8 - Writing Time: African Cold War Aesthetics and Nigerian Political Dramas of the 1960s

Summary

This chapter asks what changes in our understanding of the cultural politics of the Cold War if we prioritise the publications of creative writers who did not travel to international conferences or place their manuscripts with publishers in Paris and London, but who avidly consumed international news stories and produced texts about them for local circulation. Focusing on Onitsha dramas produced in the thick of the Congo Crisis of 1960–61, it asks about the ways in which locally published literature contributed to debates about Cold War politics and aesthetics, especially when the ‘global Cold War’ entered creative writers’ own backyards in the form of political crises in new nation-states (Westad 2005). To neglect this archive is to ignore cultural artefacts that were produced and consumed during Cold War emergencies by the very populations the superpowers attempted to tether to their poles. As the chapter will argue, attention to creative writing by local intellectuals furnishes additional perspectives that complement and triangulate the work of Cold War literary scholars of Africa, who generally focus on the work of transnational elites.

The dramatists at the centre of this chapter – Ogali A. Ogali, Thomas O. Iguh and Felix N. Stephen – made bold and original interventions in a crisis that is widely recognised to be the first Cold War proxy conflict in postcolonial Africa. Calling on the English literary canon for inspiration, they responded instantly to political developments and used the genre of drama to interpret the unfolding news story of Patrice Lumumba's assassination, adding imagination and artistic weight to the news. Their genre was not unique: bestselling romances like Veronica My Daughter and its successors were also presented as dramas, and how-to pamphlets about love and marriage were frequently spliced with dramatic scenes. Yet the Lumumba plays were extraordinary for the way they featured real, named – and often still living – political personalities.

The authors of these dramas were intimately caught up in the timelines of colonialism, the Cold War and nationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Ogali, Iguh and Stephen responded to recent events while remaining ‘quite unlike the familiar postcolonial canon’, as Francesca Orsini (2023: 76) describes similar local literatures in India.