Bro Ken,
Thanks for affirming your love for our culture and you are right, you are not alone!
Wole's celebration of democratic speech is applicable to himself and he tolerates criticism much more than the dictators who would repress people sometimes for telling an uncomfortable truth. But on any scale, his positive attributes far outweigh any defects in his scholar-activism. This is the most important lesson that Malcolm X taught us in his autobiography, according to bell hooks. When Malcolm discovered that his hero, Elijah Mohamed, was human - all too human - he nearly lost his faith but one of Elijah's sons invited him to study the Bible with him and they came to the conclusion that none of the holy men in the bible was without sin and yet they are honored for the things that they did right. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!
On the love of Achebe along with the hatred of the Igbo, think about the worship of the Bible and the simultaneous hatred of Jews or the fact that every currency in the world is adorned with Arabic numerals while Arabs are hated with passion by some but not by all. The uniqueness of Baba Sho is that he went out of his way to show solidarity with a people that no one liked even at the risk of his own neck while it was reported that some of the traditional rulers from his Yoruba culture toured the killing fields in the North to congratulate the killers for sparring Yoruba lives during the Igbo pogrom before the war. It is a puzzle that at the height of the cold war, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc teamed up with Arabs to engineer genocide on an unprecedented scale against a people who had no hatred towards any of these blocs.
Mahmood Mamdani recently suggested that anti-Muslim bigotry is awash in the literature found in Eastern Nigeria but provided no evidence for such. Soyinka's insensitive line in The Jero Plays making fun of some revered Muslim chants - 'Lie lie all na lie' as he put it - is an exercise in poetic license equaled only by Baba Fela Kuti's mocking Shuffering and Shmiling in which he took on the African adherents of both Christianity and Islam. No similar irreverence of other cultures is found in Igbo literature where the Achebean dictum that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it to make a forest appears to be the predominant democratic philosophy of tolerance but not license to kill.
Of course, you are right, the Igbo are not hated by everybody. I said 'almost'. The surprising thing is that given their potential contributions to democratisation and progress, they should be admired and beloved by many more and not just by yourself and perceptive iconoclastic heroes like Baba Sho, our very own WS. Yes, other cultures have their unique admirable qualities too but none of them comes close to the paranoia that appears to be the lot of the Igbo wherever they are found, not just in Nigeria, but with no cause for all that alarm. In South Africa for example, a recent book asserted that the Igbo are responsible for all the drugs trade there and the evidence? 'Look how many of them are in jail'!
On your fantasy about bombing a Rwanda radio station the way some say that the rail links to Auschwitz should have been bombed by America to save more lives, remember that many of those radio workers were innocent and that bombing the radio station would not have eliminated the more powerful radio without battery or word of mouth communication of la haine. The Rwandese Patriotic Front, backed by Ugandan troops, marched in and chased the genocidists out the way Nyerere's troops marched in with Ugandan patriots and chased Idi Amin out. The example of reconstruction in Rwanda with the marvel of having perhaps the only parliament in the world in which women are predominant is a far better lesson than any post-morten wish to commit postmodern genocide against genocidists. In other words, Russia, Britain, Egypt and the Nigerian governments should be lobbied to start paying reparations for the Igbo genocide instead of seeking revenge as any part of international policy.
In the final analysis, the situations that make genocide possible - the balkanization of Africa along colonial lines - could be effectively remedied by uniting all African people into one republic where no forces, alien or local, would ever attempt to commit genocide without being successfully stopped by the united peoples republic of Africa. The US could have been a more bloody terrain for the reviled people of African descent and other minorities were it not that the federal might is there to attempt equal protection for all, the way Obama is going after Arizona on immigration law after offering increased health care coverage to all Americans despite resistance from some state governments that would prefer to continue with a discriminatory health care system that risked the lives of millions of Americans.
Biko
--- On Mon, 7/12/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Monday, July 12, 2010, 7:20 AM
in response to biko's excellent encomium of WS (i've used this shorthand for shakespeare and soyinka for 30 years: somehow it seems right to me) i was very surprised to read biko's claim that there is so much animus toward the igbo. biko, do you mean by other nigerians? as much of igbo life and culture is vectored to outsiders through literature, it surely doesn't apply there: in fact, achebe has guaranteed international admiration for things igbo, esp language, for years; and he's been joined by a host of other igbo or mixed writers, artists, musicians, etc. where does this hatred reside now that the biafran war is 2 generations behind us? secondly, peripherally, WS has been the champion of open, free, unimpeded speech. i don't wish to start a diatribe against those who would censor nollywood, but it is perhaps a marker of our times that narrow nationalist movements seem to exercise great power in censoring the arts. thus 2 russian exhibitors today condemned to 3 years of prison for exhibiting art felt to be offensive to the russian orthordox establishment and their ultranationalist supporters. i associate this sensibility with many nationalist movements around the world; including the impending law against the wearing of the burka and niqba in france, and soon to be elsewhere in europe. doesn't soyinka's free spirit of critique apply here, and if so, are there limits? i would have censored, indeed bombed, radio milles collines in rwanda as it incited its listeners to genocide. i am not american enough to accept totally free speech; are there any countries without laws against libel? apply the concept to groups, and you have reason for censorship when the line between speech and incitement to violence is crossed, or blurred. but there is a difference between a line in a play, a poem, on a canvas, and a line that crosses out people. i think WS always recognized that difference ken At 08:39 PM 7/11/2010, you wrote: ODE TO BABA SHO AT 76
By Biko Agozino
'Unlike societies right next to the Igbo for instance – more famously the Benin, or further West, the Yoruba or, all the way southwards of the continent, the Kwazulu of the legendary Shaka – the Igbo, with their strong social formation rooted in republicanism, would appear to belie my general claim. The Igbo have no history of expansionism, being content with a strong organization around autonomous clan entities that made contact – friendly or unfriendly with one another as the need arose (Wole Soyinka, Distinguished Nyerere Lecture, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 2010: 1).
Soyinka may have helped to answer a question that I have been longing to ask him for a long time: Why does he love Igbo culture so much when almost everyone else appears to hate the Igbo? I found clues to this answer that his 2010 Nyerere Lecture confirms starting with his childhood autobiography, Ake, where as a kid he refused to lie down to the elders as is expected in Yoruba culture and reasoned that if he was not expected to lie down to God, why should he lie down to anyone? Before the publication of Ake, he had already fictionalized this biographical sketch in his novel, The Interpreters that a Youth Corps teacher, Adamu, tried to get my form four High School class to understand without much success perhaps because of the fractal elliptical structure that is characteristic of Soyinka's work.
What Adamu taught us effectively was always to look for a deeper meaning in the work of Soyinka and not to read it at the surface level. In that novel, there was a university lecturer, Soyinka's alter ego, called Egbo, who delivered exactly the same defiant line of prostrating to neither God nor man. Now I wonder if Egbo was a suggestive code for Igbo because Soyinka may have been rebuked as a child by elders for being an uncultured bush man or Igbo man, 'igbo' means bush in Yourba language, all because he admired the Igbo concept of all heads being equal. Maybe Soyinka actually witnessed an Igbo man perform this indomitable spirit and admired it enough to adopt it himself.
That childhood sentiment of his must have been reinforced later in life when he was obviously an admirer of Nnamdi Azikiwe and was the Master of Ceremony for the artistic tribute during Zik's inauguration as the first President of Nigeria where he refused to succumb to the domineering demands of an American opera singer who did not intend to keep to the time allocated to her despite what Soyinka saw as her poor musical talents and not withstanding that she was a personal guest of the guest of honour, Zik (see the autobiography, Ibadan). I think that Soyinka was the first to inform me that Zik was a poet, although he called him a bombastic poet somewhere in his writings, prompting me to go looking for Zik's collection of poetry that was recently republished by his wife, Professor Chinyere Azikiwe of the University of Nigeria. I read the poems and found no bomabastic verses unlike Zik's political speeches but it was probably to the speeches that Soyinka referred when he called Zik, Mbonu Ojike, K.O. Mbadiwe, et al, the bombastic poets of nationalism.
Soyinka's love for Igbo culture is very obvious in Ibadan: The Penkelmese Years where he secretly admired a bombastic prefect in his high school and said that he talked the way he did probably because that was how everybody talked in his village. No wonder Soyinka became the master of the bombast in his own work as an adult. In the Ibadan volume of his always stranger-than-fiction fictionalized autobiography, he recounts how he was approached as a family friend by the daughter of a western regional governor to ask him why he was supporting the 'socialist' culture of the Igbo rather than the monarchical tradition of his own people? The mutual admiration of Baba Sho and Igbo culture is clearest in that part of Ibadan where Soyinka narrates the role of Power Mike Okpala during operation 'Weetie'. Instead of sending thugs from the East to join the orgy of violence in the Wild Wild West, Okpala sent a team of mobile broadcasters from the Eastern Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation to broadcast live election results to the whole world since Akintola's faction was in control of the Western Broadcasting House.
Soyinka said that he sat in Awolowo's chair and persuaded the mobile broadcasters to go back to Enugu because security agents were searching for them frantically but he himself was not afraid to wait alone for the security agents that desecrated the library of Awo in search of incriminating evidence to return and face his resistance. That took some courage and is indeed part of the democratic trait that Soyinka has identified in our own African culture that is worthy of emulation. This Igbophilia is found in his collection of poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt and in the prison diary, The Man Died, where he bore witness to the oppression of the Igbo during the civil war and his one-man attempt to stop the carnage, earning him solitary confinement. Then he capped it all with that eye-popping witness-like harrowing account of the pogrom against the Igbo that he detailed in Season of Anomy. In Ibadan, he said that he traveled the country to conduct ethnographic observations of traditional theatrical performances and in Season of Anomy, the hero also travels the country searching for traditional socialist roots but ended up being confined in a psychiatric hospital as a mad man. Did Soyinka witness the pogrom in the North and could he have achieved more in preventing the tragedy if he had worked as part of a popular democratic organization instead of always tending to perform his one man shows apart from that stint with the Peoples Redemption Party as Director of Research in the 1980s?
Soyinka's love of a people who were almost universally hated calls for some explanation and he may have provided the answer in the Nyerere Lecture that I quoted from above. The Igbo are admirable because they have resisted the temptation to build empires and impose monarchs. Of course, Soyinka could have added that General Obasanjo tried to sabotage this radical republican Igbo tradition by imposing the requirement in the 1976 Local Government Reform Decree that every town should have a 'traditional' ruler, forcing the indomitable Igbo to plunge into bloody chieftaincy struggles unbecoming of their egalitarian principles. Afigbo narrates a similar attempt by the colonial administration to appoint warrant chiefs for the democratic Igbo but the result was that Igbo women declared war on colonialism and warrant chiefs just as Yoruba women did 20 years later by forcing the Alake of Abiokuta to abdicate and make way for a new Alake to be installed and just as Kikuyi women did 30 years later in Kenya. The significant difference was that the Igbo and Ibibio women faught against all warrant chiefs and the colonial administration rather than against an individual chief while the Kikuyi women were led by a Mr Harry Thuku, the Chief of Women.
Please note that Soyinka's praise for the Igbo culture of radical republicanism in the epigraph above and his critique of empires and kingdoms echoes that of Walter Rodney in Groundings with my Brothers where Rodney told poor Jamaican youth to be skeptical of African histories that emphasize only kingdoms and empires given that many parts of Africa had no kings or queens but practiced direct democracies of the sort that Soyinka appears to be recommending as a better alternative for the whole of Africa. Europeans simply assumed that such societies were primitive 'headless societies' and proceeded to impose chiefs on them but Igbo and Ibibio women declared war on such Warrant Chiefs as Adiele Afigbo documented.
The obsession with monarchism is rife in the Diaspora as well where there are annual contests to see who would be the carnival monarch, the dancehall king, the king of pop, king of reggae, calypso monarch, socca monarch and what have you despite the fact that the American revolution and the Haitian revolution clearly rejected monarchism and opted for republicanism. The late Adiele Afigbo critiqued the tendency in nationalist historiography to focus only on kingdoms as a vain attempt to prove to the Europeans that Africans are not inferior because we also had kings and queens, forgetting that we also had participatory democracy that could only be devalued at our peril.
Soyinka is emphasizing that monarchical institutions tend to be anti-democratic wherever they are found and that our people have better models of democracy to draw from rather than celebrate authoritarianism in the guise of celebrating traditionalism. Baba Sho could have strengthened his case by pointing out that this radical democracy that he admires among the Igbo is not as exceptional as he suggested because the Ibibio of Nigeria and the Kikuyi of Kenya, for instance, were also radically republican traditionally. Yet, our beloved Baba Sho should be given credit for recognizing that African cultures have indigenous models of democracy that the rest of the world could learn from as opposed to the tendency by Cornel West and CLR James alike to point to ancient Greece as the model for direct democracy despite the institution of slavery, a monarchy and the disenfranchisement of women in Athenian 'democracy'.
Happy birthday Prof! Many many more happy returns!
Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA.
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Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
harrow@msu.edu
517 803-8839
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