WOl.F SOYINKA 
Ibadan 
lEHTffllli1 TEACHING WITHOUT 
THE TEXTBOOKS: 
Ngugi 
P»taK nf Blood 
New West African 
Literature 
University 
IMO ESHIET 
n a late twentieth century literary culture submerged under by massive 
print, any suggestion of teaching literature without the text may sound as 
a poorly conceived superstition and for the less cynically disposed, a 
strange innovation. This is even more so when we consider that the text 
is the chief source of information, that is, when we consider that the text 
is an authoritative source providing the basis for the very mode of existence 
of a literary work. No doubt a teaching of sorts can be made of literature without 
regards to its construction. 
Socio-historical and cultural data such as background and the prevailing ideational 
moods that produced the writers and their literary creations yield great light in 
clarifying meaning. However, in both oral and written traditions, the form and 
substance of literature, something to hook on to in the pedagogy of imaginative 
experience, is the text. Given the primacy of the text, it is difficult to envisage the 
teaching of literature without it except in terms of a great difficulty if not a complete 
curiosity. This, however, is the concrete reality challenging the wits of teachers of 
literature in our prevailing book drought. 
Fundamental to any discipline worth teaching is a clear understanding of what the 
subject really is. The text which Chris Nwamu's 'Dramatic Literature In Nigeria: 
Critical Issues For The Playwright' declares as an informative blue-print which 
motivates action and generates interpretative responses and criticisms, derives its 
primacy from the fact that it forms the basis for the illustration and demonstration of 
the excellence of form and pattern which delight us aesthetically and of the great 
emotional intensities of literature which give us edification and instruction. 
The scarcity of texts not only grossly circumvents such exemplifications, it also 
spirals its atrophy to other vital areas. Hordes of lecturers have abandoned their 
lecture theatres and whole courses have collapsed due to scarcity of essential texts. 
W Q 
won: ^o 
Forest ota 
Thousand Daemons fHINUA 
#CHEBE 
New Challenges Of Literature 
Teaching In A West African 
TlieAfriani 
' ' • • I , ' . - \ ' ': .'•>. ^ !' 
I
I remember most vividly the traumatic experience 
of a brilliant colleague who resigned 
more than half a decade ago. A product of the 
University, she was the first to make a first 
class degree from the department. Proceeding 
to Britain soon after, she finished her 
Master of Arts degree on record time from 
the famous London School of African and 
Oriental Studies. That done, she raced back 
home with patriotic zeal to take over the 
teaching of the literature of the Blacks in 
diaspora from an expatriate whose time was 
up. 
Frustrated by perennially unavailable texts, 
she threw open the doors of her private personal 
library to the rapacity of students. 
Welcomed voraciously by appreciating students, 
her resources and materials were within 
two years worn out, dog-eared, stolen, misplaced 
or vandalised. With razor sharp enough 
to be used in high delicate surgical operations, 
rare texts were 'qualmlessly' relieved 
of vital pages. She realised it only when her 
library was as bare as a sun-scorched earth. A 
victim of the drought and forbiddingly high 
prices of books, her fortune was a mere 
incarnation of the fate of libraries looted to 
their husk all over the land, only her reaction 
was more sincere and different. Acerbic as 
her experience, she put in a resignation, transferring 
her enormous skills and talent to the 
disposal of the advertisement establishment. 
Several others have since followed her example 
either by stepping aside or transferring 
to countries where the book culture is 
still esteemed. 
The constriction that precipitates their exit 
needs to be seen from a holistic ambience to 
be meaningfully understood. Of considerable 
importance is the relation of this factor 
to a labyrinth of problems common in a 
distressed economy where the deterioration 
of the texture and essence of life in general 
ensures a sustained hollowness in the supplies 
of essential commodities. A University 
of Calabar Library Report for the period 
October 1987 to September 1988 describes 
as 'grossly insufficient' the financial provision 
for the library's acquisition of books and 
journals. Stressing the obvious need for more 
fund for the purpose of acquisition, the Report 
reveals that while the budgetary allocation 
was N360,000, as against N500,000 for 
the previous year, only a 'mere pittance' of 
N101,108.97, was actually expended on 
books and journals. 
The shortage of funds for resources development 
calls for journal prioritization and since 
in the thinking of the establishment, science 
and technology come top, it follows logically 
that the arts receive scant attention. A continuous 
down-turn of emphasis on arts means 
that its teachers have to rely on the skin of 
their teeth in the cultivation, development 
and transfer of the knowledge of the arts, 
philosophy and science of the beautiful. 
This is particularly acute when tracking the 
intertextual affinities of a bank of literary 
texts to other related texts integral to their 
context of situation or literary environment. 
A prototype text may exemplify and serve as 
a model of the essential features of a bank of 
metatext. J. P. Clark's 'Abiku' and Wole 
Soyinka' s poem of the same title easily come 
to mind. Clark's prototext provides the mythological 
framework of Soyinka's metatextual 
operations. In a literary situation such as this 
where the presence of the prototext looms 
large in the metatext, the teacher may wish to 
elucidate the essential features of the giant 
text which resonates in the secondary text as 
part of a common cultural and ideational 
background. He might wish to clarify the 
arrangement and combination of artistic items 
in the text or depict the new dimensions of 
complexity added to the shared awareness or 
intertextual resonance in the successive text. 
Soyinka's poem Abiku draws from the same 
folkloric essence as Clark's but unlike Clark 
who flounders with sentiment and mawkishness, 
Soyinka ritualises the myth for the 
celebration of assertiveness, defiance, invincibility 
and freedom. 
Again, Soyinka's aesthetic distance from his 
subject matter contrasts sharply from Clark's 
responses. His detachment is itself a rejection 
of Clark' identification. He also offers a 
different version of the human condition 
sentimentally evoked by Clark's involvement 
with his subject matter. A tremendous 
advantage here is that both texts are often 
available and the combined effect experience 
from them is similar in many ways to 
viewing both sides of a coin simultaneously. 
Not so, such germane texts as Sophocle's 
Oedipus Rex and Rotimi' s The Gods A re Not 
To Blame or Soyinka's The Strong Breed and 
Osofisan' s No More The Wasted Breed. Joyce • 
Cary's Mister Johnson and Achebe's Things 
Fall Apart, Euripides' Bacchae and Soyinka's 
Bacchae of Euripides, Clark's The Raft and 
Osofisan's Another Raft as well as Euripides' 
Alcestis are intertextually related texts familiar 
to the African literary landscape and in 
each of them authors of the metatext expect 
their audience to bring some intertextual 
memory in construing the secondary text if 
they are to make meaning in their readings 
and to meet each other as writer and reader. 
The only snag is that the primary texts are not 
always there. 
In each of these cases, the use of 
intertextuality, an obviously respected and 
ancient mode of artistic creation, might be 
simply to update a social vision or outlook 
upon the world, demystify some 
mystifications and radicalise some thinking, 
values, beliefs and ideas which govern man's 
condition and existence as in the case of The 
Raft and Another Raft. It may also in the 
process extend the frontiers of knowledge by 
exploding effete stereotypes or wrongly and 
uncritically held prejudices and assumptions 
or fallacy. In each of these cases the special 
feature of the metatexts is that they are 
charged, enriched and intensified in form 
and thought as they vibrate sympathetically 
with patterns and motifs existing prototypically 
but amendable to individual artistic 
stamp and interpretation. 
In a learning situation these two banks of text 
- the prototext and the metatext - naturally 
invite comparisons and contrasts. In tracking 
the relations of say, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex 
and Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame, 
the teacher may face a formidable task without 
the text to hook on to for the challenge 
and implication of the interweaving of texts 
demand a familiarity with the original as 
with the secondary text if befuddlement is to 
be avoided. The situation is similar to what 
obtains in mythic criticism where the critic is 
expected to be conversant with the myth to be 
able to carry our any criticism of a mythic 
work. 
Also in introducing the divergence between 
indigenous African theatre making traditions 
and Western dramaturgy which is likely to 
show up early in any discourse involving the 
two, the scarcity of texts hampers communication 
in teaching by robbing it of the advantages 
of apractical elucidation of the African 
concept of the theatre of total appeal in contrast 
with Euro-American drama which is 
anchored in dialogical logistics. In Poetics, 
his world famous treatise on the craft and 
principles of tragic poetry, Aristotle stresses 
the primacy of the verbal resource in the 
generation and resolution of dramatic conflicts 
or in his words, the imitation of action. 
Language with its accessories and embellishment 
is one of the most basically significant 
of the six elements of drama Aristotle 
names as essential components of dramatic 
art. 
Over and above the significance of the spectacular 
element which comes least and last in 
Aristotle's scheme but extremely vital in 
African dramatic traditions, the Greek phi- 
68
losopher approves the rhetorical orientation 
of Western drama as the chief source for the 
intensification of thought. Language or diction 
as he calls it, has from his time remained 
the key element for conveying and expressing 
conflict and meaning in Western drama - 
despite Antonin Artaud's slim but powerful 
campaign for a return to the primordial language 
of ritual and magic which is natural to 
theatre as he argues. This basic component of 
the literary structure needs to be read, listened 
to or seen when performed in a theatre 
in order to get a sense of the total form of the 
literary work. 
Accordingly, the study and criticism of contemporary 
literature need a printed text if the 
teachers and learners are to put themselves in 
command of the technical apparatus that the 
literary artists have worked with. A study and 
analysis of some literary pieces with textual 
affinities well exemplifies our discourse. If 
we attempt to follow the literary structure of 
Oedipus Rex as i^ unfolds we find that we 
cannot continue long enough unmindful of 
the pervasive presence of speech in the rubric 
of the play. We notice at once Sophocles' 
enormous investment in the resources of 
language as a persuasive and memorable 
mode of creating and conveying experience. 
The vocabulary range or the fund of image 
bearing knowledge explored by the playwright, 
the dramatic dialogue finely chiselled 
and artfully concentrated to achieve an 
aesthetically satisfying economy and intensity 
together with action execute the play 
story. The element of spectacle is tersely 
employed in the exposition to hint at the 
point of reference for action and character 
and to point the mood and tragic atmosphere 
of the play. Similarly, the assets of dance are 
severely played down. The play unfolds with 
the presentation of the King's Palace, an 
image which quickly establishes the active 
involvement of royalty in the conflict dramatised. 
In the forefront are alters signifying the 
presence and role of the gods in the unfolding 
tragedy. Sitting in attitudes of supplication 
and grouped around the alters are citizens of 
Thebes, their kinesics and proxemics significant 
of the tragic intimations the play enacts. 
These imagery of contending forces harbour 
subtle clues to the interpretations the playwright 
wishes to communicate but to endow 
the action with full dramatic and tragic effects, 
Sophocles' stage- business is realised 
predominantly through dialogue, the language 
resource of the dramatist. Gory moments 
such as when Queen Jocasta commits 
suicide and when Oedipus visits violence 
upon himself, are conventionally reported. 
The idioms and vocabulary of this rhetorical 
tradition which sufficiently creates a convincing 
atmosphere in Western dramaturgy, 
can with the availability of the original text 
• be beneficially contrasted with the secondary 
text which belongs to a more visual 
traditional, steeped, to borrow a phrase from 
Osofisan in the structural machinery of rite. 
The principles of construction in this tradition 
are themselves under-girded by the code 
of such art forms as mine, dance procession, 
indeed the entire repertoire of ritual. 
This gamut is scripted into the play text in a 
spectacular manner. In his adaptation of the 
Oedipus myth, Rotimi's text extends the 
scope of tragic conception by going beyond 
classical insistence on generic autonomy and 
purity to integrate viable strands of the comic 
in his tragic action. The proxemics and 
kinesics of the exposition powerfully project 
the complexity of the action and the variegated 
nature of life represented. A dance 
procession and merry singing and drumming 
charge the dramatic atmosphere while 
anticipations of tragic action are suggested 
by the clinking of metallic objects, dirging as 
well as by the ominous presence of the shrine 
of Ogun with its cultic emblems of patterned 
palm fronds and lone machete stuck in the 
ground. The upsurge and interplay of the 
aural and the visual, the tragic and the festive 
strike a peculiar African note throughout the 
expository prologue. These devices draw 
attention to one of the objectives of 
intertextuality which is to give a different 
perspective to the original subject matter, in 
this case to the variation of the conception of 
tragedy in another dramatic tradition. 
Our brief comparison of the two texts evinces 
the eclectic quality of African dramatic literature 
where the basic projections of the 
theatre such as dance power, song intensifies, 
music and visual wit constitute components 
as active and influential as dialogic and 
verbal wit. As literary compositions the texts 
can gainfully be studied systematically, based 
on the principle of literary structure. The 
printed or oral texts guide us through its 
unified components and as we participate in 
them either by exercising our reading or 
listening abilities the total pattern or form of 
the composition emerges at the end. 
This is the aesthetically satisfying experience 
often sabotaged by the critical dearth of 
texts. This situation is indeed a most irksome 
and an overwhelming educational challenge. 
It is perhaps responsible in a large measure 
for the poor performance levels in the development 
of literary and linguistic skills and 
the increasing rate of human communication 
break down. 
Teachers struggle and embark on various 
ameliorative strategies against the deplorable 
scarcity of literary texts. Often ignoring 
copyright regulations, volumes of extant texts 
are qualmlessly cannibalised by both teachers 
and students as they photocopy, duplicate 
or practice other forms of piracy that serve 
their immediate needs. In the process of 
perpetuating these illegalities, whole lines 
are jammed or completely omitted with the 
result that vital meaning and form are impaired 
and good learning defeated. 
The whole idea of teaching literature without 
the texts is a weird innovation and unless the 
abnormality is urgently redressed, we may 
have a situation similar to a fellow theoretically 
instructed in the art of driving without 
ever being given a chance at a practical 
demonstration. One of the immediate accidents 
of this unwholesome situation is coming 
to literature through the backdoor, through 
satellite texts such as reviews, critical expositions 
or commentaries accumulated over 
time around the original text. Students driven 
to their wit gleefully embrace such substitutes 
oblivious to the real thing and to the 
dulling effects these may have on their confidence 
to develop sensitive, sharp and critical 
response to unfamiliar literary compositions. 
The constrictions are perhaps not altogether 
necessary. To emerge from the befuddlement 
and may be open up vital areas of inquiry 
than we otherwise have done, books could be 
locally mass produced, under license. GR 
END NOTES 
Antonin Artaud The Theatre And Its DaubU Trans Victor 
Cord (London: Calder and Boyars. 1970). 
University of Calabar Library Report For The Period Ortober 
19*7 -September 1988. 
Chris Nwamu, 'Dramatic Literature in Nigeria: Criticll 
Issue for The Play Wright,' Solomon Unoh ed. " " T 
Journal of liberal Studies (Calabar: Centaur Press 19WIMichael 
( winnings and Robert Simmons, The Lanpugt »/ 
Literature (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 19S3. 
(Ma Rotimi. The Gods An Not To Blame. 
Sophocles. The Theban Plays trans. E. F. Walling 
(Harmondsworth: Penguin 1*47.) 
Lynn Akembemd and Luly Lewis, A Handbook farAt 
Study of Dnuma (New York: The MacmHIan Press !»•*)• 
Peter Thomson. The Actum of the Wordtfruttr: Unrfenrfy 
ofEieter. 1975). 
69