USA Africa Dialogue Series - "Chief" Dr. Chijioke Wilcox should resign immediately

My people,

 

Why is the Nigerian High Commissioner to Kenya and the Seychelles, "Chief" Dr. Chijioke Wilcox still employed by Nigeria? After battering his wife, he should be in jail, not representing us.

 

Ignore my diatribe below, and go down to the offensive piece that drew the swords of my rage - Professor Chinalum Nwankwo's pompous prose poetry in tribute to the late Professor Dubem Okafor, a serial abuser who ended up murdering his wife and taking his own life. Go to the archives here and on Naijabpolitics and compare the silence to all the jumping up and down all over the world over DSK.

 

Now, if we are the offspring of our mothers, if we have mothers and sisters, let us take a stand on this latest outrage. Why is that man who just battered his wife still employed by Nigeria? Let us ask the Nigerian government on Facebook. GEJ is on Facebook. Some of us are part of various editorial teams and newspapers. Let us shame these people. I have come to the conclusion that the only way to make change happen in Nigeria is to shame people. Let us shame this "diplomat" that just treated his wife like a Christmas goat.

 

If you are on Facebook, simply copy what is on my status page and share. If you are not my FB friend (shame on you!) attach the link to the article on the Nigerian diplomat, cut and paste something like this  on to your status page and send it off:

 

Dear President Goodluck Jonathan, why is the Nigerian High Commissioner to Kenya and the Seychelles, "Chief" Dr. Chijioke Wilcox still employed by Nigeria? My fellow Nigerian FB friends, now is the time to speak up or shut up. Shame Nigeria into doing something. Instead of prattling on about DSK (ex-IMF chief) paste this on your status and on GEJ's page. Let us make a differene. Zero tolerance for spouse abuse.

 

- Ikhide

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tragedy In Context: Dubem Okafor

Our People,

 

Let me be clear: Professor Chimalum Nwankwo's piece was offensive, dismissive as it was of those who chose to express their grief and angst about Professor Dubem Okafor's situation in ways he did not like. How typical, literally every biography of a Nigerian public person is a hurriedly compiled hagiography. We are perhaps more invested in viewing a person's life as the true biography. Nobody ever takes the time to document in writing the real lived life. The written is usually a tissue of lies. Compare and contrast these silly hagiographies with the obituaries written of say Norman Mailer and you will get what I mean. There is not much written that is readable about the personal life of Wole Soyinka. His friends merely shrug at his frailties and romanticize them. When the great man dies, out will come reams of bad prose and atrocious poetry all in disgusting praise of the man. When Obasanjo dies, imagine the nonsense that will be written about that thug. In this patriarchy from hell, women and children are mere firewood to light up puny balls and mutant giant egos.

O Chimalum! Ah, the arrogance, the condescension, the narcissism seep out the words still. Heaven help us. The last of those who see themselves as the great Nigerian romantic poets chafe at accountability. How typical: Three doomed women and presumably several children are an impatient footnote to The Man's life. No lessons learnt here, no sincere reflection on what this means for the rest of us still here. No, just an imperial wave of the hand. Hear Professor Nwankwo: "Women and children, shut up", he thunders. Yes sir, we cower in fear at the awesome power of empty words. Hurrah for fake thunder.

In the land that cradles my placenta, we do not speak ill of the dead, really we do not. It is unnecessary. The lived life is the living mirror of all our judgments and actions, to use yet another cliche, warts and all. We see you, son, daughter, father, mother, falling drunk. Why, you were one of us, why you were us. There is nothing much to say, except to sing your praises for a life lived, well, imperfectly. 

The written word is the new praise-singer; praise songs have become hagiographies, and in the absence of the true book of the lived life, hagiographies seal the troubled chambers of our friends. The truth lives in us. Because our friend was us. May the women and children who lived through this tornado find the peace that was denied them. May she who paid the ultimate price live her life joyfully elsewhere. No great poets serenade her journey, no historian traces the arc of her blood, fleeing criminal dysfunction. In her next life, powerful poets will shield her frailties from us. For Dubem Okafor was us. Hurrah for fake thunder.

- Ikhide

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Toyin Falola
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 4:11 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tragedy In Context: Dubem Okafor

 

Dubem Okafor : In Memoriam

        By

Chimalum Nwankwo

Professor of English

North Carolina A&T State University

Greensboro, NC USA

It is sad that those who have neither met nor known in any serious way Professor Dubem Okafor make comments about his life and death. Brilliant scholar-poet, gifted, and generous in heart,his most enduring legacy is MALI(Multi-ethnic Literacy Insitute ) in Allentown,Pennsylvania, which oversees the lives of about 70 children from various ethnicities and background.

The living always modify or falsify perspectives to justify what they think of the dead. But, that is understandable especially when the dead lived a life so complex and ordinarily incomprehensible to most people. And then, of course, to die like Dubem Okafor died creates even further complications, offering more baffling speculative takes and intensity of gaze than a normal death would have invited.

Dr. Dubem Okafor was my friend and school mate at the University of Nigeria. He graduated one year before me from the famous post-Biafran war University of Nigeria , Nsukka, known for its great concentration of talented students. These were largely students trapped by the Biafra civil war and therefore entering the University at points when they should have almost been graduating. Those students were also lucky despite the infrastructural decrepitude caused by the war ; some of the greatest scholars and teachers of the time were there to shepherd the ebullient post-war campus, especially the Department of English. There were there ; MJC Echeruo, Donatus Nwoga, Emmanuel Obiechina, Romanus Egudu, Juliet Okonkwo, Helen Chukwuma, Nnabuchi Orji and a plenitude of young rising stars who were University Junior Fellows or Teaching Assistants. One could not have wished for anything better than being a student in those hands and environment. It was a strange crucible of delightful work and inspiration. The best students in the Department were generally driven by the great desire to be like those scholars and teachers ; for in our ambitious eyes, each was a ball encasing ideal, idol, mentor, guide, and beacon of our ride into the rainbowed heavens of the future.

As under-graduates, we cliqued arrogantly into two groups, simply future writers and others. The "future writers" coincidentally, were always in the best brackets of performance. Chukwuma Azuonye,Dubem Okafor,Ogonna Agu and so on. This was not a very auspicious thing but we could not see it then. We cultivated an early haughty confidence and self-assurance which nearly derailed most of us before we could earn any garland or laurels. Graduating, first class or second class upper was like the visa into the starry skies. But our encounter with the Western world was a "not-so-fast!" injunction that we had to learn to adjust.

We had thought that understanding the Western tradition and consciousness was the only ferry across their seemingly placid lakes of genteel culture and reason. We did not see through the mirage of political and ideological deception,affectation and pretense, the drama of phoney propriety, and the quicksands of pathological racist condescension. It was only a matter of time for us to begin to understand the laborious finesse for negotiating the assorted subtleties demanded by cultural imperialism and a thinly veiled paternalism.

Dubem, like some of us, barely survived an M.A degree from England. He, again like some of us, also barely survived the Ph.D. in the USA. Despite his numerous books, creative and scholarly, he was denied a full professorship at Kutztown University where he taught for many years. The vicissitudes attendant on the trails of his various paper chases exacerbated a drinking habit picked up as a young man who enjoyed life excessively, living with his unpredictable maternal uncle, the celebrated late poet, Christopher Okigbo. The tragic death of Okigbo did not help his state of mind neither did the state of the Nigerian nation both of which he captured so beautifully in angry grandiloquence in Dance of Death. His second book of essays, Cycle of Doom, affirmed his uncanny understanding of human destiny as well as he defined the trajectory of his individual destiny in one of his poetry books, Garlands of Anguish.

 

For Dubem, anguish came from multiple sources. His Nigerian marriages were the unfortunate casualties of his tempestuous temperament. That temperament was that of a perfectionist, a terrible irony. He sought beauty everywhere. He sought perfection in his reading and definition of the world. He wanted you, his friends, his wife and children, to reflect his own brilliance in their conducts. He hoped that he could lead by example. Alas, he could not. His greatest pain came from his failed Nigerian marriages, especially the first marriage which he regretted up till our last conversation, two days before his sad death. He knew he was wrong with the wives but never knew how to use the spirit leash in all of us. His last wife, a Jamaican, came with a promise of renewal, but that hope we now know could not last too.

Exile first killed my friend, Dubem. Encourage Nigerians abroad to stay in touch with home always. Dubem Okafor was my friend alive, and remains my friend in death. Disoriented,his fortunes or misfortune as an overseas academic prepared the crypt for his death. The debacle from a third marriage staged the burial. There are complex tearful dramas behind this sketch that will remain private. Irresponsible internet speculations and wild media speculations about a man who lost compact with his chi should be more cautious and sympathetic,attracting more prayers than insensitive condemnation. All religions and spiritual or mystical ways appreciate the wisdom in one old simple common injunction : judge not !

I was at the funeral. His little daughter snuggled up to me when I sat with some of the bereaved family. After addressing me by my nickname, "Spirit", she brought out her cell phone and started dialing. Knowing I was looking at her, she, in most painful innocence, looked up into my eyes and informed me : "I am calling my daddy". A new flood of tears dimmed my eyes.

Chimalum Nwankwo

Professor of English

North Carolina A&T State University

Greensboro, NC USA

 

-- 

Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue

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