THE
OTHER IN AFRICAN LITERATURE: Ali Mazrui vs Christopher Okigbo
By Ihechukwu Madubuike
Sunday,
March 30, 2008
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•Okigbo
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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Continued from
last week
Okigbo found solace in traditional values which helped him
to resolve his ambiguities. His message is clear: Culturally
and morally I am superior to you. Under certain conditions
even the elite will turn his back to western (so-called universal)
values and return to a culture that he believes is more humanistic.
Traditional values and ethnic solidarity provide shield and
succor where foreign imposed values fail. Okigbo realized
early enough that group survival was a precondition for individual
survival and that ethnic pain has a way of rubbing off on
its major stakeholders and corporate citizens. If people like
Mazrui had understood this and respected it the war in Nigeria
might have been averted.
It is the pseudo universalistic and orientalists who are waging
war against us and our heritage. It is their bigotry and cultural
triumphalism that is at work in the Trial of Christopher Okigbo.
It was George Orwell who said that those in power control
the future by controlling the past. Universalism is a ploy
used by agents of imperialism, through various guises, to
control our future, often by degrading our past. It is a trap.
In an ironic twist, it was only when Okigbo shed his “universal”
garb, with its fuggy baggage, that he truly became a candidate
for greatness. Before then he made little impression on a
vast majority of his people.
But after his wasted pilgrimage and romance with a foreign
muse, after his return as a prodigal to drink from the fountains
of Idoto and traditional poesy, he found form for his song
and began to sing as the troubadour, the griot, and the town
crier of his people. Rather than diminish in stature, he gained
in craftsmanship and fame. Some of his early poems may have
been sweet nothings, but they were pleasurable to the ear;
where they did not make sense they made music. His death has
not stopped us from enjoying the music of his poetry and here
in lies part of his immortality.
The Trial of a dead man, especially if it happens to be a
revered dead man, a celebrity, is instant news. And Mazrui
is exploiting this fact to the hilt to gain cheap popularity.
It sets the tune for all manner of judicial intrigues and
manipulations.
The case is, however, not properly pleaded because it did
not meet the relevant requirements of the law of prosecution.
The Trial is a literary farce, a political heist to reduce
the influence of the poet by making him look like a tribal
champion or writer. From that point of view it is a condemnation
of the Igbo war effort and an inquisition against struggles
for freedom, self determination and social justice.
The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is technically faulty. It
lacks the basic ingredients of judicial process, lacks substance
and therefore inherent merit. The prosecutor, himself has
no locus (not even as amicus curiae) and his court no jurisdiction
(discretionary or original). It is a moot case.
It would be important to find out what is Mazrui’s real
motivation or interest in this matter. Ordinarily persons
bring cases to court because of a direct personal or organizational
interest they seek to advance. Now what is the direct personal
interest that Ali is seeking to advance? According to Mazrui’s
submission Okigbo would have won the Nobel Prize before Soyinka
if he had continued to live, but this is only a speculation.
Death cut short and obviated that possibility.
But not even Mazrui could have stopped Okigbo’s death.
At the appointed time one must die, no matter what you are
doing or where you may be, whether young or old. Besides Okigbo
at a very young age had established himself as a great poet,
one who had won and rejected literary prizes at home and abroad.
He has the distinction of being one of the most anthologized
poets of the 20th century and has a great followership in
Nigeria and elsewhere. Through the captivating beauty of his
poetry, especially his later poetry, and by his exemplary
life Okigbo is guaranteed immortality. He is forever ensconced
among the pantheon of Ndichie, in that extra terrestrial abode
of great achievers in Igbo land.
Is Mazrui pursuing organizational group interest? The answer
is definitely in the negative, if we are referring to African
literary organization with acknowledged open door policy.
This leaves us with one other motivation: political motivation.
The motive of litigants in political litigation is the advancement,
not necessarily of their self interest, but of policies they
favour. There is no mistaking the position of Ali Mazrui in
the war that opposed the Igbo against the Nigerian Government
in1967.There is also no doubt about his orientalist hegemonistic
sympathy. Politics, that is propaganda, is the real motive
behind Mazrui’s action.
The anti-Okigbo project by Mazrui can also be examined from
another angle in terms of human perceptions and psychology.
As the French like to say, “L’enfer c’est
les autres”, the other person is the devil. We must
not underrate the space between Biafra and Kenya, between
Ojoto and Mazrui’s Mombasa. Where he was born in 1933.
Even though both are Africans, the distance is very far, not
only in terms of geography, but also in terms of biology and
culture. Ojoto is traditional, Christian and contemporary;
Mazrui’s Mombassa is Portuguese, Arab, British and African.
Its contact with the Middle East dates back to 1st century.
The distance is not only spatial; it is cultural and ontological.
A gap exists and affects perception of realities.
Therefore the theology of the concept of the other is crucial;
it is critical and engaging if we must understand the currents
that shaped the two personalities and their outlook. Okigbo
is a catholic brought –up; he is also traditionally
ancestral. He had a religious split, caught as he was between
catholic religious orthodoxy and traditional religious ethos.
Mazrui is a fundamentalist Moslem and a thoroughbred Islamist.
It is also clear from his writings that he is a crusader of
sorts. He also has his immersion in Occidentalism by being
educated in the West. Okigbo and Mazrui may be both writers
and Africans but they do not share the same ontology. Okigbo
read classics; Mazrui, Political Science. Whereas Okigbo wrote
out of literary conviction and interest; Mazrui wrote out
of political persuasion and controversy.
The drama of existence in which both are involved is dissimilar.
In Mazrui’s Trial of Christopher Okigbo what is at work
is the use of a thinly disguised critical oriental canon to
view the work of a person from a totally different culture.
In the final analysis the case against Okigbo is not proved
not only because of lack of sufficient facts to condemn him
but also because of the quality of the advocacy in written
and oral briefs. Wars of secession and self determination
have continued to be fought all over the world in which both
artists and none artists are taking part and playing prominent
roles. Some have succeeded as in the break of the former Soviet
Union. Some have not quite succeeded.
Professor Mazrui is like a rogue prosecutor who has misused
the legal system to satisfy a personal agenda. It is a perfect
example of what happens when a prosecutor acts from a base
motive or malice. The prosecutor works from the answer to
the problem, using judicial and literary activism without
judicial restraint. Being innately controversial, he openly
invites controversy where the courts would prefer caution.
Robert Jackson, one of America’s great attorneys-general
once wrote (1948) that
“the prosecutor has more control over life, liberty
and
reputation than any other person in America.
While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent
forces in our society, when he acts from
malice or other base motives he is one of the worst.
At any level of reading the Trial of Christopher Okigbo betrays
a consciousness of a biased author, one who is parti-pris
and one who refused to see the incipient anarchy and civil
disorder in Nigeria which Okigbo and his fellow writers confronted
in both their literary work and social activities in order
to have a better society.
But it would be wrong to let Mazrui and his fellow literary
hangmen to get away without costs. Even if the cost is tongue
lashing. He is guilty of trivializing serious national issues
that involve the lives of millions of peoples and the destiny
of the largest black nation in the world. His meddlesomeness
is a disservice to national aspirations, national healing
and reconciliation, and an infringement on the fundamental
rights of individuals seeking accommodation in a plural setting.
To condemn Okigbo for abandoning art in favour of a local
cause is to unnecessarily mystify art. It reveals a consciousness
that is warped and anti-social. It ignores the basic tenet
of creativity—freedom untrammeled. The Trial is in service
of a philosophy that is out to ridicule Africa, and present
it as a continent of unserious writers. But it is a mock trial
in which the author has also exposed his underbelly of prejudice.
It is unbecoming to drag a dead man to the court of the living,
where the author in reality is the prosecutor, and the judge.
Indeed, in this literary parody, Okigbo was declared guilty
before trial.
Okigbo is a writer who is also Igbo (Biafran). Indeed he is
Igbo before being a writer. He did not descend from the clouds.
He has commitments to both labels which he chose not to leave
unfulfilled. He cannot deny any of the labels, nor shirk the
responsibility each imposes on him. Okigbo’s commitment
is best demonstrated in his choice to identify with his people.
And it was a deliberate choice. To understand this is to understand
Okigbo’s intellectual and literary project. To assess
him purely from a disguised Islamist and tinted Eurocentric
lenses is to misread him and reach conclusions that are misleading.
Okigbo’s social activities and literary effort are an
affirmation of self, and therefore of culture.
No matter the resonance there is little difference between
the affirmation of self and the affirmation of culture in
his poetry. That culture is African. Okigbo is a man of culture
tout court, the ambiguities of colonialism and his early posturing
notwithstanding. Okigbo, the poets’ poet and the oracle
of Idoto struck a near perfect accommodation for himself;
he is not accountable to the outside world but to his people,
hence his early retreat from abstract and hypothetical universalism.
The synthesis of the modern and the traditional is a dimension
of the life of the intellectual in a pristine culture. It
is also in this sense that the writer can be circumscribed
by the society in which he leaves. The idea that the writer
must at all the times be opposed to the system is a romantic
one that does not always reflect African social reality. Okigbo
consciously developed his poetry in the direction that will
give him a role in the society.
Because our literary culture is still very much in the making,
the concept of the artist and his social responsibility must
be approached with caution. Whereas the western or Islamist
artist may be seeking for a role for himself, the African
writer does not have that problem yet.
Africa will continue to be” a single story” as
long as critics like Ali Mazrui refuse to see literature as
culture induced, and show some sensitivity to the people’s
way of life. The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is a portrayal
of misplaced angst against a people struggling for self survival.
It is a scandal and an outrage against rational humanism.
The critical response Mazrui received in Boston is the type
usually reserved for those insensitive egg-heads who rush
in where even proverbial angels fear to thread.
All the questions that African writers raise in their works
are social in nature. Our literature represents life in the
sense that life is a social reality. It is also in this sense
that we can begin to perceive literature as a national biography,
depicting social conditions of certain periods in our history.
Biafra was and is still a social reality. The reasons why
Okigbo died are social in nature. What drove Chimamanda Adichie
to write her extra ordinary novels and captivating stories
about the human condition derive from social conditions. And
even though she was not yet born when the civil war was fought,
the effect of the war is still around. The open society for
which Okigbo died is far from being achieved.
The fact that Mazrui’s work is imaginative does not
exclude it from the point being canvassed. If it excites passion,
the type we witnessed from the audience and participants at
Harvard, several years after the war, it is because it is
very close to reality. Fiction exists because there is reality
and there is a link between the two.
What is problematic, however, is the boundary in- between.
The semblance between fiction and reality in African literature
is a cause for disaffection. It should impel us to inquire
more and more into the nature of reality and at the end of
our effort we should be in a position to affirm that our knowledge
of reality is incomplete. This should call for caution against
dogmas and hard positions.
Reality is what we know and this knowledge is defined through
the help of culture. The resolution of the human condition
which is the leitmotif of African literature must, of necessity,
be done within a cultural context. What we insist upon is
that in appreciating this literature and its practitioners
it must be done from a consideration that derives from a neo-culture
of freedom and practical humanism. It must be based on a moral
rather than a materialistic instinct. It must be a practice
that questions injustice, oppression, racism and patronizing
supremacist tendencies.
The smug, detached posture of know-it-all of the critic,
smacks of arrogance and condescending superiority. A critic
must not only demonstrate superior knowledge; he must approach
a work of art with humility, empathy and passion. The Trial
of Christopher Okigbo comes form a consciousness that is bereft
of these imperatives.
What Africa needs is genuine critical appraisals, not flourishes
and over dramatization. Because of the lives and works of
people like Okigbo our warped national consciousness will
be, at least, grazed, if not completely galvanized for change.
Okigbo was an archetype that embodied our collective unconscious,
reflecting our dreams betrayed, our hopes unfulfilled. He
should be allowed to rest in peace.
•IHECHUKWU MADUBUIKE is the former Minister of Health
of Nigeria |
