Essay On Nigeria Literature

1024 Words5 Pages
Ali further argues that at the head of the charge of men from the North on the field of Nigerian literature is the figure of Abubakar Imam Kagara who is a paterfamilias (The male head of a family). His works primarily Ruwan Bagaja and Magana Jari Ce, published in 1934 and 1939 respectively, were a link that binded the old tradition of Northern Nigerian literature and the modern tradition. Seeing that the time was changing swiftly, he had the vision not to write in Arabic or the popular ‘ajami’ (Hausa language in Arabic script). He adopted the Hausa language written in the Roman script. This is because he realised that the Hausa language, has has a remarkable ability to be adapted as a Sudanese pidgin, was thought to be the lingua franca of Nigeria. Ali believes that “this assumption was... frustrated by western education, [the] ethnic leaning position of Chief Awolowo steeped in personal ambition and a political fear of the emormous size of Northern region”…show more content…
“During the fourteenth century, written and spoken Arabic flourished in Northern Nigeria and by the seventeenth century, some Hausa literature has been translated into Arabic” (Ajuwon, internet). As if this was not enough, the Christian missionaries accelerated the importation of Western education into Nigeria during the nineteenth century. This made some indeginous Muslims to meet the threat of Christianity with a protest in poetry. Aliyu Dan Sidi, for example utilised the oral literature tradition to write protest poetry against the Christian missionaries. However, some writers from the west such as D. O. Fagunwa and Isaac Delano wrote novels encouraging the Christian missionaries and themselves teaching the Christian religion. It should be noted however, that all these writings during this period relied heavily upon their ancestral folktales and creative

More about Essay On Nigeria Literature

Open Document