08/01/2020
CULTURAL WAR: NIGERIAN (AFRICAN) CULTURE VERSUS COLONIALISM.
By
OSITA PETER ABUCHI.
Before the Nigerian–Biafran civil war, there was the cultural war between colonialism and her legacies, especially the ones that tend to erode the culture of the natives, on one hand, and the African culture on the other. The central focus in the Nigerian Nationalist songs of Herbert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Anthony Enaharo, Obafemi Awolowo, among others, was “see us to have something to show”. Part of this was the deliberate unpopular use of their colonial names by some of the Nationalists, for example, Benjamin to Azikiwe and Jeremiah to Awolowo. At the peak of this cultural/ nationalist fever in the late 1950s, the literary icon, Chinua Achebe, came out with his epic Things Fall Apart in 1958 and followed it four years later in 1962 with Arrow of God. These are novels of cultural re-affirmation. In these novels Achebe captures the rhythms of the way of life of his Igbo people (their politics, economy, socio-cultural and religious stands). In the words of Emelia Oko (2005), these novels (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God) concretise “ the essence of a way that was still vital , even if discredited by the foreigner” (p.13). She adds that, the heroes in these novels, Okonkwo and Ezeulu, “immortalise that old Igbo traditional independence and pride that could assert unequivocally that men were not born for servitude” (p.57). Achebe’s assertion in his famous article “The Novelist as Teacher” (1975), is a summation of the literary artistic response to this cultural war. Achebe had said: I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my people that their past with all its imperfections―was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them (p.45). Other Nigerian novelists, especially who wrote before the war and published by Heinemann under African Writers Series, were inspired to tread the cultural path, to use literature to explore, examine and conceptualise their Nigerian (African) culture. Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine (1966), John Munonye’s The Only Son (1966), Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) are illustrative. Amadi’s The Concubine tells the story of Ihuoma, a beautiful and virtuous woman but whose husbands must die because of her entanglement with a spirit spouse. What is of note here is that the myths are part of the spiritual essence of the African people. The same spiritual dynamics are also employed in Efuru. Though feminist scholars have almost monopolised the novel now critically (Conde, 1972; Ezeigbo, 1996), Efuru demonstrates the interplay of the physical and the spiritual in the life of an African woman. Before these novels, Amos Tutuola’s novels especially 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' (1954) has been a story of an African way of life. Spirits, demons, ghosts, trees, forests, play their roles in human existence. Each element must be respected and its ‘territorial integrity’ recognised. My Life ... shows “the people’s belief about the spiritual world and what happens to a mortal who wanders into the ‘bad bush’ and the world of ghosts” (Zell, Bundy & Coulon, p.174). In the drama medium, Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark became household names. Soyinka’s 'A Dance of the Forest' (1963), 'Death and the King’s Horseman' (1975) and 'The Strong Breed' (1971) are notable. These plays, especially the last two, were based on the Yoruba cosmological view of life after death; of the continuity of existence beyond the physical; of a life circle of the living, the dead and the unborn; of the dependency of one on the other(s). In 'Death and the King’s Horseman', there is a reenactment of the cultural war that took place in ancient Oyo in 1946, between Western culture represented by the District Officer on one hand, and traditional elements on the other. Once the king dies, his horseman, Elesin Oba, is to commit ritual su***de in order to continue his service to the king in the other world. In this particular instance, the District Officer intervenes and arrests Elesin Oba in order to stop the su***de. However, Elesin Oba’s son, Olunde, himself a product of Western education, takes his life in his father’s stead. Ola Rotimi’s uses Sophocle’s Odipus Rex to create a Yoruba myth in 'The Gods are Not to Blame' (1971). Here, again, the fate of man is attached to the decree of the gods and that is why every attempt by man to thwart the decree of the gods fails. Clark’s 'Ozidi' (1966) and 'The Masquerade' (1964) articulate the Ijaw system of existence and communality. Gabriel Okara’s poem “Piano and Drum” represents the poetic masterpiece in the cultural war between the indigenous and the foreign: piano for western cultures and drum for African traditional lifestyles.
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