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Achebe, Soyinka and the Nigerian Mess

September 26, 2007

Last weekend, I drove from Trinity College,
Connecticut to Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts to participate in events marking the
40th anniversary of the death of Christopher Okigbo,
widely acknowledged as the most verbally exciting and
deeply prophetic poet Nigeria has ever produced. Those
two aspects of Okigbo’s art—its compelling lyrical
power and prophetic insight—were stressed by many a
speaker at the series of talks, readings,
reminiscences and speeches that marked the
festschrift. 


It was an international celebration, with participants
coming from different parts of the world. There was
Gerald Moore, one of the great early champions and
promoters of African literature. There was Dennis
Brutus, the indomitable South African poet who lived
through the horrors of apartheid, including decades of
exile and surviving a bullet that barely missed his
heart. Steven Vincent, who taught many of the best and
brightest at the University of Nigeria, graced the
event. There was the ever-controversial Ali Mazrui,
the Kenyan-born political scientist whose views on
major issues, including those on Okigbo’s decision to
don military fatigues and resist the genocide on
Biafrans, inevitably inflame passions. There was Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., one of America’s most visible public
intellectuals who served his intellectual tutelage
under Wole Soyinka’s supervision at Cambridge
University in the 1970s. 
 
Much as the international roll call was impressive, it
was the Nigerian contingent that, in my view, lent the
occasion its energy and power. It was a gathering of
Nigeria’s established intellectual and moral
luminaries as well as up-and-coming writers. Convener
Chukwuma Azuonye of the University of Massachusetts,
Boston, managed to assemble a cast of writers who knew
Okigbo as well as those who continue to draw
inspiration from his poetry.
 
There was Sefi Judith Attah, Okigbo’s widow, a woman
of quiet grace and regal bearing. There was Obiageli
Okigbo, the late poet’s only child who was shy of
three years at the time of her father’s death. An
architect who makes her home in Belgium, Obiageli has
the kind of zestful, intense eyes that remind you of
the late poet’s piercing gaze. There was Chike Momah,
Okigbo’s schoolmate at the University of Ibadan who
regaled the audience with moving stories about the
late poet. Other participants included Michael J.C.
Echeruo, Abiola Irele, Ifi Amadiume, Biodun Jeyifo,
Demas Nwoko, Obiora Udechukwu, Jacob Olupona, Ifeanyi
Menkiti, J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada,  Chimamanda Adichie,
Catherine Acholonu, Chimalum Nwankwo, Obi Nwakanma,
Dubem Okafor, Folu Agoi, Esiaba Irobi, Helen Chukwuma,
Isidore Diala, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Olu Oguibe, and Obi
Iwuanyanwu. Branwen Kiemute Okpako, a Nigerian
filmmaker based in Belgium, screened a documentary on
Okigbo dually entitled “The Pilot and the Passenger”
and “Who Killed Christopher Okigbo”.
 
For me, and I suspect for many other participants, the
highpoint of the celebrations was when Chinua Achebe
and Wole Soyinka, indisputably the two giants of
Nigerian letters, shared the platform. Achebe and his
wife shared moving anecdotes about Christopher Okigbo.
For a moment, their intimate stories about Okigbo
brought the late poet back to life. Listening to their
stories—about the day Okigbo slipped into their house
and finished the goat meat Achebe’s then pregnant wife
was counting on eating, or the morning he sneaked into
their Lagos residence, woke up the Achebes’ cook and
got the man to prepare him breakfast while Achebe and
his wife were still in bed, or the guile with which he
deflected Achebe’s attention to enable him to enlist
in the Biafran Army without the novelist dissuading
him—the appreciative audience seemed enraptured.
Achebe remembered Okigbo as a man who was “greedy for
experience,” and the stories he and his wife told
brought that point to sharp relief.

Achebe spoke in that accustomed quiet tone that often
masks the power and eloquence of his stories and
insight. There was an emotionally charged moment when
he paused for a full minute, perhaps even two. I don’t
recall ever witnessing a more potent, powerfully
charged silence. Was Achebe out to make the point that
silence is a powerful rhetorical device? That silence
can, on occasion, stand as its own kind of speech? At
any rate, it was as if an external force—perhaps the
spirit of Okigbo—had swooped down to compel the
silence. Everybody in the hall sat hushed, at once
mystified and moved. Later, Mr. Momah, Achebe’s
classmate both at Government College, Umuahia as well
as the University of Ibadan, pointedly asked if the
novelist had been overcome by emotion. Achebe did not
answer that question; he let the mystery stand.

It was sheer enchantment to behold Achebe and Soyinka
exchanging good-natured banter. Achebe had told of the
Igbo rite of restitution that must be carried out in
the event that a living man is presumed dead, and his
funeral is performed. A sacrifice would be required to
undo the abomination of burying a man who was still
alive, Achebe explained. Soyinka then asked Achebe to
recall stories that made the rounds during the Biafran


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War to the effect that the then imprisoned dramatist
had died. As soon as Achebe told that story, Soyinka
declared: “I want my goat.” As the audience guffawed,
Soyinka, ever the consummate actor, feigned
seriousness. “I want my goat,” he repeated in
mock-seriousness, eliciting more laughter.

But the atmosphere in the hall was not always in the
lighthearted vein. When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asked
Achebe and Soyinka how they view Nigeria’s survival as
a nation, it was a signal that a solemn air was about
to return to the proceedings. What struck me was how
the two writers’ responses intersected in important
ways. Speaking first, Achebe noted that Nigeria’s
viability would depend on its restructuring to achieve
a truly federal character. Without this, he suggested,
the founding of the Nigerian nation would remain
problematic. While expressing a personal interest in
Nigeria’s survival as a corporate entity, Soyinka
insisted that the country could not thrive unless its
people, acting freely people, are able to discuss the
terms of their coexistence. He drew attention to the
anomaly of a country governed by a constitution that
was handed down by a military cabal. He described
Nigeria as less a nation than a nation-space whose
instruments of state are stolen at will by a tiny few.
If Nigeria is to hold up as a viable nation,
then—according to Soyinka—Nigerians must, at minimum,
reclaim the power to design their own constitution.

It was not the first time Achebe and Soyinka were
making this point. More than twenty years ago, Achebe
told me in an interview that the Nigerian nation was
yet to be founded. Last July, he firmly restated the
point in another interview. That argument is a
recurrent theme in his slim political treatise, “The
Trouble With Nigeria”. Soyinka has mined the same
territory in his many interventions in Nigeria’s
political debates. Readers of his memoirs, especially
“Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years,” “You Must Set Forth
at Dawn,” and “The Open Sore of a Continent” would
recognize that the question of how to recuperate a
humanistic collectivity out of the mutant mess that is
Nigeria is a consuming passion of his.

The symbolism of the two writers meeting in Cambridge
at this particular pass in Nigeria’s history could not
have been lost on many who listened to them. Their
meeting took place in the shadow of a scandal in the
expanding gallery of Nigerian scandals: April polls
that gave Nigeria the hardly disputed title of world
champions in rigged elections. As Nigeria’s two big
writers reflected on their nation’s missed
opportunities and misadventures, ex-President Olusegun
Obasanjo, alias father and founder of modern Nigeria,
was getting stuck on the “modern” roads he bequeathed
to Nigerians, a tragic figure who finds little love
anywhere in the country he misgoverned for eight
years, not even in Abeokuta or Ibadan. Yes, the
self-conceited one bragged that his leadership was so
superior that Nigerians must change their constitution
to permit him to stay in office onto death is now so
friendless and despised he may soon have to rent
guests if he wants any to visit.

While Achebe and Soyinka agonized over their nation’s
foundering, guess what was happening in Abuja? A
self-aggrandizing hairdresser, wangled by mischievous
forces into the exalted chair of Speaker of the House
of Representatives, was busy staging a farcical drama,
part comedy and part tragedy. Etteh, like the ghastly
state of Nigerian roads, is in every sense a legacy of
Obasanjo the godfather and founder of Nigeria!

Now imagine all the comic fodder Speaker Etteh has
been providing to members of the diplomatic corps in
Abuja who must send mocking reports to their home
nations about the way Nigerian officials misconduct
themselves. Then imagine the shame and pain she brings
to Soyinka and Achebe and to the generality of
Nigerians whose sad lot it is to watch one woman
insist that her ego must override the interests of her
nation.

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