Professor Biodun Jeyifo is still writing about Professor Achebe's book? Na today day break? Even Achebe has moved on and unreliable sources say he is now busy writing a new book, titled, America: Now THAT is a Country! Of course, to ensure commercial success, Pa Awolowo's name will be mentioned on each page. Money na hand back na ground.
As a student of the arts, Professor Jeyifo remains a giant in my eyes. He is good at what he does, but this his serial analysis of Achebe's book exaggerates his weaknesses. We should probably call the series, Refried Beans. As in been there, done that. Nothing that I have read so far improves upon the silence, let's be honest. And the timing stinks. That explains why it has flown like a lead balloon. On the ground.
I did help Jeyifo on Facebook by commenting on one of the series. It gave him a little traction, but not much. I won't be doing that with this because quite frankly, this horse has been flogged to death. Jeyifo came too late to the party.
You have to give it to Professor Achebe, he has mastered effective mass communication. And used it to devastating effect to marshall his thoughts. And intellectuals are rushing in out of breath, trying to catch up with his message. I don't think you can learn these things in PhD school, you are just born with the gift of speaking to the hearts and souls of people.
The Eagle chuckles on the Iroko. Man, I want to be that good at 80. Must be in his genes, Sigh.
- Ikhide
Stalk my blog at http://www.xokigbo.com/
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From: Chido Onumah <conumah@hotmail.com>
To:
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2013 12:05 AM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn't: Reflections On Achebe's New Book (4)
To:
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2013 12:05 AM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - 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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