Name: Tijani Tolulope Mariam Matric Number: 22/10556 Course Code:LIT1305

WHAT IS LITERATURE?
Literature entertains and educates us. It can teach us about the past, help us understand the
present and empower us to create the future. Read with this insight, Pride and Prejudice, as
all great works of literature, offers us all the knowledge required to promote individual
accomplishment and human welfare.
WHAT IS NIGERIAN LITERATURE?
Nigerian literature may be as defined as the literary writing by citizens of the of Nigeria for
Nigerian readers, addressing Nigerian issues. This includes writers in different languages,
including not only English but Igbo, Urhobo, Yoruba, and in the northern part of the county
Hausa and Nupe. It includes British Nigerians, Nigerian Americans and other members of the
African diaspora.
TO understand the literature of the people, it is crucial that we understand their political
history, their social economic life, the specific indices of their daily and collective lives.
Therefore, it is necessary to place such literature within the milieu from which it has evolved.
We must realize that all of these specificities are important in shaping the vision of the writer
who himself or herself emerged from this environment. It is necessary to therefore investigate
all these as we here attempt to describe Nigeria to describe Nigerian literature.
One of the major factors that have affected the very root of Nigerian literature can be in the
historical and political antecedents of present-day Nigeria. As early as the fifteenth century or
thereabout, Europeans traders and missionaries, ostensibly in search of the golden fleece had
come all the way to the West African Coast. Their businesses attracted them to such places
as the (then)Gold coast, Warri, Lagos and Calabar. Their trade boomed and by 1861 in their
wisdom they found it necessary to annex Lagos making it a “Crown Colony”, a political
move that now fully entrenched colonial administration in these parts.
Naturally, what followed was the strategic economic, cultural, military and intellectual
subjugation of the people and nations, which make up the Southern parts of today’s Nigeria.
In the early 1900s Western European influence had spread far into the hinterlands and before
long, Lord Lugard’s military conquest of amalgamated into the present geo-political space
called Nigeria. The extensive slave trade and colonial rule without a doubt have left their
impact and marks on Nigerian culture and history This strange hybrid of nations and cultures
still bears in its body these marks

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Name: Tijani Tolulope Mariam Matric Number: 22/10556 Course Code:LIT1305

NIGERIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH: EARLY BEGINNINGS.

The education in the hands of the colonialists was used as an instrument of further
perpetrating their presence in the colonies. The Nigerian Literature in English had Christian
theological conception. Various Bible stories and translations of the Bible itself were the first
narrative models they wee nurtured on.
The superior of the white master race was chief cornerstone the teachings in these schools.
The results were the immediate creation of an educated elite class. We must recognize that
these missionary results were the immediate creation of an educated elite class. We must
recognise that these missionary schools soon became status symbols and only the privileged
were selected to attend. Two issues we must emphasize here are: The pedagogical direction
of these schools created a curious African personality that has been described as “black
Victorian” or “black Europeans”. The foreign academic and intellectual diet of these schools
created young impressionable scholars who were steeped in the shake spare, Milton, Homer,
Aeschylus, Eliot etc on which they were nurtured but fatally deprived and alienated from
their Nigerian literary origins.
The elite secondary schools all over the country_ Government Colleges at Ibadan, Ughelli,
and Umuahia, King’s College Lagos, Queen’s School Ede, Barewa college Kaduna, provided
the cream of the foundational students at The University College of Ibadan which began in
1948 London University. At Ibadan, the curriculum in the Arts was especially designed to
celebrate the high points of Western culture and art. At the ENGLISH Department, in the
University, the students were encouraged to establish their own campus journals.
Specifically, The Horn and Black Orphaeus were created J.P. Clark was the first editor of the
Horn. The fledgling talents of poetry by Wole Soyinka Christopher Okigbo, Dapo was the
first Adelgba Molara Ogundipe, Mabel Imokehuede were carried in these journals from the
late fifties to the early sixties. Many of these have matured their literary and extra- literary
activities. The University College Press was also important in sustaining the interests of these
students.
The creative impulses on the campus combined with the intense political consciousness in the
century to increase the tempo of imaginative writings. Drama also began to flourish around
1959. By the year, three apprentice performing groups treated the Ibadan public to plays from
Greece-Roman, English and Nigerian dramatic repertories. Soyinka’s return from the Leeds
University 1960., injected a new momentum into these theatrical forays. He founded 1960
Masks and he attracted the talents of Yemi Lijadu, Ralph Opara,, Segun Olusoa, Fumilayo
Ashekun, Francesca Pexoeora. Thus began what may well be described as the core form
which a truly Nigerian theatre has emerged. Very often, theatre tours carried the experiments
of these energetic talents around the country using town halls, cinema houses and school halls
adapting these into theatres for their production.
In 1961, the Mbari club was established, its founding members being Wole Soyinka, Amos
Tutuola, Yetunde Esan, D.O.Fagunwa, Mabel Aig Imoukhuede and Ulli Beier. It later
expanded to include J.P. Clark, Duro Ladipo, Demas Nwoko and even a South African,
Ezekiel Mphahlele. Under the initiative of Duri Ladipo, the Mbari spirit moved to provide
centres for the propagation of Nigeria, art, literature, music and theatre and use these to
enhance our national life
Name: Tijani Tolulope Mariam Matric Number: 22/10556 Course Code:LIT1305