Abstract
This article traces the early careers of Nigerian writers educated in the 1950s at University College, Ibadan, through the appearance of their poetry in student magazines and limited-edition collections. Adapting Pascale Casanova’s concept of the literary present, it highlights what these published texts reveal about the position of modernist poetics in the literary system of the day. Ibadan modernism, it contends, emerged through aspiring writers’ dialectical relationship to the colonial university, which mediated to them metropolitan perceptions of the literary present. While the Ibadan writers, along with African and expatriate allies, soon developed their own cultural institutions, the fact that the CIA underwrote the most notable of these institutions — the journal Black Orpheus, the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, and Mbari Publications — suggests the extent to which aesthetic and cultural autonomy is historically negotiated rather than simply achieved.
Keywords
Comparatively young by Yoruba standards, the hill city of Ibadan swelled from a war camp into a major population centre in the nineteenth century, after the fall of the Old Oyo empire to the north brought an influx of refugees. By the year 1900, Ibadan’s inhabitants “numbered in [the] hundreds of thousands”, making Ibadan the largest city in Yorubaland and possibly in sub-Saharan Africa (Lloyd, 1967: 3). After the Second World War, Ibadan became both the headquarters of the newly formed Western Province and the site of Nigeria’s first university, University College, Ibadan (UCI). Among the university’s first entering class was Chinua Achebe, who arrived in October 1948 with a full scholarship to the medical school. In the fall of 1956, a recent graduate of the University of Leeds, Martin Banham, came to UCI as a lecturer in English, the same year that a Nigerian undergraduate named J. P. Clark began his studies in English. 1 Banham’s idea to start a student literary magazine along the lines of the University of Leeds Poetry & Audience eventually led to a meeting of students. “And it was unanimous that J. P. would edit it”, according to Abiola Irele, who succeeded Clark as editor in the magazine’s second and third years (Wren, 1991: 115). Banham provided some start-up money, the English Department contributed its typewriter, and The Horn commenced publication in January 1958 (Stevenson, 1975: 6). Initially sold for two pence per copy, The Horn cost three pence from the fourth issue on and enjoyed a circulation of about ninety copies by its third year, when it first published poems by recent UCI graduates Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka (Banham, 1960a: 6). From this student-run publication, Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka emerged as three of the most important figures in twentieth-century African poetry, even as they helped to make Ibadan well known for its vibrant inter-arts scene.
Postwar Ibadan is far from the only city in which a university served as incubator for a major literary movement. Under pressure from nationalist movements across the British colonies and shifting domestic politics during the 1940s, the British government adopted a policy of “welfare colonialism”. The Colonial Development and Welfare Acts (1940; 1945) funded the construction of UCI, the University College of the Gold Coast in Legon, Ghana, and the University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, all of which opened in 1948 and remained closely tied to the University of London until becoming independent universities in the early 1960s. In the same period, the formation of the British welfare state enabled children across the UK, including those from working-class families, to receive free secondary education and hence a chance to go to university. Throughout the 1950s, then, first-generation university students arrived on campuses across Britain and the British Empire, including Tony Harrison in northern England, Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland, Derek Walcott in Jamaica, and Kofi Awoonor (then known as George Awoonor-Williams) in Ghana. The archive of postwar poets’ early appearances in print shows students at each of these sites seeking to overcome their “provincial” status, to attune their literary work to what they perceived to be the dominant present-day modes of writing while themselves feeling removed, due to geographic and social location, from those dominant modes.
We tend to harness our sense of a recent poem’s success to our sense of an up-to-date idiom, dismissing poems that sound too much like older models as pastiche or passé. Literary centres compete, in Pascale Casanova’s terms, for the “power to claim […] the legitimate present of literature”, to serve as “the Greenwich meridian, the source of literary time” (2007: 90). 2 It is this “literary Greenwich meridian” that “makes it possible […] to dismiss a work as anachronism or to label it ‘provincial’” (Casanova, 2007: 90). In this way, “province” comes to connote not only the “spatial” distance of a city like Ibadan from London, but also a “temporal” distance from a perceived literary present (Casanova, 2007: 94). This temporal sense of the provincial as what lags behind the literary present is, of course, a perception, but a perception with real consequences: editors tend to print — and critics to praise — literature that they find innovative, though not so innovative that it’s incomprehensible.
Poets in Ibadan and other “provincial” centres confronted a similar structural problem: how to transform the outdated idiom of the poetry that they studied in school and university into the up-to-date idiom of new poetry while inflecting that poetry with their own non-metropolitan experiences. At the same time, poets who grew up speaking a language other than English or a nonstandard variant of English grappled with the colonial and class connotations of choosing to write in standard English in the first place. Although not devoid of precursors, poets from “provincial” regions faced the widespread assumption that their regions had perilously thin traditions of poetry, consisting in West Africa, for instance, of a few versifying “pioneer poets” — even if behind these lay much longer histories of poetry, performance, and song in languages other than English. 3 Innovative young writers thus had to overcome what Johannes Fabian terms the persistent “allochronism” of anthropological and other academic discourses, which have habitually constructed Africans as the inhabitants of a time other than modernity (1983: 32).
Critical treatments of these poets’ early work usually adopt the lens of an individual writer’s career, looking for signs of roads not taken by that poet or of precocious tendencies that would later mature. Bernth Lindfors’s exploration of Wole Soyinka’s early writings, for instance, reads them for evidence of continuities and developments in Soyinka’s literary personality (Lindfors, 2008: 15–64). What happens, though, if these poets’ early work is treated as evidence of the literary system of their day as well as of their individual development? In this case, it becomes possible both to maintain a vigilance about the dynamics of power — why was it that the most prestigious literary models on offer were imported from England? — and to recognize that university poets were refashioning the literary present held out to them by their education in order to create credible, legitimate idioms for themselves. Martin Banham insists that “the last thing one must do is to look at a few expatriates as the stimulus” for Nigerian literature (Wren, 1991: 33). Still, university teachers with “metropolitan” credentials — a British degree in Ibadan, for Banham — brokered encounters between the metropolitan literary present and aspiring poets that deeply affected these poets, as well as the literary communities that sustained them after graduation. Classroom discussions are lost to history, but the period’s university poetry magazines show young poets wrestling to express their literary inclinations in the idiom of English poetry from previous decades while altering that idiom, shedding their aesthetic “provinciality” without abandoning their “provincial” origins.
For Nigerian poets during the last years of colonial rule and early years of independence, coming to terms with the literary Greenwich meridian was not purely a matter of finding a language or style, but also of positioning themselves in relation to the powerful institutions of the “London-Oxbridge nexus” (Crawford, 2000: 13). London functioned, after all, not only as the political capital of the British Empire and the ultimate academic authority behind Ibadan’s university, but also as the publishing capital of the anglophone literary world. Casanova notes that “[t]he external forces exerted upon the least endowed literary spaces today” — those, like 1950s Nigeria, thought to lack cultural traditions — “assume the forms of linguistic domination and economic domination (notably in the form of foreign control over publishing)” (2007: 81). Beginning with Oxford University Press in 1949, British-owned publishers including Cambridge University Press, Heinemann, and Longman established outposts in Ibadan, drawn to West Africa by the exponential growth of its lucrative educational market. With the founding of Ibadan University Press in 1951 and Onibonoje Press & Book Industries Ltd in 1958, however, the city also became the headquarters for Nigerian publishing schemes (Van der Vlies, 2010: 316).
The most significant Ibadan-based publisher for the history of African literature, Mbari Publications, grew out of the journal Black Orpheus and the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, discussed below. During the early 1960s, this short-lived publishing house issued the first books by Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka alongside translations of francophone poetry and work by South African writers critical of apartheid. While anchored in West Africa, the Mbari list promoted writers from across the continent and circulated to British and North American readers — for several young African writers a crucial prelude to being published in London and New York. As an indigenous rival of London-based firms, albeit one launched by German-born émigré, Ulli Beier, Mbari made a remarkable attempt to achieve autonomy from both commercial and colonial values, joining a modernist dream of aesthetic autonomy with a postcolonial desire for cultural and political autonomy. That this independent stance did not hurt the Mbari writers’ prospects with editors in London is likely both a credit to those editors and continuing evidence of the fascination with “the postcolonial exotic” that had arguably led Faber to publish Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952 (Huggan, 2001; Low, 2011: 1–25). Inclusion in metropolitan publishers’ lists signalled that these writers had achieved the status of contributors, even if “exotic” contributors, to the literary present of the English language.
Ibadan modernism emerged, then, through the dialectical relationship of aspiring writers to the university. While UCI mediated literary modernity to these writers, they came into a sense of themselves as modern African poets and playwrights by developing their own cultural institutions. Even as Casanova highlights the important role of “consecrating authorities” in literary capitals like London, these young writers’ route to metropolitan consecration reveals weaknesses in Casanova’s model of the literary system, which relies on an opposition between “‘national’ writers (who embody a national or popular definition of literature) and ‘international’ writers (who uphold an autonomous conception of literature)” (Casanova, 2007: 109; 108). For Casanova, “exile is almost synonymous with autonomy” (2007: 110). Yet far from forsaking Nigeria in order to achieve international recognition, the Mbari writers remained both literary modernists and cultural nationalists. Here Mbari proved decisive as an institution that allowed Nigerian writers, in concert with other artists, intellectuals, and performers, to generate a sense of the cultural and literary present distinct from that of London but connected to it through British-trained academics and metropolitan publishers’ representatives in Ibadan. For a few brief years, Mbari enabled these writers to participate simultaneously in the Nigerian cultural economy and the world literary system in such a way as to entangle rather than oppose the categories of the national and the international.
The historical irony is that as writers in Nigeria sought to escape the orbit of the colonial university, the local publication venues to which they turned were surreptitiously funded by another global power: the United States. Both Black Orpheus and Mbari Publications unwittingly received substantial monies from the Central Intelligence Agency through grants from the Farfield Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which has been described as the “centrepiece” of the CIA’s “secret programme of cultural propaganda in western Europe” (Saunders, 2000: 109). Whatever autonomy Mbari enjoyed was at least partly enabled by an American agency that apparently saw such “freedom” as preferable to African acceptance of Soviet support. Whether or not this secret assistance to cultural producers in Africa necessarily furthered American objectives is a question to which we will return. What is certain is that the Mbari writers found ways to make compelling art amidst fraught circumstances — and in so doing to achieve a contingent, relative autonomy.
“We cannot do more than imitate”: From The Horn to Black Orpheus
When Martin Banham and J. P. Clark arrived at UCI in 1956, the university had occupied its permanent site in northern Ibadan for only four years. While nearly all the students were Nigerian, the academic staff was comprised overwhelmingly of expatriates, most of them British. 4 Under “the Scheme of Special Relationship”, the University of London awarded degrees to the students of UCI until it became the independent University of Ibadan (UI) in 1962 (UCI, 1956: 52). 5 The UCI curriculum resembled that taught in London, albeit with latitude for “local conditions” (Tamuno, 1973: 29). The English syllabus, dubbed “Spenser to Spender” by the Ibadan students, included some twentieth-century literature from outside England, such as Yeats’s poetry and Synge’s plays, but remained limited by what London would examine (Irele, 1991: xvi). As Molly Mahood, Head of the English Department from 1954 to 1963, has reported, “poetry was quite important and quite central in those days, in part because of the London system”, and in part because Mahood thought poetry to be crucial (Wren, 1991: 26). No wonder, then, that when Clark began to publish in The Horn, his poetry bore traces of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and other poets from the later end of the syllabus.
Reviewing Nigerian Student Verse, an anthology of poems from The Horn assembled by Martin Banham and published by Ibadan University Press in 1960, Abiola Irele wrote that because English “remains for us something of a second language, if not less, […] we cannot do more than imitate the poems and writers we have read” (1960: 7). The limitation of early postwar African poetry was not so much, though, that poets imitated what they read as that most of them had little sense of where the writers they had read stood in literary time à la London — and thus little control of how they sounded to other readers. Writing in the same issue of The Horn, Wole Soyinka diagnosed exactly this difficulty. Soyinka, who had returned from England the previous year with a Rockefeller grant to study drama in West Africa, wrote that the “trouble” with much of anglophone West African poetry “lay in the [poets’] inability to place the models in their own setting. Most of these works would be discredited, and already were discredited in their own countries, but how were our would-be writers to know?” (1960: 10). Soyinka’s fictionalized memoir, Ibadan, portrays his own first ventures into poetry writing, as a secondary school student with little sense of English literary temporality. Inspired by William Blake’s “Jerusalem”, Soyinka’s avatar Maren transforms Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?” into “Is Africa a land so base / Are we born into servitude […]?” without comprehending why his English teacher despairs of “the lines he had crafted with such care” (Soyinka, 1994: 154–5). The reader is left to realize not only that the teacher finds infelicitous the insertion of nationalist sentiment into the mould of Blake’s prosody, but also that Maren lacks a sense of his model’s current stature in its “home” context. In The Sacred Wood, an influential text in mid-century universities, T. S. Eliot had censured Blake’s “eccentricity”, a word Arnold had earlier associated with “provincialism”; contrasting Blake unfavourably with Dante, Eliot judged Blake too estranged from a central European tradition (Eliot, 1920: 143; Arnold, 1962: 241). Although poets as varied as Allen Ginsberg and Geoffrey Hill would begin to resuscitate Blake in their own work, Maren does not yet know that to mimic Blake so directly is to be seen as behind-the-times, provincial.
It was not according to some immutable standard of formality or contemporaneity, then, that student poets at UCI had difficulty, as W. H. Stevenson writes, “recognizing what is formal and what is colloquial, what is contemporary and what is old-fashioned”, but according to the Greenwich meridian of poetry consecrated by the London literary world and honoured by the sensibilities of British-trained academics (1975: 10). Dapo Adelugba, who became a professor of Theatre Arts at UI, recalled in the late 1970s that “we imitated a certain kind of […] outdated […] form” due to the contents of the syllabus that “we were exposed to” (1984: 65). One of Adelugba’s undergraduate poems, “Enthralled”, shows how such naïveté regarding the literary Greenwich meridian could play out in The Horn:
Yet still I see that rocky hill and meadow Whereon my dad and I did ride a sunset yellow, That run, that leap, that laugh: my boyish exuberation Now I remember true; and how my heart did sorrow To see our micro-house from macro height: O child’s vexation! (Adelugba, 1959: 4)
Apart from unusual metrical effects, the initial line of iambic pentameter giving way to one of hexameter and then a line difficult to scan at all, this stanza rubs together diction that most native English speakers would hear as belonging to different time periods: “Whereon […] did ride” and “boyish exuberation” (a word identified by the OED as “rare”) might have been lifted from the nineteenth century, but “my dad” belongs to a more recent colloquial register, “micro-” and “macro” to a similarly recent, but scientific, register. By contrast, J. P. Clark’s poem “Ibadan” consistently deploys the techniques of early Pound: concision, enjambment, and a memorable image:
Ibadan, running splash of rust and gold—flung and scattered among seven hills like broken china in the sun. (Clark, 1962: 31)
Here the “splash of rust / and gold” evokes the play of light over Ibadan’s rusty corrugated roofs at one level, the entropy and endurance of the city at another. The poem itself can be read as “broken / china”, a fragment of verse in a style borrowed from Chinese poems as translated by Pound. Thanks in part to Clark’s knowing handling of a stylistic model with ongoing credibility, his poem manages to be identifiably Imagist without sounding provincially dated.
The first evidence of J. P. Clark’s efforts to chart a poetic path forward by the lights of modernism appeared in The Horn, including his long poem “Ivbie”, to which Irele gave over nearly an entire issue of the little magazine in late 1958. Taxing The Horn’s technical capacities, the poem consists of five sections with running glosses in the right-hand margins after the manner of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, opening:
Is it not late now in the day, The soured man hankers Late, late, altogether late, for his lost infancy (Clark, 1958: 2)
6
Turning our doubled backs upon fate, […]?
Its lines and stanzas varying in length, with occasional rhymes, “Ivbie” exploits the innovations in poetic style that T. S. Eliot made famous through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men”. Clark also follows Eliot’s lead in writing a five-part — in later incarnations, six-part — poem with numerous narrative voices, including the “soured” Nigerian man, a “native guide” for European visitors, Oyin, the mother-creator of Ijaw myth, and a member of the newly literate “white-collar generation”. Snatches of Clark’s language are clearly indebted to Eliot. The Waste Land’s Philomel, “by the barbarous king / So rudely forced”, must lie behind “The dark flesh rudely torn” in “Ivbie”, as Clark’s portrait of “Old Mrs. Gamp, not a coward” resembles Eliot’s of Mrs. Porter and other female characters (Eliot, 1963: 56; Clark, 1959: 29). More importantly, Eliot’s Tiresias provides the precedent for the presiding figure of “Ivbie”’s fourth section, “I Oyin” who has “been through all before”, while Clark’s gloss on “I the white bearded woman / Of night fame saw all” — “I identify the bird here with Oyin” — mimics a footnote to The Waste Land in which Eliot takes the liberty to “associate” certain figures with others (Eliot, 1963: 70–1; Clark, 1959: 30; 31).
Michael Echeruo, Clark’s contemporary at UCI, reports that “Ivbie, when it first appeared, was seen, I suppose rightly, as a variant on The Waste Land or The Hollow Men. At the same time it was clear to his readers that J. P. was doing something new” (Adelugba, 1984: 82). The very title, for instance, translates the indictments of Eliot’s titles into the realm of indigenous practice: an Urhobo word meaning “[t]he wrong done to you without any hope of justice”, it also refers more literally to a “[h]ands-over-head signal and cry by women at time of great loss or wrong” (Clark, 1959: 32; Clark, 1962: 56). Despite being presented in English apart from its title, Clark’s “meditation on the theme of colonial intervention” remains close to the perspective of a village in the poet’s own Niger Delta region (Fraser, 1986: 181). “Ivbie” eschews both the geographical sweep of The Waste Land — “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal” — and its linguistic adventurism, which encompasses Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, and Sanskrit (Eliot, 1963: 67). Eliot approaches the aftermath of the First World War through the scrim of modernist primitivism, alluding to the myths and “vegetation ceremonies” explicated by early anthropology, but Clark draws directly on the lore of the Niger Delta where he grew up (Eliot, 1963: 70). Thus he invokes “Ijaw and Urhobo myth” about the ferrying of the dead as warrant for imagining Bartholomew Diaz and Sir John Hawkins, early European visitors to the African coasts, “wondering-adrift on / A log ferry boat”, agog at the Africans’ metalwork (Clark, 1959: 28).
To the modern anomie portrayed by Eliot and given a colonial inflection in “Ivbie” by a member of the new “white-collar generation” who is comfortable “on the cricket field and / At the office desk”, yet unable to sleep in his “father’s house”, Clark adds concern for what he bluntly terms the “exploitation” of the Delta’s raw resources: “Those unguent gums and oils / Drawn in barrels off to foreign mills” (1959: 31; 29). Clark ventriloquizes his critique of colonial modernity through the indigenous figure of Oyin, “our all-knowing mother”, who addresses “her children”:
Fear him children O fear the stranger That come upon you [sic] When fowls have gone to roost ………………………….…. Fear the poison passed out or spat Straight on our ancestral seat (1959: 30)
Appearing the same year as Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s novel dramatizing the entrance of “the stranger” into Igbo life, “Ivbie” provides a convincing example of what an anglophone African poet could accomplish, even as a precocious undergraduate, with a repertoire of technical possibilities inspired by modernist poetics. 7 In fact, those who attempted in the coming years to model their work mainly on indigenous oral poetics — the later Okigbo, Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, Niyi Osundare — would follow both Clark’s modernist-inspired rejection of traditional English prosody and his poetic foray into political critique.
A year after “Ivbie”, Christopher Okigbo’s first published poem, “Debtor’s Lane”, appeared in The Horn. In the year between the publication of “Ivbie” and “Debtor’s Lane”, Okigbo, who was teaching Latin twenty miles north of Ibadan at Fiditi Grammar School, had become friends with Clark and begun to write poetry. While at least as redolent of Eliot as “Ivbie”, Okigbo’s poem adopts the world-weary tone of “Gerontion” and “The Hollow Men” rather than the collage style of The Waste Land:
It chokes us and we die; Here rather let us lie Youngmen with wrinkled faces Watching The wall clock strike each hour In a dry cellar. (Okigbo, 1959: 6)
The fact that Okigbo lifts this choral voice almost directly from the “Hollow Men”, who “whisper together […] in our dry cellar”, seems to lend credence to some critics’ insistence on Okigbo’s “alienated anglo-modernist” sensibility (Eliot, 1963: 79; Chinweizu et al., 1980: 199).
As a recent biography of Okigbo suggests, however, he had not “alienated” himself from Nigeria by modelling his poetic voice on Eliot’s so much as found in Eliot a voice that articulated his disaffection from bourgeois Lagos. Having finished university in 1956 with a Classics degree and embarked on a fast-paced life in Lagos, where he held a prestigious civil service post and started a business venture, Okigbo suffered a swift reversal in 1958 when his business failed and he was fired from the civil service; his marriage plans were blocked, moreover, by his fiancée’s family (Nwakanma, 2010: 112–8). In this light, the “tenant humped / Beneath the bed” and wondering if he is “to hang up his life / On a rack” stands for the poet himself (Okigbo, 1959: 6). As Ben Obumselu, a close friend of Okigbo who produced a magazine with him at UCI, observes, “Eliot was a particularly appropriate choice for a man in Okigbo’s situation. For he spoke about the emptiness of all worldly striving” (Nwakanma, 2010: 124). While Clark was attracted to Eliot the formal innovator and cultural critic, Okigbo’s Catholic background, classical training, and disillusion with urban life led him to a renewed engagement with the learned Anglo-Catholic laureate of modern anomie. 8 Over the next few years, Eliot’s cross-cultural “collocation” — the term he uses to describe his juxtaposition of fragments from St. Augustine’s Confessions and Buddha’s Fire Sermon — gave Okigbo a model of how to translate his wide reading and rapidly modernizing African context into poetry that resonated with international perceptions of the literary present (Eliot, 1963: 74).
In 1965, Okigbo told an interviewer, “the modern African poet is trying to express […] a complex of values, some of which are indigenous, some of which are exotic, some of which are traditional, some of which are modern” (Pieterse and Duerden, 1972: 144). (In a noteworthy reversal, Okigbo’s “exotic” includes Anglo-American modernism, which had sometimes sought the exotic in Africa.) The crucial bridge between the derivative poems of The Horn and poetry that registered this full “complex of values” was the journal Black Orpheus. Edited mostly within Yorubaland and printed in Ibadan, Black Orpheus introduced Okigbo’s generation to literary influences beyond either the “Old Classics” of Greek and Latin literature or the “New Greats” of European modernism. 9 Moreover, it introduced their own writing to a wider readership.
Ulli Beier, the main instigator of Black Orpheus, was an outsider with a conflicted relationship to the university. Interned for seven years by the British as an “enemy alien” in Palestine, where his German Jewish family had emigrated to escape from the Nazis, Beier became reconciled enough to Britain to study and teach in London (Ogundele, 2003: 11). He had little patience, however, for the colonial chauvinism he met at UCI after accepting a position to teach phonetics there in 1950, and after a year he began to work for the Extramural Studies Department outside of Ibadan. 10 Galvanized by the 1956 World Congress of Negro Artists and Writers held in Paris, Beier and German Africanist Janheinz Jahn decided to start Black Orpheus. The editorial to its inaugural issue, dated September 1957, declared that it was “the primary purpose of this journal to encourage and discuss contemporary African writing” and that, unlike UCI’s curriculum, the journal would include oral literature, Afro-American writing, and translations from non-anglophone African literature (Black Orpheus, 1957: 4). 11
In its first issues, Black Orpheus gave particular prominence to Négritude poetry, printing translations of poems by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and others, along with critical introductions to their work. From early on, the journal also published studies and translations of poetry in indigenous languages, primarily Yoruba, with Beier active in editing books of Yoruba poetry, as well. 12 By introducing its readers to Négritude and Yoruba poetry, Black Orpheus helped to complicate African writers’ identification of the literary present with Anglo-American modernism. Ben Obumselu affirms that along with Eliot and Virgil, whom Okigbo had begun translating at UCI, Senghor became one of “the fixed stars that guided Okigbo’s course in the open seas of poetic practice. […] It was from Senghor that he learnt to score his poems for instrumental accompaniment” (Obumselu, 2006: 62; 68). 13 Translated by “Sangodare Akanji” (a pseudonym for Beier), ten poems from Senghor’s “Chants pour Naett” appeared in the June 1961 issue of Black Orpheus, eight of them scored for West African instruments such as flutes, drums, or balafong (a calabash xylophone). As he reworked and extended “Debtor’s Lane”, Okigbo adopted Senghor’s notational style, marking the new version of the poem “(with drums & ogene)”, (an Igbo gong). He also created a choral structure that identified a voicing — “A”, “B”, or “A & B” — for each section of the poem.
The result appeared in Black Orpheus just two issues after “Chants pour Naett” as “Debtors’ Lane”, the second poem of “Four Canzones (1957-61)” (Okigbo, 1962a: 5–9). Lifting the term “canzone” from Pound, basing the first of these on Virgil, and still echoing Eliot in the second, Okigbo began to fashion a syncretic lyric style recognizably his own as he wrote the final two. With this style, he applied his practice with classical and modernist poetics to more recognizably personal subject matter, including a visit to his hometown of Ojoto around Easter 1960 (Nwakanma, 2010: 142). Embracing rather than disavowing his past, the poet declares near the start of the third “canzone”, “Lament of the Flutes”, “Ride me / memories, astride on firm / saddle, wreathed with white / lilies and roses of blood …”. The poet’s invocation to his “memories” leads into a refrain that signals the hopeful tone of his engagement with his “provincial” upbringing: “Sing to the rustic flute: / Sing a new note …” (Okigbo, 1962a: 7). Calling to mind the new life associated with Easter, the new political order to be inaugurated by national independence, and a new style of writing that brings poetry from Okigbo’s university education into dialogue with “rustic” life, these lines do indeed strike “a new note …”.
“Authentic African subject matter”: Mbari Publications
In the heady months after Nigeria celebrated its independence from Britain in October 1960, the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club was established in Ibadan as a haven for artists, writers, intellectuals, and aficionados of culture (Dingome, 1986: 680; Ogundele, 2003: 104). Located in the district of Ibadan’s Dugbe Market, the city’s commercial center, the Mbari Club sat at the interface between indigenous and modernist styles of capitalism; one American observed that “in Ibadan, market women sell their goods outside of Mbari, while a modern department store towers above the street parallel to it” (Ulansky, 1965: 251). On the club’s premises were a Lebanese restaurant and space for theatre or art exhibitions. “Its major functions”, in the words of a Peace Corps Volunteer who urged his fellow “PCVs” to become members, consisted of “theatrical productions, art exhibits, art schools, and publishing”, as well as library resources — all for a membership fee of one pound (Malloy, 1963: 6). The club’s initial members included Beier, Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka, while Ezekiel (later Es’kia) Mphahlele, the South African writer who acted as director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s African initiatives, presided over the younger hotheads as the club’s first president. Frances Ademola, a Ghanaian broadcaster, publicized her fellow Mbari members through one of the first anthologies of Nigerian writing (Ademola, 1962).
The Mbari name was suggested by Chinua Achebe. The mbari “ceremony” of the Owerri Igbo, as Achebe explains in a later lecture, involved the construction from mud of “a house of images” to the earth goddess, Ala, by members of the community selected by Ala’s priest. Achebe sees in the mbari ceremony a lesson from traditional African aesthetics for modern African writing: “There is no rigid barrier between makers of culture and its consumers. Art belongs to all, and is a ‘function’ of society” (Achebe, 1975: 21; 22). The practice of mbari also testifies, though, to the historicity of even “traditional” aesthetics, since as early as 1904, mbari rituals and structures incorporated representations of British colonial officers. 14 In the words of art historian Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Each Mbari documents a cultural history of conflict resolution particular to its specific location and period of construction” (2005: 66).
Like its namesake, then, the Mbari Club incorporated signs of modernity’s conflicted unfolding into creative work. Unlike a mud-constructed mbari house, however, which could be visited only in person and was left to return to the earth from which it came, the club reached out through its publishing wing to the growing print public sphere in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, as well as to audiences overseas. Mbari Publications had its genesis in Beier’s plan to issue special publications in conjunction with Black Orpheus, beginning early in 1961 with Mphahlele’s The Living and the Dead, and Other Stories. The Mbari Club came into existence after the second of Beier’s planned volumes, Léon Damas’s African Songs of Love, War, Grief, and Abuse, had already gone to press, but Beier “had the imprint changed to M
At the same time, the Mbari list gave special prominence to poetry. Of the twenty-two books published under the Mbari Ibadan imprint between 1961 and 1964, seven were original collections of poetry in English and three of them collections of francophone poetry translated into English, while another six books presented Yoruba-language poetry or songs. 15 As Okigbo’s biographer writes, “the modern artist, especially the published poet, was increasingly considered the embodiment of national cultural genius” (Nwakanma, 2010: 199). Clark and Okigbo, in particular, were first published in book form by Mbari in 1962. Clark’s Poems was a large-format collection of lyrics concluding with “Ivbie”, Okigbo’s Heavensgate a more modest booklet, both saddle-stitched with string. Okigbo’s second booklet, Limits, appeared from Mbari in 1964. In revised form, Heavensgate and Limits later became the first two sections of Labyrinths, the book-length sequence of Okigbo’s work published only after his death. In these works, Clark and Okigbo wedded an interest in the indigenous culture of the Ijaw and Igbo peoples, respectively, with the prestige of print publication and the opportunity to address an English-speaking public of global proportions. In 1965, the Mbari Club’s secretary, Begun Hendrickse, wrote of the small volumes published by Mbari that “orders for these come in from all over the world” (1965: 110). Such interest reflected both the uniqueness of the literary work being produced and the unique position of Mbari as the only African-based publisher bringing out books of anglophone African literature during the early 1960s. 16
By providing a local outlet for publishing with a transnational reach, Mbari Publications encouraged writers to find inspiration for their work in their own contexts rather than in colonial stereotypes about Africa. Clark’s “The Imprisonment of Obatala”, which appears directly after the untitled opening lines of Poems, is an ekphrastic poem “inspired by a batik” — a work of dyed textile — that Susanne Wenger had created to represent the “ritual imprisonment” and release of the Yoruba orisa, Obatala (Clark, 1962: 4; 56). Wenger, whose lino cut images are interleaved throughout Clark’s book, had arrived in Yorubaland from Europe along with Ulli Beier, and even as Nigerian artists and writers were coming to terms with modernist aesthetics disseminated from England, this Austrian-born artist inaugurated a life-long commitment to Yoruba aesthetic, cultural, and religious practices. Clark’s poems also hearken back to the Delta of his childhood. In “Night Rain”, for instance, the poet wakes under “roof thatch” to the sound of water “falling like orange or mango / Fruits” and running across the floor “like ants filing out of the wood” (1962: 11). The protagonist of Okigbo’s Heavensgate, meanwhile, figures himself as a “prodigal” who, having strayed from the traditional Igbo devotion of his ancestors, returns to “mother Idoto”, a stream goddess, and to the connection with an ancient communal spirituality that she represents (Okigbo, 1962b: 5; Okigbo, 1971: 3). Okigbo creates mesmerizing poetic effects, as he had begun to do in “Four Canzones”, through a technical repertoire of free verse, oblique allusions, and parataxis adapted from Eliot and Pound, accompanied here by fellow Mbari member Demas Nwoko’s distinctive drawings.
A later commentator on Mbari’s role as a publisher observes that writers were heartened by Mbari’s “bias for works handling authentic African subject matters” (Yesufu, 1982: 53). Even so, what could count as “authentic” — or as “good” art — remained contested, as can be seen by differing accounts of the club’s relation to the wider Ibadan community. Okigbo’s biographer describes the Mbari Club as “elitist and modernist and centred on the University of Ibadan” (Nwakanma, 2010: 177). Beier’s biographer, meanwhile, sees Beier, at least, as resisting elitism, modernism, and the university by making “room for the non-elite, non-Westernized, non-bourgeoisified artists in [the] M
Leading the attack on “Euromodernism” in African poetry, the authors of Toward the Decolonization of African Literature charge that Clark, Okigbo (at least in his early work), Soyinka, and their acolytes betray a “neocolonialist sensibility” by pursuing modernist difficulty (Chinweizu et al., 1980: 164). 18 These critics’ antipathy towards modernist poetry leads them into a strange nostalgia for what they call the “anglo-romantic” strain of nineteenth-century British verse and its admirers among the Movement poets of 1950s England — as if the explicit imperial sympathies of Tennyson, Kipling, or Larkin were preferable to “Poundian allusiveness and Hopkinsian syntactic jugglery” (Chinweizu and Madubuike, 1980: 199; 175). But an interest in Pound and Hopkins is not necessarily “neocolonialist”, as Irele demonstrates in an introduction to Clark’s work. For Irele, “the new poetic of modernism” sanctioned African writers to rework “the [English] language in order to make it conform to the requirements of an expression centered upon our milieu and experience” (1991: xv; xxii). In this view, modernism’s expanded stylistic repertoire enabled Clark and his compatriots to face current realities in their writing — urbanization, technological modernization, debates over the adoption of European cultural values — rather than hiding behind nineteenth-century decorum.
As I suggested above, however, the Mbari generation’s recourse to modernist idioms has as much to do with staking a claim in the literary present, as they understood it, as with assimilating to the culture of the colonial university or widening their mimetic powers in the face of new realities. Poetry must not be mistaken for natural, unmediated expression. Once we recognize that university-educated poets faced a choice among literary norms rather than the option of conjuring norms ex nihilo, we can view these poets’ use of modernist strategies not as a permanent commitment to Eurocentric cultural politics or literary style but as a pragmatic bid to take part in “the legitimate present of literature” in English (Casanova, 2007: 90). Moreover, as recent work on modernism and primitivism reminds us, European modernism was itself constituted by complex encounters with “Africa”, including Conrad’s months in the Belgian Congo, Picasso’s viewing of African masks in the Trocadero Museum, and Pound’s correspondence with ethnologist Leo Frobenius. In Simon Gikandi’s pointed formulation, “Africa is the unconscious of modernism — its ‘absent cause’” (2005: 49). If, as he argues, modernist artists in Europe failed to follow through on their initial openness to “radical difference” as their art became institutionalized, why shouldn’t African poets make use of techniques initially deployed to critique Western civilization, appropriating the modernists’ ongoing prestige while departing from their ideologically conservative trajectory (Gikandi, 2005: 36)? 19
The fact that the Mbari Club’s promotion of modernist aesthetics in Africa was subtended by CIA funds, funnelled primarily through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Farfield Foundation, may give us pause. 20 Farfield’s executive director, John Thompson, has since reflected that its support for “independent publishing” in Africa “was probably in the long run, indirectly and obscurely, part of American imperialism” (Benson, 1986: 36). More recently, Andrew Rubin has argued that the US consciously manipulated literary practice after the Second World War through cultural institutions including the CCF and the Farfield Foundation in order to create an intellectual environment favourable to American hegemony. According to Rubin, Cold War cultural initiatives underwritten by the British and American governments resulted in “new regimes of consecration — a literary and cultural order through which certain authors became specifically identifiable as world authors in a new kind of international literary system” (2012: 9). If he is right, the perception of a literary present during the 1950s and ’60s cannot be extricated from institutional networks built by CIA funds, networks that promoted certain writers across the globe through periodical publication, radio broadcasts, speaking engagements, and translations of their works while seeking to delegitimize others (Rubin, 2012: 17).
Rubin’s Archives of Authority raises fascinating questions about the ideological and aesthetic effects of the “transnational assemblage of journals” that the CCF sponsored (2012: 56). His conclusions about these effects apply less clearly to African intellectuals, though, than to their American and European counterparts. Rubin makes the provocative claim, for instance, that “Black Orpheus, and later Transition, was a way to regulate, sanitize, and co-opt the literature of decolonization, as it would publish [African and Caribbean] writers on certain subjects and not others” (2012: 60). Rubin’s assertion, however, that Soyinka’s work was promoted through a “coordinated” CCF effort involving Mbari and Transition not only relies on factual errors, but also overstates the degree of control the CCF had over relatively autonomous African cultural institutions (2012: 59). 21 It is crucial to note that neither Black Orpheus nor Transition were conceived, established, or directed by the CCF, unlike CCF initiatives such as the monthly Encounter and the Transcription Centre in London (Benson, 1986: 164; Moore, 2002: 171). The editors of Black Orpheus and Transition operated independently of each other and, with regard to editorial decisions, of the bodies that helped to cover their costs. While it is true that Mphahlele took a leading role in the Mbari Club and served as one of the editors for Black Orpheus circa 1960 to 1964, while also representing the CCF in Africa, he later insisted strenuously that he had been kept in the dark about the CCF’s American backers and ideological aims (Benson, 1986: 163).
Much as the CIA may have liked to produce an African intelligentsia that uniformly welcomed American interests, its cultural initiatives often had the effect of reinforcing the de facto independence of the institutions and individuals it supported. Peter Kalliney has suggested, in this vein, that the covert nature of CIA funding made it extremely difficult for the CCF to enforce ideological continuity, even at an institution like the Transcription Centre that it had set up; indeed, by advancing modernist discourses of aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness, the CCF may actually have provided cover for African intellectuals who declined to align themselves with either side of the Cold War (Kalliney, 2012). African writers could toe the modernist aesthetic line while departing sharply from America’s political designs for Africa, as when Okigbo took Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba’s death, which the CIA had sought, as part of the occasion for an elegiac poem, “Lament of the Silent Sisters” (Okigbo, 1971: xii; De Witte, 2001).
So was the joke on the Mbari writers or on the CIA? 22 The published work of Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka advances strikingly unique visions of the world. While we could unmask such work as tainted, we might instead recognize the extent to which literary texts are part and parcel of the material realm. As university employees or civil servants, these same writers relied on salaries from the notoriously corrupt Nigerian state; as journalists and publishers, they drew on the proceeds of local and global capitalism. The colonial character of UCI and the neo-colonial initiatives that underwrote Black Orpheus and Mbari Publications may seem to call into question the Nigerian writers’ integrity, yet writers across the Global South — and Global North — are always working in, with, and against institutions that permit them only relative autonomy. What makes literary work so intriguing is not so much its detachment from compromising situations as its aspiration to address the struggles of social life in a distinctive language while thoroughly embedded within these struggles.
In 1963, ample selections of poetry by Clark and Okigbo, as well as Soyinka, were published in Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier’s influential Penguin anthology, Modern Poetry from Africa, with a print run far exceeding that of an Mbari booklet. Here they appeared in the company of Senghor as representatives of “modern” African literature. No longer mere provincial imitators, their strategic self-fashioning as Afro-modernists, coupled to Beier’s trans-continental connections, enabled them to make Ibadan into a crucial reference point on the literary Greenwich meridian for other writers in Africa and the wider anglophone world.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.