In Vanguard Uduma Kalu reports on a recent Association of Nigerian Authors conference, with a focus on Toyin Falola's keynote address -- summing up: 100 year-search for national literature, a failure.
Falola apparently concluded:
And surely it also says something that literary imaginations have failed to: "create a powerful mythology for a common Nigerian nationality" -- like maybe that's such an artificial beast that there is no good reason to even bother and try to create a mythology around it.
(Fundamentally, I support all secessionist impulses: freedom for Biafra ! freedom for Tibet ! Catalonia ! Scotland ! etc. etc. Large-scale nationhood -- especially where artificially created (as in much of Africa) -- is way, way overrated (beyond the great benefits of scale it offers).)
Falola apparently concluded:
Literary imagination is yet to create a powerful mythology for a common Nigerian nationality.And:
He accused the writers of failing, for 100 years, to write a national literature. All they have done all this time, he said, is to write from the regional or ethnic perspectives.As someone who finds nationalism the root of much contemporary and historical evil -- and who thinks the concept has been particularly debilitating on the African continent -- I find this to be, by and large, just a good thing. Yes, regional and ethnic perspectives can be equally problematic -- but at least they're smaller scale.
And surely it also says something that literary imaginations have failed to: "create a powerful mythology for a common Nigerian nationality" -- like maybe that's such an artificial beast that there is no good reason to even bother and try to create a mythology around it.
(Fundamentally, I support all secessionist impulses: freedom for Biafra ! freedom for Tibet ! Catalonia ! Scotland ! etc. etc. Large-scale nationhood -- especially where artificially created (as in much of Africa) -- is way, way overrated (beyond the great benefits of scale it offers).)