Tag: Chinua

Cheer and jeer greeted ‘There was a Chinua’, the Achebe obituary published on this page last week: cheer for perceived comeuppance and jeer for bitter pains over the alleged disrespect to the memory of a departed icon. But the message was clear: everyone would be judged by his own professed standards – so be fair to all. It’s a hot war out there. Don’t be caught by zipping bullets!

 

 

Excellent piece, in your accustomed depth, thoughtfulness, grasp of the subject matter and lucidity. I can’t resist saying excellent indeed. Well done and thank you. – +2348034004252.

Achebe started well, capturing the minds of all literate country men and women with the classic novel, Things Fall Apart. But he started faltering with the tribal-induced The Trouble with Nigeria; and destroyed whatever remains of the respect other ethnic nationalities, other than his Igbo tribesmen, had for him. He died a dyed-in-the-wool hater of the Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani nations. To Achebe, only his tribesmen deserve to dominate and others must not complain.

His is a good lesson to all our so-called elders. If they cannot add nationalistic value to the Nigerian state before their departure from this planet, they should hold their peace. There was indeed a Chinua! There goes another tribalist and an Igbo irredentist. – Adeniyi Olasunmade, Lagos.

Your article, ‘There was a Chinua’ was apt, blunt and educative. Thanks. – Chief T. A. Odofin, Ofada, Ogun State, +2348103113512

I am an avid reader of The Nation just to keep abreast of the Yoruba opinion on every issue under the sky. Your column today did not disappoint. – +2348055105774.

All of you are living to hate Achebe because he documented the truth to the world about the sins of Awo. You can only heal your conscience by stating your facts to contradict his own. ‘There was a Chinua’ you said and I ask: would there ever be an Olakunle? – Amadi Ibeleme, +2348066516467

It makes no sense for an Achebe to claim ignorance of events he witnessed. My father told us stories of how Hausas slaughtered his Igbo friends in Zaria in 1966 – same story Achebe told [in There was a Country]. I have read the remarks he made of our dear sage, Pa Awo. But Achebe wrote with conviction. He didn’t spare Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, neither did he spare Ojukwu. – +2348132634663.

I just finished reading your piece, ‘There was a Chinua’. I do not, with due respect, really understand what you want to portray or achieve with it. To me, you have done what you accused others of – tribalism. Let’s learn to write positively about our fallen compatriots. – Kelvin, The Polytechnic, Ibadan +2348033660174.

Your piece on Achebe this week was excellent! – Wale Adebanwi.

Your piece on Achebe registers on the superlative scale. Salute! – Tade Ipadeola, +2348038023412.

Truth is always bitter but it must be told. Achebe was a statesman. No amount of calumny can prevent it. – +2348038762465.

The tribute given by Labaran Maku, the Information minister, on behalf of President Goodluck Jonathan, that Prof. Achebe was a nationalist to emulate by Nigerians must be a product of a brainless intellectual. Achebe was a literary genius worldwide. But he was also a chronic tribalist. His writings are good attestations. – Larry Adebisi, Lagos, +2348060227434.

‘There was a Chinua’ – that piece today was great. – Jimo Akeran, +2348023096362.

Just read your ripples on Achebe – my sentiments exactly. Your conclusion is on point – insightful. But what to do to avoid that Nigerian harm? Sovereign national conference. – +2348023157882.

How sad that you too are a victim of Yoruba tribalism. Why are you so bitter with a dead man for chronicling an event that he witnessed, the way he saw it? Though you tried rather fruitlessly to balance your write-up as all professional writers should, you failed to disguise your hatred for Achebe and the Igbo tribe. You stopped short of openly mocking Achebe at death. The title of your article was even cheeky, the comparison between your tribesman, Soyinka and Achebe gratuitous and, at this mourning period of the fall of a great Nigerian, very indiscreet and insensitive. I got off with the impression that you had a score to settle with Achebe; and his death offered the opportunity to do it. – +2347030398497.

‘There was an Achebe’ is vintage your provenance. But one could read the complex driving your striving, as your views therein are not necessary. In fact, they are uncalled for on this solemn occasion. I am looking forward to the day your Yoruba compatriots would rise above certain innate instincts. – Peter, +2348093912933.

I am ashamed to know that you are very illogical in your war against Achebe. As a Yoruba, I have read There was a Country and believe Achebe spoke against injustice to all. There was nothing wrong in the way he defended his people, after all, they have suffered the most in Nigeria, against their wish. Please have some respect for the late icon. – Sarah Isijola, +2348132634663.

You truly have come to bury Chinua, not to praise him. Thanks for a thoughtful piece. Never mind that it didn’t sufficiently explore the psychology of Igbo chauvinism and ‘victimhood’. – Femi Macaulay, +2348020339050.

That was a wonderful piece on Achebe. You have called a spade a spade. You should not be deterred by some reactionaries over such a factual presentation. Kudos. – Niyi, Lagos, +2348023377135.

Genius and gerontocrats have one thing in common: set minds. You hardly can convince them or make them see reason from a different perspective. So it was with Achebe. I think the Federal Government and those who want a posthumous recognition for him should let him be. Otherwise, he will turn in his grave. Achebe had defined his part as an Igbo irredentist – a truly Igbo of Nigerian extraction. – Olumide, Kaduna, +2348057277770.

Your article, ‘There was a Chinua’ was good but deficient. I want you to bear in mind that other Nigerians see the late Awo’s politics as insecure, insensitive and rancorous. – +2348033334562.

Your ‘There was a Chinua’ is thought provoking. It has set me on a spiral of thoughts and wonder about our national figures. How many are nationalists? When shall we place Nigeria as a collective over and above our tribes? Until we see ourselves first as Nigerian before our tribal sentiments, all efforts towards nationalism will keep raising local champions, rather than Nigerian nationalists. – +2348071023711.

I couldn’t have agreed with you more – ‘There was a Chinua’ – Achebe died a frustrated and bitter man, as well as a jingoist. – Wale Osoba, +2348023264597.

Achebe’s book, ‘There was a Country’ is a hard and bitter pill to swallow. It takes a strong will and courage of a lion to damn the consequences of saying the truth. Achebe did the best thing by telling his people the truth of the Civil War. If Awo was a god to the Yoruba, that had nothing to do with the right of the Igbo man to say exactly how he perceived him. – Barrister Orji, Port Harcourt, +2348030961855.

I wish I can write like you. You are too good and very familiar with national issues, thus helping people like me to know. Please keep up the excellent work. – Ogoo, Abuja, +2348054727240.

I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him – Mark Anthony, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Between Things Fall Apart (1958), his first work and There was a Country (2012) his last, Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), the world-acclaimed novelist for burial on May 23, defined himself: an Igbo man from Nigeria, not a Nigerian from Igbo land.

That was no high crime against Nigeria, a country that is no nation but passionately craves doting nationalists.

Though English, the coloniser’s language, provided Achebe his vehicle to global fame, the professor, in Things Fall Apart, told a grim tale of how British colonialism smashed the Igbo pristine world: all too clear in the personal tragedy of Okonkwo, that has held the world spellbound for more than 50 years – and still counting.

But There was a Country was even more censorious of Nigeria than Things Fall Apart was of Britain.

If Things Fall Apart was a dignified, taut and divinely crafted creative prose that won about everyone’s attention, empathy and awe, There was a Country, a non-fiction that nevertheless bordered on the fictional, with its wild, sweeping and bad-tempered claims; and ringing denunciation of pan-Nigeria sinners doing in the meek Igbo saints, belonged more to the world of the virago than of the grand old sage, where Achebe rightly belonged.

Not a pretty sight, to be sure. But that was Achebe’s brutally frank (some insist, impassioned) reaction to Nigeria’s ever-unfolding crisis of nationhood, with its penchant for injustice as national ethos; and the insouciance to dominate, with its happy-go-merry march to self destruction.

That much was clear from the British-programmed Hausa-Fulani hegemony; the brief Igbo ascendancy that ended in Civil War (1967-1970) and fired the Achebe bitterness in There was a Country; the Olusegun Obasanjo me-first-others-never presidential philosophy, disguised as altruistic national ethos; and of course, the brainless muscle-flexing of Goodluck Jonathan’s current Ijaw presidency.

The most casual of logical introspections, therefore, must reveal that about everyone is a victim in Nigeria’s vast physical, spiritual and psychological killing mine.

Yet, what Achebe did in his swan song, There was a Country, was to pounce on co-victims in the Nigerian morass; and with the arrogance of a writer’s licence, tarred them as the Igbo enemy.

Talking about victims, whoever thinks the Hausa-Fulani are not, even of their own past power rascality, must chuckle at the North’s frantic bid for power after Jonathan. Yet, their grand concept of power, untrammelled ethnic over-lordship served as “national interest”, of pre-12 June 1993 Nigeria, is gone and gone for good!

Perhaps questioning Achebe’s judgment, by his last hurrah, would be going too far. But beyond clannish roar and the emotive whipping of ethnic flag to toast a master race allegedly stopped in its track, There was a Country did not show enough sensitivity to the plight of the Ndigbo still trapped, and the coming generation to be trapped, in the Nigerian debacle. It certainly did not win the Igbo new allies; nor prescribe a reasonable way out of the jam, beyond a shrill orchestration of the Igbo as victim, without admitting the vast ruin of pan-Nigeria victimhood.

This, of course, is no unanimous verdict. To the Achebe-converted, There was a Country was a tribute to the master storyteller’s brutal candour, like The Trouble with Nigeria (1983) before it.

But all too often, people come to be judged by their own professed principles; and there is but a thin line between brutal candour and bad grace, particularly when candour is brutally exercised on wrong occasions. So, it is with Prof. Achebe.

When Obafemi Awolowo died and politically correct jiving was waxing poetic about giving him a “national burial” (even if Awo was only pre-independence Premier of old Western Region), Achebe cut the crap, insisting Awo did not deserve a national burial because he was a “tribalist”. Well, Achebe himself died not exactly a “nationalist”.

Also, after Wole Soyinka, his great contemporary, won the Nobel, Achebe quipped: winning a European prize did not make Soyinka the Asiwaju of African literature. WS, a wordsmith that takes no prisoners, promptly countered: he had no intention to become the Ogbuefi of African literature! Was Achebe resentful of Soyinka’s win – and why the ethnic colouration?

That, of course, dovetails into the sterile controversy over WS, Achebe and the Nobel.

In sheer fecundity, Soyinka’s 34 titles in non-fiction, novels, drama and poetry tower over Achebe’s 20, though Achebe’s tally also includes classics in children stories, as Prof. Biola Odejide, a children’s literature expert formerly of the University of Ibadan, noted in her tribute to Achebe shortly after his death. Even in their primary fortes, Soyinka the playwright with 15 plays trumped Achebe the novelist with five novels.

But Achebe possessed the arresting simplicity that ensured probably more people have read Things Fall Apart, his flagship classic, than all of Soyinka’s works combined. So, maybe the Nobel committee settled for fecundity over accessibility.

That was their choice – and it had nothing to do with Achebe’s secured place in global literature, Nobel or no Nobel. In Nigeria’s often ethnic-powered discourse, however, things are not quite that simple and clear-cut.

But judged from the prism of writer as robust social crusader (which the Nobel citation also noted), Soyinka is it. Beyond strident protests over Ndigbo troubles, Achebe was much more muffled over other Nigerian crises: June 12 crisis, Ken Saro-Wiwa state murder, among others. Soyinka’s The Man Died and You Must Set Forth at Dawn, fully document how Civil War activism sent the author to gaol; and how he rallied global conscience against the Abacha state murder of Saro-Wiwa.

So, was Achebe roused to action not by injustice per se, but by injustice meted his native Ndigbo? That is no illegitimate poser!

The literature of Achebe is simple, rigorous, clear and sweet; the majesty of an uncluttered mind that made Things Fall Apart such a classic; and set a benchmark for the African novel.

But the politics of Achebe is far less edifying: partial, insensitive, rancorous and insecure – all in defence of his Igbo people and culture, against Nigeria’s internal colonisers: hardly a crime.

The snag is, with all due respect to individual differences, the Igbo elite does not mind dominating others, yet are shrill to protest perceived domination by others. But to all these, Achebe appeared patriotically blind, deaf and dumb; even with his rather indulgent criticism of Igbo brashness and triumphalism. That made There was a Country so rankling.

Between literature and politics, therefore, an author met own debacle: noxious gas from Nigeria’s institutionalised injustice, and the resultant fierce rivalry, robbing his golden mind of pristine equitability!

So, there was a Chinua from Nigeria who could easily have been an icon of global justice. But he bowed out as a patriotic ogre against Igbo-tailored injustice – hardly illegitimate in Nigeria’s killing fields.

Still, that was a much diminished place for his world-acclaimed genius. But it is yet another glaring example of the harm Nigeria does, even to its greatest minds.