In Lieu of A Book Review: An elegy for Cyprain Ekwensi

KWENU! Our culture, our future

In Lieu of A Book Review

Oseloka Obaze*

Tuesday 6 November 2007

An elegy for Cyprian Ekwensi

Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi

(1921-2007)

A great African mind, literary icon and all-Nigerian writer has gone to the great beyond. Chief Cyprian “C.O.D.” Ekwensi, 86, one of Nigeria’s renowned and eminent novelists passed away on 4 November 2007. Chief Ekwensi had been at work on his memoirs, titled, “In My Time” for the past several years. It is not known if he completed it and several others books he was working on before his demise. There will be many fitting eulogies and tributes to this man by those who knew him better, but having read many of his books and having gotten to know him at close quarters, it is only proper to join in doing the honors. I also owe this populist writer a tribute for several personal reasons. First, very few people leave an indelible impression on a youth on the first and initial encounters. He was among the few who did for me. Therefore, this elegy is to a gifted populist writer, whom I once described as “a man with a permanent scowl”.

Like many Nigerian kids whose parents were insistent on their forming a reading habit, I got to know Cyprian Ekwensi well before I actually met him in person. Also, like many school kids in post-independent Nigeria, I read several of Ekwensi’s popular books and novellas, such as The Drummer Boy, The Passport of Mallam Ilia and An African Night's Entertainment. His two other books which were also popular with Nigerian youths, were The Great Elephant-Bird (1965) and Trouble in Form Six (1966). Singularly or collectively, these books transported every child reader into fairytale and dreamy lands, which were also particularly enchanting because they were about myths, as well as cultural and ethnic terrains we were familiar with. Furthermore, the books were written by one of our own and about places and characters we could identify with; places not as distance, foreign and ancient as Rome and Greece. As I got older, I got into trouble for procuring and reading his racy and raunchy book, Jagua Nana, considered then by any well- meaning parents, as an adult book.

It would take many more years for me to get to meet Ekwensi personally. But I recall one event vividly, even though it happened before we met. My first published article in a newspaper, titled “Old Men’s Tale” had appeared in a national Nigerian daily, The Renaissance, in the summer of 1975. Barely one month later, there was coup and a new military regime in power. One of the fallouts of the power change was that Mr. Ekwensi was appointed the managing director of The Renaissance, which he promptly renamed The Daily Star; a name he said the “common man of the street could understand”, pronounce and identify with. He also compelled his editorial staff to revert to their journalistic roles of writing balanced and focused op-ed pieces, rather than fanning out and out-sourcing the pages of the government-owned paper to guest writers, some of who held very parochial, slanted and even anti-establishment opinions. Hence, I had like many aspiring guest writers lost the opportunity to publish my subsequent articles, but I had also gained the resolve to continue writing until I was able to write a story or article good enough that no editor, not even Ekwensi would reject. But the general readership of The Daily Star also benefited from Ekwensi’s arrival. He was unlike his predecessors (his immediate predecessor was an uncle of mine), in that he took to writing a weekly column, thus leading his staff by example. He continued that practice when in 1981 he was appointed the managing director of the The Weekly Eagle in Imo State.

As a writer, Cyprian Ekwensi coveted the populist bent and was in a class by himself. But what was it that set him apart from his fellow Nigerian writers? Ekwensi severally recalled, but never with any malice or anger, how an American literary critic, Bert Lindtford, had pigeonholed him and his works by saying of Ekwensi, “he has not seen the four walls of a university”. But the flip side to the man was captured in a Daily Champion editorial on October 4, 2006: “While writers like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, explored in their works the cultural, political and intellectual realities of the past, and future, Ekwensi showed us ourselves in our natural habitats and how they were shaping our sociology in post-colonial Nigeria. Therein lies the ultimate relevance of Ekwensi to our times. For this, we salute this All-Nigerian writer.”

Ekwensi’s audacious and near irreverent best seller, Jagua Nana (1961) would come to exemplify his personal commitment to unmasking and peeling off the outer layers Nigerian urban life setting. The book, a story of an “ageing high-lifer and habitué of the seedy Tropicana club” in Lagos, was an engrossing and gripping revelation of frenetic life in Eko and a “brilliant evocation of the chaos and intensity of modern life in Lagos.” Anyone who had read Jagua Nana or its equally seamy sequel, Jaguar Nana's Daughter, need not to have visited Lagos to fully grasp what made the city famous and at the same time notorious. The greatest tribute to Ekwensi is that his rendering of Lagos life in the 1950s and 60s, remains true of 21^st Century Lagos.

Cyprian Ekwensi was a pioneer and prodigious writer. He started his writing career as a pamphleteer and was indeed published as far back as 1947 when he wrote Ikolo and Wrestler and The Leopard's Claw. Before he went on to publish the rest of his more than forty books and novellas, he had published People of the City (1954), the first major novel by a Nigerian. The book would appear in print clear four years before Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It was with that book that Ekwensi established himself as the advocate and reconnoiter of life and goings-on in Nigerian cities. Later on, he would team up with Achebe and other African writers to give leadership and impetus to the African Writers Series (AWS). Indeed after Achebe, Ekwensi held the number two slot in the series with Burning Grass (AWS 2), followed by Lokotown (AWS 19), Beautiful Feathers (AWS 83) and Survive the Peace (AWS 185). Curiously, his masterpiece, Jagua Nana initially did not make it to the AWS genre, until it was reprinted in 1975 as (AWS 146).

Over time, Ekwensi produced other books, mostly for children, which though they may not have been internationally acclaimed, were nonetheless well known and read all over Nigeria and Africa. They included Rainmaker (1965), Iska (1966), Coal Camp Boy (1971), Samankwe in the Strange Forest (1973), Motherless Baby (1980), The Restless City and Christmas Gold (1975), The Highway Robbers (1975), Jaguar Nana's Daughter (1985), Behind the Convent Wall (1987) and Gone to Mecca (1991), Masquerade Time! (1992), and King Forever! (1992). In 2006, he completed work on two other books; “Tortoise and the Brown Monkey”, a short story and “Another Freedom”. Ekwensi’s greatest niche as a writer was his power of observation. Since he had a talent for immersing himself deeply into any scenario or environment, he not only observed people closely, but translated their mannerisms and manifestations into many of his characters. He drew broadly from his firsthand knowledge and interactions with Nigerians to build his stories. He also had a sharp and scientific mind - being first and foremost a pharmacists- and this orderly trait manifested also in his works.

I only got to know Chief Ekwensi personally in the early 1980s. As a young man, my interest in him had gone far beyond his books, for he had a daughter I had taken a very keen romantic interest in. Indeed, but for our respective stubborn commitment to pursuing our demanding professional careers, my relations with his daughter would have progressed to the point of Ekwensi being my father-in-law. Inexorably, my interaction with Chief Ekwensi was beyond perfunctory, since he was particularly fond of his daughter, who incidentally, was named after him. Whether we met in his writing haven, a modest nondescript back house apartment in the midst of the chaos in Ojuelegba, Lagos, or at his residence at Hillview Crescent, Enugu, or at his country home at Nkwelle Ezunnaka, he was always proper and received me warmly. But of course, that was only after he got beyond that initial natural suspicion that most fathers with very beautiful daughters always harbored about interloping young men, who not only visited their homes at odd hours, but seemingly had the audacity to colonize and become permanent fixtures in their living rooms.

Interestingly, it did not matter if Chief Ekwensi and I sat under the huge mango tree in Nkwelle Ezunnaka, or in his papers, journals and books cluttered apartment in Lagos, I found that we were always engaged in very diverse and meaningful conversations, sometimes even in the dark or with candle light, thanks to NEPA’s epileptic power supply. In the privacy of his home, Chief Ekwensi had a biting wit and deep repertoire of anecdotes and as such was able to laugh at issues and other people’s joke. He was very precise and almost surgical in his usage of language. He was more so with his questions, as if they were meant to elicit for him another captivating line for his next novel. Ekwensi’s ostensible public countenance - that burrowed, foreboding, inscrutable and uninviting scowl – belied his introspective but yet genial personality. I could, therefore, never reconcile the man I got to know fairly well, as being “difficult” or “distant”, two descriptions I had heard some people ascribe to him. Such qualification were far removed from the personality I encountered in the almost three years I courted his daughter.

Another trait that impacted heavily on his works was his near wanderlust. He had lived in various parts of Nigeria and was by nature peripatetic. He, therefore, knew Nigeria like the back of his hands; and understood and spoke Nigeria’s three major languages, if not more. Unlike most Nigerian well-to- dos, he preferred to drive himself, and would not pass a town, be it rural Igbanke, Odogbolu or Akwanga, without gleaning as much as he could from the people about their town and their culture. Unswervingly, Ekwensi drew his writing inspiration from the insights he gained, which translated to a social consciousness form that were constantly reflected in his books. In testimony to this inclination, Ekwensi told a reporter in 2006, “You can call it social consciousness. You have to be conscious of the people you are living amongst, their likes and dislikes and you respect them and still extract their culture and all that. As a matter of fact, I can’t even complete the books I want to write. Right now, (2006) I have manuscripts of five books upstairs in my room. I was working on my biography before I fell ill. I really want to finish it and I could, but I can’t put it down.” If Ekwensi knew rural Nigeria well, he had also mastered Nigerian cities, its denizens and their proclivities.

As regards his role and those of his fellow African writers, his views were in tandem with those of Chinua Achebe and others. His words: “In fact, much of this African writing stuff was maneuvered by the white people because they brought the capital for producing the books, fiction and non-fiction, alike. So, they teleguided the whole course of events in the literary world but it was a great contribution because it brought out to the fore, a lot of hidden materials.” Ekwensi was in this sense the quintessential Africanist. He took what might have seemed an untenable situation and turned it into an advantage for African literature.

In the brief period I interacted with his family, I cannot recall ever seeing him without his portable elite typewriter by his side. Neither can I recall his dictating his writings to anyone to type. He did it all himself. I have always felt that had Cyprian Ekwensi not been a pharmacist and a writer, he would he have made an exceptional shrink or psychologist and a well-grounded detective. He was naturally inquisitive without being nosy. Another fact I gleaned from by brief interaction with him, was that he possessed the uncanny ability to dwell on fact, even minutia. Likewise, every encounter with him was more of a discourse. True to his old school teacher habit – he sought to coax points from his interlocutor, but never hedged from offering his unvarnished opinion. In every issue and context, he saw the realities as well as the attending ironies. As one might expect, both parallels were ever present in his works.

Through his works, Cyprian Ekwensi who has been referred to as the Charles Dickens of Africa, presented and represented Nigeria well and accordingly, was rewarded with the high honor of the Member Federal Republic (MFR) in 2001, and induction into the Nigerian Academy of Arts in 2005. He had earlier in his career been awarded the Dag Hammarskjold International Prize for Literary Merit in 1969.

I suspect that many more of Cyprian Ekwensi’s works will become public and, perhaps, become even better known now that he is gone. Certainly, his memoirs, In My Time, will offer us added insight into the man. Chief C.O.D. Ekwensi will be missed. Surely, he has left a bounty of literary legacy. His unique literary footprints were scattered, heavy, and significantly noteworthy. But posterity has been enriched because of Ekwensi’s due diligence in capturing, localizing and immortalizing the very essence of his time.

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Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. His novel, “Happy Eulogy” will be published in 2007.

He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby.