The role of political horizons in literature
In today’s late capitalist epoch, the disappearance of positive hopes and expectations in the global north is shaking the very foundations of the economic system. Analytical psychology found already in the 1910s how future expectations affect individuals’ inner lives as much as their past experiences and traumas. Literature reflects closely the individual writer’s consciousness. Today’s strong academic preoccupation with literature’s radical political horizons is palpably rooted in an anguished search for an end to a stalemate in the global south as well as in the north.
Recent works that focus on radical political horizons in academic literature abound. Steven S. Lee (2015) shows us in The ethnic avant-garde: minority cultures and world revolution how the modernism of the artistic avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century was less universalistic than it is usually supposed; that its generally global ethos brought with it a number of ethnic particularisms. Nicholas Brown (2005), in Utopian generations: the political horizons of twentieth century literature, avoids Lee’s anti-revolutionary high-brow avant-gardism, and shows how post-colonial literature shares with Western modernism its clear socialist tendency and revolutionary commitment especially before the arrival of post-modernist deconstruction.
Political horizons in Nigerian literature
Chinua Achebe, in Brown and elsewhere, is seen as a quintessentially reformist thinker (Beckman and Adeoti 2006; Onoge 1985a, 1985b), although his political praxis demonstrably involved Marxian resolve against embedded feudalist structures in Nigeria (Mayer 2016) – he was at one point president of the People’s Redemption Party. Generally, the notion that Marxism is more or less lacking from the dazzling landscape of Nigerian prose is somewhat widespread especially since the late 1990s, but it is nonetheless a mistaken view. In this article, I will demonstrate this with the case of Ifeoma Okoye, a great contemporary socialist-feminist woman writer of the Nigerian literary scene. This will also show that beyond the predominantly male Marxist third generation of post-colonial writing in Nigeria that included the poet Niyi Osundare, the novelist Femi Osofisan, the playwright Tunde Fatunde, the critics Omafume Onoge and Biodun Jeyifo, and the writer of ‘the first proletarian novel’ of Nigeria, Festus Iyayi (Casely-Hayford, Fargion and Wallace 2015, 147) there is indeed, another, equally committed radical tradition in Nigerian literature: that of socialist-feminist woman writers and poets whose works engage with relevant Marxist threads in the country’s social thought.
Some general remarks are in order, when one discusses socialist-feminist intellectuals and creative artists in Nigeria. Representatives of Nigeria’s Marxist-feminist tradition not only stayed on in Nigeria when many among the creative men emigrated, but also their creative work continued and arguably even strengthened its socialist commitment after the collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of the alternatives that the ‘degenerate workers’ state’ had still provided to labour movements in Africa. When Tunji Otegbeye (formerly the head of a Marxist-Leninist party supported by the Soviet Union) joins in the early 1990s the Yoruba Council of Elders, the socialist-feminist poet Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (Mayer 2016, 177–179), or Ifeoma Okoye, carry on with their radical agendas, and write the strongest works of their entire oeuvre against oppression of women and men by men and women, thus contributing to artistic expressions of unified socialist-feminist thinking. It is one of the aims of this article to correct the picture that both the 1980s–1990s accounts of Nigerian Marxist literature, and today’s nuanced cultural critics make when they discuss Nigerian Marxist writing on the one hand, and feminist writing coming out of Nigeria on the other hand, as discrete phenomena. These two groups have overlapped historically in the 1980s. Also, the single strongest Marxian ideas manifested in Nigeria today are exactly those of a representative of socialist-feminism, the novelist Ifeoma Okoye. Okoye’s The Fourth World came out in 2013 and it speaks out for shanty dwellers in the worst slums of the continent.
I claim that Femi Osofisan’s famous 1996 declaration of ‘a palpable crisis’ in radical literature in Nigeria (Osofisan 1996) has partially been overcome. Osofisan saw the crisis as partly due to emigration, partly the effect of the collapse of local markets for local literature under Structural Adjustment Programmes. Osofisan’s depiction of a crisis of radical Nigerian literature appeared in the middle of the 1990s, when it seemed logical to call his entire generation a batch of ‘warriors of a failed utopia’. It is reasonable to challenge Osofisan’s view especially as he actually singles out Ifeoma Okoye by name (along with a number of others, including himself) as a representative of Marxian tendencies, and as ‘a warrior of a failed utopia’.
Ifeoma Okoye’s role in Nigerian literature
Ifeoma Okoye is a household name in Nigeria due mostly to her children’s books that serve as introductory readers for young pupils all over Nigeria and the wider Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region where Nigerian and other anglophone schools exist. They have also been translated, beyond Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, to southern African languages such as Shona and Ndebele, the East’s Kiswahili, and West Africa’s ubiquitous French, and they are widely used in schools all over these regions. They appeared in the following order: Village boy (1978), The adventures of Tulu the monkey (1980a), Eme goes to school (1980b), Only bread for Eze (1980c/2009), No school for Eze (1980d/2009), Neka goes to market (1995a), Ayo and his pencil (1995b), and Chika’s house (1995c). Okoye received numerous awards for her innovative children’s literature that in itself constituted a new wave of locally rooted readers for pupils. Her books mostly appeared with Heinemann Africa and Fourth Dimension Publishers. Her prizes included Macmillan Children’s Literature Award (for Village boy), National Festival for Arts and Culture Award (for the same), and Ife International Book Fair Award (for No bread for Eze). Her children’s books are user friendly, accessible, and reflect on issues that are close to young pupils’ lives such as games played in recess, a lost and found pen, or what to do with a bit of pocket money when a girl of seven years goes to the market in a Nigerian town (Neka goes to market). The answer to the latter question is that the girl should save the money in order to allow her later to buy a book.
Should we see in Okoye, who started her employed working life as a nursery school teacher and ended it as a university senior lecturer, a writer who is possessed by the didactic impulse (based on the pedagogy that we find in Neka goes to market)? As Terry Eagleton (2014) points out, our current culture strongly disfavours literature that is didactic. Educators from kindergarten to graduate school would hurry to second Eagleton’s insight even as one participates in the selfsame global culture of narcissism that naturally turns one away from anything that could interfere with one’s instant gratification and spending patterns. Ifeoma Okoye’s objective in her children’s literature is instilling in her young readers a moral code, a sense of decency, and a love of book learning. Although Nigerian culture might be viewed as more conservative than Western culture, Nigeria is still a country where a peripheral version of capitalism is hegemonic in society and where abject poverty coexists with conspicuous consumption on a grand scale. I will therefore argue that if we find the story of Neka goes to market rather quaint, that has more to do with our own consciousness than with Okoye’s intentions.
Okoye also writes highly successful and award-winning adult books and short stories: Behind the clouds (1982, novel, received Spectrum Books Award); Men without ears (1984, in which Okoye won Best Novelist of the Year Award from the Association of Nigerian Authors; translated also into Russian), Chimere (1992, novel); Nowhere to hide (2000, novel); The Fourth World (2013,1 novel, shortlisted for the NLNG Nigeria Literature Prize); ‘The pay-packet’ (1993, short story); ‘The power of a plate of rice’ (short story, 1999), ‘Waiting for a son’ (2000, short story); The trial and other stories (2005, a collection of powerful short stories). ‘Waiting for a son’ won the Commonwealth Short Story Competition (in the African Region) for the year 1999.
For the critic Oyekan Owomoyela, Ifeoma Okoye is ‘the most important female novelist from Nigeria after Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta’ (Owomoyela 2008, 142), Okoye is however generally regarded as ‘less a critic’s writer’ (Ogunyemi 1996, 303), captivating, entertaining and cathartic but offering no frills, no mystification, no primeval forests, and no pre-colonial props (beloved by both the ‘traditionalist’ African and by the Western exoticist). Instead of such accoutrements in Okoye we find a veritable laundry list of social and personal ills.
Ifeoma Okoye’s biography
Ifeoma Okoye (nee Okeke) was born on 21 December 1937 to James and Victoria Okeke, in Anambra State, in the then Eastern Region, in Igboland. She studied in Ogbunike not far from Onitsha, in Anambra’s Oyi local government area, where she received a teaching certificate in 1959. In 1963–1967 she worked at an international school in Enugu, where she later also founded and ran her own nursery. In 1974, she went on to study at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she gained her BA in English in 1977. In 1986–1987 she studied at Aston University in Birmingham, earning a postgraduate degree (MSc in Teaching English for Specific Purposes). She went on to teach at the tertiary level first at Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu (1978 to 1992) and then at Nnamdi Azikiwe University at Awka, Anambra State, 1992–2000. She had four daughters and a son with her husband Mokwugo Okoye.
Ifeoma Okoye’s succinct literary style is entirely her own creation. She was, as most educated people in her generation, steeped in the tradition of English classics, and she discovered contemporaneous African writers early on. In her early working days, there was still a well-stocked public library in her city (Enugu), which has closed since then (Ifeoma Okoye’s personal communication). Her father, a man of modest means and unbending honesty and intellectual inclinations, shared with his friends a subscription for a daily paper when Okoye was a young girl. She had to take care of tidying the paper and fetching it to her father’s co-subscriber friends: thus began her love of the written word.
Socialist-feminism in Nigeria
Marxism has had a constant presence in Nigeria since the mid 1940s, in fields as varied as the independence movement, labour, literature, music, the academe, the party structure, and feminism (Mayer 2016). Middle-class feminism opened itself up to the needs of market women and other subaltern women’s issues as early as 1946, when Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti (the singer Fela Kuti’s mother) set up the Abeokuta Women’s Union. Later Ransome-Kuti became a representative of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (headquartered in East Berlin), travelled to socialist Hungary, the USSR (where she received the Lenin Peace Prize) and the People’s Republic of China, and fought against local ‘royalty’, the corrupt Republic, and military dictatorship with equal determination (Mayer 2016, 174). When military head of state Olusegun Obasanjo’s soldiers ransacked Fela Kuti’s compound, they defenestrated her and later she died of her wounds due to this outrageous atrocity. Other, equally committed, feminist-socialist fighters followed in her wake: the Northerner Gambo Sawaba, the Trotskyite Bene Madunagu (1985), the poet and theorist Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, the prolific academic Amina Mama (2012) and many others. It would naturally be a mistake to assert however, that the political horizon of these feminist thinkers, with all their East European links, was the really existing state socialism of Eastern Europe (although all of them agreed that a number of policy options practised in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba or Tanzania were in fact preferable to capitalist solutions). The meaning of Eastern Europe for most of these thinkers was tied to an effort of realisation and the fight for a social future (however flawed the fight itself was). It would be as inaccurate to call the socialist-feminist writers and thinkers of Nigeria ‘warriors of a failed utopia’ as it is wrong to call the occasional honest International Monetary Fund consultant the same. In the coming subsections, I shall argue that Ifeoma Okoye is a warrior of a utopia that is alive for very good reasons: those of gaining, and retaining agency as a woman, as a poor person, as a childless wife, as a widow, as an honest person among crooks.
The Fourth World: Bildungsroman and magnum opus
‘Fourth World’ is the affectionate way inhabitants of Enugu’s Kasanga Avenue slum refer to their shanty, hence the title. The book came out in 2013 in an e-book format on Amazon and then it also appeared in 2013 with Rising People’s Press in Enugu in print form (which effectively meant that matters related to distribution are the author’s responsibility). Okoye had approached a number of foreign and Nigerian publishers with the manuscript, just to be subjected to polite and less-than-polite demands, and offers that carried restrictions and limitations on translations of the material. Some even praised the work’s aesthetic merits and social relevance while rejecting the submission (Ifeoma Okoye’s personal communication). Publishing through Amazon coupled with something close to self-publishing for the Nigerian market (in hard copy form) means that the work is available on US and UK markets and, with Rakuten following suit, the digital version is also available in Japan, Canada and other markets, but hard copies are only available in Nigeria. Ifeoma Okoye has commented extensively on the typically post-colonial difficulties of Nigeria’s publishing industry for Pambazuka. When she started writing in the 1970s, there was no solely independent publisher in Nigeria, she emphasised. They are still a rarity. In Ifeoma Okoye’s opinion, this is due partly to the lack of infrastructure (with Structural Adjustment in the early 1980s, a time of general deindustrialisation, paper mills closed down in the country). Neither are there bookshop chains or distributors with branches in the larger cities. Tomes are delivered by public transport to retail outlets(!) as the postal services are slow and unreliable and courier services are of course prohibitively expensive. The foreign market has thus traditionally been more important for Nigerian writers (Zoria 2015). It is reasonable to deduce that in the case specifically of The Fourth World, the unashamed focus on social ills, and the lack of nostalgic obfuscation geared to the emigrés’ emotional needs, probably worked against high sales expectations (wrongly as it turns out in this case, as the novel is doing very well on the market despite the tremendous obstacles outlined above).
The Fourth World is written by a senior Okoye: it is perhaps her warmest and most affectionate work, and also one that radiates hope and compassion, whilst it celebrates the agency of a young girl who grows up in the Fourth World in the early 21st century. It is a Bildungsroman in many ways: it narrates how Chira, the protagonist, is suddenly forced to grow up and become a provider for her indisposed mother Kodili after the sole breadwinner of the family, Akalaka, Chira’s father, dies a painful death in a government hospital. The number of calamitous events in The Fourth World even surpasses those in Men without ears: Chira’s father dies; her uncle Amos refuses to let her continue her Federal Government Secondary School (FGSS) education as he refuses to use family land to finance it; the government bulldozes Chira’s mother’s rudimentary plaiting establishment along with parts of the shanty; a neighbour loses her mind as her son is killed during a shoot-out where he participates as an armed robber; another neighbour’s husband falls off a scaffolding and dies instantly; yet another woman neighbour’s eight pregnancies end in post-natal deaths, and her only surviving child dies in a neighbourhood flood; another baby dies in the shanty’s pharmacy in front of the eyes of the entire clientele because her mother had not been able to take it to hospital in time; two further area children die as they had been run over by a lorry; Chira’s rich friend Ogom falls victim to a marriage fraud in the US; and finally Kodili, Chira’s mother, dies after a protracted illness. All this happens against the backdrop of unspeakable deprivation: loan sharking is rampant, people ask for empty bottles to rinse the palm oil that remains in the bottom of the bottle, people beg, hawk and borrow as a matter of vital necessity, whilst they suffer humiliation from the better-off most of the time when they leave the shanty. It is a feat of extraordinary narrative skill that this novel remains readable despite all this, and that Chiralum’s escape does not appear to us as constituting a didactic piece, even though her perseverance is breath-taking and the reader cannot help but root for her in most of her endeavours.
Importantly, Chira can do wrong in the novel. She denies and humiliates her father while at FGSS because she is ashamed of her own extraction among richer students (a situation that may ring familiar to many former scholarship students of private institutions under neoliberalism). She also (somewhat consciously) uses her friendship with a richer student to secure her extremely precarious position (at the school and in life in general). Nonetheless, the reader’s heart goes out to Chira. During the entire course of the novel, not only does she experience undernourishment in terms of quality but she has to constantly manage quantitative and literal hunger. When Akalaka dies, Chira’s mother Kodili loses her firm grip on reality, and Chira has to take over managing their small household. The biggest problem with this is providing enough food: hunger and starvation are always just behind the corner with the landlord threatening eviction, with loan sharks clamouring for their monies, with Kodili requesting expensive foods and caring not where they come from, with neighbours and their offspring begging for crumbs from Chira’s already poor table. Chira’s generosity of spirit, her ability to rise above herself and to grow, shines through as she keeps not only her habit of giving but also manages (believably) to ward off temptations that offer an easy escape. Kodili suspects her of prostituting herself for money (she does not), but later she is hell-bent on pushing Chira to marry Maks, a repulsive suitor – not in the physical sense, as Maks is handsome, but in the sense that he is a state governor’s crooked associate who helps the governor launder money as an occupation, and he is shallow, ignorant, careless about women, and hates book learning.
Learning, excelling in school, and being a top student is a matter of life and death for Chira, but these are also her passion. Her primary school teacher Miss Golibe helps her (with emotional support and also practical assistance) to enter FGSS. Her teacher Miss K. at FGSS becomes for Chira not only a role model, but almost an obsession: Miss K.’s words echo in her head and recur in her speech regularly. This is the point where the novel comes dangerously close to a didactic piece but it is also one that allows us to see how a young mind needs real-life examples to believe that alternative values to the prevailing social consensus are possible. Miss K. in the novel is a world unto herself amid the world of greed and ostentation that Nigeria had become, and she has no qualms about implanting this in young minds with a missionary zeal. A similar character, Dr Ajali, an entirely self-made university lecturer and IT entrepreneur, takes Chira under her wings, provides Chira with not only a job in her computer shop but also pay advances, and secures her an entry into university with a paid job as assistant teacher. This is also how the novel’s plotline ends: Chira declines Maks’s offer of marriage and decides to go for what Dr Ajali has in mind for her: the life of the mind, a meaningful life, agency over her own destiny, and a freedom to manage her private life according to her own will and not the vagaries of financial need. However, this is not a ‘slumdog millionaire’-type novel, indeed it is a socialist one, where the core of the socialist message is in the richness of interactions between the protagonist and the collective. Kasanga Avenue’s residents form a community in deed: they help each other irrespective of ethnic or religious belonging. The shanty’s women especially, live according to a communal ethic where the need of another approximates the need of one’s own in importance. More than this, especially the positive male protagonists who help Chira are active, committed socialists with a penchant for community action but also for theory and writing books. Jude, the area pharmacist who treats people for free, speaks six ‘native’ languages of Nigeria and is entirely detribalised; Mirror Head, the government official, refuses to take bribes and is passionately against international corporations and capitalist enterprise; those two had met at Nigeria Labour Congress meetings in the first place; Mirror Head writes books on radical theory, while Jude organises shanty residents into demonstrations; Okoye even gives details of a speech by Mirror Head at the National Association of Nigerian Students, a socialist stronghold that Bjorn Beckman discussed in his academic works; finally a rebellion is thrown at Kasanga Avenue where the police murder four youngsters. A life of solidarity and meaning is possible for Okoye even as Chira is set to leave the Fourth World, where solidarity is only partly by choice, to grow into roles in which solidarity is entirely voluntary and is predicated by conviction. A character of extreme strength, Chira is as physically beautiful as she is endearing to the reader, her personal growth carrying the narrative’s sequence of tragedies with grace and humanity full of solidarity and compassion. This is a magnum opus where the minutiae of abuse and degeneration are trumped by commitment, where one’s birth does not determine where a person can reach, and where hope is possible despite tremendous, almost unbearable, hardship.
Analysing Ifeoma Okoye’s socialist-feminism: a conclusion
Ifeoma Okoye’s socialism and feminism focus on agency, equality, solidarity, community and order. It is not a socialism of hedonism. Duties remain, gratification is never instant and it should not be either, according to Okoye. Thrift, rational calculation, reasonability in habits and action are celebrated. Kasanga Avenue’s rebellion degenerates into disorderliness only because of the appearance of lumpen elements. Book learning is central, commitment and determination most important …. Relations between men and women for Okoye should be ones of constant selfless give and take: she scorns the anti-male tirades of some academic feminists (especially when those do not translate to any anti-patriarchy action). Lack of care and concern for the old, and valuing the marketplace more than one’s family, for Okoye is unpardonable (even when a woman practises that, as in her novel Men without ears). Similarly for men: Okoye scolds them for robbing their families of their time and presence, even when they provide financially. Respect for the dignity of a woman, qua woman and as a human, is an absolute must for Okoye. For her, true revolution starts in disenfranchised local communities and within the family, and its essence is the opposite of upheaval: it is the construction of a deeper, more rational order, where individuals find new meaning. Real pre-colonial traditions of community living (as opposed to visual trappings of tradition run amok, complete with faux titles) are on the side of revolution as much as the existence of the traditional Russian obshchina (commune) had arguably helped Lenin – even though Lenin himself in his Friends of the people sharply disagreed with Marx’s initial predictions in that regard decades before the October Revolution (Krausz 2014, 89). Obscurantism, primeval forests and gods in disguise do not make their appearance in Okoye’s novels, making them less popular among Western readers in search of escapism, but these omissions also make Okoye’s novels truer to social reality, more relevant, and more realist in the Lukácsian sense. It is socialism for Okoye that defines and represents order (as in Men without ears, where Tanzania’s ujamaa is a celebrated reference), but Okoye’s unified socialist-feminist theory also allows for an insight that is unique to Okoye: that the humanity and kindness found in pre-capitalist social formations of a communal kind (such as acephalous Igboland where the marketplace was reigned over by women, politically as well as technically, and where women ran separate parallel political systems to men before the arrival of the British and their warrant chiefs) should be safeguarded; and that genuine tradition is dialectically maintained not by capitalism and its disingenuous conservatism (as capitalism conserves very few things of value) but by socialism. Genuine respect for elders means, in the real sense, taking care of their practical needs while they are alive, and not giving them elaborate burials when they are dead (the latter serves the empty ‘social aspirations’ of the living). Forces outside of capitalism’s oppressor strata – subaltern women, the old and frail, young children, students and workers – may find agency and meaning in their lives according to Okoye, if they choose to stand up for their real (and not imagined) interests. Societies will develop if they engage not in the celebration of invented traditions but in the genuine traditions of ethical collectivism, kindness and selflessness. Genuinely representative and innovative cultures spring out of such a dialectical conception of traditions, rootedness, and women’s role in society. Exposing the ills of Nigerian society while allowing for a genuinely African, home-grown and enlightened, socialist and feminist view of society, is Okoye’s greatest gift to her Nigerian and foreign readers, and to all radical movements in West Africa.