Of poetry, dead white men, and all that Jazz

Ikhide R. Ikheloa2 Comments

A few years ago, the writer Bruce Wexler rose, apparently from a drunken slumber and declared poetry dead. [Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care? Newsweek, May 5, 2003]. The reaction to Wexler’s heresy was swift and furious. His dignity was assaulted by a million fatwas issued by the self-identified worshippers of poetry, proving Wexler’s point – that poetry is the only art form where the population of those who write it overwhelms the population of those who actually consume it. I disagree with Wexler. Poetry is not dead. And I think a more careful reading of Wexler would strongly suggest that he would agree with me. I do agree with Wexler on one point. Anyone can write a bad poem. That is the beauty of its art. But first we have to agree on what constitutes a bad poem.

At one end of the spectrum, you have the purists who would dismiss any poem that does not meet established standards of literary expression, and then at the other end, you have those who say, to hell with rules. There ought to be a happy medium. So, who is a poet in today’s world? I propose that the poets who live on in our hearts and minds are those who have, using the tricks of the ancients, adapted their medium to effectively communicate the word.  This last point is extremely important. Poets are indeed priests. As buglers of joy and of doom, they have to fashion out crisp messages to the people in the language that the people understand. In Africa, today’s poets stand the risk of closing the barn door after the flight of doom, because they are too busy waxing their messages into the rigor mortis of what Chinweizu would call obscurantism.

Our poets and thinkers must seek to use their gifts to make a difference in our societies. Our poetry should offer perspectives that are rooted deep in the fragrance of the land of our ancestors. We go back to the earth when we are stressed; we look back to the past for succor, when our present condition does not carry us back to the warmth of our mother’s hearth. But there is a danger in imagining that this is reality. For the average consumer does not understand these details. The average reader does not understand why there must be a formula; why there must be a set way to write poetry. Who makes these decisions? One sees a lot of insightful critiques that echo the works of Western writers but one is constrained to ask” Why would Western values be necessarily relevant to the way we tell our stories, the way we sing our songs? Has anyone ever attempted to create our own rules of engagement using the robust body of work that is out there? And how do we know that Western writers like TS Eliot were thinking of us as they wove complex thoughts into elaborate structures that were obviously bound to their own ancestral lands?

We are back to divining the difference between poetry and unadulterated drivel. I propose that the consumer is the ultimate arbiter of what is good poetry and what is painful to the eyes. But I miss the haunting lyricism and imagery of poets like the late great Okogbule Wonodi. Hear him sing to me:

But we have poured more wine
than the gods can drink
more than the soil can drink
and have become outcasts
dispersing the fishes
for which the baskets are laid
and the fisherman did not like us.

[Okogbule Wonodi, Icheke: IV]

Was Wonodi a bad poet? I would never know. Who cares? I hope that there are many more “bad poets” where he came from. Freed from the stifling confines of classrooms, I have taught myself to only pay for that which my heart seeks. I read the new poets and I am comforted by the kind of chants that used to make me jump on a coffee table and dance to the courage of my ancestor’s spirits. We come from a land of simple people who hide deep meanings inside simple words. One has to listen carefully to our people to get the insult or the accolade. I look for those kinds of poems to enjoy. The critic must not breathe on every piece that calls itself “poetry.” Some things are best left alone. If a poem turns out to be what the acerbic reviewer Randall Jarrell once referred to as giving “the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter,” I will simply move on quietly to a more worthy pursuit. Life is too short to be miserable. Poetry is not dead; it just needs re-packaging.

[Guest BlogPost] Stanley Onjezani Kenani: Waiting for departure in Port Harcourt

Ikhide R. Ikheloa3 Comments

‘I am going to Nigeria!’ I said when the Africa39 list was announced.

 Online newspapers in Malawi did not know what to make of the news. ‘Malawian writers Stanley Onjezani Kenani and Shadreck Chikoti have been named  among 39 under 40,’ one paper wrote. In the comments section, an anonymous reader rightly asked: ‘What does that mean?’

 Another paper probably understood too much about what the news meant, because it wrote: ‘Kenani and Chikoti have been selected among 39 best African writers under the age of 40.’ They put a photo of a smiling me at the centre of the article. I weigh slightly over a hundred kilos, and my stomach looks like I am seven months pregnant.

First comment: ‘Is the man in the photo really under 40? Please, let us not be like African footballers, always understating their age.’ Farther down the comments section, a former classmate in college jumped to my defence. ‘I was in the same class with him,’ he wrote. ‘He was tiny before he started working for a hotel.’ But the news had by that time ceased to be about what the Africa39 list meant.

I wrote the editor of the online outfit to clarify that we were not 39 ‘best African writers under the age of 40.’ There were finer writers out there who were not on the list. I mentioned NoViolet Bulawayo as an obvious example. We were, instead, ‘39 of the most promising African writers under the age of 40’. Ignoring my point, he wrote back: ‘How much money have they given you for making the list?’

 I gave up.

But the way the news was received showed that Africa39 meant different things to different people. To me, it meant going to Nigeria to eat jollof rice. My work as an accountant gives me few opportunities to interact with like-minded individuals. In Geneva, Switzerland, where I live, there is hardly any friend I could meet and discuss writing with.

So I looked forward to interacting with all those wonderful people, colleagues I had known for a while like Rotimi Babatunde and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, and lots of others I would be meeting for the first time, among them the brilliant Kenyan poet Clifton Gachagua, whose poetry collection, Mad man at Kilifi, I was reading alongside Kei Miller’s awesome The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.

I was curious about the format the Port Harcourt gathering was going to take. I hoped it would be like Macedonia’s Struga Poetry Evenings where, after reading our poems back in 2007, we poets would gather at the balcony of the Hotel Drim to drink free wine or beer or coffee while talking about Ezra Pound or any of the greats. Or Poetry Africa in Durban where I had the chance to sit down for dinner with Dennis Brutus two years before his death. In short, I hoped for a collegial atmosphere that would make it possible for me to build new friendships.

Port Harcourt, however, turned out to be a disappointment in some way – and I am speaking for myself. The only time the writers got to meet as one group was when they sat on the bus to go to the University of Port Harcourt, or to the Ken Saro-Wiwa Centre, or to the Alliance française.

Africa39 1There was an attempt at organizing a cocktail on the festival’s opening day. The only drink featured was fruit juice. It was a colossal failure.

But not all was lost. Those who knew each other before Port Harcourt gathered in smaller groups in the evenings to chat. They sat next to the swimming pool at the foot of the ten-storey Presidential Hotel where those who could afford ordered drinks from the hotel’s expensive poolside bar.

I got to know Eghosa Imasuen this way. Desperate to shake off boredom one evening, I wandered to join a group of people I was not familiar with. And there was Eghosa. And Lola Shoneyin. And Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr. And Chibundu Onuzo. And a few other wonderful people.

Eghosa is the type of person that makes you feel as though the two of you have already met before. He started off with imitating my voice in a way that made everyone laugh. He had heard me earlier speaking on behalf of the other writers at the opening ceremony, and it was the delivery of that speech he imitated with admirable exaggeration. Great guy, Eghosa. I looked for a copy of his book, Fine Boys, but by the time I got it, he had already left the festival, depriving me of the chance for his autograph.

Ad hoc gatherings like these are what rescued the book festival from becoming too boring for me.  Organizers, friendly and helpful whenever you accosted them for help, gave me the overall impression of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment.

Africa39 2Days were long and empty, especially since there was only one event per day. Some of those once-a-day outings were not as satisfactory as I would have wanted them to be, because it mostly meant mentioning your name, which the audience were probably hearing for the first time, and in all likelihood forgot it as soon as you finished introducing yourself. You could also probably say a sentence or two about your work, and that was all. We were, after all, 22 of us, and moderating such a crowd was far from easy. Perhaps if it were any person other than the brilliant Ellah Allfrey as moderator, the events could have been without life.

I tried to enjoy the Nigeria I had come to see. I tasted the food and ventured into the streets. I saw excellent buildings of a city on the rise. I saw churches of various names and sizes. Cars seemed to be in a perpetual ‘go-slow’ or ‘hold-up,’ terms meant to classify various types of traffic jam. If Port Harcourt is like this, I wondered, what about Lagos?

On our way to the University of Port Harcourt, I saw a giant billboard touting the Rivers State development agenda. At the foot of that billboard a man was passing urine, and for a moment I wondered whether that was a kind of protest, that he was deliberately pissing on his state’s development agenda.

At the Ken Saro-Wiwa Centre, a poster on a building across the street said, ‘We must try our best to make the next governor of Rivers State an Ijaw man or woman.’

Horrified by such blatant tribalism, I said to the man standing next to me, ‘In Malawi, where I come from, that would be illegal.’ The man, probably Nigerian, said that maybe Nigerians were right to drop the pretences. ‘In Kenya, for instance,’ he said, ‘I hear such a poster would also be illegal. But, believe it or not, privately Kikuyus would in general say they want the next president to be a Kikuyu; and Luos would say they want a Luo.’

I ventured back into the Ken Saro-Wiwa Centre. I found that writers had quickly organized themselves for an impromptu show. Ricaredo Boturu from Equatorial Guinea read us a beautiful poem in Spanish; Chibundu Onuzo sang, Nana Brew-Hammond and others read from the Africa39 anthology or recited poems of their own. Glaydah Namukasa presented an interesting piece in Luganda.

But aside from such flashes of interesting outings, the entire event, on my part, passed with me lying on bed and yawning, waiting for departure.

Finally, we left. At the airport, the security guard nearly blocked me from proceeding to the departure gate. Apparently, he did not understand French and German – the only languages written on my Swiss residency permit.

About five people inside the airport asked me for money: the police who searched my bag, immigration officials who stamped my passport and security guards who screened my hand luggage. But it was the sixth person who impressed me, because he asked for a book. I gave him José Saramago’s The year of the death of Ricardo Reis.

We were three hours early for the flight, but an interesting chat with Tope Folarin made those hours fly by unnoticed. Tope’s work ethic left me so inspired that I boarded the plane looking forward to a lot of writing back home.

As my plane shot into the dark skies of the Port Harcourt night, I told myself that it had certainly been worth my while to come, to see the Nigeria I had always wanted to visit. I wished, however, that the event had been shorter and more compact.

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stanleyStanley Onjezani Kenani is a writer from Malawi. Shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2008 and 2012, he was named as one of the Africa39. His short story, The Old Man and the Pub, is part of the Africa39 anthology edited by Ellah Allfrey and published by Bloomsbury in October 2014. An accountant, he currently lives and works in Switzerland.

Ikhide Ikheloa: Analog Origins, Digital Destinations

Ikhide R. IkheloaLeave a comment

The Internet for me has been invaluable in networking, propagating and sharing ideas all over the world. There is no way I would have reached so many people in an analog world. I do find it frustrating on one level: One’s works are scattered all over the place and it is virtually impossible to gather them under one roof if one is prolific or garrulous. I am garrulous. Take interviews, I have granted quite a few of those but it is hard to remember where and to whom. I would like to start the difficult procees of collecting my documented thoughts under one umbrella, perhaps using this blog. Here is an interview I did with Sola Osofisan. It is one of my favorites. Here is how I introduce him in the interview:

Sola Osofisan: Chief Ikhide…I still think of you as Nnamdi, that faceless guy shooting out those occasional musings on our varied experiences in America. We published a whole chain of essays from you on Nigeriansinamerica.com as far back as 2002. But I never asked you why you had to publish under a pseudonym back then. Is it time to share the story of how and why you came up with Nnamdi? And when did you realize it was time to retire him and let Ikheloa roar?

Ikhide Ikheloa: Sola, so, I don’t know that many people know about you, certainly not about your pioneering work in the field of African literature, in introducing an entire generation of writers and thinkers to that huge canvas in the sky that we call the Internet. I am thinking of your work with your websites Nigerians in America and africanwriter.com. I am also thinking of your leadership on the listserve Krazitivity, the first real digital watering hole for Nigerian writers, artists and thinkers, from Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie to Helon Habila, folks like Afam Akeh, E.C. Osondu, Toni Kan Onwordi, Remi Raji, Chika Okeke, Wumi Raji, Unoma Azuah, Jahman Anikulapo, Victor Ekpuk, Chika Unigwe, Olu Oguibe, Nnorom Azuonye, Obi Nwakanma, Obemata (Abdul Mahmud), Molara Wood, Victor Ehikhamenor, Lola Shoneyin, Amatoritsero Ede, Pius Adesanmi, Tade Ipadeola, Tolu Ogunlesi, etc. etc. In those days, if you were not on Krazitivity, you had not arrived, as a writer. We should hold a reunion. This is my long rambling way of saluting you for your quiet, purposeful work as a digital visionary, helping to shape, without fanfare, the trajectory of literature. The world may not know you, but I hope history shines a light on you as that mysterious near-mythic force that helped nurture African literature on the digital space in the 21st century. I salute you. You are famously reclusive, and so unlike many of your peers, you are not an e-household name, but you do have a cult following (me included) who adore you for your mind and awesome prose poetry. For those who do not know you, I would recommend your latest book, Blood Will Call of which E.E. Sule did a wonderful review (here).

I love this interview because it is as comprehensive as you would get into my ideas about literature and the Internet. It also compiles at the end other interviews I have done.

Now read the rest of the interview here…

A. Igoni Barrett, love, power, stories, living books, and all that jazz

Ikhide R. Ikheloa2 Comments

“There are other human experiences and emotions to write about beside anger. Poems are not only for gunning, for other people, no matter how pernicious they may be. Anger is a tiny bit of human existence and should never be over-orchestrated. I am very suspicious of ‘Protest Poetry’. Poetry can be redemptive without being a banal protest; without exuding forced righteousness. Shrillness cheapens poems. A nation that demands that the entirety of its poetry should only address socio-political ills must be delusional, hysterical, and uninhabitable. A poet should not only be wracked with the meanness of history.”

– Uche Nduka in an interview with Uche Peter Umez

Igoni Barrett’s Love is Power, or Something Like That is a good, albeit frustrating read, those who love good writing will enjoy the power, intellect and industry that Barrett brings to this collection of nine tales. The Kindle copy is published by Graywolf Press, and the hard copy by Farafina Publishers. You should read the stories, if you’ve not already read them elsewhere online; Barrett displays great range in the writing. He is a powerful writer, and it shows in the stories, well it mostly does, for even with his immense talents and skills, this is a frustrating book. If the stories look familiar to some readers, it is because the book is really an archive of works previously published online. This is becoming a pattern with new writing – it portends the future of the book. The lot of the artist in the 21st century is to endure the book as a museum. Indeed it is the case that a frugal and enterprising reader could probably cobble these stories together free off of the Internet by simply trolling the Internet. I loved that the stories were well edited, some would say over-edited, perhaps to broaden the buying market to the West where the money is. Still I found a few editing issues. I wouldn’t give the publishers much credit for the editing quality since they were previously published by online journals that pride themselves on high publishing standards.

It is interesting, reading through the numerous blurbs in the book by many writers (Teju Cole, Binyavanga Wainaina, Doreen Baingana, Helon Habila, Michela Wrong, etc.) they speak mostly of Barrett as a writer of great talent and skills, rather than to the contents of the book. This is appropriate; they are on to something. As I often argue, it is unfair to judge today’s African writers solely on the output of their books. Chinua Achebe’s generation had only the book as the canvas for their literary output. Today’s generation is suffering an embarrassment of riches and a cruel paradox: They are doing great work in the new frontier – the Internet, that publisher of choice for young African writers – struggling with the reality and notion – that to be taken seriously as a writer one must have published a book – any book. For writers in Africa faced with a publishing industry that is at best mediocre, this is a tragedy. They are being judged by circumstances beyond their control. Love is Power or Something Like That is a good collection of stories but it does not even begin to light a candle to Barrett’s brilliance, innovation and leadership in telling the stories of Africa on the Internet. That is a shame, for when the history of online writing is told, at least with respect to African writing, Barrett’s name deserves to be up there with all the other digital warriors too numerous to mention that have ensured that Africa is undergoing a renaissance in literature.

So, let’s talk about the book. I have said it is an uneven book in terms of the quality of the stories, stories that stay with me because they are unrelenting in their sadness and despair. The stories bathe the reader with detailed vivid, disturbing imagination. Desolation, despair and mind-numbing suffering are everywhere. You get used to reading stuff like this:

The bathroom was small, low-ceilinged, and stank of mildew. A colony of chitinous creatures thrived in the wet earth underneath the metal bathtub. She glanced around out of habit to see if any cockroaches had ignored the daylight signal to return to their hiding places, but in the dim lighting, her eyesight failed her.

Barrett, A. Igoni (2013-05-07). Love Is Power, or Something Like That: Stories (Kindle Locations 73-75). Graywolf Press. Kindle Edition.

What strikes the reader is how Barrett expertly documents the intellectual and spiritual emptiness of life in contemporary Nigeria. Nigeria comes across as one vast farce, filled with suffering, incompetence and mediocre thinking. When the reader comes across signs of deep introspection in the characters one gasps with relief. The writer is challenged to entertain the reader with more than vacuous pablum. Nigeria hasn’t changed much; it is the same old stuff, the usual anxieties that seem to preoccupy African writers: immigration or the movement to other climes, the many vices of relationships (betrayal, infidelity), state sanctioned brigandage in the Nigerian Police Force. The new Christianity and prosperity churches, corruption, alcoholism, patriarchy, rape, you name it, all of Black Africa’s dysfunctions are collected like drunken deadbeats and made to stand at attention. It is discomfiting. In Barrett’s world, people live like lower animals. That is where his muse inhabits. There are all these asymptotes everywhere; Barrett is always questioning one injustice or the other, smirking at one dysfunction or the other. In unsparing detail. Many of these stories are beyond dark and disturbing. The darkness rushes and rises into a raging crescendo. And you are stunned by the casualness of evil. The Nigeria here is another planet. Dark. These are sad stories. Sometimes though, the love still shines through the savagery. Somehow you are reminded that these are human beings. There is humor, of the wry variety, not enough of it, alas. Barnett takes himself very seriously. Which reminds me, graphic illustrations would have broken the monotony of text.

About the stories, for my money, the piece, The Worst Thing That Happened is probably the most sophisticated short story I have read in recent times. This story alone is worth the price of the book. And yes, it debuted in Guernica (here). It contains some of Barrett’s most poignant prose. This is a deeply rich and brilliant conversation about immigration, relationships, the extended family, and fraying ties in a global world. This is brilliant, muscular writing strutting about with quiet dignity. The reader will enjoy cool lines like this one:

A FanYogo carton lay on the road, and strawberry yogurt had leaked out and pooled on her paved frontage, a lurid pink surface dive-bombed by flies. (Kindle Locations 103-104)

In a clever twist, Barrett ties it to another story in the book, Perpetua and GodSpeed, another lovely story marked by disciplined, tightly woven sentences that pounce into a beautiful trot. Here there is a tender reflection on fatherhood and one grows to admire Barrett’s eclectic eye.

Dream Chaser comes across as a dated story about 90’s style Internet scams. I am not sure I would call this a short story, whatever it is, I enjoyed it a bit. It needed more work and sounded somewhat contrived.

The Shape of a Full Circle is is a dizzying goulash of dysfunctions thrown together like empty bottles of alcohol enduring a drunk’s leer. In this story, a son’s love for the mother is unbroken by the hurtful dysfunction the ravages of his mother’s inner darkness. Every dysfunction is here, checked meticulously – alcoholism, an absent father, child abuse, theft, rampaging thugs, a society in decline. It is grossly overdone. And here, the prose comes alive and dies, comes alive and dies, as a beautiful writer is restrained by over-eager editors pulled apart by competing visions – a memorandum versus straight luscious writing. By the way, rats are everywhere in Barrett’s stories. Barett can paint the savagery, brutality, despair and helplessness from the incompetence that sometimes passes for life. These are disturbing tales of alcoholism and child neglect and abuse. The stories occasionally redeem themselves with lines like this:

Late into the night, while she nibbled the food and sucked the bottle, Daoju Anabraba apologized to her son, over and over again , for the life they were living, for her failure as a mother, for killing his grandfather. Dimié Abrakasa, a veteran of these episodes, kept his silence. Her speech grew slurred and slid farther into her throat; her eyelids sank, struggled, fell. She cried in sleep, the bottle clutched to her chest. She farted, loud and continuous. When her sobs became snores, Dimié Abrakasa rose from his seat at the foot of the bed. He freed the bottle from her grasp and placed it by the wall, where her hand, in the morning, would reach for it. Then he covered her up and blew out the light. (Kindle Locations 856-861)

This story houses some pretty prose poetry. It is as if Barrett is in a trance. Hear him:

The world turned gray, the temperature plummeted, and gusts of wind sprang up. The wind grew stronger and flung dust into the air. A lightning flash split the gloom and a rumble of cascading boulders burst from the skies. Another flash, sulphuric in its intensity— the thunderclap was like a shredding of the heavens. Birds crawled across the sky with panicked cries. There was a lull, everything froze in that instant; and then, with a sound like burning grass, rain fell. The raindrops had not made landfall when a bolt of blue-white lightning, like a forked tongue, streaked the sky, and one of its prongs struck a fleeing swallow. The bird stalled in midflight, then began to tumble earthward as the rain hit the ground. Through sheets of crashing water, pedestrians sprinted for cover. Puddles formed on the sidewalks, then flowed together and rushed for the drains, which brimmed over and poured water onto the road. The road became a river. Car engines drank water, coughed out steam, and died. Both sides of the road— and the sidewalks, too— got jammed. The horn blares of motorists became one long, unbroken blast. (Kindle Locations 536-539)

Beautiful. You wish he would produce prose like this from beginning to end. Hunting for delicacies like this was a perverse hunt, alas. And here he is channeling Ben Okri’s malarial, febrile brilliance. He writes: “The road became a river.” And you remember Ben Okri’s famous opening lines in The Famished Road:

“In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”

In Love is Power, or Something Like That, a troubled policeman tries hard to hold on to his sanity and his family. It is violent and bloody. A man is flogged mercilessly – with a cow’s leg snatched from a butcher’s stall. Still through the nightmarish story, pretty lines peek out of the undergrowth to gawk at the traumatized reader.

He spoke English like one who thought in it. (Kindle Locations 1152-1153)

From the bushes night sounds came: scrabbling noises in the undergrowth, predatory screeches and distressed squeals, the sheesh of breeze in the treetops. (Kindle Locations 1120-1121)

He felt how the warmth of the liquor would spread through his throat, his chest; but his imagination couldn’t replicate the solid weight of good alcohol hitting the belly. He’d made a pledge: no more, not when he was in uniform. Not after the time he broke his wife’s arm in two places and had to accept her judgment when she blamed the reek of his breath. She had laid down her ultimatum from the safety of Mama Adaobi’s doorway, and he, kneeling before her in his underwear, hungover and full of remorse, had given his word. (Kindle Locations 1111-1115)

My Smelling Mouth Problem is a riff on halitosis which turns into social commentary. It was a creative experiment gleefully ambushed by the red ink of editors.

Trophy is a lovely story that plumbs the mystery of the bonds of friendship. Still the sadness seeps through; Nigerians are aliens with “skin the color of rotted wood.” It is a story that rides several dysfunctions – sleepy dead end towns with teachers having sex with their teen wards, teen sex and promiscuity. Wretched lives in various degrees of disarray are examined ad nauseam until the reader screams, “STOP!”

The Little Girl with Budding Breasts and a Bubblegum Laugh is a tale of love and forbidden sex. Two young cousins fall in love. A little girl suffers the teen blues. I must say it is at once disturbing and affecting. A disturbing love story. There are nice lines:

The air smelled like rain. (Kindle Location 1583).

Okay, he said, and dug his elbow into the bed, braced his jaw against his fisted hand, stared at her with widened eyes and pouted lips, a playful face that fell away as he continued— since you’re forcing me. I like your eyes. I like the way they light up when you’re happy. I like your legs. I like the way you walk, especially when you’re hurrying, the way you throw your feet, like a child who’s about to fall. I like your nose, and your mouth, and your breath. I like the way your breath smells. Like melted ice cream. Wow, she said in a hushed, wondering voice; and then she adjusted her legs. His hand slid between her thighs. (Kindle Locations 1757-1762)

In A Nairobi Story of Comings and Goings racism confronts prejudice and one is left stunned and confused by Barrett’s brilliant but disconcerting literary sleight of hand. The snarkiness is delightful actually, a welcome release from the over-editing of most of the stories. If you want to confirm that Igoni can write, start here:

The engine of Nairobi is fired by cash-crop farming, oiled by tourism, and steered by NGO money. Everywhere you turn in the city you find NGO people, camouflaged by straw hats and safari boots and the skin color of the tourist, white. In the supermarkets (Indian-run), the swanky restaurants (white Kenyan– run), the bus parks, souvenir bazaars, immigration offices (black Kenyan– run), luxurious hotels and safari lodges (British-run), AIDS patients’ wards and spoken-word poetry slams (American-funded), and, in small sightseeing groups, in Kibera, the largest zoo in Africa. (Kindle Locations 2495-2499).

barrett picBarrett is relentless in his message, and one reflects on the fate of women and children in Nigeria and Africa. Men are the aggressors on these pages – and in real life. Women have no chance, their saviors are too busy writing books and setting up NGOs. These are violent, abusive male authority figures accountable to no one. The unfortunate subtext: The real humans are women, children and white folks. The men of Nigeria are savage beasts, sub-humans. It is what it is. Or not. Barrett is the writer as effete judge looking into a troubled society with focused supercilious concentration, many good lines wasted on stereotype and jaded cynicism. Many times the stories gasp for air and energy. Sometimes, the passion rises, and then falls flat, bored lion too lazy to pursue prey. Sometimes Barrett makes a great deal of paying attention to detail, but for what purpose? Barrett’s facility with pidgin English is sadly under-used; where he does, it is compromised by over-editing presumably for a broader audience. The paying readership is in the West. I don’t blame Barrett, but this hurts.

Let me share some random thoughts and use Barrett’s book to annoy my readers with my soapbox rants. We must define the narrative and the terms of engagement with the world more boldly. These books expose us as timid and beholden to a conservative establishment of ancient gatekeepers. When Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986, VS Naipaul in his typical bluster asked: “Has he written anything?” Naipaul was being silly and myopic, Soyinka deserved the prize, not just based on the quality and quantity of his works as evidenced by his books, but based on the sum total of his life as an intellectual and an activist. Today, almost three decades later, it is even more important that African writers be judged on the sum total of their works, not just by their books. In the 21st century, the book as a medium of expression serves brilliant young writers. Barrett is one of the victims. They think as if they are on social media and they are forced to write on paper to get stature. In the process, they are losing readers by the millions. Writers, African writers especially have an opportunity to re-capture the love of good reading and storytelling by going to meet readers where they now congregate, and speaking to them in the language and cadence they understand, cherish and relish – in the call-and-response 3-D world they live in – that community of communities we call the Internet.

We live in a world full of innovative practices in literature, many pioneered by young Africans. The question becomes: Why do brilliant young writers and thinkers feel incomplete until they have stapled their thoughts into books few will read?  In addition to writing books, African writers must actively search for and nurture innovative initiatives, like the Bride Price app, three dimensional e-books, journals and conversations that deploy hot links, illustrations, and the call and response interactions of the reader and the writer. Nothing for me is sadder and more frustrating than visiting writers’ conferences and other meeting places where digital pioneers and leaders spend their time talking about and furtively hawking poorly produced books to a handful of attendees. At these meeting places, discussions about literature online are limited and usually come across as an afterthought. It is clear to me also that prizes like the NLNG Prize are an expensive exercise in mimicry. We don’t need prizes as much as we need supports to build innovative architectures for 21st century African literature.

This is my beef with books: In the 21st century, our creativity is still centered around the book. That paradigm shifted a long time ago. We should be having literary NOT book fairs and festivals. The young should elbow out gerontocracy from scarce resources. In terms of African literature as it exists online, the world is sitting on a goldmine. The answer is not to ignore the youth behind these new forms of storytelling, but to support them. They are the new storytellers. I will say this until I am blue in the face: social media is the publisher of choice for young African writers. Online, the writer does not have to worry about being edited to bland death by over-eager Western editors. The Internet does not ask them to italicize egusi, it laughs at their jokes and doesn’t call them “ethnic.”  In the villages of social media, writers write of sorrows and despair and heartbreak, they also write of musicians who sing pretty songs, about recharge cards, bank alerts and ATMs. When you add their stories to what obtains in books like Love is Power or Something Like That, the reader gets a well rounded  trajectory of African narrative. There are all these opportunities; alas a timid generation of writers bows to laziness, orthodoxy, patriarchy and western literary imperialism.

To be fair, there are several constraints. The Internet is wild untamed territory; poaching and disorder are at an all-time high and writers and publishers are struggling to be heard and make money at the same time. It doesn’t help that there is a dearth of innovation – traditional publishing houses have invested billions of dollars in 20th century publishing architecture. It is tough for them to turn things around on a dime. In a perverse sense, Africa on the other hand has few such constraints, the architecture is not there; however many new publishers hamstring themselves daily by investing in ancient methods. I say to them, look around you, the Internet is the publisher of choice for young African writers. Build an architecture from scratch – and they will flock to you as they flock to Linda Ikeji’s blog and as they flocked to the Bride Price app. The bride price app is perhaps the most brilliant short story ever written by an African in the past decade. The data is there to prove it; there were 12million hits, 7million unique users, and 18million unique social conversations. And one suspects that the author has made money off the app’s global reach. Ask Editi Effiong. He is African. He is not waiting for the West to help him out.

Finally, for me, the most haunting and evocative line in Barrett’s book is in the story A Nairobi Story of Comings and Goings: “I got my things and left.” And then the reader remembers why it spoke to him. Dambudzo Marechera. Helon Habila considers “I got my things and left,“ the first line in Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger, the coolest opening line in African literature I agree. Barrett loves famous opening lines.

For our son, Fearless Fang: The gift of you…

Ikhide R. Ikheloa2 Comments

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
― Albert Einstein

I have this essay in my head I would love to write, inspired by Fearless Fang and Lion Cub, our teenage sons. It is about multiple intelligences. Fearless Fang is almost indifferent to books, but he is built in the oral tradition of my ancestors. He is a smart kid, he loves to play, he could be on the football field for hours and that is just fine with him. He’ll spout off ”stats” about different kinds of football plays (he literally sleeps with his football “playbook”) but tell him that he is reeling statistics, and he shuts down. I don’t think he likes to read books, but he loves the iPad. I can tell when he is on it; the sound of his liquid laughter carries the house away from its foundation as he travels the world through its glowing monitor. America’s schools prefer his brother Lion Cub, the geek who loves books and can stand the rigid sage on the stage 19th century style of instruction that still holds the world’s classrooms hostage.

FearlessFangTodaYyI once watched Fearless Fang during “Black History Month” recite a Langston Hughes poem to the accompaniment of riffs from his guitar and I understood something – it is not about the book, it is about the ideas in the person. I wish the classroom would understand Fearless Fang. I am not knocking books, I would not be here without them, I am only saying that in the 21st century, we should consider the heresy – which is that the book is dying a long slow death. I think also that the digital world offers creative opportunities for thinkers and teachers to reach all children, especially brown children. Our son is fine. The iPad may have saved him from state sanctioned academic ethnic cleansing.

The book is powerful. It can open doors. It can slam doors shut. In the 21st century, the “book” threatens to be the most stifling word ever written. In the 21st century, in the digital age, the thinker cannot think outside the confines of the book. The thinker insists on being a writer – of books. The book will not go down without a fight. I say, read, read, read, read everything, not just books. Write, write, write, write everywhere, not just in books.

Our sons and I go to this barbershop that is owned by this dude with a college degree. The degree hangs on his wall; he is a great barber though. I imagine he took thousands of dollars in college loans simply for the privilege of hanging a certificate on the wall. Somehow one feels complete with a degree. Which is a shame. The other day the locksmith came to the house to install an electronic Bluetooth enabled lock. $125 he said it would cost us, for a basic installation. We would have to get a computer technician to program the lock with Bluetooth. We laughed harder than Unoka and sent him away, too expensive. Lion Cub took down the old lock, and with a video he found on YouTube he installed the new lock and programmed all our smartphones to open and lock the door. My Lover (ML) and I have the manual keys in case the app fails – or Lion Cub locks us out of the house. He is also our network administrator, which gives him incredible control over our lives in the house. It is a new world; patriarchy is under attack by the forces of technology. Lion Cub is going to college. If he simply knocked on doors and installed locks, in four years he would be wealthy. He is going to college. In four years we will owe what he would have earned if he had been a locksmith. It doesn’t sound right. But America is weird like that.And yes, Fearless Fang is going to college, even if it kills me. I hope he gets a football scholarship. It is what it is.

At the barbershop the dudes yell at each other about ideas. They don’t read books. I have this feeling that they hate books. All their lives they have been shepherded from stifling classroom to patronizing teachers to prison. You should see the tattoos on these guys. They don’t read books, they hate books, but they are intellectuals, they just don’t know it. I go in there for a haircut, me and my book and my iPad. Their eyes point at me and laugh, and go, “The intellectual is here!” I think they are mocking me.

the boys

Pius Adesanmi – Guest BlogPost: For Whom is Africa Rising?

Ikhide R. Ikheloa7 Comments

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of You’re Not a Country, Africa!

Keynote lecture delivered at the 8th MSU Africanist Graduate Research Conference, Lansing, Michigan, October 17, 2014

(We just lost Professor Ali Mazrui. May we please observe a minute’s silence in his honour?)

The best of times and the worst of times. No, I have not come to Michigan State University to conduct an excursion into quotable quotes from Charles Dickens. I am just taking the liberty – presumptuously, some of you might say – to put into words what it must feel like to wear that enigmatic title, “Africanist scholar”, in these most paradoxical of times for and on the continent. One would ordinarily have assumed that being privileged to be called a producer of knowledge about a part of the world which is said to possess the distinction of being at once the cradle and future of humanity would come with the fringe benefit of permanent elation.

There is one additional reason why permanent elation ought to be the defining essence of my own interpellation as a producer of Africanist knowledge. In the complicated business of nationalism and national identities in Africa, we learnt a few years ago – from one of those studies frequently purporting to have discovered new truths about the African condition – that my own corner of the continent, Nigeria, is home to the happiest people on earth. All one hundred and seventy million of us provide one jolly canvass of carnival, revelry, and jouissance. Now, we are talking about the largest group of Africans in one national place – indeed, the world’s largest assembly of black people in a single nation-space – being uniformly happy in this trickle down neoliberal world of ours. If Nigeria’s happiness trickles down, chances are the remaining 1.1 billion less fortunate Africans will at least get reasonable drops of the happiness tonic.

A little over a billion happy Africans should be good enough reason for the intellectual whose job it is to make disciplinary meaning of their ways and their world to be permanently elated. The way I see it, happy subjects make happy scholarship and happy scholarship makes the world go round! Wishes, sadly, are not horses. So we know that elation of a permanent kind is a risky proposition in the business of engaging Africa, especially in terms of her chequered trajectory in the struggle for agency. Permanent torn-ness between the diametrically opposed sentiments of elation and depression, as evoked in the Dickensian conundrum, is a safer emotional and psychological refuge for the student of Africa.

padesanmi_large-carleton-uOkay, let’s get depressed before we get elated! As you already know, our renowned Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o did not win the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature after yet another nomination round. Beyond the intellectual terrain, indeed, 2014 has been a very bad year for African sports. Virtually all our teams performed woefully in Brazil, producing a cavalcade of images leading dangerously back to the familiar routes of African stereotyping. Benoit Assou-Ekotto’s headbutting of teammate, Benjamin Moukandjo; the emergency plane load of dollars from the troubled economy of Ghana to placate players in full rebellion in Brazil; the repeated hints of threat and rebellion in the Nigerian camp, are all texts underwritten by some unsayable ur-texts, constantly hinted at or whispered on social or traditional media: Africa’s corruption and institutional demission. Note that the misbehaviour of Luis Suarez remained the misbehaviour of bad boy Luiz Suarez and did not have transcendental or generic identity consequences for the American continent.

Let’s have some more depression. As I prepared to board the plane in Ottawa, I received an email from notable African scholar, Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Quinnipiac University. The crossover to Administration was never going to slow down the constant flow of books and essays from Professor Zeleza’s goatskin bag of wisdom. As it happens, some of us in his inner circle of friends do receive personal new essay alerts from him. The essay I received alerted Professor Zeleza’s “Dear Friends” to the publication in Africasacountry.com of his latest essay entitled: “Why I am Afraid of the African Disease of Ebola”.

It is true that the continent moved from the great depression of Brazil in July to the deadly depression of Ebola in August. But I am sure that you can already take a stab at the drift of Zeleza’s essay from the title. It’s a satirical tour de force on the politics of yet another gigantic “single story” (apologies to Adichie) about Africa. Of course I have been preoccupied with the emotional roller coaster that is Ebola. After all, the outbreak in Guinea and Liberia occurred just as I prepared to leave Accra after a one-year stint as a Carnegie-Diaspora Visiting Professor of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. I’ve been part of a Nigerian social media community of mourning as precious lives were lost to Ebola. Beyond loss and trauma, Ebola is creating new economies of meaning, of contact, of cross-border figurations on the continent and of transnational calibrations of African identities across the Atlantic. I have been part of it all like everybody else.

What caught my attention in Zeleza’s essay, therefore, is that after almost four decades of “writing back” through such milestones as Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa”, Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind, Claude Ake’s Social Science as Imperialism, V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa; after Fanon, after Cabral, after Rodney, the usual prosecution witnesses have dragged yet another icon of African Studies to the intellectual court to play the part of a defense lawyer and argue our case: that Africa is not Ebola and Ebola is not Africa. For I must say it unequivocally that Paul Tiyambe Zeleza speaks for me in that essay.

After every routine needless killing of a black male teenager by police in this country, I am sure you are familiar with the spectacle on cable television of black mothers lamenting the ritual of having to have “that talk” all over again with their black teenage sons over dinner: how to appear non-threatening when pulled over by cops. Not again, such mothers gasp in exasperation. And you notice the weariness of the soul seared into those voices. A hint of that sentiment creeps in on me whenever circumstances force any of us to pick up his keyboard and reaffirm what Africa is not. Africa is not Ebola, Zeleza laments. And I experience a weariness of the soul that the ritual of enunciative disavowal of stereotype is once again foisted on us. That talk that we are not Ebola; that talk that we are not HIV/AIDS; that talk that we are not famine, hunger, war, and want. Over and over we must do it again and again. Sisyphus and his boulder have far better luck than Africa and the knowledges we generate to engage her in the theatre of representation.

Still on depression, the 2014 Ibrahim Index of African Governance has been published as you all probably already know. The continent’s performance is assessed under such rubrics as safety and rule of law, participation and human rights, sustainable economic opportunity, and human development. Whatever noticeable gains there are in the individual fortunes of particular countries is immediately dampened by the overall average result for the entire continent: 51.5%. That’s a “D-” in the North American grading system, one rung of the ladder above an outright F: how else can one express the uninspiring performance!

I am sure you will all agree with me that no portrait of depressing points about Africa would be valid in which our friends in Bretton Woods didn’t make an appearance. The last newsflash I read before I boarded the plane for the trip here announced that Ghana had started the final round of talks with the IMF on a bailout loan. The news came packaged in registers and diction which evoke the trauma of the 1980s when SAPs, conditionalities, market forces, market-driven shocks, economic downturn, devaluation, inflation, and austerity measures emptied the present of my generation across Africa and mortgaged our future. Three decades after the IMF laid the foundation of the realities which made our bosom friends in The Economist to declare Africa a hopeless continent, Ghana, one of the few countries so often placed in a glass display case as continental success stories, is back at Bretton Woods, beaten, battered, and broke.

My generation came of age in the 1980s, writing tests and exams on foolscap sheets. Jacques de Larosiere and his successor at the IMF, Michel Camdessus, sealed our fate with policies rammed down the throat of one military dictator after another across the continent. Today, the youth who make Africa tick are on Facebook and Twitter grumbling about the size of iPhone 6 even as Christine Lagarde declares enthusiastically that an appropriate “policy mix” will be worked out to ensure a “good bailout” for Ghana. I am of the 70s – 80s. A generation came of age in the 90s. Another came of age in the 2000s. Three generations of Africans, only one uniting factor: Bretton Woods’s policy “mixes”. With Christine Lagarde talking about Ghana in 2014 like Getafix the Druid in the Asterix comic series, a speaker not as optimistic as my humble self would say that we have come full circle in Africa.

Being an optimistic speaker means that I must hasten to conclude this part of our exercise on depression and pretend that the atavism of crisis and conflict is not part of the tableau of depression. I am therefore not going to say that Congo is still as Conradianly dark as ever; I am not going to mention Boko Haram and South Sudan. Throwing crises and conflict into the mix will only delay us from asking the inevitable question: is there anything about the condition of Africa and the disciplines through which we generate modes of hermeneutic inquiry into the said condition that allows us to map anything other than one gory trajectory from colonial trauma to postcolonial abjection – with ten steps backward making nonsense of every step forward in a linear course?

I am assuming we all know what the politically correct answer to this question is: Yes, there is much to celebrate in Africa and about Africa. It is not all doom and gloom. Luckily for us, logic and political correctness are in happy agreement here. It is logically untenable to stabilize doom and gloom as the permanent condition of any human society. Even in the most perilous of times which led to the tragic loss of their two most important dignitaries, one to death by suicide and the other to insanity, Umuofia and Umuaro had moments of triumph not arrested by the circumambient doom and gloom as articulated by the great novelist, Chinua Achebe.

However, beyond this happy marriage of logic and political correctness lies nuance. If we agree that elation and celebration have as much droit de cite in the African story as depression, gloom, and doom, we must ask the question: how exactly did elation come into this picture? What is its trajectory? What are its contents? How do we account for the politics of back and forth between depression and elation and what does it portend for disciplinary engagements of Africa? Consider these scenarios. Jean-Francois Bayart closed the 1980s on a note of gloom by announcing in 1989 that the state in Africa was doomed to a metaphysics of corruption. In Jean-Francois Bayart’s The State in Africa:the Politics of the Belly, the African state and her political practices were effectively placed under the conceptual control of Opapala, the Yoruba deity of hunger and gourmandizing in whose domain lies the stomach.

Ten years later, in 1999, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz appeared to take a different tack in Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. On the surface, it looked like we were finally getting a break from the depressing Afro-pessimism of the politics of the belly. We were approaching the uplifting territory of elation. But, wait a minute, Africa Works – differently? Isn’t rationalizing informal networks of human and political agency – with the attendant argument to exclude ethics and value judgements – another way of saying that the usual ways and practices of democracy and the social contract would never work because Africa is somehow not culturally and ontologically attuned to those structures and practices of modernity? Even with Africa Works, have we really moved beyond the paradigm of depression in 1999?

No, you haven’t, replied The Economist one year later, famously ushering the continent into a new millennium with the now famous or infamous caption: “the Hopeless Continent”. Things moved very quickly from here. You will observe that between 1994 and the early years of the 2000s, something was brewing beneath all this veneer of depression and pessimism. Something home-grown. A discourse of vision and hope anchored in cultural, economic, and political renewal, bearing the traceries of Negritude, cultural nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Welcome to the discourse of African Renaissance and its associated agendas. Thabo Mbeki and his associates screamed African Renaissance throughout the 1990s. They convened a conference in 1998, published a book, founded an African Renaissance Institute and went about organizing instead of agonizing. They gained little or no traction outside of South Africa. In the North, everybody was interested in depression and pessimism on account of Africa. Any talk of renaissance referred to that period from the 14th – 17th century in Europe and not whatever some upstarts thought it meant in 21st century Africa.

Then, just as Mbeki and all those on the African Renaissance train finally began to gain a solid hearing in academia and beyond, those who had crowded out their voices with depression and pessimism suddenly announced that they had had a road to Damascus moment. We were advised to move on to the other extreme of celebration and elation. They said that something much bigger than a renaissance was happening in Africa. They had no room for the semantic nuancing through which Chabal and Daloz were able to deodorize disorder and the informal as legitimate praxes of agency in Africa. We were no longer in for any back-door announcements of hope. Go tell it on the mountain that Africa is rising, has risen. The Economist tried to outdo Time Magazine. Africa Rising! Aspiring Africa! The Hopeful Continent! One glossy cover after the other screamed: Africa Rising!

I believe that an audience such as this should be sufficiently familiar with the content and career of this narrative of elation which brushed aside age-long narratives of depression like Achebe’s proverbial wildfire in the harmattan. Everything that was negative and depressing about the continent suddenly became positive and uplifting. Diction and registers changed: hopelessness became hopefulness, despondency became opportunity. Numbers and statistics rained torrentially from every imaginable source, bearing mouth-watering good news of “growth”, “sustainable development”, “governance”, “democracy”, “human rights”, “rural and infrastructural development”, “gender gap”, “poverty”, “education”, etc.

I am sure you can expand this list infinitely. After all, you know by rote what the talking points and the keywords are in those PowerPoint slides whenever men in black suits from the international capital and finance community, the international development community, the global NGO and activist community, world governance bodies and their continental appendages in Africa, as well as the institutional and disciplinary world of the social sciences, descend on any seminar room to talk about Africa Rising. To these keywords and faddish phrases we must add the fact that Africa Rising also comprises an ideological investment in the future. What used to be called a problematic youth bulge when we were in the era of depression and pessimism is now said to represent the continent’s greatest advantage. She has the greatest number of youths on earth and who says youth says innovation. Africa Rising is, therefore, African Innovation on the rise.

What could possibly be wrong with this picture, some of you may wonder. After all, there is enough going on in the continent to bear out the new narratives of elation. There was the Arab Spring; South Africa is in BRICS; Nigeria is MINT, democracy is spreading. This may be true but a lot is wrong with the politics and philosophy of elation. There is the question of the suspicious timing of the rise of the discourse of Africa Rising. One African scholar who has raised this question is the celebrated Nigerian political scientist, Professor Bayo Olukoshi. I was on a panel with him early this year in Pretoria and he wondered aloud why the narrative of Africa Rising emerged only when the narrative of African Renaissance had finally begun to gain global attention. “Why and how did Africa Rising outshine African Renaissance?”, Olukoshi asked the audience and enjoined them to think about it. President Thabo Mbeki was in the room…

It may be true that the suspicious timing of the rise of Africa Rising did have something to do with the growing fortunes of African Renaissance but I have since found other issues to worry about. One of these issues is the provenance of the discourse of Africa Rising. That this narrative appears to have been born here in the West is not a problem for me. After all, Negritude was born in Paris and Black Paris of the interwar years is a legitimate theoretical framework for me. The problem, for me, is precisely where in the West the loudest noise about Africa Rising is always coming from. Google is a good Ifa Oracle to consult in these matters. I am worried that a casual google search of this term almost always brings up the May 2014 Africa Rising conference of the IMF as the first and most important hit. You click on that link and you are welcomed by the inevitable face of Christine Lagarde welcoming you to the conceptual territory of Africa Rising in a podcast and speech. I have stated earlier that we know all the keywords by rote so it must be easy for you to imagine the content of Mrs. Lagarde’s speech without even reading it.

Other google hits will take you inevitably to The Economist and Time Magazine and all kinds of neoliberal Think Tank work on Africa Rising. If you are patient, you will finally encounter some African input midway scrolling down to the bottom of your screen. You’ll encounter the Africa Rising Foundation set up by Ndaba and Kweku Mandela and you’ll encounter, ironically, a podcast by a Deputy Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Kingsley Moghalu, claiming that Africa hasn’t risen yet. Now, I don’t know about you but whenever a new narrative about Africa seems to be domiciled mainly in the market-driven mansion of neoliberalism, I tend to develop severe allergies. My migraines tend to worsen whenever I encounter the IMF, the World Bank, The Economist, and Africa in the same sentence.

I am saying that it is a problem for me that every time I google Africa Rising, Christine Lagarde is always the first to appear on the scene to welcome me and conduct a guided tour of the concept. You google African Renaissance, Cheikh Anta Diop, Thabo Mbeki’s speech, and the African Renaissance monument in Senegal are likely to be your first hits. Then you google Africa Rising and the IMF and The Economist are your first hits. This brings back Bayo Olukoshi’s query and worry: why and how did the narrative of Africa Rising emerge to overshadow and supplant the narrative of African Renaissance?

This question could be framed differently: for whom is the Africa in African Renaissance being reborn? For whom is the Africa in Africa Rising rising? I do not want to address the first question here. At any rate, you probably can guess how I would answer the African Renaissance part of the question. My answer to the second part of this question may also seem obvious. You’d be right to conclude that I believe that Africa is not really rising for the African – at least not yet. You’d be right to conclude that I believe that Africa is rising mainly and predominantly for those screaming Africa Rising in Bretton Woods and their accomplices in the commanding heights of the continent’s politics and economics. This explains why the narrative of Africa Rising is always powered by an insidious thematic of rich pickings. Africa Rising would have no meaning beyond market orthodoxy and investment friendliness. Africa is rich pickings! Go ye hither and exploit all the opportunities before wily China laps up everything!

These obvious answers mask a deeper concern. Africa Rising invites us to take a closer look at the question of African agency. As one looks at the glass display cases of triumphalist and exultant neoliberalism, many African countries are on display: Ghana, Botswana, South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, etc. After every election meeting the minimal requirements of democracy, new countries are installed in new glass display cases and brandished to the world as the latest success stories from Africa. Yet, as you window-shop and look at these African countries glistening in display cases, your mind returns again and again to the question of agency. What was the African’s role in the construction of these glass show cases and what say did he have in the politics of inhabiting that glass display case?

Let me illustrate this point with an anecdote. I was discussing Ghana at the beginning of this talk. I was lamenting the fact that the country is now in the final phase of negotiations with the IMF for a bailout loan because of “market-driven” shocks. I was lamenting the fact that Madame Christine Lagarde was talking enthusiastically about a new “policy mix” for Ghana by the IMF. We all know that this is all a honey-coated way of saying that Ghana has failed and is now back in Washington, cap in hand, begging for the loans that will predictably ruin the future of the next three generations of Ghanaians. The African Union has been talking about the Africa 2063 Agenda. I was involved with the Diaspora Consultations on this agenda in New York last year. It seems to me that the question of what Africa ought to look like in 2063 is already being settled in the case of Ghana. The year 2063 will meet Ghana repaying loans and renegotiating the terms and conditionalities of the policy mix being conjured today by Getafix Lagarde.

Yet, this is the only country in West Africa that was placed in a glass display case by Africa Rising for more than a decade. Much to the envy and annoyance of Ghana’s eternal rival, Nigeria, the usual suspects in the choir of Africa Rising screamed from the rooftops that Ghana was the beacon of hope for the continent. All the usual ingredients of discourse flooded the global public sphere in relation to Ghana: political stability, growth, democracy, jobs, infrastructural expansion, etc. So, how did we get to being unable to pay salaries after ferrying three million dollars cash to football players in Brazil? How did we get to the perdition that are IMF loans and bailouts?

I spent a year in Ghana. I only just returned in the summer. On arrival in Ghana, I couldn’t believe the level of development that I saw. Stable electricity and stable water from the taps: these two alone are enough to make a Nigerian award the Nobel Prize in Infrastructure to any country because they have not been part of our national experience since the early 1980s. Add to that the gleaming and glistening infrastructure that I saw all over the place and you would forgive me for taking enthusiastically to social media to declare that it was criminally unfair to place Ghana in the same third world bracket as Nigeria and other less fortunate African countries where electricity and tap water are never regular. Yet, Ghana was not yet at the second world level of South Africa. I decided to hang her in a no man’s land between the second and third worlds.

However, something made me perpetually uneasy about the infrastructure and modernity that I saw all around me in Ghana. I was only able to identify the source of my unease five months into my stay. It was the jeeps! There were way too many jeeps on the roads of Accra for my liking. No, I am not talking about private jeeps belonging to individuals. I am talking about what I call postcolonial jeepology, a phenomenon in which jeeps bring the symbolism of foreign aid and dependency to the doorsteps of the postcolony. You should be able to visualize those UN Jeeps by now. I mean those white Toyota Prado jeeps that are so ubiquitous in Africa. They bear the insignia of every imaginable specialized agency of the United Nations: FAO, UNICEF, UNCHS, WHO, etc. The glut of white jeeps is not the singular making of the UN. The European Union, International Development Agencies, International Development Partners, all kinds of Foundations from Bill and Melinda Gates to Clinton, Christian missions and charity organizations – everybody is pumping jeeps and experts into Africa.

I was at the University of Ghana. The campus is crawling with the jeeps of postcolonial aid dependency. I visited ministries in town and other institutions of state – jeeps and jeeps everywhere. WHO-assisted this, IDRC-assisted that; European Union-assisted this; DANIDA-assisted that; German Government-assisted this; French Government-assisted that. Now, my own rule of thumb is that any African country crawling under the weight of the white jeeps of postcolonial dependency is in trouble. It means that the modernity you see all around you is contrived, fragile, and artificially propped by ways and means that do not belong to you. It means that somebody somewhere is desperate for a narrative, for a showpiece, and is pouring resources and symbols into a particular space to prop it up as that showpiece and produce a desired narrative.

These postcolonial white jeeps of dependency power a narrative of representation hoisted for the visual satisfaction of the giver. This is why President Obama went to Ghana and the mirror beamed an African success story at him and he sermonized to Africa from that location. This is Africa Rising, president Obama screamed. This is Ghana in which Washington is well pleased. We want y’all in the rest of the continent to be like her. Today, Obama’s showpiece is at the IMF begging for loans. The IMF spent the 80s and the 90s producing those children with countable ribs and mucus-drenched nostrils with policies designed to guarantee starvation across the continent so long as the market was growing. Evidence of failure only yielded more prescriptions of the same policies and lectures that Africa was not applying them properly. Things got so bad that Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz had to draw the line for the West. Somebody somewhere desperately needed a narrative of success. Ghana was just the sort of candidate needed and ready for the assignment.

What this means is that there is little or no African agency in the modernity of the white Toyota Prado jeeps of postcolonial aid dependency. What would happen if these jeeps were suddenly withdrawn, I kept wondering in Accra. I got a taste of what could potentially happen in my last two months in the country. Power cuts made a rude intrusion into my life; water supply followed suit and became erratic; salaries started to be delayed; everybody groaned on campus and in town; the Cedi plunged into a free fall. By the time I was leaving Accra in August, echoes of Ebola were rumbling in Guinea and Liberia and we prayed for that cup to pass over Ghana. When your Africa Rising narrative is unravelling, when you are only just discovering for whom your Africa was really rising all this time you thought she was rising for you, you do not want Ebola to be the coup de grace. Thankfully, Ebola spared Ghana.

What do these scenarios portend for you as graduate students and scholars of Africa? For starters, it means that the disciplinary space between elation and depression has not been fully probed in terms of our efforts to understand the dynamics of that continent. It means that we are yet to account for the elusiveness of agency and we do not even fully understand why it remains elusive and perpetually beyond grasp in Africa. If we do not understand why we lack agency, we will never find our way to it.

For instance, you’d think that almost four decades of writing back in and through the disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities; of telling and retelling our story as Africans and Africanists as we see in Paul Zeleza’s remarkable book, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises; of detailing and accounting for the significance of Africa to the disciplines as was done in the book, Africa and the Disciplines; you’d think that all these disciplinary gains and insights would have rendered us masters of our destiny in the field of representation. You’d think that we would have become more secure and stable owners of Africa’s story by now, owning your story and the means of its narrativization being a precondition for agency. Yet, somehow, we never owned the Joseph Kony story, never owned #BringBackOurGirls, and do presently not own the framing of the narrative of Ebola. If a continent cannot even own the means to perspectivize her failures and her tragedies, how can she possibly own the path to her successes and triumphs?

My own field, African literature, falls prey to this play of agency in interesting ways. Where is agency located and enabled in terms of literature as a canonized institution? The recent social media spat between my friends, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina and Nigerian thinker and literary ‘papa terrible’, Ikhide Ikheloa (he is too old to be called an enfant terrible), is a good case in point. Binyavanga has been a relentless critic of the Caine Prize in recent times. If you want to be unkind, you’ll say that our man Binya is kicking at the ladder he rode to literary stardom. He believes it is overrated and has acquired too much power in the canonization and validation of African literatures. He whines and whines and whines. It gets on Ikhide’s nerves. Ikhide is angry that the Nigeria Prize for Literature, a USD 100,000-Prize awarded annually is an annual ritual of literary powerlessness and oblivion.

A prize worth ₤15,000 pounds is awarded to an African short story and it comes with an international media buzz announcing instant canonization. One hundred thousand dollars is awarded to a writer in Nigeria and he’d be lucky to be interviewed grudgingly by two or three local newspapers. Ikhide is mad as hell about this development. So he dismisses Binyavanga’s endless whining about the Caine Prize. Stop complaining about the white man, he screams, go and develop and empower your own prizes and narratives in Africa! If you have no clue how to empower your own cultural and institutional modes of literary valuation in Africa, stop whining about the white man, Ikhide screams.

It should be obvious to those of you in literature that the interface between the Caine Prize and the Nigerian Prize for Literature offers grounds for interrogating agency, power, and modes of privileging in your field. If Africa is rising for the African, how does one account for the fact a literary Prize worth a hundred thousand dollars in Africa guarantees oblivion for an African writer and another prize worth less than half of that amount awarded in Europe guarantees instant superstardom, including paradoxically in Africa? How does one engage the seeming unwillingness to apply ourselves in Nigeria and in Africa to the task of empowering the Nigerian Prize for Literature?

One last area of disciplinary consequence I want to mention is the question of finding appropriate idioms for the persisting disjuncture and disconnect between reality and the etiquette of disciplinary narrativizing in the age of political correctness and anti-essentialism. This past year that I spent in Ghana came with the added advantage of extensive travels in the continent. Those who were loath to paying my way for lectures such as this because of the cost of flying me from Ottawa could suddenly afford to fly me from Accra. I crisscrossed the continent for lectures but I was also a keen observer of the life and pulse of Africa. I saw gains. I saw pains. I saw evidence of Africa Rising but not with or for the African. About the only thing I saw rising is the hard-earned income of the poverty-stricken African rising into the pocket of his pastor as prosperity Pentecostalism rages across the continent to fill the vacuum abandoned by the state and her institutions.

In too many cases, Africa is simply rising without or beyond the African. Africa cannot really be said to be rising if the state still mainly demissions from the social contract and her gleaming institutions rise to satisfy the empirical and statistical parametres of outsiders at the expense of the peoples of Africa. Do the disciplines have a language for these confounding dynamics beyond the patronizing depression of Afro-pessimism? Where the idiom is lacking, do we focus on the evidence of progress which abounds and veer into un-nuanced Afro-optimism?

Yesterday, Kofi Annan grumbled about the response of the international community to Ebola. Says Annan on BBC:

“If the crisis had hit some other region it probably would have been handled very differently. In fact when you look at the evolution of the crisis, the international community really woke up when the disease got to America and Europe.”

This is one of Africa’s most famous and illustrious sons telling us that Africa has not risen. Europe and America ought to have moved in faster with white Toyota Prado jeeps to tackle Ebola. The day that Africa would be able to take care of business such as this without waiting to condemn Euro-America for not playing the traditional role of the saviour quickly enough, Africa would truly have risen for the African.

I wish you successful deliberations in this conference.

Moses Ochonu: Africa in Fragments and the limits and dangers of a single literary medium

Ikhide R. Ikheloa4 Comments

Reading Professor Moses Ochonu’s new book, Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity was not an easy task. It was no fault of the book, a well-written engaging and eminently insightful book. It simply fell victim to my newly acquired digital ADHD,  I rarely read books these days, I do read nonstop, pretty much anything I can lay my eyes on online. The book as a literary medium is in many ways a distraction from what my detractors would call an unhealthy obsession with the digital world.  Yes, as far as I am concerned, books are fast becoming a distraction in the 21st century. Thankfully, Ochonu’s book was worth my time, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and I whole-heartedly recommend it to all those who are interested in matters Nigerian and African.  It is a substantial contribution in the seemingly eternal battle to make the world see Africa’s sophisticated humanity through broader and more objective optics.

 s200_moses_ochonuWho is Ochonu? In the 21st century, it is impossible to talk about a book, without talking about the author and the sum total of his or her works and world view. Thanks to the Internet, the book is just one medium of expression deployed by the typical thinker.  Ochonu is one of the smartest and most prolific public intellectuals I have never met. Although he is less well-known than his more fiery counterparts – Pius Adesanmi, Okey Ndibe, Sonala Olumhese, etc., he is just as passionate, erudite and uncompromising in his ideals and vision for the way things should be in Nigeria. Ochonu has an uncanny, disciplined ability to hone in on an issue and spur robust, feisty conversations on the Internet, especially on the USA-Africa Dialogue forum, a list-serve and mailing list of professionals and academics who are mostly from or affiliated with Africa.  As a side note, the USA-Africa Dialogue forum is run by the world-renowned History scholar, Professor Toyin Falola, and is populated by perhaps some of the smartest and most prolific academics birthed by Africa (read my review of his awesome memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt here). You should read the discussion threads on there and marvel at how much is out there that is rich and available and free to the world. It is an honor to be part of such a pantheon and there has to be a way of introducing a resource like this group to formal classroom instruction. The culture of the Internet mailing list is dying off but if I had to recommend a mailing list it would be the USA-Africa Dialogue forum; on a good evening, its many combatants could be e-seen holding forth and creating a dust storm of rigorous intellectual provocation. It is not always pretty in that pantheon of eggheads, but there is never a dull moment.

Ochonu is a fine scholar, extremely well read and it shows in the book. His ruminations in the book span a broad range of topics that all have depth. The essays are engaging in the style that I have gotten used to in mailing lists, social media and the Internet in general. This book would be an awesome addition to any curriculum resource on Nigeria and Africa, especially in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions, where students are coming in from broken classrooms that do not teach history, because, the government has outlawed history from the curriculum. Ochonu is an intense intellectual, with a razor sharp intellect that is matched only by his passion for the work. As an example, Ochonu wrote the definitive take-down on Mallam Nair Ahmad el-Rufai (Dealing with the el-Rufai nuisance). It is a beautiful essay, crisp and focused on holding a former public official accountable, brimming with damning data and analysis, one that has yet to be responded to by El-Rufai since it was written. Because there is nothing to respond to. We are entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.

Africa in Fragments is a well-researched book, invaluable to any student of contemporary history, thanks to its detailed notes and references; the references alone are invaluable and are worth every penny of the book’s cost. Priceless tip and shameless plug: Buy the Kindle version, it is cheaper. What specifically is the book about? Well, I came up with this brilliant idea of listing the titles of the twenty six essays in the book to give you a sense of the book. They are laid out in three sections:

Section I: How Nigeria can survive; The other problems of corruption; The case for real constitutional reform; Nigerians’ love-hate relationship with government; The “federal character” conundrum; Can Nigeria afford (literally) this democracy?; Northern elites and Northern economic backwardness; The limits of electoral reform. Section II: My Oga is better than yours; Anti-intellectualism and book people; Bongos Ikwue and Idoma cultural cosmopolitanism; Names and naming in Nigeria; Helicopter escapes and the common good; The patriotism blackmail. Section III: Africa, corruption, and moral consequence; Abuja millennium tower and the problem of explaining Africa; Arab Racism against Black Africans: Toward an understanding; Boko Haram, African Islam, and foreign Islamic Heterodoxy; African participation in the Atlantic slave trade: A deconstructionist approach; Why do Africans migrate to the West?; Immigrants, uprising, and the revenge of history; Of African immigrants and African Americans; Debt cancellation, aid, and Africa: A moral response to critics; Race, racism, and the immigrant black experience in Euro-America; Nollywood and the functional logic of mediocrity; Toward a new African renaissance.

There is so much to like about this book. The chapter, Arab Racism Against Black Africans: Toward An Understanding is a provocative and important essay. He confronts the late great Professor Ali Mazrui’s views vigorously and gleefully entertains the reader with punchy paragraphs:

Arab racism is so deep that it is inscribed in the fundamental semantic structure of the Arabic language. To this day, the generic word for a black person in the Arab-speaking world is the preface abd, which translates as “slave.” Although abd is used in reverential contexts to denote devotion, as in abd-allah (slave or servant of God), its generic usage for blacks in the Arab world is a throwback to the slave status of the ancestors of black Arabs and is clearly pejorative. This linguistic norm, among many other racially charged ones, is an expressive constant that holds true for the entire Arab-speaking world regardless of dialect and orthography.

Ochonu, Moses (2014-07-23). Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (Kindle Locations 2405-2411). Diasporic Africa Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Ochonu’s essays in this book make the case eloquently that corruption is in every cell of Nigeria’s governance. As I said earlier, Ochonu wrote the most authoritative and competent essay on the narcissism of el-rufai. You can’t link to it in the book (of course not!) but here, in Chapter 2, The Other Problems of Corruption, read, laugh, – and weep at a country on her knees from the relentless pillaging by her leaders. And Ochonu has sharp elbows; the chapter The Patriotism Blackmail is a resoundingly defiant middle finger to chants of Afropessimism leveled by alleged “patriots” against those deemed too critical of African states.

In Northern Elites and Northern Economic Backwardness, Ochonu proves that this is a rich book as he confronts Northern leadership and calls them out on their performance lapses.

[T]he ideal that underpins federal character does not square with a widely shared and expressed ideal: the preference for residency rather than ancestral origin as the supreme marker of citizenship/ indigene rights. In the wake of recent ethno -religious crises, this ideal has gained currency across the political and intellectual spectrums. Conversely, there has been widespread outrage at the practical consequences of the indigene– settler divide.

Ochonu, Moses (2014-07-23). Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (Kindle Locations 978-981). Diasporic Africa Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In Why Do Africans Migrate to the West? Ochonu provides a unique perspective that perhaps could be bolstered even more by the voices of the  new underclass coming in droves from economically sacked African nations. The essay Of African Immigrants and African Americans is perhaps the most ambitious piece I have ever read, certainly a more complex and robust intervention than Adichie’s Americanah. It is a bit controversial as he tries (unsuccessfully, in my humble opinion) to offer an alternative meaning to the pejorative term Akata. Regardless, the best narrative space for an African immigrant interested in documenting the immigrant experience is the blog, twitter and Facebook. These are breathing living spaces for breathing living stories.

In Boko Haram, African Islam, And Foreign Islamic Heterodoxy, Ochonu struts his stuff majestically; this is scholarship at its best. It is a powerful, rich essay, I highly recommend it. If you read nothing else this year, please read this one. He detaches himself from an analysis, he can be dispassionate and clinical but yet deeply engaging.

Nollywood and the Functional Logic of Mediocrity is an amusing if somewhat farcical defense of mediocrity. Nollywood mirrors the society. Many would disagree vehemently with his take on Nollywood. I also loved his compelling and robust defense of the charity work of folks like Bono and Geldof and force Africans to look inwards for their help to avoid the interventions of Western “do-gooders.”

Sometimes, Ochonu seems genuinely baffled by the bizarre levels of corruption and excess of Black Africa’s leaders. The answer is deeper than the megalomania and kleptomania that fuel virtually all of Africa’s leaders. By the way, for those interested in savagery, here are graphic pictures of Mobutu’s excesses ($100 million palace) in ruins, here; in particular watch this BBC video clip.

africaOchonuWe must ask however, especially of Nigeria’s troubles: What is the state of the environment that has spawned these dysfunctions? The book is silent on that question. Without the back and forth of online dialogue, something is sometimes lost in the translation. In my opinion, Ochonu’s book does not go far enough, it is about [the lack of] accountability, a resounding failure of leadership, and I am not just talking political leadership. The analysis should be simple: There has been no substantive restructuring of any of Nigeria’s institutions since her alleged independence from colonialism in 1960. Most of Nigeria’s structures are 19th century holdovers from the colonial days. The result is a glaring 20th century caricature nation in the 21st century. True accountability is the crux of Nigeria’s current problem. I must say to Ochonu’s credit, he gave it a great shot in the essay Can Nigeria (Literally) Afford This Democracy? It is an insightful and rigorous intervention of this subject that offers, or at least hints at, alternatives. What a refreshing concept. Here, Ochonu’s passion is almost at full throttle; still it does not match his killer performances in the digital spaces that he stalks. It is not his fault, the book as a medium does poor justice to his intellect, passion and energy. You can’t contain the Ochonus, Adesanmis and Olumhenses in a mere book. They need an infinite canvas. That would be the Internet.

Africa in Fragments offers an opportunity for me to talk about the poor job the hard copy book is doing to documented thought in the 21st century. For Ochonu’s mind and industry, the book as a medium does a poor job. Even when the book is ported to the Internet as an “e-book” it is akin to using the computer as a typewriter. Let me explain. The links in the Bibliography section are not hypertext on Kindle. You would have to copy and paste it onto a browser to use it. Traditional publishers don’t get it, they are fighting a change that came yesterday, using the Internet as if it were a typewriter. Publishers, in order to survive, have to align their vision with how people, especially the youth now live. This is not how youths of today read. Youngsters are being forced to master arcane styles of referencing using “MLA” or “ALA” format. These styles are not sustainable. I point this out because Ochonu’s book is essentially an archive of his viewpoints that were previously expressed in online forums, they are written as such and it shows. Missing is the robustness of discourse that the thoughts were part of; you would have to go to the threads online to get a feel for the tenor, content and trajectory of the discourse, because there you would see the responses to Ochonu’s ideas by other intellectuals. Here, it sometimes reads like a lecture, instead of an important part of a thread or conversation. I dream of a living breathing e-book, complete with running discussion threads embedded, hyperlinks to all the resources in the essays and opportunities for comments – almost blog-like. I would be willing to pay a modest fee to subscribe to Ochonu’s mind in such an endeavor.

Ochonu also takes time in the book to explore the role of African writers and intellectuals in perpetuating the myth of the single story. However, I howled with mirth at the MLA formatted footnote of Adichie’s Ted Talk. In the book’s bibliography this is the citation for Adichie’s video, The Dangers of a Single Story:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Dangers of a Single Story,” TED Talk, July 2009. http:// http://www.ted.com/ talks/ chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html. Accessed on February 4, 2014.

If the gatekeepers of tradition believe that readers will type all that gibberish on to a computer they are joking, That is what Google is for.

I enjoyed his academic riff on his townsman Bongos Ikwue’s music, I did find the prose sometimes stodgy – in an amusing way. Here, Patrick Obahiagbon would have been proud of him, Hear Ochonu:

 The philosophical implication of Bongos’s music is that universal values are not independent of their constitutive elements; they are instead coextensive with their divergent parts. They are empowered and substantiated by the material and abstract worlds of disparate people living in localized, sometimes remote, milieus in different corners of the world. Idomaland is one such constituent of the universal. Its quotidian realities, cosmological landscape, and incantatory messages mirror and feed into the universal axioms that we take for granted in speech and gestures, and that some of us adopt as moral instructions . Not only are universal concepts minted in European linguistic systems analogous to similar concepts in the worlds of the Idoma and other non-hegemonic cultural formations; they sometimes derive their credibility and persuasive appeal from the fact that they are ultimately rooted in the material and symbolic inventions and adaptations of peoples— like the Idoma— who are often theorized as peripheries of the world.

Ochonu, Moses (2014-07-23). Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (Kindle Locations 1613-1619). Diasporic Africa Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

That part taken from the essay, Bongos Ikwue and Idoma Cultural Cosmopolitanism reads like part of an obtuse PhD thesis. If you understood all that, you are ready to take the SAT aptitude test. My son is studying for the test. He should read the book. His world-view will expand, yeye American, and he will ace the SAT reading and writing sections, LOL!

I kept dreaming: What would a really good digital book look like? We could start with Africa in Fragments and convert it to a real book, complete with links, forums and pictures. I would pay a mint to get into Ochonu’s head that way. Yes. Imagine, back and forth dialogue, multi-layered, multi-dimensional – the emerging form of literature in the 21st century. Death to the sage-on-the-stage tyranny, welcome to the guide-by-the-side paradigm. The book makes frequent, veiled references to the richness of discourse in  the USA Africa Dialogue online forum and unwittingly makes the most eloquent demonstration of the failure of the book as a medium to replicate the joys of digital media. Again, the book was written for a digital audience, and struggles with long explanations where a hot link would explain. Resources to  What is the Marshall Plan? and Tony Blair’s debt cancellation plan should have been hot links on kindle. They are not. That is the fastest way to lose an audience. In any case, to really get into Ochonu’s fecund mind, go online, Google him and feast – for free. But first you must buy this book.

The good news is that the structural transformations going on in the world, thanks to the Internet and allied technologies are very much on Ochonu’s mind and he is at his most thoughtful when he muses on them as these quotes show:

 The second potential catalyst for Africa’s development in the twenty-first century turns on the degree to which the continent’s leaders harness and channel into productive endeavors the ideas, peoples, goods, intellectual capital, and technologies moving in and out of Africa. This effort to take advantage of new ideas and mediums to rebuild, reclaim, and revitalize Africa is as much an intellectual process as it is a political project. As thinkers on Africa’s fate and future, African intellectuals must accept that certain aspects of their analytical toolkit are now simply outmoded, rooted as they are in struggles and constructs that were relevant to sociopolitical moments that have expired. For instance, the old utopian pan-Africanist vision that sought to dissolve rather than understand intra-African difference is no longer tenable. Without explicitly intending it, some of these outmoded constructs shut off discussions on communal fissures, contentious relations between contiguous African peoples, internal hegemonies of class, race, and ethnic privilege, and the ugly underbellies of a frayed Afro– Arab relationship.

Ochonu, Moses (2014-07-23). Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (Kindle Locations 4490-4497). Diasporic Africa Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Furthermore, as the spaces for discussing, brainstorming, and troubleshooting on Africa’s slate of challenges increasingly take on informal characteristics with the popularity of social media and others organs of democratized punditry, African leaders and intellectuals have to engage with nontraditional African discursive communities nurtured on informal technologies of expression and problem solving. All of this throws up larger, more consequential questions. How can African leaders and intellectuals reckon with increasingly mobile African bodies, ideas, and objects? How can they keep up with the narratives that are animating the lives of African communities in fixed, situated locales and in shifty information landscapes such as Internet forums and social networks? How do we write African stories that are proliferating in cyberspaces into our rendering of African realities, into our descriptions of African ways of seeing and structuring the world, and, ultimately, into our prescriptions for an African renaissance? Africa’s future depends on the extent to which these ideational, human, and technological flows between Africa and the world and within Africa intersect to create new economic, political, and intellectual paradigms. The first imperative is a basic existential one of remaking the territorial, constitutional, and political contours of postcolonial African nation-states in the diverse, complex images of their constituents.

Ochonu, Moses (2014-07-23). Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (Kindle Locations 4483-4516). Diasporic Africa Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

These are profound observations that should breathe beyond Ochonu’s book; they should be enough for a week-long conference, not a book. I salute Professor Moses Ochonu for engaging me with his thoughts in his insightful book. Go get your own copy, LOL!

For Linda Ikeji: Wole Soyinka on Mukhtar Alexander Dan’Iyan (@MrAyeDee)

Ikhide R. Ikheloa14 Comments

Those following the Linda Ikeji saga will forever remember her adversary, who goes by the Twitter handle @MrAyeDee. His real name is Mukhtar Alex Dan’Iyan. My views about the whole episode may be summed up in this interview with 9jafeminista. I promised to share on Twitter Professor Wole Soyinka’s views of him; it is rather harsh, but is very important to understand the man that Linda Ikeji was up against. I have known Mukhtar since the early 90’s, first on Naijanet where I was the towncrier, and then as members of the Association of Nigerians Abroad, where I served as Secretary General, and then as adversaries and allies inside the pro-democracy movement.  I shall have more to say about those heady, exciting and dangerous times, indeed I felt it was necessary for folks on Twitter to know his real name, it wasn’t obvious that they did. I don’t regret that outing, folks needed to know what they were up against. I shall have more to say about that someday. Let’s just say he was formidable enough to attract the attention and ire of Professor Wole Soyinka, a rage which spilled into his memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. Here is a direct quote from Soyinka on Mukhtar:

“One was a self-hating Igbira, a minority tribe from the Nigerian hinterland, whose yearning to be mistaken for a Fulani aristocratic scion had resulted in his changing his name from Daniyan to Dan’Iyan. Partnering him was an ambitious youth from Swarthmore College, Jude Uzowanne. The third member was a labor unionist from Edo in southern Nigeria, Tunde Okorodudu, an activist in his own right who fell under the spell of the fourth member and center of intrigue, the liaison officer for the U.S. Boston chapter, Maureen Idehen, a pharmacist who had worked closely with me and was central to the coordination of activities for much of the United States. Together, this Gang of Four—the accolade was spontaneously bestowed—succeeded in serving a timely lesson on the power lust even among a yet inchoate formation that sought to curb power at its most virulent and malignant. It was a low point in the career of the anti-Abacha movement, suddenly compelled to confront the banal distractions of trite intrigues and personal ambitions. Expelling the miscreants took its toll. The liaison officer, the Boston-based Maureen Idehen, made off with our scant funds, leaving behind a trail of bad checks.”

Now read what Soyinka had to say in its entirety. I am intimately familiar with most of he issues, I lived it along with Mukhtar and many others.  Soyinka was NOT happy with “The Gang of Four.” I don’t think he should have mentioned them in his memoir and in some cases things got muddled up a bit. One day, there may be a need for a Truth Commission to unpack all of this. Oya read… Linda Ikeji never knew what hit her. Mukhtar Dan’Iyan is one of the most brilliant and tenacious fighters I have ever engaged in my life. As an adversary and as an ally, I grew to respect and in some cases fear his mind. Those were the days. Oya read…

“I HAD HARDLY recovered from that exercise when, thanks to a meeting with the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, a former prisoner of apartheid, we found an opening through which we could advance the newly unified organization from the beginnings made at the Johannesburg/Oslo meetings. The George Soros–sponsored Goree Institute in Dakar, of which Breyten was a board member, agreed to facilitate the second meeting of the umbrella group, now going by the name of the United Democratic Front of Nigeria (UDFN). That gathering took place over strong diplomatic representations by the Abacha regime. The Senegalese government replied that it did not make a habit of intervening in “cultural” meetings, which, to the best of its knowledge, this was meant to be, since it was sponsored by the Goree Institute. It was a moment to be savored, the solidarity of the Senegalese government with the democratic cause and the coming together of twenty-seven organizations spread all over the globe, from Australia to Canada. Alas, the affliction I sought to escape in NADECO traveled with the luggage of a handful—a mere quartet, American-based—of the delegates. It served to increase my bewilderment at the craving for position and power in human disposition, one that seems especially absurd when an intervention in the fate of millions is initiated from the position of a weak challenger. It proved to be a near death at nativity; a movement that had been formed to liberate a nation from the very bane of power found itself enmeshed in a tawdry tussle for position. I had declined any formal position within the new body. This, however, signaled a contest for what the ambitious quartet read as an opportunity for self-promotion into a vacuum and the complete takeover of the organization. The plot had been hatched well in advance. It began from the moment that the liaison officer for Boston discerned, with absolute certainty, that I would not run for office and would remain content with my functions as an informal ambassador to the movement. The irony of such jostling was totally lost on the conspirators. One was a self-hating Igbira, a minority tribe from the Nigerian hinterland, whose yearning to be mistaken for a Fulani aristocratic scion had resulted in his changing his name from Daniyan to Dan’Iyan. Partnering him was an ambitious youth from Swarthmore College, Jude Uzowanne. The third member was a labor unionist from Edo in southern Nigeria, Tunde Okorodudu, an activist in his own right who fell under the spell of the fourth member and center of intrigue, the liaison officer for the U.S. Boston chapter, Maureen Idehen, a pharmacist who had worked closely with me and was central to the coordination of activities for much of the United States. Together, this Gang of Four—the accolade was spontaneously bestowed—succeeded in serving a timely lesson on the power lust even among a yet inchoate formation that sought to curb power at its most virulent and malignant. It was a low point in the career of the anti-Abacha movement, suddenly compelled to confront the banal distractions of trite intrigues and personal ambitions. Expelling the miscreants took its toll. The liaison officer, the Boston-based Maureen Idehen, made off with our scant funds, leaving behind a trail of bad checks. I should have been warned by the extralong talons, garishly decorated, that she affected in place of fingernails, but this highly efficient intriguer was the daughter of an old schoolfriend and classmate. His visits to his daughter in Boston had even served as an updating source for much of what was happening on the ground at home, and his support of the cause was quite vocal. As it turned out, he had also immersed himself in position grabbing on behalf of his daughter, even to the extent of poring through the minutes of the Dakar meeting and placing transatlantic calls to argue with my son—elected secretary-general of the UDFN—to assert the position of his daughter in the movement. To say that the entire episode constituted a personal embarrassment would be understating an experience of intense chagrin. I had the unpleasant duty of reminding the doting father that he was not a member of the movement and would he kindly keep sons and daughters outside an already draining undertaking. Ironically, it was the “vengeance” of one of the subversives that raised the profile of the opposition in the mind of the Abacha regime, far above its own ambitions or capabilities. A “confession” appeared in a Northern-based newspaper run by the brother of the inspector general of police, Alhaji Ibrahim Commassie, contributed by Jude Uzowanne. In it the writer claimed that he had been involved in the recruitment and training of a secret army, that he was in fact chief of staff of this force under my military command. In the meantime, naturally, he had had second thoughts, was now opposed to violence, had voluntarily quit the organization for this reason, and was doing his patriotic duty by revealing these terrorist plans.

Of all the fabrications put out by Abacha’s men about our activities, this was by no means the wildest. In any case, armed struggle, even from the start, was a subject that was openly introduced into discussions. This young man’s claims, self-ingratiating concoctions though they were, did have one decidedly negative effect. They had, after all, emerged from one whose earlier membership could not be denied, albeit that he was now expelled and had turned into a born-again pacifist. He had come into the UDFN through an affiliating group and been assigned the role of mobilizing the youth wing of the movement. If young Uzowanne’s claim had been true, it would have been his second conversion within a year. Revelations came tumbling in, confirming earlier rumors of his instability. He was confronted with a position paper he had sent to Sani Abacha, outlining how the dictator could turn himself into the Pinochet of Nigeria. His intellectual prowess, of which he had no modest estimation, was humbly offered to Abacha for the historic transformation. A small, ambitious Walter Mitty character, emotionally unstable, Uzowanne would indeed have been a most unusual choice for a military assignment, additionally being shortsighted, virtually blind, behind his inch-thick lenses and of such physical insubstantiality that the slightest wind from the heat of New York streets threatened to blow him right off the sidewalk and on to summary execution by the traffic. Alas, some of our supportive foreign embassies in Nigeria did swallow this “revelation” without any qualification and reported to their governments, which began to distance themselves from the opposition movement. This would have been a minor nuisance, on balance, since we were also positively served in other ways by this egregious piece of fiction. Certainly it played havoc on Abacha’s peace of mind; all reports indicated that it contributed to imbuing in him a holy terror at the very mention of W.S. or NALICON.”

Soyinka, Wole (2007-12-18). You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (pp. 402-404). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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My mother’s cell phone

Ikhide R. Ikheloa1 Comment

My dad, Papalolo served the colonialists in the fifties’ Lagos and was fond of telling anyone who would listen that he loved the white man’s orderliness, governance, discipline, etc. My mother is similarly contemptuous of my generation of looters (her word). She says ruefully that in the previous life black folks were in charge but they screwed things up so badly, God said never again. My mother half-jokes that the white folks know where God is but they won’t tell us, so we don’t go and kill Him.

I understand my parents’ cynicism; they and many people live in our village under appalling conditions. I reflect on my parents’ feelings a lot these days. President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration must be the most reviled in the history of our nation. No one that I know of has anything good to say about him and his hapless sidekicks. However reading Nigerian writing and its anxieties through the decades, you cannot help but notice that the refrain is constant. Except for the changing dates, the story is the same; massive corruption and inept governance, no accountability. I half joke that the only civil servant that ever went to jail in Nigeria was Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and that was fiction.

It is sad. Nigeria’s intellectual and political elite have used democracy to demonstrate convincingly that they are devoid of credibility and incapable of governance. It is sad but again this is not new. Chinua Achebe has raged at colonialists, postcolonial leaders, VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and anyone that questions our humanity as black people. I identify with his anger; a pox on the mansions of all racists. But I wonder at what point we should take personal responsibility for the circumstances we find ourselves in. What passes for democracy in today’s Nigeria, for example is a perverse mimicry of the real thing and foreigners may be forgiven for being skeptical of our progress and expressing this in condescending patronizing ways. It is important to demand respect but it must also be earned.

To be fair, globally, many assumptions about democracy and governance are changing. Orthodox economic theories are falling by the wayside because they were crafted under assumptions of demographic homogeneity and fixed physical boundaries. The world is browning, walls are falling and old assumptions about how we should live are no longer as useful as they once were. In Nigeria however, not much is changing in terms of governance. The intellectual and political elite seem genetically wired to look out only for themselves and their immediate families, the people be damned. The distinction between Nigeria’s ruling Party, the PDP and the pretend-opposition, the APC is a distinction without a difference. They are both profoundly corrupt and incompetent, with the PDP only marginally better in the sense that it lays no dishonest claims to honesty. Nigerians are still howling with laughter at Mr. Atiku Abubakar’s declaration that he will stamp out corruption in Nigeria if elected. He is stupendously wealthy and he has given feeble defenses to robust and compelling accusations that virtually all of his wealth came from state-sanctioned looting of the treasury. Get this, he is the most credible of the APC front-runners, yet he has refused to quash credible rumors that he is wanted in the United States. At least one of his associates is in jail for fraud. This is what the New York Times piece says about this embarrassment:

As for the money in the freezer, agents found it in a raid at Mr. Jefferson’s home in August 2005. Prosecutors said it was from a Kentucky businessman and was supposed to be used to bribe a high official of Nigeria, later identified as the vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who denied being part of any scheme.

Mr. Abubakar might end up being the first Nigerian president to be arrested by the law enforcement authorities of another nation. We are in a very humiliating place as Nigerians. But then Nigerians’ expectations for even a half-decent government are pretty low. It won’t happen anytime soon, especially given the shady characters on social media, former thug-rulers, now writing lofty tweets and posts about the Nigeria of our dreams. They would dearly love to return to the scene of the crime; they left a lot of unresolved loot behind in Abuja and elsewhere. We may be stuck. Our only hope perhaps is a second colonization. I see the harbinger of this coming dispensation in our willingness to mimic, and be assimilated by Western values. The West is an asymptote that even the most Pan-African of us has bought into. Nothing is original and valued unless it is from the West. Our leaders’ children do not go to our schools because they are not good enough. I don’t blame them, have you been inside any of our schools lately? In Nigeria, the children of the dispossessed are being abused in the name of education.

So, what am I saying? There is hope. Yes, stop laughing. The lowly cellphone saved Nigerians from the tyranny of state-sanctioned incompetence and corruption (NITEL!). So will Wal-Mart save us from the hell that our intellectual and political elite have put us in. America needs new markets, she is saturated with consumer goods, you can only buy so much. Black Africa is the new frontier; there are a lot of unthinking consumers waiting for Western capitalist detritus. Wal-Mart needs to reach my waiting mother. In order to do get to her, Wal-Mart would need to fix the broken roads and hire armed robbers as toll booth attendants. Our elders would be people greeters, taught by professional development experts to say in perfect American accents, “Welcome to Wal-Mart!” Just like they did the chaat wallahs of Mumbai’s bazaars. Wal-Mart will sell do-it-yourself (DIY) municipal kits aka Gofment-in-a-box. If you have the money you can use Wal-Mart’s roads, water, police and schools, all in a safe environment. As long as you pay for it. Just like in America. There is hope my people, go to church today and pray for deliverance through my prediction. In Jesus Name! Insha Allah! Ise! What has all this got to do with my mother’s cellphone? You will need to ask her, I don’t know. Goodnight.