Efuru at 50: A celebration, tour of 5 cities
The celebration, ‘Efuru at 50’ started in Lagos. But the literary journey began when Flora Nwapa’s novel ‘Efuru’ was published in 1966, making it the first work by an African woman. Set in Igbo land, it is about the travails of a woman prostrate to a time and culture that expected many things of her […]
The celebration, ‘Efuru at 50’ started in Lagos. But the literary journey began when Flora Nwapa’s novel ‘Efuru’ was published in 1966, making it the first work by an African woman. Set in Igbo land, it is about the travails of a woman prostrate to a time and culture that expected many things of her and yet watched her suffer.
Organised by a committee headed by Dr. Wale Okediran, a former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) and author of several books and brainchild of Nwapa’s children, the celebration and tour of five Nigerian cities, will remain in the minds of literature enthusiasts for quite a while.
It certainly wasn’t an off-the-cuff agenda. Uzoma Nwachukwu, the son of the literary icon, along with his sisters, Ejine Olga Nzeribe and Amede Nzeribe, realised how much of their mother’s legacy was lost and decided to restore it. He recalls when his mother died in 1993 while he was in far-away California, USA. He founded a non-profit foundation. But he was distracted by school at the time and so nothing much came out of that initiative. Then twenty-three years later, it became apparent to them that ‘Efuru’, his mother’s very first work was fifty years gone. This propelled them to set up the Flora Nwapa Foundation in Nigeria. So they announced the plan for the conference they intended to hold in five cities to the press in Lagos and subsequently visited University of Lagos, University of Maiduguri and Abuja. They also paid a courtesy call to the Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha. All in a bid to flag off the five city tour. And it came to pass.
“The Lagos experience was overwhelming,” Nwachukwu said about the beginning of the tour. This, he elaborated, was particularly because his mum was Assistant Registrar, Public Relations in the University of Lagos way back in 1989.
As they journeyed to Maiduguri, the implication of the legacy their mother left behind became more visible to the three siblings. The eldest, Olga Nzeribe, remembers how, while driving at 80 kilometres per hour, Nwapa was hit by her first story idea. When she got to her destination, she asked for pen and paper and started writing. “By that singular act, she found a whole new career apart from the fact that she read English and Geography at school,” she said. And Nwapa never set out to be a writer.
When ‘Efuru’ was published Nzeribe was very young, so she couldn’t read it, until she grew and could understand. But her favourite came to be ‘Never Again.’ It informed her about the Nigerian Civil War in a community and what could have happened to any family at that point in time. Still a child at the time she read it, she totally resonated with the narrative.
Nwachukwu’s story is different. His mother’s work has not played a major role in his growing up because “she didn’t put it in front of us.” But, “Interestingly, it’s only now that we are beginning to understand, which is quite ironic,” he said, adding that he only knew his mother as a writer. Born in 1969, right after the war and while he grew, she was more in government. She was the first Nigerian female who held a position as commissioner of East Central State. “So that was how we saw her,” he explained. They were all too young to know she had written her first book in 1966.
But he began to view her as a writer when she started writing children’s books. She wanted to know how her children felt about her first children’s book ‘Mammy Water.’ Nwachukwu was extremely fascinated by the story because he grew up reading all the classics like Aladdin and Gulliver’s Travels. For this reason, he was enchanted by ‘Mammy Water’, which she read out loud to him and his sister in one night. He was about eight years old then and she wanted to know how the book will be received by children. “She read to us off the manuscript,” he said, his eyes lighting with the memory. It became one of his most exciting books.
But Amede’s favourite work, like her elder sister, is ‘Never Again.’ She read the book and could envision what went on during the civil war. Her mother’s influence has encouraged her to pursue her passion. “As a writer, she followed her God-given talent which paved the way for me to follow mine. Today I’m a Lawyer turned fashion designer,” she said.
A former General Secretary of ANA, Salamatu Sule narrated how they were filled with anxiety at the prospect of going to Maiduguri, Borno State known for its continual face-off with the Boko Haram insurgents. But “the environment erased our fears. It was calm and serene,” she said.
In University of Maiduguri, where Nwapa was a visiting professor, the attendance at the conference was impressive. Professor Zainab Alkali, the first female Northern author gave the keynote speech. Her husband was responsible for Nwapa’s position in the institution many years ago and Nwachukwu described the event as a sought of homecoming because of the overwhelming support. “It was quite touching,” he said. There, papers were presented and there were cultural shows.
When the tour team came to Abuja, there was a children’s carnival where four secondary schools came up with a quiz competition, drama and sketches of ‘Efuru.’ Then there was the event at the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) children’s arena.
At the University of Abuja, another part of the programme took place at the Faculty of Arts Theatre. It was the conference proper, where a drama adaptation of ‘Efuru’ featured and a remarkable poetry performance by Deji Ige on the State of Nigeria.
Paula Uimonen, Associate Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden, was one person who has been with the tour team from the start. Her mission in the country and some other parts of Africa is a research on African women writers. “This event is very significant because it’s the celebration of the first internationally published novel by an African woman writer, so that makes it a classic in African literary history,” she said, adding that she’s impressed that there are celebrations, to start with, which brings attention to ‘Efuru.’ “I’m also happy that they are doing it as a national event, a five-city and ten-day event, to show that Flora Nwapa herself lived in different parts of the country and the book belongs to the cultural heritage of all of Nigeria.”
But Uimonen has noticed that the book had been out of print before the occasion, because she has found it impossible to buy a copy in Sweden. “But now ‘Efuru’ is being re-launched, which I think is great. I am taking it to Sweden and hope that a publisher will translate it to Swedish,” she said, adding that she enjoyed the book because ‘Efuru’, the major character is a woman. And so she got to learn a lot about life in Igbo community from the perspective of a woman, understanding what her life was about and the challenges she encountered.
Offering quick insight into the work, the Swedish professor said: “As far as I could tell, Efuru was a very beautiful woman, in appearance, in character, in action and she did everything right; followed and respected culture and yet she had all these hardships. So that was a bit frustrating. Why would she have to suffer? Husbands abandoned her, then the death of her child. It was a disturbing read because you feel that it’s not fair and she deserves better. It gave me insight into the hardships that women faced at the time.”
One of those who presented a paper was Dr. Elizabeth Ben Ineachor, Director, Research and Documentation at the National Council for Arts and Culture. A critic and award-winning author and writer of children’s literature, her paper was titled ‘Half a Century Later, Sexuality Options of Selected Female Characters in Nigerian Fiction.’
The paper took off from after Flora Nwapa and all that she represents, the fact that with her writing and publication of ‘Efuru’ the voice of the woman in the African community began to be heard. Stories began to be told from female perspectives. Now there are female writers who took off from Nwapa’s platform. Their ideologies have been different, but every one of them is pursuing one single thing, trying to answer the question of what women want, which is to be able to be the determinants of their own lives and make their own choices. “Those choices are, of course subjected to social judgement, because no story is innocent. But the other thing is, women are being allowed to make their choices and live it out,” Dr. Ineachor explained. Her presentation looked at some of the female characters created, both by male and female authors, each bearing a certain strand of feminism.
There are many reasons why the ‘Efuru’ at fifty celebrations was ideal at this time in Nigeria’s history. Speaking passionately, Sule pointed out that quite a lot of students didn’t know Nwapa was the first female novelist, “and I think this is because of the kind of educational system we have in the country where we are not preserving our first generation literature. For Achebe to have had such a big recognition for ‘Things Fall Apart’, I also think that Nwapa should have that for ‘Efuru’ because it defines who a traditional African woman is. So if we have the feminism we are preaching today, we ought to remember the kind of women writing from Nwapa’s era and spot the meeting and parting point.”
Flora Nwapa’s children said at the end of the tour, they hope to restore their mother’s legacy. Nwachukwu said she was not even mentioned at the Nigerian Centenary Awards a year ago, and “we as her children in the past twenty-three years haven’t done enough,” he added. Also, they hope to develop African women’s literature, a part they believe their mother wanted to influence. So the tour to Lagos, Maiduguri, Abuja, Enugu, and Imo is just the beginning. Plus, to flag things off, there are manuscripts of the late icon yet to be published. There’s ‘The Lake Goddess’, ‘The Umbilical Cord’ and several more.