Cyprian Ekwensi: The Storyteller Who Refused to Sit with the Scholars
I was not born in the golden age of Cyprian Ekwensi, but I have read enough of his works to know that the man had Lagos breathing inside his works. His words carried the heartbeat of the city. Of course, the ‘Lagos’ of those days was not the sanitized, polished Lagos of Instagram reels we see today but the one that smelled of suya smoke, petrol and unfulfilled promises.
When you open ‘People of the City’ or ‘Jagua Nana,’ you find yourself deeply immersed in the characters and setting of the novels. You hear the agbero calling passengers. You see the young girl with too much makeup and a dream too heavy for her handbag. You feel the pulse of survival that beats through every line.
And yet, the literary elites rarely mention his name in the same breath as Achebe or Soyinka. Perhaps because he did not sit among them in critics’ perception intellectualism. He wrote for the common people, not the elites.
They said his stories were too simple. That he lacked the depth, the gravitas, the intellectual weight that Achebe and Soyinka carried. But maybe that is because Ekwensi was not trying to impress anyone. He was trying to connect.
He wrote about the chaos, the beauty, and the contradictions of our everyday lives.
And perhaps that is why time, that unfair judge, has not been kind to him. His simplicity became his curse. Critics mistook accessibility for shallowness. But tell me, what’s deeper than a story that makes a bus conductor pause mid-change to nod in recognition?
Ekwensi’s gift was relatability. He was not Achebe, the philosopher. He was not Soyinka, the grandiose dramatist of impeccable eloquence. He was the chronicler of the streets. The griot of the city. The man who turned gossip into literature.
There is a writing lesson there — a big one. Your writing does not always have to sound ‘great.’ It is about being felt. It is about understanding that your words are not trophies for scholars but mirrors for your readers.
Ekwensi wrote like the man who had seen too much to care about applause. Maybe, just maybe, that is the real art; to write not for the critic, not for the professor but for the woman in the bus who reads your story and whispers, “Na me be this.”
He may not sit on the same pedestal as Achebe or Soyinka. But every time a writer chooses clarity over confusion, emotion over ego, and truth over polish — somewhere, Ekwensi smiles.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.
