Leadership (Abuja)
Mohammed Kabir
21 October 2008
The Department of English and French, Bayero University, Kano, has recently announced its 5th International Conference on Literature in Northern Nigeria.
The conference, which is meant to be, among other things, a forum for the discussion of northern Nigerian literary output, is to sensitise the world about the uniqueness of the literary works produced by the northerners due to their unique historical background.
From 10th to 13th November 2008, the Nigerian centre of commerce, Kano, will host the conference, the central theme of which is: "Poetry and Poetics in Northern Nigeria". Like the central theme, all the sub-themes of the conference are deliberately chosen to stimulate discussions about an aspect of northern Nigeria literature. They include new Hausa poetry, trends in indigenous language poetry in northern Nigeria, poetics of the drama in northern Nigeria, poetics of the novel in northern Nigeria, dialogism in northern Nigeria oral poetry and teaching poetry in northern Nigeria. Others are poetry and the discourse of nationhood in northern Nigeria, emerging trends in the northern Nigeria poetry, feminism and poetry in northern Nigeria, post-colonialism & poetry in northern Nigeria and literary theory & poetry in northern Nigeria.
According to a professor of oral literature with the Department of English and French of Bayero University, Sa'idu Ahmad Babura, the history of the conference goes back to the 1987/88 academic session when the department, under the leadership of Professor (then Dr) Shuaibu Oba Abdurraheem, the current Chairman of the Federal Character Commission, met and decided that northern Nigeria literature deserved better academic attention than it enjoyed before. The second Northern Nigeria Literature Conference came in 1989, two years after the first one and under the same head of the department, the proceedings of which were published in 1991. As Head of the Department in 1995, Professor Babura revived and improved the conference after a break of about 15 years. Making it international for the first time, the 1995 conference was attended from different parts of the world by highly placed scholarly personalities like Professor Graham Furniss from England and Wendy Griswold, a professor of literature in Northwestern University of the United States of America.
2004 and 2005 witnessed the 3rd and 4th international conferences on the northern literature consecutively under the same HOD. The two conferences were attended by scholars of international standing within and outside Nigeria. As qualitative as they were, the papers of the conferences were edited and published to be presented in the 5th international conference next month.
LEADERSHIP the worthiness of the northern Nigeria literature to be studied as a separate entity from the Nigerian literature as a whole. "All this while we have been having southern Nigeria literature under the guise of Nigerian literature", he said. The special peculiarities of northern Nigerian literature, which owe their origin long before the coming of Europeans, to the availability of ajami text, influence of Arabic language and the impact of the Sokoto jihad on the minds of northerners and which characterised their literary production are never discussed in the so-called conferences of Nigerian literature. Hence, a special need for the study of northern Nigeria literature so that all these things could be brought to the limelight.
Looking at the above historical development of this literary conference, which accorded special attention to northern Nigeria literature right from inception, one may rightly ask the question what is so special about northern Nigeria literature that it deserves these series of conferences and other activities such as the recent Northern Nigeria Writers Summit organised by the Niger State chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors in Minna. In his review to Pyramid, an anthology of poems by northern Nigeria poets, a professor and critic of literature in the University of Ibadan, Aderemi Raji, has raised a similar question. He wanted to know the literary value an anthology has whose criterion for selecting its poets is the region they come from. According to Professor Babura, northern Nigeria literature is so unique that it deserves a special attention by literary scholars. This is because the people of the northern part of Nigeria, given to their common historical experience of the Sokoto jihad and colonialism, have acquired common values that are not generally captured in the study of Nigerian literature. In his words, "It is a known canon in the English literature to talk about regional literature. This is the reason why we have African literature, South African literature and so on". The fact that northern Nigeria is no longer a region remains another bone of contention. In Babura's opinion, since breaking the northern region into northern states doesn't change the common history of the people, the literature of the states can still be studied as regional literature.
In an interview with LEADERSHIP, the convener of the conference, Professor Saleh Abdu, dismissed the allegation that restricting the conference on northern Nigeria is compartmentalisation of knowledge. According to Abdu, who also is the present Head of the Department of English and French, the allegation is a low level political perception of the conference. In the academia, he says, the question is not that of the political undertone of an event, it is the question of the social norms and values worthy of academic debate.
Responding to the question of the compartmentalisation of literature, a specialist of literature and one of the members of the Local Organising Committee (LOC) of the conference, Dr Badmus Wumi, took his time explaining to
The secretary of the LOC, Mallam Isma'ila Bala Garba, views the worthiness of northern Nigeria literature from a different angle. He believes that literature in northern Nigeria is lagging behind "in terms of the number of writers who are using the medium of English, in terms of the number of books published and in terms of the attention being given to the little coming out of the northern Nigeria", he said. The goal of the conference, to him, is to promote northern writers. This is because a writer is successful to the extent he is talked about, discussed and analysed.
Talking about the goal of the conference, Dr. Badmus said that the conference is meant to serve as a platform for healthy discussion and assessment of the literary development in the region. It also aimed at promoting literary practitioners to the next level.
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