CYPRIAN EKWENSI (1921–2007) was born into an Igbo family in a small city in central Nigeria and raised in the country’s rural southwest. He studied Yoruba culture at Ibadan University College before matriculating at the School of Forestry. While working as a forestry officer in 1945, he began writing short stories, which were soon anthologized in both Nigeria and England. In 1951 Ekwensi moved to London on a scholarship to study pharmacy; in 1954 he published his debut novel, People of the City. After his return to Nigeria, he worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company and married Eunice Anyiwo, with whom he had five children. At the outbreak of civil war in 1966, Ekwensi took a post in the secessionist Biafran government. All the while, he wrote hundreds of short stories and radio and television scripts, as well as dozens of novels, including Jagua Nana (1961) and Burning Grass (1962), two staples of the Nigerian high-school curriculum. In 1968 he was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize in Literature, and in 2006 he became a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters.
EMMANUEL IDUMA is the author of A Stranger’s Pose, a travelogue, and The Sound of Things to Come, a novel. His stories and essays have been published widely. Born and raised in Nigeria, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and divides his time between Lagos and New York.
PEOPLE OF THE CITY
CYPRIAN EKWENSI
Introduction by
EMMANUEL IDUMA
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Revised edition copyright © 1963 by Cyprian Ekwensi
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Emmanuel Iduma
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Akhile Ehiforia, Lagos, 2014; courtesy of the artist
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ekwensi, Cyprian, author. | Iduma, Emmanuel, writer of introduction. |
Title: People of the city / by Cyprian Ekwensi. ; introduction by Emmanuel Iduma ;
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2020. | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2019039516 (print) | LCCN 2019039517 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374291 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374307 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: City and town life—Nigeria—Fiction. | Africa, West—Social conditions—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9387.9.E327 P46 2020 (print) | LCC PR9387.9.E327 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039516
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039517
ISBN 978-1-68137-430-7
V1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Contents
Introduction
PEOPLE OF THE CITY
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Part Two
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
INTRODUCTION
AROUND the time I decided to take writing seriously, my family moved to a new town. Before that, I had spent my school holidays away from home, in houses where the books seemed orphaned and unattended to. I remember filching a worn copy of People of the City from a bookshelf, beginning to read it: maybe it could teach me a thing or two about how to write a novel. And since I was only fifteen, I saw no error in lifting entire paragraphs of Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel and, after changing the characters’ names, putting them into mine. I was anything but subtle. I described a man who, like Ekwensi’s Amusa Sango, “was seeing a new city—something with a feeling.” And then I continued echoing Ekwensi directly: “The madness communicated itself to him, and in the heat of the moment he forgot his worldly inadequacies and threw himself with fervour into the spirit of the moment.” I felt pricked in my conscience, but I figured that my plot was so different from his, and that, being so far apart from him in age and renown, my sin was sure to go unnoticed.
Ekwensi, born in 1921, was one of the first Nigerian writers to publish a novel in English. He was prolific, and by the time of his death in 2007, his output totaled nearly forty novels, along with short-story collections, children’s books, and film scripts. People of the City, which came out in 1954, predated Chinua Achebe’s better-known Things Fall Apart by four years and was predated in Britain only by Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. That no one speaks of Ekwensi as the father of Nigerian literature is perhaps due to the undisguisedly didactic and moralizing character of the stories he told.
The clash between tradition and modernity was the central concern of the writers of Ekwensi’s generation; his eyes, by contrast, were firmly fixed on the emerging Nigerian middle class—its angsts and lusts and stereotypes—and his work gained a wide readership. In Jagua Nana, for instance, published in 1961 (and which won the Dag Hammarskjöld Prize), the lead character is a sex worker. Outraged by the sexually explicit language in the novel, the Catholic and Anglican churches in Nigeria vehemently disparaged the book, and it was banned in schools. People of the City had already introduced the themes and setting he would return to throughout his career: the city as a “hill” of wrongdoing, where “everyone mounts his own and descries that of another.”
People of the City is set in the late 1940s to early 1950s, in an unnamed city, at a time when West African countries were clamoring for self-government and independence from Britain. The colonial officers began to relinquish control to indigenous civil servants, politicians, newspaper editors, and detectives. Connections between Nigeria and Britain remained close—Nigerians didn’t require visas to travel to Britain. In 1951 Ekwensi won a scholarship to study pharmacy at London University. While on the ship to England, he began work on People of the City. The book, written by a young man en route to the center of the British Empire, reflects his impatience with colonial dithering: the people of West Africa now had sufficient wisdom to govern their cities; it is time for the British to go.
Any Nigerian writer who has tried to write about Lagos as a city with feeling descends from Ekwensi. Starting in 2005, with Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, the last decades have seen that cohort grow in number. Atta’s feminist novel covered 1971 to 1995, years of military dictatorship, a time when it was nearly impossible to keep family life and politics apart. In contrast, Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief, set sometime around the mid-2000s, after the country’s return to democracy, is the introspective account of a Nigerian who has been abroad coming back to the city where he once lived. And the collection Lagos Noir, edited by Chris Abani in 2018, includes thirteen stories that, as Abani writes in his introduction, capture “the essence of noir, the unsettled darkness that continues to lurk in the city’s streets, alleys, and waterways.”
•
Amusa Sango’s city is surely dark and unsettling. He is a crime reporter for the West African Sensation, and he knows, we are told, the “smell of news.” In one instance it is the story of a woman and her child killed by men to whom she’d lent her husband’s gramophone. In another it is a ritual murder of a man by a society that he’d joined to better his fortunes, and whom they kill after he refuses to turn over
his firstborn son. Amusa can sniff out the news because he knows the city he lives in, its drive to get ahead, and the dangers that lie in the way. “What is the secret of getting ahead in the city?” he asks. Later, at his first meeting with Beatrice the Second, the woman he’ll eventually marry, he says, “The city is overcrowded, and I’m one of the people overcrowding it. . . . If I had your idea, I would leave the city; but it holds me. I’m only a musician, and a bad one at that. A hack writer, smearing the pages of the Sensation with blood and grime.”
He realizes, like many city dwellers, that year by year it becomes more difficult to disentangle his idea of fortune from the city’s promise, one that may well prove to be illusory or instead bring misfortune. Amusa makes strategic alliances and finds the door shut in his face as a consequence or succumbs to his naïveté: he is evicted from his house after his friend raises an uproar there; when he writes a story favoring that same friend, he finds himself fired.
But Ekwensi also builds Amusa up. Well-known as a crime reporter and the leader of a highlife band—“a most colourful and eligible young bachelor”—most girls in the city have his address. Although he is a catch, he is engaged to be married to Elina, who is in a convent, but from the start of the novel he is pursued by Aina, whom he sleeps with and feels conflicted about but refuses to make happy. His marriage to Beatrice receives the reluctant blessing of her father.
Unemployment, homelessness, women who wear “loose, revealing trifles, clinging to the body curves so intimately that the nipples of the breasts showed through”—Amusa must struggle with all these. That the arc of a man’s life tends toward marriage, that his prestige is underscored by the match he makes, is as prominent a theme in the novel as the vagaries of the city. The people of the city are sexual beings, men and women all lusting after one another (even if Ekwensi’s women often seem more eagerly lascivious than their male partners).
For twenty-six-year-old Amusa, the story ends with the prospect of happiness. His bride says to him, “Amusa, let’s snatch happiness from life now—now, when we’re both young and need each other.” Nothing is said about work and getting back on his feet. What matters is his youth, and the triumph of love.
•
By 2100, Lagos is estimated to become the largest megacity in the world, with eighty million inhabitants. There is a jostle—in academia, policymaking, speculative fiction, futurist studies—to propose what kind of city it will become. Are there hints to be taken from Ekwensi? If the Lagos that inspired his writing in the late 1940s was already overcrowded and subject to the sorts of clichés that remain current, how about the Lagos of 2100? What the city demands most, as an antidote to failure and prerequisite for survival, is wariness.
When I lived in Lagos, as a teenager with my family and as an adult making a life on my own terms, the size of the place made it cheerless. The scale of desperation unfolding in front of me made me anxious; I had a hunch that many people, including my friends and family, might not realize their dreams of a better life. Yet though many Lagosians pray for a miracle or breakthrough in their businesses, they also rely on something other than the supernatural: they are streetwise; they know an opportunity when they see one.
In Lagos, a story is told about a teenage boy who picks up a stray naira bill, an insubstantial sum, and there and then he turns into a yam. People who saw this transformation gathered around, distressed. They agreed to wait for someone to pick up the yam. A man with a limp showed up, sliced off a chunk, and blood spurted out. Then for several minutes he chanted unintelligible words. Right before the eyes of the agitated crowd, the yam reverted to a boy with a bloodied right ear.
In another version of the story, the teenage boy pisses on the bill before picking it up. He stays human and proceeds on his way, eager to spend the money.
In People of the City, the city remains nameless, even though numerous clues—the use of Yoruba in conversations, a rendezvous by the lagoon—point to it being Lagos as where this story of Amusa’s coming- of-age takes place: or really an archetypal West African city. The atmosphere is noir, and everywhere vice is interleaved with virtue.
—EMMANUEL IDUMA
Lagos, February 2020
PEOPLE OF THE CITY
Wrong-doing is a hill; everyone mounts
his own and descries that of another.
West African Proverb
PART ONE
How the city attracts all types and how the the unwary must suffer from ignorance of its ways
1
Most girls in the famous West African city (which shall be nameless) knew the address Twenty Molomo Street, for there lived a most colourful and eligible young bachelor, by name Amusa Sango.
In addition to being crime reporter for the West African Sensation, Sango in his spare time led a dance band that played the calypsos and the konkomas in the only way that delighted the hearts of the city women. Husbands who lived near the All Language Club knew with deep irritation how their wives would, on hearing Sango’s music, drop their knitting or sewing and wiggle their hips, shoulders and breasts, sighing with the nostalgia of musty nights years ago, when lovers’ eyes were warm on their faces. Nights that could now, with a home and family, be no more. While those who as yet had found no man would twist their hips alluringly before admiring eyes, tempting, tantalizing . . . promising much but giving little, basking in the vanity of being desired.
Of women Sango could have had his pick, from the silk-clad ones who wore lipstick in the European manner and smelled of scent in the warm air to the more ample, less sophisticated ones in the big-sleeved velvet blouses that feminized a woman.
Yet Sango’s one desire in this city was peace and the desire to forge ahead. No one would believe this, knowing the kind of life he led: that beneath his gay exterior lay a nature serious and determined to carve for itself a place of renown in this city of opportunities.
His mother had seen to it that he became engaged to ‘a decent girl from a good family, that you might not dissipate your youth, but sow the seed when your blood is young and runs hot in your veins . . . that I might have the joy of holding a grandchild in my arms’.
Many of Sango’s sober moments were spent in planning how he would distinguish himself in the eyes of his mother, an ailing woman in the Eastern Greens whose health had steadily broken down since Sango’s father died two years previously. She was no longer young. Sango did not know how old she was, but he was twenty-six and an only son. Every letter of hers expressed anxiety that Sango had to work so far away from home, and cautioned him about a city to which she had never been.
He had received one of them only yesterday, just before he met another of those girls he had been begged to avoid. And he had fallen. To make up for this lapse and to prove that from now on he really meant to be ‘good’, Sango had been up since 4.20 a.m., working on the report of an inquest. Now it was nearing 6.30 a.m., and he knew that if he did not wake his servant Sam his morning bath would not be served and he might be late for the office.
The door was slightly ajar and Sango was startled to hear a furtive knock. The room had already darkened and the caller stood behind the half-open door waiting to be invited in, yet too polite to intrude.
‘Who’s that? Come in, if you’re coming in!’
‘Are you alone, Amusa?’
A female voice, a female hand, elegant: a girl, ebony black with an eager smile. She smiled not only with her teeth and her eyes, but with the very soul of her youth. She wore one of those big-sleeved blouses which girls of her age were so crazy about. Really, they shouldn’t, for the bubas were considered ‘not good’ by the prudes: loose, revealing trifles, clinging to the body curves so intimately that the nipples of the breasts showed through. Certainly not the most comfortable sight to confront a young bachelor on a morning when he had just made noble resolutions. Amusa tried to appear unmoved. Her large imitation-gold ear-rings twinkled in the dim light. She moved across the room gracefully. Sango felt the vitality of the girl and
it tantalized him.
She came over to the edge of the table where he was working and rested her hands. This simple movement had the effect of throwing up her bust, so that it swelled within the loose blouse. She smiled.
‘Don’t you ever rest? Last night you were playing trumpet at the club.’
‘Don’t remind me about that one; I must get on with my report. By the way, where are you going all dressed up like this?’
‘I’ve come to see you.’ The smile had vanished and Aina seemed suddenly aware of herself.
‘Very kind of you, Aina; but my mother will not be pleased to hear that I spend my time in this city receiving pretty girls in my room at seven in the morning!’
She looked away. She looked down at her slender, shapely hand. She looked into his face. He saw the tears in the dark eyes and thought: now, now . . . not this morning!
‘Come, come, Aina! I didn’t mean to speak harshly. You’re looking so very pretty this morning. I love your buba and the careless ease with which you always dress. Aina, you’re a man-killer. Ah, now you smile. But I see a darkness in your face. Tell me, what is it?’
‘I – I – No! Let’s leave it till another time.’
‘Please tell me. Do you want something? Is there a way I can help?’
‘No, Amusa. Let’s leave it like that. Please fetch me some paper. For wrapping.’
Amusa found her some paper. He was wondering when she would come to the point. She took it from him and went to the corner of the room. He saw her quickly take something from the folds of her cloth and wrap it up. Then the crackling of paper ceased and she came to him once more, smiling.
‘Thank you, Amusa. I want to ask you something. Amusa, will you always love me as you did yesterday, no matter what happens?’
‘Like what? I don’t understand.’
People of the City Page 1