Pa Ikhide

Who needs reparations? Not Africa. Centuries from now, uncommon sense will return to African thinkers and there will be a new dawn of fresh thought: A deadly combination of black leadership kleptocracy and Western liberal guilt has harmed Africans more than slavery and colonialism.  Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Western aid does nothing but enrich African kleptocrats, Western do-gooders continue to heap gobs of US dollars on the “dispossessed” of Africa in the hopeless hope that the problem will go away. Haiti is a problem that was caused by that “little” problem called slavery. Haiti the Problem has remained intractable despite billions of dollars of “aid” funneled through 10,000 NGOs allegedly helping the Haitians through the trauma of their slavery, oppression, poverty, etc. Today, Haiti is still so poor, it is a fourth world nation.

Serious attempts to address the horrible consequences of slavery have been undermined by the arrogance of Western liberals and some African intellectuals who vehemently deny that Africa should be responsible for her own sins. Dialogue is driven underground as new thought is met with the unnecessary roughness of the liberal left, led by black Africa’s self-styled uncle – the great white liberal hope. Ask David Brooks of the New York Times. Recently, he mused aloud about Haiti and responsibility (the personal type). He was heckled off the square of common sense and called all sorts of names, racist, being the most benign of all of them. Brooks will never reminisce aloud again on matters affecting black folks. Who needs the stress? A cat that has sat on a hot stove will never sit on a stove again, ever.

Take the reparations movement. The only thing striking or remotely unique about the reparations movement is its incoherence of thought and vision. What is the problem that its founders are trying to solve? It does not help that some of the leaders of the reparations movement in America have been famous for shamelessly forming lucrative liaisons with some of Africa’s deadliest buffoon-leaders starting with dead dolts like Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko. Different strokes for different folks. It is not slavery when it is black folks doing it to poor black folks. And of course, white liberals, ever so patronizing and avuncular go tsk tsk and look the other way. Where is the outrage?

The reparations movement has attracted a self-selected group of black activists who tend to color their opinions to match the color of green – money. They are outraged by slavery and mark my words, like thieving pedestrians who run into a bus that has just been hit from behind, they are lining up for payback. It serves the white man right, he should never have gone fishing for slaves in West Africa in the first place- capitalism would have provided him all the slaves he needed at 40 percent interest per credit card.

How much are the reparationistas looking to harvest from the offspring of our odious slave owners? Who gets credit for the trillions of aid funneled into Africa and promptly stolen and repatriated to Swiss Banks by thieving African leaders? Who gets credit for the trillions in welfare programs and affirmative action set asides, etc, that have been expended all these years? Before you start yelling, I am a firm believer in affirmative action. I believe also that the state has a moral, if not legal responsibility to ensure the welfare and prosperity of the downtrodden. So there! I am a liberal. Confused enough? Let’s continue.

Don’t get me wrong: Africa needs help. However, thanks to the ineptitude and savage greed of African leaders, all attempts to infuse badly needed aid into Africa have been as useful as giving a hog in a latrine a bath. The trillions of dollars of aid that have been given to Africa have done nothing for anybody I know except the NGO pimps riding around Africa’s desolation in a convoy of tinted SUVs. How about this for reparations: Scour all of the banks in the West, find all of Africa’s stolen funds, load them onto airplanes and drop them on the long suffering peasants of Africa? Now, that would be reparations.

African Americans who have been wronged by African and white kingdoms in that shame called slavery deserve to have a real conversation about what shape, if any, reparations should take. And I agree wholeheartedly with Professor Skip Gates: The question of restitution should include African perpetrators. That we are destitute should not make us any less culpable. There is a new slavery going on today, black on black slavery. In the name of democracy and capitalism, black leaders of all stripes are busy raping, pillaging and carting away what is not welded to the ground. I say to the African, forget the white man, and turn your rage on your real oppressors. They are black. Like you. Now, if the white man is still rich and foolish enough to offer monetary reparations, I want mine, every penny of it. In hundred dollar bills. I said it. Sue me. I am too broke to care.

The writer Richard Ali has a debut novel out, City of Memories. A digital native and an Internet warrior, Ali is a leader of a pack of young Turks actively promoting African literature on the Internet. A renaissance man, armed with a law degree and a way with words, he is currently the editor of the online magazine Sentinel Literary Movement of Nigeria. He also recently teamed up with friends to establish a publishing house in Nigeria, Parrésia Publishers Limited, also the publisher of his book.  I love his poetry; it is new, different and politely divorced from the poetry of protest, anguish and despair that used to be the hallmark of postcolonial African poetry. Ali is also a passionate youth activist, most notably one of the leaders of the highly successful but short-lived #OccupyNigeria that in January confronted the Nigerian government over its decision to eliminate the fuel subsidy and raise fuel prices.

Ali is the face of a generation of feisty writers that I admire immensely. I applaud their ingenuity and can do industry. For they are doing for African literature what the West did for the older generation – they are building their craft and their own publishing industry. The older generation had Heinemann and Fontana publishing houses. These writers have nothing but themselves and that wild frontier called the Internet. They are insistent on a mission whose mystery is beyond their understanding, the need to tell a story. Overall, Nigerian writers in the Diaspora have been good for Nigerian literature, pushing our stories beyond frontiers that were once unassailable. However, Ali’s book reminds me why I enjoy reading Made-Inside-Nigeria Nigerian literature. The language is distinctly homegrown and you can almost taste and feel every page, there is nothing like a home-cooked story. The tenderness is indigenous, not contrived. Ali excels at dialogue the way you would imagine two people actually conversing; the conversations between the lovers Rahila and Faruk are sensual and convincing.

With City of Memories, Richard Ali has established himself as perhaps the most important Nigerian writer at home or in the Diaspora writing about Nigeria from a Northern perspective, bar none. We have not had a Nigerian write about the North with such passion and intellect as Ali. Not since Cyprian Ekwensi.  Ali demonstrates a good mastery of prose, employing nuanced turns of phrases.

“Long stretches of road were poorly maintained and every now and then the highway broke up into vague stretches that threw up geysers of dust the minute the tyres touched them. On both sides of the road, dry savannah bore the intense heat without bursting into flames. Yet there were nomads all along the way in the heat, herding more cattle than he had ever seen.” (p 10

The book is mostly pretty prose-poetry, time periods swapping themselves in and out of the reader’s consciousness. It is confusing at first but the reader gets used to it.  Ali is good when there is no fancy footwork with the dialogue, when the language does not get in the way. He endows the reader with prose so dreamy and lyrical you forget that no one thinks and talks like that in today’s Nigeria where the dollar is the only ideology and deity in a political climate of pretend opposition. Here are my favorite lines:

“It was the very worst time of the year: November. In Bolewa, it was a time of wailing harmattan winds, blowing dust and dryness from the Sahara, which lay not two hundred kilometres away. Everywhere, the sparse grassland was being set afire and bare-chested young boys made game of the scurrying grasscutters and rodents. It was very cold. In the old calendar, it was called the month of Flames. For fire ruled side-by-side with the dry, Northwestern winds. At night, there was a cold chill and you could find no one in the streets if they could help it. If you looked hard enough, you could see Mr. Cold raging personally, menacingly, towards you, bristling and blowing his disdain across the fields. It was at such a time that Usman left me.” (p 71)

So, what is City of Memories all about? The book’s blurb says it all:

“City of Memories follows four characters [the lovers Faruk Ibrahim Rahila Pam, and the political adversaries Ibrahim Dibarama and Eunice Pam] negotiating the effect of various traumas. Towering above them is the story of Ummi Al-Qassim, a princess of Bolewa, and the feud that attended her love – first for a nobleman, then for a poet – a feud that bequeaths her with madness and death. All four are bracketed by the modern city of Jos in Central Nigeria, where political supremacy and perverse parental love become motives for an ethno-religious eruption. A thwarted love affair forces Faruk to flee to the Northeastern village of Bolewa, from where his parents emigrated three decades earlier. There, he unearths his mother’s tragic past and discovers the key that just might keep his country one – if he can make it back to Central Nigeria alive.”

There is plenty to like about the book. Ali does not waste his (and our) time on a gazillion characters; he invests his energies on a few well-built characters. He makes the point now universally known that the North is not monolithic, and he dissects the ethnic tensions and flare-ups between the Hausa and the indigenes in the North Central region. The book, Chapter 3 in particular, is a very thoughtful treatise on individual and communal identity. There are nice sections on campus life as Ali records the hell that is university education. The letters between Faruk and Rahila are adorable; they alone are worth the price of the book.

Ali tries and mostly succeeds to impress the reader as well read and deeply introspective. The beauty of the book’s prose however is often ruined by Ali’s desire to be seen as cerebral. The striving to be erudite grates like nails on a blackboard. All these alien influences and the contrived grandiloquence of the language give the book a phony feel. Ali has had more than his fair fill of Khalil Gibran, Friedrich Nietzsche and he is eager to share. One almost wearies of all these moody intellectuals roaming Nigeria muttering to the beat of Miles Davis’ 1959 Kind of Blue album.

The weaving in and out of time periods is awkwardly executed but it keeps the story alive. Ali is too self-conscious of his otherness; italicizing indigenous words. It would have been more helpful to provide a glossary at the end of the book. Many African writers are incredibly well read and worldly. I do wonder if they ever read other African writers. They quote Western thinkers with glee. To Ali’s credit, in the book, at the tail end, Faruk the protagonist is reading Jude Dibia’s book Unbridled. It was amateurish, Faruk couldn’t have read the book since it was published in 2007 and the book is set in the eighties and nineties. The reflections on feminism were not convincing although it is a nice quantum leap from the near misogynic indifference of the Soyinka and Achebe era.

A professional editor would have helped the book immensely, like many books published in Nigeria, the book is plagued by some editorial issues. The book’s plot seemed elaborately contrived but inchoate; it is not as elegant as his prose, the conflict is forced and the resulting conflagration seems out of proportion to the alleged crime. Also the book suffers a problem in many contemporary Nigerian works: Over-wrought self-absorbed hand-wringing by idealistic protagonists. Whole sections appear to be long running personal opinions wrapped in the gele of fiction.

Ali demonstrates a good grasp of oral history but how reliable is the narrative? Given the range of the numerous subjects he touched on it would have been useful to include references and a glossary. On the whole, the research was sloppy. As far as I can tell, the book is set in the 80s and 90s. However, early in the book, on page 77, there is a “lemon colored” Apple iMac. This is highly improbable since the first iMac was released in 1998, in just one color – blue. On page 70, Bolewa’s population was 80,000; however on page 82, it was a hundred thousand.  There is a large LCD television in the book (p 184). That would be highly improbable in the 90s. These are all editorial issues that could have been addressed by a professional editor.

The main protagonists are idealistic to the point of irrationality, what some would call an unrealistic moral absolutism. In that sense, the book is hewn from the Soyinka and Achebe tradition, starry eyed idealists complaining about everything and proceeding to out-do their oppressors once it is their turn to be oppressors. It is plausible though; the 90s housed the last of these idealists. They fled the dictator Sani Abacha and now live abroad where they write angry essays excoriating Nigeria. Those left behind now suck Nigeria dry at the breast pumps. In them we are confronted with the hypocrisy of moral absolutism, the power of empty words.

The protagonist Ibrahim Dibarama a veteran officer of the Nigerian civil war is a walking bag of personal opinions. He is angry about the so-called Igbo coup of 1966 and ignores the equally bloody counter-coup organized by Northern soldiers. He lionizes the Northern leaders. And seems to rationalize what happened in 1966:

“There was a breakdown in communication across the north following the coup and before anyone could get anything together, the myth of the Igbo coup had spread. Ironsi lacked guts, lacked vision, lacked everything, alienated everybody, could not impose his authority – and his wife didn’t help matters, promenading like a victor all over the place. Most of the political leaders simply folded their arms and let the first killings happen. And of course, we had yet another supreme egotist in Enugu seeking a place in history with a capital H. Well you know what happened after that.”  (p 52)

[Tafawa] Balewa was a believer in the country. He saw the northern region as a company of complementary people who could come together for mutual benefit. And it was the same way he saw Nigeria. Of all the Northern leaders, he was the most unafraid of the Southerners.” (p 51)

The character Hassan Abba in charge of Murtala Mohammed’s troops that carried out the ethnic cleansing in Asaba tries to confront the massacre but appears to be offering apologies and excuses at the same time. However, Murtala Mohammed is accurately depicted as a deadly Don Quixote:

“When I arrived on the 22nd, all I met were vultures and Biafran corpses, civilians. Henry, my handpicked battalion leader, what was he doing? Shooting Mid-Western civilians! It was a mess. A mess! Corpses all over the place. It was criminal. I reimposed a curfew. That, that was Barbaria right in the centre of my country – Sir Tafawa Balewa’s dreamed of country. I imagined a race of evil djinns had run rampant. Ah Hassan, it was just a mess. Some of the finest soldiers – yet, war had turned them mad. Whatever the rhetoric, I damned Murtala; nothing, no revenge, was worth what I saw that day. But who would believe me? And yet some at Supreme HQ honoured me for that fiasco. I am a soldier all that was unnecessary.” (p 60)

This is interesting considering that the General Officer Commanding (GOC) Two Division of the Army during the civil war, Major General Ibrahim Haruna said recently that he had no regret for his troops’ massacre of over 500 males in Asaba.

We are different people, separated by the blasts of the muezzin and the relentless thumping of Pastor Joe’s bible. However, the turbulent 60s was a time of fixed physical boundaries and homogenous groups glaring at each other. That provided the context then for the divisions at the time. Today history repeats itself for different reasons. I look to Ali and others to continue the debate and to offer innovative ways forward. Finally, let me observe that what limits most African literature is the monotony of its range. The “fiction” is actually a collection of observations and strongly held opinions about certain social conditions. It is a convenient foil and cop out; an author accused of bias points out coyly that the book is, well, fiction. But then, is the reader fooled? As an aside, I do think Nigerian male writers take themselves way too seriously. Sex rarely happens in their books. They must have arrived this earth by Immaculate Conception. Well, I learned a new dish – balangu  Google it 😉

A Reprint: First published April 2006 in various outlets.

“Far too many details in personal memoirs are not even slips of memory but self-serving fiction.”

       –Professor Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn

I have just finished reading Professor Wole Soyinka’s new book, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. My first thought is that it is an important book for various reasons and I would encourage those with an interest in learning about the struggle for the heart and soul of Nigeria, albeit from Soyinka’s perspective, to go buy the book and read it. Soyinka has a lot to say in this book and I suspect that he is not finished yet despite this hefty tome (exactly 500 pages, if you count the Acknowledgments page). Age has not slowed The Man down one bit.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn is a dizzying tour de force in many ways; Soyinka has led a very busy and charmed life. There is hardly any road he has not taken and his international passport must be an immigration officer’s nightmare. Soyinka is a renaissance man who comes across as extremely comfortable in the company of fine wines, fine women and generally the good life. Despite his travails and they are many, he has been treated well by an adoring world and deservedly so. And boy is he busy! Soyinka manages to situate himself in every major event in Nigeria’s troubled history. I mean, this man is everywhere. He was actually at Dodan Barracks the day Gideon Orkar’s coup rattled Nigeria; indeed he had met with Nigeria’s Dictator Du Jour, Ibrahim Babangida shortly before the coup started. For Soyinka, roads are everywhere and they open up for him and take him everywhere, sometimes to places he has no business being in the first place.

The book is a celebration of Soyinka’s indomitable spirit. This was an intimidating display of his power of mental recall from the deep recesses of his memory. Age has not slowed Soyinka’s brain cells one bit. Either that or Kongi keeps a detailed journal every day of his life. He seems to remember verbatim whole conversations that happened decades ago.  People would be interested in his re-telling of many escapades of his that have attained mythical status – the hijacking of Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola’s speech in place of his at the radio station in Ibadan, his role as emissary in various seminal events in Nigeria, and I might add all over Africa. The book is a fascinating story told chapter after chapter. The language is not as dense as I am used to which is nice. Soyinka’s pen is getting gentler in the dusk of his life; one can actually be engaged in the book for the most part.

I liked Soyinka’s inclusion of maps of Nigeria that were really time stamps of her changes over time beginning with the regions and then the genesis of the states. There is also a useful chronology of important dates in our nation’s history. He also narrates his escape from Sani Abacha through Nigeria’s borders and there is a chapter on Kenule Saro-Wiwa’s murder. My favorite chapter is By the Waters of Babylon, where he tells with the deft use of robust prose and powerful imagery his final escape from Abacha’s Gulag (through Nigeria’s border with Benin). His description of his friendship with the late Femi Johnson was genuinely moving, a poetic ode to the strong bonds of friendship.

Those with an interest in Nigerian history should read this book. Those with an interest in the January 1966 coup and the ensuing civil war would be extremely interested in Soyinka’s narrative in the chapter titled Uncivil Wars: The Third Force and the Midwest Incursion (Strangely, Soyinka dispenses with the use of numbered chapters, making the book a challenge to follow as it wanders all over the roads, waterways and airways of the world).

Soyinka says of the January 15, 1966 coup. “Several of the killings, objectively considered, were not remotely essential to the success of the coup.” And then he goes on to say:

“In the West, however, the “wild, wild, West,” where the people had inhaled nothing but flames at close quarters for most of the preceding years, the coup was a hand of salvation, and they did not care by what means or how bloodstained it was. Mostly there was jubilation to the South – in the East, West, and Midwest – while the North was plunged into mourning and a deep, visceral distrust of the South, The Eastern Region earned the greatest loathing from the stricken North, since it soon became noticeable that the leadership of the coup was mostly Igbo, the dominant population of the East. In addition, the Eastern political leadership had been left untouched.”

 Of Biafra’s motive for secession he says:

 “The discovery of oil in huge reserves in the East, largely in the Niger estuary, played a role, unquestionably, in the propulsion of the Biafran leaders toward secession, but it would be a distortion of history and an attempt to trivialize the trauma that the Igbo had undergone to suggest, as some commentators have tried to do – that it was the lure of the oil wealth that drove them to seek a separate existence. When a people have been subjected to a degree of inhuman violation for which there is no other word but genocide, they have the right to seek an identity apart from their aggressors’.”

 He talks about his trip to the heart of Biafra and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment. He talks about meeting Christopher Okigbo in Enugu for the last time before Okigbo perished in the war. He talks of meeting Odumegwu Ojukwu and Victor Banjo. And he talks of Banjo sending him back to the Federal side with a message the crux of which was this:

 “Let them understand in the West that I am leading not a Biafran army but an army of liberation, made up not only of Biafrans but of other ethnic groups. Make the governor of the West and other Western leaders understand this. Urge them not to be taken in by any propaganda by the federal government about a Biafran plan to subjugate the rest of the nation, especially the West.”

This is heady stuff. It gets even more intriguing. Soyinka talks of his role in the war, his relationship with Banjo, his serving as an emissary between Banjo and Olusegun Obasanjo asking Obasanjo for easy passage for Banjo’s troops through his command and into Lagos. He talks about the existence of a “Third Force” of populists and he asserts a solemn pledge in stating Banjo’s true motive for his role in the civil war:

 “I owe it to the memory of Victor Banjo to contest such dishonorable, even unsoldierly, distortions of his motives and conduct; to testify, above all, that he had not acted to promote Biafran secession or aid Ojukwu’s takeover of power in Lagos. If anything, Banjo felt that he himself should take over power, and, confronted with the two discredited combatants who were propelling the nation toward a bloodbath, those of us who were self-described as the Third Force had no doubt whatsoever that Banjo represented the most viable corrective.”

 In summary Soyinka provides some important and new insights about his relationships with almost every key player (civilian and military) in the experience that has been Nigeria to date. For example, he reveals that after the death of Sani Abacha, the Abubakar Abdulsalami administration wanted him to run for President (yes, of Nigeria, not of a theatre company!). He wisely declined after thinking it over (Soyinka as President! That would have been something!).

Unfortunately, from my perspective, there are whole chapters missing from Soyinka’s story. There are key players missing who do not feature even in Soyinka’s shadows as he tells his version of the struggle for Nigeria. They will have to write their own books. One key player missing in Soyinka’s book is the Internet. Too bad. Whatever were the strengths of the pro-democracy movement, the Internet amplified them with startling force. The Internet was a leveler; you did not need a boatload of money to “fight” the enemy. Suddenly one could create a one-man army and suddenly Nigeria’s conventional forces of evil found that they had no choice but to fight these new rag-tag armies of strong-willed individuals.  And the term “Internet warriors” was born. Unfortunately, whatever were the weaknesses of the prodemocracy movement, the Internet also amplified with startling clarity. The prodemocracy movement did fritter away its energies in high decibel bickering while Nigeria burned. Meanwhile its numerous and frequent communiqués confidently proclaimed to the world the coming end of Abacha’s dictatorship. I used to half-joke that Sani Abacha would die of old age and the prodemocracy movement would claim credit for his demise. Regardless, the Internet does not get credit in Soyinka’s book for a lot of the work that went into fighting the dictatorship. A lot of people did not get credit for their contribution to any attempts to free Nigeria from her harvest of locusts.  Rather Soyinka treats them as if they were mere props in a badly written play or if they were unlucky, hapless sidekicks in Soyinka’s restless quest for what seems to elude him each time he charges out on yet another journey of search and rescue.

 I will say this about Professor Wole Soyinka: In his own inimitable way, Soyinka has put a lot of his own time and resources into the struggle for the heart and soul of Nigeria, most especially in terms of the pro-democracy struggle of the nineties. And in his own inimitable way. All of Nigeria ought to be forever grateful to this giant of giants. However, his book comes across as mostly all about his exploits in the struggle for Nigeria and oh there was a supporting cast of hangers -on and side-kicks. Even by his own admission, he is not a team player, Kongi. There is a quixotic streak to his adventures and he unwittingly reveals himself as a brilliant, perhaps eccentric loner with little patience for disciplined processes. In a revealing part of the book he derides Chief Anthony Enahoro as fixated on processes and procedures and so on:

 “Chief Tony Enahoro… thrived on endless meetings, copious minutes, points of order, standing orders, and the moving and seconding of motions, counter-motions, and amendments to motions…. I began to avoid meetings that should normally have enhanced our collective efforts, since they led nowhere and only ate up scant time and resources – flying across the Atlantic Ocean or the American landmass deserved some concrete justification in planning and results!”

 Chief Enahoro will not be amused at Soyinka’s unnecessary roughness but it is hilarious and when you stop laughing you go, this is one cat that doesn’t like a leash! My own analysis is this: Soyinka’s strength, Soyinka’s allure lies primarily in his stature as an international figure and in the eloquence of his powerful voice. He also has access to powerful people and places. All these attributes were precious money in the bank for the pro-democracy movement. But when it came to organization, even in his book, you come away dizzy wondering what all that drama was all about. Everything is long on high drama and poetic license but short on follow through. There was a lot of thunder but rain hardly came.

 Soyinka is brutal in his treatment of those who accepted assignments with military dictators but attempts rather unconvincingly and awkwardly to rationalize his controversial relationship with Ibrahim Babangida, arguably Nigeria’s most evil dictator; a man Soyinka once termed the listening president. Babangida gets a good, well-deserved dose of abuse from Soyinka’s pen but the uninitiated reader would not know the full extent of his relationship with Babangida. Similarly, the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola was no angel. However, Soyinka’s treatment of him in the book was basically a hagiography. It would have been useful to briefly explain the context in which Nigerians decided to support en masse this generous-hearted but flawed leader.

 His description of the disarray within the prodemocracy movement in the Diaspora is spot on. The pro-democracy movement did great things with whatever limited resources were at its disposal. But it was certainly an odd gathering of odd fellows who seemed to relish the fine art of bickering while Nigeria burned. The bickering was high decibel and largely unnecessary. Sadly Soyinka clutters his analysis when he resorts to personal attacks and ridicule against those who disagreed vehemently with him and the movement.  A lot of people, some very young folks who incurred Soyinka’s wrath have now paid for it by having their names immortalized in unflattering ways in his book. Sadly, in at least one instance, in Soyinka’s re-telling of the incidents that earned his  detractors his fiery wrath, some facts got lost in the translation. The personal attacks did not belong in Soyinka’s book. He should have stuck to issues and left these folks alone.

 The book could have used several edits by other people who were in the thick of things with Soyinka, people he rarely mentions in the book. In talking about the book with my friend Professor Bolaji Aluko, he vigorously disputed Soyinka’s version of many events that happened during the pro-democracy period, as well as much earlier in his father Professor Sam Aluko’s house on at least two occasions in Ibadan and Nsukka. Bolaji would know; he was there at the time. Indeed, Bolaji points out that Soyinka’s latest version of the stories have changed remarkably from the first narration in Soyinka’s Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years. Bolaji intends to fully read the book and respond in his own memoirs. One thing is for sure, Soyinka’s new book is going to get him a lot of attention from his friends and detractors – which is probably his intention in the first instance.

 Yes, the book could have used a different set of critical eyes. For one thing, a book of this size and complexity should have been indexed. There are some errors that should have been caught. For example, he locates the making of the brew pito in Sapele (not true – every Nigerian worshipper of Bacchus should know that. He does footnote it correctly as beer made from millet. Millet and Sapele, an unpardonable contradiction in terms!). In his telling of it, gwon gwon, that delectable dish of the gods made of animal intestines becomes “ngwam-ngwam” and he footnotes it as “an Eastern Nigerian delicacy made from the chopped up head of a sheep or goat.” Our revered Soyinka was probably referring to isi-ewu.  During the war, the name Gowon was turned into an acronym for “Go On With One Nigeria”; Soyinka remembers it as “Go On With One GoWon.” Finally, I cannot resist but comment on his awkward use of Pidgin English; it is cutely atrocious, as if written by a white man and it exposes Soyinka’s privileged upbringing. A pet peeve of mine: Soyinka faithfully footnotes every Nigerian word with detailed explanations but neglects to footnote his lavish use of French words and obscure English terminologies that tend to show off his erudition and worldly sophistication (those French wines!). I guess when it comes to Western culture the Nigerian reader has to do his research!

 Taken together, these errors as sloppy as they are are not fatal and they do not diminish the book. In my estimation, what diminishes the book, and Professor Soyinka, are the relentless personal attacks on those he happens to disagree with. And they are legion in the book. The tyranny of the pen is just as devastating as that of the gun. As Soyinka would probably say, it concedes power to no one but the owner of the pen; it assigns wrongs to everyone except the wielder of the pen.  Also, Soyinka’s tendency to employ unflattering character sketches and caricatures on the unsuspecting (for example on Professor Sam Aluko) is unnecessary, rude, and mean-spirited. Most of these people are still alive and I suspect he will be hearing from them. Soyinka is a brave man.

The legacy of our dysfunctional society has introduced a cultural pathology – a perverse culture of abuse which manifests itself in a debilitating inability to engage in civil discourse. That is a serious problem that needs to be fixed before we engage in any serious talk of nation-building. The book is an unsettling reminder of the complexity of the Nigerian problem, of constantly changing relationships among powerful brokers, relationships that are at once mutually parasitic and symbiotic, each one seeking the ultimate prize – power. It is a soupy, sweaty mess – of greedy, thieving, conniving self-serving agbada-clad politicians, academicians and soldiers, all aided and abetted by a populace long accustomed to the art of survival by apathy. And the beat goes on.

I enjoyed reading Noo Saro-Wiwa’s book Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, a slim travelogue (272 pages) published by Granta books. I also hated reading it. Be warned, O gentle reader, it starts and ends with an attitude. Right from the airport. Saro-Wiwa on a few months visit to Nigeria seems determined to be miserable:

 “The plane broke through the clouds and swung low over a sea of palm trees that abruptly became endless tracts of metal rooftops. That vista still choked my heart with dread. I made my way through the airport’s mustiness and out through the exit, where I was ambushed by the clammy aroma of gasoline, so familiar and potent.”

Saro-Wiwa lives in England but has ancestral roots in Nigeria She was born in Nigeria in the mid 70’s and raised in England. Her father is the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist who was executed by the brutal military regime of General Sani Abacha.

Saro-Wiwa is a good travel writer with a questioning, inquisitive eye for detail. Her prose is accessible and fresh and even though you may not agree with her, it is hard to put down this entertaining and engaging account of her travels all over Nigeria, North South, East and West. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be entertained by biting prose and interesting observations about the drama that is Nigeria, albeit from a Western point of view. Yes, I view Saro-Wiwa as a Westerner despite her strong roots in Nigeria, certainly, I see her as someone looking into Nigeria from the Diaspora. Saro-Wiwa’s book may yet be the last straw, that marker that separates Diaspora writing from what I call truly indigenous on-the ground writing. Nonetheless when she deploys her razor-blade mouth to taunt the prayer-warrior zombies, willing victims of the carcinogenic plague that is Nigeria’s new Christianity, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry:

“Janice was pacing around the living room and praying for the ‘evil spirits’ and ‘witches’ to ‘Die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die!’ A verbal machine-gun attack. I watched from the sofa, groggy but compelled, as she squeezed shut her eyes and pummelled the air with an imploring fist.”

Despite Saro-Wiwa’s muscular literary skills, this book hardly improves upon the silence. Instead several chapters are devoted to narrating what the alert reader already knows about Nigeria, very little of which is good. The analysis is rushed and the condescension is cutting, with little compassion and reflection on why things are the way they are. Those who write from the vantage point of the West tend to look at Africa using Western civilization as an asymptote. Black Africa compares very unfavorably with the West for many reasons, including the rank ineptitude and thievery of many of the leaders that sent many of us, their children, abroad away from the unnecessary roughness that they have turned Black Africa into. Who speaks for Black Africa, the children of the privileged separated from Nigeria’s pitiful educational and social infrastructure returning to taunt the victims of their parents (in)actions? Sadly, these are the supercilious voices of literature that the West recognizes and uses to view Nigeria. The victim is doubly victimized. That analysis is usually absent once you are through enjoying the chapters and chapters of self-righteous indignation directed at the nation states within that geographic space called Sub-Saharan Africa. There is this neediness, a certain desperation to link us to a preferred civilization, to assert our humanity, in a way that pleases the preferred civilization. It is an asymptote.

So, without reading the book, you can imagine what Saro-Wiwa has to say about Nigeria: The dysfunction, the incompetence, the comedy of errors, the corruption, the violence, the patriarchy, the misogyny, the pathetic mimicry of everything Western, the new Christianity, the spiritual and physical decay, she records all in painstaking detail. At some point, the unrelenting despair overwhelms you and you want to beg her to stop the torture. She unwittingly sums up the largely banal burden of the book in her tired recital of Nigeria’s woes as she describes the portraits of Nigeria’s rulers in a decrepit museum thus:

“A novice would have no idea that during its forty-seven years of independence Nigeria has lurched from one kleptocracy to the next. The leaders’ photographs resembled a series of criminal mugshots, a line-up of chief suspects in the ruination of Nigeria. The sight of them soured my tourist’s jaunt. For all their talk and intentions, most of these men pocketed billions of the country’s wealth, ruined the infrastructure, devalued the education system and obliterated Nigerians’ trust in one another, cultivating a dog-eat-dog attitude in all corners of life.”

Still, the frustrated reader cannot stop reading, this unctuous book is a page turner, Saro-Wiwa can write, I won’t lie. She is funny, even when she is laughing at her own insecurities:

“Sam gallantly lifted me up in his arms and carried me onto the beach. I felt his knees buckle briefly. ‘Ai, I didn’t think you were so heavy,’ he said as he tipped me onto my feet. ‘I weigh nine and a quarter stone. How heavy should I be?’ ‘You’ve been eating too much yam,’ he informed me, examining my frame at arm’s length.”

Like many Diaspora writers, Saro-Wiwa’s energies are devoted almost solely to whining about Africa’s numerous failings and offering very little in terms of substantive analysis and solutions. When she does, her solutions are alarmingly simplistic. As an aside, Nigerian writers have to decide whether they want to be writers or armchair social activists.  They have been saying the same things for too long, it gets old and exhausting.

I honestly admire Saro-Wiwa’s writing skills. Her sense of pacing is exquisite. When she writes about her experience in a speeding danfo bus, it is as if you are in the bus with her, your black knuckles whitened by fear. Saro-Wiwa can write. She’s got attitude and she flaunts it. The prose catches you unawares, like pissed off spouse lobbing accurate missiles. You are entertained by delicious reams of snarky prose even when she’s complaining about men issues:

“By now, Sam’s eyes were caressing my face, and his voice had lowered to a pre-coital purr.”

Her street interventions and escapades in danfo buses and perched on okada motorcycles are hilarious and priceless, worth the price of the book many times over.

“Okadas are the scourge of Nigeria’s roads. These Chinese-made, 100cc motorcycles buzz around the streets in their thousands, like a plague of giant flies. They’re popular because they’re cheap and fast and can weave through the traffic go-slows that consume such a huge proportion of people’s days.”

Saro-Wiwa is Teju Cole prowling Lagos in pumps and a wicked wit. Her visit to the “museums” is hilarious and sad. Hear her about Nigerians’ penchant to hustle anything and anyone for a buck:

“If Nigeria conducted a space exploration programme… women would be offering bananas to the astronauts as they climbed aboard the shuttle.”

The first half of the book reads like a Karaoke redux of Teju Cole’s Every day is for the Thief. I wonder if she read Cole’s book; reading her book reminded me of Cole’s book. There is the same consistent approach and attitude to the hapless subject – Nigeria.  Don’t get me wrong, it is hard to blame Saro-Wiwa entirely for the seeming self-loathing and the condescension in her travelogue. Nigeria presents as a caricature nation, many thanks to her thieving incompetent rulers.

Saro-Wiwa’s narrative style is breezy, employing imprecise mostly superficial historical analysis. It makes for easy, engaging reading though. However, one comes away with the feeling that she relied heavily on Wikipedia for her research. From the first page of Noo Saro-Wiwa’s book, self-loathing dashes out of the gates of spiritual neglect neighing like a diseased stallion. The cynicism is relentless and unrelenting, she has very little to say about Nigeria that is positive. Lagos is goat shit and mud puddles, sweat and man-eat-man savagery always prowling around the corner looking for a victim to maul:

“If Lagos were a person, she would wear a Gucci jacket and a cheap hair weave, with a mobile phone in one hand, a second set in her back pocket, and the mother of all scowls on her face. She would usher you impatiently through her front door at an extortionate price before smacking you to the floor for taking too long about it. ‘This,’ she would growl while searching your pockets for more cash, ‘is Lagos.”

I kept reading and hoping that her mood would improve as I read. Alas it only got worse, nothing Nigeria offered her would console her. Saro-Wiwa was miserable. She has harsh words for her father’s tormentors and killers. Sample: “Abacha’s “face… emanated ruthlessness: tribal marks stretched vertically between reptilian eyes and a sour pout; a brooding assassin.”  She is not enamored of former president Olusegun Obasanjo either: “There was a photo of Olusegun Obasanjo… with his characteristically small eyes and flared nostrils.” The more I think about it, she is decidedly hostile to Nigerian men, virtually everyone seems to be a caricature of the real thing:

“I paid for two seats at the back of the car to give my thighs breathing space. The gangly man sitting next to me used the extra space to spread his legs as widely as possible, leaving me squeezed once again against the window. I was livid. Months of travelling cheek-by-jowl in cars had instilled in me a new-found loathing of men’s legs, which, like air, seem constantly to expand to fill the space available. I’m amazed they’re not all buried in Y-shaped coffins.”

Saro-Wiwa has a complicated personal view of her father Kenule  but lionizes his role in Nigeria’s fortunes in what is largely a hagiography. Kenule Saro-Wiwa was not without his share of responsibilities in the Nigeria project:

“My father never bought into the Nigerian system of corruption. I was blind to the virtue behind our modest home and few holidays, and I resented his frugality and non-materialism. I craved a luxurious lifestyle. But he held an intense disdain for such things.”

Saro-Wiwa’s tender side is more evident when she visits parts of the North. Her compassion shows and even though some of her observations and view come across as patronizing, it is clear that she spent considerable time researching the places and thinking about their uniqueness compared to the South of her parents upbringing. I imagine that familiarity breeds contempt. As an aside, Granta could have used a more careful editor; the book is dotted with a few grammatical and editorial issues.

The mango does not fall from the tree: Noo Saro-Wiwa has the opinionated streak of her dad Ken Saro-Wiwa. Not many Igbo will care for her opinions about Biafra. Many Nigerians will take offense at her views:

“My people, the Ogonis, had been bit-players in the drama of Nigerian history in which the Binis, Yorubas, Hausas and Igbos played a leading role. Mocked as simpletons and cannibals, Ogonis were barely known outside the Delta region until my father made our presence felt… The economic and numerical dominance of the Igbo people engulfed us, their commercially savvy tentacles spreading as far as Bori, the tiny Ogoni town where my father was born. By the start of the Biafran civil war, Igbos owned about 80 per cent of Bori’s businesses, my mother told me. Only when the Biafran Republic was declared did most of them vacate the town to join their new republic. These ethnic disparities were significant at national level.”

All in all however, like her father’s generation, the rejection of her ancestral land for the West is complete and final, no looking back:

“Yet Nigeria, for all its sapphire rivers and weddings and apes, couldn’t seduce me fully when all roads snaked back to corruption, the rottenness my father fought against and the cause he died for.”

“Now I understood why my father never once spent the night here during our childhood stays. He luxuriated in the air-conditioned solitude of his Port Harcourt study while dispatching us to the village. As much as he loved Bane, his attachment to the place was an emotional one that didn’t require his physical presence.”

All the reviews of Saro-Wiwa’s books that I have read have been positive and deservedly so. They include reviews in The Economist, The Guardian and The Telegraph. However, these mostly Western reviews seem focused on the book’s entertainment value and can barely hide their glee at another objectification of Black Africa as (the other) exotica. If it is any comfort, Adewale Maja-Pearce has a very good review of the book in The Guardian here that makes the compelling case that the reader must not always rely on Western reviewers for decent opinions about books on Nigeria and Black Africa. Read it. Memo to the Nigerian Diaspora writer: We should probably all leave Nigeria alone, we no longer live there. I should go write my own travelogue – about America’s seamy side. America’s got issues too.