World acclaimed poet and literary icon, Prof Niyi Osundare, was recently honoured in Calabar, Cross River State, when the University of Calabar hosted the fifth edition of the Prof Niyi Osundare International Poetry Festival. The first three editions took place at the University of Ibadan while the fourth in 2018 held at the Lead City University, Ibadan, Oyo State. The Professor of English at the University of Orleans, Lakefront, New Orleans, USA, who was honoured with the title “Obong Uto” (King of Poetry) by the institution, expressed gratitude for being celebrated. In this interview with Nicholas Kalu, he shares his thoughts on recent happenings in the country.
What are your thoughts on the present situation in the country, where it seems there is so much tension, especially over issue of insecurity and so much talk about the alleged menace of herdsmen?
Nigeria is a great country with very little rulers. Ours is a great country with a lot of abundance but with scarcity of thoughtful, visionary and tolerant leaders. Nigeria at the federal level has really never had a leader. What we have been having have been rulers. That is why our country is like this. In a short interview last week, I told someone that the Nigerian civil war has not ended. Many people say “Oh the war is over, no victor no vanquished.” No lie could have been greater. We are still feeling the impact. The Lugardian experiment, the Lugardian contraption called Nigeria is not working the way it is now. The British did not intend it to work for us. It was a contraption to work for them. They wanted an outlet from the Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean and then they locked Nigeria together. I have yet to see a country that is so diverse. We have over 250 languages, most of which are not mutually intelligible. Then we have ethnic differences and so on. But I keep on saying that is not enough to say Nigeria is an impossible country. No. It is left to us to make Nigeria work. I say this all the time. Biafra Republic, Oduduwa Republic, Arewa Republic, Delta Republic and so on; I don’t believe in all those cleavages. If we cannot make Nigeria work as an entity, I am not sure we are going to make it work in fragments because the same disease that is affecting the larger national community would be imported into… Do you think that the moment you break away from a country called Nigeria, everyone in your enclave is going to become an angel? No. These are dangerous moments. The Fulani I used to know when I was young in Ikere Ekiti, these were people we called Ala Agunmu. They were friendly. Many of them didn’t even drive the cows. They came as mendicants. We as children would be running after them and they would be playing with us. In Ikere Ekiti where I grew up, the very centre of the town had a Hausa community. Papa Meti, as the leader, and his wife, an akara seller, in our family compound was an Igbo family. Papa Ejike, Papa Nwogo. The man, the husband, was from Awka, the wife from Nnewi. They taught us a little of Igbo; we also taught them Yoruba. Close to that was an Urhobo family who worked on the farm grove. There were also Igbira, the Agatu, the Idoma, all in Ikere Ekiti. It was cosmopolitan.
The first time I saw (Dr. Nnamdi) Azikiwe, my father was in NCNC, his immediate younger brother was in AG, and there was no war between them. As Zik came, we sang in Yoruba. I got home and said that man is very handsome. He is very tall and very black. This was innocence we had and then the civil war came. Since then, we have never had it right.
What do you think can be done to address this?
My first six years in this country has been 1960 to 1966. In May 1967 the civil war began and in 1970 it ended in quote. So we have been going round and round and then the military messed up the country. But be that as it may, it is we that have to build this country. I used to say this to Prof Chinua Achebe, “Oga, your book published in 1983 says that the problem of Nigeria is that of leadership.” I said, I believed him 100 per cent then. Now, it is fifty-fifty. A lot of the problem has to be traced to the followership too. It was shortly before he died. We laughed. It was on the phone. It must have been around November. He died in March.
Things have changed. It is we people in Nigeria that have to take our destiny in our own hands. Our rulers take us for granted because we don’t rise. When you don’t rise and you are ruled anyhow by leaders, you give the leaders the power of immunity and immunity usually leads to impunity. There are enough resources in this country to make all of us comfortable. We have to unite. But unity would not fall on our hands. It begins from the individual. How do you treat your neigbour who comes from a different ethnic group? We have to do something about ourselves too. We have to refuse to allow our leaders to divide us. When they are sharing the money of the country, they don’t say they are doing it on behalf of Igbo, Hausa or Efik. The fate of this country is in our hands. I know we can make Nigeria work.
This is the fifth edition of this festival and the first hosted by a university outside the Southwest part of the country. What are your thoughts on this edition?
I am stunned. This is beyond description. But at the same time, I must say I am not terribly surprised. When it began five years ago, a lot of preparations went into it. But I was skeptical all the same. This is Nigeria for goodness sake. How will this last? But it went on to the second year and third year and so on. So, I give a lot of credit to my two brothers, Dele Morakinyo, the founder and Tunde Laniyan, the Festival Director. The chemistry between the two of them and the professional understanding and mutual respect is responsible for this. Then also the University of Calabar; their delegation came to last year’s festival in Ibadan and there and then, they said they would try to hold it this year and went to work. I feel really humbled. I never knew I had touched so many lives. But I do know that people from this part of the world have been in my classroom at one time or the other at the University of Ibadan, extremely hardworking at the undergraduate level, masters level and PhD levels.
I didn’t do it for profit. I didn’t know the harvest would come this way. This is some kind of antidote to the cynicism we have in our country that nothing can work in Nigeria and that the country is where people are not appreciated and so on and so forth. What my two friends have been doing is to put a lie to all that and say no; it is possible for good things to last in this country. I am extremely grateful.
How would you describe the impact of the festivals so far?
It is a kind of cumulative impact. I left the United States in May and then a couple of weeks later my colleagues at the University of New Orleans where I teach were sending me emails congratulating me, because the announcements for this year’s festival was already on the university website. This shows the kind of spread that this kind of festival has had. These young ones we see coming here to read; these are the stars of tomorrow. I will never forget the way I felt the first time I saw Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, JP Clark, Demas Nwoko and others at the Mbari Club, in the Adamasingba area in Ibadan. They were young and we were in high school. And I didn’t understand most of the poetry they were reading but I liked their company. I liked their unorthodox way of doing things and so on. I now went back to my countryside in Ekiti saying there must be some joy in the creative effort. We touch people in different ways. And we touch people in ways we ourselves could not have imagined. I think this is what is happening here. Big things always start small. So my gratitude goes to the organisers who saw a path and decided to blaze it.
Leave a Reply