Narrative Strategies in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana: Urbanity, Desire, and the Nigerian City

This study examines the narrative strategies through which Cyprian Ekwensi constructs the Nigerian city as a site of desire, danger, and social mobility in his novel Jagua Nana. Often overshadowed in the Nigerian literary canon by Achebe and Soyinka, Ekwensi's popular fiction occupies a distinctive literary space in its engagement with the social worlds of urban Lagos in the late colonial and independence era. The study applies narratological and cultural analysis to close reading of Jagua Nana, focusing on Ekwensi's representation of the female protagonist Jagua as a figure who simultaneously embodies and critiques the city's promise of pleasure and self-reinvention. Analysis attends to the novel's use of free indirect discourse, the spatial poetics of Lagos locations including dancehalls, markets, and political venues, and the relationship between narrative pace and the rhythms of urban life. Findings reveal that Ekwensi's narrative style deliberately mimics the pace, fragmentation, and sensory excess of urban experience, producing a text whose formal character is inseparable from its urban content. The figure of Jagua is shown to subvert the typical male-centred developmental narrative of postcolonial African fiction by making female agency and mobility the organising principle of the plot. The study argues for reassessment of Ekwensi's contribution to Nigerian literary urbanism. Recommendations include greater integration of popular urban fiction in undergraduate African literature curricula in South South and South East universities. Keywords: Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana, Lagos, urban fiction, Nigerian literature.