Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria

by Wendy Griswold

Greed, frustrated love, traffic jams, infertility, politics, polygamy. These — together with depictions of traditional village life and the impact of colonialism made familiar to Western readers through Chinua Achebe’s writing — are the stuff of Nigerian fiction. Bearing Witness examines this varied content and the determined people who, against all odds, write, publish, sell, and read novels in Africa’s most populous nation.

Drawing on interviews with Nigeria’s writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers, surveys, and a careful reading of close to 500 Nigerian novels — from lightweight romances to literary masterpieces — Wendy Griswold explores how global cultural flows and local conflicts meet in the production and reception of fiction. She argues that Nigerian readers and writers form a reading class that unabashedly believes in progress, rationality, and the slow-but-inevitable rise of a reading culture. But they do so within a society that does not support their assumptions and does not trust literature, making them modernists in a country that is simultaneously premodern and postmodern.

Without privacy, reliable electricity, political freedom, or even social toleration of bookworms, these Nigerians write and read political satires, formula romances, war stories, complex gender fiction, blood-and-sex crime capers, nostalgic portraits of village life, and profound explorations of how decent people get by amid urban chaos. Bearing Witness is an inventive and moving work of cultural sociology that may be the most comprehensive sociological analysis of a literary system ever written.

Genres: Africa

376 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2000

About the author

Wendy Griswold is joint Professor of Sociology and English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980 and Cultures and Societies in a Changing World as well as coeditor of Literature and Social Practice and Places within, places beyond: the question of Norwegian regionalism in literature.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

An admirable piece of scholarship and helpful background resource for my dissertation.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an introduction to Nigeria via synopses and descriptions of fiction - Griswold read every one of the almost 500 Nigerian novels in English that she could find - supplemented by some information about its publishing, political, and social history, this book tells a very interesting and sad story. But, as a case study in the sociology of literature, it's weak. She makes a doubtless strategic choice not to second guess her interlocutors or impose broad frameworks on her "empirical" data, but in what sense can a study of fiction, including a few interviews but mostly based on reading novels, be called "empirical"? It seems polite of her, but it's not very illuminating. I miss critique. What is the point of talking about the "reading class" without a broader account of class? What is the point of invoking ideas from the ideology of Western letters (the autonomy of the author, e.g.) without giving a substantive, critical account of them, and of how they arrive in Nigeria and what function they fill there? It's deliberately, studiously simple-minded. But I certainly learned something about the novel in Nigeria.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book synthesizes a remarkable corpus of research that details almost the entire history of Nigerian novels from the perspective of their writers, readers, and publishers. THEN, as if this weren't enough, the book turns to the novels themselves in order to analyze and catalog their contents. That Nigeria, itself, has a relatively confined number of authors and books that might be directly attributed to its nation does not undercut the importance of this contribution, which not only is massively comprehensive, but also suggests what role novels play outside a Western context.