Pa Ikhide

Helon Habila is one formidable writer – of short stories. With the short story as a canvas, he takes his work ethic, mixes it up with his excellent powers of observation of the human condition and finishes up his patented recipe with a delicious dollop of prose poetry. With the short story Habila struts his stuff, gently telling complex truths with the aid of simple enchanting prose. The reader comes away comforted by this gentle storyteller who weaves evocative tales of mean giants who trample upon the innocent as they build monstrous edifices to tyranny. Habila’s short stories leave you pining for more. Unfortunately, more is not necessarily a novel.

The novel as a medium of expression undermines Habila’s strengths and exaggerates his weaknesses. Too bad, because on reading his latest offering Measuring Time, it is easy to forget that Habila is a celebrated writer with formidable literary skills. After all Habila has won both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Caine Prize for African Writing. You don’t get those accolades from tepid writing. I personally regard Helon Habila as one of Nigeria ’s important writers.

Clearly making the transition from the short story to the novel, in my view, has been problematic for Habila. I have bought both books that he has written – Waiting for an Angel, and Measuring Time. I am yet to finish reading Waiting for an Angel; instead of chapters, it is organized in chunky sections and each section reads like a good short story that yearns to be completed. The book in sum reads like a short story stretched too far. In Habila’s novels, truths that seemed profound in his short stories morph into overwrought banalities buried in way too many words. The analogy that comes to mind when thinking of Habila’s two books is that of an ungainly stretch limousine populated with soulless characters. Some vehicles should not be stretch limousines.

 In Measuring Time, we follow the fortunes and misfortunes of a set of twins – the scholarly but sickly Mamo and the soldier of fortune LaMamo and in so doing we peek through the window of Nigeria’s dwindling lights. Their mother dies during their birth and their father Lamang turns out to be one emotionally absent father. The twins are left to fend for themselves with the aid of extended family members. LaMamo and Mamo are separated early in the book as LaMamo sets forth to join a mercenary group. Mamo stays behind in the village to ruminate on the meaning of history and to write autobiographies, most notably of the Mai or chief of the village of Keti (the Mai is expecting a hagiography but the idealist in Mamo would not oblige). LaMamo and Mamo connect through the distance with long letters from LaMamo. The writing in the letters reminds the reader of the contrived English that seems to be the rage these days thanks to Uzodinma Iweala’s relentless (exasperating, I might add) use of that technique in his books. My humble opinion is that the technique fails to deliver in Habila’s book.

So why read the book? I must say in Habila’s defense that Measuring Time does grow on the reader, slowly but surely. Reading the book was a worthwhile, albeit frustrating exercise. The book does dip its many toes into too many issues and flees without any serious attempt at in-depth analysis. Habila’s technique seems to be to slyly force the reader to think about these things, and in the process, force the reader to do the research. If that succeeds in awakening a consciousness in the reader, then Habila’s experiment has been successful. This reader will never know. For me, it is hard to focus on the myriad issues in the book, thanks to an avalanche of cliched, uneven prose and dialogue that zigzags between American conversational English and English as is spoken in Nigeria.

Surprisingly, I found the book’s editing to be mediocre, with the occasional word used inappropriately. The wooden prose may have been as a result of over-editing, I’ll never know. My first experience with chapters that are not numbered was with Wole Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn. I did not like it then and I don’t like it that Habila adopts the same technique in his books. Annoying, especially since each chapter reminds me of an unfinished short story.

The reader plodding through Measuring Time feels like a ravished diner picking through a crab for crabmeat. Hard work, but there is at least the promise of meat. Every now and then, the crab offers some meat but one wonders if it was worth the effort. My verdict is that the reading was well worth my time. There were gems. My favorite chapter (or section?) is the one named after the book, Measuring Time (p 138) the one that houses my favorite lines: “… and as he waited he measured time in the shadows cast by trees and walls, in the silence between one breath and the next, in the seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months that add up to form the seasons “ (p 139) Scrumptious. My favorite sentence: “Lamang died in degrees.” (p 215) Neat. There are more gems like that but you really have to plod through the book page by page to enjoy them.

All in all, reading Measuring Time was comforting for this reader who escaped Nigeria many, many moons ago. Where the book was good, one could almost taste Nigeria . My pre-teen daughter Ominira asked me if I liked the book and I said yes. She has the book now and she seems engaged in it; she comes out of nowhere every so often and asks me questions about meanings buried inside the book. She seemed traumatized by a section in the book where the twins kill a dog and rub the dog’s rheum in their eyes. American kids don’t like dog murderers; I’ll have to find Habila and make him pay for my daughter’s psychological counseling. Ominira has been dragging the book all over the place along with her ipod and other accoutrements of American youth. It is a good thing. Our children should read these books. Would I read Habila’s books again? Absolutely, once I find my copy of Waiting for an Angel.

Daughters of Eve and Other New Short Stories from Nigeria is an anthology of Nigerian short stories edited by Dr. Emma Dawson and published by Critical, Cultural and Communications Press (CCCP), Nottingham. It features the writers Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Ikeogu Oke, Peter Ike Amadi, Jumoke Verissimo, Ifeanyi Ogboh, Rotimi (Timi) Ogunjobi, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, Tolu Ogunlesi, Soji Cole, Alpha Emeka, and Emmanuel Iduma. This is an anthology so bad, I almost resolved to give in to the fervent wishes of my friends and foes alike – to give up reading and reviewing books. It is becoming an unbearable ordeal. Why did I read this book? Well, the editor’s preface starts out with an ambitious proclamation: “This series focuses on the production of new writing in English, specifically new World Englishes fiction… writing which is newly sourced, edited and presented with a critical introduction.” This appears to be the second volume in a planned series of anthologies of short stories from certain sections of the world, where English is arguably a second language.

It is disappointing that there is only one female writer showcased in this volume. This is hardly representative of the muscular performances of Nigeria’s female writers. Several of these alleged writers do not belong in any anthology that seeks relevance. This is not an important work but it does raise certain questions about how Nigerian, perhaps African literature is viewed and categorized in traditional academia. It is time to rethink the paradigm that drives the current world view.  Students of literature are still being taught from the same tired pedagogy, reducing our stories to the pre and post-colonial. Globalization as in the coming of the Internet and smartphones has already dwarfed the linearism of colonialism in terms of its impact on the way of life of Africans living and dying in Africa. To reduce today’s literature to something as remote and amorphous as the post-colonial is to literally miss the boat of what is going on in Africa today. Life is more complicated than that. Boundaries now bleed gleefully into each other and dissolve into that gaseous entity called the Internet. We must not be bound by the strictures of what was taught us in the classrooms. What I read in hard print lately seems to be relentlessly about documenting the lives of the other, Africans being the other. Case in point: Nigerian terms that are deemed alien to Western eyes are painstakingly italicized to separate them from “normal” English. Why should we be italicizing egusi in the year 2010? Do we do the same to a Reuben sandwich? Why must our otherness be branded with a big red sign – toxic waste? Stop italicizing our way of life:

The editor makes an eloquent case – that this is not the best of Nigerian writing. Not once is there mention of the works of Nigerians writers on the Internet. You will not find innovation here. The flagship short story Daughters of Eve by Peter Ike Amadi is a heartbreak of a story only in the sense that after reading this too-long tale that goes nowhere, the reader is filled with compassion for the amount of unnecessary effort that must have gone into creating this distraction, There are some other comforting names in the book: Tolu Ogunlesi, Ikeogu Oke, Jumoke Verissimo, and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike. There is a reason why they shine; they know their craft because they practice it every day everywhere. I enjoyed Jumoke Verissimo’s Lightless Room. It was a reader’s delight. It did not belong in this collection of mostly tired tales. Emmanuel Iduma does show a lot of promise in his story Guitar Boy. However, even the best are plagued by editorial issues and poor research. Also, the claim that this is fresh writing is easily debunked by searching the titles of the stories on the Internet. I found quite a number of them on the Internet and even in other “anthologies.”

Dawson may have consulted some experts on the subject of Nigerian literature; however, it clearly does not show in the output. Several influential names come to mind: Bibi Bakare, Ike Anya, Muhtar Bakare, Sola Osofisan, Chuma Nwokolo, Nnorom Azuonye, Afam Akeh, Obiwu, Lola Shoneyin, Molara Wood, Jeremy Weate, Chika Unigwe, Victor Ehikhamenor, Ivor Hartmann, etc. Some of them are not even Nigerians; rather they are digital natives toiling on the Internet daily to push the envelope in terms of how our stories should be told. New Nigerian anthologies are born literally every day on the Internet featuring truly fresh and emerging voices. Fresh, frothing, scintillating prose struts out of those web pages and social networking media like great palmwine. You couldn’t tell from this anthology but Nigerian literature is alive and rocking although the reader can be forgiven for thinking it is on life support judging from the mostly wretched offerings in this anthology of mediocrity. If it is any consolation, the editor’s three sentence narrative on her Okada motorcycle experience in Nigeria provided one of the few nuggets of hilarity and brilliance in an otherwise forgettable anthology.

Note: Reproduced here for archival purposes only. First published in 2006.

I write this for James Meredith, the distinguished first black student of OLEMISS, and for John Hawkins, the distinguished first black Cheerleader of OLEMISS. Courage counts for something. Yes!

My time is no longer mine and I miss my Muse running alongside my railroad tracks urging me to say something, anything. In between stealing sideways glances at my Muse and struggling mightily to satisfy demons born of my life’s choices, I have managed to hold on to just one passion – reading. I just finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, Half of a Yellow Sun and if I don’t read another book for a long time, memories of this epic tome will keep me warm in the hibernation of the coming winter. But first, before I slink off into the trenches of my own doing, I must rise to salute Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of the finest story tellers to come out of Africa in a long time. Out of the seething, smoldering ruins of our collective horrid judgment, a giant Phoenix is born, worthy prodigy of the master Phoenix Chinua Achebe. Achebe lives! Adichie lives! Hurrah for the resilience of the human spirit. Chimamanda, I celebrate the mystery of you, and I luxuriate in the reassuring warmth of your gift. I salute you, silent witness to a story that never left, that won’t go away. I salute you, insistent bugler of yet another coming.

This book starts out being about Nigeria in the sixties and the Biafran war. Ultimately, it is about our collective destiny in that failed state called Nigeria. A delightful cast of well-formed characters carries the burden of this book rather effortlessly: The cast is led by a set of twins; the vivacious Olanna and the enigmatic, mysterious Kainene, renaissance women, well schooled, and well traveled. A boy Ugwu arrives from the village to be a houseboy to “Master” Odenigbo, a university don and we witness the growth of the boy and Biafra’s dreams (and demise) through his awe-struck eyes. There is also Richard an English man loitering in Nigeria as a writer who also becomes Kainene’s lover.  It is an expertly written book, professionally edited, one that raises the bar for how great books should be written. In Half of a Yellow Sun, we see mature relationships, strong men and women comfortable in their individual roles within relationships and actually enjoying themselves. There is the liberated Olanna who actually turns down marriage proposals from her long-term lover because she is enjoying the relationship. Refreshing.

When I think of this book, I think of words like, awe, admiration. And envy. Envy at such a beautiful product. Adichie manages to cobble together several complex stories and she carries out this feat with amazing, unceasing, unrelenting grace. In writing the book, Adichie makes the point eloquently that we are the sum of our experiences. Harrowing is another word that will not let go of me – the ethnic cleansing, the inhumanity of it all and you ask, for what purpose? Everything is scarce; joy, food, sex, and when it comes, it is devoured in joyful song. What is it about sex and war? The sex when it happens is luscious and the reader’s lungs and loins erupt in unadulterated joy. Adichie brings together all of the principal characters for a day of reckoning. Well, almost all the principal characters. Unless I missed it, I did not read any mention of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe. You can almost forgive Adichie for not mentioning Azikiwe, Awolowo in this epic. They probably deserve to be deleted from memory, who knows…  Besides, this is a novel. Go write your own if you are that enamoured of those two figures.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a muffled collage of courage, grace, rage, injustice, horror, and the resilience of the human spirit. Breathtaking, simply stunning is how I would describe the experience of reading Adichie’s literary salvo. Reading this book was akin to taking an unforgettable field trip, an eclectic tour through the dainty halls of several eclectic minds. It is hard to believe that only one human being wrote this epic. And yes, in my humble opinion, this book is the first epic to come out of Nigeria since Chinua Achebe’s trilogy of books: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God. This book is so good, it is easy to forget that this is the product of research, of a most unjust war, a pogrom that came and went many moons before this story teller was born. I have to admit that I bought the book expecting it to be contrived – after all I thought, Adichie was not there during the war, what can she tell me about the war? I was pleasantly disappointed that my expectation was roundly rebuffed by this writer’s formidable strengths.

Adichie pulls off the stunning feat of fully immersing the reader in a past that is more glorious than today’s quagmire, civil war or no civil war. She captures with unnerving clarity, the unctuous self righteousness of Nigeria’s ruling class and her conniving intellectuals – a cultural pathology that thrives to this day. In the book as in today’s reality, we witness the aping of alien values, the total lack of originality in anything the contemporary Nigerian embarks on, from creative writing to creative kleptomania. The most comical representation of our condition is Harrison the Nigerian cook proudly displaying his knowledge of western recipes, and ribald ignorance of Nigerian recipes: He proudly shows off one of his signature counterfeit productions – “a bean and mushroom soup, a pawpaw medley, chicken in a cream sauce speckled with greens and a lemon tart as pudding!” Graham Greene should be dying of laughter in his grave.

Half of a Yellow Sun is several complex stories, simply told. Hints of pulp fiction tug at the reader’s arrogance and it says to the reader, Get off your high horse – why must communication be obtuse? The style grows on you, surprises you like a charming lover in the night, grabbing you from behind, stirring your loins, startling you with brutal clarity and slashing a smile-gash in your happy face.  And there is beauty in the book’s simplicity. It is sheer pleasure to luxuriate in the poetry of pretty words strung together daintily like lace.  And the attention to detail is intimidating – weeks after reading this book, I can still smell the flowers and the men’s cologne. Adichie does have a thing for flowers and scents.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a messy journey narrated with neat precision, at times, told languidly, at other times, told with malaria-feverishness and sometimes you wonder where this is all leading, where is Biafra in all of this, etc, but then if it was a tidy story it would be an awful book. Life is a mess. This book is a mess. This is a good book, this is a great book. And sometimes, the book does drift, seemingly aimlessly. One of the main characters, Olanna goes to Kano to visit an ex-boyfriend. The purpose of this trip is not quite clear – why this restlessness other than to show that an Igbo once loved a Northerner? In any case, any seeming drift in the book is more than compensated for by the delightful story oozing from virtually every sentence. It is like sitting in a verandah in Lagos (choose your favourite Nigerian city) and reveling in raw street theater.  The book’s chapters move deftly back and forth between the early sixties and the late sixties, between a gathering fear (apologies to the poet Olu Oguibe) and a relentless pogrom. This technique is effective in keeping the reader fully engaged in an absorbing story. Reading the book, I felt like I was watching a gripping movie. This should be made into a full length movie for those who choose not to or are unable to read about our history.

And three decades after that shame of a war, not much has changed. The corruption is eerily the same; actually one gets tired of reading about these things, the past posing as the present tense. Only in Nigeria.  We see ourselves in virtually all of the characters – Chief Okonji – the Finance Minister is a sadly familiar caricature, not much different from today’s jokesters in Aso Rock. Refried beans must keep for ever. Too bad for Nigeria. Adichie says this book is about Biafra. It seems to me that this is more than Biafra. This is really all about the horrid fate of the long-suffering people trapped in that failed state called Nigeria. We see African intellectuals at their most unctuous and self-serving. We see them in their nakedness, aping rather uncritically Western values, trying so desperately to be white folks. Graham Greene would love this book. The intellectuals put together a babble-fest at every opportunity as they cry louder than the bereaved in alien tongues. Nothing has changed today; if anything, things have gotten worse. After all these years, Adichie’s book is eerily contemporary because the social and cultural pathologies that gave birth to the pogrom called Biafra are roaring alive today, very much alive and hungry for another death of a dream.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie adroitly exposes the near-myth of physical geographic boundaries and sews together new geographic vistas that are not necessarily contiguous, and she challenges the reader to think out of the box of traditional relationships. Yes, the world has changed since Biafra. The reader upon reading the book can feel the palpable and lingering frustration of witnessing the fraying of hurtful memories, of injustices wilting away on the bloodied picket fences of changing boundaries and allegiances. Enemies are marrying enemies, creating new allegiances and new enemies. We do not know our friends, alas.

Adichie may be accused of reaching too much for balance, for objectivity. She is not going to endure herself to Biafra die-hards. This book is definitely not an uncritical sentimental hagiography of Biafra; indeed some people would be displeased at the searing look into the perfidy, the moral and leadership decay within the rank and file of the Biafran army. Adichie exposes the hypocrisy and the self righteousness of those who convinced the populace to go to a war they had no business fighting. Good warriors negotiate from a position of strength. From my perspective, the Biafran war was an unnecessary turkey shoot and Adichie’s story spreads the responsibility for that pogrom to all, not just the Federal side.

Half of a Yellow Sun is perhaps not the definitive book about Biafra. Those interested in an extensive reading on Biafra may do well to also do their own research, starting with the useful glossary of books at the back of Half of a Yellow Sun. War is war, full of broken limbs, bloody calabashes filled with decapitated heads and broken dreams. Adichie is not able to tell us what sets this particular war apart from the others. She does not try to and in a counter-intuitive way, I see this as one of the book’s strengths. Adichie does not try too much to please. The good news is that there is not a shortage of books about Biafra. Dr. Daniel Awduche has compiled a great list here. The book’s one strength is that although it is marketed as a book about Biafra, the reader’s senses are assaulted by a panorama of images that envelopes just about every land that is trapped in that country called Nigeria. The book is an amazing journey that is best savored by actually reading it.  Regardless, Adichie does a great job of confronting the enigma that was Biafra – in my view, a tragically flawed reaction to a horrid injustice

Adichie’s book is likely to stoke the debate about the use of contrived English to perhaps improved readability in the West and reach a wider market, a debate that was started with the release of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. In the book, the hapless character Harrison employs a version of English that is strikingly similar to Iweala’s experiment with rotten, I would say, contrived English in Beasts of No Nation: “You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?” “You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?” (p 166) Contrived English trumps Pidgin English one more time. It is mercifully not as cloying, not as annoying as Iweala’s abuse of the technique and Adichie executes it quite well. In a sense, she may have bestowed some credibility to Iweala’s experiment. Regardless once senses that the African writer still struggles to reach a mass market in the West through the use of interesting techniques – for instance Igbo sentences are italicized and immediately translated in English: “Yes! Yes! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe! Give us guns! Iwe di anyi n’obi! There is anger in our hearts! (p 171)

Adichie does not look back in anger, she does not look back with just a clinical detachment; she makes us look back at history galloping back in fast furious reverse to challenge our current condition. Our collective destiny is history, fast forwarded, in reverse. Adichie’s book challenges us to have courageous conversations and assign responsibilities for the pogrom to all parties so that we may never pass this way again. It is a crying shame that after all these years there are no fitting monuments, no usable museum to the memory of Biafra. Adichie’s book has put all of that to rest. The restless spirits of our victims rustle through the pages of Half of a Yellow Sun. Buy a copy of this epic, read, relax and await yet another coming of our collective poor judgment.

Half of a Yellow Sun hints at shades of everything the reader has experienced, indeed we are the sum of our experiences. There are strong hints of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as the revolution that was Biafra turns into a dog-eat-dog race for survival. In his stirring poetry, the character, Okeoma the poet-warrior bears strong hints of Chris Okigbo:

“Brown

With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid,

She appears,

Bearing silver dawn

And the sun attends her,

The mermaid

Who will never be mine.” p 324

In Half of a Yellow Sun, the telling of our story breaks the reader into a thousand emotional pieces. It is like the story teller takes a wooden bat to all of your conscience and exposes you for the fake that you are. I have not felt this way since visiting the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and the Hector Petersen Museum in Soweto.  This book is a museum. And if you care about Nigeria, you must visit this museum.

 I salute you, Chimamanda.

I did not enjoy reading Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s hefty almost 800-page tome The Wizard of the Crow. This is a shame, for I love Ngugi. I remember his book Weep Not Child with much fondness. I will always remember the chemistry between the two main characters young Njoroge and Mwihaki. As a boy, I fell in love with the way those two fell in love. Ngugi is a gifted writer and a noble son of Africa. But Ngugi has always been given to quixotic journeys; I say quixotic because I am not quite sure his experiments in this book were productive, especially to the extent that he has not been able to foster a substantive dialogue on what and how we should communicate our literature as Africans. The question remains hanging in the air: What should be our language of discourse? The Wizard of the Crow is short on analysis but long on theatrics. Any experiment as ambitious as Ngugi’s has to acknowledge that the novel as a medium is not a constant. Africa’s oral tradition breathes free and vibrant on YouTube, Facebook, and on blogs. In The Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi brings together an unlikely riot – of the voice, the written word, and the narrative – on print. It simply doesn’t work.

The Wizard of the Crow is a familiar, dated, perhaps tired tale. Think of the stereotypical African novel and its recurring characters. There is the supreme dictator (The Ruler) in an imaginary country (Abruria) teeming with long-suffering people, there are the fawning hangers-on, and there is the idealistic great black hope (Kamiti), scheming freedom for the masses. Throw in some magic realism and a tedious literary ride is born. Despite Africa’s best efforts, Idi Amin’s buffoonery is as dated as my platform shoes. We have new buffoons. This book is what happens to the writer stuck in exile for too long, living decades mummified in despair, fretting about the Africa that has moved on.

The reader wonders how Ngugi could spread tedium through almost 800 pages. The clue is in its unrelenting wordiness, displaying armies of words where a word (or blessed silence) would richly suffice. Ngugi is understandably very unhappy with Africa; he must process his anxieties and stress through writing because the Guinness book of Records may have just logged in the longest angriest riff on paper ever. I mean ever. It is sheer tedium, the book as a medium flies like a lead balloon under the weight of so many issues, several of them unresolved. The attempted use of humor, satire and hyperbole is grotesque and does little to mask Ngugi’s overly documented rage.

Ngugi’s unresolved anxieties and strong political views mar the quality of the book. The book provided absolutely no new insights into the African condition, whatever that may be and the observations appear dated – like a slide rule competing with the awesome wonders of an iPod. Africa has moved on, for good or for bad, a realization that stubbornly eludes Ngugi. Ngugi may still be stuck in the sands of his time. The reviews, mostly by Western reviewers do not get this, they are fairly swooning. They see Africa painted as one woeful place full of exotic Ben Okri type imagery. Even at that, Ngugi’s experiment with magic realism is simply farcical. Be warned: You are not going to get much in terms of hard hitting critical reviews of this book; the Western reviewers are largely patronizing. The late great John Updike provides a largely avuncular panning of the book but I agree with him when he says: “The author of this bulky book offers more indignation than analysis in his portrait of post-colonial Africa.”

Readers may have difficulty relating to the notion of a lone savior with a monopoly of good solutions walking around weighed down with his supreme sense of self-importance. Well meaning visionary statements are mistaken for community mandates and the anxiety is to replace the buffoon’s tyranny with that of the pen. It is truly farcical when you really think about it. The African Big Man lives in the tyranny of our politics and in the tyranny of our writers’ pens. Their alter egos as reflected in the idealistic do no wrong; the main characters of their books indict them as being clueless or indifferent to their role in Africa’s mess. What it boils down to is that these are autobiographic fantasies that involve the ME in the author, systems be damned.

 However, given Ngugi’s brave fight for justice in postcolonial Kenya, his work in ensuring Africa’s rightful place in the World history of literature, and the trauma of his forced exile, any assessment of his work ought to be nuanced. Ngugi put a lot of effort into this tome – six books in one, first written painstakingly in Kikuyu – and then translated into English. Ngugi remains a visionary; our writer-warriors should carry his ideas on their giant shoulders and continue the fight he started – on Facebook, YouTube and on blogs. I salute Bwana Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

I spend the summers in America cooking outdoors; steaks, hot dogs, chicken, corn, plantain, salmon and hamburgers. I prefer the charcoal grill, but I also use gas. Charcoal-grilled steaks, medium rare are to die for. Our children strip chunks of it hot off the grill. I actually consider cooking with firewood clean cooking, certainly cleaner than the environmental degradation that we witness here in America daily, not to talk of nuclear proliferation. So, the other day I shook my head in utter disbelief when I saw someone on Facebook hawking one wimpy NGO-funded “clean energy” appliance as a viable replacement for cooking with charcoal in Africa. The contraption can’t even cook for more than one overfed environmentalist at a time, not to talk of fueling an industrial size owambe party.

Urban sprawl has caused serious environmental and social issues in black Africa but a blanket denunciation of African practices is causing unintended consequences. I think it is patronizing for Westerners to come to our homes and teach us when and how to plant trees.  They must first teach themselves how to plant trees. Here in America they have planted all these trees close to their homes; however the result is deadly each time there is a thunderstorm. These days, trees crush cars and homes during thunderstorms and we have been known to lose power for days on end. At the traffic lights, policemen control traffic after trees have downed power lines. America may be legislating itself into a third world nation thanks to her environmentalists.

Nigeria, indeed Black Africa is not managing change properly. The urban flats of my childhood were not meant for wood stoves but they were used that way. We lived in our village for a period during the Nigerian Civil War and looking back there was a method to my people’s madness. The homes we lived in were comfortable, well ventilated and designed for the kind of cooking that is being vilified today by environmentalists.

In 2004, a Kenyan, the late Wangari Maathai, was awarded the Nobel Prize for – get this – planting trees. How patronizing. My people have been planting trees all their lives well before  Shell, BP and all of those other multinational corporations discovered sweet crude in Oloibiri.  Now they say we should not use firewood because it depletes the forests and sends noxious gases up to their heaven.  I don’t know what clean cooking means in this context, but tell me, how is firewood cooking dirtier than microwave cooking? How is it dirtier than gas cooking?

I am deeply suspicious of the motives and political agenda of environmentalists when it comes to African issues. They are berating the wrong people. When Nigerians are sufficiently angry they will turn on their leaders instead of creating little schemes for coping in hell. I ask again, what is wrong with cooking by firewood? What is wrong with an awareness campaign about reforestation? Is this how they solve the problem in the West? Why the drama? Some of us suspect the truth: This is big business.

The wholesale uncritical dismissal of African values and way of life by Western liberals is getting on my nerves. In their SUVs, they traipse Africa with expensive equipment taking pictures of the devastation engineered by their forefathers.  Africa is now one huge museum to them. Why are people dying of smoke inhalation? Where are people dying? Fix the reasons and perhaps we might not need these wimpy inventions that cannot cook for more than one liberal at a time.

Nothing would please me more than to send all NGOs in Nigeria and their environmentally unfriendly begging bowls packing. You don’t see me grilling with firewood inside my bedroom. The generators kill my people more than anything else. Send all the generators packing. I think it is insulting for anyone to suggest that we did not know how to cook safely until Western liberals came along. We have to look at the context: urban sprawl, layering new systems on the old, and the dynamics and dysfunction of unbridled consumerism.

Another example: Environmentalists are now urging Africans not to eat bush meat. We should beat them over their heads with a leg of antelope! This is exactly why deer have become suburban terrorists in America. Every day, herds of deer come knocking on our doors and giving us slaps, chasing our children all over the yard, crashing into our gas guzzling SUVs, and demanding stuff. The last time a deer collided with my SUV, it cost my insurance company thousands of dollars in repairs because the stupid deer had no insurance. And the police would not let me drag the useless dead animal to the firewood at the back of our home. They measured the antlers and declared that it was illegal to kill the sob. Nonsense.

I can’t prove it but environmentalists probably mean well for Nigeria; however the first order of business if they are to be successful is to listen to us Africans. We are human beings too, we might just tell you why things are the way you have described them.

Nigerians own some of the best websites on the internet. Nigeria also boasts some of the world’s best intellectuals and professionals who quietly make the world run smoothly.  Many of them actually obtained their education in Nigeria at a time when Nigerian institutions were the envy of the world.  My point? Nigeria is a nation of greatly talented people; however you couldn’t tell this from viewing the websites owned by Nigerian governments and institutions. They seem to exist only for the purpose of loudly advertising Nigeria’s dysfunction and mediocrity.

It is interesting that Nigerians can spend umpteen hours making their personal websites the paragon of excellence but are content to let corporate sites under their watch grow weeds. A random sampling of the websites of Nigerian governmental institutions exposes them as a jumble of mediocrity, misinformation, self-serving aggrandizement served up on a spaghetti bowl of broken links. It is as if these websites were put up simply because it seems the fashionable thing to do. Once they are established, usually with loud fanfare, they are allowed to simply decay into digital earth.

Unfortunately, it is very easy to unearth evidence about what I am talking about. Take Nigeria’s official website for example: It is a disgraceful riot of broken links and outdated and in many instances false information. It is slow, buggy and awkward to navigate. Some of the links simply take you nowhere. Click on any link in there and you are confronted with either a broken link or a message indicating that “this page will soon be available.” The government of Nigeria should consider taking down the site until work and appropriate technical tests have been concluded.  It would be interesting to know how much has been spent on this website so far and what the process was to determine its design and content.  Whoever is responsible for developing this website should be held accountable.

Nothing expresses this dysfunction in more visual detail than the websites of Nigerian institutions that are devoted to education or the literary arts. It is particularly heartbreaking to click on Nigeria’s “Ministry of Education” tab and watch it announce optimistically, “this page will soon be available.” It is a disheartening visual of Nigeria’s lack off seriousness. How is it possible that Nigeria’s Ministry of Education is represented by a broken link? And folks wonder why our educational system is broken. In more respectable societies, the person in charge of this disgrace of a website would be promptly fired. Aso Rock is probably running the website in a “cybercafé” that also doubles as an amala and ewedu bukateria. I would not be shocked to find out that hundreds of millions of dollars were “spent” on this national e-disgrace.  If I sound harsh, it is on purpose. We ought to start shaming our leaders into doing the right thing. I know, I know, they don’t give a damn, but I will keep trying.

Edo State’s site should be shut down until it is usable. It is as if a gaggle of enthusiastic and clueless motor park touts collaborated on its design and implementation. Click on the Ministry of Education and see what happens. Hint: Nothing. There is absolutely no information there worth using; one might as well be reading the self-congratulatory slop of Nigerian obituary announcements.

Similarly, The Association of Nigerian Authors spends most of its dying days squabbling over inanities like who got invited to drink peppersoup and chomp on bushmeat in Aso Rock. That dysfunctional organization founded on a beautiful dream but floundering from the excessive sloth of her current warders, has, well, had a website. Google it, click on it and you realize that it no longer exists perhaps because the owners allowed its domain name to expire.

The most disappointing, is the official website of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). It is to put it mildly, a near incoherent offering of stale documents, dated information and broken web links. ASUU should please take a brief break from walking out on students (for yet another pay increase) and bring down the website immediately. It sends a very bad signal to the world about the state of our educational system.

We live in a new dispensation and Nigerian institutions are to be applauded for taking advantage of the Internet to showcase content about our country. Our leaders must however refrain from simply developing websites for the sake of it. People actually want to use these sites for what they are advertised. Increasingly, people, states and institutions are being judged by the state of their websites. Nigeria should not be on the Internet until she is ready for prime time.  I do applaud President Goodluck Jonathan for maintaining a robust presence on Facebook and for engaging a sizable slice of Nigeria’s Facebook generation. It is the right thing to do even though the editorial standards of his postings are questionable. Nigeria boasts a wealth of literary talent and President Jonathan can easily put together a top notch editorial team to manage the country’s digital presence.

First published in Next Newspapers on January, 23, 2011. Reproduced here for archival purposes only.

If you love reading this is a great time to be alive. Thanks to technology, pretty much anything these days is a book. There is always something to read.  The democratization of reading is happening at a time when it appears that people have lost interest in reading anything that doesn’t chant “Amen!” at them. Today, there are homes that house no books. Unfortunately, there are children in those homes. That is child abuse. A child should be immersed in all sorts of books. I know, I know, I have said that the book is dying a long slow death. A house should be slaphappy with books and ideas. Look at it another way: This is a great time to buy books because no one wants them anyway. Buy them and leave them lying around the house. A child may just read them.

I have enjoyed reading many African writers. The younger ones tend to be enthusiastic and eager to be published. Many are good at what they do, but if I had to give advice, I would suggest that many of our writers would improve their craft if they spent more time reading than writing. Read, read, and read. You will be surprised at how much it improves on your muse’s judgment.  What do I read? People regularly send me books from Nigeria. I stalk used bookshops thrift stores, and yard sales. You would be surprised what Americans will give away for pennies. I trek the Internet buying the books of my childhood. If you really want to see how the Internet is fueling the renaissance that is African literature today, google “African writing”, kick back with a good glass of something red, luscious and bold and enjoy yourself. There are blogs, websites, and Facebook pages out there devoted to some pretty good writing. Google Nnorom Azuonye and his Sentinel Poetry Movement and you will be love-struck. Jeremy Weate, (who with Bibi Bakare-Weate publishes Cassava Republic) owns Naijablog, a brilliant blog that I am fairly addicted to. Read Molara Wood’s Wordsbody, Chuma Nwokolo’s African-Writing, and Sola Osofisan’s Africanwriter.com and Nigeriansinamerica.com. And of course, for home grown investigative reporting, late breaking news, literature and some pretty strong opinions, you should visit Sowore Omoyele’s inimitable Saharareporters and Philip Adekunle’s bustling Nigeria Village Square.

The irrepressible writer and poet Obi Iwuanyanwu (Obiwu) manages a small group of top notch Nigerian writers on the list-serve Ederi. The poet Amatoritsero Ede edits Maple Tree Literary Supplement and manages the list-serve Krazitivity. Indeed, many of today’s Nigerian literary stars cut their teeth on Krazitivity under the watchful eyes of griots like Obiwu Iwuanyanwu, Tade Ipadeola, Pius Adesanmi, Molara Wood, Chika Unigwe, Olu Oguibe, Afam Akeh, Lola Shoneyin, Chuma Nwokolo, EC Osondu, Jude Dibia, Tolu Ogunlesi and Victor Ehikhamenor. Shola Adenekan runs The New Black Magazine.  Kola Tubosun blogs his escapades in America and elsewhere in ktravula. Chielozona Eze connects the lush dots of African Literature in his blog African Literature News and Review. Google the Zimbabwean writer Ivor Hartmann of Storytime and be enthralled. Do not die until you have read Ainehi Edoro’s blog, Brittle Paper.  Edoro is enigmatic, witty, brainy and just plain fun.  Binyavanaga Wainaina is the brainy godfather of them all, spewing his brilliant rage on our e-conscience. The uber-smart Petina Gappah blogs (too occasionally lately, alas) on The World According to Gappah. Oh, if you are on Facebook, please visit my favorite, Auntie PJ’s page, Let’s Talk About It. The sum total of our sexuality is on full luscious display right there in all its glory. It is not literature as we know it, but I highly recommend it. There are also many groups and pages on Facebook devoted to literature and writers. I am friends with several African writers on Facebook and they are an invaluable source of manuscripts, stories, leads, books, etc. They tend to accept you as a friend once you request, don’t be shy.

When I read books, I take copious notes along the margins of the books. The notes are usually my observations about many aspects of the book I am reading. At the end of the reading, I always go back and compile all the notes and it never fails, strong opinions always result from the compilation. I invariably always publish the opinions for what they are worth. If I like a book, I say so. If I don’t, I say so. It is really nothing personal. And please do not take me too seriously; I am just an opinionated consumer that has been fooled by America into thinking he is always right. I am a consumer, I paid for the damn book, and I am right. Deal with it. So tell me, I really would love to hear from you. Where do you go to for the literature of our people? I am thinking of compiling a digital reading list that I would share with the world. Send me your favorite digital site and I will put it out there for the world to see and enjoy.

First published in Next Newspapers, September 10, 2009. Reproduced for archival purposes only.

America is getting hard; the dollar is playing hide and seek with all of us; well, it is playing mostly hide. Faced with a costly choice between Uwem Akpan’s book, Say You’re One of Them and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, I chose the former.

It would appear, from my limited reading, that I exercised poor judgment in choosing Akpan over Lahiri. Akpan’s book is a series of short stories that aim to highlight an important theme–the plight of dispossessed children and women in Africa. Unfortunately, his approach is tired and made even worse by wooden prose (probably the result of over-editing by copy editors unfamiliar with the African landscape).

From my perspective, Say You’re One of Them does not break new ground. The theme is very familiar–the plight of children and women in sub-Saharan Africa. There is no shortage of books on this, so when reading a new work on the subject, I look for new insights. But the reader is not going to find fresh scintillating prose in this book and the story-telling technique is safe, straight out of an MFA program. It is a carefully written memorandum, as if penned by a timid civil servant, too scared to hurt another.

I would have loved to see some experimentation, something like what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie did recently in The New Yorker with her story, The Headstrong Historian. With Adichie’s piece, you are not conscious of the language; you are absorbed in a story. She pulls off the trick because, like Achebe, her stories wear the English language well. Not so with Akpan.

By the way, what is the purpose of Pidgin English? When do you deploy it and why? I think that was a trick (the use and timing of Pidgin English in dialogue) that Akpan had not mastered. I kept struggling to stay with the book, intent on finishing it just as you would struggle with an expensive meal in a five-star restaurant that turns out to be, well, merely expensive.

One thing I wondered is if Akpan could not be fairly or unfairly accused of manufacturing contrived stories. By this I mean that he deliberately wrote short stories from each of several African countries (Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, etc). One writer trying to be in character over such an expansive span of geography, that is an ambitious undertaking and I am not sure Akpan successfully pulled it off.

This is notwithstanding that, as a Jesuit priest, Akpan is trained to be eclectic and is widely travelled. Finally, there is an activist approach to the stories. Akpan’s Jesuit training shows in his anxieties. Nothing wrong with it but that feeling stays with you all through the stories (oh, and a number of them should really be novellas; they are looong).

As for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story (The New Yorker, June 23, 2008), it is set roughly around the time frame of Achebe’s trilogy from Things Fall Apart through Arrow of God to No Longer at Ease. I relished her story on many levels: the headstrong insistence on re-writing from a woman’s perspective and I just loved the stealth with which it crept up on me.

It wasn’t a rebuke of Chinua Achebe’s version, but a polite insistence on another cut. This is a complex and ambitious, and yes, bold, project by Adichie, using an incredibly creative process to start a debate. There is a potentially epic piece of work in there somewhere.

I do regret that the debate was started on the pages of The New Yorker, rather than somewhere else (like Nigeria), but it is not my story. Man, you should see my copy of The New Yorker; all marked up as if it were a sermon. What a treat. I actually thought for a minute I was reading a short story by Chinua Achebe, all the signs were there down to his appropriation of the English language to tell an authentic story.

No gimmicks, just clean, uncluttered communication. And of course there was Achebe’s trademark poetry in the rendering. Adichie sure has a gift. But the mimicking of style for me was deliberate to drag the reader into Achebe’s head and then listen to her voice. I am desperately hoping that this is the beginning of another epic book by Adichie! Ah, something to look forward to! Life is good! Life is really good!

But back to Akpan, whose book is impressive in the sense that it is careful not to present any new insights into the African problem (whatever that is). It is presented in a matter-of-fact style that sent me yearning for some other activity each time I tried to read it. It is pretty bad when you cannot finish a short story. I should have chosen Lahiri. My own assessment of course; I am quite sure that there are others who will find the book a delight. Good for them.

America. Every day we go to the same place and we talk to the same people who have the same ideas and the same views on the same things. Every day. It is a bit like pushing against amused walls. Every day we go home exhausted from this exercise like Don Quixote huffing and puffing at windmills in his head. The windmills stay standing, And we are diminished just a wee bit. Every day. And our days do not morph into our nights. They clash into the nights and the explosions send us merrily into the bosoms of tired deities. Dawn comes in the morning with the rude roar of the bugler’s horn. And the cycle continues. Every day. In America, we call this life, this spinning around on a treadmill that never stops spinning.

And Fear slinks out of our souls, shoots out of us in hurtful mouthfuls.  Bluster asks Fear: Where are you running to, fool, preening, prancing, peacock princess of the concrete desert? Fear wonders: Where is the night leading? He steps inside the room. It is a huge cave, this room full of men, women and plastic feelings. He fishes in his mask’s pockets for his plastic feelings. He is rearing to go, not far from beneath the skin of his heart. And he puts a face on his face to mask his contempt for the evening. Tomorrow, he swears, I will slink out of my skin to drown your prejudices in the color of my blood. For my blood is the color of your blood. I am your brother, you fool!

He says, tomorrow, I will step into the shadows of your power. Help me, he says, I am your brother. Your blood is the color of my blood. I am your brother. Blonde colossus, I will dance in the shadows of giants before I clamber on to your shoulders to yell my name to the world. Giants have shadows; you, you have no shoulders. Blonde colossus. The dibia told me: Gawk at a monkey and lose yourself in the forest. We have left our gods and followed alien gods. I will die for you, goddess of blonde chemicals. Hey, look, the life of the party is here.  The party begins. Let’s party! And Joy rides our senses, going places in the heart where fear clings to life. Look at joy bounding up and down the steps of happy memories. Joy takes us by the hand and says everything will be alright, you’ll see!

See, the clouds are scampering about with furtive rage seeping through their watery bandanas, rebels gathering storm buckets of rage. The clouds are scampering back and forth across the sky of blue moods lugging buckets of rain, imploring us to wait under the umbrella of rain buckets for the coming deluge of retribution for sins unaccounted for. The clouds are raining water buckets of rage on us and deep inside Jonah’s belly are wet slimy muddy remnants of his snacks from the feast of the land of people that have too many in the first place. Somebody give us a sump pump!

Even in the land of many there are poor people and they wail on, disconsolate about soggy beds, ruined teddy bears and waterlogged memories of days in the summers past. And from across the ocean, the truly poor but really rich look through the skies window-shopping and wishing for what they really don’t need: They pray, one day we’ll be like that.  America. For now, I am holding my lamp in my hands. It is a good lamp. The lamp’s shade broke. In America, it is cheaper to buy a new lamp than to replace the shade. America! But I have a perfectly good lamp. All I need is the shade. Maybe I’ll buy a new lamp and replace the broken shade with the one from the new lamp.  But what do I do with the new broken lamp? America! I miss my old lamp.

The more things fall apart, the more things stay together. The boy stood in the path of the Iroko tree, gentle giant of the savannah. And the boy sat down before the eagle seated on machines that weave life into unbroken giants. Show me something, the boy said; tell me a story, the boy chanted. I don’t want to watch TV, the boy wailed. The eagle shook his head, mane all wooly from the winter of his life’s journey, and the voice, gentle messenger of the gentle masquerade, the voice said, my son, I will tell you a story…

And the eagle told the boy yet another story about things falling apart when things come together. And the boy said: Teacher, you teach me a little something in big ways. Every day. After all these years, I am now old enough to sit still and listen to you, teacher. I love you, teacher.