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UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS

SOCIAL PROTEST AND LITERARY IMAGINATION IN

SELECTED NIGERIAN NOVELS

BY

ONIYIDE AJISAFE AKINGBE B. A. (Hons) English Studies, OAU, Ile-Ife; M. A., English, UNILAG

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,

FACULTY OF ARTS,

UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS, AKOKA

SEPTEMBER, 2010

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SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES,

UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS, AKOKA

CERTIFICATION

This is to certify that the thesis “Social Protest and Literary Imagination in Selected

Nigerian Novels”

Submitted to the School of Postgraduate Studies, University of Lagos

For the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) is a record of original research

carried out by

Oniyide Ajisafe Akingbe

In the Department of English, University of Lagos, Akoka

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Author Signature Date

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First Supervisor Signature Date

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Second Supervisor Signature Date

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Internal Examiner Signature Date

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External Examiner Signature Date

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P. G. School Representative Signature Date

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DEDICATION

To the youths protesting oil theft in Ilaje creeks.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thankfully acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of the following individuals in

the successful completion of this work. They include the lead supervisor, Professor Karen King-

Aribisala who helped to sharpen my arguments, the second supervisor, Dr. Chimdi Maduagwu

who offered useful comments and suggestions, Professor A. E. Eruvbetine, Professor Akachi

Adimora-Ezeigbo, Dr. Oko Okoro, Dr. Hope Eghagha, Dr. Adeyemi Daramola, Dr. Adetokunbo

Pearse, Dr. Sola Osoba, Dr. Austin Nwagbara, Dr. Emmanuel Adedun, Dr. Patrick Oloko, Dr.

Felicia Owhovoriole, Dr. Ben Nweke, Dr. Biodun Adeniji and Mrs. Ogbonna. Dr. Chris

Anyokwu has my sincere thanks for his generous offer of valuable books on protest literature.

For his enduring mentoring and criticism, I would like to gratefully acknowledge Professor Jide

Timothy-Asobele.

Dr. A. B. Adeloye deserves my sincere and genuine commendation for friendship and useful

advice. Among the very many people who provided me with their time, insights and company. I

am especially grateful to Dr. David Aworawo, Omoniyi Omosehin, Dr. Femi Adegbulu, Dr.

Eddy Onwuka, Lateef Rasheed, Gbenga Fasoto, Dr. Dotun Ogunkoya, Sola Ogunbayo, Olu

Omojugba, Dr. C. A. Ibitoye, Dr. Tony Okeregbe, Eric Usifo, Dr. Taye Arayela, Dr. Koya Ogen,

Leye Dairo, Kenneth Nwoko, Dr. Olumide Ekanade, Dr. Victor Ukaogo, Dr. Harry Olufunwa,

Bisi Arewa, Ebinyo Ogbowei, Femi Omoyele, Ferdinand Ottoh, Dr. Mayowa Adeyeye, Effiong

Akpan, Dr. Akinnifesi Fatusin and Dr. Akachi Odoemene.

I would also like to acknowledge my debt to my parents: my father, Oyewunmi Akingbe, and my

late mother, Omonola Akingbe.

My special thanks go also to Mary-Juliet, Ladele, Simisola and Tamilore, for their love, affection

and for always being there for me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title page i

Certification ii

Acknowledgment iii

Dedication iv

Table of Contents v

Abstract vi

Introduction 1

CHAPTER ONE: SOCIAL PROTEST AND LITERATURE:

A BACKGROUND 14

Protest: A Definition 14

The Evolution of Protest 23

Theoretical Approaches to Protest 28

The Rationalist Approach 30

The Mobilization Paradigm 30

The Political Process Approach 31

Social Protest in Literature 32

Relationship between Protest and Literature 38

Protest Literature 42

The Art-Versus-Propaganda Debate 48

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CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL

FRAMEWORK 52

Social Relevance in Literature 52

Protest and Social Relevance 64

Socio-Political Consciousness in Literature 66

The Novel and Society 70

Conceptual Framework 76

Ideology 81

Cardinal Concepts of New Historicism 83

Literary Texts Chosen for the Study 87

CHAPTER THREE: PROTEST AS LANDSCAPE: ANTHILLS OF THE

SAVANNAH 89

Introduction 89

Strategies of Protest in Anthills of the Savannah 100

Multiple Narration 101

Vignettes 104

Oblique Forms of Protest 106

Paradoxes of Protest 106

Communality of Protest 108

Reversing the Trajectory of Protest 108

Literary Technique 114

Folkloric Elements 118

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Textuality of Protest 122

Memory 123

The Contestation of Meanings 125

Conclusion 127

CHAPTER FOUR: HISTORY AS PROTEST IN JUST BEFORE DAWN

AND DESTINATION BIAFRA 129

Introduction 129

Faction and the Notion of Protest 133

History and Fiction 134

Telling Untold Tales 136

The Importance of Memory 140

Contesting Official History 142

Creative Recollection 144

Metaphors of Nigeria 150

Updating Nigerian History 151

Fiction as an Alternative Narrative 166

Conclusion 171

CHAPTER FIVE: INTERROGATING POWER RELATIONS:

PROTEST AS DIALOGUE IN VIOLENCE 173

Introduction 173

Class Stratification in Violence 179

Poverty as Alienation in Violence 187

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Wealth as a symbol of Social Disruption in Violence 191

Marxist Ideology as a Motif of Social Consciousness in Violence 196

Extreme Poverty as Protest in Violence 200

Dialectic as Form in Violence 204

Conclusion 208

CHAPTER SIX: DEFYING ARMIES: PROTESTING MILITARY

OPPRESSION IN ARROWS OF RAIN AND WAITING FOR AN ANGEL 209

Introduction 209

The Military as Harbinger of Terror 210

Memory as Subversion of Silence 214

Motifs of Protest in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain 220

Alteration and Loss of Identity as a Motif of Protest 222

Prison as Motif 222

Rape as Motif of Protest 225

Physical assault as Protest 226

Orature as Motif of Protest 227

Mysticism as Motif of Protest 230

National Narrative in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain 235

Literary Techniques 239

Memory 239

Narrative Strategies in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel 245

Faction 245

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Narrative Style 246

Humour 247

Use of Irony 249

Metaphor 250

Conclusion 251

CONCLUSION 252

Introduction 252

Protest and Literature in Nigeria 253

Theoretical Framework 256

Research Questions 258

Research Hypothesis 259

Summary of Major Research Findings 259

The Nature of Protest 260

The Relationship between Protest and Fiction 263

The Treatment of Protest in the Selected Texts 265

Contributions to Knowledge and Suggested Areas for Further Research 269

Works Cited 271

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ABSTRACT

This study is an examination of how selected Nigerian novelists have, through the literary

imagination, used protest as a mode of expression necessary for assessing the relationship

between art, ideology and social consciousness. This study examines the relationship of these

three elements within the context of selected Nigerian novels dealing with a specific society

struggling within difficult economic and socio-political circumstances. The analytical focus is on

six primary texts, namely Chinua Achebe‟s Anthills of the Savannah (1987); Kole Omotoso‟s

Just Before Dawn (1988); Buchi Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra (1982); Festus Iyayi’s Violence

(1979); Okey Ndibe‟s Arrows of Rain (2000) and Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel (2002).

The choice of these texts is informed by the fact that their thematic preoccupations and structural

concerns are broadly similar. In these texts, the selected writers have attempted to chart a course

of communal awareness and social reconstruction as they show concern for the socio-political

issues prevalent in Nigeria. In essence, the study takes a close look at the nature of protest, its

manifestation in literature and the novel, and the way in which the literary imagination

transforms it to suit the artistic temper of the individual authors while at the same time retaining

its essence as a means of drawing attention to inequity and injustice. A cursory examination of

the texts selected for this study underscores their reading as protest texts. Anthills of the

Savannah, Just Before Dawn, Destination Biafra, Violence, Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an

Angel. To varying extents, these texts show that the events that constitute the national narrative

are all subject to contention because they are informed by the conflicting motivations of different

characters, distorted by a variety of perspectives and shaped by the dynamics of an ever-evolving

culture, as well as by the biases and objectives of the writers themselves. The study concludes

that, in the evaluation of social protest and the literary imagination in the Nigerian novel, it is

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important to analyse the relativity or ideological pursuits of the selected writers. The selected

writers in this study appear to be shaped by the prevailing Nigerian socio-political imbalance and

its resultant harshness. This in turn is expressed in their individual reactions to these perceived

socio-political problems. The recurrent motif in all the texts in this study is what could be

regarded as the most recent state of consciousness in Nigerian fiction; namely, an ideological

stance which no longer contents itself with either blaming outsiders or by wallowing in a

literature of despair and disillusionment.

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INTRODUCTION

This study evaluates the significance of protest and the literary imagination in the Nigerian

novel. It investigates how selected Nigerian novelists namely, Chinua Achebe, Kole Omotoso,

Buchi Emecheta, Festus Iyayi, Okey Ndibe and Helon Habila have used protest as a mode for

assessing the relationship between art, ideology and social consciousness. The study examines

the relationship of these three elements within the contexts of particular works of authors who

live in a specific society, with its socio-political circumstances.

This position has often been misconstrued by their critics as “propagandistic,” that is, wrongly

utilising literature as a means of advancing grossly partisan ideological goals. However, this

study evaluates how the selected writers have employed protest as a mode of discourse with

which they delineate the socio-political vices of corruption, maladministration and

unemployment in Nigeria, while remaining committed to their calling as literary artists.

The significance of the study lies in the fact that it takes a new look at the vexed question of

social relevance of literature, the relationships between different generations of writers, and the

nature of the aesthetic responses of individual writers to stifling socio-political realities in

Nigeria. As such, the study locates literary production and reception within the context of the

development of society. This is especially important in the case of developing countries like

Nigeria, where low levels of literacy and the emergence of overwhelmingly materialistic values

have conspired to reduce the importance of literature within national life.

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Key terms used in the study are isolated and defined. One of the most important of these terms is

“protest.” As a term, protest is subject to a variety of definitions, many of which are shaped by

cultural and other imperatives, as well as the research focus of those proposing the definition,

and the nature of the society they envisaged while making it. It is, therefore, not surprising that

there are several definitions and descriptions of protest, some of which actually contradict one

another.

Many definitions of protest situate it within the context of conflicting aims of different sections

in society, where it is mainly utilised as a means through which interest groups simultaneously

justify their claims, seek a more advantageous situation and reject disadvantageous ones.

Poloma‟s description of protest accords with this view:

Protest is a process that may be instrumental in the formation, unification and

maintenance of a social structure; protest has been used as a weapon for agitation

by groups seeking power, by groups holding power and by groups in the process

of losing power. (67)

Anifowoshe has also observed that:

In virtually all parts of the world, protest has been pursued in the defence of order

by the privileged, in the name of justice by the oppressed and in the fear of

displacement by the threatened. (25)

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The writers whose novels are the focus of this study appear to show that their texts can be

utilised as instruments of protest by raising awareness of negative social, economic and political

situations, demonstrating their consequences on society, and showing how those consequences

can be lessened or reversed to the benefit of all.

This is not as idealistic or utopian as it sounds, for many of these writers bring a complex

appreciation of reality to bear on their work. They seem to be fully aware that most people desire

to follow the path of least resistance in their moral outlook; they understand that the Nigerian

society about which they write is weakened by its ambivalent positioning between poorly-

digested western values and half-forgotten indigenous norms; they realise that interpersonal

relations have been distorted by the socio-political and economic crises that have plagued the

country almost since inception. They are aware that the stance of protest that they have adopted

is not an easy one, because it is a difficult weapon to wield, especially using the medium of

literature, and they realise that it lays them open to charges of devaluing their art. They know

that the chances of success are slim, given the enormity of the problems and the seeming

passivity of those who would benefit most from radical social change.

This submission conforms to Ayu‟s observation:

Protest reverberates literature as a product of imagination which must either work

towards reproducing or transforming society. Literature anchored on protest

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realised this by identifying with the oppressed of the world and laying bare the

various elements and mechanisms of socio-economic, political and cultural

dehumanisation. (37)

Almost all the novels of the selected writers in this study have similar features. They are urban in

setting; they deal with the theme of corruption; and they are marked by the realisation that,

decades after the nation‟s independence, social ills such as inequality, political corruption and

poverty are on the increase.

The study confines itself to the study of a particular issue (the manifestation of protest) in a

particular literary genre (the novel), produced in a particular area (Nigeria) by specific writers

and a particular time-frame (1979-2002).

The literary nature of its scope gives the study uniqueness, because it is different from a social

science perspective, which has often been the chosen context for the study of protest. In such

disciplines, protest is considered a sociological phenomenon and studied for its impact on

society, especially how it serves as a barometer of social attitudes and as a measure of the pace

of social change. In choosing to evaluate protest from a strictly literary perspective, this study

aims at deepening research into the ways in which literature and society are mutually constitutive

of each other, that is, the ways in which they influence and are influenced by each other.

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The choice of six novels by six different authors provides the study with a fairly representative

selection of Nigerian fiction produced since the start of the Second Republic in 1979, to 2002,

three years after civilian rule re-asserted itself. The study therefore ranges across a wide variety

of social, political and economic situations depicted in divergent ways. This enhances a

comprehensive analysis of the ways in which protest as an observable phenomenon is portrayed

in the literary imaginations of the chosen authors.

This study is based on imaginative works dealing with events created in the imagination of the

artists, or reality that has been retold in ways shaped by the authors‟ imagination rather than by

strict adherence to fact. As such, Achebe, Emecheta, Omotosho, Iyayi, Ndibe and Habila,

through their individual imaginations, have arguably demonstrated that all literature is a product

of the social and historical circumstances of a particular society. This notion is anchored on the

Aristotelian position that society itself is political, since it involves the organisation and the

government of human beings. In this study, the selected writers consider the exposition of socio-

political issues an important part of their role as writers. This is in conformity with the view of

Howe, who observes that inveighing against institutionalised social vices, as obtainable in

Nigeria, is a particularly severe test for any writer, as well as his audience: “It arouses our

passions as nothing else does and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we

react to, in the physical socio-political circumstances” (25).

The selected writers in this study posit that art must first of all, seek to transform society‟s

dehumanising conditions if it is to establish a system in which humanity can give free rein to its

self-expression, self-fulfilment and maximum self-realisation.

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In confronting the inevitable choice between the often-opposing demands of art and

commitment, Achebe and Ndibe in this study have chosen to fall back on the possibilities offered

by indigenous traditions, where the requirements of aesthetic satisfaction and social relevance

were synthesized in such a way that both could be agreeably realised. Thus, they often seek to

utilise themes and styles that can be found in traditional drama, folktales and poetry. Despite this,

they are often faced with the difficulty of adapting these borrowings to suit the requirements of

modern literature, especially the novel, which often has no direct equivalent in traditional

literature. In addition, they reshape indigenous material to meet the expectations of their

audience, which for the most part, is made up of an urban, western-educated elite.

All the writers in this study are members of the intelligentsia, and as such are interested in

facilitating the rapid social, economic and political development of their nation. Arguably as

intellectuals, they have a strong voice in shaping national and continental realities. Indeed, it was

often the disappointment at the way in which the early promise of independence had not been

met that compelled some writers in this study to take up socio-economic issues in their works,

and to use protest as the preferred medium for getting their point across.

Historical consciousness has been identified in this study as an important factor in the shaping of

the reactions of Nigerian writers to socio-political situations. The import of history is particularly

amplified in this study by Omotosho and Emecheta, whose commitment to the emergence of new

geopolitical realities is directed toward the tasks of nation-building, emancipation and the

enhancement of national consciousness.

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The socio-political consciousness of literature in Nigerian society is inevitable for several

reasons: it is ingrained in the “traditional literatures” of the country; Nigeria‟s peculiar history

has made the delineation of social issues crucial to the proper working of any profession or

discipline; many writers espouse ideologies such as Marxism or socialism which make the

advocacy of social change an article of faith; Nigeria‟s contemporary predicament is such that

arguably, no one with the sensitivity and insight of a “true” artist can be immune to engaging

with it in his work. As Kofi Agovi claims, literature or artistic forms become the nerve centre of

a network of complementary institutions which are “integrated into the state machinery by virtue

of their pursuit of similar or related goals and ideals” (10). Such institutions are made to pay

allegiance to a common body of ideas and values that give rise to a sense of humanism in

African society.

This study revolves around the crucial issues of society, literature and social reform. It suggests

that there are certain identifiable interconnections between art, ideology and social commitment.

In focusing on the notion of protest in the Nigerian novel over a particular period of time, the

study raises questions regarding how contending social forces arise as a result of socio-economic

and political difficulties, and seeks to discover the precise nature of the literary depiction of

social problems within the context of other forms of social intervention. It also aims at assessing

the significance of literary insight in delineating social issues and the efficacy of the manner in

which it proposes solutions to them. It also seeks to trace the evolution of artistic engagement

over time, showing the different phases social commitment in literature has gone through.

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The selected writers in this study confront Nigeria‟s socio-political experience in its immediacy,

and in so doing, employ protest in a number of ways: first as a means of establishing their own

relevance as writers seeking to bridge the gaps imposed by social class, education, career, etc., as

well as to establish a position of significance for the literary artist in the affairs of a developing

country characterised by profound change; second, as a means of “contributing their quota” as

informed citizens to the advancement of the nation; third, as a latent weapon for sensitising

Nigerians to the socio-economic and political exploitation perpetuated by the Nigerian elite over

the years.

The study shows that the many definitions of protest are complicated by its all-encompassing

nature. Protest cannot be limited by notions of whether it is “political,” or overtly aggressive, or

aimed at achieving radical social change. Instead of looking at its content, the research defines

protest by its intention, namely whether or not it is contesting an existing state of affairs. The

study therefore defines protest as any verbal or non-verbal means by which an individual or

group expresses its disagreement with an existing state of affairs in all or part of a given society,

and/or seeks to alter it, either by ending the said state of affairs, or by replacing it with something

else. The implication of this is that protest is not just a means of venting grievances, but is also

an arena where the clash of opposing views are played out, compelling adversaries to

consciously articulate and propagate the ideas that form the basis for the issues they are

protesting.

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The study establishes that there are very significant links between protest and culture. Due to its

fluidity and ubiquity, protest is very often shaped by the culture in which it is being undertaken,

especially in relation to notions of justice and of what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Thus,

mass actions such as protest marches and rallies are preferred in countries that favour

congregational worship, letter-writing campaigns are common in highly-literate societies, and

protest suicides in cultures where suicide is regarded as an honourable means of dying.

In accordance with its characteristic of simultaneously reflecting and shaping society, fiction

reflects protest and influences it. One of the ways in which this is done can be seen in the manner

in which the selected novels in this study focus on the actual nature of protest itself, rather than

just portraying it. Characters debate the effectiveness or otherwise of different modes of protest

in Anthills of the Savannah, Just Before Dawn, Destination Biafra, Violence, Waiting for an

Angel and Arrows of Rain as they seek to discover the most effective ways of responding to the

dire situation in which their country finds itself. The implication of this is that, in these novels,

characters use protest to define themselves as individuals in opposition to the dictates of a

repressively conservative society, to obtain access to rights hitherto denied them, and to indicate

the possibilities of change and social progress.

All six novelists show that the relationship between protest and fiction is more complex than

at first seems apparent, and cannot therefore be restricted to the art-propaganda dichotomy.

Protest and fiction are implicated in each other; any attempt to properly understand the way in

which they do this simply cannot be done within the confines of this long-standing division

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between aesthetics and relevance. What this implies is that protest is a fundamental aspect of any

society, and to the extent that fiction is in many ways a reflection of society, fiction is also a

reflection of protest, and therefore cannot be alien to it.

The dynamic of the protest novel in Nigeria is shaped by four elements, namely the issue, the

perpetrator, the victim and the protester. The relationship that obtains between these elements is

symbiotic rather than adversarial because they are interdependent, each requiring the others to

fulfil its function and complete its meaning. The protester, however, occupies a unique position

in that the other three elements relate to him in a way that they do not relate to one another. An

awareness of this fundamental interrelationship among the elements which make up protest is

clearly displayed by the writers whose texts are the focus of this study.

Thus, instead of the issues which incite protest (social injustice, dictatorship and corruption, for

example) being at the core of the protest dynamic, five of the six writers whose texts form the

basis of this study place the protester at the core of the study. As such, the novels‟ concerns are

refracted through the perspectives of characters who engage in diverse forms of protest. This

leads to a much more effective examination of protest as opposed to the less-imaginative strategy

of merely depicting issues that trigger protest. Characters like Chris, Nkem and Beatrice (Anthills

of the Savannah), Debby Ogendembe (Destination Biafra), Idemudia (Violence), Ogugua

(Arrows of Rain) and Lomba (Waiting for an Angel) are all protesters who become the centres of

consciousness in their respective novels. Protest thus shapes the narrative in these novels in an

unobtrusive yet effective way.

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Given its ostensible centrality to most notions of protest, ideology is surprisingly absent in most

of the texts. Apart from Iyayi‟s Violence which clearly adopts a class analysis approach to

society and indirectly advocates a complete alteration of existing social, economic and political

relations, the other novels do not posit the adoption of a particular political system as a means of

resolving social issues. It is argued that this stems from several reasons: a desire to avoid lapsing

into propaganda, a belief that ideological rigidity hinders rather than facilitates the resolution of

social ills, and a lack of faith in the viability of the more radical ideologies to achieve social,

political and economic advancement. In some novels, radical ideological stances are actually

satirized, as in Anthills of the Savannah and Waiting for an Angel. Even Iyayi does not explicitly

advocate the emergence of a Marxist society in his novel. This appears to indicate that the

absence of ideology does not weaken the treatment of protest in the novels, and in fact frees the

writers to look at the issue in a manner that is devoid of political partisanship, and therefore more

insightful than it otherwise would have been. The texts are works of art, and ideology must be

subordinated to art, or else it will no longer be literature. The authors seem to be suggesting that

ideological perspectives, while not bad in themselves, have a tendency to limit the effectiveness

of protest.

The study is made up of six chapters. The first chapter is an introduction and a detailed

background to the study, and sets out to offer a comprehensive definition of protest, its

manifestation in society and its emergence in literature.

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The second chapter seeks to establish a theoretical and critical context for the study. It examines

the questions of social relevance in literature, the relationship that obtains between different

generations of writers, and the nature of aesthetic response of individual writers to the harsh

socio-political realities of Nigeria. The theoretical approaches applied in the study are also

highlighted by discussing their relevance to the texts.

The third chapter investigates the forms of socio-political protest inherent in Achebe‟s Anthills of

the Savannah. It claims that protest has always been implicit in Achebe‟s oeuvre, and that

Anthills of the Savannah brings together most of the protest-related themes and motifs that can

be discerned in previous works.

The fourth chapter focuses on Omotoso‟s Just Before Dawn and Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra.

It examines the way in which history can be manipulated to shape the national narrative to suit

those in power to the detriment of the ordinary Nigerian citizen. The chapter looks at the way in

which the status of Omotoso‟s novel as a work of faction and Emecheta‟s concentration on

feminine perspectives of the Nigerian civil war enable them to effectively highlight and analyse

these issues.

Chapter Five interrogates the epistemology of power relations between the elite and the working

class as demonstrated in Iyayi‟s Violence. The chapter shows the way in which injustice and

oppression are inherent in the fabric of society as it is presently constituted, thereby making a

radical overthrow a strong possibility. Protest is seen to be closely linked to growing awareness

of these issues.

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Chapter Six examines the way in which the reality of military dictatorship conspires to bring

about the degeneration of values as portrayed in Ndibe‟s Arrows of Rain and Habila‟s

Waiting for an Angel. The chapter emphasises the uniqueness of the two authors‟ approach to

the issues they portray using the medium of protest, and highlights the ways in which they revise

the approaches of their predecessors.

In its conclusion, the study brings together all the issues discussed. Research findings are

summed up and their implications explained. Areas for further research are also set out.

The importance of this study lies in the fact that it takes a new look at the imperative questions of

social relevance in literature, the relationships that obtain between different generations of

writers and the nature of aesthetic response of individual writers to the stifling socio-political

realities in Nigeria.

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CHAPTER ONE

SOCIAL PROTEST AND LITERATURE: A BACKGROUND

Protest: A Definition

As a concept, protest is open to a variety of definitions, some of which stand in stark contrast to

one another. When protest is considered as a social phenomenon that is ubiquitous in any

society, the problems of definition surrounding it become immediately apparent. Merriam

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines protest as “a solemn declaration of opinion and

[usually] of dissent … the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval … organized public

demonstration of disapproval … a complaint, objection, or display of unwillingness [usually] to

an idea or a course of action” (938). The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines protest

in similar terms as “an expression or declaration of objection, disapproval, or dissent, often in

opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid” (1554).

From the two dictionary definitions given above, it can be seen that protest is clearly related to

assertive demonstrations of commitment to the continued growth, development and progress of

any society. Protest is the main instrument for the accomplishment of what Paulo Freire calls

“the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their

oppressors as well” (21). As an expression of opposition or dissent, protest involves an overt

response to articulations of power and authority, and assumes the existence of social, political

and economic relationships in which individuals or groups disagree with one another, and go on

to express such disagreement in a variety of ways.

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The history of protest‟s origin as a word also helps to illuminate its contemporary meanings. It

apparently first made its appearance in 1340 as the Latin word protestari, to “declare publicly,

testify, protest,” and it is composed of the root pro, “forth, before” and testari, “testify,” which

comes from testis, “witness.” Protestari retains its meaning up till today, in the expression

“protesting one‟s innocence.” Protest‟s meaning as “a statement of disapproval” was first

recorded in 1751, while that of “expressing of dissent from, or rejection of, prevailing mores”

first arose in 1953, during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. “Protest” as a verb

was first seen in 1440. It had the meaning of “to declare or state formally or solemnly,” and it

comes from the Old French protester. The use of the word in the expression “protest march” first

began in 1959, while “protester,” meaning “demonstrator, public opponent of established order”

appeared a year later, in 1960 (The Online Etymological Dictionary).

The etymology of the word “protest” demonstrates that it has, from the very beginning, been

associated with notions of self-assertion at the individual or group level within a context that is

simultaneously adversarial and social. The Latin protestari, with its implication of a public

declaration, is invariably associated with argument and contending views, and it is not surprising

that, about four centuries later, it took on the much more specific and sharper connotation of a

statement of disapproval. This latter meaning carries implications of right and wrong, and places

greater emphasis on the need for the one making the protest to assert his opposition to whatever

it is that he disapproves of. In other words, he was, in a significant way, at odds with certain

other members of his society. Given the trajectory it had traced, it is not surprising that protest

next appeared within the profoundly contentious context of the American Civil Rights movement

some two centuries later. It is easy to see how an assertion of disapproval could be transformed

into a demand for equality under the law; after all, a person who censures or condemns an

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ongoing situation in society is very likely to also be a person who seeks to change that which he

disapproves of, and this was precisely what Civil Rights activists wanted.

The word “protest” as embedded in Roget’s Super Thesaurus has synonyms of varying accuracy,

all of which attempt to convey roughly the same meaning of the concrete demonstration of

opposition or support for a social trend, government policy, or momentous situation. They

include “objection, remonstrance, complaint, grievance, march, demonstration, strike, riot,

boycott, rally, sit-in, stink, fuss, picketing, challenge (454). Many scholars of protest prefer to

speak of protest in terms of a “protest movement,” that is, protest as a mass rather than an

individual phenomenon aimed at significant social, political and economic change. In this study,

the preferred term is “social protest” because it appears to properly contextualise protest as a

fundamentally social activity, motivated by social needs and aimed at specifically societal ends.

In The Art of Moral Protest, James M. Jasper defines protest as “explicit criticism of other

people, organizations, and the things they believe or do” (5). He also defines it as “an effort to

realize a moral vision” (9). Protest is open to so many definitions primarily because of its nature.

As a social phenomenon, it is virtually omnipresent in human society because it is manifested in

any situation in which there is a disagreement of some sort. However, it takes on a variety of

forms that are so disparate that the only thing that qualifies them to be called “protest” is the fact

that they are usually expressing opposition to a given state of affairs. In a typical industrial action

launched by protesting workers, for example, protest can take the form of blockading the gates

so that no work is done at all; working to rule, that is, strictly conforming to particular working

procedures in such a way that overall efficiency is slowed down; rioting, which may consist of

destroying company property, or battling with the police and other security operatives.

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Another reason why protest assumes so many different manifestations is to be found in the way

in which it adapts to the cultural practices of the specific society in which it is found. Protest is

an amorphous, all-encompassing phenomenon which is so ubiquitous in human society that it

can be said with some justification that almost any action may constitute protest, as long as it

seeks to express opposition to or support for an existing situation or state of affairs. This stems

from the fact that the situations which induce protest are themselves wide-ranging in nature, and

thus the responses to them are themselves likely to be similarly variegated, and indeed tailored to

suit their causes if they are to be effective. Thus, individuals protest mildly, even playfully, in

response to perceived minor issues, but angrily and even violently when the issues are regarded

by them as urgent or vital. Apart from its wide emotional range, the methods of protest differ so

widely that they may even be seen to be contradictory; hence, protest can be seen in doing

something, or refusing to do it, or doing it very slowly, or doing it very quickly, or doing it at an

inappropriate time.

Protests may take virtually any form whatsoever. Petition-writing is a popular form of protest in

highly-literate societies; self-immolation, self-mutilation and hunger strikes are commonly seen

in cultures where a high premium is placed on self-denial as demonstrative of religious purity or

personal discipline; sit-ins, teach-ins and similar forms of intrusive actions were a dominant

feature of the American Civil Rights movement because of the way in which they gave

heightened visibility to hitherto marginalized African Americans; work-to-rule strategies were

favoured in labour-related protests because of the way in which they slowed down work

activities without actually suspending work; marches and rallies appear to have cross-cultural

appeal because the assemblage of large numbers of protesters convincingly conveys

unmistakable impressions of unity, determination and a sense of purpose. Environmentalist

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protesters chain themselves to trees, making it impossible for the trees to be cut down. Women in

some African societies may ritually or literally strip themselves naked by removing part of their

clothes, or by making themselves partially or completely naked.

The amorphous nature of protest is further demonstrated by the fact that protest groups even

confront one another over the efficacy and appropriateness of their methods and strategies.

August Meir and Elliot Rudwick highlight the “protest rivalry” between the militant and

moderate wings of the Civil Rights movement in the United States: “Direct actionists often

criticized the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] for being

dominated by a conservative black bourgeoisie wedded to a program of legal action and

gradualism” (10).

The culture-specific nature of protest is underlined by the way in which new forms and ways of

protest continue to appear even in contemporary times. In the late eighties, anti-apartheid

protesters in the United States issued the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell with a so-called “Discredit

Card,” for continuing to invest in the then-apartheid South Africa. This was a form of protest

which leveraged the growing popularity of cashless payment systems and turned it into a public

relations crisis for the company. In the United States, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American

soldier who had been killed in Iraq, set up a camp outside then-President George W. Bush‟s

ranch in Texas, claiming that she would not leave until he told her why her son had died. With

the growth of information technology, protests have become increasingly sophisticated affairs,

with many protest movements going online to mobilize support, raise funds and to collaborate on

the best ways of getting their messages across to the wider society.

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The culture-specific nature of protest activities should not obscure the fact that they are aimed at

making a given society better than it currently appears to be, and in pursuance of this protests

take either of two main directions: they can be culture-affirming or culture-repudiating. When a

protest is culture-affirming, it is said to be seeking the retention or upholding of certain cultural

practices, government policies or existing situations which are in danger of being degraded,

changed or eliminated completely. The protests embarked upon by conservative groups are a

good example of culture-affirming protest activity. The best-known include anti-abortion

protests, anti-gay marriage protests, opposition to the increased secularization of society, the

prevention of obscenity and indecency in media, and the retention of the death penalty. Protest

activities that are culture-repudiating are those which seek social, economic or cultural change of

some sort, usually in order to empower social groups that are marginalised or disempowered

under the current scheme of things. This is the better-known manifestation of protest, and

includes anti-colonialism protests, pro-immigration protests, pro-euthanasia protests, anti-death

penalty protests, affirmative-action protests and pro-choice protests.

The distinction between protests which are aimed at upholding or advocating the continuation of

social practices that are felt to be in danger of disappearing and those that seek the

discontinuance of social practices that are deemed to be harmful to society is an important one,

because it clearly demonstrates the fact that protests do not necessarily oppose a given state of

affairs, but may also seek to uphold and support existing conditions. It also shows that protesters

are as motivated by the fear of what they might lose as by what they hope to gain. This

distinction also shows that protest is inextricably interwoven with culture; it cannot stand alone –

protest is nothing without something to protest against. Protest is thus shaped by the dynamics

that culture itself, especially the notion of cultural change that results in the significant alteration

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of fundamental cultural practices relating to marriage, education, work, the family and individual

social status.

Even though this is not immediately apparent, protest is one of the major ways in which a society

is able to make progress. Some of the most significant epochs in human history were driven by

protest movements in different areas of human endeavour, utilising different tactics and

involving a very diverse range of actors. They include the Reformation in medieval Europe, the

1789 French Revolution, the October 1917 revolution in Russia, the American Revolution, the

Civil Rights movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

Each of these movements was characterized by the sustained opposition of a group or groups of

people to an existing state of affairs which they believed did not favour them, and which they felt

compelled to fight against. The main weapon deployed by them was that of protest which took a

variety of different forms, incorporating intellectual debate, street demonstrations, parliamentary

agitation, riots and war.

In Africa, protest has been an effective weapon with which many countries have thrown off the

colonial yoke and gained independence. Because of its inherently violent nature, Frantz Fanon

believes that the most effective form of protest against colonialism is violence: “From birth it is

clear to [the colonial subject] that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called

in question by absolute violence” (37). Fanon thus demonstrates an important characteristic of

the phenomenon of protest: if it is to be effective, protest must adapt itself to the nature of what it

is protesting against. In other words, the method of protest is to a large extent shaped by the

issues being protested. This does not, however exclude the fact that the tactics used to protest

similar situations may differ radically. In India, for example, Mahatma Ghandi opposed British

colonialism and sought independence through the adoption of non-violent resistance which he

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held to steadfastly even in the face of intense provocation from the colonial authorities. By

contrast, Vietnam, another Asian country, engaged the colonial power, France, in an outright war

of independence with which it secured its freedom.

In describing the process of decolonization, Frantz Fanon underlines the importance of protest

when he speaks of a complete questioning of the fundamental pillars of injustice, inequity,

exploitation and racism upon which colonialism is based:

In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of

the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the

well-known words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the

putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all

decolonization is successful (37).

It is clear that, for Fanon, protest is the main process through which the colonial situation is

questioned, defied, and ultimately repudiated.

Even after colonialism ended, its deleterious effects were still present in the lives of those it had

been imposed on. As Edward W. Said observes:

To have been colonized was a fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results,

especially after national independence had been achieved. Poverty, dependency,

under-development, various pathologies of power and corruption, plus of course

notable achievements in war, literacy, economic development: this mix of

characteristics designated the colonized people who had freed themselves on one

level but who remained victims of their past on another (294-5).

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The “calling in question” referred to by Fanon is an essential part of the dynamic of protest.

Before a protest can be embarked upon, there must be a lack of satisfaction, which coalesces into

the dissent that is openly expressed through protest. Awareness represents the first stage of

protest, and is essential to its durability, popular appeal and ultimate success or failure.

The dynamics of protest are such that it involves what the study calls a “fatal embrace” in which

those on the different sides of an issue are irresistibly drawn to one another. In any protest

situation, there is an “instigator,” whose actions trigger the protest, and “reactors” who are

affected by the actions of the instigator and respond by embarking on protest. Sometimes, the

reactors are not necessarily affected by the issue in contention, and may be protesting on behalf

of those who are directly affected, but are in some way powerless to voice their dissent. Protest

therefore brings individuals and groups together, albeit reluctantly, in a way that almost no other

social phenomenon does. To this extent, protest is demonstrative of the nature of the relationship

that obtains between different individuals and social groups in a given society. The fact that the

intensity of a protest is directly proportional to the perceived depth of oppression shows that they

are not so much distinct as they are symbiotic; they feed off each other, each requiring the other

for its fullest meaning.

One of the main problems in defining protest is that of adequately characterising a phenomenon

that is capable of manifestation across widely dispersed countries, different cultures and different

historical eras. What might be considered a form of protest in one country might not be deemed

as such in another. Within a particular country, individuals might be in disagreement as to what

exactly constitutes legitimate or appropriate protest as opposed to mere vandalism and

lawlessness. Even the very character of protest itself is open to question: is it purely an activity,

an attitude or state of mind, or is it in some way a complex combination of both? For the

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purposes of this study, protest will be examined from a variety of related perspectives,

specifically the forms it takes, the categories into which it can be put, its evolution over time, its

manifestation in Nigeria, and the way in which it has been portrayed in literature.

It can be seen from what has been discussed above that definitions of what protest is are

complicated by its all-encompassing nature. Protest cannot be limited by notions of whether it is

“political,” or overtly aggressive, or aimed at achieving radical social change. Instead of looking

exclusively at its content, this study defines protest by its intention, namely whether or not it is at

variance with an existing or proposed state of affairs. The study therefore defines protest as any

verbal or non-verbal means by which an individual or a group expresses disagreement with or

support for an existing or proposed state of affairs in all or part of a given society, and/or seeks to

alter or maintain it, either by ending the said state of affairs, by replacing it with something else,

or by maintaining it. Protest is not just a means of ventilating grievances, but is also an arena for

the clash of opposing views because it compels those on all sides of a given issue to consciously

articulate and propagate the ideas that form the basis of the issues they are protesting for or

against.

The Evolution of Protest

While it is true to say that protest has been extant for as long as there has been human society, it

is obvious that protest as an activity, as a state of mind, and as a social phenomenon has evolved

over the centuries from uncoordinated acts of discontent to the very sophisticated and highly

organized movements that are observable today. Using Western Europe as a template, many

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scholars of protest have designated three main phases in the evolution of protest. They are the

pre-industrial, the industrial and the post-industrial phases of protest (Jasper, 6).

The pre-industrial era of protest refers to the era between the medieval period and the nineteenth

century, when European societies were still agrarian before the advent of the Industrial

Revolution. Due to the highly religious, agrarian and rural nature of the European societies of the

time, protest had an overwhelmingly religious character, and often sought the redress of basic

human desires such as hunger, farming and fishing rights and religious imposition. The protests

of this era often sought to retain the status quo, as opposed to changing it. With the growth of

cities, there was increased scope for protests targeted directly at social and institutional groups

that were regarded, rightly or wrongly, to be the cause of specific grievances. In this regard,

many pre-industrial protests often targeted religious minorities like Jews and Protestants,

occupational groups like tax-collectors, traders and merchants, as well as unduly oppressive or

tyrannical overlords. The methods used to carry out such protests were relatively crude and

reflected the relative lack of sophistication of the protesters themselves who were often from the

lower social classes. The methods more often than not involved violence of some sort, including

physical assault, arson and looting. At the tail end of the pre-industrial era, in the late 18th

century, increasing urbanisation and the emergence and increasing influence of the middle class

resulted in the emergence of new methods of protest, such as the boycott, petition-writing and

urban rebellion. Such methods reflected new desires and demands, rather than just the retention

of the existing order, and they included demands for increased rights, especially regarding an

increased say in governance.

The modern industrial era, which began in Britain in the late 18th

century, witnessed the

flourishing of protest as an organized activity. The enormous social, economic and political

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changes taking place at the time led to extreme discomfort for those social groups that were at

the receiving end of these changes. The development of industrialisation and mass-production

processes threw millions of craft workers into the labour market and caused great social distress

(Thomson, 112-118). The rural areas were not spared either, as an increasing percentage of

agricultural output went into industry, thereby causing severe food shortages. Many of the

protests of this era took on a labour-rights outlook, and ranged from the total rejection of

industrialisation, as seen in the activities of machine-breakers and Luddites to industrial workers

who agitated for increased wages and better conditions of service. It can therefore be seen that

the driving force behind many protests in the industrial era was the demand for additional rights

and privileges as opposed to maintaining the status quo. The main targets of protest during this

era were industrialists and the governments that sanctioned their activities. The rise of socialism

and Marxism during this era also provided a theoretical basis for identifying the emergence of a

new dominant class whose power was essentially based on the possession of capital rather than

land or the privileges of birth, and as a result, protest began to take on a class character which

continues to shape its contemporary manifestations. The methods of protest employed during the

industrial era reflected both the complex nature of the issues in question as well as the growing

sophistication of the protesters themselves, and they included mass mobilization and rallies,

strikes, media campaigns and appeals to legislative and executive authorities.

The post-industrial era of protest may be said to have emerged in the 1960s in Western Europe

and North America. It is distinguished by the emergence of new protests and disputes on issues

that had either been ignored or had long been suppressed. Many of such protests are rights-based,

such as demands of social, economic and political rights for socially-marginalised groups like

ethnic minorities, the handicapped and indigenous peoples. They also include demands of greater

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recognition for and acknowledgement of newly-emergent or suppressed lifestyles, such as

environmentalists, New Age religionists, atheists and conscientious objectors. They may also

include those who protest against perceived threats that are relatively new on the scene, such as

nuclear technology, globalisation, global warming and genetically modified crops. In many

cases, the focus of these post-industrial protests is strongly cultural in orientation, the main

demand being that of social inclusion and the official recognition of their concerns by the state.

However, this is not to say that the concerns of post-industrial protesters are not economic or

social; it is simply that the sophistication of their demands makes them so all-encompassing that

they cannot be restricted to so-called “bread and butter” issues alone. The tactics they adopt are a

reflection of the sophistication of these groups and the technologies that are available to them.

Such methods include the use of the internet as a tool of publicity and mass mobilization, the

resort to symbolic acts of protest, the active lobbying of legislative authorities among others.

Closely related to these phases of protest are the emergence of what Jasper calls “citizenship

movements” and “post-citizenship movements (Jasper 7-9). As defined by him, a citizenship

movement relates to those forms of protest which “were organized by and on behalf of categories

of people excluded in some way from full human rights, political participation, or basic

economic protections” (Jasper 7). The main focus was on acquiring rights which were deemed to

be fundamental to the full citizenship of a given society, and included workers, women and

ethnic minorities. Post-citizenship movements, as the name suggests, were made up of citizens

who were already enjoying most of their society‟s social, economic and political rights, but

whose focus was on pursuing “protection or benefits for others, including on occasion the entire

human species” (Jasper 7). Such protesters often focussed on alcohol and drug abuse, banning

smoking, opposition to war and the mitigation of global warming. Citizenship and post-

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citizenship movements encompass/straddle all three phases of the evolution of protest, as aspects

of them are visible in the pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial eras.

In considering the evolution of protest, it is important to remember that the phases outlined

above are not discrete, watertight categories. Rather, they shade into one another in such a way

that features of one phase may be detected in another. This is especially true of the industrial and

post-industrial eras. Many of the methods and tactics of protest developed in the industrial era,

for example, are still being used in the post-industrial era, even though the targets and objectives

of such protests may have changed. The withdrawal of labour, or strike, as it is better known, is

still a prominent feature of many post-industrial protests, particularly those seeking economic

rights of marginalized groups.

It is possible to utilise these categories which are based on the experience of western countries

and adapt them to the Nigerian experience. Looking at the evolution of protest in Nigeria, it is

possible to categorise three interrelated phases of protest, each with its own motivating factors,

strategies and targets. They are the pre-colonial, colonial and the post-colonial eras of protest.

The pre-colonial era relates to protest activities which took place in the indigenous communities

of pre-independence Nigeria. The issues, targets and methods of protest were shaped by the

status of those communities as either agrarian or trading, as well as traditional norms and values.

Like pre-industrial Europe, the protests of this era were aimed at maintaining a beneficial status

quo, resisting the high-handedness of those in authority and ensuring that traditional norms were

not eroded.

The colonial era relates to the protest activities which occurred after the advent of British

colonialism in Nigeria. Most of the protest activities of this era sought to lessen the various

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depredations of colonialism on the indigenes, especially taxes, forced labour and harsh working

conditions. The main tactics were a combination of indigenous and western-inspired methods, an

example of the former being the use of ritual nakedness by women to force traditional rulers who

sided with the colonialists into exile, while the coal miners‟ strike of 1946 led by Pa Michael

Imodu is an example of the latter.

The post-colonial era of protest in Nigeria refers to the protest activities which took place after

the country gained independence in 1960. Protest tactics were more varied in approach,

reflecting the fact that protesters were no longer fighting a common enemy, as well as the fact

that post-independence protest took on political, ethnic and other colourations. As Nigerians

become more educated, protest objectives became more demanding, tactics and methods became

more sophisticated, while the targets of protest became more amorphous because they had

expanded to include varied authority figures rather than just political leaders. Protests during the

post-colonial era in Nigeria were also significantly affected by whether the Federal Government

was military or civilian in orientation, as the former was generally less tolerant of protest than

the latter, although its repressiveness ironically gave rise to problems that were sometimes more

strident than those which took place during the era of civilian administrations.

Theoretical Approaches to Protest

Because it takes place in human society, protest is fundamentally a sociological phenomenon.

Considered from this viewpoint, sociologists have evolved/formulated four basic paradigms

which seek to explain the social phenomenon that is protest, taking cognisance of its causes,

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effects, aims and distinctive characteristics. These are the crowd approach, the rationalist

approach, the mobilization paradigm and the political process approach.

The Crowd Approach

The crowd approach to protest is a theory of protest which conceives of it as an irregular

emotional and irrational phenomenon in which mobs of over-excited people are driven by a herd

mentality rather than any real drive to redress grievances or right wrongs. Its main proponents

included Gustave le Bon, Clark McPhail and Japp van Ginneken. They argued that the tensions

and stresses inherent in times of profound social change created unusual situations of social

unrest which inevitably led to collective action. Protest was seen as essentially a mass action

carried out by individuals who lacked ties to stable institutions and were consequently free of the

social bonds that would have otherwise governed and controlled their behaviour (Kornhauser

60). Divorced from conventional behavioural restraints on behaviour, therefore, crowds were

possessed of a so-called “herd mentality” which drove them to collectively express their

frustrations via protest. This is what Robert M. Fogelson has called the “riffraff theory” of riot

participation (27). Some advocates of the crowd approach to protest redefined the

characterisation of protesters as irrational, and preferred to call them creative instead. Scholars

like Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian argued that the peculiar ambience of a crowd compelled

those who were part of it to act in ways that were creative responses to the situation in which

they found themselves.

The strengths of the crowd approach lay in the way in which it was able to explain the

phenomenon of mass protest, the way in which protest often appeared to be crowd-driven, as

well as the manner in which protest constituted a contravention of social norms and values. Its

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main weakness was its inability to concede that crowds are not necessarily irrational simply

because they are crowds, and the possibility that self-interest can also serve to motivate the

actions of a crowd.

The Rationalist Approach

The rationalist approach to protest emerged in the mid-1960s. It occupied the other extreme of

the spectrum when compared to the crowd approach because it saw protest as the conscious

actions of individuals who knew exactly what they were doing and what their goals in embarking

on protest were. The main advocates of this theory are Mancur Olsen, Albert Hirschman and

Russell Hardin. Arguing that people would not invest time and energy in protest without a clear

expectation of what they hoped to gain, these theorists claimed that protesters had a variety of

benefits coming from their actions, including financial gains, altruistic benefits and the

satisfaction of unconscious social expectations. The rationalist approach helps to account for the

fact that people with similar kinds of grievances tend to protest in the same groups, and the

often-ignored fact that it is usually those who have something to gain who embark on protest,

rather than those with something to lose. The main weakness of the theory is its characterisation

of individuals who engage in protest as coldly calculating beings who are on the lookout for the

fulfilment of their own interests to the detriment of all else.

The Mobilization Paradigm

This approach to protest arose in the 1970s, and it sought to characterise protest as a normal

human activity, carried out by normal people whose goals were reasonable. Most importantly,

the mobilization paradigm sought to show that the ability of protest movements to properly

mobilize existing resources determined their success or failure to a large extent. Protagonists of

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this approach included John McCarthy, Mayer Zald and Anthony Oberschall, and they focussed

on the organisational and institutional aspects of protest. They showed that protest of any kind

required manpower, resources, time and energy, all of which had to be effectively identified,

mobilized and deployed if protest was to achieve the desired end. The theory is useful in

explaining the highly sophisticated nature of contemporary protest movements, especially the

roles in which full-time activists, fund-raisers and other protest professionals have evolved a

structured approach to the idea of protest. One of the main weaknesses of the theory, however, is

that it sometimes defines the notion of resources too loosely, sometimes including emotions

among them, even though such elements are not easy to define and quantify. The mobilization

paradigm also has a tendency to overemphasise the rational motives that inspire protest at the

expense of other motivations which may be just as appropriate.

The Political Process Approach

Emerging in the late 70s, the political process approach to protest focuses on the way in which

protest simultaneously responds to and interacts with the state and with governance structures.

Often regarded as a fully-developed offshoot of the mobilization paradigm, its major

practitioners include Charles Tilly, William Gamson, Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam. They

argue that protest takes place within the context of industrialisation, urbanization and the

emergence of the nation-state, all of which changed the nature of protest itself. As political

structures evolved, protest movements adapted accordingly, often seeking to take advantage of

the new opportunities provided by the emergence of less-repressive institutions and increased

democratization of the structures of government. Political process theorists claimed that all

protest is at heart a means whereby a group of people interact with the state in order to achieve

their ends, and the extent to which they are successful will depend to a great extent on their

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understanding and manipulation of political structures. The approach helps to clarify the

relationship between protest and politics, highlighting the ways and strategies in which diverse

protest groups sought to achieve their goals by exploiting the political opportunities open to

them. However, its main weakness is that it often characterises protest movements as far more

rigid than they really are, and over-extends the notion of political opportunities.

Social Protest in Literature

Ngugi wa Thiong‟o is only stating the obvious when he claims that writers are especially

sensitive to their environment. This acuteness of perception is observable in their work: “A

writer responds, with his total personality, to a social environment which changes all the time.

Being a kind of sensitive needle, he registers, with varying degrees of accuracy and success, the

conflicts and tensions in his changing society” (47). Protest is perhaps the most effective

demonstration of this sensitivity because it shows the writer‟s grasp of the problems and

challenges facing his community. Since protest inevitably brings him into conflict with powerful

and influential forces, it is not embarked upon lightly, and therefore represents a genuine

commitment on the part of the writer to serve as an accurate barometer of the community‟s fears

and hopes. In a similar manner, Bernth Lindfors claims that “Writers have served not only as

chroniclers of contemporary political history but also as advocates of radical social change. Their

works thus both reflect and project the cause of Africa‟s cultural revolution” (135).

Even if the writer had no idea of these weighty responsibilities, society itself ensures that he is

not ignorant of them. According to Emmanuel Obiechina, “We expect the novelist in exploring

the values of society to contribute substantially to social and moral insight, to the vision of the

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good life” (93). Regardless of his own motivation for writing – which may range from the

egocentric to the altruistic – the writer is widely regarded as occupying a moral pedestal that

simultaneously imbues him with ethical authority and equips him with the vision with which he

will help guide society.

African literature was born in protest and sustained by protest. The social, political and economic

circumstances in which it arose could not have made it otherwise, as Charles Nnolim states:

The lachrymal nature of modern African literature made it inevitable for that

literature to start by blaming the white man for everything wrong with us,

castigating him for exploiting our resources and debasing our humanity. We also

blamed the white man for not granting us, at least, flag independence to allow us

develop ourselves. And when the white man threw in the towel, our eyes were

opened to the rapacity, greed, myopia and the corrupt tendencies of our

indigenous politicians (3).

Paraphrasing the Ghanaian leader, Kwame Nkrumah, Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Munro

succinctly establish the background against which African literature came to be shaped so

profoundly by notions of protest:

Recoiling from this strait-jacketing, a number of authors tried to imbibe, and

invoke, and impress, every vital spirit from outside the metropolis of the

administering power. Though each writer or group of associated writers drew

inspiration and sustaining substance from differing aboriginal atmospheres and

political climates, each according to his situation found himself voicing the

protest and conflict of his place and time. That is how the modern African

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literature of social commitment came into being, and came to dramatize the

conflict and protest of the African scene and in African communities in their

different twentieth-century stages (ix).

From this perspective, it can be seen that protest in African literature was a natural response to

colonial oppression and injustice, and had to be expressed if the literature was to faithfully mirror

the hopes and fears of the societies in which it was based.

In order to fully understand the ways in which social protest is manifested in literature, it is

pertinent to examine the ways in which the literary genres of poetry, prose and drama serve as

appropriate vehicles for the conveyance of protest-related issues.

Poetry can be defined as a piece of writing or speech arranged in consciously designed patterns

of lines and sounds which seeks to imaginatively express some important truth, feeling or

opinion. Its emphasis on personal feelings and attitudes, especially as can be found in poetic

forms like the lyric make it an especially useful medium for the expression of protest. Many of

the poems contained in William Blake‟s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are lyrics

which expressed their author‟s strong opposition to organised religion, the enthronement of

rationality and the dominance of science. Other poetic types like the verse epistle, the pastoral

and the satire were explicitly designed in form and in content to state opposition to social

conduct that was deemed reprehensible: the verse epistle highlights social vices in the form of a

letter written by a high-minded person to another detailing why he departed the city for the

pleasures of rural life; the pastoral stresses the identification of happiness with simple, natural

existence (240). and contrasts it favourably with the sophisticated worldliness and corruption of

the city; poetic satires are unambiguous protest, since they seek “to ridicule folly or vice in a

46

society, an institution or in an individual” (Quinn, 291). In Africa, there was also a tradition of

satirical poetry, such as the Yoruba ewi in which deviations from established social norms were

wittily highlighted and excoriated. Modern African poets imitated David Diop, who “called for a

poetry … which would burst the eardrums of those who would not listen” (Nkosi, 140). Even

seemingly conservative types of poetry like the epic which aimed at celebrating heroic nation-

builders often implicitly protested the moral and other weaknesses which confronted the heroes,

and which, by implication, are still present in contemporary society.

Poetry‟s often highly elliptical nature has made the genre a favoured tool with which literary

artists over the ages have protested the shortcomings of oppressive rulers and harsh societies and

gotten away with it. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, an African American poet, was able to express his

anguish at the widespread racism of his society without attracting censure by using a deceptively

simple style which couched his feelings in profound symbols. Literary history is replete with

poets who defied danger and coercion by expressing their opposition to perceived injustice in

their work. They include Pablo Neruda, Dennis Brutus, Jack Mapanje and Wole Soyinka.

Prose, or more accurately, fiction, refers to those works of literature that appear as continuous

unbroken text and consists of short stories, novellas and novels. Because they are often much

longer than either poetry or drama, fiction is capable of examining issues in great detail, and this

makes it the pre-eminent genre for the portrayal of human beings within the context of society. It

is the literary genre that has lent itself to the requirements of society more than any other.

Fiction‟s origins in the picaresque novel have imbued it with a formidable capacity to question

the moral assumptions of a complacent social order. Early European works of fiction like Miguel

Cervantes‟ Don Quixote and Henry Fielding‟s Tom Jones probed the self-deceptions of the

privileged classes, and as such, protested the essential immorality of societies where greater

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emphasis was placed on appearance rather than reality. In Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe,

another early work of fiction, empiricism is celebrated as an antidote to ignorant superstition and

aggressive ambition is favourably contrasted with passivity. Writers like Charles Dickens,

Thomas Hardy and George Eliot carefully delineated the momentous social, political and

economic issues of the time in their novels, and they were among the first public intellectuals to

point out the enormous social costs of unchecked industrialisation and urbanisation that swept

across Britain in the 19th

century.

The ability of fiction to recreate plausible social situations has made it particularly attractive to

protest, and writers like Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy and John Steinbeck used it to bring situations

of great social distress to the knowledge of the wider public. The rise of proletarian fiction in the

1930s also demonstrated the manner in which fiction could become an effective tool of protest

by advancing the views, interests and conditions of previously marginalised social groups.

In Africa, the novel has long served to protest the continent‟s social, political and economic

challenges. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe has protested the arrogant assumptions of the

British colonialists, arguing that “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from

Europeans” (8); in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ayi Kwei Armah protests the

corruption and decay that blighted the promise of a newly-independent Ghana; in Petals of

Blood, Ngugi wa Thiong‟o harshly critiques the social, political and economic arrangements put

in place in post-colonial Kenya which have led to an all-pervasive crime and poverty.

In the particular context of contemporary Nigeria, novelists play a particularly crucial role:

If Nigeria is a go-slow, Nigerian novelists regard themselves as traffic cops. They

want to straighten things out, to help get things moving, to direct people toward

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social improvement. The transition to a modern, democratic, prosperous society

has become bogged down somehow, and writers give themselves the hard task of

unscrambling the mess (Griswold 269).

Drama may be described as literary works in which actors assume roles before an audience. It

also refers to the total body of work written for the theatre. Drama is the oldest of the literary

genres, and is rooted in myth and ritual. When its antiquity is combined with its uniquely

performative characteristics, drama‟s viability as a vehicle of protest becomes all the more

clearer. Drama is the most social of the literary genres. It takes place in public before an

audience that has undergone the suspension of disbelief in order to absorb the actions without

any reservation. This has long enabled drama to distil the attitudes and standpoints that are the

basis of protest. The morality plays entrenched conventional ideas of good and evil, thereby

implicitly calling in question the values of those whose actions clashed with their religious

beliefs. Comedies poked fun at both the elite and the masses, enabling the bitter pill of protest to

be concealed within the sweetness of laughter. Tragedies examined important social questions on

an epic scale, and as great men fell from “grace to grass,” they indirectly questioned the validity

of a social order in which the downfall of a man was the end of his life without the possibility of

redemption.

As is the case in poetry, dramatic satires actively protested the follies and foibles of society. Ben

Jonson‟s Volpone was an outstanding example of Elizabethan drama which was all-

encompassing in its condemnation of the base desires that drive supposedly rational members of

society to indulge themselves in terrible acts of covetousness and lust. Christopher Marlowe‟s

Dr. Faustus satirizes the insatiable quest for knowledge that the age prided itself on; George

Etheredge‟s The Man of Mode brutally exposed the licentiousness which distinguished 18th

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century England, in spite of the country‟s pretensions to moral uprightness. In the modern era,

drama-based protest has taken on new forms. Bertolt Brecht developed new forms of theatre that

were designed to turn audiences from passive partakers into active participants in what was

going on on-stage and by implication in the larger society. Samuel Beckett‟s Waiting for Godot

protests the purposelessness of modern life by replicating it on stage. In plays like The Trials of

Brother Jero, Madmen and Specialists and A Play of Giants, Soyinka has repeatedly protested

the hypocrisy, lust for power and insensitivity that have compounded Africa‟s development

challenges.

Instead of the word “protest,” the drama critic Robert Brustein prefers to use “revolt,” probably

in acknowledgement of the genre‟s overtly performative status:

I have called these categories of revolt messianic, social, existential …. Messianic

revolt occurs when the dramatist rebels against God and tries to take His place ….

Social revolt occurs when the dramatist rebels against the conventions, morals and

values of the social organisation …. Existential revolt occurs when the dramatist

rebels against the conditions of his existence …. (16)

Modern drama‟s comprehensive revolt against the attitudes, behaviour and even the existential

context of society emerges naturally from the inadequacies of society itself.

Relationship between Protest and Literature

In considering the manifestation of social protest in literature, it is germane to examine the nature

of the connections which exist between protest and literature. Both of them are social

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phenomena, that is, they emerge from society, are carried out by individuals acting within their

status as members of a given society in response to issues that have arisen within society. As has

been pointed out, protest is essentially a social response by a social group to issues that are

perceived to have an adverse effect upon it or upon some other group. The aims of protest are

social in orientation because they seek to achieve the maintenance of the status quo or to change

it. In the particular case of literature, Welléck and Warren have comprehensively characterised

its immersion in a social context:

Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation.

Such traditional literary devices as symbolism and metre are social in their very

nature. They are conventions and norms which could have arisen only in society.

But, furthermore, literature „represents‟ „life‟; and „life‟ is, in large measure, a

social reality, even though the natural world and the inner or subjective world of

the individual have also been objects of literary „imitation‟. The poet himself is a

member of society, possessed of a specific social status: he receives some degree

of social recognition and reward; he addresses an audience, however hypothetical

(94).

Protest and literature are also seen to be closely related in the way in which human beings

perceive of their society and the actions that they take as a result of those perceptions. Social

protest can be said to refer to those mass movements, private initiatives, demonstrations and

other activities which support or oppose specific developments or situations in a given society,

with a view to changing it for the better. Literature, on the other hand, refers to that body of

written, verbal or performed work which exercises the imagination and seeks to offer insights

into the nature of the world and the place of humans in it.

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Arguably, social protest and literature share similar origins, require broadly similar strategies and

possess the same aims. They can therefore be said to be inextricably intertwined. This becomes

clearer in the argument that social protest is always present at some level in any work of

literature, regardless of whether it is explicitly stated or implicitly implied, and no matter what

genre of literature is being considered.

As has been previously stated, some poetic forms are condemnatory of perceived worldly and

corrupt societies and therefore constitute protests against the social order. There are literary

approaches that are utilised across genres and are specifically designed to condemn hypocrisy,

folly and vice by exposing them and holding them up to ridicule. Many literary genres arose in

peculiar socio-economic and political conditions which made them amenable to the

incorporation of attitudes and ideas which facilitated protest. Given all this, it may be said that

social protest is perhaps the clearest manifestation of man‟s innate dissatisfaction with the state

of things, and that literature is arguably the most considered and artistic manifestation of this

inherent will to protest.

Like other issues that are portrayed in literature, protest is almost always transformed by its

portrayal in a literary work. Operating in a literary context, protest cannot be considered as

purely a sociological or historical phenomenon, but in addition is also the basis of character

delineation and plot movement, a vehicle for the conveyance of the writer‟s ideas and vision, as

well as a structuring device. Protest, in other words, is manifested in literature in ways that are

multilayered, multidimensional, ambivalent and complex.

Literature is unique in the sense that it simultaneously does three things in relation to protest:

52

It reflects protest, by replicating protests that may or may not have taken place in real

life;

It refracts protest, by filtering it through a literary perspective and shaping it to meet the

imaginative and other requirements of that perspective;

It protests, by expressing opposition to, or support of policies, trends and developments it

either approves of or disapproves of.

This constitutes a uniquely literary context of protest, enabling protest to be viewed in ways that

transcend conventional analyses and readings of it as a social phenomenon.

This notion becomes clearer when literature is considered in relation to other forms of protest.

Much literature lacks the spontaneity of a demonstration or a riot; it is, ostensibly, less “political”

than placard-carrying marchers; it is ostensibly less propagandistic than the newsletters or

handbills of the average advocacy group. Yet, because literature is, in many ways, a reflection as

well as a refraction of human society in all its aspects, it possesses the unique ability to

incorporate features of other forms of protest into its own framework without ceasing to be

literature. Thus, without being spontaneous, a literary work may proffer a carefully-crafted

spontaneity; a work of literature may use propagandistic techniques to achieve its aim while

avoiding the pitfalls of conventional propaganda. Just as protest infuses society, so does protest

infuse literature. This inherence of protest in literature does not, however, exclude the existence

of a category of literature whose specific aim is to protest social shortcomings and which is

known as protest literature.

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Protest Literature

When examining a sub-category of literature such as protest literature, it is easy to forget the fact

that such categorisations often tend to overstress the distinctions that supposedly obtain between

it and other sub-categories. As Irving Howe rightly observes: “… we are hardly speaking of

genres at all when we employ such loose terms as the political or psychological novel, since

these do not mark any fundamental distinctions of literary form” (18). In order to properly situate

categorisations like these, it must first be realised that the differences which establish them are

actually more subtle than they first appear to be.

In his foreword to American Protest Literature, John Stauffer states:

I define protest literature broadly to mean the uses of language to transform the

self and change society. By language I refer not only to words, but to visual art,

music, and film. Protest literature functions as a catalyst, guide or mirror of social

change. It not only critiques some aspect of society, but also suggests, either

implicitly or explicitly, a solution to society‟s ills (xii).

Protest literature may be defined as a sub-category of literature in which the works espouse

protest explicitly, either as a major theme, a recurring motif, an overarching metaphor, or as a

structuring device. It is a literature which is characterised by the existence of a clearly-defined

viewpoint, strong moral convictions, an often-strident tone, a pronounced sense of outrage, a

clear perception of the issues at stake, and a usually optimistic belief in the ultimate triumph of

justice.

Protest literature does not necessarily utilise techniques which are radically different from those

of other categories of literature. However, they often combine such techniques in such a way as

54

to produce effects that are peculiar to the sub-category. The techniques might include a strong

emphasis on realism, the use of defamiliarization strategies, the liberal deployment of satire,

irony and paradox, the utilisation of anti-heroic characters, as well as unique methods of plot

construction, structure and narrative perspective. Its effects can include pity, anger, disgust and

awareness.

Because the main aim of protest literature is that of increasing the awareness of the audience,

many works within this sub-category use techniques of demystification that are designed to

unsettle long-held assumptions and attitudes in the audience. As identified by the Russian

formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, such techniques are centred upon the capacity of art to

defamiliarise reality by disrupting the “automatism of perception in several ways” (13). Some

protest writers use the technique of “seeing things out of their normal context” (17); others

deploy unexpected symbols and imagery (21), and the use of archaisms or dialect forms in the

language of poetry (22-23). Bertolt Brecht‟s alienation theory of alienation effect, in which he

tried to deny his audience the usual immersion in and identification with what was being enacted,

is also used by writers of protest literature (58).

Ideology is of particular importance in protest literature. The strong standpoints that are

prominent in protest literature are often enhanced by the espousal of ideological viewpoints.

Marxism and socialism in particular have significantly informed the radical outlook of many

works of protest literature. Ideology helps protest writers to offer a coherent understanding of the

issues they portray, and enables them to combine such understanding with a clear vision of the

way in which they can be effectively resolved. However, there is sometimes a tendency to

subordinate all aspects of particular social conditions to the dictates of the preferred ideology,

even where they are not seen to be completely appropriate. Some protest writers may not espouse

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a particular ideology, preferring instead to work in a tradition of liberal humanism whose focus is

more on the moral dimensions of the issues rather than the furtherance of a specific political

agenda. The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the pitfalls of political ideology and can

therefore be more closely attuned to the peculiarities of specific issues. On the other hand, such

approaches may lack the clear focus and comprehensiveness of outlook that characterises more

ideological approaches.

One of the ways in which protest literature can be understood is by assessing its aims, its features

and its techniques. Regardless of differences of culture, time and place, all protest literature

seeks a three-fold objective: to testify, to indict and to seek redress. In testifying, protest

literature consciously aims to remember and commemorate acts of injustice perpetrated against

particular persons or groups. The act of remembering honours those who suffered, celebrates

those who endured, and enables future generations to have a proper understanding of their roots.

The act of indictment is a central purpose of protest literature, and in doing so, it exposes those

implicated in acts of oppression and injustice, identifies, analyses and characterises the acts of

oppression of which they are guilty, as well as outlining the social, political and economic

factors which facilitate such oppression. It is a crucial aspect of the goals of protest literature to

symbolically and literally “name” injustice and its perpetrators so that they stand condemned by

all right-thinking people. In seeking redress, protest literature seeks to end the injustices it

portrays, as well as the punishment of perpetrators and the provision of restitution to the victims.

Such restitution is often physical and psychological because it seeks to comprehensively repair

the damage inflicted upon individuals, institutions and society as a whole over a sustained period

of time.

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One of the greatest shortcomings that characterise protest literature is that those who claim to

practise it seem to think that the moral positions they have taken excuse them from the need to

pay appropriate attention to the aesthetic requirements of their work. In Nigerian poetry, for

instance, the admirably high levels of social commitment are often undermined by ironically

proportionately deficiencies in their craftsmanship: “While there can be no doubting these poets‟

sincerity or the depth of their anguish, the unending self-righteousness of the narrative voice, the

artless predictability of the sentiments and the clichéd language of „protest‟ undermine … the

force of so many of these poems, as poems” (Brown 61). It is possible to see in this trend some

reaction against the extremes of the arts-for-art‟s-sake protagonists, an insufficient understanding

of the way protest should work in literature, and an overwhelming desire to appear to be

“relevant.”

Such shortcomings have strengthened criticisms of protest literature which has been subject to

attack almost since it first appeared, especially by those who feel that its emergence is not in the

furtherance of the best interests of literature as a whole. James Baldwin famously criticises the

protest novel for what he sees as its tendencies to reinforce the very things it inveighs against to

the extent that it actually comes to depend on those very situations for its own existence. Thus

the denunciation implicit in protest becomes more important than the wellbeing of those on

whose behalf the work claims to protest: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of

life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his

categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (18). Considering that

Baldwin himself went on to write some of the most memorable protest essays in American

letters, it can be said that he is guilty of overstating his position. It is true that protest fiction can

all too easily become a fashionable trend and so lose the vision and sincerity of purpose that is

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vital to its success, but that does not invalidate its relevance as an approach to the understanding

of literature and life.

Adewale Maja-Pearce argues that the direction of a great deal of protest literature in Nigeria is

misplaced because it is often aimed at the wrong target: “It is not the generalised „African‟ who

needs „protest literature‟ in order to rediscover an identity he never lost in the first place, if only

because the modern world, including literacy, has yet to arrive on his scene” (99).

Lewis Nkosi bemoans the popular tendency to dismiss a work of literature simply because it is

said to be protest literature when what really matters is the quality and effectiveness of the

protest: “My complaints about South African literature in the past have had nothing to do with

the mere fact that it is protest. How well, and how significantly it utters that protest, has been my

main preoccupation” (78-79). As Nkosi argues, part of the false premises upon which much

criticisms of protest literature is based can be seen in the way in which those who condemn what

they see as the subordination of art to subject-matter, actually turn round to subordinate subject-

matter to art. In a discussion of the fiction of Charles Dickens, Raymond Williams points out that

the great English novelist went against many time-honoured conventions of the traditional novel

in his creative and innovative approach to the portrayal of pressing social issues: “Instead of the

controlled language of analysis and comprehension he uses, directly, the language of persuasion

and display. His plots depend on arbitrary coincidences, on sudden revelations and changes of

heart. He offers not the details of psychological process but the finished articles: the social and

psychological products” (31). Dickens did not defy convention for the sake of it; he simply

sought new ways of registering his protest against the inevitable social conditions that he had

himself experienced and continued to witness. In other words, protest shaped his art, but it did

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not dominate it. If it did, Dickens would not be the great novelist that he is acknowledged to be

today.

Even the politically-committed Dennis Brutus was deceived by the ostensible incompatibility of

literature and protest; he admitted he “couldn‟t stand the way that poetry is just literary … out of

touch with reality … I actually quit” (Suster and Karim 154). Brutus, however, discovered that

the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden was able to seamlessly weave the supposedly disparate

strands of aesthetic fidelity and social commitment in his work, and realised that his fears were

baseless: “… I went back to poetry because I saw a way that you could make a political

statement, simultaneously and honestly – you know, its not manufactured sloganeering. This is

genuine poetic expression, which merges political comment with personal comment, including

love lyrics” (Suster and Karim 154).

Ralph Ellison demonstrates the way in which art and protest are so clearly interwoven as to be

almost indistinguishable:

I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoievsky‟s [sic] Notes

From Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of

nineteenth-century rationalism: Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Œdipus Rex, The Trial

– all these employ protest, even against the limitations of human life itself. If

social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens and

Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called “protest novel,”

especially when written by Negroes; but it seems to me that the critics could more

accurately complain about their lack of craftsmanship and their provincialism”

(169).

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In considering protest literature, therefore, the focus should not be on the fact of protest but the

uses to which protest is put and whether they are effective.

The Art-Versus-Propaganda Debate

For several reasons, protest literature is believed to represent a nexus where art and propaganda

meet. It is the place where the ostensibly conflicting aims of art and propaganda clash in the most

direct way. Art is often held to refer to those essentially aesthetic elements of technique,

perspective, feeling and imagination that combine to constitute literature‟s characteristic status as

a product of the imagination. Propaganda, on the other hand, is usually perceived as being driven

by much more limited goals and is therefore not as concerned with aesthetic issues; its major aim

is that of persuasion, and content is the main priority, rather than the aesthetic concerns which

underly such content. As Barbara Foley puts it, “The requirements of politics, we are constantly

told, coexist only uneasily with those of aesthetics; when novelists begin to “preach,” their

narratives descend to “propaganda” and lose their imaginative power and integrity” (188).

The art-versus-propaganda controversy is a significant aspect of an age-old debate over the exact

nature of art and its relationship with other aspects of human life. The discussion has manifested

itself in the nature/art debate, which revolved around the relative importance of the “real” and the

“artificial” to the process of literary creation, as well as the art-for-art‟s-sake argument which

held that art is autonomous and could not be compelled to serve social or moral purposes which

were not considered central to it.

The art-propaganda controversy touches on the purpose of art, or more specifically, literary art,

and seeks to establish whether the primary purpose of literature is aesthetic or functional.

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Broadly speaking, the general stance has been either that literature‟s primary purpose must be

aesthetic if it is to remain true to itself as an art, or that literature‟s relevance to society is heavily

dependent upon its relevance to the needs of the society in which it is based, and that it therefore

has no other option than to be functional.

A.P. Foulkes argues that the distinctions between literature and propaganda are not as hard and

fast as the dispute seems to suggest:

The relationship of literature and art to propaganda is not at all straightforward,

and would in any case be dismissed as insignificant by many modern critics,

whose evaluative criteria would lead them to make a distinction between „real

literature‟ and „tendentious writing‟ (2).

It is precisely this lack of straightforwardness that obscures the ways in which literature and

propaganda interpenetrate each other. Even those who regard the aesthetic status of literature as

its most defining characteristic would readily admit that it has a wide range of rhetorical abilities

whose main aim is that of persuasion, a task that is the primary feature of propaganda. No work

of literature is so aesthetically inclined that it does not have a point that it seeks to put across,

especially if it has a didactic or moral intent.

The art-propaganda debate is also distorted by the age-old politics of name-calling.

“Propaganda” is a term which has pejorative associations in addition to its denotative sense, and

has thus been used to dismiss ostensibly literary works which are in some way regarded as below

the artistic standards required of literature. It therefore seems to represent the obverse side of

canon-formation in which often-arbitrary criteria are applied to exclude literary works. As Steve

Neal puts it, such posturing inevitably leads to the illogicality of pointing out the supposedly

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propagandistic elements in literature that one dislikes while ignoring them in those that are

admired (9).

George Orwell‟s comment that “all art is to some extent propaganda” (276) is an indication that

the two concepts might not be so oppositional after all. As the author of Animal Farm and 1984,

Orwell is particularly well-placed to understand the relationship between literature and

propaganda, and his belief that elements of propaganda exist in all literature would seem to

indicate that they are implicated within each other. Utilising this yardstick, the criteria of

objectivity, or more accurately, what might be called “artistic disinterest” that is often used to

distinguish literature from propaganda should be applied in a more nuanced way than was

hitherto believed.

Indeed, such distinctions may even be irrelevant and unnecessary. Asked whether he considered

Invisible Man a “protest novel,” Ralph Ellison replied:

… in the very act of trying to create something, there is implicit a protest against

the way things are – a protest against man‟s vulnerability before the larger forces

of society and the universe. We make fiction out of that kind of protest which is

similar to the kind of protest that is involved in mastering your bodies …. All of

this is protest, a human protest against that which is, against the raw and

unformed way that we come into the world. I don‟t think you have to demand any

more protest than that (62-63).

The relevance of the art-propaganda controversy to protest literature is that it provides an

important perspective on the extent to which protest literature is protest as opposed to literature,

or vice versa. As in the case of the art-propaganda issue, it is possible to say that drawing

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concrete distinctions between literature and protest is in fact a false dichotomy. It has already

been argued elsewhere in this chapter that protest undergoes significant transformation when it is

portrayed in literature to the extent that it transcends its status as a social phenomenon to become

intricately integrated into the structure of the literary work. Of course, there can be no doubt that

the seamlessness of such an integration will depend on the literary artist‟s skill, but the point is

that when protest is so deftly woven into the fabric of a work of literature that it becomes

impossible to separate them, it is futile to seek to determine how much literature there is in the

protest, or how much protest there is in the literature.

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CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Social Relevance in Literature

There can be no doubt that the relationship between literature and society is so close as to be

virtually symbiotic. However, the notion of the significance of social relevance in literature is a

debatable one. This is because it lends itself to a wide variety of definitions, ideological positions

and sundry biases, many of which are diametrically opposed to one another. For religious bodies,

for instance, social relevance in literature would be closely related to literature‟s positive moral

outlook and its didactic elements; for those in positions of social and political dominance, social

relevance in literature would basically mean the extent to which it upholds the stability of the

existing socio-political order; for those who are committed to the radical change of existing

political systems, social relevance in literature would relate to the way in which it delineates the

flaws and shortcomings of current social and political processes, and explicitly advocates their

replacement. Similarly, minorities and oppressed groups in any given society are very likely to

base their notions of social relevance in literature upon the manner in which it is able to portray

them and highlight issues which are germane to them.

At its most fundamental, therefore, social relevance in literature is said to refer to the complex

ways in which the form, function and purpose of literature, however defined, are inextricably

interwoven with the growth, progress and stability of society. The very phrase “social relevance”

assumes that such a relationship is a default setting for any literature which deems itself worthy

of the name, and by implication would condemn any literature in which this relationship is

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absent, or even indirectly stated. Social relevance, from this perspective, would seem to imply

that literature has a duty to make the progress of society a cardinal objective, regardless of

whatever else it may seek to achieve.

It is practically impossible to discuss literature without making reference to society. René Wellek

and Austin Warren stress the very close relationship between the two:

Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation.

Such traditional literary devices as symbolism and metre are social in their very

nature. They are conventions and norms which could have arisen only in society.

But, furthermore, literature „represents‟ „life‟; and „life‟ is, in large measure, a

social reality, even though the natural world and the inner or subjective world of

the individual have also been objects of literary „imitation‟. The poet himself is a

member of society, possessed of a specific social status: he receives some degree

of social recognition and reward; he addresses an audience however hypothetical.

Indeed, literature has usually arisen in close connexion with particular social

institutions; and in primitive society we may even be unable to distinguish poetry

from ritual, magic, work, or play. Literature also has a social function, or „use‟,

which cannot be purely individual. (94)

This notion of literature has been vigorously defended in different literary eras in widely

dispersed regions of the world: the overt morality of the satire-ridden Augustan Age in England,

and the aggressive nationalism of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and the Negritude

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movement in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean islands are obvious examples of the

closeness between literature and society.

Due to its repeatedly-tragic history, with its narrative of slavery, colonialism and neo-

colonialism, it is perhaps inevitable that modern African literature is highly attuned to the

requirements of contemporary African society. S.E. Ogude argues that

the history of contemporary African literature is the story of the black man‟s

attempt to reassert his political rights and defend the integrity of his culture and

re-assess his past relationship with Europe and the many political and social

institutions which the white man has imposed on the African. (3)

Gareth Griffiths makes similar claims for the explicit utility of writing in contemporary Africa:

Writing is an activity through which the African can define his identity and re-

discover his historical roots. This self-defining function of the novel is, for

obvious reasons, especially important to writers in a post-colonial situation,

especially where their exposure to European culture has led to an undervaluing of

the traditional values and practices. (68)

Emmanuel Ngara reveals how the absence of social relevance can impact negatively on the art of

a poet like Christopher Okigbo:

The spiritual world dominated his artistic vision to the extent of negating the

material world around him. Instead of basing his conception of the function of

poetry on social reality, the real relations between people in society, he turned

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away from reality into the world of the spirit and the imagination. This gave rise

to a romanticism which associated artistic creativity with imaginary things like

watermaids and goddesses. (45)

Ngara contrasts Okigbo in this idealistic phase with the Ugandan poet Okot p‟Bitek, who

was concerned about the material world. His search for African forms was

motivated by a desire to comment on the real conditions of existence of the

African people, on how the African petty bourgeoisie related to African culture

and that of western bourgeois society. (45)

Ngugi wa Thiong‟o identifies the main achievement of Chinua Achebe‟s A Man of the People as

its exemplary focus on society and its problems; the novel, in his words, has made it

impossible for other African writers to do other than address themselves directly

to their audiences in Africa – not in a comforting spirit – and tell them that such

problems are their concern. The teacher no longer stands apart to contemplate. He

has moved with a whip among the pupils, flagellating himself as well as them. He

is now the true man of his people. (281-2)

At face value, therefore, social relevance in literature essentially revolves around the following

basic categories:

The relationship between society and literature: This relates to the connections between literature

and the society in whose context it is produced and whose members it is aimed at. The dynamics

of this relationship are such that society compellingly impinges upon the thematic and stylistic

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choices open to the literary artist to the extent that it can actually determine the success or failure

of a work.

The relationship between literature and society: This relates to a reversal of the polarities of the

above-named category. It represents a shift in perspective, in which literature is seen to act upon

society, rather than vice versa. It investigates the status of literature as being at the vanguard of

social change, and a testing-ground for the dissemination of innovative and radical ideas that are

likely to receive initial rejection in society, even though they are actually for its own good.

The literary artist as a member of society: This relationship revolves around the status of the

literary artist as a member of society, given the direct correlation between the esteem in which

the writer is held and the socio-political influence of his work. It focuses upon the perceived

importance of writers as members of society, and touches upon prevailing perceptions of their

usefulness to the continued functioning and progress of society.

Literature as a cultural artefact: This refers to the status of literature as one of the prized objects

of the cultural production of a given society. It touches upon the regard in which books and other

literary products are held, and their corresponding capacity to influence society, either for good

or for bad. Such public esteem also helps to determine the extent and depth of the ancillary

enterprises that coalesce around literature, especially publishing, the theatre industry, readers‟

clubs, and criticism.

Changing notions of social relevance: Like similar phenomena, the idea of what constitutes

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social relevance has undergone radical reformulation as a result of profound shifts in social taste,

political ideology and economic development. In the past, social relevance in literature was often

a consequence of what constituted the canon of a society‟s most esteemed literary works, and

thereby the main repository of its values. Notions of social relevance from this perspective were

unsurprisingly conservative.

Contrasting the objectives of the propagandist and the literary artist, Njabulo S. Ndebele argues

that, while the latter is as desirous of meaningful social change as the former, he is constrained

by the fundamental characteristics of his art: the literary artist, he claims

can never be entirely free from the rules of irony. Irony is the literary

manifestation of the principle of contradiction. Its fundamental law, for the

literary arts in particular, is that everything involving human society is in a

constant state of flux; that the dialectic between appearance and reality in the

conduct of human affairs is always operative and constantly problematic, and that

consequently, in the representation of human reality, nothing can be taken for

granted. (128)

In other words, the demands of social relevance sometimes clash with the requirements of

literature and other arts. The dynamics of such a clash are important for a proper understanding

of the manifestation of social relevance in literature, and they revolve around the relative

significance of society, which is the overarching context of all social relevance, and art, which

prescribes the modus operandi of literature. In this light, it is necessary to consider the question

of whether social relevance is essentially a matter of art being subordinated to the requirements

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of society, or of society being subordinated to the requirements of art, or whether social

relevance is actually the attainment of a golden mean between these two alternatives.

Most notions of the first category point to social progress as the ultimate objective of all civilised

human activity, including art, and argue that literature must reflect and advocate germane social

causes and issues if it is to truly fulfil its calling. On the other hand, ideas of life‟s subordination

to art often point to the way in which society is essentially the raw material of literature, to be

shaped by the latter, rather than vice versa, and also stress the artistic integrity of literary

practitioners as being crucially dependent on their freedom to choose between beauty and

usefulness in their depiction of society. The notion of a golden mean balancing the ostensibly

competing requirements of society and art is essentially a perspective which argues for a

symbiosis between the two categories, in which they are mutually constitutive, shaping and

being shaped by each other.

It is also possible to see specific works of literature as being positioned at different points of the

spectrum of involvement that lies between the poles of society and art. At one end of the

spectrum would be found works that belong to the much-maligned art for art‟s sake school of

thought. As Edward Quinn explains, “The argument was that art should be autonomous and not

compelled to serve a specific social or moral purpose. The phrase was used in 19th

century

France and England as a slogan of aestheticism” (25). The movement‟s authors included

individuals like Algernon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and they defiantly refused to explicitly

incorporate social concerns into their work, choosing instead to focus on intensely personal

perspectives which had little meaning or relevance for anybody other than themselves.

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The notion of art for art‟s sake has often been dismissed out of hand as unworthy of serious

discussion. In the words of Mao Tse-tung:

In all the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes

and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for

art‟s sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent

of politics (25).

In similar fashion, Jean-Paul Sartre argues

If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. That is what I mean by

„commitment‟. It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a written

sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, then it makes no

sense. What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch appropriated by the

literature? (13-14)

Despite such strident rejections, the notion of art for art‟s sake is a perspective which raises

noteworthy issues that are still relevant to a contemporary understanding of social relevance in

literature. Its emphasis on the autonomy of art, for example, raises the vital question of exactly

what the relationship between literature and society should be. If it is accepted as a given that

literature must possess a certain degree of autonomy if it is to attain the artistic integrity that is

vital to its status as literature, then the idea that literary artists should be free to choose whether

or not they wish to write about issues that are ostensibly deemed socially relevant becomes a

significant issue.

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At the other end of the spectrum lie the products of socialist realism in ideologically-committed

countries like the ex-communist nations of Eastern Europe, and particularly the former Soviet

Union. Under this dispensation, writers were not just compelled to incorporate issues of public

concern into their works; they were required to do it in specified ways. Socialist realism probably

represents the extreme end of the social relevance spectrum. Its undeniable artificiality and the

often-crude manner in which it forced literature to serve the ends of the state disguised as the

needs of society are clearly seen in the following definition of it as “a form of realism designed

to represent the superiority of socialism as a form of government” (Quinn 305). As Clive Wake

puts it, there exists “the very delicate problem of maintaining the right balance between

commitment and creation. Commitment can be creative, in the literary sense, but it can also

destroy creation” (94).

Such divergent levels of social relevance are indicative of the way in which the existing social,

political and economic atmosphere play crucial roles in determining the extent of social

relevance in literature. The paradox is that the more unsuitable the currently obtaining socio-

economic and political context in a particular society is, the more amenable such a society is to

the emergence of socially relevant literature. Perhaps the most famous examples of this

somewhat contradictory phenomenon are to be found in 19th

century England and Russia. Both

countries underwent massive social, political and economic change at this period: England was

the world‟s first modern industrial nation, and the scourge of uncontrolled urbanisation, mass

unemployment and poverty were at their peak in this era; Russia suffered the strains of transition

from a feudal to a modern state. With such difficulties, it is not surprising that during this time,

the two countries produced writers whose work has since become a byword for notions of social

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relevance. They include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The link between inclement environments and social relevance in literature is particularly visible

in Africa. As a continent whose misfortune it has been to suffer from the negative consequences

of slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, dictatorship and the associated problems of wars,

insurrections and similar social crises, the continent has, unsurprisingly, produced a crop of

writers from whom markedly socially relevant works have been the norm. Claude Wauthier

points out that:

African poetry and novels do appear on the whole to be conditioned by the

colonial situation: African poets and novelists have usually regarded their works,

as Sartre did, as „miraculous weapons‟ to defeat their „omniscient and naive

conquerors.‟ (194)

In the early post-independence era, several poets, dramatists and novelists sought to solidify

national unity and consciousness by producing works which celebrated the past as the harbinger

of a glorious future. The most prominent example of this trend was the Nigerian writer, Chinua

Achebe, who demonstrated this in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The celebration of the

past was followed by critical analyses of the present, as other African writers produced

unsentimental portrayals of social and other problems which became manifest quite early after

the attainment of independence. In Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah wrote The Beautyful Ones Are Not

Yet Born; in Season of Migration to the North, the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih analysed the

psychological and other ambiguities of the African encounter with Europe; Cyprian Ekwensi

established himself as Africa‟s premier urban novelist with books like Lokotown, People of the

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City and Jagua Nana.

As the euphoria of independence continued to wear off and the peculiar problems of many

countries in the continent became increasingly intractable, many African writers felt they had no

option other than to incorporate socially relevant issues into their texts by focusing on the

shortcomings and challenges of their societies. Achebe himself looked at moral and political

corruption, and the tension between traditional and modern modes of living in No Longer at Ease

and A Man of the People; Okot p‟Bitek dealt with the growing scourge of prostitution in

„Malaya,‟ and the conflict between tradition and modernity in Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol;

the negative effects of western religious incursion into Kenyan society were depicted by Ngugi

wa Thiong‟o in The River Between, the trauma of the anti-colonial struggle and its immediate

aftermath in Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat, as well as the failure, incompetence and

corruption of post-independence Kenya in Devil on the Cross and Petals of Blood. In his novels,

poetry and drama, Wole Soyinka consistently castigated the incompetence and insensitivity of

many influential groups in society, including politicians (Kongi’s Harvest), professionals (The

Interpreters, Season of Anomy, The Lion and the Jewel), the religious hierarchy (The Trials of

Brother Jero, Jero’s Metamorphosis).

In addition to these writers, there was a group of politically-committed literary artists whose

radical ideological positions were explicit in their work. They were led by well-known figures

like Sembene Ousmane, Alex La Guma, Ngugi wa Thiong‟o and Nadine Gordimer. For authors

like these, social relevance was not optional: it was the very basis of their work, and they brought

a Marxist-oriented class analysis of society to bear upon their writing. In doing this, they

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conformed to Louis Althusser‟s notion of art as being “„to make us see‟, and what it allows us to

see, what it forces us to see, is „the ideology from which it is born‟” (Bennet and Royle, 132).

Thus, social issues were not perceived as being the result of chance and circumstance. Rather,

they were seen as emerging from clearly discernible socio-political and economic factors whose

workings could be subjected to detailed scrutiny and rigorous analysis. Issues were viewed from

their long-term historical perspectives and were related to similar developments going on

elsewhere in the world. Because of their adoption of a socialist outlook, many of these writers

further entrenched their commitment to social relevance by actively proposing solutions to

perceived problems within their works. Most of the answers they offered were predicated on the

overthrow of the existing capitalist system and its replacement with socialism in which

ownership of the means of production would be communal.

Apart from political commitment, the manifestation of social relevance in literature can take

other forms. These include a drive towards increased cultural authenticity, as seen in the

Negritude movement in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean, Ngugi‟s famous advocacy of

indigenous-language literature, the promotion of indigenous dramatic forms by playwrights like

J.P. Clark-Bekeredemo, Femi Osofisan and Wole Soyinka, as well as the use of indigenous

literary sources and styles, such as can be seen in the work of Leopold Sedar Senghor, p‟Bitek

and Armah.

Social relevance in literature has also resulted in the condemnation of social foibles, regardless

of the particular ideology of the writer, especially those who do not espouse Marxist or socialist

ideology. In some cases, it has involved the movement away from literary advocacy to outright

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activism, as was seen in Ngugi‟s work with community theatre, Okigbo‟s participation in the

Nigerian Civil War, and Nawaal el Sadaawi‟s feminist advocacy. Another manifestation of such

activism was the entry of literary figures like Senghor, Kofi Awoonor and Augostino Neto into

the national politics of their respective countries.

Protest and Social Relevance

The relationship between protest and social relevance is an ostensibly obvious one, and would

therefore seem not to require much attention, but the precise dimensions of their connections to

each other are sometimes obscured by this very “obviousness.” At face value, the relationship

between protest and social relevance seems to stem from their apparent conceptual

complementarity: protest refers to the expression of dissent or (less often) of support for specific

ideas, situations, actions, groups or individuals. Social relevance is the adoption of positions that

display a belief in the imperatives of equity, social justice and fair play in all their ramifications

in society. Both concepts are thus concerned with social issues, and by extension, with the

promotion of those elements that would ensure that no member of a given society is unfairly

treated or discriminated against. Protest therefore is one of the main ways in which social

relevance is expressed, while social relevance is often the motivation for protest.

This conceptual harmony is evident in almost any social sphere that might be considered. Almost

all protest groups seek to establish social relevance by stressing the socially-centred importance

of the issues they are protesting: regardless of whether it is civil rights, nuclear disarmament, or

environmental protection, they always try to anchor the validity of their demands on the notion

of a fairer, more equitable society. Also, the very public nature of the methods they choose to

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protest with – marches, rallies, civil disobedience – demonstrated how they were, in a

fundamental sense, attempting to compel society and its institutions to see their causes as

socially relevant.

However, it can be a mistake to regard the relationship between protest and social relevance as

linear and unproblematic. Not all protest is socially relevant; social relevance is not always

expressed through protest. Indeed, because of the seemingly strong connections between the two,

it is easy to subvert such a relationship by manipulating those ties to the extent that they achieve

contradictory goals. History has shown that appeals to social relevance via the medium of protest

have led to the emergence of demagogues whose aspirations run counter to their proclaimed

intentions. Africa is replete with hitherto-popular nationalists and freedom-fighters who

spearheaded protests against colonial rule, and in so doing demonstrated social relevance, only

for them to become oppressive dictators upon assuming power. Many established religions can

be seen to have emerged through the genuine piety and forbearance of their founders, only for

those same qualities to become non-existent when the religion becomes entrenched in society.

The very idea of social relevance may be reconfigured in ways that cause it to contradict its own

implicit principles. For example, social relevance could become synonymous with the

unquestioning acceptance of existing social situations, no matter how unjust or inequitable they

may be. It could be interpreted to mean the adoption of negative perspectives rather than positive

ones, such as ethnic chauvinism, racial bigotry or religious intolerance. The distortion of social

relevance in this manner has correspondingly negative effects on protest because it can be

cynically manipulated to achieve selfish ends as opposed to the positive ones espoused by social

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relevance.

For example, groups and individuals can be induced to undertake protests on behalf of

oppressive policies with a view to showing that they actually enjoy wide support, and should

therefore be maintained or implemented. The so-called Million Man March held in Abuja,

Nigeria to express support for the-then Head of State, General Sani Abacha to transform himself

into a civilian president is a case in point. Indeed, many demonstrations in support of progressive

social, political and economic policies throughout history have been confronted with counter-

demonstrations whose participants sought a continuation of the status quo. Thus, the civil rights

marchers were opposed by rallies and marches organised by the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist

movement; in the matter of abortion and reproductive rights, pro-choice protests are countered

by pro-life protests; immigrants‟ rights protests are matched by anti-immigration protests.

Socio-Political Consciousness in Literature

Literature is a product of the social and historical circumstances of a particular society. This

notion is anchored on the Aristotelian position that society itself is political, since it involves the

organisation and the government of men. In this study, the selected writers – Chinua Achebe,

Kole Omotoso, Buchi Emecheta Festus Iyayi, Helon Habila and Okey Ndibe – consider the

exposition of socio-political issues an important part of their role as writers. This is in conformity

with the view of Irving Howe who observes that protest provides a particularly severe test for the

writer in confronting institutionalised social vices. It arouses human passions as nothing else

does and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we react to, in the physical

socio-political circumstances (25).

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In his seminal book Writers in Politics, Ngugi succinctly illustrates the relationship between a

writer and his society:

Literature does not grow or develop in vacuum; it is given impetus, shape,

direction and concern by the social, political and economic forces in a particular

society. (xv)

Iyorchia Ayu affirms also that

literature for the class in dominance, is an extra tool for concretising hegemony.

For the subordinate class, however, literature must aim at conquering man‟s

alienation, paving the way for the liberation of his inhibited creativity and

ultimately the restoration of his full human dignity. (3)

As the writers chosen for detailed examination in this study, Achebe, Omotoso, Emecheta, Iyayi,

Habila and Ndibe write with the understanding that art must first seek to transform society‟s

dehumanising conditions if it is to establish a system in which humanity can give free rein to its

self-expression, self-fulfilment and maximum self-realisation. Their conviction is foregrounded

on the notion that when art runs counter to the interest of the dominant class in society, the

attitude of that class to art changes. This notion reiterates Vazques‟ observation:

Art shares its destiny with the social forces which are struggling to resolve the

contradictions rending both society and the individual between true community

and true individuality. Therefore, the heroic rebellion of the modern artist need no

longer have the exclusive and impudent character it had when he was considered

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an outcast. (33)

Howe is of the opinion that the novel, while closer to the readers of literary texts than other

literary genres, usually tries to provide a faithful record of all happenings and sentiments which

comprise ordinary life (x). He further argues that the novel in its pragmatic devotion to the

commonplace is regularly drawn to the test of extreme situations, the drama of harsh and

ultimate conflicts.

In the same vein, Ezekiel Fajenyo and Olu Osunde stress that:

Nigerian and other African writers in whatever literary genre which they have

chosen to project their visions cannot but be largely influenced by the wave of

socio-political awareness forcefully attendant on the prevailing socio-political

dilemma which is the picture of experienced gloom within the social milieu. The

sensibility of the writer cannot be impinged upon in his capacity as a visionary by

varying degrees of frightening tribulations to which most African countries have

since become exposed, not so much for colonial experience, as for the total

absence of political seriousness, economic sureness and consciousness within the

social structure bereft of democratic ideals. (20)

African writers have consistently struggled with the enormous political, social and economic

problems which have beset their continent over the past decades. They are also in the process of

creating the intellectual milieu within which they confront these problems and define their world

and themselves:

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Intellectuals have a strong voice in shaping national and continental realities.

They are, after all, part of the ruling elite, sometimes policy-shapers of cabinet

rank, sometimes voices of cabinet rank, sometimes voices of opposition. Their

voices are heard, and behind their words lie the important African realities.

(Knipp, 39)

Historical consciousness has been identified as an important factor in the shaping of the reactions

of African writers to the socio-political situations in African literature. P. H. Simon opines:

Historical consciousness, the existential „being-in-history‟ is likely to permeate

the sensibilities of contemporary writers. What the writer today means by history

is not of course a re-constitution, even if it were complete, of the past. It is the

human becoming in its total reach, past, present and future, integrally bound as

the very essence of the human adventure and sometimes the entire cosmic

adventure. (14-15)

This existential notion of the import of history is amplified in the works of writers whose

commitment to the emergence of new geo-political realities is directed toward the tasks of

nation-building, emancipation and accession to national consciousness.

David S. Gordon epitomises the significance of historical awareness thus:

History as the collective memory of a people of its past experience, its heroes, its

great deeds, is a basis for its sense of identity, a reservoir upon which it can draw

to give itself meaning and a destiny, as well as to endow its young with a

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collective pride and dedication to the tribe, the state, the nation or the religion. (3)

Raymond Williams stresses the importance social relations represent for writers:

In any specific society, in a specific phase, writers can discover in their writing

the realities of their social relations. Such social relations are deeply embedded

within the practice of writing itself .... It is also to be read in different ways, in

different relations, and often by different people. (205)

The pronounced socio-political consciousness of literature in African society is an inevitable

phenomenon because literature, like other artistic forms, becomes the nerve centre of a network

of complementary institutions which are “integrated into the state machinery by virtue of their

pursuit of similar or related goals and ideals” (Agovi, 10). Such institutions are made to owe

allegiance to a common body of ideas and values that gave rise to a sense of purpose in African

society.

The Novel and Society

The novel is often considered to be the most “social” of all the literary genres. This is because it

tries to provide a faithful record of all happenings and sentiments which comprise ordinary life.

It is a genre that has been defined in many ways: as a work of fiction; as incorporating extended

narration; as having characters whose behaviour, feelings and thoughts constitute the subject-

matter of the prose narration (Fraser 8; Watt 13; Ezeigbo 4). The novel developed from the pre-

eighteenth century literary tradition, and its emergence as a major art form in English literature

was greatly influenced by the realism, intricate detail and psychological experimentation of the

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works of pioneers like Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollet, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and

Laurence Sterne (Encyclopedia Brittanica 1163).

Many theorists have commented on the novel‟s role in the representation of society. While some

espouse the view that the novel, like any other form of literature, should focus primarily on the

achievement of aesthetic excellence as propounded by advocates of art for art‟s sake, a more

socially-conscious group insists that any art, the novel inclusive, which fails to address one or

more aspects of current social reality should be discountenanced. The latter view is very popular

among African critics. Studies of the novel have therefore extended in scope to locating and

analysing the social circumstances of the text. Many scholars have also underscored the

additional necessity of historical consciousness in the portrayal of issues and events in novels. H.

H. Okam, for instance, contends that there are clearly-discernable links between the novel,

history and the social environment of the society from which it emerges:

Literature is at one and the same time History‟s major bequest to mankind and the

principal corrective of history… Because literature begins as an experience and

ends as an imitation, fiction that is, it has an edge over history. By the simplest of

definitions, history is events and records of the past. As events history moves in a

straight line, and even those who by their actions are said to have changed the

course of history only change the direction of the line; Literature, on the other

hand, gaining illumination from hindsight presents not only an imaginative

reconstruct of reality but also overtly or covertly offers correctives to history by

suggesting what should have been. Thence on the one hand the didactic undertone

of literature in general and, on the other, the differences in its interpretations …

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Contemporary West African writers, especially the novelists, have shown a

remarkable sensitivity to this dual role of literature. (54)

The relationship between text and society is further explained by Sanya Osha. He posits that

textual studies should not be limited to their aesthetic qualities alone. Considerable attention

should also be given to the texts‟ sociological background in order to achieve a holistic

appreciation of its meaning:

Now we may pose the question: why is it necessary for the writer to vacate the

merely aesthetic space for the political sphere? … The stranglehold that African

lives in is much too tenacious to allow for any kind of political complacency on

the part of the writer. (176)

In a very similar manner, Georg Lukács, in The History of the Novel, stresses the affinity

between the novel and society, arguing that a discussion of one will invariably involve the other:

Society is the principal subject of the novel, that is, man‟s social life in its

ceaseless interaction with surrounding nature which forms the basis of social

activity and with the different social institutions and customs, which mediate the

relations between individuals and social life. (6)

Looking at the novel from a different angle, Joan Rockwell sees it as an instrument for exploring

societal norms and values: “The novel ... is concerned with social reality in a special sense. It

describes and defines norms and values. It also presents its characters as actors” (112). Her

position tilts towards a Marxist perspective of the novel. Alice Kaminsky focuses on the overt

concern of the novel with the “real.” The implication of her position is that the novel‟s

significance lies in its reflection of the society known to our everyday experiences. Even where

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the novelist employs the medium of myth or symbolism, such devices, she notes, should be used

to enhance our understanding of the world we live in (213).

Literary texts from Africa are seen by many critics as social documents concerned with the

culture and politics of the continent. In the view of F.B.O. Akporobaro, the Nigerian novel

belongs to this tradition, particularly those that were written in the realist mode. The fictional

situations explored in them are often the writers‟ response to the often-harsh socio-political

realities of contemporary society (38). In the pre-independence period and the sixties, issues of

colonialism were addressed. In more recent times, contemporary realities are treated in Nigerian

fiction – the vexed issues of corruption, ethnic chauvinism, leadership crises and autocratic rule.

Ernest Emenyonu confirms this notion when he points out that “African literature [and] indeed

the literature of black civilisation in modern times, has moved ... to the literature of assertion and

emancipation which also includes self-examination” (xv). David Carrol claims that African

writers are deeply engaged in re-educating society. This education is made necessary by the long

period of colonialism and its attendant effects which have significantly eroded their continent‟s

traditional humanistic values. Thus, he explains, “African writers have employed literature in

one of its traditional roles to explore and open up new or neglected areas of experience by

clearing the ground of prejudice and preconception” (22).

An African work of art that fails to address issues of socio-political or historical significance is

considered to be outside the scope of African aesthetics. Achebe reiterates this view:

Literature whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second

handle on reality, enabling us to encounter in the safe manageable dimensions of

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make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real

life; and at the same time providing through the self-discovery which it imparts a

veritable weapon for coping with the threats whether they are found within

problematic and incoherent selves, or in the world around us. (117)

This notion of art as a weapon wielded by the writer is particularly pronounced among African

writers. Critics believe that African writers do not engage in the kind of abstractions explored in

western literature for the simple reason that the socio-political realities of the west are

significantly different from those in Africa. Whether African works have explicitly socio-

political themes is not the main issue; what is significant is the conscious concern in such works

to embody materials and ideas that are derivable from the society of their origin.

Gideon-Cyrus Mutiso agrees that “all literature, to the extent that it deals with individuals in

society, contains elements of social and political theory” (3). He adds that even where the

creative writer writes with no intention of

propagating a particular idea, there is no way he could create in a vacuum; what

the writer achieves [whether consciously or unconsciously] is a revelation of

values through his depiction of character... (3).

Shatto Gakwandi identifies the social preoccupation of African literature as deriving specifically

from nationalism, which he claims motivates it to a significant degree. He identifies three

perceptible traditions in the development of the modern novel. Works that fall into the first and

second traditions are the romance and realist novels, while the third group is made up of works

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that fuse the elements of the first two to produce what he calls “metaphysical” works. Gakwandi

asserts, therefore, that the realist novels deal specifically with society, and

the whole breadth of society as its subject matter and examine how customs,

conventions, social institutions and individuals interrelate .... With [this] social

realism, the individual is treated as a social unit; most often he is silhouetted

against the institutions, traditions and general behaviour of his society so as to

underscore his significance. His aspirations, achievements and disappointments

are seen as conditioned by his place in a given society and can be used to raise

wider ethical, moral and social issues. (126-7)

This view implies that the novel is employed in the representation of society, and it is bolstered

by David Cook‟s own claims: “Writers who are genuinely socially conscious set their works

within the framework of the society. This underscores the point that literature and society are

interdependent” (3).

Wole Soyinka‟s stand on this issue is characteristically complex. While he argues that “the

reflection of experience is only one of the functions of literature” (64), he disagrees with those

who believe that literature in whatever guise could have an autonomous objective existence

independent of society. Soyinka is clear about the advantages to be derived from literature‟s

overt concern with society:

A literature that can concern itself with social experience becomes in a manner of

perception, an ideological perception. It is this form of literature that holds the

most promise for the strengthening of the bond between experience and medium

since it prevents the entrenchment of the habitual, the petrification of the

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imaginative function by that past or present reality upon which it reflects. (64)

Other critics have acknowledged the interrelationship between not only the novel and society,

but also between the writer, the critic and the characters represented in the novels. The reality of

the literary product is conceptualised within the environment from which it evolves and the

aspects of society reflected in it. Even the critic‟s work is no longer just to assess the aesthetic

qualities of a work based on notions of literary excellence; rather it becomes

Socially useful to the extent that his society wants, and receives from him, a fuller

understanding of literature than it could have achieved without him .... In this

sense, the critic is someone who is responsible in part for the existence of good

writing in his own time and afterward. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1037)

Conceptual Framework

Given its status as a critical mode which emphasises the relationship between a text and the

society which produces it, the literary theory known as New Historicism has been chosen as the

framework for this study. It is a theory which interrogates the assumptions and attitudes

governing how events are seen differently by the author and individual readers of a literary text.

It relates a text to other texts produced at the same period in a given society; thus, literary and

political connections can be drawn between the aesthetic elements embedded in the text, and the

cultural realities that obtain in such a society. (Tyson, 288) Within the ambit of New Historicism,

the subject matter and thematic concerns of the texts under focus will be analysed with a view to

drawing out these connections and discussing their significance within the analytical concerns of

the study.

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New Historicism is pre-occupied with the examination of literary texts from the perspective of

their being embedded within the social and economic circumstances in which they are produced

and consumed. For new historicists, these circumstances are not stable in themselves and are

susceptible to being re-written and transformed; from this perspective, literary texts are part of a

larger circulation of social energies, both products of and influences on a particular culture or

ideology.

New Historicism proffers an eclectic approach to literary study. As such, it incorporates many

aspects of other critical viewpoints, even if it does not agree with them in totality. For example, it

obtains from New Criticism the approach of seeking the interconnectedness that underlies any

work of art (Selden 192). It shares with Reader-Response theory the view that a work of

literature can impart different meanings to different readers (Booker, 137). From Postmodernism,

New Historicism appropriates the critical doctrines of discontinuity, eclecticism, heterogeneity

and decentred authority in narratives. It rejects Derrida‟s notions of intertextuality in language

and puts forward its own concept of the intertextuality between culture and society. Like

psychoanalysis, the theory explores the notion of power struggles and similarly advocates that

power produces individual subjects. New Historicism shares with Marxism the notion that

literature tells the story of the past. However, while Marxism advocates the complete liberation

of the oppressed as a critical objective, New Historicism returns to the stories in the texts to find

out how they affect society. These extensive borrowings from other theories have given it a

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flexibility that enables it to adapt the analytical tools and perspectives of other theories to suit its

own purposes.

The overt concern of New Historicism with power relations among social classes in a given

society makes it particularly appropriate to this study. Influenced by Michel Foucault, new

historicist critics are interested in “concerns of power, authority and subversion at work in texts”

(Carlson 526). Selden also emphasises this pursuit when he states that “the New Historicists

believe that Foucault‟s work opens the way to new and non-truth oriented forms of historicist

study of texts” (161).

New Historicism‟s concept of history is diametrically at variance with those of the old

historicists of earlier periods. For these predecessors, “History is a homogenous and stable

pattern of facts and events which can be used as background to the literature of an era” (Abrams,

184). For the new historicists, however, history is actually

a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses, the meanings of which the

historian can try to analyse, though the analysis will always be incomplete,

accounting for only a part of the historical picture. (Tyson, 287)

Consequently, the interpenetration of history is patently relative and involves a negotiation of

meanings between competing groups rather than its imposition by a dominant group. New

Historicism is unique in its recognition that history is the history of the present, always in the

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making, and radically open to transformation and rewriting, rather than being monumental and

closed. New historicists argue that any “knowledge” of the past is necessarily mediated by texts

of different kinds. Consequently, there can be no knowledge of the past without interpretation;

the “facts” of history need to be read just like any other text. Hayden White suggests that

knowledge of the past is determined by particular narrative configurations or stories. As he

states:

Histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report,

but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that „liken‟ events reported

in them to some form with which we have already become familiar, in our literary

culture .... By the very constitution of a set of events in such a way as to make a

comprehensive story out of them, the historian charges those events with the

symbolic significance of a comprehensive plot structure. (91-2)

The additional relevance of New Historicism theory to this study lies in the way in which it

conceives of social conflict as inescapable, a feature which is in consonance with the focus of

this study upon protest. New Historicism perceives society as being made up of many different

social classes and interest groups with differing and often competing interests. Given the unequal

distribution of power in most human societies however, many of these groups are unable to

properly articulate their concerns or have them incorporated into the grand narratives (including

literature) that societies create about themselves in order to project a distinct identity. Indeed, it

is the class that is dominant at any one time in a given society that is able to impose its

perspectives upon the others in such a way that it is normalized and accepted as the worldview of

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everyone, even when it is only representative of only a group. Thus, most societies have adopted

an “us versus them” approach to creating a group identity – the Greeks divided the world into

civilisation and barbarians, placing themselves in the former category, and everyone else in the

latter category; monarchies propounded the divine right of kings as the natural order of things,

rather than as an attempt to secure their power and influence; both Christians and Muslims

demonise each other as “infidels” and other religions as “idol worship” in order to secure the

loyalty of their own followers rather than because those other faiths are intrinsically evil;

autocratic rulers throughout history have equated opposition to their rule with treason, regardless

of whether such opposition is justifiable or not.

New Historicists argue that any “knowledge” of the past is necessarily mediated by texts, or to

put it differently, that history is in many respects textual. A number of major consequences

follow from this assertion. In the first place, there can be no knowledge of the past without

interpretation. Just as history texts need to be read, so do the “facts” of history. From a new

historical perspective, any reading of a literary text is a question of negotiation: a negotiation

between text and reader within the context of history or histories that cannot be closed or

finalised. Literary works are to be understood in terms of negotiation rather than in the

conventional sense of a pure act of untrammelled creation. This implies negotiations which are a

subtle, network of trades and trade-offs, and a jostling of competing representations. The work of

art is the product of a negotiation with a complex, communally-shared repertoire of conventions,

and the institutions and practices of society.

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New Historicism, as a conceptual framework of this study, examines the significance of social

protest in Nigerian fiction in relation to the themes, ideologies and aesthetic responses of the

selected writers to social vices. As a result, they confront Nigeria‟s socio-political experience in

all its immediacy. The works employ protest as a potent weapon for sensitising Nigerians to the

socio-economic and political exploitation perpetuated by the country‟s elite over the years. This

is echoed in New Historicism in its recognition that all history is the history of the present; that

history is in the making, that rather than being monumental and closed, history is radically open

to transformation and rewriting.

Ideology

New Historicism does not consider art (images and narratives) as products to be merely

contemplated for their aesthetic content. Art operates as a “cultural workshop” where cultural

issues, anxieties, struggles, problems, hopes and aspirations are addressed or consciously

avoided. This is why ideology is an important concept in New Historicism. The ideology of an

author, or his class, or the dominant class within the historical epoch that produces a text,

invariably influences the issues raised in it. Ideology becomes a means of power negotiation and

influence in society. Critical attention consequently shifts from “the author, the canon and the

organic text to the study of the forms and flows of power,” and the text becomes “a site for the

negotiation and authorisation, interrogation, subversion, containment and recuperation of power”

(Carlson, 525).

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This phenomenon is present in each of the texts selected for this study. Violence and Just Before

Dawn are significantly coloured by the Marxist ideology of the authors. The liberal humanist

tradition shapes Anthills of the Savannah, Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel, while

womanist ideology persists in Destination Biafra. A study of these texts reveals the ideologies

embedded in them which significantly affect their aesthetics.

Rice and Waugh agree that New Historicism emphasises that “political and social needs shape

literary production and reception in ways in which traces of social circulation are effaced to

produce the illusion of the autonomous literary work” (260).

This implies that ideology is as crucial to New Historicism as it is to Marxism. This assertion is

echoed in the connection between literature, history and society, which in turn help to determine

the meaning of a given text. Robert Weiman opines that ideology plays a significant role in

power relations. The connection between social function and literary structure, according to him,

should be

sought for on historical and aesthetic planes [and] must be conceived in the

complex terms of literature, as an aesthetic mode of social activity involving

individual sensibilities as well as social attitudes, craftsmanship and ideology,

originality and influence. (288)

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In the theory of New Historicism, literature is considered in the context of social, political and

cultural history (Selden, 161). Like the cultural materialism that it shares many features with,

New Historicism maintains that literature and art cannot be divorced from the general cultural

process. Carlson observes that, like materialist criticism, New Historicism is

[Not only] naturally opposed to [the] idealist tendency to view art as a special

realm of the experience or knowledge isolated from social reality, but [it] is

equally opposed to the tendency in past historically oriented criticism to seek

some monolithic worldview behind the specific artworks of any period. Attention

instead shifts to ideology and more complex and dynamic concepts. (524)

Cardinal Concepts of New Historicism

Of the many complex and dynamic concepts employed in New Historicism, six cardinal

elements are considered germane to this study. The first is ideology. Generally defined as a set of

beliefs, values and opinions that shape the way an individual or a group such as a social class

thinks, acts and understands the world, ideology is a concept of significance to other critical

schools like Marxism, Feminism and Post-colonialism. New Historicism, unlike Marxist

criticism, considers it impossible to have an objective interpretation of a text because a critic

cannot escape his own ideology: it is the perspective that conditions his perception of the text

and is therefore inseparable from his interpretation. So it instead recognises “interpretations” of

“texts” and “histories.” It is ideology that determines personal and group identification in

society. This is in conformity with Soyinka‟s definition of ideology as:

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Systems of thought or speculative goals considered desirable for the health of

existing institutions (society, ecology and economic life) which are or have come

to be regarded as ends in themselves (62).

In the evaluation of social protest and the literary imagination in the Nigerian novel, an attempt

is being made to analyse the relativity of ideological standpoints by the selected writers whose

novels cannot but have been shaped by the prevailing Nigerian socio-political inequities and

their resultant negative consequences. This in turn is expressed in their individual reactions to

these perceived socio-political problems, as can be seen from the diverse approaches they adopt

in matters of subject-matter, theme and style, even though the overall objectives of their works

are virtually the same. The recurrent motif in all the texts in this study is what could be regarded

as the most recent state of consciousness in Nigerian fiction; an ideological stance which no

longer contents itself with the worn-out strategies of blaming others or succumbing to despair.

“Context” is the second key concept in this study. This is the setting or background or

circumstances that constitute the backdrop against which any work of art can be studied. The

historical and socio-political antecedents of corruption, maladministration, military rule and

social inequalities in Nigeria together constitute the context in which Achebe, Omotoso,

Emecheta, Iyayi, Habila and Ndibe write. They therefore cannot help but produce works of

fiction (or faction, in Omotoso‟s case) which represent responses of some kind to this context.

Nigeria‟s parlous socio-political and economic conditions provide the reference points in this

study with which to illustrate the relevance of protest, raising fundamental questions regarding

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right and wrong, and good and bad. As shall be seen in this study, the selected works are

extremely sophisticated in their examination of these age-old questions within the peculiar

context of Nigeria‟s contemporary history. The socio-political events of the period between 1982

and 2002 will provide the milieu against which Anthills of the Savannah, Just Before Dawn,

Destination Biafra, Violence, Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel will be studied.

“Class” is the third major new historical concept employed in this study. It refers to a group or

category of persons sharing common socio-political conditions in a specific social system.

Though this concept is more commonly associated with Marxist criticism and cultural

materialists, New Historicism uses it in investigating how all levels in society engage in the

circulation of power. In this study, two social classes have been identified, namely the class of

the rulers and the class of the ruled. Because they can be found in the same society, they live in

close proximity to each other. There is therefore extensive interaction between them, or what

New Historicism calls “exchange,” as each group trades skills and products not found in the

other. However, because both groups are involved in a competition for finite resources, goods

and socio-political and economic influence, the defining feature of their relationship is that of

conflict, and the principal way in which it is expressed by the less-influential “class of the ruled”

is through protest.

“Power” and “hegemony” are also major new historical concepts utilised in this study. Foucault,

a prominent influence in New Historicism, contends that power is not merely a physical force but

an ever-present human dynamic that influences how a person relates to others. Thus, power

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concerns human relationships and the perception of such relationships by the persons or

institutions involved in them. Power in this sense is synonymous with influence and control,

especially the type achieved through manipulation. In other words, “Power is the ability of its

holders to exact compliance or obedience of other individuals to their will, on whatsoever basis”

(Bullock and Trombley 678). Hegemony is often a term associated with this form of power. This

study analyses the use of power by the elite class to manipulate and subjugate the members of

the working class, and has been defined as “the predominance of one social class over others”

(Bullock and Trombley 388). The issue of power relations between these two classes will be

illustrated extensively in the selected texts.

“Discourse” is another significant concept in this study. Lois Tyson defines discourse as a

“social language created by particular conditions at a particular time and place, and it expresses a

particular way of understanding human experience” (281). Each social stratum has its own

discourse that makes it distinct from others. Often used in the same sense as ideology, discourse

“draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology.” New Historicism studies

discourse in particular settings to understand the “dynamic, unstable interplay” among them as

they compete with one another in a state of flux negotiating exchanges of power (281). Discourse

is not stable because it is dominant as long as a particular social group retains power, even as it

elicits opposition to its hegemonic tendencies. This study articulates the discourse of the ruling

class in comparison to the discourse of the working class which constitutes the opposing camp in

the selected texts. Thus, an evaluation of the dialectical relationship between the two classes is

expected to be achieved. The general use of language in the selected texts will also be assessed to

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ascertain the characters‟ perception of the socio-political conditions which necessitate protest in

the texts.

Literary Texts Chosen for the Study

In the texts selected for this study, namely Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe, Just

Before Dawn by Kole Omotoso, Buchi Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra, Festus Iyayi‟s Violence,

Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel and Okey Ndibe‟s Arrows of Rain, the writers lay bare in

fiction many of what they consider to be the psychological mechanisms by which subordinate

classes work out their class aspirations, simmering resentments, and concealed and overt hatred.

In Achebe‟s Anthills of the Savannah, several common themes are apparent – the condition of

the nation; issues of power and domination and the failure of national consciousness. In

Omotoso‟s Just Before Dawn, the novelist engages in the fictionalisation of Nigeria‟s political

history with shifts into direct dialogue and a fictionalised reconstruction of the events.

Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra chronicles the happenings of the Nigerian civil war from the

perspective of the helpless women and children who were its main victims. The protest in the

novel is directed at the greed, corruption and sadism of many of the protagonists on all sides

which suitably demonstrates the illogicality of seeking to explain the war. Iyayi‟s Violence

derives its power largely from the author‟s outrage at the injustice of a system that reduces

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human beings to chattel, and love to a commodity measured in terms of naira and kobo. The

novel reiterates New Historicism‟s submission that power is never wholly confined to a single

person or a single level of society, but circulates in a culture through exchanges of material

goods and exchanges of human beings. In Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel, the writers

frontally engage the evils of the latest incarnation of military rule and its civilian collaborators.

This is indicative of a shift in theme and concern from the previous emphasis on the impact of

colonisation and the focus on the historical past to an examination of current socio-political

problems of abuse of power by the ruling elite, as well as widespread and brazen corruption and

social inequality.

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CHAPTER THREE

PROTEST AS LANDSCAPE: ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH

Introduction

Being Chinua Achebe‟s most recent novel, Anthills of the Savannah poses new challenges which

have to be responded to in new ways. As Lloyd W. Brown points out, Achebe “exposed the

narrowness or irrelevance of Western perceptions of African traditions” (35) in novels like

Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, and “underscores the limitations of traditional African

values vis-à-vis the Western criteria of twentieth century modernity” (35) in works like No

Longer at Ease and A Man of the People. In Anthills of the Savannah, however, society has

reached an ambivalent stage in which the issues identified in the previous eras have mutated into

a crisis which encompasses the difficulties and tensions of those eras, in addition to the peculiar

problems that are particular to it.

To varying degrees and extents, protest has always been present in literature, but in African

literature, it finds deep resonance in the continent‟s tortured history:

The tradition of protest in African literature may … be said to have its roots in the

general crusade against the Slave Trade …. Although slavery was abolished at the

beginning of the nineteenth century, the relationship between the African and the

European remained substantially unchanged …. The process of decolonization,

which in reality is colonialism by other means, or further colonisation … is now

in the final stages of completion.” (Ogude, 5)

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Achebe‟s long and distinguished sojourn in the world of letters may be regarded as one long

protest against behaviour, attitudes and modes of thinking that he considers antithetical to the

development of Africa and its people. He has explicitly stated the view that protest is integral to

modern African literature, and therefore cannot be divorced from it: “I believe it‟s impossible to

write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of

protest …. (Ogunbesan, 40). Protest is inherent within Achebe because, as he himself says, it is

part of his “deep-rooted need to alter things within that situation, to find for myself a little more

room than has been allowed me in the world” (Gikandi, 19). In his different works, he has shown

that he is an expert practitioner when it comes to protest. Adebayo Williams states: “His

philippic on the failure of leadership in Nigeria, The Trouble With Nigeria (1982), remains a

classic of the genre, and his terse rebuke of the Nigerian press is as memorable as it is forthright.

When he is cross, Achebe can be pithy and pitiless ….” (9). Redemptive severity of this kind

stems from the fact that writers possess what Wole Soyinka calls:

… an array of unholy words with which to rephrase or reinterpret, for the

purposes of demystification, even passages from the same scriptures that

seemingly encrypt the doctrine of conformism or female subservience. They

embrace a morality that compels them to challenge the authority of the fatal

interpreter of the divine word. (142)

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe protests Eurocentric notions of pre-colonial Africa as barbaric and

unenlightened; in No Longer at Ease, he protests the corruption and moral degeneration of a

nation that was already failing to live up to its ideals soon after independence; in Arrow of God,

he protests the jealousy, intrigue and lack of dynamism that made indigenous African societies

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all the more vulnerable to the pressures of colonialism, Christianity and western education; in A

Man of the People, he protests the venality and corruption of leadership, as well as the

passiveness of the citizenry that made socio-political chaos inevitable. Anthills of the Savannah

seems to represent a fitting culmination of a lifetime of literary commitment, weaving together as

it does many of the diverse strands of his earlier novels and turning them into a comprehensive

and far-reaching examination of a people‟s response to societal challenges. As Ezenwa-Ohaeto,

his biographer states, Achebe regards Anthills of the Savannah as “a summation of both his

vision and the different strands of his novels” (242).

When Anthills of the Savannah is considered in relation to the issue of protest, it will be seen that

the novel demonstrates the ambivalence, ambiguity and complexity that is the hallmark of the

most memorable literary approaches to the phenomenon of protest. Such features can be seen

even in the very title of the book, Anthills of the Savannah. The clearest reference to it in the text

is found in the following quotation:

The trees had become hydra-headed bronze statues so ancient that only blunt

residual features remained on their faces, like anthills surviving to tell the new

grass of the savannah about last year’s bush fires. (31, emphasis added).

As described by Achebe, anthills are “survivors” whose very presence is supposed to bear

testimony to the occurrence of traumatic events in the past. In other words, the landscape is itself

attesting to the presence of suffering and distress. From this perspective, therefore, anthills are,

for Achebe, a reminder, a testimony, and by extension, an objection and a gesture of defiance. In

essence, anthills are symbolic and literal manifestations of protest.

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Kolawole Ogungbesan has traced the evolution of Achebe‟s perception of the writer‟s role in

African society. For him, it starts from that of a teacher and guide whose purpose is to help

people regain their lost dignity, to the embodiment of social consciousness who must point out

the evils being perpetrated in newly-independent societies by the indigenes upon themselves, to

the radical seer who must help envision meaningful change. Ogungbesan identifies each of these

phases as corresponding to events going on in Nigeria at specific times and which were reflected

in Achebe‟s literary output. Thus, the teacher‟s role was necessary in the run-up to independence

and immediately after, and was reflected in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; the role of the

social conscience became relevant in the post-independence era, and was manifested in No

Longer at Ease and A Man of the People; the radical visionary‟s role was inspired by the

Nigerian crises and its subsequent civil war, and is reflected mainly in his poetry and in the

lectures and speeches he delivered during this period.

Although Ogungbesan goes on to say that Achebe‟s various roles ultimately become

contradictory rather than evolutionary because he did not attain the critical detachment that was

vital to creativity during the civil war, the categories he isolates are useful in making the

argument that Achebe combines all these prior roles in Anthills of the Savannah. In the novel,

Achebe is simultaneously a teacher, a social conscience and a radical visionary. History,

contemporary social commentary, and pragmatic models of social action are all merged in an

ambitious work which brings all of his long-held views together. The novel seeks to answer

many of the questions that were ostensibly left unanswered in previous works, such as the

meaning of Ikemefuna‟s murder and Okonkwo‟s suicide in Things Fall Apart; Obika‟s death and

Ezeulu‟s madness in Arrow of God; Odili‟s real motivation in A Man of the People, and Obi‟s

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true loyalties in No Longer at Ease. The way in which he does this is simplicity itself. Each of

the above incidents represents an unvoiced protest against the overwhelming oppressiveness of a

given situation: in Anthills of the Savannah, the death, madness and emotional insecurity of

previous novels will be overcome by the simple expedient of speaking out, by ensuring that

one‟s peculiar circumstances, no matter how difficult, do not result in the silencing of one‟s

voice. Protest is the means by which Achebe gathers all the important strands of his previous

thinking together, and it is also the medium through which he expresses them.

Achebe‟s unique approach to protest is shaped by his long-standing discomfort with

conventional or insufficiently examined approaches to the delineation of social issues in

literature. As Gikandi asserts, his ideological standpoints are characterised by a persistent

unwillingness to follow the well-trodden path: “ideology as process and critique, rather than

product and dogma, is the key to understanding Achebe‟s narrative strategies …‟ (12).

Achebe‟s relatively non-controversial approach to the portrayal of contemporary African society

stands in sharp contrast to the overtly political commitment demanded of the continent‟s writers

by Marxist authors and critics. Talking about the role of African writers in the eighties, Ngugi wa

Thiong‟o predicted a complete integration of the committed writer into the anti-imperialist

struggle in such a way as to become virtually indistinguishable from the masses themselves:

… as the struggle continues and intensifies, the lot of the writer in a neo-colonial

state will become harder and not easier …. the African writer of the eighties, the

one who opts for becoming an integral part of the African revolution, has no

choice but that of aligning himself with the people: their economic, political and

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cultural struggle for survival …. He must be part of the song the people sing as

once again they take up arms to smash the neo-colonial state to complete the anti-

imperialist national democratic revolution they had started in the fifties, and even

earlier. (164)

Given the kind of work he has produced over the years, Achebe would accept this prescription,

but only to an extent. He understands that the writer‟s difficulties will increase, and will concede

that closer relationships between the writer and society are desirable. Indeed, these are

viewpoints that he has long advocated before they became fashionable in his critical writings.

However, a point of contention arises over the exact nature of the writer‟s identification with the

people. Achebe has always valued aesthetic distance as vital to the independence that is essential

to artistic integrity, and total immersion in the popular causes that Ngugi suggests would not sit

comfortably with him. In fact, such a close integration into such supposed “people‟s struggles”

could actually blur the distinctions between writer and audience to the extent that the former

would become unrecognisable. As shall be seen later in this chapter, Achebe does seek ways in

which writers can identify with the masses, but he chooses to find ways which ensure that it is a

sincere gesture, rather than political or ideological posturing.

In any case, the writer‟s unique position in relation to that of society also makes it necessary for

him to stand apart from it. As Soyinka claims,

… the writer is the visionary of his people, he recognizes past and present not for

the purpose of enshrinement but for the local creative glimpses and statement of

the ideal future. He anticipates; he warns. It is not always enough for the writer to

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be involved in the direct political struggle of today, he often cannot help but

envisage and seek to protect the future which is the declared aim of the

contemporary struggle. (Obiechina, Language 123)

Like most writers in Africa, Achebe labours under the weight of huge popular expectations. It is

widely believed that literary writings must offer practical solutions to social problems if they are

to be considered relevant. Njabulo S. Ndebele states:

One accusation that has often been levelled at writers, particularly in those

countries hungry for radical change, is that many of them have not offered

solutions to the problems they may have graphically revealed. It seems … this

accusation has been based on a set of premises by which the nature of the

relationship between art and society could never be adequately disclosed. More

often than not, the accusation has been presented on the demand that artists

produce works that will incite people to political action, something which, most

people will agree, is strictly speaking, the task of the professional propagandist.

(128)

The burden of relevance becomes even heavier when critics like Kemi Kuku argue that

increasingly intractable difficulties in Nigerian society have caused the country‟s authors to

become overtly revolutionary in their work:

Recently, the Nigerian writer has assumed a new role which is that of a

revolutionary. The social, political and economic situation has necessitated a more

revolutionary approach to criticism. Having played the role of moralist, saviour

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and prophet of doom to no avail, the Nigerian writer has decided to initiate the

direction towards which the people should move. (143)

It is clear that Kuku is talking about revolutions of the sort usually seen in Marxist rhetoric.

While it can be conceded that many Nigerian writers will have adapted their work to meet the

new realities of the contemporary situation, it is doubtful that Achebe could be properly

classified in such a “revolutionary” group. He is interested in revolution, but it is more of a deep

ethical change rather than a political transformation. Besides, commitment of the kind Kuku

suggests is always subordinate to the writer‟s own interests:

Engagement or political commitment do not pre-determine what a writer‟s politics

should be, it merely demands the writer write in such ways as might advance the

interests and purposes he espouses. (Chinweizu, et. al. 254)

As the person who famously declared that the novelist performed the role of teacher in African

societies, Achebe has always produced works whose overt aim is to educate and enlighten the

reader: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God instil awareness about Africa‟s past; No Longer at

Ease raises consciousness about the destructive consequences of improperly-digested alien

values; A Man of the People exposes the corruption and incompetence that had stifled progress in

Nigeria. However, as Richard K. Priebe points out, Achebe‟s desire to teach through his writing

is much more sophisticated than at first seems apparent: “Achebe‟s works are didactic, but not in

the manner of a facile, two-dimensional realism whose ethical choices are clear-cut” (48). This

sophisticated, multi-dimensional realism is brought to bear on Achebe‟s portrayal of protest in

Anthills of the Savannah. The novel has explicit didactic aims, many of which relate to the nature

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of protest, but they are depicted in such a way as to accurately reflect the ambivalent nature of

protest, and the compromises and false starts that characterise its manifestation in fallible human

beings in a society that is itself far from perfect.

Achebe is unusual among African writers in his possession of an unquenchable faith in his

society‟s ability to make real progress, while still being able to take a hard look at the failures

and shortcomings that continue to frustrate the laudable project of nation-building. As he tells

Robert Serumaga in a 1967 interview:

… if it were for me to order society I would be very unhappy about the way

things have turned out. But again, I see this as the way life is. Every society has to

grow up, every society has to learn its own lessons, so I don‟t despair. (Duerden,

13)

It is this mix of patient tolerance and tough-minded pragmatism that he brings to bear on Anthills

of the Savannah. It shapes his attitude to the society that he portrays in the novel, and by

extension, the way protest is depicted in it. This is yet another reason why Achebe is so wary of

conventional or “popular” approaches to the depiction of protest in literature, regardless of

whether it is from the perspective of style, content, or method. Instead, he chooses to let protest

emerge as a natural response to the ambiguous, albeit clearly depressing, circumstances which

have given rise to it. Achebe‟s insistence that the challenges of Africa are too complex to be

solved entirely by conventional approaches can also be seen in his belief that “we should not be

bent on the one-solution approach. Africa is not a one-solution continent. We are not a one-issue

continent” (Ezenwa-Ohaeto, 254).

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Part of the reason why Achebe‟s approach to the issues of protest in Anthills of the Savannah is

so multi-dimensional is that it is because he is dealing with contemporary history, analysing

unfolding events which are taking place in the here-and-now, as opposed to the there-and-then.

Moral principles and ethical attitudes may be relatively fixed and unchanging, but the social

context in which they are to be applied is so fluid that any attempt to express those principles and

attitudes through protest must be adaptable to the fast-changing realities on the ground. Joseph

Swann identifies the novel‟s essential ambiguity:

History is not, as it was in Things Fall Apart, there in the past to be known and

told about: it comes into being in the minds and feelings of those involved in it. It

is the product of the words which form it. That, I think, is why there is no fixed

standpoint in Anthills of the Savannah, no single storyteller and no single story:

the face of history has become a crowd snapshot, with its own very real claim to

objectivity …. Anthills of the Savannah is involved in the genesis of history. What

takes place here does so inside the characters who tell their story. They, mentally

and emotionally, are struggling to find guidelines through the morass of violence

and fear which has taken the place of corruption in their society. (Serafin, 7)

Achebe‟s notion of protest is influenced by his perception of it as being essentially moral rather

than basically ideological. In his novels and essays, he has clearly shown his impatience with the

political posturing, name-calling and labelling which all too often pass for protest and political

commitment in African literature. Thus, the principle and altruism that are supposed to be the

basic underpinnings of protest are obscured by political pomposity and affectation, dogmatic

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prescription and downright abuse, which in his opinion do little either to properly locate the

cause of protest or identify the ways in which it can ensure social progress. This is why it is

possible to read Anthills of the Savannah as a sustained meditation on the nature of protest.

Achebe carefully considers the multifarious forms it takes, the differing circumstances that

provoke it, the many disguises that it assumes, and its ultimate inevitability as a response to

intolerable situations of oppression and injustice.

Adewale Maja-Pearce claims that Anthills of the Savannah does not seek an answer to why

African governments such as that in charge of the Republic of Kangan treat their citizens with so

much contempt, and why the citizens themselves actually seem to expect to be treated in such a

high-handed manner, instead of resolutely opposing it:

If successive leaders are able to shirk their responsibilities and turn themselves

into Life Presidents the better to brutalise the society further, it is only because the

brutalised themselves collude in the endeavour. (167)

In a similar vein, Bernth Lindfors states that “one of the central questions raised in the course of

the narrative – “What must a people do to appease an embittered history?” – remains

unanswered” (“Escort Service” 9). Many of the novel‟s characters, Maja-Pearce says, are guilty

of a “naïve romanticism” (166) that they seem to think is a shortcoming to be found only in the

so-called masses: Ikem and Beatrice, in particular, are guilty of making romantic analyses of the

problems facing society. However, when Anthills of the Savannah is considered from the

perspective of protest, it will be seen that what Maja-Pearce sees as romanticism is actually an

aspect of the tortuous path these characters must follow as they gradually overcome deficiencies

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in their own personalities and come to realise the true nature of the problems confronting them,

and the consequent need to protest strenuously against those deficiencies. In other words, it is

one of the literary strategies adopted by Achebe in portraying protest in the novel.

Strategies of Protest in Anthills of the Savannah

Unlike other novels where the manifestation of protest is obvious, protest in Anthills of the

Savannah appears to be an extremely multifaceted phenomenon. It can be seen in various ways:

the multiple-narration method which enables the reader to see both the strengths and the

weaknesses of the major characters; the various vignettes in which Achebe exposes the class-

based ignorance and social assumptions of different individuals; the choice of oblique protest

over overt protest; his extensive use of myth, folktale and proverb; the way in which he conflates

protest with personal growth.

The above strategies ensure that protest is as ubiquitous as the landscape that defines the setting

of the novel, and becomes virtually atmospheric in its near-omniscience. Dictatorial leaders and

corrupt government officials are not criticised directly, but are portrayed in such a manner that

they actually seem to condemn themselves, as it were. No character is allowed to assume a

holier-than-thou attitude either, as all are subject to sustained interrogation of their behaviour and

attitudes, by themselves and by others. The novel is interspersed with moral fables or parables

which sum up prevailing situations and contemporary attitudes in a very concise manner. These

elements are essential parts of Achebe‟s overall strategy of reconfiguring protest by ridding it of

the ideological posturing, intellectual dishonesty and mental laziness that have tarnished it and

thereby made it part of the problem instead of part of the solution that it is supposed to be. They

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will be discussed in turn, as their importance to Achebe‟s portrayal of protest is now examined in

detail.

Multiple Narration

Simon Gikandi observes that “Achebe‟s works are all experimental in nature: narrative strategies

are shaped by the author‟s need to experiment with different forms of representation” (16).

Anthills of the Savannah clearly demonstrates this experimental penchant, and it resembles

Joseph Conrad‟s Nostromo and Ngugi wa Thiong‟o‟s Petals of Blood which depict “a complex

of interfused confessions emanating from the dramatic actions of characters who are caught in a

crucial historical moment” (Ker 8). Anthills of the Savannah is in a significant way reflective of a

modernist consciousness, in which the literary artist is much less certain of the stability of social

institutions than he used to be, and produces texts which reflect such anxieties and misgivings.

Achebe, ordinarily, would not be regarded as falling into this category; indeed, he is famous for

his excoriation of the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah for utilising such a modernist

consciousness in his depiction of Ghana (Morning 19-29). However, such is the desperate nature

of the situation that Africa finds itself in that Achebe has no choice but to deploy the tools that

can best approximate harsh realities.

Anthills of the Savannah is told from a number of different viewpoints, including those of the

Kangan Commissioner for Information, Chris Oriko; the editor of the leading newspaper, the

National Gazette, Ikem Osodi; and Beatrice Okoh, a senior civil servant. In addition to these

perspectives, there is a limited third-person narrative with free indirect discourse. This narrative

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method is a more sophisticated version of a technique which Achebe had used to great effect in A

Man of the People, where, as Emmanuel Obiechina says,

… we find a complex picture in which the point of view shifts rapidly between

identification and dissociation, between the author‟s seeing things through the eye

of the major character-narrator and standing aside to take a critical look at the

narrator, a feat made possible by the author‟s imaginative nimbleness in moving

between moral positions. (327)

Most analyses of this use of multiple narration point to the fact that it is being used for the first

time in a sustained way in Achebe‟s oeuvre, and go on to discuss its relevance to the novel‟s

themes. From the particular perspective of this study, however, it is argued that Achebe‟s use of

multiple narrators actually helps to underscore the novel‟s status as an extended meditation on

the nature of protest. This can be seen in a number of ways.

The first is that Achebe‟s use of multiple narrators clearly demonstrates the multi-dimensional

nature of protest, regardless of how it is conceived. Chris, Ikem and Beatrice are all protesting

the incompetence, corruption and injustice that surround them, but they all manifest such protest

in different ways. Chris sees himself as the observer who charts the degeneration and perversion

of noble ideals; Ikem is the Jeremiah who speaks truth to power; Beatrice is the portrait of the

ideal citizen whose exceptionality is a demonstration of what the nation can achieve if its house

were in order. They are all in agreement that the country is on a dangerous path and is beset by

rising social, political and economic tensions, but they all protest the dire situation in their own

individual ways.

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Related to this is the way in which the novel‟s utilisation of multiple narration enables Achebe to

refract protest by showing how it is capable of taking on different meanings when it is viewed

from different perspectives. When Ikem is seen through the eyes of Chris early in Chapter

Three, he is portrayed as a rash, intemperate man who seems to be incapable of thinking before

he acts: “Chris was smiling a mirthless smile. An angry man is always a stupid man” (27). To

Ikem, however it is Chris who is illogical and detached from national realities: “Amazing what

even one month in office can do to a man‟s mind …. To think that Chris no longer understands

such logic!” (38). Both men view themselves as committed patriots who genuinely wish to

change the situation in the country, yet when their actions are viewed through the eyes of others,

their behaviour seems to be irrational and counter-productive.

Achebe‟s use of the multiple narrative mode also enables him to concretely demonstrate and

thereby reinforce his notion of the pre-eminence of stories and storytellers, and the way in which

both are intricately intertwined with protest. In the novel, none of the novel‟s main characters has

all the facts to provide a comprehensive picture of the issues at stake: each must tell his or her

own part of the story, as it were, so that the others can complement it with additional information

and perspectives. As Chris says, “We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us

without implicating the others” (66). In a similar manner, protest is a story that cannot be told by

just one person because it is a intricate, multilayered, interwoven tapestry whose richness and

vitality stems from the ability of others to contribute to it. It is significant in this regard that

Beatrice‟s most effective way of protesting the tragedies that beset her is to take up the thread of

narration from where the now-deceased Chris and Ikem have dropped it and to ensure that it is

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not forgotten, misappropriated or distorted: she claims to have “definitely taken on the challenge

of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history” (82).

Vignettes

Like many of Achebe‟s other novels, Anthills of the Savannah is full of vignettes, which can be

defined as tales told by characters or by the author which may further illuminate a particular

situation or describe an important aspect of national life and social conditions, or dramatise a

salient issue that had hitherto manifested itself at only a theoretical level. In the novel, such

vignettes or sketches include the story of the forbearing wrestling champion, His Excellency‟s

forays into oral sex, the murderously indifferent soldier in the market, and the tortoise who was

about to die. Stories are meant to educate and entertain. They are a significant medium of

enculturation, they serve to transmit cherished values, and sanction those who deviate from them.

As the medium through which these stories are given expression, story-tellers are held in high

regard: they are, in fact, the custodians of the communal imagination, privileged persons

entrusted with the important task of explaining a society to itself.

Almost like Biblical parables, these stories encapsulate prevalent modes of behaviour in a way

that almost nothing else can. For example, the soldier who contemptuously tells the trader he

almost knocks down that his life is worth no more than a dog‟s enacts a ritual of self-indictment

that is so conclusive that he does not need to be condemned or confronted by either Ikem, who

witnesses the incident, or by the trader he nearly kills.

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In other words, the vignette is a form of self-generating protest: protest does not arise from

reactions to an unjust or inequitable situation, but from the very situation itself. A similar theory

can be observed in the story of the tortoise who was about to die. Even though he knows that he

is about to succumb to a far more superior force, he is still insistent on re-interpreting the context

of his death in such a way as to convey meanings that transcend the humiliation of defeat and

even the finality of death. When this is applied to protest, Achebe appears to be saying that

human beings can only be victims of circumstance if they allow themselves to be perceived as

such because it is in their power to re-interpret their particular predicament in such a way that

they can reject its implications. Such rejection is at the heart of the self-sustaining kind of protest

that Achebe seeks to highlight in Anthills of the Savannah.

These vignettes are also important in the way in which they help to focus attention on the story

as the real locus of protest, as opposed to physical action which is too easily tainted by self-

interest and bad faith. By concentrating on the kernel of action, reaction, hope and fear, ideals

and reality, these vignettes show that the true essence of protest lies in its essentially moral stand,

the notion that whatever is perceived as being harmful to the progress of society should be

properly identified as such, instead of being tolerated or countenanced. As Nadine Gordimer

claims, “Morals have bedded with story-telling since the magic of the imaginative capacity

developed in the human brain” (115). These vignettes, in their very artlessness, ribaldry and

folksiness reconfigure the very purpose of protest by de-emphasising the political in favour of

the human context, which is more fundamental. They reiterate the moral perspective which is the

true basis of protest, and thereby cleanse it of the irrelevant accretions of ideology, ambition and

other short-term interests that often cloud other manifestations of protest.

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Oblique Forms of Protest

In furtherance of his desire to reconfigure the very notion of protest, Achebe dismisses the tactic

of overt protest as a blunt instrument likely to do as much harm as good, and chooses oblique

and indirect forms of protest which seek to achieve the same ends in a more subtle manner. The

very techniques being discussed represent an important aspect of Achebe‟s indirect strategy, as

can be seen in their non-conventional approach to the portrayal of germane social issues. In

addition to them, however, there are ways in which Achebe specifically undertakes to carry out

indirect forms of protest in the novel.

Paradoxes of Protest

One of the most significant ways in which Achebe portrays oblique forms of protest in Anthills

of the Savannah is by highlighting paradoxes which reside at the heart of protest. He shows that

not all protest is protest, and conversely, that it is possible to protest without protesting. A

prominent example of the former is the national cabinet whose obsequious protests are simply

intended to maintain their positions of high office: His Excellency‟s statement about returning to

the barracks is “boldly interrupted by the Commissioner for Justice and the Attorney-General

and then by everybody else with an assortment of protests” (4-5). In his speech to the students at

the University of Bassa, Ikem exposes a cross-section of social classes and professional groups

whose “protests” are in fact self-centred displays of greed and selfishness: corrupt civil servants,

materialistic trade unionists and over-indulged students. When any of these groups wishes to

protect its selfish interests, it calls such activities “protest.”

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Unlike those groups, there are individuals who are able to engage in protest without actually

appearing to be protesting. A prominent example of such “anti-protesters” is Mad Medico. A

foul-mouthed Briton whose sanity is widely in doubt, his real name is John Kent. He is a hospital

administrator who is notorious for bizarre acts which repeatedly get him into trouble with the

authorities. Mad Medico “has a strange mania for graffiti” (55) which he indulges by putting up

signs that make offensive comments about ongoing situations. His graffiti does not really appear

to be protest, especially since they are often couched in terms that are designed to give maximum

offence, both to those they are aimed at, as well as conventional notions of morality. Yet, they

are themselves borne out of moral outrage at the deficiencies of society, an outrage that is further

underlined by the fact that Mad Medico is a foreigner, who ostensibly should not be as

concerned about Kangan affairs as the indigenes.

Another example of protesting without appearing to protest can be seen at the end of the novel

where a naming ceremony is conducted which defies all known traditional norms. It is presided

over by a woman; there is no alcohol; the baby girl is given a boy‟s name. Taken together, the

various components that make up this strange naming ceremony represent a comprehensive

repudiation of the oppressiveness and injustice that have led to such widespread misery and

suffering. Yet none of the participants believes they are doing anything extraordinary, much less

engaging in protest of any sort. The true import of this action is pointed out by the old man who

was supposed to do the naming: “… in you young people our world has met its match. Yes! You

have put the world where it should sit …. (27). Indeed, Anthills of the Savannah is full of people

and groups who protest without appearing to do so. The novel is replete with taxi-drivers,

househelps and other citizens of comparatively low social status who unconsciously express an

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unspoken opposition to the intolerable conditions under which they live, whether it is by battling

for space in traffic jams, declining to work on Saturdays, or by displaying insights that are

unknown to the supposedly better-educated elite. In fact, it is the educated elite who are the main

target of such anti-protests because they seem to require shaking out of an incredible

complacency which renders them blind, deaf and dumb to the terrible conditions all around them.

Communality of Protest

The paradoxes which shape protest in Anthills of the Savannah are further highlighted by the

way in which Achebe ensures that no person or group has a monopoly on protest. This is done by

portraying ways in which protesters are protested against. As has been earlier pointed out, the

novel‟s main characters all protest the state of their society, but they also protest against one

another: Ikem protests what he sees as the arrogant behaviour of Chris; Chris protests Ikem‟s

apparent lack of regard for constituted authority; Beatrice protests Ikem‟s patronising attitudes to

women, as well as Mad Medico‟s irreverent references to His Excellency. Even Captain Abdul

Medani of the dreaded State Research Council protests the repressiveness of the state he is

supposed to safeguard by alerting those it is hunting. Achebe seems to be saying that protest is so

ubiquitous and multifaceted that nobody can claim to be more worthy of it than others. Instead of

focussing on the people who protest, he prefers to emphasise the situations which trigger protest

and investigate the peculiar combination of circumstance, personality and temperament that

determine how individuals and groups respond to such situations.

Reversing the Trajectory of Protest

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Related to this is Achebe‟s strategy of revising the conventional trajectory of protest as outward-

focused and targeted at others, to making it inward-focused, targeting oneself. He believes that

all protest is founded on the individual‟s own sense of right and wrong, and that the inner person

is just as likely to be affected by protest as much as the external persons or groups it is ostensibly

aimed at. In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe does this by conflating protest and moral or

personal growth. Several characters are seen to experience increased psychological or emotional

maturity as the novel progresses. Chris, Ikem and Beatrice are prime examples of this tendency.

Although none of them is satisfied with what is going on in their country, they all remain within

their comfort zones, content to complain about how things are not as they should be. Protest

serves to take them into the new areas of experience which they must encounter in order to

concretely act on the basis of their feelings and attitudes, and by so doing achieve emotional and

psychological growth.

This process is particularly profound in Chris, whose increasing awareness and maturity Achebe

is especially careful to chart. At the beginning of the novel, he is so emotionally removed from

national affairs that he is virtually alienated. By his own admission, the main emotion that

animates him is “Pure, unadulterated disinterest” (4). As the novel goes on, however, he is

shaken out of this self-protective indifference by a series of incidents which leave him with no

other choice than to openly protest the injustice and oppression he can no longer pretend not to

see. His stance on contemporary affairs is repeatedly challenged by Ikem, Beatrice and Mad

Medico, but the turning-point is the arbitrary suspension of Ikem. When he confronts His

Excellency over the matter, it is obvious that his studied indifference has disappeared and has

been replaced by a passionate intensity even he never knew he possessed. This is seen in the

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firmness with which he defies the Head of State: “Well, Your Excellency, for once I am turning

you down. I will not carry out this instruction and I hereby tender my resignation” (144). Ikem‟s

murder finally opens his eyes to the true nature of the regime he is serving and spurs him to

outright defiance. As he flees Bassa, Chris finds himself in situations that continually remind him

of how ignorant and unaware he had been before. He learns first-hand the paradox that “to be big

man no hard but to be poor man no be small thing” (194), as one of his helpers puts it; he is

“stunned” (200) by the unimpeachable logic that makes it impossible for him to use insecticide

in a poor home where it is unknown. Ultimately, Chris is “fully reconciled to his new condition

as a wide-eyed newcomer to the way of Kangan” (201) because he understands that it is an

essential part of the “transformation … of the man he was” (204).

Ikem undergoes a similar process of change. Although it naturally differs from that of Chris in

scope and intensity, it is still reflective of an increased emotional maturity that emerges in direct

proportion to his capacity for protest. As the crusading editor of the leading national daily, the

National Gazette, it appears that he already possesses all the necessary credentials to be a leading

protest figure, but he recognises that he does not fully understand the problem, to say nothing of

having all the answers. For example, he does not understand the popularity of public executions

among the ordinary people, even though it is the very same people he claims to be fighting for.

He wonders at the “insistence by the oppressed that his oppression be performed in style!” (139),

and concludes that contradictions like these are “a basic human feeling that may only be

alleviated by a good spread of general political experience” (139).

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Despite his sympathy and striving for analytical clarity, however, Ikem still has much to learn.

For one thing, he is not as high-minded or enlightened as he likes to think. His wish to get rid of

his girlfriend Elewa in the middle of the night because of his preference for being alone in his

own bed betrays a selfishness that is at odds with his supposed sympathy for the downtrodden.

His insistence on writing crusading editorials which have scored “many bull‟s-eyes” (38) is a

silent demonstration of an intellectual arrogance that is often a weakness of socially-committed

professionals. These shortcomings are exposed when Beatrice accuses him of a gender bias

which is all the more chauvinistic because he is genuinely unaware of it. He is shocked when she

tells him that “he has no clear role for women in his political thinking” (91), relegating them to

the well-worn role of passive lamenters of their deceased menfolk. This appears to mark a

significant phase in his self-development because, as he tells Beatrice, “Your charge has forced

me to sit down and contemplate the nature of oppression – how flexible it must learn to be, how

many faces it must learn to wear if it is to succeed again and again” (97).

Ikem‟s new awareness of new perspectives is enhanced by his meeting with the delegates from

his home region of Abazon, especially its leader, whose old-fashioned wisdom and dignity serve

to remind him of the special responsibilities imposed on writers as repositories of communal

memory. After he is suspended for writing an editorial on the delegation, the unusual calm with

which he accepts his predicament is indicative of his emotional growth: Beatrice “had expected

him to come in bristling with combativeness instead of which he seemed composed, even

serene” (146). Further evidence of this personal growth is seen in his lecture at the University of

Bassa in which he seeks a more interactive experience than he could have ever got from his

crusading editorials: “Dialogues are infinitely more interesting than monologues” (154) he tells

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his audience. The interactive session is a fitting act of protest by a person who had previously

theorised that the nation‟s problems stemmed from “the failure of our leaders to re-establish vital

inner links … with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation‟s being” (141).

Of the novel‟s three characters, it is Beatrice who has to make the longest journey to achieve

personal growth because, unlike Chris and Ikem, she must pass through cultural and spiritual

phases, as well as emotional and intellectual stages. Also, as a woman, she has to confront the

additional bias of ingrained gender bias to overcome, a deficiency that even enlightened

individuals like Chris and Ikem are susceptible to. Ironically, she has a greater awareness than

either Chris or Ikem, even though she is not as intensely involved in national affairs as they are.

She sees the destructiveness of the rivalry between them and her apprehensive prediction “I can

see plenty of trouble ahead for the two of you” (65) turns out to be prescient in light of the

tragedies that subsequently occur. Her desire to resolve their difficulties contrasts favourably

with the stubbornness of the two men.

As a person requiring emotional growth, Beatrice is not without her own faults, however.

Initially, she is far less self-aware than either Chris or Ikem, and her naïveté often expresses itself

in sexual jealousy, such as can be seen in her undignified behaviour at the Presidential Lodge.

Like other members of the Kangan elite, she is content to remain within a comfortable sphere of

privileged existence and enjoy the benefits conferred on her by her social status, even when she

knows that not all is well with the country. Her journey to self-realization begins with her desire

to heal the dysfunctional relationship between Chris and Ikem. From this, she focuses on the

problematic dualisms that shape her own life: between Beatrice the civil servant and

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Nwanyibuife the priestess; between honouring the dead and succouring the living; between

memory and prophecy; between past and present. Because her focus is on repairing damaged

relationships, Beatrice needs to understand others, especially the ways in which protest

illuminates the hopes and fears of others. But she must understand herself first, and that is where

her journey of personal growth really begins. She goes back in her memory to reclaim aspects of

her personality which had been hidden from her by Christianity and western education. She

comes to terms with her affection and solidarity with her abused mother, as well as her repressed

feelings of hatred for her tyrannical father. In addition, she re-establishes contact with the vital

essence of her traditional culture, and by so doing, comes to fully understand her priestly calling

which had hitherto manifested itself as a barely-understood undercurrent in her life.

When he first meets her, Chris perceives her as “Peaceful but very strong. Very, very strong”

(63-4); as she develops, this strength moves from being a hidden quality to an outward

manifestation of her personality. As she comes into greater awareness of herself and her role, her

pronouncements carry the weight of unerring prophecy:

… I see trouble building up for us. It will get to Ikem first …. He will be the

precursor to make straight the way. But after him it will be you. We are all in it,

Ikem, you, me and even Him. The thing is no longer a joke. (115)

Like Chris and Ikem, her protest is shaken out of its elitist context when she comes face-to-face

with the grinding poverty and widespread deprivation that the majority of citizens are forced to

endure: when she visits the fugitive Chris where he is hiding, she discovers that “she was

selfishly putting out a poor family” (197). After the deaths of Chris and Ikem, Beatrice is the one

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who ensures that their memories are not forgotten, and makes certain that all subsequent

relationships she enters into are founded upon mutual trust and genuine respect: she becomes “a

captain whose leadership was sharpened more and more by sensitivity to the peculiar needs of

her company” (229).

Literary Technique

Achebe‟s desire to highlight the paradox of protest can be seen through the literary technique he

deploys in the novel. The plot sequence is heavily fragmented, with several instances of prolepsis

(flashforwards) and analepsis (flashbacks) which enable the reader to obtain a multi-dimensional

perspective of the action, thereby enabling him to understand the passions individual characters

bring to the issues they care about. The narrative mode shifts between first and third person, with

the consequence that a uniquely “inside-out, outside-in” perspective is established which offers

an insight into both the public personas that individual characters present to the world, as well as

the ambiguous and complicated personalities that lie behind the public façade. When these

modes of narration are complemented by the free indirect discourse utilised by the author, the

result is a densely-woven narrative which incorporates a multitude of perspectives that engage

one another in a contestation that actually approximates protest itself.

Achebe‟s deadly seriousness about the profoundly significant issues which engage him is

paradoxically given expression in a generally light-hearted manner of writing. The novel is

replete with a variety of forms of humour, including clever wordplay, brazen ribaldry and the

communally-enjoyed anecdotes that delineate the joys, follies and tragedies of contemporary life.

It is as if Kangan‟s situation is so dire that it has become an ironic joke, a country where one has

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to laugh to keep from crying. From the perspective of protest, such humour actually reinforces

the moral outrage of those who protest, since it underscores the psychological resilience which

underpins all protest.

In this regard, it is not surprising that many of the novel‟s most ferocious and committed

protesters are also its most humorous: Ikem, Beatrice and Mad Medico. Their capacity for

laughter is indicative also of an ability to laugh at a system that is so paranoid about its own

safety that it prescribes public executions as a form of mass entertainment. The regime‟s distinct

humourlessness is evident in its minions, like the “hard-faced orderly” (20) and the “vaguely

disagreeable” (76) director of the repressive State Research Council who directly serve it. His

Excellency himself (53) is an actor that has become so obsessed with putting up an impressive

performance that he has virtually lost his humanity, and with it, his capacity to laugh at himself.

His poor attempts at humour are distorted by the obsequious and sycophantic audience to whom

they are addressed. In contrast, it is the victims of oppression and misrule, the ordinary folk, who

are most attuned to humour. The novel resounds with the unforced and unassuming laughter of

the so-called downtrodden as they courageously respond to the ironies and discordances of life.

Ikem is surprised at the “voluminous folds of … laughter” and concludes that the “poor man can

forget what his humour is about and become altogether too humorous in his suffering” (40), but

Ikem‟s notion of “suffering and smiling” is too crude to account for the rage that also seethes

among the poor, and which is as palpable as their seeming uncomplicated good humour.

Anger in Anthills of the Savannah is mediated by the need to maintain self-control so that it does

not degenerate into uncontrollable chaos which would serve no purpose. Although most

conventional portrayals of protest view anger as the most suitable emotion for its expression,

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Achebe‟s more sophisticated approach means that it is carefully sublimated and channelled into

safer or more productive channels: it therefore manifests as Chris‟s studied indifference at

cabinet meetings, Ikem‟s wilful desire to annoy the high and mighty of Kangan‟s establishment,

Beatrice‟s retreats into her priestess persona, and Mad Medico‟s ironic graffiti. Even the humour

earlier discussed is in some ways representative of a communal desire to dissipate energy before

it attains dangerous levels. Anger is ever-present, nonetheless. It is as ubiquitous as the

landscape, and as such, is never far from everybody‟s minds, least of all the rulers who have the

greatest cause to fear it. This dread can be seen in the way in which a panicked His Excellency

abandons his carefully-cultivated aura of self-assurance at the noise of a visiting delegation from

Abazon outside the Council Chamber:

… the world surges into the alien climate of the Council Chamber on a violent

wave of heat and the sounds of a chanting multitude. And His Excellency rushes

back into the room at the same time, leaving the huge doors swinging.

“What is going on?” he demands frantically. (9)

He has reason to be afraid. Kangan is a country which has run out of excuses, and the resultant

vacuum can easily result in an explosion of popular outrage. The “concealed weapon” of rage

that Ikem is unable to detect in the crowds at the public execution is unrecognisable because it is

far more widely dispersed and camouflaged than he realises. It manifests itself in a myriad

variety of ways: the meaningless battles for a few inches of space in traffic jams; the senseless

venom of the soldier who compares a human‟s life to a dog‟s; the frenzied rage of the “red-eyed

sergeant” (176) who searches Beatrice‟s flat. The importance of protest lies in its ability to take

such fragmented and often self-destructive displays of anger and turn rage into outrage by

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focusing them in the appropriate manner. It is a task that the novel‟s three main characters take

up in their different ways. After falling out with the regime with which they have had such a

troubled relationship, both Chris and Ikem devote themselves to open protest consciously

designed to serve as rallying-points for widespread dissatisfaction and discontent. As Ikem tells

Chris, “The very worst prescription for a suspended editor is silence” (148). Chris, too,

understands that anger is put to the best use when it is given a voice: “It was clear that Major

Samsonite Ossai and his boss were adopting a quiet line. Therefore he must embark on a massive

publicizing of the abduction” (168).

Humour, anger and other motifs of protest are expressed through an imagery that is designed to

complement the novel‟s thematic preoccupations. Anthills of the Savannah deploys a great deal

of sun and water imagery which are in line with its overall environmentalist ethos. The sun is a

recurrent image. His Excellency‟s sudden amiability is described as “The fiery sun retires

temporarily behind a cloud” (3). Ikem‟s „Hymn to the Sun‟ portrays the sun as an instrument of

divine vengeance whose impact on flora, fauna and humanity alike is catastrophic. Both

manifestations of the sun as unchecked power and environmental disaster are combined in the

grim report from an Abazon elder that “all the water bore-holes they are digging in your area are

to be closed so that you will know what it means to offend the sun” (127). Water is another

prominent image in the novel. Often manifesting as rainfall and rivers, the novel‟s water imagery

seems to offer an antidote to the harshness of the sun. Beatrice, the novel‟s most redemptive

character, is portrayed as a priestess of Idemili, a lake goddess, even though she dreaded being

drenched by rain as a child. The third major image in the novel is that of darkness. Sometimes

represented as night or as a lack of vision, darkness as an existential reality abounds in the novel.

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Ikem takes Elewa down “unlit stairs” (36) and the taxi she uses does not have functioning

interior lights.

These images combine with others to offer a collage of visual, tactile, olfactory and other

physical sensations of protest, and thus enable it to transcend the limitations of an abstract

concept and attain the visceral experiences of everyday reality. The novel‟s sun imagery, for

example, represents a complex arena for the issue of protest because it is symbolic of both the

issues that are protested, as well as the way in which they can be protested against. In the novel‟s

context, the sun wreaks environmental havoc, but it is that same situation that inspires agitation

for change. The Abazon delegation‟s visit to the Presidential Palace is a good example of this:

their region has been devastated by a prolonged drought, a situation which is worsened by their

refusal to vote for His Excellency in a referendum proposing an extension to his rule. Their visit

is actually meant to show solidarity with him, but the authorities are convinced that it is a

demonstration. In other words, the sun imagery reinforces the ubiquitous, atmospheric nature of

the protest phenomenon as being driven by a dynamic that inevitably brings oppressors and

victims into inevitable confrontation with one another, regardless of what they try to do to avoid

it.

Folkloric Elements

An important part of the way in which Achebe reconfigures the concept of protest by eliminating

many of the unexamined assumptions that often accompany conventional perceptions of it is

through his use of myth, folktale and proverbs to illuminate the issue of protest. His use of

folkloric elements and the wisdom drawn from patently indigenous sources demonstrates his

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realisation that a major part of Africa‟s problems come from the disconnect between traditional

and foreign cultures. In fact, Frantz Fanon claims that the repudiation of such estrangement is a

revolutionary act, in other words, a profound act of protest:

Intellectual alienation is a creation of middle-class society. What I call middle-

class society is any society that becomes rigidified in pre-determined forms,

forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a

closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas

and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is

in a sense a revolutionary. (224)

In Anthills of the Savannah, the active repudiation of the conventional postulations of radical

rhetoric and its associated behaviour is accompanied by what may be called a corresponding

indigenization of the concept of protest by relocating it within the context of indigenous wisdom

and traditional social mores. There is the myth of power, the folktale of the tortoise that is about

to die, as well as a host of proverbs that bring out the resilience and insightfulness of the

indigenous ethnic groups of Kangan. The folktale of the tortoise is particularly instructive. By

inscribing marks of struggle on the ground in such a way that they outlive him, the tortoise

demonstrates an important understanding of the principles which underpin all protest, namely,

the fact that it is the nature of one‟s response to oppression that matters, rather than the extent

and scope of oppression itself. Something similar can be found in the folk wisdom inherent in the

Abazon elder‟s disquisition on the nature and role of the storyteller, which he suggests are

superior to those of the warrior because he alone has the ability to endow the story with an

existential significance that transcends whatever issue gave rise to it in the first place. When this

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is applied to protest, there are obvious parallels that can be seen. Like the storyteller, the

protester is engaged in an activity whose import reaches far beyond the local issues that caused

it; in a similar manner, the protester is not in control of his subject-matter – it is the subject-

matter which actually controls him. Just as the storyteller is a visionary whose eyes are

privileged to view aspects of reality that are unseen by others, so is the protester animated by

ideals that are far beyond the capacity of non-protesters to imagine. The implications of

comparisons like these find resonance on two levels. Within the novel, storytellers like Chris,

Ikem and Beatrice are encumbered by this moral-visionary burden and compelled to follow its

dictates whether they like it or not. All three take on the roles of storytellers: Chris is

Commissioner for Information, Ikem is a newspaper editor, Beatrice has the task of gathering

their memories together and setting them down both for testimonial and record purposes. Outside

the novel, Achebe seems to be reasserting his long-held opinion that writers have a duty to serve

as the conscience and guide of society, and as such are duty-bound to protest those aspects that

are not in the long-term interests of the people.

In a similar manner to the vignettes discussed earlier, proverbs, saws and other pithy statements

are an aspect of the novel‟s folkloric element, and serve to locate protest within the matrix of

indigenous experience. Bernth Lindfors underscores the importance of proverbs in Achebe‟s

work when he says

… proverbs are used to sound and reiterate major themes, to sharpen

characterization, to clarify conflict, and to focus on the values of the society

Achebe is portraying. By studying the proverbs in a novel, we gain insight into

the moral issues with which that novel deals. (“Palm-Oil” 64)

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By indigenizing understandings of attitudes to protest in Anthills of the Savannah, proverbs show

that social class, education and gender do not inhibit a people‟s ability to realise the constraints

that have conspired to condemn them to a debilitating existence, nor do they restrict their ability

to make caustic comments about the unacceptability of such a situation.

These sayings are scattered throughout the novel, and come mainly from its older, more

traditional-minded characters such as the leader of the Abazon delegation and Elewa‟s uncle.

Like most proverbs, these sayings distil attitudes to life and living that have been

comprehensively tested by experience. For example, “Every man has what is his; do no bypass

him to enter his compound …” (123) testifies to the unshakeable logic that certain rights and

possessions are inalienable, and therefore cannot be taken away by anybody, no matter how

powerful. From the perspective of protest, such a saying has obvious associations: when rights

that are inalienable are taken away, protest becomes a natural response, and its inevitability

transcends the parochial limitations of race, ethnicity and social class. Similarly, “the cock that

crows in the morning belongs to one household but his voice is the property of the

neighbourhood” (122) engages the issue of protest on two levels: the illogicality of attempting to

claim individual control of a people‟s outrage at injustice, and the fact that all individuals

respond to the same social stimuli whether they like it or not, and are therefore fated to share the

same fate for that reason. Elewa‟s uncle self-righteously asks her mother “what is the use of

bending your neck at me like the chicken to the pot when its real enemy is not the pot in which it

cooks, nor even the fire which cooks it but the knife?” (226). This admonition is a reminder that

the act of protest is useless if it fails to identify the real culprits.

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It appears that Achebe‟s purpose is to re-orient the mindset of those who seem to believe that

protest is purely a modern phenomenon, engaged in only by educated citizens of a particular

ideological bent. The mere fact that the most potent sayings are uttered by apparently uneducated

individuals is a clear indication that an understanding of the motivations for protest are far from

unknown, even in Kangan where the masses appear to be compliant and docile. It is little wonder

that early on in the novel, His Excellency demands plain speaking and asks the loquacious

Professor Okong to “… cut out the proverbs …” (19). In addition to the obvious danger of such a

widespread repository of traditional knowledge that could threaten his rule, authoritarian rulers

like the President of Kangan fear the suppleness of proverbs: unlike a newspaper, they cannot be

“occupied” by security agents or closed down.

Textuality of Protest:

Anthills of the Savannah is in itself a veritable record of various forms of protest. Its ability to

recall, re-enact and distil the significance of the various overt and implicit manifestations of

protest helps to establish their importance by simultaneously situating them within the specific

context of their time and highlighting their timelessness and universality. At a general level, this

seemingly paradoxical duality can be seen in the novel‟s setting in the fictional nation of

Kangan, and the corresponding creation of imaginary ethnic groups, environmental issues,

political and other cleavages which, though plausible, never occurred in real life. Yet Kangan is

recognisably Nigerian: even though the ethnic groups which comprise the country have been

given different names, the Abazon, for example, are recognisably Igbo. Their indigenes have

Igbo names, speak Igbo and act according to Igbo codes of conduct. By being simultaneously

Nigerian and non-Nigerian, Achebe is able to achieve the difficult feat of utilising the emotional

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intensity that familiarity generates, while benefiting from the aesthetic distance and objectivity

that the use of a fictional setting confers. Considered from the specific perspective of protest,

such balancing enables the novel to situate issues of protest within an incontestably realistic

context without succumbing to the second-guessing that such a contextualisation would

inevitably inspire.

Memory

Anthills of the Savannah is essentially a work of sustained recall and recollection. By the time it

starts, all the events recounted have taken place, with the various occurrences being pieced

together by Beatrice, who avails herself of the use of Chris‟s journal and Ikem‟s poetry. As a

record, the novel is essentially a testimony, testifying to the actions and inactions of individuals

that led to the present situation. In this regard, it is no surprise that Chris and Ikem are designated

First Witness and Second Witness respectively. Given the sycophancy, the oppressiveness and

the conspiracy of silence under which the whole nation labours, such acts of witnessing are

virtual acts of protest. They defy the elaborate system of repression put in place by the

government and assert the inalienable right of the citizenry to have a say in the way in which

they are ruled. The fact that these acts of defiance are undertaken by the Commissioner for

Information and the editor of the government-owned newspaper, who should ordinarily be an

integral part of the repressive order, only underlines the audacious courage of their actions. It is

also significant that the main target of their opposition happens to be a person who is a childhood

friend of both of them. Indeed, it is ironic that a significant aspect of their acts of remembrance is

their recollection of their carefree schooldays together. It is no coincidence that the devious

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Professor Okong and the Attorney-General refer to His Excellency‟s old friendship with Chris

and Ikem in their attempts to discredit them while ingratiating themselves with the president.

Beatrice‟s recollections take place at two levels, reflecting her need to properly understand

herself before she can begin to understand the events unfolding before her. In this light, it can be

seen that the self-knowledge and self-awareness that remembering inspires are vital to the

emergence of protest: before a person can express outrage at something perceived to be wrong,

that person must first be sure of his own position. Recollection is also vital in establishing the

credentials of those who protest in the novel, as well as the infamy of those against whom they

are protesting. Beatrice‟s recollections of Chris and Ikem are celebrations of the lives of the two

men, and are clearly demonstrative of their courage, humanity and patriotism. This third-party

perspective, as it were, helps to provide a fuller picture of their activist credentials, more than

their own actions would have done, and therefore solidifies their status as genuine protesters who

are only interested in the progress of their country and its people. In contrast are the recollections

of His Excellency by Chris, Ikem and Mad Medico. The very fact that all three characters

wistfully recall the decent man they had known in the past is a damning indictment of how far

His Excellency has fallen. For a person who “had a wholesome kind of innocence about him”

(59), and who had “a kind of spiritual purity” (65), the power-drunk megalomaniac that he has

become is nothing short of tragedy. This is why it can be argued that Chris and Ikem oppose him

so resolutely: they are mourning the end of innocence, as well as fighting against tyranny and

injustice. It is also significant in this regard that individuals who are incapable of protest have

severely circumscribed memories: Professor Okong “no longer dared to remember” (17) that His

Excellency “had not so long ago been politically almost in statu pupillari to him” (17); His

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Excellency warns the Attorney-General against recalling a confidential discussion they have just

had: “… you must forget that we ever talked about it” (24).

The Contestation of Meanings

In considering the nature of protest in Anthills of the Savannah, it is apparent that Achebe

considers all protest as essentially the contestation of meanings. The disagreements between His

Excellency and people like Chris, Ikem, Beatrice and the others over the direction of Kangan

stem from their differing perceptions of how the country can best make progress: the former

believe in an authoritarian, top-down approach because they feel they have all the answers; the

latter argue that such an approach has failed, and must give way to more inclusive approaches

that take the ordinary citizen into greater consideration.

The novel is replete with disagreements and arguments to such an extent that the narrative is a

virtual war of wills. The book opens with Chris and His Excellency, with their eyes combatively

locked in a dangerous outward manifestation of a personality clash. Ikem engages a taxi-driver in

a grim battle for a few inches of space in a traffic jam, and argues with Elewa over the necessity

of her going home in the dead of night; Chris and Ikem argue over the latter‟s editorial

comments. Beatrice engages a female American journalist over her seemingly inappropriate

behaviour towards His Excellency, and quarrels with Chris over his seeming lack of concern for

her wellbeing. Ikem has a brush with a traffic policeman over alleged illegal parking. Ikem turns

his lecture at the university into a dialogue so that he and his audience can “exchange a few

blows” (154).

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These disagreements run the gamut from the trivial to the very serious, but what unites them is

the way in which they all involve a struggle over meanings. Individuals come into conflict with

one another based on their perceived understanding of an issue, and it is the contesting

interpretations that are the basis of protest. This is the reason why it is Chris and Ikem, who can

claim to understand His Excellency better than anyone else, are the ones who ultimately oppose

him so implacably. Throughout the novel, both men, along with Mad Medico, try to draw upon

what they know about His Excellency in an effort to understand how he has become the person

he now is. On his part, His Excellency feels betrayed by his old friends: “He said he was deeply

wounded that we, his oldest friends, found it possible to abandon him and allow him to be

disgraced” (147), Chris reports.

Part of the contestation of meanings in the novel takes place at the level of social class and

occupation. Ikem‟s stubborn desire to maintain a low profile in spite of his enviable status as

editor of a major newspaper is seen by himself as a rejection of the crass materialism of Kangan

society and a demonstration of his determination to remain true to himself, but the taxi-driver he

has an encounter with re-interprets it as the unedifying miserliness of a man who is too selfish to

give employment to those who desperately need it. Perhaps the most explicit argument over

meanings is that triggered by the murderous soldier who nearly runs over a trader in the market:

„Does he mean that after killing me he will go and kill a dog?‟

„No, he means that to kill you is like to kill a dog.‟

„So therefore you na dog … Na dog born you.‟

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But the victim stuck to his far more imaginative interpretation. „No,‟ he

said again. „If I kill you I kill dog means that after he kill me he will go home and

kill his dog.‟ (48)

It is interesting that this disagreement takes place at a secondary level, namely that of exactly

what the soldier meant by his contemptuous retort, rather than questioning the propriety of the

soldier‟s behaviour. Achebe seems to be making the point that since protest is essentially about

the contestation of meanings, the meanings that are open to such contestation should be properly

identified so that the resultant contestations are not misdirected or meaningless.

Achebe‟s concern with the importance attached to meanings can be seen in the profusion of

wordplay, such as “Mandingauls” (38); mischievous double entrendes which combine the

innocuous and the ribald, such as Chris‟s unwitting advice to Beatrice to “keep all options open”

(73) on her visit to the Presidential Retreat; and the reversal of apparently stable meanings, such

as Ikem‟s “impending coup d’etat … against this audience and its stereotype notions of struggle

….” (153).

Conclusion

In Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe attempts to draw together many of the ideas and

opinions that were evident in his previous novels. As a result of this, the novel displays a depth

of meaning which influences all of its major themes, including protest. Thus, instead of depicting

protest in ways that have become conventional in African literature, Achebe chooses to examine

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it in a much more authentic context. Protest is therefore seen to be much more problematic and

complicated in the novel than at first seems evident.

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CHAPTER FOUR

HISTORY AS PROTEST IN JUST BEFORE DAWN AND DESTINATION BIAFRA

Introduction

The manner in which Kole Omotoso and Buchi Emecheta deploy history as an instrument of

protest in Just Before Dawn and Destination Biafra respectively is a testimony to the amorphous

nature of protest. Protest is such a ubiquitous phenomenon that it cannot be limited by notions of

whether it is “political,” or overtly aggressive, or aimed at achieving radical social change.

Instead of these outworn notions, this study has chosen to define protest as any verbal or non-

verbal means by which individuals or groups express their disagreement with an existing state of

affairs in all or part of a given society, and seeks to alter it, either by ending the said state of

affairs, or by replacing it with something else. Protest is not just a means of ventilating

grievances, but it is also an arena for the clash of opposing views, compelling adversaries to

consciously articulate and propagate the ideas that form the basis for the issues they are

protesting.

In their novels, both Omotoso and Emecheta proffer exemplary demonstrations of the way in

which new forms of protest can be articulated. In the specific case of Just Before Dawn, its status

as a faction, a literary work in which factual events and characters are combined with imaginary

dialogue and situations, raises important issues with regard to protest. At one level, the status of

fact as fact is contested, as competing narratives and discourses emerge, demanding attention.

The subtle questioning of history that is implied in a work of faction can be regarded as a form of

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protest against the authenticity of facts handed down by those whose socio-political pre-

eminence put them in charge of the national narrative. A similar thing happens in Destination

Biafra, where engrained stereotypes of women are interrogated. By choosing to focus on civil

war, Emecheta seeks to protest the masculinist assumptions that are inherent in the unquestioned

notion of a “fratricidal” conflict in which women and children constitute no more than collateral

damage. Her protest, then, is not just about the horror and waste of war, but is more

fundamentally directed against the testosterone-driven political struggles that make it inevitable.

Both Omotoso and Emecheta belong to the second generation of Nigerian writers, whose focus

has been on social protest, directed outwardly against the external forces of neo-colonialism, and

inwardly against the governments and social processes of the post-independence regimes in

Nigeria.

In the view of Griffith, the creativity of second-generation Nigerian writers does not extend to

the celebration of the African past, characteristic of Achebe and other first-generation writers.

Rather, they “maintain a shift away from a concern with the impact of colonisation and historical

past” (172) towards an examination of the contemporary socio-political problems in post-

independence Nigeria. Some second-generation writers have employed social realism, allegorical

forms, history and faction to articulate social protest in their writings.

Omotoso is an eclectic writer, and his work straddles drama and fiction. His early works include:

The Edifice; The Combat; Two Plays the Curse; Shadows in the Horizon. His other works

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include To Borrow a Wandering Leaf and Memories of Our Recent Boom. He has also published

a recent work, Season of Migration to the South.

Emecheta‟s novelistic concerns have stimulated feminism in Nigerian literature. She has been

able to articulate women‟s position in Nigeria‟s social milieu by reconstructing the stereotypical

perception of women as objects of procreation and being socially inferior to their male

counterparts. Some of her works include: In the Ditch; Second Class Citizen, The Slave Girl, The

Bride Price, The Family, Head Above Water, The Rape of Shavi and The Joys of Motherhood.

Emecheta has also written two children‟s texts: The Wrestling Match and The Moonlight Bride.

Seeking out the buried truth of Nigeria‟s past and reclaiming it from the morass of lies

accumulated over decades of distortion is precisely what preoccupy Omotoso‟s Just Before

Dawn and Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra. By contesting the received wisdom about the

authenticity of Nigeria‟s past, both writers utilize history as a weapon of protest. Unlike other

forms of protest and disagreement which revolve around contemporary issues and situations,

Omotoso and Emecheta are asking questions about the very basis of Nigeria itself, especially its

identity, its sense of itself, and the way in which that identity has been perverted by historical

events as well as the distortion of those events by those who ascribed the power to narrate them

solely to themselves.

Just Before Dawn and Destination Biafra are primarily literary works, given their status as

novels, but they provide a mediation between history and fiction in such a way that there is no

doubt about their intentions to contest so-called established “facts.” In the view of A. N. Mensah:

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a novel gives life to mere information and also allows the writer room to imagine

and speculate. Above all, the novel, being a more popular form of writing than the

merely discursive, provides wider dissemination of its information. In this way,

the wealth of information contained in the novel is wrested from the grasp of a

closed circle of specialists and, potentially, made available to a wider readership

(147).

This chapter examines the use of historicity as a paradigm of protest against the hypocrisy of the

leadership of the Nigerian political class from the colonial period to the present. Why history?

The discussion below will attempt to show that Omotoso and Emecheta return to Nigeria‟s past

because they believe that it is there that the contradictions and paradoxes that characterize the

country were engendered, and therefore any meaningful solutions must begin with a critical

examination of the events and occurrences of this period. In particular, they feel that the story of

Nigeria‟s past must be cleansed of lies and other accretions of falsehood, cant and hypocrisy if

the vital task of national rehabilitation is to be successful. In order to achieve this goal, they take

it upon themselves to re-examine crucial aspects of the country‟s history in which critical

missteps resulted in traumatic consequences, many of which continue to bedevil it to the present

day. For Omotoso, the broad sweep of pre-independence and post-independence history is

brought into focus, while Emecheta chooses to concentrate specifically on the Nigerian Civil

War of 1967 to 1970.

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Faction and the Notion of Protest

Just Before Dawn belongs to a literary category that is known as “faction.” The term combines

the words “fact” and “fiction” and thus denotes its status as a combination of factual and fictional

events, situations and occurrences. While it can be said that all works of fiction combine

elements of fact and fiction to varying extents, faction does so in a distinctive way. Unlike other

forms of fiction which operate on the basis of assumption and plausibility, faction does so in a

peculiarly self-conscious manner which is designed to show just how ambivalent the ostensible

distinctions between fact and fiction really are. Faction raises questions such as, “What is fact

and what is fiction?” “If a fact is told in a fictitious manner, does it become fiction?” “Does the

status of fact as fact depend upon who is telling it?” “To what extent does ingrained bias affect

the authenticity of fact and the inauthenticity of fiction?” Questions like these reveal the

intentions of the practitioners of faction to demonstrate that the distinctions between what is

generally regarded as fact and what is regarded as fiction is much closer than is often perceived,

and that much greater emphasis should be given to issues of motivation, intent, bias and

interpretation in determining the status of either phenomenon.

Given this situation, faction engages the issue of protest in a way that is particularly relevant to

the aims of New Historicism. The mere combination of factual and fictional events and

characters underlines the notion that history is far more fluid, contextual and negotiable than it

seems. History is not a fixed, unalterable, unfaltering mass, simply because it occurred in a past

which cannot be revisited. On the contrary, the past can and should be revisited because its

narration is simply too important to be left to a privileged segment of society which has its own

interests to secure and protect. Flowing from this is the fact that notions of objectivity are not as

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rigid as traditional ideas of history have made them out to be. As a text in which real historical

personages and events are re-interpreted by setting them in non-historical situations, a work of

faction shows just how tenuous any claim to objectivity can be, because it is subject to the

interpretations and biases of those that narrate them. Protest is implicated in the multilayered

approach of Omotoso‟s work to history itself: it deals with Nigerian history from the 1914

amalgamation to contemporary times, showing how arbitrary the process of “making history” is,

and how those who purport to make history actually distort it to suit their often-selfish purposes.

History and Fiction

The dichotomy between history and fiction is particularly thin, given the fact that both often

appear in textual form, are grouped into a hierarchical structure, and their interpretation is often

regarded as the provenance of so-called specialists whose competence to interpret them usually

goes unquestioned. As Leonee Ormond has pointed out, the closeness of history and fiction in

the past is an indication of their conceptual similarity:

Fiction and history are kindred forms. Indeed, as late as the eighteenth century,

history was regarded as a literary art. Both fiction and history are narrative

structures concerned with the behaviour of human beings and with the passage of

time. Modern historians, wary of using fiction as source material, stress the

scientific accuracy of their own discipline although choice and discrimination

work to produce an individual construct, not a set of statistics. Fiction, on its side,

has a strongly historical dimension. Even aggressively contemporary works

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frequently turn their attention to the past, if only in stating or implying a contrast.

(1)

Protest in Just Before Dawn is essentially foregrounded in the mediation between historical

events and their fictional representation. Essentially, Omotoso sets up a contrast between what is

deemed to have occurred in history and his approach to it in his novel. Sometimes, the contrast is

explicit; at other times, it is implied. This is demonstrated in the first page of the book, in the

portrayal in which the “no-nonsense” policies of the short-lived Murtala Muhammed regime.

History often conveys the uncontested idea that Muhammed fought corruption and incompetence

with a ferocity and effectiveness that had hitherto never been seen in the country. However,

Omotoso highlights the human cost of that campaign in such a way as to question its vaunted

success:

The present administration is anxious that a new era should be ushered into this

country.” And out of his great moral outrage, thousands were sacked in the civil

service, in the armed forces, in the universities, in parastatals, everywhere in the

country, thousands lost their means of livelihood for reasons of poor health,

doubtful integrity, redundancy, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, irresponsibility, poor

attitude to work, misapplication, old age and long absences from duty without

proper authority. (1)

Omotoso‟s protest here is steeped in the need to interpret the motives behind the action of

Muhammed, and how it caused so much anguish to those affected adversely by it, even when it

could not be conclusively proved that they were corrupt. The significance of the protest lies in

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the way it focuses upon an allegedly unimpeachable anti-corruption strategy by going behind the

unquestioned “fact” of its occurrence to point out the human cost which was just as real, but did

not merit consideration by most historical accounts of the event. The protest seeks to demand the

justification of such action as it affects Nigeria‟s national interest against injustice done to those

who were relieved of their legitimate means of livelihood.

Such strategies of exposure are in conformity with New Historicism‟s argument that any

“knowledge” of the past is necessarily mediated by texts, or to put it differently, that history is in

many respects textual. Several significant implications follow from this assertion. In the first

place, there can be no knowledge of the past without interpretation. Just as history texts need to

be read, so must the “facts” of history be scrutinised for meaning to be derived from them,

instead of simply being accepted as inviolable; this will involve subjective opinion shaped by

perspective, motivation and other stimuli, all of which must be taken into account. From a new

historical perspective, any reading of a literary text is a question of negotiation between text and

reader within the context of histories that cannot be closed or finalised because no single,

totalising interpretation can be imposed on them.

Telling Untold Tales

Buchi Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra chronicles untold tales of the Nigerian Civil War. These

tales are untold because, while history is replete with accounts of mass deprivation and suffering

during the three-year conflict, it does not describe them in the necessarily individual terms that is

vital if the enormity of the conflict‟s trauma is to be properly understood. A proper accounting of

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the war‟s moral cost is also dependent upon a clear identification and indictment of those whose

ambition, arrogance and greed made such suffering both inevitable and unnecessary.

Protest in Destination Biafra is significantly shaped by the New Historicist project of bringing

new perspectives to bear upon aspects of history that have been dominated by one segment of the

society. In this novel, interpretations of the Nigerian Civil War, hitherto controlled by men, are

moderated by what is an essentially feminist account. War is stripped of the glamour which

masculinist accounts often endow it with, and it is seen in all its senselessness and brutality. Just

as the belligerents fight over resources and territory, so are accounts of what took place during

the conflict being fought over between those who prosecuted it and largely benefitted from it,

and those who were its victims.

The novel revolves around Debbie Ogedemgbe, a precocious young woman, a daughter of

Samuel Ogedemgbe, Nigeria‟s minister of finance. When the war broke out, she was sent on a

government-approved mission to see Chijioke Abosi, to persuade him to discontinue with his

plans for secession. The various experiences she undergoes in her journey to the Biafran enclave

expose her to the harsh realities of war in such a way that she is able to clearly see the posturing,

insincerity and plain viciousness of the men who purport to be in charge. She is faced with the

stark reality of the fact that women and children, who have no blame for the outbreak of war, are

ironically its greatest casualties. Women are raped, bodies are dismembered and vulnerable

human beings are made to face every form of degradation imaginable. As Emecheta is at pains to

point out, Debbie experiences these things at first-hand:

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Debbie heard the slap on her mother‟s face and it burned into all the nerve fibres

of her body. She kicked out at one of the men holding her and heard him cry in

pain. Her punishment was that the men fell on her. She could make out the figure

of the leader referred to as Bale on top of her. Then she knew it was somebody

else, then another person .… She felt herself bleeding, though her head was still

clear …. The Ibo woman and Stella Ogedemgbe dug a shallow grave for the dead

young mother and her two babies; the soldiers had cut her open and killed her

unborn child, saying, “Who knows, he might live to be another Abosi.” (134-135)

The serial violations of Debbie and her mother, and the mutilation of the unnamed Ibo woman by

the militia is a measure of the extent to which Emecheta‟s writing strives to discuss graphically

the condition and status of women as perceived by their male counterparts in Africa during

political crises and civil wars: as objects to be pillaged, degraded and exploited, much like any

other item of booty. The agonies felt from the brutalisation of the women in the novel could

arguably only be vividly captured by a woman writer whose membership of the same gender

imbues her with the necessary insight needed to present the inner feelings of women in the light

of their experiences from their point of view.

Emecheta‟s preoccupation with the recuperation of past history of the humiliation of women in

the novel is in itself a form of protest. By returning to the past, with all its pain and trauma, she is

stating that the story of the Nigerian Civil war is incomplete if it does not accurately and

honestly depict the victimisation, maltreatment and brutalisation of its most vulnerable victims.

She demands vehemently that, in the narration of the condition and situation of women as an

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endangered species during the Nigerian Civil War, there must be no ruptures, no silences, and no

fragmentation. As a significant event occurring in the past, it must be fully narrated within the

present moment in such a way that there is no ambiguity, and by extension, no repression of the

truth of what happened.

The dialectics of historical narration are poignantly captured by Iniobong I. Uko:

Evidently, the coming of age of African literature is identifiable by the true and

pragmatic feminisation of the literary vision as a way of correcting absurd female

images in African literature and culture. Here, the female explores the inner fibres

of the androgynous ideal, thereby establishing and justifying the position of

women. (82)

Destination Biafra recreates through fictionalisation of an actual occurrence the lopsidedness of

power distribution at the attainment of independence in Nigeria in 1960, and the way in which it

aggravated the tensions and distrust which were eventually to lead to the Nigerian Civil War.

Interestingly enough, although the primary focus of Emecheta is on the consequences of the

Nigerian Civil War, especially as it affected women and children, she also takes cognisance of

the amoral manipulation of Nigerian ethnic groups against one another by the British colonial

authorities. Nigerian history becomes the basis for reconstructing a discourse of nationalismn

away from the platitudes and insincerities recounted in conventional histories. In this manner,

through her literary revision of activities in the short-lived Biafra and Nigeria itself, Emecheta

ultimately presents a portrait of the essentially ambiguous nature of Nigeria‟s creation, and the

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vital necessity of clearly identifying who did what to whom during the most trying period of its

post-independence history.

The Importance of Memory

In Just Before Dawn and Destination Biafra, the attempt to build national narratives about

Nigeria on the basis of memory has been shown to be both an irresistible challenge and a

compelling necessity. In the two novels can be seen a palpable obsession to set down, using

fiction as a vehicle, the collection of memories that form the writers‟ ideas of their country, in an

attempt to reconcile themselves to the contradictions of a lamentable past and a potentially great

future.

The attempt at reconstructing Nigeria‟s past in relation to its present in the two texts resonates in

the words of Emmanuel Yewah:

In recent years, however, writers like Sony Labou Tansi, Ngugi wa Thiong‟o,

Nuruddin Farah, disillusioned by the broken promises of “les soleils des

independinces,” betrayed by postcolonial rulers who have appropriated national

discourses, conscious of dictators‟ human rights abuses within their imagined

sovereign space, have turned their creative endeavours into weapons to challenge,

indeed to deconstruct what Jean Franco has called in another context “any

signified that could correspond to the nation.” (204)

The thematic concern of both Just Before Dawn and Destination Biafra is the formation of

Nigerians‟ elusive, problematic identity as a people and as a nation. By exposing, highlighting

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and discussing the unmentioned aspects of its contemporary history, both writers seek to clear

the notion of Nigeria of the myths and assumptions which underpin it, so that its identity – its

understanding of itself – can be formulated on the basis of greater inclusiveness and honesty. The

importance of this task asserts itself in the way in which a stubborn refusal by Nigeria‟s rulers to

understand the delicately-balanced nature of the country has led it from one disaster to another,

including military rule, political instability, civil war, widespread corruption and virtual

insurrection in the vital economic zone of the Niger Delta.

Ultimately, Omotoso‟s and Emecheta‟s positions as second-generation Nigerian writers are

trapped in a world of inescapable binary oppositions, the main manifestations of which are

Nigerian/Biafran, male/female, past/present. The overarching binary opposition which gives rise

to the others is ideal/reality, the contrast between what is and what should be that Omotoso and

Emecheta seek to direct readers‟ attention to in their works. Both authors contest the ideal

perception of Nigeria as promulgated in official history and seek to confront it with a much more

realistic version which is for that very reason, messier, unedifying and inglorious but a necessary

corrective to notions of the nation‟s past which are so sanitized as to be unrecognisable.

As part of their examination of the “other side” of Nigerian history and identity, Omotoso and

Emecheta explore the creation of the Nigerian self in literature. They feel that the way the

fictional selves have turned out to be collective one as far as Nigerian writers are concerned is

part of the historical evolution, not only of writing in the country, but also of the country itself.

Like most writers of the Third World, Nigerian writers have a relatively well-developed sense of

national self, of national life, and of the contradictions that make it problematic to even have a

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“self” in this context at all. The attempt to resolve, for instance, the conflict between the Nigerian

political system and the fragmenting effect of colonialism is a dominant theme in Nigerian

writing and, in particular, in Just Before Dawn and Destination Biafra.

Contesting Official History

In Just Before Dawn, there is a mixture of discourses of official written history. There are

political speeches emanating from the various meetings, Constitutional conferences and talks that

were carried out from 1947 regarding Nigerian independence. They were held in the regional

capitals of Kaduna, Ibadan and Enugu, and were usually characterised by horse-trading with

British colonial officials. With shifts into direct dialogue and fictionalised reconstructions of the

events, it portrays the cut-and-thrust of independence talks in the run-up to 1960:

Azikiwe‟s statement was vague, full of smooth resounding platitudes and quotes

about goodwill, parliamentary democracy, harmony, understanding and equality.

He spoke as if his mind was not there. „You know the trouble with him?‟ Ibrahim

Iman asked, leaning over to Balewa. „Tell me.‟ „The Action Group is threatening

to sue his papers for libel of a quarter of a million pounds unless he goes along

with them during this conference.‟ (187)

This is an indication of the feverish preparations for the attainment of independence by the three

regional leaders, namely, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who represents the interest of the Yoruba

ethnic group located in the geographical West, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who stands as a father-

figure of the Igbo ethnic group of Eastern Nigeria and Mallam Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who

represents the interest of the Hausa-Fulani of the Northern Nigeria. In these three characters in

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Just Before Dawn are embedded the ethnic chauvinism and sectional schisms that would later

cripple the ostensible “oneness” of the Nigeria nation, and which were manifested in the events

and actions which led to the first military coup in Nigeria.

The historical yoking together of three major ethnic groups in Nigeria with their attendant

sociological and anthropological differences engenders a multidimensional manifestation of

protest in the novel. Protest is multidimensional because it was undertaken by the different

groups for a variety of reasons which sometimes complemented and sometimes contradicted one

another. For example, there were protests over Nigeria‟s readiness for independence. While the

Western-educated Yoruba and Igbo ethnic groups wanted the country to gain independence as

soon as possible, their Northern counterparts protested that they were not ready, and

consequently wished that the date of independence be delayed. Such protests were further

complicated by the ambitions and desires of individual politicians and their parties, as well as the

neo-colonial schemes being hatched by the departing British. In this way, protest, like the history

of which it is a part, is shown to be a much more complicated construct than it at first seems.

The colonial authority‟s meddlesomeness was from the outset tilted in favour of the Hausa-

Fulani. While Chief Obafemi Awolowo formed Egbe Omo Oduduwa as a Yoruba cultural

organisation which later metamorphosed into Action Group (AG) and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe

formed the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), the Hausa-Fulani of

Northern Nigeria were at a loss as to what to do. It took the intervention of the District Officer

(DO) of the Bida native administration to retrieve the situation. This loss of focus is evident

when Makama Aliyu meets the DO:

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Here we are, with this colossal movement for self-government in the south. And

they claim to speak for us all. But we have no organisation of our own to counter

them. There are just a few of us, educated people, a handful in each province. We

have no means of meeting and sharing our views, we have no money, we have no

press, no doctors, no engineers. As far as we can see, any self-government for

Nigeria means we shall be swallowed up by the Southerners. (111)

The DO, Sherwood-Smith, suggests the formation of the Northern People‟s Congress (NPC),

which eventually becomes the party of the conservative north, and it eventually forms the first

government of an independent Nigeria. What this demonstrates is the unhappy fact that Nigeria‟s

identity as an independent nation was compromised from the outset: not only is the nation a

British creation, its first independent government is as well.

Creative Recollection

With its utilisation of fictional names for the leaders of the country‟s three main ethnic groups,

Destination Biafra is anchored in creative recollection. The novel is based on Debbie

Ogedemgbe‟s painful experiences which, in reality, acutally invite repression rather than

remembrance. Recollection, viewed from a postmodern perspective, always implicates loss or

forgetting. Even though Emecheta interprets Nigeria using different codes and from different

positions, they are all overshadowed by a prevalent sense of loss. The author has acknowledged

in the foreword of the novel that she was not in Nigeria when the civil war was fought, but

participated in the students‟ demonstration against the war at Trafalgar Square in London at the

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time. However, her sense of loss in the novel is demonstrated in her dedication of the novel to

the memory of many relatives and friends who died in this war, especially “my eight-year old

niece, Buchi Emecheta, who died of starvation, and her four-year old sister Ndidi Emecheta who

died two days afterwards of the same Biafran disease at the crisis refuge centre in Ibuza” (vi).

Loss is also amplified in the tone of Debbie Ogedemgbe, when she lies about her mission to

Biafra at Benin Park:

I am to go to my mother she lied. She is old, She is Ibo and my father was Itsekiri.

He is dead, you see, killed. My mother is the only person I have. She left Lagos

for her home town in Aba and I am going there to make sure she is all right. See?

(164)

Loss serves as the central metaphor for Debbie‟s recollection and the central code to decipher her

existence. Destination Biafra’s narrative of the Biafran secessionist enclave develops into a

semiotic of loss. The novel‟s “Biafran narrative” is rooted in Debbie‟s painful experiences on her

way to, and in Biafra. Indeed, pain and suffering are central to Debbie‟s recollection.

Consequently, the Biafra narrative discloses itself as the unspeakable experience and repressed

memory of its victims. Debbie‟s resolve against agonising over Biafra‟s problem is foregrounded

at the end of the novel:

There are two boys, the Nwoba boys, and many other orphans that I am going to

help bring up with my share of Father‟s money. And there is my manuscript to

publish. I shall tell those orphans the story of how a few ambitious soldiers from

Sandhurst tried to make their dream a reality. (258)

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For Debbie, memory embodies loss or pain so that the Biafran narrative essentially requires

concealing instead of unfolding. Remembering inevitably entails pain and, eventually, desires for

repression transform into a necessity of repression. Debbie‟s experience of Biafra is transfigured

into a discourse of repression and her recollection of Biafran experiences is translated into a

narrative of loss. Memory as a motif of history is further reiterated by Derrida:

The memory we are considering here is not essentially oriented towards the past,

toward a past present deemed to have really and previously existed. Memory stays

with traces in order to “preserve” them, but traces of a past that has never been

present, traces which themselves never occupy the form of presence and always

remain, as it were, to come – come from the future, from the to come. (58)

Within the contemporary Nigerian context, Debbie‟s recollection of Biafran experiences

demonstrates more a loss of memory rather than a recalling of the past. Forgetting,

paradoxically, becomes the key to memory. Recollection radically alters itself in a creative

process. “Loss narrative” becomes the unconscious motif for the present remembrance,

irretrievably lost beyond recall, made present only through a narrative that invites forgetting

instead of remembering. Debbie‟s reflection of Biafra signifies nothing more than the loss of

memories of vanished reality. The wanton killings, malnutrition of the children and the final

destruction of Biafra, further strengthen Debbie‟s resolute decision to forget the memory of

Biafra:

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I see now that Abosi and his likes are still colonised. They need to be decolonised.

I am not like him. I am a woman of Africa. I am a daughter of Nigeria and if she

is in shame, I shall stay and mourn with her in shame. (258)

To Debbie, a member of the Itsekiri minority ethnic group, the doomed Biafra is ironically the

locus that defines her sense of reality. Being a Nigerian and a member of a minority group only

characterises her marginal existence. For Debbie, Uzoma Madako along with her two surviving

children and the two Nwoba boys shows how recollection reveals a process of negotiation with

the past, constantly translating and revising the past into a narrative that grants reality to present

situations. In a displaced context, these characters have constructed a Biafran narrative for

themselves and for each other. It is indeed ironic that towards the end of the novel the Biafran

soldiers who have been compelled to go to the Mid-West to sue for solidarity at all cost, at the

risk of their lives, are compelled to tell the truth that they no longer remember, and tell them only

after they have lost memory:

We are Biafrans, Ibos like you. His Excellency Abosi sent us to you. Look at our

uniforms. One woman stepped boldly forward and said, Biafra. What is Biafra?

You killed our man from this part, Nwokolo; the Nigerian soldiers came and

killed what your soldiers left. We are Ibuza people, but we now live in the bush,

thanks to your Abosi and your Biafra. (230)

Biafra, so to speak, is a mirage, a repository of history with haunting memories and extraordinary

experiences. Nigerian and Biafran narratives in Destination Biafra, with its attendant

lopsidedness in a power equation created by the colonialists, snowballed into a political

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quagmire that produced inordinate ambitions in the greedy and overambitious political leaders

that were thrown up in the journey to independence. It further degenerated into a theatre of war

that imbued the egos of the Nigerian and Biafran leaders. A strong will to keep Nigeria one even

though forgotten to a certain extent, is what constitutes the locale of protest in the novel. Thus,

“the loss narrative” is transformed into an authoritative discourse.

The novel‟s complex rendering of remembrance and repudiation, of memory and amnesia are

crucially important to an understanding of the nature of protest that goes on within it. Destination

Biafra does not protest simply by inveighing against the atrocities pitiless leaders inflict on a

helpless populace; it contends that a nation that is so insensitive as to forget what it did to itself

in the name of political unity is indeed in trouble. The physical scars of war and violence may

heal, but those inflicted on the psyche may never be cured if Nigerians choose not just to

deliberately forget or downplay the moral failings that led to mass killings on a national scale. To

put it another way, a country that fails to remember what it should remember, and forget what it

should forget is in danger of reliving its nightmares all over again.

This is a complicated form of protest: it apparently lacks the directness of the more common

forms of protest that are a staple of national life, but it is symbolic of the indirect agitations

staged by Nigerian expatriates like Emecheta, who were helpless to do anything else, given their

location in a country six thousand miles away from the conflict. By emphasising the ambivalent

nature of remembering and forgetting, she demonstrates that the commitment needed to protest is

not contingent upon how close or how distant one is to conflict and trauma, but how genuine

one‟s attitude is. Debbie is the scion of a well-connected and successful politician, one of those

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whose dilatoriness and ambition contributed significantly to the worsening of the impending

tragedy, in fact. But she does not allow this admittedly inescapable fact colour her moral

response to the war; indeed, she regards herself as being in a particularly advantageous position

to repair the damage done by her parents and their associates.

In Destination Biafra, Debbie Ogedemgbe serves as Emecheta‟s mouthpiece. Unlike her creator

who by force of circumstances is away from her homeland, Debbie is fully involved in the

issues, indeed more involved than most people. Through Debbie, the author is able to carefully

trace the political history of Nigeria over the decades. In Debbie the boundaries between self and

other are not clearly defined; in her, Nigerian narrative is confronted and re-inscribed. She is

forced to negotiate her position between conflicting sets of discourses: of family, ethnicity,

culture, history and nationality. In order to reach reconciliation, Emecheta similarly has to come

to terms with herself in relation to the historical situation she is protesting in Destination Biafra.

Debbie refuses to live a hyphenated experience orchestrated by her repeated rape in her

determination to reach Biafra to stop Abosi from continuing with the Biafra project. She

manages to get to Biafra by subverting the burden placed on her by her gender. On one hand,

Debbie resists the societal codification of her gender hegemonic narrative, and on the other hand,

she rejects the male-dominated notion that the army is an exclusive preserve of men by enlisting

in the army. In Debbie is situated Emecheta‟s protest against the distorted history of Nigeria‟s

past.

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Metaphors of Nigeria

In protesting the Nigerian predicament in Just Before Dawn, Omotoso utilises what the study

calls “metaphors of Nigeria” in describing the tragedy of missed opportunities and broken

promises that he recounts. A metaphor of Nigeria is a description of a situation (an anecdote, a

vignette, an urban myth, a tall tale, a modern folktale, etc.) which encapsulates the essence of the

Nigerian situation, especially the contradictions and paradoxes which shape it, and which, to a

large extent, constitute its continuing tragedy. It is often parable-like in structure, its simplicity

standing in stark contrast to the complexities and ambiguities that it recounts.

A particularly striking example of a metaphor of Nigeria is the one which opens the book. It

centres upon the ruthless efficiency of General Murtala Muhammed, the new head of state has

ostensibly brought to bear upon his administration of the country. For a nation as legendarily

corrupt as Nigeria, a superhuman effort is required to chart a corrective course, and Muhammed

apparently is just the person to do this. Like an urban myth or tall tale, Muhammed is a larger-

than-life character, full of hyperbole and grand gestures; he does not do things by halves, as

thousands of civil servants, soldiers and teachers are sacrificed to the new leader‟s notion of the

greater good. Muhammed carries his pronounced sense of mission to the international scene as

well: he denounces the United States for its actions in South Africa and Angola. Colonel B.S.

Dimka is cast in the role of villain; he is a buffoon whose loutishness and befuddled thinking are

diametrically opposed to the clear-sightedness of Muhammed. His eventual assassination of the

Nigerian leader is as much an act of self-justification as it is a manifestation of deep-seated

jealousy.

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Like other metaphors of Nigeria scattered throughout the novel, the events described above

successfully capture the elements that make the country the unique nation that it is: Muhammed,

for example, is drawn in bold relief, but the positive image he projects here will be contradicted

by his earlier determination to ensure that the North must secede from Nigeria. Muhammed‟s

ostensibly bold attempt to combat corruption actually ends up entrenching it because it leads to

the strengthening of the shadowy Kaduna Mafia, the weakening of the Civil Service and the

social dislocation of thousands of highly-trained Nigerians. In essence, Just Before Dawn is

constructed upon metaphors of Nigeria which collectively explain why the so-called Giant of

Africa is stuck in a perpetual dawn, awaiting a morning that is eternally around the corner.

Updating Nigerian History

Just Before Dawn is ambitious in its attempt to update more than a century of Nigeria‟s history

through the lives of a few characters in the novel. Omotoso‟s basic strategy in this novel is to use

history to protest against the intrusion of foreign power typified by Britain into the political and

economic life of the Nigerian people.

He carries out an overview of the major policies and actions of successive Nigerian

administrations, including those of Balewa, Muhammed, Shagari and Buhari. This is done

through a melange of stream-of-consciousness sequences, historical vignettes, and hyper-realised

characters and events. In this manner, Omotoso cynically implies that Nigerians have been

locked in a continuous state of collision against the military, as well as economic and political

instability since the 1914 amalgamation between Northern and Southern Nigeria. This

contraption was born by Lord Lugard, and mid-wifed by Governor Hugh Clifford, who

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introduced the idea of elected members into the legislative council of Nigeria, with the intention

of playing one ethnic group off against the other:

As soon as he got up the following morning, he drafted the secret memorandum to

the Secretary of State for the colonies. There should be introduced into the

legislative council of Nigeria a number of elected members. That was all .… This

idea was going to turn Africans against themselves in different political parties

…. So it was, when the time came for the Northern and Southern provinces to

collectively fight against the British hold on Nigeria, nobody identified the

different ways which both areas could have fought for the same thing. Rather,

they seemed ranged on opposite sides and their common enemy became their

peacemaker. (113)

The novel focuses on major players in the Nigeria political conflict: Chief Obafemi Awolowo,

Chief S. L. Akintola, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Major-General J. T. U. Aguiyi-

Ironsi, General Yakubu Gowon, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, Murtala Mohammed and General

Olusegun Obasanjo. The individual political actions and activities of these men constitute the

historical narrative which interrogates the significance of Nigeria‟s past as located in her present.

Emphasis is constantly placed on the notion of Nigeria as a resilient country, and on the

importance of knowing about a historical past in order to go forward in time.

Just Before Dawn is written as a scrapbook of memories and precise images of life in Nigeria

from 1914 to 1983. The chapters of this discontinuous narrative are like fractals that present a

series of overlapping shapes. Just Before Dawn’s narrative structure, accentuated by its

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foreboding title, protests the distortion of Nigeria‟s historical past through the uses of flashy,

disconcerting, rapidly moving techniques to approach the elaborately complex riddle that is

Nigeria.

Omotoso‟s mediation of literature and society in Just Before Dawn betrays the notion of Georg

Lukacs on literary forms:

The genuine categories of literary forms are not simply literary in essence. They

are forms of life especially adapted to the articulation of great alternatives in a

practical and effective manner and to the exposition of maximal inner

potentialities of forces and counterforces. (21)

Embedded in this study are the four elements which constitute the dynamic of protest, namely

the issue, the victim, the perpetrator and the protester. The relationship that obtains between

these elements is symbiotic rather than adversarial because all are interdependent. The protester,

however, occupies a unique position in that the other three elements relate to him in a way that

they do not relate to one another. Thus, instead of the issues which incite protest being at the core

of this dynamic, the protester is placed at the core of this study. As such, the novel‟s concerns are

refracted through the perspectives of characters who protest, leading to a much more effective

examination of protest, as opposed to merely depicting issues that cause protest.

Although these four elements which constitute the dynamic of protest are found in Just Before

Dawn, the novel, unlike the others in this study, does not feature a protesting central character

through whose consciousness the story is told, although there is the instance of Chukwuemeka

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Ugokwu, an ex-soldier who attempts to assassinate a high-ranking colonial official. In spite of

this, however, it can be argued with some conviction that Nigeria takes the place of the central

characters of other novels. The novel focuses on the emergence and development of Nigeria in

much the same way as a more conventional work of fiction would focus upon a central character.

The country in the same way constitutes a centre of consciousness around which the events and

situations that are depicted in the novel are portrayed. When Omotoso recounts the errors of

omission and commission perpetrated by the wide cast of characters whose actions he depicts, it

is clear that the yardstick that he uses to assess the morality of their actions is its effect upon the

country and its people. Thus, when the British scheme and plot to ensure that the country is

denied the leadership that it needs to ensure political stability and economic growth, it is the

country that is the victim of their manipulations. When ruthlessly ambitious soldiers put their

egos above consensus and thereby drag the nation into an avoidable war, it is the country that lies

bleeding. As the central character in what is, after all, a national narrative, it is the country itself

which fulfils the role of protester. As the common denominator in events spanning more than a

century, Nigeria, in its very passiveness, condemns the actions of those whose power-lust have

caused so much disappointment, frustration and suffering.

Nigeria is seen to protest these impositions through what may be called the ultimate act of silent

protest: by doing nothing. Omotoso seems to be saying that, by merely surviving and outliving

the petty scheming of a dishonourable dramatis personae of colonialists, politicians and soldiers,

Nigeria is asserting its ability to endure. By remaining one nation, battered and unfulfilled as it

is, the very existence of the country is a living indictment of those whose actions have threatened

its peace and stability. Thus, Nigeria‟s birth in the novel is likened to the burdensome

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inconvenience of an illegitimate child; its inauspicious birth is symbolised in the cynical

objectives outlined by its sire, Lord Frederick Lugard. The emergence of national consciousness

during the heyday of colonial rule could be regarded as equivalent to growing pains, as the

indigenous people slowly gain an awareness of the need to fight for independence. The

uncertainties that surround the run-up to independence are indicative of an adolescent only

slowing becoming aware of his enormous potential. Nigeria‟s stunted post-independence growth

is, of course what gives Omostoso the greatest cause for concern, and his guarded optimism is

clearly indicated in the hopeful optimism of the title of his work.

Due to its status as a work of faction, Just Before Dawn uses facts as the underpinning for plots

that trace the roots of the oppression perpetrated by the colonial authorities in Nigeria. When

Chukwuemeka Ugokwu was demobilised from the colonial army, he protested the maltreatment

and injustice of the colonial rulers. Ugokwu planned to assassinate the governor, Mr.

Macpherson in imitation of the protest culture of the courageous peoples of Sarawak, where the

British governor had been stabbed to death by an ex-serviceman with a jack knife. Ugokwu‟s

attempt fails, and he is apprehended and arraigned for trial.

The deep sense of injustice that motivated Ugokwu‟s is heightened in his trial, when he cross-

examines the white colonial officials. Such cross examination is anchored on the binary

opposition of the coloniser/colonised. This trial highlights the narrowness of the choices

marginalized people have to make in order to survive a social context hostile to their values, and

how marginality can bring out the worst in people who are affected. Ugokwu‟s action reflects the

futility of idealism, and in the judgment of Justice B. Rhodes is inscribed self-loathing and self-

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debasement. Justice S. B. Rhodes in his dubious pronouncement on Ugokwu has acquiesced in

the most basic of post-colonial self-subjugations: the necessity to define himself not only in the

terms but in the image of the colonial master. Indeed, he becomes an apologist for the British

colonial authority against his own African brother. Ugokwe‟s narrative counters the colonial

discourse that linearises history.

Ugokwe catalyses Omotoso‟s depiction of the colonial system in Nigeria‟s past. This failed

assassin injects political consciousness into the collective psyche of the complacent Nigerian

elite. He provides the missing historical perspective for a barely literate, but idealistic rebel who

could not understand a word of all the British colonial propaganda he has been made to believe,

but which he needed to alter by demanding a better deal for the colonial subjects. The silence of

recognition betrayed by the colonial authority as a response to Ugokwe‟s radical political

demands during the trial is symptomatic of Frantz Fanon‟s “colonial violence.” Fanon asserts

that the very first encounter between native and settler was a violent one, and that their existence

together was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and canons (36). In many respects,

Fanon‟s thesis on decolonisation and its attendant violence has greatly influenced representations

of colonialism and its aftermath in the Nigeria of Just Before Dawn.

In the novel, history as protest can be seen in the juxtaposition of the narratives of the Nigerian

civil war from the differing perspectives of the Hausa-Fulani and Igbo ethnic groups in the novel.

A major historical consequence of Northern countercoup of 29th July 1966 is the decision of the

coup‟s actors who are predominantly Hausa-Fulani, to secede from Nigeria. This decision is

given prominence when a flight scheduled to leave for London at 11.30 on the morning of 29th

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July by the commandant of the airport. The purpose was to persuade the captain of a BOAVC-10

plane to airlift women and children of Northern Nigerian army officers to Kano, because the

officers no longer believe in the oneness of Nigeria as a nation; and they believe the longer they

stay in Lagos, the stronger their vulnerability to reprisal attacks from the Igbo army officers:

“There is trouble and we need your help,” the commandant told the captain. He

was polite, he did not bully the white pilot. The captain felt that he had to listen to

him at least.

“We have some women and children who have to leave to get out of Lagos now.”

“Kano. Just to Kano and back and then you can go to London.” The captain

considered but the commandant did not wait for him. “Of course the airport is

closed and may not be back to work until maybe next week.”

“I can fly out as soon as I get back?”

“Special consideration, yes.” (255)

The narrative of the bid by the Hausa-Fulani officers to secede from Nigeria, until they were

persuaded to do otherwise by the British government is juxtaposed with the determination of the

people of Igbo extraction to secede from Nigeria as a reaction to the pogrom in which a lot of

people of Igbo extraction were killed in Northern Nigeria in the aftermath of Nzeogwu‟s coup in

which the Sardauna, Balewa and other prominent politicians were killed. Irony is evident in the

way General Yakubu Gowon prosecuted the Nigerian civil war, with the refrain, “to keep

Nigeria one is a task that must be achieved.” The Ibos wish for an identity that has its

signification in the Republic of Biafra, even if it is purely psychological and political, is an

antidote to their sense of “otherness” in Nigeria.

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Omotoso‟s protest is clearly visible in his condemnation of the belated patriotic zeal of Gowon

and other Hausa-Fulani military officers who were ready to secede when it appeared to suit them,

but are now at the vanguard of “keeping Nigeria one,” to the detriment of a persecuted and

marginalized people‟s desire to move out of Nigeria into a safe enclave where their lives and

properties will be secure.

The novel‟s re-creation of the narrative of the civil war, the spatial markers between the ethnic

borders and the larger Nigerian landscape are constantly blurred but not erased.

Acknowledgments are made of the tensions generated by the Nzeogwu coup. Yet, the narrative

moves beyond a clear identification of aggressor-victim polarities by upsetting a hitherto

unproblematic linearity. The past haunts the present, even as the timidity of Gowon and the

youthful exuberance of Ojukwu did not prevent the country from being plunged into a civil war,

which has been described by many critics including Omotoso himself as wanton, reckless and

unnecessary.

The present revisits the past even as characters cross and re-cross geographical terrains through

physical and mental journeys. There is an expose of the trauma and debilitations created by the

civil war which can be seen in the narrative of the life of Sebastian Okoro, who was displaced

from Lagos to his village in Biafra, but who refused to respond to the call for enlistment into the

Biafran army. In Okoro is situated a robust protest against the senseless war:

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But here he was now almost in tears, feeling that all the deaths would be in vain at

the end of it all.

“Biafra, na bia afufu!” He stood up and threw away the stick with which he had

been scrawling on the earth. “Biafra means come and suffer!” (292)

The refusal of Sebastian Okoro to enlist in the Biafran army, is perceptively evaluated in the

words of John Cruikshank:

Human life cannot be represented in a fully or truthful manner without taking

account of the pressures brought to bear upon the individual by his milieu, by the

particularity of social situation and historical circumstances. (36)

Okoro‟s misgivings typify the important disjunction that has come to characterise the

contemporary narrative of war: a willingness to articulate the disastrous effects of the conflict on

its casualties as well as the demonstration of the reservations about the inflamed passions and

other causal elements that have precipitated the civil war. In the narrative, the civil war is

invoked to the extent to which history can accurately recover and represent the past through the

form of the narrative.

M. C. Lemon considers that the “very logic” of history as a discipline revolves “around the

rationale of the narrative structure” (131). In respect of what peculiarly constitutes historical

explanation, Lemon argues that its essence lies in the manner in which historians account “for

occurrences in terms of the reasons individuals have for their conduct.” In other words, history

can be legitimately defined as the narrative interpretation and explanation of human agency and

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intention (144). The special character of narrative that makes it so useful to historians is, as

Lemon points out, its “this happened, then that” structure which also, of course, is the essence of

historical change. It is a process that saturates lived experience. In other words, the past existed

and will exist as knowledge transmitted to us according to the basic principles of narrative form.

Just Before Dawn is replete with precise presentations of dates of events, such as the 29th of July

1966; the Aburi meeting in Ghana, the names and ranks of military officers; the names of places.

Such overwhelming specificity is deliberate: it is designed to underscore the significance of the

interaction between history and literature in the novel. Such interaction becomes necessary, if the

aesthetics shaping the narration of complex situations such as the Nigerian civil war are to be

realised.

Paul Ricoeur sees the relationship between history and literature as:

Belonging to the category of symbolic discourses and share a single “ultimate

referent” while freely granting that history and literature differ from one another

in terms of their immediate referents, (Bedentunpen), which are “real” and

“imaginary” events, respectively, he stresses that insofar as both produce

emplotted stories, their ultimate referent (sinn) is the human experience of time or

“the structures of temporality.” (140)

Hayden White, quoting Ricoeur, insists that history and literature share a common “ultimate

referent.” This represents a considerable advancement over previous discussions of the relations

between history and literature based on the supposed opposition of “factual” to “fictional”

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discourse (64). Simply by virtue of its narrative form, historical discourse represents such literary

fictions as epics, novels and short stories. But instead of regarding this as a sign of narrative

history‟s weakness, Ricoeur interprets it as a strength. If histories resemble novels, he points out,

this may be because both are speaking indirectly figuratively, or, what amounts to the same

thing, “symbolically,” about the same “ultimate referent.” Speaking indirectly arises because that

about which both history and literature speak, the aporias of temporality, cannot be spoken about

directly without contradiction. The aporias of temporality must be spoken about in the idiom of

symbolic discourse rather than in that of logical and technical discourse. Ricoeur says further,

that “history and literature” speak indirectly about the aporetic experiences of temporality by

means of and through signifiers that belong to different orders of being, “real events on the one

side, imaginary events on the other.” (175)

In Ricoeur‟s view, then, narrative discourse does not simply reflect or passively register a world

already made; it works upon the material given in perception and reflection, fashions it, and

creates something new, in precisely the same way that human agents by their actions fashion

distinctive forms of historical life out of the world they inherit as their past (178). The use of the

historical materials of Nigeria‟s past, albeit in the shape of “faction,” is what has engendered the

relevance and necessity of history and literature as a literary strategy for contemporary Nigerian

writers as they attempt to mediate the past and present.

Just Before Dawn consequently in conformity with the submission of Hayden White on the

nature of historical narrative, emphasises that in an attempt at narrating the past, has

demonstrated that, a historical narrative is not only an icon of the events, past or present, of

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which it speaks; it is also an index of the kind of actions that produce the kinds of events in the

novel which could be called historical. It is this indexical nature of historical narrative that

assures the adequacy of its symbolic representations to the real events about which they speak.

(178) Historical events in Just Before Dawn can be distinguished from natural events by virtue of

the fact that they are products of the actions of human agents seeking, more or less self-

consciously, to endow the world in which they live with symbolic meaning. The historical events

in the novel therefore, have been represented realistically in symbolic discourse, because such

events are themselves symbolic in nature. So it is with the historian‟s composition of a narrative

account of historical events: the narrativisation of the processes by which human life is endowed

with symbolic meaning.

The manipulation of actions, events and characters in Just Before Dawn through the motif of

historical narrative examines events created by human actions as its immediate subject, and does

much more than merely describing those events; it also initiates them, that is, performs the same

kind of creative act as those performed by historical agents. History has meaning because human

actions produce meanings. These meanings are continuous over the generations of human time.

This continuity, in turn, is felt in the human experience of time organised as future past, and

present rather than as mere serial consecution.

This notion reverberates in Hayden White‟s thesis of history and the past, which is explained in

fiction. “To understand what the past was about we must impose a narrative upon it;” hence our

knowledge of the past is “through a poetic act.” (85) White insists that the past as history is not

the story – it is the fictional invention of historians as we try to recount what the past was about.

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Now, although the level of understanding to which narratives aim is for Mink a primary act of

mind, he draws back from the final logic of Hardy‟s position, and here White agrees with his

conclusion that:

Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles or ends: there are

meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later, and

there are partings, but final partings only in the story. There are hopes, plans,

battles and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans

miscarried, battles decisive and ideas seminal. Only in the story is it America

which Colombus discovers, and only in the story is the kingdom lost for want of

nail … So it seems truer to say that narrative qualities are transferred from art to

life. We could learn to tell stories of our lives from nursery rhymes, or from

culture-myths if we had any, but it is from history and fiction that we learn how to

tell and to understand complex stories and how it is stories answers questions.

(557-558)

The relevance of the past for contemporary African artists is a persistent concern that Omotoso

explores in Just Before Dawn by providing a total picture of society in motion which proffers

significant insights into the potentialities of a fictional treatment of historical materials. The

novel as a national narrative mediates between history and literary imagination, allowing the

novelist to look back. In looking back, Omotoso projects certain fictional figures through a

carefully-patterned historical framework. He shows the personal destinies of these characters,

and by so doing, attempts to portray the kind of individual paths that can directly express the

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problems and contradictions of the turbulent periods Nigeria has passed through from the time of

colonialism to the period of independence. By contrasting the nature of these various individual

paths, Omotoso posits a search for authentic national values as part of a consideration of the way

forward out of the quagmire of socio-political conflicts.

Omotoso articulates a complex understanding of the role of art in confronting history, offering a

vision of national re-orientation in the distant future. He seems to be describing the past as a

resource, that could inform a renewed and politically engaged future. However, the tone of the

future in the novel is bleak and apocalyptic. The future is replete with ambivalence. The picture

of the future is cynically reiterated in the military coup d’etat’s broadcast, which is neither here

nor there, at the end of the novel:

Fellow country men and women, I Brigadier Sani Abacha of the Nigeria Army,

address you this morning on behalf of the Nigerian Armed Forces. You are all

witnesses to the grave economic predicament and uncertainty, which an inept and

corrupt leadership has imposed on our beloved nation for the past four years ….

(344)

The displacement of the politicians by the self-seeking soldiers at the end of the novel raises an

important observation in Omotoso‟s juxtaposition of the relationship between the personal and

the national, the particular and the typical, the time-conditioned and the timeless in the conduct

of the ruling elite. The soldiers‟ incursion into governance at the end of the novel might have

generated hope for political rejuvenation if it had been anchored on altruism and national

interest, but unfortunately, the coup d’etat is designed to perpetrate the selfish interests of a

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clique in the Nigerian Army. This is shockingly revealed by Sam Ikoku, a politician and “veteran

of many political upheavals in the country” (344). His cynicism serves as a barometer for

gauging the collective pessimism of Nigerians, who monitored the follow-up broadcast of the

December 1983 military coup d’etat:

In pursuance of the primary objectives of saving our great country from total

collapse, I, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari …. Sam Ikoku turned to his wife

chuckling. His mind had already taken leave of the present. He said simply,

“There is no coup. Let‟s go and sleep my dear.” (345)

Omotoso uses the motif of military coups in the novel to protest military adventurism in Nigerian

politics. He uses the motif to interrogate the role of the military in post-independent Nigeria. The

military is seen in the novel as rapacious interlopers who have done more harm than good since

Nigeria gained independence. In the novel, the military typifies an agent of social destabilisation

in the Third World.

Just Before Dawn repeatedly typifies the irony of apprehending the future through a

representation of the past in the present. Omotoso has demonstrated in the novel that national

narrative must draw on rigorous historical research that is mediated by the literary imagination.

At the end, the novel resolves neither the political problems nor the ethnic prejudices, but reveals

the profound ambivalence symbolised by the 1983 coup.

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Fiction as an Alternative Narrative

The Nigerian civil war is a sad reminder of the historical reality in Nigeria and its use in

Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra provides an alternative narrative, which hitherto had been

dominated by the male-authored works, including Elechi Amadi‟s Sunset in Biafra; Cyprian

Ekwensi‟s Divided We Stand; Chukwuemeka Ike‟s Sunset at Dawn and others. Emecheta

anchors her civil war narrative on the platform of feminism. Even though the novel focuses on

the psychological trauma of gender-specific suffering, the narrative achieves its success through

the artistic presentation facilitated by the nexus between history and literature. In as much as

literature is not history, it can be history, as literature is endowed with the facilities to examine

the past. History does not have the equivalence of imaginative literature in the sense that:

while the historian is preoccupied with actions and delineates the characters of

men as much as he can deduce them from their actions, the historian is tellingly

interested in the character as the novelist, but he can only comprehend of its

existence when the character appears in the narrative. (Foster 55)

The novelist gets more involved than the historian by employing imagination to articulate the

inner feelings and thoughts of the character. George Lukacs upholds this notion, when he posits

that:

What matters therefore, in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great

historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in these

events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human

motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality.

(42)

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Emecheta‟s use of historical motif in the narrative of the Nigerian civil war is aimed at providing

historical material for analysing the deprivation, hunger, rape, torture and general social miasma

suffered by both men and women during the war. The feminisation of Debbie Ogedemgbe, who

is neither Igbo nor Hausa, but from the minority Itsekiri, is to further underscore her

condemnation of the political failings which led to the civil war and to demonstrate her fury at it.

Debbie‟s involvement in the civil war started when she enlisted in the Nigerian army at the

beginning of the war. She is relatively close to Abosi, the leader of the breakaway Biafra.

Momoh, the Nigerian head of state is convinced that Debbie could use her friendship with Abosi

to persuade him to drop his determination to create the Republic of Biafra. Debbie has her first

experience of the pain and anguish of war when she and her mother were raped by the soldiers in

spite of her protestation that she is also an officer of the Nigerian army. At this juncture in the

novel, protest is foregrounded in the transformation of Debbie from a complacent Oxford-

educated daughter of a former minister of finance and one of the major casualties of the first

military coup of January 1966.

The enlistment of Debbie in the Nigerian Army and the placement of the burden of negotiation

on Debbie, for peaceful resolution in the tension between Abosi and Momoh is informed by

Emecheta‟s feminist consciousness which seeks to deconstruct the stereotype that soldiering is

mainly for men. Accordingly, Emecheta uses Debbie as a bridge between men and women,

between Abosi and Momoh; she is a kind of agent of change, a mediator who helps Nigeria

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traverse the strange and uncertain frontiers of political crisis with its attendant challenges,

prospects and opportunities.

In Debbie‟s heroic movement from Nigeria to Biafra with its dangers and physical abuses,

Emecheta neutralises the stereotype of women being seen as “mothers” and “mistresses,” as well

as the seemingly irreconcilable fissure between women as the “weaker sex” and the struggle for

survival. In so doing, Emecheta unequivocally in Destination Biafra inscribes the importance of

women in nation-building and national development. Women‟s resilience is imbued by the

capability to adapt to new situations and circumstances more easily and quickly than men.

Emecheta has been able to prove prima facie, in the image of Debbie, a sacrosanct historical

truth about the war, that women can demonstrate the courage needed to survive difficult

conditions. Grace Okereke has aptly commented on women as a symbol of courage in

Destination Biafra:

By creating a self assertive, politically-informed heroine like Debbie Ogedemgbe,

Emecheta has successfully taken woman from the periphery of Nigerian politics

and made her an article of history …. Nigerian woman and indeed, the African

woman, emerges from the shadows of history to become herself a subject of

history on whom depends the redemption of many lives and the restoration of

peace to a nation. (149)

Emecheta thus uses history to protest the ill-treatment of women by men and the need for society

to embrace the significant role of women as harbingers of peace and justice. In the text, violence

is centred mainly on women, depicting in vivid terms the rape and the torture they experience.

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The war narrative in the novel provides insights in two main ways: as a pretext to look at the

past, at the political crisis created by the politicians who are predominantly male, and to revisit

history. In the novel, Debbie‟s narrative and her perception of the degradation of women during

the civil war serve as a point of departure to step back and reflect on history, on the rapport

between memory and history, and how history is shaped by a writer. This notion is further

reiterated in the view of Barbara W. Tuchman:

Good fiction, even if it has nothing to do with fact, is usually founded on reality

and perceives truth – often more truly than some historians. It is exactly this

quality of perceiving truth, extracting it from irrelevant surroundings and

conveying it to the reader or the viewer of a picture, which distinguishes the artist.

What the artist has is an extra vision and an inner vision plus the ability to express

it. He supplies a view or an understanding that the viewer or reader would not

have gained without the aid of the artist‟s creative vision. (46-47)

The characters in Destination Biafra are fictionalised. They are historical representations of

members of the Nigerian political class from the colonial administration to the first republic and

during the civil war. For instance, Mallam Nguru Kano is Alhaji Tafawa Balewa. Sardauna in

real life is Sir Ahmadu Bello; Chief Olusegun Odumosu in real life is Chief Obafemi Awolowo;

Chief Durosaro, is Chief S. L. Akintola; Dr. Ozimba in real life is Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe; Dr. Eze

in real life is Dr. Kingsley Mbadiwe; Brigadier Ene Onyemere is General J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi;

Samuel Ogedemgbe is Chief Omimi Ejoor Okotie-Eboh; Colonel Oladapo is Colonel Adekunle

Fajuyi; Captain John Nwokolo is Major Nzeogwu Kaduna; Colonel Chijioke Abosi is Colonel

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.

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Historically, these “characters” existed. While Omotoso made use of real events, situations, and

characters in Just Before Dawn, Emecheta fictionalised the events, situations and characters in

Destination Biafra. Emecheta is not primarily particular about dates, like Omotoso. Emecheta

relied strongly on Nigeria‟s historical past to analyse the country‟s political trajectory.

Emecheta‟s technique is synonymous with the argument of Akachi Ezeigbo:

The duty of the historian is to record and interpret as objectively as humanly

possible the events of the past. But the historical novelist cannot be so restricted

for he is at liberty to interpret history to suit his purpose; he could dramatise and

reconstruct moments in history which he considers important to the reshaping of

his people‟s destiny. Above all, his interpretation of history is creative and does

not have to comply strictly with historical reality. (11)

Emecheta‟s employment of historical materials in Destination Biafra allows her to manipulate

events, situations and characters so as to represent the complexities of the past. Such

representation is fundamental, because it is a story based on the imagination of the writer. By

employing Nigeria‟s historical past, Emecheta has unavoidably imposed herself on the past by

inventing narratives that strive to explain what the “past really meant,” what the source-text

“really says,” what the author‟s intentions “really were.” (600)

As in Just Before Dawn, Emecheta in Destination Biafra interrogated the role of British and

American governments in the political affairs of Nigeria. The mentioning of names like

Governor Macdonald and Captain Alan Grey, with their attendant meddlesomeness in the

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shaping of Nigeria‟s political landscape is strongly criticised in the novel. The manipulation of

the first republic‟s election in favour of the Hausa-Fulani elements by British colonial authorities

is protested in the novel. The effects of this manipulation eventually threw up political problems

which degenerated into the civil war. Also, the role of Grey, as a double agent who serves as an

adviser to Momoh, a friend to Biafran Nwokolo, and whose advice was rebuffed by Abosi, is

strongly condemned by Emecheta. Grey, even in the thick of the war gets to Biafra and is able to

collate information on the strength of Biafra. He is also portrayed in the novel as a male

chauvinist and racist. This is vividly captured at the end of the novel, when he asks Debbie to

move with him to England, so that they could get married. Debbie, however, tactically refuses.

Conclusion

Omotoso and Emecheta sought new ways to protest the decline of a country whose initial

promise of glory has been perverted. Both novelists seek to describe the process by which

Nigeria came to this sorry pass: Omotoso prefers a bird‟s-eye view of the nation‟s history,

setting, events and occurrences in their proper context so that their true implications might be

better understood; Emecheta focuses on the most traumatic event of Nigeria‟s post-independence

history in order to retell it from a new perspective that would throw fresh insight on the self-

destructive propensities of its people.

For both authors, protest is essentially a new way of seeing, an attempt to stand back from the

issues in order to look at them anew. This is demonstrative of an awareness that the tried and

tested strategies of protest are simply inadequate for the task of national rebirth because they do

not start by re-imagining the problem and asking the basic question: why is Nigeria the way that

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it is? This capacity to take a hard look at the internal workings of a very complicated nation

without succumbing to the temptation to avoid “washing dirty linen” in public is perhaps the two

writers‟ most profound contribution to the evolution of protest in Nigerian fiction.

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CHAPTER FIVE

INTERROGATING POWER RELATIONS: PROTEST AS DIALOGUE IN VIOLENCE

Introduction

Of all the issues which can trigger protest, none is arguably more endemic than the inequitable

relationship between the wealthy and the poor in a given society. It is, indeed, the prototype of

protest because most of the issues that provoke protest are related to the question of what the

relationship between different social classes is, and how it can be made to function on a more

equitable level. Thus, industrial action may ostensibly be about increased pay and improved

working conditions, but at a fundamental level, it really is just another conversation between

social classes; when students disrupt classes to protest the perceived poor quality of education

they are getting, their actions can actually be said to constitute a discussion in a dialogue

between those who do not have power and those who do.

Festus Iyayi‟s Violence takes a critical look at the nature of this relationship. Focusing on the city

of Benin in mid-western Nigeria, the novel sets out to understand the nature of the interaction

between those of its citizens who possess power, wealth and influence, and those who lack them.

Violence identifies the major participants, catalogues the moral imperatives that drive them,

charts the consequences and effects of their actions upon themselves and upon others, and

examines its long-term prospects. In undertaking these functions, Iyayi avoids the temptation of

lapsing into a conventional analysis of the relationship between divergent social classes. In

particular, he does not seek to bestow innocence or guilt on the basis of social class. What he

does is to carefully construct prevailing social conditions and show how they are designed to

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perpetuate inequity and injustice. Ultimately, he argues, no single individual is really at fault; it

is the system that makes extremes of wealth and poverty possible that is to blame. More

specifically, the prevailing system of social relations is so distorted that the only way in which

the rich and the poor can co-exist is through a state of perpetual aggression, or violence. The

privileged class or elite can maintain its grip on the benefits it has only by ensuring that the poor,

who wish to share them, are denied the opportunity to do so. The poor, on the other hand,

quickly realise that they have a narrow choice between a dehumanising marginality or the

forceful assertion of themselves in the articulation of their desires.

Protest, therefore, comes into this equation at two levels: the overarching protest of the author,

whose use of the omniscient point of view enables him to discern the true motivations of his

characters regardless of what they say to others, and the myriad protests that occur within the

novel, as individual characters, agitate against the near-intolerable conditions an inequitable

social structure has placed them in. Protest, in this regard, emerges as the only reasonable

response to the exploitativeness and inhumanity of society. It is a clear signal that the system of

social relations which makes it impossible for the poor to get any justice against the rich can no

longer continue. It is the unmistakable sign that the masses of the people will no longer accept

the diminution of their humanity because they do not have money. Ultimately, it portends the

self-correction of a society and the propagation of the principles of true civilisation.

Violence is thus both an instrument and an outcome. It is the former because it represents the

means by which the masses and their working-class vanguard will seek to interrogate existing

power relations; it is the latter because it is what unremitting injustice and exploitation inevitably

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lead to. As the title of Iyayi‟s book, violence becomes the purest form of protest, the natural way

for a mass of dispossessed people to resist the dehumanising oppression that is their lot.

Violence is a novel whose deceptive subtlety is belied by its somewhat forceful title. It does not

really portray acts of sustained violence, other than the instinctive lashing out of the working

class against those who oppress them, or the coercive actions of the elite designed to maintain

their grip on their privileges. It certainly does not portray a bloody class war in which workers,

peasants and rural dwellers violently overthrow the prevailing system. What the novel actually

does is to provide a portrayal of the social, political and economic conditions under which

violence can become the only way in which wrongs can be righted. Violence is not a means of

achieving vengeance; it is a form of protest.

Violence objectifies oppression as an endemic social and political problem generally in Africa

and particularly in Nigeria‟s contemporary social context. In the novel is inscribed a clear

disruption in social relationships between the elite and the less-privileged. This disruption in the

novel serves as an indicator of the injustices created by post-colonial power structures that

oppress the underclass.

The intentions of Violence are palpable in the way in which it conducts a class analysis of

Nigerian society, reveals the way in which it fails to provide succour for its most vulnerable

members, and shows how this failure is the basis for protest. This text also seeks to contest

conventional interpretations of history by offering the often-ignored perspectives of the urban

poor and by showing how the greed and covetousness of the elite is the direct cause of suffering

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and oppression. Apart from the way in which the issues are treated, protest is seen in the novel‟s

sustained use of irony to draw a stark contrast between the ideal and the reality.

Iyayi‟s identification with the plight of the urban poor in the novel, and his subsequent

objectification of their social conditions is done in conformity with Mao Tse-Tung‟s position on

literature:

Revolutionary literature and art should create a variety of characters out of real

life and help the masses to propel history forward .… Writers and artists

concentrate such everyday phenomena, typify the contradictions and struggles

within them and produce works which awaken the masses, fire them with

enthusiasm and impel them to unite and struggle to transform their environment.

(25)

The narrative of social disequilibrium in Violence focuses on the tenuous social relationship

between the elite class typified by Obofun and Queen his wife, and the peasant class represented

by Idemudia and his wife Adisa. The novel is a parody of a post-colonial African nation which

fails to provide a meaningful means of livelihood for its teeming population, thereby making

members of the underclass vulnerable to the harsh socio-economic dictations of hunger, disease

and social marginality.

Idemudia‟s narrative of social dislocation recalls the collective traumas of post-colonial

nationhood that are implicated in wrong socio-economic strategies and stupendous economic

mismanagement usually orchestrated by the elite class in most post-colonial Third World

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countries. Idemudia‟s narrative betrays the paradoxes and tragic repercussions of the lopsided

post-colonial social relationship which places the elite in the control of the nation‟s economic

opportunities and renders the less privileged in economic difficulty. This is vividly captured by

Osaro, a co-traveller of Idemudia in the trajectory of social displacement:

“It‟s so unfair,” Osaro added. “One man has enough to eat, in fact so much that

he throws some away. Yet here we are, hungry, with nothing to eat.” (20)

The significance of this succinctly demonstrates that most post-colonial nations, especially

African nations, are not nations in the true sense of the word, but fragile collective projects that

may not always be protective of its citizens‟ social and economic needs. This depersonalises the

less-privileged members of society by causing them loss of identity, and this in turn leads to a

pronounced lack of patriotism for the nation-state. This circumstance is elaborately presented in

the words of Apparadurai:

The incapacity of many deterritorialised groups to think their way out of the

imaginary of the nation-state is itself the cause of much global violence because

many movements of emancipation and identity are forced, in their struggles

against existing nation-states to become anti-national or anti-state and thus to

inspire the very state power that forces them to respond in the language of counter

nationalism. (166)

Violence provides a vivid account of contemporary Nigeria, enmeshed in socio-economic

disequilibrium. The disparity between rich and poor is so extensive that the devastating effect of

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poverty in the lives of the poor has rendered them virtually sub-human. Iyayi‟s graphic

presentation of the economic schism between the rich and the poor seeks to capture the

particularity and intensity of the psychological dehumanisation the poor suffer in contemporary

Nigeria. Idemudia, the hero of the novel, is a stereotypical poverty-ridden Nigerian, whose

disrupted family life and chequered personal history cause him to experience repeated

humiliation meted out to him and his wife, Adisa, by Obofun and Queen.

Festus Iyayi and other second-generation Nigerian writers like Kole Omotosho and Femi

Osofisan have consistently discussed the theme of social inequality which had opened up a vast

gulf between the rich and the poor in Nigeria shortly after independence. Such gaps could no

longer be blamed outright on colonial history, but largely on the greed of a new elite class

typified by Obofun and Queen. (Griffith, 192)

Iyayi foregrounds the dialectic of materialism and social stratification on the manipulation of

Idemudia by Queen, who exploits his labour and refuses to pay him his meagre wages on time.

Iyayi methodically presents the poor health of Idemudia triggered by unremitting labour; his

selling of his blood to survive, his subsequent hospitalisation and his eventual confinement to the

hospital because his bills have not been paid. While Idemudia is marooned in hospital, Obofun

exploits the situation by having a sexual relationship with Adisa in return for money which she

would use for paying her husband‟s medical bills. Queen had also attempted to lure Ideumdia to

her bedroom, but Idemudia resists the entrapment.

Violence articulates the failure of post-independence regimes in Nigeria to ensure a fair society,

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and the growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity betwean rich and poor. Iyayi uses social

realities in contemporary Nigeria as a platform of protest but also as a means to create an artistic

work. The main action of the novel takes place in Benin City and focuses on the lives of

labourers who usually gather at Iyaso Motor Park. Most often, they are employed on a daily

basis.

Class Stratification in Violence

The dialectic of the human relationship between the rich and the poor in Violence is aptly

illustrated by Tunde Fatunde:

In Festus Iyayi‟s novel a balanced picture is given, both of the working people

and of the exploiters. Neither social class is infallible. They both show a degree of

human failing and human strength, although it is abundantly clear that Iyayi is on

the side of the working people. As a radical writer he is not complacent towards

the plight of those who have only their labour to sell. But he does not legitimise

Idemudia‟s attempt at beating his wife; neither does he approve of the

(understandable) „sexual methods‟ of Adisa, who searches for money to pay off

Idemudia‟s hospital bill. (114)

No doubt, the significance of labour ethos is given prominence in the novel. However, Iyayi does

not hesitate to acknowledge the importance of the workers‟ contribution to national

development, even if their efforts are not adequately rewarded:

Not far off were the houses which sweat and labour had already erected. Life

there was ablaze where labour had left its positive mark, the labour of hundreds of

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thousands of workers, working in the blinding rain, piling the blocks higher and

higher and wiping the salt and sweat from their eyes and their foreheads with the

backs of their hands and all underpaid, treated no better than slaves. (255-6)

Protest in the novel derives its power largely from the author‟s outrage at the injustice of a

system that reduces human beings to chattel and love to a commodity measured in terms of

Naira and Kobo. The commodification of Idemudia, Osaro, Patrick and Omoifo in the offloading

of the bags of cement at Freedom Motel by Queen is a signifier of this outrage. This outrage

further reverberates in a scenario at the building site, when Queen had to treat some workers

with indignation:

The other workers were already there and they gathered as soon as they saw

Queen. Queen faced them. “I understand that some of you want more money,” she

said quietly. Idemudia was surprised at the hardness in her voice.

“You there,” and Queen pointed to a tall, shirtless man. “You have always made

trouble, ever since you came here.” She drew an envelope. “Here is your money.”

She spat at him. “You will find twenty-three Naira, seventy-seven kobo inside the

envelope. Not one kobo more, not one kobo less.” (234)

The rhetoric of protest in Violence is mediated by Festus Iyayi‟s Marxist inclinations. It is an

inclination which is represented in a sustained disappointment and bitterness of the failure of the

Nigerian State to provide employment and basic social needs for her citizens. Iyayi in the novel

posits social relationship as a continuous process of contestation inseparable from human

development paradigms. Iyayi‟s interrogation of the social inequity in the novel is anchored on

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Karl Marx‟s theories of class stratification. This is done to enable him to interpret Nigeria‟s

social milieu. Iyayi‟s narrative of class stratification in Violence foregrounds the exploration

rather than amelioration of social relationship of the elite and working classes. Iyayi‟s

delineation of social classes in Violence underscores Ngugi‟s examination of the typology of

writers in post-colonial Africa as identified by Patrick Williams:

For Ngugi, social conditions mean that there are broadly two types of writers in

any given historical period. The first group consists of those who believe in the

status quo … The second group comprises those who have deliberately or

instinctively acquired a more dialectical perspective on society, as well as belief

in the possibility and necessity of change …. (Williams 156).

Such narrative betrays a discourse of class identities as they intersect new social formations.

Iyayi decries the appropriation of societal wealth and opportunities by the elite class, typified by

Obofun and Queen. This class is used by Iyayi to examine certain matrices of Nigerian society.

The elite class constitutes an economic threat to the well-being of the nation. Iyayi evaluates the

relationship between Queen and Idemudia to shape negotiations over identity, society and social

boundaries. Consequently, the dehumanisation Idemudia suffers articulates the high-strung

categories through which the novel‟s characters imagine themselves as part of a socially-

fragmented Nigeria. The importance of money as a signification of “social exchange” between

the elite and working classes is given prominence in the novel. Money symbolises power for the

elite, while it paradoxically symbolises a means of survival to the working class. Money serves

as a potent tool for the construction of identities by the individuals from both social divides in

the novel. As such, money is an effective symbol through which class identities are constructed.

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Ultimately, what gives coherence to the social relationship between the elite and the working

class is embedded in social exchange signified by money. This is appropriated by Iyayi as a

political discourse which he uses to create frames of understanding of contemporary Nigerian

society. Money serves as a potent tool of social exchange in the novel. The motif of money is

used to “construct” Nigeria society, articulate a shared experience of oppression, and evaluate

social consciousness through which Iyayi identifies himself artistically by making an emphatic

case for the value of social justice to society. Through the depiction of money as a vehicle of

social exchange, and especially by juxtaposing stupendous wealth with abject poverty, Iyayi

evaluates the danger inherent in the misuse of money as derivations of corruption, injustice,

greed and oppression.

The social context of contemporary Nigeria society which is Iyayi‟s focus in Violence is

reminiscent of Robert Fraser‟s analysis of Chinua Achebe‟s “The Novelist as Teacher,” in which

an African writer cannot but become involved in the social circumstances of his immediate

environment:

The African writer works against a background of often awesome social and

material deprivation: hunger, displacement, human stress. These are all needs

which demand instant and sustained attention, but not such as the professional

writer is in any real position to alleviate. The committed writer thus has perforce

to view his duty in different terms. Poverty he is unlikely in any sense to relieve,

but there is an ingrained poverty of the spirit and the cultural will, a chronic

failure of the communal imagination for the tending of which his craft and skills

are peculiarly relevant. (103)

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Iyayi‟s identification with the condition of the working class also partly reflects his own class

position as a petit-bourgeois intellectual who is able to empathise effectively with the working

class through his writing. His portrayal of Obofun, Queen, Dala and Iriso as exploiters of the

working classes offers a helpful context in which we can assess Iyayi‟s commitment to the cause

of the downtrodden. He courageously exposes the moral depravity of the Nigerian bourgeoisie,

paradoxically a class to which he too belongs as a privileged individual. Iyayi decries the

gluttonous attitude of the elite who assumed the leadership of their nation at the expiration of

colonial rule in Africa and have since independence perpetrated the exploitation of their own

people with a ruthlessness that was never seen during colonial rule. Such exploitation is seen in

the rapacity of the elite: sexual promiscuity as typified by the relationship between Iriso and

Queen; bribery and racketeering in the ministries and government parastatals which Obofun was

involved in before his premature dismissal; diversions of essential commodities like milk and

eggs from the ministry of agriculture to Queen‟s supermarket.

The employment of Idemudia by Queen to offload bags of cement with its attendant poor

remuneration provides the needed political discourse for the analysis of the economic structures

of the society, prevailing norms, injustice, exploitation, conflict and revolt, as the variables of

social exchange between the elite and the working class in the novel. The commodification of

members of the working class by the elite in the novel recalls the observation of Maynard

Solomon:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social

character of men‟s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon

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the product of that labour, because the relation of the producers to the sum total of

their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between

themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the

products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the

same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. (40)

Solomon emphasises that within the capitalist system as obtainable in Nigeria, all methods for

raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual

labourer. All means for the development of production transform themselves into means of

domination over, and exploitation of, the producers:

they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of man, degrade him to the level of an

appendage of machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work, and turn it

into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the

labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an

independent power .... (41)

The depredation of the working class in Violence recalls the observation of John Harris:

We must remember that to deny someone control of their own lives is to offer

them a most profound insult, not to mention the injury which the frustration of

their wishes and the setting at naught of their own plans for themselves will add.

(35)

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Iyayi protests the oppressive labour policies which hold an individual captive and makes him a

gratuitous object of commodification. He further reiterates that all methods for the production of

surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of

accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore

that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer must grow worse. This

subsequently becomes accumulation of misery, with its attendant accumulation of capital.

Therefore, for Idemudia and his friends, their engagement by Queen which nets them five Naira

individually at the end of the task, also comes with their acquisition of misery, toil, agony and

slavery. This degradation is manifested in Idemudia‟s illness.

The “existentialism” of the members of the working classes is largely determined by the elite.

Because the elite has the means of material production at its disposal, it also has control at the

same time over the means of “mental production.” This privileged position of the elite allows it

to ride roughshod over the collective existence of the members of the working classes.

The elite in Violence through its uncontrolled desire and insatiable greed crave the acquisition of

material goods. By so doing, they have become slaves of their own creations and are

consequently alienated from the humanness of society. The despoliation of the societal resources

by the elite renders members of the working class dehumanised. Idemudia, Adisa, Osaro, Pa

Jimoh and a host of other poverty-stricken individuals in the novel are graphically presented by

Iyayi as individuals who have suffered some degree of estrangement from the economic well-

being of society. They are forever consigned to that unfathomable abyss between what they are

and what they would like to be, which is the fallout of social disequilibrium orchestrated by the

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likes of Obofun, Queen, Iriso and Dala of the elite class.

Idemudia is a typification of a fragmented man whose social identity is ambivalent, as

exemplified in the hospital play titled Violence. He is a representation of millions of individuals

marooned in a cesspool of poverty, whose lives are crushed beneath the merciless and

implacable wheels of economic manipulation of the elite. Idemudia is a product of the

Foucauldian analysis of power play in the society:

The individual is no doubt the fictitious atoms of an „ideologist‟ representation of

society: but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that

I have called „discipline.‟ We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of

power in negative terms: It „excludes,‟ it „represses,‟ it „censors,‟ it „abstracts,‟ it

„masks,‟ it „conceals.‟ In fact, power produces: it produces the reality: it produces

domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that

may be gained of him belong to this production. (194)

Although the pauperisation of Idemudia, Osaro, Adisa, Pa Jimoh and Mama Jimoh has its more

remote sources in chequered post-colonial economic and political history, it was directly caused

by the head-on collision of two different, indeed totally opposed circumstances: the social

inequality orchestrated by the post-colonial apparatus, greed, avarice and economic schism

created and nurtured by the elite class. Subjected to this double trauma, the members of the

working class in Nigeria are helplessly condemned to be the spectators of their degeneration into

the state of dementia. The gap between them and the opportunistic members of the elite who

enjoy the opulence and bliss of society becomes deeper at the emergence of every successive

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civilian and military administration in the country and has become more and more difficult to

bridge. The economic disempowerment of Idemudia and other members of the working class is

thus by no means a physical one. The deprivation they experience is due to their exclusion from

the economic largesse of society. They are not people crippled by physical disabilities but

specific and well-defined individuals stranded in a socio-economic quagmire: poverty, hunger,

disease and loss of identity.

Poverty as Alienation in Violence

To the members of the working class in Violence, poverty presupposes non-existence, and non-

existence culminates in a deep sense of alienation. This notion is clearly demonstrated in the

submission of Isaac Yetiv:

Alienation presupposes identity, just as Death presupposes life. It is in the final

analysis, the loss of identity, be it individual or ethnic, and the effort to recapture

this lost identity which constitutes the “identity crisis.” Like life itself, identity is

a dynamic phenomenon …. (87).

Virtually all the working-class characters feel themselves estranged from their society. They are

haunted by a sense of alienation borne out of hunger, lack and want. Protest is deployed in the

novel to articulate the palpable emptiness in the lives of working-class people. Idemudia‟s

inability to secure a permanent job, Osaro, Omoifo and Patrick‟s consistent existence on the

fringes of life; Adisa‟s endless endurance of hunger and Papa and Mama Jimoh‟s subsistence

living in a rundown apartment are significations of the emptiness aptly mediated by Iyayi‟s

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dialectic of class stratification.

Violence is a canvass crowded with alienated individuals and an alienated society of the wealthy

and the poor. Idemudia serves as a metaphor of the alienated individuals trapped in an urban

society. Idemudia, a school dropout who could not continue with his education because his

parents could not pay his fees, finds it remarkably difficult to secure a decent job, and ends up as

a casual labourer at the building site.

The thought of his failure to complete his education, which would have provided him with an

adequate meal ticket often fills him with resentment and bitterness. His preoccupation with

charting a path of survival for himself and his wife Adisa also led him into selling his blood

intermittently:

Idemudia saw himself nodding and saying, “Blood, sir!”

“Yes.”

“How much will you pay?” Osaro asked.

“How much do you want?” the man replied. “I want as many as four pints.”

“It is twenty-five naira a pint.” Osaro said.

The man laughed. “Twenty-five naria! That is too expensive.”

“Then how much can you pay?”

“Ten naira a pint, nothing more, nothing less” .… (155)

The overwhelming sense of economic marginality drives Idemudia to rue his almost existential

sense of helplessness: “The things an empty stomach can drive a man to” he said to himself now,

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and shook his head. “The things hunger can make a man to do!” (157). Idemudia is vehemently

against the oppressive social system which arrests him in action or drives him to do the exact

opposite of what he most desires. What troubles him is not so much his existential anguish but

the absence of fairness in the distribution of economic opportunities in Nigerian society.

In spite of the social difficulties and economic marginality suffered by the novel‟s working-class

characters, these individuals‟ refuse to succumb completely to the criminal existence to which

they have been condemned. Idemudia‟s courage, untarnished by the misery around, and his

equally uncorrupted love for Adisa are a demonstration of human dignity in struggle. This is a

central assertion which is imbibed by members of the working class, and significantly buoys

their determination to survive against all odds.

Most of these characters are not articulate about their marginality. Aside from Idemudia, Osaro

and Omoifo, who are assertive and often confrontational, Papa and Mama Jimoh, Patrick, Adisa

and the other reactionary elements at the building site seem to have internalised their collective

subjugation. They are crippled by the prevailing social conditions. Their inability to take on

their oppressors is rendered in terms of the physical details of their daily activities which is

mediated by outright passivity and subtle compromise. This tellingly recalls the feeble

personality of Adisa, who could not live out her courage, but succumbs to intense pressure from

Obofun. Pa Jimoh is also culpable of passivity, as can be seen in the incident where he is

mistakenly detained by his employer for allegedly taking out the official car after working hours.

One would have expected him to protest his illegal detention when it had been established that

he was not guilty of the offence. But despite not being compensated, he complacently accepts his

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dehumanisation.

The reactionary attitude of these individuals in the working class succinctly foregrounds the

dialectic of class stratification by Ngugi wa Thiong‟o:

They would like to have a slave who not only accepts that he is a slave, but that

he is a slave because he is fated to be nothing else but a slave. Hence he must

love and be grateful to the master for his magnanimity in enslaving him to a

higher, nobler civilisation. (12)

However, Idemudia, Osaro and Omoifo frantically strive to restore self-worth and dignity to the

image of the working class. Through hard and debilitating tasks, they are determined to assert

themselves and their inalienable human identities. Their quest for social security and identity is

encapsulated in the concrete and specific terms of a definite social struggle: their protest against

inhuman social conditions foist upon them by the elite in the form of poor remuneration at the

building site. The workers‟ strike provides the much-needed opportunity to confront their social

marginality headlong. Their triumph over social alienation comes when they succeeded in

forcing Queen to negotiate over the condition of work and remuneration. But such a meeting is

marked by a pervasive cynicism, because it portends for the workers fear and humiliation

symptomatic of a tyranny of fear that elite oppression creates. Negotiation between the labourers

at the building site and Queen should have normally promised something positive and realistic:

an increase in the wages of the workers and better conditions of service. But its circumvention

by Queen, through her sexual blackmail of Idemudia, underscores a sign, not of disruption or

change in the relationship between the elite and the working class, but of continuity in the

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unchanging dialectic of oppressor and oppressed.

Iyayi uses the dialectic of the elite/working class to foreground empirical realities. Violence, for

instance, uses the hospitalisation of Idemudia after offloading bags of cement from a truck for

Queen and his inability to pay his medical bills as a springboard to criticise extortionist gambits

of the elite. Idemudia‟s quest for employment get him a job that demeaned him and which

subsequently made him sick, because he had to work in the rain amidst debilitating hunger.

Consequently, he fell ill because he was cold and hungry. The point of scathing criticism against

the elite class in Violence is that the elite economically emasculates the poor in order to

perpetually gratify their gluttonous appetites.

Wealth as a symbol of Social Disruption in Violence

Iyayi decries the unconscionable acquisition of wealth and moral decadence of the elite in the

novel. Obofun is presented as a man suborned by his acquisitive wife, Queen, and his

contemporaries in the ministries like Dala and Iriso. He pursues stupendous wealth through

barefaced graft, and he is preoccupied with the use of his position in a government ministry to

aid his crooked get-rich-quick schemes. Obofun typifies a metaphor of the Nigerian urban elite

which is steeped in social corruption and who craves insatiably after material possessions. His

wife, Queen, is a satirical portrait of a pseudo-enterprising woman, whose business trajectory is

motivated by sexual negotiations with powerful men in society as she voraciously pursues men

who could facilitate her building contract bids and guarantee the supply of supplies to her hotel

and supermarket. Queen‟s pervasive sexual indulgence is robustly criticised by Iyayi. Her life

comprises a world in which men intervene only as passing characters: official or transitory

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lovers, suppliers and weak husbands. But beyond her momentary relationship with any of these

men is her repulsion to any emotional attachment to males generally. Her relationship with the

men in her life is played out in terms of power and domination. She is portrayed as heartless,

cold, calculating and exploitative. This is demonstrated in her encounter with Iriso at the

rendezvous on Sakponba Road:

“Why do you think this will happen again?” she asked.

Iriso looked at the ceiling. “Won‟t there be a next time?”

“The bitch,” he thought. “As if she is not going to need any more milk, eggs and

meat. If she won‟t need any of these, she will need other things, and if a man

supplies them, she is going to use her body to pay for them. Harlot” he spat out

towards the other side of the bed on the wall. (100-101)

The matrimony of Obofun and Queen epitomises instability and collapse of a family structure

among the elite, in which a wife pursues economic freedom so as to create an individuality and a

separate personhood. Queen is presented as a typical urban woman of the elite class in a post-

colonial African society where most socially pre-eminent women are pre-occupied with the zeal

to be economically independent of their husbands, and many often worship money above

principles and values.

The elite in Violence are engaged in infidelity and drunkenness. The sanctions and taboos which

shape the traditional society and gave it its seeming stability, dignity and respectability are

completely subverted, as everything takes second place to the relentless drive for wealth.

Obofun, Iriso and Dala, who are supposed to be respectable husbands and fathers, plunge into

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decadence and immorality. The uncontrollable subscription to corrupt practices also signifies the

fragmentation of the hitherto secured family units as husbands and wives are neck deep in the

feverish wealth-acquision syndrome, thereby becoming vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

Obofun does not care if Queen takes lovers and Queen in turn realises that Obofun has

mistresses. Iyayi‟s knack for presenting the inner character of the elite class in the novel and for

describing their extra-marital activities affords him the narrative space to build up polemics for

the condemnation of the egoism, irrationality and recklessness associated with them. Obofun and

Queen are marooned in a lifeless matrimony devoid of a conjugal relationship. Whatever co-

habitation there is is merely a product of artificiality, as most outsiders do not have a glimpse of

the sterility of their marriage.

Iyayi, however, in Violence, does not significantly stress the oppression of one gender by the

other. He creates a balance of judgment in the relationship between men and women, especially

among the elite. The portrait of men as harsh, dictatorial and inconsiderate has its match in the

portrait of women as callous, selfish and vindictive. While Obofun‟s sexual predation ensnares

Adisa in its web, Queen successfully seduces Iriso, with Idemudia only narrowly escaping her

snare. Queen is financially independent of Obofun. She is privileged to enter into sexual

relations with any man without other motives than that of emotional and sexual gratification.

Adultery, for Queen, is the ultimate possibility of exploring a relationship devoid of utilitarian

ethos.

For Obofun and other male members of the elite, adultery provides the sexual benefits of

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flaunting their wealth and success in society. Since wealth is relatively concentrated in the hands

of men, a woman needs a financial lift in order to have a chance at a decent standard of living.

But unfortunately, the elite males prey on the hapless wives of the working class, as

demonstrated in the amorous affair between Obofun and Adisa, Idemudia‟s wife.

Unlike Queen, Adisa is not acting out of a sense of disillusionment with the institution of

marriage, but Adisa‟s vulnerable position essentially derives from the fact that Idemudia does

not adequately provide for her. She has an affair with Obofun to raise the much-needed money

for Idemudia‟s hospital bills. Here, Iyayi sees the city as a site of corruption where sex is

commodified. Material wealth is seen as a weapon effectively deployed for the benefit of

prosperous men, and all women are placed in a position of powerlessness. But Iyayi does not

seem to agree with the notion that women have to adapt to their subordination in order to

survive. Such subordination smacks of oppressive, exploitative, and alienating arrangements that

serve to further social control of the working class by the elite in its entirety. Adisa is presented

as the epitome of a semi-literate, vulnerable, and poverty-ravaged working class woman trapped

in the throes of the cities of Nigeria, and whose social and economic survival is determined by

the urban elite.

The social and economic subjugation of the working class by the elite reflects a complex

situation of gender oppression intertwined with the rhetoric of class oppression. This remarkably

posits how different forms of exploitation are made possible within these structures of power

relations in Violence. This reading further places the novel within the limitations of a system

where the working class‟ prescribed roles as labourers and mistresses constitute their entire

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sphere of action. Their actions, needs, and aspirations can thus be understood only in relation to

complacent subordination and so paradoxically turns those who benefit most from their

oppression, the elite, into their only benefactors.

Iyayi appropriates the social gulf between the elite and working classes to articulate the

suffocating misery which broadly pervades the milieu of the novel. The theme of misery and its

effects are sharpened against the backdrop of wanton desolation as given attestation on the

opening page of the novel:

Outside, the flood built up steadily and gradually. Owode Street, like its father,

Ekenwan Road, was always over-flooded any time the rain fell. Two days before,

two houses had collapsed on the street. A small child had been trapped in one of

the buildings under the fallen mud walls. Fortunately, rescuers, including

Idemudia, had dug the child out in time. For the people who lived in the mud

houses on Owode Street, there was now another major preoccupation: which

house would be the next to fall? (1-2)

This precarious habitation of the downtrodden in the novel is conceived as a metaphorical abyss

where human lives are cheap and fragmented. In a fundamental social sense, the run-down

habitation of the working class dramatises an aberration highlighted in elite opulence against

working class despair and hopelessness.

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Marxist Ideology as a Motif of Social Consciousness in Violence

Iyayi‟s ideological disposition, as mediated in Marxist dialectics, is discernible in his

interrogation of power structures in the post-colonial Nigerian society, with its attendant

variables of dominance, control, exploitation, subjugation and victimisation. In the view of

Emmanuel Ngara, the ideological preoccupation of a writer “will in part depend on his or her

level of political consciousness.” Consequently, “whatever stance the writer takes constitutes his

or her authorial ideology.” Ngara defines further the concept of ideology:

Ideology refers to that aspect of the human condition under which people

operate as conscious actors. Ideology is the medium through which human

consciousness works. Our conception of religion, politics, morality, art and

science is deeply influenced by our ideology. In other words, what we see and

believe largely depends on our ideology, ideology being the medium through

which we comprehend and interpret reality … (11)

The exploration of social relationship between the indigenous entrepreneurs and casual labourers

in Violence foregrounds Iyayi‟s determination to expose the ideological bias of the Nigerian elite

against the perspective of the exploited majority to interrogate the class interests as significantly

inscribed in the novel. The collective plight of the underprivileged in ruthlessly competitive

Nigerian urban cities sharpens the social consciousness of Iyayi, and develops into truculent

protest against the inhumanity of the elite.

By so doing, his voice typifies the voice of the oppressed. This is inscribed in the thematic

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preoccupation of Violence, the social background of Ideumdia, and the evocative style which is

replete with ironic overtones. The novel‟s title, Violence, articulates the callous exploitation of

the surplus labour of the working class in the novel without a commensurate remuneration. This

exploitation is vividly captured in the novel:

The Greek leaned back in his chair, relaxed. “He says what they send him to say.

That they work very hard for too little pay. Too many hours of work and too

many sackings. Everyday. Every hour. He says,” and the Greek paused, “he puts

it grandly, the Greek continued, “He says it is violence!”

“Violence?”

“Yes, violence.” (250-251)

Iyayi protests the exploitation and inhumanity to which the workers are subjected with

characteristic power and intensity of feeling. The poor pay and constant dismissal of the workers

is nothing but calculated violence on their social wellbeing. The narrative of Violence is that

when a worker loses his job, he suffers some degree of social disruption and discontinuity. Such

disruption is analogous to marginality. When this happens, such an individual may take to armed

robbery and other social vices. This has an undercurrent in the satiric play titled Violence which

is staged at the hospital. In the play, violence is used by both the elite class and the working class

as narratives for the evaluation of their respective class positions. The elite class appropriates

violence as hegemonic narrative to examine the disruption of their social status by the activities

of the working class, which if not controlled could irreparably destroy their power base. Thus,

social disruptions like armed robbery, mob action, rioting, kidnapping and assassination of

members of the elite class are frowned upon. Codes in the name of laws and legislations are

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therefore established to curtail such working-class interrogations. The working class on its own

part approves violence as a counter-narrative to decry their frustration, exploitation and

dehumanisation by the elite. It also creates its own codes of reaction through the use of tactics

like armed robbery, kidnapping, drug-pedalling and prostitution to subvert the elite‟s hegemonic

narrative. The narrative and counternarrative of violence of both classes is clearly captured by

Paulo Freire:

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognise

others as people – not by those who are oppressed, exploited and unrecognised.

It is not the unloved who cause disaffection, but those who cannot love because

they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate

terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which

begets the “rejects of life.” (32)

Iyayi‟s identification with the oppressed is given prominence in the mobilisation of the

labourers, led by Idemudia, for a showdown with Queen. Such mobilisation is designed to

champion the cause of the oppressed members of the working class and also to project Marxist

ideology as the only viable ideology which can question and challenge class inequity in

contemporary Nigeria. Thus, the labourers‟ confrontation of Queen and Mr. Clerides, the site

engineer, is presented in Fanonian mode, in the form of a fearless and aggressive attitude, which

represents the new determination of the labourers to liberate themselves as prescribed by Frantz

Fanon:

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from

his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless

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and restores his self-respect. (74)

The confrontation of Queen by the labourers strikes a chord of optimism in the trajectory of

social struggle in the novel. The confrontation imbues the labourers with the zeal of social

consciousness, which doggedly pursued, could signal the eventual victory of the oppressed over

the oppressor. Iyayi‟s advocacy of social change in Nigeria echoes Inih Akpan Ebong‟s call for

economic, political and attitudinal change in Africa:

Africa is ripe for a revolution. It is not the promiscuous violent, bloody revolution

of permissive wantonness to life and property, nor is it the cultural revivalism of

black humanity asserting itself in protest against the indifference of the West. The

revolution for contemporary Africa presupposes the reorganisation and the

restructuring of the African mind and psyche. (71)

Protest as invested in the labourers‟ confrontation of Queen, the epitome of oppression

orchestrated by the elite, betrays Iyayi‟s attempt to move beyond the ostensibly passive critical

attitudes characteristic of first-generation Nigerian writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka,

Gabriel Okara, J. P. Clark and Chris Okigbo, whose reactions to social issues in Nigeria are

often perceived as reactionary by many second-generation Nigerian writers.

Iyayi as a representation of second-generation Nigerian writers clearly and confidently

articulates the dialectical relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed in Violence. Such

articulation has its undercurrent in Nigeria‟s social, political and economic problems which have

become more pronounced in recent years. Instead of merely portraying these inadequacies and

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shortcomings, Iyayi has stridently advocated radical social change as a viable alternative to the

situations depicted in the novel.

He is one of the few Nigerian writers who specifically extol the virtues of the working class in

their works. His concern with socio-political circumstances delineates the social structure and is

mediated by a class analysis of post-colonial Nigeria.

The trajectory of Marxist consciousness has been successfully traversed by African literary icons

like Sembene Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiong‟o to evaluate the social, economic and political

problems in their respective countries. While Ngugi‟s depiction of the working class as a leading

force in revolution is exemplified in Petals of Blood, Ousmane presents the working class as a

force that has the capability to enforce socialist change in God’s Bits of Wood. Iyayi not only

adopts a class analysis approach to Nigerian society but indirectly advocates a complete

alteration of existing social, economic and political systems. Prima facie, Ousmane and Ngugi

unequivocally call for the inauguration of Marxist society in their novels, but Iyayi does not

explicitly advocate the emergence of a Marxist society in Violence.

Extreme Poverty as Protest in Violence

Iyayi employs the motif of poverty to protest the desperate living conditions in which the

working class is mired. Lack, want and dire need provide the undertone for the lampoon of

inequity in social distribution in the novel.

The critical evaluation of the manifestation of poverty from the Marxist point of view locates the

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narrative of economic subjugation within the locale of dialectical materialism. It is a subjugation

which could have attracted criticism from other literary tropes, be they humanist or feminist.

Nevertheless, it is imperative to state that it is not the type of trope employed in the depiction of

the appalling situation of poverty in the novel that matters so much as its vivid depiction, which

is reminiscent of the material poverty of the downtrodden in the contemporary Nigeria. Such

depiction is a reaction to the quintessential question by Gayatri Spivak:

What is very much a question for me at the moment is that if you are construed in

one particular kind of language, what kinds of violence does it do to your

subjectivity if one then has to move into another language, and suppress whatever

selves or subjectivities were constructed by the first? (66)

In Violence, the exploration of the living conditions of the urban poor in contemporary Nigeria

provides the locus of the narrative of social condition, woven around Idemudia and Adisa‟s

attempt at coming to terms with their society.

The novel opens with the portrayal of the squalor and deprivation of Idemudia and Adisa which

underlie the vivid detail of the deprivation and destitution of the lives of the urban poor in Benin

City, an urban settlement in Nigeria. Motifs of lack and want are used as a signification to

protest malignant poverty and its devastating effects on Idemudia and Adisa who cannot afford

the luxury of a wall clock but have to monitor the time broadcast from the radiogram of their

neighbours:

“Open the window wider so that we can hear what the time it is.” He and his wife,

Adisa, were tenants in one of the low mud but zinced houses along Owode Street.

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Adisa who had been sweeping the badly cemented floor of the room, dropped the

broom and stretched her hand across the table which stood against the window.

The window screeched on its hinges as it went wider. Adisa bent down to pick up

the broom. Then she resumed her sweeping. The broom was so short that she had

to stoop substantially to sweep clean. (1)

The desolation presented in this opening page foregrounds the semiotic of lack which permeates

the lives of the working class throughout the novel. Idemudia and Adisa his wife are too poor to

afford wristwatches or a wall clock. They are quarantined in a rundown mud house that is

vulnerable to flooding. The cemented floor of the dingy solitary room is cracked. The broom is

decrepit and the rusty window hinges underscore their level of impoverishment. This graphic

presentation of the decrepitude provides a counterpoint to the splendour of the vast opulence of

the chalet in Obofun‟s guest house in the novel:

Again Adisa looked round the room. She noticed the polished floor again, then

the walls and the high ceiling painted white where the air-conditioner softly blew

cold air into the room. (123)

This description is further complemented by the aesthetics of landscaping, which further

accentuate the glamour of the elite‟s neighbourhood:

Then there was the low window with its white curtains, drawn aside to let in some

of the fading light of the day. Each window had a mosquito net proofing directly

attached to the wooden window frame.

Outside the window the grass grew and the hibiscus flowers stood in red and

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green splendour. And interwoven with the flowers were the pine trees against

which the wind blew, producing a whistling in their higher branches. (122)

The comparison of the squalid habitation of Idemudia and the sumptuous abode of Obofun

encapsulate the dialectical tragedy of the social, economic and political disequilibrium of post-

colonial Nigeria. Iyayi engages the motif of extreme poverty to protest the economic

strangulation of the poor in the novel. The comparison of the habitations further concretises

Iyayi‟s protest against the corrupt practices of the elite in Nigeria, who divest public funds meant

to provide infrastructure for society for their own use.

The juxtaposition of the two habitations constitutes a repudiation of the economic emasculation

of the poor by the elite in the novel. The poor in turn are helpless and are engaged in their own

struggle with an oppressive social system and a frustrating economic system. The dynamics of

social relationship in the novel are dictated by an elite that is unsympathetic to the condition of

the poor.

The squalid living of the poor reiterates the basic problem of economic insecurity which is

transformed into class struggle in the novel. For the poor whose lives are consigned to

transcendental hopelessness, they are marooned in their economic deprivation. Their awareness

of this deprivation leads Idemudia, Omoifo and Osaro to protest against inhuman working

conditions at the building site. The workers‟ confrontation of Queen and the subsequent threat to

embark on a strike if their demands are not met urgently is strongly endorsed by Iyayi. Violence

is thus a protest novel of class reconstruction, portraying and justifying the proletariat‟s struggle

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for social and economic liberation.

The exemplary virtues of Idemudia, who led the protest against the elite class, are also given

resounding acknowledgment. His social and political consciousness make the workers aware of

their exploitation and inspires them to plunge into the protest against inhuman working

conditions at the building site.

Dialectic as Form in Violence

Violence‟s protest of the Nigerian social system is characterised by dialectical materialism which

sees human society as being in a constant state of motion, progressing from lower to higher

levels. Iyayi‟s style exemplifies a perception of the class struggle which does not betray any

sense of self-pity of the working class in the novel. Instead, it encourages them to sustain a

refusal to accept subjugation and domination by the elite which controls economic power.

The thematic of Violence foregrounds the dialectic of economic manipulation and resistance, the

contest between the emasculation characteristic of the Nigerian social system and the struggle of

the majority to break that system. The delineation of the characters into two significant classes,

elite and working class, bespeaks the struggle against social and economic dehumanisation

perpetrated by the elite class. The protest against this dehumanisation, is mediated by Iyayi‟s

social consciousness and artistic commitment. The polarisation of his characters into two

dialectically-opposed groups thrusts upon Iyayi the need to accentuate his role as a Marxist who

has to conscientise the working class on the significance of struggle for liberation from the yoke

of economic exploitation foisted upon them by the elite.

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This conscientisation gambit is reiterated in his pedagogy of the working class concerning who

is primarily responsible for the inequity in the distribution of economic opportunities in Nigerian

society. Rather than resorting to conventional didactism and propagandist sloganeering, Iyayi

adopts satire as an implicit tool of dialectical conscientisation. This is demonstrated in the

rhetoric of the defence counsel in the hospital play. The play is a motif of protest adopted by

Iyayi in the novel in order to avoid lapsing into outright Marxist propaganda which would have

compromised his artistic commitment. The narrative violence evinces a contestation of meanings

between the elite and the working class. However, Iyayi‟s protest against the domination of the

social system which triggers off conflict between the two classes is succinctly foregrounded in

the narrative of working-class dehumanisation by the defence counsel. This incontrovertibly

represents Iyayi‟s dialectical analysis of the Nigerian social system:

The judge smiled sarcastically. “Is that then your own understanding of violence?

Counsel for the defence nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “In my understanding

acts of violence are committed when a man is denied the opportunity of being

educated, of getting a job, of feeding himself and his family properly, of getting

medical attention cheaply, quickly and promptly. We often do not realise that it is

the society, the type of economic and hence the political system which we are

operating in our country today that brutalises the individual, rapes his manhood.

We often do not realise that when such men of poor and limited opportunities

react, they are only in a certain measure, answering violence with violence. (185)

In the complexity of the satiric play, the judge represents the elite, presented in the play as

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oppressive and exploitative, while the accused persons alongside the defence counsel are

presented as members of the working class. By extension, Obofun, Queen, Iriso and Dala, all

belong to the elite, while Idemudia, Adisa, Omoifo, Patrick, Osaro, Papa and Mama Jimoh are

all members of the working class.

Iyayi‟s adoption of a satiric play as a vignette in Violence provides a mode of conscientisation

aimed at galvanising the working class into confronting their oppressors in Violence. This

fittingly confirms Daniel P. Kunene‟s recommendation on the choice of a suitable linguistic

medium for African writers who need to address volatile social and political issues in their

countries:

When the struggle has progressed to a certain point, the demon of fear is

conquered. The politics of fear are replaced by the politics of confrontation, for

the oppressed can now speak to his oppressor from a position of equality. This

stage was reached quite decisively in the late sixties and early seventies. For the

writer, the problem of choosing a suitable linguistic medium then becomes more

complex. (38)

The use of a satiric play, Violence serves in the novel as an objective medium for the articulation

of protest against elite subjugation of the working class. It provides the much-needed irony

required in deciphering the signification of violence as appropriated by both classes in the novel.

Violence derives its title largely from the satiric play, and it points to the centrality of the

symbolism in the dialectical relationship between the elite and the working classes in the novel.

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The title of the novel underscores the incontrovertible dialectic of oppressor/oppressed,

elite/working classes, haves and have nots. Violence constitutes a vibrant dialogic motif in The

Wretched of the Earth by Fanon with which Iyayi prefixes the novel. It suggests brutality,

dehumanisation, emasculation and mental castration of a person or group by another person.

Violence recalls an imagery of domination, subjugation and outright devaluation of an

individual, group, institution or society by another individual or group. The aftermath of this

brutality brings about conflict, mayhem and disorder in society.

Iyayi in Violence has appropriated the phenomenology of violence in the Fanonian dialectics of

the social relationship between colonial authorities and the natives of colonial territories to

protest the wide gulf in terms of material well-being between the rich and the poor in post-

colonial Nigeria. Violence in the novel has acquired an expansive vocabulary for the description

of the economic exploitation of the surplus labour of the working class by the elite. The misery,

poor housing, unemployment and constant hunger of the working class are perceived as

collective violation of their physical and psychological essence by the elite in Violence.

Iyayi does not just gleefully present the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed with its attendant

narrative of violence and counter-violence in the novel. He also proposes the resolution of the

social impasse within the purview of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis in the

oppressor-oppressed matrix. The proposal for such resolution betrays a materialist, dialectic

vision stridently amplified by Iyayi through the defence counsel in the hospital play:

What I would like to see, however is not just for a handful of men to take up arms

to rob one individual. I feel and think it is necessary that all the oppressed sections

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of our community ought to take up arms to overthrow the present oppressive

system. The system has already proved that it operates through violence …. (185)

The proposal for the resolution of the oppressive social system through armed struggle in the

novel, underscores the climax of the self-liberation of the oppressed class as dictated by the

Hegelian dialectic materialism which has been elaborately articulated by Marx and Fanon, and

overtly subscribed to by Ousmane and Ngugi in their work.

The inevitability of revolutionary confrontation in Nigerian society underlies the narrative of

violence in the novel. However, Iyayi counsels that such confrontation must be subsumed within

the trajectory of dialectical struggle: exploitation of the surplus labour of the working class by

the elite; the conscientisation of the workers towards the apprehension of their exploitation;

protesting their perceived economic and political exploitation and finally, the inauguration of

revolution to subvert and displace the oppressive social system.

Conclusion

In Violence, Iyayi attempts to interrogate the epistemology of power relations between the elite

and the working class. He contends that power concerns human relationships and the perception

of such relationships by the persons or institutions involved in them. Protest in the novel is

mediated by the portrayal of a balanced picture of both classes as regards their strengths and

failures within the ethos of the creative role of labour. Consequently, Marxist ideology is

significantly employed as a critical tool for analysing the dialectic of class and social

stratification in the novel.

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CHAPTER SIX

DEFYING ARMIES: PROTESTING MILITARY OPPRESSION IN ARROWS OF RAIN

AND WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

Introduction

Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel are satiric, allegorical representations of Nigeria in the

grip of dictatorship foisted upon it by the military in the last four decades. Waiting for an Angel

engages Nigerian society in a manner that utilizes its status as faction which consciously takes

contemporary facts and analyses them from the perspectives of different characters in order to

bring out their deeper meanings for society. Contested views of a painful history of Nigeria as a

nation are the main issues in Arrows of Rain. History‟s negotiability and the way in which this

feature gives rise to the notion of protest is seen in the varying perspectives of different

characters, as well as the contestation between official history and private memory. Ndibe‟s

Arrows of Rain and Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel both tackle headlong the evils of military

rulers and their civilian collaborators. This orchestrates a shift of theme and concern away from

the impact of colonisation and the historical past toward an examination of current socio-political

problems of abuse of power by the ruling elite, corruption and pronounced social inequity.

The overt subscription to social concerns in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel reveals the

extent of the determination of third-generation Nigerian writers to confront the social realities

considered responsible for the failure of the country to live up to its widely-acknowledged

potential. In both novels, the writers imaginatively assess endemic political problems aggravated

by the military‟s incursion onto the Nigerian political landscape. As Elerius John points out,

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literature provides a specific form of social consciousness to which the artist and the critic cannot

be indifferent:

In apprehending observable reality and reflecting the findings in his literary

creation, the African writer is not unaware of the real nature and objective of good

literature which he sees as being largely determined by the needs of the society.

(195)

The Military as Harbinger of Terror

Waiting for an Angel underscores the reign of terror orchestrated by successive military

administrations in Nigeria, especially the military regimes of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani

Abacha. The novel is a documentation of the atrocities of the military in all facets of Nigerian

life between 1990 and 1998. The narrative of torture, victimisation and brutality in the novel is

presented from the viewpoint of Lomba, who serves as the novel‟s central character. He is a

journalist and writer, a person whose versatility with words and keen insight enable him to

delineate society in such a way that the arbitrariness of historical interpretation of events

becomes clear. Although intelligent, he has abandoned his pursuit of a degree in English because

of the prolonged closure of his university by the military authorities, and is forced to take up

journalism on The Dial. Lomba was arrested and kept in detention when a coup was attempted

against the maximum ruler, General Sani Abacha, by some officers close to him. While in

prison, Lomba kept up with his creative writing but this was soon exposed to the prison

authorities by his fellow inmates, thereby exposing him to the ire of the prison superintendent:

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„So, you won‟t talk. You think you are tough,‟ he shouted, „You are wrong.

Twenty years! That is how long I have been dealing with miserable bastards like

you. Let this be an example to all of you. Don‟t think you can deceive me. We

have our sources of information. You can‟t. This insect will be taken to solitary

and he will be properly dealt with until he is willing to talk.‟ (14)

Waiting for an Angel is a novel composed of seven interrelated stories. Its significance lies in its

capability to capture socio-political circumstances and events which border largely on state-

sponsored violence during the Babangida and Abacha military regimes. The novel opens with the

incarceration of Lomba and other political prisoners and closes with violence in which a

prominent journalist, Dele Giwa is killed and The Dial’s premises are set ablaze by soldiers:

“Yes? Adam … hello‟ He has one hand on the wheel; the other holds the phone to

his ear.

What breaking news? Dele, Dele … who? Dead?‟ His voice shoots up and Lomba

stares at him curiously. (150)

The novel reflects Habila‟s thoughts on the political crisis in Nigeria in the late 1990s. Protest

against the military is carried out by socially-marginalised men and women in society. Lomba,

the protagonist, is ubiquitous throughout the novel. Through this device, Habila is able to

condemn the corruption and authoritarianism of the military dictatorship. Although the novel has

a loose plot, its political message is nevertheless striking. This is realised through specific and

beautifully-drawn characters like Alice, Joshua, Kela and James. The narrative of military

brutality is sufficiently articulated by the characters in the novel as well as the colourful

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evocation of its locale, emphasising street names, filthy environments and the many casualties of

military brutality that ostensibly portray Nigerian life.

The portraiture of the military in Waiting for an Angel is foregrounded in a semiotic of

deprivation and destruction. This can be seen in the deprivation of the downtrodden masses on

Poverty Street, the urban debris of Lagos with its squalid slums, its suppurating sewers, its huge

craters on the road, and the mountain of filth and dirt of Egunje Road. Rot and dilapidation

demarcate the landscapes of Nigeria during Abacha‟s rein of terror. The political class and

members of the opposition are decimated due to constant arrest and outright liquidation. Political

repression and the economic marginalisation of the mass of the people has led to the virtual

elimination of the embryonic middle-class.

Habila retrospectively presents indictments of the oppression and corruption of the Abacha

regime. Waiting for an Angel takes an unambiguously committed political stand on degradation

of humanity by the military. Terror and violence are inscribed in the narrative of the seven stories

in Waiting for an Angel. Such a narrative combines a grotesque irony with chillingly realistic

details of the regime‟s propensity to employ torture and summary execution as a convenient

weapon of violence and terror. In line with its status as a work of faction, the novel weaves a

narrative that reflects actual practices and events during the Babangida/Abacha regimes. One of

such events is succinctly captured when Joshua, a civil rights activist, is brutalised by the police,

on the orders of the military sole administrator, during the change of name of Morgan Street to

Poverty Street:

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All eyes, including those of the police, were on Joshua as he jumped down from

the drum and headed for the police column on the north, where an inspector, fat

and furiously moustached, stood in front, tapping his leg with his baton, looking

undecided. The inspector turned and whispered to his men, and just as Joshua

reached him, he did a curious thing. He raised his right hand and brought it down

sharply. And his men charged. (134)

The impulse to pull down the larger-than-life façade of military invincibility is what marks out

Waiting for an Angel as the prototype for the more overtly radical Nigerian political novel. Its

rhetoric of disillusionment with military adventurism reflects a general sense of disappointment

harboured by the generality of Nigerians regardless of ethnic origin. Through the centrality and

articulateness of Lomba, Habila is able to mobilise other characters to protest the excesses of the

military. Lomba typifies the spokesman for the young generation in the novel. Protest in Waiting

for Angel is both verbal and psychological. Lomba‟s articulation of the social and political vices

of corruption, political manipulation through election rigging and the brazen annulment of the

1993 presidential election purportedly won by Chief M. K. O. Abiola provides the connection

between the fiery narrative of military domination and vibrant artistic commitment comparable

with Ofeyi in Wole Soyinka‟s Season of Anomy.

The title of Waiting for an Angel defines the underlying theme of despair and despondency,

which pervades the Nigerian political atmosphere which lasted from 1993 to 1998.

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Memory as Subversion of Silence

Arrows of Rain is imbued with the capacity to remember what has happened, which in itself is a

form of protest given that what is being remembered is subversive of the existing order.

Negotiated history and defiant protest coalesce in the experiences of the central character

Ogugua, whose occupation as a journalist enables him to straddle both, thereby offering a

complex interpretation of the way society, history and protest are all implicated within each

other. Ogugua‟s narrative in Arrows of Rain echoes not only the ambivalence of a post-colonial

Nigeria and the politics of remembering, but also the process of narrating and organising

memories and of evaluating the role of the military in national development. Ogugua‟s narrative

is a web of recollections from the distant past after it had undergone deliberate repression. His

decision to narrate his turbulent past to his son Femi Adero comes with the conviction that it will

help him come to grips with his altered personality, a personality that has been dismembered by

General Isa Pallat Bello:

I am here because many years ago I fooled myself that the counterfeit coin of

silence was good enough to buy peace of mind. I forgot my grandmother‟s

wisdom, that the mouth owes stories to the debt of speech. (245)

Ogugua‟s decision to break out of the self-imposed silence of self-censorship clearly evaluates

the power of narrating the brutality of the military in its assault of the collective sensibility of

Nigerians. Ogugua‟s memory is a motif of interrogating Nigeria‟s chequered history in its

struggle against military decapitation of its social and political values. In some sense, Ogugua in

his nightmarish re-telling of the past presents himself as a bridge between the past and the

present of Nigeria‟s history; he feels his disrupted history will provide the missing link in the life

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of Adero who becomes a victim of controversial parentage, orchestrated by the military culture

of gratuitous repression. The connection between Ogugua and post-colonial Nigeria is made

more significant when his role in re-telling the historical past of Madia (Nigeria) is taken into

consideration. His introspection not only empowers him as a chronicler of events and

circumstances in post-colonial Nigeria, but also make him a compass for navigating Nigeria‟s

future history.

Ogugua‟s narrative of military preoccupation with torture and repression led to his alienation.

This strikes a parallel in the narrative of biological dislocation of Adero. This narrative was made

to stand on its head, when Adero, in his quest to trace his biological roots, traded his narrative of

controversial parenthood with Ogugua:

That is my story. I am a man searching for his lost pebble. I am a stream cut off

from its source. Tell me if you know: where does such a stream go? (241)

This reveals the extent to which the military repression of the citizenry could fragment and

damage the psyche of an individual and obliterate family roots in a post-colonial nation.

Ogugua and Adero are casualties of recollecting the past. In recalling the past, the duo stumbled

on the incontrovertible truth that they are two individuals “linked, by a strange intersection of

fate and probability.” (245) However, the apprehension of the reality of their oneness throws up

despair and unmitigated cynicism in Ogugua. Such cynicism is borne out of futility of existence

to Ogugua whose life had lost enthusiasm for celebration of fatherhood because of the

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transcendental frustration imposed on him by the armed forces of Madia. Hence, to Ogugua,

nothing matters anymore:

Every familiar thing has become strange. Still, are not all humans, at bottom,

mirages and mirrors? Mirages of faces in constant transfiguration endlessly

forming and reforming into multiple images. Mirrors of one another, reflecting

now this stranger, now that, becoming one with every living thing. (245)

Ogugua‟s reaction to Adero‟s narrative betrays the fact that in re-telling the past, there is bound

to be contradiction between factual or forensic truth and the other shades of personal and social

truths which constitute its problematics. Ogugua is conveniently disposed to remember and

articulate a story in which his vulnerability to the military campaign of terror is sufficiently

substantiated, rather than one in which he is indicted as a father who abdicated his responsibility.

This realisation contests any sacrosanct subscription to the power of story-telling as a balm for

healing the wounds of the past. Arrows of Rain examines the potential violence of both the

processes and contexts of narration. This notion recalls the role of silence in the recollection of

the past as explained by the anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Troullot:

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the

moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly

(the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives);

and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final

instance). (26)

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Ogugua‟s narrative impinges the silences, particularly in the construction of archives and

narratives, suggesting that these are inter-related with “the making of history in the final

instance.”

In its form, Arrows of Rain evaluates the appurtenances of violence in recollection of the past, by

indicating the silences in the narrative of Ogugua in parallel to the narrative of Adero. The

narratives of Ogugua, Iyese and Adero are all intertwined. They interject into one another to

indict the military in its torture and violence. The narratives therefore are woven around Ogugua

who has the narrative authority to decipher which story should be told from the ones that should

not be told, since certain types of stories are more difficult to tell than others. The novel aligns

with Ogugua‟s need to talk about the rape, killing, torture and dehumanisation of the generality

of the citizenry by the military under the command of General Isa Pallat Bello, in order to

portray the military as an institution which perpetrates violence on its people in Third World

countries. Ndibe protests these excesses through the use of irony, metaphor, fictional imaginings,

proverbs and anecdotes.

Ogugua‟s narrative of self-isolation aligns its silences with narratives of Iyese‟s repeated rape by

General Isa Pollat Bello as a systemic violence which by extension reverberates a narration of

subjugation of the state by the military. The novel‟s depiction of Ogugua‟s inability to recall and

analyse certain parts of his past while deliberately shying away from others suggests that

narrating the past also recalls violence which could disrupt the present. The end of the novel

submits that the exploitation of memory to recall the past is susceptible to the dispensation of

violence by those who oppose such re-telling of the past for the purpose of avoiding indictment.

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Hence towards the end of the novel, Ogugua hangs himself to avoid being sentenced to life

imprisonment by General Bello‟s obtrusion into the court trial whose entire processes have been

subverted, with the compromise of Justice Kayode. Kayode, as an agent of the state has to carry

out the script of the military junta of Madia, if he wishes to keep his job. The dilemma of Ogugua

at the end of the novel is a symptom of self-hate caused by his delay in heeding the advice of his

grandmother that “stories never forgive silence.” His prolonged silence had created a lot of

damage, and his regrets know no bounds:

My silence has no hope of redemption. It is too late in the day for me to look for

grand insights. What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is

reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know

that memory outlasts power‟s viciousness. (248)

Ogugua‟s decision to take his own life is sufficient to save him from being traumatised

afterwards by the nemesis of narrating the past when the relevance of such narrative has become

somewhat belated. His death is an affirmation of the consequences of his choice to recall and

narrate his politically disrupted past.

Ogugua‟s narrative is a signification that in some situations, the need for re-telling the past leaves

in its wake its own kind of forgetting, not so much of violence perpetrated on an individual or

community of the past, but of the violence that continues into the present.

Ogugua‟s narrative of military brutality is subsumed in a narrative of injury, incorporating both

physical and emotional injuries. The wounds inflicted by the military authorities on both the

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individuals and society of Madia can be felt both on the small and larger scales, inscribing in its

wake, indelible weals on communities, political structures and individuals. Brenna argues that

this process is dismembering, because it stifles whatever relationships bind people together in the

past:

Having denied that the “object” has any will of its own, the foundational fantasy

also denies the effects of the object upon the subject. These effects become far

more significant as developing technologies permit the subject to construct a

world of objects which fulfil its fantasies. When the world is actually turned into a

world of objects, the power of the fantasy, the extent to which it takes hold

psychically is reinforced. (14)

Ogugua‟s narrative evaluates the violence of story-telling as it corresponds to the violence of the

public sphere. In the view of Slaughter, the public sphere creates site of a certain kind of

discursive “ambivalence.” This anomaly is an underpinning of the imagined locale for

juxtaposing the essence of humanity and its negation. Slaughter argues furthermore that:

Historical assumptions about the civic virtues and emancipatory characters of

publicness also make it a primary site of human rights violation – a place where

citizens are exposed to each other and to the repressive potential of the state.

(144)

Ogugua‟s incarceration at Bande Maximum Security Prison is a reminder that material violence

can stifle an individual‟s drive to tell their own stories. His perception as a security risk by the

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military authorities of Madia strikingly reiterates the danger that threatens storytellers when a

social landscape is marked by insincerity, terror and violence.

Ogugua‟s death in jail does not signify the death of his narrative, which constitutes a robust

protest against military highhandedness, particularly in Madia and in Nigeria generally. His

narrative typifies a moral assault against the military and an indictment of their dubious

preoccupation with nation-building.

Ndibe‟s protest against the meddlesomeness of the military in Nigeria‟s political project

underlies his condemnation of the institutionalised and systematic extermination of dissenting

voices and the general brutality against the captive population.

Motifs of Protest in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain

Protest in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel is shaped by the political circumstances in

Nigeria over the last twenty years. The novels reflect social situations mediated by the military

regimes‟ mode of governance in which they deploy disproportionate force in dealing with the

people they purport to govern.

Waiting for an Angel combines elements of fact and fiction to varying degrees to depict the

impact of military rule in Nigeria and to gauge the corresponding reactions as foregrounded in

the attitudes of the characters. Arrows of Rain’s depiction of protest is remarkably nuanced by its

heavy dependence on imagination. Military rule in Nigeria is depicted in ways that highlight its

inherently repressive and violent nature.

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Ndibe and Habila utilise various motifs of protest to symbolise the frustration, anger and

helplessness that characterises the individuals who engage in protest in the novels. These motifs

include a variety of altered states (dreams, insanity and drunkenness), confinement (in jail and in

rigid social convention). Acts of protest in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain are situated

in characters rather than political context. What this means is that neither author is interested in

pushing the virtues of a particular ideology; what they are most concerned with is the human cost

of oppressive and incompetent governance. This is why the experiences of individual characters

are so important to understanding both the nature of oppression and the ways in which it can be

most effectively protested.

Ndibe apparently favours altered states in his portrayal of social, political and economic

degeneration, and the inevitability of the need to protest against it. Ogugua is deemed insane, but

he is insane in a special way. It is not the insanity of drug abuse, or spiritual oppression, or any of

the usual reasons for sudden insanity: his madness is the result of a human inability to

comprehend an impunity that is so brazen that it defies logical thought. Habila‟s characters often

come to terms with themselves in situations of involuntary incarceration, be it prison detention or

the no less constricting confines of poverty and social marginalisation. He is aware enough to

realise that such confinement does not only afflict those who are put behind bars; the

superintendent of Lomba‟s prison is as much a prisoner of his hopes and fears as any of the

captives he presides over.

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Alteration and Loss of Identity as a Motif of Protest

Protest in Arrows of Rain is given impetus when Ogugua is compelled by circumstances to adopt

a new name, Bukuru, in order to evade arrest by the military authorities. Ogugua‟s acquisition of

a new name also signifies the attainment of a new identity which corresponds with the gradual

loss of his personality at B beach. Bukuru‟s acquisition of a new identity is employed by Ndibe

to protest the viciousness of the military administration who will not hesitate to hunt down its

perceived enemies. Ogugua‟s internal conflict following the loss of his name is traumatising

because he also needs to alter his personality and feign madness. Ogugua‟s transformation to the

perceived demented Bukuru at B beach implies a severance with the society to secure the much

needed peace which was ruptured by his arrest:

Until my arrest and that ride in the back of a police car, I had lived under the

illusion that nothing was misshapen about my life. It was the world that had gone

mad, not me. (79)

Ogugua‟s split personality is employed by Ndibe to symbolise the psychological cost of the

pressure critics are subjected to during the various military regimes in post-independence

Nigeria.

Prison as Motif

Imprisonment is employed as a motif of protest in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain.

Imprisonment constitutes one of the methods usually adopted by the military to weaken and

dehumanise its critics who in the text are usually lawyers, journalists and civil rights activists.

This notion is seen in Waiting for an Angel, when Lomba is kept in prison. The prison experience

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of Lomba is utilised as a protest against the military‟s intolerance for dissent views. Prison in

Waiting for an Angel strengthens Lomba. This is reiterated when he continues with his writing.

Prison here is seen by Habila as an extension of the struggle against an authoritarian military, and

as a pungent comment on the cruelty of a system which has no regard for human dignity. Lomba

is presented as an intellectual who is directly involved in the struggle of his society for social

justice in a cynical military regime. His emotional detachment from the discomfort of the prison,

and his pre-occupation with writing to amplify his triumph over his immediate confinement are

what Eldred Durosimi Jones refers to in The Writing of Wole Soyinka as:

The triumph of the universal mind in its ability to go beyond the limitations and

frustrations of a purely local situation. (195)

Lomba‟s defiance of the prison situation to continue with his writing is employed by Habila to

underscore a notion that prison does not negate the continuation of social struggle and protest

against injustice in society. It is not a euphemism for surrender on the part of the writer or

political activist, nor does it connote defeat. Rather, it fortifies the writer with the needed mental

rejuvenation required to continue with the social struggle against all social and political vices

from without. Lomba‟s commitment to social struggle through his writing in spite of the prison

limitations is succinctly acknowledged in the words of Randa Abou-bakr:

The strategic shunning of the traditional position of the hero of resistance

literature can at the same time be viewed as a comment on that literature and an

implied attempt at reinventing the imprisoned political activist as one with the

people living an antiheroic life under oppressive regimes, rather than as yet

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another category of “intellectual” alienated from those people‟s everyday lives.

(285)

Lomba‟s imprisonment is used as a metaphor by Habila to universalise the bizarre political

situation in Nigeria during the notorious regime of Abacha as a huge prison where all semblances

of humanity are violently suppressed. Bukuru‟s imprisonment at the dreaded Bande Maximum

Security Prison constitutes a vibrant motif of protest against the military establishment. Bukuru‟s

confinement is intended to kill the truth in him.

The deplorable state of the prison condition underscores Ndibe‟s condemnation of the lack of

sensitivity to human conditions by the military. The appalling condition of the prison is a

signifier of the viciousness of the military in the novel:

The prison compound was deadly quiet, bare and barren. Grass lay about the

surface like sun-dried algae churned out by the sea …. A horrible stench flowed

out of each door we passed, the stink of unwashed bodies mingled with the

foulness of things that come from within them: faeces, urine, vomit, blood. (47)

These descriptions of prison conditions are vivid and frightening; they portray a Madia in which

the values of human decency have been abandoned. The prison conditions provide a locale for

criticising a society reeling under the yoke of the military. The whole system is laid out to expose

the inner workings of the military regime as a system which mirrors the narratives of emotional

and physical violence. These narratives intend not only to criticise the oppressive military

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establishment, but to humanise and restore the dignity of men and women held under these

disturbing circumstances.

Rape as Motif of Protest

Ndibe and Habila utilise the motif of rape to protest the sexual depravity of the military. Women

are randomly raped in the novels by soldiers. The physical and psychological injury that rape

causes the victims in the novels provide a convenient platform for the condemnation of the

military as barbaric and inhuman.

In Arrows of Rain, Iyese was repeatedly violated by Major Bello. Her refusal to marry him

eventually led to her murder. Prostitutes were also raped by soldiers attached to the vice task

force. These women are helpless and cannot fight off the soldiers who constantly attack them.

Ndibe‟s portrayal of Madia dictator, now General Bello, and the bizarre way his sexual

exploitation has occasioned the death of Iyese reiterates the perception of the soldiers as sex

maniacs and predators, who violate women in order to satisfy their warped sexual desires.

Habila criticises the viciousness of the police when they rape girls on the university campus

during a students‟ demonstration. The exploration of rape as a motif of protest by Ndibe and

Habila further evaluates the extent to which the military can go to devalue and defile women

whom they regard as little more than booty.

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Physical Assault as Protest

Habila and Ndibe protest the physical brutalisation of characters in the novels. Torture, beating

and killing constitute the basic instruments of repression in the military establishment of the two

novels.

Bola and Lomba were beaten up by security operatives in Waiting for an Angel. Brother was

brutalised and subsequently lost one of his legs during a nationwide demonstration against the

annulment of the June 12 presidential elections of 1993. An unnamed character was shot dead

after the coup in Waiting for an Angel. Military brutality also claimed the lives of the ace

journalist, Dele Giwa and Chief M. K. O. Abiola, the acclaimed winner of the June 12 1993,

election. General Shehu Musa Yar Adua was given a lethal injection while in prison detention.

Arrows of Rain is crowded with scenes of killing and brutality. This is graphically articulated

when Ndibe uses it as a motif of protest against the military authority who celebrate wanton

killing as a mode of power retention. The power-drunkenness of General Bello knows no

limitations as he embarks on macabre and grotesque brutality. The accounts of this viciousness

are showpieces in foreign newspapers‟ headlines:

MADIAN WRITER HANGED

- He was a critic of the dictatorship

MADIAN MINISTER‟S DEATH SUSPICIOUS

Dictator is said to be having an affair with deceased‟s wife

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120 STUDENT PROTESTERS REPORTED KILLED

DESPOT CANES VICE-CHANCELLOR IN PUBLIC

DIPLOMATS SAY AFRICAN DICTATOR BEHIND DISAPPEARANCE OF

OPPONENTS

- Victims may have been fed to lions

(213)

The representation of the military in Arrows of Rain as an army of occupation whose delight in

violence defies comparison is not primarily targeted at demonising the military as an institution,

but rather at the leadership of Madia military, whose state of mind becomes a source of concern

to the nation.

Orature as Motif of Protest

Ndibe‟s confrontation with the evils of military rule in the text is further reiterated in

employment of the motif of orality, such as proverbs, anecdotes and folklore. The foregrounding

of his novel‟s political theme on the frustration and dispossession of the Nigerian populace by

successive military leaderships is explored against the backdrop of Igbo mythical symbolism.

Ndibe‟s exaltation of Igbo folklore and beliefs provides an enduring background for mediating

literature, culture and social preoccupation in the novel to challenge the distortion of human

values by the military leadership of General Bello.

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Ndibe‟s appropriation of folklore material to discuss the military‟s flagrant abuse of power in

Arrows of Rain has been articulately evaluated by Eldred Durosimi Jones:

Although African writers draw inspiration from their particular ethnic bases, their

ultimate vision is national, even global. The ethnic background offers them the

metaphor for their vision. What the writers see around them as they survey their

political and social environment since independence is a recurring cycle of

misrule, mismanagement, corruption, violent upheaval and general misery. (6)

Ndibe‟s subscription to the African traditional world view through the specificity of Igbo orature

is demonstrated in terms of character presentation. He uses irony to delineate the individuality of

Bukuru, whose original name is Oguguamakwa, which literarily means “the wiper of tears, a

consoler, a vindicator and comforter.” However, there is an ironic twist of the name in the novel.

“Ogugua,” as used in the novel, typifies a harbinger of ill luck and deep-seated misfortunes. This

notion is underscored by the sudden death of Ogugua‟s (Bukuru‟s) mother at childbirth. The

potency of the ironic twist of Ogugua as a name is also repeated at the birth of Olufemi Adero,

who is originally christened Ogugua by his biological mother, Iyese. Rather than consoling or

being a comforter to his mother, Ogugua (Junior) actually hastens the death of his mother who is

stabbed by her lover, General Bello. In spite of the fact that a name is an epitome of an

individual in Africa, a compendium of an individual‟s prospects in life, Ndibe‟s subversion of

Oguguamankwa to mean ill luck, misfortune and loss of identity is deliberately done to present a

metaphor of biological and social dislocation characteristic of military rule in post-independence

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African states. Ndibe seems to assert that an individual‟s life can be negatively altered by a

vicious military regime which mindlessly tortures, rapes and kills its citizens at will.

Ndibe appropriates the elements of Igbo orature in Arrows of Rain in a subversive manner by

exploiting the considerable power inherent in its onomastic exegesis to protest the military

interventionist destruction of individuals and societal structures. Ogugua, by serving as a name to

both Bukuru and Adero, reiterates a symbolic reminder of the ruination of cultural ethos by the

military establishment in contemporary Nigeria. Many journalists and scores of politicians as

well as academics have been incarcerated and killed, thereby disrupting the lives of the family

members they leave behind. Ogugua evinces a symbolic structure anchored on objects as an

emerging post-colonial nation, an aborted hope and stultified growth. The Ogugua symbol, as

subverted by Ndibe, goes beyond its onomastic essence to encompass other metaphoric

significations. The latter includes meddlesomeness in an individual‟s life by the military regime.

It also stands for the gradual erosion of the expectations and promises of independence, which in

turn generates despair and self-doubt in the citizens, borne out of a political emasculation by the

military regime.

The blending of the myth and symbolism of rain in Arrows of Rain is employed to create an

ambivalent image of the military. Rain, just like the military, can perform two paradoxical roles

of being a “sustainer of the earth‟s plentitude, but also the harbinger of malaise” (195). This is

similar to the military, which is capable of ousting a corrupt civilian administration with ease,

but also has the tendency to unleash unlimited terror and grief on the members of the public. The

motif of rain becomes the controlling motif of the novel. The mythological contextualisation of

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rain underscores the image of the military in Arrows of Rain. Using a narrative framework drawn

from the Igbo oral tradition, Ndibe satirically describes the adventure of the military into the

political life of Nigeria depicted as Madia in the novel. But such adventure, although

overwhelmingly applauded at first because it marks an end to the tyranny of civilian government

of the debauched prime minister Askia Amin and his kleptomaniac ministers, soon bares its

fangs against the citizens, thereby justifying its condemnation as an aberration of democratic

orderliness. The military as paralleled against the rain can be seen within the context of two

conflicting concepts of human development which are discernible throughout the novel: the one

imagines the military as a rescue platform for liberating a depraved country from the grip of its

civilian political elite; the other, typified by gratuitous brutality and mass killing, imagines the

military as representing a degeneration from human civilisation to the abyss of human

degradation. In a military regime, the soldiers justify their rule with the explanation that it

intervened in the political affairs of the country so as to save it from the economic and political

ruination caused by the corrupt civilian government. In contrast, Ndibe sees the military as a

scavenger which has come to obliterate all pretence to human civilisation left behind by the

displaced democratic government. Consequently, the military, just like the metaphorical rain,

“has two faces.” “It can give life but its arrows can also cause death.” (196)

Mysticism as Motif of Protest

Habila employs the motif of Arab-Islamic mysticism to protest the wanton killing associated

with the military in Waiting for an Angel. In Chapter Two, foretelling the future is tied around

the military which is presented as an angel of death or Israfael. This is a fallout of an encounter

between an unnamed character with a marabout at Badagry beach. The fortune teller foretold the

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imminent death of the character which will be occasioned by Israfael. Habila emphasises that the

military is the obvious symbol of death as the prophecy came to pass following a coup broadcast

on the television, when soldiers deployed to the streets to enforce the obligatory curfew,

overzealously kill the unnamed character. Through the exploitation of the mytho-poetic

signification of death, Habila presents a moving picture of the way in which the viciousness of

the military is responsible for irrational and needless deaths. Killing is portrayed as a

demonstration of the way in which the military in post-independent Nigeria reacts to the slightest

restiveness in the civilian populace.

This outright killing of the unnamed character by the military as forewarned through fortune

telling is further juxtaposed with Bola‟s dream of the death of his father, mother and two sisters,

who die when their vehicle suffers a head-on collision with a stationary military truck “carrying

furniture of an officer on transfer from Lagos to Ibadan.” Habila uses dreams as a manifestation

of metaphysical ethos to emotionally prepare Bola for the imminent loss of his family. This

further reiterates the portrayal of military heartlessness. Their notoriety for orchestrating death is

felt both physically and terrestrially. In narrating the loss of Bola‟s family, Habila reveals his

compassion for the underdog. The tone of the narrative underscores the complexity of the

military as a social problem. It affords Habila the opportunity of protesting the social conduct of

the military while generating sympathy for the civilian populace who collectively epitomise the

unfortunates and who are trapped in the quagmire of military subjugation.

As the title of the novel, Waiting for an Angel conveys the notion of a benign intervention from

cosmic forces, and apparently looks more like a supplication offered to the divine in order to get

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rid of the military scourge plaguing Nigeria. Habila makes a swipe at the pretentious messianic

outlook of the military who have held Nigeria captive and made it a pariah shortly after

independence. The novel reiterates the anguish of people under military repression, waiting

anxiously for supernatural intervention to break the dire social and political straits in which they

find themselves. Habila presents the military as a monster whose destructive potentialities are so

covert that they take their victim by surprise. For Nigeria to maintain its equilibrium, it must seek

divine intervention to get rid of the military. Habila uses the trope of an angel to explore the

narrative of dissatisfaction with the military by Nigerians, and their hope of divine succour and

celestial vengeance.

Michael Hanchard has argued that the mediation of political and spiritual tropes by a writer to

articulate a critical social issue in a text serves as one of the markers of Afro-modernity‟s

“specific deployment of time in relation to liberation movements, where the language of

transcendence is harnessed in the service of concrete, immanent struggle” (285).

Habila‟s employment of the spiritual motif to protest military oppression in Waiting for an Angel

demonstrates that the quest for the correction of social and political malaise in post-

independence Africa requires the employment of spiritual tropes alongside satire in order to

successfully struggle against a prevalent social malaise. The author‟s deployment of both satire

and spiritual tropes to confront military repression in the novel underscores the desire by the

younger generation of Nigerian writers to adopt a new epistemological framework in their

campaign against the deep-seated problems besetting the country. As Antonio Candido claims:

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The production and fruition (of literature) are based on a sort of universal need for

fiction and fantasy which is surely coextensive to man, since it appears invariably

in his life as an individual and as a group, alongside the satisfaction of the most

basic needs. And this happens with the primitive and the civilised, with the child

and the adult, with the learned and the illiterate.

The motif of mysticism is further appropriated through clairvoyance in Arrows of Rain.

Ogugua‟s grandmother typifies a sage who is imbued with the gift of prophecy in the novel. She

is stands between the past and the modern. She travels the paths of the world, seeking answers to

knotty questions and solutions to complex situations. She is a manifestation of a new myth which

has the knack of gazing into the future. Ndibe uses her clairvoyance as a binocular for seeing into

the future of Madia reeling under the throes of military subjugation. She warns Ogugua about the

need for him to “wash his face” so that he would be able to decipher between good and evil men

when he comes in contact with them.

The grandmother‟s ability to see the future and its attendant occurrences distinguishes her as a

mythical receptacle of the future. Lurking beneath the futuristic delineation of the evil men is

General Bello and his minions. However, Ogugua was too naïve to decode the signification of

his grandmother‟s warning. Ndibe uses this motif to emphasise the need to mine the past for the

purpose of securing signals against the future emergence of military tyranny in post-

independence Nigeria. As Ndibe draws on the vitality of Igbo orature, aesthetics and mysticism

are inextricably interwoven, and military tyranny has the power to overwhelm neither.

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Ndibe‟s appropriation of mysticism as a corollary of orature in Arrows of Rain is designed to

challenge the fraudulent narrative of the military as a stabilising agent in a political crisis-ridden

nation like Nigeria.

This appropriation drives home the point that the military scourge has assumed a monstrous

propensity and its exorcism will need to be negotiated from within the locales of physical and the

spiritual. This fittingly conforms to Heidegger‟s notion of art:

Art, as the setting-into-work of truth, is poetry. Not only the creation of the work

is poetic, but equally poetic, though in its own way, is the preserving of the work;

for a work is in actual effect is a work only when we remove ourselves from our

commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring

our own nature itself to take in a stand in the truth of what is (74).

Heidegger argues that the artist should be flexible enough to move between the interstice of

external and internal as to create a balanced world which Heidegger calls “the open.” He argues

further that in “the open” things are presented in their “unifying oneness” and “that oneness is as

the integral globe of Being, encircles all pure forces of what is.” (136) It suffices to say that

Ndibe‟s mediation of mysticism and orature has sufficiently portrayed the military in post-

independence Nigeria as bloodthirsty, and life under a military regime is precarious. As such,

survival in such a situation would require a subscription to cosmic consciousness.

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National Narrative in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain

In their novels, Habila and Ndibe examine Nigeria from the perspective of the kaleidoscope of

political upheavals that it has undergone. Though Nigeria attained independence in 1960, its

journey towards the attainment of self-development has been tortuous. It is a trajectory strewn

with economic mismanagement, ethnicity, cultural devaluation, moral decrepitude and political

potholes which have claimed scores of lives.

The 1980s and the 1990s witnessed an unprecedented surge in writing about issues of power,

prison and incarceration, political resistance and confrontation with military regimes in Nigeria.

As the Nigerian political landscape becomes more and more desperate, so also does it breed a

strident reaction grounded in protest literature from a younger generation of writers, among

whom are Habila and Ndibe. Disillusioned by the pretentious benevolence associated with the

military regime and its corresponding notoriety for human rights abuses, Habila and Ndibe

employ varied imaginative techniques of satire, faction and political discourse to narrate Nigeria

in relation to its military rulers.

In these texts, Africa generally and Nigeria in particular, have been portrayed simultaneously as a

failed continent and a failed country, betrayed by rulers who have mismanaged its economy and

destroyed its political ethos in their bid to cling on to power at all cost. This has been vividly

captured by Kenneth W. Harrow:

The nation state in Africa today is in crisis. Misrule and corruption have danced

across the land, provoking widespread scepticism towards the mechanisms of

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government and a sense of resignation over the inevitable indifference of the

wealthy and powerful to the enormous social problems at hand. Globalisation and

AIDS have spread their pandemic effects; war and anomy have gained the terrain,

so that walking downtown or driving at night have become risky undertakings in

many areas; one has merely to mention the words Southern Sudan or Eastern

Congo to elicit a shrug of despair. (33)

In Waiting for an Angel, Habila‟s narrative of Nigeria is grounded in the problematics of nation

and nationalism. Nigeria, undoubtedly large, powerful and relatively wealthy, is portrayed as a

country drifting precariously towards disintegration. General Abacha‟s military regime provides

the narrative platform for articulating the concept of a nation in the novel. Nigeria under Abacha

is a country under dictatorship. In order to maintain himself in power, he suppresses his

opponents by imprisoning and killing some. During his rule, corruption and nepotism are

heightened. Rather than improving the living conditions of Nigerians, Abacha uses national

resources for his family and to take care of his terminal illness. Through Abacha, Habila has

accurately described many post-independence African rulers who have imagined their countries

to be an extension of their personal estates. The subjugation of Nigeria to a military ruler like

Abacha foregrounds Nigeria as a fixed physical space, an artificial structure vulnerable to

construction and reconstruction by its military rulers. This underscores Iliana Pardes‟ notion of a

nation as an “imagined construct” or an “inscape rather than a landscape of national identity.” (9)

Pardes sees nation as a wishful thinking, mere conjecture, whose shape and sphere can be

arranged and rearranged at will by leadership. This corresponds with Rhonda Cobhan‟s

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perception of a nation as “having a shifting and unstable significance within African political

discourse” (84) because dictators have appropriated the task of defining national character,

thereby subverting the process of narrating their countries by the replacement of national

narratives with their personal narratives.

The artificiality of the Nigerian state is raised in the narrative of Nigeria by Habila in his account

of the annulment of the June 12 presidential election won by Chief Abiola, a Yoruba politician

from the southern part of Nigeria. This was an annulment carried out by the regime of General

Babangida from the northern part of Nigeria. Abiola was subsequently arrested and incarcerated

by the successive military regime of Abacha. Abiola‟s narrative of political persecution depicts

Nigeria as a web of disparaging ethnic nationalities yoked together by the colonial system, where

the dominant ethnic group with superior numerical strength in the armed forces could lord it over

other ethnic groups.

Ndibe in Arrows of Rain depicts Nigeria as a country experiencing internal colonisation under

the military ruler, Sani Abacha, who is grotesquely portrayed as General Isa Palat Bello, a

vicious, psychotic military ruler whose preoccupation with brutality and repression leads

inevitably to the killing of intellectuals, journalists and other watchdogs of society in the

fictionalised country known as Madia. In his narrative of Nigeria from the time of independence

in 1960, Ndibe goes beyond a conventional nationalist ideology towards the pressing problem of

military rule. The nation as a pariah constitutes the focal point of Ndibe‟s analysis of the

Nigerian state. The novel evolves from the experiences he encounters during the Abacha military

regime, when he was a journalist in the country.

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In Arrows of Rain, Ndibe examines the role of the military in Nigerian politics and nation-

building. His exploration of the issue of military brutality underscores the notion that Nigeria is a

nebulous structure whose collective destiny can be determined by a particular military ruler who

feels compelled to enforce artificial cohesion through coercion. This reiterates Nuruddin Farah‟s

argument of a nation which he considers to be no more than “working hypotheses portals

opening on assumption of allegiance to an idea.” As he further explains:

At times though one‟s loyalty may be owed to another idea equally valid …

During the long travel out of one hypothesis to another … a refugee is born, who

lives in a country too amorphous to be favoured with a name. (16-20)

Farah‟s idea of a nation provides a striking counterpoint to the explanation of the dilemma of

Bukuru, the central character of the novel, who suffers internal alienation when he disguises

himself as a mad man and lives on the beach during the repressive regime of General Bello.

Bukuru‟s disguise as a mad man running away from the viciousness of Bello highlights the irony

of an ostensibly independent nation where the very existence of its citizens is determined by the

whims and caprices of its ruler.

National narratives in Waiting for an Angel and Arrows of Rain echo Benedict Anderson‟s

concept of a nation in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, where he controversially describes a state as “an imagined political community”

(15). It is imperative to state that the amorphousness of the Nigerian state is what creates Abacha

and his military regime.

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The characters in these texts are imbued with the consciousness of Anderson‟s concept of the

state. Bukuru, Adero, Iyese, Dr. Mandi in Arrows of Rain and Lomba, Kela, Joshua, Brother and

Alice in Waiting for an Angel are the victims of the amorphousness of the Nigerian state.

Literary Techniques

In Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel, Ndibe and Habila chronicle the dark history of

Nigeria during the military regimes of Babangida and Abacha. Their unique subject matter, as

inscribed in the narratives of military brutality and viciousness, draw their sources from past

accounts of the chequered military misadventure in governance in Nigeria‟s recent past. These

narratives are mediated by the appropriation of varied literary techniques, including the

following:

Memory

The narrative of military brutality in Arrows of Rain is anchored on memory. Bukuru, the central

character stands outside time, recounting the past and the present of Nigeria (Madia). Bukuru, a

casualty of the viciousness of the military maximum ruler, General Bello, transcends time and its

attendant scars in order to record the dehumanizing conditions unleashed upon the citizens of

Madia by the military establishment. He constantly relates past events to subsequent events in a

retrospective future tense because the actions and other inanities of the military are already

known to him. For Bukuru, future is past. He also relates past events to an even more remote

past, revealing the national tragedy of Madia in correspondence to the traumatisation of her

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citizens with sweeping totality. Thus, at the beach which provides Bukuru with the much-needed

anonymity, the past, present and future are rolled into one another.

The structure of Arrows of Rain is basically rectilinear rather than cyclical. Ndibe manages to

convey in words the vagaries of disrupted lives of individuals, the unpredictable whimsy of time

which makes moments seem endless and ages like moments. This makes the narrative of military

siege on Nigeria seem to double back upon itself and describe circles in time. This is accentuated

by the sadistic growth of Bello and his psychotic disposition to life; Iyese‟s fragmented life;

Adero‟s loss of identity and the general subjugation of the people of Madia by the military

regime.

Just as the whole history of Madia is revealed, so is the whole history of several characters

revealed, their beginnings constantly related to their ends by Bukuru from his point of view

beyond the end. Bello‟s repressive regime is summarized before its exposition in the novel: long

before his military regime is inaugurated, Bukuru exposes the readers to the psychopathic

personality of Bello. Iyese‟s brutalisation and subsequent killing provide the linking device for

harnessing the psychoanalytic reading of the personality of Bello. All the characters in the novel

feel the pressures of time from two directions: past and future, memories and premonitions

burden the present and separate the characters from one another. Starting with Bukuru to Adero‟s

narratives of their past in relation to their present, Ndibe‟s characters underscore the fact that

they are inextricably bound to their past. This past is constantly mediated by memory.

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Memories are very important to the Madians, for they offer the illusory possibility of

transcending the momentary to the future. It is however ironic in Arrows of Rain that memories

are associated not with duration but with death. The characters‟ most vivid memories are

recounted as they realise that they are about to die: the novel begins with Bukuru‟s first memory

as he awaits trial which will eventually lead to his death in prison. The memories of Iyese,

TayTay and Bukuru‟s grandmother also erupt as they face death. Memories constitute a special

source of isolation for Bukuru, for he recollects with agonising clarity the killing of Iyese by

Bello before becoming the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of

Madia.

The characters‟ memories at the point of death only underlie their realisation that the past is lost

and irretrievable, and can only be narrated as a retrospection to the turbulent history of Nigeria.

If Arrows of Rain is about the tortuous history of Nigeria under the regime of Abacha, it is also

about the deciphering of the period-by-period recordings of Nigeria‟s idyllic past from

independence in 1960 to the political misfortunes of the 1990s, orchestrated by military rule.

Bukuru‟s mediation of the past with the present objectifies the destruction of the social and

political equilibrium of Nigeria by successive military regimes. As much as Bukuru‟s narrative

startlingly objectifies these situations, it also chronicles Nigeria‟s past as a sad reminder of an

uncertain future.

If Arrows of Rain mediates the past and the present with its attendant tool of memory to

appropriate the need to remember, to relate beginning to end with words, Waiting for an Angel

chronicles in great detail Abacha‟s repressive regime within the trajectory of memory which

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unobtrusively shapes its narrative aesthetics. The novel is grounded in the recollection of the

disruption of social and political life in Nigeria during Abacha‟s military rule, and it thus features

a reportorial narrative style that painstakingly portrays the minutiae of the characters‟

surroundings and experiences.

As a work of faction, Waiting for an Angel makes it possible to identify with Nigeria‟s real

world, the people and the actual events depicted in the narrative. This identification with real-life

situations is one generic characteristic of faction which distinguishes it from other narrative

forms which are considered fictional. Waiting for an Angel catalogues the bizarre and traumatic

experiences of Nigerians in Abacha‟s reign of terror between 1994 and 1998. It is a historical

period when Nigeria became a pariah in the comity of nations and life became unbearably

difficult for its citizens, as scores of politicians and journalists were herded into detention and

those who were not lucky to survive the period were murdered by the minions of the military

junta.

In his literary recreation of this period, Habila‟s narrative plank is memory, and language

constitutes the main trope of such memory. In the novel, memory assumes the antenna that picks

the signal of a diminished social life, the mediation between presence and absence of Lomba, the

central character: present when he recorded social and political events while working as a

journalist in Nigeria and absent when he was kept in solitary confinement, which signals his

absence from the society. His delineation of the categories of persecution and brutality of

Nigerians under the military junta crystallizes the dehumanisation perpetrated by Abacha‟s

despicable military regime.

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In his narrative of military repression, Habila has been able to establish that the relationship

between the military ruler and the ruled is grounded in the ethos of power relations. This recalls

the Foucauldian perception of power relations in the discourse of events and dialectics of social

relationships between two opposing sides in a narrative:

Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it

institutionalises, professionalises and rewards its pursuit. In the last analysis, we

must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in

order to produce wealth in the first place. In another way, we are also subjected to

truth in the sense in which it is truth that makes the laws that produces the true

discourse which, at least partially, decides, transmits and itself extends upon the

effect of power. In the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in

our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of

the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power. (93-94)

The articulation of power as embedded in the discourse of the military junta is signified by its

brutalisation of the people. This brutality, however, raises a paradoxical condition: on the one

hand, it affirms the power and supremacy of dominant discourses of the military, but on the other

hand, it also frees the traumatised people from its grip by inscribing, no matter how marginally,

the resistance and resilience of their own alternative discourse. The resilience of Lomba against

the military in the wake of the re-naming of Morgan Street to Poverty Street leads to a bloody

confrontation with the junta. This resilience and confrontation empower the dehumanised people

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to insist that the boundaries of discourses can never be completely closed, no matter how

temporarily dominated by the military junta.

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Narrative Strategies in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel

Ndibe and Habila adopt various strategies of narration in the texts. These range from satire,

burlesque, metaphor and metonyms to irony. The adoption of these strategies of narrative further

strengthens the representation of the military in Nigeria‟s social and political landscape.

Faction

The key narrative strategy to reverberate military repression in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for

an Angel consists of appropriating the true story of Abacha, the army general who ruled Nigeria

between 1994 and 1998. In Arrows of Rain, Madia represents Nigeria and Bello is a metaphor for

the depiction of Abacha. His rule depicts a chaotic and violent period in Nigeria‟s history.

Nigeria, as a setting of the novel, is suffocating under his evil domination. Abacha‟s regime is a

metaphor of the most grotesque nightmare: disorder and dislocation of man‟s personal and social

relationships, utter confusion of truth and falsehood, reality and appearance, and abject fear of

the future are its features. A loss of human society constitutes the locale of the novel which

presents the protagonist searching endlessly for justice and fair play. This narrative design

implicitly justifies Bukuru‟s ceaseless flirtation with memory to restore his lost humanity which

the continuous absence of justice and fair play have permanently denied him: “I know that power

dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power‟s viciousness …” (248)

Bukuru‟s narrative of military repression elicits the reader‟s collaboration, the account from

which the reader cannot escape responsibility. It is the account that refuses to leave the reader out

of it, the account where the past is not distanced from their lives, and where the consequences are

not over for them, that refuses the comfortable position of distance and mere observation. It is the

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account that implicates the readers because it not only attempts to convey what happened, but

also requires readers to recognise the need for involvement and action because of their emotional

involvement.

Narrative Style

The narration of events and action in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel is mediated by a

huge cast of characters. Salient issues are presented through self-narration, while other events are

narrated through multiple narration.

The major narrative of military repression in Arrows of Rain is done by Bukuru. The story of

such repression is told from his viewpoint as he is trying to make meaning out of his experience.

Ndibe invests considerable understanding in the narrator of the real and historical details of

military rule and its problems in Madia. However, Bukuru‟s narrative is complimented by the

narratives of Iyese, Adero and TayTay. While Bukuru himself is preoccupied with the narration

of contemporary issues as they impact on the lives of people in Madia, his grandmother is

imbued with the revivalism of the past mediated by the web of anecdotes, folklore and proverbs.

In Waiting for an Angel, Lomba as a central character creates a clearly organic connectedness

with other characters like Bola, Kela, Joshua and Alice to narrate the excesses of the military

regime. From different shades and perspectives of these characters, Habila creates

representations of gratuitous repression and other circumstances of beating, killing, maiming and

general harassment of the citizens in the novel. Both novels detail circumstances and events of

repression and dehumanisation carried out by the military authorities. Both writers through their

narrative methods have been able to establish that literature has the capacity to personalise and

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make immediate what the great scale of history cannot. This recalls Richard Priebe‟s argument

about how literature mediates society:

In fiction, unlike real life, we are given a sense of distance and control, and it is a

basic aesthetic principle that those things that are most threatening in real life give

us pleasure when encapsulated in play (artistic form). The unthinkable, the

unimaginable, the unspeakable can be thought, imagined and spoken in literature

with an impunity not granted us in real life, yielding an understanding we find

hard to abstract from real events. (50)

The military oppression represented in the novels establishes that the portrayal of brutality has to

do with the individual in relation to the community. Such brutality reinforces the fact that

repression and other psychological devaluation of human beings are an inseparable part of shared

humanity; its application is inimical to the individual and community alike; no one person or

group can own or control it; no one or person or group can use it with impunity. The writers in

the texts clearly establish that repressing the individual/ communal nexus hampers the

interrogation it forces regarding membership in a community.

Humour

The narratives of military repression in Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel are interspersed

with humour. Humour in the novels is used to satirise abuse of power. For instance, in Arrows of

Rain, following the overthrow of the former prime minister, Askia Amin, Ndibe employs humour

to satirise the debauchery of Amin and his cabinet to depict their insatiable appetite for sex:

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The prime minister slowly lifted himself off the girl, who seemed for the first time

to recognise the awkwardness of lying in bed with a man who was losing power.

Amin sat down on the edge of the bed, looked sternly at the soldiers and sighed.

Then he muttered, “only bastards would interrupt an orgasm.” (198)

Amin is being presented here as an irresponsible prime minister who fails to uphold the integrity

of his political office, which demands he focus his attention on the affairs of running the state,

but who chose instead to engage in sexual sessions. This constitutes an indictment of African

leaders whose preoccupation with ruling their respective states is shaped by the frivolities of sex

and drunkenness they engage in.

Habila in Waiting for an Angel makes a mockery of the military. It is couched in the

representation of the military in exaggerated militarism of a character called Mao:

“Look, we are living under siege. Their very presence on our streets and in the

government houses instead of the barracks where they belong is an act of

aggression. They hold us cowed with guns, so that they‟ll steal our money. This is

capitalism at its most militant and aggressive. They don‟t have to produce any

superior good to establish monopoly. They do it by holding guns to our heads ….”

(122)

Habila lampoons the image of the military as a rapaciously kleptomaniac institution with a

pronounced tendency to subjugate and dehumanise members of the public. Habila does not

confront the military through a direct repudiation; instead, he uses one of his characters. The

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import of the repudiation of the military regime as a political aberration in the governance of a

state is too obvious to miss.

Use of Irony

Irony constitutes a vibrant literary technique in both Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel. In

both texts, the ambivalence inherent in Marxism as a political ideology is significantly portrayed.

Ndibe and Habila do not subscribe to the use of Marxism to effect political change in Nigeria.

Marxism is ridiculed in Arrows of Rain, when the extent to which its aesthetic could be

appropriated for the well being of both the individual and the society is circumscribed. This is

depicted in a conversation between two characters in the novel:

“What is this you call Komanism?” his companion asked.

“Communism,” Buzuuzu corrected.

“What does it mean?”

“It means that people own everything in common.” Explained Buzuuzu.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

… Let me ask you,” he said, his eyes shining with mischief.

“Can I go and fuck one of the Chief‟s wives, when you bring this Komanism?”

“No!” snapped Buzuuzu. “Communism isn‟t about sex. Sex is decadent.”

Iji looked dejected. “Leave the world as it is,” he said. (83-84)

This is juxtaposed against Professor Sogon Yaw‟s hypocrisy as a Marxist teacher at Madia

University. He “cultivated a Marx-like beard and wore military fatigues that accorded well with

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his table-pounding ranting style.” His hypocrisy as a committed Marxist is depicted in the novel,

when he accepted his appointment as Madia‟s Minister of External Affairs. “Within a few hours

Yaw presented himself to be sworn in. He arrived for the ceremony clean-shaven and made his

vows in a quiet, even voice” (83).

Irony is further employed to portray Communism and Marxism as fantasy in Waiting for an

Angel, when Joshua vehemently dismissed Mao‟s Marxist romanticism in the novel:

That romantic fool. He has read too many books about revolutions in China and

Russia. Now he thinks he can start one here with petrol bombs and maybe a

couple of guns and knives. He‟ll get us all killed. He doesn‟t know what desperate

people he is up against. Now everyone on the street is waiting for me to start a

revolution. (123)

This underscores the inadequacy of Marxism as a political ideology to be employed in

checkmating the excesses of the military regime in Nigeria.

Metaphor

The degradation of the military as a symbol of national cohesion constitutes the central axis

running through the significations of the very titles of Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel.

Brutality, repression, torture, rape and killing are grounded in the locales of the two texts and

provide tellingly appropriate metaphors for the demystification of the military in the titles. The

military is seen as an avalanche of arrows of rain, devoid of succour which sting people

mercilessly in Arrows of Rain. Nigeria‟s precarious political trajectory which has been further

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bastardised by the military, necessitates a search for a redemptive solution from the divine realm

hence Nigeria‟s anxious wait for an angel.

Conclusion

Okey Ndibe and Helon Habila have tenuously articulated the narratives of military repression in

Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an Angel. The social chaos stemming from the subjugation of

civilians by the military fills practically every page of the two novels. At the same time, the

novels figure their condemnation of this social degeneration through the fates of Ogugua

(Bukuru), Iyese and Tay Tay in Arrows of Rain; Lomba, Joshua, Bola and Hagar in Waiting for

an Angel. Repression in the texts is a signification of a wave of the political apocalypse which

engulfed Nigeria‟s socio-political landscape between 1994 and 1998, greedily fuelled by the

military‟s penchant for power. The deaths of Dele Giwa and M. K. O. Abiola, Shehu Musa

Yar‟Adua and Hagar in Waiting for an Angel, alongside the deaths of Bukuru, Iyese and the

photo journalist in Arrows of Rain, further allegorises the viciousness of the military. Drawing on

the nebulous political and economic policies of the military which cannot move the nation

forward, Ndibe and Habila vulgarise the insensitivity of the military to human and national

development.

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CONCLUSION

Introduction

This study has sought to evaluate how six Nigerian novelists writing in different periods have

utilised the literary imagination as a means of protesting actions, situations, attitudes, individuals

and phenomena which they believe have had a negative impact on the progress and development

of their country. In doing this, the study also examines the relationship between art, ideology and

social consciousness as they relate to the literary portrayal of socio-economic and political

problems in a developing nation.

The study has taken a close look at the nature and scope of protest as portrayed in six novels,

namely Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe, Destination Biafra by Buchi Emecheta, Just

Before Dawn by Kole Omotoso, Violence by Festus Iyayi, Arrows of Rain by Okey Ndibe and

Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila. The choice of six novels by six different authors provided

the study with a fairly representative selection of Nigerian fiction produced since the start of the

Second Republic in 1979 to the entrenchment of the Third Republic in 2002. The study therefore

ranged across a wide variety of social, political and economic situations depicted in divergent

ways. This enabled the study to comprehensively characterise the ways in which protest as an

observable phenomenon was portrayed in the literary imaginations of the chosen authors. The

choice of these texts was informed by the fact that their thematic preoccupations and structural

concerns are broadly similar. The selected writers have all attempted to chart a course of

communal awareness and social reconstruction by concerning themselves with the socio-political

issues prevalent in Nigeria.

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In essence, the research takes a close look at the nature of protest, its manifestation in literature

and the novel, and the way in which the literary imagination transforms it to suit the artistic

temper of the individual authors while at the same time retaining its essence as a means of

drawing attention to inequity and injustice.

Protest and Literature in Nigeria

The study sought to show how protest, as the act of speaking out against or otherwise resisting

perceived injustice, has always been related to literature. While it is explicitly seen in literary

works which satirise particular social vices, protest may be said to be present in all forms of

literature. Due to the manner of its emergence against the background of European colonialism,

protest has always been present to a significant extent in Nigerian literature. Even during the

colonial era, literature was used as an instrument by leaders of nationalist and independence

movements to protest against the injustice of foreign domination and exploitation. Thus,

individuals like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dennis Osadebey and others used literary expression to

advocate essentially political ideas. Their themes often centred upon the historical greatness of

Nigeria and the way in which colonial rule had debilitated it.

After independence was won in 1960, protest did not die out in Nigerian literature but found new

causes to espouse. One of the most prominent of these causes was the way in which the new

indigenous leaders were failing to realise the lofty ideals of the independence movement, issues

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which were expressed in such novels as T.M. Aluko‟s Chief, The Honourable Minister, Wole

Soyinka‟s The Interpreters, and Chinua Achebe‟s A Man of the People. There were also plays

such as Soyinka‟s The Jero Plays and Ola Rotimi‟s The Gods are Not to Blame. In works like

these, the failures, foibles and shortcomings of the country‟s leaders were portrayed in detail.

For most literary works during this era however, the protest was somewhat implicit, since it was

often indirect in its criticism and usually a-specific. In other words, protest was inherent in the

depiction of negative social situations rather than explicitly stated in such literary works. Yet the

fact that Nigerian authors were beginning to point out the flaws in their society so early in the

life of their nation shows the way in which protest is virtually inherent in literature in general and

fiction in particular.

As the country‟s social, political and economic problems became more pronounced, the nature of

the protest within Nigerian literature became harsher and more explicit, a development that was

facilitated by the increasing popularity of Marxist ideology among younger writers, particularly

those of the second and third generations of Nigerian literature. Instead of merely portraying

inadequacies and shortcomings, many literary artists began to advocate viable alternatives to the

situations they depicted in their works. Thus, writers Kole Omotoso, Femi Osofisan, Tunde

Fatunde and Festus Iyayi among others begin to produce works which protested social injustice

as necessitating the need for radical social change. This meant that they not only portrayed

negative social, political and economic conditions like their “non-ideological” predecessors, they

also sought to show explicitly how such negative situations stemmed from an inherently flawed,

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unjust and unsustainable economic system called capitalism, and how the only way out was the

destruction of capitalism and its replacement by a socialism that would guarantee the fair and

equitable distribution of resources and opportunities to every member of society, regardless of

gender, age, ethnicity or status.

The emergence of Marxist and socialist ideologies into Nigerian literature was accompanied by

other specific forms of literary protest in which writers targeted particular aspects of the Nigerian

condition. The campaign against gender-based discrimination, for example, became more

prominent as writers like Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Karen King-Aribisala, Akachi

Adimora-Ezeigbo, Zaynab Alkali and Ifeoma Okoye produced works of fiction in which this

issue was focused upon. Hitherto-untreated topics like environmental degradation also began to

receive consideration in the works of writers like Tanure Ojaide, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Lyndon

Barret, as well as more-established writers like Soyinka, Clark-Bekeredemo and Rotimi.

Over time in the Nigerian literary corpus, protest has come to be seen as a useful yardstick for

measuring the seriousness of the average Nigerian writer and assessing the depth of his

commitment to progressive social, political and economic change. Writers who did not espouse

radical ideologies were often unfairly dismissed as pro-establishment writers who did not wish to

disrupt the status quo. Achebe and Soyinka, in particular, have been constantly seen in this light

by many of their successors, like Femi Osofisan, Chinweizu, Olu Obafemi and Niyi Osundare.

Some, like Osofisan, have even gone ahead to produce literary works which directly contradict

the perceived positions of their predessors, as he does in No More the Wasted Breed, in which he

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caustically responds to Soyinka‟s The Strong Breed. From the perspective of protest, what this

meant was that protest was gradually coming into its own as an important aspect of literary

production and criticism. It was no longer satisfactory for it to be merely implicitly encoded into

literary works: it was now expected to be overt and explicit, and would be used to judge the

overall success of the work.

Theoretical Framework

Given the significance of protest in this study, it was felt that a conceptual approach which

would be able to serve as an appropriate analytical tool for the interpretation of social conflict,

interpersonal and inter-communal relations, and their depiction in fiction would be the most

relevant. It was in this regard that New Historicism was utilised as the theoretical model.

New Historicism is pre-occupied with the examination of literary texts as being embedded within

the social and economic circumstances in which they are produced and consumed. For new

historicists, these circumstances are not stable in themselves. They are a reflection of specific

positions, and therefore are susceptible to being re-written and transformed, depending upon the

particular perspective that is being brought to bear upon them. From this perspective, literary

texts are part of a larger circulation of social energies because they are both products of and

influences on a culture and ideology (Tyson, 292).

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The relevance of New Historicism can be seen in the fact that it regards social conflict as

inescapable, and indeed, vital to the continued functioning of society. Thus, the novels selected

for this study conform to the New Historicist project of relating to society in a particular complex

way: because they are mutually constitutive, the texts simultaneously reflect society and are

reflections of society, and as such are an important part of the social texts New Historicism

deems essential to an all-inclusive understanding of the nature of society.

In the view of Lois Tyson, New Historicism contends that all history is the history of the present.

It considers history as a text that can be interpreted the same way literary critics interpret literary

texts. Thus, New Historicism views all historical accounts as narratives, as stories, that are

inevitably biased according to the point of view, conscious or unconscious, of those who write

them. Such bias is not necessarily a bad thing, since it is only reflective of the worldviews of

those giving the accounts. New Historicism, however, requires that such bias must be recognized

for what it is, rather than assigning spurious notions of objectivity which simply distort them and

deny credibility to other accounts simply because they come from socially-disadvantaged or

marginalized groups. To counteract this tendency, the theory advocates an all-inclusive

approach, in which all accounts of a particular situation, event or phenomenon have equal status,

with none regarded as being more truthful or objective or worthy than others.

Considered in the context of New Historicism, the examination of protest in fiction is

particularly responsive to this critical approach. If fiction is seen in terms of competing

interpretations of history, protest may be regarded as the concrete manifestation of such

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competing interpretations. Thus, examining protest in fiction using a New Historicist approach in

this study reveals the ways in which there are multidimensional perspectives in which fiction and

protest reinforce each other and shed greater light on the way in which a society functions.

Research Questions

This study was informed by the following research questions:

(i) What is protest, and how may it be characterised in relation to literature as opposed to

other disciplines?

(ii) How does the vexed question of social relevance relate to literature in general and the

novel in particular?

(iii) What is the nature, scope and significance of protest in Nigerian fiction?

(iv) What are the parallels between literature and protest as demonstrations of the way in

which human beings attempt to confront the challenges facing their societies?

(v) What is the relationship of art, ideology and social issues within the context of the

texts chosen for this study?

(vi) What are the relationships and intertextual connections that obtain between different

generations of Nigerian writers, and what are their aesthetic responses to harsh social

realities?

(vii) Is there a new impetus in Nigerian fiction towards redefinition? If so, what are its

characteristics?

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Research Hypotheses

The novels which constitute the focus of this research are hinged on the need of the artist to

constantly communicate his insights on the state of society to his compatriots, and as such, they

are based on certain premises, as given below:

literature, and more specifically the novel, can be used as an instrument of protest

there is a motivation for protest in the selected works, and they share certain

similarities

certain circumstances determine what literary artists protest against, and shape the

way in which their protests evolve over time

the effectiveness of literary manifestations of protest depends on several factors,

including the issues being protested, the existence of other forms of protest, the

nature of the novel, and the obstacles to effective protest that are to be found in

the society where the literary texts are set

as part of the strategy of protest, literary texts often propose alternatives and

solutions, and suggest the means by which they can be implemented.

The study‟s findings were seen to substantiate these premises to a significant degree.

Summary of Major Research Findings

The research has given rise to several findings which fall into three main groups. These are (i)

findings centred upon the nature of protest; (ii) findings centred upon the relationship between

fiction and protest; and (iii) findings centred upon the way in which the authors selected for this

study portray protest in their texts.

271

The Nature of Protest

The research found that many definitions of protest are complicated by its all-encompassing

nature. Protest cannot be limited by notions of whether it is political, or overtly aggressive, or

aimed at achieving radical social change. Instead of looking at its content, the research defines

protest by its intention, namely whether or not it is at variance with an existing state of affairs.

The study therefore defines protest as any verbal or non-verbal means by which an individual or

group expresses their disagreement with an existing state of affairs in all or part of a given

society, and/or seeks to alter it, either by ending the said state of affairs, or by replacing it with

something else. It is not just a means of ventilating grievances, but is also an arena for the clash

of opposing views because it compels adversaries to consciously articulate and propagate the

ideas that form the basis for the issues they are protesting against.

Another finding related to the intrinsic nature of protest was that protest was seen to be an

amorphous, all-encompassing phenomenon which is so ubiquitous in human society that almost

any action may constitute protest, as long as it seeks to express opposition to or dissatisfaction

with an existing situation. This stems from the observation that the situations which induce

protest are themselves wide-ranging in nature, and thus the responses to them are highly

variegated, often tailored to suit particular causes if they are to be effective. Thus, individuals

protest mildly, even playfully, in response to perceived minor issues, but angrily and even

violently when the issues are regarded by them as urgent or vital. Apart from its wide emotional

range, the methods of protest were seen to differ so widely that they may even be seen to be

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contradictory; hence, protest can be seen in doing something, or refusing to do it, or doing it very

slowly, or doing it very quickly, or doing it at an inappropriate time.

It was found that protest may be broadly categorised into two kinds, namely verbal and non-

verbal protest, and can be broken down into very many different types/methods, including

demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, letter-writing campaigns, the facilitation or

obstruction of access, parody and effigy-burning, as well as the more violent forms like fighting,

hostage-taking, self-mutilation, vandalism and suicide-bombing. Its methods are varied, and

include placard-carrying, shouting, singing and dancing, vandalism and murder.

Protest often involves what can be called a “fatal embrace” between an oppressor, often the

source of the protest, and the oppressed, who is protesting against the existence or continuation

of a given situation. To this extent, protest is often an accurate indication of the nature of the

relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, and, by extension, the nature of the society

in which they live. The fact that the intensity of a protest is often a demonstration of the depth of

oppression shows that protest and oppression are not so much distinct as they are symbiotic; they

feed off each other, each requiring the other to be complete. In novels like Anthills of the

Savannah, Destination Biafra and Arrows of Rain, this relationship is often symbolised in the

existence of sexual relationships which break down when one character protests against

inequitable situations caused by the other.

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Protest is sometimes inverted into something approaching its opposite in the novels in focus, as

in cases where oppressors get interest groups to “protest” on their behalf, as is seen in Anthills of

the Savannah, Destination Biafra, and Just Before Dawn. It can also be seen in texts like

Violence and Arrows of Rain, where individuals who have been oppressed by others are coerced

into seeing their oppressors as instrumental to their own happiness in life. In this sense, it can be

seen that protest is not the sole provenance of the oppressed, as it can be a tool used to mislead

others and entrench their suffering. Many of the novels depict such inauthentic protesters, in

order to emphasise the difficulties that genuine protest entails, and to show that it can be used for

negative ends, and therefore should never be regarded as an end in itself.

It was found that there is an important link between protest and culture. Due to its

amorphousness and ubiquity, protest is very often shaped by the culture in which it is

undertaken, especially notions of justice and of what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Thus,

mass actions such as protest marches and rallies are favoured in countries that favour

congregational worship, letter-writing campaigns are common in highly-literate societies, and

protest suicides in cultures where suicide is regarded as an honourable means of dying.

It was found that protest has culture-affirming and culture-disrupting capabilities that stem from

its strong cultural underpinnings. Protest affirms a culture because it upholds the basic cultural

ideal of stability and peace when it seeks to correct social ills; protest disrupts a culture by

upsetting the status quo and seeking alteration, correction or adjustment to existing situations.

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These capabilities often become instruments of protest themselves, as they are appealed to by

those involved.

The Relationship between Protest and Fiction

One of the most prominent of the study‟s findings dealing with the relationship between protest

and fiction is the way in which that relationship is more complicated than at first seems apparent,

and cannot therefore be restricted to the art-propaganda dichotomy. Instead of being discrete

elements seemingly unrelated to each other, protest and fiction are in fact, implicated within each

other. Protest is a fundamental aspect of any society, and to the extent that fiction is in many

ways a reflection of society, fiction is also a reflection of protest.

The study also found that, given fiction‟s heavy dependence on the imagination, the

manifestation of protest in literature is subject to creative manipulation. Thus, its depiction in

literature is nuanced, enabling it to be depicted in ways that highlight its multidimensionality,

amorphousness and ambiguity. The authors whose work was the focus of the study were seen to

utilise a variety of techniques in portraying protest, especially “indirection,” as seen in their use

of satire, irony, myth and symbol.

It was found that all works of fiction are, in a fundamental way, works of protest, because,

protest is implicated in the very form of the novel. It emerged in Europe, and particularly 17th

century England, as the favoured genre of the middle class emphasising rationality, hard work,

275

humanism and empiricism. This is an indication that the novel sought to protest against the

decadence of kings and feudal overlords, and the corresponding emphasis on the privileges of

birth, the supernatural and the fantastic. The early English novel celebrated the achievements of

central characters like Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, who were

acquisitive, ambitious and money-minded, and were not paragons of moral behaviour. The

portrayal of these characters, has further reiterated the fundamental link between protest and the

novel as complementary.

In accordance with its characteristic of simultaneously reflecting and shaping society, fiction

reflects protest and shapes it. One way in which this is done is seen in the manner in which many

works of fiction focus on the nature of protest itself, rather than just portraying it. Characters

debate the effectiveness or otherwise of different modes of protest in texts like God’s Bits of

Wood, Anthills of the Savannah, Things Fall Apart, and So Long A Letter. In these novels,

characters use protest to define themselves as individuals in opposition to the dictates of a

stiflingly conservative society, to obtain access to benefits hitherto denied them, and to indicate

the possibilities of change and social progress.

Many works of fiction reconfigure protest by conflating it with moral or personal growth. They

do this by tracing the personal growth of the main character using protest as a yardstick. Thus, a

character may react to a traumatic or otherwise significant situation by embarking upon a form of

protest whose consequences compel him to develop into a stronger person. Examples can be

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found in the work of novelists like Thomas Hardy (Henchard, Tess), Ngugi wa Thiong‟o

(Njoroge, Waringa), Nawal el Sadaawi (Firdaus) and Ayi Kwei Armah (The Man).

The Treatment of Protest in the Selected Texts

It was found that the dynamic of the protest novel in Nigeria is shaped by four elements, namely

the issue, the victim, the perpetrator and the protester. The relationship that obtains between

these elements is symbiotic rather than adversarial because all are interdependent. The protester,

however, occupies a unique position in that the other three elements relate to him in a way that

they do not relate to one another. Thus, instead of the issues which incite protest being at the core

of this dynamic, five of the six writers whose texts form the basis of this study placed the

protester at the core of the study. As such, the novels‟ concerns are refracted through the

perspectives of characters who protest, leading to a much more effective examination of protest,

as opposed to merely depicting issues that cause protest. Characters like Chris, Nkem and

Beatrice (Anthills of the Savannah), Debbie Ogedemgbe (Destination Biafra), Idemudia

(Violence), Ogugua (Arrows of Rain) and Lomba (Waiting for an Angel) are all protesters who

become the centres of consciousness in their respective novels. Protest thus shapes the narrative

in these novels in an unobtrusive yet effective way.

Although the four elements which constitute the dynamic of protest are found in Just Before

Dawn, the novel is unlike the others in that it does not feature a protesting central character

through whose consciousness the story is told, although there is the instance of Ugokwu, an ex-

soldier who attempts to assassinate a high-ranking colonial official. This is probably due to its

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status as a work of faction, an overt combination of fact and fiction. However, despite this, it is

argued in the study that Nigeria becomes a character in what is, after all, a national narrative, and

that it is the country which fulfils the role of protester. As the common denominator in events

spanning more than a century, Nigeria, in its very passiveness condemns the actions of those

whose power-lust cause so much disappointment and suffering.

It was found that the writers of the six texts which are the focus of this study use a variety of

methods and devices to enlist the reader as a collaborator in their works of protest fiction. These

devices include the utilisation of points of view that enable the reduction of the distance between

readers and characters; the creation of situations and circumstances which evoke empathy on the

part of the reader; attempts to ensure that the issues and individuals being protested against are

familiar and easily-recognisable to readers; the use of plot structures which make it almost

inevitable for characters to protest against injustice and oppression; and ennobling the act of

protest by raising it almost to the level of a sacred duty which is vital to the continued existence

of the nation.

It was found that the novelists whose texts are the focus of this study utilise what the study terms

“motifs of protest” which are used to symbolise the frustration, anger and helplessness that

characterises the individuals who engage in protest in the novels. These motifs include a variety

of altered states (dreams, insanity, drunkenness), confinement (in jail, in rigid social convention),

extreme poverty and extreme vulnerability, and they help to situate acts of protest in a human

rather than political context.

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Although all the texts being focused upon combine elements of fact and fiction to varying

degrees, Just Before Dawn stands out as the only acknowledged work of faction, a literary work

in which factual events and characters are combined with imaginary dialogue and situations. As

such, it raises important issues with regard to protest. At one level, the status of fact as fact is

contested, as competing narratives and discourses emerge, each demanding attention. The subtle

questioning of history that is implied in a work of faction can be regarded as a form of protest

against the authenticity and reliability of facts handed down by those whose pre-eminence put

them in charge of the national narrative.

In protesting the Nigerian situation in Just Before Dawn, Kole Omotoso utilises what the study

calls “metaphors of Nigeria” in describing the tragedy of missed opportunities and broken

promises he recounts. A metaphor of Nigeria is a description of a situation (an anecdote, a

vignette, an urban myth, a tall tale, a modern folktale, etc.) which encapsulates the essence of the

Nigerian situation, especially the contradictions and paradoxes which shape it, and which, to a

large extent, constitute its tragedy. It is often parable-like in content and structure, its simplicity

standing in stark contrast to the complexities and absurdities that it represents.

As a cultural artefact, fiction is able to focus effectively on the cultural underpinnings of protest

by highlighting its culture-affirming and culture-disrupting properties. In the novels that are the

focus of the study, Nigerian society is often portrayed as something of a cultural wasteland, in

which time-honoured traditional values like honesty, selflessness and decency have lost ground

279

to crass materialism, violence and selfishness. In some novels, particularly Anthills of the

Savannah, protest is seen as a way in which these cultural values can be brought back and made

to play a stronger role in national life, thus emphasising its culture-affirming aspects. In other

novels, protest is aimed at totally supplanting existing social, economic and political

relationships and replacing them with a system that is more equitable. Violence is the exemplar

of this culture-disrupting approach.

It was found that many of the writers whose texts are the focus of this study utilise the resources

of myth and folktale which enable them to deepen the purpose of protest beyond the restrictions

of a particular political or socioeconomic issue. In Anthills of the Savannah, there is the myth of

the water goddess Idemili which is used to justify Beatrice‟s decision to actively oppose the

regime instead of continuing to live a comfortable life. The use of such devices enables the

writers to endow protest with a timelessness and depth which reinforce its importance in human

society.

It was found that ideology is surprisingly absent in most of the texts. Apart from Iyayi‟s

Violence, which clearly adopts a class analysis approach to society and indirectly advocates a

complete alteration of existing social, economic and political relations, the other novels do not

posit the adoption of a particular political system as a means of resolving social issues. It is

argued that this stems from several reasons: a desire to avoid lapsing into propaganda, a belief

that ideological rigidity hinders rather than facilitates the resolution of social ills, and a lack of

faith in the viability of the more radical ideologies to achieve social, political and economic

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advancement. In some novels, radical ideological stances are satirised, as in Anthills of the

Savannah and Waiting for an Angel. Even Iyayi does not explicitly advocate the emergence of a

Marxist society in his novel. The absence of ideology does not weaken the treatment of protest in

the novels, and in fact frees the writers to look at the issue in a manner that is devoid of political

partisanship, and therefore more insightful than it otherwise would have been.

By the absence of ideology, what is meant is the refusal of most of the writers to rely solely on

the perspectives of an explicitly stated political belief or manifesto. Achebe, Omotoso,

Emecheta, Iyayi, Habila and Ndibe do not portray protest based on their political beliefs; they do

so based on their moral beliefs. The argument is that these authors feel that refusing to stress

ideological issues gives them an artistic freedom which is manifested in their works. As for

Iyayi, his Marxist ideology is toned down in Violence because he realises that it is a novel, not a

political tract.

Contributions to Knowledge and Suggested Areas for Further Research

This study has evaluated the significance of protest and the literary imagination in the Nigerian

novel. It has investigated how selected Nigerian novelists namely, Chinua Achebe, Kole

Omotoso, Buchi Emecheta, Festus Iyayi, Okey Ndibe and Helon Habila have used protest as a

means of assessing the relationship between art, ideology and social consciousness. The study

has examined the relationship of these three elements within the contexts of particular works of

authors who write about a specific society that they are deeply interested in.

Its importance lies in the fact that it takes a new look at the imperative questions of social

281

relevance in literature, the relationships that obtain between different generations of writers and

the nature of aesthetic response of individual writers to the stifling socio-political realities in

Nigeria.

The study has revealed that protest serves as a latent weapon for national sensitisation and

conscientisation of Nigerians to socio-economic and political exploitation perpetuated by the

ruling elite. Further research anchored on the examination of the texts individually and

collectively from other critical approaches will further enrich the relevance of social protest in

Nigerian society.

282

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