THE OTHER IN AFRICAN
LITERATURE:
Ali Mazrui vs Christopher Okigbo
By Ihechukwu Madubuike
Sunday,
March 23, 2008
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among
old parchments or musty views….They are written, as
with a sun beam in the whole volume of human nature, by the
hand of divinity itself, and cannever be erased by mortal
power”.
–Alexander Hamilton, 1775
After listening to Ali Mazrui’s presentation at the
International Multidisciplinary Conference on Christopher
Okigbo in Boston on the 22nd day of September, 2007, I went
home disturbed.
This was after my official intervention at the conference
on what I felt was an unfair criticism of Christopher Okigbo’s
social engagement as a writer and the oversimplification of
an individual’s fundamental rights and freedom.
It was my first meeting with the eminent professor, a regular
visitor and consultant to the Nigerian government. I sought
to know more about this otherwise well honed public intellectual.
What disturbed me was his intellectual obduracy even in the
face of popular dissent and disapproval of his position.
I turned my computer and searched through the engine of Google
to see what further information I could get about the man,
especially his background. Among other relevant things I found
out is that “Ali Mazrui is a radical Islamist who lectured
last year at the Bin Laden funded ICPC….etc.”
ICPC means the International Centre for the Propagation of
Islam.
I have no quarrel with that. Other listings revealed that
he was a man who apparently enjoyed controversies. He is variously
listed as a left wing extremist and anti-Semitic. He has been
detained in the United States of America for attempting to
meet a radical Islamist leader linked to terrorist activities.
He had also once been reported to the US State Department
as one whose visa should be rescinded “due to profiting
from corruption”. Efforts to find out if he studied
literature or literary criticism at any point in his career
proved abortive.
However, I know that some men who have made statements or
taken actions that have debased humanity, from Darwin to Montesquieu,
to Hengel, Hitler and others have been persons with a heavy
dose of intelligence. All of them decided based on the exigencies
of the time (compulsions of racial dictates, colonialism,
political or religious persuasions) where to direct the might
of their intellectual gift and what cause to serve.
Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his book The Spirit of the Laws
while commenting on black people said, inter alia:
“It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures
to be men, because allowing them to be men,
a suspicion would follow that we are ourselves
not Christians.”
And Hengel (1777)-1831) in his book The Philosophy of History
(1831) said:
The Negro as already observed exhibits the natural man
in his completely wild and untamed nature.
There is nothing harmonious with humanity
to be found in this type of character”.
The stereotyping is not limited to Europeans only. The Arab
geographer Idrisi (1110-1165), while speaking about the blacks
had said: “Their ignorance is notorious; men of learning
are almost unknown among them” (See Lewis, Race and
Colour in Islam (p. 37).
It is this “single story of Africa”, to borrow
the phrase of Chimamanda Adichie who was in the same panel
with me and Mazrui at the conference, and of the black race,
as the wretched of the earth that Mazrui is perpetuating.
He is also extending to the epistemic frontier the intellectual
warfare that opposes and separates African elites from different
cultural persuasions and background, thus making uniformity
of thoughts and vision very difficult. It is still racism
at work. Or is it a Freudian slip when Mazrui asserts that
“some lives are more sacred than others”? Or when
he says that Okigbo’s poetry is the voice of universality
heard from a village boy” or yet that universalism cannot
be achieved through the vernacular language or that Africans
marry many wives to achieve immortality? Is this scholarship
or confirmation of old values and systems?
What is disturbing, again, is the fact that Ali, coming from
Africa, chooses not to be on the side of the needlessly maligned
and brutalized people of his continent, brutalized both by
Western and Arab racism. What is equally troubling is the
intellectual dishonesty which the professor parades about
as a universal critic without bias, the pseudo scholarship
which contains a large dose of contaminated ideological hypocrisy.
Mazrui should be able to distinguish between literary criticism
from pure propaganda or come out clean and tell us which one
he is practicing. By not doing this Professor Mazrui undermines
interpretative validity, professionalism and academic freedom.
This has also led to inconsistencies in some of his ideas
and pronouncements.
In one of his lectures titled “Islamic and Western Values”
delivered at the Al-Hewar Centre, the Professor-at Large at
the School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Virginia,
had this to say:
“Cultures should be judged not merely by the heights
of
achievement to which they have ascended but by the depth
of brutality to which they have descended.”
This is quite interesting. Mazrui made this statement while
comparing Western (European) culture with Islamic culture.
The interesting point is that the same Mazrui refuses to point
out the cruelty inherent in a culture that admits or condones
the butchering of hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians
in 1966 in what many has described as one of the worst forms
of ethnic cleansing in post colonial Africa.
The measure of cultures is not only in their virtues but also
in their vices. In the same lecture Mazrui justifies the ban
placed on the Satanic Verses after enumerating other books
that have banned in the West.
Whereas it may be perfectly logical to ban the Satanic Verses
of Salman Rushdie because, according to Mazrui, it held Islam
to ridicule does it occur to him that his Trial of Christopher
Okigbo could be banned because it held the Igbo to ridicule!
The Igbo whose distant in-law I understand he is could declare
him a persona non grata and ask all their sons and daughters
not to read his books.
Obviously the Igbo culture is more accommodating and more
humane and that explains why the Igbo ethnic formation has
never gone around subjugating anybody under its hegemony as
many other empire builders do. That is not in their character.
If mankind must enjoy the fruits of an open society, it is
not only the West and Islam that must be consulted, contrary
to Mazrui’s illogic. Contemporary Africa must be in
the thick of the confabulation. That is the only way, to quote
Mazrui “the dialectic of history will continue its conversation
with the dialectic of culture within the wider rhythms of
relativity in human experience”
. But Mazrui ought to have started this hypothetical conversation
at home, with the Igbo culture, since he was a frequent visitor
to Nigeria. But this would not have been in the interest of
his mission. It might have helped him to understand Okigbo’s
point of view, since that is part of the essence of the dialectics
of cultures.
It should have been clear to him that it was quite agonizing
for some one like Christopher Okigbo, who was nurtured on
a diet of national and trans-ethnic consciousness to take
up arms against Nigeria. That act is metaphoric and is a measure
of the level of the failure of statecraft in many newly independent
states in Africa.
The point is that Professor Mazrui’s book on Christopher
Okigbo is a strategic response to a situation of anomie which
provided the functional background to an imaginative work,
an unnecessary erosion of our Afro-humanism. As we shall show,
Professor Mazrui’s work is not an attempt to understand
a fellow intellectual’s predicament at the most critical
point in his existence but an essay to ridicule him, and through
him, his work and his people. It is the complicity of scholarship
with state authority.
Now let us turn to Mazrui's charges against Okigbo.
They are as follows:
1.” Okigbo’s poetry is the voice of universality
heard from a village boy”. This is very condescending
and patronizing. Okigbo, a village boy?
2. “Okigbo’s poetry is a case of promise cut short;
a symphony interrupted”. A genuine, I hope, lament and
regret at the death of Okigbo and the promise his poetry held
for further development.
3. “All lives are sacred but some lives are more sacred
than others”. How do you justify this? A writer should
stand for the sanctity of all human lives. Mazrui’s
position is an outrageous and revisionist stand to be taken
by a third world intellectual or indeed by any intellectual
for that matter.
4. Okigbo subjected his genius to parochial goals by acting
as an Igbo first and a poet second. He asked “Did Okigbo
sacrifice the universality of his genius to his parochial
interest? Should a gifted human being have a right to sacrifice
himself?” Before we proceed let us understand and explain
the meanings of some of the key words in these charges, words
like, parochial, universal, and sacrifice. They are strong
and loaded.
Parochial means one who is only interested in the things
that affect him and his local area and not in more important
things. Universal, on the other hand, means something that
is done or understood by everybody; something that includes
or involves everybody. Sacrifice is the act of dying while
fighting for a principle.
Unarguably, the above charges derive from a consciousness
that is apparently nurtured on a bogus universal theology.
They represent the focal point of the trial, even though there
is more to it than is immediately apparent. It is therefore
apposite to review briefly a lecture once given by Professor
Ali Mazrui before proceeding.
In the lecture entitled “Pretender to Universalism:
Western Culture in the Globalizing Age”, Ali Mazrui
argues that even though western culture is the dominant culture
in the world today it is not universal. He reasons as follows:
The West’s triumph in the last two or three centuries
has led to the claim that Western civilization has universal
validity.
Such a claim, he argues, faces three challenges— the
challenge of historical relativism (what was valid in the
West a hundred years ago is not valid necessarily today);
the challenge of cultural relativism (what is valid in the
West may not be valid in other cultures and civilizations)
and the challenge of empirical relativism (not only does the
West fail to meet its own ethical standards, but these standards
are sometimes better fulfilled by other cultures than by the
West.).
“If there is a universal ethical standard in the world,
we have not yet discovered it. It is certainly not the Western
ethical standard…” concludes Mazrui. Now, if the
search for the universal is still ongoing, and it is not to
be found in the West, to which universal principle is Mazrui
subjecting Okigbo in his trial? Which universal ideals has
Okigbo betrayed either as a writer or as a solder fighting
on the side of Biafra? If he had fought on the side of Nigeria
would he have been validating any universal ideal? The answer
is no, since no such ideal exists, according to Mazrui.
Did Okigbo sacrifice his genius for a lesser ideal? Again,
by whose standards do we determine what ideals are high and
which are low? The principle of relativism, as proffered by
Mazrui is enough to plead the cause of Okigbo here.
There is no universal ideal and since we are still in the
realm of relativism; ethical standards are also culture induced.
The entire book, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is an ethical
evaluation; a moral judgment. Ali is a prisoner of his own
logic and cannot escape its application to him.
The accusation that Okigbo sacrificed arts—a presumably
higher universal ideal-- for a parochial interest , that is
the defense of a people fighting for survival and self determination
–cannot stand serious scrutiny.
Does an architectural hierarchy of life exist in the oriental
literary critical canon or value system? In other words does
the Islamic moral ideal have a scale of values for rating
human lives? Does it distinguish
between important and less important lives? Where does Mazrui
derive the idea that some lives are more sacred than others?
From western or oriental, or African, ethical canons? There
are still strong debates over capital punishment in many civilizations
today, showing the premium placed on human life. Even the
lives of known criminals are not rated lower than those of
nobles and princes. Abortion of yet to be born human embryos
is highly resented in many circles.
Mazuri is yet to prove how Okigbo’s life was more “sacred”
than the lives of a thousand others who lost their lives during
the war especially when it is known that some of these were
also artists? In other words, Mazrui should plead with evidence
places where grading systems exit to determine the value attached
to individual lives which warrants some lives to be more sacred
or important or superior to others? And why should we tolerate
such a system if it at all exists and why should we allow
it to be extolled insouciantly in scholarly conferences?
We hold it that all lives are equal and sacred and that all
men are born equal. It is only racists who hold and propagate
such supremacist values. Okigbo obviously did not subscribe
to this supremacist ethical idea, given his down to earth
and vivacious life style.
Soldiers go to war to defend positions which they or their
superiors believe in. However, not every soldier that goes
to war dies. That is to say that the act of going to war is
not necessarily an act of sacrifice in the sense that Mazrui
understands it, since it may not result in death.
It may certainly lead to other deprivations but not always
to death. Okigbo did not voluntarily kill himself so that
he will no longer write poetry. There are many people who
fought the civil war who did not lose their lives. Mazriu
has not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Okigbo committed
suicide in order not to continue with writing poetry.
Okigbo is modern, not universal. He took to politics of commitment
based on a value system which essentially derives from his
culture and from an objective assessment of the situation
at the time of the war. Okigbo is not a tragic figure.
His death is not the result of punishment by any god of art
nor does it derive from any known hubristic act as is usually
the case with classical tragedies. He was an “ecrivain
engage” in the best usage of the word, representing
best practices, a truly committed individual to the cause
he believed in.
He was responsible for his action, not pushed by an implacable
foe or uncanny forces. There is no cathartic effect, nor pity.
Okigbo died in the war because of the superior fire power
of the opposition. He died in the discharge of his social
obligation as a member of a deprived community; this is as
valid as any other engagement.
This action, rather than excite condemnation evokes admiration
and celebration. We celebrate Okigbo today not only because
of his poetry, but also because of his courage and his conviction,
because of who he was: a man who did not allow his art to
bar him from fulfilling his social responsibility, a man who
knew that art can only be useful when it serves suffering
humanity.
Much of Africa is still ethnic in organization and outlook.
Universalistic values— so-called —do not give
meaning to individual lives in transition Survival instinct
is a strategic, pragmatic instinct. It goes for results, not
ideals.
(Continued) |
