Nigerian literature may be roughly defined as the literary writing by citizens of the nation of Nigeria for Nigerian readers, addressing Nigerian issues. This encompasses writers in a number of languages, including not only English but Igbo, Urhobo, Yoruba, and in the northern part of the county Hausa and Nupe. More broadly, it includes British Nigerians, Nigerian Americans and other members of the African diaspora.
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe is one of the milestones in African literature. Other post-colonial authors have won numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Wole Soyinka in 1986, and the Booker Prize, awarded to Ben Okri in 1991 for The Famished Road. Nigerians are also well represented among recipients of the Caine Prize and Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.
Nigerian literature in English
Nigerian literature is predominantly English-language. Literature in the national languages Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa plays only a minor role. Most of the important English-language authors in West Africa come from Nigeria.
Under British rule
Among the first modern Nigerian authors was Amos Tutuola. In his magnum opus The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) the author follows a man befuddled by palm wine in a fairy-tale atmosphere that leads him to the city of the dead. There he discovers a magical world populated by ghosts, demons and supernatural beings. The book contradicted all realistic narrative conventions and was written in flawed English. For this very reason, the book later became stylistic and highly regarded, although it was criticised at the time for maligning Nigerians as barbaric, perpetually drunken people and provoking racist fantasies.
In 1957, Black Orpheus magazine became the main forum for many Nigerian poets and writers.
Independence
A number of writers, members of the Mbari Club of Prof. Ulli Beier, became popular in the immediate aftermath of independence.
The Arts Theatre of the University of Ibadan developed into a touring theatre from 1961, but mostly performed plays by European authors. Thus, as a critical reaction to the emerging alienation of theatre from everyday African life in Ibadan, the Mbari Club emerged as a literary centre for African literary figures. Playwright John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo staged his first play Song of a Goat here in 1962, a synthesis of forms of ancient theatre and a theme always relevant in Africa - fertility and motherhood - for the European-educated young generation. In 1966, he documented the festival of a hero of the Ijaw people, which is celebrated every 25 years in the Niger Delta, in the original language in his drama Ozidi, adapted it dramatically and translated it into English. He turned the folkloric symbolism into the psychoanalytical.
The only representative of négritude in Nigeria was considered to be the essayist and literary scholar Abiola Irele, who became the director of the journal Black Orpheus in 1968. He criticised the overemphasis on ideological differences between the English- and French-speaking writers of Africa.
As early as the 1950s, popular metropolitan literature based on the American model emerged in Nigeria, published in booklets distributed in the market, the so-called Onitsha market literature, of which Cyprian Ekwensi was probably the most important representative. Ekwensi, the son of a storyteller, wrote hundreds of short stories as well as 35 novels and children's books. His best-known work is Jagua Nana (1961), a description of the life of an ageing sex worker that is not free of stereotypes.