Nigerian Literature In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

1939 respectively, were a bridge between the old tradition of Northern Nigerian literature and the new Western ways. Seeing that his time was changing swiftly, he had the vision, quite radical, to write neither in Arabic nor in the popular ‘ajami’ (Hausa language in Arabic script). He chose Hausa, written in the Roman script for he felt that the Hausa language, with its remarkable adaptability as a Sudanese pidgin, would be the lingua franca of Nigeria. Ali is of the opinion that “this assumption was of course frustrated by the western education, ethnicist-leaning positions of Chief Awolowo rooted in personal ambition and a political fear of the mega-sized Northern region” (internet).

Imam’s contribution to Nigerian literature was thus overshadowed two decades later by the publication of Chinua Achebe’s famous novel Things Fall Apart in 1958, written with the same sense of cultural identity, but written in English. Another notable writer from the north during this

“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 native Muslims to meet the threat of white Christians with a protest in poetry. Aliyu Dan Sidi, for example utilised the oral literature tradition to write protest poetry against the Christian missionaries. However, other Yoruba artists like 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