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Tag: Achebe

  • Generation of change: Young and old people in culture 2

    Generation of change: Young and old people in culture 2

    Serious-minded and well-planned trans-generational collaboration is needed now more than ever

    In these and other writings of Achebe, the country’s new ancestor made it clear to his readers that the responsibility or duty to create a good life for people in pre-colonial and post-colonial Nigeria rests on the shoulders of old and young alike, particularly on the shoulders of all human beings who are emotionally intelligent enough to know that good values lead to good change in the hands of old and young people alike. In other words, Achebe did not see a world divided along binary lines. He saw a world that is driven by ever-present possibility of ‘unitiveness’ or ceaseless negotiation between elements on what appears to be a divide on the surface.

    While Chinua Achebe deserves to rest in perfect peace for the many good ideas he had bequeathed to Nigeria, the call for dialogue on Thursday at Bola Tinubu’s birthday colloquium is timely, coming at a time that our nation needs to change its ways, if it is not to go the way of dinosaur, perishing by avoiding to change.

    We concluded this column last week by saying that the call for inter-generational dialogue at Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s 2013 birthday anniversary colloquium: “Beyond Mergers: A National Movement for Change – A New Generation Speaks” is most timely, coming at a time that our country needs to change its ways, if it is not go the way of dinosaur, perishing by avoiding to change.

    Exactly a week after the colloquium, the British Council released a report that contains more dismal statistics or scary statistical interpretation about the country. Titled ‘British Council Raises Alarm,’ the report says in summary that Nigeria’s population is heading in the direction of swelling by 63 million people by 2050, with the likelihood of becoming the 5th most populous country in the world, and with the likelihood of teetering on the edge of ‘demographic disaster,’ unless the country’s stagnant economy improves rapidly enough to support its teeming population of young people.

    The British Council’s report further observes that large cohorts of unemployed and underemployed young people have the propensity to destabilize society, boost crime and foment conditions where civil conflict becomes more common. The report pontificates that any country that is not well prepared to make the best of its Baby Boom generation can find itself in the midst of ‘a demographic disaster.’ It concludes that if Nigeria fails to respond positively to employment needs of its rising population of young people, it stands the risk of getting its youth radicalized, particularly in the direction of Boko Haram and its Al Qaeda mentor.

    As is expected, Nigerians with fathomless and infectious enthusiasm have not failed to addtheir comments at the end of the British Council’s report online. Some of such comments go thus: “Our stagnant economy of 6.1 growth rate will soon be supporting UK’s stagnant economy of negative -4.6% growth rate,’ and ‘This seems devastating, but before then d youth of Naija will put things in order. Lets (sic) empower one another cos its (sic) one of the way (sic) out.’

    The call for the empowerment of the country’s youths to avoid a demographic disaster is evident in thinking of the organisers of this year’s colloquium in honour of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and in the presentations of the speakers at the colloquium. Certainly, the young Nigerians that spoke to their elders at the colloquium fully understood the problem facing the country when they insisted that senior citizens in party politics must engage them optimally if they are to drive the country from its current position of inertia and ritual celebration of percentage of growth in the last few years to an ethos of action and development that provides employment for the nation’s youth and thus predispose them to self-actualisation.

    One theme that was announced at the colloquium is that Nigeria’s young men and women less than 40 years of age are technology lovers, and like youths across the globe, more computer savvy than their parents who are currently directing the country’s politics in all the political parties. Without doubt, young Nigerians are capable of using Twitter and Facebook and other devices to mobilise citizens to participate in demands for equity and social justice, just as their counterparts in the Arab world were able to do before and during the Arab Spring. Young people thus need to be attracted to joint meetings on the way forward for Nigeria from its decades of self-paralysis.

    The responses of most of the elders at the colloquium suggest that the celebrator’s party is not just interested in creating a large party to take over power from the ruling party of today or to stiffen competition for power between APC and PDP. Elders driving the merger appear interested in more than allowing the younger generation to speak. They want the country’s youth to join them on the train of change. The elders do not seem to be interested just in the technological advantage or superiority of the youth; they are desirous of drawing young people into the new political configuration that is expected to bring new ideas and positive change to the people of the country.

    While the elders have no reason not to acknowledge the technological advantage of Nigerians under 40 years, they also must know that technology is not an end and that the technological wonders of our century is a product of ideology and culture in other parts of the world.Useful as it is, the technological skills of young Nigerians should not be the focus of trans-generational rubbing of minds. What is needed is intellectual and emotional honesty of young and old in efforts by concerned Nigerians in progressive political parties to construct a worldview that can galvanize Nigerians to acknowledge the imperative of change.

    What is most needed is the continuation of the dialogue started at the colloquium beyond the walls of the venue of this year’s festival of ideas. Young people are not to wait to be invited to join a party that is being projected as the party of change. They are expected to insist and act as co-founders of the Merger for change. Young men and women are thus not to wait until the party’s ideology is cast in stone before they engage party leaders on the way forward for the country.

    This is the time for focused trans-generational meetings on the ideology that is capable of keeping the country united and at the same time poised for the kind of economic development that can ensure equity and justice for all. Young people need to be in the boardroom of ideas that create the ideology to change Nigeria from its present paralysis to actualization of the potential of young and old as well as boys and girls. Veteran politicians and aspiring ones need to realize that political culture determines economic development or lack of it. There is no better illustration of this than today’s Nigeria. Both groups ought to create a conducive environment for collaboration on how the new party plans to move millions of the country’s youths out of unemployment or underemployment.

    Similar efforts had been made before. Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his forties joined hands with the likes of Chief Anthony Enahoro then in their twenties to prepare an ideology of Freedom for All, Life more Abundant. This ideology popularized among young and old the duty that political power puts on those in charge of governance, particularly the principle that people voted into power are duty-bound to create and implement policies that assist citizens to have a sense of fulfillment in life and not fight alienation through life as most citizens do in our own country today. Alhaji Aminu Kano also popularised similar ideology of equity and justice in his time in NEPU. The principle that government is created to serve the interest of the people it governs went from Action Group to Unity Party of Nigeria and, to a large extent, to M. K. O Abiola’s Social Democratic Party. It surfaced again in AD and later ACN and in other parties now in the process of merging.

    Serious-minded and well-planned trans-generational collaboration is needed now more than ever, more so at the instance of a new party that sets out to be a national movement for change.

  • My own experience with Achebe

    LIKE millions of others, my only contact with the late Prof Chinua Achebe was through his books. I cannot tell whether I read Things Fall Apart as a junior or senior secondary pupil, but I know for sure I read a portion of the book on Ikemefuna, the captured boy he adopted, that was published in my Intensive English textbooks for JSS1 or 2. I can also vividly reading a portion of another of his novels, Arrow of God, published in one of the textbooks.

    What I really enjoyed about reading his books was the way it explained the Igbo culture, their food, proverbs and way of life. For me, it was like stepping into a world far removed from the Yoruba background I had growing up.

    I have read some of the tributes written by both Nigerians and foreigners about this great man and I am immensely proud that such a man is from the same country as myself. Despite the negative publicity Nigeria has in international circles because of underachievement, fraud, and lately, insecurity, we are currently enjoying a glow because Chinua Achebe fulfilled his purpose in life.

    He is popular today not because he is known as a man of means – with houses, cars and oil wells in his estate – but because he used his pen to tell the African story the African way. Through his effort, he inspired a new generation of African writers. I have not written any novel so far, but I can also say I was influenced by the great writer. He was one of the many authors I read who moulded my writing skills.

    Like Achebe, I hope many of us will develop our talents and help our nation develop. Like the great man, I also hope our influence will extend beyond the shores of Nigeria and even the continent of Africa so the world knows we are not inferior.

     

  • ‘Achebe was Africa’s literary ambassador’

    ‘Achebe was Africa’s literary ambassador’

    The Principal of the Kings College, Lagos, Otunba Dele Olapeju, has described the late Prof. Chinua Achebe as Africa’s cultural ambassador.

    The Principal of the college, Otunba Dele Olapeju, spoke while distributing copies of the book to the pupils during the school’s cultural programme.

    Senior Secondary 1 and 2 pupils of the college will write a test on the late Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, on April 22.

    Olapeju said: “Welcome back test on the book will hold April 22 for SS1 and SS2 students. We are not giving you the book for the fun of it. It is a compulsory test to promote the reading culture.”

    He said the school would give copies to parents and others who love to read.

    He said the books were distributed to inspire the young ones to read and write like the late Achebe, describing the late literary icon as Africa’s cultural ambassador.

    “Achebe remains the cultural ambassador of Nigeria. We recall he started as a young author. His books are found in the nooks and crannies of the world. After his death, we read his profile during our assembly. Learning that he had written a lot of books, many pupils were challenged to achieve similar feat,” he said.

    One of the pupils, Izuchukwu Nneji, said he looked forward to reading the book having watched the movie produced long before he was born.

    “I hear he was a prolific writer. I have watched the film. My mother kept the CDs and she also told me the story. Now that I have the book I will read so I can enjoy it more,” he said.

    Anambra State indigenes living in Aba, Abia State also described the late Achebe as a literary icon.

    In a tribute by the Association of Anambra State Development Unions (AASDU), its president, Dr. Sylvester Okolo and secretary, Dennis Okafor, described the renowned writer as a man who transformed the landscape of the contemporary African literature.

    The union said the late Achebe used his works to redefine African literature, highlighted Africa’s heritage, history and culture.

    The group said the late author used Things fall Apart to reunite Nigerians and Africans at home and in the Diaspora.

    The statement reads: “He was responsible for redefining African literature and highlighting African’s glorious heritage, history and culture especially when juxtaposed with modern consideration, colonialism and post colonialism.

    “It changed the perception of Africa as a people without a culture. His book, Things Fall Apart as Maya Angelou once said ‘is a book wherein all readers met their brothers, sisters, parents, friends and themselves along the Nigeria road’.”

    The group said the late Achebe would be missed for his outspokenness against bad governance and lack of leadership.

    “He rejected two high National Honours (2004 and 2011) third highest honour in the country, citing pervading corruption and other issues.

    “Truthful and fearless, his voice always resonated with an authoritative candour on matters that affect the nation or Africa.

    “He was a doughty and dogged fighter who didn’t shy away from the battle arena once he perceived any decadence in the moral fabrics of the society.

    “Nigeria nay Africa, in fact the world will miss this great and intellectual writer and fighter whose sand print will continue to traverse the universe for eternity.”

  • Chinua Achebe, a tribute

    Chinua Achebe, a tribute

    SIR: I first encountered Professor Chinua Achebe in the Literature class handled by Basorun Seinde Arogbofa at the African Church Grammar School, Oka-Akoko via Things Fall Apart, which, with Julius Caesar, Mayor of Casterbridge and West African Verse, were the compulsory texts for the 1974 May/June examination. But I met the man himself at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he had just returned from the United States as a Professor of English with a new Mercury Monarch that was the cynosure of all eyes on campus.

    Achebe defined my world as a youngster, especially as a literary scholar, though I studied and taught History all my post-secondary life. He defined for virtually all non-Igbo, the Igbo personality, precolonial Igbo agricultural/rural life and the parameters of social mobility, definition of wealth, influence and power in that society. His role in inaugurating and sustaining the Heinemann African Writers Series, which is now defunct, made him the Father of Modern African Literature. That feat made literature by Africans accessible to young readers of my generation and sustained the reading culture that is practically missing among the youth today.

    He cemented his place in history as one of the two all-time leading literary figures out of Africa, the other being the Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka. Even in death, Achebe will continue to define the African literary landscape, being (I presume) the most widely read novelist from Africa. He was far less successful as a politician or pan-Nigerian social critic, but he won respect and praise, and empowered the dwindling number of academics with a social conscience, by spurning the poisoned chalice of tainted national honours presented by successive bankrupt Nigerian governments. His place in history is secure as there cannot be another Chinua Achebe.

     

    • Professor Ayodeji Olukoju, FNAL,

    Vice-Chancellor

    Caleb University

    Imota, Lagos State

  • Magical Chinua Achebe goes

    Is it merely my imagination that we have recently lost more well-known people than is usually the case? Even as we drove back from our funeral to Kampala from Kabale, news reached us Chinua Achebe, arguably the best-known (and best ever) writer in Africa had died, aged 82.

    Chinua Achebe: the name rolls off the tongue, as poetry, as magic. (What’s in a name, asked Juliet. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet!” Maybe; but could you imagine Chinua Achebe as a butcher or sandal-maker?)

    His fellow Nigerian countryman, Wole Soyinka, is the better rewarded writer, having bagged the Nobel Prize, plus not far short of a million US, but for me, and a multitude of others, that should have gone to Achebe (profuse apologies, Wole!) Ask a million African schoolchildren who have read African literature, and I bet most will say Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the best book ever written by an African. And that it would rank at the highest level beside those from any other continent or time.

    I first met him and other mainly African writer-lions, but also some Black American ones, in 1962, at a Writers’ Conference at Makerere University, from which I had just recently graduated. Wole Soyinka was there too, and others: Zik Mphahlele, Dennis Brutus, Lewis Nkosi, Alex La Guma (South Africa) John Pepper Clark, Chris Okigbo (Nigeria), Kofi Awoonor, Cameron Duodu, Efua Sutherland (Ghana), Langston Hughes (US), who won my everlasting friendship (though I never saw him again) when praising the lyricism in a short story of mine, which some participants had judged of no political merit! Ah, there were many other writers there, but memory (from which I list these) and space, are my masters…

    Thereafter my meetings with Chinua Achebe were perforce infrequent, and mainly where birds of the writing feather were gathered together! Once, or perhaps twice, we crossed paths on teeming London streets. He always had a smile for me, of warm but perhaps quizzical nature. I heard he had been reduced to a wheelchair by an accident, and gone to the US semi-permanently. I wondered whether his heart for Nigeria (without Biafra) had broken. But I never forgot Chinua Achebe, much less now!

    We who were alive at that hour when his first book, Things Fall Apart came out, when he was merely 27, were astounded and captivated by its writing power. But also by how, through its Igbo protagonist, Chief Okonkwo, an older, African, civilisation, was submerged by a later, European, one.

    Thus it could be called a song of defeat, but sang in heroic tone, and fashioned elegantly into an English with Igbo undertones: technically a magical and miraculous feat. The book, it is no exaggeration to state, blew our minds. But equally those of countless others: it went into more than 50 translations, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide.

    Four other novels followed: No Longer at Ease (1960) Arrow of God (1964), which some, but not I, consider his greatest achievement: I stick with the first book, Things Fall Apart (which to me seems nearer to perfection), then satirical A Man of the People (1966) and finally Anthills of the Savannah (1987), his kind of summing up of his and other African writers: to me seemingly an afterthought. There were some children’s books too. He also brought out Beware Soul Brother (1971), an award-winning collection of poems, and Girls at War and Other Stories (1972), a volume of short stories. These last two came from his experiences of the Biafran War.

    This was that calamitous civil war of an attempted secession, by Biafra from Nigeria, in which more than a million, a huge majority of them Biafrans, perished. Surprisingly, Chinua Achebe, the most peaceful person you could ever meet, believed firmly that only an independent Biafra, to which its people could retreat, would ensure the survival of the Igbo, of whom he was one. He said, “I believe our cause is right and just. And this is what literature should be about: right and just causes.” From this came his often-repeated statement, “Let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch”: Equality!

    A friend of his from earliest schooldays was the Okigbo I met, brilliant poet who chose to fight for Biafra in this war, and died, some say shot in the back while ordering his troops to follow him where the fighting was fiercest!

    Chinua Achebe might seem mild, but not if he thought something was not right. In America when giving a lecture at Massachusetts University, he denounced Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in forthright terms, finding it condescending and even racist to Africans. Many in the audience, to their shame in my view, walked out.

    But he was the same man who refused honours from his own Nigeria, saying the leaders there who offered them had not done enough for their citizens. Elsewhere he accepted numerous awards, including over 30 honorary doctorates. He must have glowed particularly at the tribute from Nelson Mandela: “There was a writer named Chinua Achebe, in whose company the prison walls fell down.”

     

    •John Nagenda wrote this tribute for New Vision of Uganda

  • Achebe departs amid umremitting turmoil

    Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, 82 perhaps the most illustrious son of Ndigbo, nay Nigeria, among the literati, joined his ancestors on March 22, 2013. If the world renowned great wise one had lived in the distant past, before things fell apart with the coming of the white men, his final funeral rites would have to be accompanied by male and maid servants and other paraphernalia due to a titled man; to serve and cater for him in the great beyond. But this is now. So Chinua Achebe will join Ndihe alone, with his frustrations over a niggardly supine and tumultuous Nigeria, the land of his birth.

    With frustrations deeply etched within the burrows of his face, Achebe had tried for the better part of his life, particularly in the last two decades from his wheelchair, to combat the political buccaneers playing ping pong with Nigeria’s testicles. His bazooka was his moral authority. But as he will probably realise as he is beckoned into the pantheon of deified deities, the political leadership which he surmised as the trouble with Nigeria is armored against moral persuasion. This is particularly so with Ndianambra within the Ndigbo sub-group of the rampaging marauders, euphemistically called the Nigerian political elites.

    Who will forget in a hurry the ‘Grade A’ performance of the group then allegedly aligned to the Uba brothers in 2006, as the reigning kingpins in Anambra State, when Obasanjo was the President? Like demented masochists, a variant of the Peoples Democratic Party’s dominant political leadership in the state, clearly derived pleasure as their agents in the full glare of cameras visited their homeland with humiliation and punishment. Achebe must have wished that the sober majority of Ndianambra would have had the courage to take sticks to break the heads of those who strode into their sitting room to defecate.

    Achebe’s fame, like that of Okonkwo, his protagonist in Things Fall Apart, had grown over the years following its publication in 1958, like bush fire in the harmattan; more so, in his hoary years. Defiant and resolute he had rejected the national honour of the Commander of the Federal Republic twice; first offered by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the godfather of the Anambra malcontent, and recently President Goodluck Jonathan, the under-performing President under whose watch, Nigeria is slipping into anarchy.

    In rejecting Obasanjo’s offer, Achebe wondered how a nation can consciously seek to destroy itself, by gleefully attempting to destroy a part of it. Despite the protests and the apparent incongruity of celebrating a criminal conduct before the cameras, the federal authorities pretended that a willful destruction of public property is an accepted state policy. When the offer of national honour came again from President Jonathan, Achebe observed that nothing has changed in the way and manner his fatherland is plundered. But of course there is no dearth of willing honourees in Nigeria. So what Achebe rejected many willingly accepted.

    As some have rightly argued, Achebe was very disillusioned with his country, particularly since after the pogroms against his kinsmen and the eventual Nigeria civil war. As he admitted in his last literary outing, There Was A Country, A Personal History of Biafra, published last year, 2012, Nigeria has officially replaced merit with cronyism, and the consequences has been at home with us. He also argued that the civil war by other means is still ongoing against his people; offering that for Nigeria to make progress, equity and fair play must reemerge as the national ethos. Of course the backlash to his memoirs was in several cases harsh and condescending; while in extreme circumstances were cruel and illogic.

    But for his numerous admirers nothing less than the forthrightness of his views as expressed in that book, was expected. More so now with hindsight as obviously he was preparing the living for his final exit. If I may ask, which father will hide the secrets of the kingdom for all times from his children? In between the first and last books, he had written several other books, where he prophetically and patriotically warned of the doom that eventually befell the country. The two most outstanding prophesies were in A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah.

    In A Man of the People, he had warned the thieving first Republic politicians of the consequences of their misbegotten popularity. Incredulously, his prophesied consequences of a coup de tat that happened on the day the book was launched in 1966. Again in Anthills of the Savannah, it was the bandit military that had waylaid the nation’s patrimony that he attacked. Chinua Achebe also characteristically laid squarely the challenges facing the country on its poor leadership, in his long essay, The Trouble with Nigeria. As many have since come to realise, whether under the military or civilian regimes, the country has been under the numb of a debilitating leadership; and the consequences are with us.

    Clearly Chinua Achebe was a living oracle. Now he will transmute to a deified deity. And need it be said that his prophesies can only be ignored to the detriment of the living. Despite his best efforts and that of other patriotic Nigerians, Nigeria is presently seething on daily killings of innocent citizens, with the government helpless. Many argue that the problem is substantially political. If so, Achebe counsels in his last book: ‘the road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected.’

    As we grapple with our national challenges, it is important that we drink from Achebe’s wisdom. It is also appropriate that we send him off with pomp and pageantry.

  • Achebe: A literary titan and his times

    Achebe: A literary titan and his times

    A mighty tree fell in Boston, Massachusetts, two weeks ago, and its fall was heard across the world.

    That tree was Chinua Achebe, and the fall was heard by the tens of millions who had read his first and best known novel, “Things Fall Apart” in the major languages into which it has been translated, among them, his native Igbo, and Yoruba.

    It was heard in the leading world academies, where his novels, essays, poems, lectures and other literary forms are studied. It was heard in every establishment involved in making or executing policy or otherwise transacting business in Nigeria and indeed Africa as a guide. It was heard by everyone across creed, colour or tongue he had charmed with his incomparable skills as a story-teller, the majestic simplicity of his prose, and a profound sociological imagination.

    His writings burst upon the literary and political world at a time of ferment. The wind of change which gusting over Africa that British Prime Minister called the attention of the heedless apartheid regime in South Africa was gathering speed, sounding the death knell of colonialism and imperialism. In the United States, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum, putting Jim Crow and its clan on notice that all those “self-evident truths” must amount to much more than articles of faith in the Declaration of Independence.

    To them, Achebe lent a voice, a stirring, eloquent voice – a voice that derived its power from the acuity of his insights no less than from being so understated. He rescued subject peoples from the mutilate versions of themselves and taught them to see themselves whole, to be at peace with their being and essence. This was the context in which he got to know and collaborate with the writer James Baldwin, one of the leading lights of the movement.

    Africans and indeed black people everywhere can walk tall today in part because Achebe exploded the racist stereotypes Europe and America developed and assiduously propagated about them. He wrote back to the makers of empire. The civilising mission they prided themselves on was a rude disruption of long-established ways of life and was in some ways and actually a regression. It is a mark of his towering achievement that his obituary notice in the digital edition of The New York Times attracted some 150 comments from readers worldwide, all of them laudatory.

    In a famous essay, Achebe wrote that writer has a duty to teach. And what a teacher he was! Many of the better-known young Africans writing today owe their success to his example, his inspiration, and encouragement. The genre that has come to be called African Literature owes its status in no small part to Achebe as publisher and editor and teacher. He at once embodied and brought before the world the wisdom of his people.

    He was also an iconoclast. In another essay – or was it an interview? – he said the writer is the one who, when you beat your chest about the graceful architectural sweep of your city flyovers, calls to your attention to all the unsightly mess under it.

    Though often remarked in his oeuvre, the iconoclastic streak that perfuses it as well as his political engagements rarely gets the emphasis it deserves. Everyone familiar with his writings knows how he took down Joseph Conrad and Joyce Carey from their pedestal. All that was in the line of literary duty.

    Applied to Nigerian politics, which is still largely ethnic-based, and a blood sport of sorts, that kind of iconoclasm can have unintended consequences. As Obafemi Awolowo was being mourned in 1987, Achebe dismissed him as “a mediocre politician.” The Nobel was a European prize that did not and could not translate into the “Asiwaju” of Nigerian literature, contrary to the impression some “idle lackeys” of the Yoruba recipient Wole Soyinka were trying to create, he wrote.

    In the tit-for-tat matrix in which identity politics is played in Nigeria, it seemed very likely that, at his death, Achebe would attract among some of Awolowo’s adoring kinsmen at least something close to Achebe’s embittered putdown of the chief and his petulant remarks about the Nobel, its 1986 recipient, and his band of admirers.

    Achebe turned that likelihood into a certainty in his controversial last work, “There was a Country,” in which he offered it as his “firm impression” that Awo had, “for the benefit of his people,” devised or pursued policies that did incalculable harm to the Igbo when he was Federal Commissioner for Finance and Vice Chair of the Federal Executive Council during the civil war.

    This charge in effect makes every Yoruba an accessory to whatever Awo was alleged to have done or left undone. Achebe was not the first to make this charge; lesser characters have been bandying it for decades. But he gave it a fresh infusion of oxygen, with consequences that no one who pays even the most casual attention to the misnamed “social media” can applaud. It was as if the civil war was being fought all over again, this time in cyberspace, but with undiminished ferocity.

    Not a few Nigerians feel gravely offended by such charges and assertions strewn across the book with far less rigour than usually marks his work, and by significant omissions that would have provided a richer context. The Achebe they behold is not exactly the Achebe the rest of the world is celebrating — the literary titan, the voice of calm, reasoned discourse, the great teacher. They accuse him of setting out in his last work to glorify his people and vilify everyone else.

    Achebe was proud of his Igbo identity. He proclaimed it, celebrated it, rejoiced in it. He was not in the least apologetic about it. Nor should he have been; no one should have to apologise for his or her ethnic identity. If avowing and affirming his ethnic identity somehow constricted his political vision, Achebe would have said: so be it, secure in the knowledge that his place in the world of letters is assured.

    Not for him the sham pretence of being a “detribalised” Nigerian. Show me that “detribalised” person and I will show you a person who is practically unconscious. Some have succeeded more than others in sublimating or transcending their ethnic identities. Yet, it is by virtue of being Igbo or Hausa or Yoruba or Kanuri or Nupe or Tiv or Igala or Ijaw or Urhobo or Efik or Ibibio, or of belonging in some one of 300 ethnic groups that make up the national population that one can lay claim to being a Nigerian.

    By word and deed, Achebe taught that we should speak forthrightly on these issues, without muzzling opposing viewpoints or denying others the right to do the same.

    Would that we could do so with respect for one another, and without bitterness.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Achebe versus Soyinka

    Achebe versus Soyinka

    Barely two decades ago, poet and playwright Femi Osofisan delivered a broadside, and it was as a keynote speaker at an annual convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors. According to the big-eyed lover of theatrics, only two serious Nigerian authors inhabited our literary firmament: Wole Soyinka and Niyi Osundare.

    Not a few writers and critics were scandalised by his claim. Many thought it was deliberately contrarian, an act of drama by a dramatist to draw attention to himself not by the pithy wisdom of his declaration but the mere vanity of it. He was a public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention.

    The first question thrown at him was predictable: What of Chinua Achebe? Wearing a glum mien almost as defiance, he maintained his assertion and said many people paid attention to Things Fall Apart, and that was not even his most accomplished work.

    At the time, I was in my mid-twenties and just beginning to overcome my illusion from my teen years. I was weaned on Things Fall Apart, read it, worshiped its creator and placed Achebe as the preeminent deity in the literary pantheon not only on the African continent but all over the world. But how many writers did I know and how many books had I read? How skilled was I in the art of appreciating the collaborations of words into narratives?

    But as I grew out of my naivety towards the end of my years at the Obafemi Awolowo University, renouncing Achebe as a god of literature was like a shock of atheism in the church. I was abandoning the temple, unfrocking the priests and demystifying the canon. I became an apostate in the true religion. I felt conned by my breeders. I ate the poisoned diet, malnourished by untutored chefs.

    Literature belongs to a complex world, and because everyone can pick a novel or play and read, the impression often comes across that it is everyone’s game. George Bernard Shaw said snidely that “vocations are a conspiracy against the laity.” He was right. Not everyone can be a medical doctor, or software analyst or Supreme Court judge. Everyone can sing but not everyone can tell why a good song is great although they have their personal attitudes and predilections. Not everyone can postulate on good literature. Achebe’s works were good literature, but whether he wrote a great novel, leave that to those who know.

    I never intended to write another column after last week’s in which I echoed William Shakespeare when I characterised Achebe as a self from self. That is, he struggled with alienation throughout his life.

    Since the bard’s death, many people either by subtle references or direct barbs have tried to do two wrong things. First, they claimed he deserved the Nobel Prize but was deprived. Two, that Achebe was greater than Wole Soyinka. By inference, they claimed that Soyinka did not earn the prize and the wise men of Stockholm ought to have given the medal to the author of TFA.

    How come the father of African literature did not win the preeminent prize? The phrase, made popular when he won the Booker Prize Lifetime honour, has been appropriated to imply that Achebe was number one on the continent. So why did he not win the prize? First, TFA was a great book not because of its literary properties but because of its ideological potency. The Nobel Prize does not go to a novelist whose work is signposted by sociological fixations supplanting narratives with long pages of how Igbo villages are organised. When Osofisan asserted that TFA was not his best book, he meant that more attention should go to Arrow of God, a better book. So why do his admirers say less of Arrow of God but pay more encomiums on TFA. It is because they are struck by the timely power of the book. The West, embraced TFA for its introduction of its peoples to the dignity of African society, a thing they did not care to glean from accomplished works that came before TFA. Even the writer, Amos Tutuola, with his Palm wine Drinkard, came long before. But the west wanted an African to write like them so they could applaud him. And Achebe did it in a simple language.

    Did he succeed by using the language as a tool of subversion? Hardly. For a sampler of that sort, read Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence. TFA was a story of a clash of culture, which was nothing new. He wrote about the assertion of local pride, which was hardly original. But it was a counter-narrative, and it was done with gusto and minimal dexterity, and that was enough for them. They were amazed at the manipulation of proverbs and other manifestations of local colour. But the proverbs were never original, just like many of the proverbs in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame.

    The other novel often quoted was A man of the People and critics have credited him with prophetic insight. The novel predated the 1966 coup. But it was hardly original because the conversation was already in the air on the continent. So he wrote good works, not great works, not textured by deeper insights that you would see in better accomplished works.

    Achebe was nominated severally for the Prize, but he did not get it because his works had to be weighed against the competition, other works also nominated by various groups. It was the comparison that exposed his works. If TFA was not his best work, it goes without saying that it was a book that thrived on popularity not subtlety. Literature is not about the popular text. It is about high art. If Achebe influenced a generation of writers, that makes him a great writer. But it is a testament to theme and not artifice.

    Soyinka, on the other hand, won based on his plays and poems. If we were to judge by popularity, many would pick the Lion and Jewel and the Jero Plays as Soyinka’s masterpieces. But far from it. They compare in richness to TFA. Many who cavil at his prize have probably not read the following: Death and the King’s Horsemen, Madmen and Specialists, Kongi’s Harvest, A dance of the Forest, The Road, Opera Wonyosi, among others. Each of these works is a stunner, primed with layer after layer of thought and meaning wrapped in narratives.

    Those who read TFA like clockwork may be put off by some of Soyinka’s opus. So they should not obsess out of ignorance. They should read first. If you knock Soyinka on obscurity, you have a right. But high art is not always easy to understand. Those who claim to enjoy TFA cannot write a literate essay on the book and why it is high art.

    Because of his stature as a playwright, some downplay his other gifts. In the Nobel citation, he was also praised for his prison Notes, The Man Died, as well as his long poems like Ogun Abibiman, which I guess many readers have not even heard of.

    It is true that some great writers are passed over for the prize. But few disagree that those who win deserve the accolades. The other Nigerian I expected to win was Christopher Okigbo, who was tragically lapped up by the Civil War.

    Achebe was a good story teller, so was my grandmother. Turning from a raconteur to an art of sublimity and depth belongs to the masters. Because of his influence on a continent, I compare him with Samuel Johnson of the Shakespearean era. He was described as a great writer but not a great artist.

  • Achebe: A non-romantic view

    Achebe: A non-romantic view

    There is no doubt that Chinua Achebe, who died last week in the United States after a long residence there probably because it was better for him to live there than in Nigeria, was, by many accounts, an outstanding writer. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), received wide critical acclaim soon after its publication, which came in the wake of the great wave of decolonization. A year before the publication of the novel, Ghana became the first independent African country, in 1957. Things Fall Apart was published at a time when non-Western but Western educated intellectuals and cultural nationalists were looking around for indigenous cultural documents that could vindicate pre-colonial African cultures, in what the British-Indian writer, Salman Rushdie once called, in memorable phrase, “writing back to the Centre” (the West).

    It was arguably in that context, the urgent need, by the African literati, to produce an African narrative that would vindicate indigenous African cultures which were heavily denigrated by centuries of Western writers, priests, and colonial administrators, rather than the novel’s intrinsic literary merits, that brought Things Fall Apart to prominence, at least within the post-nationalistic African intelligentsia. The same may be said of Achebe’s other novels: their timing, 1960-1966, was fortunate because there was, then, a large literate international English-speaking reading public eager to get access to the new African writing, not to speak of publishers such as Heinemann which were looking to cash in on it all. Again, it was in that context that Achebe’s works were appropriated for all kinds of culture wars, especially within the ranks of militant post-colonial intellectuals.

    Achebe’s collection of essays on literature, cultural politics, and colonial history, from the early Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) to the later Hopes and Impediments (1989) and Home and Exile (2000) sealed his reputation as an African or Black cultural critic, activist, and nationalist. His other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), Man of the People (1966), not to mention short stories and poems such as Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) and Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971) were widely admired by critics and literary historians for their “realistic” and, some would say, vivid, subtle, and complex portrait of the African, or, at least, “the Nigerian condition”, which, to this day, has persisted in more complicated forms.

    Achebe was also the influential editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, between 1962 and 1972. Under his direction, the series published some of the most canonical of African writers such as Alex La Guma, Taha Hussein, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Doris Lessing, Ayi Kwei Armah, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head, Cheik Hamidou Kane, Okot p’Bitek, and nationalist intellectuals such as Amilcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah.

    Chiefly because of his first novel, and his pioneering role as the editor of the African Writers Series, many have considered Achebe as the “father of African fiction” (or the founding father, even the grandfather, of modern African literature), a dubious claim that Achebe himself could not accept, since, as he knew in his lifetime, there were many African writers of fiction and non-fiction that wrote compelling accounts of African cultural and social life well before he was born. Claims for Achebe as being the “father of African fiction or literature” are based on a partial and reductive view of Africa’s literary history, or a diminution of African writing to a minor position within the Western literary tradition.

    Yet there had been indigenous African writing in native languages. Consider, for example, the case of the Basotho (Lesotho) writer and novelist, Thomas Mopoku Mafolo (1876-1948), the celebrated author of Chaka the Zulu (1912-15?), which many literary historians have called a masterpiece, an epic tragedy, and, in the words of a reviewer, “the earliest major contribution of black Africa to the corpus of modern world literature”. One could cite the example of the celebrated Yoruba writer, D. O. Fagunwa, author of Odo Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1936), or the works of the Arab writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and countless other writers who wrote in Hausa, Tamashek, Amharic, Wolof, and so on. Indeed, no one author or person could have begun what we call today “African writing”. The African literary tradition is far older, more enduring, and more complex than the alleged effort of a single author, however gifted. In any case, the idea of Achebe being the “father of African fiction” is not a scholarly argument but a romantic and naïve one because it ignores the major contributions of pre-colonial African authors and a huge corpus of African writing in Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

    But whatever the artistic merit of Achebe’s work, which is considerable to say the least, it is in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1988), that his literary-story-telling skills began a terminal decline. Indeed the novel marks a notable decline in his liberal vision and creative acumen. The novel is, by any standard, a trivial thriller and is uneven in linguistic and literary quality. Arguably, large parts of Anthills read like pulp fiction, or a crudely crafted political thriller. The storyline is fragmented; the attempt at covert plotting is unsuccessful; the narrative exposition is slow and cumbrous; the style of representation is too thin and shallow; the plot is threadbare and thin, perhaps even superficial in many instances. The dialogue is unconvincing, heavy, and tedious, and the characterization is one-dimensional. For example, neither Ikem, Beatrice, Abdul on the one hand nor Professor Okon, Sam, and Osodi on the other has any emotional and psychological depth. Indeed no character in that novel has convincing uniqueness of character, and none is admirably individuated. Moreover, the characterization and dialogue are stagey, as can be seen in the first person account of the First Witness, Christopher Oriko (Chapter 1) and the dialogue in the opening section of Chapter 2. Anthill is also marred by obliquities of narration and an undisciplined, un-integrated multiplicity of viewpoints: the novel’s attempt at an epic-scale representation of a dystopian land and its failure to offer an intensely imagined, superbly coordinated narrative irony are telling. Yet all this may be accounted for by the novel’s melodramatic structure and the poor quality of its speech representation.

    Frankly, Anthills of the Savannah is a disappointing work; little wonder it failed to win the 1987 Booker McConnell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. For example, the novel combines melodrama with a political roman á clef, as can be seen in the closing section of the narrative, the journey on the “Great North Road” (Chapter 17). Indeed, this chapter presents a veiled dystopian narrativization of northern Nigeria, which is variously called “the scrub-land”, “the scorched landscape”, “another country”, “full of dusty fields [and] bottomed baobab tree[s] so strange in appearance”, etc. In this novel, the rainforest (“the rain country”) of the South is favourably contrasted with the “parkland of grass and stunted trees… of mud walls and reddish earth”, the North. One conclusion, which, of course, may be problematic from a strictly literary-critical perspective, is that unlike the Exceptional Southerners, the Northerners don’t know how to make the North “prosperous” (the roads are full of pot holes) so that all the talented, intelligent, hardworking, economically gifted, and industrially-savvy Southerners could migrate to the North (perhaps in the mode of mission civilatrice), which is, as of now, wallowing in economic and social desperation (see the opening pages of Chapter 17).

    The novel has other defects as well: the author’s heavily moralized, didactic view of life repeatedly intrudes in the narrative, and, in particular, in the facile and tired representation of the Military Ruler, the Head of Sate. Ikem and Beatrice’s romanticism, their romantic view of social relations, is clearly the real author’s because the entire drift of the narrative is towards a heavily moralized view of life (Light versus Darkness; Enlightenment versus Ignorance; Diligence versus Parasitism).

    Yet it is in Achebe’s essay, The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), that his romanticism comes full circle. In that book, Achebe argues that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership… the unwillingness and inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example” (p. 1). This postulation of Achebe’s ignores the deep structural constraints on human action and psychology. It is pre-critical to ignore the complex ways in which social structures mediate, modify, condition, and constrain human choices. Leadership works within institutional, historical, cultural, and economic contexts which place limits on what human agents can and cannot do. This notion of the structural determination of leadership means that a leader has inevitably to work within, and exist in, a system and a political logic whose proper system, laws, and operation his or her “leadership” cannot, by definition, dominate absolutely.

     

     

     

     

    The leader, despite his having a certain measure of freedom, has inevitably to be governed by the system within which he or she exists. And although men and women make their own history, they clearly do not make it as an act of will, or in their own freely-chosen circumstances, but under the structural constraints of the accumulated past and inherited traditions. This is what The Trouble with Nigeria has missed: Nigerian leaders cannot be the miraculous changed men or women of their country but the changed men and women of their country’s changed circumstances. This is the truth of the time-honoured liberal credo that the educator herself needs educating and that if leaders are educators, who will educate the educators?

    From this perspective, Achebe’s conception of leadership may properly be called “voluntarism”, even a form of messianic thinking: on Achebe’s flawed logic, all a leader need do is become, by the force of sheer will power, a morally good person, who has only to lead by example rather than by veritable political principles. Achebe’s is another way of saying that Nigeria needs a strong leader, one who has miraculously escaped all the cultural and historical pressures of his community or country; in effect, a messiah. This dubiously Christian view of leadership is a convenient way of avoiding the complex problem of institutional, cultural, and historical constitution of subjectivity and moral choice in a multi-ethic, multi-religious country, one with a large, primordialist, backward-looking civil society. Indeed one reason for the failure of Achebe’s little book to capture the scholarly or popular imagination was its threadbare romanticism and an un-modern (a feudal and mystical) vision of political leadership.

    Perhaps Achebe’s most disappointing book, or to phrase matters differently, his most inferior work, is There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012).

    As a personal testament, the book vindicates the time-honored dictum that “the personal is political”. Perhaps we need not be critical of Achebe’s passionate defence of his ethnic group, or of the short-lived Biafra, and his role in it. Yet there is something distasteful about open myopia of blind ethnic solidarity or communal jingoism. What is striking about the book is its complete lack of a keen political insight, its petty romantic vision of Nigeria’s political history. For example, consider the book’s astonishing claims, namely that the Igbos wholly deserved their entrenched positions in the military, economic, and bureaucratic structures of pre-civil war Nigeria (“… the Igbos led the nation in virtually every sector— politics, education, commerce, and the arts”, pp. 66-67); that all non-Igbo Nigerians are united by their hatred for the Igbo ethnic group; and that British rule in Nigeria and elsewhere was not, as popularly assumed, an unmitigated disaster. According to Achebe in There was a Country, the British government ruled the Nigerian colony “with considerable care… and competently… British colonies were more or less expertly run” (p. 43). In the same book, however, Achebe accuses British colonial officials of rigging the election and the population census in favour of conservative elements such as Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto from the “Islamic territories” (p. 46; Achebe does not say that the Igbo were from the “Christian territories”), people who “had played no real part in the struggle for independence” (p. 52). In addition, for Achebe it was the behaviour of the British that sowed the seeds of Nigeria’s eventual descent into civil war. If indeed Achebe has this rosy view of colonial rule, then his entire corpus of anti-colonial polemic and cultural nationalism has been in vain, or, in a way, a hypocritical effort at self-publicity.

    Worse, Achebe argues, in an astonishing moment of historical revisionism, that the originators of the very idea of one-Nigeria were “leaders and intellectuals from the Eastern Region” (p. 52). This may explain why he credits Nnamdi Azikiwe with the enviable position of being “father of African independence” (“There was no question at all about that”, (p. 41). In sum, then, there are many instances of sloppy argument and poor judgment in the book, as, for example, Achebe’s claim that Nigeria failed to develop because the Igbo, despite their “competitive individualism” and a unique “adventurous spirit”, were excluded from Nigerian economic, social, and political life. Examples of Achebe’s unsophisticated political perception of things are, first, his lack of political sensitivity concerning non-Igbo political leaders such as Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The first two are seen by Achebe as ruled by inordinate ambition (“resuscitated ethnic pride”) and conservative traditionalism respectively. The latter Achebe almost casts into the role of a lackey of the Western world, which, he claims, turned (“built up”) Balewa through flattery into a great statesman (p. 51).

     

    It is thus fair to say that, in There was a Country at least, Achebe is an overwhelmingly “ethnic nationalist”, an “Igbo-phile” (or a philo-Igbonis, to coin a new term), and a Biafra apologist to boot. He is, in this book at least, a homo duplex, the Double Man, in effect, both Biafran and Nigerian; Igbophile and Nationalist; Anti-colonial Writer and a Post-colonial Apologist of Expert British Rule. This should explain why the book has a schizoid thematic orchestration and its claims pressed within a phlegmatic stylistic mode, which, again and again, has proved incapable of sustained irony. Surely, then, There was a Country is a patchwork of Achebe’s deep, even unconscious, prejudices. In one moment after another, the book fails to offer a finely integrated presentation of a realistic historical, geographical, economic, and culturally diverse, though troubled, country.

     

    So while I pay tribute to this important novelist and essayist, I should remark, at the same time, that we should not, in our romantic rush to venerate our little (culture) heroes, forget earlier illustrious and master English-speaking storytellers such Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) and Cyprian Odiatu Ekwensi (1921-2007). Their books, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town (written 1946 and published in 1952) and People of the City (1954), are two outstanding pieces of literature and narrative self-assertion that blazed the trail in modern, English-speaking African fiction writing. In the same manner, while we pay tribute to Achebe and his literary legacy, let us not also forget great post-colonial African storytellers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Sambene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiog’o, and, not least, the incomparable Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi, the author, in my opinion, of the finest African novel ever—Going Down River Road (1977).

     

    As for Achebe, I say “goodbye”; for there was indeed a great novelist, but who, tragically, had to write the greatest anti-novel of his career—There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

     

    Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano

    March 26, 2013.

     

  • Our memories of Achebe, by students

    Our memories of Achebe, by students

    LIKE many others in the society, students are also mourning the late Prof Chinua Achebe. His death, they said, has created a vacumn. They described his death as an arrow through the heart of the literary community.

    One of them, Steven Adebola, a sophomore student of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), said: “I was shocked when I received a broadcast message on my Blackberry that Prof Chinua Achebe is dead.”

    Rasaq Malik, 300-Level English, University of Ibadan (UI), described the late Achebe as a rare gem whose death would be felt in the education system. “We have lost a great writer, who contributed in no small measure to the development of Nigerian and world literature. The nation’s education is worst hit by the death of Achebe because many literature students still have a lot to draw from the bank of his knowledge. But then, I don’t believe he is dead, rather his works have made him to continue to live.”

    Immanuel Galadima, 400-Level Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University of Technology, Minna (FUT MINNA), said Nigeria has lost its literary conscience. “We should ask ourselves how much we valued the late Achebe when he was alive. Despite his grouse with successive governments, the late Achebe never ceased to be a Nigerian; a patriotic one at that. I hope his legacy inspires a new crop of Nigerian writers, who will tell Africa’s story to the world as it is.”

    His works signposted a watershed in the history of African literature.

    Uche Anichebe, 500-Level Law student of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka (UNIZIK), said: “Prof Achebe left an indelible mark in our literature. By his death, a sharp spear has pierced through the heart of African literature. But we should be consoled by the fact that he left behind immortal works that many generations will read. He will never be forgotten.”

    Williams Onogu, 500-Level Physics, FUT MINNA, said the writer gave Nigeria and its citizens the hope to dream of a better future.

    “Although, I never met him physically, but through his works, some of which I have read, I felt like I had physical contact with Achebe,” Daniel Tsado, a 500-Level Chemistry student, said.

    He added: “I came across the late Achebe’s Things Fall Apart when I was in SSS 2. As I read through the book, I was captivated by his prowess and the accuracy with which he narrated the whole story. His creativity and ability to stitch events together made his stories electrifying. I read a few of his poems too, and these encouraged me to pen a few of mine.”

    Chisom Madu said literature has lost one of its finest grandmasters.

    Opeoluwa Sonuga, 400-Level Law, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile Ife, said: “The demise of Chinua Achebe once again reminds us of the painful reality that derivativa potestas non potest esse major primitiva (the power which is derived cannot be greater than that from which it is derived). This implies that the resourcefulness of our lives does not stop it against the commands of the source of life itself, which is God.”

    Born in Ogidi, Anambra State on November 16, 1930, the late Achebe, who was regarded as the father of modern African literature, came to the limelight in 1958 with his first novel, Things Fall Apart. The work depicts the dehumanising condition and division created among Africans by British colonialists.

    A recipient of over 40 honorary degrees and several international awards, the late Achebe’s subsequent novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), Anthills of the Savannah (1987), described the struggles of individuals to survive in Africa under Western imperialism.

    The late Achebe also published books of essays, short stories and poems, which include Beware, Soul Brother (1971), Christmas in Biafra (1973), Girls at War (1972), How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972), Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), Hopes and Impediments (1988) and Home and Exile (2000).

    Last October, the late Achebe released his last book, There was a Country, which stirred controversy following his assertion that the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo masterminded the policy of starvation of the Igbo during the 1967-1970 civil war.

    The late Achebe used his last work to emphasise the role of modern African writers. “What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotype, myths and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories – prose, poetry, essays and books for our children. That was my overall goal,” he wrote in There was a Country.

    Twice he turned down offers of national awards from the government on the grounds that such honours are often bestowed on thieves and corrupt politicians.

    Until his death last Friday, Achebe was a professor at David and Marianna Fisher University and scholar of African Studies at the Brown University, both in United States.