International African Institute

Writers and Politics in Nigeria by James BoothReview by: Martin CornerAfrica: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 53, No. 2 (1983), pp. 76-77Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1160563 .

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Reviews of books * Comptes rendus

c. s. OLA, Town and Country Planning Law in Nigeria, Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1977, 134 pp.

In spite of the enormous social and economic problems of rapid urbanization, physical planning in developing countries is often a 'Cinderella' activity. The need for a regulatory framework of town planning law has also been little recognized. Therefore Dr Ola's book on Nigerian planning law is particularly welcome.

Town planning law in Nigeria derives from the 1946 Town and Country Planning Ordinance, itself based largely on the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1932 and similar legislation in British colonies. The two main elements in the legislation were planning schemes for future urban development, and a system for the control of development. Over twenty years after Nigeria's independence, while there have been sweeping legislative changes in other fields (such as the Land Use Decree of 1978), town planning law has remained little changed, despite serious criticisms of its usefulness.

Dr Ola's short book (less than a hundred pages of main text) gives a good introduction to the legal framework. Particularly useful material relates to case law on the land acquisition and development activities of the former Lagos Executive Development Board. This board for over fifty years was able to plan and build housing and other developments with a freedom rarely found in Britain (except in the new town corporations), and the model of an urban development corporation has recently been revived in Britain and other countries, such as Jamaica.

Dr Ola goes beyond description to identify shortcomings in the Nigerian planning laws. There is little public participation in the system, and no provision for public local inquiries into appeals. The placing of planning within the appropriate level of government is also a problem, largely because of the weak local government structure in Nigeria's nineteen-state federation.

Unfortunately Dr Ola does not examine how far the legislative framework works in practice. Apart from some population census tables there are no statistics in the book. We are not told, for instance, much on differences in planning practice between states, what proportion of land area is under planning control, the numbers of planning applications and what standards are applied to them. There is a short reference to the 1967 Kaduna Master Plan (now very dated and apparently little applied in practice), but virtually nothing on more recent master planning activities. Despite these limitations the book is a useful contribution to the difficult but important subject of planning urban growth in Africa.

ROBERT HOME

North East London Polytechnic

JAMES BOOTH, Writers and Politics in Nigeria, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981.

Mr Booth's is a relatively short book, and, necessarily, a selective one in those aspects of the Nigerian political scene and in the literary material to which it gives attention. Within those limits, though, it is well done, and it will be useful to that increasing number of people outside Nigeria who, without any direct contact with the country, are beginning to read its literature. Mr Booth writes directly and unpretentiously; he is not embarrassed to go over what to many will be familiar ground, yet the book - particularly on a second reading - reveals a balance of emphasis and approach which is in general refreshing if not aggressively new.

He begins with two contextual chapters, one on the political and cultural situation of post-colonial Africa and of Nigeria in particular, and the other on the language problem as it confronts the African and Nigerian writer. At no point does he lose sight of his chief purpose, which is to make sense of the literature, and he moves back and forth from text to context in an illuminating way. In the second chapter he includes a short but acute discussion of three

Reviews of books * Comptes rendus

c. s. OLA, Town and Country Planning Law in Nigeria, Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1977, 134 pp.

In spite of the enormous social and economic problems of rapid urbanization, physical planning in developing countries is often a 'Cinderella' activity. The need for a regulatory framework of town planning law has also been little recognized. Therefore Dr Ola's book on Nigerian planning law is particularly welcome.

Town planning law in Nigeria derives from the 1946 Town and Country Planning Ordinance, itself based largely on the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1932 and similar legislation in British colonies. The two main elements in the legislation were planning schemes for future urban development, and a system for the control of development. Over twenty years after Nigeria's independence, while there have been sweeping legislative changes in other fields (such as the Land Use Decree of 1978), town planning law has remained little changed, despite serious criticisms of its usefulness.

Dr Ola's short book (less than a hundred pages of main text) gives a good introduction to the legal framework. Particularly useful material relates to case law on the land acquisition and development activities of the former Lagos Executive Development Board. This board for over fifty years was able to plan and build housing and other developments with a freedom rarely found in Britain (except in the new town corporations), and the model of an urban development corporation has recently been revived in Britain and other countries, such as Jamaica.

Dr Ola goes beyond description to identify shortcomings in the Nigerian planning laws. There is little public participation in the system, and no provision for public local inquiries into appeals. The placing of planning within the appropriate level of government is also a problem, largely because of the weak local government structure in Nigeria's nineteen-state federation.

Unfortunately Dr Ola does not examine how far the legislative framework works in practice. Apart from some population census tables there are no statistics in the book. We are not told, for instance, much on differences in planning practice between states, what proportion of land area is under planning control, the numbers of planning applications and what standards are applied to them. There is a short reference to the 1967 Kaduna Master Plan (now very dated and apparently little applied in practice), but virtually nothing on more recent master planning activities. Despite these limitations the book is a useful contribution to the difficult but important subject of planning urban growth in Africa.

ROBERT HOME

North East London Polytechnic

JAMES BOOTH, Writers and Politics in Nigeria, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981.

Mr Booth's is a relatively short book, and, necessarily, a selective one in those aspects of the Nigerian political scene and in the literary material to which it gives attention. Within those limits, though, it is well done, and it will be useful to that increasing number of people outside Nigeria who, without any direct contact with the country, are beginning to read its literature. Mr Booth writes directly and unpretentiously; he is not embarrassed to go over what to many will be familiar ground, yet the book - particularly on a second reading - reveals a balance of emphasis and approach which is in general refreshing if not aggressively new.

He begins with two contextual chapters, one on the political and cultural situation of post-colonial Africa and of Nigeria in particular, and the other on the language problem as it confronts the African and Nigerian writer. At no point does he lose sight of his chief purpose, which is to make sense of the literature, and he moves back and forth from text to context in an illuminating way. In the second chapter he includes a short but acute discussion of three

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.31 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 08:56:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

different responses to the problem of writing in a non-African language- those of Tutuola, Okara, and Achebe. Here two of the general strengths of the book become apparent. Mr Booth does not belong to that school of literary criticism which practises a sycophantic mystification of the text: when something is wrong, muddled, or simply fails he is not afraid to say so, and this is to be seen in his judgement of Tutuola. The discussion of Achebe's language carries a hint of qualified enthusiasm, but more important it demonstrates the author's ability to find enlightening instances in unobvious places. He makes us see that Achebe's language, for all its coolness and correctness, may well be the most subtle and effective strategy against the pressure of an alien medium.

The remaining hundred pages of the book are given over to a discussion of Aluko, Achebe, and Soyinka. This is set within the context provided by the earlier chapters, though not in such a way that the contextual frame becomes a straitjacket. Instead emphasis is given to issues of a political nature as they emerge from the work considered: Aluko's elitism, Achebe's sense of the problematical nature of all post-colonial political activity, Soyinka's concern with the political commitment of the artist. Throughout this part of the book Mr Booth treats his material subtly and suggestively. He shows very convincingly how the real political interest of a text is likely to be diffused throughout its entirety; how it is as likely to emerge in a turn of the narrative strategy or in a failure of construction as in the creation of a 'political' character or the direct comment of the author. This approach works well with Aluko, where it enables Mr Booth to maintain a respect for the novels without having either to ignore the explicit political attitudes of the author or to enter a special pleading on their behalf. It works even better with Soyinka: Mr Booth makes a compelling case for the view that the irresolutions and mystifications of Soyinka's work are a response to - perhaps even an expression of - the irresolvable political dilemmas that confront the author. That a text can speak through those flaws that work against its 'success', that the political in fiction is not exhausted by 'political' characters, problems, and statements- these are points that many readers of this book will benefit from well outside the area of Nigerian literature.

The selective nature of Mr Booth's undertaking becomes clear in this later, more directly critical part of the book, particularly in his omissions and in the balance that he strikes between his chosen authors. One can see justifications for his emphases. In talking about Achebe, he concentrates on the two novels that deal with a contemporary situation, and this is refreshing in itself as well as appropriate to the theme of the book. He gives what may at first seem disproportionate weight to his consideration of Soyinka (nearly 60 pages out of 170, or more than half the critical part of the book). But his justification must be that this is, from a critical point of view, the liveliest and most involved part of the discussion: he demonstrates in Soyinka a complexity which fuses the political and the creative in a peculiarly rich way. He makes it plain that Soyinka is by no means the most perfect artist of those discussed, yet at the same time he goes a long way towards convincing the reader that, from the political point of view, Soyinka is the most interesting of recent Nigerian writers.

As for the omissions, the most striking gap, given the title of the book, is the almost complete absence of poetry. Perhaps it reflects the tendency of Mr Booth's critical instruments- something of Marxism, something of deconstructionism - that he turns more readily to the novel and to drama. But it is in the poetry, particularly that of Okigbo, Pepper Clark, and Soyinka, that some of the deepest intuitions and explorations of conflict have emerged. Such poetry approaches the very roots of the political, and it does so most memorably, of course, in the years before, during, and after the civil war. And there is another omission. The most scarring event, the political disaster which almost no writer could entirely evade, receives little notice in this book, at least as far as the critical discussion is concerned. At that point its self-limitation, effective though it is in other ways, is likely to strike the reader as a serious weakness.

MARTIN CORNER

Kingston Polytechnic

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