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In Search of Chinua Achebe’s Corpse By Patrick Naagbanton

On Wednesday, 22nd May 2013, I was on the road again, in search of Okonkwo’s corpse, hanging on a tree behind his compound. I journeyed through the “small bush path” to Omuofia. No! To Ikenga Ogidi in the Ndemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State, the real birth and burial place of Professor Chinua Achebe(November 16th 1930-March 21st 2013), Nigeria’s great novelist, poet, memoirist,  teacher and  activist.

On Wednesday, 22nd May 2013, I was on the road again, in search of Okonkwo’s corpse, hanging on a tree behind his compound. I journeyed through the “small bush path” to Omuofia. No! To Ikenga Ogidi in the Ndemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State, the real birth and burial place of Professor Chinua Achebe(November 16th 1930-March 21st 2013), Nigeria’s great novelist, poet, memoirist,  teacher and  activist.

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About 2.10pm, I found myself at the New Motor Park, east of Onitsha town. I had travelled by road from Port Harcourt in the eastern Niger Delta through Owerri of Imo State to Onitsha, the market town. Though the weather over the city appeared fettered to the stomach of the skies, but the sun from it was nearer and harsh. Onitsha looked like a place that has not experienced a drop of rain for ages. At the motor park, I stood like a lonely tall palm tree, observing the movement of cars, buses with goods over-loaded on its roof tops struggling against one another, amidst the discordance of noises arising from them, motorbikes popularly called “Okada” in Nigeria in dreadful race with tricycles also called, ‘KekeNAPEP’ and humans walking fast through dense clouds of dusts and dregs on the roads.

Onitsha, in the middle of the 19th century, served as the springboard of vigorous Christian missionary activities, which spread rapidly into other parts of Igboland and beyond. And around the 1940s was the explosion in book writing, its printing and sales on themes of culture, romance, politics and gossips in the city, which is notably referred to as the Onitsha Market Literature. Onitsha like any other famous centres in Nigeria is now faced with the problems of insecurity, crimes and unsanitary human conditions.

Certainly, like what the legendary Irish poet, William Butler Yeasts (1865-1939) would say, ‘Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world’

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I stood there for few minutes with my huge black bag tied to my back like a bunch of dry fire wood when a dark, tall man with wide shoulders like mine, laughing contagiously, drove his okada and stopped in front of me. “Oga, come make I go drop you anywhere you dey go,” he said in Pidgin English, Nigeria’s corrupted version of English Language. I jumped to the back of his old okada and we sped off, and headed north-west and meandered through the shades of dusts and wastes on the roads as the motorbike wept under our heavy weights. After twelve minutes of crazy ride, he stopped me at a junction connecting the Enugu – Onitsha Expressway where I boarded an L-300, 10-seater Mitsubishi commercial bus heading to the Tarzan intersection on the eastern axis; from where I took another to Ogidi. The bus surface looked clean, but the interior was the opposite. The seats, roofs and floor were either shattered or corroded. The only new thing I saw inside the vehicle, which appeared neat, was a huge crest of Chelsea football club knitted to the roof over the driver’s seat with a small white thread.

No one needs to explain to me, that Tarzan is the gateway to Ogidi. A bulky billboard with the picture and confident letters on it, stirred at all, “A life of purpose celebrating the life of Prof. Chinua Achebe”. At the junction, another okada man arrived, beckoning on me, “Sir, don’t join this bus’, pointing at another red- coloured Mitshibushi bus I had wanted to enter.

‘They will waste your time. I will drop you at Ogidi for same N100 they want to charge you”. He added as a phony smile strolled across his face. He spoke good English, looked calm and calculative. His dress, motorbike and everything around him appeared arranged. He had a helmet on, but there was no one for me. Perhaps, he is a graduate from one of Nigerian universities who couldn’t find a real job, then takes to the Okada business. I didn’t ask him anything about his person. My mind was more on   Achebe’s occasion rather than going into that.  He was an opposite of the first okada I had travelled with from the New Motor Park. He rode gently through the old Akwa Expressway, passed BukiePoly, Iyi-Enu Hospital and the secretariat of Idemili North Council to Ugwunwaskike junction, few poles to Achebe’s country home.

The motorbike screamed through the groups of persons on the road to Achebe’s compound. We pulled to a stop at his massive compound at Ikenga Ogidi. I stepped down and walked through the main gate where friendly civilian guards in tidy uniform mounted. In the compound, everybody seemed to act in line with the Brownian motion or movement (the irregular or zigzag movements of cells or particles in a liquid or gas- propagated by the renowned Scottish Botanist, Robert Brown, 1773-1858). I marched sluggishly to a passageway in the main building where a group of women sat, discussing in low tones. I assumed they were relatives of the deceased writer. Beside them, was a framed picture of Achebe watching a long ledger notebook that they had converted into a condolence register laying on a small table with a pen inside it. I opened and wrote down some panegyric lines for the man.

The smarting sun was shrinking into its shell, giving way to nightfall when I jumped out of the compound like the wild Egwugwu warriors in Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). I boarded the same Okada, to head to the Paradise Regained Hotels, some ten minutes away where I spent the night. Billboards, banners, posters and images of Professor Chinua Achebe flood the Ogidi town and its environs. Ogidi is no longer the rustic village Achebe portrayed as Umuofia or Mbano in his fictional world. Ogidi is now an urban administrative centre with its facilities, problems and achievements.

I returned to same Achebe’s house after an hour at my Paradise Regained Hotels. But, this time, gun-brandishing security operatives in uniforms and plainclothes who didn’t even smile had replaced the ever-smiling civilian guards in uniform I had met there earlier. I was thoroughly questioned and searched before being allowed to enter the compound again. I spent few minutes and left for the Ogidi town hall where Achebe’s corpse in a sealed casket was placed on a long table at the centre of the hall where tributes were poured generously on him. I left before the end of the activities as night swamped the landscape like a dreaded flood.

Thursday, 23rd May 2013, the smiling morning sun fell from the distant skies and rested over Ogidi, announcing the final journey of the great storyteller, teacher, scholar and activist. From the Tarzan junction to the St. Philip’s Anglican Church where his corpse was brought to, for Christian prayers before burial; posters, billboards and images of politicians announcing their gubernatorial determinations had either replaced or over-shadowed that of Achebe. Anambra State Governorship elections hold next year, not 2015.

Around 10.50am, President Goodluck Jonathan and his Ghanaian counterpart, John Mahama and others swooped from the cold and hot womb of the skies like a hawk to the church premises in a Nigerian Air force helicopter- NAF 573. The number of security operatives multiplied, and outnumbered common folks like us who had come from far to witness the writer’s final departure. Good writers like Achebe don’t die, they live forever!

I had spent few hours taking pictures inside the Anglican Church compound and was bored. I stepped out through the right side gate where a group of angry-looking young men numbering about twenty, each armed with the Biafran flag (red, black and green), were struggling with security operatives to enter the compound, and stage a protest to the President and others.

Various neo- Biafran activists under the aegis of the Movement for the Actualization for the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and other pro-Biafran organizations had either been killed, jailed or facing treason charges, and others still being hunted by security operatives.

A small group of young men in their 40s and 50s and above who travelled all the way from Aba, the commercial town of Abia State to Ogidi to honour Achebe provided us with entertainment outside the premises. They were war dancers from the old Bende division of the state. On certain small parts of their arms, dotted dried goat and lamb skins with long hairs and in their hands were piercing, short machetes, on some portions of their bare bodies and eyelids were tinted with white chalks and on their heads were red caps. While few in the group, carried a small rectangular wood containing lesser-carved female images with few goat skulls fixed to the wood exterior, which appeared like tiny human skulls. Their uniform dance footsteps seemed like old anxious chicken scratching beneath the soil for food bits with their curled toes in obedience to the whipping of the drums. In the hands of the leader of the war dancers was a live hen dancing too with various sizes of tusks and fragments of wrappers knotted across their waists. Their fleshy ribcage muscles swung freely, radiating out, rivers of sweats under the scorching mid-afternoon sun, and their white chalk paintings on their bodies and eyelids washed down.

Group of war dancers and numerous others from other far-flung parts of Igboland were all over the place, performing their dances of warriors. War dancers are always seen at burial ceremonies of old people, new yam festivals and traditional ceremonies in the Igbo areas, but they can be hired to performing their ‘disco’ elsewhere.

The great writer was buried later at his country home in Ikenga Ogidi.

 

Go-di-di-go-go-di-go .Di-go-go-di-go. Diim! Diim ! Dim! The great man of Umofia Obodo dike, ‘the land of the brave’. Oh! The great warrior of Iguedo of the Yellow grinding-Stone is gone (page 96 of Things Fall Apart). Go well, the great warrior of Ogidi, Chinua Achebe.

 

Naagbanton lives in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital.

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