Introduction: Everything Good Is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation

The origins of this special issue of Research in African Literatures date back to 1998 when the guest editors, Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton, drew up plans to assemble a collection of essays on what we referred to as “third-generation” Nigerian writing. This resulted in a special issue of the South Africa-based journal English in Africa, titled “New Nigerian Writing” and published in 2005. The essays and reviews collected in that volume focused on “emergent writers who had acquired a creative identity markedly different from that of second generation writers [such as Niyi Osundare, Festus Iyayi, Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan, Zainab Alkali, Tess Onwueme and Bode Sowande]” (Adesanmi and Dunton 7). An important stimulus for the exercise was the recognition that while the work of third-generation authors was receiving considerable journalistic coverage—within Nigeria and to some extent elsewhere—hardly any sustained scholarly attention had yet been paid to this corpus.

In referring to the work of a third generation of writers, we were engaging in an exercise in system description, in this case a type of description that demarcates a literary field. Clearly the question then arises, where to place the field posts, and on this question rest others, such as “When is a generation?” Harry Garuba ably addressed these matters in his contribution to the volume.

As noted at the time by the editors and by several contributors, in Nigeria there has been a marked ebb and flow in the relative rates of production and of perceived prestige of English-medium poetry, fiction, and drama, through the 1980s and ’90s and the early years of the twenty-first century. Most recently, the novel has been at the forefront, with the appearance of highly acclaimed works by such emerging novelists as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Chris Abani, and others. While the four authors listed here have all enjoyed enthusiastic recognition outside Nigeria, with their work first published in the USA or UK and with (variously) Nigerian and South African editions published thereafter, we wish to emphasize also the importance of novelists whose work has not had such wide dissemination, for example, Akin Adesokan, Jude dibia, and Maik Nwosu.

By the time the English in Africa volume appeared, it was clear that this fresh and vigorous upsurge in novelistic creativity was not going to dissipate in the fore-seeable future. An acknowledgment of this was very apparent in the contents of a seminar in Lagos in September 2005, organized by CORA (Committee for Relevant Art) and titled “Lagos in the Imagination.” With presentations by scholars Wumi Raji, Chris Dunton, and novelist Toni Kan, and vigorous interventions by writers such as Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan, and others, much of the discussion focused on the phenomenal revival of the Nigerian novel. Since 2005, Adichie, Habila, and Abani have produced second novels that in no way belie the promise of their debut works. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is perhaps one of the richest creative works yet to appear on the subject of the Nigerian Civil War, eliciting unstinted praise from Chinua Achebe, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edmund White. Adichie’s novel, which recently won the 2007 orange Prize, marks, as for now, the culminating achievement in a resuscitation of the Nigerian Civil War novel in recent years. In 2005, two novels appeared that examine the role and experiences of boy soldiers in the war: Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and Dulue Mbachu’s War Games. A year earlier, Nigerian author Philip Begho had published Jelly Baby, a novel for young readers that recounts the experiences of a group of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone’s fratricidal war. In the realm of nonfiction, fresh insights into events leading up to the war and into its aftermath are offered in Wole Soyinka’s memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn (New York: Random House, 2006); although it is far more concerned with the mapping of individual consciousness, Soyinka’s earlier memoir, The Man Died, can be read...