Month: November 2014

The novel Onitsha written by French author and 2008 Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio is a beautiful piece of fiction. Originally written in French and translated into English in 1997, it bears prose that steals your heart. Le Clézio can sustain quiet tension in a book and build up suspense. It does get silly in places where it succumbs to a puzzlingly mythical babble in which case it deteriorates from haunting prose to malarial hallucinations about the deities of Egypt and Ethiopia. As for the content and what it says about how the West sees Africans, it is an ugly book for it reveals the insidious patronizing attitudes of white liberals.

According to the blurb, “Onitsha tells the story of Fintan, a youth who travels to Africa in 1948 with his Italian mother to join the English father he has never met. Initially enchanted by the exotic world he discovers in Onitsha, a bustling city prominently situated on the eastern bank of the River Niger, Fintan gradually comes to recognise the intolerance and brutality of the colonial system and gives the novel a notably direct, horrified perspective on racism and colonialism.”  I agree with the blurb for different reasons. I think Onitsha is a racist book. You can smell Africa in Le Clézio’s Onitsha. Unfortunately, Africa reeks in his imagination: “Fintan breathed in the odour. It entered him, soaked into his body. Odour of this dusty earth, odour of the very blue sky, the gleaming palm trees, the white houses. Odour of women and children dressed in rags. Odour which possesses the town” (p20)

Hear Fintan’s surprise as he comes in contact with Africans, when their ship lands in Africa from Europe: “Fintan discovered the source of the sound: the entire foredeck of the Surabaya was crowded with blacks! They crouched down and were beating with hammers on the hatches, the hull and the frames to remove the rust.” Blacks! You almost hear ‘Vermin!’ The first time he saw us, we were immediately labeled the other, apart from whites, human-like but not quite. In 1948. And once the book encounters our humanity, everything starts to get wretched, dark and savage. Europe is light; Africa is darkness. In 1948, the visiting white expatriate sees Africa as exotica and the otherness of the African reeks of savagery. We are talking of a time when our folks were returning home from England, armed with the Golden Fleece. In 1948, Nigeria’s premier university, The University of Ibadan was founded. This was after the era that inspired Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood, that wholesome memoir of childhood and family values. This is not the same Nigeria of Nnamdi Azikiwe’s epic autobiography, My Odyssey that so wonderfully captured the intellectual passion of 1930’s Africa.

In this semi-autobiographical tale, Le Clézio exposes the racism of the colonialists in the era in copious detail. Fintan and his mother Maou are saddened by the verbal and physical abuse that blacks endure in the hands of insensitive whites and the experience is quite gruesome. Black prisoners work in chains digging swimming pools for the pleasure of whites, getting injured as the walls collapse on them. In the process, though, Le Clézio seems to unmask his own prejudices as he describes Africans in the patronizing lingo invented and perfected by white liberals: “She has never cared for anyone as much as she cared for these people. They were so gentle, their eyes so luminous, their gestures so pure and elegant.  When she walked through the different neighbourhoods to reach the wharf, children came up to her, not shy, and caressed her arms; women took her by the hand, spoke to her, in the gentle language which hummed like music” (p118)

The research is sloppy and it shows. There is no excuse for what passes for Pidgin English in the book. What Le Clézio calls Pidgin English does not exist in West Africa, it was clearly contrived: “Big black fellow box spose white man fight him, he cry too mus!” p40. Go figure.  Le Clézio is at pains to showcase his knowledge of African gods, mythologies and history; unfortunately the result is error-prone. He places Benjamin Adekunle, the “Black Scorpion” on the Biafran side of the Nigerian Civil war (p193).  Sigh. Don’t ask me how Le Clézio got to Biafra from 1948.

In Le Clézio’s Africa, everything is pristine, filled with a contrived innocence. It is truly fiction so he could be forgiven for liberal applications of poetic license. Africa is storm buckets of thunder and rain and mud and more thunder. Everything is dark. Africans are subhuman and primitive. And sweetly angelic in a childlike way. The book is populated by black people with distended exaggerated features. The title of the book should be The Great White Hope Comes to Save Africa Again. Joseph Conrad, meet Le Clézio. This is history liberally distorted, romanticised to fit a liberal orthodoxy. How can a book written in the nineties be so bigoted? The real question is this: Why do many Western writers who write about Africa persist in seeing us as hapless sub-humans?

When I was a little boy, I looked forward to being a father. We did not call them dads in those days, we called them ‘father’ or ‘papa’. Any other term of endearment was liable to get us in big trouble which usually meant an adult fist or something more malevolent colliding with a sensitive area of a child’s head. It just seemed at the time that my dad did not have much responsibility. Our main connection with Papalolo was extracting money from him. In retrospect, he was a generous giver, but at the time I remember us going to him for stuff with great trepidation. There was always drama accompanying any request. There would be the history lesson on how children of nowadays do not value money, blah, blah, blah. There would be the interrogation; “What do you need money for, do you think money grows on trees?”

Dad was the breadwinner and he made sure we knew it. He went to work in clothes that we had starched and ironed and in shoes that we polished so well we could see our teeth in their shine. He would return from the day’s job loudly protesting the stress of work, blah, blah, blah. One of us would be deployed to grab his briefcase (we don’t remember ever seeing the inside of that briefcase, maybe it was for show), one of us would take the shoes off him once he had sat down to continue his tale of woe about work and one would hand him a glass of cold water from the pot (we did not have a fridge at the time, we heard rumors that some families had it). Then my mother would, with great drama, produce his dinner. It just seemed like a great life, this patriarch that got his way without as much as snapping his fingers.

I am a father now and I can only say that I should sue my father; he cleverly hid all the indignities that fathers are subjected to in the household. The good news is that unlike the male praying mantis, our heads are not decapitated after sex. In my generation, men have lost the perks of patriarchy and added other responsibilities to the weighty ones that my father hid so well from us. For one thing, the children seem to be in charge around here, and heaven help you if you complain. They may call the police and social services on your black behind. The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer, perhaps inspired by a tall glass of cognac (VSOP, straight, no ice cubes), blurted out the other day that today’s children are “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” This truth told under the influence inspired hundreds of angry essays in support of her great words like this one called, well, Why Parents Hate Parenting. We are about to #Occupy our kids’ bedrooms. Kids have gone from being our cheap labour to being our bosses.

Why, the other day, our teenager Ominira’s phone broke. I remember the day quite vividly, when she came to me very calmly and assured me that her phone was broken and we would need to go to the store right away to get a replacement. In Ominira’s world, breaking a phone is like breaking an arm, and our daughter’s pain threshold is pretty low, more like zero. We had to go to the phone store right away. Ominira goes everywhere with her friends, all 5,000 of them. They tweet, they Facebook, they instagram, they snapchat, they rarely see each other in person, in fact like every other member of her generation, she has only physically met five of her 5,000 friends.

So, we went to the phone store with the offending phone. Ominira was not happy with the phone; the stupid phone had made the mistake of falling into water all by itself. This is one stupid bumbling phone; I don’t understand why they call it a smartphone. Why would you drop inside water all by yourself? Ominira was in the car fuming at the world. She had commandeered her little brother’s phone because she needed to do some really important stuff with her friends on Facebook. Her little brother was unimpressed with the urgency of the moment and insisted on accompanying his own smartphone with Ominira to the store in case Ominira attempted to drop the phone in the water like she did her own phone by accident. This unnecessary move was not appreciated by Ominira and a huge fight broke out in the car with all 5,000 Ominira’s Facebook friends witnessing. This she accomplished by posting on her status the kinds of gory things she would do to her “doofus stoopid” brother once there were no parental witnesses. Little brother Lion Cub did not take kindly to these Facebook threats and blamed me for not allowing him to have a Facebook account, otherwise the whole world would know that Ominira has a boyfriend! Until that moment, I had not known this very important distressing news. Sigh! I want my mommy!