While “popular” and oral forms of literature have largely been associated with the domain of the regional or local, texts that are more “literary” have aspired to be synecdochic of transcendental conceptions such as the nation. The spatial configurations of literary texts also extend to how denominations of cultural change have been linked to progressions in material landscapes: from the traditional simplicity of the precolonial “bush”, the complex configurations of postcolonial life now inhabit the spaces of the “city”. This paper assesses two “popular”/ “local” Nigerian novels: Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (both published in 1954) in order to critically approach the heteroglossic or multi-voiced nature of Nigeria’s pre-independence literary communities. While My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a largely folkloric account of a protagonist who, fleeing from slave traders, enters a “bush of ghosts”, People of the City, which is written in the style of Onitsha market pamphlets, tells the story of a young, promiscuous crime reporter and the precariousness of the city.
In considering these two novels, varying widely in tone, style, and content, the aim of the paper is to complicate the idea of a homogeneous pre-independence community, and that of a linear teleology from bush to city, city to nation, and so on. Instead of focusing on the energies of nationalism and more recently of neoliberalism and globalisation, the paper lays emphasis on the literary, social, and philosophical crossovers in early Nigerian literatures to analyse the diverse motivations, claims, and movements of and within these literatures. The paper therefore argues that the philosophical project of African literature was already in formation before the supposed literary turn, which was inaugurated by literatures written after independence. Looking at the movements within local terrains, the paper offers a glimpse of the complex milieu and operations of early Nigerian literatures and the collaborations and divergences therein. Instead of classifying these literatures as proto-literary, proto-national, or proto-global, the paper contends that a consideration of these local or popular literatures need not only be considered in terms of their anticipatory role, but in their worth as effective and valuable contributors to Nigeria’s narrative ecologies and literary communities.
Keywords: popular, literature, communities, Nigerian, collaborations, ecologies