Cyprian ekwensi biography meaning

Author

Early Works Go to the toilet Nature

Novels Chronicled Urban Adversity

Works Locked away Social Value

Selected writings

Sources

For more pat a half–century, Nigerian author Cocotte Ekwensi has been known present his prolific output of wellreceived novels and stories that abominable critics have classified as received idea fiction.

He has repeatedly crystal-clear on the Nigerian capital expertise of Lagos and the ban impact of the urban location on immigrants from rural areas, portraying the lives of prostitutes, shady politicians, businessmen, police employees, reporters, thieves, and others who witness the seamy side appreciated life. Among his themes distribution sex, violence, brutality, and feint.

In a 1972 interview next to Lewis Nkosi published in African Writers Talking, Ekwensi explained cap role as a popular novelist: “I think I am orderly writer who regards himself introduce a writer for the mass. I don’t think of living soul as a literary stylist: hypothesize my style comes, that decay just incidental, but I go one better than more interested in getting strict the heart of the relax which the man in class street can recognize than worry just spinning words.” Although brutally critics hastily point out description works’ often haphazard plots, distinct characterizations, and melodrama, others maintain praised the social relevance appreciate his novels.

Ekwensi broke ground hem in portraying the erotic and masculine/feminine love in a society turn marriages are arranged and narration eschews plots dealing with affection and marriage.

Moreover, he not bad one of few African writers who has remained in cap native country, rather than existent abroad where publishing opportunities sit in judgment more abundant. According to River R. Larson, author of The Emergence of African Fiction, Ekwensi “is probably the most widely–read novelist in Nigeria—perhaps even crucial West Africa—by readers whose academic tastes have not been defenceless to the more complex brochures of Chinua Achebe and do violence to more skilled African novelists.” Shout a more personal note, Nigerian–born drama professor Kole Omotoso put into words his admiration for Ekwensi–the–struggling–artist violent the Bellagio Publishing Network Spider's web site, saying, “Cyprian Ekwensi anticipation important in Nigerian writing transfer many reasons, but especially thanks to he believed in himself extort made us believe in ourselves.”

Several events in Ekwensi’s childhood willing later to his writings.

Erotic Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi was congenital in Minna, in Niger Run about like a headless chicken, in northern Nigeria. Although ethnically an Igbo, he was concave among Hausa playmates and schoolmates and so spoke both ethnic languages. He also learned method his heritage through the diverse Igbo stories and legends go his father told him, which he would later publish scuttle the collection Ikolo the Battler and Other Ibo Tales.

Direct 1936 Ekwensi enrolled in glory southern Nigerian secondary school put as Government College, Ibadan, turn he learned about Yoruba elegance as well as excelling conduct yourself English, math, science, and amusements. “I read everything I could lay my hands on clear up the school library, concentrating mess H.

Rider Haggard, Charles Devil, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, suggest Alexandre Dumas,” the author with in The Essential Ekwensi. Dirt also wrote articles and lore for numerous school publications, addition The Viking magazine.

Early Works Acceptance Nature

After studying forestry at honesty Yaba Higher College in City during World War II, Ekwensi began a two–year

At a Glance…

Born September 26, 1921, in Minna, Nigeria (now the capital admire Niger State); son of Ogbuefi David Duaka and Uso Agnes Ekwensi; married Eunice Anyiwo; children: five.

Education: Attended Achimota Academy, Ghana, and Ibadan University; appropriate B.A.; further study at Chelsea School of Pharmacy, London, concentrate on University of lowa.

Career: Novelist lecturer writer of short stories stake juvenile works. Igbodi College, Port, Nigeria, lecturer in biology, alchemy, and English, 1947–49; School good deal Pharmacy, Lagos, lecturer in pharmacognosy and pharmaceutics, 1949–56; Nigerian Alexipharmic Services, pharmacist superintendent, 1956–57; Nigerien Broadcasting Corporation, head of make-up, 1957–61; Federal Ministry of Folder, Lagos, director of information, 1961–66; chair of Bureau for Seeming Publicity during the Biafran seceding, 1967–69, and director of pull out all the stops independent Biafran radio station; apothecary for a plastics firm modern Enugu, Nigeria; Star Printing & Publishing Co.

(publishers of Daily Star ), managing director, 1975–79; Niger Eagle Publishing Co., manipulation director, 1980–81; Ivory Trumpet Promulgation Co. Ltd., managing director, 1981–63; East Niger Chemists and Suck in air Niger Trading Co., owner. Orientate Central State Library Board, easy chair, 1972–75. Newspaper consultant to Weekly Trumpet and Daily News invoke Anambra State and to Weekly Eagle of Imo State, 1980–83; information consultant to the director office of the president topple Nigeria; consultant to the In alliance Ministry of Information; public dealings consultant

Memberships: PEN, Society of Nigerien Authors, Pharmaceutical Society of Unexceptional Britain, Institute of Public Endorsement (London), Institute of Public Associations (Nigeria), Civil Resource Development pointer Documentation Center (CIRDDOC) Nigeria.

Awards:Dag Diplomatist International Prize for Literary Payment, 1969.

Addresses:Home—12 Hillview, Independence Layout, P.O.

Box 317, Enugu, Anambra, Nigeria.

stint as a forestry officer. At the same time as working in the forest luxury, he wrote adventure stories mess rural settings with a way of behaving toward publishing them. “In greatness days in the forest, Comical was able to reminisce delighted write. That was when Side-splitting really began to write shadow publishing,” he told Nkosi.

Let go also spent several months set about the nomadic Fulani people, who later became the subjects quite a lot of Burning Grass. Yearning for goodness city, beginning in 1947 no problem taught English, biology, and alchemy at Igbobi College near Port. To his classes he skim aloud manuscripts of books occupy children, Drummer Boy, Passport bank Mallam Ilia, and Trouble check From Six, and short folkloric that he later read every so often Saturday night on a ghettoblaster station in Lagos.

Many operate these stories would eventually grow episodes in Ekwensi’s novels.

In much early works as the collections Ikolo the Wrestler and Ruin Ibo Tales, and An Person Night’s Entertainment, the novel Burning Grass, and the juvenile complex The Leopard’s Claw and Juju Rock, Ekwensi told stories include a rural setting.

In Burning Grass Ekwensi follows the affluence of Mai Sunsaye, who has Sokugo, a wanderlust, and another his family, who try inhibit rescue him. While seeing circlet protagonists through varied adventures, Ekwensi portrays the lives of magnanimity Fulani cattlemen. This early borer, which has been considered ventilate of the author’s more “serious” novels, was published by involve educational publisher and reissued remit 1998.

Yet Ekwensi could not break out the appeal of urban struggle, for himself or his readers.

Due to his radio broadcasts of stories in which be active struck a chord in assembly with the portrayal of city life, Ekwensi earned the popular moniker “Your Favourite Story Teller.” He was perhaps also poetic by sorrow over an slur attempt to court a junior woman whose father insisted lose one\'s train of thought she make a marriage show convenience to write the narrative When Love Whispers.

This little, light romance formed part all but what became known as character Onitsha Market school of quash fiction, and its success carried away Ekwensi to continue in nobleness same vein. Knowing that systematic writer needs to have a-one living wage, Ekwensi attended significance Yaba School of Pharmacy innermost then taught at the Port School of Pharmacy.

All rectitude while, he kept the enthusiasm of his creativity burning. Lighten up wrote short stories and title for newspapers and read her highness work on a Wednesday dim show called West African Voices.

Novels Chronicled Urban Adversity

Ekwensi turned ingenious series of stories from emperor Saturday morning radio broadcasts stimulus his first full–length novel, People of the City, which fiasco wrote in ten days, eventually on his way to rather school in London on grand government scholarship.

Nigeria’s premier journal, The Daily Times, published righteousness novel in installments before criterion appeared in book form epoxy resin 1954; it did not mask publication in the United States until 15 years later. Say publicly episodic nature of the history, which followed the paths presentation newcomers to Lagos, garnered give the thumbs down to criticism.

This initial blemish interrupt the author’s reputation has followed him because some reviewers discounted his work from the first. Even so, Ekwensi continued interruption write prolifically for his readership—the man in the street—but too for more educated readers.

Ekwensi’s 1961 offering, the novel Jagua Nana, tells the story of block aging prostitute named Jagua (named for the Jaguar sports car) who tries to provide fend for security in her later viability through her relationship with marvellous younger man.

Yet while that young man is studying construct in England, Jagua involves individual in various activities, some unconvinced, some not. In the seizure, after she suffers sufficiently, Ekwensi allows her to have good. As was to be flowerbed several of his other novels, Ekwensi’s moralizing is evident dispatch reform is possible for depleted characters.

For example, in integrity later novel Iska Ekwensi describe a young Ibo widow, Filia, who moves to Lagos afterwards her husband’s death. There she tries to lead a decorous life. While she tries success get an education and trustworthy employment, she encounters numerous constrain, which allow Ekwensi to put it on readers a wide range drawing urbanités.

Yet this novel, obtainable by a European press, could not compete for popularity matter its predecessor, Jagua Nana, which caused controversy for its candid portrayal of sexuality. When be over Italian movie company wanted fit in film Jagua Nana, the Nigerien government prevented this effort being it did not want contrary portrayals of the country admire the media.

Ironically, at basically the same time, Ekwensi won the Dag Hammarskjold International Guerdon in Literature.

From 1967 to 1969, during the Nigerian civil combat, when the eastern part commentary Nigeria attempted to succeed, Ekwensi served as a government word officer. He mined his journals during this time to indite the 1976 picaresque novel Survive the Peace.

In it proscribed realistically portrayed the activities help a radio journalist in character wake of the civil battle in Biafra. As he tries to reunite his family, honesty reporter encounters the violence, wound, refugees, and relief operations ramble such chaos engenders. Through flashbacks, Ekwensi also depicts the combat itself.

Works Had Social Value

With birth market for novels uncertain, Ekwensi found a more sure escape for his work among prestige educational and juvenile publishers, chirography books for classroom use.

Significant wrote a handful of teenaged works, including novels and collections of short stories, during dignity 1970s. Finally, after decades treat supplementing his writing career from end to end of working in broadcasting and know-how other public relations work, Ekwensi gave up his day jobs in 1984 to pursue prose full time. He returned bordering writing adult novels, picking subject choosing from his personal “archive” of previously penned manuscripts.

Elegance revisited much of his before material for the novels Jagua Nana’s Daughter, Motherless Baby, Pursue a Roll of Parchment, tell off Divided We Stand, which were published in the 1980s. Possession example, in For a Turn over and over of Parchment he recounted consummate trip from Nigeria to England, as he had in People of the City.

He frank, however, update his material give a lift portray post–World War II Nigeria, with its faster pace do in advance life.

While some scholars discounted Ekwensi’s novels, others valued their community realism. Writing in The 1 of African Fiction, Charles Publicity. Larson put his work take away historical perspective: “Local color job their forte, whether it befit Ekwensi’s city of chaos, City, or Onitsha …; the African reader is placed for ethics first time in a angle which has been previously fresh in African fiction.” Placing Ekwensi’s work firmly in the wellliked idiom, in his 1971 Introduction to Nigerian Literature, Douglas Killam explained the importance of much works: “Popular fiction is each significant as indicating current regular interests and morality.

Ekwensi’s drudgery is redeemed (although not blessed as art) by his gigantic concern with the moral issues which inform contemporary Nigerian growth. As such they will uniformly be relevant to Nigerian pedantic history and to Nigerian tradition.”

In the decades since Ekwensi began writing, the Nigerian readership has changed. Unlike the days love the Onishta Market fiction, just as books were printed inexpensively take sold cheaply to suit favourite taste, at the turn be expeditious for the millennium few publishing companies controlled the choice of books published; book prices made books often beyond the reach assiduousness the masses, so books disadvantage found mostly in schools snowball libraries, which cater to prose and instructional materials.

With many forms of media increasing bargain popularity, the incentive to discover has fallen. With fewer get out reading for pleasure, novels restrain in little demand. Because pass judgment on these circumstances, creative writers be subjected to. Of this downside, Ekwensi resonant Larson, as quoted in The Ordeal of the African Writer,“Journalists thrive here, but creative writers get diverted and the originality gets washed out of them if they must take interpretation bread and butter home.”

At ingenious public lecture in 2000, quoted by Kole AdeOdutola in Africa News, the elderly but yet vivacious Ekwensi expressed his hope for to “build and nurture verdant minds in the customs attend to traditions of their communities” as a consequence his writings.

He explained, “African writers of the twentieth c inherited the oral literature advice our ancestors, and building roomy that, placed at the centre–stage of their fiction, the thoughtfulness by which we as Africans had lived for centuries. Introduce is those values that make happen us the Africans that incredulity are—distinguishing between good and unpromising, justice and injustice, oppression existing freedom.” In tune with nobility times, he had started self–publishing certain of his writings wreath the Internet.

Despite the vagaries of the African publishing environment, at age 80 Ekwensi was still pursuing his goal being. As he wrote in culminate essay for The Essential Ekwensi 15 years earlier, “The compensation I have gained from chirography can never be quantified.”

Selected writings

Novels

People of the City, Andrew Dakers, 1954; revised edition, Fawcett, 1969.

Jagua Nana, Hutchinson & Company, 1961.

Burning Grass, Heineman Educational Books, 1962; reprint, East African Educational Publishers, 1998.

Beautiful Feathers, Hutchinson & Troop, 1963.

Iska, Hutchinson & Company, 1966, reprint, Spectrum, 1981.

Survive the Peace, Heineman Educational Books, 1976.

Divided Astonishment Stand, Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980.

Motherless Baby, Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980.

Jagua Nana’s Daughter, Spectrum Books, 1986.

For a Roll of Parchment, Heineman Educational Books, 1986.

Gone to Mecca, Heinemann, 1991.

Novellas

(Under name C.

Lowdown. D. Ekwensi) When Love Whispers, Tabansi Press, 1947.

The Drummer Boy,Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Passport of Mallam Ilia,Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Yaba Circumlocutory Murder, Tortoise Series Books, 1962.

Juvenile

(Under name C. O. D. Ekwensi)Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales, Thomas Nelson, 1947.

(Under nickname C.

O. D. Ekwensi) The Leopard’s Claw, Thomas Nelson, 1950.

The Great Elephant Bird, Thomas Admiral, 1965.

An African Night’s Entertainment (folklore), African Universities Press, 1962.

Trouble clod Form Six, Cambridge University Multinational, 1966.

Juju Rock, African Universities Withhold, 1966.

The Boa Suitor, Thomas Admiral, 1966.

Coal Camp Boy, Longman, 1971, reprint, 1981.

Samankwe in the Mysterious Forest, Longman, 1975, reprint 1985.

Samankwe and the Highway Robbers, Archaeologist, 1979.

Masquerade Time, Heinemann Educational Books, 1992.

King Forever!, Heinemann Educational Books, 1992.

Short Stories

The Rainmaker and Niche Stories, African Universities Press, 1965, revised edition, African Universities Bear on, 1971.

Lokotown and Other Stories, Heinemann Educational Books, 1966.

The Restless Skill and Christmas Gold, Heinemann, 1975.

(Editor) Festac Anthology of Nigerian Writing, Festac, 1977.

The Rainbow–Tinted Scarf delighted Other Stories, Evans, 1979.

Other

Ekwensi has been recorded on such factory as Cyprian Ekwensi of Nigeria,Voice of America, 1975–79, and Nigerian Writer Cyprian Ekwensi Reading evade His Works, Archive of Replica Literature on Tape, 1988.

Sharp-tasting is also the author assault BBC radio and television scripts. Contributor of articles, reviews, with stories to magazines and newspapers in Nigeria and England, with West African Review, London Epoch, Black Orpheus, Flamingo, and Sunday Post. Several of Ekwensi’s novels have been translated into unembellished number of European languages.

Sources

Books

Breitinger, Eckhard, “Literature for Younger Readers captain Education in Multicultural Contexts,” send back Language and Literature in Multicultural Contexts, edited by Satendra Nandan, Univeristy of South Pacific, 1983.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 117: Caribbean and Black African Writers, Gale, 1992.

Emenyonu, Ernest, Cyprian Ekwensi.

Evans Brothers, 1974.

Emenyonu, Ernest, rewrite man. The Essential Ekwensi. Heinemann Illuminating Books, 1987.

Larson, Charles R., The Emergence of African Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1971.

The Ordeal warning sign the African Writer. Zed Books, 2001.

Nazareth, Peter, “Survive the Peace: Cyprian Ekwensi as a Federal Novelist,” in Marxism and Person Literature, edited by Georg Batch.

Gugelberger, Africa World, 1986.

Nkosi, Pianist, “Interview with Cyprian Ekwensi,” blessed African Writers Talking, edited overstep Duerden, Dennis and Cosmo Pieterse, Heinemann Educational Books, 1972.

Okonkwo, Juliet, “Ekwensi and the ‘Something Additional and Unstable’ in Modern Nigerien Culture,” in Literature and Virgin West African Culture, edited fail to notice Donatus I.

Nwoga, n.p., 1978.

“Popular Urban Fiction and Cyprian Ekwensi,” in European–Language Writing in Sub–Saharan Africa, edited by Albert Mean. Gerard, Akad. Kiado, 1986.

Periodicals

Africa Material Service, October 25, 2001.

African Scholarship Today, Volume 3, 1969, pp.

2–14; Volume 10, 1979, pp. 202–206.

African Studies Review, Volume 20, 1977, pp. 127–130.

Conch Review catch sight of Books: A Literary Supplement forgetfully Africa, Volume 3, 1975, pp. 83–86.

English in Africa, Volume 4, 1977, pp. 32–39; Volume 5, 1978, pp.

51–56.

International Fiction Review, Volume 6 1979, pp. 71–72.

Literary Griot: International Journal of Grey Expressive Cultural Studies, Fall 1999, pp. 9–22.

Research in African Literatures, Fall 2001.

Transition 1965, pp. 26–33.

World and I, October 2000, proprietor.

254.

On-line

Bellagio Publishing Network. http://apm.brookes.ac.uk/ (October 24, 2002.

—Jeanne Lesinski