Cyprian Ekwensi

Cyprian Ekwensi (1921-2007), Nigerian novelist, short-story writer, and children’s author, who portrayed the moral and material problems besetting rural West Africans as they migrated to the city. A prolific and popular writer, he owed his immense success to his ability to write realistically about current issues affecting ordinary people.

Born Cyprian Duaka Odiatu Ekwensi in Minna, Nigeria, on September 26, 1921, he began his secondary education at Government College in Ibadan and completed it at Achimota College in Ghana (then the Gold Coast) in 1943. In the early 1950s he studied pharmacy at the Chelsea School of Pharmacy in London. While working at various jobs—forestry official, teacher, journalist, and broadcasting executive—Ekwensi pursued his writing career. He got his start as a writer by reading his work on a West African radio programme. His first published success came with the novella When Love Whispers (1948). People of the City (1954), a collection of short stories tied together almost as a novel, chronicles the frantic pace of life in modern Lagos, Nigeria’s former capital. The book introduced the critical view of urban existence that won Ekwensi international attention.

From 1957 to 1961 Ekwensi was head of features at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, and from 1961 to 1967 he was Federal Director of Information Services. During this period he wrote his most successful novel, Jagua Nana (1961), the story of a vibrant middle-aged prostitute who moves between the corrupt, pleasure-seeking life of the city and the pastoral life of her rural origins. He continued exploring the contrast between the appeal of city life and its corruption in his collection Lokotown and Other Stories (1966). During the Biafran War (1967-1970), Ekwensi was the director of the Broadcasting Corporation of Biafra, and in 1968 he won the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize for Literary Merit.

After the war, Ekwensi continued his career as a writer, reflecting on the war and its aftermath in the novels Survive the Peace (1976) and Divided We Stand (1980). In 1986 he published a sequel to Jagua Nana called Jagua Nana’s Daughter. His children’s books included The Passport of Mallam Ilia (1960), The Drummer Boy (1960), and Juju Rock (1966). He died in Enugu on November 4, 2007.