The Republic, a youth-led magazine and one of the smartest, most serious public-facing journals published in Africa, interviewed me on a variety of topics as part of their FIRST DRAFT series. Full access to the online and print publications requires a monthly or yearly subscription, but the full interview is at: https://republic.com.ng/first-draft/historians-value-closure-moses-ochonu/
Historian and author of 'Racism or Classism: Africa's Hidden Race Problem', Moses Ochonu, finds the ending of Things Fall Apart disappointing. Historians value closure and 'the tragic end of Okonkwo raises more questions than it answers.'
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I have always been drawn to adventure, broadly defined. I love reading about unconventional human experiences and about people who dare to step out of their states of comfort to explore other lands and cultures. Growing up, I read books about adventure, travel, cultural encounters, and fantasies. It didn't matter if the stories were fiction or non-fiction. Such books availed me an opportunity to embark on my own mental adventures, to travel to other times and spaces. I was fascinated by stories of other places, peoples, and cultures. The familiar rarely appealed to me. It's probably the reason I read a lot of novels in the Pacesetter fiction series. I cannot count the number I read, but I must have read close to 80 per cent of the titles. We used to exchange them in those days, and we would brag about how many we had read. I could not get enough of that series in my early teenage years. Later, as my reading palate became more discerning, I gravitated towards the novels in the African Writers Series—novels by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Flora Nwapa. I had a knack for memorizing lines from some of these works, lines I considered great accomplishments in rhetorical and linguistic creativity. I loved stories. The more removed from my own experience and from my time the story was the more it appealed to me.
As I grew up in multiple places and followed and lived with relatives around northern Nigeria, adventure stories approximated my own nomadism and transcultural life. I was not particularly fond of serious history books as a child, although I loved books on the coups and counter-coups, the civil war, and past Nigerian political crises. War memoirs and autobiographies captivated me. Some schoolmates would bring these books to our school and we would queue up to read them in turns. I also loved oral stories of the past because they made my mind wander and wonder about how plausible those stories were. These mental wanderings fed into the fecundity of my youthful imaginations. As they say, the past is a foreign country, so the foreignness of historical accounts satiated my appetite for the exotic, the different.
If you could rewrite a classic book/text, which would it be and why?
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart has always left me with a tinge of disappointment. The tragic end of Okonkwo raises more questions than it answers. For me, the end of the protagonist complicates the story more than it resolves it. Maybe this is why I am a historian and not a novelist. We historians value closure. We are like sleuths pursuing explanatory endpoints and truths, even if these are often elusive and subjective goals. For me resolution and conclusion in storytelling are important. I would definitely rewrite the conclusion of Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo's central position as an anticolonial hero is ultimately undermined by, some might say sacrificed for, the need to portray colonization as an all-consuming machine of brutality and destruction.
What is the last book you disagreed with, and why?
I was an undergraduate in Bayero University, Kano, when I read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. I had a visceral reaction to it. I disagreed with its overwrought premise of a neat dialectical progression in human ideological evolution. For me, this premise, rooted as it was in a rather mechanical adaptation of Hegelian dialectics, stood in contrast to the contingencies and instabilities of human evolution and behaviour, which have profound causal implications for the trajectory of humanity. Nor could I totally buy into the book's hubristic ideological triumphalism. I thought at the time that Fukuyama's victory lap on behalf of Western liberal democracy and its neoliberal capitalist subsidiary was premature. Finally, the book's central postulation of 'the end of history,' the very idea that there is an end to human ideological evolution and that that end had been reached with the global ascent of liberal democracy, sat uneasily with me. Some of that scepticism has intensified and been vindicated more than two decades since the book. For instance, the current troubled state of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in the West invalidate the triumphant finality of Fukuyama's ahistorical argument.
What's the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?
It is not so much that this book changed my mind, but Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republicgave me a new way of thinking about a dual phenomenon he analyses so well in the book: the Pentecostalization of Nigerian politics and the politicization of Nigerian Pentecostalism. I had always known about the ways that Pentecostal performative, symbolic, linguistic, and even sartorial elements have seeped into Nigerian popular socio-political discourses and practices. What this book did for me was give me several empirical frames of reference and make the symbiotic link between Pentecostalism and popular political and social beliefs more compelling. For me, the biggest takeaway from that brilliant book is the persuasive argument that those who are non-Pentecostals, those who profess an anti-Pentecostal leaning, and those located on the opposite end of the Nigerian religious and denominational spectrum have, in fact, become implicated in the symbolic practices that, according to Obadare, make Nigeria a Pentecostal republic. The foundational assumptions of Pentecostal Christianity and their associated worldviews, rituals, and beliefs have infused the Nigerian body politic in spite of what seems like a rejection of these beliefs in some quarters.
Recommend, bury or unwrite a book. You'd:
Recommend— Farooq Kperogi's Nigeria's Digital Diaspora
Bury—Ayn Rand's corpus of books, because, while they may have compelled people to think more critically about the pitfalls of collectivism and collectivist socioeconomic and political ideologies, they have infected the world with an even more dangerous ideology of self-worship. They have infested our world with the seemingly incurable virus of selfishness, extreme individualism, and the soulless, arrogant pursuit of narcissistic gratification at the expense of the common good. The praxis activated by that philosophy of radical individualism has been globalized as deregulated capitalism or neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has, in turn, destroyed many societies around the world, impoverished millions, and caused historic socioeconomic inequality and upward redistribution of wealth. It is time to retire the Ayn Rand corpus.
Unwrite—None, because every book is a work of intellectual labour that, whether good, bad, or reprehensible, provokes conversation, controversy, and debate, which ultimately advance the cause of knowledge.
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart has always left me with a tinge of disappointment. The tragic end of Okonkwo raises more questions than it answers.
What's a common misconception about African history?
There are numerous misconceptions about African history. Many of them, unfortunately, are rooted in colonial and Euro-American stereotypes about Africans and African culture. In the popular Euro-American imagination, African history is an illegitimate field of inquiry. This perception is founded on a belief that the African past is one dark void bereft of significant human accomplishments and experiences. A corollary of that belief is a set of colonial stereotypes about Africa that has endured to this day. So many are these stereotypes that my Africanist colleague, Curtis Keim, has authored an entire book on it. The book is titled Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind.
Tragically, many Africans have internalized some of these demeaning misconceptions about the African past. The most stubborn of these myths is the claim that European colonizers and so-called explorers 'discovered' certain awe-inspiring features of the African landscape. This is a clear read-off from the colonial script, in which nothing of note exists in Africa until the white man has seen and documented it for the entertainment of his kind. Another myth is the idea prevalent among some Africans that their ethno-linguistic communities were organized as 'tribes' which were incapable of civilization, sophisticated thought, and knowledge production. Even today, I have a hard time convincing some of my young African mentees and interlocutors on social media that the African past was a temporal and spatial arena of civilizational flourish and intense knowledge production. It is difficult to get them to believe that this African indigenous knowledge corpus and its philosophical underpinnings can illuminate their scholarly inquiries much better than Western knowledge systems and theories that speak to Euro-American experiences.
What three history books should be on every Nigerian's bookshelf?
Elizabeth Isichei's A History of Nigeria is an old classic that remains relevant, even if it's a bit dated. It's a comprehensive tome on Nigerian history, a primer for those seeking a general introduction to Nigerian history. Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton's A History of Nigeria is a must-have because of its sheer breadth. The book spans the entire temporal length of Nigerian history. It begins its exploration from the precolonial state formations, interactions, conflicts, and coalescence that birthed modern Nigeria. It then brings the narrative forward to postcolonial times. In that way, a reader can see how the present socioeconomic and political circumstances he or she is living through connect to Nigeria's chequered and complex past.
If contemporary history is more your taste, or you desire a Nigerian history text written in a journalistic, non-academic style then Max Siollun's Nigeria's Soldiers of Fortune: The Abacha and Obasanjo Years should take its rightful place in your library. It is a gripping political story of the critical last few years of military rule, the pro-democracy movement that challenged it, and the transition to elected civilian rule after the death of dictator Sani Abacha. The story is told with the intimacy of an eyewitness and the narrative dexterity of a veteran public historian.
In the popular Euro-American imagination, African history is an illegitimate field of inquiry.
What is your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
Writing for me is a process of discovery, reflection, improvisation, and thought discipline. The discipline part is often the last stage in conceiving and incubating a piece of writing. Writing for me begins with reflection. It begins with intense, mentally laborious thinking and rethinking of phenomena. This stage is quite chaotic. It is an unorganized, stream-of-consciousness ideational production process. Ideas occur to me in waves and strands and I struggle to give them coherence and organizational structure. By the time this struggle is over, however, I would have figured out the rough form of what I want to write. I often visualize the sections, chapters, subheadings, arguments, evidence, introduction, and conclusion at this stage.
Unlike many writers, I take few if any notes or make any outlines prior to writing. But I often have a mental map, an architectural design, if you will, of the piece of writing in my head. This stage is the hardest and least enjoyable part of the writing process. After this stage, the actual work of putting metaphorical or literal pen to paper comes quite easily to me. The writing stage enables me to put the ideas down. The ideas pour out of me in torrents, sometimes faster than I can type or organize them. The result is that my first draft is often scattered, and sometimes embarrassingly unreadable. But within this chaotic phase there is much satisfaction because it is here that I discover, pursue, and establish the trajectories of the work. It is also at this stage that the work's direction emerges and its thrust takes shape. The editing process follows.
Depending on the genre of writing, editing can last much longer than the process of producing the first draft, for editing is a highly involved and reconstructive process that entails sharpening the language and argument and imposing order, discipline, coherence, and linguistic character on the writing. Typically, my academic writings—mainly articles and books—undergo at least five rounds of editing before they enter review. For non-academic writings, the editing process is shorter but is no less intense.
What was your process for writing 'Racism or Classism? Africa's Hidden Race Problem'?
To be a good writer, one must be a good reader. This is a cliché rendition of how writers practice their craft, but it is actually true in many cases. Most writers have no capacity to simply conjure up a phenomenon and generate original thoughts on it. In that sense, we're indebted to multiple nameless authors and to ideas gleaned from other writings. In my case, this piece grew from two sources of inspiration. One is my recent reading in critical race theory, a rich field of humanistic and social scientific inquiry that exploded in the last two decades. Many iconoclastic works have ruptured conventional understandings of race as a fixed, innate, colour-bound, and geographically contained construct. On the American side, Ibram Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America enriched and challenged my thinking on the manifestation of race in 'non-racial' contexts. One work that influenced my thinking in respect to race in Africa is Jemima Pierre's award-winning book, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. That book broke new ground by insisting on the possibility and ferocity of race and racial thinking in so-called black Africa, where race is said to be meaningless and non-existent except in contexts of colonial and neo-colonial relations. That work opened the door for me to explore my own long-held questions on the unacknowledged manifestations of racial thought and symbols in African quotidian settings. This brings me to the second factor that catalyzed the piece.
Traveling across Nigeria and some African countries, I've always experienced and witnessed sites, scenes, interactions, and material culture that alerted me to the persistent presence of residual and recalibrated racial thinking in Africa. These experiences convinced me that race and the powerful ideas behind it were at work in shaping many aspects of contemporary Nigerian and African life despite or perhaps because of the morphological racial homogeneity of many African states. Several of the examples I advance in the piece to bolster my argument about the presence of race and racial hangovers in contemporary Africa come from my own observations, experiences, and inquiries. The piece was my way of making sense of this experiential repertoire. It was my way of developing the conceptual and analytical frames for talking about race, racism, and aetiologies of racial valuation and devaluation. These signs and significations of race hide in plain sight in many parts of Africa, but they are either disguised in the language of class or culture or unacknowledged as racial formations.
What's something [simple] about race or racism that few people tend to know?
Most people mistake prejudice for racism. Prejudice can occur in any race and can be directed at members of any race. But racism is not the same as racial prejudice. Nor is it the same as racial affinity or solidarity, which is an understandable human comfort with the familiar, the relatable, and the self-affirming. Racial solidarity also grows out of a concomitant natural tendency to suspect the unfamiliar until it becomes familiar, and to gravitate towards one's kind. Racism, contrary to these popular conflations, is about power, about how racial prejudice is transformed into and expressed through the power to harm, to exclude, to marginalize, to exploit, and to dehumanize. Racism occurs when racial prejudice, constructed on exaggerated and largely fictional assumptions about racial difference, is married to power. The resulting power formations are then embedded in institutions that have the capacity to determine fates, cause injury, allocate resources and opportunities in a discriminatory manner, and construct a hierarchy of value corresponding to differences in physical attributes. It follows therefore that only groups who control power, historically and in the present, are implicated in the discourse of racism. In our world, that group is predominantly white and Euro-American. They have created or inherited a white power structure that they police with fervour because in their understanding there are zero-sum stakes involved. People from other groups can be prejudiced, but that prejudice has no power to victimize, exclude, exploit, dehumanize, and render its targets invisible in socio-political and economic institutions. This is a crucial difference that should be noted by people who deflect or minimize racism by pointing to 'black racism' or 'reverse racism.'
Writing for me is a process of discovery, reflection, improvisation, and thought discipline.
What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you've ever received?
Let me take the liberty of stating three. The first advice I got is to 'just write.' It's similar to the Nike advertisement slogan: 'Just do it.' As I stated earlier, I tend to take so much time agonizing, reflecting, and mentally framing a piece of work before I begin writing it. This can be and is often a recipe for procrastination. It gives me an alibi to delay writing because I can always say truthfully that I'm in the thinking and reflection phase. The problem, as one of my graduate school advisers told me, is that if you wait for the ideas to completely form in your head before you begin writing, you may never begin and, worse, the ideas may be lost to the natural fluctuations of the human mind. That advice has worked for me. It has helped me break the cycle of procrastination and has made me realize that drafting activates the muse. The muse is dormant as long as you remain in the research or thinking phase.
The second advice I received made me realize that all writing is provisional. Therefore, one should make peace with an imperfect but publishable piece of writing rather than seek to make it perfect. The quest for perfection can stand in the way of productivity and risk-taking in the writing endeavour. The perfection impulse wants you to play it safe, and perfectionists seek to produce writing that is beyond reproach and critique. Unfortunately for them, there is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing and even if there were it would be boring, for provocation, vulnerability, and incompleteness are hallmarks of successful works. Finally, I was advised early in my writing career to reconcile myself to the fact that all writing is ultimately autobiographical. This means that every writer leaves a piece of themselves in their writing, and there is nothing wrong with that. We write subconsciously from our own personal, experiential, or professional places. There is no need to agonize over objectivity, neutrality, and intellectual detachment. Once you come to terms with the fact that all writings are deeply personal exercises in thought and expression, you will become a liberated and emboldened writer.
Who is an author you wish you had discovered earlier?
Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez. I discovered him when I was almost in my final year of university. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude and the experience was intellectually and aesthetically orgasmic. I had read Ben Okri's A Famished Road, so I already had a first immersive experience in magical realism. For me, Marquez is the master of that genre and I wish I read him earlier. An honourable mention should go to the Ghanaian-American philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah. I read his In My Father's House for the first time in graduate school and it transformed my thinking on race, identity, culture, genealogy, essentialism, social construction, and other important phenomena critical to analyzing our world. It's one of those books that you wish you had read earlier in your life. I have since become an insatiable consumer of his work.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?
I have become fascinated by self-narration and the politics of self-writing, to paraphrase Cameroonian philosopher and historian, Achille Mbembe. To that end, I read a lot of memoirs and autobiographies. Inevitably, some of my own writings, even the academic ones, have taken a turn towards the autobiographical and the biographical. For instance, my current book project titled Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity, which will be published by Indian University Press, profiles several Nigerian aristocratic visitors to Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The book analyses the aristocrats' own writings and travelogues on Britain and on their experiences there—a set of travel autobiographies or what I call reverse colonial ethnography. These days, I like to draw from my own experiential database, and I've become comfortable with self-inflected, self-reflexive analysis. I have little enthusiasm for pretentious, jargony, hyper-academic writings nowadays. I read them only because I have to.
I have also become a little jaded about fiction. I still read the occasional work of fiction but I'm now a bit dubious about the capacity of fiction to fully illuminate or accommodate the gravity and urgency of Nigeria's political predicament, or to approximate the tragic and complex human stories emanating from it. At a time of unprecedented assault on Nigerian national institutions and uncertainty about the survival of the country, I increasingly find fiction to be something of a distracting luxury. I do not mean to diminish the socio-political work of fiction, which is undeniable and enduring. What I've come to believe, however, is that nowadays fiction is sometimes deployed as a stand-in for direct, frontal commentary on the ills of Nigeria.
Brave journalistic, investigative, and editorial commentary on our predicament has become a dangerous, sometimes life-threatening undertaking, no doubt, but fiction is not an effective substitute for it. This is because the medium by its nature privileges aesthetics over explicitly scathing social commentary. This fact conditions its reception similarly in a more aesthetic direction. Moreover, I think that fictionalization can sometimes obscure a socio-political message that requires clarity and directness of delivery. These days, I find memoirs, personal, political, or professional, and biographies infinitely satisfying and stimulating. They raise for me intellectual questions about authorial objectivity, the nature of truth, the malleability and tentativeness of facts, the politics of self-disclosure, and the narrative life of the fraught self. Memoirs and biographies help me get at the political and the socioeconomic through the personal. The memoir is a less depressing medium because adversity is couched in the seductive aesthetic of personal narrative. Toyin Falola's A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is, hands down, the best autobiographical— or biographical— work I've read lately. When I started reading it, I could not put it down. It was that engrossing. Ohio University Press has a short history series, which publishes succinct historical biographies of some of Africa's most consequential twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures—Thomas Sankara, Wangari Maathai, Haile Sellassie, Miriam Makeba, Nelson Mandela, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, Ellen John Sirleaf, and others. To read these biographies is to enter the personal and political worlds of Africa's great men and women. It is to pry open their inner lives in ways that academic analysis cannot help you do.
Brave journalistic, investigative, and editorial commentary on our predicament has become a dangerous, sometimes life-threatening undertaking, no doubt, but fiction is not an effective substitute for it.
What can we expect you to write about next?
My next book will focus on the subject of colonial exile in African history. I am fascinated by stories of African kings who confronted rather than surrender to European colonial invaders and, upon their defeat, were exiled to far-flung lands within and outside Africa. Examples include King Jaja of Opobo, King Prempeh of Asante, Nana Olomu of Itsekiri, and Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru of the Sokoto Caliphate. Most of them were eventually allowed to return to their domains after they were deemed incapable of threatening colonial rule. Some died in exile or while on their way home. I want to understand the process and trauma of exile, these kings' exilic lives, and their perspectives on colonization in that violent moment of colonial occupation.
Moses Ochonu is Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History and Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author, most recently, of Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity.
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