The Successors: On the African Literary Renaissance

There has been much talk lately of a renaissance in Nigerian literature. Hardly a year passes without yet another young writer winning yet another international prize. This renaissance is measured against the writers who came of age around the time of independence from British colonial rule, in 1960—notably Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986, and Chinua Achebe, whose seminal novel, Things Fall Apart, earned him the sobriquet “the father of African literature.” The successors of that generation, if that is what they are, came of age at the turn of the millennium, the country having meanwhile supped full with horrors: civil war shortly after independence, followed by decades under the military jackboot.

Here is Jowhor Ile in his debut novel, And After Many Days, describing a scene in Port Harcourt in 1995:

That was when one of the corporals saw a boy who could have been a university student; he was carrying a knapsack. The area was deserted now, and the boy was walking briskly between the stones and the tear gas. The corporal thought he looked suspicious . . . “Hey-shhh, come here.” The boy acted like he didn’t see or hear the corporal. “Hey-shh, you there carrying bag, come here now!” The boy kept walking. The corporal rushed toward him in a fit of rage and whacked the boy from behind with the butt of his gun at the base of the neck, and the boy went down at once.

Paul, the seventeen-year-old boy in question, dies as a result of the blow, but his parents and siblings do not know this. All they know is that he had stepped out to visit a friend and never returned. The tension surrounding his disappearance is meant to track the larger politics of the time. The year 1995 was a tragic one for Nigeria, the political turning point when General Sani Abacha—the latest in a long line of military strongmen, who nonetheless claimed to embody a “duly constituted authority”—allowed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his fellow activists, known as the Ogoni Nine, to be executed by military decree despite an obviously flawed trial, thereby turning what had been a peaceful insurgency into a violent one. (As Saro-Wiwa himself put it, “The men we are dealing with are mindless, Stone Age dictators addicted to blood.”) More galling was the fact that the general helped annul what many agree was the freest and fairest election in the country’s brief history, and then imprisoned the presumed winner.

Tension in the house, tension in the land: Unfortunately, tension is what Ile’s novel lacks. Ajie, the protagonist and Paul’s younger brother, is the last member of the family to have seen Paul alive. As the story unfolds, Ajie occasionally interrupts the narrative to remind us that he is full of guilt—that he wishes he had paid more attention to Paul’s last words— but only after he has taken us on yet another long detour of life in the household before his brother went missing. Paul himself comes across as an exemplary figure—invariably top of his class and always even-handed when settling disputes between Ajie and their sister, Bibi (the subject of even more detours). We do get occasional glimpses of the world outside the household—when, for example, Ajie accompanies his mother to the market to buy provisions for school. For the most part, however, we must make do with heated conversations between adults in the parlor (the parlor looms large in this family drama).

Ile’s novel is set in Nigeria’s predominantly Christian south, the region from which the bulk of the country’s English-language writers hail. Until recently, there has been no literature in English of any significance in the predominantly Islamic north, where Hausa is the lingua franca (and where...