1 It is sad when people and nations choose foolishly and then blame fate or the gods for the consequences of their choices.
2. Experience is the best teacher but Nigerians are resistant to its teaching.
3. Huge traces of masochism must be embedded in the DNA of large portions of our populace when it comes to making political choices.
4. One bitten, twice seduced, thrice perpetually confused!
5. Rational Choice Theory (RCT) can explain anything including the worst forms of irrationality and that is its core flaw!
Category: Prose
Purple Hibiscus – a critique of patriarchy and misguided religiosity
By Noel Ihebuzor
Purple hibiscus is a tragic tale of lives and family destroyed by the effects of extreme religiosity, a religiosity that strays quite frequently into the irrational and the psychotic. It is also a tale on the dangers of patriarchy, of domestic violence (spousal and GBV) and what could happen when the battered acquiesce for too long in their systematic humiliation. I also see it as a critique of crude and arrogant Catholicism of the type practised in some parishes in Nigeria. The author of the novel, Chimamanda Adichie has certainly amplified that criticism in her recent address to the council of Nigeria’s, and thereby called out the church and its leaders on a public platform.
But let us go back to the story and see what it tells us – simply this – a fanatical father infected with extremes of religious belief engages in behaviors which systematically estrange from his family, his own father and his sister. In the end, he is poisoned by his wife who sees murder as the only route to end his reign of terror and her suffering.
Let us look at the characters – Papa, a Catholic and publisher of a newspaper, mama, his subdued wife who he humiliates at will, their two children, Kambili and Jaja, whom Papa terrorises and who live in total fear of his fits of temper and excesses, Aunty Ifeoma, Papa’s sister, a lecturer and a beacon of liberalism and radicalism, her two children and finally Papa Nnukwu, Papa’s dad and the children’s grandfather. Papa Nnukwu practices traditional religion and this reality creates a permanent tension between him and his son. The tension is such as that it stands permanently in the way of any demonstration of any bond of filial loyalty from our super Christian pater familias to his father.
Interwoven in this sad tale and in the lives of the characters are snippets of the social ills of Nigeria, including that of corruption, poor governance, abuse of office, wrong and aggressive policing, the corrupting and corrosive effects of a poorly examined religious life and what could happen when a young girl either falls in love with or fantasizes over her priest. The tension is intense and eventually leads to the tragic ending of the novel. The title of the novel ” Purple Hibiscus” is thus at variance with its content.
In the end papa dies from the effects of sustained poisoning by his wife but Jaja takes the rap for his mum. A family is destroyed because of the misguided religiosity of a domineering and aggressive father.
This is a troubling and troubled novel told with sensitivity and tact. One sees in it also the early signs of the author’s feminism, a feminism that has since blossomed as can seen in her positions and speeches on several social media platforms. But some questions persist. One of these is this – is papa a rounded character or a flat character? Does his characterization lean towards a single story approach? Remember that Adichie comes against single stories in one of her now famous lectures? What does the reader think?
Nkemdirim by Noel Ihebuzor
The person who calls his/her child Nkemdirim is not asking for too much! The person is simply asking God to confirm and sustain his gift to him or her. He or she is also asking God to imbue that gift with utility, distinctiveness, a sense of identity, permanence and sustainability. Nkemdirim is also a prayer that the gift remains with us whatever may be the vicissitudes of life!
People advance and progress when they grow, solidify and edify what is theirs. People advance when they build on their positive values and assets. Peoples and nations advance recognizing the value of what is theirs and not by uncritical self abandonment nor by group rejection nor through the adoption of the structures that belong to others. You cannot be an Ogaranya with someone else’s wealth or structure. Charity and beauty, they say, start from home. “Eji eshi uyo mara mma fuma ama” the Owerri person would say, and correctly too!
We approach others with more confidence and with a greater sense of security when invested and vested in our uniqueness, our USP, if you like. These constitute our distinctiveness.
In such situations, our base is firm, our unit flags, our symbols and our totems are visible, unique, vibrant and distinctive.
These things give us identity. A family, a village, a town, a clan…indeed, any structure without identity is lost and will be absorbed by others in a way that degrades it and ultimately wipes it off from any serious reckoning.
As in life, so also in other spheres of life, including associating with others in politics. Which political structure is ours? Just asking! Nkemdirim.
Scribbles on Inclusion and exclusion
By
Noel Ihebuzor
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102%….why we must return him for a second term, 102%
Chidi Odinkalu’s verdict on Buhari’s Anti-corruption War
Truth is often bitter but it is the perfect antidote to self-deception. Truth also helps protect the public from undue manipulation and mind control by governments and their licensed agents and spinners anxious to sell smoke, hype and inaccuracies to a population seduced by adulation and trapped by credulity. We need social critics and activists who are willing to speak evidence-based truths to rulers and the ruled. Chidi Odikanlu’s take on this government’s anti-corruption campaign is important because it is precisely such an exercise. It is an exercise in fact-checking and evidence-based evaluation where hard reality is used to confront government’s posturings and verbalizations on corruption. His verdict? “Buhari’s Anti-corruption war (is) Partisan (and) Lacks Credibility”.
I would even add that the “anti-corruption war” is the child of political posturing which was used, along with two other sound bytes – Security and Employment, to appeal to a populace that had felt politically excluded by PDP misgovernance.
The entire contribution by Prof Chidi Odinkalu is worth reading. Clicking the link line takes you to it. It needs a lot of courage to speak up and out as Professor Odinkalu has done. Yet such voices of courage are needed since as more voices rise to speak truth to power and to chastise with love and civility those we have entrusted with ruling us for observed mismatches between their rhetoric and action, the more and firmer will grow the tree of accountability and responsible governance.
There was a country
(I share my review of Chinua Achebe’s book – There was a country TWAC – a review I wrote so many years back.)
Chinua Achebe’s new book “There was a country, a personal history of Biafra” (TWAC, for short in the rest of this essay) has stirred up and continues to stir up considerable furore in Nigeria. Reactions to the book cover a broad spectrum of emotions – from over-enthusiastic reception at one end to outright rejection and even condemnation of the author and his book at the other. We are a nation with unique proneness for extreme positions on some matters. We often forget in the manifestation of this predilection for extreme positions, that truth is usually sober and flees such extremes in most cases.
My purpose in this essay is to attempt a review of this book as objectively as I can and in the process identify whatever utility the book possesses for Nigeria in its efforts to manage its challenged present and chart its future in the current haze of colossal national dysfunctions. Any effective charting of such a future must, in my view, depend on a proper understanding and acceptance of her troubled past.
Let me start by presenting the structure of the book. TWAC is in four unequal parts with a postscript (on the example of Nelson Mandela as an icon of leadership in Africa) and an appendix – Brigadier Banjo’s Broadcast to Mid-West. Achebe claims he is writing the book for the sake of the future of Nigeria, for our children and our grandchildren. Let me then attempt a synopsis of this book.
Part 1 recounts Achebe’s early days, his education from primary school days, his secondary school experience at Umuahia, his days at Ibadan, the beginning of his literary career and his meeting with Christie Achebe, his wife. Part 1 also examines the January 1966 coup, the army, the counter-coup, the reprisals, the pogrom, the worsening tensions, attempts at peace, the failed Aburi accord, ethnic tensions, and resentment. It ends with a sub-section titled “the nightmare begins”, where we learn of the creation of states by the Gowon led Federal Administration on the 27th May and the proclamation of Biafran Independence by Ojukwu on the 30th May, 1967. There is a lot of nostalgia for the good old days in some portions of part 1 and some of the sections here are teasingly brief and telegraphic, especially his meeting, courtship and marriage to Christie!
Part 2 deals with the Nigeria-Biafra war. It presents a fairly detailed account of the war, Achebe’s wartime activities and his role in the Biafran struggle. We also get to learn of his association with Chris Okigbo and the death of this great poet. Achebe’s narration of this death is so subdued. Part 2 also provides glimpses into life in Biafra, starvation, death, air raids, war casualties, Biafran ingenuity, the Ogbunigwe, the war efforts and theatres, the role of external parties in the conflict, the Uli airstrip, the airlift operations and a host of other details.
Part 3 narrates the economic starvation and blockade, the vicissitudes of the fighting and takes the reader through to the eventual collapse of Biafra. It also addresses the very sensitive issues concerning the use of hunger and starvation during the war and some economic decisions taken by the federal authorities both during the war and at its end. This is the part that has caused most offense in some quarters in Nigeria and also provoked a torrent of ethnic driven and emotive responses.
Part 4 looks at Nigeria in the present. The writer’s hopes and aspirations for a renewed Nigeria shine through. The prose in each of these parts is interspersed with his poems, two of the most haunting being Refugee mother and child and the vultures!
I am Igbo, lived through the war and may therefore not be in a good position to be neutral about TWAC. But I think that Achebe has written a fine book, a book in which he makes every effort to be factual to the point of adopting what I call a flat clinically detached narrative voice in much of parts 1 and 2! One of the strengths of TWAC is the detailed historical referencing and openness to a diversity of sources! The creative writer in Achebe cedes place in major portions of parts 1 and 2 to the cold and detached historian. This is not Achebe that we know, the animated storyteller who knows how to make words come alive, dance and sing with the same virtuosity one would ascribe to Obika in his Ogbazulu obodo role. Not only does he subdue personal voice in large portions of TWAC, Achebe also succeeds fairly well in managing any biases. For instance, he does not spare either Ojukwu or Gowon in his judgments, laying the blame for the conflict on the pride and personal jousts between these two colonels. For someone who served Biafra in such elevated and personal levels to achieve this level of objectivity in a personal war memoir is commendable
In much of TWAC, what we therefore see is the subdued artist surrendering his impulses to the discipline of facts and available evidence. So great is this surrender to the demands of objective historiography that the personal comments one expects are not delivered. Rather the writer presents the views of others even when these challenge the Biafran position! This historical disciplining appears to have been lost on the writers of some reviews who have tried to fault TWAC on grounds of faulty historical methods. One reviewer even went as far as accusing Achebe of Awophobia whilst another accused him of senility! Such ad hominems are useful to the extent that they provide us good glimpses of how serious minded some of our literary scholars and reviewers in Nigeria are! Incidentally, one also wonders whether some of these reviewers really read the book! I suspect some did not, given the timing and content of their reviews. But this suspicion does not in any way reduce my admiration for such gifted folks who can review a book without ever reading it! They are proof of the abundance of paranormal capacities in Nigeria!
Like I said earlier, the narrative tone is one that is controlled and clinical. Achebe’s voice however returns from p.222 through to part 4 of TWAC. With the return of voice, the book then comes more alive.
TWAC is inconvenient though useful as we grapple with nation building. It forces us to think of our past. To move into the future on firmer footing, the present must go back and catch up with our troubled past and learn from it. We cannot deny the reality of the pogrom. We cannot say that children did not die of hunger and starvation during the war. It is also unproductive to seek through convoluted sophistry to exonerate certain persons from the consequences of their actions or inactions. We need to confront our past, accept our mistakes and learn from them and move on. This is the inconvenient message of TWAC, its beauty and its social utility. Truth is bitter but it heals!
Incidentally, some of the issues in TWAC had already been touched upon in part in Achebe’s earlier works notably – “The Education of a British Protected child”, “Home and Exile” and “The Trouble with Nigeria” books which overflow with wit, sarcasm, erudition, intellectual energy and boldness! Yet the reception to these books was not as hostile as the one accorded TWAC. A discerning reader noting the focus and thrusts of the hostile reactions will easily know why!
But beyond providing a history of a piece of our troubled past, TWAC, especially pp39-61, represents an important contribution to African aesthetics. It therefore extends Achebe’s thinking presented in his books “Home and Exile” and “The Education of a British protected child” on the role of literature and the artist in reclaiming the past, understanding the present and building the future. I find the notion of beneficent fiction in TWAC (p57) to represent a useful African position on the role of literature and writers in social engagement! For Achebe, the writer must be engaged as a moral obligation and must not “ally oneself with power against the powerless” or run the risk of producing “elegantly tired fiction” TWAC p.59
But TWAC is not only about criticisms, social or literary. Achebe addresses current issues including corruption and Boko Haram. He laments our cult of mediocrity which he believes is at the base of our present malaise. He argues for checks and balances to reduce the decadence, corruption and debauchery of the past several decades (p252) He argues for a strengthening of democratic institutions and for free and fair elections and looks forward to the emergence of a leader humbled by the trust people place on him/her and who is willing to use “the power given him for the good of the people?” p253. Achebe has been prophetic in the past. I hope GEJ and JEGA are listening to him. The successes of Edo and Ondo already encourage and challenge.
Noel Ihebuzor
@naitwt
The Jury is out for candidate Buhari – Elombah News
The Jury is out for candidate Buhari – Elombah News
— Read on elombah.com/amp/index.php/politics/jury-candidate-buhari/
A must read!
On bathos and pathos, a reflection on the on-going boju-boju in Nigeria
By
Noel Ihebuzor
When an ever enlarging comedy has the effect of overwhelming you with sadness,
it is no longer a comedy, no matter how innately talented the actors are in the art of the comic.
When tragedy slips out of control and verges towards the ludicrous,
it loses its capacity to inspire pity.
Soon bathos and pathos will converge.
And before long, the audience finds itself unable to feel either pity or compassion.
Rather, it finds itself increasingly burdened by the weight of ineptitude on display,
and irked by the profound shallowness and triviality with which serious matters are being treated by clumsy clods.
Clumsy clods are at their most farcical when they take themselves seriously,…..
and when sick souls in pursuit of selfish agendas sequester a sick man,
putting him out of reach of his constituency and out of touch with reality,
preferring to put utterances in his mouth,
when a group of elected officials go off at public expense for empty photo shoots with the hale and hearty
and return home with excess baggage of shopping
full of hackneyed expressions,
unconscionable and empty
they also reveal the depth of their own sicknesses and their burgeoning moral bankruptcy,
their very hollownesses.
Cry, the beloved country. Cry for that country where the rich and privileged go abroad to visit the sick.
Cry, the beloved country, cry for that country because the trips of the privileged sick abroad
to seek medical care speak of the deep sickness of our health delivery system.
Cry since the sick medical system, victim of neglect by the privileged now takes its revenge
on those who supervised and benefitted from her neglect!
Pathos and bathos now reunite.
Reflections 