One of Nigeria’s pre-eminent and prolific poetical and literary voices as well as a consummate and often brutally frank public intellectual, Odia Ofeimun, never ceases to surprise with the range of his scholarship, the dazzling dexterity with which he handles a complex diversity of ideas from an array of disciplines and the freshness of his sometimes unorthodox perspectives in his numerous cerebral offerings. His book, ‘In Search of Ogun: Soyinka In Spite of Nietzsche’, published by Hornbill House, Lagos, in 2014, is another veritable, nourishing and provocative intellectual feast. The three essays that make up the 206-page book constitute a breath taking tour de force traversing diverse areas of specialisation ranging from literary theory, history, philosophy, traditional African religion, Nigerian and world history, arts and culture, political science, political theory, music, drama, theatre and much more.
Students of Wole Soyinka’s works, ideas and politics will inevitably find this book irresistible and indispensable as the Nobel laureate features prominently in the three extended essays. The first two, ‘In search of Ogun – Soyinka, Nietzsche and the Edo century’ as well as ‘Wole Soyinka: The writer as cultural hero’, were delivered as The 2003 Egharevba Memorial Lecture in Benin and the 2004 70th birthday lecture at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, in commemoration of Soyinka’s 70th birthday, respectively. The third titled ‘The Beauty of Identity: Taking Naija-movies to the next level’, was a discourse on the Nigerian film industry delivered at the Best of the Best-TV event with the theme- The Arts and National Identity. Even then, Soyinka’s poetry, prose and drama offer the prism through which Ofeimun sheds light on his topic.
The curious question evoked by the title of the first essay is what the author really means by the Edo century. Thus he understandably prequels his lecture with an intriguing excursion into the both heroic and tragic history of the people of his native Edo land. Ofeimun establishes a relation between Ogun Ewuare, king of the Edo Kingdom for 45 years in the 15th century, and Ogun, the fabled god of iron, war, roads and creativity in Yoruba and several other African cultures both on the continent and diaspora. In 1997, the Edo people decided to commemorate the centenary of the Benin massacre, which took place in 1887. In that incident, nine British war ships were deployed to crush and utterly decimate a people who had been deliberately provoked to act in ways to justify the criminal looting and arson unleashed on them. Benin City, the capital of the Edo Kingdom was set ablaze. The reigning monarch, Oba Overamwin, was sent into exile in Calabar marking the end of a dynasty that had lasted over 500 years.
Ofeimun was aghast that the centenary commemorating what was a tragic moment in the otherwise glorious history of a proud people took the colour more of a celebration than the mourning he thought it ought properly to have been. Was this an approbation of the superiority of British colonial rule over the traditional system it overthrew as well as subsumption or incorporation of Edo land into the macro Nigerian ‘artificial’ entity that was the product of colonial imperialism? A pained Ofeimun writes: “Whether it was a marking or mourning, I found myself taking it very personal. The commemoration appeared to me like a celebration of the British defeat of the Edo people…what was there to ensure that if the colonisers returned today, there would be no routing of indigenous people as happened in 1897?”
The writer’s angst is understandable. The Edo Kingdom had a pedigree that went back more than a thousand years. Yet, it suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of nine British war ships manned by thugs of foreign trading companies in a matter of days. Ofeimun metaphorically describes the period between the razing and destruction of Benin in 1897 and the centenary commemoration of 1997 as ‘The Edo Century’ just as historians narrate different phases of history as the European, American or Asian century. While he uses Edo as the anchor or peg for his analysis, Ofeimun has his sights really on the larger Nigerian entity arguing that “It makes no difference whether you are talking about the Edo people or the people of Nigeria. The implications of the Edo century are the same on either side of the flowing river of time. The Edo people are Nigerians or Nigerians are just Edo from the logic of a defeated people who have not overcome their defeat”.
His fervent and rigorous search for Ogun can thus be interpreted at a deeper level as a quest for the rediscovery of indigenous cultural, spiritual and intellectual moorings or resources that will enable African nationals to regain their self- confidence as a basis for recovering psychologically from the humiliations of their colonial past while reviving and strengthening their capacity for genuinely autochthonous development. This is particularly because Ofeimun believes that the cultural and spiritual depredations suffered by African religions, traditions and social systems in their contact with invading religious and values was no less devastating than military and economic subjugation of the continent. In his words “Since the British overran our geographies, we have all failed, and woefully too, at putting up a liveable, countervailing strategy for dealing with, not just rampant imperialism but our own incapacities, our past and the need always to map the future”.
Odia’s essay is an interdisciplinary voyage into history and myth not for its own sake but with the hope that “by enabling us to engage roots of development that were abandoned at some point in the past, it might tell us something about how to escape the morass of present tense” because “our self- knowledge and general development as a people have been compromised by the inadequacies of our responses to the challenges of western civilization”. In pursuit of this objective, Ofeimun deploys Ogun as his medium although he also exhaustively discusses Sango, Obatala and the indigenous but subverted knowledge systems of diverse African cultures. He undertakes his intellectual quest for Ogun through the works of Soyinka who has consciously and deliberately drawn inspiration from the fount of Ogun. For him, Soyinka “more than any other writer has plumbed deepest to the core issue of enriching an African world view from the defeat of yesterday and extracting such strategies of self-management from it which belongs to our traditional past and can still belong to our future”.
In this panoramic survey of Soyinka’s literary corpus from the observatory of Ogun, Ofeimun not only gives insights into the Nobel laureate’s prodigious creative output, he also critically interrogates his several intellectual encounters with the dramatic aesthetics of a Femi Osofisan, the radical, Marxist perspectives of a Biodun Jeyifo, the modernist philosophical vision of the Ghanaian thinker, Akwasi Wiredu and the combative Afrocentric trio of Chinweizu, Onwucheka and Madubuike. He draws parallels between the German Philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche’s resort to the gods in Greek mythology to help re-orientate people away from moral distress in a chaotic and anarchic world in which he assumes the death of God, and Soyinka’s seeking a “return to the African gods as a means of healing the severance that had taken place between humankind and the original Oneness”.
As Ofeimun puts it, “Just as Nietzsche felt free to bend Greek gods to his will Soyinka felt free to bend the Yoruba gods to his will as a way of engaging spheres of experience in which neither science nor Christianity had any explanatory force”. However, one cannot help but wonder at the practical utility of Soyinka’s intellectual experimentations with Ogun mythology when Ofeimun writes that “For Soyinka, Ogun had become a twentieth century deity, who superintended not only over iron foundries that gave rise to modern civilisation but other scientific pursuits, beyond Metallurgy, in electricity, electronics and related fields. In his metaphysics, Ogun is represented as the modal archetype; not a god of either/or but a force capable of either good or evil through whose feats civilisations may be explored, established or dissolved”. How do we contrast this ‘modernising’ conception of Ogun with the protracted technological and other forms of underdevelopment across Africa where the god is most widely worshipped?
