This should rightfully be in the "Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle" thread but I don't want to disturb the latest in that thread (by Salimonu Kadiri ) since the first part of this is at best a digression, even if the second part is more pertinent.
Let me voice what many of us are thinking: That was an excellent piece by Brother Salimonu Kadiri!
It was as if Truth told him, "speak up brother, and tell 'em!"
Re – Salimonu Kadiri's opening first two paragraphs about Nigerians and Nigeria's official language.
There's the state of Politics and the English Language after WW2 – and there's the mass communications problems of the now more globalised & localised English Language in today's Nigeria & Diaspora. I'd go a little further than what Salimonu has said I'd say that in contrast with Brother Amos Tutuola, Brother Wole Soyinka has had a pervasive effect on many of those who wield the English language as a club with which to clobber some other people of the intelligentsia on the head with their big grammar, from a very deliberate Pius Adesanmi who consistently goes for the overkill (although, sometimes "less is more" – more effective) to the always altruistic Makinde Ag Mankind' Adewale & his high ideals, to the Rivers State's innocent Odimegwu Onwumere whose columns I read regularly.
I have notes for an essay on the effect of Mr. Soyinka on the state of the Nigerian letters ( for the time being scribbled on some scraps of paper) on this I'm still sporadically collecting the evidence, it's part of an on-going project on the man this forum loves to hate : V.S. Naipaul. At this stage the essay's called " The Naipaul in some of us" mostly based on some of V.S. Naipaul's output, including "The Middle Passage" and "The Mimic men" , "A Bend in the River" and his brother Shiva Naipaul's " North of South" and some insights from " Under Western Eyes, - India, from Milton to Macaulay" by Balachandra Rajan. It's something I hope to submit to Professor Harrow for some kind suggestions and possible editorial assistance. The only other short project is a review of Professor Falola's autobiography after Ikihide's impressive take on it – but my range of impressions or responses to stimuli are probably not the same as Ikhide's or we may express ourselves very differently even musically, one does not have to rehearse to be one's self so all I'm waiting for is Sheikh Bangura´s mathematical applications to Prof Falola's literary text and for that we may have to wait till June next year when his work on the African Renaissance man should have arrived at some perfection or at least is slated to be in the final state and public-ation , so I'm looking forward to the first review of that work in the Journal of Modern African Studies....
Re – Obi Nwakanma's "Why not put it this way: the civil war in Nigeria would not have happened if there was peace in Western Nigeria," etc - that's like the last line here:
"that the property of rain is to wet and fire to
burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep, and that a
great cause of the night is lack of the sun " ( Corin , "As You Like It" )
and that a great cause of the war is the lack of the peace...
The verbal and evidential dynamics of the blame game is far from over even though the main actors of the piece including the late great Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Emeka Ojukwu are now with the ancestors and that's why yesterday I wrote to Brother Obi that "I guess that Emeka Ojukwu's version of the Biafra War would have sounded like scripture to you, especially if written posthumously, with a vantage view – maybe quite another perspective after meetings with both Igbo and Federal victims of the Biafra War on the other side."
I had some regrets after pushing the send button – one is always open to misinterpretation and at this point a literary project for someone other than myself could be something in the genre of Eric Linklater's Crisis in Heaven - some of which we performed at one of our annual speech day and prize giving ceremonies at secondary school ( it's a play in which Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln, Pushkin, Voltaire, Helen of Troy and Frederick the Great etc., meet in heaven) so wouldn't it be a good idea to have ( in alphabetical order) Sani Abacha, Chief M. K. O. Abiola, Chief Obafemi Awolowo , Gowon, Chief Emeka Ojukwu and some of the other such prominent figures in Nigerian politics having a crisis meeting in heaven and ironing things out up there? The problem is that probably not all of the rascals are in heaven or on transit from the dimension or space called purgatory since it's said that at least one of them deserves to be in the other place. As for me I don't know any of the characters well enough to dare write a fictional play giving those words to say. I've never written a play in my life....
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