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Starting off from his thrilling and stimulating plots it is most evident that Cyprian Ekwensi spins for the most part very good and interesting stories. But his plots are often episodic thence losing organic unity. In People of the City the plot is loose and episodic. The looseness at the end of the respective sub-plots makes the novel read like a chronicle of events in the lives of people. However, the placing of the same characters in all these events holds them together. The plot is likewise episodic in Jagua Nana with with regards to three subplots not with resolute determination linked and justified within the wider contexts of the novel. One of them is the one that brings Jagua to Freddie’s homeland. The other three novels nonetheless are spared this problem as they have better plot control. Some incidents in the works do not come out real and convincing. All too often times there is usual recourse to melodramatics. These are most evident in the a heap of dramatic incidents involving Amusa Sango and Jagua Nana, those of murders, fights and suicides as well as the a great deal of sexual orgies involving the same characters. Fortunately Survive the Peace seems to have been spared much of that. In addition, numerous characters fail to come off real and convincing. The women Amusa Sango meets with in People of the City are largely unvaryingly portrayed as beautiful. Even the main reputation himself, Sango, comes off as shoal and stereotyped.. Much of what we know of him is through authorial commentary rather than through what is revealed of him through his words, thoughts, and actions. Freddie’s portrayal in Jagua Nana is very shadowy. Many of his activenesses seem rather implausible. It is improbable for such an honorable and idealistic young man to be all of a sudden transformed to a self-serving and lusty political aspirant plainly because he has just returned from studying overseas. Other characters such as Uncle Namme, Uncle Ofubara, and Dennis Odoma are almost as good as pawns. Uncle Taiwo’s comical activity of formally presenting something makes him more of a caricature than a to the full or entire extent formulated character. He is there plainly as a pawn introducing the political distinct elements of Lagos life. Seldom does Ekwensi concede the reader to follow the thought processes of his characters. Neither is his use of diction successful in distinguishing the respective characters whose speech remains unvarying in spite of the varying situations and circumstances in which they find themselves. Freddie’s superior education does not enable him to speak differently from his uneducated prostitute lover, Jagua. Ekwensi’s characters even when involved in events of cultural signification disclose only a superficial awareness, learning little or not one thing regarding themselves in their quests. There is also not much striking in Ekwensi’s use of language. For one, his use of English is largely uncertain, displaying little mastery of the rules and current usages. Unlike Achebe, he has not produced an authentic African voice. His language seems for the most part imitative of fourth-rate westerns. For he seems to be merely pandering to the tastes and expected values of the book-buying public in the West that expected from him sure literary conventions and forms. His style of writing consequently had to be influenced by them. For as he himself said he was writing for a mass appeal so much so that in an consultation with Larson he was anticipating the wealth he would have been swimming in if he were writing in America. Despite the above, hundreds of thousands of readers both in the West and in Nigeria, have found amusement and a realistic picture of the delights and hazards of city life in his writings. But could his works be redeemed by his severe preoccupation with a good deal of of the most pressing social and political difficultnesses threatening innovative Nigeria? How well does he come to terms with the social and political worries of Nigeria as well as Africa? It might also be necessary to look at how he grapples with the “chaotic formlessness and persistent flux of the modern Nigerian city.” In response to the interviewer who asked him what fundamentally inspires him as an artist. he. said: You may call it social consciousness. You have to be conscious of the persons you are living amongst, their likes and disfavors and you respect them and still extract their culture and all that. Ekwensi’s works are set in rural as well as urban centers. These bipolar environments enable him to show up the ugliness and monstrosity of the city besides the idyllic and pristine beauty of rural life. In the rural countryside values such as honesty, industry, and respect for the elders, ancestors and Gods are kept in high regard. But in the cold, foreign, alien and barren wasteland which is the city, people are dishonest, politicians are corrupt and neighbors are at hostilities. It is such a hostile world that the émigrés from the rural area are thrust into as prey. In contrast to the beauty and innocence of the country, here they are “daily confronted by wretched filth, decadence, hopelessness, and prevarication.” Thus in spite of the superficial luster they might see in the city their hopes of self-fulfillment are always beset with stifling setbacks, For the city has a formidable influence, a magnetic strength that brandishes from a distance only it is excitement, gaiety, and transient glitter, luring people to either destruction or downfall. Ekwensi was gifted as a writer with an acute power of observation. With his talent for immersing himself deeply into any scenario or environment, he not only observed people closely, but translated their mannerisms and manifestations into a lot of of his characters. drawn broadly from his firsthand psychological result of perception learning and reasoning and interactions with Nigerians and a sharp and scientific mind – being primary and foremost a pharmacist- an orderly trait that manifested itself in his works. Cyprian Ekwensi has thence had a prolific output of standard novels and stories repeatedly concentered on the Nigerian capital city of Lagos showing the negative affect of the urban milieu on immigrants from rural areas, portraying the lives of prostitutes, shady politicians, businessmen, police officers, reporters, thieves, and others who witness the seamier side of life there as well as portraying the (erotic|sexual pleasure|sexually arousing love in a society where marriages are for the most part arranged and fiction eschews plots dealing with love and marriage. In People of the City Sango and almost everyone with whom he interacts are shown as suffering from oppressiveness. The city moves to getting a central motif and then graduates to almost like a character, controlling, defining, organizing and often times demolishing other people’s lives. It is like a trap helping to devour the unwary as is suggested in the very introductory sentence: “How the city attracts all types and how the unwary ought to suffer from ignorance of it is ways.” The policeman’s warning after Aina’s arrest: “. . . person who’s not careful the city will eat him” further captures the incipient danger. Added to that is the continuous warning voice of his mother, with regards to the women of the city. Beatrice is the prime victim. altho she seems the most vulnerable. She already demonstrates, on our initial acquaintance with her, the restlessness and the yearning for excitement, action and freedom which commonly impel those who are destined to be the city’s victims, but she is likewise showing signs of degradation and disintegration – she already suffers from the deadly sickness which is finally to assert her life. Beatrice is so entrapped in it is clutch that at the end she could not respond favorably to salvation thence earning for herself in the end a humiliating pauper’s funeral. The young girl, Aina, when led to court, standing versus a city determined to show her no mercy,” though initially competent of demonstrating warm feelings, becomes inevitably conditioned by the city’s callousness into a hardened thief and blackmailer.” earning herself in the long run a hard prison sentence. Dazed by the illusory glitter, they all surrender to the money, fame and influence to be gained. Lost in such a hysteria of living, they follow their basest tendencies with total abandon. Sango in the end, however, cannot bear the scrutiny of others. Jagua, like all other oppressed females “who came to Lagos, imprisoned, entangled in the city, unable to extricate themselves from it is clutches” had come to free herself from the taunts and menacing attitude of her persons in Ogabu who held chiding her for not being procreative even after three years of marriage. The Lagos she goes to is found to cherish values diametrically opposed to those of her village. There “girls were glassy, worked in offices like men, danced, smoked, wore high-heeled shoes and narrow slacks and were free and fast with their favors.” There no one stands in judgment over another for failure to fulfill any responsibility. In effect, Jagua feels relieved, for she cannot be kept down to account for her failure to fulfill her obligation as a woman and a wife as has been the case back home. She thence falls into the open but pernicious arms of the city. She keeps moving from one circumstance of desperation to another with little, if any self-satisfaction. At the Tropicana, a bestloved night spot for the Lagosians, she entertains varying species of men with the make-believe luster of this degenerate world, it’s dim lighting making her look even more seductive and pretty than usual. All the women wore dresses which were unquestionably beneath size, so that buttocks and breasts jutted grotesquely above the frequent contours of their bodies. At the same time the midriffs shrunk to suffocation. A dress succeeded if it made men’s eyes ogle hungrily in this innovative super sex-market. The dancers occupied a tiny floor, unlighted, so that they became silhouetted bodies without faces and the most un-athletic man could be drawn out to try the improvisation called High-life. The full effect of her corruption by the city is to the full or entire extent realized when the villagers of Ogabu ridicule her values and her standards: The women fixed their eyes on the painted eyebrows and one child called out in Ibo “Mama! Her lips are running blood!… Jagua heard another woman say, “She walks as if her bottom will drop off. I cannot perceive what the girl has become Jagua’s abandonment to the excesses of city life only leads to her drifting away from unfeigned self-knowledge. She therefore escapes into living momentarily, intensely, desperately, without use for social conventions. But upon realizing that the Tropicana was a mere illusion which she will have to speedily renounce to attain a new life, the big change begins in her life. Jagua thence returns to Ogabu “with new attitudes, and is rewarded with feeling of satisfaction she had been longing for all her life. Her pregnancy gratifies this longing. And for this, Jagua’s joy is boundless.” Quite significantly the act that led to her conception takes place in the countryside in “a shed by the river, a stone’s throw from the shrine.” She is therefore seen reuniting with the land, her roots, which she had so long rejected and fled from.
Poverty and squalor are both a cause and an effect of the troubles of the city. Just a glimpse of the house of Aina’s mother tells so much: It had looked drab sufficient in the sun, but now the darkness gave it a quality of musty poverty. The only light was from a street lamp a heap of fifty yards away, even though the two houses that flanked it somewhat glittered with their own lights Predictably the internal conditions are worse off: He could not see his way forward. With hands outstretched he groped towards what might be a door. His hand caught versus something and he ducked…Then he realized that the entire floor was covered with sleeping bodies. He was covered with sleeping bodies. He was in a kind of bed less open dormitory. Everyone but the old woman slept on the floor. Old, young, lovers, enemies, fathers, mothers, they all shared this hall. From early childhood Aina had listened to talks when it comes to sex, seen bitter quarrels, heard and perhaps seen adults bare their passions shamelessly like animals. Buraimoh Ajikatu is a representative of the underdogs in the stifling economic system of the city. It is ironic that in the midst of such abundance as are to be expected in such stores a clerk in a huge division store could scarcely have sufficient to support himself, his four children and wife. Even he himself found it incomprehensible. He hence regards the city as “an enemy, that keeps raising the prices of it is commodities without increasing his pay; or even when the recompense was increased the prices quickly raced in front therefore worsening the circumstance much more than before. His circumstance is only redressed when he joins a mystery society. Then he receives a salary increase and the much overdue advert with promise of another major one within a month. He now realizes why all along he had been subjected to suppression, being the only non-member. And then: One night the blow fell. . . . They asked him in a matter of fact manner to give them his first-born son. He protested, asked for an substitute sacrifice, and when they would not listen threatened to leave the society. But they told him that he could not leave. There was a way in, but none out–except through death. He was terrified, but adamant. He had told no one of his plight, and that was when he vanished from home. Now that the good things of life were his, he would not go back and tell his wife. All this Sango learnt, and much more besides. For him it had outstanding significance. By uncovering this veil, he had came upon where all the lowspirited people of the city went for sustenance. They in a literal sense sold their souls to the devil In Jagua Nana we are given more perceptivenesses into the lower reaches of Lagos life with very gory details of it is filth and pain: A young woman in the corner of the smelly room seemed to be making a statement which Freddie had interrupted. She begun bawling swear words at the young police constable, who ignored her and kept on writing steadily . . . other constables were deriving some lecherous gratification from the young woman’s behavior. She had a defiant twinkle in her eye, her breath smelled of alcohol and her blouse–one arm of which had been in a good deal of scuffle–slouched over a naked young breast with a dare-devil abandon that could not but be comical. She seemed by her manner to be conscious of the power of her feminity over the males in the khaki uniforms. Freddie stared at this ragged woman who confronted him with the eternal struggle to live, so tragic in the lower reaches of Lagos life. Ekwensi vividly captures the squalor and filth: She stored away the food, then took out her towel and went to the bathroom, but when she knocked a man answered her from inside and she went rather to the lavatory. The same old bucket piled high, the floor messed about, so she could see nowhere to put her silver sandals. It was all done by those wretched children upstairs. Why blame them when their mothers did not recognise any better. Where was the landlord? Where was the Town Council Health Inspector? This Inspector was supposed to come here once in a while and whenever he came he made notes in his black book but not one thing ever happened. She would talk severely to him the next time. The unpleasing side of Lagos life: the flies in the lavatory–big and blue and stubborn–settled on breakfast yam and lunch-time stew (they were invisible in a stew with greens). But Jagua closed her eyes and shut her nostrils with her towel. Ekwensi’s works likewise demonstrate juvenile delinquency. Beatrice is said to be the one who promotes it in the city. For as Bayo reveals, she introduced Suad Zamil to him “and we fell in love. . . . Of course we employed to meet in her room and she was kind to us.” The insidious influence of the city on the young is likewise brought out through Aina the mature teenage prostitute who represents the “mad age” and the mid-teens whose eyes are full of infatuation with life, Aina fuses within her all the evils of the wild life of the city, She contributes most to Sango’s depravity. Her meanness and dishonesty manifested exceptionally in her penchant for shop-lifting she transfers to Sango and uses him in a lot of exploitative and damaging ways therefore depriving him of his cash and standing among him and good influences like Elina. Through Aina and Beatrice we have a clear view of prostitution. Beatrice, the most sensual in the novel came from the Eastern Greens, the city of coal. She became attracted to the city as she herself said by the need for experiencing high life which to her includes cars, servants, high-class food, decent clothes, luxurious living all of which she could only gain as she recognized by attaching herself to an individual who could. Once in the city she becomes immersed in it is ways as well as becomes engaged in advancing it. She herself boasts of her inordinate sexual appetite as “hot stuff that Europeans are crazy about.” But then Gunnings the European with whom she has had three children was not sufficient to satisfy her. She then abandons him for Sango. She flirts indiscriminately with Lajide and Zamil and later allows her flat to be applied as a nest for young lovers like Bayo and Suad Zamil. There is also the pitiful case of Dupeh Mattin who was born and bred in the city with just crucial education and perhaps the firstborn few years of secondary education but yet knowing all regarding western sophistication–make-up, cinema, jazz, and so on. This kind of girl Sango knew would be content to walk her shoes thin in the air-conditioned atmosphere of section stores, to hang with regards to all day in the foyer of hotels with not a penny in her handbag, rather than live in the country and marry Papa’s choice. In Jagua Nana, prostitutes are staged in general as victims of the city drifting along with it. The young prostitutes go to the Tropicana daily expecting something to occur that could put an end to their poverty and starvation. Lagos consequently is where some others are practically strangers in a town where everyone there has come to make fast cash by quicker means. Its bright lights, it is noise, it is suffocation, have in time become her friends. The Tropicana in time becomes for her “a potent, habit-forming brew,” which gives her a ceaseless stock of excitement and gaiety as well as popularity, and money, even though contest inevitably gives rise to among her and her colleagues in their bid to lure and capture customers. Ekwensi likewise discloses crimes and shady deals. Sango’s servant accordingly warns that Bayo whom we already know is involved in the underworld of crime is a bad boy whom one including his master has to be careful of lest he drags you into trouble. But Sango apparently does not heed the counsel and has to pay the aftermaths very dearly. Sango’s room becomes the venue for the execution of Bayo’s highrisk plans. So in the end the C.I.D. raided the apartment and whisked him off. Jagua’s drift into crime also enables us to heighten our cognition of that world in Jagua Nana. Obanla’s ugliness is shrouded by the offices of the highly reputed barristers, engineers, and business men in respectable cloak. In Dennis Odama’s place everything is so dark and mysterious that Jagua had to spend numerous time before she could accustom her eyes to it is darkness. All its’ inhabitants pass time waiting for the night and keeping always on the alert for the police siren, upon hearing which they would swiftly climb into their hiding places. For Dennis, crime has become the only way to earn a living in a cruel city. As he states when dismissing the possibleness of getting engaged as a clerk: …I already undertake to find work. Dem ask me to fetch bribe money. I give one man ten pound, and he chop de cash and he no fin’ work for me. How I go do? .I mus’ chop. Myself and de taxi-man who die, sometime we kin make one hundred pound by Saturday. Sometime we don’ see anythin’. But we live happy. . . . We never look cash in de face, an’ say ‘dis cash is too much.’ We jus’ spen’, to get anythin’ we want. Anythin’. So why I worry? De day dat de policeman catch we, we go. Is all the same, whedder we live in cell or outside de cell. Ekwensi likewise confronts his society with it is social injustices and immoralities. This includes housing troubles allied with the high-handedness and almost inhuman attitude of it is landlords, and the fraudulent means by which the rich keep improving themselves at the expense of the poor. For instance when tenants are thrown out of their lodgings they become rich meat, as was the case for Sango, for the remorseless exploiters: the housing agents, the pimps, and liars who receive cash under untrue pretenses. Zamil, the Lebanese, a carefree, wealthy financier who keeps tossing his cash to bait beautiful women is one of those so-called alien investors who come into African cities with promises of bringing in industrialization but who only succeed in edging the little African traders out of business. They could even advertize misery further by taking a whole compound and paying it is rent for five years in advance while ten Africans would squeeze into one musty, squalid, and slummy room. Lajide, a local landlord alternatively chooses foreigners as they are more than willing and capable to offer him “five thousand pounds cash…for a tenancy of five years.” He is a frivolous spender when in the company of gorgeous women but oftentimes stingy and cruel to men. He has no scruples when it comes to acquiring more money. He buys stolen military vehicles at scaled down rates and then sells them later at a high earnings part of which he would then use to influence the law in his favor. Because of his callousness to the less fortunate, Sango regards him as his “one great obstacle in the city.” In Survive the Peace Ekwensi moves on to examining the social effects of the Nigerian Civil War which was fought to prevent the Ibo’s undertake to breakaway from the federation to form the Republic of Biafra in 1967 to 1968. With the end of the war the devastation was of such dimension that it was almost unbelievable that the war itself had ended. Families, tribes, and cultures have all disintegrated. Deaths have become so mutual that mourning becomes pointless. Wives get so entrenched in harlotry that they couldn’t be redeemed whilst husbands shirk their marital responsibilities thence causing a popular disruption of family life. The venture required to survive the peace becomes more outstanding than that required to survive the war. Essential commodities become either rare or prohibitively priced. A chicken which cost fifteen shillings before was now going for twenty pounds. Life here is marked by suffering. Whilst a great deal of are starving to death others keep fearing the possible onslaught from prowling bands of armed bandits who loot and kill. It is in truth ironical that in the midst of peace a great deal of keep dying and girls are being raped. The war has not changed anything for it is both stupid and pointless, being the product of cursed power-seekers who whilst protecting themselves send others to be killed. For according to Pa Ukoha: When a good deal of black men begin to rule they become too greedy. They eat and fill their stomachs and the stomachs of their brothers. That is not sufficient for them. They proceed till their throats are filled. And that too is not enough. They have feed in their stomachs and in their throats and they go on till their mouths are full and then carry on to fill their bags. But no one else outside their families or their tribe must partake of this food. Yet everyone will have to have a part in the food. This is what brings the trouble in Africa. So, I want to rule – so as to have my share. You want to rule, to have your share. Then we get started killing ourselves. God forbid. Ekwensi, in spite of the earlier cited shortcomings has contributed much to the development of African creative writing of recognized artisti value through the wide corpus of works that brought life in the city so much alive with bright evocation of setting along with local color. . References Beier, Ulli ed., Introduction to African Literature (1967); Breitinger, Eckhard, “Literature for Younger Readers and Education in Multicultural Contexts,” in Language and Literature in Multicultural Contexts, edited by Satendra Nandan, Uinveristy of South Pacific, 1983. · , Volume 117: Caribbean and Black African Writers, Gale, 1992. Dictionary of Literary Biography Dathorne, O. R. The Black Mind A History of African Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974. Emenyonu, Ernest, Cyprian Ekwensi. Evans Brothers, 1974. Emenyonu, Ernest, editor. The Essential Ekwensi. Heinemann Educational Books, 1987. Larson, Charles R., The Emergence of African Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1971 Larson, Charles R. The Ordeal of the African Writer. London: Zed Books, 2001. Laurence, . Margaret Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952-1966 (1968). Lindfors, Bernth, ‘Nigerian Satirist’ in ALT5 Palmer, Eustace. The Growth of the African Novel. Studies in African literature. London: Heinemann, 1979.
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A Fun Movie
Still funny after all these years