Ṣóyínká’s translation of Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀, published by Thomas Nelson in 1968 and subtitled A Hunter’s Saga. The title page carries three names: Fágúnwà’s, Ṣóyínká’s, and — given equal billing — Bruce Onobrakpeya’s, as illustrator.
That third credit is the reason this book sits at the centre of the collection rather than the edge of it. Fágúnwà’s novels have been reprinted many times since; the original artwork, Onobrakpeya’s among it, appears on none of those later editions. The words survived the reprinting. The pictures did not. A first edition is where they still are.
The jacket calls Fágúnwà “the leading writer in any West African language” and wonders whether Akara-Ogun, the hero, is the author himself — “a Yoruba Bunyan” — or whether the novel is a pilgrimage of the Yorùbá race, before conceding that perhaps none of this was intended and there are no grounds to read such things into it. The fantasy, it allows, “may have a touch peculiar to the Yoruba, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t”.
Printed, improbably, at the “Franklin” Printing House in Budapest — a Nigerian novel translated by a future Nobel laureate, illustrated by a founding figure of modern Nigerian printmaking, and manufactured in Hungary for a London house with offices in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and San Fernando.
A note on the spelling. The title page prints the illustrator’s name as “Bruce Onabrakpeya”. The artist’s name is Onobrakpeya. The catalogue uses the correct spelling; the book does not, which is itself a small piece of evidence about how carefully the illustrator was credited at the time.
