Cyprian Ekwensi
1921 — 2007 · Minna-born Nigerian Igbo novelist; author of the 1961 novel Jagua Nana — the first popular-fiction novel of urban Nigerian life of the late colonial period
Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi was born on the twenty-sixth of September 1921 at Minna, in north-central Nigeria, an Igbo son of David Anadumaka Ekwensi — a storyteller, elephant hunter, and carpenter whose oral tales first kindled his boy's imagination. Though rooted in Nkwelle Ezunaka in present-day Anambra State, Ekwensi grew up amid the many peoples of the Nigerian middle belt, and that early immersion in a plural, mobile country would shape the crowded, restless world of his fiction.
He was schooled at Government College, Umuahia, Achimota College in Ghana, and the School of Forestry at Ibadan, before turning to pharmacy at Yaba, at the Lagos School of Pharmacy, and finally at the Chelsea School of Pharmacy in London. He worked as a teacher, a pharmacist, a broadcaster, and a journalist — a breadth of life that fed his gift for the ordinary voices of the modern African city.
His novel People of the City (1954) announced a fresh, journalistic realism, and Jagua Nana (1961) — the story of Jagua, a vivid, self-possessed woman navigating urban Lagos — became his most celebrated work and among the first popular novels of late-colonial Nigerian city life. In 1961 he was named federal director of information; during the Biafran war he led external publicity for Biafra. He was honored with the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize (1968), made a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic (2001), and elected a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (2006).
Cyprian Ekwensi died at Enugu on the fourth of November 2007. May the teller who gave the African city its own voice be remembered with honor.
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