The Question of a National Literature for Nigeria.(nationalism, culture and language)

Haka aka ce in ji mai ba da labarin iarya.

"So they say," as the teller of false stories always says.

In the designation of countries, objective and subjective criteria cleave the notion of country into two quite different entities: the state and the nation. The state is marked by a tangible, observable, recognizable set of facts. The state has borders, a central government, a population, an economy, and a bureaucracy, all of which act to maintain and perpetuate continuity. The nation, on the other hand, constitutes itself through the will and the imagination of the citizens of the state. The health of the nation depends on each citizen's desire to identify with the entire population of the nation despite racial, ethnic, or religious differences. This idea of loyalty to the nation above and beyond individual differences is known as nationalism, and often competes with fervent loyalties to subnational groups. Yet within each nation those loyalties differ, and thus no one determined course of action can be employed in the name of nationalism. In effect, rather than molding itself on universal terms, nationalism shapes itself to fit the particular needs of each nation.

Unlike nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric, which mused romantically upon the consent and will of the people who desire to live together "with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart" (Renan 17), twentieth-century criticism has roundly rejected the idea of a natural nation as homogeneous or singularly ethnic. With few exceptions, the preponderance of nations are necessarily invented, consisting of diverse groups whose loyalties must be bent toward the nation through psychological means other than family or clan affiliation. For the reality of the nation, broad in both geographic and cultural terms, is that no one citizen will ever know the majority of his or her compatriots, and so a figurative bond must be substituted in order to maintain the "imagined community" (Anderson 6) of the nation. Modern scholars thus consistently subscribe to theories of the nation as discourse; an invented or imagined, fictional construct.

Given the reality of virtually all African countries, their clinically induced birth at the Berlin Conference regardless of traditional ethnic boundaries, nationalism has had little to cling to in the sense of even vaguely natural, homogeneous affiliations, loyalty or trust. Anthony Smith has suggested that "short of prolonged and intense application of centralized force" (147), the only way to draw a nation's diverse peoples together is through rewriting history, diminishing if not effacing ethnic differences, replacing them with conflated pasts and new, imagined, unifying experiences. Ernest Gellner concurs, insisting that culture must be shared if the nation is to cohere. Problematically, the idea of one shared culture is undermined by the prolific small cultures tied to oral folklore and variegated histories which resist unification. Peasants, especially illiterate ones, according to Gellner, do not make good nationalists. Education emerges as the great leveler of difference, creating a nation of potentially mobile "clerics," and the state is the only organization large enough to take care of education and shape national culture. Nationalism succeeds when universal education produces a homogenized "high" culture. This culture, virtually imposed on the populace, while manifesting links to various folklores and histories of "low" cultures, represents a new, hybrid, "high" culture. Literacy thus opens the door to an education program aimed at homogenizing the nation's culture by inventing a new culture, which is, in fact, a fiction.

A regular pattern of literary metaphors emerges in the various discourses of nationalism: rewriting the nation's history on the palimpsest of forgotten pasts; creating a fiction of the nation; disseminating nationalism through print; harnessing literacy to reformulate a modern hybrid national culture. Although the "state" has been reified into a series of facts and numbers, the "nation" remains more ephemeral, a psychological bond, a state of mind, an act of consciousness (Kohn 10). Invented, imagined, reordered at will, the nation is constituted by a fiction, a willed belief in unity where there is no natural affiliation.

Yet by the very nature of that fiction, the nation remains a fluid, unstable entity, amorphous, complexly layered, and slippery. Homi Bhabha reminds us that the nation, rather than representing a historical certainty, emerges as an ambivalent metaphor, "more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identification--gender, race or class--than can be represented" (292), consequently tending to slip into metonymical representation. Like many African countries, Nigeria exemplifies the overdetermined metaphor of nation, which as yet has failed to stabilize and hold. The fictions of Nigeria's nationhood are rife with conflict, strong ethnic loyalties and central organizing weaknesses. There are many who think Nigeria has not even achieved nationhood, stalled in the complications arising from its complex state formation (see Afolayan; Hutchinson; Smith). The tenuous condition of the Nigerian state has directly influenced the nation's sense of identity as fractured and unfraternal throughout the twentieth century.

Nigeria was originally conceived of as three separate colonial territories, Lagos, the North, and the South, each independently administered. In 1914, Lugard united the territories in the name of Nigeria, but maintained the distinct administrations. By 1945, regionalism had become a reality, as the north, southeast, and southwest each possessed a capital, parliament, high court, and budget, dominated respectively by the Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. State leaders themselves proclaimed Nigeria a sham nation, "a mere geographical expression" designated by the British but not ratified by the Nigerian people (Coleman 320). Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa stated unequivocally, "Since 1914 the British government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigerian people themselves are historically different in their backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs, and do not show themselves any sign of willingness to unite" (qtd. In Coleman 320). Wole Soyinka, in The Open Sore of a Continent, has suggested that if a nation is constituted by the will of a people, then perhaps we should think of Nigeria as a non-nation. The 1993 election disaster destroyed any semblance of nationhood Nigeria might have clung to, he rages, and until democracy succeeds, Nigeria exists in name only.(1)

The most facile observation concerning Nigeria's failure, one that is made by most analysts, is that ethnic loyalties and religious differences precede and supersede any notions of national loyalty (see Afolayan; Amoda; Coleman; Ekeh; Okoye). A wealth of evidence supports this line of logic. Unlike many African nations that drew together, despite internecine factionalism, in order to achieve independence, Nigeria has been repeatedly beset with ethnic and regional forces that…