Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (4)

God bless Jeyifo for this effort and Chido Onumah for bringing it to us.

Thanks, Kenneth Harrow, for this painstaking analysis of the ideological shaping represented by various kinds of writing. 

Superb : "  what the palmoil got us to swallow was not just the words, but the invisibility of what produced those words."

I wish to make what might seem  an unkind statement in response to this: " a truth and reconciliation process has not even begun here, and it surely does seem to be needed"  

and this : "given achebe's stature, these charges of genocide and perniciousness require powerful analytical tools to bring to the fore a moral judgment on what happened and who was responsible".

I could be wrong but I think that the weight given to these issues by the right wing pro-Biafra school is out of proportion to the attitudes of Nigerians generally, Igbo and non-Igbo.

I also think that Achebe's stature and influence is often exaggerated. That exaggeration goes along with a clear disconnection between contemporary Igbo life and his own focus. 

Some members of Ndigbo in Nigeria have applauded what is described as his efforts to speak on their behalf but his concerns are not their central concerns  They have truly moved on, in positive and negative ways,  from 1968 but he has not.

What was the trajectory  of Ojukwu in politics on his return to Nigeria? Ws it an Igbo centred trajectory? Did Ndigbo anoint him as the carrier of their political fortunes? 

Bolaji Aluko is one of the very few on these fora who mentioned the shocking fact that there is no mention in Ojukwu's will of anything to do with providing for the Biafran war veterans whose condition is known to be unenviable.

When I began researching contemporary attitudes to Biafra among Nndigbo, I was moved by accounts of the pathetic state of the Biafran war veterans in their camp at Ori River, some commentators lamenting poignantly  that Ojukwu has not been known to even visit them, not to talk of trying top make their condition a part of national discourse  Someone has even mentioned the tragic sight of seeing these veterans begging along the road.

When one recalls the spirit in which these people, many of then young, idealistic men at the time enlisted to fight for an under-equipped d  and outmanoeuvred Biafra, as described so striking by one of the young idealistic fighters  of the time, Ebeh in Broken Back Axle : Unspeakable Events Inside Biafra, the tragedy of the situation comes into clearer focus. 

The other day, a governor in one of the states in Igboland sacked  emasse  members of the civil service from another Igbo state to make way for workers  from his own state displaced by unrest in the North.

Commentators observed that states in other parts of Njgeria would not behave that way. 

Apart from these sad developments, my understanding of the Igbo story after the war is not consonant  with the invoking of continuos suppression  that  Achebe  is struggling to perpetuate. 

Members of Ndigbo are also asking  why Biafra resisted for so long in the midst of almost certain defeat, to the great cost of the average Igbo person. 

One view is that the leadership argued they would be massacred if they surrendered and that this view is reinforced by the Asaba and other massacres, 

by mentalities like the Colonel Benjamin Adekunle 'Black Scorpion' declaration 'When we enter Igbo territory we shoot anything that moves" .

Obi Nwakanma argues on these fora that Biafra holding out for so long forced the Nigerian government into a relatively  humanitarian attitude to Biafran surrender. 

This question will be difficult to answer conclusively but my immediate response is that a fundamentally hubristic mentality was at play at strategic points in the Biafran enterprise, 

blinding the leadership to the realities of the situation.

The declaration of Biafra, in my view, was an extreme response that was taken without exhausting the diplomatic possibilities available.

The South East was in no danger at the time. 

If Ojukwu feared the consequences of  Gowon's modification of the Aburi Accord to include the right of the central government to declare 

a state of emergency in any region, such fears were better handled through political negotiations, ideally with the aid of external powers. 

To now choose to unilaterally excise a section of a nation to pursue a goal held by only  a relatively small number of members of that nation, and even within that number, there existed 

divisions as to the way forward, would have looked heroic, but with the massive inadequacy in human power and equipment, it could be described as a disaster waiting to happen.

Whatever the momentum of the general outcry against the pogroms in Northern Nigeria, did the South Eastern leadership not owe it to the people to explain the dire consequences of this

 initiative in their weak position? 

Imagine what could have been gained if the intensity of the outcry inspired by the sense of being rejected had been challenged into developing the South-East instead of into war.

Wonderful things were achieved in Biafra on the strength  of this sense of the desperate need for self determination. Massive population mobilisation in the war effort, heroic fighting 

at times with bare necessities, fantastic developments in engineering ingenuity, technological achievements, which, with the war over, the very scientists who achieved them in Biafra 

could not replicate even though they had the resources, the impetus being no longer there, as an investigator  of the situation within and after Biafra who engaged both 

situations comments in his essay I posted  on these fora.

Does this story not sugest that some people, at some time, were too hasty? 

Is Achebe not operating at this time within a mindset oblivious of present reality? 

Various people agree that Ndigbo were victimised after the war. Is that identical to Achebe's declaration that Ndigbo have never been integrated into Nigeria? Are Ndigbo still victimised?

Did Achebe really need to invoke what could be described as a sense of Igbo exceptionalism in relation to Nigeria?

Does Achebe have anything to say about positive and negative  conditions in the states where Ndigbo are firmly in control?

Personally, I think Achebe and those I describe as the right wing pro-Biafra school are out of sync with Ndigbo. 

At one extreme is a declaration by Obi Nwakanma that the Biafra genocide claim is the foundation of a future Igbo nation, while Ndigbo are dispersed  all over Nigeria, struggling successfully  to 

make the most of the possibilities of the nation in Nollywood, in trade of all kinds, in the property market, in finance, in politics, and recently bargaining for a stronger role in the Lagos State government.

Are those the people you are going to invite to feed themselves on memory of the war so as to fuel aspiration for  a separate state?

Such perspectives seem to struggle to graft the Biafran experience onto the Jewish Holocaust that spurred a drive for a Jewish homeland that emerged  some years after WWII. 

Are the conditions in this instance  not very different?

Would a Biafra on those terms not actually work against the interests of Ndigbo, who thrive in spatial dispersion?

Would a more realistic vision not be one of creating a new socio-economic order on different principles from that of Nigeria as it is currently constituted, the kind of vision being canvassed

 for the South West by people like Leye Ige on the Nigerian centred listserves? 

Even then, many Ndigbo will not be returning to the East. They are too entrenched in other parts  of Nigeria. 

Is it really realistic to plan for Ndigbo outside the complete Nigerian context? 

One cannot negate the prominent role of Ndigbo in many aspects of Nigerian life. Can one address issues dealing with Nollywood and focus on only Ndigbo alone, 

trade in mechanical equipment such as vehicle spare parts, sale of books by small to medium sized traders, banking, property acquisition in all parts of Nigeria, Nigerian government

 appointments  at both state and national levels, areas of endeavour where Ndigbo are prominent,  and focus on Ndigbo alone?

It is not possible.

The paradigm Ndigbo need is not a paradigm based on the civil war experience.

They need something contemporary. Something alive to their existential realities.

thanks

toyin 

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 7:02 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

Fundamental to jeyifo's analysis of First, There Was a Country, has been the notion that Acbebe has deviated from his earlier admirable use of realism in representing the realities of nigerian or igbo life. the claim that realism is not simply mimetic has been countered by him in claiming that the techniques of revealing causalities and actions in life and history are most closely approximated in realism.
this claim ignores the fact that both realism, and the mediations of "reality" meant to be transparent or approximated in realism, are grounded in presuppositions which some might term ideological or discursive. if we can imagine that there are dominant values in society, and that those values succeed in generating a general consent amongst us that that is the way things are, that it is natural to view things thus, that this is a normal way to understand and speak about reality, then we might see that by focusing on the "reality" rather than on what produces that "reality" is to subscribe to those dominant values and ideologies, without being conscious of it, without seeing how they play a role in shaping our perceptions of reality.
thus, for example, when Things Fall Apart presents a certain vision of a certain time and place, and it is taught as an example of an "Igbo" world or worldview, it becomes striking only years after its publication how much that world view excluded women, how much that world was partial. as my friend lem johnson put it, we never enter into the menstruating hut with the women in that novel; we never really view the women except through a patriarchal lens, a masculinist lens that notes the shapeliness of the buttocks of the young bride. that was natural back then.
so too was it natural to call it igbo, as if it were self-evident what that meant. what the palmoil got us to swallow was not just the words, but the invisibility of what produced those words. to imagine a colonial imaginary was fundamental in producing an ethnic imaginary was out of the question in 1958. not now.

so the charge now by jeyifo is that in privileging tribe achebe is occluding the role that power played: power he describes in the political parties and their leaders, and as representing class interests. in claiming this, in readjusting the lens so that it more "realistically" gives us the world achebe should have described, jeyifo renaturalizes class analysis as something that is the vehicle that will transmit with the greatest transparence reality.

it is not a matter of a simple technical or theoretical quibble to argue that realism is no better equipped to convey reality or history than other genres. i am claiming that it is the opposite in a sense: it more powerfully obscures the sources of its presuppositions by having its normalization of dominant values rendered "already there," i.e., invisible. for all its complexity and fragmentation, postmodernist discourses that highlight their self-reflexivity are actually closer to the ways we make "real" the world to ourselves through others.

more importantly, it makes visible the question of what presuppositions are grounding not only achebe's arguments, but the critiques of him. it seems really inadequate to me, the outsider to this debate, to simply aver, that was the way it was, without identifying and characterizing what is being used to affirm how it was and especially how we know it.

these are not ivory tower issues. jeyifo points in his 4th installment to this most shocking passage in Achebe's account, seen below. that is the claim that awolowo wanted to eliminate a generation of igbos, especially the children, so as to allow the yoruba to supplant them, to end their superior performances in the modern nigerian economy. given achebe's stature, these charges of genocide and perniciousness require powerful analytical tools to bring to the fore a moral judgment on what happened and who was responsible. maybe acknowledging the limits of those tools would be the beginning for what seems apparent to me: that a truth and reconciliation process has not even begun here, and it surely does seem to be needed.
ken

On 1/13/13 12:05 AM, Chido Onumah wrote:

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn't: Reflections On Achebe's New Book (4)

By Biodun Jeyifo

I will begin by stating that I am not a sociologist, a political scientist, a human rights lawyer, or a government official. My aim is not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps to cause a few headaches in the process.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country (page 228)

The epigraph for this piece is the very first sentence in a section of the third of the four parts of First There Was A Country titled "The Question of Genocide". This section is far and away the most explosive segment among the dozens of segments in the entire book. For this reason, in saying that his aim in this segment is "not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps … cause a few headaches", Achebe is either being disingenuous or is deploying the penchant for ironic understatement that is a central aspect of his novelistic art. In my own frank opinion, I think Achebe in this opening statement of "The Question of Genocide" is being both ironic and disingenuous. At any rate, instead of "a few headaches", the spate of responses to this section of the book has been more like an epidemic outbreak of violent seizures of the type that we find in either severe epileptic fits or the death-throes of a patient that has just been taken off a life-support machine.

I am using the metaphors of severe epilepsy and final death-throes here deliberately. Biafra was not defeated, was not vanquished easily; relatively speaking, it took a long time of agony and trauma for it to be subdued by the Nigerian forces. This is contrary to the initial over-confidence of the Nigerian federal government that what would be needed to end the secessionist republic was not a full-scale war but a "police action" that would take no more than three to six months. And indeed, after the recapture of Benin and the Midwest region from the Biafran invasion force, there were swift, decisive victories by the federal forces within Biafra itself.

Notable in this case were the captures of Calabar and Port Harcourt, both of which then enabled concentration of the war offensive of the Nigerian forces on the Biafran heartland in the Igbo-speaking areas of the breakaway republic. But thereafter and fatefully, the war became stalemated: Biafran resistance became extremely fierce and resilient; the federal forces slowly but inevitably came to the realization that they had more than a "police action" on their hands. It was in this long drawn out phase that the all-important question of mass starvation and an alleged deliberate and systematic genocide against Biafrans - especially women, children and the young - became the primary human and moral issue of the Nigerian-Biafran war, not only while it lasted but apparently now more than four decades later.

In my view, any and all discussion of this question of mass starvation and alleged genocide ought to keep two crucial issues in mind because failure to do so almost inevitably leads to either deliberate or unwitting distortions in analysis, interpretation and judgment. The first of these two issues was the fact that, unexpectedly, this phase of a stalemate was the longest phase of the war. Secondly, this phase of the war was also almost entirely concentrated on the Biafran heartland in the Igbo-speaking areas of the secessionist republic and it came after most of the non-Igbo areas of Biafra had been effectively captured, militarily occupied and administratively run by the federal Nigerian forces. Before getting to these two issues, first a word on the human and moral dimensions of the matter of mass starvation and alleged genocide, both of which Achebe in this book engages with a combination of a master novelist's artistry and a passionate Biafran ideological zealotry.

"It is important to point out that most Nigerians were against the war and abhorred the senseless violence that ensued as a result of the conflict", Achebe observes on page 233 of There Was A Country. And earlier in the book, on page 108, Achebe had also asserted that "the war came as a surprise to the vast majority of artists and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict". This is the voice of Achebe the humanistic and progressive thinker. Unfortunately, it is a part of the Achebe that we confront in this book that has been almost completely buried under the bitterness and severity of the critical responses to the controversial and tendentious aspects of the book.

At the moral and human core of Achebe's portrayal and evocation of so much suffering and death of individuals and the masses in Biafra is the simple but profound humanist belief that the claims of those who suffered and died on those who survived and are living can never be settled by convenient or expedient answers to the question of whether genocide was intended or merely incidental. In other words, while the matter of genocide has been largely framed by figures, data, statistics and probabilistic projections, the fact that millions of people did die and suffer - perhaps avoidably and needlessly - can never be in dispute. The elegiac poems, the harrowing prose evocations of death, trauma and madness of so many in Biafra that accompany the "objective" accounts constitute powerful and moving parts of this book that nothing in the vast controversy that it has engendered can diminish.

On that note, we come to the heart of the controversies. If the charge of organized and systematic genocide through mass starvation is the single most controversial claim of the book, the most controversial observation or statement in support of this claim is contained in the following sentences concerning Awolowo: "It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for the advancement of his Yoruba people in general. And let it be said that there is, on the surface, nothing wrong with those aspirations. However, Awolowo saw the dominant Igbo at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigerian-Biafran war – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations."[p. 233]

The charge of genocide, as advanced by Achebe in this book and as proposed by scholars like Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe who Achebe cites, rests on many factors. Some of these are statements of bloodlust credited to many field commanders of the Nigerian army; actual atrocities committed by Nigerian forces in the Biafran heartland the went well beyond Geneva conventions and the norms of civilized warfare; and the indisputable fact that the Nigerian government did use economic blockade and the resultant mass starvation as a means of forcing the Biafrans to surrender. But the charge of the diabolism of Awolowo in using genocide for the advancement of his personal ambition and as means of once and for all time eliminating Igbos in the competition for dominance in Nigeria is something else altogether. Let us address this observation carefully.

While Awolowo did make the infamous statement in justification of starvation as a "legitimate" weapon of war and while, as a matter of fact, he made the statement after the fall of Calabar and Port Harcourt and the consequent tightening of the noose of war on the Biafran heartland, in order to achieve the diabolical project imputed to him by Achebe, Awolowo would have had to possess the power to foresee and magically bring many things into being. First, he would have had to know beforehand that the war would drag on for more than the three to six months that the federal forces initially expected that it would take to overwhelm Biafra; the over two millions that reportedly died of starvation died because the war was stalemated for nearly two years.

Secondly, Awolowo would have needed to have the assurance that his alleged diabolical genocidal schemes would receive "help" from the Biafrans themselves by the kind of resistance, the "fight to finish" that they put up. Finally, Awolowo would have needed to have the power to make the Biafran leadership reject the offer by the Nigerian government of which he was a member of a land corridor that would have enabled food and other necessities to reach the blockaded Biafra. For if the Biafran leadership had accepted this offer that was in fact very reluctantly made by Nigeria under intense international pressure, the number of those that died in Biafra of starvation and kwashiorkor would have been significantly less than two million.

At this point, I must confess that of all the controversial claims and statements made by Achebe in his new book, the charge of a diabolical plot hatched by Awolowo to exterminate Igbo people (!) in furtherance of personal ambition and ethnic advantage for his people seems to me so bizarre and irrational that I for one refuse to take it seriously. If Achebe had stuck to the claim, the charge that some of Awolowo's actions and policies during and immediately after the war objectively worked to the advantage of Yoruba middle and moneyed classes and interest groups whether or not this was Awolowo's intensions, he would have been on more rational and plausible grounds. For instance, by the time the Indigenization Decree came into effect, Igbo moneyed and propertied classes and interest groups had little access to capital in sufficient quantities to make the best of that unprecedented bonanza of post-civil war Nigeria to the kingpins of our country's ruling class.

As I have stressed throughout this series, once again we see in this absurd charge the confusion, the conflation by Achebe of the class component with the generality, the entirety of the ethnic group, whether the ethnic group in question is Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa or others.

I had thought the series would end this week. But we are not done yet. Please bear with me as I bring it all to a close in next week's column in which I shall be arguing that while there may be no easy or satisfactory answers to the myriad of questions thrown up by Achebe's book, there are solid grounds on which we can move beyond the predominantly divisive and acrimonious controversies that have so far dominated the responses to the book.

http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=110255:jeyifo-first-there-was-a-country-then-there-wasnt-reflections-on-achebes-new-book-4&catid=38:columnists&Itemid=615

 

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--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  distinguished professor of english  michigan state university  department of english  619 red cedar road  room C-614 wells hall  east lansing, mi 48824  ph. 517 803 8839  harrow@msu.edu

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