Pa Ikhide

First published in Next Newspapers, August 20, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted for archival purposes; First published in NEXT Newspaper in May 2011

The Caine Prize for African Writing has been great for African literature by showcasing some truly good works by African writers. The good news is that the Caine Prize is here to stay. The bad news is that someone is going to win the Caine Prize this year. This is a shame; having read the stories on the short-list I conclude that a successful African writer must be clinically depressed, chronicling in excruciating detail, every open sore of Africa, apologies to Wole Soyinka. The creation of a Prize for “African writing” may have created the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa for glory.

The mostly lazy, predictable stories that made the 2011 shortlist celebrate orthodoxy and mediocrity. They are a riot of exhausted clichés even as ancient conflicts and anxieties fade into the past tense: Huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty. The monotony of misery simply overwhelms the reader. Fiammetta Rocco, the Economist’s literary editor who chaired last year’s judges, crows that the stories are “uniquely powerful.”  The stories are uniquely wretched. The chair of this year’s judges Hisham Matar declares presumptuously that the stories “represent a portrait of today’s African short story: its wit and intelligence, its concerns and preoccupations.” Really? Is this the sum total of our experience, this humorless tasteless canvas of shiftless Stepin Fetchit suffering?

Five stories made the shortlist. Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has a fly-ridden piece, Hitting Budapest, about a roaming band of urchins, one of them impregnated by her grandfather – at age ten. Uganda’s Beatrice Lamwaka features, Butterfly Dreams, a pathetic story about a child soldier. Lamwaka apologetically documents Africans’ otherness by italicizing and explaining every Ugandan word – layibi, tipu, opobo, malakwang, etc. Enough said. South Africa’s Tim Keegan’s What Molly Knew, is a plodding tale about an interracial marriage gone awry filled with gunshots and ingredients that make for an African howler. Botswana’s Lauri Kubuitsile fires a volley of wretchedness in In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata, portraying the men of Botswana as drunken simpletons. South Africa’s David Medalie almost rescues the prize from the murk with The Mistress’s Dog, an affecting tale involving a well-fed dog, (what a concept, Africa without kwashiorkor!).

Medalie may not get the Caine Prize. His story is not African enough. No rapists, no murderers, no poverty. Why, there is a cell phone in the story. Shame on Medalie. Besides Medalie, Bulawayo would be my pick for the prize. She sure can write, unfortunately her muse insists on sniffing around Africa’s sewers. The tragedy is that these are good writers showcasing good prose and great dialogue.  But to the extent that literature documents the lived life, they are stuck in the fog of stereotypes. The stories are so ancient, it is a wonder they did not feature smoke signals and slide rules. Except for Medalie’s The Mistress’s Dog, there is not a single mention of the Internet and cell phones, not once. Outside of the destructive force of organized religion, wars and diseases, the Internet and cell phone technology are the most powerful forces in the ongoing restructuring of African communities.

In 2005, the Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, himself a Caine Prize winner wrote the now classic satirical essay How to Write About Africa in which he caustically smirked thus: “Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment.” It is as if these writers read Wainaina and misunderstood his sarcasm and rage as the bible on how to write. Wainaina, tell them it ain’t so,

The sponsors of the Caine Prize may be looking in the wrong places. We are witnessing a renaissance in African literature; it breathes joyfully in those spaces where African writers are not self-consciously burdened by the need to tell a certain story. It is interesting, the prize’s rules do not require that you write only about misery and huts and crap, it only requires that you be a writer of African descent. With the exception of Medalie, all the writers are united by a narrowness of range, and shallowness of depth.

The Caine Prize has become a truly prestigious prize, which is a good thing. The problem now is that many writers are skewing their written perspectives to fit what they imagine will sell to the West and the judges of the Caine Prize. They are viewing Africa through a very narrow prism, all in a bid to win the Caine Prize, The sponsors of the Caine Prize should organize a retreat and invite African thinkers of history and literature to vision a prize that encourages writers of African descent to write, yes, think and write out of the box of orthodoxy. Keep the Caine Prize, lose the contrived stories. Africa has suffered enough as it is.

The name is Ikhide. I am an African. This African rises to applaud Jason Russell the filmmaker, and  Invisible Children, the geniuses behind the epic video Kony 2012, a riveting documentary that has now been watched by over 50 million human beings. Kony 2012 is a ringing indictment of a silent horror, of the murderous acts of a barbarian and child murderer Joseph Kony and his sick Lord’s Resistance Army, operating in Uganda and neighboring states. Please stop whatever you are doing if you care about the fate of children in this world and watch this 30-minute film. And when you are done, pay tithe to this wonderful organization that has damned the consequences to tell the truth about the shame that is happening to children in Africa. The world is silent as an indifferent political and intellectual elite sips alien wine in stolen mansions. I say to you Jason Russell, do not stop what you are doing, you are an angel.  Ignore the nattering nabobs of negativity. They are experts at babbling and doing nothing to save Africa’s children.

Let me restate this to our tone deaf Western liberals and their co-opted African intellectuals: Joseph Kony’s deadly acts are being wreaked on beautiful children whose only crime is to be born in the war that Africa has become, thanks to thieving rulers and narcissistic African intellectuals. Watch the video, it is masterful. If it does not bring you to tears, nothing other than onions will. As a brilliant side benefit, it showcases the rank incompetence and barbaric greed of the African intellectual and political elite. Let me restate once more:  I am an African, and I salute Jason Russell and Invisible Children for producing KONY 2012, and for shining a bright light on one of the open sores of Africa (apologies to the venerable Wole Soyinka). I said it, I mean every word, sue me please.

I have been reading on the Internet what appears to be some lame grumbling about the intentions of Russell and  Invisible Children. There has been some high-minded whining about Invisible Children’s methods. You can read a sample of such pointless hand-wringing and muttering in this piece in the UK Guardian, Kony 2012 campaign: Oprah and bracelets won’t solve problem by Michael Wilkerson. The patronizing mumbling of condescending white liberals aside, I am not surprised by the loud noise making by many of my fellow African intellectuals. This  is what we do best; coolly bite the fingers that feed us. It bears repeating: This über awesome video, Kony 2012, will forever be the visible face of a viral social media campaign that has raised awareness about a war against children and humanity that has been going on now for about 25 years. I say again to Russell and Invisible Children, please ignore all distractions and continue the great work that you are doing on behalf of the beautiful children of Africa. I will make bold to say that there is hardly any African intellectual on earth that has the moral right to point accusing fingers at the motives of Invisible Children. To Russell et al, I raise my fists to your industry; may you profit mightily for every child that you save.

 Hurrah for Invisible Children. A snake is dead and people are wondering who killed it. Who cares? Is the snake not dead? Western liberals and African intellectuals are baying at the moon, their favorite pastime. The mess that is today’s Black Africa has been engineered by her political and intellectual elite of which I am a card-carrying member. We are a self-serving lot parading the streets of Europe and America, sipping lattes and the best wines of the world and yelling at the white man for doing for us, what we are too lazy and selfish to do for ourselves. Let me restate this: There is virtually no African intellectual of stature that is left in Africa; we and our cute children are safely ensconced in the laps of the West from where we write beautiful but insincere twaddle about the West’s obsession with the single story.

Well, the latest single story to come out of Black Africa is the mini holocaust being perpetuated on children and women by Joseph Kony, a lunatic barbarian whose Lord’s Liberation Army has been terrorizing human beings (yes human beings) in East Africa for a quarter of a century. What started out as the lunatic malarial rant of a demented woman soon turned into genocide against children and women. As many as 30,000 children have been conscripted, maimed hurt and killed according to several estimates (we will never know since Africa’s political and intellectual elite tend to loot funds that are meant for niceties like education for children and real data).

Enter Invisible Children a non-profit that is visionary and yes, controversial (who isn’t?). They come up with a brilliant concept. Make this barbaric criminal Joseph Kony famous so that he qualifies for world attention and accountability. Plaster the fool’s face all over the world, make this deadly buffoon the face of a modern day Hitler and hold him accountable. They enlist opinion and political leaders all over the world. The video clip is a hit; by the time you have read this, about 60 million enraged people would have watched it. Please, please, please, be one of this new emerging citizenry by watching it. It is only 30 minutes. You will not be the same again. It is one of the best produced videos on human suffering that I have ever watched. I broke down in tears when a child that could have been mine broke down crying begging to die so he could go be with his brother in heaven, a child who had been slaughtered by these animals. What is misleading about that?

 In my Nigeria, Christians routinely murder, yes, murder children for being witches.  You do not hear powerful writers complaining about that. Let a white person say a word; out comes their powerful pen in defense of Africa.  This is not the first time we have risen in self-righteous indignation.  A few years back, BBC produced a harrowing documentary Welcome to Lagos, about the lives of Nigerians in Makoko, the slum from hell. It documented the shame of Nigeria, of women, children and men, living and loving under conditions that would make pigs attempt a jailbreak. This spectacular work was met with derision by some of Africa’s most powerful intellectuals, most notably Wole Soyinka and Teju Cole.  I am tired of this, I really am. White man, help yourself, knock yourself out, shine a light on the plight of the children of Africa. They are children too. They deserve a wholesome childhood – like my children’s. Nigeria produces geniuses like Soyinka and Cole and unspoken horrors like the witch children of Akwa Ibom. What is happening to thousands of African children is a silent genocide and we should all be ashamed of ourselves for babbling while children burn. Literally.

I ask: Where is the outrage? There is outrage alright – strangely directed at Invisible Children  and  those who have dared to do something even as Africa’s intellectuals mutter in their lattes at Starbucks and their friends the politicians loot everything in sight like ravenous simians.  To put things in perspective, a former governor of one of Nigeria’s impoverished states, James Onanefe Ibori has just been convicted in Britain for stealing $250 million of his state’s money. $250 million! What did Ikhide and his fellow intellectuals do? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. We mumbled, said the usual nonsense and went back to drinking Argentinian wine. Think of how much that money would have done for the children of that criminal’s state. By the way, Nigeria’s anti-corruption outfit had previously declared Ibori more innocent than Mother Teresa. If you want to see what Nigerian intellectuals and politicians have done to public education in Nigeria, please visit one of their “universities” and ask a random student to write an essay. Visit one of their primary schools; in the West such a building would not qualify as a piggery. What the Nigerian elite steal from each child annually is what the West genuinely spends on each child’s education. Let us stop fooling ourselves. We need help and I welcome those who are trying to help. And to those carping about the methods of Invisible Children, I remind you, we say to the deity, Orisa, if you cannot help us, do not hurt us, get out of the way.

For the avoidance of doubt, Joseph Kony is more than a thug, he is a mass murderer who must be found and destroyed. Uganda’s  Museveni regime (yes, it is a regime pretending to be a democracy) crows that Kony is not a problem in Uganda anymore because he had been driven into another country. We are not talking about Mars, we are talking about another hapless African country being ruined by yet another incompetent buffoon. If the man has 300 children in his custody, that is 300 children too many. That should be unacceptable to every one of us. Drop your intellectual pretensions, help a child today.

The hypocrisy around this issue is galling. The columnist Max Fisher, writing the piece The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012  cannot quite make up his mind about the video and the intentions of Invisible Village. He makes assertions that reek of Western liberal arrogance and condescension. Hear him: “The viral video campaign reinforces a dangerous, centuries-old idea that Africans are helpless and that idealistic Westerners must save them.” Dear Mr. Fisher, I have news for you, Africans are helpless many thanks to their irresponsible, thieving leaders, many of them PhDs from Ivy League schools. Africans will take help from Wal-Mart, Oprah, anybody with a wallet and/or a conscience. Because no one else is coming to their aid in the war on them by black intellectuals and politicians.  Interestingly Teju Cole and Fisher engaged in some sort of Twitter banter that is fascinating only in the sense that no one is listening to the other. Cole’s tweets collate into whiny poetry, beautiful but not saying more than we already know about white privilege:

“Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that. From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege. I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.”

Teju Cole is spot on. The West is a big bowl of hypocrisy. So what? Invisible Children can’t win; if they had put a cute picture of my cute son asking the question that the cute white kid asked, they would have been accused of being patronizing. If you don’t like their video, go make your own. I am not holding my breath. Let Invisible Children tell our story the only way they know how, warts and all! Lord knows, Ikhide and his club of fellow intellectuals only lift their arms to grab a Malbec.

Yes, I said it. With democracy as a pretense black leaders are getting away with murder. Literally.  White liberals are guilty of double standards – white leaders go to jail for misusing a credit card, African rulers, certified wife beaters, murderers and kleptomaniacs are paraded on the world stage as statesmen. If they were white they would be paraded in front of the world as jail birds. It is time to stop the silliness. Joseph Kony must be stopped, dead or alive, preferably dead. I have one suggestion to make. Invisible Children should put a $10,000 ransom on Joseph Kony’s head,  anything more than that is too much, his mother will deliver him any way you want, dead, alive, sautéed, drawn and quartered. We are like that, we don’t ask for much to throw one of our own under the bus. I said it, sue me.

As an aside, it is interesting that folks are now rifling through the financial statements of Invisible Children, calculating how much per dollar they actually spent on a “helpless African child.” Who cares? Those that have not held the thousands of NGOs in Black Africa and Haiti accountable are now baying at the moon. I say leave Invisible Children alone.  Every dollar that they spend on a child in Africa is a dollar truly spent that will not be spent by any African NGO that I know of.

Back to the buffoon Joseph Kony: The children of Africa need help desperately; those that have been hurt could use the closure from bringing this man to justice dead or alive and liberals are engaged in hand-wringing psychobabble. Not so for Western liberals and their African intellectual sidekicks. For them ideology trumps common sense. President Bush the Republican had a well-funded, thoughtful policy toward Africa (President Barack Hussein Obama’s has been largely incoherent by the way, he is too focused on re-election and so he is ashamed of Africa). As a result, we saw the dramatic results in Aids abatement (the Lazarus effect happened mainly because Bush flooded the region with funding). You don’t hear liberals giving him credit for anything other than his disastrous foray into wars. On the other hand, President Clinton dismissed the Rwandan holocaust because according to him Rwanda is of no strategic significance to the United States. For such silliness, he is revered in pantheons of the liberal left. Sometimes you want to holler.

We may quibble with the methods of Invisible Children but they have been hugely successful. Thanks to their energy, passion, intellect and doggedness, 50 million people have engaged in a Civics lesson about a part of Africa that would have been neglected. They have also fostered a useful debate about the nature of giving etc. Russell and Invisible Children have shown us the face of the new world and it is populated by citizens without walls. They have forced President Obama to commit and deploy troops to East and Central Africa to help an incompetent regime root out a thug and a mass murderer. What is wrong with that?

Thanks to Russell and Invisible Children, the world has an opportunity to give back to Africans the humanity that is being denied them daily by narcissists who call themselves rulers and thinkers. I say lustily, a pox on all their houses. And as for avuncular patronizing Western liberals, maybe this video will begin to cure them of their condescending avuncular double standards. Now I have to run to go buy me a Kony 2012 Action kit. Please buy one. It is only $30. I am an African. I approve this message.

Related Reads:

Max Fisher: The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012

Max Fisher: The Bizarre and Horrifying Story of the Lord’s Resistance Army

The Kony 2012 video

Max Fisher: Why Is Obama Sending Troops Against the Lord’s Resistance Army?

Elizabeth Flock: Invisible Children responds to criticism about ‘Stop Kony’ campaign

Joshua Keating Guest post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub –  Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012’

Russ Feingold: Fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army Will Take More Than Guns

Polly Curtis: Kony 2012: what’s the real story?

Vanity Fair: Africa Bono

 

Reprinted for archival purposes: First published December 25, 2010

The poet Ahmed Maiwada is a talented, hard working writer possessing a vision seemingly informed by a personal sense of integrity. In his poetry and prose, Maiwada, boldly experiments with life’s meaning, even as he stares controversy in the eye. He has just written a debut work of fiction titled Musdoki, published in Nigeria by an outfit called Mazariyya Books. Maiwada is the Chairman of Mazariyya Entertainment Company, which presumably owns the publishing unit. What is this book about? I am not quite sure, even though I read it back-to-back twice. Let’s just say that the main character Musa Maidoki aka Musdoki, is a good looking self-conscious lawyer from Northern Nigeria with awkward social graces who is hounded by a demonic lady bent on setting him on a destructive path.  Also, as the book tells it, Musdoki, living in the South, gets caught up in the civil unrest following the 1993 annulment of the Nigerian elections by a Northerner, General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida. M.K.O. Abiola, a Southerner was widely believed to be the winner of the elections. Angry Southerners spill into the streets, eager to exact revenge on Northerners for the sins of Babangida. So alleges the book. This distorted interpretation of history ensures that this deeply flawed book is fascinating reading.

Musdoki reads like a typical debut novel. It seems autobiographical; like Musdoki the main character, Maiwada is a lawyer and one detects his life’s experiences between the book’s covers. It is difficult to tell if one is reading a work of fiction, or the true autobiography of the author. The book has its charms. Read it, close your eyes and you can visualise Nigerian males in heat lusting after ladies with names like Christine, ladies who wish to be re-christened Jolene after country singer Dolly Parton’s song of the same name. Weird, but charming.  This is one quirky, strange book; Maiwada loves lime and shades of green. It seems like every colour in the book is lime, or a shade of green: The story inhabits a strange space filled with malevolent aliens wearing lime and green coloured dresses. Sorcery is a recurring theme. Sometimes however, attempts at magical realism manufacture hallucinatory silliness. The book is an intriguing, if awkward sequence of malarial hallucinations; Musdoki sees apes, hawks, flying feathers etc in strange places. The reader is treated to Ben Okri-like scenes with people morphing into snakes and appearing in bathrooms.

Like Okri’s The Famished Road, Maiwada’s novel adequately captures the drama and dysfunction that is Nigeria. There is atmosphere, lots of it. Maiwada negotiates the Nigerian cities with eyes of wonder and magnificent detail. The book draws on a lot of colourful characters to portray equally colourful scenes: Nigerian bus drivers collect urine to use as hydraulic fluid for their buses; there is a dog named Junta and there is a tortoise named Tortoise; the reader learns a lot; for example, fadamas are flood plains, low-lying land; and there is a truly gripping, scary section in the book where a girl tries to drown Musdoki in the sea.

Shabby production. From a technical standpoint, however, Musdoki is a shabby production, a disjointed sequence of events featuring awkward dialogue with an inchoate plot. Maiwada’s talent for prose-poetry is not enough to save the book. This is a book featuring loosely and poorly structured narrative, hopping along on several themes, many allergic to each other. Musdoki, the main character is described as handsome and he knows it. He is also self-absorbed and narcissistic, wearing an air of megalomania. He has these awkward, stilted mannerisms. A deity-complex seems to follow him everywhere he goes and he loiters around, drenched in a smug air of self importance. muttering baffling psychobabble that fuels his self-absorption. The dialogue flows with the speed of molasses, moving along like a constipated boa constrictor. Most times the dialogue is merely baffling and one wonders where it is leading.

Musdoki is a sad commentary on the awful state of the publishing industry in Nigeria. It is really disheartening how a publishing company can take the product of a promising writer like Maiwada and simply staple together his raw manuscript with little attempt at polish and refinement. There is abundant evidence that not a single sentence was edited by someone with editing skills. The book showcases the usual issues plaguing books published in Nigeria and they collectively spell mediocrity, to put it mildly. ‘Musdoki’ suffers from an abundance of poor attention to detail, sloppy research, grammatical errors, awful prose, inappropriately used words and an atrocious grasp of Pidgin English. Even the spine loudly misspells the book’s title. The publishers have done all the wrong things that it is possible to do to a book. It is a shame because one could visualize a totally different outcome for the book in the hands of a competent publishing company.

Stereotypes and caricatures. One gets the feeling that the main purpose of Musdoki, once one gets past its editorial issues, is to goad Nigerians of Southern extraction into a foaming rage. It features unfortunate stereotypes of Southerners as caricatures. On the other hand, Northerners are clothed in the dignity of moral rectitude and are portrayed as victims in that troubled space called Nigeria. Where Southerners communicate in halting English like half-humans, Northerners happily engage others using standard English. The book is reams of bigotry and ethnocentrism casually dropped into the middle of a baffling tale. It features an analysis of the events after the unfortunate annulment of the Nigerian elections on June 12, 1993. The analysis is rife with misstatements. According to the narrative, Southerners, especially the Yoruba, enraged that the elections have been annulled by a Northern president, go hunting for Northerners to kill in revenge. There is an orgy of ethnic cleansing and Musdoki survives a near lynching: “Lagos was shut down by the riots in the streets following the annulment of the 1993 Presidential Election in Nigeria… I learnt that offices and banks had been shut down; that there were bonfires… that the Hausas were being murdered in the streets by the Yoruba who would stop a moving vehicle and demand for its occupants’ identities and then hack down any of its Hausa occupants (p86).” What are we supposed to make of this? I would say that ‘Musdoki is a work of fiction bearing weighty untruths. This is magical realism taken to an unnecessarily provocative level. As an aside, the book makes the case eloquently that Nigeria is a strange country of mimic-people invested in uncritical imitation of whites and western values. Who in the world has hot dogs and hot coffee for breakfast?

Bigotry. As poorly produced as the book is, it is an important one, because it allows the reader a peep into the seething soul of a Northerner. At some point in the book’s journey, Musdoki is in a car filled with Northerners, fleeing the South and an alleged pogrom. This is Maiwada at his best, or some would say, at his worst. The reader is taken by Musdoki’s trip home to the North away from the vengeful Yoruba. It is harrowing and moving indeed, except that this is fiction. It did not happen. The dialogue in that car houses some of the worst bigotry against Southern ethnicities that I have ever heard or read in my lifetime. In any case, someone with a good grasp of the events of 1993 should educate me: What exactly did M.K.O. Abiola the presumptive winner of the elections say against the North after the annulment that was meant to incite Southerners into war?

This book is an inelegant expression of lingering resentments by Northerners against Southerners, a book that is almost dismissive, perhaps a rousing defense and justification, of the pogrom of the sixties against the Igbo, one that is curiously silent on the genocide that was the Nigerian civil war. It also seems devoted to glorifying T.Y. Danjuma’s counter coup, that bloody response to Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu’s 1966 one (p100). Hear one of the characters taunt the Yoruba. “They are indeed white hyenas. Otherwise, why have they deserted their towns and villages for their dogs and goats? See for yourself! How can white hyenas ever have the liver to declare a war, like Ojukwu did? (p99).” ‘Musdoki’ is a bipolar organism moving swiftly between narcissistic self-absorbent musings to a sweepingly false vista of Nigeria’s history, relentlessly blurring the border between truth and fantasy. It comes across as a partisan attempt to rewrite a most unfortunate portion of Nigeria’s history.

Misogyny. Musdoki is also an important peep into the state of gender relations in today’s Nigeria. If this book is accurate, the relationships are mostly unwholesome and steeped in disrespectful engagement. Strong shades of misogyny colour relationships; and women get the awful end of the stick. It is a disturbing look at how Nigerian men view women and how women (submissive and docile for the most part) respond to the abuse. This attitude is pervasive and it doesn’t seem to matter if the women are educated and accomplished. Indeed it appears to be the case that those attributes would appear to aggravate the misogyny.

Musdoki is what happens when living witnesses remain mute and a nation refuses to confront its past. Time is dulling the pain of injustice. It is the nature of injustice that Biafra seems so far away. Dozens of books have been written about this mad episode in our nation’s growth, most of them by Southerners, the latest being ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’. Adichie’s book is a work of stellar industry and near genius considering that the author was born well after the end of the war. There are perhaps some facts and conclusions in that book that need to be addressed and confronted. This should be done with respect for historical accuracy and compassion for the hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost in that unjust war.

It is true that in terms of the written word, with respect to the Nigerian civil war, the commentary has been dominated by Southern thinkers. There have been few Northern writers weighing in with their perspective. Despite the myriad flaws of Musdoki, it is an important book in that it shows that a fiery rage burns still in the hearts and minds of Northerners. There is no excuse for what happened during the pogrom and the Nigerian civil war. Today, the major characters of that era are still with us, sporting fancy titles and stealing the nation blind. They loom large on the landscape seemingly proud of the mess that they have created out of our nation space. It is said that Danjuma’s counter-coup was the North’s deadly response to what they saw as an Igbo coup led by Nzeogwu. We are living with the consequences of those dastardly actions today. Let it not be said that the writer Ahmed Maiwada is following the same dastardly dysfunctional tradition.