UzorMaximUzoatu

Power of the Printed Word

2011-12-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

With the weapon of words the writer unmans emperors. The creative artist alive to his craft almost always has the last word in the march of civilization and history. The Nigerian writer of today is poised at the crossroads of profound societal re-engineering, and capturing the daily flux of activities can indeed be quite tasking to even the most gifted of writers. As Chinua Achebe deposed in Anthills of the Savannah, what survives after the epic battle is the story. Creating a platform for the many stories of our epoch is a splendid generational statement.

There is so much writing going on in Nigeria in this age. The argument has been raised in some quarters that Nigerian writing thrives more in exile. Publishing outlets are said to be few and far between within the shores of Nigeria as opposed to the teeming outlets in the Western world as exemplified by, say, London and New York. The truth of course is that many masterpieces are lying dormant in drawers because of this lack of well-organized publishing ventures. Literary magazines are needed as they will go a long way in filling the void. A short story or poem or critique that stands out may eventually prove the forerunner of a fruitful literary career.

When Achebe in 1981, at Nsukka, initiated the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), there was the palpable fear that the body might die in infancy, as writers all over the world do not have sterling qualities of leadership and communal bonding. Creative writing happens to be the loneliest of occupations, and it is always a war getting the writer out of his hermitage to bond with others. ANA has famously survived through the years. The writers’ body has had its share of ups and downs, and it is not uncommon to hear detractors mouthing “ANA for anarchy”, but the fact remains that in 28 years of existence ANA has given voice to the voiceless and meaning to a polity that others would have scoffed at.

The many novels, plays, poems and sundry literary works that have appeared over the years have learnt needed meaning to the Nigerian experience and the larger human condition. The coveted literary prizes are highly regarded, though controversial in some instances. It is praiseworthy that ANA at no time championed a literary orthodoxy. The diverse ideologies have a ready playground on the hallowed altar of ANA. The major aim has always been to celebrate literary excellence rather than political correctness. Of course nobody is talking of celebrating meaninglessness for the heck of it. Great art has to be married to the milieu to merit the ranks.

Nigerian writing has garnered all the major prizes across the globe. In winning the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka served a powerful reminder to the world that the body of work created by African writers, especially Nigerian wordsmiths ought to represent the necessary future for world writing. To cement the authority of Nigeria in the matter, sundry writers such as Ben Okri, Helon Habila, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Attah etc have followed up ever since, winning esteemed prizes like the Booker, the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Wole Soyinka Prize respectively. Even so, as Achebe did argue in first collection of essays, it is morning yet on creation day.

The absence of requisite criticism has been cited as a major drawback of the new literature. Time was when renowned Nigerian critics, notably, Abiola Irele, Ben Obumselu, Dan Izebvaye, Michael Echeruo, Biodun Jeyifo, Charles Nnolim, Ime Ikiddeh, Sunday Anozie, Theo Vincent, Emmanuel Obiechina, Sam Asein, Ernest Emenyonu etc were all the rage. It would appear these days that too many poetry collections, novels and plays are chasing too few critics. This way, most of the eminent writers of today are bogged down doing literary criticism instead of concentrating on the major function of literary creation. With the emergence of literary magazines it is hoped that the new critics of the age will now have a platform to launch themselves onto the stratosphere.

The joy is that that the grand old men of Nigerian letters are still very much around to partake of the imminent spring. Octogenarian Gabriel Okara is still waxing strong as the inimitable poet, author of The Fisherman’s Invocation and the 2005 joint winner of the $20,000 Nigerian Prize for Literature administered by the NLNG. Elechi Amadi is still hard at work, as well as Achebe and Soyinka.

Through the power of the printed word we hope to give voice to the veteran and the tyro, the guru and the innocent. What will unite the company is the esteemed goal of literary excellence, for it is from the virginal that the world grows to celebrate the original.

Going to the Slave Castle in Ghana

2011-12-12T08:34:00.001-08:00

Going to Ghana for me is always a special joy. Curiously the matter that excites me the most is making a tour of the Elmina Slave Castle in the Central Region of Ghana. The place is steeped in the history of the slave trade. It was from this point that millions of Africans were sent into slavery. There is the particular place known as “Point Of No Return” from whence the captured slave learns the grave truth that he can no longer come back to his dear homeland.

Imagine what would be in the mind of a captured slave when he reaches that point of no return in which he must perforce board a ship to the New World! The hapless fellow of course comes to the harsh reality that he would no longer set his eyes on his own people ever again. It is akin to the highest point of man’s inhumanity to man.

The Portuguese reputedly captured the first African slaves in Elmina in 1441 AD. By 1471 the trade had grown and the Portuguese settled in the land. The Slave Castle was built by the Portuguese in 1482. Some 600 Portuguese soldiers built the castle. The Portuguese held the place for all of 155 years before they were displaced by the Dutch invaders.

The Dutch took effective occupation in 1637 and stayed on for 251 years. The fort on the hill of Elmina was built for the Dutch soldiers in 1665. By 1872 the place fell to the British who ruled for 85 years before

Ghana

got her independence in 1957.

It was not a pretty sight beholding the cells for the male and female slaves. The top floor was reserved for the white administrator to have a good view of choosing the best female slave to have for each night! A dark windowless room was reserved as punishment place for disobedient slaves to stay there until they die. The only peephole into the horrendously dark place was for the soldiers to see when the punished slave had died!

The white administrator has Psalm 132:4 emblazoned in the castle: “This is my rest for ever: here will I dwell; for I have desired it.”

The Africans have since put up a plaque of their own at the entrance of the castle on which is written:

In Everlasting Memory

Of the anguish of our ancestors

May those who died rest in peace

May those who returned find their roots

May humanity never again perpetrate

Such injustice against humanity

We the living vow to uphold this

Slavery has been a very controversial matter in the annals of Africa. There are those that would argue that the African notables who sold their brothers and sisters as slaves should take more of the blame than the white slavers. Whoever is to take the blame, the point is that slavery is inhuman. The relics of slavery that I saw at Elmina was so revolting as to make one question the idea of complementary humanity.

Even as slavery is unarguably bad, the reality of life in Africa today has led to the issue of Africans today willfully asking to be taken as slaves in Europe and America. It is no longer a case of getting to a point of no return literally at gunpoint. Now scores of youths brave the elements wandering through the desert to get away from Africa. It is against this background that one recalls the quip of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali: “Thank God, my great grandfather got a place in that slave ship!”

The colonization of the African mind these days happens to be the worst point of no return as opposed to setting eyes on the slave ship of yore. The rampant corruption all over the land unleashed by conscienceless leaders has made the citizens to lose all hope of achievement within the continent. It is becoming a given that one is doomed to sure death unless one steps out of the shores of Africa.

The enslaved mind is of course worse than a body bound up in chains. The chains can always be broken especially with the example of slaves like Olaudah Equiano who bought over their freedom and prospered in life. There is a crying need to address the slave mentality currently holding sway all over Africa. God, give us leaders!

Deathless Fela

2011-12-09T06:44:00.001-08:00

With the recent sacking of Madam Farida Waziri as the boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), a dear friend of mine said that he wished that Fela Anikulapo-Kuti were still alive so as to listen to his take on the scale of corruption in the country now. I told my friend that Fela had seen it all ahead of his time and needed to add nothing new. It is only left for us to learn from what Fela has left for all eternity.

There can be nobody else like Fela. The icon is quite simply indescribable and can never ever be written about in the past tense. He lives forever as evidenced by his show on Broadway in America that broke all the records. FELA LIVE!, as a musical, set the world stage on fire on Broadway.

There was a time we were doing a story on the Kuti brothers for the defunct THISWEEK magazine, and we asked the eldest Kuti daughter, Dolupo, to describe each of her three brothers. She said Olikoye was a gentleman while Beko was a diplomat. As for Fela, all she could yell was “yayoyoyooooo!”, because there was no word in English language to describe the phenomenon!

On August 3, 1997 Olikoye Ransome-Kuti addressed a press conference at Fela’s Afrika Shrine at Pepple Street, Ikeja to announce to a startled world that Fela died of AIDS-related complications the previous day. After the press conference, my great buddy and brother, Adewale Maja-Pearce and I decided to take some of Fela’s band boys who were our friends out to drink. In the course of the drinks one of Fela’s boys unaccountably exclaimed: “Na God go punish that Fela sef!” We were shocked at his utterance and asked him to explain what he meant. The distraught fellow lamented that Fela had no business dying thus leaving them, his band boys, stranded on earth. The guy explained that Fela ought to have taken the Western medicines that could have saved his life; after all, the saxophone he was fond of blowing was equally made by the white man!

I write now against the background of the beats of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s album ITT, where the iconic musician starts out by stressing that from the very beginning Africans never used to “carry shit”. The corruption of Africa’s original values that came with the arrival of the white man led to Africans staining their hands with shit. Fela makes his case by giving the names of the original shit-holes used by a very diverse range of the ethnic nations of Africa.

The advent of colonialism elicited in its sweep the abandonment of the old African way of passing faeces. Metaphorically, the “carrying of shit” has progressively led to the corruption of the entire cosmos of the African peoples. To underscore his conviction, Fela had to swear by most of the deities across Africa such as Edumare. Fela of course does not kowtow to the Godhead of Christianity as can be seen in his many songs such as Shuffering and Shmiling.

The local comprador elite would in the course of time team up with the white colonisers to loot their own country as exemplified by Obasanjo and Abiola whom Fela audaciously named in the music. The failure of the society is therefore anchored on the lack of rootedness to the real values of the traditional society, Fela powerfully argues.

It can be said that the great man died for his beliefs. Fela was not afraid to dare and die, believing that what is not worth dying for is not worth living for.

Fela can be an uncommon fun to be with. How can one ever forget the nightly rides with Fela in his Brother Beko’s ambulance upon his release from prison in 1986? Those days, I would always accompany my friend Abdul Okwechime - who used to live with Fela in Kalakuta Republic - to visit with the music maestro at the Imaria Close, Anthony Village place of his younger brother Beko, where Fela had his temporary abode then. Fela would give us a ride in the ambulance all over Lagos at night, before ending up at his cousin, Frances Kuboye’s Jazz 38 club on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi. At every police checkpoint the policemen on duty would hail and rejoice on seeing who was behind the steering-wheel! Then Fela would tell them: “Yeye people, una dey here dey suffer cold for night while oga dey deal with una wives for house!” The policemen would then give him more ovations for insulting them! That’s Fela for you.

Many of Fela’s ideas are simply out of this world. He once told me that Nigeria could win the World Cup by placing a very mighty drum behind the opposing goalkeeper! I told him FIFA would not allow that, and he replied me thusly: “But how would FIFA see it?” I kept my mouth shut, not knowing how to argue with him any further.

Atmosphere of wonder

2011-12-08T08:19:00.001-08:00

The False Truth; by Bisi Daniels; Austen & Macauley Publishers Ltd, London; 2011; 310pp

The thriller tradition in Nigerian fiction needs a breakthrough blockbuster. The early thrillers of the likes of Cyprian Ekwensi and Adaora Lily Ulasi did not create much of a tradition at a time the earnest novels of Chinua Achebe and the African Writers Series (AWS) held sway. Later practitioners such as Eddie Iroh (48 Guns for the General, The Siren in the Night) and Kole Omotoso (Fella’s Choice) did not enjoy the publishing clout to carry through their initiatives. Iroh’s novels, published within the ambit of Heinemann’s AWS, appeared at a time the Nigerian economy was collapsing and books could not be successfully distributed from Britain because returns from the Nigerian end could no longer be guaranteed. Omotoso’s book, published locally, suffered the fate of all locals: unseen. Macmillan London remarkably initiated the landmark Pacesetters Series but the collapse of the Nigerian economy put paid to the bloom.

Fast-paced fiction does the reading culture of all countries of the world a world of good. The trail being blazed by Bisi Daniels as a prolific author of thrillers deserves countrywide attention. The False Truth is indeed “a compelling and atmospheric story…” that should pave the way to a greater comprehension of the narratives of our lives and times.

A celebrated journalist and columnist who had stints in two of Nigeria’s biggest newspapers, The Guardian and ThisDay, Bisi Daniels has authored well over 20 books, including seven novels, plays, inspirational books and children’s books. The False Truth is inspirited by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels-like dictum, to wit: “Any lies repeated often enough can eventually be accepted as truth.” Dedicated in bold capitals to Dr. Mo Ibrahim of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation for promoting good governance in Africa,” The False Truth is a hip and contemporary account of Africa in the cusp of change.

Reviewing a thriller is a very delicate matter because revealing the twist in the tale is akin to removing the stuffing from the matter. It suffices to stress that The False Truth extends the narrative in a manner that the spectacle is only secondary to the idea and craft. To that extent, the essence trumps the accident.

Bisi Daniels’ special agent is of course Peter Abel, the irrepressible media advisor to President Robert Suweri of Mubonde. The False Truth is set against the background of the recent upheavals in Africa where despots glued to the thrones of various countries are coming unstuck. High-wire suspense is established from the very beginning as President Suweri addresses his countrymen and women: “A silence fell on the huge crowd, over 100,000 Mubondians crammed into the Victoria Square – a space designed for 75,000 people. After the frenzy of drumming and dancing, the silence was so heavy that, for a moment, it suggested danger. But Abel knew that the heavy security surrounding President Suweri’s team would protect the man.”

Peter Abel - who had only some years before “left his high-profile job at The Zodiac Newspapers in Lagos to work for President Suweri, as his Senior Media Advisor and speechwriter” - could always sniff danger once it manifested in any precincts. Even as the vast majority of Mubondians feasted on and rejoiced over President Suweri’s words there was one dissenting voice, screaming back at the people: “You deserve what you get! You have bought into their lies! You refuse to see the truth! You are all fools! Suweri’s agenda is right before your eyes and you refuse to see it! You will be enslaved – and you deserve it! You are whores for Suweri and you don’t even know it! You can quote me. Taye Momson.”

The protesting Taye Momson ends up being beaten up and arrested. Much as he tried, Peter Abel could not save him from sure death in the hands of his captors.

In the Mubonde house of power at Victoria Villa there are more webs than spiders could muster. With his conscience suffering from the killing of Taye Momson, Peter Abel cannot find any soul-remedying poser to the charge: “You used to be one of us… now you are one of them!”

The cabal surrounding President Suweri, led by the sinister Songa, is at odds with Peter Abel. Some interesting statistics come to the fore in the sweep of the story such as the revelation that “between 1960 and 1969, twenty-eight of the thirty-seven African leaders who left office had to be forced out.”

In the scheme of the plot of the cabal term limits cannot be respected. Tenure elongation becomes the rule rather than the exception. Anybody standing in the way must perforce be eliminated. This way, Peter Abel dies! Or, did he? It all comes to a shattering climax at a reception for President Suweri in the United States where his drink gets poisoned and a dead man wakes…

Bisi Daniels has told a spellbinding tale in The False Truth. He deserves many readers in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth, the inimitable author of The Day of the Jackal. A well-packaged reader-friendly book, The False Truth however suffers some editing errors in some places such as at Page 14: “The 73-year-old Mubonde was reticent and extremely calm…” I believe “Suweri” ought to have been there instead of “Mubonde”.

Even so, The False Truth deserves to be celebrated as a breakthrough thriller in Nigerian genre fiction. Bisi Daniels is indeed a pathfinder.

Dominic Ezeani and the reinvention of Nigerian football

2011-10-27T10:23:00.001-07:00

Many football pundits tend to forget that the first serious victory for the Nigerian national team was the soccer gold won at the 1973 All-Africa Games staged in Lagos. For many years before then, Nigeria flattered to deceive with an array of football masters such as Teslim “Thunder” Balogun, Dan Anyiam, Etim Henshaw, Dejo Fayemi, Godwin Achebe etc. Some of these early star players were seen as irreplaceable, and they played for Nigeria for many years on end. In fact Godwin Achebe who had been playing for Nigeria since Independence in 1960 was still the captain of the 1973 All-Africa Games until a young centre-back straight out of Christ the King College (CKC) Onitsha, Dominic Ezeani, replaced the great man, thus helping Nigeria to win her very first major soccer title.

Curiously, whenever the list of Nigeria’s greatest-ever footballers is compiled you more often than not find that Dominic Ezeani’s name is missing. What even makes it more scandalous is that it was not only Godwin Achebe that Ezeani retired but that other football great known as Victor Oduah. A player who ended the era of two of Nigeria’s greatest ever defenders deserves his place among the immortals of Nigerian football. It was with Ezeani that the modern era of effective libero application began in Nigeria.

Popularly known as “Hugo Harris”, Dominic Ezeani was the pillar in the defence of the all-conquering East Central State Academicals of 1971 that won the All-Nigeria Manuwa/Adebajo Cup. The team boasted of such schoolboy soccer artistes as Ahamefula Umelo, Pat Ekeji, John Azinge, Moses Nweke, Obed Ariri, Godwin Ogbueze, Kenneth Ilodigwe, Tony Uzoka etc. After winning the Manuwa/Adebajo cup competed for by the secondary school footballers across the then 12 states of Nigeria by beating Kwara State 2-0 in the final, the East Central State Academicals were paired up in a match with Enugu Rangers. Within a short time the schoolboys were three goals up, menacingly thrashing the great Rangers team. Soccer administrators in Enugu had to think fast to save the pride of the Igbo nation, such as Rangers was seen after the Civil War, from total disgrace. The administrators met with the match officials to ensure that the match ended as a respectable drawn game! It was there and then that Ezeani was drafted into the Rangers squad, and was soon made the captain of the team.

Ezeani proved such an irreplaceable pivot of the East Central Academicals team that once he left they became beatable. Ezeani played for the All-Nigeria Academicals team that dealt heavy blows, home and away, to Ghana that used to be the nemesis of Nigeria’s senior national team. Whenever Ezeani returned back to his school, CKC Onitsha, after representing Nigeria, the legendary Principal of the school, Rev. Father Nicholas Tagbo would insist that the budding soccer star must sit and pass his exams!

The next stop for Ezeani was the Green Eagles, then preparing for the January 1973 All-Africa Games in Lagos. He of course displaced the very captain of the team, the great but ageing Skipper Godwin Achebe, and then paired with Victor Oduah in the centre of the Nigerian defence. Oduah had to take over as the captain of the team that won Nigeria’s first ever football title by beating Guinea 2-0 in the pulsating final.

Soon after the All-Africa Games soccer gold triumph, Nigeria’s Green Eagles met with perennial rivals Ghana’s Black Stars in Lagos on February 10, 1973 in a World Cup qualifier. Nigeria’s line-up for the match was: Emmanuel Okala, Tony Igwe, Morton Owolo, Sanni Mohammed, Victor Oduah, Dominic Ezeani, Gideon Njoku, Yakubu Mambo, Haruna Ilerika, Kenneth Olayombo, Josiah Dombraiye. Ghana fielded: Lante France, Enoch Asumadu, Samuel Ayi Acquah, Joseph Ghartey, Daniel Oppong, Samuel Amartefio, John Taylor, Eric Amankwah Amansua, Kwasi Owusu, Isaac Eshun, Malik Jabir. The Green Eagles scored two goals through Kenneth Olayombo and Yakubu Mambo while Ghana netted three goals through the dreaded centre-forward Kwasi Owusu in the 18th, 55th, and 82^nd minutes. There was crowd trouble at the National Stadium, Surulere, Lagos, as Ghana’s third goal was suspected to be scored from an offside position but was awarded by referee Paul Nkounkou from Congo-Brazzaville. The match was abandoned after 87 minutes. Ghana was thereafter awarded a 2-0 win.

The return leg in Accra, Ghana witnessed the dropping of captain Victor Oduah, thus ensuring that Ezeani had effectively retired Nigeria’s two great captains! Ezeani was paired with the young Anthony Ottah in central defence and succeeded magnificently in keeping striker Kwasi Owusu quiet in a match that ended as a goalless draw. Of course
Ghana’s Black Stars won on 2-0 on aggregate, but Ezeani had made the point of setting a new course for Nigerian football.

Having been made the captain of Enugu Rangers, Ezeani led the club to winning the double of Challenge Cup and League Title in 1974. In the 1974 Challenge Cup final that Rangers defeated Mighty Jets of Jos 2-0, the late Aloy Atuegbu who was playing for the Jos team told me of his encounter with Ezeani. Atuegbu said that the then Head of State Gen. Yakubu Gowaon who hailed from Plateau State had come to his family home in Jos and promised him a Volkswagen Beetle if he could help defeat Rangers and thus end the jinx of Mighty Jets never ever winning the Challenge Cup. Atuegbu was therefore charged up, turning the Rangers defence at will in the early minutes of the match. According to Atuegbu, Ezeani ran up to him and spoke Igbo to him that can best be translated in the modern lingo of “Aloy, you go wound-o!” Atuegbu and Ezeani happen to come from neighbouring towns (Adazi and Agulu respectively) in today’s Anambra State. Atuegbu did not want to hear any Igbo talk and thus brushed Ezeani aside. Meantime, Rangers no-nonsense left-back Harrison Mecha had heard what his captain had said to Atuegbu. Shortly after, Atuegbu made yet another darting run only for Mecha’s crunchy tackle to ensure that he was stretchered off the match!

After setting Rangers on the part of success, Ezeani was offered admission to Howard University in the United States. Christian Chukwu was then groomed to take over from Ezeani, and that was how Chukwu became the Green Eagles captain even as a new member of the team! Even so, the Rangers management ensured that Ezeani was brought back to Nigeria to play for the team anytime it had problems in prosecuting the then 1975 African Cup of Club Champions. Ezeani could not come back for the celebrated semi-final clash with Mehalla of Egypt because he was playing in the NCAA semi-final match as reported in the December 15, 1975 edition of the celebrated American magazine, Sports Illustrated Volume 43, Issue 24, where he dealt with a 190-pound 6-footer of a striker named Greg Villa. According to the Sports Illustrated report: “Early in the second period Villa stole the ball from Fullback Samuel Acquah and charged in for a goal. Taking a pass from Steve Axmacher, he scored again at 17:13 of the half to make it 3-1. A few moments after that, Howard's Dominic Ezeani nailed Villa with a body block in midjump. Villa got up slowly and wobbled to the bench, bleeding from the mouth and clutching his thigh. No penalty was called, except that normally mild-mannered Midfielder John Zacheis was banished from the Cougar bench and the game for expressing his displeasure with the referee's evaluation of the incident. The referees worked the rest of the game with their hands hovering over their pockets, yellow cards at the ready.”

Ezeani was flown back from America for the final of the African Cup of Champion Clubs against Hafia FC of Guinea in December 1975 after Rangers had lost the first leg by 1-0 in Conakry, Guinea. The Rangers team was holed up in Enugu, hoping to play the Hafia team in the Coal City, when the then Nigeria Football Association (NFA) suddenly asked the team to proceed to Lagos a day to the encounter. There was even talk of Rangers boycotting the game when the new military governor Lt-Col. Atom Kpera who had just replaced the more charismatic Col. Anthony Aboki Ochefu ordered the team to depart to Lagos despite club chairman Jim Nwobodo’s protestations. In a match played in such controversial circumstances, Rangers players could not believe their eyes when the referee disallowed the long throws of Nwabueze Nwankwo with which they had planned to dislodge the passing game of Hafia of Guinea. Ezeani and his mates tried as best they could in the oppressive circumstances, losing 2-1 in the end.

The Ezeani phenomenon may have been brief but it represented a major shift in Nigerian football from the old style centre-back to the modern libero such as Germany’s Frank Beckenbauer. Ezeani paved the way for the emergence of the Christian Chukwus, Godwin Odiyes, Stephen Keshis, Uche Okechukwus, Taribo Wests and the sundry modern centre-backs who ensured that at last Nigeria could be counted among the countries winning soccer laurels.

50 Years of Nigerian Literature

2010-08-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria rules the world of literature. There is no major prize in literature that has not been won by Nigerian writers. Wole Soyinka capped it all up in 1986 by winning the coveted Nobel Prize for literature. Chinua Achebe, the acclaimed Father of the African Novel, was awarded the Man Booker Prize for his lifetime achievement in fiction writing, beating a redoubtable shortlist that included Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Ian McEwan etc. Ben Okri had earlier won the Booker Prize in 1991.

Before Nigeria’s arrival at Independence in 1960, diverse literatures had thrived in the local languages. Pita Nwana, the author of Omenuko blazed the trail in the publishing of fiction in Igbo. In the Western part of Nigeria D.O. Fagunwa, author of Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole, was the trailblazer in the writing and publishing of Yoruba literature. Abubakar Imam, author of Magana Jari Ce, was the pathfinder in the North. The many Nigerian languages were well represented in literature before the almost overwhelming adoption of English by the emergent writers.

Amos Tutuola astounded the literary world with the publication of his novel The Palmwine Drinkard in 1954, some six years before Nigeria’s winning of self-rule. The book written in quaint English won the praise of the Irish poet Dylan Thomas and set Tutuola on the path of a redoubtable literary career.

Cyprian Ekwensi who had trained as a forester and a pharmacist quickly won his plaudits as an early story writer and novelist. From 1947 onwards, he published such titles as Ikolo the Wrestler and When Love Whispers which helped to launch forth the legendary Onitsha Market Literature chapbooks. Ekwensi would in the years ahead prove to be arguably Africa’s most prolific writer with the publication of books such as People of the City, Burning Grass, The Passport of Mallam Ilia, Jagua Nana, An African Night’s Entertainment, Drummer Boy, Divided We Stand, Survive the Peace etc. Ekwensi died in 2007.

In publishing Things Fall Apart in 1958 Achebe initiated a trend into looking into the history and the past to “understand where the rain started beating us”. The success of Things Fall Apart led to the initiation of the African Writers Series (AWS) that saw many African writers getting into print. Achebe’s first hero Okonkwo was a strong man who failed because he thought the white man could be confronted with force. In the sequel No Longer at Ease corruption became the undoing of the anti-hero Obi Okonkwo. The intellectual Ezeulu in Arrow of God equally fails in battling the white man with reason as opposed to Okonkwo’s brute strength. Achebe prefigures the collapse of partisan politics in his 1966 novel A Man of the People that uncannily ends with a coup and the hint of a counter coup. The advent of the military in politics recharges Achebe’s 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah in which the telling of the story is given supreme command in the affairs of the world.

The many feats of Nigerian writing of course received the crowning glory in 1986 when Wole Soyinka won the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature. Soyinka in accepting the prize graciously said it was due honour for all the labour of his fellow writers across the African continent. Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature happens to be an all-rounder who is at once a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, translator etc. His vast body of works includes the plays A Dance of the Forests, The Swamp Dwellers, The Road, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, The Jero Plays, Death and the King’s Horseman; the novels The Interpreters and Season of Anomie; the poetry collections Idanre and other Poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Ogun Abibiman, Mandela’s Earth, Samarkand; the autobiographical titles Ake, the Years of Childhood, Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years, You Must Set Forth at Dawn etc.

The traditional past that Achebe put on the literary front burner has been undertaken by other writers such as John Munonye in The Only Son and the sequel Obi, Elechi Amadi in The Concubine and The Great Ponds, T. Obinkaram Echewa in The Land’s Lord, Flora Nwapa in Efuru and Idu etc.

Flora Nwapa was at the vanguard of the emergence of female explorers of the lore that included distinguished writers such as Adaora Lily Ulasi, author of Many Thing Begin for Change, Many Thing You No Understand, The Man From Shagamu etc.

Buchi Emecheta, based in London, earned her lofty placing in the annals of Nigerian literature with novels like Second Class Citizen, The Joys of Motherhood, Destination Biafra etc.

After the initial flush of independence, came the disillusionment that attended the ruinous politics of the local politicians who took over from the colonial masters. Novelists such as Nkem Nwankwo, author of Danda and My Mercedes is Bigger Than Yours, turned to satire and comedy to depict the emerging world. For the poet Gabriel Okara who wrote one novel, The Voice, finding the “it” was well nigh impossible in English laced with Ijaw phrasing.

Onuora Nzekwu in Wand of Noble Wood as well as Blade Among the Boys walks the tight rope of tradition and modernity in the emergence of the Nigerian nation state. T.M. Aluko extends the divide between the modern and the traditional in his novels One Man, One Matchet; One Man, One Wife; Kinsman and Foreman; Chief the Honourable Minister; His Worshipful Majesty and Wrong Ones in the Dock. Aluko died earlier this year but not after publishing his last novel, Our Born gain President.

The emergence of Obi Egbuna on the scene somewhat made him to be seen as the enfant terrible of Nigerian literature with controversial books such as Wind Versus Polygamy, The Anthill, Emperor of the Sea, The Rape of Lysistrata, The Madness of Didi and so on. He was an unapologetic defender of the Black Power movement which made him to run into problems with the mainstream media in Britain.

A major rupture in Nigerian writing occurred with the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra war which affected the psyche of all the writers in a variety of ways. I.N.C. Aniebo saw action in the war and his novel The Anonymity of Sacrifice is an insightful tale on fratricidal infighting, a theme he extends in his next novel, the tradition-cum-Christian portrait The Journey Within.

Kole Omotoso had in his first novel explored the theme of black-and-white in love in The Edifice but the absurdity of war seized his consciousness in The Combat; only for him to later tackle the sweep of Nigerian history in Just Before Dawn. S.O. Mezu in Behind the Rising Sun undertakes an in-depth recreation of the Biafran debacle while Eddie Iroh engages all facets of the war in his Biafran trilogy Forty-Eight Guns for the General, Toads of War and The Siren in the Night.

Isidore Okpewho initially undertakes a study of polygamy in The Victims before winning the 1972 African Arts Prize with his second novel The Last Duty.

The situating of social reality in the appreciation of the mores of the day was given fillip by Festus Iyayi in his novels Violence, The Contract and the Commonwealth literature prize winning Civil War novel Heroes.

The 1991 Booker Prize was won by Ben Okri with his 500-page novel The Famished Road, thus confirming the great promise of the author in early novels such as Flowers and Shadows and The Landscapes Within.

The debut novels of Okey Ndibe (Arrows of Rain) and Ike Oguine (A Squatter’s Tale) were published as the last titles in the esteemed African Writers Series.

The feminine experience gets mainstream treatment in Ifeoma Okoye’s Behind the Clouds and Men Without Ears. Mabel Segun who recently emerged joint-winner alongside Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo of the Nigeria Literature Prize administered by the NLNG remains the doyen of children’s literature writing. Segun’s daughter Omowunmi is equally an award-winning novelist with The Third Dimple.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is without question the doyenne of the new writing coming out of Nigeria. Her debut novel Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Prize while her second novel based on the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the esteemed Orange Prize for female writing. She has since released her debut collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck.

Sefi Attah won the Wole Soyinka Prize with Everything Good Will Come. Karen King-Aribisala (Our Wife and Other Stories) and Bina Nengi-Ilagha (Condolences) are celebrated award winners in fiction. Chika Unigwe writes out of Belgium, and her The Phoenix is a spellbinding read. She followed up with a critically successful novel on the black prostitution ring in Belgium entitled On Black Sisters Street. Unoma Azuah, author of Sky-High Flames, is charting her own course in the United States in the manner of Chris Abani of Graceland fame. Helen Oyeyemi made worldwide headlines with her debut novel published by Bloomsbury The Icarus Girl.

Zaynab Alkali of The Stillborn fame is the Northern star, and she is backed to the hilt by the men as represented by Ibrahim Tahir (The Last Imam) and Abubakar Gimba (Golden Apples).

Adebayo Williams is the master of the political novel while the youthful Akin Adesokan carries the carnivalesque strategy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to fruition in his award-winning Roots in the Sky. Maik Nwosu is a winner of multiple awards with books like Invisible Chapters and Alpha Song.

The new kids on the block writing their names in gold on the fiction marble are Toni Kan (Ballad of Rage), Odili Ujubuonu (Pregnancy of the Gods and Treasure in the Winds), Jude Dibia (Walking with Shadows and Unbridled) and Kaine Agary (Yellow-Yellow). Agary won the coveted Nigeria Prize for Literature sponsored by the NLNG.

Dulue Mbachu broke bold ground with his Biafra war novel War Games while intellectual fiction in the manner of Soyinka’s The Inte4rpreters was given pride of place by Isidore Emeka Uzoatu in Vision Impossible. El-Nukoya writes the ultimate Nigerian blockbuster in his award-winning Nine Lives.

The Caine Prize for African Writing was won by Helon Habila with his short story entitled “Love Poems” and he has since published two highly rated novels Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time. He has just come out with a new novel, Oil on Water, limning the Niger Delta tragedy. Another Nigerian based in Britain, Segun Afolabi, also won the prize and published the well-received novel Goodbye Lucille. I happen to have been nominated for the 2008 Caine Prize, but that is by the way!

As a Black Briton Nigeria’s Diran Adebayo won much praise with his debut prize-winning novel Some Kind of Black.

Biyi Bandele has straddled the podia of drama and fiction, publishing novels like The Man Who Came From The Back of Beyond and Burma Boy as well as plays such the adaptation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

It was Soyinka’s exploits in drama that won the Nobel Prize. A distinguished contemporary of Soyinka is of course J.P. Clark, author of the plays Song of a Goat, The Masquerade, The Raft, Ozidi, The Wives Revolt, All for Oil etc. Clark is equally an accomplished poet whose collections such as A Reed in the Tide and Casualties inspired the succeeding generations of poets.

Femi Osofisan brings the man in the margins of Soyinka’s drama to the centre stage. His many plays like Morountodun, Once Upon Four Robbers, Midnight Hotel etc are the most performed in the country.

Bode Sowande has run the Odu Themes theatre group for decades and is the author of Farewell to Babylon and Other Plays, Tornados Full of Dreams etc. Tunde Fatunde is the acknowledged master of drama in pidgin with such popular titles as Oga na Thiefman and No Food, No Country.

Ahmed Yerima who manages the National Theatre as well as the National Troupe rivals Osofisan for prolific output of plays. He won the Nigeria Literature Prize for 2006 with the play Hard Ground.

Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo is another respected new age playwright with plays like Tower of Burden. Wole Oguntokun is a lawyer-dramatist reviving live theatre at Terra Kulture with his plays notably Who is Afraid of Wole Soyinka?

Tess Onwueme is a leading female playwright carrying further the torch of the pioneering Zulu Sofola.

Nigeria happens to be a land of poets where, it is said, if a pin is thrown up it will inevitably land on the head of a poet! Christopher Okigbo was the quintessential Nigerian poet until his death in the Biafra war. The poets dotting the land today must each have received a knock from Okigbo. Such is his influence with his collection Labyrinths with The Path of Thunder.

Okigbo, Clark, Soyinka and Okara were the first quartet of distinguished poets from Nigeria. Odia Ofeimun with his controversial collection The Poet Lied leads the charge of extending their legacy. Kalu Uka is as accomplished a poet as any.

Niyi Osundare remains an adored poet all over the world with outstanding collections like A Nib in the Pond, Eye of the Earth, Waiting Laughters, Moonsongs, Midlife etc. Tanure Ojaide, Chimalum Nwankwo, Funsho Aiyejina, the late Ezenwa Ohaeto, Obiora Udechukwu, Tony Afejukwu etc are poets who have added so much luster to what Nigeria has to offer the world in lyricism.

The Update Poets namely the recently deceased Esiaba Irobi, Afam Akeh, Uche Nduka, Emman Usman Shehu, Kemi-Atanda Ilori and the late Idzia Ahmad showed early promise in the poetic craft and they have in various degrees fulfilled the promise.

Olu Oguibe, Amatsorero Ede, Harry Garuba, Chiedu Ezeanah, Nike Adesuyi, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, Nnimo Bassey, Kayode Adenirokun, Angela Agali-Nwosu etc are charting diverse courses in the poetic craft.

Ogaga Ifowodo has won three awards with his troika of collections, namely, Homeland, Madiba and The Oil Lamp. Amu Nnadi characteristically only writes in the lower case; he was an award winner with his first collection, The Fire Within. Akeem Lasisi and Kudo Eresia-Eke are exceptional performance poets.

Nduka Otiono bags the prize for eclecticism. His award-winning story collection The Night Hides With a Knife is a study in oral application. Nengi Ilagha is a prolific award-winning poet, author of Mantids and an ambitious omnibus twelve-volume tome.

Nigerian writing has justly earned its high placing on the global literary chart. As I wrote from the very beginning, Nigerian writers have on all the prizes available all over the world, be it the Nobel Prize, the Booker, the Orange Broadband, the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth, the Noma and so on. Even so, as the grand old man of Nigerian letters Chinua Achebe wrote “It’s morning yet on creation day.”

Okot p'Bitek at Ife

2010-08-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

Okot p’Bitek at Ife: Days of Dance, Dreams and Drinks

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The urge to go the university was not to earn a degree, but to hang out with writers. And lionized writers do not come any greater than Professor Wole Soyinka whose name I traced down to the department he was heading at the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), before I filled in the university entrance examination forms. I got to Ife and Soyinka was there with a supporting cast of engaging characters, but it was Okot p’Bitek, the inimitable Ugandan author of Song of Lawino who took over my life completely for the period he spent at the university. Soyinka, like his art, could be aloof, but Okot was readily accessible and a charming man of disarming simplicity who drank beer and whisky with all in fetching fellowship and would not want to be referred to as “Prof” or whatever title.
“Just call me Okot,” he always said in his soft, cooing voice. Between 1978 and 1980 at Ife Okot was the issue. It was while Soyinka’s lad Francis was taking me to the great man’s refrigerator for yet another beer session on a certain campus afternoon that I ran into Okot the Ugandan. He did not wait to hear the personable Francis out before he turned to me and said: “Let’s go and drink!” Okot could not understand why I should be wandering to an absent Soyinka’s beer when his was ready to hand!
The drinking with Okot lasted till late in the night, and resumed very early the next morning. It was a process that continued until Okot left Ife, and there was hardly any space between the drinking bouts for hangover to get a look-in!
The son of a prominent Protestant family from Gulu in the northern region of Uganda, Okot was born in 1931. He published a novel, Lak Tar, in his native Acholi language in 1953. He revealed that he had earlier written a poem entitled “The Long Spear” as well as composing an opera in English modeled after Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”. Okot could not really be brought into recounting the details of his juvenilia, save to say that the novel Lak Tar told the sad story of a young man who travelled to the city of Kampala to earn the bride-price for his sweetheart, only to end up coming back to the village broke after being robbed of the pittance he had earned.

In addition to his interest in literature, Okot was at once a choirmaster, schoolteacher, local politician and an ardent footballer. It was in fact for his prowess in the football field that he earned his early renown. He was in the squad of the Ugandan national team that travelled to the United Kingdom in 1958. He was an enchanting dribbler who left his opponents kicking the grass in his wake. While other members of the team went back to Uganda Okot stayed on in the UK to further his studies. He earned a Diploma in Education at Bristol University, England. He would later bag a Law degree from the University of Aberystwyth in 1962 before ending up at Oxford University to study Social Anthropology. A polymath, Okot excelled in diverse fields.

According to Kojo Senanu and Theo Vincent in A Selection of African Poetry, Okot’s study of Social Anthropology “has become an abiding passion and in some sense has enabled him to study in great depth the oral literature, culture and traditions of his people. His poetry is not only the outcome of his findings, but is also fortified by a rich blend of native traditional literary forms and acquired English forms. p’ Bitek’s poetry represents one of the best examples of African poetry to successfully express African ideas in European forms, retaining the lyric freshness and simplicity of the songs of his own tribe, the Acholi, and using personal imagery. The distinct result has no comparison in the whole range of African poetry.”

A student of traditional songs and divinities, Okot who had lost his Christian faith while studying abroad returned to Uganda to organize the Gulu festival of song and dance. The original version of the classic Song of Lawino was written in the Acholi language and was titled Wer pa Lawino. In the words of Okot, the song was “translated from the Acholi by the author who has thus clipped a bit of the eagle’s wings and rendered the sharp edges of the warrior’s sword rusty and blunt, and has also murdered rhythm and rhyme.”

Song of Lawino became an immediate phenomenon on publication in 1966. Bookshops could not stock enough copies, and the East African Publishing House was hard-pressed to meet with reprint demands. Okot won more fans for poetry than all the other African poets put together. While the general readers celebrated Okot, the politicians felt threatened. Okot in fact lost his job as the director of the Uganda Cultural Centre because of his strident lampoon of politicians in Song of Lawino. The best critic of the poem, according to Okot, was an enraged woman who broke a bottle on Okot’s head while he was drinking in a Gulu bar with his friends. The woman whose name was Tina pointedly accused Okot that she was the Clementine lampooned in the poem. Okot bore the scar of the wound till his death! Who says poetry makes nothing happen?

Song of Ocol, the husband’s reply to Lawino, was published in 1967. Writing in Books Abroad, Richard F. Bauerle states: “Together Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol constitute a heated debate over the future of Africa. In graphic metaphor and with dramatic intensity, p’Bitek presents the conflict between the new and old, and in the process reveals a remarkable sensitivity to the values of both.”

Okot also published Two Songs, made up of “Song of Prisoner” and “Song of Malaya”. The interesting story behind the writing of “Song of Prisoner” is Okot’s imprisonment after getting drunk in Uganda. He had visited some friends and took to many bottles until his friends put him on a train to send him away. The train passengers accused him of disturbing them with his noise and had him locked up overnight. In the morning he asked to talk to the district commissioner so as to contact his wife. His jailers were shocked to discover that the “vagrant” knew the big man who instantly kowtowed to Okot by ordering his immediate release from captivity. Okot wrote the poem in the weekend following the murder of the prominent politician Tom Mboya who was equally his drinking companion.

“Song of Malaya” was inspired by the hypocritical arrest of prostitutes by Ugandan potentates who use the women. Actually some of the men were actually pulled off the women in order to make the arrests!

In 1978, just before coming to Nigeria, Okot published his translation of Acholi stories in the volume Hare and Hornbill. His translation of Acholi songs and poetry is entitled The Horn of my Love.

As a scholar Okot published African Religions in Western Scholarship in 1971 and Africa’s Cultural Revolution in 1975. His disagreement with John Mbiti, the distinguished authority on religious studies, is total.

The stories Okot told me of his life can fill a very large book, but only a fraction will suffice here. After his dismissal from the directorship of the Uganda Cultural Centre, Okot was employed by Kenya’s University of Nairobi where he enjoyed a healthy rivalry with emerging East African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Taban lo Liyong.

During the years of Idi Amin’s reign of terror, Okot’s visits to Uganda became fraught with danger. For instance, when Okot travelled to his hometown Gulu for the burial of his father, he was at a ceremony where Idi Amin caught sight of him and exploded in rage: “Get him! He is one of our enemies!”

One of Idi Amin’s cabinet ministers who happened to be a friend of Okot ensured that the arrest was not brutal. The minister actually helped Okot to escape by literally forcing the adamant poet to put on a coat before pushing him into the ministerial convoy for a death-defying drive across the Ugandan border! It was the narrowest of escapes, but Okot concerned himself more with complaining that he was against his will made to put on a suite and wave to the roadside crowds like a minister!

Okot’s arrival in Nigeria and at Ife foreshadowed a time of great drama and high jinks. The delegation sent from Ife to meet Okot at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, missed the man. Okot on his own hired a cab for the journey to Ife. He was hoping to put up with his friend David Rubadiri, the Malawian poet who had also taken up an appointment with the University of Ife.

“I suddenly barged into David’s room and I was disappointed that I did not catch him making out with a Yoruba woman!” Okot said, laughing.

Okot was yet to get a breather when Soyinka came in. Then there was a knock on the door, according to Okot’s account, and in stepped JP Clark who was not then on speaking terms with Soyinka. A heavy silence descended on the room. Okot tried to make the most of the embarrassing moment but his two visitors would not play ball. JP had driven all the way from his post as a professor in the University of Lagos when he heard of Okot’s arrival at Ife. In the end, one of the poets stormed out for sanity to prevail.

Getting Africa’s three leading poets into such a charged room is the stuff of which legends are made, and Okot happens to be a legend and legend-maker. He told me of a reading he had overseas, and how a particular girl appeared to be enjoying his delivery more than the others. He later invited the girl over to his hotel suite, and he was about to start “touching” when the girl told Okot that “Mum wants you at home for dinner.” It was then it dawned on Okot that the girl was actually his daughter!

“I nearly made love to my daughter!” Okot lamented. Laughing, I quoted his words from his poem “Song of Prisoner”: I want to suck the stiff breasts/ Of my wife’s younger sister.” He leered at me, and ordered yet another round of beer and whisky.

Okot always held court at the bar in the foyer of Oduduwa Hall, the big theatre of the university. Anything could happen during those drinking sessions. The Deputy Vice-Chancellor accosted Okot one day and said: “This is wrong, Professor p’Bitek. How can you take your students out to drink?”

Okot stared at the man for a good minute before saying: “You must have gone to a bush university or you would have known that professors share drinks with their students. By the way, why do you part your hair?” The man fled!

The proprietress of the bar once remonstrated with Okot on not clearing the huge bill he had accumulated and the poet promptly told the woman: “I am sure your husband didn’t do you well last night. When you go home, tell him to f—k you thoroughly!” And the woman, too, fled!

Even with the talk of unpaid bills, Okot would order a big bottle of White Horse whisky for the great actress Florence Toun Oni who had joined the table. Presenting the whisky with a flourish Okot blew a kiss to the smiling lady. Watching in a safe distance the proprietress simply shook her head. A friend of mine, Patrick Izobo-Agbebeaku who would later make history as the first university graduate bus conductor in Nigeria, demanded to see Okot’s debts. Patrick wondered aloud why the madam should be insulting “Prof Okot for a small amount of money”. Okot quickly shut up my friend with these words: “If you think it’s a small amount, then pay!”

Okot would not use the urinary of the bar, stressing that the place was dirty. Motioning to me, Okot started out of the bar. I got the message. He only made use of the Vice-Chancellor’s toilet which he said was the only clean toilet in the entire campus. It was drizzling, and I pointed at the falling rain.

“Come on, the rain makes you grow,” Okot said to me, walking in the rain.

Walking with him up the staircase, we came into the office of the VC’s half-caste secretary. “Watch me do some beautiful things to this beautiful woman,” Okot said, grabbing at the lady who ducked and ran.

Okot felt then that I was a fully-formed poet who had no business being a student. It was under his influence that I wrote the long poem “When I Shall Marry (Eater of my Wealth)” which was published in the university’s arts magazine Sokoti.

“Sharpen your pen!” This was the unique piece of advice I got from Okot on the art of writing. He discussed everything but the nitty-gritty of creative writing. I once tried to discuss Wole Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters with him. Picking up the book, he said: “Fine book by my friend Soyinka.” Then he tossed the book aside and said, “Let’s go and drink.”

He told me he was working on a book on his experiences in Nigeria to be dedicated to me. To him, everybody in Nigeria was a lizard, starting from the country’s leader who was the big lizard then based in Lagos. He had actually written the first line of the book which goes thus: “The lizard says he is coming, but the lizard never comes.” Whatever became of the book is in the lap of the gods. There was also mention of a long poem entitled “Song of Soldier.”

He would not discuss his fellow writers except to say, for instance, that Chinua Achebe is “a beautiful man.” He told the story of how Ugandans broke down and cried when Achebe was flying back to Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War after a visit to Kampala. The East Africans could not bear the thought of not seeing the author of Things Fall Apart ever again as had happened to Christopher Okigbo.

Okot took ill towards the end of his stay at Ife. He discharged himself from the hospital on regaining consciousness. He got back to his house to discover that all the drinks and alcohol had been removed. He was dying to have a quick drink. Then he saw David Rubadiri’s houseboy learning to ride a motorcycle. Okot promptly ordered the learner to ferry him to the nearest watering-hole. Both fell down from the bike, and Okot had a big gash for his efforts.

When Idi Amin was chased away from power Okot celebrated. He pointedly told me that I would follow him to Makerere University as he would not want me to continue my studies at Ife which he dismissed as a “University of Lizards”. He spoke glowingly of Yusuf Lule who was poised to take over from Idi Amin. He was so determined to take me to Makerere University that he chased me out of the examination hall of the GNS 1 “Use of English” course. I left the exam hall to help him buy meat at the Leventis Stores near the staff quarters. Then we retired to drinking beer and whisky while my mates were writing the exams!

Okot was open to a fault. He showed me letters from universities like Iowa, Harvard, Texas, Makerere etc offering him professorships in diverse disciplines such as Creative Writing, African Studies, English and Divinity. In the end I could not summon up enough courage to abandon my studies at Ife for the journey with Okot to Uganda’s Makerere University. Schoolwork and passing exams may not have mattered to me, but damaging my parents and sundry loved ones through transnational rascality did. It was while writing my degree exams in 1982 that the news was broken to me that my great friend Okot was dead. I dedicated my final year thesis to him. He deserved no less.

James Hadley Chase & Lobsang Rampa

2010-08-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

From Hadley Chase to Lobsang Rampa

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Back then as schoolboys in the 1970s we used to enjoy such authors as James Hadley Chase and T. Lobsang Rampa. It was much later in life that one learnt that James Hadley Chase was the penname of Rene Raymond, an Englishman who used to work for the booksellers Simpkin, Marshall. In the course of his work Mr. Raymond read many trashy thrillers written by American authors and felt he could write better than the lot. He then penned his own thriller in 1939 entitled No Orchids for Miss Blandish and sent it off to the Hutchinson publishing house then under the chairmanship of the half-mad “Mr. Walter” Hutchinson. Two positive readers’ reports were needed for the maverick publisher to agree to publish the book. An editor in the publishing company, Jim Reynolds, forged the two reports that convinced Mr. Hutchison. The author who had then adopted the pseudonym of James Hadley Chase was paid an advance of 30 pounds sterling. In a handful of years No Orchids for Miss Blandish sold a staggering half a million copies thus enabling James Hadley Chase to write more thrillers such as The Vulture is a Patient Bird, Believed Violent, The Way the Cookie Crumbles, An Ear to the Ground, This Way for a Shroud, Strictly for Cash etc.

The case of another author named T. (for Tuesday) Lobsang Rampa is even more fabulous. This Lobsang Rampa fellow wrote to the publishers, Secker and Warburg, that his real name was Dr Kuan-suo and that he had authored his autobiography in which he told the true story of his life as a lama in Tibet from the age of seven. According to the self-styled Lobsang Rampa, his search for higher knowledge in Tibet led to his being operated on to open a “third eye” in his forehead. This was done by boring a hole through his forehead! The book The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa was published in 1956 and quickly sold some 50,000 copies and was translated into a handful of languages before alarm bells rang fast and free about the dubiousness of the book.

The Daily Mail of London scooped that the so-called Lobsang Rampa was no Tibetan after all; he was in fact an Englishman named Cyril Henry Hoskins, the son of a plumber from Devon! He was in real life a surgical goods maker and part-time photographer. After he was exposed for the fraud he was Lobsang Rampa was traced to a hotel in Dublin where he was hiding. He made some very interesting explanations to the reporters.

He readily agreed that he was truly an Englishman but added the dimension that his body was inhabited by a Tibetan lama! Lobsang Rampa, also known as Dr Kuan-suo and Cyril Henry Hoskins, further explained that the lama took possession of his body on one inauspicious day in which he fell down from a tree while attempting to take photographs of an owl! It was while he lay on the ground that a lama in blue and saffron robes floated in the air toward him and then suddenly took possession of his body! This kind of a tall story is deserving of the ultimate prize in fiction writing. Lobsang Rampa, even as he was exposed as a hoax, went on to publish other books such as Doctor from Lhasa, The Rampa Story, Living with the Lama etc.

The intriguing life of Lobsang Rampa forms a part of the memoirs of his publisher Frederic Warburg entitled All Authors Are Equal. Actually other publishers had turned down Lobsang Rampa on the grounds that his proposition was implausible but the enthusiatic Warburg gave the benefit of the doubt to the self-styled mystic whom he agreed to meet over lunch. Publisher Warburg was surprised that mystic Rampa ordered only fish and chips for lunch!

The scoop by Daily Mail on Lobsang Rampa was masterminded by another writer with links to Tibet, Heinrich Harrer, the bestselling author of Seven Years in Tibet.

I have been reliably informed that a Nigerian publisher is in the process of re-publishing James Hadley Chase’s bestselling titles here in Nigeria. Methinks it would have made more sense encouraging Nigerian authors to write their own thrillers instead of reissuing Anglo-American junk. The way we are going, we may end up having a Nigerian publisher actually printing for Nigerian consumption the English 419 known as Lobsang Rampa. That will be the very limit.

Scrap Aso Rock

2010-08-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

Scrap Aso Rock today!

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Due to the request of one of my ardent readers, Chief Joe Ifedobi (Okosisi Akpo), who I refer to as a “strategic source” I am reprinting this article I had published earlier – but in a slightly amended form. The source of the plenteous troubles of Nigeria is Aso Rock. That place is deadly. Anybody who thinks that the protracted death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua is “ordinary” should have his head examined and his brain unscrambled. Aso Villa is a haunted house, haunted day and night by very vile and evil spirits! How do I know this for a certainty? Ask my jujuman in Agege, near Pen Cinema!

Actually it is only death wish that would make any man agree to occupy a house reluctantly vacated by that highly “medicated” man who propounded the immortal theory that Apartheid in South Africa could only be defeated by juju! It is my candid opinion that the departed “Umoru” was not sufficiently “medicated” to occupy that cabalistic enclave. He was grossly unprotected against the relentless onslaught of supernatural Scud missiles and preternatural Molotov cocktails directed acutely at his pericarditic heart! Now that Yar’Adua is gone I pray that President Goodluck Jonathan should promptly scrap the killer Aso Rock. There is no “Good Luck” in this matter. Let the man from Otuoke in Bayelsa State level Aso Rock for good!

In the astral plane, as observed and traversed by people with “Third Eye” like the crooked T. Lobsang Rampa, Okija shrine is a picnicker’s paradise when compared with the dastardly coven known as Aso Rock!

The trouble with Aso Rock started from the very beginning. Nigeria’s one and only Military President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida did not pack into the place under normal circumstances. As they say, it is not with ordinary eyes that harassed mortals run into the embrace of the born-again “Jehovah Sharp-Sharp” churches! The Evil Genius from Minna ran to the Villa following the hot pursuit of Major Gideon Orkar and his comrades who smoked him out of his bedroom in Dodan Barracks, Lagos. The coup lion-heart named Gideon Orkar had accused Babangida of running a “homosexually-centred oligarchic” regime; and it was only split seconds that saved the utterly frightened self-advertised “Master of Violence” from sure death. And the man fled! Let’s not be detained here by the news that I am yet to corroborate that the Evil Genius actually shat in his undies during the Orkar coup, like General Diya did when he was charged with coup-plotting by General Abacha’s goons! It suffices to say that ever since Babangida made Aso Rock Nigeria’s presidential abode the country has known no progress whatsoever. Ask Babangida or Shonekan or Abacha or Abdulsalami or Obasanjo or Yar’Adua or their wives! Now Babangida who “fortified” the place wants to get back there. God save us!

In the light of building institutions that last forever there was the Biblical injunction on Peter the Apostle thusly: Upon this rock I will build my church. This way, the Evil Genius turned to Aso Rock and said: “Upon this rock I will build my evil empire!”

For a visibly shaken man running for his dear life from Dodan Barracks in Lagos all the way to Aso Rock in Abuja, there was the clear and present need to fortify the place against all spiritual attacks, metaphysical onslaughts and terrestrial diabolism. I have it on good authority that hoary marabouts and voodoo grandmasters were put to work from all corners of the globe to root forever the life presidency of the then First Family deep inside the rock. It is against this background that any wannabe so-called leader of Nigeria who hopes for a place of abode in Aso Rock is doomed to occult failure.

So when Chief Moshood Abiola sought to succeed his bosom friend Babangida via the June 12, 1993 presidential election he was promptly made to understand that Aso Rock was not made for another family through the instant annulment of the election! The like of old man Tony Anenih who was ostensibly rooting for Abiola suddenly turned tail with the evergreen slogan: “No Vacancy in Aso Rock!”

Even when so much heat was put on Babangida to quit power it’s remarkable that he told all willing to listen that he was merely “stepping aside”. Chief Ernest Shonekan whom Babangida installed as interim leader of Nigeria could not get a hang on the spiritual and sundry grigri underpinnings of Aso Rock until he was shabbily kicked out by Abacha. Then Abacha had to stay holed up in Lagos for quite some time for Aso Rock to be detoxified for his occupation! See what I mean; even the ordinarily tough Abacha did not want to dash in where angels feared to tread!

Once Abacha got his bearing within the Aso Rock terrain he upped the ante in making the ornate palace his permanent home. He reportedly ferried in a million blind mice from Niger Republic into Aso Rock to keep all Nigerians eternally blind to his antics at self-perpetuation in power! Marabouts became two for a kobo in the biology and geography of Aso Rock. Even so, Abacha did not reckon with the terminal depths of Indian apples! And thus the man expired, giving place to General Abdulsalami Abubakar who just took as much money as he could in nine fast months and simply ran from the deathbed of Aso Rock.

A lot of people had so much faith in General Olusegun Obasanjo during his reign as a military leader back in Dodan Barracks in Lagos, but now see the donkey that eight long years in Aso Rock made of the Owu man! Who out there is still arguing with me that there is “something” in that Aso Rock? To illustrate the matter of the recurring decimal of madness in Aso Rock, let’s play up the role of a certain comical character that appeared at the Oputa Panel. This fellow whose name I will not mention here as it will only elicit laughter - and I am such a serious writer whose essay should not make people laugh! Yes, this fellow, let’s just call him Tokyo, complained to Oputa that he was detained by Abacha’s security goons, Gwarzo and Mustapha. This Tokyo fellow was fond of going to the security agents in Aso Rock from the time of Babangida with his waxed music in which he sang the praises of any government in power. After making so much money with his music “Babangida forever”, “Shonekan forever”, “Abdulsalami forever” he approached Gwarzo and then Mustapha with his brand new CD “Abacha forever!” They promptly clamped him into detention for his bad repetitive music! Mustapha then told an astounded Justice Oputa: “As we are talking now, this shameless fellow is back worshipping with Obasanjo at the Aso chapel with the selfsame music!” “Obasanjo forever” indeed! Everybody at the Oputa Panel burst out laughing. Poor Oputa had to chid the audience by saying that instead of laughing the people should weep for Nigeria.

Any wonder then that Obasanjo fell like Humpty Dumpty with his Third Term calamity. And now see what became of ex-President Yar’Adua! President Jonathan should take urgent heed. Except Aso Rock is scrapped there may be no light at the end of a very dark tunnel. As my buddy Bob Marley would sing, “Total destruction is the only solution!”

IBB & Death Threats

2010-08-11T08:02:00.001-07:00

Death threats in a time of kidnapping

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Journalism is a dangerous job even at the best of times. In Nigeria where the times tilt from bad to worst it is akin to a death sentence being a journalist. Just the other day, after my column entitled “Babangida on politics of personality” was published an “Unknown” caller put through a call on my line reserved for only sms messages.

“You are Uzor, you wrote that nonsense on IBB, you are a politician, you are dead!” the voice at the other end said breathlessly.

“This line is only meant for text messages,” I said evenly. “You can send your text message if you please…”

“We are going to kill you!” the voice cut in.

“Do you really need to make a phone call before killing a person?” I asked, only for the fellow to cut the line.

I did not pay much attention to the call, knowing that not a few cranks have taken advantage of the cheapness of mobile phones to play idle pranks.

Shortly after, the man called again, saying, “Uzor, you are dead” and cut off before I could deign to make a reply.

When he called yet again I pressed the “answer” button without bothering to put my ear to the phone to hear his gibberish. I felt he could waste his credit till kingdom come. It was when he kept repeating the call at the office that I gave the phone to my colleague, Ayodele Ojo, the Saturday Editor to answer the call.

“Speak out loud so that I can hear you,” I heard Ayodele say over the phone before turning to me to say that the man has cut the line.

Ever since, the voice has not called again, and I happen to still be alive! I have not looked back to see if I’m being stalked. I still come to work without taking any security precautions whatsoever. I as ever frequent my regular haunts without let or hindrance. In short, my life has not changed in any way whatsoever. Death will come when it will come, as the great bard wrote, death threats or no death threats.

We cannot stop doing journalism because Dele Giwa was threatened and then killed. Bagauda Kaltho was brutally murdered yet Nigerian journalists are still penning truth to power. The only thing that struck me in receiving the death threat calls was that it was happening at a time three journalists and their driver had been kidnapped in Abia State. Not a few persons have called over the phone to inquire of my safety since the advent of the menace of kidnapping journalists in Nigeria. The solitary voice calling for my death was by far outstripped by the many praying for me to be alive. The minority of murderers deigning to superintend over Nigeria should actually be pitied.

My concern really is about the freedom of my colleagues in the custody of the kidnappers rather than the threats of a disembodied fellow. Making death threats over the phone reminds me of a scene in the celebrated Western film, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, in which the assailant pointed a gun at the hero in the bath-tub and was sounding triumphant with so much talking. Of course the man in the bath-tub had his gun under the foam and promptly shot to death the assailant by saying the following words: “If you want to shoot, shoot; don’t talk!”

One refuses to be intimidated. Babangida in his first coming was driven away by my pen. Now that I have a laptop I don’t think he can survive any better. Already people all over are hearkening to my poem to vote for him with stones! Not even the deadliest killer squad in the world can help him survive! A tear for him…

As my hero Che Guevara would say, "Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms."

IBB

2010-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Babangida on politics of personality

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria is indeed a very wonderful place where wonders shall never end. What with characters like former military president and now a desperate presidential aspirant for the 2011 election on the platform of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), General Ibrahim Babangida calling on the PDP to rise above what he termed “politics of personality” or that of “he who pays the piper”. Thank God for democracy, Babangida who during his days as a military dictator boasted that he was not only in government but in power is now crying out like a rain-beaten chicken! Whatever became of his claim that he is a master of violence? It is incumbent on him to use his so-called powers to rein in on those playing the politics of personality. And, pray, who has more money than Babangida to deign to pay the piper?

Babangida has been very fast to make two reactions in two days over PDP Chairman Okwesilieze Nwodo’s deposition that zoning is dead in the party. In his second reaction in two days flat to the statement by Nwodo, and the follow-up clarification the next day that the party may re-visit zoning, Babangida pointed out that he was pleased to read the position of the PDP chairman. According to Babangida, “Nwodo was first among equals when he was zoned-in from a group of other persons from the South-east zone. He is a direct product of zoning after waiving some encumbrances that would have mitigated his emergence as the new chairman of our great party. Nwodo pronounced the zoning policy of the PDP as dead, even though he said it can be revisited and that he is not afraid of an open discussion of the issue. By making room for further discussion on the zoning policy, Nwodo has demonstrated his liberal and progressive disposition to the whole world.”

To underscore the importance attached to the matter, the statement was signed personally by the man who likes to be addressed as “Evil Genius.” The gospel according to Babangida goes on thusly: “In order for the PDP to be seen as a progressive vehicle for change, it must rise above politics of personalities or that of ‘he who pays the piper’.” Let us remember that in his days of authoritarian power Babangida used to tell anybody who cared to listen that every Nigerian had his price.

As former Kenyan president Arap Moi used to say after he took over power, all Kenyans must be singing songs of praise to him because when his predecessor, the legendary Jomo Kenyatta, was in power every Kenyan was singing for the old man and he (Arap Moi) was the chief praise-singer. In the case of our dear Nigeria, it is President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s turn now, so Babangida should turn to praise-singing instead of disturbing the peace of the country with his latter-day convolutions.

The truth of course is that Babangida has made matters difficult for himself by coming across as a Northern irredentist in his championing of the so-called zoning arrangement in the PDP. It will be well-nigh impossible for him to clear himself of the charge of pursuing a Northern agenda. Even Gen. Muhammadu Buhari who used to seen as being too pro-North is making better noises than Babangida this time around. In a sense, Babangida is somewhat antagonising the more liberal stalwarts in the selfsame North through his current tribal politics.

Babangida would want us to believe that he stands the chance of winning a free and fair election in Nigeria as notice his noises on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the body’s newly-minted chairman: “There is a glimmer of hope with current happenings at INEC most especially with the refreshing appointment of Professor Attahiru M Jega, as the new INEC chairman. It is hoped that all stakeholders will rally round the new INEC in order to have credible elections where voters will not only guard the count of their votes, but rather that their votes would truly count in the emergence of winners in all elections. I believe Professor Attahiru will need the support of all Nigerians because he alone cannot do it unless the people truly want him to do it by expressing their franchise in accordance with the dictates of the electoral laws.”

Haba! I have heard enough, for crying out loud! Talk of a man who annulled a free and fair election pontificating on credible elections! This Babngida fellow is simply insufferable! Why are we so blest? As the ace Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah would ask…

Nollywood

2010-08-11T07:32:00.001-07:00

THE ROOTS OF NOLLYWOOD

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The Nigerian national football team, the Super Eagles, was in 2005 having a pulsating match with the Zimbabwean national team in Harare, and the Zimbabwean supporters had one big banner in the stands on which was written in bold red: “Nigeria – Good only for Films!” For the many men and women of Zimbabwe, the prowess of Nigeria in the football pitch was not as great as the accomplishment of the country in the film industry. The Zimbabweans are not alone, for across the length and breadth of the African continent the Nigerian home movies are all the rage. The phenomenon has extended to the frontiers of Europe, North America and Asia with throngs of foreigners making the frequent pilgrimage to Nigeria to have a feel of the revolution known as Nollywood, which accounts for the third place in worldwide film production after America’s Hollywood and India’s Bollywood.

Professor Jude Akudinobi who teaches film studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says: “What Nigeria has in Nollywood is a global brand. I am always being consulted from all over the globe about the workings of the Nigerian home movie industry. The government has a goldmine in the industry if properly managed with the requisite technical competence.” Akudinobi has in the past many years made many trips from his base in California to Abuja and Lagos to facilitate Nollywood projects undertaken by Emeka Mba’s National Film and Film Censors Board (NFVCB) and Amaka Igwe’s Best of the Best African Film and Television Programmes Market, aka BOBTV.

Film luminaries who have shown profound interest in Nollywood range from the top Hollywood director Bill Duke to the respected acting coach Ms Adilah Barnes, the international copyright expert Ms Avalyn Pitts and the Paul Robeson Award director Prof Shade Turnipseed.

In the words of Alder, “The revenue generated by sales and rentals of movies in Lagos State is N804 million per week.” This adds up to an estimated N33.5 billion per annum. Demand for broadcast content in Nigeria averages 836,580 hours of programming per year valued at N250 billion. Uptake of CDs at Alaba International Market, Lagos alone is estimated at 700,000 discs per day. Alder submits finally that “the market potential of the movie industry in Nigeria relative to the size of each state’s economy is at least N522 billion per annum.”

World Bank President and former Nigerian Finance Minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had at a seminar on “Global Imperatives for the Nigerian Movie Industry in 2005” said that the “Government expects the industry to generate about US 250 dollars in foreign exchange.”

The Nollywood phenomenon being celebrated globally today started most inauspiciously. A few Nigerian dramatists and comedians in Lagos and Onitsha had recorded and sold some of their plays via the VHS format until the advent of the Igbo language home movie Living in Bondage which launched forth the revolution. At the heart of the making of that breakthrough film is the story and tenacity of one young man known as Okechukwu Ogunjiofor, popularly known as Paulo, after the character he played in Living in Bondage. Okey, that is short for Okechukwu, needs to be quoted at length on how Living in Bondage came about.

Here is Okey’s story: “I would want to start by saying that when I left TV College, Jos in 1987, one of the challenges I had then was that my parents were confused as to what I went to do in the university. I went to Jos because I had admission to study law. That year, on October 1st, we had a very terrible accident that left me in the hospital for eight months. I broke my legs, and so I was in the hospital when the others matriculated and it never occurred to my parents and uncles to go and defer my admission.”

The young Okey got out of hospital only to see that his admission to the University of Jos had lapsed. He had to do the JAMB University exams all over, and could no longer pass the exams. It was against this background of incipient failure that his uncle advised him to take advantage of the advertised Nigerian Television (NTA) College course on Television Production “instead of staying and wasting away at home.” He found his niche in the course, but had to make do with hawking at National Theatre in Lagos on completion of the course.

Other theatre artistes such as Frank Vaughan, Ruth Osi and Wale Macauley who were rehearsing at the theatre could not understand why he should be hawking after his training. The personable Ruth Osi gave Okey a note to meet Kenneth Nnebue who was into the marketing of Yoruba movies on VHS.

On meeting Kenneth Nnebue who would eventually provide the funding for Living in Bondage Okey said he needed N150,000 to be able to make the film. Kenneth told him that the amount was enough to make three Yoruba movies. The self-assured Okey instantly did an analysis of how Kenneth could quickly recoup his money on the investment. Kenneth then told Okey to bring along his certificate to prove that he was not some nobody. He went home and came back with his certificate. As Okey had said he was not willing to shoot on VHS, Kenneth told him he would make a trip to Japan to procure cameras.

Kenneth then told him to put the story together while he made the trip to Japan. Okey went back to the National Theatre, and began rehearsals without any script whatsoever. Okey who had been under the tutelage of the ace director in the NTA Chris Obi-Rapu could not but bring the great man into the project. Since Chris was still in the employ of the NTA he could not append his real name to the project.

According to Chris Obi-Rapu, “What made the Nigeria home video industry to take-off was the input from Okey Ogunjiofor and my direction. Nobody had wanted to do anything in Igbo or Yoruba among television producers around then because they felt it was degrading. There had been some shootings of Yoruba and Igbo videos. Mike Orihedimma recorded Igbo home videos in Onitsha, while NEK (Kenneth Nnebue) was recording and marketing Yoruba videos in Lagos. They were poorly produced and directed. It is a known fact in filmmaking that it is the direction that makes the film. If I had not shot Living in Bondage and Taboo there could not have been any Nollywood. This film business really took off because Living in Bondage was well shot as at that time. If I had not stood my grounds the financier could have influenced the production and direction in a negative way. I resisted him because I knew that he lacked the knowledge of filmmaking. It was a deliberate directorial effort that brought about the home video revolution. It was not accidental.”

The making of Living in Bondage, according to Okey Ogunjiofor, marked “the first time some people were paid in thousands of naira to act on a film. I got N500 because I had not made a film then. People like Bob-Manuel (Udokwu) and others were paid a thousand naira. As a producer and an actor, what I got was only N500.”

Okey stresses that the formula that pushed him on was that unlike in the western part of Nigeria where the Yorubas always went to the theatres to watch movies the easterners, especially the Igbo needed the movies to be brought to their homes. For whatever it is worth, the young man’s dream has materialized into a phenomenon that now holds the entire world in thrall.

The words flow almost childlike from Okey’s mouth: “I had some stories and something to share but I am looking into bringing something into film for people to buy because I had thought that since the Eastern part of this country does not have cinema culture, and all of them are rich enough to have video machines in their homes, why don’t I take the film to their home so that they can watch it?” He adds the following words of fulfillment: “Since after we shot that film (Living in Bondage) the only happiness I have is that God used that opportunity to lift the celluloid era. And what we said was let’s bring the current format of celluloid film into digital and let’s create jobs for people and today we can imagine the number of thousands of people that are feeding from film.”

The movies have since proliferated in the major languages such as Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa as well as in Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio etc. The English language films are seen as welding the diverse ethnic groups together. Major players in the English language films include the producers Zeb Ejiro and his brother Chico Ejiro, Amaka Igwe, Mahmood Ali-Balogun, Tade Ogidan, Andy Amenechi, Opa Williams, Kingsley Ogoro, Charles Novia, Fred Amata, Don Pedro Obaseki; marketers-cum-producers Ken Nnebue, Rob Eze (Reemy Jes), Ossy Affason, Gabosky Okoye, Azubuike Udensi, Arinze Ezeanyaeche, Ugo Emmanuel and Alex Okeke (Emmalex) etc.

Actors who used to earn peanuts while hanging around the NTA premises are now worth their weight in gold, notably Richard Mofe-Damijo, Olu Jacobs, Pete Edochie, Bob-Manuel Udokwu, Sam Loco, Justus Esiri, Enebeli Elebuwa, Ejike Asiegbu, Saint Obi, Jim Iyke, Kanayo O. Kanayo, Clem Ohameze, Emeka Ike, Segun Arinze, Ramsey Noah, Emeka Enyocha, Nkem Owoh, Mr. Ibu, Hanks Anuku etc. The equally distinguished ladies of the klieg lights compete with the men in the earning front, and the list is made up of Amazons such as Genevieve Nnaji, Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde, Chioma Chukwuka, Sandra Achums, Stephanie Okereke, Liz Benson, Joke Silva, Ebube Nwagbo, Rita Dominic Nkiru Sylvanus etc

The making of Glamour Girls by Kenneth Nnebue shortly after the making of Living in Bondage showed that movies made in English language could make good returns on investment. Actors and actresses such as Zack Orji and Eucharia Anunobi shot into limelight, if not notoriety.

Diverse themes were explored along the line, from traditional practices such as the Osu caste system (Taboo) and prostitution as in Zeb Ejiro’s high-grossing Domitilla. Some of the films were shot outside the shores of Nigeria like Kingsley Ogoro’s record-breaking Osuofia in London acted with requisite mastery by the inimitable Nkem Owoh. Comedy films have over the years proved to be winners with the actors Nkem Owoh, Mr Ibu, and the diminutive duo Aki and Pawpaw acquitting themselves as the masters of the genre.

The banks have started to show interest with Ecobank funding the films of Charles Novia, Fred Amata, Chico Ejiro, Fred Duker etc. The actors are fast gaining recognition in the national honours list with such eminent recent honorees as Pete Edochie, Justus Esiri, Lere Paimo, Eddy Ugbomah, Zeb Ejiro etc.

Schools and agencies are springing up for the training of the new talents from scriptwriting through directing and marketing. Leading the charge are such schooled eminences as Wale Adenuga, Muritala Sule, Victor Okhai etc.

51 Iweka Road, Onitsha retains its top spot as a major market for the home movies. It would appear that any film that comes out of Nollywood must bear the imprimatur of the ubiquitous 51 Upper Iweka Road, the most famous address in Nollywood. It used to be a place for electronic merchants who have since abandoned there trade for the making f home movies. That famous address is an old building, about 60 metres in length, and made up of three storeys of a thousand and more shops owned by the Modebe family of Onitsha.

The Yoruba film setup continues to draw the crowds to the film theatres in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta and so on. A major player in Nollywood is obviously Tunde Kelani who is almost always invited to all the major film festivals across the globe. He is almost 60 years of age but he still talks film with the passion of youth. He started out as a cameraman and literally knows all the nooks and crannies of the film world. The maker of such masterpieces as Thunderbolt, Saworide, Agogo Eewo etc says, “I think the journey to become a cinematographer is a long one and it could as well be a lifetime.”

The indomitable Hausa film world is tagged Kannywood, and Sanni Muazu who produces films in Kano stresses: “We may not produce tapes or cameras but we have a product: films. So we do have an industry.” Ali Nuhu is arguably the most highly rated actor out of Kannywood having acted in about 100 Hausa films. Mama Hajara on her part has acted in well over 100 films in her 20-odd-year career. The industry currently employs about 15,000 talents working as directors, producers, scriptwriters, engineers and costume designers. Ibrahim Mandawari doubles as a leading actor and director, saying: “You cannot expect filmmakers to have a free ride. Custodians of society’s heritage, clerics and conservative elite will react, stressing the need for social responsibility in the kind of themes we display.”

The relevance of Nollywood in the cultural renaissance of Nigeria cannot be gainsaid. It is getting obvious by the day that Nigeria can indeed conquer the world through the reach of film just as the Americans did through the exploits of Hollywood. Through training and re-training such as the annual SHOOT! Workshops organized at the National Film Institute, Jos by the Afolabi Adesanya-led Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC) in association with Refuge Island Media, Nigerian movie makers are breaking bolder grounds. For instance, producers can now upgrade movies shot on video to the world-class 35mm celluloid format. The technology is readily available, and Nigerian producers can avail themselves of the breakthrough to push their works into the mainstream of world cinema. This way, Nigerian filmmakers will no longer only serve as observers or as idle bystanders in the many film festivals all over the world.

Peace Anyiam-Fiberisimma who organizes the annual AMAA awards says, “When a man wants to make up with his wife, he comes home with ten video cassettes. If he wants to go out without her, the same thing – that way, she won’t want to come with him!”

Nollywood has become an integral feature of the life of every Nigerian, and the joy is that the phenomenon has spread through the Diaspora, blazing through all of Africa. The hotel rooms of the major cities across the East and West coasts of Africa beam to the guests from all over the world films featuring such Nigerian celebrated stars as RMD, Genevieve Nnaji and the redoubtable diminutive ones known as Aki and Pawpaw. Little wonder there was a riot in Sierra Leone when some conmen duped a mammoth crowd about bringing the Aki and Pawpaw duo to the stadium!

Now that Nigeria is poised on the dream of pushing to the very front of filmmaking in a fast-changing world, the exploits of the champions of Nollywood can only readily stand “the Giant of Africa” in good stead.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

2010-08-11T07:25:00.001-07:00

KEN SARO-WIWA: TEN YEARS AFTER THE HANGING

By UZOR MAXIM UZOATU

Ken Saro-Wiwa was controversial in life, and his death by hanging was even more so. It is therefore understandable that any discussion of the man is almost always fraught with controversy. A book about to be published, Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays by Adewale Maja-Pearce, is currently bogged down by controversy bordering on censorship.

Becky Clarke of Ayebia Clarke Literary Agency & Publishing Ltd had all but agreed terms with Adewale Maja-Pearce to have the book released in the first half of the year. Becky and Adewale had been friends since their days in the African Writers Series (AWS) and the publisher suggested there was no overarching need to sign a formal contract. The title essay “Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa” had earlier been sold by Adewale to Lagos-based Glendora magazine published by Kunle Tejuosho. This background is crucial in the light of unfolding events.

Author and publisher were at peace, promoting the forthcoming book in their different ways. Then The Guardian of March 19, 2005, published an interview with Adewale. The rather solicitous reporter who conducted the interview Tajudeen Sowole writes: “For late Ken Saro-Wiwa, it is back to back attack from Maja-Pearce. While The (sic) Mask Dancing (an earlier book by Adewale) has the author faulting the late Ogoni activist’s literary use of English in the latter’s book Soza Boy (sic), Maja-Pearce’s new book Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Essays due to be launched soon has a stronger (sic) view on the late poet. Disclosing some of the issues raised in the book, he narrated how he was forced to re-visit Ken Saro-Wiwa because the Ogoni question cannot be divorced from the complex nature of Ken who was one of the leading character” (sic). The reporter goes on to quote Adewale directly as saying: “Ken was part of the problem.” According to the report, Adewale said Ken had a “long romance with the federal government and military establishments” while insisting that Ken was Abacha’s friend: “They were neighbours in Port Harcourt during the civil war.” The Sowole report continues thus: “Until the tragic death of Ken the children of late General Sanni Abacha and that of the activist were friends, Maja-Pearce said. The veracity of his assertion notwithstanding, this may not be strong enough to post-humously (sic) dock Ken in the court of morality.”

It is obvious that reporter Tajudeen Sowole has more than a soft spot for his beloved Ken Saro-Wiwa! The first inkling I had of the trouble afoot was when I got a call from Dr Ike Okonta, the Caine Prize nominee, asking if I had read Adewale’s interview and if I knew anything about the proposed book. Of course I replied that I had read the essay in typescript and that it posed no dangers whatsoever to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s legacy. I felt that the essay would elicit much-needed intellectual engagement in the Ken Saro-Wiwa enterprise rather than the hagiographies that are the order of the day. I told Okonta to wait for the book to come out instead of coming to judgment based on a poorly presented newspaper article for I believe in the dictum of Thomas Hardy: “Never retract, never explain, get it out and let them howl!”

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Wiwa, author of In the Shadow of a Saint, was however beside himself with rage and fired a riposte to Adewale’s publisher: “I just saw Adewale Maja-Pearce’s interview in the Nigerian Guardian and I’m livid. I cannot believe he is still repeating the same lies he has been peddling for years regarding my father’s financial affairs. Let me be frank about this – Adewale Maja-Pearce is a liar and poor excuse for an objective journalist. He has never substantiated ANY of his claims about my father’s business dealings – he constantly repeats old allegations and rumours that have NEVER been proven by ANYONE. Don’t you think it is time to put an end trying Ken Saro-Wiwa by rumour? Don’t you think it is time responsible people, especially Nigerians, insist on reconstructing our history and our futures on the basis of solid facts instead of recycling rumours and allegations that have been put out to smear the hard earned reputations of honest men? Etc. etc…”

Publisher Clarke who was almost poised to release the book now had to go back to “re-editing” it in order to stay in line with the liberal establishment that had always held Ken Saro-Wiwa up as a saint. Adewale on his part argued that he would only remove a word if a qualified libel lawyer found anything libelous in the essay. Incidentally Adewale stresses that Ken Wiwa helped him with some of his sources for the essay, notably Richard Boele who in his 1995 Report of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) Mission to Investigate the Situation of the Ogonis of Nigeria wrote: “In Nigeria, there is a clear patronage system that usually runs along family, tribal, or friendship lines. Large sums of money are simply given through the granting of government or company contracts for road building, electrification and so on… Many of the Ogoni leaders… benefited from this patronage system – securing either government or oil company contracts… Ken Saro-Wiwa also received such government contracts in the 70s and 80s but ceded this practice in the 1990s so as not to compromise him once he became actively involved in the political struggle…”

The point really is that it diminishes the Ken Saro-Wiwa legend if a book has to be stopped to keep it up. No book or essay can defeat a man whose cause is well situated as Ken and the Ogoni cause. The recourse to blatant censorship is unconscionable. Clarke who was not initially talking of signing a formal contract with Adewale now has this to say: “The way forward is for you to sign a contract. This contract will include the standard right of the publisher to edit your work to make it marketable internationally. Without this undertaking I cannot proceed to publish.” Adewale would rather not publish than change a word. He has since instructed Glendora, the magazine he first sold the essay to, to publish the original essay. He was profoundly surprised when he serendipitously learnt from Lolade Bamidele, the editor of Glendora, that Clarke had sent a re-edited copy of the essay to the magazine in PDF format that cannot be changed.

Author and publisher have clearly fallen apart. My take on the matter is that the book should be published as originally planned. The argument that “the man is dead and unable to defend himself” belittles the fact that Ken Saro-Wiwa left behind an intimidating legacy. In the making of saints, warts and all are explored before the destination is attained.

Ajegunle

2010-08-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

INSIDE AJEGUNLE

STARS OF MUSIC, COMEDY AND THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The road to Ajegunle is rough. On this hot Lagos noonday the rickety, overcrowded kombi bus takes almost an eternity to get to Boundary Bus-Stop, the bustling gateway into Nigeria’s most celebrated slum. Another ride, this time on the ubiquitous motorcycle, alias “Okada”, takes one into all the nooks crannies of the shanty town that evidently lives up to its nickname: “Jungle City”. At the very busy Orodu Street, an odd spectacle arrests all attention. A drunken tall man was staggering on the very centre of the road and all the buses, cabs and motorcycles were mightily dodging him! A closer inspection of the drunk reveals a wounding truth: the fellow is from my hometown, a man I know only too well, Geoffrey, the son of Fara! Welcome to Ajegunle where everything is possible…

Away from the drunk and his wobble, in an open ground amid the jumble of churches and mosques and brothels, a group of bare-bodied teenagers are engaged in a pulsating game of football. The goalposts are formed with stones, and there is a heated argument over whether to allow as a goal a shot that flew past the stone. The argument nearly results in fisticuffs until an elderly man watching from a corner walks into the group to settle the matter. The game continues. A pint-sized boy of about 12 gets a pass, dribbles nearly all the players of the opposing team and scores.

“Okocha! Okocha!” the motley crowd intone, saluting the skill of the lad who had taken after the former Super Eagles skipper Austin Jay-Jay Okocha.

The dream of nearly every child you meet in Ajegunle is to be a star: in football, in music and show business.

According to Daddy Showkey, the musician who is arguably the greatest export out of Ajegunle, “In Ajegunle, you choose what you want to be yourself. A gunman, or you want to be a footballer, a musician, or anything you want.”

Daddy Showkey’s original name was John Odafe Asiemo. A very poor kid indeed, Daddy Showkey had a rough childhood in what he calls “the roughest neighbourhood, the strongest neighbourhood, the toughest neighbourhood in the world. That is Ajegunle.” His father died when he was only nine. His hapless mother had to face up to the daunting task of bringing up the five children of the marriage, all boys. He became a street hustler, selling stolen goods and was once shot for his efforts. The idea that he came from Ajegunle denied him legitimate jobs as all the boys from the neighbourhood were looked at with suspicion.

He even suffered the indignity of being accused of stealing a dog when he applied to a security company to work as a guard. He was taken to the police station, and when he was told that he had stolen a German Shepherd he taught they were accusing him of stealing a white man!

He was a street entertainer par excellence, performing all over Ajegunle as an acrobat, a boxer, an actor, as a comic, dancer and then singer. It was against this background of street entertainment that he got the nickname “Show Kid”. He would modify the name to Showkey, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Channeling all his energy into music, he became the dancer of the group, Sexy Pretty Boys, he formed with other Ajegunle boys in 1990. They were able to release an album entitled “Biggy Belle”. The band soon broke up and Daddy Showkey was left in the lurch. He eked out a living as the clerk amongst motor-park touts, and the manner he barked out orders with a funny tone amused his colleagues who advised him to sing with the voice. Without much ado Daddy Showkey sang his first hit: “Congratulation! Jubilation! Celebration! In our nation!” The song ended with the prophetic words: “Welcome Daddy Showkey, welcome!”

Daddy Showkey is the acknowledged master of the Ajegunle street sound known as “Galala”. Influenced by roots reggae, galala fuses Jamaican, African-American and highlife into pulsating dance music. The music is mostly delivered in pidgin English of the Warri, Delta State blend. Incidentally most of the Ajegunle stars hail from the Niger Delta axis of Warri, Bayelsa and sundry interlocking towns.

He has as many as five albums to his credit, and he is proud to be addressed as “Ghetto Soldier”. He has a professional management team run by the inimitable showbiz impresario Edi Lawani. He is married to Sandra, with a son, Raymond. He bears the title of Aare Onifaji of Ajegunle.

Daddy Showkey has an alter ego in the other celebrated Ajegunle musician, Daddy Fresh, who stresses that a cordial relationship exists between the duo despite media reports to the contrary. A very sensitive artiste, Daddy Fresh reveals that the most traumatic experience of his life was losing his 57-year-old mother on May 23, 1996. It took him all of five years to get over the trauma. Happily married with a daughter, his latest album is “Nwon Kpariwo”.

Just as musicians from Ajegunle dominate the charts, star footballers are daily being minted from the slum. Celebrated national team players such as central defender Taribo West, left wing-back Ifeanyi Udeze, and strikers Jonathan Akpoborie and Samson Siasia were all born and bred in Ajegunle.

Taribo West started life as a local roughneck in Ajegunle, being a member of the shanty gangs. He narrowly missed death before his skills in the beautiful game of football attracted the attention of soccer scouts. He distinguished himself in the Nigerian football league, playing for the elite cubs, notably Sharks of Port Harcourt, Rangers International of Enugu and Julius Berger of Lagos. He later took his talents abroad, first to the French top division side Auxerre and later to the two Italian giants Inter Milan and AC Milan. He was a Trojan in the central defence of Nigeria for many years, capping his achievements in the 1998 World Cup in France.

On his part, the flying left-sided wing-back Ifeanyi Udeze was a star in the Korea/Japan World Cup of 2002. Jonathan Akpoborie starred as a striker in the Nigerian Under-17 team that won the maiden FIFA cadet world cup of 1985 in China. He would go on to star for the Under-21 and the Super Eagles.

Samson Siasia stepped out of Ajegunle to be a schoolboy international soccer player, barely completing his secondary school examinations to star in the 1983 Under-21 world tourney in Mexico. He was a pivotal player in the Super Eagles for many years, helping the team to qualify for its first ever World Cup in the United States in 1994 where he scored a spectacular goal against Argentina, complete with Diego Maradona. Since quitting active playing, he has turned into a successful coach, winning the African Under-21 competition and leading the team to the silver medal in the World tourney in Holland in 2005.

Even as Ajegunle justly celebrates its established stars, many wannabes are coming up fast to dominate the world stage. Simon Okwori, a 20-year-old from Benue State, and Nimikini Mackintosh, 19, are masters of Ajegunle Street soccer. Okwori happens to be one of the twelve children of a retired soldier living in a one-room home in Ajegunle. Mackintosh’s parents have moved back to their native Bayelsa State, leaving the boy behind to fend for himself by sleeping with friends. The two young footballers have found a measure of fulfillment in the “Search and Groom” street soccer initiative of FIFA.

The young achievers in the field of music are the Dixon Twins, Anthony and Andrew of the Mamuzee singing group. Their father officially has 10 wives and nine concubines, with their mother ranking as ninth in the official wives’ list! They are proud of their album “Born to Reign”, and readily admit that “Life in Ajegunle is a do-or-die affair.” They shot into the limelight with the 1999 single “Bobo” and consolidated their presence on the scene with the gospel track “Abi you no know say Jesus na God?”

Ajegunle boasts of its resident philosopher in the poet, musician and activist Aj Dagga Tolar. By way of explanation, the “Aj” before Dagga Tolar stands for Ajegunle! Aged about 40, Dagga Tolar is tall, wears dreadlocks and is gap-toothed. His tiny shack of a room is crammed full with books and CDs. He accommodates several artiste types of Ajegunle in his digs. A big poster of Tupac Shakur, the murdered American rapper, dominates the blue wall. He writes committed poetry and has just been elected the vice-chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Lagos Branch. He recently led the body to protest the proposed privatization of the National Theatre which was broadcast on Lagos Television (LTV).

“Ajegunle has become a metaphor for the entirety of the Nigerian nation,” says the angry Dagga Tolar. “It is in this part of the country that you meet the poor of the poorest, and we try to survive day in and day out.”

His poetry boldly says: “This Country is not a Poem.” His poetry as well as his singing is primed on protest against a system that supplies no light, no water, no infrastructure for the teeming masses he loves so much.

As Ajegunle musicians such as Baba Fryo of the “Denge Potz” fame and Papa English play up the numbers, the multi-ethnic ghetto of Ajegunle thrives and throbs, lending a way of life like no other for her five million or so inhabitants. This trip on the rough roads of Ajegunle ends as a beautiful game of soccer on a sandy pitch comes to a pulsating end with a penalty shootout and the moving music of Daddy Showkey:

If you see my mama

Hosannah

Tell am say

Hosannah

I dey for ghetto

Hosannah

I no get problems

Hosannah…

AJEGUNLE… THE WARRI CONNECTION

Richard Mofe-Damijo, popularly known as RMD, is arguably Nigeria’s most famous actor, but he simply introduces himself to me as a “Warri boy”. Clad in a flowery shirt with two buttons seductively undone to expose his hairy broad shirt, he is full of passion anytime the topic is Warri, the city in Delta State where he grew up. His father was a wealthy landlord who let out his house to a multi-ethnic mix of Nigerians – Urhobo, Itsekiri, Ijaw, Igbo etc. RMD was then known as “The King of Boys” as all his friends from the neighbourhood had access at all times to his room. It is in the drive to promote his beloved city that RMD in December 2004 founded the “Made-in-Warri” show, a music-and-comedy concert showcasing musicians and comedians who remarkably mostly have a bond with the Lagos shanty Ajegunle.

The celebrated comedian Bright Okpocha hails from Abia State but was born in Ajegunle. The Sociology graduate of University of Benin uses the city of Warri as fodder for his jokes, quite like other comedians such as Ali Baba, Okey Bakassi, Julius Agwu and so on. The blending of Ajegunle and Warri can be likened to Siamese twins joined at the navel of jokes.

Ali Baba, who is generally acclaimed as the godfather of comedians in Nigeria, is an “original Warri boy” as he unabashedly admits. He has taken comedy to such heights as to compete with top-rated corporate gurus in the field of take-home cash. Ali Baba is a splendid advertisement that one can rise from the ghetto to take over the high street. Struggling comedians from Ajegunle and sundry slums such as Orile, Amukoko, Badiya and so on have been mentored by Ali Baba. Some of the comedians have taken after his Warri style of delivery, with a particular young comedian actually taking the name Omo Baba, after the maestro.

Marvelous Benji of Ajegunle combines the music and comedy of Ajegunle while Fragrance (real name: Bright Kayo) was born in Warri but is today recording his music out of Ajegunle studios.

Obus Bezalee Brodo formed the music-and-comedy group known as DC Envoys, a group that has wowed crowds from Ajegunle to Warri. The legacy of Warri and Ajegunle is extended by the likes of Rymzo and Gzay.

The jokes combining Warri and Ajegunle are so much such that there is hardly anybody who can truly trace the copyright of the jokes to any particular comedian. The multi-ethnic jumble of Ajegunle and Warri makes it imperative that the lingua franca is Pidgin English. The galala music that accompanies the jokes is equally rendered in pidgin or broken English.

The comedian Okey Bakassi laughs at my mention of Ajegunle and tells matter-of-factly: “A poor Ajegunle man was in church with his wife and the pastor asks the widows to step out for special prayers. The woman leaves her man, stepping out. The man protests only for the woman to retort that a person as poor as him cannot claim to be alive!”

Then he reminds me of Warri thieves who would ask you if you wanted to buy a watch. When you ask him where the watch is he would point at the watch somebody passing by is wearing!

The Ajegunle-Warri connection is the Nigerian spirit writ large. Nigerians across the ethnic divides find fruitful communion in the abode provided by the waterside of Ajegunle and Warri.

Encounter with President Obasanjo

2010-08-11T07:18:00.001-07:00

ONCE UPON AN INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT OBASANJO

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

9.42 AM. Friday, May 20, 2005. Aso Villa, Abuja. A well-modulated voice announces the coming of the leader of the nation. The five men and one woman in the hall rise as one. In strides His Excellency Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. His colorful agbada radiates against the soft amber of the hall as Mr. President walks to his chair with that characteristic swagger that is all his. He sits expansively, scans the hall and turns to his right to ask his Senior Special Assistant, Media, Mrs. Remi Oyo: “How much time do we have?” Mrs. Oyo is fast with her response: “Thirty minutes, Sir.” Mr. President adjusts his cap and asks jocularly in pidgin English: “Se my cap dey well?” All say “Yes, Sir” with laughter.

The mention of his cap by Mr. President struck a particular resonance with my presence in the hall. When I came into the hall a handful of breathless minutes before the arrival of President Obasanjo, I had no cap on my head even I was in a traditional attire that ought to be complete with a cap. It was the photographer Tunde Olaniyi who first asked of my cap as I took my seat between Mr. C.K. Alabi and Ken Tadaferua. I brought out the cap from the pocket of the gown and put it on my head where it ought to be. When running late to meet up with an appointment with the President, it is infinitely more important getting to the venue in the first instance rather than be properly fitted out only to end up arriving when the door had been locked!

The interview with Mr. President was a case of running against time. It had earlier been fixed for 2 O’clock in the afternoon, but because of unforeseen pressing presidential matters the interview had to be brought forward to 9 in the morning at very short notice. For Tadaferua and me who had to travel from Lagos that very morning it literally meant running a marathon with the speed of a sprint. Getting out of bed in the pre-dawn hours and making it to the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, before making the long journey from Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja, to the seat of power in Aso Villa called for all the effort and coordination in the world.

Consulting Editor (Copy) Taiwo Obe, fondly known as TO, who had coordinated the pre-interview sessions was on top of the matter from the very beginning. At exactly 4AM, he sent across the text message that it was time get up for the journey to the airport. He was himself heading for the office to muster additional questions for Mr. President. Tadaferua made it in good enough time to make the first flight out of Lagos on Bellview Airline. The construction site at Iyana-Ipaja impeded my journey to the airport and I was forced to make a detour through Agege, that is, after losing a bag in the melee! Even so, TO was always in touch with me until I boarded the Chanchangi flight to Abuja. The journey in an unmarked taxi to Aso Villa was another matter entirely, a very fast race not unbefitting of Michael Shumacher of the Formula One fame! There was no time in my mad rush to send the message to TO back in Lagos that I made it after all before submitting my mobile phone to the security apparatchiks at the last door in the Villa.

Editorial Board Chairman Alhaji Ibrahim Ida (CON), C.K. Alabi, Tommy Odemwingie and Tadaferua were already seated waiting for the arrival of Mr. President. After the issue of my cap had been sorted out, the little time left was used to assess the questions to be directed at President Obasanjo. There was no point repeating questions that had been elaborately addressed by Mr. President in other interviews and whose answers were already known to the wider Nigerian public. The point of the interview was freshness, an issue that had been stressed by Consulting Editor (General) Chido Nwakanma who would have been at the interview but could not make it at short notice from Enugu where he had gone to for an assignment.

It was therefore meet to grill Mr. President on the true worth of Nigeria’s foreign debt, an issue that had taken much of his time. There was also the dimension of the IMF stressing that Nigeria’s foreign debt is sustainable at the current $50 per barrel for crude oil, except that the body ominously did not say what would happen in a future of declining oil prices. The cost of the peacekeeping exploits of Nigeria was also an issue at question. The vexed question of Charles Taylor’s continuing asylum in Nigeria when the rest of the world would rather have him surrendered to face the war crimes tribunal equally needed an answer from the horse’s mouth. Even as they sound somewhat alike, NEPA and NEPAD are worlds apart, but it is a measure of the vastness of President Obasanjo’s enterprise that only he can provide the requisite progress report on both issues. The farmer-president cannot but be put to task in the field of agriculture. Matters such as dearth of long-term funds, bank recapitalization and the battle of poverty against slogans like NAPEP, SMEDAN, SMEIES etc, it was agreed, would give the President sufficient food for thought. Other questions slated for discourse included independent funding for INEC, restiveness in the Niger Delta, the controversies attending to the then ongoing National Confab and the embarrassing issue of importers using neighbouring countries’ ports because of high Nigerian tariffs. The clinching question goes thus: If the Confab recommends a third term for you, will you accept?

Of course when it dawned on us that we had only 30 minutes to exhaust a score or so questions, there was an immediate re-ordering of priorities. Mrs. Oyo was quick to point out that the President would not take kindly to undue flattery; each interviewer should go to the meat of the question immediately, not going round in circles. It fell on Alhaji Ida as the chairman of the board to put the introductory question. While waiting for the arrival of Mr. President I took in details of the room, the handful of paintings on the wall, the quietude of the place, and the general sense of order pervading the atmosphere.

The appearance of Mr. President belied the “tough” image always portrayed in the media. He was as relaxed as can be, showing a kind of media savvy he had never been given credit for. He advised not to allow ourselves to be bullied by Mrs. Oyo while hurling our questions at him. He took all the questions without any ill feelings whatsoever, and was somehow helped to be at ease with all because none of the interviewers got his facts and figures wrong, a feature that almost always annoys Mr. President. The interview took more than the allotted time, with President Obasanjo allowing for more questions even when Mrs. Oyo felt we had had enough. Even the Chief of Staff and other stalwarts had to come into the hall, and wait a little while, before Mr. President genially answered the last question. For a man who remonstrated against us for not coming with a woman, Mr. President was quite generous to the “male chauvinists” who had come to interview him! At the photo session that followed the interview, he amiably exchanged banters and pleasantries before departing to another urgent engagement.

However, the impression that would forever remain green in this encounter with the President is how at home he appeared to be with the interviewers immediately he entered the hall. For a man who is widely seen as practicing the art of attack as the best form of defence he did not initiate any gesture to put us out of our stride. After making sure that his cap was sitting well on his head, he waved at the interviewers to start the encounter with the pidgin word “Oya!”

Fire in the House of God

2010-08-11T07:16:00.001-07:00

FIRE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Religion provides an anchor to the lives of believers. The belief in a Supreme Being lends meaning to man’s existence on earth, and the promise of the afterlife makes the toil of life more bearable. Toying with matters of faith almost always brings conflagration in its wake; little wonder church and state can hardly ever be yoked together. In the liberal evolution of the world the church, given its innate conservatism, has met with much controversy.

The confirmation of the openly homosexual Rev. Canon Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire in the United States has whipped up much controversy within the ambit of Christianity, especially the Protestant or Anglican dominion. Nigeria’s Most Rev. Peter J. Akinola has formidably opposed the phenomenon to the extent that he is being seen in much of the Western world as an intolerant apostle of conservatism. The redoubtable Rev. Akinola would not bend, stressing that the church should not support what is not scriptural. Anglican bishops in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America severed ties with the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster in British Columbia when it sponsored same-sex marriage, a development rocking the church across the globe. The 77 million worldwide members of the Anglican Communion are mired in a crisis that gets more intractable by the day.

Christianity is indeed in dire straits. Like the church at Antioch, its many followers are seeing all kinds of visions. Witch-catchers and sundry demon-arresters are today parading themselves as Christian preachers and Pentecostal evangelists. There are more charlatans on the pulpits of Christianity than there are criminals on the streets of Lagos and Onitsha. You can sum up the antics of these so-called Christians with one short sentence: The devil finds work.

The early church found its anchor by the salvation of the soul. The Nigerian church mostly preaches material success. Prosperity is the word. Every pastor stresses that his “God is not a poor God,” and the name of the game is crass materialism. There is no greater trading organization than the church.

All through history the church flourishes at the worst of times. Nigeria today suits the bill. Christianity has been commandeered for nefarious reasons by the cream of Nigeria’s wannabes. The man-made churches of today are as wonky as all single proprietorships which more often than not die with the owner, or may be transferred to the wife or “Mummy” until fatal fate takes its toll.

There is the need to return Christianity to its roots. The church should go back to its spiritual moorings in the Bible, to wit, when Christ anointed St. Peter. The Catholic Church traces its history to Christ’s naming of Peter the Apostle as the rock on which the church is built, thus naming him the first Pope. The Catholic Church was the universal faith until 1517 when in Wittenberg, Germany Martin Luther challenged the Catholic sale of indulgences and the doctrine of salvation by merit. Henry VIII followed suit in 1534, breaking from Rome for marital-cum-political reasons. Thus was born the Protestant Anglican Communion which got a boost when the Protestant Episcopal Church was founded in the United States in 1789.

John Calvin’s efforts during the 16th Century Reformation movements led to the birth of the Calvinists and ultimately to the founding of the Scotch Presbyterian Church by John Knox in 1560. The history of the Baptists dates back to John Smyth and the English Separatists of 1609; and later, Roger Williams of Providence in 1638. The Methodists started out within the Church of England, Rev. John Wesley having founded it in 1738.

The Church of Christ Disciples would in turn challenge the decline of fervor and the factionalizing within Protestantism by carving out yet another faction among evangelical Presbyterians from 1804 to 1832. Joseph Smith received visions of the Angel Moroni as revealed on the golden tablets of The Book of the Mormons to found the faith of the Mormons in 1827 in New York.

Charles Taze Russell founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses movement in 1870, incorporating the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in 1884; and the church finally adopted the Jehovah’s Witnesses name in 1931.

A major rupture in Christianity occurred in the American cities of Topeka and Los Angeles in 1901 and 1906 when the Pentecostal movement of “speaking in tongues” began as a reaction to the loss of fervor among Methodists and sundry Christians at large. The advent of Pentecostalism has been quite sweeping across the globe.

To take one example of church-founding from nearer home, Samuel Bilewu Joseph (SJB) Oschoffa founded the Celestial Church of Christ in 1947 in the jungles of Porto-Novo after wandering in the forest for three months without food or water. Like the other sects, the Celestial fold has broken into factions since the death of the founder.

The history of the church as summarized here clearly shows that all the other churches in one way or the other were protesting against the Roman Catholic Church, the pristine universal faith. Even as far back as 1054AD the Orthodox Catholics had broken away from Rome following intractable doctrinal dissension. Even amid the factionalizing, some churches did see the need to come together to form a strong union. The United Church of Christ is a 1957 ecumenical coming together of Calvinists and Lutherans.

The crucial issue to address in the greater need to save Christianity is that the dissenting churches have over the years not fared any better than the original church. Critically, Vatican Council 2 has shown that the church is not inimical to change from within. As Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, he said: “The whole world expects a step forward.” Well over 2,400 patriarchs, cardinals, bishops and religious superiors participated in the proceedings. In an unprecedented display of accommodation, observers from Protestant and Orthodox churches were consulted and sat in attendance at the deliberations. Vatican 2 differed markedly from the 20 previous ecclesiastical assembles of Roman Catholicism that preceded it, and the 16 promulgated decrees, constitutions and declarations are a testament to modernization and liberation. Vatican 2 did more to accommodate the other protesting churches than the First Council of Nicaea which was summoned in 325AD by Emperor Constantine to combat the Arian heresy. Of course the abortive Vatican 1 was undermined by the Industrial Revolution. It was Pope Paul VI who closed Vatican 2 in 1965, proclaiming it as “among the greatest events of the church.” As Christendom’s oldest and largest body, the Catholic Church has used Vatican 2 to provide a shelter for all followers of Christ.

It is unfortunate that factionalizing lingers within Christianity despite the catholic appeal of the universal church. It is as though everybody wants to head his own church, in the manner John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, to wit, “To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” Every bloke today adorns the toga of Man of God, even when caught with bleeding severed heads of human beings! Christ is simply seen as the winning brand that can serve as cover for a vast range of practices such as voodoo, juju, magic, grigri etc.

The protesting churches should retrace their steps to the beginning, that is, where the rain started beating them, to redeem Christianity from the disrepute into which it had fallen through crass factionalism. From within all true believers can reform the one Christian church into a great institution worthy of Christ’s name. It is a pity that Christian brethren are still disaffected by the pejorative indictment: Roma locuta; causa finita (Rome has spoken; the case is closed.) But my inquiry shows that Rome has since embraced the modern times with all its plurality, especially with the landmark changes wrought by Pope John Paul 2. Catholic theology has taken into its stride the ideals of social justice, the revolutions of science and the mores of global secularization. Even controversial matters such as homosexuality, abortion, divorce etc can now be queried without the Inquisition stepping in!

Jesus Christ founded only one ministry and made faith the cardinal principle of worship. In losing faith in the universal church, the acolytes of the other churches have without apparently knowing it forfeited their stake in Christianity. The modern day claims of being “Born-Again” holds no water outside the very idea of becoming a Christian through baptism that started in the days of John the Baptist, St Peter, Nicodemus et al, and is still upheld today. Christianity is all about having faith in Christ’s laid-down institution instead of erecting parallel bodies. In truth these man-made parallel bodies cannot be Christian. The founders of these other churches could well have named the bodies after themselves – instead of dragging the name of Christ along. A revolt against a divine mission cannot be mitigated by nomenclature. Christianity is divinity and any breakaway contraption is a distraction courting damnation and the flames of hell for putting fire in the house of God.

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart @ 50

2010-08-11T07:13:00.001-07:00

THINGS FALL APART AT 50: CHINUA ACHEBE RULES THE WORLD

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

At barely 28 years of age Chinua Achebe published the novel Things Fall Apart in 1958, and it has in its fifty years of existence proven to be the single most important piece of literature out of Africa. The 50th anniversary of the 200-odd page novel is being celebrated all over the world with festivals, readings, symposia, concerts etc. The novel which has been likened to epic Greek tragedies has been translated to 50 languages and has sold over ten million copies. It is taught not just in literature classes but in history and anthropology departments in colleges and universities across the globe. The archetypal theme of the meeting of the white world and the black race makes Things Fall Apart an epochal event in the annals of world literature.

Things Fall Apart tells the deceptively simple story of Okonkwo, a strong man whose life is dominated by the fear of failure. As a teenager he brought honour to his village by throwing the hitherto unbeatable Amalinze the Cat in a wrestling match. His fame spread through the nine villages of Umuofia and even beyond like harmattan bushfire, but he remained troubled that his father Unoka was a debtor and a failure. As if to compound matters, Okonkwo notices weakness in his own son Nwoye, and he comes to the sad conclusion that raging fire only ends up as impotent ash. Against the warning of an elder, he kills the ill-fated child Ikemefuna who had been given over to the people of Umuofia as ransom, a child who called him “father”. An accidental gunshot that kills a fellow villager at a wake leads to Okonkwo being exiled from Umuofia for seven years. When he comes back from exile he discovers that the Christian missionaries have literally overrun the land and even his son Nwoye had joined them. In anger Okonkwo cuts off the head of the white man’s messenger but the people of Umuofia would not follow him to war. He hangs himself on a tree and ends up being buried by the strangers he had spent his life fighting.

The book works at several levels, and can be read at any age from 10 to 100. As a child one can enjoy the incidents such as the match with Amalinze the Cat, Unoka’s dismissal of his creditor, Okonkwo’s attempted shooting of one of his wives, the visitation of the masked spirits etc. Later in life the many ironies in the book come into play such as the joke on the District Commissioner thinking that Okonkwo’s story can only end up as a paragraph in his planned book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, without knowing that one Chinua Achebe had taken the thunder from him by giving Okonkwo an entire book in which the story is narrated from inside!

It is not for nothing that Achebe is celebrated as the father of African literature. He has changed the perspective of world literature from the gaudy picture of Africa as painted by Europeans such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Sir Rider Haggard to the authentic telling of the tale by the Africans. Unlike earlier African writers like Guinea’s Camara Laye, author of The African Child, who painted a romantic picture of the continent, Achebe is relentlessly objective in his narration, telling it as it is, warts and all.

It is because of the remarkable success of Things Fall Apart that the publishers Heinemann UK launched the African Writers Series (AWS) in 1962 with Achebe’s first novel as the first title. For many years Achebe served as a non-remunerated Editorial Adviser of the series in which the majority of African writers got their breakthrough in publishing. Things Fall Apart reputedly accounted for 80 percent of the entire revenue of the AWS.

Nelson Mandela calls Achebe “the writer in whose hands the prison walls came crashing down.” Former American President Jimmy Carter numbers Achebe as one of his favourite writers. The rave reviews for Achebe’s most famous novel have somewhat dwarfed his other novels such as No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe recently won the Man Booker Prize for his lifetime achievement in fiction writing, beating a formidable shortlist that included Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Ian McEwan etc. He equally won, as the first African, the American National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature in November 2007.

The celebration of Things Fall Apart as a global event has seized hold of all the continents. The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) which Achebe founded and served as first President is hosting an international colloquium on “50 Years of Things Fall Apart: Telling the African Story in a Global World”. The ANA event will feature a plenary on the theme, book exhibitions, visits to historical places like where Achebe stayed while writing the book, special auction of early copies of the book, the screening of the NTA adaptation of the novel, a competition on the adaptation of Achebe’s work etc.

Universities across the globe, notably, Princeton University USA, University of London England, Central State University, Wilberforce Ohio etc are organizing landmark events based on the novel. On April 1 State University of New York, Buffalo State undertook the screening of “Chinua Achebe with Bill Moyers” for 30 minutes as well as the 60-minute documentary “Chinua Achebe: the importance of Stories.” The PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Anchor Books USA and the Washington Post Book World presented “An Evening with Chinua Achebe” on March 24 at the Washington Post Building, Washington DC.

Labyrinth Books under the leadership of Dorothea Von Moltke celebrated the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart on Wednesday March 26 by getting Chinua Achebe in person to read from the book and discuss it with acclaimed philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, to a packed audience in the Nassau Presbyterian Church.

Things Fall Apart has earned its uncommon distinction as a modern classic and was in 1992 adopted into the esteemed Everyman’s Library of world classics. The Igbo world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which Achebe limned in Things Fall Apart has become the global picture of Africa writ large. At the turn of the 20th century the book was voted as Africa’s “novel of the century”. Achebe has in the book given the world a new English language which paradoxically portrays African life without facetiousness or affectation. He lays bare the brute masculinity of the age without bending the knee to latter-day political correctness or gender balance. The truth happens to be Achebe’s sublime weapon in telling the immortal African story.

The Essential Soyinka

2010-08-11T07:08:00.000-07:00

The Essential Soyinka

By: Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The presentation of the book, Journeys around and with Kongi: Half a

Century on the Road with Wole Soyinka written by the ebullient German

journalist, translator and cultural activist Gerd Meuer provoked my

own memories of my encounter with the Nobel Laureate as humanist and

writer. I had personally chosen Soyinka as my own teacher; that was

why I ended up at the Dramatic Arts Department of University of Ife

(as it then was) where Soyinka was the Head of Department, leading the

cast of lecturers such as Kole Omotoso, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Euba, Olu

Akomolafe, Segun Akinbola, Bankole Bello and others. The ambience

provided by the presence of Soyinka made for a joyous engagement with

his works.

The greatest discovery I made back then was Soyinka’s refrigerator,

which was always well-stocked with cold beer and wine! One evening

when Soyinka was teaching my classmates in his house, he found me

otherwise engaged in a corner. Aghast, the great man asked why I was

drinking beer while my classmates were busy getting educated. ‘Well,

sir, beer is how I get my own inspiration!’ I told Soyinka. He only

laughed, before continuing to teach the other more serious students.

Any other don would have rusticated me for such behaviour but Soyinka

was much larger than them all. My best friend in the school was of

course Soyinka’s Ghanaian houseboy, Francis, who left the fridge and

its multiform artworks at my mercy even as the legendary playwright

taught my classmates at the department or travelled all over the world

directing his plays.

Another boon companion of those days was the great Ugandan poet Okot

p’Bitek, author of Song of Lawino and a formidable tippler as well! My

time with Okot is material for another day, however. My subject today

is my mentor Soyinka, whose life and times one is hard-pressed to come

to terms with in this offering. Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, universally

known as Wole Soyinka, was born on July 13, 1934. His father Ayodele

whom he fondly calls ‘Essay’ in his acclaimed book Ake - The Years of

Childhood hailed from Ijebu-Isara town while his mother Eniola or

‘Wild Christian’ came from Abeokuta of the selfsame Ogun State. With a

father from the Ijebu section and a mother from the Egba zone Soyinka

refers to himself as an ‘Ijegba’ man. His father was a primary school

headmaster who rose to become a school supervisor. His mother was a

trader who ran her shop with an iron grip that spared no debtor.

A precocious child, Soyinka began his elementary education at the age

of four, attending St. Peter’s School, Ake, Abeokuta, one of the elite

primary schools in colonial Nigeria under the headship of his father.

He was a brilliant, if rascally, pupil who played a lot of practical

jokes. He had little interest in sports. In Standard III he performed

the role of The Magician on prize-giving day. Thus was the early

beginning of Soyinka as a dramatist. He was always the prankster

amongst his mates, witty, inventive and unstoppable.

Aged 10 in 1944, he was admitted into his secondary school, Abeokuta

Grammar School, popularly known as AGS, where the maverick musician

Fela’s father, Rev. A. O. Ransome-Kuti, was the principal. Fela was of

course Soyinka’s cousin. Soyinka was the youngest student in the

school; most of his classmates could even pass for his teachers in

age! Soyinka’s early grooming by the principal Ransome-Kuti whom

Soyinka fondly addresses as Daodu was matched by the mother-care

offered the young lad by his famous wife Olufunmilayo whom Soyinka

fondly refers to as Beere.

Even in his early years Soyinka had started building his stature as an

activist by serving as a go-between between his own mother Wild

Christian and Fela’s mother Beere in the Women’s Movement that

demanded the abolition of the tax on women from the District Officer,

the Alake of Egbaland and his Council of Chiefs.

Soyinka’s father wanted his son to have the best of education

available; in the young boy’s second year at AGS he sat for

examination to win a scholarship into the prestigious Government

College, Ibadan (GCI). He passed the exam and was summoned for an

interview in Ibadan. For the first time in his life he had to make a

long journey without his parents or any elders. He was on his own, as

it were. He eventually got admission into GCI but did not win a

scholarship.

The students of GCI were drawn from all parts of Nigeria. Most of

Soyinka’s classmates were ‘men’ just as in AGS though a good number of

the lads were nearer his age bracket. Some 24 students were admitted

and they were divided into two groups to occupy either Grier House or

Swanston House. Soyinka was allocated to Swanston House. One of his

mates was Olumuyiwa Awe who recalls that even in Class Four Soyinka

was so small in size that he was appointed the Captain of ‘Mosquito

Football Eleven’, a team made up of Class One or Two students! He was

a scorer for the cricket team, touring with the squad to such far-

flung schools as Government College Umuahia, Kings College Lagos, Edo

College Benin and Government College Ughelli.

Soyinka excelled in drama at GCI, being a prominent member of the

dramatic arts society. He excelled in English and Literature while

Mathematics was never his strong suite even though he surprised all by

taking a credit in the subject. He left GCI in December 1950, and was

in January of 1951 appointed a stores assistant in the medical stores

of the Government Medical Department in Lagos.

Soyinka wanted to start a career in journalism. He applied to the

Daily Times and took a written test with the other wannabes. The

applicants were asked to imagine a market fight and report the

incident for the newspaper. The other applicants wrote up their

reports and left while Soyinka stayed on, writing furiously, filling

up eight lined foolscap pages as though intent on writing up the

entire newspaper. He was indeed expansive, giving the detailed

histories of the market fighters and their extended families, their

ill-assorted businesses etc. The exasperated white invigilator could

not but snatch the foolscap sheets from the irrepressible young

writer! This may well have been a blessing in disguise. Given the

addictiveness of journalism, one wonders what would have become of

Soyinka if he had not failed the Daily Times test. He quit the job at

the medical department in September 1952 following his admission into

University College, Ibadan (UCI).

Soyinka talks of his great excitement sometime in 1951 at having one

of his short stories broadcast on the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.

He mastered typing and bought his first typewriter. A major highlight

of his UCI days was the founding of the Pyrates Confraternity aimed at

abolishing convention, reviving the age of chivalry, ending elitism

and tribalism. After reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island

Soyinka and his mates were struck by the lives of the pirates as

narrated by young Jim Hawkins. The original seven founders of Pyrates

Confraternity are Wole Soyinka, Muyiwa Awe, Ralph Opara, Pius Oleghe,

Ikpehare Aig-Imoukhuede, Ifoghale Amata and Nat Oyelola.

The critic Bernth Lindfors has traced Soyinka’s first poem published

in UCI to The University Voice, the official organ of the Students’

Union, in January 1953. The poem of 98 lines is entitled Thunder To

Storm and, to say the truth, was a very bad effort indeed. He was

politically active on campus, belonging to the radical Progressive

Party that opposed the policies of the Dynamic Party. He edited the

cyclostyled newsletter The Eagle. His acting prowess was immediately

recognized on campus, and he played the part of Tobias in the play

Tobias and the Angel by James Bridie while his friend Ifoghale Amata

played Raphael, to wit, the angel. He starred in other plays such as

The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw. He was the source of

admiration of the few young ladies around then.

He was of course very brilliant in his academics as a student of

English, History and Greek. He led the class in English, competed with

Gamaliel Onosode in Greek and slugged it out in History with Ifoghale

Amata. It was back then that Soyinka read Bacchae by Euripedes in the

original Greek, a play he would later write his own version of as The

Bacchae of Euripides. He left Ibadan for Leeds University, England, in

October 1954 but continued to send articles to the campus publications

The Eagle and The Criterion edited by his friends Pius Oleghe and

Ralph Opara respectively as ‘Epistles of Cap’n Blood to the

Abadinians’. In one of the articles he wrote of a white girl who kept

staring at him until he felt he had won the girl’s heart only for the

girl to retort that she was only wondering how many average noses

could be made out of Soyinka’s big nose! In yet another article he

wrote of the strong winds blowing in England which pushed his hand so

sharply that he ended up shaking the person behind him when he had

actually wanted to shake the hands of the man in front of him!

His short story ‘Keffi’s Birthday Treat’, broadcast on the children’s

programme of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service was published in the

Nigerian Radio Times magazine of July 1954. Soyinka was awarded second

prize in the Margaret Wong Memorial Fund writing competition of 1956

for the short story ‘Oji River’. He wrote poems such as ‘The Other

Immigrant’ and two of his short stories were published in the

University Of Leeds magazine The Gryphon. The first story, ‘Madame

Etienne’s Establishment’, appeared in the March 1957 edition of the

magazine. The next story was, like Charles Dickens novel, entitled ‘A

Tale of Two Cities.’

He graduated from Leeds with an Upper Second Degree, and there is no

truth whatsoever to the fable spread in certain quarters that Soyinka

managed only a Third Class degree at Ibadan! Soyinka initially

enrolled for graduate studies but soon turned his back on further

university degrees. He fell in love with the young English girl

Barbara who gave birth to his first son, Olaokun, born in November

1957. Soyinka eventually formalized his union with Barbara into his

first marriage.

The Royal Court Theatre, London, was all the rage for all theatre

wannabes in the Britain of those days. It was the golden age of

British theatrical revival that was built on the success of John

Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. The great director and theatre

manager George Devine held court at the Royal Court Theatre and young

playwrights like Harold Pinter, John Osborne, John Arden, Edward Bond,

Arnold Wesker, Ian Johnstone, Anne Jellicose earned their breakthrough

under Devine’s direction. There was the Sunday night innovation in

which new plays were tried out and fledging playwrights earned ten

shillings a script as play-readers. Soyinka was attached to the Royal

Court Theatre as Play Reader between 1957 and 1959. He acted in the

Royal Court production of Eleven Men Dead at Hola, dealing with

colonial repression in the British detention camps, a production he

made significant contribution to. His unpublished play The Invention

was performed in the theatre on a November 1959 event ‘An Evening

without Decor’ alongside excerpts from A Dance of the Forests and the

much-anthologized poem ‘Telephone Conversation’.

His play The Swamp Dwellers was produced in 1959 for the Sunday Times

Students Drama Festival. In the same year, the earliest version of his

comedy The Lion and the Jewel was produced in Ibadan alongside The

Swamp Dwellers. Soyinka was building quite a reputation for himself

even as he had not broken into print with a major publisher. Literally

all his plays had not been published then. It was not until 1963 that

plays like The Lion and the Jewel were published for the critical

industry to dissect the written texts. Soyinka was a total man of the

theatre who wrote, acted and directed plays. He could build the set,

and knew so much about costuming. Many theatre enthusiasts at the time

learnt at his feet.

Soyinka returned to Nigeria in January 1960. He had been awarded a

Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to travel all over Nigeria to study

and record traditional festivals, rituals and masquerades rich in

dramatic content. He bought a Land Rover with which he made his many

journeys.

Soyinka’s writing began to get some international attention with the

1960 publication of the great African-American poet Langston Hughes’

African Treasury that contained some of the fledgling writer’s poems.

He formed The 1960 Masks, a drama company, to kick-start theatre

activities in the country. His entry for the independence playwriting

contest, A Dance of the Forests, won the first prize. After winning

The Encounter Award, Soyinka discovered that after a thorough reading

of the play some of the officials were not comfortable with the

subversive nature of the play, and it was officially turned down as a

part of the independence programme. The 1960 Masks produced the play

at Ibadan to sold-out audiences. The speech of Forest Head, acted by

Soyinka, himself underscores the relentless pessimism of the play.

It was in the selfsame 1960 that Soyinka earned the distinction of

writing the first play produced on Nigerian television. The Western

Nigeria Television (WNTV) reached the milestone at 8.45 pm on Saturday

August 6, 1960 with the screening of the first full-length play

produced in the Ibadan studios entitled ‘My Father’s Burden’ by Wole

Soyinka and directed by Segun Olusola.

The year of independence was indeed remarkable for the artistic

exploits of the young Soyinka. He served as a Master of Ceremonies at

the independence ball where he literally chased off the stage the

boring opera singer flown into the country at the special request of

Governor-General Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, ‘Zik of Africa’. He made

contributions to The Horn, a magazine founded at the University of

Ibadan by J. P. Clark and Martin Banham. His critical essay, ‘The

Future of West African Writing’ published in the magazine in 1960 made

the case for novelist Chinua Achebe as pointing the right direction of

future African writing. Of course Soyinka would later charge Achebe of

‘unrelieved competence’ in his writings.

When eventually Soyinka made the famous statement on negritude that ‘a

tiger does not have to proclaim its tigritude; it pounces’, it has to

be understood that it harked all the way back from the ‘duikeritude’

article he had published in The Horn in 1960. At the turn of the year

in March 1961, Soyinka had done enough on the national stage to earn a

major illustrated feature article in Drum, easily the most popular

magazine in the country then, entitled ‘Young Dramatist is earning the

Title of Nigeria’s Bernard Shaw.’

His early comedy, The Trials of Brother Jero, was produced at Ibadan

in March, 1960. The respected theatre director and teacher Dapo

Adelugba informs that the play was written at his request in three

days! He would later in October of that year act the part of Yang Sun

in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan at Ibadan. The next

year, he again directed a production of his The Trials of Brother

Jero, alongside R. Sarif Easmon’s Dear Parent and Ogre, in which he

played the part of Dauda Touray. Soyinka was fast winning a reputation

for himself as a leading member of the emerging writers in the new

nation. It was little wonder that he was well represented in the

anthology of the new Nigerian writing, Reflections, edited by Frances

Ademola. His works published in the anthology include the small play

The House of Banigeji, poems like ‘Telephone Conversation’ and the

essay on Yoruba culinary overdrive entitled ‘Salutations to the Gut’.

With the troubles in the Western region rearing up, the activist in

Soyinka began to manifest in earnest. He wrote ‘Emergency Sketches’ in

1962 - press lampoons on Dr Majekodunmi who had been appointed

administrator of the troubled region.

After serving as a Rockefeller Research Fellow mainly attached to the

University of Ibadan up to 1962 Soyinka took appointment as a lecturer

in English at the University of Ife. He waged consistent wars with the

goons of the Premier of the Western Region, Ladoke Akintola, who had

fallen out with the party leader Chief Obafemi Awolowo. He raised a

dust of controversy over the world middleweight boxing title fight

staged at Ibadan between Nigeria’s Dick Tiger and America’s Gene

Fullmer, dismissing it as amounting to a misguided sense of national

priorities. He put up the satirical revue, The Republican, in 1963,

and it was followed up in the year with a performance ofThe New

Republican.

The year 1963 marked Soyinka’s major breakthrough into mainstream

publishing. A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and the Jewel were

published by Oxford University Press. Soyinka’s poems were well

represented in the Anthology of Modern Poetry from Africa edited by

Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier and published by Penguin.

Soyinka felt that his theatre group The 1960 Masks was not

professional enough to drive his drama revolution. He therefore formed

the Orisun Theatre drama group in 1964. His highly-charged one-act

play The Strong Breed was adapted and filmed in Nigeria for American

television by Esso World Theatre. To round off the year, The Strong

Breed and The Trials of Brother Jero were produced at Greenwich Mews

Theatre, New York. A collection of his plays, Five Plays, was

published by Oxford University Press.

By 1965 the crisis in the Western region was getting to boiling point,

and Soyinka stood up to be counted. His satirical revue depicting the

mood of the times, Before the Blackout, was produced in Lagos and

Ibadan in September, 1965. His play The Road was directed by David

Thompson at Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London.

Soyinka, as a crucial part of his activist intervention in the

politics of the day, moved into the Ibadan radio studio to switch the

tape of Premier Akintola’s broadcast. The aghast public, instead of

hearing the Premier’s voice, heard another voice hectoring the Premier

to ‘Get out!’ Soyinka was immediately fingered as the ‘mystery gunman’

who had done the damage. He was declared wanted. He went into hiding,

traveling to the Eastern region to be with Sam Aluko, who had taken up

an appointment at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, after he had been

hounded out of the University of Ife by Akintola’s administration.

Soyinka met with the Premier of the Eastern region, Dr Michael Okpara,

who promised to back the activist-playwright.

It was eventually decided that Soyinka should submit himself to the

police, that is, after making a round of the newspaper houses. He went

around in the company of Dapo Fatogun, the leftist ideologue. He

submitted to arrest in October 1965. He was acquitted in December by

Justice Kayode Esho on a technical error of the prosecuting team.

Soyinka’s bosom friend Femi Johnson, who had provided his driver and

car for the forceful evacuation of the activist-playwright from the

court in the event of a conviction, had to settle for a victory party.

Even so, Soyinka knew that the government, which had lost face, would

resort to extra-judicial choices to deal with him and his compatriots.

Instead of enfeebling his resolve to fight the regime, this

paradoxically emboldened him as several activists rallied behind him

in the arduous task of saving Nigeria from the iron grip of the

thieving political class.

From 1963, the publishing of Soyinka’s plays became an almost yearly

affair. Early plays such as A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and

the Jewel were published by Oxford University Press (OUP) to wide

critical acclaim. Soyinka raised the standard of Nigerian drama from

the standard fare of This is Our Chance by James Ene Henshaw. The Road

as a play text was published by Oxford University Press in 1965.

Soyinka directed his new play Kongi’s Harvest in Lagos. His radio play

Camwood on the Leaveswas broadcast by the BBC, London in 1965,

depicting tragedy of an authoritarian father and his stubborn son who

put a neighbour’s daughter in the family way.

He gained appointment as a Senior Lecturer in English at the

University of Lagos in 1965 and was soon made the Acting Head of

Department. A major highlight of the Dakar, Senegal, Festival of Negro

Arts in 1966 was the performance of Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest. Back at

the University of Lagos, Soyinka celebrated what he tagged Rites of

the Harmattan Solstice. In June of that year, The Trials of Brother

Jero was produced at Hampstead Theatre in London. In December, The

Lion and the Jewel was produced at Royal Court Theatre, London. The

opening lines of The Trials of Brother Jero are some of the most

quotable lines in the annals of Nigerian theatre.

Kongi’s Harvest was eventually published in 1967. For reasons no one

can really explain, the alias ‘Kongi’ has stuck with Soyinka amongst

his students and colleagues even though the character in question in

the eponymous play is highly detestable.

Soyinka’s reputation is largely based on the poetic nature of his

drama. To that extent, he is seen in most critical circles as the

world’s most poetic dramatist. Even though he had been well

represented in many anthologies of poetry it was only in 1967 that he

published his first collection of poetry,Idanre and Other Poems. It is

remarkable that Soyinka did not include his most popular

poem‘Telephone Conversation’ in the collection. Instead what would

later become the title of his 2006 memoirs, You Must Set Forth at

Dawn, was limned in one of the early poems ‘Death in the Dawn’.

As a part of the global recognition of his writing prowess, he was

awarded the John Whiting Drama prize in 1967. It was in the same year

that he was appointed Head of the Department of Theatre Arts at the

University of Ibadan, succeeding Geoffrey Axworthy.

The country was teetering on the edge of Civil War following the

controversial January 1966 coup carried out by the young majors led by

Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu. The revenge coup of

July, 29 1966 undertaken by Northern soldiers in which the Head of

State General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi was murdered alongside his host

Adekunle Fajuyi in Ibadan somewhat worsened matters. The genocide

meted out to the Igbo in the North led to a mass movement of the

people back to the Eastern region. Col. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu decided

to pull the Eastern region from Nigeria, declaring the sovereign state

of Biafra. Amid the confusion, Soyinka took it upon himself to visit

the Eastern region to see what he could do in stopping the descent to

war. He led a group he called the ‘Third Force’. He outrageously

countered the mantra formed with Gowon’s name, to wit, ‘Go on with one

Nigeria,’ with his own dictum: To have one Nigeria justice must be done!

He met with major figures in the war effort such as Ojukwu, Victor

Banjo and Olusegun Obasanjo. He was promptly locked up by Gowon for

his efforts, an imprisonment that Soyinka writes about in his prison

notes, The Man Died. He spent most of the prison term in solitary

confinement, stubbornly resisting his captors’ efforts at breaking his

mind. While in prison confinement he was awarded the Jock Campbell New

Statesman Literary Award. Soyinka’s translation of D.O. Fagunwa’s

novelOgboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irumale was published as The Forest of a

Thousand Daemons in 1968.

The prison walls certainly did not still his voice. His Three Short

Plays was published in a volume in 1969. Poems from Prison was equally

released and he was eventually set free from detention in October

1969. He thereafter assumed his position as Head of the Department of

Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan. Soyinka was immediately

thrust into the mainstream of the theatre circuit as he staged his

play Madmen and Specialists at the Eugene O’Neil Theatre Centre,

Waterford, USA in 1970. He would produce the same play in 1971 at

Ibadan and Ife. He also published his revues,Before the Blackout. He

traveled out of Ibadan to Britain in July 1971, ostensibly for the

long vacation, but it turned out to be a four-year self-imposed exile.

He sent in his letter of resignation to the university authorities in

1972.

He published his prison notes, The Man Died, in 1972, decrying the

massacres that led to the war, the alliance of the corrupt military

and civilian mafia, the repression of trade unionists and organized

labour, and championing the cause of the triumph of the human spirit.

His collection of poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, which includes Poems

from Prison was also published in 1972, giving voice to Soyinka’s 25

months of solitary confinement.

The British publishing house Methuen would in 1973 publish his The

Jero Plays in one volume made up of The Trials of Brother Jero and

Jero’s Metamorphosis. The charlatanism overwhelming Christianity in

The Trials of Brother Jero is given a greater bite in the sequel

Jero’s Metamorphosiswhich begins with Jero dictating,

in time of trouble it behoves us to come together, to forget old

enmities and bury the hatchet in the head of a common enemy

It ends with Jero promoting his followers in the manner of the

military, only to appoint himself a General because ‘After all, it is

the fashion these days to be a Desk General.’

Camwood on the Leaves was also published by Methuen. Oxford University

Press publishedCollected Plays 1. His second novel, Season of Anomie,

was published by the London-based publishing house Rex Collings in

1973. This very difficult novel follows Ofeyi into the commune of

Aiyero in the search for egalitarian community. Soyinka undertook an

adaptation of the ancient Greek play The Bacchae by Euripides which he

entitled The Bacchae of Euripides and it was performed at the National

Theatre, London.

When he was appointed a Visiting Fellow at Churchill College,

Cambridge University in 1973-74, he wondered why he should be assigned

to do his lectures in the Department of Social Anthropology, rather

than Literature. ‘African literature’ was not then recognized; but

Soyinka and his colleagues in the intervening years have done enough

work for the world to take requisite notice. It was at Cambridge that

Soyinka helped to supervise the work of a certain young man named

Henry Louis Gates who had since become a lifetime friend of the master

dramatist.

His beloved father, Essay, died while he was in exile and he was

warned by his mother, Wild Christian, not to come home for the burial

as the military regime was still out to deal with him because of his

damning prison memoirs The Man Died. His mother warned him to be

prepared to bury mother and father, should he risk coming home at such

an inauspicious time! In 1974, Soyinka edited the epochal Poems of

Black Africa published by Secker Warburg, which gave the needed break

to younger African poets such as Odia Ofeimun and Richard Ntiru.

He would later in 1974 return to Africa, to Ghana, to edit the

influential magazine Transition (later renamed Ch’Indaba) and served

as a Visiting Professor at the University of Ghana, Legon. He used the

magazine to launch a no-holds-barred attack on the evil regime of Idi

Amin of Uganda. He was in 1975 elected the Secretary-General of the

newly formed Union of Writers of the African Peoples (UWAP).

Soyinka’s arguably greatest play, Death and the King’s Horseman, was

published by Methuen in 1975. In the play, the King’s Horseman has to

follow tradition by dying with his King, but he hesitates and there is

the intervention by the colonial officer, only for the Horseman

Elesin’s Europe-trained son, Olunde, to kill himself instead. His

father eventually kills himself so that there are two deaths instead

of one.

His Collected Plays II was published by Oxford University Press in

1975 and the radio play The Detainee was broadcast by the BBC, London.

His play Jero’s Metamorphosis was performed in Lagos, that year.

The regime of Yakubu Gowon fell in a July 29, 1975 coup. Gen. Murtala

Mohammed became the new military Head of State with Soyinka’s townsman

Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo as the second-in-command. Soyinka felt safe

enough to return to Nigeria to take up appointment as Professor of

Comparative Literature at the University of Ife. He produced Death and

the King’s Horseman at the University in 1976. Soyinka’s longest poem

Ogun Abibiman that lauds Samora Machell’s bold decision to lead his

Mozambique in the damning of apartheid South Africa was published in

1976.

Cambridge University Press published Soyinka’s collection of essays,

Myth and the African World, in 1976, containing the lectures he gave

as a Churchill Fellow at Cambridge and an early essay, ‘The Fourth

Stage’ that juxtaposed Yoruba gods with Greek deities in the study of

tragedy. Soyinka’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera

was performed in 1977 at Ife as Opera Wonyosi with the author as the

director. The play, set in a Nigerian expatriate colony in Jean-Bedel

Bokassa’s Central African Empire, is a classic parade of mass-

murderers, fools, clowns, prostitutes and villains.

From the date of the performance of the play in December 1977 to its

publication by Rex Collings in 1981, deadly African dictators such as

Idi Amin of Uganda and Emperor Bokassa of Central African Empire were

chased away from power while Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea not

only lost power but ended up being hanged.

On the home front, Soyinka in 1977 resigned from the International

Secretariat of FESTAC, the second Black and Arts Festival staged in

Lagos, Nigeria. He became the Head of Department of the newly

established Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Ife in

1978. He formed the UNIFE Guerrilla Theatre, the troupe with which he

performed satirical revues against the regime of the day.

Even while at Ife his commitments abroad remained high, and he

directed Death and the King’s Horseman at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago

and the J.F. Kennedy Centre, Washington. Between 1979 and 1980 he

served as a Visiting Professor at Yale University, USA.

The ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) regime of President Shehu

Shagari got several knocks from the pen of Soyinka. The party’s

politics of rice was satirized by Soyinka in his 1980 satirical

revues, Rice Unlimited, performed at Ife, Ibadan and Lagos. Soyinka

helped the Oyo State government run by his bosom friend Governor Bola

Ige to organize the road safety corps of the state. He worked with the

likes of his childhood friend Prof. Olumuyiwa Awe.

His childhood memoirs, Ake, The Years of Childhood, which more than

any other book extended the frontiers of Soyinka’s reception all over

the world, was published in 1981. The New York Timesnamed it one of

the year’s best books. Soyinka gave his inaugural lecture at the

University of Ife entitled The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy

and Other Mythologies, which was later published by the University of

Ife Press in 1981. The radio play Die Still, Dr Godspeak was broadcast

by BBC, London in 1982. The play was later put on stage as Requiem for

a Futurologist at Ife in 1983 and it undertook a countrywide tour. His

satirical revues, Priority Projects, also undertook a tour of the

country that year.

The general elections of 1983 in Nigeria was massively rigged, which

eventually led to the return of the military through a coup in the

last day of the year. Soyinka waxed an LP, Unlimited Liability

Company, to lampoon the politicians, and the songs written by him were

performed by Tunji Oyelana and the Benders alongside Jimi Solanke.

The injustice in the country is what maddens Soyinka no end. He had

stressed in The Man Died that ‘For me, justice is the first condition

of humanity.’ Soyinka even shot a film, Blues for a Prodigal, to

depict the shenanigans of the politicians. He had earlier turned

Kongi’s Harvest into a movie in which he acted the part of Kongi under

the direction of the Hollywood great, Ossie Davies, and the production

of Francis Oladele’s Calpenny Films.

The return of the military, especially the emergence of the iron rule

of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and his partner, Tunde Idiagbon, drew the ire

of Wole Soyinka. The military regime’s refusal to announce a date for

a return to democratic rule met with the opposition of Soyinka and

sundry activists. The draconian decrees on detention and gagging the

press alongside the retroactive conviction and execution of three drug

couriers further confirmed the unpopularity of the administration.

Gen. Ibrahim Babangida took over through a palace coup, and Soyinka

felt that the new man who addressed himself as a Military President

was a ‘listening’ leader as opposed to the dour Buhari.

Soyinka eventually fell out with Babangida even as he had volunteered

to set up the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC). Soyinka’s

‘international conspicuosity’, as the village teacher Lakunle would

put it in The Lion and the Jewel, was growing in leaps and bounds,

such that his name started being mentioned in enlightened circles as

odds-on favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. A celebration

of his 50th birthday by his colleagues at the University of Ife in

1984 underscored the pull of the Soyinka mystique. He published A Play

of Giants in 1984, sending-up dictators such as Idi Amin of Uganda on

the hallowed floors of the United Nations. Requiem for a Futurologist

was also published that year. Soyinka directed The Road at The Goodman

Theatre, Chicago in April of that year.

He won the Enrico Mattei Award for the Humanities in 1984, run by the

ENI (Agip) group. In 1985 there was so much speculation in Nigeria

that Soyinka would be announced the winner of the coveted Nobel that

year. When it was eventually given to the French writer Claude Simon

there was acute depression in the land.

Then came 1986. Soyinka had just made the flight from Cornell

University, New York where he was then teaching, to the International

Theatre Institute (ITI) in Paris to attend the executive meeting of

the world body, which he headed. His plan was to spend a quiet time at

the apartment of his cousin Yemi Lijadu. He found his cousin giddy

with joy: The news had just broken that Nigerian playwright Wole

Soyinka had won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, thus becoming the

first African to win the coveted award.

Even in the anonymity of his cousin’s apartment Soyinka could not hide

away from the invasion of the world press. He therefore made quick

plans to return immediately to Nigeria. He wanted his entry into

Nigeria as quiet and uneventful as possible, but his friends were

quick to sniff out that he was on his way back home. His bosom friend,

the insurance magnate Femi Johnson sent a car and driver to ferry him

from the airport. Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi and other close friends ensured

that the goldfish had no hiding place.

The government of Babangida provided a presidential jet for the

ferrying of Nigerians to the Nobel award ceremonies in Stockholm,

Sweden, even as the government continued to deny accusations of

orchestrating the killing of Dele Giwa, ace journalist and friend of

Soyinka, through a parcel bomb delivered to his home days earlier.

Soyinka’s Nobel lecture entitled ‘This Past Must Address Its Present’

was dedicated to Nelson Mandela, who was still imprisoned at the time.

Soyinka was conferred with the high national honour of Commander of

the Federal Republic.

Soyinka notes that George Bernard Shaw had said that he would readily

forgive Alfred Nobel his invention of the evil dynamite but not the

diabolical Nobel Prize for Literature. The aura of the prize

overwhelmed Soyinka soon after the award such that he could do no

other work. He hoped that the din of the Nobel would end after the

crowning of the next winner only to be reminded in Cuba by novelist

and 1982 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One

Hundred Years of Solitude, that ‘It never ends, my friend. It never

ends.’

He published a collection of poems, Mandela’s Earth, after winning the

Nobel and celebrating the triumph of the human spirit as exemplified

by Nelson Mandela of South Africa after his epic sojourn in the

dreadful Robben Island Prison. A bemused Soyinka would later discover

that the next three years would amount to ‘three lost years.’

The vagaries of Nigerian military politics also took its toll on

Soyinka. Babangida’s interminable transition programme to civil rule

had enough twists to overwhelm a faddish fiction writer. Politicians

were banned and un-banned while dates were fixed and cancelled.

Even amid the merry-go-round in Nigeria, Soyinka was able to premier

his play From Zia with Loveat the Dionysus Chianti World Festival in

Contemporary Drama in Italy in 1992. The London publishing company

Methuen published A Scourge of Hyacinths in 1992.

Nigeria’s political troubles got out of hand with the annulment of the

June 12, 1993 Presidential election, an election generally accepted as

won by Chief MKO Abiola. The annulment of Nigeria’s freest and fairest

election by Babangida threw the country into turmoil. Abiola insisted

on affirming his mandate while Babangida was forced to step aside in

disgrace on August 26, 1993. The lame-duck Ernest Shonekan Interim

National Government was put in place only to be displaced by General

Sani Abacha who unleashed a brutal dictatorship on the country.

Abiola, was arrested jailed.

With a price on his head, Soyinka escaped into exile on a life-and-

death ride on a motorbike. Abroad, he mounted a sustained campaign

against the regime of Abacha until the dictator suddenly dropped dead

in June 1998. Abiola, curiously, died the very next month.

General Abdulsalami Abubakar who took over power discussed with

Soyinka on the possibility of the Nobel Laureate inheriting the mantle

of leadership of the country from him! Gen. Obasanjo was eventually

talked into taking power through the elections held in 1999. He won re-

election in 2003 and canvassed for a Third Term in power which was

stoutly opposed by Soyinka, the National Assembly and the vast

majority of the Nigerian people. President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua took

over the mantle of leadership after the worst elections ever organized

in the history of the country. Soyinka is currently calling for the

convocation of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) to find lasting

solutions for the problems of the country.

The activism within the annals of Nigerian national politics has not

dulled Soyinka’s creative enterprise. His play, The Beatification of

Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope, was published in 1995 by the Ibadan-

based Spectrum books. On August 6, 2001 Soyinka’s King Baabu was

premiered at the National Theatre, Lagos. A loose adaptation of Alfred

Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the play depicts the murderous exploits of Basha Bash

who to all intents and purposes is modeled after Sani Abacha.

Soyinka’s latest collection of poetry, Samarkand and Other Markets I

have Known, was published by Crucible Publishers Limited, Lagos, in

2002, and was launched at the National Theatre under a tree that is

now known as the Samarkand Tree. In the poems he celebrates departed

friends such as Femi Johnson, Kudirat Abiola, former French President

Francois Miterrand, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nobel Laureate Naguib Mafouz, and

‘the dead and maimed of Kenya, Tanzania.’ He pillories Abacha in the

poems ‘Exit Left, Monster, Victim in Pursuit (Death of a Tyrant)’ and

‘Where the News Came to Me of the Death of a Tyrant.’

The long poem ‘Elegy for a Nation’ dedicated to Chinua Achebe at

Seventy is quite striking. Soyinka had wanted to read the poem at ‘An

Evening With WS’ sponsored by Globacom, but there was too much noise

at the Golden Gate, Ikoyi venue such that it did not provide a

conducive environment for the Nobel Laureate to pay homage to his

great compatriot.. Soyinka was a notable presence at Bard College, New

York, in 2000 where Achebe celebrated his 70th birthday. Both writers

shared the stage at the celebration of the Christopher Okigbo Festival

in September, 2007 at Harvard University, USA.

Critics of Soyinka’s works charge him with willful obscurantism.

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, in their acerbic

book Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, argue that

Soyinka’s art suffers from a total embrace of Euro-modernist

obfuscation that does not lend itself to clear meaning. Soyinka always

replies his critics in kind, publishing his hot exchanges with the

critics in the 1988 book Art, Dialogue and Outrage, and likening

Chinweizu to the mythical Ghanaian bird Chichidodo that hates shit yet

only eats worms, as depicted in the novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not

Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. Critics of the socialist bent argue that

Soyinka does not depict the class divide in his plays and would not

let the oppressed triumph in their struggle.

At the last count, Soyinka is the author of some 17 plays, six

collections of poetry, two novels, eight non-fiction books and the

ongoing intervention series he publishes on burning national issues.

Soyinka appears to be in no hurry to depart the scene of Nigeria’s

national events. Although he had previously been Special Guest at the

Inaugural Edition of the Nigeria Literature Prize, which was organized

annually by the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd (NLNG), Soyinka

called for a total boycott of the 2007 awards ceremony by the

Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) because former Military

President Ibrahim Babangida was appointed the Keynote Speaker. The

call created a lot of controversy in the media, with some of

Babangida’s associates such as Godwin Daboh taking full-page

advertorials in the newspapers to attack the Nobel Laureate.

Soyinka’s argument against the choice of Babangida was anchored on the

fact that the former Head of State did nothing for literature during

his tenure even as he ended up executing soldier-poet, General Mamman

Vatsa, despite the pleas of Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and J.P. Clark.

Most of Nigeria’s notable writers such as ANA President Wale Okediran,

past presidents of the writers’ body Olu Obafemi and Femi Osofisan

boycotted the awards night in Lagos. Babangida was supported at the

ceremony by former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon and Head of the

Interim National Government (ING) Chief Ernest Shonekan.

As the never-flinching conscience of the nation, Soyinka takes on all-

comers with uncommon gusto. His many demands across the globe have in

no way dimmed his appetite for participation in Nigeria’s national

affairs almost on a daily basis. It is in character for the playwright

to fly into the country at short notice from Emory University,

Atlanta, where he has tenure, to address a press conference in Lagos.

These days, a major concern of his is the drafting of a people’s

constitution for the country. The call for the convocation of a

Sovereign National Conference (SNC) has his unalloyed support. He is a

major promoter of the People’s Representative National Conference

(PRONACO). Even amid all his engagements, Soyinka remains a family

man, married to Adefolake Wole-Soyinka, who at times calls the

peripatetic master ‘visiting husband’. He is blessed with children.

But beyond his biological children, Soyinka is a father-figure and

mentor to multitudes. Nobody comes into the Soyinka presence without

being moved. During the PEN conference in Toronto, Canada in 1989, I

told a venerable Roman Catholic reverend sister and writer to look

forward to Soyinka’s reading. She was in a tizzy after witnessing the

performance. While attending the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing

in England I laughed when one of my fellow nominated authors was being

touted as a student of South African Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee. The

house came down when eventually it was revealed that I was a student

of Soyinka as opposed to some ‘eaglet’ Nobel prize-winner!

From Helicopter To Oil Platform And Beyond...

2010-08-06T04:24:00.000-07:00

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The joy of journalism is that you can afford to do the impossible. Given the fact that we do have many powerful sources, we can get into circles where mere mortals can only dream of. There was once the opportunity of flying out of Lagos early in the morning and getting to Aso Rock to interview then President Olusegun Obasanjo, and getting back to Lagos before sundry workers could well get to their Lagos offices!

Some of the readers of my last column entitled “At Sea in Niger Delta” had wondered how I managed to stay all of 36 hours on the volatile waters of the Niger Delta without getting kidnapped or even killed. Well, let me now inform them that I did not end the trip just being ferried about in a boat; I wangled a trip in a chopper, a helicopter.

As a true journalist, I will not reveal my source. This strategic source of mine was talking of hiring a helicopter to go to an oil platform in an island off the coast of Port Harcourt. I told him point-blank that I will accompany him on the trip. He said my cover will be blown as a journalist and I risk being killed or jailed or whatever.

“Don’t cry for me,” I replied, adding, “Just get me a space in the helicopter and I’ll take care of myself.”

So, off we went to Nigeria Air Force (NAF) Base in Port Harcourt. The helicopter people gave us pre-flight safety instructions and we boarded the small chopper. It took just 15 minutes’ flight to land on the helipad on the oil platform near the town of Idama in Rivers State. We had to descend a very steep staircase into the main building. Then we got into a boat for the journey into the town of Idama.

The Idama traditional town square is dominated by the statue of the ancestral mother of the town, known as “Mother of Wealth”, from whose redoubt one can clearly set eyes on the Generator house built by the Idama Regional Development Council (RDC) under sponsorship by an oil company. It did not end with just the construction of the generator house and the purchasing of 36.5 KVA soundproof generating set; the power line was equally extended thus aiding the town in electrification expansion. Idama thus boasts of two working generators; one generator is from the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). There is electric light all over the community, all day and night, 24/7. So unlike major cities in Nigeria which complain of lack of power, here is one town that never ever knows darkness!

Aside from the road of the town, drainage, generator and generator house, the Idama RDC has also with support of the selfsame oil company renovated the six-classroom block at Government Secondary School, Idama. The work was commissioned by Governor Amaechi on December14, 2007.

The teachers’ quarters built by the company in partnership with the Idama RDC are all of 10 self-contained rooms. The science laboratory built through this partnership is spick and span, enabling the students to put their experiments to work while I was there watching with my source.

The Idama water borehole was made possible by the oil company, completing the picture of the Idama town as one example of what is possible when a host community works in tandem with the oil and gas companies, as confirmed by youthful Akobo Gogo-Abite, the Idama Youth Leader and RDC Secretary. There is no militancy here!

Exploring the town is a joy in itself; most of the locals are laid back, enjoying their lives as best they can. When it was time for us to leave in the evening we boarded the boat for the short journey to the platform. When we got to the building we found to our horror that the sea had dried up, and there was no way we could get the boat to the steep staircase we would use to climb up to the helipad. We were stranded! Eventually it was suggested that we should get to the nearby Joint Task Force (JTF) camp where the soldiers put a long plank for us to climb over the sea to an embankment. It was more than scary! As God would have it, I survived the unimaginable horror until I got into my helicopter seat for the 15-minute flight back to Port Harcourt. That is journalism for you, a life-and-death matter.

At Sea In Niger Delta

2010-08-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

At sea in Niger Delta

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

I have just come back from the waters of Niger Delta, where I travelled in an open boat from Sapele to Ogbudugbudu, Okifamba, Opia and Olougbene in the Egbema Kingdom of Warri North LGA; then from Warri to Okiyotoru, Makaraba and Kokodiagbene in the Gbaramatu Kingdom of Warri South-West LGA; and then from Koko to Eghoro, Bateren and Jakpa in Warri South LGA. I capped it all up with another boat travel from Warri in Delta State to Bilabiri Kingdom on Dodo River in Bayelsa State where I met a very special king, HRM Pere Paul Seidei (JP), Angirikpe the 5, Ibenanawei of Bilabiri Kingdom and Gbarakepa of Dodo River who remarkably addresses himself as “The Ark of God”.

In all, I spent more than 36 hours on the high seas.

The Niger Delta is a region defined by water, aside from the oil and gas under the ground. Navigating the many creeks of the region is a daily chore for the people. Stepping off the coast at Sapele one accosts the beehive of activities in the mammy transport. The fishing and trading activities supported by the mammy transport encompasses all the communities of the Gbaramatu Kingdom made up of Kokodiagbene, Benikrukru, Kenyagbene, Makaraba and Okoyitoru. The mammy transport also includes in its sphere the diverse towns of the Egbema Kingdom such as Tsekelewu, Ogbudugbudu, Opuama, Opia, Dumok, and Polobobou.

Setting sail through the wide sea and narrow creeks, it is a two-hour journey to the town of Ogbudugbudu in the Warri North Local Government Area. The school serving the entire town was founded back in 1955. Utolu Primary School, Ogbudugbudu, which bears the legend “Knowledge is light” hardly ever saw any improvement in its affairs until 2007 when Chevron partnered with the Egbema/Gbaramatu Central Development Committee (ECGDC) in the construction of one block of six classrooms. The new construction has definitely upped the ante of activities in the school, as the School Principal Mrs M.A. Torumade readily attests to.

The erection of the new classroom block has been embraced in a way that some of the educated Ogbudugbudu townspeople living in far-flung areas like Sapele and Warri are longing to return home to teach in the school. As many as seven of them applied to teach in the school but were not taken by the government in the course of the Delta State recruitment exercise for teachers:

Education takes pride of place for the children across the creeks of the Niger Delta, as the children can be seen daily having to row in boats for long distances to attend school.

Health is another key issue in the lives of the people of the Niger Delta. Water-borne diseases are all the rage. The construction of a Health Centre at Okifamba brings so much joy to the people. The expansive building was commissioned by Rev. Dr. I. C. Tolar, the former chairman of ECGDC on Thursday, November 19, 2009. The facility serves the 36 clans making up Okifamba.

Time was when wooden jetties used to serve the communities. These poorly constructed jetties almost always gave way against the surge of the sea. The situation is improving with the construction of not only concrete jetties but waiting sheds to boot. Typical examples include the Opia Concrete Jetty and waiting shed.

Even as the Niger Delta is surrounded on all corners by water, the region suffers from acute shortage of drinking water. It is akin to the case of the poem, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”, in which Coleridge laments of “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” It is in the drive to offer potable water to the region that the Olougbene Water Project was undertaken.

At the Okoyitoru community, the need is a public toilet. The construction of a concrete public toilet is now in place together with the construction of a footbridge leading to the toilet. The people of Okoyitoru, who already had a jetty and waiting shed, recall that it used to be so much trouble doing their daily toilet routine, until the advent of the new public toilet. Makaraba community, celebrated as an ancestral homeland of the Ijaw, equally savours the joys of the construction of a concrete jetty and waiting shed.

The stark contrast made in the affairs of the communities of the Niger Delta is illustrated in bold relief by the side-by-side view of an old decrepit wooden bridge falling apart and the brand new concrete link bridge constructed at Kokodiagbene. The Kokodiagbene Elders-in-Council Chairman Mr. Daniel Ukuli knows the difference made in their lives by the new construction, saying that it used to be hell travelling from one community to the other.

Now that one of their own is the president of the country the Niger Delta ought to be on the front burner in the scheme of development in Nigeria.