Attempts to classify national literary production often falter when rigid temporal boundaries are imposed, and Nigerian literature is no exception. Since the publication of Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), scholars have relied on generational taxonomies to organize subsequent works. Yet distinguishing one “generation” from another frequently resembles the futile task of separating pebbles from stones. Thematic continuities and the persistence of writers publishing well beyond their supposed cohort reveal the instability of such taxonomies. Ode Ogede nonetheless advances a bold account of what he terms Nigeria’s Third-Generation Literature.
At the heart of Ogede’s study is the claim that this generation—represented by Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Helen Oyeyemi, Ifeoma Okoye, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, Tade Ipadeola, Amatoritseri Ede, Maria Ajima, Okey Ndibe, Teju Cole, Chika Unigwe, Lola Shoneyin, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—
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1. emerged in the 1980s under the “looming shadow of the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967–1970” (1);
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2. constitutes a distinct literary epoch characterized by stylistic innovation, thematic boldness, and candid self-exposure (25); and
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3. responds directly to the sociopolitical failures of the Nigerian state while refusing to sacrifice aesthetics to emotion (33).
The book’s central contribution lies in its mapping of how these writers, while reshaping their inheritance, deploy diverse narrative forms—allegory, magical realism, parable, anecdote, and more—to register the anxieties of Nigeria’s postcolonial condition.
Across eight chapters, Ogede develops commendable arguments. Chapter One lays the conceptual foundation, framing third-generation literature as a response to national failure and generational disillusionment while rejecting the localization of Nigerian literary production in sites such as Ibadan (16). Chapter Two situates Maria Ajima’s The Web as a trenchant allegory of national decay, exposing corruption, ritual violence, and moral collapse. Chapter Three turns to Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods Inc., reading its use of allegory and the mock-epic as dramatizing migration, religious profiteering, capitalism, and spiritual bankruptcy. Chapter Four extends the analysis of allegory and migration to Teju Cole’s Open City, interpreting its fragmented consciousness and elliptical structure as a meditation on exile and diasporic alienation.
Ogede’s attention to female Nigerian writers is especially notable. Chapter Five reads Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street as exemplary of “the mode of the subverted life narrative” (158), where interpolated testimonies of women subjected to what he calls “chattel sex slavery” (157) expose gendered vulnerabilities within transnational economies. Chapter Six analyzes Lola Shoneyin’s feminist critique of patriarchy and polygyny in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, showing how women’s voices destabilize male-centered narratives. Chapter Seven considers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, emphasizing how its structural variety, restrained tone, and subtle irony unify explorations of dislocation, race, gender, and the personal costs of migration and war. Chapter Eight reflects on the state of language in Nigerian literature, critiquing what Ogede describes as “nonsensical bastard usages” (289), before urging writers and critics to pursue “the wisdom of rigor in research and publishing of African … and Nigerian literature” (295).
While Ogede’s study makes significant contributions to Nigerian literary criticism, it is not without flaws. Chief among them is the imprecision of his taxonomy. He repeatedly classifies writers as “third-generation” without establishing clear aesthetic or formal criteria for inclusion. This lack of definition undermines the book’s central premise. Relatedly, his periodization is inconsistent: although he dates the emergence of third-generation literature to the late 1980s (14, 286), he leaves its endpoint undefined, thereby permitting questionable categorization of works such as Cole’s Open City (2011) and Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Equally problematic is his treatment of earlier Nigerian writers. Except for Okimba Launko and Niyi Osundare (30), Ogede dismisses the so-called “second generation” as lacking aesthetic brilliance (27). This sweeping judgment, resting largely on charges of irascibility (32), substitutes assertion for rigorous evaluation. In a literary climate marked by hybrid forms and stylistic experimentation, the criteria by which “aesthetic value” is judged remain troublingly undefined.
Conceptual imprecision further mars the analysis. Ogede’s conflation of slavery with trafficking in Chapter Five, for instance, collapses historically distinct experiences into a single frame. As Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU Press, 2019) cautions, such conflations risk undermining analytical clarity. Similarly, Ogede’s genealogy of influence is reductive. His claim that “third-generation” writers primarily draw on Nigerian predecessors (10) overlooks their engagement with transnational literary traditions. Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, for example, resonates with Soyinka’s prison writings but also gestures, through its title and stylistic choices, toward J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Likewise, Chika Unigwe’s exploration of trafficked women recalls Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana as much as it echoes Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero.
Questions of inclusiveness also arise. Ogede’s list of third-generation writers omits several notable authors whose works challenge his unidirectional propositions. Nnedi Okorafor’s genre-defining speculative fiction, alongside Oyinkan Braithwaite and Leye Adenle’s crime fiction subgenre, receives little acknowledgment. Likewise, prominent figures such as Chigozie Obioma, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, and A. Igoni Barrett are conspicuously absent from his classification. While selective focus is understandable in a study of this scope, the exclusion of such authors’ mention—even in passing—unduly narrows the view of a potentially acceptable third-generation Nigerian literature.
Despite these limitations, Ogede’s book offers valuable insights. Its close readings and attention to form make it a useful resource for students and scholars of Nigerian literature, African literature, contemporary African diasporic writing, and the broader literary history of Nigeria.
