By Chijioke Uwasomba
Continued from last edition
Twilight of Darkness as a radical novel
As noted at the beginning of this essay, this novel belongs to the radical tradition of the Nigerian novel. Again, this novel as highlighted earlier on is truly a “factional” experience of events that took place in Nigeria during the dictatorship of General Ibrahim Babangida. Nigeria is a post-colony with its grave challenges. Its ruling elite is very bankrupt and unpatriotic that in spite of all the resources available to the country, the latter has remained clay-footed and dismally under-developed. Little wonder the Nigerian state is described in various ways by scholars as a Rentier State (Falola and Ihonvbere 1985), Prebendal (Joseph, 1997), Rouge (Joseph, 1995), Lame Leviathan (Callaghy, cited in Ibrahim, 1988), Neo-patrimonial (Medard in Ibrahim, 1988) among other epithets.
The upshot of all these is that the Nigerian state has been reduced to a centre of struggles for private primitive accumulation by the forces and individuals that have hijacked it. Its military and civilian wings while misruling the country have accumulated massive wealth for imperialism, its agents and for themselves. The state has become an anti-developmental structure which suffocates the people and destroys their hopes and aspirations as its activities encourage and deepen the misery of the people. Olorode (2016) notes that:
With state power in the hands of indigenous collaborators of the departed colonialists, private and primitive accumulation became the pre-occupation of the ruling circles in the succeeding post-colonial governments. These collaborators were driven constantly by the illusion of becoming effective partners and even competitors of the international plunders (8).
It is the ruinous activities of this class with their foreign collaborators represented by the IMF, the World Bank, WTO, etc. that have reproduced the state of insecurity and antideluvian displays that Chude retells in his novel.
Even before Dike sets his feet on the university of his choice, the reprehensible activities of the touts at Iddo park where he has gone to board a vehicle to Port-Harcourt constitute a sign that the country is in a mess. The touts are said to be used by politicians to rig elections and assassinate political rivals and create mayhem. The ruling clique does not see government as a ramifying social contract but, as a bully that must be obeyed. These campus bullies that Dike later confronts in his University are mimicks who see themselves as the Lords of the university enclave. Fashina (1999) has characterised them as “mini-models of neo-colonial small groups with a quasi-religious but autocratic orientation” (107).
Dike, apparently because of his exposure to reading, was already politically conscious and, therefore, finds it easy to have an anchor with a political platform of the Left with a sound political orientation. He is not given to fear even when his life and that of his girlfriend, Adaorah, are threatened by the cultists. In the university portrayed, the fear of the rampaging cultists is the beginning of wisdom. In the same vein, the political platform he has chosen to identify with is a fearless one whose credo is to espouse values of progressivism and to defend the interests and welfare of the students.
The influence of Youssan is total as can be seen in the novel. At all times, the movement is seen to be taking risks even when threatened by the murderous cultists. The cult groups are everywhere and have frightened the wits out of every student and other members of the community:
They had wrapped the entire community with a cloak of fear. Students were scared, lecturers were terrified, the school authority (sic) didn’t want to get involved. They were growing in boldness and daring by the day. Perhaps the greatest testimony of this was their new-found penchant to strike even in the day time. In doing this their hit men no longer bordered to hide their individual identities during operations (69).
The de-proscription of students’ unionism is also as a result of the struggles and vanguardist roles of Youssan.
In Nigeria’s higher institutions of learning, especially the universities in the 1980s up to the late 1990s, students were up in arms against the neo-liberal policies of the various military regimes in the country. Chude recalls these battles and assigns the successes of these struggles to organisations with social conscience as the motivators and that in places where they do not exist, society is doomed. Youssan provides the students with historical, theoretical and intellectual perspectives on the students’ movement in Nigeria, issues of development and under-development, the political and economic world order, imperialism, the Bretton Woods institutions and such other issues with ramifying philosophical, and socio-political dimensions. Without organsations as focused as Youssan, universities would be like grave yards and the state and its representatives would undermine the people the more. Higher institutions, especially universities have a historical role in moulding their students to appreciate their responsibilities to themselves and the society in general. In developing societies such as Nigeria, these public spaces cannot but be, active in helping to build a society worthy of emulation.
Having realised the strategic roles of organisations like Youssan, the university administration in cahoots with the military regime plans all sorts of stratagems to neutralise the students. One of the stratagems is to encourage students-on-students violence. Another, among other various ways is infiltration by encouraging agent provocateurs. Unknown to the leadership and members of Youssan, Priye Darlington, a member of Youssan is a state agent who has been planted by the state. Priye has all along pretended to be a student. His studentship is an arrangement secretly worked out between the state and the university administration. It is obvious that he links up with his office (the SSS office) in town every day to divulge a lot of information detrimental to the students. Agents of Priye’s hue are many in higher institutions in Nigeria. They spend many years in school and even when they have graduated they continue to hang around in schools.
As a political novel of radical persuasion, Chude tries as much as possible not to imbue the protagonist with heroic values and qualities to the exclusion of Youssan, the quartet of Adeyemi, Johnson, Briggs and Dike, the students and the leaders of Abumog. The quartet of Adeyemi, Johnson, Birggs and Dike are vibrant. Leaders of Youssan are always churning out ideas to rescue the students from the vice-grip of the cultists. But a clear reading of the novel attests to the fact that this is a novel that is constructed within the philosophical plank of collective heroism. Dike is no doubt the protagonist of the novel but the heroic deeds of the students lead to the dismantling of cultism in the university of the novel. The collective responses of the students constitute a big challenge both to the state and the university administration.
It bears repeating that were it not for the revolutionary and collective efforts of the students engineered by Youssan, the students would not have got their union restored and the menace of cultism would have been on the rise. The value of the political education offered by Youssan is made manifest by the responses of the students to the various economic policies of the regime in power.
The novel bristles with the heroic and patriotic displays of students, Gani Fawehinmi, Aka Bashorun and other public-spirited Nigerians that fought military dictatorship to a standstill. The novel is really a documentation of Nigerian history during the dictatorship of Babangida/Abacha. Twilight of Darkness is truly a committed novel that dwells on facts and socio-historical realities that have arrested Nigeria’s march to greatness and development. The complete lack of defamiliarising tropes should be seen within the context of the new realities that have defined decadent societies like Nigeria. In societies of this nature, realities take the shape of fiction.
Conclusion
An attempt has been made to locate the first novel of Chude within the domain of radical aesthetics. Though the novel cannot by any standard be considered as a truly fictional exercise, but it reflects the emerging novelising tradition in Nigeria which treats facts as if they were fictive events. Facts are competing for equal spaces with fiction and new Nigerian writers like Chude perhaps, have not been able to extricate themselves from the damaging impact of these realities on their creative consciousness. The level and impact of the new realism are very destabilising not only on creative writers but also on all who have been affected.
A succession of civilian and military power mongers with their neo-liberal international and local agents have looted and misgoverned Nigeria. The 1980s’ policies prepared the ground for the current barbaric realities that the country is confronted with. And as Kagarlisky (1999) has noted, “so long as neo-liberalism retains its ideological hegamony in the society, despite proving a failure in economic terms, the only alternative to it is a new barbarism which is becoming a reality…”(viii).
Chijioke Uwasomba is with the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
NOTES
1. Part of the title of this essay is taken from the book of a Russian writer, Boris Kargalisky. The book is titled New Realism, New Barbarism. It is a blistering attack on globalisation and the new imperialist order after the fall of the former Soviet Union.
2. The Supreme Court of Nigeria gave a controversial judgment in favour of Alhaji Shehu Shagari and warned that the judgment should not be quoted anywhere as a legal precedence. Many people were of the view that Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo did not want Chief Obafemi Awolowo to succeed him. Richard Akinjide, the then Attorney-General of the federation argued the case for the NPN.
3. General Babangida’s Independence Day anniversary officially marked the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). Attempts by many Nigerian patriots to provide an alternative was rebuffed by Babangida and his advisers like Olu Faleye, Chu Okongwu, Idika Kalu, etc.
4. In 1978, Nigerian Students through their Association, National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) and with the support of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) embarked on a National Protest that rattled the Military Regime. Col. Ahmadu Ali, the then Federal Commissioner of Education who announced the policy of the withdrawal of Subsidies targeted at the Students became the object of criticisms by the protesting students hence the protest was named “Ali Must G”. Many radical lecturers and workers were sacked by the regime in UNILAG, UI and UNN for allegedly supporting the students.
5. Youssan was a Marxist/Leninist organisation of University Students in Nigeria. It had its headquarters in UNIJOS and actively participated in the struggle against Apartheid in Southern Africa. It was also involved in the NANS politics at the PYMN politics. (The Popular Youth Movement of Nigeria was the core of NANS).
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