Colonial Lagos 
LITERATURE AND THE CITY 
A-*~~ ,., .• •_ home and write your best poem or your 
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NIYIOSUNDAR 
our cities L • 
E 
i_ the courage of people who live there. 
There is so much chaos, so much 
degeneration. There is no planning. 
There is really no time to stand and 
discourage creativity because when you k . u 1/ i 
j ir . ' best short storv or your best play. 
spend four hours on one spot in a traffic 
hold-up, it is not likely that you will get v , t A 
6 You are simply fagged out and angry. 
- Z
governments we've been having have 
not planned any of our cities as centres 
of inspiration. But be that as it may, this 
is not enough reason for us to fold up our 
hands and say all is lost. 
Certainly not. There is some kind of 
negative inspiration, afterall. Although 
the cities are so bad, we are still writing 
about them. We criticize and satirise all 
those who get the funds to improve our 
cities but put these money in their bank 
accounts and theirstomachs. So creative 
writers and artists are asking for the 
authorities to bring some humanness 
back into our cities. 
However, cities are not the only place in 
Nigeria. In fact, the cities cannot exist 
without the rural areas. I'm a poet of the 
rural areas, for example. There is nothing 
wrong in our writers going to the 
countryside. In fact, the trend in the 
developed parts of the world today is 
towards rural migration. There is also 
nothing wrong going abroad to write. I 
have done it before. Midlife which won 
an award was basically written in Iowa 
City, US A in 1988.1 was then a resident 
artist at the university under the 
International Writers' Programme. The 
manuscript I have in press now, Horse 
of Memory which is due out any time 
from now was written in Yaddo in New 
York. It really helps a lot when you can 
step out for a while and recapture some 
of the inspirations that the home base 
has provided. 
It was once a trend for African-American 
writers to go to France, especially Paris, 
to write. Langston Hughes and James 
Baldwin are typical examples. I have a 
collection I'm working on which is a 
kind of travelogue in poetic form. As an 
artist I have tried to ensure that every 
part of the world that I have been has 
become a part of me and also that I am 
part of that area of the world. I'm not a 
stranger anywhere: China, Australia, 
Japan, Canada, US, France, etc. 
This world belongs to all of us. IGRI 
kind of plural mentality which should 
really make creativity possible. But that 
is when these cities are organized: where 
there are parks and open spaces; when 
there is enough shelter for everybody; 
when highways are not blocked by 
garbage. These are the negative things 
you see in our cities today. The 
Our cities have been dehumanized and 
that is why those who are their 
inhabitants have been dehumanized. 
Cities are supposed to be inspiring. 
Dublin for James Joyce, Abeokuta, 
Ibadan and Ishara for Wole Soyinka, 
London for Charles Dickens, etc. Cities 
have some anonymity about them; that 
3
EDITOR'S WISHES 
A yawning problem has for long, for too long 
we have every right to say, defined Nigeria's art 
and literary landscape. And this is the problem 
of space. A problem of medium. Today, hardly 
any reputable journal exists in the country that 
services the vocation of artists, writers, musicians 
and film makers. A few which made initial 
valiant efforts were snuffed out of existence by 
acombination of debilitating forces, chief among 
which is Nigeria's prevailing economic gloom. 
Some publishing efforts which became the voice 
of artists promptly relocated abroad when it 
became inevitable that their founders/editors 
should migrate, presumably prompted by the 
general decline of the climes of existence in a 
nation which only too recently was the luxuriant 
hub of assorted art and literary activities. 
Have the artists and writers consequently ceased 
to exist? If no, would they continue to remain 
voiceless? True, in the last decade we have 
witnessed an upsurge of interest in the arts and 
in literature by the managements of leading 
Nigerian national newspapers. The leaders here 
being the banned Guardian and the Daily 
Times, the reviews pages of the latter I have 
both reported for and edited in the past six years. 
But these only helped to expose more problems: 
the allocations of space could never satiate the 
growing activities of cultural workers,especially 
when it is borne in mind that we had to face an 
almost limitless landscape of genres and art 
forms. Visual artists had to besiege my desk in 
Daily Times on many occasions with charges 
that I resorted to granting more audience to film 
makers, literary artists, sometimes musicians. 
And when we made conscious efforts to level up 
somewhat, we had angry expletives from some 
of their counterparts specializing in the other 
genres to cope with. And then the worst began 
to happen: the famous art feature columns began 
to vanish weeks on end whenever extra advert 
placements were recorded; they very conveniently 
usurped the traditional spaces on which the arts and 
books columns normally appeared. The very worst to 
follow was the widespread ban of influential and 
vibrant newspapers, leaving us with only a few. 
We must pay tribute to former attempts similar - and 
whenever they do resurrect, we shall be happy to say, 
complimentary - to this. Aside from serving as the 
official voice and news bulletin of the group, the 
Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Reviewhad 
a far more noble objective of being a reputable 
annual review. There also was Okike founded by the 
novelist Chinua Achebe; Black Orpheus (published 
in the early 1960s in Ibadan by the German scholar 
Ulli Beier, long since out of print); Positive Review 
(formerly produced in Ue-Ife,Nigeria); Opon Ifa 
(edited by Femi Osofisan); Transition (which only 
recently resuscitated in the United States) and a host 
of others. Many of those are now extinct. GR does not 
pretend to attempt to fill any of their shoes - beyond, 
perhaps to keep up irregular fevered heartbeats. 
GR is first and foremost a Nigerian review but with 
a broad international perspective. It is an effort on the 
whole to amplify the voices of those creative people 
of Nigeria and of Africa wanting to speak to the rest 
of the world. If we do it well - and there is no reason 
why we would not - doubtless, the world would not 
only listen but would speak back through us to Africa 
and to Nigeria. 
The choices of materials are in our own self-evaluation 
defective in that they have not been able to inclose 
sufficient represeatative voices. But this is only an 
initial attempt, the very first step. With your help, we 
are sure the ground under us will not give way. 
4
LETTER 
Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onabrakpeya, 
Kolade Oshinowo, Obiora Udechukwu, 
Ben Enwonwu, David Dale and the list 
goes on and on. Each year, we are 
bewildered by a variety of exhibitions 
and retrospectives from these Nigerian 
artists. The galleries that sponsor these 
exhibitions always go to town and label 
these exhibitions contemporary African 
art. Pray! What do we really refer to as 
contemporary? 
The Oxford Advanced Learners 
Dictionary defines contemporary as 'of 
the time or period being referred to.' 
Are we to believe that this art being 
practised by these gurus of the brush 
and pen is really contemporary and of 
the time? These masters have been 
practising for perhaps up to thirty years 
and even much more. In my humble 
opinion, these our masters have been at 
their easels for decades satisfying our 
yearnings for art. I can also bet that the 
tag contemporary has always been added 
to classify these our proud masters. Are 
these works really contemporary or is 
the Nigerian art scene evolving towards 
a loci that we can really call 
contemporary? 
We are daily inundated by our so called 
critics everyday with this bastardised 
cliche 'contemporary African art'. The 
galleries do not spare us either. The 
artists also have developed fads and do 
not stop rushing for exhibitions that are 
constantly being offered if not 
embarrassingly to a populace that is 
constantly being fawned over by 
exorbitant and glossily printed 
catalogues. The question really is who 
determines contemporary African art? 
The artists themselves, the critics or the 
populace that knows no better. I think 
that the Nigerian artist has a case to 
answer concerning this. The art world is 
in a constant state of revolution. 
Important landmarks are being created 
world-wide in contemporary art, Africa 
and indeed Nigeria must find its own 
footing in this epoch. Yet the 
repercussions of this world-wide scheme 
of things is still being felt too slowly in 
these regions. Are we really still 
primitive and tribal in our artistic 
offerings? Do we really have 
contemporary art in Nigeria? 
Embarrassingly, we still find that the 
offering of the yesteryears still reigns 
supreme today. 
Not that this observation is meant to 
support a group of Nigerian artists and 
run the others down. The Zaria school, 
the Ife school, the Osogbo school and 
the Yaba purveyors all herald and 
constantly strive for ideals. One cannot 
but be easily swayed by their offerings. 
The question is, are these leanings so 
different and are they really 
contemporary? The market scenes, the 
Fulani milkmaid, Durbar, mother and 
child and drummers are so typical of 
recent offerings. Is this what we can 
ART.FRAMES.CARDS 
18A Keffi Street.South West Ikoyi, Lagos. Nigeria 
really call contemporary? Don't we 
really need to shut down our exhibitions 
and our schools for some time to give 
our artists time to repossess thoughts 
and really evolve contemporary art? On 
the other hand, are we to call the art of 
the 1940s being practised by our still 
living masters as contemporary? Have 
they really evolved in what they are 
doing to occupy that niche we can 
present and juxtapose with our western 
contemporaries? Or are we to present 
our new practitioners with their 
overflogged themes? Try as much as we 
can, we cannot run away from the fact 
that there is a problem that needs 
addressing, if Nigeria is to evolve a 
truly contemporary art scene. The 
problem is 'has Nigerian Art evolved at 
all?' and where is the longevity, the 
strength and continuing vitality? 
Wole Olagunju, 
Lagos. 
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