ken harrow
On 1/21/11 6:49 PM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola wrote:
Literary legends that continue to inspire
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Written by Parselelo Kantai in Nairobi
On the morning of 18 September 1967, the first day that Major Christopher Okigbo fought under direct orders, his Biafran unit came under a two-pronged surprise attack from Nigerian federal forces at Opi Junction in Nsukka, eastern Nigeria. Refusing to flee even as his unit descended into chaos, Maj. Okigbo hastily organised a defensive bunker, came under heavy federal fire and fell to the assault of an armoured tank.
Okigbo's death was one of the most profound losses of the Biafran war. A prodigiously talented poet, regarded by many of his peers as the most gifted of his generation, he went to war in defence of an ideal and was turned into a cult hero in Biafra and across the continent. Okigbo's reputation as a romantic idealist, an African Byron, so to speak, was cemented in the imagination by the posthumous publication of Labyrinths and Path of Thunder, his two most well-known volumes of poetry. His death and the meaning of his life became the subject of emotional and often heated debate among the African intelligentsia. Ali Mazrui's 1971 novel The Trial of Christopher Okigbo linked his death with the growing tensions between nationalism, ethnicity and heritage.
More than 40 years after Okigbo's death, these remain some of the central dilemmas of African nationalism: to what does the writer owe his greatest allegiance? Must the African writer be a political animal? Is home the nation, the tribe or both? Or neither?
These issues have been the major preoccupations of the first generation of post-independence writers and intellectuals. While the persistence of these debates suggests that the questions remain hugely relevant, the fact that they continue to inform much of African literary debate is in part due to the dominance of the first generation of African writers. Okigbo, the romantic cult hero of a generation of writers that includes Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and a host of others, continues to be amongst the most recognisable figures in African literature. The homage paid by three award-winning 21st-century African writers to their literary muses shows how this generation still looms large (see boxes).
Political heritage
One of the reasons for these authors' almost mythic influence on African literature was that their work was disseminated through a coherent continent-wide infrastructure. The African Writers Series, which took advantage of the sunset years of British colonialism, was able to channel the works of budding African writers to virtually every high school in the former British colonies and beyond, turning many writers into household names and national celebrities.
But these greats are getting old. Last year, Nigeria marked Wole Soyinka's 75th birthday with national celebrations. Similarly, in Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 70th birthday was the occasion of solemn ruminations in the Kenyan press. Chinua Achebe's 80th birthday was an international event, celebrated across the airwaves of the BBC.
It was therefore timely that for both the writers and their audiences, the septuagenarian years seem to have provoked a flurry of biographies and memoirs. Most notable are two new biographies, one of Okigbo and the other of the South African writer, journalist and anti-apartheid activist, Alex La Guma. Notable, too, is the fact that the new biographies are written by African writers. On a continent where biography writing has been in short supply, they mark a breakthrough in a field that has been dominated by hagiographers in the service of sitting strongmen.
The Okigbo biography Christopher Okigbo: Thirsting for Sunlight by Obi Nwakanma was over 20 years in the making. It was time well spent. Nwakanma first stumbled on Okigbo in the scorebooks and cricket records at Government College Umuahia, Okigbo's alma mater. From the early 1990s, he began interviewing people who knew Okigbo. It became a life's work, and the final product is a tour de force of detail, family history, a close examination of Igbo religious tradition and an exposition of those early, exultant years after Nigeria's independence in 1960, when the intellectual elite flowered across southern Nigeria. Nwakanma locates Okigbo within an Igbo heritage that straddles the difficult ground between tradition, Christianity and nationalist politics.
The portrait that emerges of Okigbo is one of an individual bequeathed with what historian Ali Mazrui would later call "a triple heritage" – modernity, tradition and religion. What is most powerful about Nwakanma's biography is the picture of Okigbo, a naughty, loveable middle child of prodigious talent. Born into a family that had converted to Roman Catholicism, his older siblings were high achievers, settling comfortably within the upper crust of the Igbo elite. Okigbo, a rebel, only begins to find his true calling and a sense of larger social obligations with the onset of the Biafran war.
One of Nwakanma's major breakthroughs is the way in which he has been able, so many years after the fact, to piece together the details of the Biafran war. For that alone, Thirsting for Sunlight stands as perhaps one of the most significant accounts of that most traumatic period in Nigerian history.
Return to the personal
If Nwakanma's book fails to fully answer the question of the African writer's political heritage, Roger Field's Alex La Guma: A Literary and Political Biography offers a response to this question. Refusing to pigeonhole La Guma as a "regional writer" of South Africa's Western Cape, Field not only examines La Guma – who was "born in a political household" – as a socially-conscious novelist, but he also unearths lesser-known facts about the author's life.
That La Guma was an accomplished political cartoonist and artist may surprise many who only know him for novels such as A Walk in the Night and In the Fog of the Season's End. More significantly, Field (like Nwakanma, his biography was two decades in the making) wrestles with the questions of political and cultural heritage. Like La Guma, Field went into exile and briefly underwent military training in the Soviet Union.
La Guma, a coloured (mixed race) South African, consciously wrote his fiction with the intention of portraying the lives of coloured people in Cape Town's District Six. However, his anti-apartheid activism was both allied to the nationwide black liberation struggle and strongly internationalist. Field's biography is the story of a man of many parts as well as a detailed portrait of apartheid South Africa.
If there is a unifying theme in these two biographies, it is their portrayal of the writers' private allegiances – their strong sense of a homeland disrupted by a sharpening awareness of how a wider politics has begun to impinge on their private lives.
Similarly, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's bittersweet childhood memoir Dreams in a Time of War, published in March 2010, is written with a novelist's cadence and rooted in the consciousness of a home that preceded the nation. Perhaps his best writing in recent years, Thiong'o has dispensed with the strident polemics of his more political work to produce a book that skilfully weaves the rich memories of childhood with brief, if significant, glances at the outside world that was simultaneously impoverishing it. In so doing, he communicates a sincerity that may have otherwise been diluted by forays into ideological musing.
In a recent interview, Wole Soyinka describes his political activism as a burden – one that he could not avoid, but also one that has often disrupted his writing. What was not publicly known were the motivations and personal struggles, the friendships and intimacies, all the business of betrayals, disappointments, fallouts and interventions that constituted the lives, fictions and activism of these writers. It is almost ironic that this return to the personal renders more humanly, thus more powerfully, the political animals that these writers have become. This article was first published in the October-November 2010 edition of The Africa Report.
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-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu--
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