode Sowande, Without a Home, Harlow: Longman, 1982, p. 55. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 20. T. M. Aluko, Wrong Ones in the Dock, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982, p. 184. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. He is also the author of five other novels, all published in London by Heinemann Educational Books: One Man, One Matchet (1965); Kinsman and Foreman (1966); One Man, One Wife (1967); Chief the Honourable Minister (1970); and. His Worshipful Majesty (1973). 21. Interview with Soyinka, New York Times, 20 July 1970, p. 22. 22. Lekan Oyegoke, Cowrie Tears, Harlow: Longman, 1982, p. 14. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 23. Ifeoma Okoye, Behind the Clouds, Harlow: Longman, 1982, p. 5. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 24. Ifeoma Okoye, Men Without Ears, Harlow: Longman, 1984, pp. 127-8. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 25. Kole Omotoso, Memories of Our Recent Boom, Harlow: Longman, 1982, p. 187. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 26. The term is taken from a poem by Ayi Kwei Armah, with which the author prefaces the novel, 'The educational process': the educational process . . . a series of jumps through increasingly narrower gates, elementary school, the first gate, the millions already eliminated, leaving thousands. secondary school, second gate, the thousands dropped leaving hundreds. sixth form, the hundreds forgotten, a dozen here; twenty there. university, single survivors in the last reaches of alienation. 27. This is taken from Heart of Darkness. The context in which the quote occurs ought to give the lie to those who image the novel to be an imperialist tract: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to. . .

182

A Mask Dancing

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 140-1. 28. Buchi Emecheta, Double Yoke, London and Ibuza: Ogwugwu Afor, 1982, p. 162. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 29. Buchi Emecheta, The Rape ofShavi, London and Ibuza: Ogwugwu Afor, 1983, p. 6. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 30. Lander, Richard and John, Journals of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger, etc. . London, 1832, vol. 2, p. 253. 31. Eno Obong, Garden House, Ibadan: New Horn Press, in associ¬ ation with Heinemann Educational Books, Nigeria, 1988, p. 213. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 32. Cyprian Ekwensi, For a Roll of Parchment, Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1986, p. 220. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 33. Zaynab Alkali, The Stillborn, Harlow: Longman, 1984, p. 3. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 34. Interview with Zaynab Alkali, in Adeola James (ed): In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk, London: James Currey, 1990, p. 30. 35. Alkali, p. 30. 36. Flora Nwapa, One Is Enough, Enugu: Tana Press, 1981, p. 8. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 37. E. Okolo, No Easier Road, Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1985, p. 6. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 38. See, for instance, his first published novel, the aptly-titled People of the City, London: Dakers, 1954; Heinemann Educational Books, 1963, the story of a young crime reporter and dance-band leader through whose eyes the familiar problems of corruption, bribery and nepotism in contemporary Lagos are examined. Also, Iska, London: Hutchinson, 1966, the story of a beautiful young woman whose success as a model introduces her to the underside of Lagos political life, with tragic consequences. 39. Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987, p. 13. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 40. Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana’s Daughter, Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1986, p. 91. All subsequent quotes are from this edition. 41. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, London: Wm Heinemann, 1987, p. 66. All subsequent quotes are from this edihon. 42. Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, p. 1.

Notes to the Conclusion 1. Chinua Achebe, The African Writer and the English Language', Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann Educational Books' 1975, p. 61. 2. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, p. 10. 3. Chinweizu et al., p. 242.

Bibliography

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184

A Mask Dancing

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Index

Achebe, Chinua 2, 3, 10, 24, 28, 29, 44, 65, 73-4, 106, 145, 163, 171 A Mart of the People 35-9, 41, 47, 49, 53, 74, 163, 170, 177; Anthills of the Savannah 65, 73, 163-70, 182; Arrow of God 13, 16, 43, 176; Hopes and Impediments 175; Morning Yet On Creation Day 175, 182; No Longer at Ease 35, 42-7, 53, 177; "The Role of a Writer in a New Nation" 176; The Trouble with Nigeria 106, 166, 175, 180, 182; Things Fall Apart 10-32, 42, 70, 136, 141, 171, 176 Africa the collective experience and the Nigerian psyche 2, 97, 105, 135; gods, goddesses and ancestors 10-28; 43 versus Europe 4, 11, 32, 157 African Concord 177 African Guardian, The 179 African literature and literary criticism 97-100, 113 Afrocentric literature 98; bolekaja critics 4; 'dignity' and rescuing the past 9-10, 15, 32-3, 136, 145 Nigerian publishing industry

66; 'protest literature' 98-9; 'rotten English' 61; satire 65; 'second generation' writers 65; the 'thriller' 106, 109, 155

Alkali, Zaynab 73, 151 The Stillborn 73, 151-3, 182 Aluko, T. M. 73, 111 Chief the Honourable Minister 181; His Worshipful Majesty 181; Kinsman and Foreman 181; One Man, One Matchet 181; One Man, One Wife 181 Wrong Ones in the Dock 73, 111-3, 129, 181 Amadi, Elechi 23-4, 28, 61 Estrangement 61, 73; The Great Ponds 23-4, 176 Armah, Ayi Kwei 66, 132, 181 The Healers 178 Why Are We So Blest? 177 Baldwin, James 171 Beal, Anthony D. H. Lawrence 175 Biafra 59 Chinweizu "Beyond Western Realism" 180 "What the Nobel Prize is not" 175 Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike 4, 98-9, 173 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature 4, 98, 175, 180, 182 Christianity and converts 13-5, 20-2, 24; 43 Conrad, Joseph 16, 108, 134, 172 Heart of Darkness 16, 181; The Secret Agent 108 Cook, David African Literature 176

Index

196 de Beauvoir, Simone 45 Force of Circumstance 177 Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders 41, 162 didacticism 3, 113, 140-1 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Possessed 108 drugs 76 Dunton, Chris "Theatre as Game" 175 Echewa, T. Obinkaram The Crippled Dancer 33, 176 Ekwensi, Cyprian 39, 73, 149, 157-8 For a Roll of Parchment 149, 182; Iska 182; Jagua Nana 39-41, 149, 157-8, 161, 177, 182; Jagua Nana's Daughter 73,15863,182; People of the City 182 Emecheta, Buchi 73, 113, 141, 145-6 Destination Biafra 58, 141, 178; Double Yoke 73, 136-41, 181; In the Ditch 176; Second-Class Citizen 176; The Joys of Motherhood 29-32, 141, 155, 176; The Rape of Shavi 141-6, 181

Go won, Major-General Yakubu 62 Head, Bessie The Collector of Treasures 105 Hunt, Albert "Amateurs in Horror" 178

Igbo proverb vii; society 13-5, 18, 26 Ike, Chukwuemeka Expo '77 73; The Chicken Chasers 73 Independent, The 178 Index on Censorship 180

Iroh, Eddie 57, 59 Forty-Eight Guns for the General

57-8, 177; The Siren in the Night 57, 177; Toads of War 57

lyasere, Solomon Ogbede "African Critics on African Literature" 176 lyayi, Festus 73, 113 Heroes 60, 178; The Contract 73-86, 89-90, 124, 127, 179; Violence 73-9, 81, 84, 129, 179 James, Adeola In Their Own Voices 181

Fanon, Frantz 50 Black Skin, White Masks 177 Faulkner, William 57 fertility and childbearing 25, 33, 48, 85, 119, 122, 135, 148, 150, 152-5, 159, 161

Jeyifo, Biodun 97-8 The Truthful Lie 180 Joyce, James 1 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1, 101, 180

Killam, G. D. gender and sexuality 13, 24-31, 47, 57-8, 85, 110-11, 114, 122, 129, 134, 137, 141, 147, 152, 155, 162 Gibbs, James Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka 178

Gordimer, Nadine 100 The Black Interpreters 176

African Writers on African Writing 176

King, Bruce The New English Literatures 176

Laing, Kojo 102 Search Sweet Country 102, 180 Lander, John and Richard 145 Journals of an Expedition 182

197

Index language 67 experimental 61-2; French 2; Hausa 2, 173; Ibo 47; 54, 173; mother-tongue debate 2-3, 47, 54, 102-3, 132, 135, 171; narrative 102; Portuguese 2; Swahili 2; Yoruba 132, 172-3; Zulu 2 Lawrence, D. H. 5 "John Galsworthy" 175 London 40, 47, 49, 120-1, 131-5 magical realism 102-3 Moto 175 New York Times 179

Nigeria civil war (1967) 35, 57-8, 63, 73-4, 159-60; class struggle 60; corruption 73, 80, 83-4, 86, 92, 95, 106, 108, 116, 123-4, 127, 149, 158, 165-6; democracy 2, 73, 170; failure of leadership 69, 106, 166, 170; first military coup (January 1966) 35; Independence (1960) 1, 5, 35, 45, 65-6, 73, 85, 173; Indirect Rule 18; military rule (to 1979) 73; underclass 155, 157-8; Nkosi, Lewis Mating Birds 177 Nkrumah, Kwame 173 Nwapa, Flora 27, 73, 153 Efuru 27-9, 176; One Is Enough 153-5, 182 Obong, Eno 73, 146 Garden House 73, 146-51, 182 Ogungbesan, Kolawole New West African Literature 180

Okara, Gabriel 62 The Voice 62, 178 Okigbo, Christopher 35 "Come Thunder" 35 Okike 180 Okolo, Ernest 73, 155, 157 No Easier Road 73, 155-8, 182 Okoye, Ifeoma 73 Behind the Clouds 73, 119-23, 140, 153, 181; Men Without Ears 73, 123-9, 181 Okri, Ben 73, 86, 106 Flowers and Shadows 73, 86-92, 96, 101, 179; The Famished Road 73, 102-3, 180; The Landscapes Within 73, 92-7, 101, 106, 129, 179 Omotoso, Kole 48, 66, 73, 132 Fella's Choice 180; Memories of our Recent Boom 73, 132-6, 181; The Edifice 48-51, 43, 177; To Borrow a Wandering Leaf 66, 69-70, 135, 179 Orwell, George 46 Inside the Whale and Other Essays 177

Osofisan, Femi 4, 65 Kolera Kolej 65-6, 179; "Reflections on a Fading Breed" 79 Oyegoke, Lekan 73, 113 Cowrie Tears 73,113-9,122,181 Palmer, Eustace An Introduction to the African Novel 176

Petersen, Kirsten Holst Criticism and Ideology 178 power and authority 2, 22, 68, 70, 73. 76-7, 79, 86-7, 101, 106, 112-4, 143, 164, 167

racism 44-7, 142 Saro-Wiwa, Ken Sozaboy 61, 178

198 Serumaga, Robert "Interview with Chinua Achebe" 176 sexual violence and betrayal 25, 48, 75-7, 118-^9, 122-3, 135, 138-9, 142-9, 152, 156, 169 • slavery 18, 25, 31-2, 144-6 Sowande, Bode 73, 106 Our Man the President 73, 10611, 116, 180; Without a Home 73, 108-11, 181 Soyinka, Wole 4, 21, 32, 35, 36, 65, 68, 74, 97-8, 100, 112, 158,. 163, 171, 181 A Shuttle in the Ciyptl78; Art, Dialogue and Outrage 180; Myth, Literature and the African World 4, 176, 177; Opera Wonyosi 74;

"Power and Creative Strategies" 175, 180; Season of Anomy 63; 65, 142, 178; The Critic and Society 180; The Interpreters 9; 50, 100-1, 127, 176; The Man Died 57, 62-3, 163, 178; "The Writer in a Modern African State" 175, 176 Sunday Times (Lagos) 179 Turkington, Kate Chinua Achebe 176 Tutuola, Amos 4, 103 wa Thiong'o, Ngugi 1, 100, 175 Decolonising the Mind 1, 175 Wali, Obi 1 "The Dead-End of African Literature?" 175 Wastberg, Per The Writer in Modern Africa 175 West Africa 175 Yari, Labo Climate of Corruption 178

Yeats, W. B.

Index "The Stare's Nest by my Window" 132

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Maja-Pearce, Adewale. A mask dancing

A Mask D Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties ADEWALE MAJA-PEARCE Writers such as Festus lya'yi, Ben Okri and Kole Omotoso represent what has come to be known as the 'second generation' of Nigerian novelists. Emerging from the shadow of the 68-70 civil war, they were greatly influenced by the ensuing shifts in public and social life, especially the obscene levels of corruption which coincided with the country's second experiment in democracy under President Shagari. Adewale Maja-Pearce argues that the failure of Nigeria is simply and squarely the failure of the Nigerian intelligentsia. Concentrating mainly, but not exclusively on the novels of the 1980s, he traces this failure in terms of the literature itself, which is the touchstone throughout this deliberately provocative study. 'All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form', as D.H. Lawrence put it, is eschewed in favour of the novels themselves and the extent to which they reveal that intellectual failure. A Mask Dancing is the first full-length study of Nigerian novelists that have come to prominence since the late 1970s. It presents a detailed critique of the major figures of the 'second generation', while also touching upon lesser-known writers.

Hans Zell PubEshers is an imprint of BowkerSaur Ltd. Bowker-Saur's publishing programme encompasses a wide range of professional and reference titles in print and electronic formats. Alongside our publishing under the WkerSaur unprint we distribute titles from leading reference imprints R.R. Bowker, MartindaleHubbell, Marquis Who's Who, K.G. Saur and D.W. Thome. Together, as REED REFERENCE PUBLISHING, we share an international commitment to excellence in the publiation of reference information and databases. ISBN 0-905450-92-2

ISBN 0-905450-92-2