The Exceptional Mind of Cyprian Ekwensi

Ekwensi saw himself as a custodian of Nigerian life and the patron saint of the city dweller. He wrote social commentaries where the Nigerian city or town took on the texture of a character. Even when his human characters did not appear to be going through any serious internal upheavals or developments, the city, site of the epic and mundane, acting on them, was dynamic, punishing, exhilarating and elusive.

Not particularly Ekwensi’s most ardent reader, I read him anyway. He was available and it was routine to read The Passport of Mallam Ilia as a required school text. I must have picked up copies of An African Nights Entertainment and The Drummer Boy at some point in a school library. I sought out Jagua Nana and Jagua Nana’s Daughter in my late teens and early twenties. This is as far as my familiarity goes. I have not reread the author as an adult beyond a recent attempt to read Jagua Nana again. I did not get far. This is not to say that the book does not satisfy the requirements for necessary delight. Its engagement with the world of sex work was progressive for its time. But it is a book I fear I have now sadly outgrown.

Yet Ekwensi, undeniably a prolific writer, knew how to tell a good story. I imagine him at this very hour writing another novel about Lagos. What would he make of Lagos today? Its inventive underbelly. Its con artists. Its musicians. Its nightlife. His characters, considered by certain critics as lacking the kind of cognitive depth or range of mythological interest common in the works of his contemporaries, were familiar and fascinating. A writer with as much interest in the daily encounters that happened in public spaces, the countryman’s dream of grandeur, the psyche of sex workers, Ekwensi treated the novel as a living inventory document. We may find progenies of Ekwensi in many new generation writers as anthologized in Lagos Noir, but more broadly, perhaps in a new kind of storyteller, the skit maker. Not just any skit maker, but the kind quick with translating desires and documenting social mobility, social unease, adventure, romantic exploits, all with an invitation/reminder to live in the moment. This kind of skit maker understands the medium of the skit as doing its best work as a vehicle for social realism.

Ekwensi was born in 1921 and died in 2007. He is noted by the Guardian as having published more than 40 books in his lifetime. In his literary debut, People of the City, Ekwensi’s fascination with public life and the personas we create for public living is evident. It drives the plot. The novel tells the story of a character, Amusa Sango, a staple of the Nigerian cityscape, perhaps more so today; a fine boy on the come-up who plays a club gig and works as a crime reporter in the West African Sensation. It was published in 1954, selected by the Heinemann African Writers Series editor, Chinua Achebe. This was well before Achebe made the pivot from editor to writer and published his own monumental works, including the city novel No Longer at Ease.

Before People of the City, Ekwensi wrote romance and folktales, some of which were published in 1940s Onitsha. Along with Ayi Kwei Armah and Amos Tutuola, Ekwensi’s first works appear in the collection of essays, Early West African Writers by Bernth Lindfors. His later novels, written in quick succession include the 1968 Dag Hammarskjöld prizewinning Jagua Nana published in 1961. The book, immediately controversial, spurred discussions on the floor of the Nigerian parliament amid concerns that it would have a corrupting influence on the Nigerian character. And its pop culture status was sealed when the musician, Orlando Julius, immortalized the main character, naming his breakout song after her. Alongside a writing life, Ekwensi worked as a pharmacist, broadcaster, forester, teacher and filmmaker. He wrote radio and television scripts, and newspaper columns. He balanced the necessary solitude that writing required with a complete immersion in society. When he lived in Lagos, his writing room reportedly faced Ojuelegba Road on the Lagos Mainland. His son, George Ekwensi, shares a family lore in a retrospective on the author’s legacy, in which Ekwensi on a steamship en route to study in the United Kingdom, completes a novel, For a Role of Parchment, during the duration of this trip, prompted by the solitude of uninterrupted days at sea. He is said to have finished the first draft of Jagua Nana while studying abroad in a record ten days.

In a 1965 interview, Ekwensi offered his theory of the novel, noting that he had no interest in being a political writer. He considered the creative writer one who was primarily defined by their sociological concerns. For him, the categories did not necessarily mix. The creative writer ‘showed the people [to] themselves,’ and the story acted as a self-correcting mechanism at work within society. About a year later, the Nigerian Civil War would begin and Ekwensi would take on a role that required the lines between the sociological and political concerns of the writer to meet and mix. He served as Head of Publicity for the Biafran government, resigning his position as Director for the Ministry of Information on the Nigerian side. By 1969, in another interview, he appeared to have reworked his theory toward flexibility. He noted that the writer, incapable of ignoring the times and saddled with the job of truth-telling, had to be faithful to mirroring the truth found in the subject. He also published one war novel, Survive the Peace.