..
Mr Nwakanma,
First, let me say that unlike Olu Oguibe, I do not think Chris Abani appropriated the persona of Chima Ubani. His stories are not Ubani's stories. Yes, their surnames sound similar, but that is all. Anyone in the West or elsewhere who would confuse Abani for Ubani can as well confuse James Frey with Mother Theresa!
Secondly, I also do not think Abani suffers from any mental illness, because I'm no psychiatrist and have no information that he's been so diagnosed. What I see is a rabid, unreconstructed liar who painstakingly scoured our national history to paint himself into its choice parts with mindless lies in a heartless game of emotional torture. Chris Abani knew from very early his talent with writing, but he was always a coward. To create the persona of the writer as an action man, the fearless tribune of the people, the Elijah of his time, he painstakingly manufactured stories, mastered them and took them to Western promoters and audiences who in validating his talent, validated his lies and sold both wholesale. He's enjoying his loot now and would continue to pump out these lies in gatherings after gatherings, because that is what feeds his stomach and establishes his false legacy.
I wonder why you have suddenly grown weary of standing by the truth you pushed in front of Abani almost a decade ago. Then it was no witch-hunt, but now it could be because Ikhide Ikheola resurrected it? Is there a statute of limitation against exposing lies? Well, let me just say that Ikhide should not be singled out as the man behind this witch-hunting. I am a full card-carrying member of the Chris Abani Witch-hunt Party and I expect any decent Nigerian who knows what is at stake here to join this party now!
You see, the difference between those who confronted Abani almost a decade ago and those ready to take him on now is that those of us doing so now are as rabid and mad about the truth as he is about lies and something must give in our confrontation this time! We are fair people; we'll give him time and opportunity to speak, defend himself and challenge us to any type of test to prove the truth of whatever he says. We will give him an opportunity of righting the wrongs, if he owns up to his lies. We do not care being called names! We do not care being called jealous so and so! We do not mind people calling our conduct "un-African" or claiming we are Judases bringing down one of our own in the West. Truth has never been known to have friends, so why should we be surprised?
Today, those of us confronting this matter understand perfectly what the moral question is and therefore have no doubt where our duty lies. For us, it's time to free the many victims of Abani's lies. But, even at this point, we welcome those who've done a bit of hand-wringing and head-scratching over this in the past. It doesn't matter to us when they get their Damascene conversion. What matters is that they now fully appreciate the danger of letting the Chris Abani's juggernaut of lies continue unchallenged. We know that a whole country, a continent, audiences, young and old, who listen to him around the globe are all his victims. We know that great writers all over the world who have truly suffered in the hands of the state for their art and politics are all victims of Chris Abani who has stolen their persona and drained tears and dollars from the unsuspecting to fill his barn. He can keep the blood money he has made by suckling heartlessly on the true suffering others; but, at this moment, the only moral question before us is whether we are prepared to sacrifice our country, our continent, the various audiences who listen to Abani and those great writers who truly suffered and died for their art and their politics for Mr Abani's 'career'. The answer is a resounding no! Mr Abani can quietly stake out his piece of earth and write to his heart's content; but he should never be allowed again to soil our name, humanity and integrity in the course of his business!
I mean, think about it. What kind of university did he attend and what kind of Professors and lecturers were there who couldn't raise a voice against the arrest of one of their distinguished students, one actually commissioned to write a play for a university function, whisked away by armed soldiers at the point of duty, along with his colleagues, in the full glare of people of authority in that school? They never told anyone, seek out any journalist or newspaper house, write letters to the powers that be or call up anyone to free the poor boy locked up all of 28 months he was supposed to be in school? What kind of people are citizens of a country where a teenager was seized for writing a small book, charged with being the intellectual brain behind a coup, put on death row and left with memories of one John James having his penis nailed to a chair or table and left to die for the crimes of some relation who's absconded? What kind of people are citizens of a country where a young genius is abandoned to the jackboots of khakied philistines?
Ah, and what kind of activist or human rights fighter or social crusader is Fela Amikulapo-Kuti who met this little boy in prison, mentored him, taught him to play sax and listened to his tales of confronting the establishment when all he left him with was: "The business of truth is risky business"? Heartless Fela came out of prison and couldn't tell the world about this young genius! Fela who groomed young musical and activist talents two-a-penny did not invite this young genius to The African Shrine to introduce him to the initiated and have him jam with him even for one session, having taught him to play sax! What type of people are the Afikpo people, their elders and prominent people, who couldn't tell the nation or anyone about the travails of their little son? And what type of mother – an English mother who didn't voice out to the international media the travails of her son on death row in Nigeria? And Achebe and Soyinka, what type of men are they to come before national television to plead for the life of Major-General Mamman Vatsa when the little boy who wrote the book which was suspected to be the blueprint for his coup was there, languishing on death row? And why oh why didn't those Amnesty International Country Reports for all the times this chap was in prison pick up a whiff of him? Quite early in his career, this young man complained of being sidelined by more established or older writers. See? He's a prophet! He was going to be sidelined and abandoned by the whole world only to later become the head cornerstone! Brave Chris Abani the survivor of his own lies! The man whose hatred for his late father is such that he said anyone who knew his father would feel like poisoning him – yes, his father, Michael Abani who he says was a Federal Commissioner and who, because he joined 'the other side', disowned him as a son! Well, I'm not sure I've heard of any Michael Abani who was a Federal Commissioner during the military era. I mean, I genuinely don't know; but it would seem the old man knew something about his son that the world is gradually waking up to now.
Mr Nwakanma, please do not bother with the comparative analysis you're making with his work, Achebe's or Adichie's. No one doubts the literary talent of Chris Abani. Here we are more concerned with character, not intellect. No, Chris Abani is not a victim of negative Western expectations of Africa and Africans; he is a perpetrator of the stereotype of Nigerians as conmen and liars, even where they're blessed with great intellect. But, if a man thinks he's so intelligent as to rewrite his nation's history, cream his people with putrid faeces and go around the world making a monkey of them in the garb of a literary genius, he's got another think coming. We, his own people will tame him, no matter how big a monster he's become! Enough is enough!
…
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 22:21
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Olu Oguibe on Insanity and The Creative Genius: Draft for A Future Note
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To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 22:21
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Olu Oguibe on Insanity and The Creative Genius: Draft for A Future Note
Ikhide,
Abani's story rose up many years ago on a different forum and we drew much blood. I personally took him to task and I had raised my doubts about many of his claims. I still think these claims fantastic in the extreme, and I still doubt that Abani went through torture in Kirikiri, or that he met Fela in prison, or that he was arrested by the military because of street theatre. I was an active journalist in Lagos and I was very involved in the public discussions about the military in power in that era; had my own run-ins and near misses like many a journalist; and I knew, as did any working journalist in Lagos in those years, much of the story of who got locked, went undeground, where and when, and the means of setting up the many underground networks in those years. Moreover, I was on the other side of Kirikiri. I did not hear about that 14-year old Abani held for staging a play. I was literary editor of the Vanguard, I would have known. Lagos was a vast sieve of information, and many of us were committed to making much hay of it.
That said, I think that Abani's case may turn into a witch-hunt in your hands if you focus merely on Abani. You'd have to examine the total picture and the many you also know, who have retailed all kinds of fibs and cornered the market of "African victimhood" to draw sympathies and left-handed gifts from the west. Of course, I hate to continue what many of you now think as the cliche of the "west and the rest of us" - but Abani reflects a most intriguing phenomenom - what I call the game of stories. It is gaming of the sorts that is double-tongued and double-edged; in which the "image of Africa" is the commodity. People buy the image of Africa. They love Africa of the jungles; of mindless brutality; of the miseries of man writ-large. And Achebe was right, in that dialectic, the only useful or usable Africa in the western mind is the brutal and mysterious continent plagued by war, poverty, disease, ignorance and war. It is the antithesis of the West. The poor of the western world need a most damned Africa for consolation. Also, because at the roots of power is that which we call culture, the more visible and vivid form of value that allows for bragging rights, it is often neccessary to demean Africa in order to subvert it. We use literature - writing - and other means of representation to make vivid and visible the nature of our worth. It is therefore not surprising that the writing that appeals to the publishers in London and New York are those that overdetermine contemporary Africa. The writings on the new booklists from the prestigious western publishers of contemporary African literature (who therefrore teach Africa and shape its canon by validating the things they publish with their own prizes and laurels also) remains those that continue to make it a profoundly antinomic space - the other, more horrifying face of 21st century man. Check out the publishing list: from Helon Habila's stories Waiting for an Angel- and I find Measuring Time as unreadable as Uwem Akpan's silly story "Say You're One of Them" - to Adichie's Purple Hibiscus - whose redemptive figure is squarely the ancsetral presence of Papa Nnukwu to even Abani's Graceland.
I think Adichie escapes with the same paradox that makes Achebe escape with Okonkwo's character in Things Fall Apart - because both novels were published for the wrong reasons. But if you closeley examine the new fiction - and it is generally fiction - from contemporary African writers published by the International publishers, it is often, at the core, stories that feed into the Abani phenomenon. Stories that make the African experience of life a horrifying experience; that tweaks the tear-ducts of the kind-hearted western reader - with the donor instinct - unable to see beyond the terrible fib and the feud in the souls of the purveyors of this cant. EC Osondu in "Voice of America" has had to shape up too, stab Nigeria in the back, and get his own laurels as a voice for Africa. What is often ignored are the more humane and more balanced stories that speak about a more humane, even if complex and flawed continent. Abani had to neccessarily feed into this - that neccessity to demonize Africa in order to be affirmed by the Euro-American academy and its canon-making machinery. The more dangerous thing in all this however, is that your own mindset, Ikhide, feeds into that terrible ritual of self abnegation when you too declare that "ours is an illiterate leadership" - and in seducing hyperbole to run your own errand of demonization, I personally do not see anything diferent betweebn you and Chris Abani, except that Abani does his with the garb of Hermes, and with a Saxophone accompaniment. I say let Abani be - he is Hermes - thief, liar, creator of text, master of the herbs and of the act of dissapearance and fabulation. He has sprouted from the fabric of a Hermeneutic that began long, long ago. When Achebe sank Conrad, it became neccessary to recruit "native Conrads" as I have called many of these contemporary African writers to justify the new CCC - Commerce, Christianity and Civilization - which today in Africa rides on a profoundly new wave of neo-liberal political and economic masterplan for the dark and woebegone continent. To understand it, look to the 19th century. We have run the full cycle.
Obi Nwakanma
_____________________ "If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell, I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell." --Christopher Okigbo
Abani's story rose up many years ago on a different forum and we drew much blood. I personally took him to task and I had raised my doubts about many of his claims. I still think these claims fantastic in the extreme, and I still doubt that Abani went through torture in Kirikiri, or that he met Fela in prison, or that he was arrested by the military because of street theatre. I was an active journalist in Lagos and I was very involved in the public discussions about the military in power in that era; had my own run-ins and near misses like many a journalist; and I knew, as did any working journalist in Lagos in those years, much of the story of who got locked, went undeground, where and when, and the means of setting up the many underground networks in those years. Moreover, I was on the other side of Kirikiri. I did not hear about that 14-year old Abani held for staging a play. I was literary editor of the Vanguard, I would have known. Lagos was a vast sieve of information, and many of us were committed to making much hay of it.
That said, I think that Abani's case may turn into a witch-hunt in your hands if you focus merely on Abani. You'd have to examine the total picture and the many you also know, who have retailed all kinds of fibs and cornered the market of "African victimhood" to draw sympathies and left-handed gifts from the west. Of course, I hate to continue what many of you now think as the cliche of the "west and the rest of us" - but Abani reflects a most intriguing phenomenom - what I call the game of stories. It is gaming of the sorts that is double-tongued and double-edged; in which the "image of Africa" is the commodity. People buy the image of Africa. They love Africa of the jungles; of mindless brutality; of the miseries of man writ-large. And Achebe was right, in that dialectic, the only useful or usable Africa in the western mind is the brutal and mysterious continent plagued by war, poverty, disease, ignorance and war. It is the antithesis of the West. The poor of the western world need a most damned Africa for consolation. Also, because at the roots of power is that which we call culture, the more visible and vivid form of value that allows for bragging rights, it is often neccessary to demean Africa in order to subvert it. We use literature - writing - and other means of representation to make vivid and visible the nature of our worth. It is therefore not surprising that the writing that appeals to the publishers in London and New York are those that overdetermine contemporary Africa. The writings on the new booklists from the prestigious western publishers of contemporary African literature (who therefrore teach Africa and shape its canon by validating the things they publish with their own prizes and laurels also) remains those that continue to make it a profoundly antinomic space - the other, more horrifying face of 21st century man. Check out the publishing list: from Helon Habila's stories Waiting for an Angel- and I find Measuring Time as unreadable as Uwem Akpan's silly story "Say You're One of Them" - to Adichie's Purple Hibiscus - whose redemptive figure is squarely the ancsetral presence of Papa Nnukwu to even Abani's Graceland.
I think Adichie escapes with the same paradox that makes Achebe escape with Okonkwo's character in Things Fall Apart - because both novels were published for the wrong reasons. But if you closeley examine the new fiction - and it is generally fiction - from contemporary African writers published by the International publishers, it is often, at the core, stories that feed into the Abani phenomenon. Stories that make the African experience of life a horrifying experience; that tweaks the tear-ducts of the kind-hearted western reader - with the donor instinct - unable to see beyond the terrible fib and the feud in the souls of the purveyors of this cant. EC Osondu in "Voice of America" has had to shape up too, stab Nigeria in the back, and get his own laurels as a voice for Africa. What is often ignored are the more humane and more balanced stories that speak about a more humane, even if complex and flawed continent. Abani had to neccessarily feed into this - that neccessity to demonize Africa in order to be affirmed by the Euro-American academy and its canon-making machinery. The more dangerous thing in all this however, is that your own mindset, Ikhide, feeds into that terrible ritual of self abnegation when you too declare that "ours is an illiterate leadership" - and in seducing hyperbole to run your own errand of demonization, I personally do not see anything diferent betweebn you and Chris Abani, except that Abani does his with the garb of Hermes, and with a Saxophone accompaniment. I say let Abani be - he is Hermes - thief, liar, creator of text, master of the herbs and of the act of dissapearance and fabulation. He has sprouted from the fabric of a Hermeneutic that began long, long ago. When Achebe sank Conrad, it became neccessary to recruit "native Conrads" as I have called many of these contemporary African writers to justify the new CCC - Commerce, Christianity and Civilization - which today in Africa rides on a profoundly new wave of neo-liberal political and economic masterplan for the dark and woebegone continent. To understand it, look to the 19th century. We have run the full cycle.
Obi Nwakanma
_____________________ "If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell, I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell." --Christopher Okigbo
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 12:05:38 -0800
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Olu Oguibe on Insanity and The Creative Genius: Draft for A Future Note
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; Ederi@yahoogroups.com
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From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Olu Oguibe on Insanity and The Creative Genius: Draft for A Future Note
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; Ederi@yahoogroups.com
"Over the years, as Abani's compatriots ponder his fantabulist tales, several theories have been floated to explain those stories. Some have suggested that because he only came out with the tales after moving from the UK to the US as a young writer, he might have felt the need to concoct stories of personal persecution and horror like many immigrants do in order to gain work papers or asylum, apropos the Senegalese lady who was allegedly assaulted by former International Monetary Fund chieftain Strauss-Kahn. Others have suggested that he told his tales in order to gain liberal sympathy and support for his writing especially at a time when such tales needed no verification because Nigeria was still under dictators. Having found not only acceptance and sympathy, but acclaim also by telling those stories, some have suggested, he has continued to tell them out of a need to remain consistent as well as generate publicity for his books. I have suggested, rather quite speculatively, that perhaps after years of being mistaken for the activist and former prisoner of conscience Chima Ubani, thanks to their seemingly similar surnames, Chris Abani might have purloined Ubani's identity and remained in character afterwards. Some others, still, have suggested that he might be engaged in willful subterfuge against Nigeria and Africa as a whole, intent on painting them even darker than they are."
Read the rest here...
- Ikhide
Read the rest here...
- Ikhide
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