Gimba, ‘Patriot of Nigerian Literature’: A Tribute (1)
By Olu Obafemi
I have always argued, in all
the occasions of discourse of ethnic national literature, that it is rather
reductionist to contextualize and define Abubakar Gimba’s literary output
mainly within the ambit of its northernism.
Some have in fact referred to Gimba
as the ‘Northern answer to Achebe’. This is indeed carrying a speculative
business into absurd extremities. And it was quite a pleasant relief that Gimba
himself managed to restrain himself from embracing such needless comparison by
Delta Publications when he expressed his stupefaction and embarrassment—he
called it intimidation and being ‘flabbergasted…not out of fear though; I
was disturbed by the North-South colorization’
No
doubt, the sociology of a writer—his background, his geographical locale and
his functional ambience are important in a total critical delineation of his
work but it is not appropriate, in the context of the dominant character of
Nigerian literature to define and prescribe a Nigerian writer’s output as
representative, in the main, of his the geo-political background or immediate
cultural subsoil of his origination. Not the least of this exception is the
case of Abubakar Gimba who recently departed from the literary and social world
to join the immortals.
By extension of this assertion, I need
to refer to the position that I have always canvassed that we need to
re-iterate the fact that Nigerian writers forged a nationist,
rather than an ethno-national vision for our literature. Our politicians, alas,
fifty-four years on, failed to emulate that feature in their practice of
politics. This critical uniqueness devolves on the fact of our literature’s its
transcendence from origin, from its ethnic back-drop, to assume a national
character. A significant illustration of this national, rather than ethnic –
specificity of Nigerian literature has been observed in the writing of the late
Cyprian Ekwensi, an early writer, who is non-hesitant in claiming
responsibility for the national character of Nigerian literature, and who
consciously set some of his highly cosmopolitan fictional works in the Sudan
and Sahel Savannah topographies of the Islamic cultural fauna of Northern
Nigeria. Ekwensi’s novels, like The Burning Grass (1962), Passport of
Mallam Ilia (1960) and An African Nights Entertainment (1962) were
written, as Ekwensi himself claimed in 1961, to ‘portray … the authentic
Nigerian scene’. Indeed, the importance of Ekwensi in the development of the
Nigerian literary culture lies, essentially, in the pan-Nigerian character of
his writing. He can be said with a reasonable degree of certitude, to be a
leading proponent of the authentic national Nigerian literature in English. It
also lies in his initiation of the popular literary culture in Nigeria, which
was derided at the beginning by the high-cultural Mbari-nurtured literary
sensitivity of the late fifties and early sixties, but which flourished in the
post-Civil War years. The early works of other writers of his generation like
Soyinka, Clark Achebe, and so on, also followed this trend. This is the context
in which the universality and national character of Abubakar’s literary oeuvre
should, to my mind, be evaluated. Indeed, alongside many of us who may have
been fashionably pigeon-hole as writers of northern Nigerian literature is
therefore Cyprian Ekwensi, if such northern literary typology is of any value
at all.
My depicting the universal and
national character of Gimba’s work, is by no means, to undermine or diminish
his great contribution to the cultivation and nurturing of generation of
writers from above the Niger through his constant gathering of young and old
writers in workshops, festivals and writing groups in a way that has been
justifiably and aptly said of Gimba by Sunday Ododo as being the ‘arrowhead of
modern Nigerian Literature in the north’. Indeed, Denja Abdullahi christened
Gimba as the ‘trail blazer in literary fiction (of English expression) up the
Niger’ in a manner comparable to what Abubakar did for northern literature of
Hausa expression. In a brief critique of the essential fictional creation of
Gimba in this literary tribute, it is the over-arching nationist
and universal verities implicit in his creative product that we emphasize, both
on the formal and contentual parameters of his works as evinced right from his
first novel, Trail of Sacrifice.
His life encounters, travails and
exploits provided material for many of his fictional works. Babajo has captured
this life-to-text penchant of Gimba in his book, The Novels of Abubakar
Gimba (itself an outcome of his doctoral thesis. Trail of
Sacrifice(1985) reminisced, in part, Gimba’s experiences during
his National Youth Service Corp in 1974-75, as embodied in the hero of the
novel, Sadiku. Two of his novels, Innocent Victims1988) and Sunset for
Mandarin (1992) articulate his experience as bureaucrat and technocrat
in various government establishments. Additionally, materials for weaving Footprints
(1992) emerged, to a large extent, from his boardroom activities as a member of
the Board of Directors of the Bank of the North Limited and as Chairman of the
Steering Committee of Niger Printing and Publishing Company.
His frustrations
and disillusion as a technocrat under the military government of David Mark is
avidly delineated in his fourth novel, Sunset for a Mandarin. The
imagery of sunset which captures the blight of hope in the grip of
dysfunctional governance is very instructive even in our society today where
visions are wrecked through ineffectual, if not totally philistine and darkly
cynical leadership.
It should be noted that Gimba’s
tendency to ex-ray his life experiences in his fiction has been found to be
largely responsible for his evident preference for thematic preoccupations to
the detriment or adequate development/cultivation of characters. And this is
perhaps responsible for the critical observation that both his style and themes
were unable to soar or fly or indeed attain usually desirable aesthetic
elevation of profound art (Osofisan). There has been observed a bent in
Gimba for subordinating characterization to message. This is a style which
Onokome Okome couched in theoretical terms as the ‘monologic imagination.’
Besides this factional creativity are other novels that have largely
appropriated material from oral narratives of his indigenous Niger heritage and
backcloth. Other influences on his creative enterprise, besides personal
experiences, are those emanating from his Islamic cultural background ( an
influence which Tanimu Abubakar aptly described as the factoring into art
a philosophical liberalism rather than fundamentalism in his
article titled the ‘Religious Paradigm ‘ in rail of Sacrifice); and
the large socio-political canvass called Nigeria with its varying false steps
and socio-spiritual decadence such as the deep corrosion of the national fabric
by the cankerworm called corruption, dysfunctional and unethical leadership,
religious hypocrisy and phoniness and other such features of moral
bankruptcy that have impeded the growth and development of the nation in
general. This is the dimension of social realism in the fictional work of
Gimba. Generally therefore, personal experiences, the oral traditional and
cultural heritage, the socio-political landscape, religious and sectarian
environment, all converge to paint a literary canvass upon which for Gimba’s
carved his creativity in a form and style that is palpably simple and
accessible, with an ideological bent towards revolutionary pacifism.
The simplicity of his language, his
uncluttered narrative form and the lucidity of his rhetorical strategy in his
fiction largely account for the popularity of his novels in colleges and
universities. His ideological orientation of non-radical protestation of the
disruptive ailments that cripple the fulfillment of the nation’s dreams and
aspirations since independence has led to the categorization of his art as
pacifist, even with their tinges of revolutionary preferences as social
alternative to the nation’s developmental problems.
SUN
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