Many readers of Olatunji Dare, master satirist and doyen of polished, felicitous writing, must have felt a pang of pain tinged with regret as the nobleman from Kabba signed off from his long-running column on this paper this past week. As this writer told him in a private tribute, many compatriots, yours sincerely included, have grown so accustomed to reading him from his days as the bus stop journalist, that they could not imagine life without the column and the columnist.
But columns do die, and so do columnists themselves eventually. What is important is the lasting impression stilled in the consciousness of the populace and the impact on national conscience. Judging from the torrents of tributes as he clocked his eighth decade on earth last week, there can be no doubt that Dare has been hugely impactful and consequential for the nation both as a teacher of journalism and its active practitioner in Nigeria.
Yet he remains an elusive quarry and quantity for many of his compatriots. Diffident, retreating and self-effacing almost to the point of self-erasure, Dare is worth his weight in gold. It will be a mortal error for anyone to mistake his quiet retreating nature for lack of resolve or to confuse his diffidence and discretion for a namby-pamby complicity with evil. The notable columnist is a man of steely disposition and iron fortitude. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday about twenty years ago, yours sincerely volunteered to fly over from San Antonio to his Peoria base only to be politely told not even to bother. The occasion was for quiet reflection and family members.
Nigeria has thrown up many notable satirists, among them cartoonists who mock and damn with their brush rather than their pen but who remain under-celebrated and in glorious anonymity. This is probably because unlike the traditional painter or sculptor, the cartoonist illustrates with his brush what has already been painted in words or what has already been conceived in someone else’s imagination. As this writer once observed, even among geniuses there is a pecking order. In the league of super-satirists, Olatunji Dare belongs in a class of his own for reasons we shall adumbrate shortly.
In his epic slugfest with the late Alade Odunewu in 1973 over diarchy, a combination of military and civilian rule, Zik cunningly baited the great journalist by asking him whether he was ready for some preliminary skirmishes before the main tournament. A noted prize fighter in his youth, the Owelle of Onitsha was also a storied master of psychological intimidation and attrition in political warfare.
By dropping heavy hints of the dire prospects that awaited Allah-De in entering the same ring with him, Zik was following the rule of engagement as laid down by the patron saint and military progenitor of Fabian warfare, Fabius Cunctator. The great Roman general it was who noted that preliminary skirmishes must never be fought with main artillery. Always reserve the sucker punch and the overwhelming firepower for the last moment when the enemy might be deluded into thinking he was winning the war or the argument as the case may be.
Like a compulsive combatant, Zik relished literary confrontations or the odd political discombobulation till old age. In advanced years the old duelist often cut the figure of an elderly hawk with its powerful talons primed for immediate deployment. No slight or contumely escaped his eagle-like surveillance. Those who tangled with him managed to extricate themselves with deep claw marks and bruises as if they had survived a Mammy wagon crash. Ask Ajie Ukpabi Asika who he woundingly dismissed as a lapsed Doctoral candidate. And ask the Oyi himself, Chuba Okadigbo, who barely escaped those waiting to physically fraternize with him at Flora’s funeral.
Olatunji Dare is of a different breed and brood; a happy warrior at the level of professional and stylistic consciousness. Even though he has collected quite a few political and journalistic scalps in a long and distinguished career he goes about it in a civil and civilized manner and with a cheeriness and playful deadliness which a few may find galling because it does not conform with the fierce urgency of the moment and its sectarian tempest. That is the nature of satirical writing in a charged and combustible atmosphere where even the most astute could be wrong footed.
It will be appropriate at this point to say a few words about the notion of the happy warrior. The motif has travelled far and wide particularly in America. But it originated from an 1807 poem by William Wordsworth with the title, “Character of the Happy Warrior”. It was modeled on the career and life of Admiral Horatio Nelson of Trafalgar, the ultimate selfless patriot and noble man of action. Before he was taken down by a French sniper at the battle of Trafalgar, Nelson had already lost an eye and an arm in heroic exertions at the behest of his nation.
In more recent times, this was the nickname of Herbert Humphrey, a notable American politician and statesman. The distinguished senator from Minnesota was the losing presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in the race to succeed Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968. Richard Nixon was the winner. Combative and battle-joyous, Humphrey was ready to jump into the ring with anybody at short notice. But he was also known for his benign and benevolent politics.
In the mass hysteria that followed the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, he was a figure of reason and calm judgment. Not long after losing the presidential election to Nixon, he found himself in the White House on a bi-partisan mission. After the meeting, he was invited for a tour of America’s preeminent sanctuary of power and prestige. Upon being chaperoned into the master bedroom in its majestic and magnificent splendor, Humphrey rued in good-natured self-depreciation. ”You know Richard , If I had known it is this beautiful here, I would have worked harder.”
Perhaps we need to go back to traditional Africa for the quintessential encapsulation of the legend of the happy warrior. At the end of Sembene Ousmane’s groundbreaking novel, God’s Bits of Wood, a cinematographic capture of class confrontations as they reached a tipping point, the lead characters were admonished to fight and battle to the end without allowing hatred and bitterness to dwell in their heart in the tradition of some ancient Africa warriors.
But how is it possible to fight and battle to the bitter end without allowing hatred and bitterness to dwell in one’s heart, particularly in a society marked by inequities and injustice of staggering and idiotic proportions? This writer suspects that this is an antinomy that dogged Dare in his distinguished career. An antimony is an epistemological impasse, an irresolvable contradiction, an impossible moral conundrum that defies totalization. In Dare, the animus sometimes seeps through having escaped the guardrails of urbane reticence and immense self-discipline. At other times, it is deflected on the pathway of a torrent of delicious and felicitous ironies in a strategic feint.
Only few people in history have been able to completely overcome this contradiction. For example, Karl Marx, the great philosopher of change and past master of proletarian polemics, could not. Marx saw no reason for moderation which he believed is a vice in the pursuit of social justice. He hated and abhorred the old European feudal oligarchy and the emergent bourgeois master-class with equal passion. On his deathbed, Marx vowed to make the bourgeoisie pay for every one of the carbuncles that had turned his life into an unrelenting misery. On the other hand and probably because of his aristocratic and more privileged background, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s confidante and collaborator, was far more benign and conciliatory.
There are more than enough grounds and excuses in Dare’s chequered career to be angry and disappointed. But he has managed it very well. Nominally and peripherally from the north, he was ideologically and politically dissociated from its conservative politics as a result of a progressive upbringing as well as his own egalitarian worldview. He could not have expected rapturous approval from its feudal honchos. Its loud silence on his stellar accomplishments speaks volumes.
But it was a case of double jeopardy. If the northern oligarchy had little or no time for him, the self-consumed and self-obsessed Yoruba political establishment was also tardy and remiss in making use of his abundant talents. Yet there is a play of ironic signifiers across binary divisions which must have impacted on Dare as a humane and compassionate composite.
For every humiliation he experienced in the hands of rude and wanton boys as a teacher on the playing fields of Birnin-Kebbi, he will always remember the glorious example of Major Mustapha Jokolo whom he taught as a young chap in the same place and who has continued to accord him utmost courtesy and kindness. To compensate for the tardiness of the Yoruba establishment, there is always the example of Lagos State and its succession of governors who have treated him with utmost courtesy and kindness since the advent of civil rule.
Having politically unbundled the man, that leaves perhaps his most significant part, which is Dare the stylistic exemplar. This is the essence of the man. Nigeria has thrown up many stylistic titans, men who could command words to do anything for them. Even among this distinguished lot, Dare stands out for the integrity and passion that power his writing. It is said that a man’s word is his bond. Shakespeare famously quips that “words have become rascals since bonds disgraced them”. But the master satirist from Kabba would have none of that in the magisterial suzerainty he exercises over the written word.
Hence his disavowal of sloppy writing, rude writing and writing that disgrace writing. Dare could smell the dabbler and dilettante of the written word from a distance. The dabbler merely lumps words together in a crude and inchoate manner hoping to create some effect. But the master is not impressed. Great prose is made of sterner stuff.
Exceptional writing is the product of exceptional mental labour. In extreme concentration and like a mini-god of creation, the writer is transformed and transported to a supra-human portal where nothing else matters. Nothing can be more intriguing and ennobling than to chance upon Dare as he finessed his delectable prose completely unaware of his immediate surroundings. It is like witnessing a lion in labour. You quickly shut the door.
In this writer’s life time the only other comparable experience was to happen upon Dele Giwa as the ace prose maestro knocked away at his typewriter oblivious of everything else even as he lapped at his favourite Benson and Hedges stick of cigarette as if it was a bar of honey. He was a picture of celestial rapture, a cherubic smile hovering around his lips as he fingered and figured out the most magical combinatoire on the keyboard. Dele Giwa was murdered almost forty years ago but his words continue to resonate. So will Dare’s own memorable disquisitions beyond our age and succeeding eons.
