Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952-1966 (review)

Anyone interested in writers as well as in writing should applaud the University of Alberta Press's decision to bring out a new edition of Margaret Laurence's Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952-1966. While literary critics are thick on the ground, the chance to see one master novelist analyze the craft of other writers is rare. And the fact that this analysis took place over thirty years ago yet continues to reward readers gives Long Drums and Canons historical as well as critical interest.

Margaret Laurence (1926-87), called the most successful Canadian novelist of the twentieth century, was one of those outsiders who introduced African literature to the West during the late colonial and early postcolonial era. She moved to Somalia in 1950 when her husband was engineering reservoirs in the desert, and in 1954 translated and published A Tree for Poverty, a collection of Somali folk literature. In 1952 the family moved to the Gold Coast, and Accra became the setting for her first novel (This Side Jordan, 1960) and collection of short stories (The Tomorrow Tamer, 1960). Leaving Africa in 1957, she began publishing the novels that would establish her name in Canadian literature in the middle of the 1960s, but she remained fascinated with African political and literary life. Living in London during the sixties, she was caught up in the heady intellectual life of Commonwealth writers passing through the city during the early years of independence. During this time she read deeply, met young writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo, and came to the conclusion that Nigeria had now emerged at the center of African literary excellence. After writing some scripts for the BBC on Nigerian literature, she decided to collect her observations and responses into a full-length study of Nigerian literature.

Her timing, as it turned out, couldn't have been worse. As she was finishing the manuscript in 1967, Nigeria broke up, with Biafra's secession setting off what would become a long and bloody civil war. When Long Drums and Cannons was published in 1968, Laurence herself considered it irrelevant, noting in her preface that the title, taken from a poem by the recently killed Okigbo, was "cruelly ironic." The book was never brought out in Canada, where Laurence's reputation would have won it attention, and despite Achebe's praise in Morning Yet on Creation Day, it remained little known and far less influential than other studies of the era by George Moore, Ezekiel Mphalele, Ulli Beier, and Janheinz Jahn.

This fate was undeserved and, fortunately, has now been reversed. Although Laurence recognized that she was no literary critic and apologized for her lack of theory, in fact her perceptive-yet-straightforward observations offer an unusually lucid introduction to the first generation of Nigerian novelists and dramatists in English. She devotes a chapter to the five major writers of the day—Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, John Pepper Clark, Amos Tutuola, and Cyprian Ekwensi—with shorter discussions of T. M. Aluke, Elechi Amadi, Nkem Nwankwo, Flora Nwapa, Onuora Nzedwu, and Gabriel Okara. After introducing each author with a short biography, she offers a close reading of his or her writings. Free from jargon, characterized by the habits of the time (e.g., she compares the Nigerians to European writers, not to other African writers), enthusiastic, and attentive to the craft of writing, Laurence's selections and her analyses have stood the test of time. The only thing she was totally wrong about was the irrelevance of her book.