Tony Harrison in Nigeria: Teacher, Translator and Dramatist

Tony Harrison, famously born and bred in Leeds, was a Lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria from 1962 to 1966. Harrison’s notebooks show that his earliest experiments with Northern Englishes and dialects were carried out in Nigeria at this time. His letters and notebooks also reflect his interest in languages and traditions of the region. Harrison was also fascinated with questions of spoken language, dialect, slang and swearing, and collected widely to prepare for his teaching, including lists of onomatopoeic words in Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Igala and Igbirra. This article draws on documents held in the extensive Tony Harrison Archive held at the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds to highlight Harrison’s extraordinary interest in speech and performance in Nigeria, including his experiments with dialect, speech and slang. It is suggested that these experiments did not only shape Harrison’s early writing, but were formative for his subsequent literary practice, both as a poet and dramatist. The article shows that Harrison’s early work in Nigeria is crucial to understanding the poetics and politics of his later work, moving away from the established binaries of current literary scholarship which remains dominated by the tension between his working-class background and grammar school education.