People of the City by Cyprian Ekwensi

First published: 1954; revised, 1963

Type of work: Social morality

Time of work: The early 1950’s, before Nigerian independence

Locale: Lagos and eastern Nigeria

Principal Characters:

• Amusa Sango, the protagonist, a crime reporter by day and dance-band leader by night
• Aina, a beautiful young woman of the streets who falls in love with Sango
• Aina’s Mother, whom Sango suspects of witchcraft
• Lajide, a financier and realtor, and Sango’s landlord
• Beatrice the First, a beautiful but fatally ill woman attracted to the nightlife of the city
• Beatrice the Second, a woman whom Sango eventually marries

The Novel

The story is limited to several months in the life of Amusa Sango, in which he moves from being an up-and-coming journalist and popular musician to being unemployed and homeless, culminating in a surprise marriage into a wealthy family and a departure from Nigeria. Sango’s decline contrasts with his strong ambition for success, and this decline is difficult to ascribe to any specific cause other than the general malaise of city life. When Aina, a young woman of the streets, is arrested, a policeman remarks to Sango: “You see, person who’s not careful, the city will eat him!” As a reporter investigating a variety of criminal tragedies, Sango is well placed to expose to the readers of his newspaper as well as the novel the ways in which people, lured by tales of the highlife of the city, are “eaten up.” The novel, in fact, seems to move to a rhythm of the constant deaths of maladjusted city-dwellers.

Evicted from his flat by his lecherous landlord for complaining about electrical economies, Sango embarks on a transient life-style while trying in vain to find another residence in the overcrowded city. He loses his place with his band when he plays at political meetings for a party the proprietor of his club does not support. He loses his job as a reporter for sensationalizing a tragic story with interracial complications. Reduced to playing trumpet in other bands in waterfront bars, he marries the infatuated Beatrice the Second and they impulsively decide to start anew in the Gold Coast (later Ghana).

His decline is related to his relationship with Aina, whose love he rejects because of his ambitions. She is soon jailed for theft, and he retains a shaky connection with her after her release as she, claiming to be pregnant, extorts money from him. Driven to desperation by her demands, he uncharacteristically beats her and causes a miscarriage. His guilt over these events is complicated by the appearances of Aina’s mother, a sinister character whose association with witchcraft is supplemented by grisly tales of secret societies operating in the city.

The Characters

Amusa Sango is as much a viewfinder as a character, one who provides opportunities for the author to reveal scenes of urban discord, political opportunism, and interracial tensions. His playboy nightlife reveals the plight of single girls attracted to the city, away from the values of the countryside. While some degree of empathy with Sango is maintained because of his essential self-honesty and the pathos of his decline, he is delineated crudely and somewhat inconsistently. Except for his behavior toward Aina, explained by his all-consuming ambition, he behaves well throughout the novel, offering help to those who need it when he can supply it. Yet he fails to develop through his experiences. Even when he reports on coal miners’ riots in eastern Nigeria and the political consequences for the nation’s movement toward independence, he remains personally detached from the nationalist spirit of the masses he observes. He is constantly aware of his own shortcomings but does nothing about them. Sango’s function in the novel is primarily that of a reporter: His personality is subordinate to the point of view from which he reports.

Vagueness inhibits the other characters as well. Motivation beyond basic needs is seldom seen, and to satisfy such needs many of the characters are involved in the criminal underworld of the city. Lajide, the wealthiest character in both wives (eight) and real estate, is seen to be totally unscrupulous: He drinks himself to death. Bayo, having attempted a black-market penicillin racket, is shot by a Lebanese merchant for trying to elope with his sister. Beatrice the First, a beautiful woman desperately trying to wring pleasure out of the city, also dies, probably of venereal disease—the result of her hedonistic and promiscuous life-style.

Aina is representative of the single girl in the city, trading a transient beauty for the good life, hoping to gain a husband in this new way of life where traditional customs of betrothal are less important than in the country. She, like the others, is shallow and undeveloped psychologically. She, also like the others, brings into the city with her (in her case physically represented by her mother) a thin legacy of traditional beliefs and behavior that is shown to be sadly out of place in the urban rat race.

These characters are desperate, frightened individuals whose motives are rarely seen above a level of self-interest, and even then are inadequately explained and unconvincing. The failure of characterization can be linked with what Cyprian Ekwensi seems to say is the difficulty of being a person in the city. It is a tribute to the author that such limited characterization, even though its technical weaknesses are obvious, has often been praised for its authenticity.

Critical Context

People of the City was one of the first novels published in the very successful African Writers Series (AWS) by Heinemann Educational Books. Revised from its original 1954 appearance for the AWS edition in 1963, the novel has in its second form been taught widely in Africa and in Commonwealth literature courses elsewhere. Yet it has by now been superseded by more sophisticated and up-to-date accounts of urban life after independence.

The book seems, especially as it begins, to work more as a collection of short stories than as a cohesive novel. In fact, many of the chapters were originally written as short stories and broadcast by Radio Nigeria. This may explain why certain events and characters are restricted to certain chapters, with poor patchwork transitions inadequately connecting them. It may also explain the dependence on melodrama as well as why the characterization itself lacks systematic development and depth.

Yet the style of the novel also presents an easy target for criticism, being full of cliches, stilted conversation, and logical blunders. For example, in the opening pages the setting is identified as “the famous West African city (which shall be nameless),” only to be identified as Lagos a few pages later. Cliche responses by Sango in particular seem cinematically derived, and the Hollywood dialogue at times looks so remarkably out of place that Ekwensi’s style has been described by one critic (D. Passmore) as camp. By the time he produced People of the City, Ekwensi had practiced his craft in half a dozen published works of slowly increasing merit. Nevertheless, this novel is written without the polish and with little of the experimentation with form to suit the African subject matter that readers have since come to expect from African literature.

Clearly, this novel is not important for its style; rather, its significance lies in Ekwensi being the first African writer to investigate closely, in the form of the novel, the reality of big-city life in Nigeria and to question the direction his society seemed to be taking.

Bibliography

Pieterse, Cosmo, and Dennis Duerden, eds. African Writers Talking, 1972.

Povey, John. The Political Vision of the West African Writer, 1978.

Wright, Edgar, ed. The Critical Evaluation of African Literature, 1973.