Shola Adenekan is an associate professor of African literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the principal investigator of the “Yoruba Print Culture” project, which is funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. Adenekan has worked as a freelance journalist for organisations that included the BBC, the Guardian, and the Times Educational Supplement. He is the publishing editor of Thenewblackamagazine.com. His first scholarly monograph, African Literature in the Digital Age, was published in 2021 by James Currey. The selection below represents some of the seminal works that influence his current thinking, particularly on Yorùbá print culture.
Samuel Ajayi Crowther: “Vocabulary of the Yorùbá Language”
Ajayi Crowther was a formerly enslaved person who became a leading intellectual of his time and the father of Yoruba print college and modernity. Crowther was a polyglot who spoke several African and European languages, including Yorùbá, English, Latin, and Greek. He was the first ordained African priest of the Church of England and its first African bishop. Crowther was born circa 1809 in today’s Nigeria. The dictionary he published circa 1842 was the first compilation of Yorùbá words into a dictionary. The robustness of Crowther’s dictionary lies in the space it created for not just classifying and translating Yorùbá words and thoughts but also in how it uses those words and thoughts to narrate the core essences of Yorùbá traditions, arts, proverbs, and poetic genres. The dictionary was the foundation for print culture among the Yorùbá people and helped launch journalism and creative writing in this language. He later helped devise alphabet systems for Igbo and Nupe languages, using Roman letters. Crowther wrote several books and translated the King James’s version of the bible into Yorùbá. Crowther’s writing style has influenced successive generations of writers to date, including scripts for Yorùbá film and theatre, but the mistake he made in the Yorùbá bible, in which he equated Esu, an important Yoruba God, with the Christian Satan, stands to date.
Oyeronke Oyewumi: “The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses”
This is a seminal work in African feminist thoughts in that it challenges contemporary ideas about Yoruba and African gender and sexual history. Although written in English, the award-winning book is grounded in deep and robust knowledge of Yorùbá history, culture, tradition, and art. What Oyewumi does is to challenge the masculine version of African gender history written by Europeans and contemporaries of Samuel Ajayi Crowther such as the Rev Samuel Johnson in the 19th century, and those who came after them. Oyewumi signposts readers to how gender was not a feature of the Yorùbá worldview before the 18th century. The female and male binaries were ideas that came with Islam and Christianity and were included in written history by Europeans and Western-educated African men. “Invention” has been translated into several languages, and its ideas have shaped the thoughts of many scholars.
Isaac Babalola Thomas: “Itan igbesi aiye emi "Sẹgilọla" "Ẹlẹyinju-Ẹgẹ", Ẹlẹgbẹrun ọkọ l'aiye”
Thomas was a popular Lagos editor who wrote what could be said to be the first novel in the Yorùbá language. Thomas’s novel began as a series of short stories in the mid-1920s in his popular “Akede Eko” newspaper, mimicking the style made popular in Victorian England, in which writers like Charles Dickens penned a series of short stories for news and literary presses that culminated in novels. The fictional protagonist was Sẹgilọla, born in 1882, and was sexually confident with several lovers. In this work, Thomas combined the English tradition with Yorùbá written and oral styles that were legacies of Crowther’s work. Contemporary Yorùbá writings often reflect how history and literature intersect, as well as the close relationship between journalism and creative writing. I.B Thomas not only wrote a 'novel' warning readers about the antics of his protagonist, he also took it upon himself to comment on the sexual antics of real life and fictional modern women alike, in addition to encouraging his readers to write letters of condemnation against modern women’s supposed sexual waywardness. As a response to the fictional figure of Sẹgilọla, many readers wrote to Thomas to express their condemnation of modern women like her. This book embodies the confusion that envelops West African societies regarding what constitutes Western moral corruption and African sexual history.
Wole Soyinka: “Death and the King’s Horseman”
In April of 2009, Rufus Norris’s adaptation of Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horseman” was staged at the National Theatre in London; the reviewer for the London Times Benedict Nightingale, was struck by rich language, so much so that he wrote: “Why does no Nigerian seem able to speak without delivering yet another proverb or luxuriant image? “Nightingale could not comprehend the importance of proverbs to Yorùbá and Nigerian languages, which is what this seminal work for Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature highlights. “Death and the King’s Horseman” brings together Yoruba and European traditions and histories – a hybrid embedded in Yorùbá poetic traditions. This is a must-read text for any lover of Yorùbá culture.
Ama Ata Aidoo: “Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint”
Although Aidoo has no close ties to Yorùbá print culture, her work underlines the importance of female thinkers and writers to West African print culture. “Our Sister Killjoy” was a novel with a powerful protagonist, Sissie, who challenges European perceptions of Africa and Africans, as well as contemporary masculinity in the spaces she finds herself in Europe and Africa. The book is a mixture of prose and poetry and has been the subject of many scholarly engagements for the opportunity it offers to think about the notion of the empire writing back to the European centre and to think about what African feminism looks like. Sissie points mirror to both Europeans and Africans alike, so much so that one can also read this book as what Ewan Mwangi describes as Africa speaking back to itself.