People of the City

A vivid coming-of-age tale about a young man trying to make his way as a journalist and band leader in a big Nigerian city.

When Chinua Achebe became the editor of the legendary Heinemann African Writers Series, one of the first books he chose was a collection of stories by Cyprian Ekwensi. People of the City, Ekwensi’s early masterpiece, is the tale of Amusa Sango, a young man who travels from the country to a great and crazy city that is not named but might well be taken for Lagos, where he means to make a career as a crime reporter for the never less than sensational West African Sensation while leading a dance band whose calypsos and konkomas “delight the heart of city women.” Amusa is a man on the make, looking for stories, success, sex, maybe even love, and he finds a lot of what he’s looking for, though whether he can hold on to what he has and get what he wants is another story altogether. Ekwensi’s delicious novel has the swagger, bravado, and elation of the great bands of West Africa.

Cyprian Ekwensi (1921–2007) was born into an Igbo family in a small city in central Nigeria and raised in the country’s rural southwest. He studied Yoruba culture at Ibadan University College before matriculating at the School of Forestry. While working as a forestry officer in 1945, he began writing short stories, which were soon anthologized in both Nigeria and England. In 1951 Ekwensi moved to London on a scholarship to study pharmacy; in 1954 he published his debut novel, People of the City. After his return to Nigeria, he worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company and married Eunice Anyiwo, with whom he had five children. At the outbreak of civil war in 1966, Ekwensi took a post in the secessionist Biafran government. All the while, he wrote hundreds of short stories and radio and television scripts, as well as dozens of novels, including Jagua Nana (1961) and Burning Grass (1962), two staples of the Nigerian high-school curriculum. In 1968 he was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize in Literature, and in 2006 he became a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters.

Emmanuel Iduma is the author of A Stranger’s Pose, a travelogue, and The Sound of Things to Come, a novel. His stories and essays have been published widely. Born and raised in Nigeria, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and divides his time between Lagos and New York.