Long before anything else in Nigerian literature, there was the oral literature or orature. This was in the form of tales by moonlight, storytelling, riddles, incantations, dirges, lullaby, eulogy, folk songs, chants, jokes and much more. The various activities of orature were practised throughout the length and breadth of hamlets, villages, towns and cities within Nigeria.
Pita Nwana, Daniel Olurunfemi Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi had all written and published what later came to be known and accepted as novels before the other members of the first generation of Nigerian writers.
There was Pita Nwana’s Igbo language work OMENUKO of 1933. D. O. Fagunwa began with his own 1938 Yoruba fiction OGBOJU ODE NINU IGBO IRUNMALE that was later translated in 1986 by Wole Soyinka as THE FOREST OF A THOUSAND DAEMONS. Amos Tutuola originally wrote his first work THE PALMWINE DRINKARD in 1946 that was later published in London, UK, by Faber and Faber in 1952. Cyprian Ekwensi later on in 1954 published PEOPLE OF THE CITY.
Then it came the turn of Chinua Achebe with his slim novel THINGS FALL APART in 1958 and that Western European critics saw as marking the beginning of serious literary and fictional discourse in Nigeria. Other writers were soon to follow, including the 1986 first African Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka.
Fifty years later, the 148 page paperback novel THINGS FALL APART has proved remarkable and rather successful until the emergence of the long-awaited and expected GREAT Nigerian epic novel of 2011 titled IN THE MIDST OF LOAFERS, 945 pages, 46 lines per a page by Omohan Ebhodaghe.
It was originally completed in 2002. It thus marked the upward paradigm shift and progress in the development of old and new generational Nigerian literature as it made its author an overnight pillar of African literatures.
In-between the novels THINGS FALL APART and IN THE MIDST OF LOAFERS, there have been two novels of note.
They are THE FAMISHED ROAD, 519 pages, 1991, by Ben Okri and HALF OF A YELLOW SUN, 448 pages, 2006, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Both of them won the then known Booker prize and the Orange Broadband prize respectively.
Yet, the two cited works of later generations were not to match the creative literary fiction of philosophical depth and prophetic undertones of the third generation gargantuan edifice of a novel IN THE MIDST OF LOAFERS that easily compared favourably well with the novels DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra of Spain, DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER by Cao Xueqin of China, WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy of Russia, LES MISERABLES by Victor Hugo of France and A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth of India in terms of size and quality.
Africa World press at Trenton in New Jersey also published Omohan Ebhodaghe’s poetry collection in 2007 as HIGHTOWER: Ibhayu poetry. www.africaworldpressbooks.com/servlet/Detail?no=59.
It is universally agreed that with or without literary prizes, great works of arts live on
Omohan Ebhodaghe’s forthcoming projects are the novel manuscripts PHOTOCOPIES & ORIGINAL, 950 pages, A HEALING FREEDOM, 244 pages, ONLY FOOLS DIE, 213 pages and other stories, A HEART OF THEIR OWN, 141 pages and other stories and A CASUALTY OF TIME and other stories, 232 pages.
If Chinua Achebe’s novel THINGS FALL APART, 148 pages, is a FOLK ballad of the first generation of Nigerian authors, and him one of the fathers of modern African literature, the epic novel IN THE MIDST OF LOAFERS, 945 pages, by Omohan Ebhodaghe the anointed one, is the LITERARY ballad equivalent and him the master of the game amongst generations of African writers.
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