Please can you explain further what you mean by the construct "truncated ethnicity" as it applies to Nigeria? Is it that Nigerians consider themselves, first, foremost and primarily, as part of a particular ethnic collectivity--say, Ibo, Ibibio, or Itsekiri--and only secondarily, as a member of that historical-political construct called the Nigerian state?
Seun.
-- On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:21 PM, Ibrahim Abdullah <ibdullah@gmail.com> wrote:
I also suspect that BJ has gone overboard in his quest to red card
Achebe. The point about realist writings is that they come up straight
as mothers' milk--ideological constructs, easy to swallow as faction(
fact plus fiction) not fiction! What you read in achebe can be
reproduced ad infinitum for almost all Nigerian intellectuals. And
this is the point that should interest us, not what achebe said today
or what Kongi will say tomorrow. What undergirds all these literary
effusions/discourses et al is the simply the historical accident of
how citizenship is constructed/reproduced/experienced/consumed in
post-colonial Nigeria. Nigerians experience citizenship as truncated
ethnicity--the original sin--and this gets reproduced in whatever they
do or say. This is as true of the left as it is true for the
right/centre.
How do we transcend/subvert this original sin without reproducing it
in its multi-layered ccomplexity is what we should be discussing. As
BJ himself has repeatedly made clear in the two postings there is
nothing new in what Achebe has to say!!!
IB
============================================
> this is probably not the place to argue this, but i feel my friend bj is not
> correct in his definition of realism. it is a genre, a construct, like all
> others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically
> presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that
> regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more
> obvious their constructions of "reality."
> achebe's title as the greatest realist in the past 150 years is overblown,
> in my view, regardless of the definition of realism employed.
> further, the issue of ethnicity here should take into account not simply the
> politics of the coup plotters or the leadership of the regions, but how the
> events were presented by the population to themselves: did people say,
> "those igbos in biafra want to secede"? did the biafrans, like achebe, say
> the same?
> it isn't a question of whether this or that individual came from the north
> or spoke hausa or wore robes: it is how he represented himself, and how he
> was taken by others.
> ken
>
>
>
> On 12/29/12 9:43 PM, Chido Onumah wrote:
>
> First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn't: Reflections On Achebe's New
> Book (2)
>
> By Biodun Jeyifo
>
> Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed "an
> Igbo coup". However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are
> discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in
> name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner,
> spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress
> when not in uniform.
>
> Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country
>
> In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power
> over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange
> stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.
>
> Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
>
> If in There Was A Country "a Nigerian ruling class" only appears in the
> narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
> book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and
> discursive architecture of the book. This "architecture", this "grammar" is
> none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book with
> the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe's
> "explanations", all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly driven
> by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter.
> Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that "explanations" and
> speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
> inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
> excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure
> from virtually all of Achebe's writings prior to this recently published
> book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
> subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
> particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
> book.
>
> The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the
> January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the "opening shot" in the chain of
> events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central subject of
> Achebe's book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both
> general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And
> indeed, Achebe's long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section
> of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the January
> 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of "motives" or
> "interests" that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
> that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, "tribe": Was it, or was it
> not, "an Igbo coup".
>
> There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a
> "southern coup", this in light of the fact that most of the political and
> military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were, overwhelmingly,
> either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More
> pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
> plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant
> in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
> Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class
> parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the
> United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
> Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to the
> NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
> chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
> assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was
> spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of
> fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the
> intension of making or "forcing" Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime
> Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far
> more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and
> conservative allies of the NNA.
>
> Achebe's book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable
> factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or
> was it not, "an Igbo coup"? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring -
> and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form the
> complex fabric of that fateful coup d'état, this single thread of ethnicity
> or "tribe" is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. This
> may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against Igbos
> in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
> completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had
> incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe's book was written more than
> forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
> hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this
> reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that
> Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to
> ethnicity or "tribalism" while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all
> other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.
>
> At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two
> examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
> between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the
> Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe's own words, is the particular case: "By
> the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper
> outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in
> the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
> situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all
> over Nigeria in general had become untenable" (p. 77). This is indeed a
> fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
> realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to
> carefully state what these other facts and realities were.
>
> First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here was
> that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic
> Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
> government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
> post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and
> fixes exclusively on this government's anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
> Secondly, Akintola's government and party were not only virulently
> anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and anti-socialist. A
> brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly
> satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
> composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic
> visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –
> wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not the
> slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these facts
> and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly, Akintola
> and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions
> and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
> founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which they
> called "Egbe Omo Olofin". And for good measure, they tried, unsuccessfully,
> to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter
> Hubert Ogunde's famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.
>
> It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and
> realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
> ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
> simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
> pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which
> no other aspects of social identification are allowed to "contaminate" the
> singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
> quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to
> this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo "in name only", the January
> 15 coup could not have been "an Igbo coup".
>
> In last week's beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that
> Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
> last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion
> to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is
> that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work
> of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to
> the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman's
> formulation of this "big grammar", this means that above all other modes,
> forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art
> or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
> happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that typically
> and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how things
> actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only the
> most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging that
> gap.
>
> In all of Achebe's books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he
> had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
> practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality
> had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No
> Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble
> with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country
> marks a radical rupture in Achebe's writings on our country, a rupture in
> which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
> considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense
> of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a
> fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
> choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In next
> week's continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if only
> speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I
> personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was A
> Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he
> deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter
> collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.
>
> Concluded.
>
> bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
>
>
>
>
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> kenneth w. harrow
> faculty excellence advocate
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