As for Ogaga Ifowodo, another congrats from me on his winning the 2026 Nigerian Prize for Literature. It's coming 29 years after my study of current Nigerian poetry of third generation of Nigerian poetry prompted by him and published by his Art Vanguard in 1997. That essay was perhaps the first defining critique of the new writing. It was entitled, The Failure of Craft in Present Nigerian Poetry. In it I critiqued even Ogaga Ifowodo as one of those needing improvement in their craft. Ogaga was aghast. I remember him telling Obi he was the one enduring me. But today, Ogaga has gone to work on his craft and this win is a testimony to that.
But the essay has shaped most criticisms of new Nigerian writing. Obi, in his post, is continuing on that thread. That's good.
But I disagree with him on some angles.
First is the dead end of Nigerian literature. And it's Hegelian. Hegel argues that collapsed nation builds a fraudulent literature.
In Africa that expression first came up in Makarere university during an African literature conference in 1962 before it was published in Transition of 1963.
At the conference, Obi Wali was of the view that African literature in European languages were extensions of European Literatures. Hence, it's dead. We must write in African languages.
I agree with Wali to the extent that little translation is done on outside African texts into African languages. Yet, so much of ours is mined by our writers into European and Arab
Literatures.
However,as Achebe noted, our writing in European literature has also helped to push our literature to the world.
Though this is not saying we must all write in European languages, we must remember that Achebe collapsed the European novel through his Things fall apart so much that his adaptation as response to Conrad and Cary means reevaluation of European literary canons led by Conrad.
The writings of Tutuola, Clark, Okara, WS, Okigbo etc have brought Igbo, Yoruba , Urhobo, Ijaw and other African consciousness into European literature that Europe has to expand its reading and dictionary because of the new words and worlds of Africa.
What about our philosophy? For example, we have ofo na ogu, izu... which is Igbo equivalent of Ubuntu... you are human because I am too. Europe doesn't have such philosophy. It has embrace and teach it today.
Our literature is thus the new frontier, not a dead end. What you call magical realism is just one gift of African literature to the world. As Marquez, Okri and Rushdie.
On our criticism and writing and transmission.. that's visibility, I believe the internet is the new alternative.
On fraud and the nation.
Obi is hinging the collapse of a nation and literary fraud as same.
I defer.
First, absence of a nation does not make imagination fraudulent. It makes it prophetic, builds a new one.
Perhaps, Obi borrows a Hegelian idea: that literature needs a coherent State to be valid. If nation is in fragments, literature is fraud.
In Africa, the reverse is true. The critic, Benedict Anderson says, Nations are imagined into being by literature. The novel and the newspaper invent nations before the flag does. Was Yehuda fraudulent when Jews wrote about Israel 2000 years before the State of Israel?
Was Kafka fraudulent? Their imaginations kept a people alive until a nation happened. That is not fraud. That is archive.
In Nigeria, we had Igbo literature before Nigeria.
Nigeria was created by Lugard in 1914. But before then we had ifo, folktales, mbari, arts collections, Ojaodili- heroic tales. Songs, mbem, poems etc. Was that fraudulent because there was no Nigeria? No. It was nationness before nation.
Biafra existed for 30 months as a state, but it has existed for 55 years as literature- Achebe, Ekwensi, Saro-Wiwa, Chimamanda. The literature is more real than the state ever was.
I think what Obi calls fraudulent imagination for me is literature doing what the nation cannot do.
The school has collapsed. The poem is the school.
A nation fragments, the poem holds it together.
Nigerian poetry is therefore evidence that we imagined
Nigeria. Nigeria didn't imagine us.
So Nigerian poetry after 1970 is not a fraud. It is evidence that we imagined Nigeria, Nigeria did not imagine us back.
For Obi, that is melancholy. But that's not failure. It is mood of a literature that remembers a nation yet to arrive.
Had we waited for a coherent or incoherent nation to arrive, we would have had only British adminstrative reports, not African literature.
The creative imagination is not fraudulent. The nation is incomplete.
[10/12, 5:47 PM] udumak28: Well, Obi, I have been your ardent reader and acolyte for decades. So, I can remember some of your postulations, one of which was that it would be unwieldy to lump three big nations...Igbo, Hausa and the Yoruba- all equal in size and number-into a one nation together.
You are blaming the writer for not imagining that nation out of this chaos.
Well, my problem is with Zik's superpower ideology from which you are arguing, and from which much of our nationalist literature is meant to draw its oxygen.
Zik got the idea from the logic of the Cold War. The West has America. The East has USSR, now Russia. Therefore, Africa must have one — and by population, that must be Nigeria.
But who then is for Europe? Superpowers fragmented Europe between America and Russia. Cold War and all that. Who is for Asia? Who is for South America?
And what, really, is a superpower? Is it an amalgam of independent nations united in shared vision — like Europe, like ASEAN — or is it one big brother lording it over the rest?
Zik subscribed to both at once. He believed in a United States of Africa — an African superpower of nations — and at the same time believed in Nigeria as that black superpower. That is a contradiction. And that contradiction has been our failure: the inability to let the fragments become their own nations, which Bhabha you cited correctly, recognizes as nations.
And Zik himself knew this earlier.
In 1949 at Aba, in his "Address to the Ibo People," Zik did not call us a tribe. He called us a nation. He said: _"The only worthwhile stand we can make as a nation is to assert our right to self-determination, as a unit of a prospective Federal Commonwealth..."_ He listed _"twenty main dialectal regions in the Ibo nation"_ and said we must develop alongside _"the Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri, Yoruba, Ibibio, Tiv, Ijaw, Edo, Urhobo, Itsekiri... and other nationalities... each as separate as the fingers, but united with others as a part of the same hand."_
That 1949 Zik understood Igbo as a nation, Yoruba as a nation, Hausa as a nation. Fingers separate, hand united. That is confederation. That is Europe.
The later Zik of the 1960s tried to legislate the fingers into one finger — Nigeria as the fist, Nigeria as America's mirror. You cannot legislate fragments into a nation by fiat. That is why those imposed nations are still fragmenting. Nnamdi Kanu is in jail negotiating a separate nation. Millions, dead and alive, negotiating the same thing cannot all be wrong.
And that is the problem with the national literature you advocate. The city vibe of mixed ethnicities is loud, and you captured it honestly by calling yourself a Josite, a lover of Ewa Agoyin and Ofe Owerri. But that mixture has always happened. Onitsha market always had traders from the North, West, South and Europe before colonialism. And the people's orality was already filled with them. Mixture is not modernity. Mixture is antiquity.
The reality facing Africa today is not the lack of thinkers and writers, yes ,we need printers, but the absence of thinking independent of the European construct of our reality. If we understood that, we would be talking about a coming together of nations in Bhabha's sense — that is, the fragments as nations, those voices you heard in the markets, each a nation in its own right. Each with its own collective unconscious, its own exchange, its own literature.
They should be allowed to exist on their own terms, and then come together — like Europe did, like Asia is doing — to become that idea of an African superpower. Not an imposed and unnegotiated Nigeria lording it over fragments and lesser nations.
Nigeria as superpower failed because it tried to be both empire and nation at once. Zik's own 1949 formula — separate as fingers, united as hand — is how Africa as superpower can succeed.
[10/12, 5:47 PM] udumak28: Uduma, I’m certain you’re not reading Bhaba well, or worse still, you might have misunderstood my reference to him, and his stance on nation. I will be short with this because I’m getting old and I’m going to bed😜 Bhaba was very categorical when he described the modern nation as an “ambivalent” site that “ links together diverse acts and actors on the national stage who are entirely unaware of each other.” It is hybrid, unstable and ambivalent. Nigeria checks in all the spots. In my view, the nation is shaped by the dynamic quest for perfection. It is necessarily unfinished and therefore infinite. It creates its ideal and strives towards it. If I once told you that the fusion of three powerful entities in Nigeria makes national formation difficult, and possibly fraught, I hope I did not say it was impossible and unrealizable. Otherwise India and China will not currently exist. As for Zik, Africa, and the quest for a super state, I hope you realize how wrong you are in your analysis, because the behemoth states still exist. China, for instance, is the big elephant in the room. In any case, the constant question of security historically compels states and nations towards expansion. Not contraction. Azikiwe wanted a West African republic, in the frame of the thinking of 19th century West African intellectuals like Blyden, etc. That ultimately should be our quest. An organic West African state. Zik’s original proposition for 8 regions in Nigeria contained in his Political Blueprint for Nigeria, which significantly influenced Kalu Ezera’s Constitutional Development for Nigeria , gives us a productive guide. But it is not an absolute guide. Nations and their quests for coherence evolve dialectically.
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