What a grisly birthday present! In August this year, Ola Balogun, the notable Nigerian filmmaker, visual artist, dramatist and culture impresario, will turn seventy. Penultimate Thursday, Ola Balogun lost everything he has acquired in life to a terrible inferno which consumed everything in sight until it was put down.
I use the phrase “put down” and not “put out” advisedly. In our part of the world, wild fires are like mad dogs. Everybody runs away from them if they have the chance. They range and roam with volcanic gusto until a combination rudimentary technology and sheer primitive prowess knock them out. Then everybody goes home to await the next mad dog.
Such is the fate of societies trapped between the ancient order and modernity. Modernity will bring the consumer goods and all the trappings of occidental and oriental civilizations. But you cannot rent fire-fighting equipments and fire-fighters from America. In the absence of these, all the emblems and totems of civilization, all the gadgets acquired from other people’s technological labours, are mere ephemeralities awaiting the ultimate consumer. It is known as uninsurable goods and goodies.
There are periods in a nation’s life when the personal tragedy is indistinguishable from the public tragedy, when indeed the private tragedy of the exceptional individual is a profound metaphor for the collective tragedy of human existence in the society. Take another look at the picture of the bewildered and stoically bemused filmmaker of impeccable upper class breeding amidst the rubble and horrific carnage of what used to be his adored home and you may well be looking at the last snapshot of the old Nigerian middle class or what the French call the “haute culture”.
In its classical epoch before the barbarians overwhelmed the barricades, Ola Balogun’s father, an Aba-based Yoruba lawyer, was part of it all, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Zik, Francis Akanu Ibiam, Eyo Ita, the Adeniyi-Jones and many other members of the emergent illuminati that birthed around the Enugu-Aba-Port Harcourt and Calabar axis. Just as the middle ground has disappeared from Nigerian politics, the middle class, the cultural, spiritual, political and economic backbone of any civilized society, has also vanished from the Nigerian horizon.
It is perhaps profoundly symptomatic of this loss that the values of Calvinist thrift, restraint, delayed gratification, liberality and tolerance with which the European and American bourgeois classes powered modernity and rapid development in its classical epoch have also disappeared from Nigeria. The old African jungle with its commodious capacity for the re-absorption of the absconding has reclaimed its own.
It is a tragedy that has been long in coming. Rues Ola Balogun: “Everything is gone now-my books, films and other belongings. Although I still have some of my books in Paris, France. I have not lived in Paris for many years now. My family is over there. Meanwhile, this is a rented accommodation, which I have occupied for more than 10 years now”.
Ask yourself what an internationally acclaimed filmmaker was doing in rented quarters and you are beginning to fumble with the firmly shut lid of a national scandal. How many retired professors can boast of having their own houses? As to the cause of the fire, Balogun was even more ironically revealing of the state of the nation and the collapse of its old middle class: “I can’t say I saw the start of the fire. There was no light before I slept and I put on my generator. Suddenly, I noticed that my generator went off by itself at about 1.30 am, but I didn’t come out for security reasons”.
This is the image of a global citizen stranded by patriotic choice, a gifted and sensitive soul marooned; a cosmopolitan intellectual trapped in the punishing hell of a retarded post-colonial state. In the darkest moment of tormenting private loss, of strenuous intellectual and creative labour summarily eviscerated, Balogun must have wondered what made him stick to his beloved fatherland in spite of the ominous signals of distress.
But it was not always like this. In the not too distant past, there was another country. The mind rolls back to Ife at the turn of the seventies. Anybody associated with the old University of Ife at the turn of the seventies, particularly the ancient Faculty of Arts, must remember a tall stripling young man fabulously attired in native fabric of francophone pedigree and his enchantingly exotic wife.
Impeccably mannered and impressively credentialed, Ola Balogun had returned home after degrees from Dakar and Paris to contribute his own quota to the development of the fatherland. The great university at Ife was the place to be at that particular time. There was the aroma of human distinction and future greatness in the air. Mesmerising exotica abounded. Ola Balogun together with the likes of Ulli Beer, Professor Feuser, the Heywoods, the Euba couple was part of the charmed circle of learning and culture. There was also the recently departed Jeffrey S. Gruber who had studied Linguistics at MIT and was rumoured to be a protégé of the old MIT hell-raiser, Noam Chomsky. It was a magic mountain.
Forty five years down the line, both mountain and magic had disappeared as if toppled by an erupting volcano. But no matter what the ruins of a great architecture must remain. A few months back, as Snooper was traipsing and trampling around the Ikeja supermarket hub like a footloose flaneur, the eyes suddenly fell on a gentleman of unmistakable distinction quietly sipping his afternoon tea while browsing through some newspapers in cheery solitude.
It could have been a Parisean café in the glorious era of Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion, collaborator and confidante, Simone de Beauvoir. But this was a small cramped coffee shop on the upper stairs of Goddy’s Supermarket in Ikeja. Consumed by his own company, it seemed that the gentleman sipping his tea was bent on avoiding eye contact with everybody. But there was something about him and the aura of solitary politeness which increased one’s fascination. Then he made a slip by briefly looking up, or it may be that the intense gaze penetrated his chilly armour. It was Ola Balogun.
“Dr Ola Balogun, I must presume”, Snooper opened with a famous gambit of colonial interlopers. He smiled back, the hesitant and polite smile of the wellborn and well bred before inviting yours sincerely to a vacant seat near him. We had barely finished exchanging pleasantries about the good old days when an animated discussion about the state of the nation ensued.
Like all concerned patriots, the famed filmmaker was disturbed and distressed about the state of the nation and how things could have been allowed to degenerate to this level where everything seemed to have gone to the dogs. He was quietly vehement but soft spoken. He did not seek to impress or to castigate unwholesomely. There was something about him which reminded one of the Etonian charms and diffidence of the old public school boy. From his travels, he has acquired the cosmopolitan savvy of the global denizen. But he also communicated a calm fortitude and stoic endurance.
What particularly irked and riled Balogun was the virtual collapse of the middle class culture which supported and valorised the creative industry and artistic production in the country. The half a million readers that bought Gbolabo Ogunsanwo’s Sunday Times in the mid-seventies have all vanished into thin air. Even the down market Onitsha market literature has disappeared. In contemporary Onitsha market, you can see sweaty musclemen physically lugging expired freezers and other monstrous looking contraptions. It is not a scene for effete literati.
But what was clear that afternoon was that despite the parlous state of the nation, the likes of Ola Balogun refused to be fazed or daunted. He kept coming up with schemes to revive the reading culture and the revival of an active intellectual class which will spearhead and pioneer the rebirth of the nation. He had many names ready and already penciled down. His quiet enthusiasm was to say the least quite infectious.
If he is not persuaded to leave the country as a result of traumatic loss, Balogun may yet live to witness that glorious dawn of a renascent Nigeria and its resurgent middle class. But it is going to be a lot of hard work and imaginative thinking. As they say in American boxing parlance, the Nigerian middle class has taken a bad beat.
The middle class is the most vital and vibrant stratum of any society. It is a historical truism and not a curse that any society that tries to wipe out its middle class will know neither peace nor stability. This is because it has removed the buffer that prevents the filthy rich from coming to direct collision with the filthy poor. Those who will redeem Nigeria have their work cut out for them. For now, there is going to be a helluva hollerin and hammerin in the land. May the notable filmmaker find the strength and fortitude to bear his huge loss.
