A short life of the author
Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi (26 September 1921 – 4 November 2007) was a Nigerian novelist, short story writer, and children’s author who was one of the founding figures of modern African fiction in English. His novels — People of the City (1954), Jagua Nana (1961), Burning Grass (1962), and Beautiful Feathers (1963) — depicted the energy, corruption, and cultural upheaval of modern urban and rural Africa with a populist storytelling instinct that made him one of the most widely read African writers of the twentieth century.
Life
Ekwensi was born in Minna, in what is now Niger State, Nigeria, into an Igbo family. He was educated at Government College, Ibadan, the School of Pharmacy in London, and the University of London. He worked as a pharmacist, a teacher, a broadcaster (head of features at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation), and a civil servant. During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), he served the Biafran government as chairman of the Bureau for External Publicity.
His career as a writer began with pamphlet fiction — the small, inexpensive publications sold at market stalls across West Africa — and he never lost the popular storyteller’s instinct for pace, character, and dramatic situation. He was prolific, publishing over thirty books for adults and children.
People of the City (1954)
Ekwensi’s breakthrough novel and one of the first novels by a Nigerian writer to be published internationally. It follows Amusa Sango, a crime reporter and dance-band leader, through the streets, nightclubs, and political intrigues of Lagos — a city depicted as simultaneously exhilarating and predatory. The novel captures the chaotic energy of African urbanisation with a journalistic eye for detail and a storyteller’s sense of pace.
The novel’s significance is partly historical: it was published a decade before Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and established that modern African life — not just traditional village society — was a valid subject for serious fiction.
Jagua Nana (1961)
Ekwensi’s most celebrated novel. Jagua Nana is a beautiful, ageing Lagos prostitute — glamorous, shrewd, sentimental, and ruthless — who navigates the city’s underworld of politicians, businessmen, and young hustlers. The novel is a picaresque tour of Lagos society, from the Tropicana nightclub to the corridors of political power, and Jagua herself is one of the most vivid characters in African fiction.
The novel was controversial: Nigerian critics attacked its depiction of prostitution and corruption as damaging to the national image. But Ekwensi was writing in the tradition of Defoe’s Moll Flanders — the picaresque novel of survival in a corrupt society — and Jagua Nana is too vital, too intelligent, and too honestly drawn to be merely scandalous. A sequel, Jagua Nana’s Daughter (1986), followed.
Burning Grass (1962)
Ekwensi’s most accomplished novel in a rural setting. It follows Mai Sunsaye, a Fulani herdsman who is struck by the “wandering sickness” (sokugo) — an irresistible compulsion to wander — and whose journey across the savanna takes him through encounters with bandits, a leopard cult, and the changing landscape of northern Nigeria. The novel is a rare literary treatment of the Fulani nomadic cattle culture and an achievement in a different register from Ekwensi’s urban fiction.
Critical Standing
Ekwensi’s critical reputation has always been complicated by his relationship to Chinua Achebe. Achebe’s fiction is more formally polished, more psychologically complex, and more internationally celebrated. Ekwensi was dismissed by some Nigerian critics as a “popular” writer — too fast, too journalistic, too willing to entertain rather than instruct.
But this judgement is unfair. Ekwensi was the first Nigerian novelist to take modern urban life seriously as a subject, and his best work — Jagua Nana, Burning Grass, and People of the City — captures a dimension of African experience that Achebe’s village-centred fiction does not address. He was a genuinely popular writer in the best sense: his books were read, discussed, and argued about by ordinary Nigerians, not just by the academic establishment.
Collecting Ekwensi
People of the City (1954, Andrew Dakers) in first edition is scarce and sought by collectors of African literature. Jagua Nana (1961, Hutchinson) first editions bring $50–$150. The Heinemann African Writers Series editions — which made Ekwensi’s work available across the continent — are collected for their cultural significance.