Social Protest And Literary Imagination In Selected Nigerian Novels

ABSTRACT

This study is an examination of how selected Nigerian novelists have, through the literary

imagination, used protest as a mode of expression necessary for assessing the relationship

between art, ideology and social consciousness. This study examines the relationship of these

three elements within the context of selected Nigerian novels dealing with a specific society

struggling within difficult economic and socio-political circumstances. The analytical focus is on

six primary texts, namely Chinua Achebe‟s Anthills of the Savannah (1987); Kole Omotoso‟s

Just Before Dawn (1988); Buchi Emecheta‟s Destination Biafra (1982); Festus Iyayi’s Violence

(1979); Okey Ndibe‟s Arrows of Rain (2000) and Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel (2002).

The choice of these texts is informed by the fact that their thematic preoccupations and structural

concerns are broadly similar. In these texts, the selected writers have attempted to chart a course

of communal awareness and social reconstruction as they show concern for the socio-political

issues prevalent in Nigeria. In essence, the study takes a close look at the nature of protest, its

manifestation in literature and the novel, and the way in which the literary imagination

transforms it to suit the artistic temper of the individual authors while at the same time retaining

its essence as a means of drawing attention to inequity and injustice. A cursory examination of

the texts selected for this study underscores their reading as protest texts. Anthills of the

Savannah, Just Before Dawn, Destination Biafra, Violence, Arrows of Rain and Waiting for an

Angel. To varying extents, these texts show that the events that constitute the national narrative

are all subject to contention because they are informed by the conflicting motivations of different

characters, distorted by a variety of perspectives and shaped by the dynamics of an ever-evolving

culture, as well as by the biases and objectives of the writers themselves. The study concludes

that, in the evaluation of social protest and the literary imagination in the Nigerian novel, it is

important to analyse the relativity or ideological pursuits of the selected writers. The selected

writers in this study appear to be shaped by the prevailing Nigerian socio-political imbalance and

its resultant harshness. This in turn is expressed in their individual reactions to these perceived

socio-political problems. The recurrent motif in all the texts in this study is what could be

regarded as the most recent state of consciousness in Nigerian fiction; namely, an ideological

stance which no longer contents itself with either blaming outsiders or by wallowing in a

literature of despair and disillusionment.