NIGERIAN ARTS IN FOCUS: A REFLECTION ON LITERATURE AND MUSIC
Over the years, across eras and shifting seasons, literature has gradually lost some of its fire, its wit, its meaning, its joy. A haze of mediocrity has settled upon the landscape like the coronavirus did in its infamous year, leaving too much of today’s poetry reduced to baseless rants and hurriedly assembled words. West Africa, once a roaring furnace of literary brilliance, now finds itself struggling to match the legacy of her giants. Yet Nigeria still stands tall if only by the sheer weight of the writers who have come before, whose spirits and stories refuse to fade.
Renowned literary icon, Professor Femi Osofisan, has repeatedly raised concerns about the disturbing decline of artistic and literary pursuits in the country. He lays a significant portion of the blame at the feet of Nigeria’s struggling economy. In a recent conversation with the Daily Sun, after delivering one of his characteristically evocative lectures, he did not hide his disappointment.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the state of our economy drive many of our brightest intellectuals abroad,” he said gravely. “But what troubles me just as much is the loss of focus among our youths. They are increasingly mimicking foreign cultures, rather than embracing and celebrating our own rich heritage.”
His words pronounces a reality many see but few are willing to confront: a cultural detachment that deepens with every new generation.
Yet Nigeria remains fertile ground for literature, rich, unpredictable, and endlessly alive. Its artistic ancestry can boast of minds whose works transcend geography, culture, and circumstance. Among them is the incomparable Wole Soyinka, a titan of modern African writing whose literary universe cuts across varied human experiences. His classic play The Trials of Brother Jero remains a sharp, almost mischievous critique of false prophets and the theatre of manipulation that often surrounds them. The story pierces to the heart of religious quackery, an issue as old as time and as current as today’s headlines, while retaining the charm of satire and the beauty of performance. Soyinka, like so many of our literary elders, has gifted us timeless mirrors through which we can examine society, history, and ourselves.
Other voices continue to scream with the same lasting resonance. The late Chinua Achebe, whose 1959 masterpiece Things Fall Apart is still a literary compass for Africa and the world, remains unmistakably golden decades later. Achebe’s storytelling, simple yet profound, preserved histories, interrogated colonial encounters, and dignified the Igbo worldview at a time when African narratives were still dismissed or distorted. His influence laid the foundation for generations of writers who now shape global conversations.
Collectively, these authors remind us of the power of Nigerian literature not merely as entertainment but as a vessel for memory, identity, resistance, and imagination. They set standards that challenge contemporary creators to rise above the noise, to reclaim the artistry that once defined our literary tradition, and to speak boldly in voices rooted deeply in who we are.
Book Cover of Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe
The upsetting death of Ikemefuna and Okonkwo’s tragic, self-inflicted role in that horror lingers in the reader’s mind as one of the most haunting turning points in Things Fall Apart. It becomes the first fracture in a world that once seemed unshakeable. Nwoye’s perceived betrayal of Umuofia, followed by the inevitable and devastating fall of Okonkwo, forms a chain of events that not only mirrors the complexities of the precolonial era but also foreshadows the fractures that would come to define the Nigerian experience for generations. Achebe’s narrative, though cast in the past, reads with an haunting timelessness: it is so understandable in its human emotion, so simple in its structure, yet profoundly complicated in its consequences, bitter, sweet, and unforgettable.
Beyond retelling the collapse of a man or a village, Achebe’s novel quietly transforms into a prophecy, almost as if he were whispering warnings across time. Written decades ago yet still painfully relevant today, the book reveals how easily a people’s culture, values, and beliefs can be unstitched, not only by external forces like colonialism but also by internal conflicts, silence, and denial. The introduction of Christianity into Umuofia, portrayed with striking clarity, becomes more than the story of cultural intrusion; it becomes a metaphor for how societies lose their center when they cannot balance tradition with inevitable change.
In today’s Nigeria, where identity, heritage, and modernity frequently clash, Things Fall Apart feels less like historical fiction and more like a literary prophecy fulfilled. Achebe captures the early tremors of a cultural earthquake whose aftershocks continue to shape our politics, our religions, our communities, and even our personal lives. What happened in Umuofia is not merely a memory; it is a reflection. The disintegration that befell Okonkwo’s world resounds loudly in our present reality, reminding us that when a society fails to adapt with wisdom, or loses its spiritual and cultural anchor, the center indeed cannot hold.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, born in Enugu and raised in Nsukka, is one of Nigeria’s most influential literary voices and a defining figure of 21st-century African storytelling. She grew up in the academic environment of the University of Nigeria, where her father was a statistics professor and her mother the institution’s first female registrar, a background that exposed her early to the power of words, ideas, and identity. Adichie later moved to the United States to study Communications and Political Science, followed by creative writing and African studies, experiences that profoundly shaped her global perspective while sharpening her Nigerian roots.
Her literary contributions are monumental. With novels like Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, and her short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie has carved out a space that blends personal narrative with political consciousness. Her writing is celebrated for its emotional precision, richly drawn characters, and fearless exploration of themes such as war, migration, family dynamics, and postcolonial identity. She has helped re-energize global interest in African literature, bringing Nigerian stories to international stages without diluting their cultural texture.
Beyond fiction, Adichie is a powerful cultural critic and one of the most recognizable feminist voices of her generation. Her TED Talk, We Should All Be Feminists, evolved into a global manifesto, reshaping conversations about gender equality in classrooms, governments, and pop culture, including its incorporation into Beyoncé’s music. Adichie’s feminism is distinctly grounded in African realities; she challenges patriarchal norms with clarity and compassion, urging women and men alike to rethink roles that limit human potential. Her later work, such as Dear Ijeawele, offers practical, deeply personal guidance on raising a new generation of empowered girls.
Her book, purple hibiscus, known for its infamous introduction, “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère…” tells yet, another reality that is undoubtedly original.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is one of those rare novels that stays with you long after you close the final page. Not because it shouts, but because it whispers with frightening honesty. It is a novel drenched in silence, oppressive silence, frightened silence, hopeful silence, and it is within these silences that Adichie performs her finest work.
First published in 2003, the book remains a contemporary classic of African literature because of its ability to fuse political instability, domestic tension, religious dogmatism, love, silence, and self-discovery into a single, compelling narrative. It is a coming-of-age story, but it is also a political novel, a psychological novel, a family chronicle, a critique of extremism, and a celebration of resilience.
What makes Purple Hibiscus irresistible is not loud drama, but Adichie’s delicate weaving of quiet moments, glances, silences, whispered apologies, hesitant laughter that accumulate into a powerful emotional experience. Through fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike, Adichie invites the reader into a world where beauty and brutality coexist in the same breath. The novel’s greatness lies not only in its story, but in its craft, its symbolism, its themes, its contrasts, and its layered character arcs.
At the core of Purple Hibiscus is the Achike family, wealthy and admired within their Catholic community in Enugu. The patriarch, Eugene Achike, known simply as Papa, is a towering figure. He owns factories, publishes a newspaper, funds charities, and is considered a moral pillar of society. To the outside world, he is benevolence personified.
But within the walls of his immaculate mansion, Eugene rules with a rigid, suffocating version of Catholicism, one that justifies control as discipline, silence as respect, and punishment as purification. His wife, Beatrice, moves like a shadow behind him; his children, Jaja and Kambili, exist in a constant state of tiptoe, waiting for cues, calculating how to breathe correctly.
Kambili narrates the story in a voice so soft you can almost hear it tremble. Her childhood is structured to the minute, prayers, studies, chores, rehearsed interactions. Her self-worth is tied to her father’s approval, her mistakes punished with frightening precision.
The novel’s turning point arrives when Kambili and Jaja are sent to stay with their Aunty Ifeoma in Nsukka. Ifeoma is Eugene’s sister, a widowed university lecturer whose home is noisy, cluttered, joyful, imperfect, and free. It is in this small apartment, where laughter is allowed to rise without permission and opinions spill over dining tables, that Kambili begins her transformation.
With the remarkable contribution of literature to the very essence of human expression, music slips seamlessly into its rightful place beside it, an artistic sibling carved from the same ancestral stone. To speak of African music, with Nigeria as the focal point, is almost to write an elegy for the pioneers who shaped it with little more than genius, grit, and an unyielding sense of identity. Nigeria’s sonic landscape is a mosaic of extraordinary diversity: from the deep-rooted rhythms of Fuji and Apala to the evolution that birthed the global phenomenon now known as Afrobeats. This vibrant transformation stands as a testament to the immense reservoir of talent woven into the corners of our culture, a reminder that within this world of ours lies an artistic force unmatched in depth and dynamism.
To discuss Nigerian music without invoking the name Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is to remove the spine from its body. Fela was not just a musician; he was an institution, a revolution, a cultural blueprint. His contributions transcend melody and instrumentation; they penetrate politics, identity, philosophy, and the evolving consciousness of the Nigerian people. Fela understood music not merely as entertainment but as an instrument of truth, a living archive of the people’s struggles, and a dialectical weapon against oppression.
The late Fela Anikulapo Ransome-Kuti
His creation of Afrobeat was itself an act of rebellion. Drawing from highlife, jazz, funk, and Yoruba percussion, Fela crafted a genre that was rhythmically hypnotic yet intellectually combative. Afrobeat became a battlefield with horns blaring like alarms, drums pulsating like marching feet, and lyrics cutting through hypocrisy with surgical precision. Each performance was a protest; each song, a manifesto. His music carried the pulse of the streets and the philosophy of resistance, merging the sacred, the political, and the profane.
But Fela’s greatest contribution was his relentless truth-telling. At a time when military governments demanded silence, Fela chose volume. Songs like Zombie, Coffin for Head of State, and Shuffering and Shmiling were sonic grenades hurled at corrupt leadership and societal complacency. His criticisms were not symbolic; he called out names, pointed at institutions, and exposed the performative religiosity and oppressive power structures crippling the nation. Through his art, he reclaimed the role of the griot, the storyteller who safeguards history by challenging those who distort it.
Fela’s activism was inseparable from his music. Kalakuta Republic, his home and commune, was a living embodiment of his ideology: a self-declared independent state where creativity, resistance, and radical self-expression thrived. It was repeatedly raided, burned down, and violated by the authorities, yet Fela rebuilt it every time. His resilience became a cultural statement, an assertion that the artist must not only create, but confront.
Beyond politics, Fela deeply shaped Nigeria’s cultural self-awareness. His celebration of African identity, especially through his embrace of Yoruba spirituality and traditional aesthetics, challenged the colonial mentality still lingering in post-independence Nigeria. He reminded the people that African culture was not backward or inferior, it was rich, powerful, and worth defending. His use of Pidgin English democratized his music, making it accessible to all Nigerians regardless of class or ethnicity. Even his sartorial choices, ankara fabrics, beads, body paint, were declarations of cultural authenticity.
Fela’s influence is not confined to the past. His legacy reverberates through generations of musicians, activists, and storytellers. Artists like Seun Kuti, Femi Kuti, Made Kuti, Burna Boy, and even contemporary poets and filmmakers echo his themes of resistance and cultural pride. His life and art continue to inspire movements against injustice, raising questions about governance, freedom, and what it truly means to be African in a world that constantly demands narratives of compromise.
In essence, Fela did not just contribute to Nigerian music; he expanded its boundaries, infused it with purpose, and elevated it to a form of intellectual warfare. He proved that art can unsettle, challenge, and revolutionize. Through rhythm, he taught courage. Through melody, he taught memory. Through defiance, he taught identity.
Literature and music are like fraternal twins who, despite their differences, still bear an unmistakable resemblance, each one shaped by history, emotion, and the pulse of human experience. While literature may seem to have lost some of its spark, perhaps only to a certain demographic, the embers still glow stubbornly beneath the surface. They refuse to be extinguished, even in a country like ours where chaos often overshadows calm and where the noise of survival threatens the silence needed for true creativity.
In the midst of this tension, something promising is happening. A new crop of writers and musicians is rising bold, talented, and unafraid to challenge convention. Many are rekindling the essence of storytelling, anchoring their work in heritage, identity, and the lived realities of the African experience. Yet, alongside this revival, there is an unsettling trend: some creators appear increasingly detached from the core of pure artistry, Westernizing every fragment of our culture in an attempt to chase global approval. The result is often art that looks polished but feels hollow, impressive on the surface but missing the heartbeat of authenticity.
Still, hope persists. The resurgence of works that speak not only of our heritage but of our struggles, our politics, our pains, our joys, our contradictions signals a shift toward a truer artistic renaissance. These pieces, rooted in sincerity rather than imitation, have the potential to reshape perception and spark conversations that reach far beyond our borders. If nurtured, this revival could restore the dignity of West African art before its influence stretches once again to the rest of the world.
For in the end, literature is a language best communicated not by the words we read, but by the emotions they awaken. And music is understood not only by its rhythms, but by the truths it carries. When both forms remain rooted in who we are, they become more than art, they become memory, prophecy, and healing.
.png)