Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the intra-national encounter in Nigeria from the perspective of the Yoruba-speaking national traveller in two Yoruba novels: J. Akin Omoyajowo’s thriller Adegbesan (1957) and Debo Awe’s Kopa (2009), a story about the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the nation from the perspective of the Yoruba-speaking national traveller in two Yoruba novels: J. Akin Omoyajowo's Adegbesan (1957), a thriller centred on the chase for a murderer fleeing to northern Nigeria, published just before Nigeria became independent, and Debo Awe's Kopa (2009), a story of youths serving the nation as part of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme. I read these novels against the context of my broader research on Yoruba-language travel writing throughout the twentieth century.

Adégbẹ̀san is intensely interested in intra-national encounter. Its characters travel across Nigeria, meet Hausa-speakers and emirs, and revel in the exoticism or strangeness of what they find there. By contrast, there is strikingly little interaction in Kopa between the Yoruba-speakers and the other Nigerians in the novel, despite the novel's setting in the intra-national framework of NYSC. Though Awe idealises students and youth as a united national community, this ideal is undermined by the minimal presence of non-Yoruba Nigerians, who appear only as metonyms for their part of the nation.

The picaresque adventure novel, as epitomised by Fagunwa's novels, dominates critical readings of the journey in the Yoruba novel. These novels are often read through the paradigm of transformation, both personal and communal, as a kind of Bildungsroman. But national travel in the Yoruba novel also traces an alternative ethic: that of translation, making strangeness comprehensible but without radical alteration. I discuss the strategies of literal and metaphorical translation these novels employ in their encounters with non-Yoruba speaking Nigerians.