By IK Ngene
“While we do our good works, let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” – Chinua Achebe, Anthills of The Savannah
Fireballs and thunder did not augment the wailing wind when he died. This month eight years ago, Achebe crossed the abyss between the lands to make a new beginning with his ancestors.
Achebe died as he had lived: with quiet dignity.
Achebe was a man of exceptional achievement and his appreciation can only increase with time. Review with me a couple of events, which provide the context within which I make such an assertion.
Last week, in the country that Achebe left behind, there were the usual offerings of horrific news paid for in the currency acceptable to the Nigerian government, human misery. First, was the abduction of 30 students of the Federal College of Forestry and Mechanization, Kaduna. The terrorists rode into the school premises, on bikes and trucks, rounded up as many students as they could carry, and rode off with them into the forest.
A spokesman for the Kaduna State government told CNN that soldiers rescued about 180 students and staff. But that egregious lie was immediately shot down by one of the students, who escaped abduction, who confirmed to reporters that the abductors had already left with their hostages before the military came on to the crime scene.
The spokesman was interested not in the mobilization to get back the abducted young men and women, who in their states of undress were even more vulnerable to sexual abuse, but in spin: to burnish the image of the state government and to modulate reality.
Second was the return of the so-called Ibori loot to Nigeria. Chief James Ibori, former governor of Delta State, had been arrested, tried and convicted in a Crown Court in London, in 2012, for money laundering. His bank accounts were frozen and his properties were confiscated; $5.84 million of that loot had finally made its way back home by way of a memorandum of understanding agreement between Britain and Nigeria.
After the fact of the return of that loot, Nigerians weighed in on what should be done with it. Delta State lawmakers and representatives in Abuja, who apparently came to the party late, and opinion leaders elsewhere, all spoke up. Pa Edwin Clark and Chief Femi Falana, SAN, both thought, for instance, that the money should be returned to Delta State.
However, Mr. Abubakar Malami, the attorney-general of the federation and minister of justice, who co-signed the agreement, announced that, since the funds were secured by the diligent efforts of the staff of the ministries of justice and finance, they, therefore, rightly belonged to the Federal Government. Then he threw in a sweetener when he thought out loud that the Ibori loot should probably go to the construction of the Second Niger Bridge. The Second Niger Bridge is that type of project: a phantom project that has no completion date but very useful for retiring receipts.
However, I was committed to articulating my own opinion, for its own sake, when a friend advised me, “You know I am a Deltan. Ibori remains invincible over there. If those funds ever got to Asaba, don’t be surprised if they are remitted to Ibori with apologies and thanks.”
Well, who knew that ‘re-looting’ was a thing.
Perhaps the British government might as well hang on to that money.
The preceding were just a snapshot of a week in the life of Nigeria, where some of us need gallows humour to process these dystopian events. But the truth is that all these had nothing to do with Achebe.
On second thoughts, however, I reject that easy conclusion and admit that Achebe had everything to do with Nigeria as is. We are at this place because we rejected his counsel when he tried to warn us. He spoke with proverbs, he spoke with simplicity, and he shunned the use of histrionics to make his point. Anyway, we always thought that Achebe was speaking to Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and others who expressed in fancy prose and poetry unwholesome thoughts about the Black race.
When Kipling, the English journalist and short story writer, wrote his poem “White Man’s Burden,” he actually directed it to Americans who had defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. He urged the victorious Americans to embark on empire-building and colonize the Philippines among other places. But the message in the Black Man’s Burden soon became a clarion call on the superior race – White men – to take on the moral, fateful task of bringing all men – Black, Brown, and Yellow – to civilization.
Also in the “White Man’s Burden,” Kipling described the African as “half devil, half child” even though he lacked any intimate intercourse with Africans other than a short vacation in South Africa. So, in his eye, an African was capable of horrific things, and at the same time of being easily deceived.
Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born British adventurer and writer, titled his novella, “Heart of Darkness.” He also had only a passing intercourse with Africans. He had travelled once up the Congo River Basin. The Congo runs for 2,500 miles to circumscribe what became later the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its basin was a rainswept, sun-splashed, verdant prime estate rich in agricultural and cash crop produce, in diamonds and gold, and rare-earth elements and critical minerals. To flag off the beginning of the post-slavery exploitation of Africa was King Leopold II of Belgium who claimed the so-called Congo Free State for himself. He then used native labour and the horrific tactics of his Force Public to harvest rubber for the bicycle tyre industry in Europe.
You have to be someone special to visit sun-bleached Congo and come out to describe it as the Heart of Darkness. Or perhaps Conrad was talking about the hearts of the people of the Congo who have been engaged in intra-regional wars since independence from Belgium over mining rights of the over-abundant minerals under their feet.
By and by contact with Europeans had driven changes in the African community and the African personality. Curiously, it led to the emergence of the ‘Europeanized Africans’ whom Lord Lugard mentioned a couple of times in his amalgamation report. Africans had learned to read and write in English language.
Some had traveled to London to write college examinations and returned as lawyers, doctors, or journalists.
You will notice that those were essentially prestige professions with which they had hoped to demonstrate their equality with Europeans.
Thus did African elites aim no higher than to be replacement Europeans, and they enthusiastically became surrogates for them.
That then was the emerging dynamic between aliens and natives when Achebe was born in 1930. Even in his formative years he looked around and what he saw was unwholesome. He concluded that Africans could not be the equal of Europeans if they are playing a strange game, on a turf prepared by aliens, and according to rules set by aliens.
Achebe sought then to change the game, or otherwise invent new rules of engagement. So he set out to engage, on a common and reasonable human level, with rationalizers of white superiority and promoters of empire building on the one hand; and on the other, African nationalists who had recruited themselves from the educated elite.
Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ was published in 1958. It was a veritable road map to a place of Black Consciousness and Community where his people could realize their own manifest destiny even as they interacted with the White man in a mutually beneficial relationship.
With Things Fall Apart Achebe breathed life into a fictional Okonkwo who represented to a certain extent every man in Nigeria. He was a man with his own vulnerabilities and his own strengths; but he was not a caricature of the White man – a super man who had no apparent weaknesses. Okonkwo was a man capable of showing love: he loved Ezinma, his daughter by Ekwefi, his second wife whom he contracted by elopement, and he showed that love without shame; he was not a caricature of that African of popular literature who was all about masculinity and who sought only male heirs. Okonkwo was a strong-willed man who trusted his own mind. He had looked at the White man and recognized the danger he represented: not so much by himself but by the attitude with which his own people sought to engage with him; he was not a caricature of a man who wrestled with god and lost.
_Okonkwo thought, therefore he was._
On that basis alone Okonkwo was the equal of any man. But by the manner of his death, death by suicide, that was not always apparent. Okonkwo lived and died in a village called Umuofia. He was a hardworking yam farmer and merchant, and he was an outstanding citizen.
The people of Umuofia worshipped Agbala among a pantheon of gods which included Ani, the goddess of fertility and good harvest. The supreme deity of Ndigbo was called Chukwu and he resided only in a shrine somewhere on the hills and subterranean streams in Arochukwu. The fearsome oracle, Ibini Ukpabi, overthrown by the British in 1902, used to speak and deliver judgment in his name.
What stands out about the religion of Ndigbo was the existence of a personal god. Okonkwo built an altar to his Chi in his compound. Daily he offered offerings or supplications to it and generally revered it: for he recognized that his Chi represented a moeity of Chukwu in him and helps to guide his destiny.
Thus by definition each person was in fact a member of the supreme deity. It is in this wise that you find the core similarity between the Igbo religion and the Christian religion. When Jesus walked among men it was the next logical step in the evolution of the friendship and familiarity between creator and creature whose consumation was promised when Abraham, the son of a wandering Aramean, was called to discipleship.
This is not the place nor the time to undertake a comprehensive retailing of the road signs in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I have highlighted enough for my purposes here. Achebe presented a people in their own community doing their own thing to the world. And in his anti-hero, Okonkwo, he created the universal man in his own image.
Achebe’s message to Europeans was not we are your equal; but that we are humans too, and the respect with which you treat us is a reflection of your own immanent dignity, or lack thereof. The British in Nigeria went ahead and created a native class of surrogates or Europeanized Africans whom they colluded with to transfer Africa’s wealth to their homeland.
Free trade became a farce as Adam Smith’s invisible hand which was supposed to correct inequities in the marketplace was subverted by force of arms. For instance, Royal Navy frigates bombarded Lagos in 1851 to break up the Ijebu trade hegemony on the lagoon and gain access to suppliers in the ‘Lagos hinterland’; and George Goldie led an expedition, armed with British army issue Maxim and mountain guns, to capture Lokoja from the Bida emirate in order to dominate trade from Bussa in west central Nigeria to Adamawa in the east.
That said, Achebe reserved the most salient message for Nigeria’s thought leaders and politicians. Sixty-something years after the fact, a brilliant thought occurs to me: let’s hand a copy of Things Fall Apart to each of the national delegates who convened in London for the 1958 Lancaster House independence conference. Most of them probably spent 21 days on the sea commute to London which afforded them ample time, if they wanted, to appreciate again the skillful treatment Achebe afforded the people of Umuofia. He showed them as common people doing ordinary things in an extraordinary manner.
In the negotiations that followed in London that was all they needed – a perpetual redirection of their minds to their true vocation: to build a socio-economic and political framework to deliver good governance to a people who looked just like the people of Umuofia and the people of the villages and towns they left before they made permanent residences in the cities.
The negotiations that took place at Lancaster House deliberations were a success for the elite and political class. A time table for independence was announced. Nigeria’s replacement Europeans were in charge and they were set to take the place of privilege of the departing British even if they were not equipped technically to run the utilities; even if they lacked administrative competence; or even if they were not morally-fortified to provide good governance.
But the people got nothing. That road to hell was paved with bad intentions. Otherwise we would not have a country where the minister of state for education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, would think it was okay to say out loud, that the government could not secure every school in the country. Thus, his advice to parents and school administrators was to be vigilant and to report suspicious activities to the nearest security agency.
Sad Fact: The college of forestry where 30 students were kidnapped, mentioned at the beginning of this tribute, is located near the Nigeria Defence Academy barracks in Kaduna.
Boko Haram’s stated mission is to make the human cost of schooling in Nigeria prohibitive. Evidence on the ground shows it is winning. The kids and young adults that survive kidnapping from the hallowed premises of their schools, immediately put further schooling out of the question.
So here we are: at the beginning of the end.
At every crossroad our leaders followed the line of least resistance of their conscience and made the wrong turn. Achebe’s narrative ended with Okonkwo’s suicide. But to see Okonkwo as a tragic figure of his own lack of discernment and intolerance is to miss the point completely. Okonkwo’s crisis started with his drive for achievement coupled with his consuming need to compensate for what he thought was his father’s life of underachievement: Unoka would die as he had lived with unpaid debts.
Okonkwo’s crisis continued with his inability to close the spiritual expectation gap between his Chi and himself. Okonkwo thought that his Chi had not done enough to redirect Agbala from claiming for sacrifice his daughter, Ezinma. The negative energy thus generated he then channeled to resist the alien influence in thought, culture, and religion that targeted his people. That negative energy peaked when he was unable to recruit any of his family or friends to the resistance, especially Obierika his best friend.
At each point of Okonkwo’s personal and social crises an intervention by men of conscience could have produced a different outcome. In the final analysis, Achebe’s genius is revealed when we understand that Things Fall Apart was more than a literary rebuttal of Kipling and Conrad on an intellectual level. It was a social allegory of Nigeria as Okonkwo.
Now let’s go and find ten men or women of conscience in Nigeria; if we are not sixty-something years too late.
“When we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.” – Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-protected Child
• Ngene writes from Atlanta, USA.