Musing on Architecture

My PhD journey has changed my reading hobby. What was once leisure has become a serious, methodical process that slowly transformed into a chore. It has been a constant effort to keep reading—fiction especially—just for the fun of it. But even unconsciously, I’ve begun to see fiction beyond the story on a page. Thankfully, a positive outcome of this was re-reading popular Nigerian and African literary works for their incorporation of architecture in their storytelling. The 12-year-old me who read and enjoyed Things Fall Apart like any other storybook can finally articulate the themes of identity, colonisation and modernity that Chinua Achebe described in his acclaimed novel. In the past year I returned to old books that addressed these themes in the university setting. Many of Chimamanda Adichie’s books and short stories set in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka easily come to mind. ¹An interesting and unexpected find was the books by Chukwuemeka Ike, whose hilarious Potter’s Wheel I read for my UTME (Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination) university entrance exams.

His books Toads for Supper (1965) and The Naked Gods (1970) were set in universities of fictional colonial and independent African countries, respectively. The stories are both similar to the early independence era of Nigerian universities, which I am currently studying. The themes of independence, modernity, politics, and identity weren’t far-fetched, as Ike studied at Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, and worked at the University of Nigeria for almost a decade. It is difficult to distance his portrayal of campus life in his books from his lived experience as both a student and staff member of Nigeria’s foremost universities.

Although this was a detour from the architectural and archival bubble of my larger work, I have shared my early findings in conferences such as the Lagos Studies Association Conference 2024 and The National Archives Students Symposium 2023.

Lagos Studies Association (LSA) Conference 2024

In June 2024, I presented my research on Ike’s portrayal of university architecture at the Lagos Studies Association Conference held at The Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos.

Here is an online recording of the presentation.

An interesting finding is Ike’s descriptions of university architecture as a representation of modernity and upward class mobility in the characters’ motivations.

^{Adefola Toye, 20244}

Also, the naivety of full political (and at times educational) independence in the late colonial country of Toads for Supper is challenged by the post-colonial realities of foreign policies and domestic politics of university building in The Naked Gods.

I know I’ve just scratched the surface with this literary analysis, and I hope I can pick this up in the future.

Footnotes

1. A few of Adichie’s books set (partly or in full) in the University of Nigeria are Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) ↩︎
2. Adefola Toye. (2024) Engaging with Nigerian University Architecture in the Literary Works of Chukwuemeka Ike, presented at Lagos Studies Association Conference, Lagos,Nigeria. ↩︎
3. Ibid ↩︎
4. Ibid ↩︎

_{Cover image: Toads for Supper cover page}