Nigeria has a terrible image – as a land of email scammers, obscene
corruption and religious bigotry and violence – but the stereotypes only tell
part of a more complex, and often more attractive, truth. Nigeria is a land of
rich cultures, stunning artistic achievement and industrious and resourceful
people. Here are 10 books that show Nigeria in all its cruelty and folly, but
also its beauty, generosity and humor.
As a young man Achebe read the canon of western literature, but could
not find his own people's story there. So he set about writing a tragic tale:
of how a vulnerable society, and a flawed man, could not cope with the military
superiority and crushing arrogance of the white invaders. Millions of readers
around the world have since identified with Things Fall Apart as the definitive
account of what happened to their own societies when the Europeans arrived.
Invariably the colonial legacy was destructive and destabilising, and one that
"Nigeria", a British invention, has never quite recovered from.
No apologies for including Achebe twice. He wrote this caustic booklet
in the early 80s, but it still rings true. This time, Achebe puts the blame for
Nigeria's many post-independence failings firmly on the Nigerians themselves.
"Nigeria is not a great country", he writes. "It is one of the
most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt,
insensitive, inefficient places under the sun … It is dirty, callous, noisy,
ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short it is one of the most unpleasant
places on earth!" And yet Achebe still believes in Nigeria's potential, if
only it could find leaders with integrity.
Nigerians – of all ethnicities – rarely talk about the civil war of the
late 1960s, but it is a suppressed trauma. It began when the Igbo people of the
east formed the doomed breakaway state of Biafra, and ended more than a million
deaths later. No one can understand Nigeria today without some knowledge of
those events, and John de St Jorre – a British journalist who covered the war
for the Observer – wrote a brilliant account soon afterwards: a readable and
scrupulously fair history
of a conflict that aroused great passions across Africa and in Britain.
You've read the history of the civil war, now read Adichie's novel. It's
a story of ordinary people swept up in extraordinary times; a privileged young
woman, an ambitious university lecturer, an illiterate houseboy and a British
writer, all of whom struggle to stay faithful to their ideals, loyalties and
loves as their world falls apart around them. Add colonialism, tribalism,
class, race and sexual desire, and you have an epic.
Another haunting work of fiction to come out of the
civil war. Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed by a military junta in 1995, was a writer,
human rights activist and environmentalist. Sozaboy is written in "rotten
English" – a mixture of Nigerian pidgin and idiomatic English – from the
viewpoint of a naive young recruit who discovers the horror of war. William
Boyd wrote: "Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel, it is also a
great anti-war novel, among the very best the 20th century has produced."
Noo is Ken Saro-Wiwa's daughter; she grew up in England and after her
father was killed she stayed away from Nigeria for many years. This is the
poignant and witty story of her return. Noo's family history gives her an
unusual take on Nigeria; she's both intimate with the country and an outsider.
Her "unglamorous, godforsaken motherland" will always be a place that
angers and frustrates her but on her intrepid travels she also finds much to
love.
Cunliffe-Jones is a British journalist who lived in Nigeria during the
transition from military to civilian rule at the end of the 90s. But the
country was already part of his family folklore; his grandfather had been a
colonial official there for 30 years, and helped write the 1960 independence
constitution. Cunliffe-Jones dissects the British (and his family's) legacy in
a history of Nigeria blended with personal memoir, and his conclusions are
often harsh.
Nobel laureate Soyinka's memoir of his childhood years is full of charm
but is never sentimental. He grew up in Abeokuta, in the Yoruba south west, a
medium-sized town that has supplied a disproportionate number of Nigeria's
great and good. The young Soyinka is witness to a society torn between traditional
and modernising forces, and some of the first protests against colonial rule in
the 40s.
Shoneyin's novel deals with polygamy, rape and domestic abuse in a
contemporary Nigerian family. Heavy issues, but her touch is so skillful that
she finds redeeming features in even her wickedest characters, and comedy even
in violence and cruelty. Baba Segi himself is foul, foolish and arrogant. He
gets his come-uppance, and we learn much about Nigeria along the way.
But it's about New York, you say, not
Nigeria. True, but so many of Nigeria's brightest and best now live abroad, or
at least with one foot abroad, so it's inevitable that more and more
"writing about Nigeria" is from the diaspora and reflects its place
in the wider world. Julius, the fictional narrator of Cole's beautiful novel,
has flashbacks to his Nigerian childhood as he wanders around Manhattan. The
memories float to the surface of his consciousness; they are part of his
complex identity.
Source: Barnaby Philips, The Guardian
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