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Tag: Achebe

  • A memorial conference for Achebe

    A memorial conference for Achebe

    Okike, an African journal of new writing founded by the late Prof. Chinua Acbebe in 1971 at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) hosted the “The Chinua Achebe Memorial Conference”. It was an occasion dominated by the academia from the various universities in Nigeria. The occasion actually was to mark the 50th edition of the journal. It was also an occasion in which the Okike team honoured one of Nigeria’s brightest politicians, the Deputy Senate President, Prince Ike Ekweremadu.

    The current editor of the journal, Rev. Fr. Amaecii Akwanya explained that the 50th issue was conceived to commemorate Chinua Achebe’s contribution to the literary world. Okike, according to Akwanya is the oldest surviving literary journal in Africa.

    “The 50th edition is deservedly dedicated to its illustrious founder. This journal is one of Achebe’s most enduring legacies at the University of Nigeria, and it was assiduously sustained by his former collaborator and protégé, Professor Osmund Ossie Enekwe from 1986 to 2008. It is a proud legacy which I and the present team at Okike are determined to carry on at all cost,” declared Akwanya.

    Akwanya, who at the occasion solicited for a befitting memorial for Achebe said “Okike would be delighted and is ready for corporate or private individuals to partner with in order to do honour to the memory of this world renowned writer. What is needed is nothing less than a Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature at the University of Nigeria.”

    Agreeing with the editor of Okike, the deputy Senate President, Ekweremadu said the University of Nigeria is highly privileged to have enjoyed the services of “Ugonabo both as professor of literature and director of Institute of African Studies.” “Achebe’s type,” he said, “comes once in a blue moon, for it is not always that you have a great Iroko like him grow and flourish on your land.”

    Ekweremadu commended the thoughtfulness of the University of Nigeriam especiall the board of Okike in initiating the Chinua  Achebe  Memorial Conference. “It is a befitting honour for a man who has in lifem as in death, brought so much glory and honour to this great institution and Africa as a whole. It is also a veritable platform to reflect on Professor Achebe’s legacies and works and to continually recommit ourselves to his ideals and visions for a greater Nigeria and truly emancipated Africa.”

    The deputy senate president further remarked that Achebe “was indeed a visionary and literary giant that brought out the special attribute of a writer as a philosopher and prophet. He was half man and half spirit and the Nostradamus of our time who saw far into the future

    “Through A Man of the People, for instance, he forewarns of the dangers of reducing independence to merely replacing white colonialists with a fresh set of homegrown overlords and parasites who live in flagrant opulence, while subjecting the people to abject poverty.”

    The 50th edition of Okike contains tributes written in poetry and essays on Achebe by some of Nigeria’s literary minds. The tributes include “No Tears Today” by Chimalum Nwankwo, “Achebe: Indescribable Unto death” by Chibueze Prince Orie, “Our Iroko Has Fallen” by Idris Amali, “Chinua Achebe: Sacrificial Tributes” by Amechi Akwanya, “Chinua Achebe: Searching For Truths Beyond the Abyss” by Abba A. Abba, “Achebe, Achebe” by Joseph Ogbonna and “The Return of the Eagle” by Ikechukwu Emmanuel.

    Among the essays published in the 50th Okike include “Memoir as Swan Song: Echoes of Nostalgiam Disillusionment and Valediction in Chinua Achebe’s There Was  a Country” by Onyebuchi Nwosu, “Chinua Achebe’s Aphoristic Biolography: Another Road Taken on the Path of Criticism” by Chibueze Prince Orie, “Chinua Achebe ‘s Counselling creativity” by Romanus Egudu and “Why Did He Do It? Chinua Achebe’s Spectacular Heroes” by A. N. Akwanya.

    There is also a review titled “Who is Angry with Achebe? A Review of There was a Country: A personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe” by Macpherson Nkem Azuike.

  • ‘Achebe’s writings gave me confidence’

    ‘Achebe’s writings gave me confidence’

    Five months after his death, the late Prof Chinua Achebe’s influence on many African writers, especially the young ones continues to show at literary platforms. Last Friday, Nigeria’s celebrated international writer and current winner of Chicago Tribune Heartland prize for fiction Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said Achebe’s writings gave her the confidence to go into writing. She said Achebe was very important to her like others such as Flora Nwakpa.

    She spoke at a reception tagged; Literary Evening marking the closing of a 10-day workshop for 22 talented creative writers organised by Farafina Trust and Nigerian Breweries Plc in Lagos.

    Adichie said she initially found it difficult carrying on with the writing of her earlier books, adding that it took her about two-and-a-half years to complete her first book. “In fact, my second book took me five years to complete. You live to prepare to fall and rise again,” she said of how she weathered the many challenges of writing.

    Reacting to why she abandoned medicine for political science and communication, she said it was the best decision of her life.

    Adichie, who claimed she is not into poetry writing, said: “I passed well in science. I left medical sciences because it did not seem right for me. During lectures, I will be writing poems on the back of my note books. Leaving medicine was the best for me. I did not want to study literature after that, so I took to political science and communication.”

    She observed that at the workshop, writers that came with best entries never emerged as the best of the lots, but added that there are enormous potentials in the writers. Eight hundred entries were received for this year’s workshop, out of which 22 were selected.

    Managing Director, Nigerian Breweries Plc, Mr. Nicolas Vervelde said the partnership between Nigerian Breweries and Farafina Trust which began five years ago, was founded on the company’s desire to encourage the development of literary writing skills in Nigeria, as part of “our strategic corporate initiatives towards talent development and youth empowerment.”

    “We expect that the impressive parade of facilitators this year just like in the past years would help give birth to a new generation of writers in the mould of the Chinua Achebes, Wole Soyinkas, Ben Okris and Chimamanda Adichies among others,” he said.

    Vervelde hoped that the writers that have emerged from the workshop would have the potential to become future Nobel Laureates in literature.

    The literary event, which was held at the Lagos Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos was spiced up with poetry performance by Efe Paul, one of the participants and musical performances by KCee, of the Limpopo fame. Certificates of participation were presented by Mr Vervelde and Chimamanda Adichie to al the 22 participants.

    Other writers that facilitated at the workshop included Kenyan writer, Mr. Binyavanga Wainaina; who won the Caine Prize for his short story Discovering Home in 2002, Mr Aslak Sira Myhre; a Norwegian politician and former party leader of Red Electoral Alliance (RV), Dr. Eghosa Imasuen; a Nigerian writer, medical doctor and author of Fine Boys.

  • Achebe’s books for distribution

    The Anambra State Government yesterday announced its readiness to distribute the collection of the late Chinua Achebe’s works to schools.

    Governor Peter Obi spoke to reporters in Nnewi yesterday. Obi said it was not encouraging that despite the international acclaim of Prof. Chinua Achebe’s works, some pupils, especially in Anambra where he hailed from ,do not know about them.

    He said the government would buy container-loads of books and distribute to schools.

     

  • How QBand stole show at Achebe’s burial

    WHEN the world converged on the quiet town of Ogidi in Anambra State recently for the final burial rites of literary icon, late Prof. Chinua Achebe, one of the highlights of the occasion was the spectacular performance by a 12-man Lagos-based live band known as QBand.

    Led by versatile musician, Innocent Aniedi-Jackson, the vibrant band dished out popular Nigerian tunes of various genres to the delight of the special guests and personalities at the occasion including President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana among other eminent personalities.

    Guests watched with admiration as an impressed Senator Chris Ngige could not resist the temptation of the juicy tunes coming from the band as he hit the dance floor. “It was a big honour to be chosen to perform at such an epoch-making occasion. This is one will be kept in our archives and will be remember for a long time,” said an elated Innocent Aniedi-Jackson, Band Leader.

    What stands the band out, according to Aniedi-Jackson, is that it parades a blend of local percussions and contemporary music. Some of the recent high-profile events where the Band has performed include Vice President, Sambo’s daughters’ Abuja Pre-Wedding Dinner held on December 1 at the International Conference Centre, the Annual NNPC/SHELL Cup Finals and Fidelity Bank’s bi-annual thanksgiving dinner among others.

  • In honour of Chinua Achebe

    Being a paper titled: ‘Chinua Achebe. Historical lineaments of an icon’ presented by Okey Ikenegbu at the opening of a group art exhibition, tagged: Chinua Achebe –Visual Expressions held by some professional artists in Enugu to celebrate the late Prof Chinua Achebe.

     

    In this brief article there is no room and no need for me to write generally about this great man’s life and work. Obviously, this has already been done admirably, notably in obituaries and the encomia delivered by great people of all over the world since his demise.

    I am compelled to quote from his foreword to Igbo Arts, Community and Cosmos: Another reason why it is important to the Igbo to renew their art frequently is their view of the world as never standing still. “No condition is permanent” is the contemporary assertion of this view. In Igbo cosmology even gods could fall out of use and new forces were liable to appear without warning in the temporal and metaphysical firmament. The practical purpose of art is to channel a spiritual force into an aesthetically satisfying physical form that captures the presumed attributes of that force. It stands to reason, therefore that new forms must stand ready to be called into being as often as new (threatening) forces appear on the scene. It is like “earthing” (grounding) an electrical charge to ensure safety1.

    This above expression is necessarily apt to appreciate fully the subject of this reminiscence. Essentially, other contributors in times like this will have written of Achebe’s understanding and encouragement of African literary arts; I shall confine comments to Achebe’s love of visual arts, his skill in using the richness of the English language; his way with words. He was a formidable master of words.

    There is no doubt that in the field of literary art, Achebe was always larger than life, enjoying every minute and every encounter. Most people may well think of Achebe as a specialist in the visual arts of Africa. Achebe’s impact on the field of visual art is infused with intense sensibility and creative inspiration. Achebe always spoke eloquently about the power of objects to move us as well as the peoples of the society within which were created. He held that the visual arts are symptomatic of cultural values and that they are for the most part oriented positively, that is, toward man’s search for a secure and ordered existence.

    Chike Aniakor sums up the Achebe’s most critically acclaimed classical novel – Things Fall Apart, as a vivid picture of an Igbo society in its historical encounter with colonialism, by enthroning a sense of cultural and ideological consciousness, of both human freedom and history, in place of preceding colonial distortions of Africa. That, provided the historical benchmark for liberation of the African consciousness so that a man would know where the rain began to beat him.

    Similarly, Edith Ihekweazu in a perfect foreword to Achebe Celebration Exhibition Catalogue writes that Achebe’s artistic use of language, his wealth of imagery and symbolism, his recreation of a proud and dignified concept of African history and culture, and his unrelenting exposure and rejection of myths of racial superiority have helped in paving the way for the present achievements of Nigerian artists. Essentially, the Nsukka Art School is playing a major role in the emergence of modern artistic movements. She remarked that the exhibition was a land mark and a forecast of a new movement which counts Achebe’s works among its sources of visions and inspirations.

    It is significant to note that artists have drawn inspiration from societal life and experience while creating works as part of national development.

    Achebe’s contribution to visual art history was characterised precisely by his ability to see beyond the constricted and sometimes pedantic web that (we) spin for ourselves, and also his ability to contextualise a discourse of and about visual art within wider discourses – wider in terms of form, medium and time and place. Indeed, he nurtured the view that the greatest acknowledgement of the aesthetic power of a work of art is that it can still move us when it is presented totally both in and out of context. When confronted with the role of masquerade in Igbo cosmos, Achebe notably remarked,

    “What makes the dance and the masquerade so satisfying to the Igbo disposition is, I think, their artistic deployment of motion, of agility which informs the Igbo concept of existence. The masquerade (which is really an elaborated dance) not only moves spectacularly but those who want to enjoy its motion fully must follow its progress up and down the arena. This seemingly minor observation was nonetheless esteemed important enough by the Igbo to be elevated into a proverb of general application: Ada akwu ofu ebe enene mmuo, ‘You do not stand in one place to watch a masquerade”. You must imitate its motion. The kinetic energy of the masquerade’s art is thus instantly transmitted to a whole arena of observers.

    With Achebe’s death, literary and visual arts lost their most distinguished spokesman.

    Oke osisi a da go – A great tree has fallen.

    Oke mmanwu a naa – The big masquerade has gone.

    Nnukwu azu efue na mmiri – A big fish has disappeared from the waters.

    Ugo belu a daa n’elu oji – The eagle has fallen from the iroko tree

    These metaphors used by the Igbo to announce the demise of an important person, aptly describe the vacuum created in the arts by the death of Chinua Achebe.

    Notably, Achebe has a wonderful way with proverbial and traditional metaphors. In recognition of this, Dennis Walder a writer and critic notes, “As ever, Achebe brilliantly manipulates the style he has made his own, introducing proverbial and traditional metaphor, the ‘palm oil with which words are spoken’ in Ibo society, to enrich his meaning throughout,— and it is evident that no other African novelist currently in production comes near this level of achievement”. For the Igbo proverbs serve as speech embellishments, to fabricate and furnish firm and solid platforms on which social institutions and behaviors grow. In his works Achebe used proverbs and metaphors to keep the minds of readers on the alert.

    While his passing on Friday, March 23, 2013 in a foreign land was profoundly sad for all lovers of literary and creative arts, his life line of achievements and his enduring legacy in the fields of literary and visual arts are causes for celebration. Chinua Achebe was a true Igbo son. His interests were catholic, extending from ideas to politics, creative art to performance. It is the cherished thought of every Igbo man to die well. To die well means to be mourned for, in other words to have people around to mourn for one. This in its turn implies association. Igbo folklore teaches that he who possesses a relation is preferred to him who is in possession of great wealth.

    I consider myself extremely fortunate not only to have been part of visual artists who celebrated Achebe while alive, but also that of his epilogue6. As a special tribute from visual artists, this current exhibition in honour of the fallen iroko tree – Chinua Achebe has been mounted in appreciation of his role as a dynamic source of inspiration for artists both at local and international levels. Everything in life shall perish but not ideas. This exhibition is a harvest of creative energies from life experiences. It is indeed bold salute to the withered Rose. Of course, Achebe would certainly have agreed that a debt may get moldy but it never rots.

    I conclude with lines written by Achebe himself … his words on the marble:-

    “You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Whoever planted an iroko tree – the greatest in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there it will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there — so it is with greatness in men”.

    In Igbo land Ugo the Eagle portrays a remarkable audacity of greatness. The eagle depicts success, and an outstanding achievement. It means excellence, first, purity and eminence in all ramifications. And so, there was a man! A man of the people, a man of the arts! …who acted the strong and clean, and withstood creative turbulence. He has fallen asleep. The eye is not harmed by sleep, as the great giant has joined the ancestors not on dead men’s path. Achebe did not die, don’t let him die. Chinua Achebe has merely passed on.

     

    •Ikenegbu is Director, School of Communication Arts, IMT, Enugu.

  • Achebe: The story and story teller

    Finally, the story ends. The story teller has gone to sleep. He has gone with his stories – a bagful. But then another story begins. It is telling the story according to the story teller. It is the story of Chinualumogu Achebe and his stories. It is also about the stories of Chinua Achebe, the man with the stories. It is a story that thrills, enthrals and captivates – both sides of it. Children hear it and demand for more until they go to bed dreaming it. Adults too. They continue to cogitate over both the story and the story teller until a mental war begins to take place; an endless clash of which is the bigger – the story or the story teller.

    At that remote village of Nkwele Ogidi in Idemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State where the story began 82 years, ago it was a gathering of those who came to tell their own last stories, while others came to hear them. Yet others became the story. They came from all parts of the globe – Europe, Asia, The Pacific, Antarctica, Australia, Oceania, The Americas and Africa, where the story of the story teller had spread and is being retold in different tongues; written and verbally. Those who failed to make it to the ancient village, physically, had to rely on the varied media instruments to hear the story or tell theirs.

    The frenzy actually began on March 22, when the story teller told his last; when the eagle descended from the iroko and took a permanent habitation with others before him.

    Sitting there in the crowded enclosure of St. Phillips Anglican Church, I could tell that though many struggled, there were and still are many stories to tell. Attempts will be made as they were indeed made on that occasion. But it will continue to be like the proverbial story of the blind men attempting to describe an elephant by feeling it, each telling his according to where he touched and felt.

    I even told mine. When confronted by those who wanted to know my own version, I said: “Chinua Achebe rose to become an iconic figure in the area of literary geniuses. He stood up for everything that was right, everything that was good, everything that had to do with accountability and transparency. Chinua Achebe was so bold, so great, so courageous that he could hold a whole country ransom whenever he was ready to call for accountability and transparency. Chinua Achebe was a man who never feared anybody and he spoke the truth from the profundity of his heart not minding whose ox was gored. So, we give God thanks that this wonderful man, one man iroko tree and one man army squad has gone the way of all mortals…”

    To many, the fascination in the story of Achebe was that he told the story of Africa the way no other did – that indeed there was life and living in the continent; that Africans didn’t live on trees or hunted each other for meals; that it was actually the white man that came and put a knife in Africa, cutting the existing cord of sequence and order that bound those elements of life and living together. But he did not stop there. From Things Fall Apart, a book he wrote at age 28, he went ahead to do other works, which basically pointed out the contradictions between life and living, man and his environment and the consequences of those contradictions. These were the import and purport of No Longer At Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble With Nigeria, There Was A Country, et cetera.

    In all, Achebe, simply tried to re-establish the principle of the teaching of Jesus Christ that Man Shall Not Live By Bread Alone. He tried to tell the world that man could indeed conquer his environment; that all that is needed is for him to follow the sequence as part of creation and not to attempt the impossible of re-creating it. He tried to point out the hugely destructive factor of man’s desire and attempt to own the world. Things Fall Apart, the book that put him in the eyes of the world must have sold in hundreds of millions and earned more proceeds for its translation into about 50 languages. Other works could have earned him fairly sizable amounts equally. This is apart from his other earnings from his work as a teacher and other engagements. Therefore, there is no doubt that he ought to be an extremely rich man. Yet, his riches translated more in his reflection of ordinariness and his closeness to humanity and his environment. At every point he perceived that environment drifting towards danger, especially man-made, he never failed to warn. That was the essence of those books. For him, any position must never be used to serve self more than the society. It was this demand that he made of me few days after my appointment as the Vice Chancellor of University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), in 2003. He had called from the US to wish me success. But beyond that he reminded me that I must strive to re-establish the standard of the institution and ultimately Restore the Dignity of Man, its motto. I must not fail, he emphasised, to use that platform I had to advance humanity. The effect of those words cannot be stated here. But it suffices to say that the modest achievements recorded in that assignment owes a lot to their direct impact.

    And for those who thought that such a demand was utopian, impossible and even obtuse, Achebe showed how it could be done, using his immediate environment, Nigeria.

    Yes, some of the things he wrote, said or did, could be considered as and were indeed controversial. But more important were the motives, principles and courage that drove those thoughts and decisions. Either in his controversial rejection of national honours or the fact that he, according to the Most Reverend Ikechukwu Nwosu, officiating minister at his funeral church service, described same sex marriage as alu (taboo) or his latest book – There Was A Country, Achebe was not only able to demonstrate unquestionable courage to speak his mind at all times, but that a man could and indeed, should say no to certain things no matter the attraction.

    Whether wrong or right, in the instant examples, Achebe was able to demonstrate the teaching that saying No! at a time it is needed could reduce greed, one of the greatest elements that have held Nigeria down and prevented the giant in it from rising. By writing his version of part of the Nigerian history in that book, he simply tried not only to state the truth as he knew it, but remind the country of the glorious past and the need to rediscover itself.

    Many actually miss the point by putting Achebe on the hot seat for those deeds. They do because they forget that he was an intellectual. And one of the most visible elements of intellectualism is that those who inhabit that elevated platform often disagree on virtually every issue, yet remain friends.

    The abiding lesson(s): We can say No! to a lot of things in this country, particularly the desire for mindless and obscene acquisition of wealth through corruption and obtrusively clogging the steady match towards making Nigeria the great country it deserves because of selfish agenda. More importantly and even more relevant to our present reality, Nigerians can disagree at every point and in all places, but must remain friends. We must never allow such disagreements destroy our unity. Those are what we owe Achebe as a legacy.

    • Nebo, professor of Metallurgical Engineering, is Minister of Power

  • The centre cannot hold in Achebe’s Ogidi

    Forty-eight hours after the funeral of Prof. Chinua Achebe, the people of his hometown, Ogidi in Anambra State, gathered at their Town Hall for a meeting. The meeting was marred by a row because of its sensitive nature. The people gathered to deliberate on how to pick a new ruler for the town, about 10 years after the death of the last monarch. Evelyn Osagie report

    In his life time, the late Prof Chinua Achebe was a rallying point for his kinsmen. His home was their home; he settled quarrels for them and also helped in the development of the community.

    Despite his fame, the late Achebe never forgot his roots.

    But that town, which he loved so much is in dire need of a monarch. Last Saturday, the people gathered at the Ogidi Town Hall in Idimili Local Government Area of Anambra State in their search for a monarch. The council’s secretariat also houses the building of Ogidi Traditional Ruling Council.

    Ogidi like most Igbo towns, runs a form of kingship system, which is headed by the Igwe. He is the traditional custodian of culture, unity and oneness in the land. Unfortunately, The Nation gathered that for some time, there has been a rift over the position of the traditional ruler.

    Over a decade after the death of the last Igwe, the stool has remained vacant. Thus, the centre has refused to hold in Ogidi as it is yet to get another head. A regent Chief Samuel Okeke acts as ruler.

    Moreover, the town is not only bedeviled with problem of who would become the Igwe, the Ogidi Union that is supposed to work towards the enthronement of one is not also spared. For both parties, it has been one court case or another.

    “Weeks before Achebe’s burial, there were fears in some quarters over whether the crises would affect it. Fortunately, with the federal and state might that played key role in his transitional programme, it went smoothly. But the seemingly peaceful ambiance was soon broken up,” a chief, who wished to be anonymous said.

    An incident that took place last Saturday at the town’s hall was evident of the crises in the place. During a town’s meeting that morning, which was meant to review, among other things, the aftermath of Achebe’s transition, some policemen unjustly accosted them, stalling the town’s activity. It was later gathered that they were sent by a faction that did not want the meeting to hold because, as they put it, the executive were not meant to be presiding over the meeting given its case that is still in court. At the end, the parties involved took themselves to the police station.

    “You have not seen anything yet,” an observer said, “this is what we face here. This tussle in the union and the Igweship has been on for a long time now, especially after the death of the last Igwe, Igwe Walter Amanobi, an engineer, who died mysteriously. The one before him was shot dead in his clinic in Enugu.”

    That incident opened the can of worms and brought to the fore the crises in the place to which political chieftain and former Chairman, Ikenga-Ogidi Union, Dr Emmanuel Obianagha, said is the fallout of egocentricity and loss of value system. Despite having great minds like the late Achebe, regrettably, like most big towns typical of Ogidi, it has problem of “Igweship’’, adding that Achebe, who was a one-time president-general of Ogidi Union, had always felt sad about such happenings.

    In his words: “If a land has problem with its ‘’Igweship’’ who is supposed to be the unifying force of the people, then, the centre cannot hold and things may surely fall apart. People need to have an Igwe who will be able to carry people along. Things have truly fallen apart here in Ogidi and the centre can no longer hold because of greed, pride, intolerant and our tradition have been undermined. If Achebe were around, I am sure, he would have frowned at what is happening in Ogidi today. We have no Igwe in Ogidi for the past 14 or so years since the last Igwe died as a result of which a new is yet to emerge. It has been one problem to another. It was only about five years ago that we had a president-general of Ogidi Union Nigeria. And it is still having some problems with its tenure and so its case is still in court. Things have changed for the worst. In those days, elders, especially the traditional ruler and the red cap chiefs, were highly revered.

    And they do not tell lies.

    “Here in Ogidi, the red cap chiefs had a place they called Erulu to wash their tongues. At that time, if they put their hands in anything evil, they’d die immediately. Then, someone with a criminal record cannot be given an Ozo title. Today, it is not the case: whether kidnappers or armed robbers as long as you have money, you’d get a title. This is not just the problem of Ogidi alone, but in most part of Igboland. But what is happening here pains my heart greatly. People have died over this Igweship and the Ogidi Union disputes,” he said.

    Futhermore, he explains that ‘’the situation had worsen over the years because some people think that it is their birthright to rule while others feel that everybody should be given an equal opportunity. You see, the Amanobi family have always been ruling over Ogidi for years until they were challenged by some eminent personalities in the town and the court ruled that the Igweship is not exclusively preserved for one family alone, but is open to all indigenes of Ogidi. After which Chief Obi Ezegbo contested alongside three members of the Amanobi’s family and won. But he was soon taken to court by the Amanobi’s who claim that it is their birthright. And since then, there has not been a meeting point, the situation is stalement and a regent is in place,” he said.

    This was over a decade ago. Yet, the battle for the seat of the Igwe rages on, as a relation of Achebe also informed that two dissatisfied factions (Chief Ezegbo and the Amanobis) clamouring for the position have continued to take themselves to court. Last December, the court ruled in favour of Chief Ezegbo, stating that any indigene of Ogidi is qualified to rule. And so, it was made open to the public. That judgment has since been contested in court by the Amanobi family. And so goes the vicious circle that is eating deep into the fragment of its cultural values.

    Consequently, Chinedu Eze, a member of the community said: ‘’The community is still waiting to see the outcome and pray that soon an Ezegbo be made the Igwe or new fresh but capable one will emerge.’’

    Like Eze, the allegedly Igwe-elect, Chief Ezegbo, who is also Achebe’s contemporary, wants the dispute to come to an end, saying it has hampered on the community’s move to properly immortalise the late author.

    He said: “We hope everything is resolved soonest because we have gone to court and won. But there are always some complexities. If you are solving this problem, another problem is raising its head. Now that we have buried Chinua, we would begin again because the issue is in court and court cases don’t end overnight. If not for the problem within the Ogidi hierarchy, we were already contributing money to build a library not like the type of the present one at the council, which is political, but a massive one.”

    On why he had kept up the over-a-decade fight for the position, he said: “ If the wrong person gets into the throne of Ogidi kingship, I wouldn’t know what to tell Ogidi people in Diaspora when the come to ask people like me, “Why did you people allow this type of person to be our Igwe”. So that was why people like myself entered into it thinking that it would soon be over (laughs). But since 2003, it has been on.”

    Efforts to speak to the President-General Dr Eric Obiakor, on the problems confronting the union, which The Nation gathered are still in court; and the regent proved abortive.

    Meanwhile, some youths have urged the elders of Ogidi to put their acts together, “if not only for the tourist potential of the town, but also for posterity sake”.

    .

  • In dispraise of Achebe

    In dispraise of Achebe

    One of the reasons why Africa’s growth is stunted is what I call – pardon the bombast – the fetishization of the dead. We turn the dead into so great a fetish and canonize them immediately they breathe their last. Evil men a few seconds ago suddenly assume the garb of angels the moment they die, so cloaked because of the age-long aphorism that cautions against speaking ill of the dead. In a great way, this emboldens evil men of today and has made their evil hydra-headed.

    What bigoted hypocrisy this is that has become the refrain on the lips of the living! Why can’t we progressively shame evil doers in their lifetimes and even at their departure, so as to serve as a disincentive to potential evil doers that whenever they exit, society will reserve the hottest scurrilous tongue against their acts and misacts while alive?

    Chinua Achebe, great author, literary scholar, poet and story teller of note comes under reference here. His death has depleted the literary firmament of writers whose works breathed life into the inertia of our intellectual environment. There are seldom as talented writers as Achebe in this part of the world any longer. In the eulogy penned by John Pepper Bekeredemo-Clark and Wole Soyinka, these great authors spoke of the near irreplaceability of Chinua in the literary firmament.

    When you read Things Fall Apart and its suffusion with African proverbs, culture and language, you will almost mythify Chinua as a gnome who hailed from the spirit world but was loaned to humanity by the spirit world; that he took temporary residency on earth.  How could a man, born of a woman, aggregate the thinking and culture of his people into such an unputdownable book for posterity as this? How could a man codify the worldviews, thoughts, philosophy and ways of life of his people in such a way that he colonizes other peoples as prisoners of his people’s ways of life? For before Achebe’s book, many of us were alien to the persona of the Igbo man. But Achebe opened the book of the lives of his people bare, threw the gate open into their historico-societal lifestyle, their weltachuung and upturned them into the lives of the rest of the world. Knowingly or unknowingly, since the 1950s when Chinua emerged as one of the authors of note on the African continent with his Things Fall Apart, the centre has refused to hold for the rest of the world, as we have transferred our centre to the Igbo cosmology; we have become slaves of his Igbo thinking which we drink in intoxicating suffusion.

    We can reel into tomes of Achebe’s literary scholarship, a shuttle of which Wole Soyinka recently made in an interview with SaharaReporters. But, after all that and all that about Achebe’s literary scholarship, full stop! Chinua was an extremely bigoted man who saw the world only from the prism of his Igbo people. For him, humanity ceases to exist outside the locus of Igbo and indeed, the world could go jump inside the Zambesi River once his Igbo people are sequestered inside the safe haven of a decent existence.

    For anyone who was alive to witness the 1966 pogrom and the Nigerian civil war, especially if you were Igbo, you already possess in your being cicatrices that will last you through a life time. The reprehensible massacre of the Igbo in the North, the beheading of Akaluka in Kano and the recent extinguishing of several Igbo in a South-bound bus in Kaduna, are some of the callous vilifications of the Igbo and his unfortunate lot in the Nigerian nation.

    The above could anger anyone and it did gnaw at the pancreas of the great story teller. But Chinua became so paranoid about these ethnic vilifications of the Igbo and refused to forgive any race he presumed had a hand in the suppression of his people. His vituperations were vivid in virtually all the interface he had with the rest of Nigeria in his literary voyage. He amplified most of the character flaws that the Yoruba noticed in Nnamdi Azikiwe and his West African Pilot. Those who were alive during this period would recollect that Pilot over-celebrated Igbo who traveled overseas for the golden-fleece at their departure and arrival in Nigeria. The converse was the case whenever any other ethnic nationality recorded same achievement. Mbonu Ojike, ace Pilot columnist and Zik, with his Weekend Cathecism, did a great job of trumpeting Igbo achievers and relegating any other nationality with same achievement. It was this perceived media projective inequality that led to the establishment of other newspapers and the upturn of Daily Service, the National Youth Movement (NYM) organ, edited by Ernest Sese Okoli, into a converse of Zik’s Pilot which also began to fan ethnic agenda the moment editors like Samuel Ladoke Akintola and Bisi Onabanjo took over the editing suite.

    If the 1966 pogrom bored crevasse of hatred that could never be filled in Chinua’s heart, the civil war even dug a greater cesspit of anger in his subconscious. Everyone who contributed to the failure of the Biafran agenda became object of literary crucifixion and denigration in the hands of Chinua. Administrators on the side of Nigeria who sought every means to return Nigeria to normalcy, he scurrilously disparaged. The archetype of his disdain and vilification, till death, was Obafemi Awolowo whom he disdained in death and even while alive.

    Achebe had shown his disdain for Awo when this man of uncommon sagacity passed on on May 2, 1987. In the defunct Thisweek magazine of June 15,1987, while Nigerians and African political maestros poured encomiums on Awo, Achebe chose to insult the dead. In a rather insipid piece he entitled The Apotheosis of Awolowo, Chinua wrote, “Chief Awolowo was a great Nigerian leader in so far as he was a Nigerian and a leader. But his contribution to Nigerian public affairs of the last 40 years did not qualify him as a great national leader… to turn the burial of a tribal leader to a state funeral with invitations to foreign countries is both absurd and unacceptable”.

    The novelist and poet was not done yet. His words got more pungent and caustic. “It is in the light of this simple fact that the decision of the federal government to accord the status of a Head of State to him in death should be seen as no less than a national swindle”. As a parting short, the former professor of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka summarized the bile in his lacerating cudgel: “Despite the clowning circus of ex-politicians and would –be politicians in Ikenne in recent weeks, there is no doubt that serious minded Nigerians are highly critical or even contemptuous of the expensive hocus-pocus which is now being staged in their name”.

    Where Achebe got it wrong was that, at the war front, you are to fight and not to preach morals. The moment Ojukwu declared war against Nigeria, he was no longer the Odumegwu that Awolowo and co visited but an enemy of Nigeria. All his people (unfortunately) became enemies of Nigeria and they could not be treated as friends. Biafrans didn’t treat Nigerians as friends as well. That was why Murtala Muhammed faced his waterloo in Asaba where hundreds of Nigerians were killed by Biafran soldiers and the heavy casualty suffered by Nigeria in the Abaagana disaster, amply romanticized by Achebe in There Was a Country. How then did Achebe expect Nigerians and Awolowo to deal with Igbo as friends when Biafrans were killing Nigerians at every available opportunity? Indeed, only a fool feeds and not starve his enemies!

    Soyinka’s recent interview, where he reasoned that Achebe’s There Was A Country was a poor reading of the ethnically-biased person that Achebe was was too patronizing. Perhaps, the laureate also fell into the African mantra of not speaking ill of the dead. Achebe’s ethnic irredentism did not just start with his last book. It was merely a continuation of the war against Awolowo and his race. If you read the book very well, you would see his profuse eulogies for the Flora Nwapas, the Christopher Okigbos, the Cyprian Ekwensis and none for any other ethnic national. It was as if only the Igbos existed.

     As great as Achebe was as a literary icon of note, his global size was terribly diminished by his consuming tribal inclination. What then is the difference between Achebe the tribal warlord and Joseph Conrad whose Heart of Darkness he vilified for his racist inclination?

    The National Assembly would lose the last ounce of my respect for it if Achebe was ever considered for a state burial. As what and for what? He was a great story teller. Full stop. Any attempt to celebrate him beyond this prism would be irreverence for the Igbonness that he did not disguise while on earth.

    • Mukaiba is an Ibadan-based journalist and newspaper columnist.

  • Chinua Achebe: His wondrous passages

    Chinua Achebe: His wondrous passages

    [Being a revised version of a tribute written for Transition Magazine, U.S.A.]

    Chinua Achebe had more than the standard allotment of respect and fame for writers, including even those who in their lifetime achieve great acclaim. One of the most notable expressions of this respect bordering on adoration came from one who is himself a celebrity among celebrities, Nelson Mandela. In their long time in the prisons of the South African apartheid system, above all other writers it was Chinua Achebe’s works that sustained the spirit of Mandela and the other giants of the anti-apartheid struggle. “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell”: That is how Mandela described the liberation of psyche and spirit that he and his mates felt when they encountered Achebe’s brooding and deeply insightful novels on colonialism and its complex legacies for Africa, the West and the rest of the world.

    I had not yet read of Mandela’s uncommon praise for Achebe’s writings when, as a member of a volunteer team of professors of Cornell University that taught in both medium and maximum security prisons in Elmira and Auburn in upstate New York, I taught Achebe and Frantz Fanon to some inmates of these prisons. A disproportionately large number of these prisoners were African American, and all were men. I think these factors account for the fact that more than all the other Cornell volunteers, the inmates felt a very special emotional bonding with me since I was the only African male in the group. But beyond this, Achebe, shall we say, provided the real fulcrum for that emotional bonding – Achebe in dialogue with Fanon. Fanon was not exactly a hard nut to crack for the prisoners, but the mix of flights of spellbinding psychoanalytic and philosophical musings with visionary and prophetic prose was a bit too abstruse for them.

    With Achebe, things ware different. His stories, his prose style, and the depth of his wisdom made an apparently deep impact on the prisoners. With very little prompting from me, many of these prisoners – some of whom were lifers who were serving time for extremely violent crimes – used Achebe’s works to throw further light on my explications on the more schematic or programmatic aspects of Fanon’s theories of radical decolonisation. One surprising thing in this was the fact that the two Achebe novels that I taught the prison inmates, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, told harrowingly tragic stories of the failures of anti-colonial revolt, whereas Fanon’s books mapped difficult but ultimately victorious paths to decolonization. When I probed the sources of this deft move by the prisoners, they revealed their deep empathy with aspects of Achebe’s novels that I hadn’t at the time paid much attention to, aspects to which their own situation had apparently made them far more responsive. Chief among these was the startling fact that beneath and beyond the main plotlines of failed and tragically flawed nationalist revolt against colonialism, Achebe’s novels told scores of mini stories of ordinary men and women whose humanity, resilience, and self-empowerment were not crushed, could indeed not be crushed by the otherwise powerful and all-conquering forces of colonialism and imperialism. This experience, this revelation served as the catalyst for two of the most important among the half dozen essays and monographs I have published on Achebe: “For Chinua Achebe: the Resilience and Predicament of Obierika” and “An African Cultural Modernity: Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the Philosophy of Decolonisation.”

    The passage from the heroic world of Mandela and his prison mates at Robben Island to the world of hardened criminals and other carceral subjects in America’s prison colonies is typical of the centrality of passages between incredibly diverse spheres of sociality and community that Achebe as writer and public intellectual traversed in his life and career. One of the most portentous of these passages is the journey in his works in fiction and non-fiction into virtually all the literary languages of the world. He got extensive commendations, inquiries and plain “thank you and thank you again” correspondence from men and women, old and young, the highly literate and the modestly schooled. And these came from all the continents, all the regions of the world, and all stations in life.

    This liminality, these wondrous passages into nearly every corner of the world of letters on the planet pose tremendous interpretive challenges to us. Achebe is one of two or three of the most popular, most widely read contemporary authors and yet he is a writers’ writer, an author who was/is deeply respected by some of the most influential authors of the past half century like James Baldwin, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka. He is a towering pioneer figure in modern African literature but he is also in the front ranks of the rarefied canon of World Literature. He is a constant subject of discussion in the popular presses of Africa, Europe and America but he is also an endless source of debate and controversy among literary scholars all over the world.

    As much as these passages are constitutive of Achebe’s fame and renown, they cannot be taken as self-evident or self-explanatory. Of course it is not the case that “explanations” that don’t explain much, that are in fact rather tautological have not been proffered as interpretive keys for unlocking the enigma of these exemplary, border crossing passages of Achebe across the typically fragmented publics of writing and cultural production in the African continent, its Diasporas and the world at large. For instance, here is one such “explanation”: Both the popular mind and the world of scholarly researchers and exegetes have focused almost exclusively on Things Fall Apart, ignoring other writings of the Nigerian author like the infinitely more complex Arrow of God and the fascinating and reflexive meta-narrative that is Anthills of the Savannah, thereby making the passage from the “high” to the “low” and back again to the “high” a fairly easy one to make. Here is another “explanation”: Things Fall Apart cemented Achebe’s celebrity status among both “naïve” readers and the professoriate of letters because it enabled legitimacy for African writing in the upper stratospheres of academia to be tokenised without compromising that legitimacy with racial and cultural condescension which, for a long time in literary history, had been a constant, almost inevitable precondition for granting legitimacy for any intellectual or cultural production from our continent.

    These “explanations” are neither false nor redundant. But they are external to writing qua writing. In other words, they do not even remotely engage the fact that both the passionate enthusiasts and the sometimes equally passionate if more politely and discretely self-restraining opponents of Achebe as an author base themselves on his writing. And on this central issue of writing, and in particular on the nature and status of Achebe’s writing, we are caught between two fundamentally opposed notions or traditions of writing. Writing, the best writing, must draw attention to itself, to its forms and modes of self-constitution: this is the fundamental article of faith of modernists and postmodernists alike, even if both camps differ in big ways on the specific terms for self-display and self-reference in writing to be manifested. Conversely, writing must not unduly draw attention to itself; it must find a balance, an equipoise between what needs to be expressed and the formal and linguistic means for its expression. That is the classical and much older but still extant tradition of writing to which – so goes the determination of the arbiters of taste in the contemporary world of letters – Achebe putatively belonged. I would personally argue that Achebe actually made the passage to and from these two seemingly opposed traditions in several of his writings in both fiction and non-fiction. But that was not the judgment of the border guards of modernist and postmodernist literary culture and thought. This, it seems to me, lies at the root of why the so-called “highest” prize, the Nobel Literature award, was denied him.

    In all, I personally met Achebe only a few times, on four, perhaps five occasions, only one of which was at his home at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka when he taught and lived there. But among contemporary authors, he was among the select few to whom I felt a great closeness because I found myself returning again and again in the last four decades to his works. He was a master storyteller who had the quite unique gift for folding countless stories of ordinary women and men into the big, “world-historical” currents and forces of modern culture and society. In certain key areas of artistic vision and humaneness, I think he quite easily surpassed nearly all the other great novelists on colonialism – Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and Ngugi. First of all, Achebe took the humanity of both coloniser and the colonised for granted; he neither deified nor demonised one or the other, coloniser and the colonised. By contrast, most of these other great novelists of colonialism could not, did not entirely escape this trap. Secondly, Achebe forcefully showed that both sides in the colonial divide were simultaneously subjects and objects of powerful forces whose outcomes they could neither control nor predict. And thirdly, Achebe had a deeply tragic sense of life and history that was however leavened by irony, wit, humor and a calm openness to the absurdities of existence. As perhaps the single most important historical force in the making and the unmaking of the modern world as a global community structured by and in inequality and interdependence, colonialism needed a master novelist and essayist whose works could resonate throughout the world in the West and the Non-West, among both the ex-colonisers and the ex-colonised. It was given to our own Chinua Achebe to be the novelist and essayist who rose to successfully engage that challenge.

    With his recent death, another passage, perhaps the most significant of all, has taken place. I once joked that Achebe was second only to his own creation, Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, as the most famous Igbo person in the world. But that was about half a decade ago, long before Achebe’s demise. With the number and scale of the outpouring of the mix of grief and celebration from all parts of the world that followed the notice of his transition, Achebe, it now appears, is second only to Nelson Mandela as the most famous African in the world. I don’t think the near unanimous judgment that he has achieved immortality through his works is premature.

    In due time, Achebe’s works will undergo passage into the regime of posthumous commentary and debate, free of both the positive and negative consequences of their imbrication in the towering presence and subjectivity of Achebe himself. I am thinking here in particular of his last published book, There Was A Country. The anger, the bitterness and the outrage caused in many quarters by some of the views and claims made in the book will stay with us for some time to come. But I personally see no portent at all in the fact that this last book was the most controversial among all of Achebe’s writings. His legacy is much vaster than the controversies engendered by that book, just as it is also absolutely unconstrained by the Nobel Prize that was not awarded to him. Speaking about the loss of another great Nigerian, Wole Soyinka once remarked that that personage will walk tall among the ancestors. With my unabashed rationalist and humanistic idealism, I read that benediction as meaning that the departed had entered the hallowed ranks of the true immortals of all ages. So let it be with Chinua Achebe.

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Achebe: Another hero departs

    Achebe: Another hero departs

    The part of the national anthem that fascinates me the most is the contention that the labour of our heroes past shall not be in vain. The major question to ask is: Who are the heroes past? What sets them apart from others?

    Professor Chinua Achebe was distinguished by all standards. He was a Nigerian ambassador, a man of integrity and honour. All over the world, he is renowned for his great novels and the power of telling the African story.

    Although he was a literary giant, he qualifies to feature in this column because of the political message in his writings and the pungent political commentaries in his essays. He had a passion for a greater Nigeria, of which all could be proud. At least twice, he rejected attempts to give him the national honour. He felt that the award had been stripped of honour and looked at the process and the persons conferring the honour.

    The man is dead, but he lives. He lives through his works. He lives through Things Fall Apart; he lives through No Longer at Ease; he lives through A Man of the People; He lives through Anthills of the Savannah, among others. He also remains relevant through his latest work: There was a Country, a controversial memoir of sort.

    Achebe was a political activist and a preacher. He wanted a society rid of corruption and corrupting influences and he spoke loud against them. In The Trouble with Nigeria, he lamented the quality of leadership foisted on the country over the years. It could have been Cry My Beloved Country.

    There may be dispute about the prism Achebe employed in assessing Nigeria and other heroes. In the main, he could be described more as an Igbo irredentist than a Nigerian patriot. But, a rigorous look into his works would show that he was driven into the corner because of the contradictions in the country. He was on the wheel chair in the last years of his life, but neither his spirit nor his head bowed. Achebe was a hero.

    Achebe lived a full, fulfilled and useful life. His footsteps cannot be missed on the sands of time. As he was buried at Ogidi on Thursday, the challenge is to appreciate the living heroes. Nigerians must speak out against the ills of the society and resolve to shun evil. Leaders who war against the country should be exposed and resisted. The only way out of the rot that has taken over the Nigerian political space is for all Nigerians, especially the youth, to get socially engaged.

    Achebe is gone. Who are the heroes present? This is the challenge of the moment.

     

    Rivers: Just before dusk

    The respected Professor Jacob Ade-Ajayi once lamented the treatment History has received as a subject. He likened the subject to the rear-view mirror of a car. He warned that any vehicle without a device to look back, pledging itself to the philosophy of “forward ever, backward never”, could only lead to disaster.

    A review of Nigerian political history warns very loud that any leader who, like Nebuchadnezzar believes he is all in all, is headed for doom. Herod was compared to the Almighty God and that got him destroyed. No one can play God. No one can share the glory that should belong to God only. In Bayelsa, Jonathan played God, got Timipre Sylva removed and installed his puppet. That must have encouraged him to take steps that could only egg him on to the pit.

    Last week, many praised him for declaring state of emergency in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe States, while avoiding the Obasanjo path. He was lauded for keeping the democratic institutions in place. But, he has now shown that the institutions have actually been supplanted. Now, Jonathan is the governor of the states, except in name. He does not need appropriation to spend their money and could actually make laws without passing through the due process.

    In Rivers, Rotimi Amaechi, the governor has been having a running battle with the presidency. Jonathan is determined to give him the Sylva treatment and, if possible, get a minority of members of the House of Assembly to get him impeached. In the alternative, he could get the lawmakers harangued and then sign an impeachment notice under duress.

    The measures could work in the short term. They are bound to boomerang. God is always behind the oppressed. Anyone who has been to Rivers State would attest to the quality of work being done by the young man. It does not matter whether Jonathan likes his face or politics. He was elected by the people of Rivers and his fate should be decided by them.

    Twisting the arms of Amaechi, engineering rebellion in the Nigerian Governors’ Forum that he heads and taking steps to bully leaders to toe the Jonathan line is not the way to go. It is perilous and ruinous.

    Those who have ears let them hearken to the voice of reason.