Cyprian Ekwensi

Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi was born on the twenty-sixth of September 1921 at Minna, in central Nigeria, the son of David Anadumaka Ekwensi — a forest officer of the Nigerian colonial administration of Igbo origin — and Uso Agnes Ekwensi. The family was Igbo of Nkwelle-Ezunaka in the Onitsha area of eastern Nigeria, posted to central Nigeria on the father’s colonial-service posting.

He was placed at six at the Government School at Jos and completed the Government College at Ibadan in 1939 and the Achimota College at Accra, Gold Coast, in 1942. He took the Higher Forestry Course at the Yaba Higher College at Lagos in 1944 and the Diploma in Pharmacy at the Chelsea School of Pharmacy in London between 1951 and 1953.

He took employment in 1944 as a forestry officer in the Nigerian colonial service and as a lecturer at the Lagos School of Pharmacy from 1947 to 1949 — and at the same time wrote the short fiction and the radio plays that he sold to the Nigerian Broadcasting Service from 1947 onward.

He published in 1947 the novella When Love Whispers and the children’s novel Ikolo the Wrestler — the first prose fiction in English by an Igbo Nigerian. He was named in 1956 head of features at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and director of information services of the Federal Republic of Nigeria at independence in October 1960.

He published in 1961 the novel Jagua Nana — the chronicle of the Lagos courtesan Jagua Nana through the night-club and the political-rally Lagos of the closing years of the colonial period — at the London house Hutchinson. The novel was at the time of publication the most popular novel of urban Nigerian life and ran into several editions across the following decades.

He served the Republic of Biafra as director of information at Enugu during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970 and lost his Lagos house and library at the war’s conclusion.

He published across the following thirty years a further twenty novels — among them Burning Grass (1962), Beautiful Feathers (1963), Survive the Peace (1976), and Divided We Stand (1980).

He died at Enugu on the fourth of November 2007 of complications of a fall, at eighty-six.

He is honored here as the author of Jagua Nana.