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MODERNIZING LOVE: GENDER, ROMANTIC PASSION AND YOUTH LITERARY CULTURE IN COLONIAL NIGERIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2015

Saheed Aderinto
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Abstract

This article concerns literary culture and the representation of romantic love in colonial Nigeria's print media. It examines how Nigerians, during the first half of the twentieth century, began redefining love, as both a biocultural and a historical construction, through what I call the modernization of African romantic passion. Through letters to editors and articles, print media showed that love, like education, politics and other institutions of colonial power, could be modernized to reflect Nigerians' quest to embrace ‘civilization’ and Western modernity. Modern romantic love did not just replace the precolonial or ‘traditional’ norms; rather, selective appropriation of precolonial gender and romantic norms created a hybrid that was neither African nor totally Western. While much has been written on African textual and print culture, gender, marriage and sexuality under colonial rule, the subject of romantic passion has received limited attention. Those few published works on the subject overlook it as a significant element of modernization that was championed by Africans who sought new avenues to express their emotion for the consumption of the reading public. This article attempts to retrieve the literary culture of colonial Nigerian youth by weaving textual analyses of representations of love into the wider socio-cultural transformation under alien rule.

Résumé

Cet article traite de la culture littéraire et de la représentation de l’amour romantique dans la presse écrite du Nigeria colonial. Il examine comment les Nigérians, dans la première moitié du vingtième siècle, ont commencé à redéfinir l’amour comme une construction à la fois bioculturelle et historique, à travers ce que l’auteur appelle la modernisation de la passion romantique africaine. La presse écrite, à travers son courrier des lecteurs et ses articles, a montré que l’amour, comme l’éducation, la politique et d’autres institutions du pouvoir colonial, pouvait être modernisé pour refléter la quête de « civilisation » et de modernité occidentale des Nigérians. L’amour romantique moderne n’a pas simplement remplacé les normes précoloniales ou « traditionnelles » ; l’appropriation sélective de normes de genre et de normes romantiques précoloniales a créé un hybride, ni africain, ni totalement occidental. Alors que l’on a beaucoup écrit sur la culture textuelle et écrite africaine, sur le genre, sur le mariage et sur la sexualité sous le régime colonial, le thème de la passion romantique a quant à lui été peu traité. Les rares ouvrages publiés sur ce sujet l’ont émis comme important élement de modernisation prôné par les Africains en quête de nouvelles voies pour exprimer leur émotion auprès du lectorat. Cet article tente d’en dégager la culture littéraire de la jeunesse du Nigeria colonial en tissant des analyses textuelles de représentations de l’amour dans la transformation socioculturelle plus large sous mandat étranger.

Type
Pageants, play and passion
Information
Africa , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 478 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2015 

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