CHUKS OLUIGBO
Kaye Whiteman, in a Q&A session published on the Africa Centre
website dated February 1, 2012, was asked what he would say had inspired him to
take up writing/in his writing career. “From very young an involvement with
words,” he answered.
Anyone who encountered Kaye Whiteman in any of his works in all the
years he lived as a journalist and a writer couldn’t agree more. Whiteman was a
master of words. He did not just use words – he engaged with words. A firm
believer in Alexander Pope’s maxim that “Words are like leaves; and where they
most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found”, he was very
economical with words, picking them with much care and precision, the same way
a conscientious painter would pick colours.
Kaye was indeed a wordsmith. His fascination with words was evident
in all his writings. In one of his BusinessDay columns he entitled
“Summits remembered”, this was how Whiteman describes the frustrations a
journalist sometimes faces trying to cover one of those high-powered summits:
“Memories of hours of boredom surge back – of ante-chambers, sofa-bestrewn
lounges littered with a thousand coffee cups or corridors (and cooped up in the
increasingly stifling confines of media centres), waiting for the inevitable
release of a communiqué, or tight-lipped conferences. It sometimes conjures up
semi-religious rituals – each organisation playing the role of a church, with
secular cardinals, bishops and their minions releasing indulgences and other
spiritual placebos to the wondering masses, in this case the motley media gang
with their cameras and notebooks, now increasingly furnished with arrays of
digital gadgets.”
Born into a family of journalists, Kaye began his journalism career
in 1960 and was immersed in the world of writing for over 50 years. “I come
from a family of journalists and I see no reason why I should not become one.
But I did have two interludes, including international bureaucracy, which was a
mystery to me and still remains a mystery. I was at the Commonwealth
Secretariat with the former Secretary-General, Emeka Anyaoku. It was a new
dimension to me, but essentially, I am a writer,” he once told an audience.
And an excellent writer he was. In his masterpiece on Lagos,
entitled Lagos: A Cultural and Historical Companion, Whiteman pays close
attention to detail in a very striking, remarkable way. As I wrote in a review
of the book titled ‘Inside Kaye Whiteman’s Lagos’, “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.”
But his fascination went beyond involvement with words. He was an
artist through and through. His interest spanned through all of the arts –
history, journalism, culture, music, art, literature, film, theatre, etc. Much
of this comes out glaringly in the book on Lagos, where Whiteman dedicates chapters
to Lagos in literature, music, film, art, and, ultimately, to Fela
Anikulapo-Kuti as “the archetypal Lagos boy”.
In exploring Lagos as a city of imagination, Whiteman 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, 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, etc.
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. He 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.
Particularly intriguing was 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 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.”
But beyond the fictional nightclubs, Kaye was also captivated with
the real-life ‘Kakadu nightclub’, dedicating a full page of the book to spirit
and soul of ‘Kakadu’, which he describes as “a well-remembered icon among West
African open-air night-clubs, the memory of which still deserves eulogy”.
In his column in BusinessDay, where he wrote about ‘Kakadu
the Musical’ – an exciting, inspirational and moving musical play that takes
its name from the famous Lagos nightclub of the 1960s, written by Uche Nwokedi,
a prominent oil and gas lawyer – Whiteman recalls being taken to Kakadu the
nightclub by Peter Enahoro, then editor of Daily Times. “It was October
1965 and I had just been in Ibadan covering the Western Nigerian election, and
the tension still in the air formed a poignant background to the club’s
enjoyment and its memorable highlife music plangent in the night air. I wasn’t
to know then, but this was the Kakadu which, in Nwokedi’s idea, was a symbol of
unity, indeed a ‘metaphor for Nigeria’ in its years of crisis and civil war
which were already about to break,” he wrote.
Following the release of the book, he was in Lagos last year where
he was hosted by the Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA). The event held at
Kongi’s Art Gallery, Freedom Park, and served as an occasion for conversations
around the book on Lagos.
During that visit, Whiteman, then 77, told his audience, “I have
found more fulfilment in finally being able to write the book that I have
written. I have written so many articles in some publications but now that I
have done this book, I feel able to do more. I can do two, three more books. I
have my memoirs to do,” adding, “Just like a famous song, in my mind I feel 25.
At some points I have been unwell. I did some surgery. I carry on doing what I
am inspired to do. In the past 10 years I have concentrated in writing. When I
was the editor-in-chief of West Africa, I was also writing books.”
He also had interest in poetry and even did a song. “I did a song
and I have done poetry, which I hope to publish in future. There is a song I
intend to perform with Tunde Kuboye. It is titled ‘Oyinbo where you dey go?’”
he once said.
Beyond Lagos: A Cultural and Historical Companion, he also
edited a book of extracts from the magazine, West Africa Over 75 Years,
and co-edited The EU and Africa: From Eurafrique to Afro-Europa – a book
of essays that confront the historical, political, socioeconomic and cultural
dimensions of the European Union's relationship with Africa – with Adekeye
Adebajo.
Kaye Whiteman arrived in Lagos in 1964 as a young journalist with influential
West Africa magazine and began writing for Daily Times, during
which period he covered the Nigerian Civil War. He worked as editor, then
editor-in-chief, of West Africa. During this period, he developed
expertise in West African affairs and subsequently wrote on the sub-region
(particularly Nigeria) and Africa with much authority, understanding and
affection that were rarely found among Western writers on Africa.
Kaye was head of Information for the old European Economic
Community (EEC) which became the European Union (EU), as well as head of the
Information and Public Affairs Division in the Commonwealth Secretariat,
serving under Secretary-General Emeka Anyaoku in the late 1990s.
Until his death on Saturday, May 17, 2014, aged 78, Whiteman was a
weekly columnist in BusinessDay, Nigeria’s leading business and
financial newspaper.
