← Nwapa and the Task of Nigerian Fiction
This essay first appeared in Issue 1 of Mamasima Magazine, which was distributed in Lagos in November and December of 2025. Learn more about the magazine here.
   What can one say about Flora Nwapa? When reading ‘Ada,’ the first chapter of a novel which may never have come to be, one has the impression of sinking into a dream - of being sheathed in gloom, in glamour. What is it about her demure protagonist? Her demure protagonist casts a taciturn spell.
   This story communicates. It has heft. In fine, it’s unusual. What would it take to write a story like this for my time? For it goes without saying that every one of us who is living is living in a different time. That is perhaps what the narrative conveys most expertly of all. Ada, if that is the protagonist’s name, is suspended in a trap, a romance, that sketches the hours of her life. The story describes the moments before tragedy, and then it ends.

   The terseness of this short story, if we can be permitted to read it as a short story, is of course one of its best qualities. It is also a quality that seemed to me at first to age it. I realized that this was less an association with a particular movement in our literature (our literature, after all, is totally heterogenous in theme and purpose. It is not new, nor is it ‘traditional.’ Could it be primeval? Is there a word for it?) What I had, I now believe, was rather a personal association with silence, which, like other spaces in our world, is rapidly being shuttered.
   It was possible, while reading this story by Flora Nwapa, to think. The weight of my own thoughts had become unfamiliar to me. They tire me out. Was that always the case? Where can I find my attention?
   The new Nigerian fiction has a task which it must make its beacon. It must bring us into strong awareness of the spaciousness within and without. I believe it is well suited to meet this task because of its antecedents, but it is up against a formidable and fascinating enemy in the pressures of life under capitalism, our mirrored pen. It is vital not only that we take pleasure in things, but that we seek pleasure out on our own initiative as well, thereby creating it both for ourselves and others.
   The only bounty is that which we will create now.