Pa Ikhide

I don’t know why I came to America. The year was 1982. Nigeria was a world super power, our embassies all over the world routinely denied white people visas to come to Nigeria (yes, we did!). Sisi Clara at the embassy in Washington DC would take one withering look at the pale jelly fish quivering in her presence at the embassy, stamp a lusty DENIED! on his passport and shoo him off with the sage words: “Gerraway jo! Olosi! Your father will not see Nigeria, your mother will not see Nigeria! You will not see the yansh of Nigeria! Olosi! Olori buruku! Moose from Alaska!” And the wimp would slink off wailing: “I want to go to Nigeria! Waaaaaaaaah!” Those were the days. The Naira was stronger than the American dollar and university graduates were paid N300 a month. That was a lot of money in those days. I would know. So, my friend Fat Stanley and I were really enjoying life. We walked around telling people that we were university graduates and people gave us things for being graduates; their money, their daughters, their chickens and their goats. Sometimes they tried to give us their wives. Life was good. The Gulder was flowing, the suya was on the barbecue grill everyday, man, life was good.

 So, I don’t know why I came to America. I am a Nigerian in America. I have been a Nigerian since escaping to America. I have been trying not to be an American since I came to America. The harder I try, the worse it gets, this Nigerianness. There was no reason for me to leave Nigeria. It was 1982, Nigeria was a world super-power, richer than even America. My best friend was Fat Stanley and we were members of a posse of irresponsible Nigerian youths. We were irresponsible because there was nothing to be responsible for and about. Anything we wanted, our parents gladly gave to us. But we were miserable; America was calling out to our restless souls. In Nigeria, like most Nigerians, I did not enjoy being a Nigerian. I wanted to come to America to be an American. Fat Stanley wrote me long letters about the heaven called America and the nightclubs and the women. He wrote about enchanting evenings with American women spent on a strange American activity called a “date”, a ritual that seemed to involve spending dollars. But not to worry, Fat Stanley wrote, the dollars are there. He wrote me in the winters of his exile and my despair and sent me pictures of himself, plump, well fed, leaning on his Cadillac, his winter jacket draped in the dreamy white of snow flakes. He complained a lot in his letters: about the stress of having so many girlfriends, white, black and brown! White girlfriends! He complained about the sex, sex, sex, too much of it, because, you guessed it, he had too many girlfriends! He complained about the food, the chicken that you could have all to yourself, how boring! And the turkeys, he said were of the mutant varieties, giant birds that would make our Nigerian turkeys look like distressed pigeons. I cried and refused to be consoled until my family, actually, my entire village came together and stole enough gofment money to take me to America.

And then I came to America. It was great to see Fat Stanley. For ten minutes. And then I found out a few things about Fat Stanley and America. The Cadillac was not his. Fat Stanley loved taking colored pictures of himself posing by other people’s cars in the parking lot of American shopping malls. Even the winter jacket was not his. Fat Stanley no longer liked us holding hands with me for long walks, any walk, even like we used to do over and over back home in Nigeria. He said it was too gay, whatever that meant. Fat Stanley got one thing right though; there were lots of huge women. I vividly remember my first iyawo. Her right arm alone weighed more than all of my skinny little self and she ate like a starved elephant. Fat Stanley’s Nigerian accent was no longer his. He spoke like a masquerade – through his nose and with his tongue tied in several alien knots. I loved that part about him. I loved his new accent. I simply could not wait to sound like him.

When I first came to America, whenever I opened my mouth, Only Fat Stanley could understand me. Americans avoided conversations with me; they would bribe me with hamburgers not to talk to them. My lecturers promised me top grades if I didn’t raise my hand in class; it was just too stressful for them to decode my guttural sounds. My situation was very stressful to Fat Stanley. Each time, I opened my mouth, Fat Stanley would whine thusly: “Abeg arrange your mouth! Dem nor go understand you!” Fat Stanley told me I had to take accent reduction classes if I was to survive in America. I took the accent reduction classes in Mazi Okezie Ekene Dili Chukwu’s one-room “apartment.” Mazi Chuck as we called him had been in America for twenty years; he spoke like a Made-in-Aba American. I liked that. I took his classes and now no one understands my accent. Not even me.  Whenever I open my mouth, Americans coo “I love your accent! Is that British?” I find this habit racist, definitely aggravating. The people that irritate me the most are the Nigerians that come to the restaurant where I work. They step into my fast food restaurant and even though my name tag says JEFF (not my real name, long story, you won’t understand, trust me!) these bad belle messiahs would go “Nna men, na where you come from?” I always say Pittsburgh! They don’t like that. But who cares? Fat Stanley and I are still here, middle-aged dreamers luxuriating in the wretched promise of America’s love that never shows up. Fat Stanley is now simply Stanley, gone scrawny from shoveling snow and America’s bullshit off his driveway and his dreams. But who cares? We are Americans!

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

(Remarks at the Anglophone-Francophone Cultural Conversations Panel Convened by the African Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Penn State University, February 27, 2013)

First things first. I want to thank the usual suspects for inviting me back home to give a talk. For those of you who are new members of the Penn State community in this audience, I use the word home because this is where it all began – I mean my career – amidst wonderful colleagues and under the exceptional mentorship of Professor Carey Eckhardt, my Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor Thomas Hale who, at the time, was Chair of the French Department. Since I left to join other wonderful colleagues in another wonderful Department at Carleton University in Canada, every return to Penn State, for me, is an answer to the call of home, to the summon of origins. Penn State does to me what “the call of the river nun” does to the poet, Gabriel Okara, in his famous poem of the same title:

I hear your call!
I hear it far away;
I hear it break the circle of these crouching hills.

I want to view your face again and feel your cold embrace;
or at your brim to set myself and inhale your breath;
or like the trees, to watch my mirrored self unfold and span my days with song from the lips of dawn.

I hear your lapping call!
I hear it coming through; invoking the ghost of a child listening, where river birds hail your silver-surfaced flow.

That’s the river nun for Okara, that’s Penn State for me. Let me also ask this audience to join me in wishing Professor Eckhardt a wonderful birthday. Because she is present here, most of you may not have even suspected that it’s her birthday today! And while you are at it, you may also want to wish me a happy birthday. When my head obeyed the marching orders of my feet in the direction of Penn State after my doctoral degree, little did I know that I was coming to work and bond with a Chair whose birthday I share and who has been so instrumental to my development as a scholar. Yes, Carey Eckhardt and I were born the same day. Not the same year o!

I have modelled my title on a title and a concept. Everyone here, I’m sure, is familiar with the movie, The Hunt for Red October. That is where the hunt in my title comes from, given the resonance that the hunt for that elusive Russian submarine has for my own idea of a similar hunt for a particular kind of conversation across borders within the ranks of Anglophone African literary and cultural intellection.  Francophonism, I presume, oozes a whiff of the familiar for all of us here, given its immediate evocation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s atavistic struggle to rid African letters of the “parasite” (his word) he calls Europhonism.

I don’t need to belabour the meaning of that concept – Europhonism – for an audience such as this. Suffice it to say that if Europhonism, as coined and deployed by Ngugi, encompasses the entire corpus of modern African literatures produced in the language of the colonizer, it stands to reason that the concept must have component parts known as Anglophonism, Lusophonism, and, of course, Francophonism. To remain faithful to the theme of this panel, I have decided to focus only on the history of encounters, discoveries, and contact zones between Anglophonism and Francophonism. I will frame Anglophone African literature’s quest for a conversation with the Francophone text as the story of a hunt, not unlike the hunt for red October.

Although the coming into consciousness of the literary other across the iron curtain of language – the so-called Anglophone-Francophone divide – was a mutual process, I have decided to look at just one side of the story in a necessarily inexhaustive manner, while hoping that my talking point would lead to a fuller examination of both sides of the coin when we get to Q and A. For instance, since I will be addressing the conversations from the perspective of the Anglophones, I will not be talking about the journal, Présence Africaine, by far the most significant contribution to cross-border conversations in African literatures.

Luckily, my brother and colleague, Professor Ken Harrow is here. Ken and I have been having wonderful and productive conversations in recent years so it’s a good thing you have invited both of us to this panel. We have agreed to a division of labour. I will take us down memory lane and bring things up to the beginning of the third generation phenomenon in African writing. Ken will take over and flesh things out while also paying attention to Nollywood. My approach in this exercise is part literary history, part anecdote, and part theory. In other words, I am going to be touching various parts of the body of an elephant like Bernth Lindfors’s proverbial blind men, hoping that the various parts will come together seamlessly to give us a window into Anglophone African literature’s discovery of and conversations with her Francophone African counterpart across generations.

Francophonism came to global reckoning ahead of its counterpart, Anglophonism. I am thinking of Négritude galloping to European recognition and canonicity after its discovery by André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre and in the ambience of recognition afforded the Negro-African text by René Maran’s winning of the Prix Goncourt in 1921. However, contact zones emerged as soon as Anglophonism found her voice decades later. Sadly, the rich tapestry of Anglophonic voyages of discovery into Francophonism is always overshadowed by the story, so often told, of a foundational hostility. Everyone coming to the subject of how Anglophone African literatures discovered and processed the alterity of the Francophonic text always automatically thinks of Wole Soyinka’s famed outburst about the tiger and the tigritude. In essence, Anglophone Africa is said to have fired the first shot in what is then dressed up as an intractable sibling rivalry underwritten by the invisible leash of the coloniality – especially on the Francophone side.

Those persuaded by the thesis that Anglophonism rode to its first meeting place with Francophonism in an armoured tank love to present Eskia Mpahlele’s well-known hostility to Negritude as the younger brother of Soyinka’s foundational hostility. You will recall that Mpahlele was so vocal in his critique of Negritude in the 60s that he was eventually forced to defend himself against charges of “hindering or frustrating the protest literature of negritude its mission”. Hence, in his 1963 essay entitled, “On Negritude in Literature”, Mpahlele avers that his hostility to that Francophonic body of work is based on the fact that:

“Too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa-as a symbol of innocence, purity, and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. I am a violent person and proud of it because it is often a healthy human state of mind; someday I’m going to plunder, rape, set things on fire, I’m going to cut somebody’s throat; I’m going to subvert a government; I’m going to organize a coup d’etat; yes, I’m going to oppress my own people; I’m going to hunt the rich fat black men who bully the small weak black men and destroy them; I’m going to become a capitalist, and woe to all who cross my path or who want to be my servants or chauffeurs and so on; I’m going to lead a breakaway church there is money in it; I’m going to attack the black bourgeoisie while I cultivate a garden, rear dogs and parrots; listen to jazz and classics, read “culture”, and so on. Yes, I’m going to organize a strike. Don’t you know that sometimes I kill to the rhythm of drums and cut the sinews of a baby to cure it of paralysis? This is only a dramatization of what Africa can do and is doing. The image of Africa consists of all these, and others. And negritude poetry pretends that they do not constitute the image and leaves them out. So we are told only half-often even a falsified half-of the story of Africa. Sheer romanticism that fails to see the large landscape of the personality of the African makes bad poetry. The omission of these elements of a continent in turmoil reflects a defective poetic vision. The greatest of Leopold Sedar Senghor is that which portrays in himself the meeting point of Europe and Africa. This is realistic and honest and a most meaningful symbol of Africa: an ambivalent continent searching for equilibrium. This synthesis of Europe and Africa does not necessarily reject the negro-ness of the African.”

I am smiling as I read this long quote because Mpahlele reminds me so much of his contemporary incarnate, the Nigerian literary and cultural critic, Ikhide Ikheloa, whose reputation as the “Area Fada” of contemporary Nigerian letters is soaring. This is the sort of irreverent spanking Ikhide would have given Negritude were he a participant in the Anglophone hunt for Francophonism in the 1960s and 1970s.  Beyond these hostilities, however, the picture is actually neater and speaks of an Anglophonic spirit of curiosity mediated initially by the cultural hand of Europe. I am thinking of the roles played by the likes of Ulli Beier, Gerald Moore, and Janheiz Jahn in initiating a conversation by breaking linguistic boundaries to bring Negritude poetry into the world and consciousness of the literary generation they worked with in Anglophone Africa, notably Nigeria.

Significantly, the journal in which this conversation started bore no other name than Black Orpheus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous baptismal name for Negritude poetics. We can get into the nature of these initial conversations during our discussions. Suffice it to say that Soyinka, Mpahlele, and their generation owe their awareness of Negritude poetry largely to the translations and commentary of these pioneering European Africanists. Jahn’s Muntu, for instance, contains an exploratory section on Négritude and Surrealism and Negritude and Expressionism that were very useful for the Anglophone literati and culturati in the 1960s. And no one can forget the impact of Beier’s and Moore’s 1963 The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry in terms of the conversations it initiated between the major continental traditions in European languages: Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone.

I always like to think that this is what set the tone for the monumental work of cultural translation and literary conversation that Abiola Irele did in the 1960s. He almost single-handedly commenced the tradition of serious Anglophonic exegeses of the Francophonic text with his essay, “A Defence of Negritude” (1964).  Now, why would a contemporary of Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo, and JP Clark need to mount a defence of Negritude in the charged atmosphere of the sixties? And in whose court was Irele defending Negritude? Let’s hear Irele out:

“While the concept of negritude has met with considerable success in French intellectual circles, though not without inspiring some controversy among certain French African elements, it has met with either suspicion or open hostility (and even ridicule) among English-speaking Africans. Much of this attitude arises, I believe, from grave misconceptions about the real aims of the movement in general, and in some cases, from prejudice and complete lack of knowledge. It is in this respect that the recent separate publication of Sartre’s preface in an English translation comes as a welcome move.”

Nobody, I believe, should be surprised that Irele went ahead to publish two seminal essays in 1965, “Negritude: Literature and Ideology,” and “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism”, to reduce his Anglophone contemporaries’ ignorance of the concept, increase the love, and enhance the conversation. Irele’s efforts – and the antecedent efforts of the Europeans – paid off. Subsequent anthologies of African poetry, this time edited by African literati, included selections from the Negritude corpus, complete with very helpful introductions for an Anglophonic audience. I am thinking, in particular, of Donatus Ibe Nwoga’s West African Verse, the text from which generations of Anglophone West African school kids, including yours truly, learnt to chant, “Africa my Africa/Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs” in our pre-teenage and teenage years. Oh how we loved the intensity of:

The blood of your sweat

The sweat of your toil

The toil of slavery

The slavery of your children

We would turn it into music! In 1975, the hostile Wole Soyinka eventually allowed Senghor, Birago Diop, and David Diop to proclaim their tigritude to their hearts’ content in his edited volume, Poems of Black Africa.There is also A Selection of African Poetry (1976) edited by K.E. Senanu and Theo Vincent.

Since we are talking of the 1960s and 1970s, it is perhaps a good idea to mention the fact that the Anglophone hunt for Francophonism in the era was equally very productive at the level of thought. Anglophone African writers and intellectuals discovered and deployed Francophonic radical thought and intellection with considerable vigour. Frantz Fanon inspired generations of Anglophone African intellectuals, especially the neo-Marxist writers and literary scholars of the 1960s  – 1980s. Think of the essayistic careers of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Eskia Mpahlele, Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Niyi Osundare, Biodun Jeyifo. Through Fanon, the Anglophone world would also encounter his teacher, the Césaire of Discourse on Colonialism. Down the road, the Anglophones, especially those who trained in North American English Departments, would also discover the Edouard Glissant of Caribbean Discourse.

We could spend time talking about Anglophone discoveries of Francophonism in other genres – the novel, drama, and even music – but I’d like to talk about a doubly neglected genre: the short story. I did say that part of this presentation would be anecdotal. In the late 1990s, I made trips to South Africa on a Fellowship offered by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS). My research mandate was to study the attention paid to Francophone African Literatures in the curricula of select South African Universities. You can see that I’ve been involved in these literary conversations between Anglophone and Francophone Africa for a while. Here was France recruiting a Nigerian to go to South Africa and examine the health of Francophone African literatures in that post-Apartheid clime. During my visits to South Africa, I got the opportunity to meet many South African writers and formed lasting friendships. One of them was the novelist and poet, Stephen Gray. Stephen at the time was always complaining about the lack of attention to the short story in both the creative and critical aspects of African literatures. “Look at Nadine Gordimer”, he would exclaim, “She is always represented as a novelist. Nobody seems to remember that half her career is that of a short story writer.”

Stephen wasn’t just agonizing, he was organizing. He had proposed and was working with Picador on a book of African Stories. He had received original stories from some of the continent’s best writers: Ama Ata Aidoo, Nuruddin Farah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Yvonne Vera and so many others. But he wasn’t satisfied. One day, over lunch at his house in Crown Mines, Johannesburg, he complained to me about a second problem. According to Stephen, super-imposed on the marginalization of the short story is a second problem: a complete lack of conversation between the short stories of Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa. He was going to help overcome that problem by creating a common universe for stories from these traditions. “You’ll have to translate one of my French entries to English,” says Stephen, “a fantastic story by the Moroccan writer, Lotfi Akalay.” I acquiesced.

In 2000, The Picador Book of African Stories, edited by Stephen Gray, was published. Given the background I have provided about Stephen’s Anglophonic hunt for Francophonism and Lusophonism, you should not be surprised by this statement in his introduction to the volume:

“From the first I was determined that this Picador Book should not – as some recent anthologies of African writing have done – give the impression that all the literature in the continent worth reading is really written in English, with perhaps the odd translation attached. Only nineteen out of forty pieces were originally written in English, a fair proportion. French, being my reading language, I have always been able to keep abreast of French-language developments, and have convinced a team of translators to make rare, choice texts in French which I feel should not be overlooked available in English (in all thirteen pieces derive from the Francophone African world).”

Shortly after the publication of the book by Picador, one member of Stephen’s team of translators, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, was surprised to receive a cheque of one hundred pounds from the publisher for the translation role he played in Stephen Gray’s hunt for Francophonism! You can see that the financial aspect of my own participation in the Anglophone-Francophone literary conversation mirrors the story of Africa in a funny way. First, the French send me to South Africa to see if African literatures written in their language is being properly taught in that country’s Universities. In South Africa, I get involved in a project for which I am paid in the currency of the Queen of England. Those are the sinewy hands of Britain and France in Africa’s cultural work but, trust me, imperialism was nowhere near my mind when I got that cheque!

I am having to make a lot of shifts because of time constraint. Mentioning the year two thousand allows me to make another huge leap into what has been happening in terms of the Anglophone search for Francophonism. Although the phenomenon that is generally known as third-generation African writing was a phenomenon of the 1990s, it was discovered in the West and canonized only after members of that generation began to win international literary prizes. The Caine Prize was inaugurated and brought Helon Habila, Binyavanga Wainaina and Monica Arac de Nyeko to reckoning. Chris Abani got his break in the United States and so did Teju Cole. Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Lola Shoneyin all got their respective breaks. In Francophone Africa, a new generation emerged: Calixthe Beyala, Abdourahman Ali Waberi, Bessora, Alain Mabanckou, Kossi Efoui, Leonora Miano, Fatou Diome, and so many others.

I’ve heard many critical descriptions of this generation. For the Anglophones, I’ve co-edited refereed journals calling them the third generation; I’ve heard some use the term “post-Uhuru writers” for the East Africans; I’ve heard post-Apartheid for the South Africans. It’s a good thing that my very good friend, Gabeba Baderoon is here. She can tell us about her post-Apartheid contemporaries later. On the Francophone side of the divide, those writing Africa in my generation are known as “migritude writers” or, as my friend, Abdourahman Waberi describes them in a famous essay, “the children of the postcolony.”

In my opinion, it is now possible to talk of waves with third generation writing, especially in Nigeria. There is a sense in which the poets who blazed the trail in the 1980s-1990s cannot easily be lumped with the current twitter generation. I am thinking of a certain temporal and aesthetic distance between Chiedu Ezeanah, Toyin Adewale Nduka, Ogaga Ifowodo, Afam Akeh, Uche Nduka, Obu Udeozo, Olu Oguibe, Remi Raji, Amatoritsero Ede, Nduka Otiono on the one hand and much newer kids on the block such as Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Richard Ali, Eghosa Imasuen, Ukamaka Olisakwe Evelyn, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo, and Chinyere Iwuala Obasi on the other hand.

How do these waves of third generation writers handle Francophonic alterity? Alas, the news is not so good. I cannot point to anything close to the active hunt for Francophonism and the cross-border discourses which characterised the Soyinka era. This is strange considering the fact that the new writers inhabit the borderless world of social media and the blogosphere.  Beyond the Anglophonic provincialism of too many of my peers in contemporary Nigerian writing for whom African literature starts in Lagos and ends in Johannesburg via Nsukka, Ibadan, and Nairobi, I can point to patterns of awareness of our Francophone contemporaries by particular writers who are inspired to invest in literary knowledges across Africa’s colonial language borders. For instance, Chuma Nwokolo, author of The Ghost of Sani Abacha, has taken Francophonic content extremely seriously for his ezine, African Writing, and would often consult me on Francophone writing during production period of particular issues.

Lola Shoneyin’s interest in our Francophone contemporaries goes all the way back to our Ibadan years in the mid-1990s. She would go through my vast library of Francophone novels, making me tell her about Beyala, Mabanckou, Waberi and a host of others and yearning for English translations. Today, that nascent interest has morphed into active engagement. The author of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives counts Francophone writers – including Mabanckou – in her list of friends. Come November 2013, Shoneyin will be organizing a major book festival in Nigeria and she’s is paying considerable attention to Anglophone-Francophone conversations. Yours truly is billed to mount the stage with Alain Mabanckou at the event.

What I am saying is that the nature of the conversation has changed with the new generation of African writers on both sides of the language divide. While the writers in question have migrated en masse to social media, tweeting, Facebooking, and running very active blogs, that very medium fosters borderless co-presence more than it fosters serious conversation. Soyinka, Mpahlele, and others in their generation actively engaged Négritude and discoursed it. We cannot speak of that level of engagement of migritude by the new generation despite the increasing availability of migritude novels and commentary in English.  The Francophones are just as guilty of provincialism. As far as I know, Abdourahman Waberi and Patrice Nganang are among the very few who engage the works and discourses of their contemporaries in Anglophone Africa. Waberi has even featured yours truly in his blog after the Penguin Prize.

As far as conversations go, generational ezines fare generally better than blogs on both sides. Saraba Magazine, African Writing and other Anglophonic ezines pay some attention to Francophone material. Africultures, the famous internet age successor of Présence Africaine in the Francophone world, also pays the occasional attention to Anglophonic material. However, popular blogs by prominent literati on both sides create universes of Anglophonism and Francophonism respectively. Ikhide Ikheloa’s blog is doing incredible work for new African writing but it basks and waltzes in its Anglophonic non-attention to the other half of the continent’s literature, even in English translation. Apart from the already-cited Waberi who invests a lot in Anglophonic knowledges, the novelists Kangni Alem and Bessora run very popular blogs. Both blogs, like Ikhide’s on the Anglophone side, are monuments to Francophonic literary navel gazing.

Perhaps the privileging of social media co-presence over cross-border conversations is due in part to insufficient effort of cultural translation? If Abiola Irele robustly and relentlessly carried Négritude across to the Anglophone literati, who, in my generation, is doing the same for migritude today? Perhaps those of us with one leg in each world, Anglophone and Francophone, ought to do more carrying across work?  Perhaps we need to try harder to sustain the example of Abiola Irele? Perhaps somebody like me needs to return to the role I played for my generation in the Lagos-Ibadan axis of Nigerian letters in the 1990s?

Week after week, as a Special Guest Critic of the defunct Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS) edited by Nduka Otiono, I reviewed Francophone African novels, translated major interviews of Francophone African writers, wrote op-eds on burning issues in the Francophone African literary world, such as the Calixthe Beyala plagiariasm-of-Ben-Okri scandal, all for the consumption of my contemporaries. Sometimes, publications such as Glendora Review would lure me away from PELS and ask for reflections on current trends in Francophone African literatures. Sometimes, Odia Ofeimun, Harry Garuba, Akin Adesokan, Ogaga Ifowodo, Charles Ogu, Chiedu Ezeanah, Sola Olorunyomi, Nduka Otiono – folks I teased and taunted as one-legged writers because of the missing Francophone leg – would ask me to write about specific issues they wanted to know about the Francophone world.

I don’t do this kind of work anymore. I just do my thing. Abiola Irele still does. As recently as 2010, he published The Negritude Moment. This is what I mean by our failure to sustain his example. Is anybody doing this kind of cultural translation work for the wave of Nigerian writing represented by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Richard Ugbede Ali, Eghosa Imasuen, Olisakwe Ukamaka Evelyn, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo, and Chinyere Iwuala Obasi? I don’t know. Are these writers evolving in a world with sufficient inflatus for cross-border conversations? I don’t know. Shall we wake up one day to piquant and irreverent opinions about the Francophonic literary world on Ikhide Ikheloa’s blog? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

We were sent the wrong people. We asked for statesmen and we were sent executioners. – Wole Soyinka

I salute the French for rescuing Mali from her oppressors. A pox on the houses of those African intellectuals muttering into their navels about imperialism, prattle, prattle, prattle. I wish the French would land Nigeria and come and rescue my mother from this perversion called “democracy.” Actually, a “No Fly Zone” over her village would be very nice, thank you. Any African intellectual who doesn’t like my attitude should go find the largest rock in Olumo and hit it repeatedly with the head.

There is something profoundly hypocritical about today’s African intellectual. The African intellectual most probably lives in the West, is funded by Western largesse and structures, children and family members are far away from the scene of the crime, attending good schools and hospitals in the West, yes, receiving good Western education, protected by Western structures and processes of Western civilization, in effect living a lush life of Western colonization, yet, insisting that the liberation of less fortunate Africans, those who have no voices must be from within Africa. How hypocritical is that?

You are protected day and night in the cafes of Europe and America by unmanned drones and you rail against unmanned drones liberating your people from their people? You and your family are in effect luxuriating in the laps of the imperialist, enjoying the trappings of your capture and you deny your siblings the same privilege? How hypocritical is that? If your child cannot attend the primary school in this video, please do not come talk to me about “imperialism.” I pray every day that the French, anyone comes to rescue these children from the war they found themselves in. Someone should chase you from that Starbucks. Go get your own WiFi, free-loader. I said it. Sue me. *cycles away slowly*

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. – Dante Alighieri, Inferno

 All thinking Nigerians should watch Channels Television’s video clip of the dilapidation and national embarrassment euphemistically called Ikeja Police Academy or Ikeja Police College. It bears repeating: These images of Nigerian police “trainees” in quarters unfit for hogs should break each of our hearts. What you have seen of the Police College is just the tip of the iceberg of the life that I survived in Nigeria as a “barrack boy” and as a ward of various public institutions.  If you don’t believe me, here is a video clip that documents the horrid state of public education in Anambra State. Anambra state is Nigeria, what you will watch is what obtains pretty much anywhere in Nigeria where the dispossessed cannot buy their way out of hell with stolen dollars. Forget the decrepit infrastructure and listen to the bald-faced bullshit of the “commissioner for education,” the “governor,” etc. They stand before decayed buildings, remnants of what was gifted us by the colonialists and the first military governments and they shamelessly reel off insincere words like “collaboration,” “empowerment,” etc. Meanwhile, not one of their kids attends these pigsties and hovels. Chew on this: When you calculate the cost per policeman, the cost per pupil in those public schools, I can bet you that the figures are competitive with the same figures in the West, the only difference being that much of the funds are looted in Nigeria.

The state of Ikeja Police Academy is the state of most police barracks in the urban areas of Nigeria. I should know. My dad is an alumnus of Ikeja Police Academy (1955). He also attended a number of training programs there over the course of his long career as a policeman. I am what Nigerians call a “barrack boy.” I grew up in the barracks, born in what was then known as Ikeja General Hospital. My parents took me home to Ikeja Police Barracks and then Falomo Police Barracks.  Our Yoruba neighbors nicknamed me “Babatunde” in the barracks because I was born three weeks after the death of my paternal grandfather. When I was not in Boarding school, I lived in various police barracks all my life. I remember Moor plantation Ibadan; we used to get a supply of fresh milk delivered to our home daily. We were at Eileyele Barracks in Ibadan, where my father was part of the first set of the elite “Kill and Go” Mobile Police Force (Mopol 4).

Around 1966, we moved to Sapele Road Benin City, where my father helped to start the Mobile Police unit (Mopol 5). My childhood memories are of a blur of barracks  all over the then Western Region – Lagos, Ibadan, Moor Plantation, Benin City, Igarra, Sabongida Ora, Agenebode, etc, etc. My dad is a real Nigerian hero if there ever was one. He never tires of telling me that when the Queen of England visited Nigeria in the late 50’s, he was one of 100 hand-selected “handsome” police officers that performed parades for her wherever she went. He claims that the Queen stopped by him at one of the parades and asked a question about his uniform but by protocol his commanding officer had to respond to the question. My dad was always a fantastic but unreliable historian.

Some are of the opinion that police officers and their families should also bear responsibility for the squalid mess that we see in the barracks.  Well, in the cities, the living quarters in the barracks we lived in were cramped and squalid. It is a structural problem, they were not meant for our way of life.  The extended family was an integral part of our existence and if you lived in the cities as we did, there was a constant flow of relatives from the village wanting to try their luck in the cities; get an education, get a job, start a business, or in a few cases, hit my dad up for money. I do not remember any time that someone took a paint brush to the walls of any barracks that we lived in. I do not remember any maintenance. Not that there was much to maintain. There were walls and space, nothing else.

In the police barracks of my childhood, “rank and file” policemen lived in two rooms per family, a room and a parlor. There was typically a shared latrine and bathing quarters. They were filthy because they were not enough for the hordes of people cramped into the rooms. I hated taking baths and I doubly hated using the latrines. In Benin City, the latrine was a hole that led to a bucket. Each night, night soil removers or agbepo (as they were called) would come and take away the buckets and replace them with fresh buckets. Filthy work. For some strange reason these men were ill-tempered and if they caught you doing your business when they were visiting, you were in big trouble. Some kids would fool around with them, put “kaun” or potash in the buckets and watch the feces foam and pour all over them. Sometimes the agbepo would chase the kids to their homes and pour buckets of excrement on their parents’ doorsteps. As a “barrack boy” nothing shocks me. If you’ve never used a barracks “latrine”, never been chased down the street by an agbepo, you are lucky. Life was fun in the barracks.

I have said the living quarters were cramped. They were. I remember rats, lots of them – in the kitchen, in the rooms, everywhere. I remember them, because my father, a trained killer and warrior, was deathly afraid of them. We derived pleasure from watching him jump on our “center table” and giggle nervously as the rats taunted him.  At any time, “t”, there were always at least a dozen people in our “room and parlor.” The kids would sleep in mats on the floor and we would pee over each other. One cousin was particularly bad; he would pee on our mat each night. Many rituals were performed to exorcise his peeing demons.  One, I remember: He was required to pee on a burning log each night before bedtime. The babalawo said at night each time he needed to relieve himself, he would have a burning sensation and he would wake up and go outside to pee. Yes, at night, we simply went outside to the yard to relieve ourselves. The sensation did not burn him enough, he kept peeing on us. There are many things I witnessed as a child that I should not talk about. My aunt ate shit right before my eyes because her toddler daughter who lived with us had eaten shit and it was taboo. To save the child, she had to eat the shit also. In the barracks. Yes. Savagery.

In the barracks, my job was to sweep the verandah and yard with a long broom made of twigs. I hated the job. I would hold the broom and stare at tomorrow. Literally. My mother would yell at me and say if I stared long enough I would see the spirit world.  At the Mobile Police barracks in Benin City, there were “house inspections.” The police officer in charge of the barracks would conduct an “inspection” of the living quarters. That meant we had to clean our quarters, make the beds, take our baths and look wholesome behind our dad as he stood ramrod straight while the “inspections” went on. It was usually invasive and in some instances humiliating. If the inspector found filth, he would berate your dad who would in turn berate your mom who would in turn berate all the kids.

The Mobile Police Barracks in Sapele Road is no longer in use. My point is that the design and implementation of these quarters are colonial. Built in the fifties, these are colonial structures that have not been improved upon since Independence.  The colonial masters did not imagine that they would be permanent structures lasting well into the 21^st century. You should see the “kitchen” my mother slaved in day in and day out. We used firewood. It is a wonder she did not die of smoke inhalation. My mother is a saint. It bears repeating: Life in the barracks of the cities was dysfunctional and sometimes terrifying for women and children. Marital and child abuse of the physical and emotional sort was common. Alcohol abuse was prevalent and women and children bore the brunt of these men’s rage. By the way, I know of a few families that were polygamous in the two-room quarters of the police barracks.

The police barracks in the rural areas were way better than those in the cities. There was more space. And they seemed to have been better built for our way of life. Things were more hygienic. To be fair, by the time my dad was making the rounds in the rural areas, (Sabongida Ora, Igarra, Agenebode) he was now an officer, qualified for more spacious quarters, away from the more spartan “rank and file” barracks. Still, water was hard to come by. We fought over water in Sabongida Ora. As kids we would traipse a couple of miles down the hill to the streams under the hills of Igarra to get buckets of water. We would be woken up at the crack of dawn by our dad and we would go to get the water from the streams under the hills of Igarra. We all developed bilharziasis as a result, a disease that I remembered because each time I peed I would pee blood.

These barracks are an embarrassment. There is no reason today for them to be in existence. I would demolish all of them, adjust police salaries to allow for accommodation expenses and require them to show up for work when they should. By the way, life in the barracks wasn’t all bad. There was music. We danced hell away. I learned a lot and inherited a joy for the arts in the beautiful men and women that endured the hell I have described. In their songs, I met Rex Lawson, Celestine Ukwu Ebenezer Obey, Sunny Adey, and Victor Uwaifo’s spirits. I met lovely men like Corporal Ohanugo who went to Biafra and never returned to us.

Today, Nigerian policemen and women are reviled and ridiculed as the face of official corruption. It is more complicated than that. My dad was one of the first set of Mobile Police,an elite force of men trained to die for Nigeria. Today, in the winter of his life, Nigeria will not pay him his pension. The mobile police force that my father was part of was designed as a rapid deployment force. They were kept in barracks because they were often needed for emergencies. Whenever there was a riot, like the Tiv riots, or the uprisings in Western Nigeria, or when they had to protect “liberated areas” during the civil war, the police bugler would blow the horn for an “emergency” and the men would be assembled within hours, racing in long convoys to the scene. My dad was missing from home a lot. In Asaba, his team was ambushed by Biafran forces and they got the beating of their lives. My father’s bones still hurt to this day. As a little boy, I always worried that he would not come back alive. Many mornings, I would wake up to see he had disappeared in the night. Many mornings, he would be there at home, stern warrior, Okonkwo, fussing about why I did not go to school. I took to sleeping, clutching his singlet. His smell, embedded in the singlet, was comforting. He always came back. Some of my friends were not that lucky, their dads did not come back.

Every living Police Inspector General since Independence should be hauled before the EFCC and asked to explain the decay at the Police College Ikeja. But then, the truth is that since inception, resources belonging to the Nigeria Police Force have been allocated and systematically looted – by policemen and women of all ranks, from the lowliest recruit to the Inspector General of Police. As a child of the police barracks, I can say I do not know of any living police officer that is not corrupt. They could not afford to be honest. Even as children, we knew the policemen and women who had plum assignments. If you went to “road-block” your family would feast. The officer in charge of assignments expected his kickback and so the kickbacks went up the chain of command. Many police officers built mansions and sent their kids to good schools abroad with the loot. There is a half-joke about this police sergeant in charge of road blocks who was in the habit of keeping the loot all to himself. His superiors, angry at his greed promoted him to a desk job so he would have to rely on his monthly salary. Corruption is a perverse form of revenue allocation.  We have been looting from each other since the white man taught us how to be civil servants. Go and read Chinua Achebe’s No longer at Ease. Na today?

One last word. I was a student at the University of Benin in the 70’s and witnessed and enjoyed the good life as an undergraduate: heavily subsidized meals and beverages, staff to clean our rooms, dress our beds, iron our clothes, going to classes in air-conditioned buses, etc. I also witnessed the deterioration and decay as the administration battled to manage a burgeoning student enrollment that they were clearly unprepared for. The university administration did not plan for the phenomenal demand for tertiary education. The university that I entered in 1976 was a shadow of its self in 1979. Within three years I saw how a campus could decay from lack of maintenance. Today, largely thanks to looting and incompetence, just like the Nigerian Police Force, it is laughable to compare even the best of Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions with the worst in the West. We deceive ourselves if we think all is well with our country, Nigeria. And yes, I have no solution to this mess. I have come to believe that we are undergoing Darwinism, the survival of the fittest. The rich are eating the poor. God help you in Nigeria if you are not rich. I should have a tee-shirt: I SURVIVED NIGERIA.