Traditional and Western Education in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure

The conflict between indigenous African values and Western-imposed educational and economic systems is a central theme of postcolonial African fiction, and a comparison of Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure (L'aventure ambiguë) illuminates how Nigerian and Senegalese writers have represented this conflict from very different cultural and religious perspectives. This study examined how both novels construct the experience of individuals who move between traditional community values and the modern urban or European worlds that colonialism has made available. A postcolonial comparative cultural methodology was applied. Kane's Samba Diallo undergoes the trauma of Western education as a rupture from his Peul Islamic cultural formation, while Ekwensi's Jagua Nana navigates Lagos's urban economy without the benefit of Western education, relying instead on her body, charm, and economic intelligence. The analysis revealed that both novels depict the colonial education system as a form of cultural violence, but from opposite directions: Kane mourns the loss of Islamic intellectual tradition, while Ekwensi depicts the survival strategies of those excluded from Western educational opportunity. The study concludes that these two texts offer complementary perspectives on the colonial education system's fracturing of African communities and recommends the pairing for courses on African literature and colonialism at Nigerian universities, particularly at institutions in the South East zone where Ekwensi's Lagos context is culturally familiar.

Keywords: colonial education, postcolonial Africa, Ekwensi, Kane, Western education