[Ebe]

Let’s be honest and start with the major obstacle to any hope of some of our lost writers abridging the chasm between their Euro-American intellectual thinking and writing and our African intellectual thinking and writing.

That obstacle is our false sense of intellectual sophistication attached to writing like Europeans and Americans. As part of this false sense, among some writers of African descent, they immerse themselves into the protocols and analytical thinking of the western writers and academics and, very often, blame such immersion on their western education and their need to survive in the western world of academia.

What many Nigerian writers, who lay claims to intellectual erudition in Europe and America, want most is some esoteric prestige, the recognition of their western peers, and to impress their friends and audience with their writing styles. Thinking and writing in the ways of their African audience is often a secondary concern and usually surfaces only when their African audience complains. As a consequence, these writers are often too far immersed and indoctrinated in the Euro-American writing and thinking processes that it is difficult to, intellectually, come back home to Africa. Many of our prominent Nigerian citizens have been afflicted by this can't-go-home-again disease ever since we started coming to the west to acquire education.

To be fair, this type of struggle among expatriate African writers trained and schooled in the west, trying to intellectually return home, is not new. The movement in the 1940s and 1950s called Negritude, attempted, and to some extent succeeded, among French-speaking Africans living in the west to fashion Afro-centered thinking and writing processes that would capture the values and minds of the African audience in ways that French intellectual writing, thinking, and colonial policies had been deficient.

First, I place the blame squarely on the feet of the Nigerian intellectual writer who finds it difficult to articulate for his Nigerian audience his avowed message. I blame him simply because I consider such failure to be antithetical to true intellectualism which he claims.

Second, acquiring western education, writing in western jargon, trying to fit in with western peers, are no excuses for alienation from the values, idioms, peculiarities, heritage, and proverbs of his Nigerian place of origin. I am solidly persuaded that if he, the Nigerian writer, were not alienated, by choice or negligence, from the peculiarities of his Nigerian home and internalized his western indoctrination, there would be absolutely no reason, yes no reason, why his thought-processing (which, after all, are informed by his Nigerianess) and writing cannot easily capture his Nigerian audience because he himself, as a Nigerian, is a part of his own audience.

Wayo Guy,

Ouch!!!!!!