For Cyprian Ekwensi

Maik Nwosu

A long time ago, I went to interview Cyprian Ekwensi in his home at Ojuelegba, Lagos. I was then a reporter with TSM, The Sunday Magazine. When I arrived at the address, I wondered: Would I really find the famous Ekwensi living amidst the chaos of Ojuelegba in a house that seemed to have been built alongside Noah’s Ark? I did. It was an introduction to Ekwensi’s spartan lifestyle. As we sat in his studio or work area, with an ancient typewriter beside him, it was obvious that writing was not simply a career to Ekwensi. It was a passion, perhaps the centre of his life. He even spoke about “sensing” things as a writer, like a modern day shaman with a life of the mind in harmony with pristine altars. Finding him in Ojuelegba was a testament to his immersion in the life of the city as well as a pointer to his adaptability. Several years later, after we had started The Source, he came to our office with a copy of the American hip-hop magazine also called The Source. Seeing him with that magazine, with the sort of bohemianism that it somewhat suggested, somehow reminded me of finding him in Ojuelegba. Ekwensi had travelled to the United States, seen the magazine or noted its name, and bought a copy. In his life and in his art, Ekwensi was a man of his own and other times.
His death on November 4 brings to an end one of the most fascinating literary careers in Nigeria. Between 1947 when his Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales was published and this year when his latest collection of short stories, Cash on Delivery, came out, Ekwensi was the most prolific Nigerian novelist and short story writer – one who significantly progressed from pamphleteering to a robust output as a memorable storyteller. Ekwensi’s children’s books such as The Drummer Boy, The Passport of Mallam Ilia, An African Night’s Entertainment, The Leopard’s Claw introduced generations of young Nigerian readers to a world of wonder and myth that sometimes even grew – rather than diminished – in the imagination with the passage of time. I read these books at about the same time that I was also reading Aesop’s Fables. Together, Ekwensi and Aesop – one Nigerian, the other Greek – helped break the boundaries of the near and the distant for me. Ekwensi was not essentially a fabulist, but his characters and setting in some of these books – such as Kurmin Rukiki or the forest of death in An African Night’s Entertainment – sometimes tended towards the extraordinary or the fantastical. Not only did Ekwensi the writer of children’s books normalise the magical, he also imbued the everyday with a wondrous atmosphere. When Amos Tutuola died in 1997, Odia Ofeimun, then the president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, described him famously as a man who had only a donkey for his life’s work but who flogged that donkey until it became a horse. Ekwensi had more than a donkey, but he was like a sole rider that became a durbar.
The sense of Ekwensi as a solitary horseman, almost, is suggested by the distinctive texture of his works – especially in relation to the works of his contemporaries such as Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, John Munonye, Flora Nwapa. Ekwensi the novelist – the author of People of the City, Jagua Nana, Jagua Nana’s Daughter, Lokotown – was principally a chronicler of the city, a Dickensian re-enactor of the transition from rural to urban life, particularly in the 1950s and the 1960s. However, it is mostly as a writer of this class of novels that Ekwensi has been criticised, the harshest condemnation being that by Eustace Palmer, who described Ekwensi’s books as “an example of how not to write.” But critics like Palmer overstate the case. As a writer, Ekwensi was not trying to accomplish the Faulknerian ideal – “to create out of the material of the human spirit that which did not exist before.” Ekwensi was fundamentally a populist storyteller who saw even in specks of dust in the crannies of the city, with its flash and dash, its hustle and bustle, material for literary entertainment – and edification, of course.
Ekwensi’s love of stories and spectacle is evident in the flow and the cinematographic quality or pageantry of many of his novels. His most famous, Jagua Nana, was easily made into a movie and a television serial. In his response to a description of Jagua Nana as “pornographic,” Ekwensi cited one of the responsibilities of the novelist as holding up a mirror to nature. That mirror, in its depths, also reflects Ekwensi’s concern with identity and the nature of being. Many of his novels can be examined as quest narratives. In Jagua Nana, Jagua leaves her husband, works as a city prostitute, and eventually falls in love with a teacher. Beyond the seamy city life, it is in fact a novel of self-definition. In the sequel, Jagua Nana’s Daughter, the main character searches for her real mother; she eventually finds her mother as well as a lover. In People of the City, which has been described as the first major novel in English by an African, a journalist and bandleader eventually realises that he can be of greater use to his country than merely indulging in the pleasures of the city. In each case, there is a discernible gravitas to the narrative that goes beyond a reflection of the city as seductive. Ekwensi inspirits the city not only with a physical dynamism, which is his forte, but also with an interior consciousness. There are many more diarists or novelists of the city in Nigerian literature today, but it was Cyprian Ekwensi who first charted that territory. For that, and for many other reasons, we will always remember him.