treasure, despite attempts(most times unknown to him), by a tiny
Nigerian and International cultural cabal to appropriate his
personality. Happy birthday Prof.
Chidi Anthony opara
On Jul 11, 7:39 pm, Biko Agozino <bikoz...@yahoo.com> 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.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment