CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Nigeria is an Anglophone country. The Europeans, who arrived in Nigeria

from Britain, came with their ‘civilization’ that was heralded by many. The

Christian priests and evangelists were sent ahead of the political set. In some cases

they came together but the evangelists were the first to approach the indigenous

with their religion of peace and salvation. As the saying goes, they came with the

cross in one hand and the gun in the other. As the priests moved, the

administrators followed to quell any resistance wherever there was one. They

imposed their government, religion and culture on Nigerians.

Gradually some Nigerians acquired the Western education and fought for

independence which was granted in 1960. Nigeria got independence without

bloodshed unlike Kenyans and South Africans. The reason is that the colonial

administrators did not discover any solid minerals or fertile land for tea, coffee or

any other produce. If they had discovered, for instance, crude oil, the fact that

they were scared away by the thick rain forest, mosquitoes, and malaria would

have been nullified. After all, despite the hostility from the Niger Delta, they are

still in the creeks drilling oil.

One of the most outstanding effects of colonialism on Nigerian lifestyle

and culture had been the evolvement of Nigerian literature. As a result of

colonialism, Nigerian literature moved from oral to written art. Colonialism

introduced western education in the country. Consequently some Nigerians

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acquired the skill to read and write. They were able to read the literature of

different countries and other forms of writing. These influenced the development

of Nigerian literature of the present time. The Nigerian artists sought to record

their stories for others to read instead. They failed to present them to a selected

audience in their own localities. The written stories had a wider audience.

The writers were also able to read what foreign authors wrote about

Nigerians or Africans and wrote their own reactions against such pieces of writing.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is said to be a reaction against Joyce’ Cary’s

Mister Johnson. Achebe was able to react, to present his own view because he

could read and write. This means that colonialism had a positive impact on

Nigerian literature. Other implication of colonialism on Nigerian literature is that

it provided early Nigerian writers with themes for their works especially in prose

and poetry. They include colonial themes, like the culture clash, tradition or

modernity, oppression, subjugation and many others.

Western influence began to affect Nigerian literature as early as the eighth

century AD when Arabic ideas and culture were introduced to Africa. Later in the

fourteenth century, written and spoken Arabic flourished in Northern Nigeria and

by the seventeenth century, some Hausa literature had been translated into Arabic.

Christian missionaries accelerated the import of western education into Nigeria

during the nineteenth century. Some native black Moslems reacted to the

incursion of colonialists with protests in poetry. Aliyudansidi, for example,

utilized the oral literature tradition to write poetic protests against the missionaries.

However, other Yoruba authors, such as D. O Fagunwa and Isaac Delano, wrote
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novels promoting the missionaries and teaching the Christian religion. Delano

wrote novels promoting the missionaries and teaching the Christian religion.

Although Fagunwa and Delano offered Christian instruction and preached

acceptance of western ideas both relied heavily upon their ancestral folktales in

creative writing.

Both the historians and the artist need to carry out a research to

authenticate their documentation. The historians need a more thorough and

exhaustive research to ensure accuracy. The creative artists need a research to

ensure that he gets the correct account of the particular incident she or he wants to

depict in his or her work. Here the research is not usually comprehensive. In most

cases, he gets his material from the historian’s document and presents it with

additional information from his imagination to make his work interesting.

Sometimes fiction and falsehood are used interchangeable. Although some

falsehoods are imaginary tales, they are told for selfish reasons. Generally fiction

which is an imaginary art is produced for the benefit of the audience, the society.

The fiction writer’s motive is to inform, to educate and to entertain. Fiction differs

from history because history has nothing to do with imagination. The historian is

a documentarian. So, he deals with raw facts, un-distilled, undiluted. Creative

writers present these facts from their perspectives, distilled, filled with ingredients

added to make a pleasurable reading.

In 1930 in various parts of Nigeria novels begin to develop. It centered

upon fantastic, magical characters of humans and fairies. Hausa novels were called

non-realistic novels, based on folktales. The ‘mysterious’ characters transmuted

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into other beings; fairies, animals and humans. All conversed among one another

of Muhammad Bell’s fantasy novel Gandoki is a reduction of Hausa oral tradition

to written literature. In the 1930’s, Igbo land also saw a growth in the number of

novelists who expressed the dedication of their people for the Christian

missionaries. Racism was common theme in early Nigerian literature. Africans as

savages, uncivilized, native and brutal is portrayed advertently or inadvertently in

their novels. Most of the novels were inspired by their experiences in Africa. As a

creative output, each writer records his own perspective of the encounter between

Africans and the west.

Before the written tradition developed in Nigeria, a Nigerian, an ex-slave,

OlaudahIquiano had published a book in Europe. He became the first African to

write a literary work in English language. The novel titled the interesting narrative

of the life of OlaudahIquiano, The African: Written by Himself was published in

1789, marked a significant point in the development of Nigerian literature. The

novel contains an account of how Iquiano was kidnapped as a boy of 12 from his

village of Essaka, near Benin and sold to a white slave trader. He recounts how he

eventually got his freedom. The novel is presented in the first person point of

view. He states clearly in the novel that he is an African and that the story was

written by him.

He describes with nostalgia his African home. The novel is divided into

three sections. In the first section, he gives an account of his country and the way

he was sold into slavery. The second section is an account of his various

adventures and his personal achievements. Finally the last section presents his
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involvement in the anti-slave movement and his attempt to get the British

government to develop other forms of trade in Africa. In this brief description

above, one would be inclined to think that this is an autobiography but it is not.

He may have presented a personal account but this is imaginatively presented and

it cleared a path and led the way for not just Nigerian literature but laid the

foundation for the contemporary protest literature in Africa.

The real indigenous Nigerian literature in English was pioneered by Amos

Tutuola. His work, The Palm-wine Drunkard is famous enough to be the first

Nigerian novel, having been published in 1952. This novel is seen as a link in the

transition of Nigerian literature from vernacular to English language and to the

western literary tradition. It preceded Cyprian, Ekwensi’s People of the City

which is regarded as his first novel though he started earlier. The original title of

Tutuola’s novel was The Palm-wine Drunkard and His Dead Palm Wine Tapster

in the Dead’s Town.

The novel is presented in an episodic plot technique but the loose episodes

are bound together by the quest motif which is central to the novel. In it, the palm

wine drunkard losses his tapster and because he could not live without drinking

palm wine, he goes to the land of the dead in search of the tapster and to bring him

back to earth to continue tapping wine for him. On reaching the land of the dead,

he is told that once someone has been certified dead in the land of the living, the

person cannot be resurrected. However, he is compensated. His tapster gives him

a magical present that would help him cope without him when he gets back.
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The novelist draws extensively from the story telling, myth, legend and

other forms of Yoruba and oral traditions. The major critique of the novel is on

the language. The story is presented in a language and that could be called a

transliteration of the story-teller presentation in Yoruba. Perhaps like Coleridge in

“Kubla Khan”, Tutuola recorded his story as the inspiration came to him. His

proficiency in English language is very low and this could be attributed to the

death of his father that made him drop out of school in the primary level.

However, this shortcoming could be over-looked given the manner in which he

captures the English language spoken by the ordinary people in his community. In

spite of this apparent flaw, the novel was a huge success. It brought him to the

limelight and instantly to international fame. He followed it with the publication

of other novels like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1952), Simbi and the Satyr of

the Dark Jungle(1955), Ajaiye and His Inherited Poverty (1968). The Brave

African Huntress (1958), The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town (1981).

CyprainEkwensi’sPeople of the City (1954) was regarded as the first West

African novel in modern English. His first creative work was a collection of short

stories Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales published in 1947 and The Leopard

Claw also in 1947. In 1948, he published his first pamphlet in the Onitsha Market

literature tradition. His other works include The Passport of MallamIlla (1960),

Jagua Nana (1961), Burning Grass (1962) and many others. He has written about

twenty six novels and novella and could be said to be the most prolific novelist in

Nigeria.
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Interestingly, CrprianEkwensi studied forestry and pharmacy. He later

studied broadcasting. He worked and retired with the media where he rose to the

rank of the Federal Director of Information in 1961. This does not mean that he

did not practice his original profession but he seemed to have been involved in a

lot of professions and excelled in all. He was a teacher, journalist, pharmacist,

diplomat, businessman, company director, public relations consultant and writer.

His most controversial novel was Jagua Nana which has been the only

novel that was debated upon by Nigerians in the house of parliament. This was

when a foreign company’s proposal to adapt the novel for the celluloid was

stopped. The novel uses the heroine, Jagua Nana, a prostitute to satirize the

Nigerian society especially politics. Jagua is an Igbo lady who abandons her

husband in Enugu, goes to Lagos and becomes a superlative prostitute. Through

her profession, she gets involved with all sorts of men from the top civil servants

or politicians to rouges and armed robbers. In her encounter with these men,

Ekwensi explores the theme of corruption in the Nigerian Economic and socio-

political system. The political story in the novel is that of exploitation of the

people, fraudulent abuse of power and reckless embezzlement of public money.

Nigerian writers of English expression are versatile and sophisticated.

Popular writers show expert competence in the three genres of literature. These

writers in the post-independence era are often divided into three broad generations

in terms of their emergence, thematic concerns and stylistic predilection. The first

generation were those who wrote in the period immediately before or after

independence in 1960. These include those who provided counter-discourses to

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colonialist representation of Nigerians and Africans in texts such as Joyce Cary’s

Mister Johnson and African witch, Rider Haggard’s She, King Solomon’s Mines

and Allan Quartestmain and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and so on.

These writers focussed on themes of culture alterity, reception, urban

versus rural life and encounters between the indigenous and imported cultures of

Nigeria and Europe while calling for an end to colonial rule. The cultural agenda

of these writers which found expression in the Negritude Movement led to their

adopting an overtly romantic and often uncritical view of ambiguous

contradictions and contraries of the pre-colonial societies of Nigeria. Chinua

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Ekwensi’sPeople of the City and

Jagua Nana and T. M. Aluko’sOne Man One Wife belong to this group. With the

departure of the colonists, Nigerian writers turned inwards, raising questions on

issues of governance and corruption among the indigenous politicians who took

over. This period witnesses the publication of highly critical novels like Chinua

Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People and Wole Soyinka’s The

InterpretersSeason of Anomy, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialist. In terms

of language the literature of this period are highly individualistic and stylised and

they are tending towards the elitist and of the language spectrum.

The critical tone of the literature of the first generation of Nigerian writers

would be sustained by the writers of second generation who entered the literary

map in the mid 1970s to late 1980s. These writers credited with initiating an

alternative tradition in terms of their adopted themes and style wrote socially-

relevant, highly critical literature in highly accessible, people oriented language.

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Ola Rotmi, Femi Osofisan, Wale Ogungemi, Bode Sowande, Tunde Fatunde, Olu

Obafemi, Femi Fatoba, NiyiOsundare, OdiaOfemiun, FunsoAiyejina,

TanureOjaide and Festus Iyayi and Eddie Irob etc. were members of this

generation writers. The point on the relative accessibility of the language of this

generation of writers can be overstated in certain cases given the linguistic density

of the writers mostly the poets in this group. The latter writings of NiyiOsundare

and OdiaOfeimun are good examples to it.

The mid 1990s to the present is the era of the third generation who grew

and started writing in the period of the structural and economic disjunctions that

characterised military rule. The pressure exerted by the seemingly unending crises

in various sectors of economy, labour crisis, electoral crises, mass unemployment,

decayed infrastructures, constant closure of schools, lecturer’s strike, police

brutality and military brutality –constitute as themes of the writings of this

generation of writers. There is a lot of experimentation, both thematic and

stylistic, in much of these writings. The dearth of publishing avenues which has

been identified as impairing the quality of work produced in this period has never

dampened the enthusiasm of the writers who continue to garner accolades against

all odds.

Some of the more prominent members of this community of writers are

Akin Adesokan (Roots in the Sky), Maik Nwosu (Invisible Chapters), Helon

Habila (Waiting for An Angel and Measuring Time), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

(Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun), Sefi Attah (Everything Good will

Come and Swallow), Adimora – Akachi Ezeigbo (House of Symbols), Biyi-

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Bandele (The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams, The Man who Came in

from the Back of Beyond, Burma Boy), Zainab Alkali (Stillborn), Akeem Lasisi

(Iremoje: Ritual Poetry for Ken Saro-wiwa), Toyin Adewale – Gabriel (Naked

Testimonies), Lola Soneyin-Soyinka (All the While I was Sitting on An Egg),

OgagaIfowodo (Mandilaand Oil Lamp), Remi-Raji (Web of Remembrance: A

Harvest of Laughters) Ahmed Yerima (Hard Ground and Yemoja) are among the

others.

In recent years Nigerian Writers of the third generation have done well for

themselves winning some of the most prestigious literary prizes available in the

literary world. Helon Habila’s Prison Story and Waiting for an Angel, and Segun

Afolabi’s Monday Morning have won the Caine Prize for writing in Africa. E. C.

Osondu’s Waiting won the 2009 edition of the prize, making him the third

Nigerian to win in ten years since the prize was instituted. Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichi has, like Habila, won the Commonwealth prize for Literature as well as the

Orange prize for her novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun.

Chimamanda NgoziAdichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu,

Nigeria, as the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James

Nwoye Adiche. Though the family’s ancestral home town is Abba in Amambra

state, Adichie grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly occupied by the Nigerian

writer Chinua Achebe. Chimaman Adichie’s father worked at the University of

Nigeria located in Nsukka. He was Nigeria’s first Professor of Statistics, and later

became Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University. Her mother was the first

female Registrar at the same institution.

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Adichie completed her secondary education at the University’s school,

receiving several academic prizes. She went on to study medicine and pharmacy

at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period she edited the

Compass, a magazine run by the University’s catholic medical students.

At the age of nineteen, Adichie left for the United States. She gained a

scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two

years, and she went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science

at Eastern Connecticut State University in Connecticut. She stayed with her sister

Ifeoma, who runs a medical practice close to the University. Adichie graduated

and then completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins

University, Baltimore. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts Degree in African

studies from Yale University. Adichie was a Hodder fellow at Princeton

University during the 2005-06 academic years. In 2008 she was awarded a Mac

Arthur Fellowship. She has also been awarded a 2011-12 fellowship by the

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study in Harvard University.

Adichie published a collection of poems Decisions in 1997, and a play For

Love of Biafra in 1998. She was shortlisted in 2002 for the Caine Prize for her

short story You inAmerica. In 2002, her story That Harmattan Morning was

selected a joint winner of the BBC short story awards, and she also won the O

Henry Prize for American Embassy. She also won the David [Link]

International short story prize 2002 and 2007 Beyond Margins Award for her short

story Half of a Yellow Sun.

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Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus published in 2003 received a general

acclaim. It is set in Nigeria against the background of the late 1990s political

turmoil. The story centres on Kambili Achike, a fifteen year old school girl, and

her family. Kambili’s father, Eugene is a complex character. He is a devout

catholic and a political activist, he also rules his household with a heavy hand.

The narrative is told from the perspective of young Kambili. Kambili’s brother

Jaja defends his father’s authoritarian attitude. Alternative models are provided by

their more liberal aunt Ifeoma and their Igbo traditionalist grandfather, whom

Eugene dismisses as a ‘heathen’. Family, religion, politics and tolerance thus

appear to be the central themes of an outstanding novel which has already received

considerable critical attention.

Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-

lived nation of Biafra, is set before and during the Biafran War. It is like one of

her short stories published in late 2006. Anticipated by both critics and avid

readers of African literature at the time of its release, the book rapidly became one

of the UK’s best selling works of fiction when it was featured on Richard and

Judy’s Book Club on channel 4. It has subsequently earned several prestigious

literary awards, among which is the Orange Broadband prize for fiction in 2007.

Half of a Yellow Sun, which is set before and during the Biafran War, is

told from the perspectives of three different characters. At first it is told from the

perspective of Ugwu, a teenage boy who, at the beginning of the narrative, arrives

in the University town of Nsukka, in south eastern Nigeria, to work as a houseboy

for Odenigbo, a mathematician who lectures at the local University. Secondly it is

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told from the perspective of Olanna, a rich and educated young woman who

becomes Odenigbo’s wife. Finally it is told from the perspective of Richard, a

white Englishman who is obsessed with the roped pots of Igbo-Ukwu art and falls

in love with Olanna’s less attractive twin sister Kainene. The novel raises political

questions as well as many challenging gender, race and class related issues, but it

also provides a sensitive portrayal of the characters and of their relationships with

each other. While Adichie does not shy away from depicting the devastating

effects of the Biafran conflict, she also shows her reader that people not only die,

but also live, love and dream, in times of war. This novel was awarded the 2007

Orange Prize for Fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun has also been adapted into a film of

the same title directed by BiyiBandele, starring Academy Award nominee

Chiwetel Ejiofor and BAFTA Award winner Thandie Newton and was released in

2014.

Adichie’s third book is The Thing around Your Neck published in 2009. It

is a collection of short stories. In 2010 she was listed among the authors of The

New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Adichie’s story, Ceiling, was included

in the 2011 edition of The Best American short stories. In 2013 she published her

third novel, Americanah which was selected by the New York Times as one of the

Top Ten Best Books of 2013. In April 2014 she was named as one among thirty

nine writers aged fewer than forty in the Hay festival and Rainbow Book Club

project celebrating Port Harcourt UNESCO World Book Capital 2014. Adichie

has also delivered lectures on different topics. She spoke on “The Ranger of a

Single Story” for TED in 2009. On March 15, 2012 she delivered the ‘Connecting

Cultures’ Commonwealth Lecture at the Guild Hall, London. Adichie also spoke
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on being a feminist for TED Euston in December 2012, with her speech entitled,

“We should all be feminists”.

This project titled “A Study of Conflicts in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s

Purple Hibiscus” will critically analyse the conflicts and represent the stylistics

used by the author in the novel taken for study. The first chapter “Introduction”

introduces Nigerian literature, the author and the novel taken up for study. It also

mentions the chapter divisions. The second chapter is “Domestic Conflicts”. This

chapter will critically analyse the domestic conflict in the novel Purple Hibiscus.

The next chapter is “Style and Technique”. It will concentrate on the style and

techniques used by the author in representing conflicts in Purple Hibiscus. The

fourth chapter is “Struggle for identity”, which shows that the struggles faced by

Jaja in search of his own identity. The final chapter is ‘Summation’. This chapter

will sum up the arguments and present all the findings made in previous chapters.

The methodology used in this dissertation is in accordance with the MLA

Handbook (Eighth Edition).