Looking Back and Going for ANA Mbari Tomorrow
When Ulli Beier started the Mbari Club, Soyinka was 27, Okigbo 29, Clark 26, and Achebe, the oldest of them, was just 31. The Mbari Club, we can argue, was the coven with the best minds of the first generation of Nigerian, nay, African writers. The club hosted writers like Ezekiel Mphalele, Kofi Awonoor, Dennis, Brutus, and Alex La Guma. At their young age, these writers converged to form the foundation of African ‘modernist thought’ not only in literature but also in other art forms. According to Isabelle Malz and Nadine Siegert in The Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan, citing Suhr-Sytsma, the club “provided the cultural space to develop an African modernity” known beyond the shores of Nigeria, and it “had the intention to strongly impact national culture”, which I believe it achieved.
Hosted by Professor Udenta O. Udenta, the ANA Mbari Series has commenced in Abuja. I have attended various editions. For one, it offered me the opportunity to meet Udenta on a more solid ground of discourse. The first edition I attended after relocating to Abuja, I engaged with a Professor who believes — as most Nigerians and older people do — that the younger generation is not reading. The discourse veered into contemporary Nigerian writing, and I had to state there that there is a fourth generation of Nigerian writers with their poetics, their consciousness — call it a postmodernist consciousness which bows to the neocolonial whim and globalist turn, there is a generation writing their audacity and journey.
Udenta asked me to collate the writings that defined my generation. While I was at it, there was a massive turnout of essays on what constitutes the poetics and style of this new generation. It became an avenue to show what my generation is saying. Beyond the project I discussed with Udenta, I cannot go into full detail about what that meeting created. His house, for me, is what Mbari space in Ibadan was for the young Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo and the others. Amidst palm wine, we always discuss theory, literature, history, and politics. There is a sense of comfort and shunning of class — an attitude many Nigerian professors cannot keep aside.
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Tomorrow, ANA Mbari is celebrating Soyinka @90. The ANA President called me, and that offers a twinkle of hope that young people are acknowledged enough to be in the discourse. It shows that the spirit of Mbari is not dead. But I hope that the celebration of Soyinka becomes a basis for us to look back at how young people are the drivers of tomorrow.
There is an argument — sadly a silent one — on the transition of Nigeria into the postmodern age. While we criticize this turn, I am sure we all agree that we could not have stopped at the bus stop of what drove Nigerian modernism in the 60s, the Alter-Native movement of the 70s, and the rage poetics of the 80s and 90s. Mbari Club was the mainstream discourse platform for young people. In Nigeria today, such platforms do not exist. The places where serious literary conversations thrive are inside University journals, which are rife with a “[dull] kind of disciplinary monotony, a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction” (Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing). So we don’t even access them.
Celebrating Soyinka is a way of looking back, and as Biere and Jahn note, “For it is on the heritage of the past, that the literature of the future must be based” (Beier & Jahn 4). And will Mbari be the next place young people converge to discuss today’s post-coloniality or postmodernity? If “Mbari Club helped to influence and form the discourse of artistic modernism during this time in Nigeria and Africa” (Isabelle Malz & Nadine Siegert), where is the platform forming or curating the discourse of contemporary Nigerian and African journey? Where are the spaces like the imaginary room in Esiaba Irobi’s space where Soyinka and Chinweizu and co battled out their stands in Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh?
