The Achebe phenomenon

CHUKS OLUIGBO

With the avalanche of eulogies streaming in since the announcement of the death of Chinua Achebe on March 21, 2013, one is almost at a loss as to where to begin. What can be said about Achebe that has not been said? It’s hard to find. No wonder my brother Max Amuchie wrote that “there is nothing to be said about Achebe's accomplishments in, and contribution to, African literature and post-colonial political consciousness that has not been said”. Yet, I believe that there is no description of Achebe that can capture the whole essence of that great man of letters. Achebe was a colossus. As the tributes continue to pour in, this fact becomes even clearer. It is like that story about ten blind men trying to describe the elephant, or different literary scholars with diverse orientations trying to interpret a particular piece of literature. Moreover, as Achebe himself observes in his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, it is only the man who does not have the gift of oratory that gives the excuse that his kinsmen have said everything there is to say. So...

While the debate raged over a portion of Achebe’s parting gift to Nigeria and the world, entitled There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, I refused to be dragged into it, partly because it was getting real dirty. But a day after the announcement of the man’s death, a thought came to me: what if Achebe hadn’t written that book before he died? It was then I realised it, and I wrote thus on my facebook wall: “Just like a few ancients who were blessed with that rare gift of fore-knowledge of their death, he gathered his children around him and whispered into their ears: THERE WAS A COUNTRY. And while they were still trying to decipher it, he took a bow and left the stage. Now they have something to think about for the rest of their lives...”

At that moment I had no doubt, nor do I have any now, that Achebe sensed the end was near, and he knew he owed the world his personal account of the Nigeria/Biafra Civil War, a war in which he was a very active participant, a war that virtually severed his cordial relationship with his great friends across the other side, particularly John Pepper Clark and Wole Soyinka, and ultimately cut down in mid-morning his bosom friend Christopher Okigbo. Anyone who has read JP Clark’s poems “The Casualties” and “I Can Look the Sun in the Face” may be able to get an idea of the extent of the damage done.

Looking back, I am inclined to believe that Achebe was no ordinary man. He was indeed a phenomenon. He was one of the few who have treaded these paths whose ‘chi’ imbued with extraordinary wisdom. He perfectly fitted the description of that proverbial elder who could see while squatting what a child could not see even from atop an iroko tree. He was both a prophet and a diviner. His prophesy about a possible coup in the country in A Man of the People (1966) did not take long to materialise, and we’re still out there in search of a solution to his divination 29 years ago that the trouble with Nigeria is “the failure of leadership”.

Achebe was a man who said yes, and his ‘chi’ concurred. His paths were clearly mapped out. And he followed his heart when it mattered most – dropping out of medical school at the risk of losing his scholarship just so he could pursue his dreams. His manner of writing reveals a born storyteller, no doubt, yet there is evidence that Achebe’s course of study helped to shape, sharpen and fine-tune his raw talents, without which he might have still made a good writer but might never have stood out the way he did. His life was a manifestation of his own aphorism in No Longer at Ease about greatness and the iroko tree: “You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Whoever planted an iroko tree – the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men” Chapter 5 (p. 57).

So, irrespective of what anybody might say about There was a Country, a book, fortunately, I have read cover to cover, I believe it was Achebe’s way of unburdening his heart to the younger generation before joining his ancestors. There, as I said in that facebook post, he played his final role as a responsible father – leaving his children not without a parting word. It was the quintessential Achebe at work. Even if we do not totally agree with everything he said in the book, let’s not forget the saying that posterity may forgive us for not doing something right, but never for not doing anything at all. Achebe has done his part; rightly or wrongly, it is now left for posterity to judge.

Perhaps it is also pertinent to remind us that historical interpretations most times are based on a fraction of the evidence, a part of the whole, but so far as the arguments follow where the available material leads, they are valid. The often seemingly divergent conclusions in historical accounts are due to the different angles from which various historians approached the same episode. As Chimamanda Adichie aptly titles her tribute to Achebe at 82, “We remember differently”.

Finally, for those who think they still have an axe to grind with the late sage for writing that book that they feel he shouldn’t have written, it’s a challenge to write their own personal history of that war and “put the accounts straight”. Adebayo Kareem, a respected lawyer, actually wrote an article, in the heat of that debate, urging Yakubu Gowon, the wartime military head of state, to write his own memoir. I’m waiting to read that book.

Meanwhile, may the soul of “The Eagle on Iroko” find peace, the very thing that eluded him in the country of his birth.

Thurstan Shaw and his African legacy

By CHUKS OLUIGBO

It was from the late Fred N. Anozie (PhD), then a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and coordinator of the Combined Arts programme of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), that I first heard the name of Charles Thurstan Shaw. That was in January 1999. I had just been admitted into the Combined Arts programme and had gone to Anozie to sort out my combination. There were many combinations available, he had told me. One could, for instance, combine History and Archaeology, History and English, English and Dramatic Arts, English and French, English and German, and so on. Up until then I had only known archaeology as a branch – or, as we referred to it in secondary school, one of the sources – of history. In those secondary school History classes, our teachers called it archaeology or dug-out history. And so I didn’t understand what a full-blown Department of Archaeology would be doing. I expressed these sentiments to the amiable doc and he took time to explain to me. It was in the process that he mentioned Charles Thurstan Shaw and his archaeological works in Nigeria and across West Africa. Even though that did not convince me to take on Archaeology, it left me better enlightened.

But that was only part of the gist. I was later to learn that F. N. Anozie hailed from Igbo Ukwu, Anambra State. He was, according to the gist, a mere impressionable youth around the time Thurstan Shaw was undertaking his archaeological excavations in that town. Shaw’s discoveries in Igbo Ukwu had left a lasting impression on young Anozie, who thereafter made up his mind to study Archaeology in the university – and, in my estimation, he turned out a great archaeologist. In his 2003 inaugural lecture “Reflections on History, Nation-Building and the University of Nigeria”, P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, then professor of History at UNN, did refer to Anozie’s contributions to the establishment and development of the archaeology component of the History Department of the university (In 1963, to demonstrate the importance the university attached to African history, the History Department changed its name to the Department of History and Archaeology). Archaeology would eventually develop into a full-blown department, and has now graduated to become the Department of Archaeology and Tourism Studies, in the spirit of the times. Clearly, Anozie et al nurtured succeeding generations of archaeologists who have continued the good work they started – all thanks to Shaw’s influence.

Moreover, it is hard to gloss over Shaw’s imprint in the works of Catherine Acholonu, eminent professor, researcher and culture enthusiast, who has literally made a home in Igbo Ukwu. In a paper she presented during the 2010 Nigerian National New Yam Festival in Igbo Ukwu on recent findings regarding Shaw’s archaeological discoveries in that town, Acholonu said: “In 1990, we began research on the African cultural phenomenon. Our intention was to challenge the misconception that Africa had no long history and that the continent had no contribution to knowledge, technology and global civilisations. Twenty years of research and five major publications later, we have more than enough evidence that Africa was not just the mother of humanity, but the mother of culture and of human civilisations.”

Among other books, Acholonu has gone on to author, based primarily on archaeological evidence, a trilogy on the African past – The Gram Code of African Adam, a 500-page book about the monoliths of Ikom in Cross River State and how they contain evidence that Eden was in Nigeria; They Lived Before Adam: Pre-historic Origins of the Igbo – The Never-Been Ruled; and The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam, Unearthing Heliopolis/Igbo Ukwu – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India, which answers, among others, such raging questions as: what was the ancient city that the present Igbo Ukwu town is sitting on? Who was the sovereign buried in Igbo Ukwu? And, how far back in time does Igbo Ukwu’s history go?

So, it is not for nothing that Shaw is highly revered in the world of archaeology. Shaw first came to West Africa – specifically to the then Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) – in 1937 to work as an archaeologist. Starting as a tutor, he was later appointed curator of the Anthropology Museum at Achimota College, a post he held until 1945. It was during this period that he made the first archaeological excavations in Ghana at Dawu, near Accra – although some records refer to earlier excavations at the Achimota College farm and at the Bosumpra rock shelter at Abetifi. In the 1950s, Shaw was instrumental to the founding of the Ghana National Museum and the Archaeology Department at the University of Ghana.

In 1959, Charles Thurstan Shaw came to Nigeria on the invitation of the Antiquities Department of the University of Ibadan to embark on an archaeological excavation at Igbo Ukwu. Shaw's excavation revealed bronze pieces that were evidence of a sophisticated Igbo civilisation from the 9th century, marking the most-developed metalworking culture of the time. In 1964, he returned to the town and conducted two more excavations, which also revealed extensive bronzes, as well as thousands of trade beads demonstrating a network extending to Egypt. He also found evidence of ritual practices related to burials and sacred sites.

According to the records, Shaw made further excavations at the Iwo Eleru rock shelter, located about 24 kilometres from Akure in Ondo State, which produced evidence of human occupation of the forest fringes of West Africa during the Late Stone Age and the skeletal remains which show Negroid characteristics had been dated 11,200 ± 200 BP, the oldest known specimen in the West African region at that time.

While at the University of Ibadan, which he joined in the early 1960s as a research professor of Archaeology in the university’s Institute of African Studies, Shaw founded the Archaeology Research Unit of the Institute. He went on to establish a Department of Archaeology, of which he became the founding head of department. There, he would help in nurturing many great archaeologists for the country’s needs.

Shaw founded and edited the West African Archaeological Newsletter, 1964-1970. From 1971-1975, he also edited the West African Journal of Archaeology, successor to WAAJ. In 1970, he wrote a two-volume monograph on Igbo Ukwu and followed it up with two books – Discovering Nigeria’s Past (1975) and Unearthing Igbo Ukwu (1977). It could then be said, and rightly, that it was Thurstan Shaw who initiated the process of re-examining, re-evaluating and reconstructing the African past using archaeology. One would assume he worked closely with Kenneth O. Dike and Saburi O. Biobaku, eminent African historians, who fought, and succeeded, to debunk the obnoxious claim by Eurocentric scholars that Africa had not history but the history of European activities in Africa – as distinguished Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper told the world in 1960.

Born on June 27, 1914 in Plymouth, England, the second son of Reverend John Herbert Shaw and Grace Irene Woollatt, Charles Thurstan Shaw was educated at Blundell's School in Tiverton, then at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. He received a BA (First Class) in 1936, was awarded an MA in 1941, and then a PhD from Cambridge in 1968 based on an assessment of his published work. Though Shaw departed this physical world on March 8, 2013, it is without doubt that his legacy, particularly in West Africa, will never die.

Inside Kaye Whiteman’s Lagos

By Chuks OLUIGBO

The first thing that strikes you about Kaye Whiteman’s Lagos is its close attention to detail. The book is clearly the work of a thorough-bred historian and articulate, eagle-eyed researcher before whom nothing is lost and to whom no detail is considered of less importance.

 

Whiteman puts the tools of his training in historiography to good use, combining primary and secondary sources in good measure, adopting a fusion of narrative, analytical and descriptive techniques, and presenting his findings in free-flowing prose that makes the work a reader’s delight. This free flow also has the consequence – perhaps unintended – of making the book racy, more like the fast-paced city that Lagos is.

Reading through the book, it is easy to see how truly it is “a cultural and historical companion”, as its subtitle suggests. The eleven-chapter book covers such topics as The Story of Lagos; The Topography of Lagos; Changing Society and the “Look” of the City; A True City of Imagination: Lagos in Literature; Prominent Personalities of Lagos; Streets of the Imagination: Everyday Mysteries of the City; among others. However, of particular interest to the present writer are the chapters on Lagos as a true city of the imagination (Lagos in Literature); Music, Film, Art and the Havens in the Wilderness; and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: Archetypal Lagos Boy.

In exploring Lagos as a true city of the imagination, the author x-rays the many representations of Lagos in works of literature across the generations, the journalist as a hero in Nigerian fiction and non-fiction, as well as the history and development of the media industry in Lagos (nay, Nigeria – Lagos is both the birthplace and the heartbeat of the media in the country), beginning from the 1860s with the “short-lived Anglo-African” owned by Jamaican immigrant Robert Campbell, through Iwe Irohin, a Yoruba-language paper produced in Abeokuta by missionaries from 1859-1867, Herbert Macaulay’s Lagos Daily News, Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot, among others.

On the representations of Lagos in works of fiction, particular mention is made of Cyprian Ekwensi’s early works, especially Iska, Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, T. M. Aluko’s Kinsman and Foreman and Conduct Unbecoming, Flora Nwapa’s 1971 book of short stories This is Lagos, Wole Soyinka’s Interpreters, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s play The Transistor Radio, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, among others. The pack is unassailable, but it is in Saro-Wiwa’s The Transistor Radio that the indomitable Lagos spirit comes alive when Basi tells Alali: “Lagos is the place for you, man. With a job, without a job, this is a place of hope. The future lies here, man. I tell you, we’ll make it here, suddenly, without warning. And then our lives will be transformed. This room will become a palace, we’ll own planes...”

Lagos is also the centre of creativity where budding talents find expression.

In the chapter on Music, Film, Art and the Havens in the Wilderness, Kaye Whiteman showcases the art enthusiast in him, incorporating his personal adventures in the potpourri of music, literature, entertainment, art, culture, film and night life that is Lagos. The author explores the origins of such music genres as Sakara, Asiko, Juju, Highlife, etc, citing generously the musicologist John Collins, Christopher Alan Waterman, Bobby Benson, among others. Such names as the mandolin-playing Tunde King, the guitarist Ayinde Bakare, the drummer Lamidi George, Isaiah Kehinde Dairo, King Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey, Victor Uwaifo, Nico Mbarga, Victor Olaiya, E. C. Arinze, Cardinal Rex Lawson, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Lagbaja, Osita Osadebe, Roy Chicago, etc also prop up. Musical venues, art galleries (which the author refers to as “havens in the wilderness”), the bars, and the cinemas also come into perspective.

But, deservedly, Fela eventually gets a whole chapter dedicated to him entitled Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: Archetypal Lagos Boy.

One is particularly intrigued by the sub-chapter “The Night Club as Metaphor”, which also relates to Lagos nightclubs as represented in Nigerian fiction. Such works as Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (where there is a nightclub called “the Imperial”) and Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows (where we encounter “Champagne” nightclub) are mentioned. But in all, Maik Nwosu’s Alpha Song stands out. As the author rightly admits, “The nightclub known as The Owl in Maik Nwosu’s Alpha Song is one of the most striking in all Nigerian fiction as it is a focus for all the alienation expressed by the novel’s hero, as if only in a nightclub can he find existential ease. This is where the role of the nightclub in Nigerian fiction becomes truly emblematic as a kind of symbol of the Nigerian condition, a place of shadowy ‘managers of the night’ who people the novel.”

I’ve read and reviewed Nwosu’s Alpha Song for africanwriter.com and I must admit it is indeed a quest into the night and its impregnable “soda ash fountain of mysteries”. Other nightclubs mentioned in the novel include Tamuno’s Heaven, Sundown!, 24, Red Hat, Lingo!, Music Temple, etc. For Nwosu, “The night is like a spirit and usually possesses different people in different ways” (p.12).

While every chapter of Whiteman’s book is an experience in itself, the chapter dedicated to FESTAC is very instructive. Here’s the author’s verdict of FESTAC: “In a way, the experience of FESTAC came to embody all the glory (and folly) of the oil era, and the hangover was severe. Intended as a national cultural booster, it probably did more to damage Nigeria’s view of cultural activities because it came to be seen as a symbol of waste and corruption. Apart from Festac Town (originally an artists’ village constructed for the festival itself), its main legacy seems to be the still-decaying National Arts Theatre” (p.172). This is an indictment as well as a call to action.

In all, Kaye Whiteman’s Lagos is a cornucopia, a compendium of history, literature, art, music, culture, etc, not only of Lagos but of Nigeria. After all, Lagos is where it all began.