Okigbo And The Makerere Conference

Christopher Okigbo

BY JAMES GIBBS

What happened at and after the Makerere Writers Conference held in June 1962? The significance of the Conference of Writers of English Expression held in Makerere College, Kampala, during June 1962, continues to be pondered, and rightly so. As I write, a conference to mark the sixtieth anniversary of that gathering is being organised by the Pan-African Writers Association (PAWA), Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL) and Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), and is scheduled for June 23-26. It is to be hoped that questions raised by the original meeting will continue to be considered. There is certainly much about what happened 60 years ago that should be examined closely and, indeed, I note that, myth-making is still in progress. This was illustrated by the use of a photo-shopped picture to illustrate the article about the PAWA Conference by Akintayo Abodunrin carried in the Nigerian Tribune of June 19, 2022.(See ‘Ibadan hosts Pan-African Writers conference, 60 Years After Kampala’.) This is not the first time that this particular photograph has featured in relation to an event marking an anniversary of the 1962 Conference.

In London, during 2017, the same picture was used by the organisers of a London conference marking the 55th anniversary of the Makerere Conference. It is reproduced below, along with a ‘key’, and the full title that includes the words ‘artist impression.’ At the 2017 anniversary meeting, the picture filled the cyclorama behind the speakers who included Wole Soyinka. During an early session, I raised the question of the origin of the photograph, and went on to point out that whatever it showed it did not reveal the organisation that had funded the event. That is to say, it did not hint at the presence ‘behind the scenes’ at Makerere of the Central Intelligence Agency. As has since become common knowledge, the 1962 Makerere conference was financed by the CIA, then operating clandestinely through the Farfield Foundation and the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. The betrayal of trust involved in this deception has been chronicled in detail by Frances Stoner Saunders in her exposé of ‘The CIA and the Cultural Cold War’ entitled Who Paid the Piper? (1999).

The ‘photo-shopped’ photograph used in London in 2017 that has now resurfaced was a shoddy piece of work on several levels. To ‘pick apart’ the photograph, we must start by saying that it shows the heads of some of the writers present at the conference ‘grafted’ onto to bodies in a fairly formal picture of a group that may be of members of a Makerere College Society. This is monstrous enough and to imagine all is explained or excused by the description ‘Artist impression’ is preposterous. The deception is compounded by the fact that the picture does not show all who were present. A full ‘gallery’ would include, for example, critics, publishers, and editors, at least one of whom was a long-serving agent of the CIA.

The objectionable photograph is, I understand, the work of Dada Khanyisa for a website called ‘Chimurenga Chronic’. It was irresponsible of the London 2017 conference organisers to have used it in 2017 without a clear ‘Warning’, and it is sad to see it being used again, once more, without warning. Incidentally, it may be of interest that when Soyinka was button-holed after the first session of the London conference, and asked what he made of the picture, it was apparent that he had not ‘recognised himself’ in the podgy, suited figure on the extreme left. In part explanation,he pointed out that he had stopped wearing ties and suits long before June 1962!…It is to be hoped that the 60th Anniversary gathering will get off to a better start than the 2017 event, and that there will be a determination to get to the bottom of what really happened at Makerere in 1962. Despite the presence of Soyinka – and it should be said of Cameron Duodu -at the 55th anniversary in London, the gathering did not by any means sort out all the issues raised by the 1962 conference. Many loose ends remain. Serious research into archives are among the steps required to discover who expected what from the gathering.

Over the years, details about individual experiences at Makerere 1962 have emerged but the conference is still surrounded by uncertainty. Perhaps fifty-five years was too strange an anniversary to celebrate. It smacked of organisers who had failed to mark the fiftieth anniversary sufficiently and feared that none of the original participants would be alive at the time the sixtieth celebration – that has now ‘come along’.Perhaps the 60th Anniversary Conference will fare better?

Christopher Okigbo and Makerere 1962

To shed light on the 1962 Conference and to gesture towards areas where work is still required, I am going to bring together some reports and thoughts about the experience of the poet Christopher Okigibo at Kampala. I am doing so in the hope that it will provide an insight into what was going on below the surface and behind the scenes. Okigbo presents himself as a suitable subject for this exercise because he has been the subject of a scrupulous biography, Thirsting for Sunlight by Obi Nwakanma (2010), and because a significant ‘industry’ has gown up around him his life and works. For example, during 2007, he and his works were considered at a four-day conference held in Boston. Okigbo was easy to find at the Makerere Conference: he put himself forward, contributed to discussions, delighted in shocking the more staid of his fellow delegates, and generally ‘made his mark’. He did this by, for example, declaring that he did ‘not read his poetry to non-poets’ and he also took a leading role in ensuring that the social side of the conference was ‘memorable’. First some background to his presence at the Conference:

Okigbo graduated in Classics from University College, Ibadan, and embarked on a career in the Civil Service. However, that did ‘not work out’ and he moved into teaching. In the meantime, he had begun to write poetry and had had some success, notably with verses published in the Ibadan-based Black Orpheus. That publication had been founded by Ulli Beier, and had been put on a fairly solid financial basis thanks to grants from the ‘Farfield Foundation’ – that Saunders and others have exposed as a CIA front. Okigbo’s writing has long intrigued and pleased. By 1962, he had already attracted the interest of Donatus Nwoga, who was a member of the Nigerian delegation at Makerere and who must be briefly introduced here. By the time he set off for Makerere, Nwoga had completed a Dublin PhD and secured a lectureship at the University of Nigeria. He was, in fact, one of the first Nigerian literary critics to establish a reputation and it was inevitable that he would engage with Okigbo’s work. The two men had much in common: they were near contemporaries, and both had been brought up in Igbo families that had been exposed to Catholic missionary influences.

The Makerere Conference has become known as a ‘Writers Conference’, but this has tended to obscure the presence of critics, such as Nwoga. The same, misleading ‘short-hand’ has tended to obscure the presence at the Conference of others who were not writers. The ‘delegates’ included, for example, broadcasters, editors, and publishers, and people who were ‘more than publishers’ – see below. Okigbo clearly made an impact on the deliberations of the Conference. He did this, first of all, by his contribution to a discussion at the heart of the conference: the answer to the question: What is African writing? To this Okigbo responded abruptly, ‘finally’, and, as many must have felt, frivolously, by saying: ‘There is no such thing as African writing. There is only good or bad writing.’ (Nwakanma: 182.) Of Okigbo’s other contributions, Nwakanma records that in the session on Language and African Literature the poet threw ‘many of the writers into guffaws when he wondered aloud about the kind of Pidgin English Nigerian prostitutes spoke in Lagos.’ This topic – The Language Issue – has, of course, been of consuming interest to many, including one of the younger writers at the conference, ‘James T Ngugi’. One can’t imagine Ngugi wa Thiong’o – as he was later known guffawing at Okigbo’s irreverent answer.

At one of the reading sessions, Okigbo, declared, as noted above: ‘I don’t read my poems to non-poets!’ Nwakanma describes this as an ‘impish’ moment, however delegates at Makerere might have categorised it in other terms, as, for example, aloof, pompous or elitist.

‘A cool place for a conference’

Whatever others made of him, Okigbo described Kampala in positive terms. He thought it was ‘a cool place for a conference’, and, ever alert to recreational opportunities, he said it offered ‘more than adequate outlets at Top Life and White Nile’. (Night clubs visited by delegates.) However, he went on to describe Makerere / Kampala as ‘a literary desert’ and he expressed the hope that the Conference would do ‘what irrigation does to the Sudan.’ (It being understood that the image was of a ‘literary desert’ in need of water.)

Nwakanma gives further insights into Okigbo at Makerere by writing: ‘During the conference Okigbo was always to be found in the company of the Ugandan playwright and journalist Robert Serumaga and he struck up an easy friendship with the South African writers and exiles, Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi.’ (181)While in Uganda, Okigbo also got to know Langston Hughes and Otis Redding. Nwakanma offers that the latter’ shared many views, especially on the meaning of international blackness and against racial essentialism in cultural production.’ The lastsentence of the paragraph on these interactions reads: ‘Okigbo and Robie Macauley, Editor of the Kenyon Review, discussed the possibility of publishing Limits and the early version of “Laments to the Silent Sisters.” But nothing came of it.’ (181)

In sifting these pieces of information, it is interesting to note that Serumaga’s name is omitted from some lists of those present at the conference. The fact that Nwakanma’s book makes it clear that Serumaga was not only present but interacted with Okigbodraws attention to the need for fuller, more authoritative documentation of the conference, and who came and went during it. Perhaps Serumaga’s established contacts with the University and his interests in both journalism and playwriting made him ‘persona grata’. He certainly sems to have moved in and out of the conference easily, and to have mingled with the visitors.

I want to draw this article to a close with the image created by Nwakanma’s reference to Okigbo in conversation with that other delegate who is glossed as the editor of the Kenyon Review, Robie Macauley. Macauley was indeed an influential editor, but he was also a long-serving CIA agent.

Macauley’s commitment to espionage is alluded to in on-line sources and in exposés of the CIA. From these it is possible to get a sense of how Macauley might have attempted to manipulate the ’soft power’ the CIA leveraged through its links to publications, its budget of $900,000,000, and the support it received from disenchanted Communists. Macauley was an experienced operator, how did he engage with the impish, witty, Okigbo? Did he, for example, dangle the prospect of publication in the Kenyon Review before the poet? If so, it can be seen that Okigbo did not swallow the bait – since ‘Limits’ first appeared in Presence Africaine (1966).

More research must be undertaken into what happened at Makerere in 1962. In the meantime, we must insist that coverage of the 60thanniversary conference risesabove photo-shopped images that have been concocted, confected, contrived, compounded, and cooked up. As a first step in searching for the truth about what happened in Uganda sixty years ago, it must be recognised that Dada Khanyisa’s ‘artist’s impression’ cannot be taken at face-value.

Gibbs writes in from Bristol, United Kingdom.

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From Garfield To Black Panther: Nnedi Okorafor On The Power Of Comics

Nnedi Okoroafor. Image: Neilson Barnard/Getty

BY NNEDI OKOROAFOR

My path to writing the big black cat started with a fat orange cat.

I’ve always been attracted to comics. Even before the word, it was the black line that drew me (pun intended). It began when I was about seven years old in the early ’80s with . . . Garfield. My father was an avid Chicago Sun-Times newspaper reader, and every day he would sit at the dinner table and read it. It was while hanging around him that I noticed that there was a comics page every day. The Family Circus, Hi and Lois, Bloomsbury, Calvin and Hobbes, Momma, Ziggy—there were so many I enjoyed. And, oh man, on Sunday, there were pages of comics, and they were in color! I loved these little stories told in pictures. But I became most obsessed with Garfield.

It was more than the hijinks and jokes. There was something about those dark lines, how they looped and swirled to create images and how those images molded with the “drawings” of letters that were words, communicating thoughts and ideas with the pictures. Even before I was writing stories using prose I was marveling at the dance of symbolic representations of sound and images.

Nevertheless, I didn’t arrive at comic books until much later in life. When I was a kid, I’d see the local comic book shops. I was interested and so, yes, I’d walk in there. I had seen boys at school with comic books and their colorful covers with titles in electrical-looking fonts. The excitement of those boys and their flimsy books intrigued me. And since I was very little, I’d always had dreams of flying. Heroes in capes with super powers were definitely in my realm of wonder.

However, when I’d push that comic book shop door open, the bell on the top of the door would ring and then something problematic would happen. I’d like to compare it to that moment when Luke and Obi-Wan walk into the bar or that record-scratch moment in Westerns when the stranger walks into the saloon. The comic book shop was always full of white boys; the person behind the counter was always a white guy. None of this bothered me; I’d grown up in a white neighborhood. What bothered me was their reaction to me. The staring, and staring.The comic book shop was always full of white boys; the person behind the counter was always a white guy.

I’d slowly walk in, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. However, the silent scrutiny and feeling that I had invade a place where I wasn’t welcome would be so strong that I’d leave soon after. On top of this, I was unfamiliar with comic books, how they were shelved, so I didn’t even know what I was seeking. Let alone the fact that when I glanced at all the covers, I didn’t see anyone black or female or outside a male gaze.

It was the late ’80s. I was between eight and twelve years old in those years, the child of Nigerian immigrants, an athlete playing and grandly excelling in the sport of tennis. I was navigating through a lot of blatant racism, prejudice, and xenophobia. I knew when to avoid a space, even if I didn’t fully understand the depth of it. Comic book shops remained an unwelcoming place on several levels for many years. I can’t state it enough: to be white and male was such a privilege if you loved or wanted to love comic books.

My discovery of superheroes didn’t happen until I was nineteen years old and paralyzed from spinal surgery complications when doctors tried to straighten out my acute scoliosis. That’s a lot crammed in one sentence, I know. I wrote a whole book about it called Broken Places & Outer Spaces. I was a semipro tennis player and a track star with severe scoliosis that was increasing in severity every year.

I was eventually told that I could either have the spinal surgery to straighten it out or become crippled by 25 and have a much shorter life due to compressed organs. When I had the surgery, I was in the anomalous 1 percent of patients who mysteriously respond to the surgery with paralysis. So I went from super athlete to paralyzed from the waist down in a matter of nine hours. I’d lost my super powers.

It took me months to regain sensation in my legs (and the doctors didn’t know whether I would until it gradually happened). After a month in the hospital, and then another several weeks of rigorous physical therapy, I got out of that wheelchair and began using a walker. Eventually I graduated to a half walker, then cane, then finally using only my own two legs. But that summer, while I was still using the walker, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. And that’s when I discovered the X-Men. I especially loved Storm, who could fly.

But the one who intrigued me most was Wolverine because he was so angry and he had a skeleton that was unbreakable. As a 21-year-old who’d just lost her super powers and was now trying to figure out who the heck she was, this discovery gave me strength. It was the first time I understood why so many loved superheroes. The first superhero comic I read was Wolverine.

I went on to consume comics through graphic novels, including Persepolis, A Contract with God, Bone, and two more iconic cat narratives in The Rabbi’s Cat and We3. I read these while I earned my second MA and then PhD. I came to more superheroes through Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and Vixen and Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

And then, years later, while I was a professor at the University at Buffalo, I learned about a country in Marvel’s Africa called Wakanda and I said, “Hmmm, interesting.” I thank Ta-Nehisi Coates for introducing me to King T’Challa. Yes, yes, I was late, but we can’t always be on time.Even before I was writing stories using prose, I was marveling at the dance of symbolic representations of sound and images.

Writing Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017–2018) was a marvelous experience. Initially, I came to it looking at King T’Challa and the country of Wakanda out of the side of my eye. I’m Igbo (a Nigerian ethnic group), and among the Igbo there’s a common saying, “Igbo enwe eze,” which means, “The Igbo have no king.” Being a series of democratic societies consisting of small independent communities, historically, Igbos didn’t have a centralized government or royalty.

I grew up hearing this phrase, and between this and also being an American, any type of monarchy gets my side-eye of disapproval . . . even a mythical one. Then I realized, in writing Black Panther, I could affect him and his country. I could enter into direct conversation and be heard. It was like visiting a country for the first time, and not as a tourist, but as a diplomat. I couldn’t be passive during my visit, and that made my visit even more interesting. I got to listen to, know, and speak to T’Challa and the people and land of Wakanda.

Black Panther and Wakanda hold a powerful place in the Marvel Universe. I’ve always viewed Wakanda as a proper return of African Americans (the direct descendants of enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade) to the continent of Africa. Because one can never go back in the past, the gaze is into the future, and that was where the reconciliation was made . . . at least the beginning of one. There’s a sense of homecoming and belonging in Black Panther that is celebratory. One gets to claim Wakanda as a space and make an African connection.

One of the reasons I agreed to write T’Challa, Shuri, the Dora Milaje, and Wakanda was because I wanted to further develop that bridge. I focused on bringing T’Challa closer to the common people of Wakanda and later, when I wrote Shuri as the Black Panther, bringing her to the rest of Africa.

Comics are powerful indeed. King T’Challa, the mantle of Black Panther, and the country of Wakanda have all evolved so much over the decades. I look forward to what comes next.

Nigerian writer Ben Okri once wrote in his book Birds of Heaven, “The happiness of Africa is in its nostalgia for the future, and its dreams of a golden age.” I think this is true both on the continent and in the Black Diaspora beyond. Wakanda Forever.

Prof. Chukwuma Azuonye (1944-2022)

Professor Chukwuma Azuonye

BY OBI NWAKANMA

Chukwuma Azuonye, poet and Professor of African Literature, died in Massachusetts, the United States, on May 8, and his final remains were interred June 10 at the Milton Cemetery in Massachusetts, the United States. He joins an increasing list of iconic Nigerian intellectuals including Abiola Irele, Isidore Okpewho, Oyekan Owomoyela, Akin Euba and Fela Sowande, among many, whose earthly remains now lie in alien lands far from the homeland, from where they strayed, some in search of meaning, some in search of the golden fleece, and all ultimately into exile.

In the case of Azuonye, he will now lie by his second son, Nnamdi, who perished in an automobile accident a decade ago, and whose death shook Chukwuma to his very timbers. Born in Isuikwuato, now in Abia state, Chukwuma Azuonye studied English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka from 1965-1972. Quite early at Nsukka, his literary and intellectual gifts had come clearly to fore. He was editor of The Muse, the Literary Journal of the Nsukka English department, and Omabe, the Nsukka Poetry Monthly.

The civil war however interrupted his studies at Nsukka. Like other young men of his generation, on whom the holy task fell, to defend the shrines of their gods and the bones of their fathers, in a civil war that was brought to the East of Nigeria, Chukwuma Azuonye volunteered to serve the young republic of Biafra, not as a combatant, but as a publicist. He was deployed as a correspondent for the Biafran War Information Bureau. The work done by the Biafran War Information Bureau under the renowned poet and scholar, MJC Echeruo, who was also Azuonye’s teacher, has not been fully documented, but that bureau drew to it, some of the finest literary minds available to the republic.

It was certainly a nod to Chukwuma Azuonye’s gifts that he was shielded from combat, but tasked with documenting, archiving, and preserving the stories of the battlefront, and of the soldiers of the young republic. He was in a sense a war historian. But the effects of the war was to weigh on him psychologically too, for like most of his generation, he did not really, fully return from that war. There was something restless and unresolved in his mind – a quest for which even he did not have a name; but it drove him towards a full discovery of the Igbo world; its language and its lore.

At the end of the Civil war, when the dream of Biafra collapsed, Chukwuma Azuonye returned to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and earned his degree in English in the First-Class honours in 1972. In 1973, he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to the School of African and Oriental Studies of the University of London, where he did graduate work, and completed his doctoral on African Oral Literature, with a dissertation on the Ohafia War Songs.

In 1976, Chukwuma Azuonye returned to Nigeria, to the department of Languages of the University of Ibadan as Lecturer. By this time, Professor MJC Echeruo had moved as Head of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, to Ibadan, as the first African Head of the English department at the University of Ibadan, and subsequently, its first Dean of the College of Postgraduate Studies. Important work was going on at Ibadan, and the universities in Nigeria were still in their golden age. At Ibadan, in Languages with Azuonye were the likes of the famous literary critic Abiola Irele, and Isidore Okpewho who had also just returned from his studies in the United States, and was doing path breaking research in Oral literature, where he would earn his most significant plaudits. Echeruo was at the head of that pile, with his work, Victorian Lagos, just breaking into the scene, signifying one of the earliest works in the emerging methodologies of modern cultural studies.

Azuonye fitted naturally into the phalanx of stars in the Ibadan humanities, doing strategic work of recovery in the postcolonial era, with his own research primarily on Igbo Orality and African Diasporic cultures.

In 1981, he left the University of Ibadan and joined the faculty of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka’s Department of Linguistics and African Languages. He would subsequently serve as the Head of the Department from 1986-1988. The Nsukka phase of his life might be legitimately described as the most exciting and productive period of his artistic and intellectual career. The literary scene of the so-called Nsukka School was at its nadir. Azuonye was quickly made editor of Uwa Ndi Igbo, the journal of Igbo life founded by the famous novelist, Chinua Achebe then at Nsukka, and he was also one of the editors of the Okike Literary journal.

In these endeavors, Chukwuma Azuonye helped to extend and enrich the cultural environment and output from Nsukka. It was in this period that he became a collaborator with the legendary critic, Professor Donatus Nwoga, on the project of the recovery of a lost tradition of the Igbo Script, which resulted in one of Azuonye’s most intriguing works: “The Nwagu Aneke Igbo Scripts: its origin, features and potentials as a medium for alternative literacy in African languages.” It was a most sophisticated and daring work, whose scope remains even now, overwhelming and complex. Unfortunately, it was work which he could not complete, owing to circumstances, which including the sudden death of his co-investigator, Professor Nwoga, and Azuonye’s slowly failing health, stymied the work.

in 2007, which had brought together one of the largest body of writers, scholars, and poets to celebrate the life of one of Africa’s greatest poets of the 20th century. It was a most impressive outing which had also led to Azuonye’s relentless and methodical work that led the UNESCO to adopt Okigbo’s papers as an important part of world heritage. It was also in a sense, Azuonye’s last hurrah. His rapidly declining health forced him increasingly to seclusion. He fought bravely but death undoes us all.

He was married to Dr. Chioma Azuonye, whom he met in London as a student, and they shared a devotion that was pagan and fierce. Chukwuma Azuonye’s death closes an important chapter on the life of one of those really remarkable figures of Nigeria’s modern intellectual tradition. He was an impressive intellectual: eloquent, and precise. He had the rare gift of subtlety which often came to light, for instance, in dissecting a poem like “Sophia,” that very difficult work by Echeruo, with its matrix of imagery, as no one else possibly could among his peers, with such elan and aplomb. A star indeed has departed.

Lucky Were The Bodies

Armed soldiers were stationed here and there. Grannies wondered why we remained in the north. We should come home.

BY IFEANYICHUKWU EZE

I want to remember. No. I don’t want to keep remembering. But shouldn’t I? His face keeps popping up here and there, in my dreams, in my wakefulness, inciting me with his smile to come and play, as if he were here.

I want to ask him if he is fine, as we were when dawn fed us chants of cockerels, muezzins, and preachers. When our shadows grew shorter, like dots under our feet as the bright lone eye of the cloudless sky moved to the center, inviting our stomachs to cry for food. When the lone eye went to sleep, its mild colleague crept in to usher our game-tired bodies home.

On weekends we were fed with Indian films. We crowded a tiny parlor belonging to the only owner of a twelve-inch black-and-white screen. Or we huddled outside and struggled for space to look through a glint in the window. Or we passed broomsticks through the open window to part the curtains for our yearning eyes to see.

We fought wars, reenacting the Indian films we watched. Our regalia were green leaves from mango trees. Our swords — maize stalks — were sharp with playfulness. Our guns shot bullets of sound, torrents of our shrieks. We killed. We died and were resurrected with laughter.

Then we couldn’t leave our rooms. Or dream with closed eyes. For the next couple of days, the most popular phrase was “Sharia law.” Why should we stay at home because of some law? Clouds of smoke wrapped up neighboring communities, as if in reply. All of our men — fathers and boys armed with machetes, bows and arrows, sticks and spears — spread out in groups to defend the town, their faces darkened with soot. Some, including Tema, went off to the border. Mama wouldn’t allow me to go. But I had no liter of courage either. And then the army came.

Tema’s catapult always hung around his neck. When we went hunting for tswi-tswi in the fields, he was accurate with his target. I was never his match. Once, I struck and missed, scaring the bird away; despite the fury boiling in Tema’s eyes, a stream of chuckles cracked his face. They say he had a smiling face.

I saw him. He saw me. He smiled. I smiled back. The group marched away.

In February 2000, Kaduna was awakening from the rubble of religious crisis. Malali, one of its towns, was a swelling of people who had run away like an endangered species — from burnings, from lynchings common as air, escaping, if luck embraced you, from attacks by the burners and killers lusting over our end.

Everybody now belonged to a body of tribal consciousness — of identities as Christians and Muslims, southerners and northerners, natives and non-natives, pagans and believers. Words were tied like nooses around our necks.

People died. Friends, relatives, fathers, mothers, babies — dead. Families were charred to black ash. Bodies were lost. The dead were buried in graves, real or imaginary. Lucky were the bodies recovered and recognized, luckier still if given burial.

Fear hung in the air like a bad omen. Movement was regulated with a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Armed soldiers were stationed here and there. Trespassers didn’t wake up at dawn. The order was: gun them down. Vengeance for this, vengeance for that, was mused. Paranoid was the air we breathed. Relatives and friends in other parts of the country kept asking us to leave the state. Grannies wondered why we remained in the north. We should come home.

No more street play, hide-and-seek, card games, moonlight tales, aimless scampering about. No more Tema?

Like most families from the southern part of the country, we succumbed. The red sand and soft green trees of Nsukka welcomed us to the southeast. We stayed at our grandparents’ place, with a twelve-inch black-and-white TV. The wall clock still ticked, ageless. Framed photos hung on the walls. One of Grandpa’s large faces stared like it was daring you to do something silly. Seats were set around the spacious parlor — a door that led into Grandpa’s room inches away. It was always ajar. On windy days, the house howled through its roof.

Everything seemed as familiar as when I lived there years back. We had traveled home for Christmas. Grandma had requested that I be brought to stay with them. Three or four years old, I was driven in a Volkswagen by their neighbor from my own father’s house. Grandpa was lying down in a camp bed in front of the house, reading a newspaper — or was it a book? He didn’t move or say a word to me, though I was still crying.

Now, having spent much of my life growing up in the north, my Hausa was fluent. Better than my Igbo. Though we spoke Igbo at home, it was an exclusive preserve of communication with my parents, especially Papa, who would never want me to speak anything else. Igbo was my mother tongue; Hausa was not. He thought I should be a master of my mother tongue. He wanted me to be good at English too.

In the village, there was only Igbo, which limited me to just a few utterances. The words felt heavy on my lips. They sounded like I was learning the language anew. I listened more than I spoke. I didn’t want to be laughed at, let alone rebuked by Grandma, when I pronounced the words wrong. When I didn’t know which Igbo words to use — the appropriate words — I’d utter the Hausa or English equivalents. They came easily.

Once or twice, I went to Grandma for soap to wash the plates. The word had skipped me. I didn’t say ncha. Instead, I said sabulu. She said she didn’t understand. She continued stitching our torn clothes. My cousin told Grandma what I needed. I was relieved but disappointed. Grandma’s knowing smile stirred a growing feeling that had crept into me — that the whole world was staring at me, at my every deed, expecting me to be flawless, and I responded by coiling back into myself. I heard it said that I was quiet and shy.

The room I occupied was Grandpa’s. He had passed away a few years back after complaining of chest pain. There was a cupboard of books, a table by the window. From the window I could see flowers at the entrance to the front door and the wide path that met our colonial heritage, the market road whose asphalt surface had thinned away into patches here and there. One end led to the University of Nigeria, and the major town of Nsukka, while the other led to Nkwo market. On market days, Nkwo especially, the road was busy with people avoiding police checkpoints on other roads.

Across the road was the primary school where Grandpa had taught. As a teacher, he was nicknamed Masquerade. His moral strength, they said, scared away its offhand neighbor. If Grandpa had been loose, his mud house would have been a mansion, and his family would be living off the cake of his millions by now, but his pupils wouldn’t have grown into credible men and women. Mama said she was his pupil at some point. She made a face to indicate that the privilege hadn’t spared her anything. My last encounter with him was a hard thrashing I received for not feeding the goats. The night whined of their hunger.

The cupboard of books in Grandpa’s room was made of redwood. It was taller and bigger and housed more books than my father’s. If my appreciation for books and reading had so far been a hidden trait, the books in Grandpa’s cupboard baited it out. The meeting was irresistible. And the books were good company. I took solace in them. They saved me the discomfort of facing people, speaking to them, speaking Igbo to them, or being accused of avoiding them.

Some books I read willingly. Others, I felt, were very deep. I left these to read later. When I read Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, I didn’t understand anything. But I read it anyway. When I became a philosophy major at the University of Nigeria years later, I was intrigued by his famous “ghost in the machine” metaphor — a critique of Cartesian dualism. But I liked Descartes’s dualism, not so much because of his subtle approval of modern science but because of his style of writing. And the famous “cogito, ergo sum” was a dictum I personalized in other ways. I sleep, therefore I am. I read, therefore I am. I write, therefore I am.

The cupboard was dusty for lack of use since its owner had gone. I would take out the books and beat off the dust or blow it away. I liked the smell — their musty perfume. When I flipped through their pages, the buzzing rustle tickled my ears. Sometimes I would hold a book in my hand just to enjoy the feel of its weight.

The ones that tickled me were The River Between and Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti, The White Man of God by Kenjo Jumbam, Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe, The African Child by Camara Laye, Zambia Shall Be Free by Kenneth Kaunda, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwe Armah, Toads for Supper by Chukwuemeka Ike, A Fresh Start by Helen Ovbiagele, Sammy Going South by W. H. Canaway, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Dignity of Man by Russell W. Davenport, Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot, and Remove the Heart of Stone by Donal Dorr. Most of the books presented me with a world similar to the one I lived in — dirt roads, cornrowed hair, black skins, and straw beds.

I was hungry for more books. I would strip the cupboard of all the books just to find something new to read. Some books had lost pages or even covers. I read them like that. A copy of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was falling apart. There was James Hadley Chase’s Tiger by the Tail and, under the pen name Raymond Marshall, You Find Him, I’ll Fix Him. I read Grandpa’s lesson notes and letters and marveled at his handwriting, at the old black-and-white photos of his not-quite-younger years.

I learned new words and expressions, which I wrote down on sheets of paper and later transferred into a notebook. I became obsessed with the dictionary. An old Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary was handy. I wanted to know every word. I thought I could. But there was always something new. One new word. Two more. A dozen more. In senior secondary, my classmates would call me Dictionary. I was at ease with words and their meanings, and it was an honor to be looked up to in class or approached to explain the meanings of new or unfamiliar words.

Chores kept me briefly away from reading. Every day after morning prayers, I swept the compound with a broom made of palm fronds and washed the plates before and after meals. We went to the farm on Saturdays. It was a new experience: tilling the soil, weeding, making ridges. Afterward, we gathered firewood and brought it home.

In the fields, I looked forward to reading, so much that I remained locked up within myself, digesting words, sounds, and voices, replaying them in my mind, rolling over new words — Igbo words too — in quiet dialogue with myself.

While Grandpa’s books fed me, the news from Kaduna was that life was getting back to normal. Business was beginning to bubble. People who had left now returned, Christians among Christians, Muslims among Muslims. But I was excited. I hoped Tema had returned — from wherever. I wanted to go back, to be with my friend, to laugh, to play on the streets, to hold hands, to behold the city again, to bask under her sky without fear. We would make traps. We would go hunting. My trap would catch nothing. His would catch a dozen bush rats. We would make kites and fly them. They would take our dreams to the sky. His would fly higher than mine. We would slice empty tins and make miniatures of our dream cars.

And I would tell him of the books I had read, of the new words I had learned. I would show him my notebook with many words. He would nod at my accomplishment.

I wondered what he could have been up to. Reading like me, perhaps, or going to the farm. Hunting? When our teacher, Mr. John, had asked us what we wanted to be in the future, Tema had always said he wanted to play. I didn’t know what I wanted either. Playing seemed the most feasible thing to do.

“Happy birthday,” Mama said. It was November 23.

But it was immaterial. Tema didn’t return. He was never found.

ABOUT IFEANYICHUKWU EZE:

Ifeanyichukwu Eze studied philosophy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He explores survival as it reveals layers of being, the utopia of place, and the intersections between faith, identity, mental health, and death. His work has appeared in Adda, The Offing, The Temz, The Dark, Agbowo, Akuko, and a few other places. A fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency, Eze was longlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won second prize in the inaugural Akuko Writers’ Prize, 2020.

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Pastor Tunde Bakare And The Lies Of A Failed State

BY CHUKS ILOEGBUNAM

Image via The Biafra Telegraph

Pastor Tunde Bakare of The Citadel Global Community Church recently spoke through his hat while preaching a sermon. He told his congregation that, during the January 15, 1966 military action that toppled the First Republic, the soldiers that took Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa removed his turban, poured wine on his head and force-fed him with the alcohol. For abominating him, Balewa, just before he was shot, pronounced a cause on Ndigbo, to the effect that no one from the ethnic group will ever bear rule over Nigeria. Mr. Bakare’s story, fanciful as it sounds, is a pack of lies. This article, therefore, is to educate Mr. Bakare and others of his misguided persuasion with the truth, of which Jesus, the Christ said in John 8: 32: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

On the mundane level, no one removed any turban from Sir Abubakar’s head. The turban is a headdress. Soldiers invaded the Prime Minister’s official residence at around 3am, when the man was in bed. Did he sleep turbaned? Do people sleep in their headdresses? Apart from that picture in which presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari appeared in suit and tie, wearing a wan smile and looking almost comical with his receding hairline, there hardly is another photograph of the man in which a cap does not adorn his head. Would his traditional fondness for full dressing gear ever mean that he went to bed in a hat? Do women sleep with all those accessories they routinely assembled on their heads for public events? Tafawa Balewa’s turban was not removed because he wasn’t wearing one when his adversaries closed in on him.

Muslims are by injunction forbidden to consume alcoholic beverages. The story that the Prime Minister was bathed in wine and inebriated with it is aimed at sustaining the opprobrium first established by revisionists in 1966. Also his recovered body showed clearly that he hadn’t been shot. The lies spewed by Mr. Bakare have one source. They always had a single objective: the monopoly of political power by the geo-political north. There are many such lies still enjoying vibrancy in the country. Three of them should suffice for our argument. One, when General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s regime was toppled, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, who succeeded him, was going to sunder the country by announcing the Republic of Northern Nigeria, for the simple reason that political power had left the region. Gowon is still denying this fact, despite incontrovertible evidence to its certitude. (See the document marked CAB/128/41 at the British Public Records Office at Kew Gardens, London. It contained the minutes of the British Cabinet meeting of August 2, 1966 that was declassified after a 30-year moratorium. It incontrovertibly shows Gowon’s secessionist tendency after they assassinated General Aguiyi-Ironsi.) Two, Gowon said in his maiden speech as Head of State that there was no basis for Nigerian unity. He denies the statement to this day. As a matter of fact, his government disingenuously published a misleading version of his speech, claiming that he had only discounted national unity in a unitary dispensation. But, the BBC Monitoring Service recorded Gowon’s broadcast live, and the transcript is forever available. It has Gowon saying, “Suffice it to say that putting all considerations to the test, political, economic as well as social, the basis of unity is not there…” Three. Nigeria’s military leaders met in Aburi, Ghana, on January 4 & 5, 1967, for a conference to avert the contingency of civil war. They reached an agreement. Back in Nigeria, Gowon reneged on the agreement, an infamy he denies to this day, even though the Aburi proceedings were audio-recorded from start to finish. Had the agreement been implemented, the civil war might well have never occurred.

The military action of January 1966 was called and is still called an Igbo coup. How could a putsch intended to install the Yoruba Chief Obafemi Awolowo, as Prime Minister be an Igbo coup? Here’s Major Patrick Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu: “Neither myself nor any other lads was in the least interested in governing the country. We were soldiers and not politicians. We had earmarked from the list known to every soldier in this operation who would be what. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was, for example, to be released from jail immediately and to be made the Executive President of Nigeria.” See West Africa magazine of July 29, 1967, page 981. And here’s Major Adewale Ademoyega: “At the end of the first week of January, Major Anuforo and I arranged to meet Captain Udeaja, a young engineering graduate from the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, UK. We met in Major Chukwuka’s house at the Ikeja Cantonment but Chukwuka himself was not there. Having briefed Udeaja generally and got his consent, we gave him his task. He was to fly a special plane provided for the purpose to Calabar on the morning of D-Day, to effect the release of Chief Awolowo and bring him to Lagos on the plane. We had already arranged for a plane of the Nigeria Air Force to be made available that morning. This was done through Major Nzegwu (not Nzeogwu) of the Air Force.” See Adewale Ademoyega: Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup, Evans Brothers Limited, Ibadan, 1981; pp 68-69.

The Nzeogwu and Ademoyega stories were corroborated by no less a person than Chief Awolowo, thusly: “It was learnt after the January coup that the authors had planned to release me from Calabar, fly me to Lagos, and install me as Head of State whether I liked it or not. If I refused the offer, they were prepared to govern in my name until I was persuaded to accept the offer. The authors of the coup had no plan to govern the country under a military administration.” See Obafemi Awolowo, My March Through Prison, Macmillan Nigeria Publishers Limited, Ilupeju Lagos, 1985; page 297.

In spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the myth of the Igbo coup has been sustained to this day. According to Ademoyega, the innermost circle of the coup plot was composed of three Majors: Adewale Ademoyega from Ode Remo in today’s Ogun State, a History graduate of the University of London; Emmanuel Ifeajuna from Onitsha, a University of Ibadan Science graduate; and Chukwuma Nzeogwu from Okpanam, a town bordering Asaba in present day Delta State. Besides these facts, there were 50 Majors in the Nigerian Army on the morning of the coup; 24 of them were Igbo. About 20 of these knew nothing of the coup and never participated in its execution. The coup cost the life of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe, the Quarter-Master General of the Nigerian Army. Chinyelu Unegbe was Igbo from Ozubulu in today’s Anambra State. General Aguiyi-Ironsi put down the coup; he was Igbo from Umuana Ndume in Umuhia in the present Abia State. These facts have never constituted extenuating circumstances. The coup must forever be labelled an Igbo coup, a lie from the pit of hell that continues to be used as a basis for the sporadic massacring of Ndigbo and their consignment to fourth-class citizenship in their own country.

All these lies are the reason Nigeria is a failed state. And unless these lies and countless others are finally and permanently abrogated, Nigeria’s chances of resurrection are unequivocally non-existent. In a sense Pastor Bakare is a tool in the hands of forces he scarcely recognises. The fibs he told his church members were as old as 1966. The precursors are from the top echelons of Northern Nigerian hegemony, but their lies first surfaced in book form when the Hudahuda Publishing Company of Zaria published John M. Paden’s Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto in 1986. This is Professor Omo Omoruyi in The Tale of June 12; The Betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians (1993) (Press Alliance Network Limited; 1999.) “President Babangida ruled out any Yoruba person if Chief Abiola who had been with the military and the North in various capacities could not win the support of the ethno-military clique. He ruled out the Igbo on the argument that the country and definitely the North would not buy an Igbo then or in the near future. More seriously, he argued that the Yoruba and the Igbo did not have strong representation in the Armed Forces to provide them with the kind of protection they would need. This is still at the heart of democratisation today” (page 253).

Professor Omoruyi, who was the Director-General of the Centre for Democratic Studies and, more importantly, Babangida’s closest confidant, sought clarification from the military President. “This was when (General Babangida) called my attention to the feeling in the North about an Igbo as President. He thought that it would violate the curse placed on the Igbo by the late Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa before he was executed on January 15, 1966. Sir Abubakar was quoted to have said: ‘I know you are going to kill me; you will never get a Prime Minister like me. The Igbo will suffer for twenty-five years.’” (Page 262.)

Now, under Pastor Bakare, the consummate wielder of the microphone, the falsehoods got added embellishment. The curse preventing any Igbo from becoming President over a period of 25 years assumed eternal dimensions. The snippety nonsense of turban and wine got thrown in. No one seemed to underscore the impotence of the curse by General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo being Balewa’s immediate successor. I reacted thus to this story in Ironsi: Nigeria, The Army, Power And Politics (Press Alliance 1999; and Eminent Biographies 2019): “The story that was put out claimed that Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa ‘cursed’ the Igbo, saying they will not rule Nigeria for 25 years. By the time Babangida used this fiction to discount an Igbo President in 1993, 27 years had elapsed since Sir Abubakar died. Yet, the “curse” was still potent. Babangida himself had no qualms marrying into a “cursed” ethnic group and raising four children who by extension must be half cursed. The main point here is that, apart from Sir Abubakar’s lack of locus standi to curse the Igbo, (how many million curses will the thousands of Igbo victims of the 1966 pogrom utter?), the story is patently false. Its authors lacked authenticity because their story was bereft of citation and attribution. The most detailed account of the interrogation of those that carried out the coup of January 1966 was released by the regime of General Yakubu Gowon. The details also appear in Crisis And Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 1971) by A. H. M Kirk-Greene. Nowhere is there anything about any curse. No authority ever corroborated the story. Yet this fiction is what the Clique has held on to in the protracted subjugation of Ndigbo. That was why Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, a principled officer and gentleman, was ignominiously removed as Chief of General Staff within months of his appointment. That was why Ndigbo led the formation of the PDP and gave it their all, only for the currently acclaimed Igbo leader, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, to be given a short shrift.” (pp 242-243.)

According to Omo Omoruyi, Chief M. K. O. Abiola’s presidential election victory was nullified because it was not backed by what he called Ethno-Military Clique of Northern Nigeria. General Babangida posited in 1993 that, “the Yoruba and the Igbo did not have strong representation in the Armed Forces to provide them with the kind of protection they would need.” Yoruba and Igbo representation in the military today are for more minuscular today than ever before, due to the conscious and deliberate nepotistic policy of the man at the helm today. Besides, no one has bothered to decipher the Caliphate’s thinking on 2023. Perhaps the assumption is that its deafening silence is symptomatic of non-alignment? How could this be when Sultan Dasuki was one of the prime forces against Chief Abiola’s presidential election? All these point to the fact that, in the ultimate, even the Jagaban would discover that he washed his hands and cracked a nut for an errant fowl to carry the seed away. At that point only would the incalculable harm done to Yoruba and Southern interests by the forward-looking politics of Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu become ever so clear.

To return to phantom curses and negative repercussions! Pastor Bakare needs to ask himself this fundamental question: Why is the curse for bad behaviour unidirectional? A sensible answer to that question may assist him in coming to terms with a myriad of other questions. Those who killed General Aguiyi-Ironsi in July 1966 have the longest streets in Abuja named after them. Apart from Aguiyi-Ironsi, they also killed countless other officers, including Lieutenant Colonels Israel Okoro, Gabriel Okonweze and Francis Adekunle Fajuyi, and Majors Nzegwu, Emelifonwu, Nnamani, Ihedigbo, Obienu, Ekanem, P. C. Obi, Isong, Ogunro; and 11 Captains, and 13 Lieutenants, and 128 NCOs and Other Ranks. They went ahead with a pogrom that cost 50,000 lives of Eastern Nigerians, mostly Ndigbo. Why have the perpetrators of the nsoani never been visited by a curse? Nigeria has five functional international airports. Two of them are named after the mass murderers of July, August, September and October 1966.

They claimed that wine was poured on Tafawa Balewa, and that alcohol was forced down his throat. Compare it to the following: “Thirdly, the evidence disclosed that it was not merely a case of Northerners descending on Easterners and shooting, matcheting and clubbing them to death. They embarked on various methods of torture and humiliation. One method was described by the 72nd witness – Dick Iwebi. This punishment is one of the most dreadful ways of crucifying a person. A heavy rod is tied across the back of the chest of the victim with the hands stretched and secured firmly on the rod. While the victim may still be standing on his legs, he is as helpless as a man nailed to a cross. In this position they then proceed to torture the victim by plucking his eyes, cutting his tongue and cutting his testicles.” See The Report of the Justice G. C. M Onyiuke Tribunal on the Massacre of Ndigbo in 1966, Tollbrook Publishers Limited, Ikeja Lagos, pp 125-126. Dear Pastor Bakare, who got cursed for this atrocity?

The thoughtful must ask what informed Pastor Bakare’s timing for his peculiar sermon. But the answer is all too obvious. The presidential election is next year and people who should only be seen and never heard are bursting eardrums hectoring all-comers for an Igbo President of Nigeria. It is important that their agitation is shot down before it gets a chance of taking off and actually flying. Of course, anti-Igbo propaganda was never a spontaneous thing. Its real name is INSIDOUS. To exemplify: In 1954, Emmanuel Ifeajuna won the gold medal in the High Jump event of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games held in Vancouver, Canada. Ifeajuna was not just the first Nigerian, but also the first Black African, to win an international sports event. Back here in Nigeria, those that must never be cursed set up a national Sports Hall of Fame, which, to this day, does not include Ifeajuna’s name. Those who recall that Chioma Ajunwa is the first Nigerian to win an Olympic gold (in the long jump in Atlanta 1996) must go check out “their” sports “Hall of Fame”. Chances are that her name is not there. Not because she committed any offence but because of “from where she from come from”! Yes, it is a capital offence to come from the Igbo country. In 1995, Gideon Akaluka, a young Igbo trader based in Kano was accused of desecrating the Koran. He was locked up. But an organised mob broke into his Police cell, dragged him out, beheaded him and danced through Kano metropolis with his bodiless head. Does Bakare know that not one person was cursed for this atrocity?

The injustice against Ndigbo is pervasive. Take the National Honours. Every head of every hamlet in the far North is an MFR or an OFR or a CFR or a CON or a GCON. Not so for Ndigbo. That is why a personage like Eze (Professor) Green Onyekaba Nwankwo, a distinguished traditional ruler, an accomplished academic who set up the Department of Finance at the University of Lagos, a former Executive Director in charge of banking and monetary policy in the Central Bank of Nigeria and the author of over 20 books has only the MON – the least of all the honours Nigeria can offer. The iniquity is most eloquent in the military. Unless they are in the Education Corps or the Medical Corps or the Physical Training Corps, hardly any Igbo gets promoted above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Those of us campaigning for an Igbo President of Nigeria are looking at more than the spectacle of a politician from the ethnic group enjoying the tenancy of Aso Rock. That is too simple. We are demanding equal rights. We are saying that a country indexed on lies already collapsed before it got the chance to take a first step to nationhood. An Igbo President is supposed to be the antidote to nearly 60 years of a people’s subjugation. People have no business forgetting that there is a distinction between being a slave and being enslaved. Ndigbo are no slaves. That was why in 1803, 75 of them rebelled at Dunbar Creek in Georgia, USA, took control of the slave ship carrying them, drowned their captors and chose to walk into the ocean rather than be slaves to white slave masters. That was why, between 1791 and 1804 they rebelled and overthrew the French regime in Haiti to establish an independent country founded and governed by ex-slaves. That is why the Igbo, indigenous to their current geographical space for millennia, find intolerable their insolent subjugation by recent migrants from the Fouta Djalon whose numbers no credible census has put at more than 5 percent of the Nigerian population.

The systematic enslavement of Ndigbo in what is supposed to be their own country has got to be terminated. The epic Igbo struggle has taken various forms and will continue to do so. A prime example is their attempt at secession in the 1960s. Britain, and a genocidal war in which “Starvation is a legitimate instrument of warfare” thwarted them. Back inside Nigeria they are compelled to permanently stand back and keep bloody quiet forever. For any sigh, groan or moan of theirs, goons, troops, the Police and paramilitary contingents are deployed with extreme prejudice and excessive numbers against them. They are called terrorists while those that have stopped Kaduna State and wiped out innocent thousands in many parts of the country are termed bandits and treated with kid gloves. They have been branded “a spot in a circle,” a military euphemism underscoring their unenviable situation as targets for continued massacring.

There is news for the liars and the killers. Nigeria is unsustainable on the diet of lies and more lies. It is true that those that laid into Ndigbo in the 1960s and killed them in the tens of thousands got rewarded with high political offices and oil blocks and whatnot. But the kill-and-go ship of Ndigbo finally steamed into turbulent waters. Although census exercises in Nigeria are a huge joke, there are at least 40 million Ndigbo in Nigeria today. Nobody and no country can manufacture enough weapons to wipe them off the face of the country. Even in the extremely unlikely event of all Igbo in Nigeria getting killed, there are millions of them abroad today. From their number, at least a thousand will eventually pay a visit to the mother country, these question pouring from their flaming tongues: “Why did you slay my mother? Why did you massacre my father? Why did you annihilate my sister? Why did you exterminate my brother?”

For all of the above, and especially at the lectern, the microphone should never be a justification for verbal diarrhoea. So, Mr. Preacher Bakare, the next time the sound of your voice is amplified by the electronics of public address systems, you must endeavour to annexe some circumspection. On disseminating the falsehoods of those who claim the right to perpetually sit and fart on all our heads, you must do two things: DESIST and CEASE!

 Chuks Iloegbunam is the author of The Case for an Igbo President of Nigeria.

Why It’s Okay To Forget The Books You Read

BY NOORA SHAMSI BAHAR

What makes them my favourites, if I can't remember the names of the engrossing characters or the details of the intricate plots in some of my "favourite" books? Is something wrong with me? Is that faculty of my brain which stores and retrieves information faulty? Am I showing early signs of Alzheimer's or Dementia? Do I really even like reading? Am I not reading "properly" enough?

Sir Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, once wrote: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Does this mean that I only "taste" books while reading and then spit them out soon after they go into my bookshelf? Am I simply a taster and not a digester?

I've come to realise that this is not a "problem" unique to myself and is in fact, quite common. I realise that in this digital era, with easy access to the internet and therefore, with information at my fingertips, I don't really have to have total/perfect recall. For example, I knew Bacon wrote something about books, so I simply used the search words "Francis Bacon on books" on Google, and voila, I had the essay from which I took the aforementioned quote. Siegfried Sassoon, a World War I poet, stated that "it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read" and so, I've learned to forgive myself for forgetting, for I'm just an ordinary human.

With this realisation, one may ask, what's the point of reading, if I am going to forget most of it anyway? The answer is pretty simple. One shouldn't read to remember; rather, one should read for the experience of reading. We tend to prioritise recalling over experiencing. I can recall the different emotions I felt and the realisations I came to while reading the books I've read, with each experience different from the other.

While reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), I remember feeling that the Nigerian novelist had mastered the English language—the language of the colonialists. I was reminded of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", particularly the character Caliban, who tells his master Prospero, "You taught me language, and my profit on't Is I know how to curse." I remember feeling that Achebe had symbolically used the coloniser's tools to dismantle the master's house through his tale, which is aimed at the Western reader, and yet, at the same time, he was successful in portraying the African experience in English while preserving African authenticity, which by the way, is neither faultless nor idyllic.

Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece that allowed me to perceive the African people unlike the way white authors such as Joseph Conrad (through his Heart of Darkness) portrays them (in a racist, reductionist, stereotypical manner), thereby offering me the chance to see them through an alternate, non-colonial, authentic lens. I know the novel's name came from WB Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming" and while the poem is about the anti-Christ and the anarchy that he brings with him, the book is about colonisation and the consequent collapse of the Igbo society. The disintegration of values, customs, traditions, relationships, etc. of the Igbo people is also a result of internal flaws within that society, which Achebe didn't shy away from exposing. I remember feeling that the author was just as critical of the colonisers as he was of his own people and I couldn't help but marvel at his objectivity. I remember making a connection between Achebe's novel and Shirley Jackson's unsettling short story, "The Lottery'' because both texts have characters who question rituals such as human sacrifice, and both texts also have characters who cannot accept change. Lastly, I remember understanding the concept of cultural hegemony, where the white man did not need to resort to brute force to colonise the Igbo people in Achebe's novel; rather, colonisation came about through the latter's consent.

The reader of this essay may think that I remember a lot from reading the novel, but I cannot write another word unless I re-read the book again. I don't remember a single character's name or the relationships between characters and tribes, and I don't remember most of the flaws in the Igbo society that led to its demise when the British came into the picture. However, my experience of reading a book by an African author changed me in more ways than one. I got a glimpse of a culture and a people completely foreign to me, I made connections with other texts that I had read, and I understood theories that I had studied but could not apply until I read the novel.

I believe that even if you remember nothing but a certain intense, raw emotion that you felt while reading a book, you have a valid reason to pick up another book and continue to experience the joys of reading.

Noora Shamsi Bahar is a writer, translator, and Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University.

SOURCE: DAILY STAR

Whittier Tech Students Earn Biliteracy Designation

Javier Infante Rodriguez of Haverhill with his seal of biliteracy. Image: Whittier Tech

BY MIKE LABELLA

HAVERHILL, MASS (EAGLE TRIBUNE) — Two Haverhill students who attend Whittier Tech are among four students recognized by school Superintendent Maureen Lynch for earning the Massachusetts State Seal of Biliteracy distinction in Spanish.

The students are: Jesus Infante Rodriguez, a senior from Haverhill studying marketing education and business technology; Nolan Macario, a senior from Haverhill studying electronics/robotics; Roberto Catuc Coc, a senior from Newbury studying electrical and Julio Diaz, a senior from Groveland studying electronics/robotics.

The seal recognizes students who have achieved proficiency in English and at least one other language by high school graduation. Students were awarded this distinction based on their performance on the Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages test administered by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, school officials said.

Students also fulfilled the Carnegie unit credit requirements in English language arts. English Language Coordinator Susannah DiMauro, who serves as the Seal of Biliteracy adviser, helped prepare students for this comprehensive test, which was administered at the end of January.

“Thankfully I got this last-minute opportunity to take the test,” Macario said. “There are more opportunities within the workplace, college and scholarships after earning this distinction.”

The Seal of Biliteracy promotes excellence in the study of world language, respect for human differences by exposing students to other cultures and perspectives, and equity by honoring the diverse literacy skills of those in the community. It also provides evidence of biliteracy skills to future employers and college admissions officers.

“We are particularly proud of these students’ achievements, as they represent the highest number of State Seal recipients since our school began the program three years ago. This award is not easy to attain,” DiMauro said. “Students must have a high level of fluency in a partner language, demonstrating proficiency in all four domains of speaking, listening, reading and writing.”

DiMauro praised her school’s administration for initiating this program and for their support of Whittier’s diverse student body, who she said come with many gifts and talents in a number of different languages and cultures.

Eight heritage languages are represented across 1,261 students at Whittier Tech: Igbo, Swahili, Twi, Portuguese, Spanish, Pashto, Haitian Creole, and various Central American dialects of Spanish.

Proffer Solution To Frequent Collapse Of Our National Grid, UNN VC Charges Engineers

IMAGE: UNN.EDU.NG

BY IKECHUKWU ODU

NSUKKA, ENUGU STATE (VANGUARD) - The Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN, Prof. Charles Igwe, on Friday, charged engineers to intensify researches aimed at finding lasting solution to the energy crisis which results in frequent collapse of the national grid.

The Vice Chancellor who described energy as the life wire of all the sectors of the economy, said that the prospect of the nation towards solving its myriad of challenges may not be feasible without reliable electricity.

He made the statements during his opening address at the 19th Herbert Macaulay Memorial Lecture, HMML, christened ‘The Path to Stable Electricity in Nigeria,’ organised by the Faculty of Engineering, UNN, at the St. Teresa’s College Main Hall, Nsukka.

He also described Herbert Macaulay as one of the first Nigerian nationalists who championed Nigerian independence, adding that UNN would continue to recognize his great contributions to national development.

He equally said that UNN instituted HMML lecture series to highlight the several faces of a man who has been described as the father of Nigerian nationalism and to encourage present day engineers, surveyors, architects and other professionals to learn from his professional lifestyle and make every effort to leave good footprints on the sands of time.

While delivering the HMML lecture, the Managing Director of Azura Power West Africa Limited, Eric Okeke, said the problem of energy problem in the country is lack of money.

He also said “This is because, without money, whatever product we develop is a waste. In simple terms, what makes a product attractive to the inventor is simply the ability of that product to generate money. Is there a market for this my product and if there is, are people ready to pay me to enjoy the services of my product? Once the answer is yes, then we are in business. But where a product is not attractive enough for users to pay for it, or where it is attractive, but the owner does not have the mechanism to collect payment,then no matter how beautiful that product is, it is a failure,” he explained.

Okeke also said that lack of enough energy generation, transmission and distribution capacity to ensure that consumers enjoyed stable electricity in their homes and offices, as well as non cost reflective tariff to ensure that value chain was operated and maintained efficiently, and investments made for future growth, were the two major issues resulting in inaccessibility of energy in Nigeria.

He also said “Nigerians have always taken electricity as a social product which should not be paid for. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this attitude emerged; but it stands to reason that electricity from the grid became increasingly unstable (and so served as a backup power source to most people rather than their primary source), people stopped paying for a product they were not receiving. Cognizant of this, the government at the point of privatisation planned to increase the tariff over time.

“The logic was that people would only start paying when service had improved, and service would only improve if the previous issue of under capacity was solved,” he said.

He however said poor private investments in power sector had been attributed to fear of investors to recoup money invested as electricity consumers most times feel reluctant to pay for service rendered.

“Power generation is cost effective,so the inability of some customers to pay for service rendered have been a drawback to electricity distribution companies in the country,” he said.

Mr. James Agada, an Engineer and Managing Director, Ixzora Laboratories in a keynote address said that the problems of stable electricity in Nigeria has to do with technical, political and economic challenges.

“Technical, political and economic are among the challenges militating against stable electricity in Nigeria

“It is also an opportunity for policy makers to create an environment and structure where such private generation can be fed back to the public grid,” he said

Earlier, Prof Emeka Obe, Dean, Faculty of Engineering in UNN said that electricity remain the key driver of every modern economy.

According to him, “electricity is the base of infrastructure on which nearly every other infrastructure relies.

“The lecture provides us with the avenue to interact with distinguished professionals who have the love for our faculty and indeed our university at heart,” he said.

The Dean, however appealed for help to enable the faculty to have a 1000 capacity lecture theater, new and separate building for seven departments, among others

Retooling Igbo Language In Era Of Digital Pedagogy

BY UCHENNA AGBEDO

Image: Reddit

Today, the 21st day of February 2022, the United Nations through its organ, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) marks the International Mother Language Day (IMLD) originally proclaimed by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 1999, a special day which the UN General Assembly ratified in its Resolution of 2002. Following that landmark proclamation, the United Nations General Assembly, had in its resolution A/RES/61/266 of 16 May 2007, enjoined Member States “to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world”. The UN General Assembly, by the same resolution proclaimed the following year, 2008 as the International Year of Languages, to “promote unity in diversity and international understanding, through multilingualism and multiculturalism,” thus designating UNESCO as the lead agency for the Year.

International Mother Language Day is driven by the mindset, which not only recognises language and multilingual education as veritable catalysts for inclusiveness, but also advances the Sustainable Development Goals’ focus on leaving no one behind. This tallies with UNESCO’s position that “education, based on the first language or mother tongue, must begin from the early years as early childhood care and education is the foundation of learning”.

Contemporary times have witnessed rebounding consciousness about the centrality and primacy of language in guaranteeing cultural diversity and intercultural dialogic exchanges, strengthening cooperation and attaining quality education for all, building all-inclusive knowledge societies, preserving cultural heritage, as well as galvanising political will for deploying the limitless resources of science and technology to sustainable development. It is against this background that this year’s theme – ‘Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities’ – speaks to the potential role of technology in advancing multilingual education and supporting the development of an all-inclusive quality pedagogy. This represents a clarion call on policy makers, educators and teachers, parents and families to scale up their commitment to mother tongue education, and inclusion in education to advance education recovery especially in the context of post-COVID-19 pandemic. It is in sync with the 2019 Cali Commitment to Equity and Inclusion in Education and the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032), which places multilingualism at the heart of indigenous peoples’ development with UNESCO as the arrowhead.

Digital pedagogy, which derives its roots from the Constructivism Theory, is the use of contemporary digital technologies in teaching and learning. As a type of digital education tool (also referred to as Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) or e-Learning) that is applicable to online, hybrid and face-to-face learning environments, this innovative use of digital tools and technologies during teaching and learning, has collaboration, playfulness/tinkering, focus on process and building as its key components. One of such digital tools is the Digital Pedagogy Toolkit designed by Jisc’s Digital Practice Team led by Chris Thomson, meant to support academic staff to make informed choices about how they use technology to underpin the curriculum, provide ideas and inspiration for how staff can overcome barriers to using technology, promote current approaches in curriculum design theory to ensure technology meets the learning outcomes of the course, module or programme of study, dispel a range of misconceptions about what can and cannot be achieved by using technology. As a challenge-based approach, the toolkit presents a series of scenarios based in real-world situations that institutions have been grappling with such as delivering live online learning with students, designing engaging VLE courses or managing digital communities of practice, and describes areas of digital practice one may want to develop.

Perhaps, advocating the deployment of digital tools that provide for synchronous and asynchronous Igbo pedagogical platforms may sound outlandish or utopian in the light of near or total absence of strong web presence in most hinterland communities of Igbo land. This is not excluding other daunting challenges bordering on skills, motivation, knowledge and environmental factors, dearth of digital competencies and support staff, lack of staff’s access to required digital tools, absence of guidelines, key policies and measures for evaluating the effectiveness of online delivery, for instance, as well as monitoring and managing learner expectations.

Nonetheless, as herculean as these challenges may sound, digital pedagogy remains the way to go. There is no viable alternative course of action for rolling back the digital pedagogy revolution ignited by digital technologies. Following a rash of school closures in 2020 precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the world employed technology-driven solutions to ensure continuity of teaching and learning. The ugly experiences of many learners in developing societies such as Africa, who lacked the requisite Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) that would have facilitated distance learning, might have diminished the pedagogic relevance of technology. However, it is a proven fact that technology holds all the aces in addressing a great deal of education’s greatest challenges today in the light of its pivotal role in reinventing equitable and inclusive lifelong learning opportunities for all as guided by UNESCO’s core principles of inclusion and equity, hence the strong emphasis on mother tongue education, which represents a key component of inclusion in education.




The foregoing underscores the urgency of exploring technologies and their potential in enhancing the role of teachers in the teaching and learning of the Igbo language.

Herein lies the inescapable option of Igbo digital pedagogy if the language and its owners hope to escape the rampaging proboscis of globalisation currently gobbling up their rich tapestry of cultural heritage, and indeed all the valuable resources that are of strategic importance for preserving their unique modes of thinking and expression, identity construction, in-group integration, education and development.

The gloomy UNESCO report suggests that a language disappears every two weeks, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage’ with not less than 43 per cent of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world being endangered.

Regrettably, the Igbo language belongs to this hapless league of endangered languages, whether considered from the theoretical prism of Joshua Fishman’s (1991) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), which recognises the degree to which intergenerational transmission of the language remains intact as the key factor in gauging the relative safety of an endangered language or Lewis & Simons’ (2010) Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) that evaluates a language’s literacy acquisition status, identity function, state of intergenerational language transmission, vehicular and a societal profile of its generational use.

Going by the UNESCO’s template for global assessment of the state of world’s languages, Igbo falls within Level 7 of both Fishman’s GIDS and Lewis & Simons’ EGIDS and meets UNESCO’s criterion for fitting into an ‘endangered language’ frame, which states that “the child-bearing generation knows the language well enough to use it with their elders but it is not transmitting it to their children.”

It is in the light of the unfolding scenario in the global linguistic ecosystem that we have observed elsewhere that language endangerment is a serious social problem, which has elicited clarion calls from renowned language scholars for owners of such languages to develop renewed interests in their languages as one effective way of reversing the ugly trend.

In particular, foremost Nigerian linguists, Ayo Bamgbose (Professor Emeritus) and Professor Nọlue Emenanjọ (of blessed memory) had expressed a consensual view that “the fate of an endangered language may well lie in the hands of the owners of the language themselves and in their will to make it survive”.

As it concerns the Igbo language, Centre for Igbo Studies (CIS), University of Nigeria, has been in the vanguard spearheading fine-honed advocacy for reimagining Igbo studies. Its Igbo Ezue colloquium – a linguo-cultural renaissance featuring homecoming of Ndigbo in Homeland and the Diaspora cum maiden international conference – slated for the last quarter of the year 2022, represents one of such practical steps towards igniting emotional commitment in Ndigbo to promote, develop and sustain their language and cultural heritage.

Furthermore, we argue for the practical implementation of the mother tongue policy of UNESCO. As it concerns Igbo in our educational institutions, for instance, we call for the immediate formulation and implementation of a policy that makes Igbo language a compulsory subject in primary/secondary schools in Southeast states and a credit pass in Igbo as a precondition for admission into tertiary institutions in Igboland; mounting of Use of Igbo as a course in the General Studies programme of tertiary institutions in the Southeast region of Nigeria; reward system in form of scholarship schemes for students who elect to study Igbo in higher institutions and automatic employment on graduation.

These steps align with the consensus among language scholars and researchers that appropriate measures must be taken to ensure the maintenance of languages by way of revitalisation and spare them the frightful prospects of endangerment, attrition and outright death. The case of Igbo is not different.

Therefore, as the world marks this year’s International Mother Language Day, it presents an auspicious moment for Ndigbo to reflect on the endangered character of their God-given language (for which almost everybody is currently bemoaning listlessly) and make a resolute commitment to change the unsavoury narrative through the instrumentality of digital pedagogy, which accords Igbo a rightful place in education systems, the public domain and digital space; as well as practical implementation of the UNESCO’s mother tongue policy as it concerns the Igbo language, literature and culture. Perhaps, in this way, the significance of International Mother Language Day would have rubbed off on Igbo and by extension reformatted its motherboard; rebooted its floundering gait; rekindled its dwindling embers; and re-gigged the waning interest of Ndigbo in their mother language.

Agbedo is a Professor of Linguistics and Director, Centre for Igbo Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Shelf Life: Akwaeke Emezi

BY RIZA CRUZ

ELLE

KATHLEEN BOMANI / ILLUSTRATION BY YOUSRA ATTIA via ELLE

The National Book Award finalist and author of Dear Senthuran and Bitter takes our literary survey.

Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Expect to hear even more from Akwaeke Emezi this year, starting with Bitter (Knopf Books for Young Readers, out next week), a companion novel to their debut YA novel, PET, a National Book Award finalist. Their first poetry collection, Content Warning: Everything is out in April, and their first romance novel You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty will be released in May. Screen rights to the latter were bought by Amazon Studios with Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society attached; Emezi will be an executive producer.

Born and raised in Nigeria, the NYT-bestselling writer and video artist moved to the U.S. at 16 and now lives in New Orleans—their house has an Instagram account (@shinythegodhouse) as does their Devon Rex cat, Gus PonPon (@gus.ponpon).

The Igbo-Tamil Emezi is a Gemini, was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree; graced Time’s cover as a Next Generation Leader for their memoir, Dear Senthuran; considered becoming a nun; once wrote six blogs simultaneously; went to veterinary school and has a degree in nonprofit management and public policy from NYU; can’t write in cafes because of the noise; named their garden Emmeline; appeared in Jay-Z’s 4:44 video; and got an Artist Formerly Known as Prince symbol the day after he died.

Likes: Rotimi Fani-Kayode art, soca music, Bolden skincare, black groundnuts, gold ceilings, fruit stands (mangoes to eat with sweet soy sauce and guavas are favorites), clothes that feel like pajamas, cacti. Dislikes: coffee, writing essays.

The book that:
...shaped my worldview:

Of Water and the Spirit by the late and great Malidoma Patrice Somé introduced me to the concept of decolonizing reality itself and taught me how to center indigenous African realities, which was foundational to my own body of work.
…currently sits on my nightstand:

I just started In Sensorium: Notes For My People by the brilliant Bangladeshi writer and perfumer Tanaïs, and so far, it’s an incredible and evocative text that I can’t wait to drown in.
…I’d like turned into a Netflix show:

The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty would be absolutely phenomenal on screen! It’s a brilliant series about djinn and royalty that the author once described as “a fantasy homage to the medieval Islamic world.”

...I last bought:

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi, because she is a literary legend and the worlds she writes are always so special.

…I recommend over and over again:

Under The Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta is a classic piece of literary fiction reminding us that queer people are a real and vital part of all our histories.
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:

Anything by Katee Robert, but particularly her Dark Olympus and A Touch of Taboo series. Whew!

...fills me with hope:

I’m pretty jaded about the world, so when I read the Brown Sisters series by Talia Hibbert, those books warmed my heart because I got to see Black femmes who were in chronic pain, who were neurodivergent, and who didn’t fit white supremacist beauty standards being loved and loved fiercely.

…made me weep uncontrollably:

All About Love by bell hooks is a deeply necessary and utterly devastating book that can reshape your life in the best way if you let it. I think I had a meltdown by the second chapter.

…should be on every college syllabus:

Oreo by Fran Ross is a satirical novel written by a Black queer woman and published in 1974. I consider it an indisputable genius-level text that should absolutely be taught widely.
...I read in one sitting, it was that good:

The Tensorate series by Neon Yang, and yes, I read the entire series in one sitting on a plane. It really is that good.

…I swear I'll finish one day:

I have chronic pain caused by muscle spasms from C-PTSD, so multiple people recommended The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, but I can never finish it because it contains accounts of trauma that are honestly too disturbing for me to take in.

Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:

I think this one is a classic, but Belle’s library in Beauty and The Beast. Technically, it might be the Beast’s library, but as a kid, that was the absolute dream.