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Contemporary
African Literature:
New Approaches
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Carolina Academic Press

African World Series
Toyin Falola, Series Editor

Africa, Empire and Globalization:

Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins
Toyin Falola, editor, and Emily Brownell, editor
African Entrepreneurship in Jos, Central Nigeria, 1902–1985
S.U. Fwatshak
An African Music and Dance Curriculum Model:
Performing Arts in Education
Modesto Amegago
Authority Stealing:
Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics
in Post-Military Nigeria
Wale Adebanwi
The Bukusu of Kenya:
Folktales, Culture and Social Identities
Namulundah Florence
Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches
Tanure Ojaide
Contesting Islam in Africa:
Homegrown Wahhabism and Muslim Identity in Northern Ghana, 1920–2010
Abdulai Iddrisu
Democracy in Africa:
Political Changes and Challenges
Saliba Sarsar, editor, and Julius O. Adekunle, editor
Diaspora and Imagined Nationality:
USA-Africa Dialogue and Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood
Koleade Odutola
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Food Crop Production, Hunger, and Rural Poverty in

Nigeria’s Benue Area, 1920–1995
Mike Odugbo Odey
Globalization: The Politics of Global Economic Relations
and International Business
N. Oluwafemi Mimiko
In Search of African Diasporas: Testimonies and Encounters
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World:
Calabar-British Experience, 17th–20th Centuries
David Lishilinimle Imbua
Perspectives on Feminism in Africa
‘Lai Olurode, editor
Pioneer, Patriot, and Nigerian Nationalist:
A Biography of the Reverend M. D. Opara, 1915–1965
Felix Ekechi
The Tiv and Their Southern Neighbours, 1890–1990
Emmanuel Chiahemba Ayangaôr
The Women’s War of 1929:
A History of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Eastern Nigeria
Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock
The Yoruba Frontier:
A Regional History of Community Formation,
Experience, and Changes in West Africa
Aribidesi Usman
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Contemporary
African Literature:
New Approaches

Tanure Ojaide

Carolina Academic Press

Durham, North Carolina
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Copyright © 2012
Tanure Ojaide
All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ojaide, Tanure, 1948-

Contemporary African literature : new approaches / Tanure Ojaide.
p. cm. -- (African world series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61163-029-9 (alk. paper)
1. African literature--History and criticism. 2. Literature and soci-
ety--Africa. I. Title. II. Series: Carolina Academic Press African
world series.

PL8010.O3296 2011
809.896--dc23

2011036969

Carolina Academic Press

700 Kent Street
Durham, North Carolina 27701
Telephone (919) 489-7486
Fax (919) 493-5668
www.cap-press.com

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface ix

Preface xi

1 • Examining Canonization in Modern African Literature 3

2 • Migration, Globalization, and Recent African Literature 31

3 • African Literature, Globalization, and the Quest for Peace 41

4 • Deploying Modern African Literature Towards

the Environment and Human Rights 65

5 • Language and Literature in Conflict Management

in Africa 85

6 • I No Go Sidon Look: Writing in Pidgin English 109

7 • Deploying Masculinity in African Oral Poetic Performance:

The Man in Udje Dance Songs 123

8 • Poetry in Northern Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects 141

9 • African Literature and the Scholar-Poet Tradition 155

10 • African Literary Aesthetics: Continuity and Change 167

Index 193

vii
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Series Editor’s Preface

The Carolina Academic Press African World Series, inaugurated

in 2010, offers significant new works in the field of African and
Black World studies. The series provides scholarly and educational
texts that can serve both as reference works and as readers in col-
lege classes.
Studies in the series are anchored in the existing humanistic and
the social scientific traditions. Their goal, however, is the identifi-
cation and elaboration of the strategic place of Africa and its Di-
aspora in a shifting global world. More specifically, the studies will
address gaps and larger needs in the developing scholarship on
Africa and the Black World.
The series intends to fill gaps in areas such as African politics,
history, law, religion, culture, sociology, literature, philosophy, vi-
sual arts, art history, geography, language, health, and social wel-
fare. Given the complex nature of Africa and its Diaspora, and the
constantly shifting perspectives prompted by globalization, the se-
ries also meets a vital need for scholarship connecting knowledge
with events and practices. Reflecting the fact that life in Africa con-
tinues to change, especially in the political arena, the series explores
issues emanating from racial and ethnic identities, particularly those
connected with the ongoing mobilization of ethnic minorities for in-
clusion and representation.
Toyin Falola
University of Texas at Austin

ix
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Preface

Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches is the result

of several years of reassessing African literature from multiple per-
spectives, including the interdisciplinary, ethical, and scholar-poet
traditions. While literature generally has always been informed by
other disciplines, more than ever before it now carries so many is-
sues that were once thought to be far from it. African literature is
unique in the sense of expressing the African condition. The African
condition today involves globalization, conflict management, en-
vironmental and ecological concerns, and human rights, among
many other issues. This book tackles many of these issues and does
not consider them as “extra-literary” but valid materials for literary
creations and so intrinsic to the literature. Other issues such as
masculinity and the use of Pidgin English are also related to liter-
ature and have their separate chapters.
The book is conceived under the premise that literature is a cul-
tural production, a point repeated in many chapters. With this
premise comes the acceptance of a utilitarian function of literature
as of the other artistic creations of African peoples. Thus, it is the
belief of the author of this book that literary criticism has an eth-
ical function and so relates that ethical function to how literature
can affect the society and its readers for the better. The chapters
on globalization, environment, human rights, quest for peace, mas-
culinity, conflict resolution, and a few others are written from the
viewpoint that literature should sharpen the consciousness of its
people and readers for a better world. For instance, the writer and
literary critic should defend their culture in an age of globalization
and inscribe it into the cultures of the world. Similarly, in a world
in peril environmentally and ecologically, it is the writer’s duty (as
of the literary critic’s) to sensitize the public to be ecologically lit-

xi
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xii PREFACE

erate and work towards a balanced relationship between humans and

non-human lives of the universe. Of course, for peace and har-
mony in our respective communities, societies, and the entire world,
there should be the promotion of human rights. Majority popula-
tions should be sensitive to the feelings of minorities as the pow-
erful should do towards the weak, the rich to the poor, and there
should be fairness and justice and avoiding of exploitation and op-
pression of all kinds. Also, as in oral literature, masculinity should
be redefined to express sensitivity to the female gender and the pro-
motion of those virtues that make a man a sensitive and compas-
sionate human being.
This book carries the scholar-poet perspective, which is dis-
cussed in one of the chapters. The author is not only a creative
writer who has written many collections of poetry, novels, and
short stories but also a literary scholar who has been studying and
writing on traditional and modern African literatures. It is from
the vantage points of both the creative writer and the literary scholar
that I write this book. The reader should not therefore be surprised
when I illustrate a point with my own poetry or fiction. More im-
portantly, as a scholar-poet, I shift from the creative writer to the
literary scholar and back and forth with the insights I have gained
over several decades in the respective fields of creative writing and
literary scholarship. I attempt to harness the skills of both careers
that have coalesced into one mission in the book: a perspective that
combines the craft and insights of the writer and the critic at the
same time studying African creative works critically.
I conceived the different chapters of this book in such a way that
I have done a practice run on them in various avenues. I deliber-
ately proposed to speak on some of the topics as a keynote speaker
or lead paper presenter in some conferences as with the chapters
on globalization and the quest for peace, the environment and
human rights, poetry in Northern Nigeria, and language, litera-
ture, and conflict resolution and management in Africa. On an oc-
casion, I chose to make a presentation on my use of Pidgin English
in my creative works. I already published the chapter on migra-
tion, globalization, and recent African literature in World Litera-
ture Today. Similarly, the essay on canonization in modern African
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PREFACE xiii

literature was published in the online issue of the Asiatic: Journal

of the Department of Language and Literature at the International Is-
lamic University of Malaysia after being presented as a lecture to
students and faculty. I also presented a variant of the globalization
and modern African literature chapter at an international confer-
ence on Asia-Pacific Cultures and Literatures in Kuala Lumpur,
where it represented the African perspective. The chapter on mas-
culinity has just appeared as an invited chapter in a book on mas-
culinity, Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts, edited
by Helen Mugambi and Tuzyline J. Allan. The chapters might have
been conceived for different literary outlets but are meant to com-
plement each other.
I have placed in the book a chapter on an issue which has al-
ways been in modern/written African literature but not discussed
in that light: the scholar-poet tradition. I intend it to be a call to look
at modern African literature, especially the poetry, and see the im-
pact that having one leg in creative writing and the other in the
academy is having on the literature produced by such a writer. Do
Africans in general and scholars and students of the literature in
particular identify with what they read from their writers? If they
do not, what is the cause and how can this problem be remedied?
I do not posit any solutions in response to this issue in African lit-
erature but mean to provide food for thought for those involved
in this literature: the writers and the readers.
The book begins with canonization in modern African litera-
ture and ends with African literary aesthetics: continuity and change.
No matter the issues or topics discussed in modern African litera-
ture, one will at the end come to the crux of the matter, which
these two chapters represent. To me they complement each other
in the affirmation of literature being a cultural production and
African literature possessing those qualities that define it as such.
That is why I trace response to oral poetic performances as of the
udje and ijala and the continuation into modern works in English,
French, or Portuguese, among others. Modern African literature
is the natural inheritor of traditional African literature and though
there is hybridity, the literature seems to work best when it carries
the old traditions in a new manner. I have always argued that if
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xiv PREFACE

there is no dispute about the existence of a Western literary canon,

there should be none when one talks of the African literary canon,
especially if one agrees that literature is a cultural production. This
I have done again in this book. The complementing final chapter
on literary aesthetics reinforces the first chapter as African literary
works that do not address in some relevant way the African condition,
as Chinua Achebe also sees it, will be deemed irrelevant.
It is my hope that these topics and approaches will generate a
new form of criticism of African literature in general and also in-
spire writers to know the traditions from which they write as they
affirm their own individuality while not forgetting the Africanity of
their works. If the book generates interest among scholars and stu-
dents as well as writers, then it has fulfilled its primary objective.
Tanure Ojaide
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
November 2011