Ekwensi one of Africa's most productive essayists who passed on toward the end of last year and was covered early this year, kept an energetic composing action for the duration of his life, distributing an assortment of short stories, Cash On Delivery, his last work of fiction and finishing work on his diaries, named, In My Time for quite a while on to his demise. With more than twenty books, assortments of stories and short books to his name, Ekwensi's topical distraction similarly covered the Nigerian Civil War from the point of view of a writer and life in a peaceful Fulani setting in longNorthern Nigeria.
Ekwensi's previously distributed work was the novella, When Love Whispers, distributed in 1948, ten years before the incomparable African epic, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, showed up in London. He was motivated by distress over his ineffective endeavor to court a young lady whose father demanded that she makes a marriage of accommodation to compose it. This short, light sentiment shaped piece of what got known as the Onitsha Market school of raw fiction, and its prosperity roused Ekwensi to proceed in that equivalent mode.
Ekwensi had effectively separated himself by the few short stories he had composed for communicated on radio. These he later set up, inside ten days, while on his approach to Chelsea School of Pharmacy, London, to understand his first novel, People of the City, which Nigeria's head paper, The Daily Times, distributed in portions before it showed up in book structure in 1954. be that as it may, which was not distributed in the United States until 15 years after the fact. Individuals of the City (1954) was the primary West African epic in present day style English to be distributed in England. It's distribution subsequently denoted a significant improvement in African writing with Ekwensi getting one of the main African authors to get a lot of openness in the West and at last the most productive African writer.
The way that Cyprian Ekwensi began his composing profession as a pamphleteer is reflected in the wordy idea of People of the City (1954) an assortment of stories hung together however perusing like a novel, in which he gives a dynamic picture of the quick moving life in a West African city, Lagos. Individuals of the City which describes the coming to political attention to a youthful correspondent and band pioneer in an arising African nation is loaded up with his running editorial on the issues of pay off and debasement and tyranny tormenting such states. In it and a few others, Ekwensi investigates the draw, excites and difficulties of metropolitan life, and the limit leniency and indifferent connections saturating the existences of travelers to the city, where close-ties typically cultivated by the more distant family arrangement of their customary social orders comprise a genuine mind the freak ways of life that discover full articulation around there.
As per, Bernth Lindfors, none of Ekwensi's various works is altogether liberated from unprofessional smudges and botches. Lindfors accordingly infers that he was unable to call any "the handicraft of a cautious, talented skilled worker." On his depiction of the ethical recklessness in city life, Bernth Lindfors, contended that "since his corrupt champions ordinarily arrive at awful finishes, Ekwensi can be seen as a genuine moralist whose books offer guidance in temperance by showing the appalling outcomes of bad habit. However, it generally appears as though he is more intrigued by the bad habit than in the righteousness and that he intends to tantalize just as instruct." While this view might be challenged, it is verifiable that he generally endeavored hard to contact his crowd in the most prompt and cozy style. In reality, it was to keep up this that he clung to those topics that managed the cost of him the mass readership he so much desired
In a 1972 meeting by Lewis Nkosi, Ekwensi characterized his job as essayist in this way: "I think I am an author who views himself as an author for the general population. I don't consider myself an abstract beautician: if my style comes, that is simply coincidental, yet I am more keen on getting at the core of reality which the man in the road can perceive than in turning words."
Ernest Emenyonu, a Nigerian pundit noted for his compassion towards Ekwensi, charges that Ekwensi "has never been effectively surveyed as an author."
Another thoughtful critic,the long-standing American believer to the investigation of African Literature, Charles Larson, portrays him as perhaps the most productive African authors of the 20th century. As indicated by Larson, Ekwensi "is likely the most generally perused author in Nigeria- - maybe even in West Africa- - by perusers whose scholarly preferences have not been presented to the more perplexing compositions of Chinua Achebe and other more gifted African writers."
