The Question of a National Literature for Nigeria

Haka aka ce in ji mai ba da labarin iarya.

"So they say," as the teller of false stories always says.

In the designation of countries, objective and subjective criteria cleave the notion of country into two quite different entities: the state and the nation. The state is marked by a tangible, observable, recognizable set of facts. The state has borders, a central government, a population, an economy, and a bureaucracy, all of which act to maintain and perpetuate continuity. The nation, on the other hand, constitutes itself through the will and the imagination of the citizens of the state. The health of the nation depends on each citizen's desire to identify with the entire population of the nation despite racial, ethnic, or religious differences. This idea of loyalty to the nation above and beyond individual differences is known as nationalism, and often competes with fervent loyalties to subnational groups. Yet within each nation those loyalties differ, and thus no one determined course of action can be employed in the name of nationalism. In effect, rather than molding itself on universal terms, nationalism shapes itself to fit the particular needs of each nation.

Unlike nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric, which mused romantically upon the consent and will of the people who desire to live together "with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart" (Renan 17), twentieth-century criticism has roundly rejected the idea of a natural nation as homogeneous or singularly ethnic. With few exceptions, the preponderance of nations are necessarily invented, consisting of diverse groups whose loyalties must be bent toward the nation through psychological means other than family or clan affiliation. For the reality of the nation, broad in both geographic and cultural terms, is that no one citizen will ever know the majority of his or her compatriots, and so a figurative bond must be substituted in order to maintain the "imagined community" (Anderson 6) of the nation. Modern scholars thus consistently subscribe to theories of the nation as discourse; an invented or imagined, fictional construct.

Given the reality of virtually all African countries, their clinically induced birth at the Berlin Conference regardless of traditional ethnic boundaries, nationalism has had little to cling to in the sense of even vaguely natural, homogeneous affiliations, loyalty or trust. Anthony Smith has suggested that "short of prolonged and intense application of centralized force" (147), the only way to draw a nation's diverse peoples together is through rewriting history, diminishing if not effacing ethnic differences, replacing them with conflated pasts and new, imagined, unifying experiences. Ernest Gellner concurs, insisting that culture must be shared if the nation is to cohere. Problematically, the idea of one shared culture is undermined by the prolific small cultures tied to oral folklore and variegated histories which resist unification. Peasants, especially illiterate ones, according to Gellner, do not make good nationalists. Education emerges as the great leveler of difference, creating a nation of potentially mobile "clerics," and the state is the only organization large enough to take care of education and shape national culture. Nationalism succeeds when universal education produces a homogenized "high" culture. This culture, virtually imposed on the populace, while manifesting links to various folklores and histories of "low" cultures, represents a new, hybrid, "high" culture. Literacy thus opens the door to an education program aimed at homogenizing the nation's culture by inventing a new culture, which is, in fact, a fiction.

A regular pattern of literary metaphors emerges in the various discourses of nationalism: rewriting the nation's history on the palimpsest of forgotten pasts; creating a fiction of the nation; disseminating nationalism through print; harnessing literacy to reformulate a modern hybrid national culture. Although the "state" has been reified into a series of facts and numbers, the "nation" remains more ephemeral, a psychological bond, a state of mind, an act of consciousness (Kohn 10). Invented, imagined, reordered at will, the nation is constituted by a...