Amato, Ikhide, and Moses:
You guys have grossly under-estimated the problem we have on our laps here. I have seen people have their low moments in the history of this listserv. I've seen terrible performances. I've had mine. We've all had ours. But it is painful to know that were Professor Toyin Falola ever be inclined to establish a USAAfricadialogue Hall of Shame for low moments and disgraceful performances, the first inductee-emeritus would undoubtedly be a Nigerian, Biko Agozino, for his truly shameful and disgraceful behaviour in this thread.
So, don't think that this is just his problem. The man don disgrace us finish. You have your work critically trounced as it should be - because it is a bad piece of writing - and you suffer a disgraceful teleportation back to your pre-adolescent school yard days, throwing juvenile tantrums. I hope none of your doctoral students is here to witness your behaviour. Not even my friend, Maurice Amutabi, would insult me this much were I ever to break the rule again by asking him to stop decreeing that this and that does not exist in Africa.
This must be the most insulting, most patronizing "tribute" to Wole Soyinka ever written. And because Alagba Agozino thinks the world of his horrible text and the sky would fall were he ever to respect critical opinion and rework it, I won't put it beyond him to keep it as is and brandish it 40 or 50 yearsdown the road as funeral oration when Soyinka's work is done and he flies away home one bright morning.
You are celebrating a man at 76 and it is the occasion to make the man's cultural matrix cleverly inferior to yours and, worse, attribute authorship of this inferiority to him! Poor exercise of judgment if you ask me. In a heady fit of cultural triumphalism, you throw facts out of the window, make wild claims in every sentence, cobble together everything he has ever said about your world and arrive at the conclusion, via a thoroughly disgusting ..philia, that the Igbo world is the central thematic in Soyinka's oeuvre!
And this is supposed to be the insulting discovery of the century that every literary critic has missed or repressed until God so loved the world that he gave us his only begotten sociologist to deliver the epiphany. I hope you will extend the same courtesies to Maazi Chinua Achebe on his next birthday by stringing together any and everything he has ever written or had to say about the Yoruba, Hausa, or Zulu and attach the appropriate philia to those ethnicities as the central thematic of Achebe's work.
Ah, lest I forget, I know the drill. Let me help you with the opening line of your response - to take you on this way is Igbophobia. I am familiar with that song.
Pius
--- On Thu, 15/7/10, Amatoritsero Ede <esulaalu@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Amatoritsero Ede <esulaalu@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Thursday, 15 July, 2010, 11:27
dis man,
in your la-di-da, self-adulatory indignation, you keep writing, "Baba Sho." On the one hand you laud; on the other you demean. Are you Soyinka's bosom friend to be labeling him with nicknames? Do you know the shock in prof. soyinka's part of the world when you do this. Or are you an American fronting as an igbo defender? Stop dis yama-yama i beg.
Amatoritsero On 13 July 2010 17:46, Biko Agozino <bikozino@yahoo.com> wrote: Impish-Childish Payos and his boys,
It seems like you people like my name so much that you must call it multiple times and find excuses to reply multiple times to my single Ode to Baba Sho. If the name sweet you so, make you name your son after me. You hear?
What makes you think that you call the shots on this or any other forum? You must think very highly of yourselves and we all agree that you are a great writers but you have no power to censor anyone who has something to say that you might find annoying. What annoys you so much is that I said that our Baba loves our people and that this love affair has been going on since his childhood. Why do you find that annoying? Are you annoyed because this love affair seems scandalous to you or are you annoyed because I simply stated the obvious? Now, you should take your koboko and self-flaggerate yourselves for being so arrogant that you assume that you could tell folks what to write about and how.
Your boy Ochonu, the mouthseeker-jobseeker who appears to be looking for a mouth to echo with no original thought of his own in his job-seeking (as his name implies), joins you in opposing the Pan African solution to the genocidal state that imperialism imposed on us by imputing to me a micro nationalism that I do not subscribe to. Ocho mouth, say your own and let me say my own as Osadebe advised. At least you agree that the Igbo genocide has yet to be addressed in the interest of justice. How have you addfressed it with your own mouth, Mr Mouth-job-seeker?
Ochonu thinks that everything I have written is about the Igbo but he must be unfamiliar with my work as a criminologist. A simple bibliographic search will tell him that my scholarly focus is on injustice and the injustice against NdiIgbo just happens to be one of them. From the Middle East to the Congo, Zimbabwe, Caribbean, the US, Ivory Coast, Bakassi, Nazism, black women, apartheid, slavery, corruption, neocolonialism, Liberia, death penalty, war on drugs to football law and the elimination of poverty, I have made my voice heard with clear emphasis on my preference for a united Africa as the terrain for better possibilities for us Africans. I have not addressed every injustice but then who has?
Mr Ochomouth aka Ochojob wants to speak for Mamdani on his false claim that bigotry against Islam is everywhere to be found in Enugu but Mamdani is quite capable of speaking for himself. Mr. Mouthseeker-Jobseeker claims that he grew up in Kano and knows for a fact that the Islamic militants only target Christians and then asks if the Igbo are the only Christians in Kano. I do not know how he got the information that only Christians are targeted by militants (Bala Mohamned was lynched in Kano for his progressive ideas and he was neither Christian nor Igbo) and presumably Igbo pagans would be spared but he must know that the Igbo are the predominant group in the migrant quarters in Kano and so whenever that quarter is targeted, Christian or not, the Igbo would be the most vulnerable to attack. This has happened again and again starting with Jos in 1945, then in the far North in 1956 before the 1966 major events and has continued ever since periodically.
What solution does the mouth-seeker-job-seeker proffer for what is obviously one of the Open Sores of A Continent? I have advocated mass education and empowerment of the masses of poor Talakawas in the North to help them see that their Igbo neighbors are not their enemies. I have also advocated fair reparations tp be paid to the Igbo for their losses over the years. Finally, I have advocated that the peoples republic of Africa should be supported as a way of offering our people the democratic space to move freely, settle anywhere, run for office, trade, work, play, study, marry and raise a family without molestation the way it is in the USA today. If you disagree with any of these prescriptions of mine, present your own prescriptions and let us examine them but none of these prescriptions of mine comes close to being an ethnic nationalist agenda. For your information, what I advocate is not a prescription but a recognition that our people have already voted with their feet and can be found throughout Africa as they collectively disregard the disdainful colonial boundaries. What is left is for the elite to recognize this reality and reconstitute the peoples republic accordingly.
Crossed-Out Okigbo wannabe, XOkigbo, alias Nnamdi, Ikhide, thanks but no thanks for the dated bibliography from Kwenu.com and for your multiple responses to one post of mine that you claim does not make sense to you. If you go through that list of 80 publications or more, you will not find an item from Soyinka or Iyayi, the two significant progressive creative authors who are not of Igbo origin that found the creative energy to address this monumental tragedy of ours. None of the items on your list is a literary theory of the genocidal war and the pogrom before it but you claim to be an expert on literature without a single publication on what is arguably the greatest tragedy that ever visited your country. In fact, Adichie provides a better bibliographic list as an appendix to her Half of a Yellow Sun which is pretty unusual for a novel but she was probably reassuring the reader that although she did not experience the war, she read the mostly memoirs that document the history. But the question for you is what you intend to do with your bibliography? Are you going to develop a curriculum to teach the lessons to be learned from this tragedy as part of the efforts to prevent future repeats? Or are you just going to continue pretending that you are the judge of literature who is out to correct the grammar of even Baba Sho and Ngugi without addressing the serious issues of injustice that they have been tackling for us? When next you visit kwenu.com, look beyond bibliographic lists and visit their page on the wounded war veterans who are still left to languish in misery at Orji River with no program of rehabilitation and only manage to survive on alms in a country that is celebrating the 50th anniversary of failed leadership with billions of naira. Are you against the call for reparations to be paid for the Igbo genocide and if so, why? This is not an academic question that will be solved with footnotes, book reviews and bibliographic lists, just add your voice if you care. Baba Sho got it right when he said that the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyrany.
For Ken, I would say thank you for being nice in saying that my Ode to Baba Sho is an excellent tribute. I appreciate it even if you said it to be nice but you are also right in implying later that excellence is overrated as a virtue given that perfection is often a mirage and there is always room for improvement, hence new editions of publications. If it is any comfort to you, others have also told me that the tribute is excellent and that they would be proud to attract such a tribute as a birthday wish. It is not often that the birthday wish for a great writer-activist charts a new territory in the interpretation of his work. The shock that the pretentious literary tyrants are expressing here is because they did not perceive this theme in Soyinka's work before I alerted them. Instead of thanking me for educating them free of charge and asking their graduate schools for refunds, they started shouting that I appear to be an illegal immigrant in their imaginary literary country and that I must be deported from the discourse that they wrongly see as exclusively theirs. Go and check out the large body of secondary theories on Soyinka's work and you will find nothing that comes close to my perspective on the centrality of the Igbo motif in his work. That is what is called an original thesis and I await to read the many doctoral dissertations that will attempt to develop this theme. Payos and his boys are blinded by bad belle hiubris and so cannot see clearly. na jealousy dey worry them because now their students will have to cite me in their bibliography.
For Baba Sho, I say no mind them. Thank you for loving our people. We want you to know that we love you too and we wish you many more happy returns.
Biko
--- On Tue, 7/13/10, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com>Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2010, 9:51 AM Alagba Agozino:
Deopka Ikhide is right. The man sef must be getting tired to have reviewed your work so positively. Many bad books and bad pieces of writing have been lucky to live to tell the story after being reviewed Deopka Ikhide. But, abeg, biko oga Biko, is this not the annoying blog I advised you to rework? Is this not the text that even Nwanna Obi Nwakanma - of all people! - was careful to avoid in this forum - not wanting to run the risk of encountering the sjambok I had ready for him?
The trouble with this blog is squarely one of wild, runaway claims. You cannot just cobble together every sentence Soyinka has ever written about the Igbo and the Igbo world, declare him an Igbophiliac - like he is any less Fulaniphilic or Zuluphilic or any ethnicityphilic -, make him sound like a two year-old in a candy store in his contemplation of Igboness, make him sound almost apologetic for not being Igbo, declare that his Igbo praxis is central to his oeuvre - poor peripheral Ogun! - and rush this sort of patronizing text out in celebration of his 76th birthday.
Maybe its your triumphalist tone. Something ain't jelling in this your work. And what is a man like Deopka Ikhide to do? He knows that a huge chunk of Soyinka's essayistic efforts in the last two decades have been about the Nigerian conundrum - with the Niger Delta and religious clashes in the North as recurrent thematic bases. So, should Ikhide now jump up to celebrate Soyinka's Ijawphilia, Ogoniphilia, and Itsekiriphilia? Should the Hausa-Fulani talakawa, whose plight he constantly regrets because they are instrumentalized by the Hausa-Fulani elite, jump up to declare him a Hausa-Fulaniphiliac?
My friend, Soyinka's praxis and humanism cannot be reduced to any patronizing "...philia." Not even Yorubaphilia. A de nso o lo gbo (we dey talk am since you say you no hear)!
Pius
--- On Mon, 12/7/10, xokigbo@yahoo.com <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com <xokigbo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: harrow@msu.edu
Date: Monday, 12 July, 2010, 23:22
Citizen Agozino, One final point, just to show you how ahistoric your essay is, when Soyinka wrote Ake and The Interpreters, there was no njakiri word like "igbotic." Besides nor be yoruba people discover "igbotic", yeye man ;-))))) - Ikhide Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:19:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
Ikhide,
You are neither Yoruba nor Igbo but you do sound like a goat! Just because you are ideologically opposed to a united Africa, you start by imputing motives that do not exist in my heart in terms of being anti-North or pro-Biafra. Listen to yourself about Africa being a foreign concept. The grammar that you are blowing here, is it indigenous? Ewu indigenous!
So you have never heard the term Igbotic as a Yoruba-derived term of abuse denoting primitiveness in Nigeria? So a learned man like you thinks that because Ake was set at age 3, then Baba Sho must have written it even before he started counting ABC and 123? No my brother, he wrote that book or at least published it long after The Interpreters was written and that vignette of not bowing to anyone appeared first in The Interpreters but he has the license to borrow from himself without being accused of plagiarism.
Oga Ikhide, I never alleged that because Baba Sho loves NdIgbo he must have been a Biafra supporter. No, I said that he wanted to end the carnage and he did so by visiting the East to persuade Ojukwu and his friend Okigbo to return to Nigeria peacefully and negotiate a better future. That did not work but the irony is that none of the radical scholars joined him in this principled attempt to apply the African philosophy of non-violence to prevent a tragedy of genocidal proportions. Soyinka was in favor of a united Nigeria that was progressive and so he could not have been in support of Biafra but that does not mean that he did not love the Igbo and vehemently oppose the genocide against them as he has opposed genocide wherever it has reared its ugly head. You see, you are even uncomfortable with the fact that someone like Soyinka would love the Igbo while you are asking me to show you the evidence that Igbophobia abounds.You sound like you must have been old enough to witness the pogrom and the genocidal war or know about it at the time. Show me where you have written a word condemning of the lives of three million of your fellow citizens in any genre of your corpus...
Ikhide, there is no doubt about the fact that tens of thousands of the lives of our fellow Africans were wasted in the pogrom in the North before the genocidal war that cost us another three million lives. Soyinka and Iyayi (Heroes) are the only creative writers to devote large bodies of work to this tragedy until the more recent retelling by Adichie. Literary theorists like you are yet to say a word about this central theme in Soyinka's work and just because a non-literary theorist like me points it out is no reason for you to remove your shirt and start doing shakara. If you are into genocide denialism, come out and tell us because then we can point you in the direction of the evidence you pretend does not exist.
Will Soyinka love the Igbo if they committed pogrom against the North? Well, bros, they did not and that is part of the reason Soyinka loves the despised Igbo. Does Soyinka hate the North? Of course not, he worked with Malam Aminu Kano as the Director of research for the Peoples Redemption Party while Achebe was the National Chairman of the Party and another Igbo man, S.G. Ikoku was the national secretary. And neither do the Igbo hate the North for all over the North, you will find Igbo artisans providing services that are essential to the livelihood of their fellow citizens. Before the war, Ojukwu's uncle, Okonkwo Kano, was an elected member of the Northern House of Assembly while a Kano man was the elected Mayor of Enugu. Will paying reparations for the Igbo genocide hurt the North or the Yoruba? Of course not, just as the budgeting of billions for the Niger Delta amnesty is not seen as a loss to anyone from other parts of the country. Oh yes, the Northern Talakawa also deserve reparations for the deliberate denial of educational opportunities to them by the mis-rulers of the country.
Oga Ikhide, it seems that you have followed the suggestion of Biodun Jeyifo in his Talakawa column in The Guardian yesterday (Sunday) to start listening too much to that yeye WAZOBIA FM radio with their invention of the virtual koboko with which to flog people they disagree with. Thanks for the advice to tear my Ode to Baba Sho to pieces. The little dictator in you is calling on Soyinka to censor my Ode to him but your little fantasy cannot hold in the age of the internet where the ode has already gone viral. I agree, I do not know book like you, that is why my tribute is full of grammatical errors and you, the village headmaster, would like me to tear it into a thousand pieces and start afresh. Make you go siddon, o jare.
The Pan African solution to our problems are no-brainers but those you call the looters of Nigeria and elite scholars like you are too self-centered to see it. Almost all the debates in Nigeria will start and end with internal Nigerian problems while smaller countries in Africa are leading the intellectual and moral struggles towards unification. The USA where many of us live and work, with all its flaws, is a good model for our people to follow so that Africans can move to any state in their fatherland without fear of brotherphobic violence. Yes, the US also owes us reparations especially for the fact that the Igbo were the dominant group of Africans enslaved in America, according to Douglas Chambers (Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo of Virginia).
Biko
--- On Mon, 7/12/10, Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
To: bikozino@yahoo.com
Cc: harrow@msu.edu, USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Monday, July 12, 2010, 4:14 PM
"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?"
"... [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." - Biko Agozino Citizen Agozino, Where to begin? I guess I should first thank you for attempting an oriki of Professor Wole Soyinka on his 76th birthday. But I must be honest and say that your analysis leaves me bewildered There are so many errors in the rendering, I am afraid it reduces to tatters the credibility of the essay. Let us start with the above musing of yours. In Ake, Soyinka started out his story as a precocious 3-year old, filled with wonder and fascination at the world around him. At that age, the concepts of ethnicity, ethnocentricity, blah, blah, blah are hardly formed, at least not of the sort that you are inputing above. At that age how would he know an "igbo" from a "Yoruba?" Yet, that is the central backbone on which your baffling essay flounders. And it is news to me that the Yoruba regularly deride children as "uncultured bush man" or "igbo man." This is an outrageous distortion of history. And it is quite honestly a bigoted lie. And to say that Soyinka supported the Biafran cause because of his "igbophilia" is over the top. Would he have chanted the praises of the Igbo if they had executed a pogrom on the North, because he hates the North? What kind of analysis is this? And what is this nonsense about most people hating the Igbo? What does that mean? You make all these wild statements that seem pulled straight out of the air and then you end up in some Pan-Africanist fantasyland about the United Nation of Africa. Is the term "Africa" an indigenous construct? Why must we be "Africans"? My point in all of this is you need to take your essay, tear it up into one thousand bits and start all over. But first get your facts straight. And if I had to advise you, I would say that at least in a perverse sense, your analysis is filled with dated concepts. I have news for you. The Northern cabal no longer exists. There is a new cabal - an equal-opportunity cabal of thieves from the East, West, North and South, raping Nigeria blind, while our intellectuals continue to write pieces like yours. I think you should think about these things some more, think of the current order, imagine the new world that our Nigerians live in today, a world with expanding boundaries and brand new challenges and write about that. And dream of a desired state for our country and force our mis-rulers to do the right thing. For you to write the below, eg, stating that Yoruba leaders went to the North to thank Northerners for sparing their bretheren and killing the Igbo, for you to say that without providing a source (not one!) is plain irresponsible. Professor Soyinka would be the first person to dissociate himself from this bigotry of yours that comes clothed in praise for him. And no, I am neither Igbo nor Yoruba.
- Ikhide
From: Biko Agozino <bikozino@yahoo.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, July 12, 2010 9:27:03 AM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
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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