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________________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chidi Anthony Opara [chidi.opara@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 3:50 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
"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".
----------Biko Agozino
It is also on record that Wole Soyinka after the visit to the East
became the middleman between Victor Banjo, the Biafran commander at
Ore and Olusegun Obasanjo on the Nigerian side, in a rapproachement
meant to explore the possibilty of getting Ojukwu and Gowon out of the
way as prelude to a declaration of Oduduwa Republic which would
recognize Biafra, an idea, Obafemi Awolowo was from records, not
opposed to. The execution of Banjo by Ojukwu ended that plan.
Chidi Anthony Opara
On Jul 12, 10:19 pm, Biko Agozino <bikoz...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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 <xoki...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> From: Ikhide <xoki...@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
> To: bikoz...@yahoo.com
> Cc: har...@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 <bikoz...@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 ...
>
> read more »
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