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Nigerian Letters: More than Flowery Language

The State of Journalism and Literature in Nigeria

By Obi. O. Akwani
Editor: M. Global Village

In my literary endeavors, both as a consumer and a producer of literature, my starting point has always been Nigeria. Such is my hunger for the good of my country, buoyed by an innate understanding that unless I am prepared to subjugate that good and cut myself free of my fatherland, casting all my hopes and faith elsewhere, then my own good as an individual is not separated from that of Nigeria. Of course this twinning of my fate with my country is based on my belief that Nigeria will not fail me; and for my country to succeed, we must give it our best. Thus, even during my more than 20-years’ sojourn in North America, the focus of my literary passions was always Nigeria first, followed by my place in the world as a Black man and an African.

Though it had its own challenges, the North American environment fostered a flourishing literary culture in which we all shared. Artists and writers subsisted in an environment of robust creative activity, appreciated and supported by society through specific government and other programs. The creative and literary arts, including the stuff that journalists do, were part of the cultural industry, promoted and understood to be economically important just as other industries like agriculture, shipping or manufacturing. Hence the cultural industry was nurtured and contributed significantly to the creation of employment and added to the gross domestic product.

Having spent sometime back in Nigeria now, it is impossible not to notice some very significant differences between the literary environment here and what obtains over there in North America. In Nigeria, while there is no lack of abundant bush-land of fodder for the enquiring mind, it seems evident that the real gems – the healthiest blades and bundles to enlighten the ruminant – are rare. But this rarity is what you might call an artificial scarcity. The real gems, I believe, are there aplenty; but they are concealed, not by any conscious conspiracy, but because of a society that has not yet come to value such things (I will return to this question of value later in this article). In North America, on the other hand, it was always easy to come across these rich morsels and ingesting them, for the keen mind, was always an education – the sort of thing that brings about a flowering of new and not so new ideas. The chief object of creativity is enlightenment – increasing self-awareness and expanding the horizons of knowledge. When literary outputs clearly have something to teach, learning becomes a joy and the consumer looks forward everyday to what wonders and new vistas may come open.

Unfortunately, in Nigeria, this enthusiastic expectancy is lacking for me. One does not look forward to the reading of the newspapers, watching locally produced television, or listening to local radio stations, (mark you, I didn’t particularly look forward to reading the local newspaper in North America, but watching television or listening to radio there, with their rich variety and thorough treatment of issues, was joyous education).  Beyond the bare news value of the output from these media, the rest of what they have to offer in Nigeria is disappointing. Ready and nourishing fodder may be found, but in special places like private readings and critiques in book clubs and the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) gatherings that take place in Abuja on a regular basis. But these are isolated events, obscured by the limitations on our communications networks. Not every writer or creative person wants to be clubbing about on a regular basis. A lot of them need solitude in order for the creative juices to flow. Hence the effects of, or even the awareness within, these isolated gatherings in Abuja and other places have not yet begun to filter through society in such a way as to impact media workers and influence the nature of their output.

I have attempted to isolate the specific reasons why I find the offering from the Nigerian media so disappointing; why most of newspaper news reports, opinion pieces and analysis are so tedious to read. The simple and direct answer is that they are poorly thought out and poorly written. Many are so obviously biased, yet they lack the allure of elegance. Most are ideological and grammatical jumble; and nothing extinguishes the reading interest faster than bad writing. Often, to gain something from such articles, one must tediously study them in order to tease out the little gem they may contain. Writing is like interior decoration. Most people do not know what they are missing until a good designer comes along to bring out the best from their usual décor.

CULTURAL OBJECTIVES

What we need, as Nigerians, is to discover or rediscover our cultural objectives. I believe that having an idea as to what is best for our national civilization gives producers focus to know what is important and what is not. With focus writers and producers of all kinds will be able to do a better job of their writing and production. Somewhere along its historical trajectory, a society begins to define for itself a cultural objective. It is in this cultural objective that the society finds its self-confidence and matures. This objective is spelt out within the society’s art and literature. The definition of ours was begun quite early by such writers like Cyprian Ekwensi whose work emphasized the idea of Nigeria as a nation (see my write-up on Ekwensi as a nationalist writer). Others like Amos Tutuola attempted to put a stamp of the Nigeria vernacular culture on modern literature. These early attempts were eventually eclipsed by an outward looking society and an emerging culture that was more interested in learning from outsiders than in feeling itself out and developing its own systems.

The continued tendency to suspend inner reflection in favor of outward-looking has pauperized Nigerian literature, resulting in a literary culture and industry that lacks much internal zeal and strength. That outward-looking perspective does not seem to have any other objective except thorough imitation. Further more, what is being created answers to the dictates of a publishing establishment outside of Nigeria (see Neo-colonization in African Literature). This is the reason, I believe, why much of what we read in the newspapers or garner from other media in Nigeria is not that inspiring. Most of our publishers and editors, and, yes, some of our writers, are still looking outward for standards and forms for what they do.

When compared to the British literary culture – which, it might be argued, gave birth to modern literature in Nigeria – one can see a stark difference between the Nigerian literary scene today and that of our former colonial masters. Before the 18^th century most literature produced in Britain were sponsored works written by people eager to please their mentors – the Church or nobility. Invariably, this meant that the general tone was conservative – descriptive of the accepted way of life, but not seriously critical of it. Those British writers who tried to defy that convention, like Daniel Defoe in 1703, found themselves thrown into jail. Ironically it is this difference which, today, is resulting in a lack of zeal within the Nigerian literary culture and industry.

Beginning from the Victorian era (1837-1901), even though the conservative trend did not come to an end, British literature became distinguished by an increasing number of dissenting voices. In the first quarter of the 19th century, this voice of dissent was mild – tending toward a realistic portrayal of contemporary life, designed to bring the plight of the poor and down-trodden to the general audience, but neatly packaged so as not to offend the powers that be. This trend is apparent in the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and other notable and popular novelists of that era. Toward the last quarter of the century, the English novel became more realistically challenging. Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" so scandalized conservative British society of 1895 that Hardy made it his last novel and thereafter relied on poetry as an outlet for his talents.

The conformist forces of censorship, which compelled Thomas Hardy to shift his literary focus, are still present in the British literary industry today. They continue to temper the tone and output of most writers, but they have not been able to silence such bold and revolutionary writers like George Orwell (1903 – 1950) and Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989) whose works are uncompromising indictments of the failures of contemporary Western civilization. They have, however, been very effective in tempering the literature coming out of Nigeria from the 1980s on. Ben Okri, the Nigeria-born writer and naturalized Briton, acknowledges and accedes to these forces of censorship in at least one of the stories in his short story collection, Stars of the New Curfew (1988).

CONFUSION ABOUT VALUES

Okri is now more a British writer than a Nigerian writer. But his is a conscious choice that presumably recognizes the difference – or recognizes that there ought to be a difference – between these literatures. But many Nigerian writers today still do not recognize any difference. And this is what saps them of access to originality. It prevents them from being able to orient themselves toward a self-defined purpose that adequately addresses the most important issues for society in their outputs. Appreciation is a priori here. Depending on the level – and whether there is any appreciation at all – of the creative outputs within a milieu, appreciation determines the value and nature of subsequent outputs. When the appreciation employs determinants outside of the cultural milieu, it becomes pseudo and values are bound to be warped or confused.

And so long as literature in Nigeria continues to be greatly influenced and determined by the British and Western literary and cultural industry, defining our own values in literature will remain difficult and the struggle to gain our own voice, elusive. Nigerians need to be able to make a distinction between culture and industry. Cultural influences from without are welcome and even coveted, but the influence of the industry outside of our budding literary culture must not be taken lightly or unquestioningly welcomed. The demands of the cultural industry outside of Nigeria have tended to confuse our values and limit what can be attempted successfully by Nigerian writers who remain dependent on the British and Western publishing industry.

Our values help us define our national literary objectives. It is rather difficult to do the later when we remain confused about the former. It is easy to understand this confusion when one looks at the literary prizes that are being organized and given out annually to writers in this country. What we need most today is to define and produce the Nigerian novel in this era. But the criteria for these literary prizes (the LNG literature prize, for instance) are too general, aspiring to international fads rather than rewarding works that help progress the definition of the Nigerian novel by highlighting our values and defining our cultural objectives.

RADIO AND TELEVISION

This lack of (or confusion about) values is also affecting the output from Nigerian radio and television. It seems that the producers of Nigerian radio have decided that all their listeners are teenagers who desire to hear only hip hop music twenty four hours of the day. But I suspect that even teenagers must get tired of incessant mindless music. Nigerian radio producers and program directors seem to care nothing for thinking listeners or for the mood of the hour. Talk shows and specialty programs lack depth and scope. The producers (radio & television) don’t seem to take the time to research their programs and install hosts who are able to select guests with expertise, and able to engage and challenge the guests for maximum value to audiences. The same music you hear at 8 am is the same sort you get at noon, 6 pm and 3 am in the morning. Woe to the insomniac who tries to get to sleep at night listening to soothing music from Nigerian radio. The only radio station that seems to have a respectable variety of programming is Radio Nigeria; and even they fall short of the mark a lot of the time.

None of the television stations have enough variety and interesting programs to make watching them broadly enjoyable. From the news angle, most of the television stations are doing fine. Some of the private TV stations are also introducing locally produced sitcoms and entertainment shows. That is encouraging. But Nigerian TV stations generally seem not attuned to viewer sensibilities when they broadcast filler programs which they have no intention of running to conclusion. Poor programming generally and unstable power supply are the two drawbacks bedeviling Nigerian television.

ACCULTURATION AND POINT OF VIEW

I have often wondered whether my long years of acculturation to the North American scene have biased my values and point of view to a point that I can not see the good in Nigerian media offerings. I do know for sure that my Nigerian acculturation did influence my writing style earlier on; and it resulted in my producer at CKCU – a Canadian radio station in Ottawa – objecting to my first write-up, in the early 1980s, for a special on apartheid in South Africa. I had written my piece in that verbose, flowery language and self-conscious style common in Nigerian letters; to which she objected: “We don’t write like that here.” I got the message and did get it right by the second draft. That, you might say, was the beginning of my acculturation to the North American style.

After so many years of viewing the world from a largely North American perspective, it is perhaps right to assume that that perspective colors my judgment and contributes to my disillusionment with the output from Nigerian media. Certainly, poor newspaper journalism is not peculiar to Nigeria and, not everything that comes out of the Nigerian media is uninspiring. There are a number of columnists and social commentators whom I look forward to reading their thoughts with relish. But those are more the exception than the rule. What is going on in the Nigerian media is more than “flowery language” and my disappointment cannot merely be accounted for by my other acculturation. I do not, for instance, find the same level of disappointment with the South African media offerings. I find what the South Africans write about themselves and about Africa a lot more inspiring and illuminating.

I believe there are other things, more than “flowery language,” at work in the Nigerian media. And I believe it begins with the quality and type of education we receive, in and out of school, in this country. It is an accepted fact today that most Nigerian universities graduate a lot of people who may be able to read but cannot write or articulate ideas properly. And, going by the quality of Nigerian journalism, it does not appear that our finishing schools of journalism are hitting the mark either. Even in the so-called ‘good old days’ (during and before the 1970s) when the educational system was supposedly better, there was already an emphasis on rote-learning which was meant to enable students absorb the subjects and pass their examinations. I was never an enthusiast of that method of learning and have always held it suspect. Today, I see my stance on rote-learning justified by what is happening in Nigerian journalism where the newspapers are full of badly written stories and poor analytical pieces. I bet two kobo that all of the writers who produce those bad stories are rote-learners. The stories they produce reflect lack of real knowledge and grasp of subject matter, which in my opinion is the inevitable outcome of learning by rote.

The most important factor failing Nigerian letters, and journalism in particular, is lack of adequate government support for the cultural industry. I don’t believe our government grasps the economic and social importance of this industry. Already the film industry or Nollywood is contributing significantly to employment and economic activity in Nigeria. With proper encouragement, the creative industry can contribute far more than what Nollywood alone is doing today. The government needs to recognize this, and realize also that the cultural industry may need a little more priming than the oil industry, for instance, before it can reach full steam in self-sustained growth. Writers need to be encouraged to be able to write full time. The same is true for other creative – graphic and visual – artists. The same way government recognizes that the business world requires credit to flourish and has put systems in place to make such credit available; the same way it should know that the creative industry requires credit – grants and loans – to make what the industry does more possible.