By Sunny Awhefeada
Come Thursday 15 January 2026, I will take my turn with unmatchable joy and gratitude to God Almighty to mount the platform at the Delta State University, Abraka, to deliver the 117th inaugural lecture and present to the academic community and the public the cumulative of the research endeavor that culminated in my professorship. For eight long years, I was on the podium introducing inaugural lecturers, valedictory lecturers, convocation lecturers and more. Next Thursday, I will be taking my turn after being introduced and called upon to do so. The thought of delivering an inaugural lecture was and is still fascinating to me. From my student days at the University of Benin and later at the University of Ibadan, I watched with indescribable admiration the rites that attended inaugural lectures. The time honoured academic gown with its monastic touch, the slow, measured and dignified steps of dons in reverenced procession, the citation, the insights offered by the lectures and the approbation of the appreciative audience denoted in occasional applauses are ennobling spectacles to behold. It is a cherished academic rite. I would be performing mine that day!
My focus on literary scholarship accentuates the impact of history on literature. In doing this I have had cause to interrogate the relevance of history to the comprehension of African literature in general and Nigerian literature in particular. Life in summation is a narrative which is what history is all about. Literature in all ramifications is also nothing but narrative entrusted with educative and didactic roles. My seminal interest in African Literature dates back to my second year at the University of Benin when I took Introduction to Modern African Literature. The course magnified the essence of African history in the understanding and evaluation of African Literature. A year later I took courses in African Prose, African Poetry and African Drama and encountered Lewis Nkosi’s (1981) thought that history is the subject matter of African literature. The literature curriculum at the University of Ibadan reinforced what Benin offered. When I arrived at the Delta State University, Abraka, as an academic subaltern twenty-four years ago, the literature curriculum I met was a hybrid phenomenon which not only consolidated what Benin and Ibadan offered, but went further to foreground a Nigerian literary tradition which immersed itself in the vortex of our national history. While offering similar African Literature courses available at Benin and Ibadan, Abraka had a unique course named Introduction to Nigerian Literature offered in two semesters. My encounter with that course at Abraka was my academic epiphany!
As I taught that course, I came to realize the buoyancy of Nigerian literature and its capacity to constitute a national literature essentially conditioned by socio-historical currents. This realization was to influence the trajectory of my doctoral thesis entitled The Burden of History in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare and Tanure Ojaide (2007). The successful defence of that thesis in 2007 marked my formal and authoritative engagement with “the Literature of our State” which I have used to codify Nigerian literature in this lecture. A defining character of my academic work has been an abiding fidelity to history as the conditioning factor of Nigerian literature. While the imaginative element of literature cannot be denied its Nigerian variety is hugely indebted to history. Nigerian literature from the beginning has been a representation of politics and history and it has maintained that curve.
I have given hint that “the Literature of our State” in this context refers to Modern Nigerian Literature. It is not my intention to bother the audience with tendentious definitions. I wish to therefore declare that what is here referred to as “the Literature of our State” is basically the literature woven around the Nigerian experience whether it is drama, prose, poetry or popular culture. This literature in its variegated manifestation totalizes the Nigerian narrative. I wish to avoid the hackneyed delineation of Nigerian literature into generations of writers. This way of reading “the Literature of our State” has stirred a lot of controversies and there has not been a consensus regarding generational classifications. What I propose to do is to configure the literature understudy in terms of phases and, or traditions defined by motifs conditioned by the socio-historical experience that birthed them.
The paternity of this literature, in its present form is the colonial encounter occasioned by the contact between Britain and the many ethnicities that make up the “geographical expression” known as Nigeria. The expression “in its present form” refers to the written mode of the literature which bears the prefix-label modern or contemporary. Besides this mode is the vast array of enactments in folklore that constituted the core of creative and imaginative rendition before the emergent of its modern counterpart at the instance of the colonial encounter.
The inaugural moment of modern Nigerian literature dates back to the colonial era, especially the onset of the anti-colonial struggle. The earliest known writers who were mostly poets were actually nationalists who deployed poetry as a tool for cultural nationalism to agitate and enlighten colonial Britain that the colonized have a culture, a civilization and a memory. They deployed poetry, which is considered as the most elevated of literary genres, in the cause of Nigerian nationalism. The poetry was neither apologetic nor tentative. It was also not lachrymal. The poetry rang out in a manner that was assertive and definitive. It was poetry that told imperial Britain through the voice of Dennis Osadebay:
Let me play with the Whiteman’s way
Let me work with the Blackman’s brains
Let my affairs themselves sort out
Then in sweet rebirth
I will rise a better man.
This kind of insistence foregrounded by the deliberate structural repetitiveness of “let me” defined that early phase which literary historians now call “pioneer phase”. Another leading nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe also wrote poems in the same tenor and temper as did Osadebay in the clamour for independence. Interestingly, the former succeeded the later as Nigeria’s Senate President in 1960 when he became Governor-General. The consolidation of that early poetic effulgence manifested in the publication of Osadebay’s pan-African collection entitled Africa Sings in 1952. Such was the audacious, promising and auspicious beginning of what has flourished to be modern Nigerian literature.
Modern Nigerian literature commendably reflects the Nigerian spirit. It is also probably the nation’s prime endowment in human capital and international prestige. The literature of our state matters because it embodies the totality of our lives as we lived and live it. The literature holds a mirror to us that is didactic, educative, entertaining and above all therapeutic. Literature in its creative essence is endowed with the capacity to not only encode national aspirations, but also able to offer alternative pathways out of underdevelopment. Literature has the capacity to inspire a nation. This is the reason why many American presidents beginning with J. F. Kennedy insist on having poetry read by a distinguished poet during presidential inauguration. Were literature not relevant there would have been no Nobel Prize for Literature. Wole Soyinka’s winning of the Nobel Prize in 1986, the first black writer to do so, gave fillip to Nigerian literature as having come of age. It is apt to say that Nigerian literature through the towering achievements of the writers remains a redemptive element for Nigeria across the globe. Nigerian letters have brought more honours and prestige to the nation more than any other sphere of human endeavor. It is a literature that is far ahead of the domain from which it sprang. Thankfully, the West African Examination Council (WAEC) made literature a compulsory component of English Language to underscore the centrality of literature to human capital development through creative and critical thinking. Should every academic programme in our tertiary institutions not make literature compulsory to holistically cultivate the mind of our youths? I think so! It is not by accident that the best known Nigerian names in the world beginning from the 1960s till date are writers.
As I take my turn, I look back and say thank you to God and humanity. I have been a beneficiary of the goodness of humanity. I am a witness to the Urhobo ethno-philosophy “I wrap people around myself like clothes”. I think I have benefitted from every human being I have encountered. I must admit that what I have become is the making of the generousity of humanity.
