THE LANGUAGE OF AFRICAN LITERATURE-IN-ENGLISH

A LINGUISTIC JUSTIFICATION

A term paper submitted by

AKINWOLE, Tolulope A.
070102008
[of the full-time M.A. class, 2013/2014 session]

to

Dr Austin U. Nwagbara
Department of English
University of Lagos

As required for ENG 846: The Language of Nigerian/African Literature-in-

English

January 2015
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Introduction

The aim of this paper is to determine and justify the language of African literature-in-English.
The task itself is a curious – if not mischievous – adventure, for it seems uncomfortably
understood that African literature-in-English is written in English, unless there is more to it than
meets the eye. Indeed, there is more to the language of African literature-in-English than just the
English language as it is known and spoken by native speakers. This term paper is an attempt at
defining the language of African literature-in-English, an undertaking not entirely novel, for one
might hazard that all that need be said about the language of African literature-in-English has
been said, thanks to such African writer, thinkers and critics as Achebe, wa Thiong’o, Soyinka,
Wali, Irele, and Owomoyela. But that will be a sweepingly lazy conclusion, given the recent
offerings from new African writers and the refreshing insight to language use that they bring into
the art.

In this paper, therefore, a careful linguistic examination of works of some prominent African
writers will be examined. Works considered in this paper will cut across the three genres of
literature – drama, poetry and prose. Material for this paper will be drawn heavily from Nigerian
literature-in-English because Nigeria is regarded as the literary powerhouse of Africa, for
Nigeria has produced more literary writers than any other African country. Works from Nigeria
since the publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart being greatly influential and attracting
international interest, they stand to represent the totality of works that have been produced in
Africa. Once in a while, other African writers than Nigerians will be examined.

The English Language in Africa: The Nigerian Example

Using Nigeria as an example in discussing the status and influence of English in Nigeria suffices,
because Britain maintained a uniform policy in all its colonies. For one to do adequate justice to
this paper, there is the need to delimit its scope.

Long before the British Empire formally became responsible for the administration of the entity
that would fourteen years after be known as Nigeria, the stage had already been set for the
colonialism of Nigeria. But even before then, missionary activities had burgeoned on the
Nigerian soil. The Christian Missionary Society had in 1856 established the first secondary
school in Nigeria. The Society also established Iwe Irohin, the first Nigerian newspaper. The aim
of the Society was to give Nigerians enough education to read the Bible and perform some
religious rites. English was the language of the missionary and ought to be the language of the
new adherents in the heart of Africa, too!

In 1900 when Britain began to rule Nigeria, English acquired a new impetus. The colonial
government took over education from missionaries. Western education was however not popular
with Northerners who had been influenced by the Islamic teachings of the Jihadist Uthman Dan
Fodio. Soon, Southerners who had been educated by missionaries went on to study abroad,
where they interacted with European students and other political thinkers of the time. They came
 2

back demanding the right to determine the affairs of Nigeria. By that time, the English language
had been fully entrenched in the colonial constitution. Oliver Lyttleton’s Constitution of 1922,
which gave Nigerians the right to elect people to represent them, had English as the language of
legislation. Seeing that education was the key to freedom, and particularly because it dawned on
them that only the educated would stand the chance of leading Nigeria when at last Britain
granted independence, Northerners embraced Western education, albeit just few of them got
educated. Richard’s Constitution of 1946, which increased the number of Nigerian
representatives in the legislative body, still upheld the status of English as the language of the
parliament.

Moreover, before Britain came with the amalgamation of 1914, the entity that is now known as
Nigeria existed as a cluster several ethnic groups, each with its own language and systems of
government. When the Southern and the Northern Protectorates were brought together, it became
inevitably necessary for them to interact with each other in order to negotiate the political
freedom of Nigeria. Crystal (2000:73) puts the number of languages in Nigeria at 470. Given the
multiplicity of languages in Nigeria (Jowitt, 1991:9), there was the need for a neutral language to
serve as a language of interaction, and English readily filled in this linguistic void.

The establishment of the University of Ibadan in the 1940s also played a crucial role. It was at
the time the only university in Nigeria, and it was affiliated to the University College, London. It
therefore drew students from all parts of the country. Because of the diverse linguistic
backgrounds of the students, they had to adopt English for interaction. This further established
English as the lingua franca in Nigeria. In essence, because of the language contact situation in
Nigeria, English became the “language of wider communication” (Adedun and Shodipe,
2011:121).

What honour Lyttleton’s and Richard’s constitutions paid to English was upheld by the
Independence Constitution of 1960 and subsequent constitutions. For instance, section 55 of the
1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria states that:
The business of the National Assembly shall be conducted in
English, and in Hausa, Ibo (sic) and Yoruba when adequate
arrangements have been made therefor.
This establishes English as the language of political administration in post-independence Nigeria.

Bamgbose (1995:9-11) identifies five dimensions of the influence of English in Nigeria:

educational, political, cultural, sociolinguistic and linguistic. The educational and political
dimensions have been explained above. It is hard to separate a language from the culture of the
people who speak them, since language is in the first place culturally transmitted. Not only has
the English language settled in Nigeria, the English culture has also permeated and even
dominated indigenous cultures. That English has found its way into the phonological, lexical,
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syntactic, and semantic configurations of indigenous languages shows the linguistic dimension of
its influence in Nigeria. The sociolinguistic dimension of its influence – which is the concern of
this paper – has to do with the role of English in giving rise to a community of bilinguals. It has
been shown in this paper that Nigeria has indigenous languages before English came. The
prominence of English resulted thus in giving rise to the bilingual elite.

Interestingly, Bamgbose (1995: 11-20) notes that English as spoken in Nigeria has three strands.
He identifies Contact English (CE), Victorian English (VE) and School English (SE). Contact
English is made up of two other variants – Broken English and Pidgin English. Broken English is
the variety of English spoken by people who were hardly educated. It is deformed English which
flagrantly flouts the rules of the English grammar. Pidgin English is a different type of English
that is borne out of its contact with another language. English serves as the lexifier, for it supplies
most of the words; but the other language supplies the linguistic structure, and so is the substrate.

What Bamgbose calls Victorian English is the high-sounding, convoluted usage of English by
the elite of the nationalist period. This form of English stems from the inclusion of Latin words
and far-fetched English words. He gives a humorous example of this from Ogali’s Veronica My
Daughter:
As I was [descending] from declivity yesterday, with such an
excessive velocity, I suddenly lost the centre of my gravity and
was precipitated on [macadamized thoroughfare].
A modern example of this type of English is offered in this Easter greeting ascribed to the
politician, Patrick Obahiagbon, a former member of the House of Representatives famous for his
use of convoluted English words:
Beyond the fugacious razzmatazz of the moment, I seriously call
attention to the rutilanting and coruscating modus vivendi (sic) of
Master Jesus the Christ and I dare pontificate that save and until
we viscerally emblematize the virtues of self-immolation,
quintessential abnegation, eulogizeable simplicity, Christ-like
humility and immerse ourselves in a platonic emotionalism of
agape love and communalist service, we would have woefully
failed in learning and imbibing the true meaning of Easter. We
must elevate this moment from a proscenium of joi de vivre into
one of meditative transcendentalism.

The third variant, School English, is the English taught at schools in colonial days. It is
deliberately simplified, given that it was to be taught to speakers who were not used to it. This is
largely the common form of English spoken in Nigeria today, although with a distinct Nigerian
flavour. This variant has evolved into the form spoken and written nowadays, riddled with
element from indigenous languages.
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A Brief History of African Literature-in-English

Owomoyela (1993:348) sets the beginning of the history of African literature as the Victorian
era. The incursion of English into Africa, he opines, was triggered by the attitude of the
Victorian English society towards Africans, whom they believed were mentally inferior to and
less human than Europeans. Africans were seen as being totally incapable of complex thinking
and of attaining the grand accomplishments of Europe.

Amidst this arose the question of educating Africans. This proposition was vehemently opposed
by racists who argued that Africans do not have the mental capacity to withstand the kind of
rigorous education that Europe wanted to offer and that pursuing this course might give the
Africans a high impression of their “real” level in relation to Europeans. Booker Washington was
one of those who furthered the latter idea. He called for just the “sort of education that would
ensure their usefulness to the dominant white society and would not give them any ridiculous
idea of equality to whites” (Owomoyela, 348).

Then came missionaries, who did not buy the idea of Africans’ inferiority to Europeans. Their
primary task being to preach the gospel to a spiritually dark Africa, they needed interpreters to
reach their audience, who did not understand English, the language of the Bible and of the
missionaries. This necessitated that they educated some of the natives. This is the major
motivation of the education arm of the missionary activities. Another thing the missionary had to
do was to produce literature in the local languages of their audiences.

The next incursion into Africa was of colonialists. England took over control of such African
countries as Ghana, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi,
and, of course, Nigeria. The presence of colonial interests in Africa modified the educational
operations and policies of the missionaries, if we take the western Nigerian example for instance.
Initially, the missionaries educated western Nigerians in Yoruba, but the colonial government
came with its need for messengers, clerks, civil servant and court interpreters. It was as a result
of this that English became the language of instruction, so as to prepare Africans to take up the
posts available to them in the colonial government. As some scholars posit, Africans initially
protested the supplanting of their languages, but they welcomed the idea when like Achebe’s
Ezeulu they got foresighted in their thinking. One could almost still hear them as they said to
their children in Ezeulu’s voice:

I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If

there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something
there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask,
dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.
My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man
today will be saying had we known tomorrow. (Arrow of God, 45-
46)
 5

Bearing this prospect in mind, many English-controlled African countries endorsed the English
language either overtly or covertly.

Another factor that promoted English was the linguistic configuration of many African countries.
It all started with the amalgamations that happened across Africa. These amalgamations brought
people of different cultures and languages together. This warranted that inter-ethnic
communication be carried out through a foreign language. The agitation for self-governance
brought several Africans from different ethnic groups together; they were fighting a common
foe, and so they needed a common language to fight their common cause, in whatever form.

Literature is not to be left out in this, for English became the language of literature in Nigeria.
Very early Nigerian writers such as Dennis Osadebey, Mike Echeruo, Gabriel Okara, Cyprian
Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka employed writing as a form of nationalism. Theirs
was indeed what one might call literary nationalism. They did not just write for the sole sake of
writing; they wrote to agitate for freedom – freedom of the mind. They therefore had to write in
English, in order to reach a lot of people. They wrote mainly not for Nigerians but for the outside
world, and they admit that much. Achebe and Soyinka came out most forcefully. Achebe (1975)
avers that he wrote Things Fall Apart in response to the jaundiced portrayal of Africa by John
Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary in Mr Johnson. Although there were writers like J.
F. Odunjo, D. O. Fagunwa and Adebayo Faleti who wrote in their indigenous languages, their
works were not as widely read and taught in schools as the works of writers who wrote in
English. This trend in literature has continued till today, and it further establishes English as the
language of scholarly endeavours in Nigeria.

This was the situation in other parts of Africa, too. There were Joseph Casely Hayford of Ghana,
Peter Abrahams in South Africa and Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Kenya who were also deploying
English in their fight against racial subjugation.

The Language Question in African Literature-in-English

Among African writers, there has sprung a heated debate about what the language of African
literature should be. Some African writers have taken English as their language of imagination
and creativity; others have employed English only in order to reach a wider audience in an era
where the world is seen as a global village that has accorded English a hegemonic status; and
some still take English as a symbol of psychological domination that writers should do away
with. The principal debaters have been Achebe at the one end, and Wali and wa Thiong’o at the
other end.

Achebe opines that the African writer can adopt English to express is imagination. This, he adds,
takes pre-eminence over the need to reach a wider audience, since the principal aim of the writer
is to express his mind. He writes:
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So my answer to the question: Can an African ever learn English

well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is
certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to
use it as a native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither
necessary nor desirable for him to do so. The price a world
language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different
kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a
way that brings out his message best without altering the language
to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange
will be lost. He should aim at fashioning an English which is at
once universal and able to carry his experience. (61, my emphases)

Here, Achebe raises issues that will be dealt with later. But his stance was that English should be
employed by the African writer.

Ngugi (1986) argues that the English language remains a relic of the colonial past, calling to
mind the bitter experience many Africans went through in the hands of their colonial masters. He
sees English as an instrument of colonial masters left to complete the task they started. To him,
since language embodies culture, the white man still seeks to foist his culture on unsuspecting
Africans who are helping the propagation by employing English for literary creativity. He avers
that

For colonialism, [domination] involved two aspects of the same

process: the destruction or deliberate undervaluing of a people’s
culture, their art, dances, religion, history, geography, education,
orature, and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language
of the coloniser. The domination of a people’s language by the
languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination
of the mental universe of the colonised. (16)

Wali (1963/2007) objects to Achebe’s stance. He sees the African’s embrace of a foreign
language for expressing his imagination as shortsighted, if not totally unjustifiable. He sees
African writers who do this as “playing to the gallery of international fame” (283). He opines
that neglecting indigenous African languages in the composition of literature places African
languages at the risk of extinction. He argues that

Literature after all, (sic) is the exploitation of the possibilities of

language. It is the African languages that are in crying need of this
kind of development [of being used in composing African
literature], not the overworked French or English. There is, for
instance, a good deal of scholarly work being done in the linguistic
structure of several African languages, but there is practically no
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use being made of these in creative writing, simply because we are

all busy fighting over the commonplaces of European literature. If
linguistic science devotes so much energy to and attention to
African languages in spite of their tribal and limited scope, why
should imaginative literature which in fact has more chances of
enriching the people’s culture, (sic) consider it impossible to
adventure in this direction?

It is clear that Wali is concerned about safeguarding African languages from extinction. He
advances the view that literature is a potent tool for developing a language. He cites the example
of Milton who composed good poetry in his mother tongue. But as Achebe rebuts, Milton was
fortunate to have English as a mother tongue.

The African writer, who is not as fortunate as Milton, encounters the invidious task of choosing
between his mother tongue and a foreign tongue. His problem is made even more knotty by the
fact that he really writes in order to be read by everyone. He does not necessarily appeal to a
wider audience; he rather feels he has something to say that the world must hear. So he ought to
write in a language accessible to the rest of the world. Like Achebe, he must therefore not seek to
be able to speak English like the native speaker but learn it enough to envelope his experience in
it. Achebe’s argument, it seems, feeds the question at stake in this paper: What is the language of
African literature-in-English? Reflective of what was already the philosophy of many African
writers was Achebe’s submission:

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of
my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still
in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its
new African surroundings.

Achebe’s submission brings to mind a popular Yoruba tale, just in keeping with Achebe’s style.
It was the story of a wealthy man who had several slaves. His wife was barren for a long time. At
this time, the man accorded to one of his slaves the rights of a child. He loved the slave and took
him for his own child. When his wife eventually gave birth to a child, he found it difficult to love
the child as his own. Some years later, when age had taken its full course on the man, he died.
Before his death he requested that all he had be given to his favourite slave, but that his child
might choose just one thing and be content. The child, now a wise young man, thought that since
his father owned the slave and the slave now owned all that his father had, he could choose the
slave. And so, the young child wisely retained his father’s wealth intact.

African writers who have chosen English have behaved like this wise young man. They have
seized English to express their culture. In that way, it is indeed a new language that they write in.
But then again, what is that language? The answer to this question is not certain; but it is certain
that the language of African literature-in-English is not strictly English. This is partly because
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the African writer is not sequestered from his people, culture and mother tongue, and partly
because he wants to score a point – that he can adapt English to his culture.

African Literature-in-English and Its Language

African literature has been through much linguistic experimentation. To be sure, all the forms of
language in African literature-in-English are built upon English. There have been deviant forms,
which sometimes are deliberately contrived, as can be found in Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy (cited
in Bamgbose, 1995:13):

Myself, very very stupid? Nonsense. Even sef, this Zaza is not
better man. He have no work and no wife. No shoe and no shirt.
He cannot be prouding for man like myself who is apprentice
driver. Is it because he have fine voice and he cut his hair fine and
he out fine scent and that type of thing? Is that wy he can call me
very very stupid? Even sef the man is chopping from his mother’s
kitchen like all those young men he is talking about. Is it because
he have fought in war before? Praps.

There has been experimentation with pidgin in the novel form and in poetry. In poetry, one is
easily reminded of Frank Aig Imokhuede’s works. Here is an example from Tori For Geti Bow
Leg and Other Pidgin Poems by the soldier-cum-writer, Mamman Vatsa.

Mma Ete
na whosai you dey?

Na peep I peep
say make
I look you
an’ say:
“How ya body?”

Den I come see

say you dey
de sleep-sleep. (As reproduced by Kalango, 2012.)

There has been deviant forms of English that owe to the writer’s level of education. Amos
Tutuola presents an example. Tutuola could not complete his education because of his father’s
untimely death. His widely acclaimed novel, The Palmwine Drinkard, presents one with an
example of this form of linguistic deviance:

When it was early in the morning of the next day, I had no palm-
wine to drink at all, and throughout the day I felt not so happy as
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before; I was seriously sat down in my parlour, but when it was the
third day that I had no palm-wine at all, all my friends did not
come to my house again, they left me there alone, because there
was no palm-wine for them to drink. (As reproduced by Kalango,
2012.)

The discussion in this section will not concern deviant forms like this, rather forms of deviation
are the focus. Linguistic deviance, as used here will refer to forms and expressions in English
that would be regarded as substandard or unaligned with the grammar and syntax of Standard
English. Linguistic deviation is used in this paper to refer to linguistic forms that are in
consonance with the structure of Standard English, not flouting any morpho-syntactic rule, but
used peculiarly to describe African experiences. It is in the deviation that we find a basis to ask
what the language of African literature-in-English is.

Arguably, the linguistic deviation of African writer is more palpable in the novel genre than in
other genres. We read, for instance, in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart:

Nwoye’s younger brothers were about to tell their mother the true
story of the accident when Ikemefuna looked at them sternly and
they held their peace. The fact was that Obiageli had been making
inyanga with her pot. (35)

The first sentence conforms with Standard English, but the second sentence deviates a bit. The
only level at which it deviates is the lexical, courtesy of the word inyanga, a word for “a proud
display”. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe introduced other non-English words into the narration,
examples of which are udala, chi, ndichie, obi, egwugwu, umuada, ochu, and iba. In some cases,
he takes the pains to give equivalence in English of each of the words, especially at the
beginning of the novel. He keeps the Igbo words intact in the novel only in order to give the
story its local colour.

The most glaring deviation is at the level of semantics. Okonkwo is made to speak of his son,
Nwoye, thus:

I am worried about Nwoye. A bowl of pounded yam can throw

him in a wrestling match. (52)

The term, pounded yam, is itself not strictly English, but a description of an African meal. But
the concern is with the second sentence. The sentence, having a grammatical subject (a bowl of
pounded yam), a predicator (can throw), an object (him), and an adjunct (in a wrestling match),
is un-English. This is based on the semantic properties of the entities bowl of pounded yam and
him. It reminds one of Chomsky’s Colourless green ideas sleep furiously, which is
grammatically correct but semantically odd. In Achebe’s sentence, the subject is inanimate; and
the object is animate. The semantic property [-ANIMATE] of the subject renders the predicator
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inappropriate and the entire sentence nonsensical to a native speaker. An African will easily see
in the statement the oratorical beauty of speeches rendered in African languages. What many
African writers have, of course, done is to build African oracy into literature. Achebe’s
exploitation of English in this manner has been regarded as his greatest contribution to Nigerian
– nay, African – literature (Nwagara, 2010: 122).

It is to be noted that African literature is largely intertextual – in the very beginning, at least.
English is used only to describe the African culture. A final example of the use of English in the
African novel, for this short paper, comes from Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Bottled Leopard:

The Hausa goat, so designated because it came from the northern

part of Nigeria, towered above the local breed; like the giant
Alakuku standing five heads above ordinary men. Nma’s father
had acquired it at Eke Ogbu for next to nothing, and fed it so
devotedly that it had in no time been transformed it from a moving
skeleton to a young cow. The money it would fetch him at the next
ikeji festival, he reckoned, would pay the bride price of a new wife
anytime Mama Nma began to pass water like a man. (1, my
emphases)

Ike’s narration was particularly mindful of the African form. It expresses what, in the last
sentence, will pass for meaninglessness with a native speaker of English. The student of African
culture easily makes sense of it, this perhaps being the best way to put it for him to. First, a new
wife in the excerpt is foreign to the native speaker of English and is not to be found in Standard
English, especially when it is understood that the man taking a new wife has a wife presently. It
stands semantically odd, therefore. An African reader understands that Africa is a polygamous
society, where the man can marry as many wives as he likes, provided he can take care of them.
An African man could marry another wife for several reasons, one of which is if he finds his
present wife no longer sexually attractive, if she no longer rouses in him the desire to have sex,
when she becomes a man of some sort. In the excerpt above, Nma’s father foresees the
possibility that his wife, Mama Nma, may soon start “passing water” (urinating) like a man, in
which case he will have to marry a woman, as he cannot gratify his sexual desires with another
man.

There has been this sort of deviation in African poetry, too. African poets have been very
adventurous in using English. African experiences have been projected through beautiful poetry.
Kofi Awoonor of Ghana demonstrated the poetic beauty of the African dirge in “Songs of
Sorrow”, “Abiku” – a phenomenon alien to the English world – has be described in beautiful
poetry by Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark, to mention just a few leading African poets. Most
prominent in this wise is Niyi Osundare, whose stunning adaptation of the African culture leaves
the English language at a loss, so to speak. In Eye of the Earth, Osundare describes the earth as
 11

The earth is ours to plough and plant

the hoe is her barber
the dibble her dimple…
The line that reads “the hoe is her barber immediately casts at one’s mind not just a
remembrance of the literary device called personification, but the African manner of addressing
the earth. An African reader of this poem immediately understands it, just as he easily comes to
terms with Soyinka’s and Clark’s Abiku and Awoonor’s Dzogbese Lisa (controller of the
universe of men), indispensable characters in the African worldview.

In drama, there also exists this deviation in at the lexico-semantic level. In Soyinka’s The Lion
and the Jewel, Baroka, the village chief, is made to say to Lakunle, a young teacher:

“Guru morin, guru morin,” that is all you get from an alakowe
when you call at his house…. Will “guru morin” wet my throat?1

Guru morin in the excerpt above is easily discernible as a corruption of Good morning. The
lexical entry alakowe is what will get native speaker of English at a loss. The word literally
means one who writes – used by the Yoruba people of West Africa to refer to the educated and
elitist.

Of course, several other playwrights have exploited the English language in this direction.
Examples are Femi Osofisan, Ola Rotimi, Femi Fatoba, and Ama Ata Aidoo. So as not to sound
as a bad disc, a list of the linguistic characteristics of their works will suffice.

1. Borrowing words into English from native African languages.

2. Reference to the African worldview.
3. Transliteration of African proverbs.
4. Introduction of the African form of oracy into the English language.
5. Modification of the semantic structure of English to accommodate the African
experience.

Conclusion

From the foregoing, one may conclude that in accordance with Mare’s (2000, cited in Adedun,
2010:115) classification of linguistic strategy employed in fiction, African fiction employs the
strategy of evocation (a strategy that enables the writer to make characters speak in a way that
denotes the original language in which actions take place). One can thus conclude that the
language of African literature-in-English is structurally English, but essentially African English.

One should not just run away with this conclusion. The discussion of the language of African
literature-in-English in all scholarly circles appears not to be up to date. This is because the
discussion has always been limited to the works of early African writers. Newer and younger

1
Recollected from memory, as the play was not readily available for this paper.
 12

writers than Achebe, Soyinka, Clark, Emecheta, Aidoo, Awoonor, Ike and their ilk have come to
see the world as a small, global village. They gravitate therefore towards the Western style. One
begins to imagine that contemporary African writers no longer wish to do with the English
language what early writers did with it, for there is a glaring difference in the application of
language by these two broad categories of writers. And yet, we stand at a crossroads, for English
remains but a second language to them. The question then is, when shall we extend the scope of
our question to accommodate newer, global-village-conscious, adventurous African writers?
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Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975.

_____________. Arrow of God. 3rd ed. London: Heinemann, 1986.

_____________. Things Fall Apart. 3rd ed. London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2008.

Adedun, Emmanuel. “The Sociolinguistic of a Nollywood Movie”. Journal of Global Analysis.

(2010) 1:2.

Adedun, Emmanuel Adedayo, and Mojisola Shodipe. “Linguicism, Bilingualism and Language
Attitudes of Nigerians: The Experience of a University Staff School”. Language
Literature and Cultural Studies, (2011) 4:1. Bucharest: Military Technical Publishing
House. Retrieved from http://academia.edu on Wednesday, 10 September 2014.

Crystal, David. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Jowitt, David. Nigerian English Usage: An Introduction. Lagos: Longman Nigeria Plc., 1991.

Kalango, Koko. Nigerian Literature: A Coat of Many Colours. Port Harcourt: Rainbow Book
Club, 2012.

Nwagbara, Austin Uzoma. “Mbari Heritage and Achebe’s Pluralingual Aesthetics”. Discourses
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