A Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, USA, Niyi Osundare is a prolific poet, dramatist and literary critic. A vehement champion of the rights to free speech and one who believes in the power of the spoken word, Osundare maintains that African poets have no choice but to be political. He uses his poems to criticize government and seek ways to make the society better. In 2005, he was caught up in Hurricane Katrina, and he and his wife were stuck in the attic of their house for two days. In December 2014, he was awarded the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA), the country’s highest award for intellectual and creative achievement. His literary records show that he has over 20 books to his credit with various literary awards from across continents. Some of these awards include Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, Fonlon/Nichols prize for “Excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa”, The Tchicaya U Tam’si prize generally regarded as Africa’s highest prize for poetry, and many more. Osundare turned 70 in March. In this interview with Edozie Udeze at the University of Ibadan, he takes a deep look at the Nigerian political, social and economic situations, and his experiences from Hurricane Katrina, state of Nigerian Literature and more.
Let’s talk about the state of the nation. How do you assess President Muhammadu Buhari’s two years in office?
Mixed blessing, oh, mixed blessings. If you want to know who people are, it will be important for you to know where they are coming from. This is no apology at all for the present government. But they have to know the kind of country they inherited. This country was already dead by the time the APC came to power. But we didn’t know, because the then ruling party was papering over the cracks in readiness for the national election. No one knew the rot in Nigeria was so deep, so pervasive. I don’t believe what I am seeing now. In my many years on earth I have seen a lot of this country. In fact, several aspects of my development are parallel with the development of Nigeria itself. I knew Nigeria when it was at its best. This was in the six years after independence. Since the civil war, we’ve never been the same.
Now, I have never seen Nigeria so corrupt, so blatantly, so thickly, so animalistically corrupt as it is now. Just look at the horrifying legacy of the PDP regime. Look at all the monies, raw cash, being discovered all over the place – water tanks, warehouses, public buildings, private residences, cemeteries, etc. Some people would say this may be a photo trick. But you see raw cash; real raw cash stacked here and there in their dizzying billions. You don’t need any guru to tell you that we are a crazy people, ruled by crazy scoundrels, in a crazy country! …….No wonder, the Naira has been reduced to a miserable piece of paper. By around 2012, 2013, the Naira had actually started losing value, but it was being propped up in all kinds of ways by a government anxious to win the next election.
The Stock Exchange had tanked and the Naira had plummeted. Now the election is over, and all the gedegede (rot, decay) is out. And then the issue of the Chibok Girls. They were abducted under such crassly irresponsible circumstances that some Nigerians are even doubting that they were ever abducted! The naysayers are insisting that Nigeria’s terrible tragedy and shame must have been stage-managed! A terribly insane superstition that is an insufferable affront to commonsense and trivialization of the unimaginable suffering of these girls, their families, the nation as a whole, and the entire global human community. Every rational human being is constrained to ask: was there any government/governance in Nigeria when this tragedy unfolded? Were the rulers in Abuja awake or asleep, or simply too busy stealing and squandering Nigeria’s resources, to care? Nigeria was simply a big, dysfunctional ship adrift – captain-less, rudderless…… And, of course, the nation’s money-spinner, the NNPC became an ATM machine for all kinds of corrupt politicians and political agents. There was no control.
So this is the kind of country that was taken over by the present administration. Virtually everything we consumed was imported from abroad. I still remember that between 2013 and 2014, I bought a few things not because I needed them but because I wanted to see where they were made. Tooth-picks came from India. Spoons and other cutlery came from China. Some other things came from Brazil. Ironing boards from Turkey. The rice from Thailand or wherever, and I was wondering how can a country depend so pathetically on products from other places. We are not even talking about our cars, you know. Go to Nigerian roads, you see Mazda, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, Kia, etc; all these cars come from other countries. Every car you buy produces money, plenty of it, for somebody far away. So we are only consumers, pathetic, notorious consumers of the products of other people’s intellectual and physical initiatives. This is the kind of situation we are in. I am not saying the previous government created all these problems; the issue is that they deepened them. These are the problems the present government inherited.
And the question now is: what have they done to improve the situation in the past two years. The answer is, very little so far, but in our present circumstances, that little may total up to so much in a number of cases. Take the anti-corruption “war” as an example. This is a “war” that is neither total nor thorough, but is producing some revelations that we only witnessed in the early years of the Obasanjo Presidency. In our present circumstances, naming the venal criminals that have brought us to this pass and shaming them in that process cannot be seen as an idle stunt. Since, in the last analysis, no crime is, actually, anonymous, those who commit those crimes must also have names. As for shaming, my issue with this is that our society has lost its sense of shame. There was a time when shame possessed a high deterrence potential, a virtue we have since lost to the monster of impunity. Nigeria’s political and economic thieves – and they are dangerously powerful thieves – work with impunity; operate with impunity because we are not calling them out. They have developed some thick skin because the country itself has lost its sense of shame. If you called someone ole (thief) in my childhood days in Ikere Ekiti, it was like calling him a leper.
Nigeria is a country ruled by powerful thieves who would do everything to make their crime anonymous. Look at our Senate; the president of that Senate stole his seat. Each time he holds the gavel and bangs it on the table, he bangs away at the conscience of the nation, of the world. And he forgets all about that sense of decency. For goodness sake, how can someone like Senator Saraki talk about corruption? And he has a number of other legislooters who dance around him – impunitous court jesters. What kind of country can these lawless folks be legislating for or in? What kind of apathetic people are Nigerians? And, by the way, that gang recently launched a book on – wait for it – CORRUPTION! Can anyone ever think of a more painful salt in the wound of a nation? What I see in Nigeria at the moment is a combination of tragedy and farce – a terrible combination indeed; the type which precipitates an ugly revolt if not a tidy revolution.
Finally, like I said yesterday at the poetry festival, this is a dying country. Yes, it is a dying country. And that is a phrase – I’m using with every sense of caution.
And by some kind of happenstance, the President of the country is ill at the present time. My sympathy goes to him. Nigerians have to remember that their president is also a human being. As human beings, we are nothing other than complex contraptions made up of vulnerable parts. But transparency is extremely important. We want to know what is happening to the President. Those who pray among us should be able to know where to direct their prayer and what affliction they want to train their vatic trajectory on.
Let nobody make a regional or ethnic or religious or political mileage out of this. This is no moment for opportunism or insensitive gloating. But let the nation know where its President is and what is actually wrong with his health. This is a matter of accountability without which democracy can only be a sham, some Byzantine conundrum. And, specifically, this is no time for coups or rumours of coups, as my friend Yakubu Mohammed, has poignantly put it in a recent column. We are tired of military adventurism and its ruinous excesses. A nation that has survived the perilous machinations of a Babangida and an Abacha must think twice before tolerating the “Fellow Nigerians” mantra of another military junta. We are tired of them. They do not have the solution to our problem. They are part of our problems. During their time we had a civil war. It was their action that led to that civil war – coup – counter – coup and so on. They are a force of destablisation.
So the situation in Nigeria at the moment? As the Yoruba would say the hen is perching perilously on the rope; no peace for the rope; no peace for the hen. The economy is extremely bad. People are hungry. The kind of letters I get from home – from people I do not even know. Help out with school fees, help out with housekeeping money. I find it difficult to look the other way. So what is government doing about this? People are hungry; people are dying. Last week when I came from the US and I was standing at a newspaper stand, one woman said to me, “oga, please give me money for food. And not just only me; I have three children and my husband has run away”. I wanted to buy three papers, but I ended up buying one. I added the balance to whatever I wanted to give to her. There are many desperate people in this country. And the terrible irony is that as Achebe would put it, ‘we are people who live by the ocean, but wash our hands with spittle’. Nigeria has enough to go round; more than enough, yet we are where we are. Do our governors and legislators and ministers see what we see, feel what we feel; hunger the way we hunger, fall sick the way we do?
Most critics of the Buhari administration say he has not jailed any of the people involved in corruption yet to serve as a deterrent to others and that the fight is selective. What is your comment?
Those critics have a reason for feeling the way they do and saying what they say. The anti-corruption war seems to have a predictable plot: arrest, take to court, make quite a fanfare of it, go through all the legal motion, get an adjournment, and watch the hue and cry taper off strategically or erroneously. The case drops out of the headline, and before you know it, from public consciousness. From what I have noticed, the law could be a nasty drag; and in Nigeria, it is doubly so. As I have said on some other forum, a lot of legal hairsplitting and shenanigans are being used to frustrate the prosecution of corruption in Nigeria. Most of the cases are knocked off on technical grounds. The EFCC needs to be more thorough, more professional, more proactive, and smarter. The law is a cumbersome ass: what may appear as a clear case to a layman may collapse under scrutiny in court. Most of us often forget that judges are human beings too. They have friends, families, professional colleagues, etc. Take the case of judges and other judicial officers currently facing trial for gross corruption, before other judges, their professional mates. I do not know if Nigeria has got to that stage in which a judge would be able to “jail” another judge as required by the law, without feeling a tinge of espirit de corps. Throw into this mix the nature of the presidential system we pretend to run: can the Presidency really fight and win the anti-corruption war without the cooperation of the Legislature and the Judiciary? How eager, how willing could a Senate President who is himself on trial for corruption be in a war against corruption? It’s this kind of tissue of circumstances people have in mind when they say “Corruption fights back”. Yes, it does. And it has a lot of stolen money to do this. This, however, is not to throw down our hands and let the monster win. The country needs the cooperation of every citizen to be able to prosecute a successful anti-corruption war. Nigerians surely need to be more critical, more willing to cultivate a system of values that is less corruption–compliant.
Would you still like to lecture in Nigeria again?
Ah, a septuagenarian! Since yesterday we’ve been talking about the issue of my “return”. A colleague wrote me six years ago about it as if I am an Andrew, someone who has abandoned the country. I replied him by saying no, no, I have never left the country. How can I come back to a place I have never left in the first instance? Exile is only a state of the mind. There’re thousands of Nigerians, who live in Nigeria but their minds and aspirations live elsewhere. And there’re many Nigerians who live abroad whose minds and aspirations are at home. I have never considered myself an exile. If I return to this country on a Thursday by Monday or Tuesday, I am at the English Department of U. I. You know, I left this country for family reasons. This is what people do not know.
Most people do not know that I had to leave the country in 1997 for family reasons. Even then, I have never been far from Nigeria, as I come home twice or thrice a year Most of the time, I am here. Two universities that are very important to my career are the University of Ibadan and the University of New Orleans. New Orleans has been kind to me, allowing me to come legitimately on leave of absence, on sabbatical and so on to Nigeria which is my home and research base and my laboratory and I go back to the US. So I come home three or two times in a year, on my own money. Last year I think I spent over $7,500 on tickets alone. A chunky portion of a teacher’s earnings! And when I am coming, I have books to share with colleagues and graduate students. When I was leaving this university in 1997, I did not abandon the four PhD students under my supervision; I combined their supervision with my tasks at the University of New Orleans, and they completed their doctoral programs in record time.
This university has done so much for me and I’ll never forget it. So, I never left Nigeria. This is one country where my life took its bearing. I have not overlooked UI, especially the Department of English. They have been gracious to me, very, very gracious to me. One of the most important values in Africa is gratitude – gratitude, yes gratitude. All the cultures I have studied I have seen that people place much premium on gratitude. And I have to say thank you if you have done something good for me. But now that I am 70, have to lean more closely to home. In Nigeria, I have three constituencies. They are education, the mass media and the publishing industry. These are the three areas to which I will continue to pay attention until I breathe my last.
People say to me how are you managing to cope, with all the problems in this country? There’s something that is still human about this country and that is what pulls me home most often.
Since 1986 when Professor Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Nigerians have been looking forward to another one. How soon do you think Nigeria can have another Nobel?
Ha, ha, I am not going to be eloquent about that because it is a question I have been asked so many times, especially in recent years. I am not a member of the Swedish Academy. I wouldn’t know, but I know that the Nobel Committee have the entire world as their constituency – the entire world. And some balance is extremely important. I just wouldn’t know, but I know good literature is coming out of Africa and in spite of all our problems. From those who are here at home, on the continent and our compatriots abroad, people are working. I teach African Literature, literature of the African Diaspora and I teach African and Caribbean literature and so on. But I know that the quality of our writings, not all of it though, is very high, given the kind of problems we have here. Here I try to send my e-mail for three days without success, but in the US I can do that within two minutes. There are ways the problems around us also inspire us to write. These problems also spur us to creativity. African literature is still growing. It’s a mixed bag of the excellent and the barely tolerable. Just as is the case in other parts of the world.
What endearing lessons did you learn from your 2005 Hurricane Katrina experience in New Orleans, USA?
Oh, very, very important question. It has taught me new lessons but it has also reinforced the lessons I knew already, one of them is the attachment to maternal things. For about seven days, my wife and I had no shoes because we left our houses with none. And my wife had a blouse and I had a shirt upon pair of shorts. That shirt was torn when they were trying to get me on the boat. We had some money in our banks but no access to them. We were nonentities because nobody even knew who we were. We had no identity cards on us. Yet for several days we survived. We survived because of the generosity of other human beings. We had a taste of American generosity. America itself is a complex society. There are racists and bigots, but there are those who feel for others. There are many who are large-minded, kind, generous to fellow human beings. At times over-generous; everywhere we went people gave us things free. We went into a pharmacy that didn’t charge us. In America, because we had rashes all over our bodies and the doctor prescribed drugs and the pharmacist said oh you are Katrina people. Just take the drug and go, do not pay. When I was wheeled into a hospital in Birmingham I was suffering from dehydration. I was weak and while the nurses discovered I had no shoes and somebody disappeared and within five minutes, he came back with a pair of shoes – lovely shoes. And I asked him, did you buy this? And he said no; one of the doctors at the hospital came, looked at my feet and went and removed his own shoes. Does it matter whether that person is black or yellow or white or brown or whatever? I was touched, I was really touched. Incidentally those shoes were a little too small for my feet. I wore them for sometimes and I kept them as mementoes.
When people say that I am optimistic, yes, I am, because I know we human beings are basically good. Not the issue of religion or race, no, no, we are all human beings to begin with. So, that reinforced my trust in the goodness of people. The man who rescued us is a Cuban-American with little education. He is an artisan. He used to pass by. But one day I went to his lawn when he was mowing it and I spoke with him. And he said to me, you are a university professor? And I said yes, what does that matter and we laughed. We became friends. Nobody knew he would be the one to save us. Twenty six hours after Katrina when we were choking, no food, no air, and we were in the attic, he was the one that came to boat us out.
But for him, we would have died. That’s a Cuban-American. I have a long one for him in my Katrina Poems. That’s a Christian who loves grace but also loves sacrifice. When eventually my daughter saw him she said I want to thank you for giving me back my parents. Look, supposing we had perished, what of the kid for whom we went to America? She would have been an orphan and that would have been a double tragedy. Side by side with the lesson I learnt was my suspicion about governments, about politicians. The Katrina tragedy wouldn’t have happened if money voted for the building of the protective walls had been spent the way they should be spent. For a long time America neglected the safety of the people around the area. Truth has to be told. That’s the only thing I know how to do. Katrina was not totally a natural disaster. It wasn’t God sent; it was man-made.
What has that taught me? That to him whom much is given, much is also expected. If I have been blessed that way, I also want to bless others. Pass on the goodwill, that is it.
When you had the Nigerian National Merit Award in 2014, you were quoted to have said that it wasn’t the Federal Government that gave you the award, but your colleagues who examined your body of works…?
Up till now, people still ask me why did you accept the award from President Jonathan? Why did you accept that award? But I tell them President Jonathan didn’t “give” me an award. It was my colleagues who did. What I got was not one of those doled out on October 1, every year, but this one was based on peer review and assessment of your work. It was done in strict confidentiality. It had integrity. As I said, there are people who have won the prize in whose company I am proud to be. Chinua Achebe won it in 1979; the first one. Soyinka is an awardee, so also are J.P. Clark, Bamgbose, Banjo, Adamolekun, Mabogunje, Osofisan, Laz Ekwueme, Oluponna, Chukwuemeka Ike, Alagoa. I am extremely proud of it. I didn’t have a second thought about it at all. The NNOM is a worthy reward for intellectual and creative excellence; an award to be encouraged in a country that doesn’t lay much store by excellence. No, no. President Jonathan did not “give” me an award, but he was gracious to me in his presentation of the award and in his generous encomium.
Who among young Nigerian poets are your favourites?
Oh, well, I am sure you know you are not going to get an answer. That reminds me of one of the last interviews the poet and artist, Obu Udeozor, had with Professor Ben Obumselu… (Ah, that man’s mind! The way he talked; very articulate, soft, humorous and uncanny). The poet kept pressing him to identify his favourite Nigerian poet, but the man never really gave a specific answer. ….. No, I am not going to engage in ritual of anointment. But I would say that a lot of good poetry is being written in Nigeria by the younger ones. Oh, yes, it is so. Poetry still remains the most patronized, the most practiced of all the literary genres in Nigeria. Hardly any week passes without one or two poets writing to me with one request or another about an ongoing or completed manuscript. Unfortunately, I have not been able to cope with all the demands… I wish I was in the position to accede to all these requests. It is not possible, but what is clear is that people are writing good poetry in Nigeria. And a lot of the poetry is really remarkable stuff. The kind of social consciousness our generation had… There was a point the generation after us rebelled against it, and went inside and came out better. But I am witnessing a renaissance of the kind of answerable imagination which powered the poetry of the second generation, no doubt a consequence of the resurgent anomie in the country.
So, some good writing is going on, but there is still a lot of work to be done to improve the quality of the “rendering”. There is a vital need to deepen our insight through a deeper familiarity with our indigenous cultures and languages. For genuine decolonization is a perennial process.
