Literature in Northern Nigeria: Language and Popular Culture
CHAPTER ONE
OBJECTIVE OF STUDY
This essay delves into the study of literature in northern Nigeria. The study discusses the scope of literature, the region of Northern Nigeria and aspects of its popular culture, and finally goes ahead to examine the socio-political issues captured in Abubakar Gimba’s Inner Rumblings. It concludes that the literature of Northern Nigeria still needs to be explored to the fullest by the activities of Northern Nigerian writers so as to bring it to the fore of Nigeria and the world at large.
CHAPTER TWO
An Overview of Literature
The online Encyclopædia Britannica (2015:7) catalogues the development and the criteria of what constitutes literature from pre-literate to modern times noting that the content of literature is as limitless as the desire of human beings to communicate with one another. The thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands, since the human species first developed speech have built up the almost infinite systems of relationships called languages. A language is not just a collection of words in an unabridged dictionary but the individual and social possession of living human beings, an inexhaustible system of equivalents, of sounds to objects and to one another. Its most primitive elements are those words that express direct experiences of objective reality, and its most sophisticated concepts on a high level of abstraction. Words are not only equivalent to things; they have varying degrees of equivalence to one another. A symbol, according to the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2007:506), is something that stands for something else or a sign used to represent something, “as the lion is the symbol of courage, the cross the symbol of Christianity, the crescent and the star as a symbol of Islam.” In this sense all words can be called symbols, but the examples given—the lion, the cross and the crescent and star—are really metaphors: that is, symbols that represent a complex of other symbols, and which are generally negotiable in a given society (just as money is a symbol for goods or labour). Eventually a language comes to be, among other things, a huge sea of implicit metaphors, an endless web of interrelated symbols. As literature, especially poetry, grows more and more sophisticated, it begins to manipulate this field of suspended metaphors as a material in itself, often as an end in itself. Thus, there emerge forms of poetry (and prose, too) with endless ramifications of reference, as in Japanese waka and haiku, some ancient Irish and Norse verse, and much of the poetry written in Western Europe since the time of Baudelaire that is called modernist. It might be supposed that, at its most extreme, this development would be objective, constructive—aligning it with the critical theories stemming from Aristotle’s Poetics. On the contrary, it is romantic, subjective art, primarily because the writer handles such material instinctively and subjectively, approaches it as the “collective unconscious,” to use the term of the psychologist Carl Jung, rather than with deliberate rationality (online Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015:7).
By the time literature appears in the development of a culture, the society has already come to share a whole system of stereotypes and archetypes: major symbols standing for the fundamental realities of the human condition, including the kind of symbolic realities that are enshrined in religion and myth. Literature may use such symbols directly, but all great works of literary art are, as it were, original and unique myths. The world’s great classics evoke and organize the archetypes of universal human experience. This does not mean, however, that all literature is an endless repetition of a few myths and motives, endlessly retelling the first stories of civilized man, repeating the Greek Epic of Odyssey or Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The subject matter of literature is as wide as human experience itself. Myths, legends, and folktales lie at the beginning of literature, and their plots, situations, and allegorical (metaphorical narrative) judgments of life represent a constant source of literary inspiration that never fails. This is so because mankind is constant—people share a common physiology. Even social structures, after the development of cities, remain much alike. Whole civilizations have a life pattern that repeats itself through history.
CHAPTER THREE
Analysis of Abubakar Gimba’s Inner Rumblings
Abubakar Gimba’s Inner Rumblings touches on various socio-political issues that affect the Nigerian society especially in its relationships with other parts of the world. Some of these issues are:
Deceptive Snares of International Politics
Abubakar Gimba throws stones at the relationship between the so called super-powers and the underdeveloped world. He sees this relationship as lopsided where the super powers oppress the less developed nations. He attacks the United Nations and America which he refers to as the world’s police-man who preaches one thing but her actions go contrary to what she preaches. He says they (Americans) should practice what they preach because charity begins at home.
Practice thy Gospel first
To the guardian angel says the world
Your words and deeds seen
to be at war with each other (10).
This is because of the foul plays involved in international politics where the United Nations and Americans have self-selected themselves to be the number one in the world; a position they self- acclaim and see other nations as coming under their authority and command;
From atop your mountain/Or is it your watch –tower?/For yourself appointed role Of protector of law and order /Guarantor of justice/You could detect from afar/With revolting sense of righteousness /The stinking stench of crimes/That engulfs the world like flames/Singling our self-destruction (10).
Yet, this self – acclaimed policeman misuses her position, claiming self-righteousness and blaming the world for erring. She wants the erring world to be rectified as she preaches the “human rights” for all. But the poet says, she is just a wolf in sheep’s clothing because her self – righteousness lack dignity. The world can see her for the wrongs she also commits against the under developed world.
Human rights” you cried/With solemn saintly command/As if relaying God’s commandment/Urged the rest of the erring world/Towards violations’ rectification/ Alas, what an effort spent/The world’s self appointed policeman/Your indignation lacks dignity/Because the rest of the world Has no blinkers and can see/That the emperor has no cloth (10).
The poet says she is hypocritical because for all the freedom and human rights that she preaches, she continues to impoverish the world; her colonies (the black world) continue to be plunged into deeper poverty and squalor; she is an eye sore as she is raped and her wealth taken from her by tricks to enrich the empire of the Western world.
Your verbal crusade the world hears/ Hail human rights!/But take away from the world’s sight/Your basic human wrongs/Your colonies of poverty,/Sprawling slums, such an eyesore/Dotted by empires of affluence/Makes vampires of your system/… Such irreconcilable inconsistencies/At once smacks of double standard and bad faith: Hallmark of hypocrisy (10-11).
The poet says the world’s policeman should recognize her double stands first and accept that she is a failure; and leave the world to govern itself.
CHAPTER FOUR
Conclusion
Northern Nigeria is a vast tract of landlocked space in the Central Sudan bordered by the republics of Niger, Chad and Cameroun; its furthest southern border is marked by the territories of the Borgu, Yoruba, Nupe, Igala, Fulani and other Kwa-language speaking people. The admixture of an Islamic influence via the trans-Saharan trade route, and the very accommodating policies of the British colonial administration which favoured a propping of the early 19th Century Islamic reformer Uthman dan Fodio’s system of Emirates, resulted in the peoples of the North not being exposed to Western education until about a century after the peoples of the Southern parts of the country. While a rich history of Arabic-based literature existed, the extent of the known world of our fathers quadrupled in the decade starting from 1901. English, not Arabic, became the language of world expression. Consequently, while the people of the North have had their unique experiences, these experiences have hardly weighed in the national consciousness for they are only recently, in the last thirty years really, being expressed in the language that counts – in English.
Perhaps the most dominant mental image that is conjured by the phrase “Northern Nigeria” is that of the Durbar, that traditional panorama of homage to Emirs, a fleeting movie of men ceremonially robed on splendid horses charging down a field and drawing rein before their suzerain amidst the dust – with the exited ululation of crowds of Talakawa (working class) as a necessary backdrop. The durbar is a fitting metaphor for the North.
CHAPTER FIVE
At the head of the charge of men from the North on the field of Nigerian literature is the figure of Abubakar Imam Kagara who is recognized as a paterfamilias. His works, primarily Ruwan Bagaja and Magana Jari Ce, published in 1934 and 1939 respectively, were a bridge between the old tradition of Northern literature and the new western ways. Seeing that his times were swiftly changing, he had the vision, quite radical, to write neither in Arabic nor in the popular Ajami (Hausa language in Arabic script). He chose Hausa written in the Roman script for he felt that the Hausa language, with its remarkable adaptability as a Sudanese pidgin, would be the lingua franca of Nigeria. This assumption was of course frustrated by the Western educated, ethnicist-leaning, positions of Chief Awolowo rooted in personal ambition and a political fear of the mega-sized Northern Region. Thus was Imam’s contribution overshadowed two decades later by Chinua Achebe in 1959, with his famous novel Things Fall Apart written with the same sense of cultural identity, but written in English. After Imam’s experimentation, a lull in Northern writing occurred until the late 60’s which saw the contributions of Labo Yari as well as those of Mohammed Sule whose The Undesirable Element remains one of the classics of African literature. Abubakar Gimba became the leading light of northern writing in English in the late ‘80’s and through the ‘90’s. Perhaps recovering from trauma, or simply in recognition of the importance of writing in English, the ‘90’s saw the emergence of many Northern writers ranging from Abubakar Othman, Ismail Bala and Ahmed Maiwada in poetry to Maria Ajima and Victor Dugga in drama. However, with the exception of Abubakar Gimba’s contributions in prose, which while noteworthy are hardly stratospheric, there have been no important novels in English from Northern Nigeria since Yari and Sule’s contributions in the mid ‘70’s. Neither has the poetry or drama been exceptional. Contemporary northern writing is now centered on four towns (Minna, Jos, Kano and Kaduna). Among the older contemporary writers in the North are B. M. Dzukogi, Ismail Bala, Yusuf Adamu, Musa Okapnachi, Razinat Mohammed, and E. E. Sule who has also been the pre-eminent literary critic. The younger contemporary writers include Gimba Kakanda, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Awaal Idris Evuti, Elnathan John, Binta Shuaibu Abdallah Abubakar, Adam Ibrahim and Alkasim Abdulkadir.
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