The occasion was the 70th birthday anni-versary and the retirement celebration party of Professor Chima Anyadike of the Department of Literature in English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, where Mr. Sam Omatseye delivered a valedictory lecture in his honour. Themed: The rebellion of reality: a contest between fact and fiction, Omatseye took guests through instances and stages of the meddling of one against the other and how the journalism profession has been caught in the middle of it all. Edozie Udeze was at the lecture in Ile-Ife.
The auditorium II of the Faculty of Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Ile-Ife, Osun State, penultimate week was agog with an array of literary events that kept the atmosphere aglow. It was a day when Professor Chima Anyadike was celebrating his 70th birthday and to also retire from the university. Anyadike is a professor of Literature in English, one of the most notable and classical Achebe scholars in the world. The celebration which attracted scholars, friends, colleagues and students in large quantum was an opportunity for a valedictory lecture in his honour. The lecture, entitled The Rebellion of Reality: A contest between Fact and fiction, was delivered by Mr. Sam Omatseye, chairman editorial board of The Nation newspapers Lagos. Fortunately, Omatseye was a student of Anyadike.
The hall came alive as guests scrambled for space to enable them partake in the richness of the moment. It was a day when literature and literary matters truly took hold of everyone present. And no one ever disputed the fact that Anyadike did impact profoundly on the campus and those who happened to be his students. But it went beyond that, for the Vice Chancellor of OAU, Professor Eyitope Ogunbodede availed himself the opportunity of the programme to pour encomiums on the celebrator.
“It is a moment to cherish”, he began with a glow on his forehead. ‘As I happily welcome all of you here today, especially Chairman of Council, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, and his wife, let’s not forget to highlight the fact that we have witnessed tremendous progress and peace here since Ogunbiyi became chairman. Before the end of the year, we will have begun to generate our own internal electricity. Beyond that, the Anyadike family has been a wonderful one; exemplary. They have been good to the campus, both the wife Bisi, when she was a student up till this moment. She had been an activist and she still is. Anyadike has spent all his career years here with us without a break. This calls for celebration. When the situation seemed tough, he struggled on; others could not do so” Ogunbodede said.
He then turned to Bisi who was also seated on the high table: “You’ve done well. He doesn’t look his age, because he has a wonderful wife in you; you’ve been taking good care of him. Yet, it is God’s gift to look young. You have played a remarkable role to help build this university. Therefore, we will be glad to prevail on you to remain a little while to contribute more to the wellbeing of this citadel of learning”. The Vice – Chancellor decided, while guests cheered.
In his speech, Dr. Ogunbiyi recounted how he got to meet Anyadike about forty-two years ago through Professor Biodun Jeyifo. “It has been interesting ever since. We have worked together in the department for a long time. But more interestingly, Chima came here and met an Ife princess and got married to her. Today God has blessed them with lovely children, one of who once won the most beautiful girl in Nigeria. And here today in our midst are their lovely grandchildren”, he teased turning to Anyadike. “How many of them do you have yet?”
Ogunbiyi who chaired the event reiterated the need for Nigerians to continually honour those who deserve honour while they are alive. “We should honour our own as they should. We should do that from time to time. This is why I am suggesting that the university should find somewhere for him to render more services to the university. Chima has done well; he has given his utmost to the university”, he said while most close allies and colleagues of the celebrator nodded their acclaim.
Reminisces
Omatseye who took the theme of the lecture based on a number of encounters in the society as they relate to fiction and non-fiction, began by paying tribute to the man who helped to shape his literary life. “I want to thank Professor Chima Anyadike for this opportunity to deliver the lecture”, he said as the hall suddenly became solemn and deeply quiet. “But first, I want to congratulate him for a marvel of a career as a teacher and scholar. I also thank God Almighty for the gift of his life, for roaring through the decades to what the Bible, in its inimitable style, calls three scores and ten to fruitful, engaged, but quiescent life”.
An engaging and quintessential journalist himself, Omatseye went back into time: “Anyadike is known for a number of things. He is a mainstay of the literature department at the Obafemi Awolowo University; an exponent of African literature, an international consultant on literary matters. He is also a model of institutional longevity and loyalty. He has been here like an unshaken and immovable Iroko tree, while others fled.
“He is a well-known Achebe scholar, dissecting the bard like few intellectuals can. People know him for these qualities and more. Of course, I did not know that in my life time, I would ever call him the Odenigbo of Ekwulobia. So, when he became a chief around the time he became a professor, I quipped at this diptych virtue, and I was at a loss whether to call him Chief Professor Anyadike or Professor Chief Anyadike and I knew as a literary person I was inadvertently launching into a miry clay about linearity in a story”.
He then quizzed, as the hall came abreast again: “Should we start from the beginning or the end and then there is the question as to what is the beginning, the middle or the end. I might be waking up the eternal theorist of deconstruction known as Jacques Derrida, who confused reality and fiction because he thought reality is the most dangerous thing to take for granted because structure, in the last reality, is probably not structure at all”.
Like a historian who never detaches from his past, he went on: “Some see Professor Anyadike also as a vineyard of beauty queens. But for me, each time I think of him, I remember that he was the great and imperturbable simplifier as a pedagogist. As a student, once there was a complex novel, play, poem, or theory, I counted on him to give the snapshot line, the clear and simple words that tore through mesh. He did it in his quintessential laconic manner and the few words and sentences lingered through the semester like a constant meteor of illumination”.
While he admitted that Anyadike simplified issues for them, he equally gave credence to a history professor who paved the way to ensure he and others acquired the depth of an all round knowledge. “Grab the taproot. And others would fall in place”. And with that, Omatseye, a multiple award-winning journalist grabbed brevity alongside knowledge, for as the great English playwright William Shakespeare noted, brevity is the soul of wit.
Realities and fiction
For Omatseye the theme is not just topical, it is one that goes deeper to examine if indeed there is really any difference between fact and fiction or between realities and unrealities in the stories we tell; or in the narratives we embellish in time and space.
“Now some realities”, he continued, even as guests looked glowingly at this towering and ever smiling figure on the dais. “When I chose the subject: The Rebellion of Reality, the contest between fact and fiction, I told myself I might even have reversed it and called it rebellion of fiction. But it is convenient for us to say it is the rebellion of reality because we tend to think that reality came before fiction. That, I think, is one of the greatest unrealities in history. Did you hear what the scientist and master of relativity, Albert Einstein, say? He did not always traffic in reality if everyone thinks he was the ultimate icon of science in the past century. So reality, he said, is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”.
He gave many instances in the past and the present about the inseparable nature of reality and unreality, fiction and fact and how they have all come together to shape the surface of the earth. “We know that societies begin with a sense of illusion we call myth. We have seen societies that believe the world began on the back of elephants or that they were birthed by snakes, or that they have no story except with cows. In my mother’s home village, Orogun in Delta State, the monitor lizard, with the ominous grace of its glides, is a totem tied to the origins of the people. Here in Ife, the story is about human beings as it is about a gourd of palm wine, a piece of earth, water and cockerel, et al”. So, where does one start and the other ends. Are they are not interwoven?
Omatseye noted that in most situations, an event is often dictated based on the point of view of whoever that is involved. But one thing is clear: “fiction or reality depends on where or how you are standing, what shade of eye glasses you are wearing, whether it is coloured by a certain faith or vanity, whether you love a tribe or kiss a totem. So the origin of reality is really fraught from the beginning. Even something we take for granted as reality may be disputed and projected as fiction”.
In other words, every story is seen from the point of view of whoever that is reporting it. It might be twisted to suit the whims and caprices of the person. Therefore, it becomes difficult or even near impossible to always separate fiction from fact, or reality from unreality. Together, both make up a story and it sticks and becomes eternally etched in history.
“I am a journalist”, he continued, after recounting series of examples where twists and raconteurs helped to embellish a situation. “And no trade simultaneously craves facts and holds them in contempt like journalism. I am of a few journalists who never believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. We are always sure of facts until we are no longer sure. Sometimes facts are sacred that we pooh-pooh the truth. That is why libel lawsuits, retractions, and apologies have become part of the journalistic narrative. That’s in spite of the inbuilt securities with editors and copy editors. We call them gatekeepers”.
But what is really a fact? Or how does one separate fact from fiction or make both a reality in every narrative? He went on thus: “But one of the problems of reality is that we want to turn them into our own realities and that provides fiction for those who look at the world from a different lens”. He then referred to the drama that played around the rumoured death of the great Dr. Nnamdi Azikwe at a point. R. B. K. Okafor, the man behind the drama swore he was with Zik when he died, yet Zik was never dead then. In the end, The Owelle declared, “I am not in a hurry to leave this planet”.
An American Mark Twain also said, “stories of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. As it happened to Azikwe, so has it happened to many great men and women of history. Omatseye went on to relate a scene that was created around Chief Obafemi Awolowo by those who believed in the myth. “I was at home one evening in Lagos, when I was jolted to the streets by what began as a hum and later buzz and ultimately faces overwhelmed by the majesty of the figure they were looking at in the moon. They said it was Awo. The man was not just gone to heaven. He had reappeared may be in the secular replay of the transfiguration of Christ in the Holy Bible. Now, I might either have been blind, or may be, as the case of the transfiguration, the vision was meant for only the initiated, that is those who loved and bowed to him while he lived, just like Jesus and when Jesus came back from the dead, he appeared only to his disciples. Perhaps that was why I was one of the few who lacked an eye of understanding, apologies to Apostle Paul”.
So reality can be experienced by two persons and they can as well see different things. In that case the theme of the lecture readily comes into play in all this. The rebellion or rivalry between fact and fiction is ever constant. That’s why even when a novel is supposed to be a fiction or clearly stated to be so, readers still swallow line, hook and sinker its contents and making the story believable in their subconscious. Omatseye insists that the Da Vince Code by Dan Brown situates the narrative clearer in this instance. “Yet that best seller provoked so much interest around the world that some persons were reading it as reality… And it created a burst of tourism in France as many trooped from around the world to the Musee Du Louvre to see some of the scenes the author crafted”.
As it is in political narrative so it is in social life. And so “because of this entanglement of fiction and reality a genre came into play called faction”, he further elucidated. “Some have looked at it in another way and highlighted a genre creative non-fiction. What this means is that you tincture with the facts, by retelling what you witnessed in the style of a novelist. This is tricky… Because of the flourishing of facts, and the need to sustain fiction, the novel had had to reinvent itself. Hence we have magical realism, a genre that serves up fiction within fiction throwing up fantastical tales. Novelists like Marquez and Rushdie are the masters”,
In summation, the fact remains that “at the bottom of the fight between reality and fiction is the struggle for power and domination, a hegemonic tension that goes back to the beginning of time. The solution is simple: Fiction lovers should get back their stories from imposters. Fiction has a way of elevating reality. Both are partners. We don’t need those who use it to kill, because the ultimate rebellion of reality is to fight the flourish of lies and distortion of reality”.
Do we need to marry both? “Yes,” Omatseye enthused. “That’s the solution. We should follow the philosopher Blaise Paschal’s solution: To shut reason out, and to let nothing else in”.
The session was handled by Dr. Chijioke Uwasomba who regaled guests with series of stories around the celebrator and other theatricals in the larger societies. The Eze Ndigbo of Ife Ezekiel Onyejekwe was there. From the palace of the Ooni of Ife, came some chiefs with the insignia of authority to identify with Bisi Anyadike, a princess of the kingdom. The event was spaced with some cultural displays and the three books produced around Professor Anyadike were also unveiled.
At the end of the lecture, there was a resounding applause for Omatseye. As he wound up, the guests stood up in unism to give him a thunderous ovation. Many of the scholars confessed that it was a profound treatise on the topic, something that needs to be looked into for further research and acclaim.