Elitist and Popular Ideological Forms in Selected Nigerian Campus Novels

ABSTRACT In Nigeria, the university system and its campuses are relatively new, having only been in existence for about 70 years. Within this university system, there has always been a tension about whether its role is to reproduce elites (initially considered its role), or to change society for the better, which later became the expectation of society. The tensions between these two trends in thinking about universities are transgenerational. As the nation that gave birth to these universities changed for the worse, its universities followed. This bifurcation in thinking about the role of Nigerian universities is evident in the novels that have been inspired by the Nigerian university as setting. This article argues that the Nigerian campus, in terms of ideological formation, as reflected in the novels selected for this study, is elitist in foundation and populist in progression. It argues that campus narratives, while acting as documents of elite behavioural activity, also highlight that the relationship between the evolution of Nigeria and its university system is instrumental to the formation of elite forms on campus, and reveals universities’ subsequent transformation into spaces for the creation of non-elite ideological forms in the larger society.