The death of Stanley Macebuh last weekend robs Nigeria of one of its greatest minds ever; a man of outstanding intellect and great cultivation. He was cut in the finest tradition of the liberal intellectual. He was refined, humane and tolerant of dissenting opinion. He was also generous and compulsively selfless. In a brutal and uncaring society, these endearing traits cannot be part of a survivalist kit or a manual for manumission from economic slavery. But exceptional nobility of spirit is not a crime. It is a monument in itself.
Stanley Macebuh was the quintessential man of ideas, an intellectuals’ intellectual and a pundit among pundits. He was unarguably the doyen of intellectual journalism in Nigeria. To make this claim is of course to do grievous injustice to those “old thunderers” of early Nigerian journalism; anti-colonial men of letters and pan-African patriots who took the colonialists to the cleaners in their own game of fiery polemics. In his grave, Lord Lugard still winces in pain at the rowdy effrontery of “these seditious niggers”.
But when we are talking of intellectual journalism, we are talking of a deliberate and systematic infusion of ideas and conceptual rigour into the practice of journalism and the transposition of the principles of standard scholarship into its modus operandi. On this, the scholarly and urbane Macebuh was the dean and doyen. He was the driving motivator and master of connectivity.
It is to be noted that before Macebuh arrived on these shores from America, he was already a tenured Associate Professor and author of two acclaimed scholarly works particularly a memorable treatise on James Baldwin, the celebrated African American writer. Had he chosen to stay on in America, the sky would have been the limit. But America’s loss is Nigeria’s inestimable gain.
It is to this fortuitous development in conjunction with certain beneficial economic and political circumstances that we owe the intellectual transformation that has taken root in Nigerian journalism. A few prominent Nigerian journalists might have become a corrupt and unethical lot, but there can be no doubting the keenness of their mind or the soundness of their education. If in the process they have become a more menacing danger to the society, this is a subject for another day.
Before its dramatic transformation, journalism in Nigeria was in danger of becoming a veritable haven of “the flotsam and jetsam” of the society as Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo once memorably put it. The typical column was an impressionistic rollercoaster lacking intellectual depth or rigorous engagement; full of sound and fury; brimming with petty sulking and nasty name-calling. Conceptual thinking was persona non grata and litigious writs flew in all directions from Agbadagbudu to Kakawa Street.
Macebuh and his colleagues seized all this intemperate nonsense by the scruff of the neck. Apart from Macebuh with his cherubic insouciance and professorial mien, there was the courtly, cigar-chomping Patrick Dele Cole with his donnish imperiousness and Oxbridge bravura. And then there was Oladele Sunmonu Giwa, he of the film star good looks and Great Gatsby sartorial aplomb, who pioneered a new tradition of feature writing based on American New Journalism with its combination of creative flair and political pizzazz.
It must be said at this point that certain favourable developments anticipated and complemented this new intellectual crusade in journalism. First, was Alhaji Jose’s visionary policy of recruiting fresh graduates into Journalism. This singular policy was so transformative that it led to a paradigm shift and an explosion of talents. Next was the arrival on our campuses from various graduate schools a new generation of university teachers who were bent on having a say in how the nation was run. Finally, the economic and political climate was quite good. Nigeria was awash with petrodollars, and having survived a Civil War, the country was also steadily and solidly transiting to democratic rule.
But something was afoot in journalism. Something truly new was coming out of Africa. The old order took it all in the chin, shocked and awed by the daring of it all and the breezy confidence of the shamans of the new order. Ruing the momentous developments one afternoon on the corridor of the Daily Times at Kakawa with a friend, the late Chief Olu Akaraogun, himself a notable journalist with considerable intellectual firepower, was shocked out of wits when Stanley Macebuh, the subject matter, suddenly materialised. But rather than join an animated but futile discussion, Macebuh romped through the duo as if they were nonexistent. Macebuh took both praise and damnation in his stride.
Stanley Macebuh always took things in his stride. He was not a temperamental genius. He was gifted with calm fortitude and equanimity. He was courteous, courtly and unfailingly polite, but he knew his onions. He could be roused to occasional fury by ungentlemanly conduct. But till the end, there was something about him which reminded one of a star professor in a notable American campus. Perhaps it was his mien and comportment.
But the professorial mantra cuts both ways. While it connotes a cool sobriety and calm detachment, it also suggests a certain degree of naiveté and idealistic hubris. In the real world to be dismissed as an intellectual is to be deemed to be on sabbatical from grim reality. In the brutal world of post-colonial politics it is almost always fatal to be demonised as an intellectual.
Yet only a visionary idealist could have conceived The Guardian on such magnitude and magnificence. The Guardian remains a magnificent tribute to visionary idealism and the ineluctable power of brilliant ideas and to the fact that no monument is ever left behind by the incurable cynic. But The Guardian is also a telling reminder of how lofty idealism can come unstuck under the relentless hammer of dogged reality.
The typical Macebuh project always came unstuck as recalcitrant reality came into violent and potentially fatal contradiction with posturing idealism. To have imagined that the liberal tradition as it is known in the west can be transplanted to a post-colonial culture without first transforming its illiberal economy and politics is a classic instance of daydreaming that is particularly touching in its idyllic innocence.
To think that the tenets of New Journalism as it is practised in America can be grafted overnight on a culture nurtured by Fleet Street and the wizards of Wapping is to fail to distinguish between harsh reality and elevated reverie. Finally, to begin to imagine that intellectual capital, however solid and sterling, will be equated to real capital when the blue chips are down is to substitute fiction and fantasy for the real world. But as Paul de Man has taught us in Literary Theory, the moment of great insight is often accompanied by great blindness.
The illiberal culture has a way of taking care of the liberal tradition. No organic liberal tradition can emerge from a society steeped in authoritarian and feudal mores. As we are currently learning with the drama unfolding in Nigeria, the more you try to humour such a malignant tradition, the more severe and exorbitant its price becomes.
Stanley Macebuh ought to have learnt the lesson very early enough. Shortly after the military retreated to the barracks, Dr Patrick Dele Cole, his bosom friend and confidant, was eased out of office. Most politicians have no time for freewheeling intellectuals. For Macebuh, the final straw and the moment of radical epiphany came not long after. By his own admission, he had gone back to Umaru Dikko’s office to retrieve a document only to find the great man of letters and Admiral of the rice armada, red biro in hand, poring over an editorial he (Macebuh) had just passed for publication. It doesn’t get more liberal than that.
Still, it must be conceded that it takes a certain audacity of hope to have conceived The Guardian on such a scale, and so soon after The Daily Times fiasco. The Guardian at its inception was the greatest constellation of intellectual luminaries to have graced any newspaper stable in the history of Nigeria. It was brimful of the best and the brightest and boasted of all kinds of ideological tendencies from the far left to the far right. Almost three decades later, one still marvels at how anybody could have pulled off such a stupendous coup. It was a starry-eyed venture by a starry-eyed intellectual.
As a completely detribalised Nigerian who believed in the aristocracy of intellect, one of the unintended consequences of the arrival of The Guardian was that it opened the door for many Nigerians who were technically Macebuh’s intellectual adversaries to be heard. Snooper owes Macebuh and Dele Giwa a personal debt of gratitude for this development. But as usual, reality came knocking very fast. The strange but understandable reversal of The Guardian’s “simply Mr” policy was a sickening blow to its credibility but it was a pointer to a coming katakata. It showcases the immense capacity of a rooted and organic illiberal culture to upend a disembodied liberal tradition. From this point, things began to read like the chronicle of a liberal collapse foretold.
After the great electoral robbery of 1983 by the Shagari administration, The Guardian for a long time maintained a studied and significant silence. It was a case of hear no evil and see no evil. It took a blistering and damning rejoinder from a don in one of our universities to rouse the flagship from its millennial stupor. The article was published on 1st November, 1983 after The Guardian Nomenklatura sat on it for over five weeks. As the author, yours sincerely should know.
As a direct response to the article and a rebuttal of its argumentative thrust, Stanley Macebuh penned a classic famously titled, The liberal Tradition and its Enemies. It was Macebuh at his most brilliantly persuasive and at the summit of his stylistic sublimity. But the article was also seething with glaring contradictions and unintended ironies. Rather than calming frayed nerves, it brought a gale of intellectual recriminations which only subsided with the military take over a few weeks after. The Guardian and Macebuh had been badly mauled.
After this, it was only a question of time before the contradiction between real capital and intellectual capital would arrive at the flashing point of fatality. In the contest between brutish, illiberal power and effete liberality the outcome is certain. The end came not long thereafter. In a night of the long knife, Stanley Macebuh was summarily cashiered from The Guardian. He was also reportedly slammed with an oath of silence as part of the settlement.
By this time, Dele Giwa had been physically accounted for. SAP was also taking care of those rowdy professors who were disturbing the peace of the nation by writing what they were not paid to write. Surely, if they do not eat, they cannot philosophize; and if they are made to become pedestrians all over again, their thinking will also become pedestrian. By which time they will know the true husband of their mothers. And so it came to pass. All became quiet on the intellectual front. It is called the pacification of professors.
But Stanley has paid his dues and paid the price. Hurt by the abominable discourtesy with which he had been treated by the capital class, Macebuh also made a bid to acquire real capital through the business of sugar importation. This did not go far either. Impishly hilarious as usual, MKO Abiola was known to have accosted Macebuh at a public function. “Ah Stanley, sugar is sweet ooo!!!”, MKO bellowed. “Chief, but money sweet pass”, Macebuh was said to have shot back.
Sugar is sweet, money is sweeter but power is the sweetest. In his bid to understudy power, Stanley Macebuh was rewarded with serial dismissal by his friend, General Olusegun Obasanjo. Perhaps we can now conclude. The greatest enemies of the trader in intellectual commodity are not the other traders in ideas however adversarial but the trader in power as a commodity. The greatest enemy of the liberal tradition is the illiberal tradition and its champions and collaborators. Let this great Nigerian now rest in peace.
