Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (review)

The rapid development of a Nigerian Literature in English after the Second World War was tangled with political and cultural nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and such questions as how the various groups within the nation could live together. The source of political power became the ethnic group while the new anglophone literature was said to be a continuation of oral sources and models. The creative writers themselves contributed to this view. Wole Soyinka claimed a tradition of Yoruba symbolism and myth based on ritual that could also be found in the fiction of D. O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola.

Ato Quayson’s Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing examines such claims and attempts to show how by using oral-source (he would say resource-based) materials, a Pan-Yoruba tradition was shaped by the Reverend Samuel Johnson, modified by Tutuola and Soyinka, and then adopted by a non-Yoruba writer, Ben Okri. The historical contexts are the formation of a Yoruba national identity in the late nineteenth century in Johnson’s The History of the Yoruba, the new Nigerian anglophone literature based on African thought introduced by Tutuola towards the end of colonialism, Soyinka’s individualism that resulted from disillusionment with the new nation, and the subsequent formation of a post-Civil War national identity partly based on Yoruba symbols by Nigerians of other ethnicities, especially those of the diaspora as represented by Okri. In a curious way, with a brief acknowledgment of irony, Quayson recalls T. S. Eliot’s paradox of a continuing tradition that is radically modified by each additional significant work, a critical perspective that, Quayson notes, Abiola Irele has adapted to African literatures where the roots were supposed to be in the oral tradition. Irele transforms Eliot, Quayson transforms Irele.

As Quayson’s book is (sometimes a bit too) densely and carefully argued, summary risks distortion, but the basic claim is that the myths, rituals, songs, stories, and other oral and religious materials of the Yoruba people provide resources from which a modern written literature was created according to the needs of each period and writer. This differs from earlier claims of an unbroken continuity between oral and written literature. Quayson’s transformations are not as radical as ruptures or paradigm shifts. Alongside his analysis of how each writer and period differs, he instinctively seeks the affirmation of supposedly traditionally African cultural characteristics, especially integration into a community. Quayson is sympathetic; concepts are treated critically, but with the purpose of understanding why there were transformations. Instead of the Yoruba, there are various peoples and groups who constitute the Yoruba and who share or have differing traditions, beliefs, and rituals. They are provided with a unified written tradition by the Reverend Johnson.

The use of Johnson’s monumental The History of the Yorubas as a starting point is original within the context of the study of Nigerian fiction and yet is in keeping with the poststructuralist treatment of all writing, utterance, and symbolization as fictional discourse with a political purpose. One of the best things about Strategic Transformations is that detailed rhetorical analysis is a basis for interpretation of how texts are related to historical situations. Usually the style has possible psychological implications that can be related to the cultural and political. After outlining the structure of the History, Quayson notes that the introductory ethnological material is unusually extensive and creates a Pan-Yoruba culture. Next there is a narrative history formed by linking praise songs and other oral forms into an epic story. This is followed by modern documentary history concerning the British protectorate. Quayson sees the History as influenced by Johnson’s mission school education in the Bible and Xenophon’s histories of the Greeks, the nineteenth-century European concern with the formation of nation states, Edward Blyden’s black nationalism, the collapse of the Oyo Empire, the resulting Oyo-Ilorin conflict, and the meeting and mixing of Yoruba with European culture. African history needed to be retold in ways...