Sola Osofisan
07-29-2009, 02:16 PM
By Teju Cole
Recently watched "The Producers", the 2005 film made from the highly successful Broadway show of the same name. That stage play, which opened in 2001 and garnered a record-breaking twelve Tony Awards, is in turn derived from a 1968 film.
The story told in "The Producers," unlike the history of the film itself, is straightforward: a pair of theatre producers realise that if they raise a certain amount of money, and they put on a play that flops, they get to keep the rest of the money. And so, they come up with a plan to raise a couple of million dollars, and put on a play that's guaranteed to fail.
But what play could be in such poor taste that the crowd would be sure to shy away from it? When they find a campy comedy featuring a singing, dancing Adolf Hitler, they know they've found their flop. "Springtime for Hitler," with its Nazi salutes and goose-stepping cabaret numbers, it would surely be hated, they reason.
But of course, things go awry, and the sure-fire failure tickles the audience's funny bone, and as a result the producers' embezzlement scheme is the real flop.
While watching the film, I recalled an uncannily similar scenario. What came to mind was an earlier play, a Nigerian drama from the late fifties or early sixties: "The Statements of Hitler Before the World War" by Okenwa Olisah. This play is, without a doubt, one of the strangest, weirdest things I have ever read; it surpasses even "Springtime for Hitler" for sheer oddness value.
Nowhere else on earth will you find Adolf Hitler ranting about how the British make poor quality machetes and stamp "Made in Germany" on them as a ruse to sell more. Nor are we likely to see again the idea that the Germans invaded Japan and were defeated by the Japanese, or that they invaded India and the Indians gained victory over them by using charms and snakes.
But do you recognise the author Okenwa Olisah's name? No? How about Cyril Nwakuma Aririguzo, Wilfred Onwuka, or N. O. Njoku? Not to mention the obviously pseudonymous C. N. O. Moneyhard? These men were once among Nigeria's most popular authors; they are the writers of Onitsha Market Literature, which encompasses the very first popular fictional publications for Nigerians by Nigerians in the English language.
I'll add one more name, and this one more familiar, to the list above: that of Cyprian Ekwensi. It was Ekwensi's "Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Igbo Tales," a collection of folk-tales published in Lagos in 1947, that was the firing shot for Nigerian fiction in English (it predated the more ambitious and meticulously-written "Things Fall Apart" by some eleven years). It was to be in the vibrant city of Onitsha that popular literature would find its most enthusiastic audience.
It was a large population, eager for new productions, tolerant of a rough and ready feel, but certainly interested in escapades, romances, fetishes, and satisfying moral conclusions. In all these respects, it is the mirror of the contemporary Nollywood scene.
It was out of this milieu that Ekwensi's "Tales of the City" (1954) emerged. By 1960, there were some two-dozen booksellers on New Market Road alone, and Onitsha could boast a literacy rate (according to a 1953 census) of around 38 per cent.
The Igbo working-class eagerly snapped up titles of an entertaining nature, most of them written by talents less tutored than either Achebe or Ekwensi: "Drunkards Believe Bar As Heaven," "Adventures of the Four Stars," "Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away," "The Statements of Hitler Before the World War." In addition, many of the books-or rather, pamphlets, as they were brief and simply made-were targeted at moral improvement and life advice: "Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors," "Lack of Money is Not Lack of Sense," and so on.
The authors of these pamphlets judged the interests of their buyers very well. Money was a hot topic, how to avoid being cheated by city women was important, and maintaining your general sense of morals out there in the dangerous metropolis was vital.
Collections of Onitsha Market Literature from this time period (the 1950s and 1960s) offer an insight into the thoughts, contradictions, enthusiasms and, not least, linguistic inventiveness (the English of the pamphlets is unremittingly funny, and not always intentionally so), of Eastern and Southern Nigerians in the years just before and just after independence from colonial rule.
The best collection of Onitsha Market Literature, and indeed the one from which I have drawn the titles above, is "Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English," compiled and edited by Kurt Thometz, who is also a noted collector of this material. The publishers have made the salutary choice of reproducing each pamphlet as a distinct whole within the volume, imitating the newsprint feel and cheaply-dyed covers of the originals, so that it feels like one is reading a pile of actual publications from the period.
"Man Has No Rest In His Life," by Okenwa Olisah ("the strong man of the pen"), contains a compilation of proverbs, some of them droll and memorable: "A dog carrying a dead chicken is blamed, but a chicken moving next to dead dog is not blamed." True talk. "A boaster says, ‘All my things are sliver and gold, even my copper ketter.' You no lie, my brother; and even if the spelling leaves much to be desired, the main concept comes across clearly.
Wonderful, too, are the cautionary tales like Thomas Iguh's "How to Avoid Corner Corner Love and Win Good Love from Girls," and Speedy Eric's "Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away." The cover of the latter reads: "Her Skin would make your blood flow in the wrong direction. She was so sweet and sexy, knew how to romance. She married at sixteen.
"But she wanted more fun. Yet it ended at seventeen, And what an-end? SO THRILLING." Cautionary tales these may be, but they don't shy away from talking about sex. That was part of their appeal: a familiar assemblage of tricky vixens, smooth operators, tough guys, and doomed love affairs.
As it turned out, I did not really enjoy the film of "The Producers": it was a slick, unconvincing product, having gone through too many iterations. "Life Turns Man Up and Down" was the perfect antidote. I opened up the pages to "Adventures of the Four Stars," a caper set in Lagos and published in Onitsha. The world it described is the ultimate in cosmopolitan cool in the Nigeria of fifty years ago: guys drinking "Spanish Whisky," clad in "Navy blue suits" and "Italian bally shoes."
They have the lingo to match, and there are lots of bar fights, and lots of fast women; characters are named "Kid Akabueze" and "Axe-fear-no-wood."
The stuff is not high literature, nor is it meant to be, though at moments its madcap logic approaches James Joyce's or, for that matter, Ben Okri's. It also has a good dose of American pulp fiction thrown in. This is from "Rosemary and the Taxi Driver" by Miller O. Albert: "She was in her maiden form and had remained untampered, since her generate days.
"Even to meddle with her zestful glamour of beauty, nobody had ever succeeded. The grim enthusiasm of her ardent lust was bubbling on her romantic face, and her youthful glances of shyness. She had got up all the zests of the West and mettled her senses, to bolster alertly, to crack love, romance and joke, up to their highest mediocre of acme. It was a doy for love maniacs to come and a day for Rosemary to travel too."
And it has the force of vernacular, though that vernacular is English: an English delivered of hybrid parents, rooted in a thousand and one influences. When I read it, I find myself helpless with both recognition and laughter.
NEXT (http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5438102-146/story.csp)
Recently watched "The Producers", the 2005 film made from the highly successful Broadway show of the same name. That stage play, which opened in 2001 and garnered a record-breaking twelve Tony Awards, is in turn derived from a 1968 film.
The story told in "The Producers," unlike the history of the film itself, is straightforward: a pair of theatre producers realise that if they raise a certain amount of money, and they put on a play that flops, they get to keep the rest of the money. And so, they come up with a plan to raise a couple of million dollars, and put on a play that's guaranteed to fail.
But what play could be in such poor taste that the crowd would be sure to shy away from it? When they find a campy comedy featuring a singing, dancing Adolf Hitler, they know they've found their flop. "Springtime for Hitler," with its Nazi salutes and goose-stepping cabaret numbers, it would surely be hated, they reason.
But of course, things go awry, and the sure-fire failure tickles the audience's funny bone, and as a result the producers' embezzlement scheme is the real flop.
While watching the film, I recalled an uncannily similar scenario. What came to mind was an earlier play, a Nigerian drama from the late fifties or early sixties: "The Statements of Hitler Before the World War" by Okenwa Olisah. This play is, without a doubt, one of the strangest, weirdest things I have ever read; it surpasses even "Springtime for Hitler" for sheer oddness value.
Nowhere else on earth will you find Adolf Hitler ranting about how the British make poor quality machetes and stamp "Made in Germany" on them as a ruse to sell more. Nor are we likely to see again the idea that the Germans invaded Japan and were defeated by the Japanese, or that they invaded India and the Indians gained victory over them by using charms and snakes.
But do you recognise the author Okenwa Olisah's name? No? How about Cyril Nwakuma Aririguzo, Wilfred Onwuka, or N. O. Njoku? Not to mention the obviously pseudonymous C. N. O. Moneyhard? These men were once among Nigeria's most popular authors; they are the writers of Onitsha Market Literature, which encompasses the very first popular fictional publications for Nigerians by Nigerians in the English language.
I'll add one more name, and this one more familiar, to the list above: that of Cyprian Ekwensi. It was Ekwensi's "Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Igbo Tales," a collection of folk-tales published in Lagos in 1947, that was the firing shot for Nigerian fiction in English (it predated the more ambitious and meticulously-written "Things Fall Apart" by some eleven years). It was to be in the vibrant city of Onitsha that popular literature would find its most enthusiastic audience.
It was a large population, eager for new productions, tolerant of a rough and ready feel, but certainly interested in escapades, romances, fetishes, and satisfying moral conclusions. In all these respects, it is the mirror of the contemporary Nollywood scene.
It was out of this milieu that Ekwensi's "Tales of the City" (1954) emerged. By 1960, there were some two-dozen booksellers on New Market Road alone, and Onitsha could boast a literacy rate (according to a 1953 census) of around 38 per cent.
The Igbo working-class eagerly snapped up titles of an entertaining nature, most of them written by talents less tutored than either Achebe or Ekwensi: "Drunkards Believe Bar As Heaven," "Adventures of the Four Stars," "Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away," "The Statements of Hitler Before the World War." In addition, many of the books-or rather, pamphlets, as they were brief and simply made-were targeted at moral improvement and life advice: "Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors," "Lack of Money is Not Lack of Sense," and so on.
The authors of these pamphlets judged the interests of their buyers very well. Money was a hot topic, how to avoid being cheated by city women was important, and maintaining your general sense of morals out there in the dangerous metropolis was vital.
Collections of Onitsha Market Literature from this time period (the 1950s and 1960s) offer an insight into the thoughts, contradictions, enthusiasms and, not least, linguistic inventiveness (the English of the pamphlets is unremittingly funny, and not always intentionally so), of Eastern and Southern Nigerians in the years just before and just after independence from colonial rule.
The best collection of Onitsha Market Literature, and indeed the one from which I have drawn the titles above, is "Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English," compiled and edited by Kurt Thometz, who is also a noted collector of this material. The publishers have made the salutary choice of reproducing each pamphlet as a distinct whole within the volume, imitating the newsprint feel and cheaply-dyed covers of the originals, so that it feels like one is reading a pile of actual publications from the period.
"Man Has No Rest In His Life," by Okenwa Olisah ("the strong man of the pen"), contains a compilation of proverbs, some of them droll and memorable: "A dog carrying a dead chicken is blamed, but a chicken moving next to dead dog is not blamed." True talk. "A boaster says, ‘All my things are sliver and gold, even my copper ketter.' You no lie, my brother; and even if the spelling leaves much to be desired, the main concept comes across clearly.
Wonderful, too, are the cautionary tales like Thomas Iguh's "How to Avoid Corner Corner Love and Win Good Love from Girls," and Speedy Eric's "Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away." The cover of the latter reads: "Her Skin would make your blood flow in the wrong direction. She was so sweet and sexy, knew how to romance. She married at sixteen.
"But she wanted more fun. Yet it ended at seventeen, And what an-end? SO THRILLING." Cautionary tales these may be, but they don't shy away from talking about sex. That was part of their appeal: a familiar assemblage of tricky vixens, smooth operators, tough guys, and doomed love affairs.
As it turned out, I did not really enjoy the film of "The Producers": it was a slick, unconvincing product, having gone through too many iterations. "Life Turns Man Up and Down" was the perfect antidote. I opened up the pages to "Adventures of the Four Stars," a caper set in Lagos and published in Onitsha. The world it described is the ultimate in cosmopolitan cool in the Nigeria of fifty years ago: guys drinking "Spanish Whisky," clad in "Navy blue suits" and "Italian bally shoes."
They have the lingo to match, and there are lots of bar fights, and lots of fast women; characters are named "Kid Akabueze" and "Axe-fear-no-wood."
The stuff is not high literature, nor is it meant to be, though at moments its madcap logic approaches James Joyce's or, for that matter, Ben Okri's. It also has a good dose of American pulp fiction thrown in. This is from "Rosemary and the Taxi Driver" by Miller O. Albert: "She was in her maiden form and had remained untampered, since her generate days.
"Even to meddle with her zestful glamour of beauty, nobody had ever succeeded. The grim enthusiasm of her ardent lust was bubbling on her romantic face, and her youthful glances of shyness. She had got up all the zests of the West and mettled her senses, to bolster alertly, to crack love, romance and joke, up to their highest mediocre of acme. It was a doy for love maniacs to come and a day for Rosemary to travel too."
And it has the force of vernacular, though that vernacular is English: an English delivered of hybrid parents, rooted in a thousand and one influences. When I read it, I find myself helpless with both recognition and laughter.
NEXT (http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5438102-146/story.csp)