A Comparative Analysis of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe

Swati Srivastava, Asst. Prof. & Avneesh K. Singh, Asso. Prof.
Department of Applied Science and Humanities
Ambalika Institute of Management and Technology, Lucknow

 

Postcolonialism in Africa refers in general to the era between 1960 and 1970, during which time many African nations gained political independence from their colonial rulers. Many authors writing during this time, and even during colonial times, saw themselves as both artists and political activists, and their works reflected their concerns regarding the political and social conditions of their countries. As nation after nation gained independence from their colonial rulers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, a sense of euphoria swept through Africa as each country celebrated its independence from years of political and cultural domination. Much of early postcolonial writing reflects this sense of freedom and hope. In the years that followed, as many African nations struggled to reinvigorate long-subservient societies and culture, writers of postcolonial Africa began reflecting the horrors their countries suffered following decolonization, and their writing is often imbued with a sense of despair and anger, at both the state of their nations and the leaders who replaced former colonial oppressors.

Postcolonial studies gained popularity in England during the 1960s with the establishment of Commonwealth literaturein the United States, this phenomenon did not reach its zenith until the 1990s. Because postcolonial writers are studied by and read most often by Western audiences, their works are often seen as being representative of the Third World and studied as much for the anthropological information they provide as they are as works of fiction. This, notes Bart Moore-Gilbert in his Postcolonial Theory, has led to the creation of a criticism that is unique in its set of reading practices, which are “preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge, or reflect upon … relations of domination and subordination.” In his study of postcolonial African fiction, Graham Huggan also comments on this phenomenon, theorizing that western critics need to make an increased effort to expand their interpretive universe in order to study African texts as fiction, rather than as windows into the cultures they represent. This difficulty is further compounded by the fact that many indigenous African authors in the postcolonial era and beyond remain un-translated, and are thus unavailable to western critics. In the meantime, the canon of translated or European-language works that are available, although but a minor part of African literature in general, have come to define postcolonial literature and its critical response.

African writers are themselves very conscious of this gap between texts that are accessible to the West and those that remain in Africa. In fact, the language issue became a central concern with many African writers in the years following decolonization, and some, including Ngugi wa Thiong'o, have chosen in the years following independence to reject English and other European languages in favor of native African writing. Ngugi and his supporters were opposed by several African writers, including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, who challenged the usefulness of such a stance. In contrast, Ngugi theorized that by writing in English or French and other European languages, African authors are continuing to enrich those cultures at the expense of their own. Writers who support African language literature are also concerned that European languages are unable to express the complexity of African experience and culture in those languages, along with the fact that they exclude a majority of Africans, who are unable to read in these languages, from access to their own literary success.

Postcolonial writing focuses on global mixing of cultures and identities. The retrieval of cultural dignity and literary appropriation of the colonizer’s language, reshape to reflect a particular cultural situation.  It is by reshaping the language that the African writers will be able to communicate with their society. While reshaping the language with a typical African flavour, the writers should aim at international readership. Wole Soyinka denies the need for a writer to have an aim ‘outside’ what he calls ‘the very ontology of literature.’ And on the other defines the primary aim of his writing as ‘transforming a reality: the reality has to do with people’ (Interview 60) He does not believe that ‘a tiger needs to proclaim tigritude,’ yet he affirms the need to restate the authentic world of African peoples and ensure its contemporary apprehension through appropriate structures.
Chinua Achebe, “aim to use English in a way which brings out the message without altering the language to the extent that its value will be lost. One should aim at fashioning out English which is at once universal and able to carry the particular experience.” (1975 61) Achebe believes that an African writer must have some kind of perception of the society in which he is living and the way he wants his society to be. As a writer is a social priest and it is his responsibility to leave humanity to a new and better world.

This paper is an attempt to make a comparative analysis of the two English writers, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe portraying true African reality. The paper seeks to make an insightful study of the life, their literary contribution to the world. The comparison made between these two writers relies therefore, not upon their status as political commentators but rather upon their formation of an aesthetic in response to the conditions of valid discursive articulation operating within their given cultural and social conditions. African literature occupies a special place for its vigour, vitality, and freshness. It is used as an organ of instilling social awareness and also to help in creating national consciousness. Its writing is at once a literary piece, a social protest, and a medium of political re-assertion.

Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the well known literary figures of the twentieth century. He is worldwide recognized for his versatile approach to literature as a social agency of change his strong commitment to the promotion of the human rights. The Swedish Academy rightly applauded for his “commitment as a dramatist and writer of poetry and prose to problems of general and deep significance for man, modern and ancient.”

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934 at Abeoukuta, near Ibadan in West Nigeria. After preparatory University studies in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds from where he took his doctorate. While at Leeds, he acted with the University Theatre Group and began developing his own form of drama blending western and Yoruba traditions. Yoruba ethnic group a culturally and historically rich community. Soyinka’s literary works manifest a close self experienced connection with this rich and complex African heritage.

Although Soyinka composes some of his poetry in his mother tongue Yoruba, and is a chief proponent of their national language Swahili, he writes mostly in English, which is still the common language of postcolonial Nigeria. His literary contribution includes several plays, collections of poems, two novels and a large number of essays on a variety of topics, prison notes and an autobiography. His works bear the mark of a refined sensibility, critical temper and great creative energy. He is one of the major thinkers of our times and his contribution to postcolonial theory and discourse is seminal.

The writer cannot shy away from the social responsibility, the task of re education and regeneration. It is the duty of the writer to identity and celebrates those particular activities of daily life which enables his society both to recognize and be proud to it. From ‘The Novelist as Teacher,’ Achebe quotes:

I think it is part of my business as a writer to teach... that there is nothing disgraceful about the African weather, that the palm tree is a fit subject for poetry. Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the consequences of the years of denigration and self abasement (1955 44).

Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, the son of Isaiah Okafor Achebe, a teacher in a missionary school, and Janet Ileogbunam. His parents, though they installed in him many of the values of their traditional Igbo culture, were devout evangelical Protestants and christened him Albert after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. In 1944 Achebe attended Government College in Umuahia. Like Wole Soyinka he was also educated at the University College of Ibadan, where he studied English, history and theology.

At the university Achebe contributed several stories and essays to its magazine, University Herald. Rejecting his British name Achebe took his indigenous name Chinua. In 1953 he graduated with a BA. Before joining the Nigerian Broadcasting Service NBS, later changed to Nigerian Broadcasting Corporarion, or NBC in Lagos in 1954. He travelled in Africa and America, and worked for a short time as a teacher at a local school in Oba. For a period in the 1960s he was the director of External Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria. During this time, a collection of Achebe’s short stories entitled The Sacrificial Egg and Other Short Stories (1962) was published. Two years later, Achebe completed Arrow of God (1964).

Backing Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) Achebe worked for the government as an ambassador. Achebe's writings from this period reflect his deep personal disappointment with what Nigeria became since independence. Achebe returned to the war years and their effect on his work and identity.  When the Biafra struggle ended in defeat, Achebe rejoined the African Studies department at University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In 1971 Achebe began editing Okike, the leading journal of Nigerian new writing. While holding the post of Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he met there James Baldwin, also a faculty member. Returning to Nigeria in 1976, Achebe was appointed research fellow at the University, and after serving as professor of English, he retired in 1981. Since 1985, Achebe was a professor emeritus, but in the 1990s he taught literature to undergraduates at Bard College, a liberal arts school.

In the years following the war, Achebe produced three collections of poetry: Beware, Soul-Brother and Other Poems (1971, 1972), Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems (1973), and Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo (1978). In addition, Achebe was a coeditor of Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry (1982). With this turn to poetry as a medium for his creative talents, Achebe was able to distinguish himself as both a great novelist and a fine poet. During this period, Achebe also wrote a collection of short stories entitled Girls at War (1983) and co edited another collection entitled African Short Stories (1984). In addition, he produced three works of juvenile literature as well as a number of essays. In the 1980’s, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was adapted for stage, radio, and television.

It is well known fact that the evil legacy of colonialism still continues to characterize the social and religious institutions and tenor life in Africa, more so in Nigeria to which these two writers belong. Soyinka, views regarding the socio political condition of African States;

Africa “draws material, nourishment, breath and human recognition from the strengths and devices of that world; with an umbilical cord which stretches across oceans”. (1990 18)
Achebe’s too held the similar views, like Soyinka which remained true for almost the entire continent in the postcolonial phase is very pertinent:

Within six years of independence Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth… elections were blatantly rigged… The national census was outrageously stage managed; Judges and magistrates themselves were manipulated and corrupted by foreign business interest (1975 82).

These two writers were keenly aware of the political, economic and cultural turmoil’s of the African situation. Also, as intellectuals they were forced to take a firm stand on many issues and remain sensitively alive to the political and social changes on the continent and their own country.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his study of African self-identification In my Father's House, (1992) encounters Soyinka's work as a problematic, but absolutely necessary development in contemporary Nigerian culture;

In taking up so passionately the heritage of the printed word, he has entered inevitably into the new kind of literary self that comes with print, a self that is the product surely, of changes in social life as well as the technology of the word. This novel self is more individualist and atomic than the self of pre-capitalist societies; it is a creature of modem economic relations. I do not know that this new conception of the self was inevitable, but it is no longer something that we in Africa could escape even if we wanted to (134).

What Appiah recognizes in Soyinka's developing oeuvre and his reference is particularly to the essays collected under the title Myth, Literature and the African World - is not the product of an elitist system of education, nor an assimilation of colonial values imbibed through the British University system, but rather an awareness on the part of the writer that the written word throws into disarray the stable and accommodating knowledge born of a traditional, oral culture. Appiah makes the point that an oral culture is, by definition, devoid of written records; it is therefore, absolved of the need to overcome or explain inconsistency in its beliefs. The words of the ancestors survive only through a living tradition which is perpetuated by the repetition of originary words and actions representing a form of truth. Knowledge, within this framework, is accumulative and eclectic, but the basic principles upon which it is founded must remain constant if its inherited authority is to retain its sacred character. It is Appiah’s argument that culture’s ‘image of knowledge’ changes with the introduction of the written word, and that the growth of literacy will inevitably herald a refusal of knowledge defined by its self-evident ‘body of truths’. Communal interpretation of knowledge, which prioritizes the interests of the community as a whole and invests little or no social effort in individual research or enquiry which is not to say that these modes are nonexistent is challenged by literacy which takes as an a priori assumption the individual interpretation of the written word.

The Interpreters demonstrates the postcolonial realities of Africa cannot be put into one single narrative or framed in one simple format. Soyinka is one of those African writers who reject stereotypical representation, are aware of the diversity of post-colonialisms inherent in their own countries, and commit boldly transgressive acts against pre-established dogmas. The Interpreters (1965), five years after Nigeria got its political independence. The main characters are university graduates, who have studied and traveled abroad and have just returned to Nigeria because of the country’s newly obtained independence. These intellectuals, interpreters of the new Nigeria, are trying to find their way within the new political structure, within a society dominated by confusion, insensitivity, social climbing, and corruption.

The Interpreters and the later Season of Anomy (1965), tend toward questioning of this role of individual will as the agent of social transformation a role that is generally affirmed in Soyinka’s prolific dramatic output. In following the lives of a group of friends, their drunken bouts, their individual love affairs, and their idiosyncrasies, The Interpreters launches a supremely witty critique of Nigerian society, steered by corrupt, laughable, and self-hating elite. On one hand, the novel preempts any possibility of social transformation as coming from these elite: one has only to glance cursorily at Soyinka’s excoriation of this elite present at Professor Oguazor’s party to be disabused of any such notions. On the other hand, the novel also deliberately eschews presentation of its four individual protagonists as agents of any transformation. The journalist, Sagoe’s, “dissertation” on the voidante’s manifesto reveals not only Soyinka’s mistrust of collective activity, but also of these new interpreters, the novel’s protagonists. By the end of the novel, when the epic painting by one of the protagonists, Kola, is finally revealed, we find the Ogun figure “distorted.”(1965 253) Another of the protagonists, Egbo, describes Kola’s Ogun as having been presented, not in his heroic aspect, but “frozen” in Kola’s depiction of one single myth associated with Ogun, during which he, “at his drunkenness, loses his sense of recognition and slaughters his own men in battle”; he is presented only as “a damned bloodthirsty maniac from some maximum security zoo.”(253) Though Egbo sees this depiction of a distorted Ogun as Kola’s failure, the drunken Ogun also refers us to the drunken bouts of this novel’s protagonists, in a self-critique of the Soyinkan practice of valorizing the Ogunian individual will and agency.

Soyinka has chosen an approach, a form, that allows him to explore his characters, and finally to throw some doubt on the easy assumptions that they make about themselves and their community. At the same time he hints at the dynamic relationship between the past and the present, in connection with both the development of the individual and the self-apprehension of the community.

Achebe not only presents but also challenges, defines, and describes the new world of African culture under the influence of colonizers where the old tradition is in struggle with modernity and where post colonialism is not only a break and reaction against old culture but also an evolution of new values. His novel is groundbreaking work as it is significantly differentiated from colonial way of writing where the entire onus for subjugation and exploitation lies on colonizers. His position as a postcolonial writer is indispensable in the history of modern Africa because he made the natives realize that along with colonization their own lack of character has some where led to the destruction and downfall. In 1972, in an interview, Achebe said, “I never will take the stand that the Old must win or that the New must win. The point is that no single truth satisfied me and this is well founded in the Ibo world view. No single man can be correct all the time, no single idea can be totally correct.”

Achebe acknowledges his pioneering role in the emergence of modern African literature in this revealing excerpt from Home and Exile:

The launching of Heinemann African Writers series was like the umpire signal for which African writers had been waiting on the starting line. In one short generation an immense library of new writing had sprung into being from all over the continent and for the first time in history, Africa’s future generations of readers and writers youngsters in schools and colleges began to read not only David Copperfield and other English classics that I and my generation had read but also works by their own writers about their own people (2000 51).

Achebe remains the most read African author in the world. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, 1958, has been translated into numerous languages. Like many African writers, His primary focus has been African identity. In particular, he has been highly critical of the way that Western literature has portrayed native Africans. His work also explores the many detrimental effects of centuries of colonialism on the African continent. In his fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and even children’s literature, He has questioned not only how the West views Africa but also how Africa views itself. His potent social commentary has earned him worldwide acclaim.

Achebe’s second novel  No Longer at Ease, (1960). As in his first novel, Achebe took the novel’s title from a poem by T. S. Eliot. This work examines African society in the era of independence and continues the saga of the Okonkwo family with Ox’s grandson Obi, an educated Christian who has left his village for a position as a civil servant in urban Lagos, Nigeria. The story deals with the tragedy of a new generation of Nigerians who, although educated and westernized, are nevertheless caught between the opposing cultures of traditional Africa and urban Lagos.

It is important to bear in mind that Okonkwo who embodies the culture of his people is a leader among his people. His dictatorial tendencies and rigidity accounts for his tragedy in the novel, and of course, the tragedy of political leadership in Africa today. In Arrow of God, we witness a society suffering a crisis of identity. Things Fall Apart is the inception of the Europeans in Africa; Arrow of God is a phase or trend the natives have accepted the imposition on them by the Europeans to live side by side with them. Ezeulu, the protagonist, embodies this crisis by his actions. One cardinal and superb theme Achebe illustrates with this novel relevant in our present time is that no matter how strong an individual is, he can never be stronger than his whole community. This novel raises a question, the people and their leader who is superior? The novel answers thus as our narrator remarks:

So in the end only Umuaro and its leaders saw the final outcome. To them the issue was simple. Their god has taken side with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and thus upheld the wisdom of their ancestors- that no man however great was greater than his people, that no one ever won judgment against his clan (1969 230).

In this, his third novel, Achebe once again painted a picture of cultures in collision, and once again his novel attracted much attention, which only added to the high esteem in which he was already held. A Man of the People, (1966) which would be Achebe’s last novel for more than two decades. With this novel, Achebe continued to develop the urban themes that he had presented in No Longer at Ease, but this time with a satirical edge, examining corrupt politicians who used to their own advantage the political system that they had inherited from the departed imperial power.

The year 1988 saw Achebe return to the novel as an expression of his now world renowned talents. His work Anthills of the Savannah (1987) was very well received and earned a nomination for the Booker Prize. According to Charles R. Larson, writing for the Chicago Tribune, “no other novel in many years has bitten to the core, swallowed and regurgitated contemporary Africa’s miseries and expectations as profoundly as Anthills of the Savannah.”

At inception, Achebe’s novels embraced the colonial era with novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The former has a fabula of the initial coming of the Europeans to Africa while the later explores a fabula that treats the side by side living of the European among the African. Achebe believes that Africans should know where “the rain started beating them”, before attempting a look at their present predicament. In his essay, ‘Morning Yet On Creation Day,’ Achebe states:

Here is an adequate revolution for me to espouse to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of years of denigration and self abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of the word... I would be quite satisfied if my novels especially those set in the past] did no more than teach my readers that their past with its imperfections was not one long right of savagery which the Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them (1973 45).

In A Man of the People, Odili, the protagonist uses the metaphor of the rain to succinctly express the driving force or impulse of personal greed and hankering for power:

The trouble with our new nation was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say ‘To hell with it!’ We had all been in the rain together till yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart and the lucky an d hardly ever the best had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they had sought to persuade the rest of us through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and the next phase- the extension of our house- was even more important and called for new and original tactics, it required that all arguments should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house (1966 42).

Achebe’s novels have been consistently transformational, transitional and mobile. From themes embodying pre-colonial times in his first novel to colonial times. From colonial times to independence times, then post independence capturing the military in power and the contemporary. Achebe’s fictions have not only a trend with transitional themes but as well as a mobile narrative structure or plot that synchronizes these themes.

African fiction has been very much influenced by culture and politics. Thus, African literature has tended to reflect the cultural and political phases of the continent. Beginning from the colonial days, African fiction spans the succession of cultural clashes and political crises which have beset the continent. Most of the writers use their works to explore and portray these themes. They dramatize the point that ills we witness in Africa come from those at the helm of affairs or African leaders. African writers believe that the antecedents of African leaders before the coming of the Europeans make them vulnerable to corrupt practices. To withstand this pressure of the past, African leaders need a strong, moral courage and strength. The emerging African elite no doubt lack this courage. The political elite that took over the reins of government in Africa after independence were themselves corrupt and inept. They weigh oppressive power and deny their citizens freedom and opportunity. They become exploitative and engulfed by materialism. Achebe has observed in his essay, The Trouble with Nigeria thus:

The trouble with Nigeria Africa is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian African character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian African land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian Africanproblem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to challenge of personal examples which are hallmarks of true leadership (1).

Achebe’s fiction has tended to change with the political situation in his home country. This transition has been replicated by other African fiction writers. The attainment of independence by African countries was to foster an egalitarian society. Leadership by Africans was considered a welcomed innovation. But African leaders wield oppressive powers and deny their subjects the resource, freedom and opportunity to develop. Materialism, corruption, injustice and exploitation become the vogue rather than the bane. The ideal society of upright life, honesty, security, equality and justice languish only in the fertile imaginations without opportunity to manifest in concrete reality.

It could be recalled that writers were with the politicians in the struggle for political autonomy for Africans and political independence. At the attainment of independence they celebrated with the politicians for the victory but to their consternation, afterwards, politicians were not only sabotaging and abusing the gains of independence but also allowing the worthy gain to perish thus making a naivety and mockery of Africans and Blackman in leadership position. This brought about a strain and stalemate in their relationship which made writers to see it as their duty and obligation in spite of oppositions from politicians to guide the people who are majority in this midst of sabotage, abuse, mediocrity and call them to order.

Soyinka believes that a writer possesses an inner light unavailable to the politicians and the masses of his people; and his duty therefore is to use this inspiration and insight to guide his society towards an inspiring and beautiful future. Hence, he stated in 1967:
The question of vision simply refers to the contribution of writer to the kind of human society-individual, parochial or world- that he believes in (Wastberg, op. cit.52).

He has made use of a variety of subject matter, continuous experimentation, what he has called ‘the quest for literary forms’ and held on to his major themes such as social, political, and revolutionary vision. Small wonder, therefore, that today he is a highly accomplished writer and undoubtedly the greatest of contemporary African writers. James Gibbs rightly remarks thus:

Soyinka is one of the few highly productive African authors writing in English whose works are original, creative, imaginative, and satisfying…. His imagination, vision, and craft distinguish him as a creative artist of the very first rank, as a writer of world stature. (1980 19).

Achebe was nominated severally for the Prize, but he did not get it because his works had to be weighed against the competition, other works also nominated by various groups. It was the comparison that exposed his works. Literature is not about the popular text. It is about high art. If Achebe influenced a generation of writers, that makes him a great writer. But it is a testament to theme and not artifice. Soyinka, on the other hand, won based on his plays and poems. If we were to judge by popularity, many would pick the Lion and Jewel and the Jero Plays as Soyinka’s masterpieces. Death and the King’s Horsemen, Madmen and Specialists, Kongi’s Harvest, a Dance of the Forest, The Road, Opera Wonyosi, among others. Each of these works is a stunner, primed with layer after layer of thought and meaning wrapped in narratives.

Soyinka and Achebe held similar views regarding the sociopolitical condition of African states like Nigeria. Also as intellectuals they were forced to take a firm stand on many issues and remain sensitively alive to the political and social changes on the continent and in their own country. Their heroes, have similar experiences of life and struggle; as leaders of the struggle movement they suffer similar predicaments unleashed by the colonial and neo colonial forces in strife torn states to which they belong. Thus there is ample ground to look for the thematic unity of their writings which could be summed up as expression of their political commitment.

Achebe’s writing is straightforward, at times almost documentarian. He uses English as a mirror to hold up a revised image of Africa to the colonizers and imperialists as well as African readers. Soyinka more freely changes English and, in reflecting mythology through poetry, makes it his own. Both writers use the English language as a form of resistance against continuing colonial dominance of their nation.

Collectively, these two writers build a foundation for a future of literary expression in Nigeria and the experiences and realities across the many cultural and linguistic divides in Africa and into the consciousness of the rest of the world.

Biobliography
As quoted by Rajeshwar M. in The Novels of Wole Soyinka; New Delhi: Prestige Books. 1990. 18.
Achebe. Chinua. “African Writer and the English Language.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann Educational. 1975.
------  A Man of the People. London: Heinemann Ltd. 1966.
------  Arrow of God. London: Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
------  Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann Ltd.1987.
------  No Longer at Ease.   London: Heinemann Ltd. 1960.
------ Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann Ltd. 1958.
------ Morning Yet On Creation Day. London: Heinemann Ltd. 1973.
Bernth Lindfors. “The Early Writings of Wole Soyinka.” Critical Perspectives on Wole
Soyinka. ed by James Gibbs, Washington DC: An Original by Three Continents Press, Inc.,
1980. 19.
Farah, Nuruddin. 2000. “Chinua Achebe: A Celebration.” Unpublished manuscript
Interview with Kunapipi. 9.1. 1987. 59 – 64.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of
Culture (London: Methuen, 1992) 134
Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. New York:Macmillan. 1965. 253.
------ Season of Anomy.  New York, Macmillan, 1973.
------ “The Writer in a modern African State” Wast Berg, P. (Ed.) The Writer in Modern Africa. Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. 1968