MOTHER IS GOLD: book review by Lenrie Peters

MOTHER IS GOLD

By Adrian Roscoe Cambridge University Press.

Book review by Lenrie Peters

(Vol. 2, Issue 1. March 1972)

"Mother is Gold" is a well written and refreshing interpretation of one group of African writing which derives strength from this particularization. Unlike what it says on the cover, the book deals almost exclusively with Nigerian authors, and Mr. Roscoe tells us so in his preface. His only diversions from this concentration are in his mention of Davidson Nicol of Sierra Leone, Awoonor-Williams of Ghana and his discussion of Francophone writers in his chapters on Negritude.

The blurb tells us Mr. Roscoe has been a lecturer in English at the University of Nairobi. What comes through his book is that he has done a lot of homework and the clarity of his ideas suggests a deep involvement with his subject. By concentrating on a small group of African writers, the hook escapes the sweeping arrogance of a Wauthier and the superficial journalism of a Gunther.

Constant in theme, and even repetitively so, the writer illuminates for us the deeper traditional images and concepts of the Nigerian writer without which knowledge we're like blind men in an exhibition of sculpture. We can feel the outline, sense the plastic substance, and yet miss the ideas behind and within them.

I am grateful to Mr. Roscoe for peering through the curtain of his performance and so revealing to us, bringing into finer focus, a grading of jewels. Thus the powers of Okara are spread out, and ranging as the book does through creative as well as political and journalistic writing, we learn, perhaps for the first time, of the eccentric though pointed and prophetic shrills of a Solorin. Here was a man who engaged in educational experiments as in the school he founded and pointed out many of the truths of our political transition which we now accept as bedevilling all our institutions.

Objective as the author tries to be, he is unable to avoid comparisons with European authors. Having just told us that Okara in one poem was imitating Dylan Thomas, he gives us this about Clarke:

"The pull of the British tradition remains strong, for Clarke here is obviously feeling the influence of Hopkins, a poet whose deliberately rude handling of language for special effect might be expected to appeal to a young free spirit like Clarke!"

The book squirms with such passages and reminds me of a critic who asserted that "The Second Round" was again obviously written under the influence of Forster's "A Passage to India"; an assertion which prompted me to read the book for the first time. Here, the author occasionally demonstrates the confusion of mind which beclouds the inexact sciences.

Perhaps because of the inevitable protraction of scholarship there is evident some deep contradictions which suggest that the author has forgotten his earlier conclusions in successive chapters. While early on in the book he is extolling and underlining the values of the traditionalist writer so that we begin to feel that he has no place in his scheme of things for anything which excludes the Yoruba God, Ogun, he then exalts Okigbo's verse for being 'free-ranging, borrowed from Latin metre—a poet of the universal experience.'

The chapters on poetry and drama are well thought out and sustained. The Novel is cursorily discussed. Clearly the author is not impressed by the efforts of African novelists. The weakest point in the book is his chapter on Political writing for here he gives us no more than glimpses at a few prominent Nigerian Politicians and attempts a facile interpretation of what is in fact a very complex political situation. Amadou Bello emerges as a level-headed and wise, even mild, Northern Aristocrat. The rhetoric of Azikwe receives due if short mention. In any case, there is reason to

doubt that all publications by African Politicians are indeed products of the names appended.

Nevertheless, Mr. Roscoe has given us a timely and useful assessment of the Nigerian literary scene since the 1800s, for which he is to be congratulated.