Ezechi Onyerionwu
23 July 2008
interview
Lagos — The name Dan Izevbaye has resonated deafeningly in the study of African literature for roughly four decades now.
Unarguably one of Africa's best literary scholars of all time, this legendary critic speaks on issues concerning the role of the contemporary Nigerian literary scholar, national development and the fate of Nigerian literature in the 21st Century.
PROFESSOR Daniel Sunday Izevbaye, you are at the twilight of a highly illustrious career as one of Africa's greatest literary scholars ever. What does fulfilment mean to you at this point in time?
Well thanks for your generous praise. I think for the academic, fulfilment does not come at the end of his career. It is a continuous thing. At a certain point, when you think you have said what you have to say and people understand and accept it, and you have made some kind of impact, however minor, it is from that point that you begin to get a sense of fulfilment. I would go further to say that when you publish your first article, fulfilment begins at that point. It is not like a civil service career, where you retire and look back. I don't think academics retire and look back. Even when they have left institutions, they remain academics.
You have remained at home despite apparent temptations to take your scholarship to a foreign university. Nigerians would want to know why you have not joined other distinguished academics who are now established in the academy of the Diaspora?
Well let's say that domestic reasons are a part of what has kept me at home. I grew up in the North, had my university education in the West, in Ibadan here, and I did not want to let go my roots. I wanted to cultivate my roots for my children as well as hold onto it because of my parents. So these are parts of the reason. But I did spend five years abroad.
One year in the US, and four in South Africa. At that time, it was virtually impossible to function meaningfully in Nigeria as an academic. That was when academics were being paid ridiculous sums. And they had to draw on other resources, usually some savings abroad meant for conferences and journal subscriptions to supplement what was being paid. That's when I went abroad for a short period. But when it looked like financially, the lot of the university teacher had improved, I came back at the end of those five years.
So it coincided with the reconsideration of the ASUU case for the revision of salaries, when Obasanjo just came in as head of state. But having said that, I don't think you can use individuals to measure the trend. I think those who went abroad, many of my friends and colleagues, went not only because of the financial reasons I have given but also because the universities were suffering a kind of decadence in so many ways.
At that point, they did not see any hope for a purposeful life as academics in the country. But they went abroad and thrived. Many of them occupied enviable university positions, name, chairs and so forth, in the U.S. especially. This should be an eye-opener for Nigerians but I must say for those of us who remained behind, it is not because we think that our educational institutions, as they are now, have attained some ideal status, but because of certain reasons which may be domestic.
So what are the implications of this trend on literary scholarship in Nigeria, considering the fact that some of our best hands are abroad - the likes of Okpewho, Jeyifo, Echeruo, Osundare, Obiechina, Irele, etc.?
Let me make an exception of two of those you mentioned. Osundare was forced by domestic circumstances to travel out, just as domestic circumstances have had a hand in my decision to stay back. In Osundare's case, you couldn't call it searching for greener pastures. He had genuine compelling reasons and in fact, returns home regularly to renew his roots. The other exception is Jeyifo, who is at present at Harvard.
But in his case, we have to distinguish between physical location and intellectual presence. As you would notice, he has been publishing in The Guardian and this has to do with his own kind of commitment, where he sees the intellectual not working with purely textual materials, but relating these to material reality. So he sees himself as that kind of scholar, that's why he can't let go the Nigerian setting.
Even if physically he is not always based here, intellectually, he retains here as his base. After those two exceptions, I think I should say that living abroad for a writer and for a critic has far-reaching implications for the Nigerian setting. Question: Who will teach our children? Question again: We have over ninety universities now, how can we staff them with distinguished scholars?
It may be easy to get holders of master's degrees to be assistant lecturers, but how about getting the professors? These are some of the implications. I think one should seek a balance. These scholars who went abroad are there, taking advantage of great, vast and valuable resources. It enhances the quality of their production. But then, what they write there in this global age, in this age of the internet is still available to people here.
Cultural borders
So it is also a bit of a plus. It is almost like the Western Union thing, your brother or whoever goes abroad to work and he sends money down for your upkeep. That's the way scholarship works these days. Going there has enhanced their value as scholars. I guess what it is also likely to do is to get them interested in materials beyond our cultural borders. So they are not just scholars of African literature, but scholars who are interested in African-American literature, Caribbean literature, English literature, etc.
You have been a literary scholar/critic for roughly four decades now. This means you have lived through a number of generations of literary scholars in Nigeria. Against this background, how can you describe the present day practice of literary scholarship/criticism in Nigeria?
Well, the present day practice is facing a lot of challenges. One of the problems is that of outlet, where our people can publish their articles. Who are the publishers? The publishing industry is "thriving," judged by the quantity of books produced and the number of publishers. Whether all these are real publishers is a different matter, since we all know that real publishing is a complicated process - books going through one stage of assessment to other levels of reading and editing.
I think, and there are no disputes here, that the quality of publications are slightly lower than they ought to be. One needs to only look at the quality of proof-reading, the quality of production, paper quality, print quality, colour separation, etc, to find this out. You know, you may call this packaging and argue that it is the content that is really important.
But that's only partially true. The quality of the packaging enhances what is in it. If you want to treasure certain books, you want them on your bookshelf; you will want them to be well-produced. Even if it is first-rate material in there and the work is shoddy, I think it devalues it. People are writing and publishing. There are quite a few promising young scholars in our universities, and a handful of them are in the middle age.
Some good work is being done, but there are also problems with that. Some of our young people are impatient. I have to be tactful here. People should aspire to the highest level in their career, but there is a bit of haste in some quarters which you cannot justify in the quality of what is produced. The other problems, of course have to do with the outlets- the seminars, conferences, thriving journals, etc. I notice that University of Ibadan has revived the literature conference which Echeruo inaugurated many years ago. But it was dead for a long time too.
Just like University of Lagos has revived the Black Orpheus...
Right. So, that problem of the lack of continuity is there and, therefore, to the detriment of the young scholar who doesn't have the money to attend conferences, and, therefore, may not know what a literary conference looks like, and the kind of dialogue, debate, interaction and scholarly exchange that goes on in a conference setting.
Good scholars
He would not know all these unless he travels out. Those are the constraints. That does not mean that we don't have good scholars. But if you have somebody in a desert, you don't expect him to grow a garden, because it doesn't mean that the person cannot be a gardener, but if the environment is not there, the resources are not there, he cannot do much. So if we have enough regular international conferences, I stress, international, (we don't want it to be regional of parochial), people will come and bring fresh ideas and challenge those who want to take things for granted, challenge ideas, see that knowledge grows through this kind of exchange.
In that same vein, I wonder if you think that these young scholars have responded well to the challenge of criticising the writers of their own generation?
Well, I suppose that they have done that only to an extent. What you find these days is not really criticism. Many of the reviews that one reads in papers and elsewhere these days do not go beyond summary, a couple of comments on style, one or two statements about theme and that's about it. This is more or less salesmanship for the author.
The second point of course is that what goes for the latter generation of critics, goes for the new creative writers. The writers do not have an appropriate setting on which to gain exposure and to receive criticism. Also, many of the writers are careless with language. The creativity is there quite all right but one finds certain embarrassing examples of loose use of style.
The quality of the language in terms of precision in the use of words, the avoidance of clichés, insights reflected in the language, etc, are common shortcomings. We have a lot of writers, hundreds of books are being turned out, but they are being carelessly written and people are not paying attention to language.
I think it is sad that fifty years after Achebe's Things Fall Apart, we have not evolved a Nigerian literary language. One would have thought that the example of Achebe will teach writers to reflect the immediate environment, history, experience and the multi-lingualism of Nigeria in their style. But this has not happened.
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