The Coming-of-Age Novel as a Portrait of Nigeria

In his infinitely ranging and cerebral essay, ‘The French and Moslem Backgrounds of The Radiance of the King’, famed Nigerian critic, Ben Obumselu, performs an utterly engrossing exegesis of the political, linguistic, and religious impetus behind Guinean novelist Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King. He makes instructive observations about the novel’s protagonist, Clarence, at different points in the essay. Obumselu tells us that there is an ‘idea implicit in the pattern of his development’; in another instance, he observes that the ‘story begins with the hero’s spiritual awakening’; in another, he conjectures that the hero feels ‘a morbid sense of a divided nature.’ These descriptions can also be applied to Laye’s first novel, the autobiographical The African Child, which details the author’s own coming of age. In such narratives, the focus is always on a young person’s development through a period of conflict of nature or place, which leads to an awakening, an epiphany, or an understanding, out of which experience the hero attains maturity.