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The benevolent West, traditionally avuncular to African writers is getting impatient with the attitude of African writers and is fighting back, beginning with The Economist’s recent review of Binyavanga Wainaina’s new book “One Day I Will Write About This Place.”  The imperially dismissive review snorted with derision: “[It] would be cheering to report that his first book… is worth the wait. It is not. Mr. Wainaina should not have been encouraged to write in the form of a memoir… Too many African writers are co-opted by the American creative-writing scene only to be reduced by prevailing navel-gazing. Separately, much of the African writing culture that remains on the continent… is propped up with cash from the Western donors that African writers purport to excoriate.”

The Economist is right. Quite a few African writers of stature have been supercilious and condescending in their engagement with the West. They feel entitled to the generosity of their hosts. However, virtually every penny they have earned has come from the West because they write exclusively for the paying Western audience. Back home no one cares much. African governments only scan through books to see who is criticizing them after which they hunt down the poor chap. The writer is lucky to escape the continent into the arms of the waiting West.

The end of dictatorships has spurred rather than slowed the flight of writers from Africa. Virtually all African writers of stature live in the West. Some of them flee with dog-eared reams of foolscap paper in which they have stored what they imagine will sell in the West. And it does. Made-in-Africa misery sells like hot cakes in America.  Thanks to lavish Western funding, there is now such an animal called African writing. Africans created it.  In their works, Africa is a morbid museum, romanticized in perverse ways that would be racist were they to be penned by white writers. Yes, the West should start calling African writers on their hypocrisy. Virtually all African writers of stature beginning from pre-colonial times have been nurtured by Western aid. It bears repeating: The paying reading audience is in the West. No writer can live on what passes for a reading culture in Black Africa.

The vision of the founders of The Caine Prize for African Writing sustained the gifted and vulnerable whose only crime is to be born African. The Caine Prize (please delete “For African Writing” – too patronizing) has been good for African writers, and we should celebrate that. On the contrary, it is impossible to name an African funded prize that is as organized and thriving as its western counterpart. There is not a single award in the arts in Black Africa by Africans that has been sustained for more than a few years. They are usually established loudly with much fanfare, inappropriately compared to better funded, better managed Western prizes and happily allowed to grow weeds until they die of unnatural causes to the accompaniment of the loud bickering of pretend boards of “trustees.” Nigeria’s much touted NLNG Prize for Literature is an example: After several years of wallowing in lush mediocrity, its sponsors have decided that there is no dysfunction that money cannot cure. The award has been increased from a hefty $50,000 to an absurd $100,000 as if money confers prestige and stature on mediocrity. The NLNG Prize does not even have a dedicated website, yet it is offering $100,000 to young upstarts. What for? I say use some of that money to build a website for heavens’ sakes.

He who pays the piper should dictate the tune. Perform a roll-call starting with Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka to the new writers – Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani, E.C. Osondu, Helon Habila. Binyavanga Wainaina, Petina Gappah, etc., and it becomes obvious that virtually all of these writers got their fame abroad. The older writers were literally rescued from the jaws of prison, destitution and death – to dizzying fame. From pre-colonial times, African writers of stature have been nurtured and sustained by white liberal largesse in the form of funding, awards and fame. They have enjoyed being wined and dined by white funders, only taking breaks to berate the West for her “racist” ways. The list of complaints is endless and exaggerated by a bounteous imagination: The white wine is not well chilled, the steaks are too done and of course whites are all racists who are interested only in the single story coming out of Africa, whine, whine, whine. Nonsense. Left to Nigeria, Soyinka’s papers would be dinner for termites. Today, they are cooled in the air-conditioned vaults of Western libraries, and serenaded by attentive guards. If Achebe had stayed in Nigeria after his paralyzing auto accident, he would have been long gone to his ancestors by now. He is alive by the grace of modern medicine and the generosity of white folks. The immense contribution to the cannon of English literature by African writers would have been impossible without the West’s generosity. African writers should be grateful. I said it. Sue me.

ps

I did read Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir and I enjoyed it, I recommend it highly. Read my review here.

First published in Next Newspapers, August 29, 2011

For several weeks, Blackbird, the new book by the Nigerian writer Jude Dibia followed me everywhere.  When I was not with the hard copy, the e-book stared at me from inside Adunni my iPad. I just finished reading it; I won’t lie, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, despite the best efforts of its publisher, JALAA Writers Collective. It is a pretty book, I love the cover. It is of high quality both in design and texture. Blackbird is perhaps the best designed book to come out of a Nigerian publishing house in recent times. It helps that it is highly readable. I will leave it on my coffee table so that Americans will see that we also know how to write and publish books, yes. It is not a perfect book; I realize that our writers and publishers at home are working extremely hard against the odds; however JALAA needs to collaborate with a reputable editor. Blackbird suffers from editing issues that should have been caught even by an untrained eye. My review hard copy was missing page 276; that is absolutely unacceptable and unprofessional. The only reason I completed this review is that I was able to continue reading the book on my iPad’s Kindle app (no missing pages there. My sense is that I got a bad copy, quality control is an issue here). No one should have to go through all that just to read a book. I will not die until Dibia pairs himself with a professional publishing company. His literary talents are being frittered away by mediocre support. The patrons of the arts should seriously consider expending some of their boundless energies and resources to supporting writers like Dibia who are long on talent and short on critical support. The world would be better for it and it would begin to stem the ongoing distortion of Africa’s richly lived life by some of her more established writers.

An engaging treat. Luckily the book was engaging enough for me to want to continue reading it. Overall, Blackbird is a work of considerable industry and purpose. I was sad when I got to the end of this pretty book. I wanted more. Yes, Blackbird is an engaging book – and an important narrative. This book gracefully charts Dibia’s upward trajectory as the writer of Walking with Shadows and Unbridled. With Blackbird, Dibia has firmly established himself as a Nigerian writer of stature Let me just say that Blackbird is one of the very few truly credible looks at contemporary Nigeria since the end of military rule. Dibia does this by allowing the story to showcase the seething resentments of an impotent people being suffocated by the mean currents of freewheeling capitalism and insensitive thieves posing as leaders. In Nigeria, as Dibia shows so eloquently, no laws protect the newly free. Dibia gently powers the novel with convincing prose that unfortunately would have sizzled even more in the hands of a practiced editor, “The ocean refused to be still; it took more, claimed more, and retreated less but paradoxically the hungry sea left behind more of its unwanted children, its vomit littering Scorpion’s little patch of beach-front: a seagull’s skull, uncapped beer bottles, horse scat, empty packets of cigarettes, the left foot of a size twelve shoe, a dead army of used condoms, and an old deflated football.” (p 14)

Love and lust in Nigeria. Blackbird is a thrilling story of love and heart break on many levels, populated with interesting characters that proudly wear names like Scorpion, Razor, Nduesoh and Mfoniso. Well formed characters are carefully introduced with impeccable timing. The story revolves along the not too parallel lives of three couples whose demons intersect as a result of love and lust. The confrontations become a vehicle for examining today’s Nigeria. There is Nduesoh and her older white husband, Edward, representing the upper class. Maya and Omoniyi are struggling to make ends meet in the underbelly of Nigeria’s underclass. Ndoesoh’s sister Idara is betrothed to Gabriel, a police officer; they both hope to join Nigeria’s fast shrinking middle class someday. This is modern Nigeria with all of its challenges and triumphs. You will not see these stories in the traditional places where generous prizes are offered to writers willing to pen the past tense for glory. Dibia does a great job of getting into the hearts and heads of his characters. With the exception of a few spots, Dibia effectively deploys the English language as a mere vehicle of communication.  He does falter when he experiments unsuccessfully with Pidgin English. With Blackbird, Dibia makes the case that even in the new dispensation, there is deprivation also. Blackbird wears a carefully designed plot; indeed, Dibia is almost too fastidious in his attention to design detail. In this book, Dibia thought through every sequence, every movement. Gone (well almost) is the over analysis of issues, and the communal navel-gazing; some of the characters actually want to have fun. What a concept.

Well researched analysis. Using muscular research, Dibia tackles a sweeping breadth of canvas and he pulls it off nicely. Under the guise of a romance novel, he explores a broad swath of social issues, starting with the androgynous Omoniyi who is married to the sultry singer Maya, the object of Edward’s wandering eyes. He explores relationships, the failed promise of monogamy, and the yearning that results from material and spiritual deprivation. There are class struggles, sexuality and gender issues, extended family stresses, educational inequities, racism, the obsequious treatment of white expatriates by Nigerians, police brutality, urban renewal and gentrification, etc. Dibia relies on allusions and subliminal messages to tell his story. The protagonist Nduesoh’s self-loathing and self-esteem issues are a collective proxy for communal self-loathing: “She stared at her reflection in the huge mirror… she hated the sight that greeted her – the large landscape of a forehead, the flared nostrils that were begging for a surgeon’s knife, the puffy lips, the spaced out eyes and the gap between the two incisors, which could clearly accommodate another tooth. She was a monstrosity to look at without make-up…” (p 30) I love how Dibia documents perverse gentrification of once tranquil neighborhoods, Nigeria’s upper class have sharp elbows and they are not taking any poor prisoners. There is also true romance, affecting, it touched my rugged heart, all these loving couples that get caught in a culture war of the haves versus the have-nots.

Letting the muse loose. Dibia relaxed his literary muscles and let himself gloriously loose in Chapter 5 and 11 my two favorite chapters. Chapter 5 contains my favorite lines. ‘As Omoniyi walked from the bus, he suddenly felt intimate with this place. It had its own lost soul and palpable body; its own vibe, expressed by a pandemonium of car horns, mixed with the cacophony of tired bus engines, overlaid by a multitude of voices that talked, whispered, shouted, traded, cursed, laughed, cried, sang and sighed, all in unison. Once you set foot in Underground City, you felt its touch and its breath on you.” (p 104) You can almost touch and smell the places the book has been. Tenderness resonates everywhere. Listen to these lovely lines. “Underground City. A conglomeration of roguishly built shanty homes, it flanked the Sambo creek, a torrid expanse of water twisting like loins to the sea.” (p 104) There are also clever allusions to cities like Ajegunle in the barely fictitious names Dibia assigns places, for example, Elnugeja and Muelegba. I would say Chapter 11 is his best. Dibia comes alive with passion and conviction. It reads like the apocalypse. Nigeria’s burden is black on black crime. He unwittingly makes a compelling case. Our leaders are criminals and her followers are fools for taking their nonsense. This book updates the unending catalogue of Nigerians’ fate in the hands of successive herds of rogue leaders in an understated style.

Earning a place in our history. I love Dibia; he shies away from hallucinogenic crap, the staple of some of his writing colleagues.  I liken Dibia to Chukwuemeka Ike, one of Africa’s most understated literary icons. Ike is relatively unknown today because he shunned politics of drama to entertain and educate us with stories of contemporary Nigeria. Like Ike, Dibia is firmly grounded and genuinely focused on understanding our Nigeria. Through his eyes, we see the madness of urban sprawl and the devastation from the exodus from the villages. Dibia knows fashion in an intimidating way; but, he shows off this knowledge tastefully. Dibia quietly shows us Nigeria, a complex place while some of his peers write pretentious nonsense for the cocktail circuits of the West. Dibia has in at least one sense focused on tackling contemporary issues that the ordinary reader can identify with while the older generation of writers brood over the fading past tense. Nigeria is a nation reveling in self-doubt, pining for definitions that spell mimicry. Dibia’s story is familiar to us.

This is not a perfect narrative. Blackbird is not a perfect book. There are simple errors that should have been fixed by an editor. Some of the story’s conflicts appeared contrived and come off as a bit melodramatic, with little nuance. I would advise Dibia to explore his funny side more, He is downright funny when making fun of Nigerians’ quirky ways of giving directions: “That yellow house wey get green-white-green for doormat and opposite am you go see Mama Sikirat beer parlour or when you reach the end of the street, you go see one plank like bridge wey dey near Holy Ghost Church, cross am and in front you go see the house wey get tap for de front.” (p107) Sometimes it has the feel of a soap opera; it has its fair share of clichés and melodrama. At times the dialogue doesn’t flow as well. It clatters towards a hasty unconvincing end like a villager hurriedly gathering her wrapper around her ahead of a gathering storm. There are still traces of Dibia’s tendency to overanalyze; sometimes people just want to have fun. Some would say that Dibia has sewn a web too neat for real life. But Dibia doesn’t live a messy life. What is wrong with that? I make bold to say that this book with all its myriad imperfections is an important scroll. And just so you know, the book’s title, Blackbird, is inspired by Morning Has Broken, a song by Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. You have to give it to Dibia, he is coolly eclectic. I love this man!

It takes uncommon intelligence to survive Africa. I know. I lived it for over two decades. But then, suffering is overrated and conquering it requires effort and uncommon intelligence. Africans are geniuses. So why are things the way they are? We can’t talk about it because white liberals love to stifle debate. White liberals and their African sidekicks love to hate V.S. Naipaul. They refer to him as what Chinua Achebe would refer to as a thoroughgoing racist. Once pronounced thusly, all debate is smothered and we are all back to being human beings again – until the next racist book about Africa is written. And the wailing and drama resume. Sure Naipaul is a racist. And it seems every book written about Africa today is awash in the red ink of racism, bigotry and prejudice.  Even many Africans write about Africa as if they are snooty expatriates from on high. Africa is filth, savagery and broken people pretending to be humans, that is the message they subconsciously communicate.

Liberalism is the arrogant guard of the black wall that rejects debate. No one must go past it. When it comes to matters African, our avuncular white liberals tend to cry louder than the bereaved. We ought to move past cute Third World movies and the despondent poets of the past, dark era that depict us as the other.  Why are things the way they are? Our intellectuals understandably seek desperately to legislate relationships. From Chinua Achebe to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the refrain is: “Can’t you see, we are human beings like you?” We are scared and we lash out at those that ask questions about our humanity and our competence. I fully understand how Achebe can accuse Conrad of racism for turning the corner, seeing Africa and Africans and saying, “This is another planet, these are not my people.” But then at what point do we begin to ask hard questions about ourselves and hold our looter-leaders accountable? Yelling racism keeps at bay the answers to our issues. It drives away accountability also.

I have harsh words for our leaders. Western education has created the worst caliber of leaders that has ever ruled much of Black Africa.  It has taught them the key tenets of selfishness. They lack compassion and understanding. They are solely responsible for the mess that Africa is in today. The white man’s contribution historically is well documented.  Today, he has become a convenient foil for the greed, ineptitude and evil of our leaders. Yelling at the white man has become a money maker.  Our intellectual and political elite have found profitable props in the avuncular patronizing condescending attitudes of white liberals. White liberals have been singularly responsible for genetically coding in our leaders a lack of introspection, an allergy to accepting responsibility and a disdain for the word, credibility. As the Nigerian project has shown, their motto is do what I say, not what I do. Certified wife beaters, thugs and thieves are paraded on the world stage as “statesmen.” Plagiarists are forgiven their transgressions and false prophets are handsomely rewarded for lying about their achievements. There is no excuse for what is happening in Nigeria. At its best, we are looking at uncritical mimicry. Democracy has combined with the new Christianity to become a force more deadly than AIDS in oppressing our people.

African intellectuals are at war with the West. They are human beings and they are not going to stop telling white folks that. They write obsessively about the otherness that is African but they are obsessive about not living the life that they describe so hauntingly in their oh so cute books. Kiran Desai’s gorgeous book The Inheritance of Loss is a work of haunting beauty and dark genius, lovely how she mimics our mimicry, our rejection of the state of being conferred on us by a racist, mean God. We do not question why things are the way they are. We describe what is and demand equality and respect. The self-loathing manifests itself in many ways, not only in Naipaul’s books.

It is tempting to romanticize the writer as a dreamy eyed idealist resting only on truth-oars. With respect to African writers, nothing could be further from the truth. Many African writers have written for dictators, and continue to share wine and break bread with thieves mimicking democracy. When it suits their purposes, they ignore, with powerful words, atrocities committed by their friends and relatives. It is an abuse of power: The power of empty words. But mimicry is not going to get us far. We are building monuments that are unsustainable. We insist on going to the moon when our people hanker for the simple pleasures of clean water, good roads and safe communities. We have embraced a religion that is dismissive and contemptuous of our past and present.  Their God says we must reject our being in order to be accepted by him. Ours is the only race that has uncritically embraced this new plague called Christianity. Mimicry. It will kill off our race.

First published in Next Newspapers, November 14, 2009

There is this thing called the Caine Prize for African Literature, whatever that means. People compete for it and someone invariably wins. There is a lot of noise making and jollification for a deserved win and the poor winner is expected to write a book. The poor fellow always obliges and dutifully produces a thoroughly wretched book. It hardly ever fails. There have been notable exceptions but one would argue that the writer wrote a good book despite winning the Caine Prize. One such wretched book is Harare North, written by the brilliant, perhaps gifted Brian Chikwava. He is destined to write a good book – once he finds his voice. It is just that right now, his toes are flirting with crickets while Africa is carrying elephants on her head. There are few books that have frustrated me more than Harare North. It is like staring in anger at a rich pot of soup ruined by an impish but talented cook.

Harare North is a meandering journey undertaken by an unnamed main character fleeing imaginary trouble back home in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe (you get the story already, sorry!). He heads for London (aka Harare North) and proceeds to lead a wretched meaningless existence.  Saddled with a not-so-bright friend named Shingi he immerses himself in the under belly of the immigrant community in London building tricks to stay above water. It is not pretty but this is not just because of the wretched lives these people live in the grimy underbelly of grimy London. This is an unfortunate book for reasons that are the fault of Chikwava and publishers eager to publish and sell reams of Africa’s dignity to a willing and gullible Western audience. What is it with African writers and stereotyping? In the 21^st century many of them are still scheming their way into the pockets of gullible Westerners who truly believe that Africans are exotic lovable dolts to be watched like animals in a zoo.  I am not amused.

 On one level, Harare North is a brilliant book, written by a brilliant, sensitive author with the potential of shining a compassionate light into the lives of immigrants of color.. And sometimes it works. Chikwava lays bare the tricks that immigrants turn to somehow survive in London. But then, what’s with the contrived English? Harare North is engaging and heart-warming, but the contrived English gets in the way, each time. It is like finding your favorite meal infested with tiny obnoxious stones. The book offers evidence of formerly elegant prose poetry ruined by reckless experimentation with contrived English. There is no linguistic structure to it because the language simply doesn’t exist. Profound thoughts become distressed babble under the weight of dysfunction. Not convincing, the contrived result. Chikwava has dissipated vigorous energy to write nonsense. It is funny but it is nonsense.

 This is too bad because there is all this brilliance peeking furtively out of the contrived fortress of a pretend-language. There is something phony about contrived language, because it is, well, phony. I didn’t like it when Uzodinma Iweala used it in Beasts of No Nation, and I certainly am dismayed that it ruined a brilliant opportunity in Harare North. Read this beauty of a sentence, reconstruct it in real prose and tell me why I shouldn’t mourn the loss of a dream novel: “Harare township is full of them stories about the misfortunes that people meet; they carry bags full of things and heads that is full of wonders of new life, hustle some passage to Harare North, turn up without notice at some relative’s door, only to have they dreams thrown back into they faces.” (p 5)

 The reader is distracted to drink by sentences that Chikwava almost forgot to engineer into nonsense. “And then me I hear that people in the village where Mother is buried will be moved somewhere because government want to take over the area since emeralds have now been discovered there.” (p 17) The language gets in the way in a subversive manner and it as a result the book is torpedoed by an inane contrivance. But I must say Chikwava, can describe despair with a few deft strokes of the pen. “She take me to the kitchen and the air smell of bad cooking and the sink have one heap of dirty dishes and all. It’s like they lie there for donkey years. The ceiling on one corner is growing mushrooms and things.” (p 30)

 It is perhaps a weakness of the narrative that Chikwava could be accused of creating negative stereotypes and spinning bigoted tales at the expense of Zimbabweans. This is not the Zimbabwe of Petina Gappah’s elegant stories (Elegy for Easterly), or even of Dambudzo Marechera’s brilliant angst-ridden anthems. There are traces of bigotry and prejudice some aimed at gays and lesbians. We see the immigrant of color as a shiftless aimless buffoon. This is just one aspect of the immigrant life. Who tells the others? Read it, it is fun despite itself. I do miss Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale. It is a better book. By far.

First published in Next Newspapers, November 20, 2010

There are days in America that wear the beauty of a well-tended garden, every image in its right place, days created the night after goddesses loved and rocked their lovers to blissful restful sleep. On those magical days, I always go for a walk. And my friends come with me, strong voices of Africa, spilling in song out my iPod. Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Sunny Ade, Osita Osadebe, Ebenezer Obey, Rex Lawson, Celestine Ukwu. Prince Nico Mbarga. Victor Uwaifo. They follow me, our ancestors’ son, wearing a blue suit and an attitude, trailing all these people staring at my weirdness.

The guttural sounds of the spirits of Lagos gush out of Fela, Abami Eda, the Weird One. My senses threaten to implode from the torrent gushing out the eaves of Fela’s motor mouth. Alagbon Close. I am the son of my ancestors dressed in the other’s blue suit. I am dancing, dancing, dancing, in my head as Amebo my iPhone shivers with delight.  Listen to those drunken horns strutting high attitude. Fela is perched deep in the orchestra pit of the dispossessed taunting privileged thieves. Hear the horns honking at thieves, mooning bastards:“Now listen now! Now listen now! I dey do my part, I be human being like you like you! I dey sing I dey dance, without me you nor go happy at all at all. Now listen!”

Roforofo Fight. At home, my laptop Cecelia is fueling her breasts with tomorrow’s juice cells. I am feasting on food, rice and designer stew and Jumoke Verissimo’s book. I Am Memory. Hear Verissimo purr. I love this owner of words. Me, I am worshiping in temples where words dare not go. Oh, Fela. Fela is on a roll. Overtake Don Overtake Overtake. ODOO  Hear horns spreading attitude on the antiseptic fields of Babylon.  And I miss my mother, Izuma of the stout bush that cannot be felled. I should be dancing with my mother under that canopy.

American morning. Air, crisp, freshly minted, eager to please, still nippy. Me, hands in winter jacket watching our sons.  Soccer. Little boys bounding out of pods of infinite energy, going at soccer balls and dreams. Our teenage daughter Ominira, snapping pictures that will die on Facebook.  Fela rises out my iPod, sassy. Alu Jon Jonki Jon. Sweet delicious lunacy. Pure genius! Life is good today in Babylon as Fela rides me to that magical place that grows hope out of the oven of defiance. Suffering and Smiling. In Babylon. Fela. Palm Wine Sound. Fela. We are stalking the mean streets of America’s neighborhood, speaking truth to power. Fela. Trumpets strutting denial, horns sobbing, strings snickering justice to injustice.

Fela. Priest, summoning spirits from termite mounds.  Palm Wine Sound. Horns sobbing. Suffering and Smiling. Hear the guttural voice of Abami Eda calling the dispossessed from the latrines of despair. Come and dance. Come and dance. Alu Jon Jonki Jon. Lagos comes calling, with roasted plantain and groundnuts. And trumpets taunt the meek, loosening timid limbs under broken lamp posts.  Tight. This is genius. Listen to that, just listen. Grab Fela and dance, just dance. Today. Who are you re? I say, who are you re?

Winter in America. Snow. White. Wet. Slippery. Me, sober; got the groceries, forgot the cognac. Me, lucid, bored. Fela, Weird One glares out our window, in his underwear, longs for sex & sax. Kalakuta Republic calls. Our sons and other cubs roll the snow brown, building igloos and dreams. In the white plains of America, Olokun cradles our sons, and hands the bigoted bifocals. We did not ask to be born; we will not beg to be saved by this narcissus. Fela, Abami Eda, where are you? Sango’s horn sobs thunder to Ogun’s flash of iron rage. Dance with me. Life is good.

Fela. Monday Morning in Lagos. Joy blares out of horns. Genius. Jazz. Smooth. Raw. Guttural. Words of the oracle chase the cowries of divination on the streets of Ajegunle. The arrangements are pure joy. Lagos lives amidst the horns and the shakara. Pure water. Pure genius. Life is good. Joy. Save me. Christmas Eve. Fela, sassy sax building Lagos brick by brick in our living room. Yellow Fever. My lover and I are busy building a bukateria in the kitchen. America. Exile. Home. Exile dulls her pain on cognac, now my tongue has fallen hard for plump American peaches. Nigeria. I miss Akara junction. I miss my little brother grinning at me as I spend his Naira on long-lost delicacies. Africa calls but it is great to be home with my very own clan and Fela. The seasons are changing. Make wherever you are home. In the beginning, Orunmila made Fela. Esu gave Fela big balls. Orunmila covered Fela’s balls in pants of fire, handed him a sax and said: Go forth and multiply. And Fela complied for once in his riotous life. Oh what joy. What a riot. Abami Eda is up there in the pantheon of imps, suffering and smiling. I miss you, Baba.

First published in Next Newspapers, August 20, 2010

 Fifty years ago Professor Chinua Achebe stunned the world with the novel, Things Fall Apart, a muscular response to the stereotypical way the world viewed Africa in her stories, Driven by fierce pride in our Africa, recoiling from stories that had turned Africa into a disease-ridden pit of mumbling savages, he set out to prove the truth in the East African adage: “Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.”  Achebe was one of an elite squad of super-bright intellectual leaders out of Africa that jacked up conventional prejudiced opinion against the wall of the world’s conscience.

I am in awe of Things Fall Apart. I read it regularly and I always discover something new and insightful in its pages each time I read it. I also marvel at the energy and fierce determination that it took to produce such a masterpiece in a world without word processors and the wondrous tools of the computer and the Internet. Achebe’s generation of writers certainly was seized by a grand vision and in their books they laid it out often with sweeping imagery and majesty. That generation’s energy and disciplined sense of purpose is awe inspiring. Think of what it took to edit Achebe’s manuscript and the energy it required to publish it overseas.

It is virtually impossible to detect an editing issue in Things Fall Apart. This is a miracle considering when, where and how it was written. Achebe’s generation also had the heavy burden of entertaining the community in the absence of the ubiquity of television and the Internet. And they delivered, writing books that even when bereft of any message or ideology, simply delighted and entertained. There was coherence and a consistency in quality and message and it was possible to define and identify a great generation of African writers.

Fast forward to today. Sad to say five decades later, the Nigerian publishing industry is still virtually as inchoate as the environment that drove Things Fall Apart to be published abroad in the fifties. In many ways when you adjust for all the enormous resources available to today’s publishers, one could argue that the publishing industry has gotten worse since then. Sure there are bright spots, but these are sadly outliers. Nigerian writers understandably continue to look to the West for relief from the mediocrity at home. This is a shame; there are many reasons why things are in near disarray; it is not all the fault of our publishers: To say for instance that successive Nigerian governments have been irresponsible is to engage in polite understatement. There is not a shortage of passionate, talented writers willing to write today’s story. But the sad quality of the production mirrors the sad quality of virtually every production from virtually every Nigerian institution. Art imitates life’s reality.

Many Nigerian writers are worthy ambassadors and they do good things for Nigeria. The best of them have been adopted by well funded Western individuals and institutions. The unintended consequence has been to emphasize the narcissistic individualism of our best thinkers. Too self-absorbed to be relevant to Nigeria, they are busy grabbing prizes from the West while giving Westerners condescending lectures for being avuncular and patronizing towards them. They openly eat the cake offered them and demand it back. Given the abysmal state of today’s Nigeria it seems self indulgent for our writers to be jetting around the world, lecturing white folks that we are humans deserving respect.

Many Nigerian writers seem obsessed with garnering lucrative prizes, engaging in gimmicks to enhance book sales, etc. I call it writing to the smell test of dollars. Short stories are hurriedly written to order for the enjoyment of white Johns in return for dollars: “Um, write us a story, fill it with huts, army generals and peasants. I liked the line in your delectable short story, Things Rotten in Nigeria “the fish in the egusi had a face! Brilliant!”

Apparently superciliousness is not exclusive to Nigerian writers. I do love the Caine Prize for African Writing. It has been great for African literature and I applaud the vision of its founders and funders. The Sierra Leonean Olufemi Terry is the 2010 winner of the prize. After winning, however, he assured the BBC that it was “unhelpful” to see writers from Africa as a unique category. Hear Terry: “There is a danger in seeking authenticity in African writing,” He then hoped that winning the prize would help him get his book published.  This is where I lose it with our writers. Terry knew what the Caine writing prize is all about. Hello, it is called the Caine Prize for African Writing, for Heaven’s sakes. Nobody put a gun to his head to compete for the prize. He wrote a short story to the test of this particular prize and he won based on his very “African” short story.  He then proceeds to chide the West for calling him an African writer. Olufemi Terry does not deserve the Caine prize. He should return the prize.

The writer V.S. Naipaul recently published a book, The Masque of Africa that is supposedly based on his recent visits to African countries like Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa. These travels were allegedly to discover the “nature of African belief” according to this review of the book by Sameer Rahim in the UK Telegraph. Rahim gives the clear impression that this book does not improve upon the silence. It is the same tired, stereotypical garbage about Africa and civilizations of color. You wonder if at 80 years of age, Naipaul is finally losing it.

The drama Naipaul records in the book is cringe-worthy: In Gabon, his legs give way and someone attempts to transport him in a broken wheelbarrow. Give us a break! The sad truth is that ever since Naipaul was born among the wretched of the earth, as he would probably put it, he has struggled obsessively to escape his skin. He fills great books with reams of self-loathing. The more he tries to escape his past, the more he is rejected by the interlocutors of his present. His interviewers never fail to notice this little man of color in a tweed jacket huddled in an English countryside abode. Almost every interview of Naipaul mentions with breathless wonder that this man from India via Trinidad is dressed – in a tweed jacket. It is the ultimate rejection of his claim to another civilization, and humanity. Just like us. Naipaul is us.

So, who cares what Naipaul and his ilk say about Africa? The African intellectual from the beginning has been frustrated by the constant label of “the other” that is implied in how Westerners view Africa and her inhabitants. It just seems like as people of color, there is nothing we can do or say that lets even our most liberal Western friends view us as part of a bland, no-drama humanity. It understandably upsets us, and when Naipaul, one of us, joins in the heckling, we froth in the mouth. There is plenty of blame to go around, but African intellectuals refuse to accept responsibility for any of the blame. We have abandoned the peasants who spent so much to get us an education so we could get them out of hell. We are in pursuit of our own needs, screw the people. Wine glass in hand, we mouth white words to white-out what we view as our frailties. Why would anyone look at the charade that is governance in today’s Nigeria and respect it? It is taboo to talk about these things; we say it is self-loathing and racist. With the awesome power of the white man’s own words we bully the West away from the table of dialogue. In secret, we admire these strange people that see tomorrow, and go into it fighting. They are next to their God, the Narcissus who sends mean armies after us in gleeful hunt.

We obsess about what people think of us. I say, get over it; they probably believe we are pretend humans. A pox on their houses. We are not savages. The real savages are the racists in our midst. Possessing only primitive instincts, bereft of thinking skills, they shudder at the other. Racism is savagery; it diminishes the perpetrator and assigns humanity to the garbage heap of Early Man. Only savages would spend trillions on an unnecessary war against those who cannot tell nuclear from noodles. Ask the Iraqis.

There is no defending Naipaul. Achebe already deconstructed Naipaul’s demons and I couldn’t agree with him more. But I say it is time to move from yelling at racists, real or imagined, to reflecting also on our role in this mess. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River was written over four decades ago. Today, black Africa may have regressed from that point in time. Why are things the way they are? We get defensive and yell: “Can’t you see, we are human like you, we wear suits, and we eat ice cream with cutlery!” “We are like you!” is our best defense against charges of our human ineptitude. Yet, our leaders can barely sustain what passes for modern society, even when they are given all the resources. They steal it and invest in pretend processes. Let’s face it: What is racist about pointing out that much of black Africa is a farce today, many thanks to us her intellectuals and leaders?

Raheem observes this about Naipaul: “Perhaps, like his father, he is worried about what he sees when he looks in the mirror. Is he the Nobel Prize-winning sage who has written 30 acclaimed books over 50 years? Or is he a fraud, pretending to be a country gentleman in Wiltshire when his true home is among the wretched of the earth?” The question should be directed not only at Naipaul, but at all of us, fighting gamely to flee the condition we were born into. We may be blue-suited frauds pretending to be country gentlemen even as we ignore the travails of our fellow wretched of the earth.

The era of brutal African dictatorships found many writers of conscience physically and emotionally brutalized. Indeed several works by the writers of that era came later as they began to explore what happened to them and post-colonial Africa. This examination has been an occupation for our writers and this is understandable in many instances. We should talk about this: Why are so many of our writers consuming several lifetimes examining obsessively what they decree is the African condition?

Do not get me wrong, we should all be grateful for the industry of these thinkers, many of whom endured heartbreaking abuse in the hands of military goons simply for owning powerful words. Their insights have been useful in understanding Black Africa, and in sharing with the world state sanctioned black on black crime in Africa. We will forever be in the debt of these fine warriors and wordsmiths. However, we should also rage against literary mulch, useful only as fodder for racist musings. I have never really advocated for positive stories out of Africa; I am simply concerned that if we are the sum of our experience, then contemporary African literature greatly distorts the rich history of the lived life of Africans.

There is now a blossoming industry of African writing that feeds on victimhood and the alleged otherness of Africans. The writers go to great lengths to market their works as truly unique. The problem is that every writer feels the same way and now each work seems to read, look and feel the same. We had Onitsha Market Literature, now we have African Literature. The title African Literature is threatening to be a parody of African culture. Most of these novels are poorly disguised personal and ideological opinions directed at the West, whose people it seems delight in self-flagellation – because they buy these books. The distortion of our history is on the march.

The worst offenders of this new dysfunction that I call African Literature are writers that live in the West. Many of them are like me, they have lived here for decades, cocooned and mummified in a culture of contrived despair. Africa lives rent-free in their heads and they could not tell you the names of their neighbors, they do not see parks, they simply mope around Babylon writing about their Africa. Writers who have lived in Western societies for decades, they clam up like drunken mummies, only to take a break from whining about their lot to write desiccated stories about the Africa of their past. And here is the hilarious irony: When a white person dares do the same thing, they raise holy hell.

This is interesting, because easily the best books on Africa that I have read recently were written by white authors. I remain indebted to them for actually doing the work, traveling to Africa, doing the research, interviewing actual people and then writing a book. Contrast that with the preferred methods of many of my compatriots, which is to simply staple together reams of personal opinions and call the result a novel. So my point is that African writers should stop yelling at white folks for writing about Africa. Let whoever wants write whatever the hell they want. We the consumers will vote with our money. In any case, most African writers have little credibility as far as this matter is concerned. They are mostly just as bad. I personally love Paul Theroux’s writing, I think he is a better writer on Africa (whatever the hell that means) than many African writers I have read. And yes, his prejudiced slips show just as magnificently as those of his African-writer brethren, so there. Who cares? I have enjoyed his perspectives on Africa.

Many times Africa’s unnecessary drama exaggerates and inflames Western prejudices. The other day, a Western liberal railed about the racism of a Western newspaper reporting about goats kept in a police cell in a God forsaken African country. I felt that he was pandering to the choir as they all always do. I asked him, “In your village, do you lock up goats in your police cells? So, don’t you think it is racism to accept less from your siblings?”

In many instances, my brothers and sisters are worse than Westerners in terms of the evil that they are rightfully upset about that. Let us turn our gaze inwards and examine ourselves. And yes, let us turn our gaze outwards and examine the savagery of the other. When you look hard, it is even more spectacular than Africa’s. Did America not just spend $35 billion on weapons that she promptly abandoned? This in the midst of the poverty of her people, and yes, Africans? Who talks about that savagery? Her African American children languish in jails at a cost per warrior of $80,000 a year and they will not spend $12,000 a year on educating her children. Who talks about that savagery? Our writers in the Diaspora are more qualified than anyone else to speak truth to power by pointing out these things. They should start writing and talking – about the Babylon that adopted them.

Note: Reprinted for archival purposes; first published May 28, 2011

I am still fuming over the wretchedness of almost all the offerings on the shortlist of the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. Aided by some needy “African” writers, Africa is being portrayed as an issues-laden continent that is best viewed on a fly-infested canvas. Memo to the Caine Prize folks: It doesn’t have to be all about issues. Just tell me a story, any story.

The Caine Prize is beginning to behave like much of the aid that is funneled towards Africa and black nations. The wrong people are benefitting from the West’s fascination with all things impoverished and African. Let me observe that aid (without accompanying accountability) is threatening to cripple black Africa’s ability to breathe on her own. An army of ne’er do well NGOs tramples through black Africa, armed with dollars and drunken liberal opinions, “eradicating” poverty, disease, illiteracy and saving trees and chimps from those “Africans” who love roasting bushmeat with bush twigs. These issues remain precisely because it is not in the interest of these termite stakeholders to eradicate these issues. They would be out of a paycheck. These poverty pimps are mostly self-serving intellectuals wailing all the way to the bank. The West and her liberal purveyors of snake-oil remedies for fixing “Africa” ignore unintended consequences. We were felling trees before the “explorers” came with demands for “resources.” Right after Nigeria’s civil war ended, the West decided to help all of us who survived that war. I was in my first year of secondary school. Someone must have determined that I was suffering from rank malnutrition. I was poorly fed, not because of the war; the Catholic priests who ran my school were mean cheapskates. The do-gooders supplied us tons of stockfish, wheat, and powdered milk. We were several hundred boys in this Boarding school. The rock-hard stockfish ruined all our teeth; each time we drank the milk, we all sprinted for the latrine, all six hundred of us. We were lactose intolerant.

Helped with lots of dollars, the West is now busily forcing our stories into a particularly obnoxious trajectory. The allure of fame is overwhelming and our writers are trying way too hard to be “African” writers. They seek a vision that eludes them because it is wrong. Perhaps the term African writer is too limiting. I say screw boundaries and prizes, just write. Contemporary African writing is suffering from a serious hangover, the deleterious effect of overdosing on the legacy of Africa’s misery and the over-documentation of it by the previous generation of writers. The older writers for the most part genuinely wrote what they felt in their hearts and bones – the prejudice of colonialism, racism, anxieties about postcolonial life, and the painful alienation of exile. Suffering and anxieties united the writers, and forged a bond that in many instances sharpened the focus of their minds and pens. You don’t get the sense that the stories were contrived to fit a market.  Similarly, read the poetry of that era and you feel that a historian could piece together the issues of the times quite coherently.

Today, contemporary African writing as defined by what one reads in books is struggling to find a personality. I think I understand why: Whereas the previous generation of writers had only the book and traditional publishing as the avenue for expression, today’s generation has an avalanche of avenues. And they are exploring all of them. Unfortunately, the yardstick for judging African writing continues to be what is in print. The Caine Prize will not accept short stories that do not come from publishers (although they do accept offerings from online journals). The contemporary representation of our writing is becoming offensive at a time when today’s writers are putting out some pretty muscular stuff in the new media. In fact, it is at once an exciting and a frustrating time to be reading African literature because technology forces too much of it on the reader. There is an overwhelming abundance of stellar prose and poetry in places where judges of African writing are not looking. They should look harder.

I like the Caine Prize. I love that the Prize has done writers’ workshops in various parts. I hope that the organizers spend time to reflect on its vision and purpose. They should review the short-lists and winners since its inception, and put structures in place that ensure a more rounded set of offerings each year. I am not particularly sure why the stories’ settings are physically in Africa. Is this a requirement? They may wish to explore if that is part of the reason why the range of the output is so narrow. It is not always about issues; I know many African writers who simply write to delight. Many African writers happily dominate writing genres that do not define what the world knows and expects of African writing. I have come to believe that in the age of Facebook, the term “African writing” is as useful and empowering as the term “African. I am being sarcastic of course.