African Literature is a Country

Image credit Suad Kamardeen

(By Lily Saint and Bhakti Shringarpure) - African literature is a country

          What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Only a few canonical ones continue to dominate curricula. 

          This is the first post of the series “African Literature is a Country” which asks how we decolonize literary studies today.
          We would like to thank Henry Vehslage for his assistance in organizing and gathering all the information and Dr. Erin Butler for help in interpreting the data. An additional heartfelt thanks to the late Professor Tejumola Olaniyan for his support and advice on this project.

          African literary studies today is a site of deep paradox. On one hand, the last two decades have seen astonishing growth for African literature in the global North and South, evidenced by lucrative publishing deals; new prizes and grants; literature festivals; the establishment of many new presses and imprints; and an increase in blogs and platforms that disseminate and discuss these developments. On the other hand, African literature continues to exist on the margins of the academic mainstream and is also underrepresented within larger reading publics.

NOMAREC: Nollywood Gets Virtual Media & Research Center

PRESS RELEASE: Azuh Amatus Unveils Nollywood Media And Research Centre 

          Nollywood Media And Research Centre, (www.nomarec.com), a new information resource hub that is out to provide media-driven and in-depth research on Nollywood—the globally renowned Nigerian motion picture industry, its practitioners and various publics has been unveiled. 

          According to a statement issued in Lagos by its Founder and CEO, Azuh Amatus, NOMAREC serves as a rendezvous for journalists, filmmakers, professionals, scholars, researchers, film writers, students, entertainment enthusiasts, agencies and stakeholders within and outside Nigeria to access media-related and industry data on Nollywood, virtually.

          Shedding more light on NOMAREC and the services offered at the first-of-its- kind media and research driven centre, Azuh, a leading and revered Nollywood journalist with over two decades experience, disclosed that it is a one-stop virtual shop for reliable media contents and information on Nollywood.

Bello: Nigeria's Most Ecumenical Name

(By Farooq A. Kperogi) – Hello Bello: How “Bello” Became Nigeria’s Most Ecumenical Name

This article has been in the works for months. Each week I decide to work on it, something more pressing that invites my commentary comes up. But I have bucked all temptations to abandon it this week. 

Few people realize that “Bello” is Nigeria’s most universal “ethnic” name. Fewer still give a thought to how that came to be. By “ethnic” name, I mean a name that isn’t derived from universal religions like Christianity or Islam, which most Nigerians profess and practice, and that isn’t a Western ethnic name introduced to us through colonialism. 

Bello is a Nigerian Fulani name that has, over the years, lost its ethnic rootedness. It is the only name that is borne either as a first name or a last name in all Nigerian geo-cultural groups, except in the former Eastern Region, that is, Igboland and southern minorities, minus Edo State (who doesn’t know the Bello-Osagie family?). 

If we go by Nigeria’s contemporary geo-political categories, it’s only in the southeast and in the south-south (with the exception of Edo) that you may not find a native Bello. (There are three Bellos among Nigeria’s current governors, and at least one of them has no drop of Fulani blood in him). Essentially, of Nigeria’s 36 states, only 10 states don’t have a native Bello. No other “ethnic” name even comes close to this onomastic cosmopolitanism. (Onomastics is the study of names).

Of Yoruba Names With Arabic Origins

(By Farooq A. Kperogi) – Top 10 Yoruba Names You Never Guessed Were Arabic Names

I have always been fascinated by Yoruba people’s creative morphological domestication of Arabic names. There are scores of Yoruba names that are derived from Arabic but which are barely recognizable to Arabs or other African Muslims because they have taken on the structural features of the Yoruba language. 

This is not unique to Yoruba, of course. As scholars of onomastics or onomatology know only too well, when proper names leave their primordial shores to other climes they, in time, are often liable to local adaptation. (Onomastics or onomatology is the scientific study of the origins, forms, conventions, history and uses of proper names. Anthroponomastics specifically studies personal names, so this article is an anthroponamastic analysis of Yoruba Muslim names). That’s why, for instance, there are many Arabic-derived personal names in Hausa, the most Arabized ethnic group in Nigeria, that would be unrecognizable to Arabs. Names like Mamman (Muhammad), Lawan (Auwal), Shehu (Sheikh), etc. would hardly make much sense to an Arab.

I am drawn to the onomatology of Arabic-derived Yoruba names because their morphological adaptation to Yoruba’s structural attributes seems to follow an admirably predictable, rule-governed pattern. I have four preliminary observations on this pattern.

Of Nigeria and Hausa Christian Names

(By Farooq A. Kperogi) – Hausa-Speaking Northern Christian Names: An Onomastic Analysis

… I have a scholarly fascination with the origin, form, development, and domestication of personal names—an area of inquiry linguists call onomastics. … 

I pointed out that several Arabic names “have taken on the structural features of the Yoruba language.” I said this wasn’t unique to Yoruba Muslims. “As scholars of onomastics or onomatology know only too well,” I wrote, “when proper names leave their primordial shores to other climes they, in time, are often liable to local adaptation…. That’s why, for instance, there are many Arabic-derived personal names in Hausa, the most Arabized ethnic group in Nigeria, that would be unrecognizable to Arabs. Names like Mamman (Muhammad), Lawan (Auwal), Shehu (Sheikh), etc. would hardly make much sense to an Arab.”

The personal names of Hausa-speaking Northern Nigerian Christians also have an onomastic uniqueness that is worth exploring. I use “Hausa-speaking Northern Nigerian Christians” here rather loosely to refer to a miscellany of ethnic groups primarily in Nigeria’s northwest and northeast who are nonetheless united by Christianity and the Hausa language. This geo-cultural group, for the most part, excludes northern states like Benue, Kogi, Kwara, and maybe Niger, where most Christians historically bear conventional Western Christian names, but might include Plateau and Nasarawa states.

"Nollywood in Focus" Premieres in San Francisco

(TheGuardian.ng) - ‘Nollywood In Focus’ To Premiere At San Francisco Black Film Festival

Nollywood in Focus, an exciting documentary film offering a rare glimpse into the burgeoning Nigerian film industry, … premiere[s] at the 22nd San Francisco Black Film Festival on June 19, 2020. 

#Black Lives Matter

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - "Dear American Non-Black, if an American Black person is telling you about an experience about being black, please do not eagerly bring up examples from your own life. Don't say 'It's just like when I was ...' You have suffered. Everyone in the world has suffered. But you have not suffered precisely because you are an American Black. Don't be quick to find alternative explanations for what happened. Don't say 'Oh, it's not really race, it's class. Oh, it's not race, it's gender. Oh, it's not race, it's the cookie monster.' You see, American Blacks actually don't WANT it to be race. They would rather not have racist shit happen. So maybe when they say something is about race, it's maybe because it actually is? Don't say 'I'm color-blind,' because if you are color-blind, then you need to see a doctor and it means that when a black ma is shown on TV as a crime suspect in your neighborhood, all you see is a blurry purplish-grayish-creamish figure. Don't say 'We're tired of talking about race' or 'The only race is the human race.' American Blacks, too, are tired of talking about race. They wish they didn't have to. But shit keeps happening. Don't preface your response with 'One of my best friends is black' because it makes no difference and nobody cares and you can have a black best friend and still do racist shit and it's probably not true anyway, the 'best' part, not the 'friend' part. Don't say your grandfather was Mexican so you can't be racist (please click here for more on There Is No United League of the Oppressed). Don't bring up your Irish great-greatparents' suffering. Of course they got a lot of shit from established America. So did the Italians. So did the Eastern Europeans. But there was a hierarchy. A hundred years ago, the white ethnics hated being hated, but it was sort of tolerable because at least black people were below them on the ladder.

Benin Kingdom, the Oba, and Religious Diversity

NEBO TV

Afamefuna: The Headstrong Historian

Illustration by Yvetta Fedorova

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) – The Headstrong Historian

Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him and the firmness of his weight, and feeling as if she were surrounded by light. Other memories of Obierika also remained clear—his stubby fingers curled around his flute when he played in the evenings, his delight when she set down his bowls of food, his sweaty back when he brought baskets filled with fresh clay for her pottery. From the moment she had first seen him, at a wrestling match, both of them staring and staring, both of them too young, her waist not yet wearing the menstruation cloth, she had believed with a quiet stubbornness that her chi and his chi had destined their marriage, and so when he and his relatives came to her father a few years later with pots of palm wine she told her mother that this was the man she would marry. Her mother was aghast. Did Nwamgba not know that Obierika was an only child, that his late father had been an only child whose wives had lost pregnancies and buried babies? Perhaps somebody in their family had committed the taboo of selling a girl into slavery and the earth god Ani was visiting misfortune on them. Nwamgba ignored her mother. She went into her father’s obi and told him she would run away from any other man’s house if she was not allowed to marry Obierika. Her father found her exhausting, this sharp-tongued, headstrong daughter who had once wrestled her brother to the ground.

Mma: At the Heart of Igbo Cosmology and Culture

"To understand more fully the complex set of ideas behind Agu's charge of witchcraft, it is necessary to say something about the connection between and Igbo person's life, his or her productiveness, and the communal 'good.' Mma is arguably the most important, single Igbo cosmological term. It contains a complex bundle of meanings: not only 'good' but wealth, health, and beauty are also implied. The key to following the discussion below is that the reader must keep all of these meanings in mind, since the values expressed by the use of mma are central to Igbo thought, particularly Igbo thought about human worth.
          For the Igbo, personal mma is both a reflection on the mma of the community and a positive statement about, or a continuation through time and space of, that good. "Goodness" is thus an active property in the life of an individual as well as in the life of a group. In practical terms, this means that a productive person is a person who manifests 'goodness' through his/her actions, by working hard and creatively, by having children and by teaching those children proper values, by accumulating wealth and by redistributing that wealth to the community through participation in title taking, town and local credit associations, and the establishment of patron-client relations with the less fortunate.
          One of the most important signs of 'goodness' for the Igbo is children. Children are, on one hand, the visible continuation of the lineage into the future, but they also represent material and spiritual wealth in the present. This is why murder and robbery are so closely linked in Igbo thought. The death of any person implies the loss of his/her productive and reproductive potential for the community at large.

Biafra: We Remember and We Pray #Ozoemena

(By Emmanuel Iduma) – ‘Gone Like a Meteor’: Epitaph for the Lost Youth of the Biafran War

In 1967, Nigeria had been an independent country for just seven years. The declaration of secession that year by an Igbo majority in the southeastern region of Nigeria, and the war that followed when the federal government decided to keep the country as one, was already the culmination of a bloody sequence of events. By May 1967, two coup d’états had taken place, and the Igbos of northern Nigeria had been killed in the tens of thousands. 

The Biafran War, otherwise known as the Nigerian Civil War, lasted from July 6, 1967, until January 15, 1970. The men who led each side—Yakubu Gowon on the federal side and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu of Biafra—were in their mid-thirties. Boys, some barely teenagers, volunteered to fight for the breakaway Republic of Biafra. Many of the civilian casualties were children: in September 1968, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that almost ten thousand people died daily from starvation caused by Nigeria’s blockade of Biafra. An entire generation was wrenched from the future.

Of Prophet Odumeje, Pastors, and Sundry MOs

(By Obinna Aligwekwe) – Beyond Odumeje Comics and Theatrics.

First off, let me say I will never be more a fan of Odumeje than I would Adeboye, Oyedepo or Oyakhilome. 

Perhaps I might even be tempted to place him amongst men like Chris Okafor, TB Joshua and Apostle Suleiman who in my personal opinion rank lower in credibility than the first three above.
————————-

I do not subscribe to the opinion that casts out Odumeje and places him on a pedestal of falsehood from the others.

Odumeje is not more false than Oyedepo who once publicly slapped a lady in church during deliverance session.

Why was Oyedepo banned from entering the United Kingdom?

Odumeje is not more false than TB Joshua, who has delivered numerous false prophecies, and once claimed the Holy Spirit misled him.

Odumeje is not more false than Adeboye, who declared that corona virus had nothing to do with members of his church. 

Many still doubt that story of driving a car without fuel, but you who believe, wants to question another’s belief in Odumeje?

Odumeje is no more false than Chris Okafor who was involved in a recent scandal where a woman with a fractured arm was passed from church to church in healing scams.

"I Represent Earth": Religion in Social Media Age

(By Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu) - Angela Nwosu: Interview with an Ogbanje

In 2016, there was that trending video of a girl with scant hair and no makeup talking sex in vulgar Igbo. While some cheered her bravado, others were deeply offended, yet she released some more. Four years later, the lady, Angela Nwosu, has found some acceptance, pulling perhaps the largest following by any Nigerian using a private account on Facebook: 203,000. How did a random girl with a smartphone become a famous brand inspiring traditional worship in a digital generation?

Was the sex talk a way to get people to listen? I ask her, opening an interview this past Sunday.

“No. I just love talking about sex. I can’t have an adult conversation without talking sex. I had no friends and I needed to talk. When I started, there were so many trolls reporting me, so Facebook banned me.” 

Four times she created new accounts but all were banned, the last time permanently, she tells Nigeria Abroad. Angela moved to YouTube, where she met the same fate.

“I had to hire an IT guy to formally write letters and beg Facebook that I’d be of good behavior.”

Her spiritual nature has always been there since she was a child, Angela says, only she had to “use her available platform to provide solutions to people’s problems.” Today on social media, she sells spiritual items—amulets for luck, scrubs for spiritual cleansing, etc. She also provides free spiritual counseling on how people can use nature to better themselves.

Odumeje Vs Pericoma: Surviving the Gods

(By Mitterand Okorie) - As the Pericomas unleash terror, has night come for Odumeje?

Chukwuemeka Ohanemere a.k.a Odumeje is an internet sensation. Yellow to the soles of his feet and lanky like an okro plant, the self-acclaimed Liquid Metal has given Nigerians so much to talk about in the last few days. Recently also he trended on Twitter and today, dominates discussions on Facebook since the Pericomas came to town. Individuals or corporations pay influencers to trend on Twitter; Pastor Odumeje a.k.a Ikuku a na-afu anya (the visible wind), has remained an organically trending topic on social media Nigeriana. In short, some now called themselves Indaboskians, culled from the pastor’s favourite war chant – “I am Indaboski Bahose”. Apparently, Marlians (fans of the singer Naira Marley) have not only met their match; they have been overtaken by a more exuberant bunch. 

Odumeje is a popular prosperity pastor who, unlike most of his colleagues, found an unconventional route to fame. He is remembered for his antics more than for his preaching. He throws his spiritual patients around like a wrestler in a WWE bout. I once saw a video of him taking a crippled man’s crutches and proceeding to hit the man’s legs with the iron frame in an attempt to heal him. Spirits, they say, work in mysterious ways. 

While pastors of conventional Pentecostal churches call for tithes, Odumeje enjoys people spraying money in his church, sometimes over his head while he jumps around with the flexibility of an excited ninja.

Of Okija Shrine, Unforgiving Deity, & Tech-Savvy Ezemmuo

(By Mark-Anthony Osuchukwu) - Inside Okija shrine with the Goddess who never forgives

In the middle of a forest lies the dreaded Okija shrine, home to Ogwugwu-Mmiri, one of the most powerful deities in Igboland. Leading to the shrine is a dirt road plied by men on a date with spirits, surrounded by vegetation and fear. The shrine is a half-hour journey on okada from Ihembosi, a busy community in Anambra State. Save for the sputtering of the bike and the chirping of birds, the entire world is silent. A two-man journalism crew from Nigeria Abroad, we are on a mission to poke into the shrine’s historical mystery, and separate fact from fiction. 

The okada whines to a halt by a lonely structure where a man in red cap is sitting on a low stool. We pay the rider and approach the good man with pleasantries.

“Clear your throats before you come any further,” he commands. 

 A young man in his 40’s, his charge, a ritual for all who visit the shrine, is larger-than-life, instilling fear and obedience. We clear our throats, unlocking his hospitality.

“I am Ezemmuo Meekaodimma”—Chief priest bent on doing good. “What did you bring for the Alusi?

It is not our first visit. The day before we had come to book an appointment for this interview, and were told of what items to bring along: kolanuts, edo, native male chalk, native female chalk, and dry gin. We present the items.

“Whatever you give to the Gods can never be taken back,” Ezemmuo states, as if reading our rights.