Nelson Mandela: Why the World will never forget

Picture the world, for a moment as a silent pond where God casts occasional pebbles to cause a ripple.  If Nelson Mandela were a pebble in God’s hands, what sort of ripple would you say he has caused?

At the Apartheid Museum in Jo,burg

This might sound simplistic, of course, but I am at a loss about how to wrap my mind around the magnitude of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela; how to contemplate the very idea of Nelson Mandela.  What god sired him? What smithy forged his soul? Pardon my hyperbole but how else would one fully grasp the enormity of a man who single-handedly reshaped our world?

Most people around the globe are well acquainted with the Mandela story; a story of unspeakable courage and tenacity; of a will that is stronger than iron and a soul purer than gold. While it may be true that his royal background may have prepared him for leadership, it is common knowledge that a royal birth does not always translate to a nobility of character. The world is full of royal knaves. But Madiba was different. His autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, offers ample insight into his ancestry and the character strength of his father who bore his pain with dignity for speaking the truth and standing resolute to ensure that Jogintaba, the regent of Thembu, ascended the throne of his fathers. Mandela inherited his father’s cold resolve and capacity to endure pain. From the same book, we gleaned that Mandela became fascinated with chieftaincy and the church in equal measures but we are reminded of his humanity when we learn that even while living in the midst of surplus in the regent’s house, little Mandela stole maize from Rev. Matyolo and was punished. Ironically, great as the rest of his life was, it was never without faint reminders of his humanity.

Nelson Mandela arrested the attention of the world when he showed the iron will he inherited from his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanqiswa by surviving the inhuman conditions in the Robben Island jail for 27 long years. In so doing, he shattered racial stereotypes on the inferiority of the black race; our trumpeted emotionalism and our so-called love of pleasure. Madiba was to burst more stereotypes when he wilfully handed over power to his successor, Thabo Mbeki, at a time when he could easily have done a Mugabe and held on to the office for life and no one with any sense of justice would have blamed him.

Madiba made life more difficult for racial profilers when he rose above the usual cut of mortals to bestow forgiveness on the promoters of Apartheid and lay a solid foundation for a rainbow nation. Through his understanding and bestowal of forgiveness on the people who persecuted him, Madiba redefined our world and created a new attitude to race relations. He reminded us that sometimes the greatest strength may be found in what might considered the greatest act of vulnerability. Through his many remarkable feats, he firmly hoisted himself across the various chasms that separate our world and became a part of everything good.   

Until his death in the evening of December 5, 2013, Nelson Mandela’s life could be considered as one of absolute grace. He rose from so many years of astonishing uprightness to become the conscience of the moral world. He was so outstanding that there is no human being in living memory that could be compared to Nelson Mandela. He lived among the gods; his trademark sunny smile was like an island of peace in a world riddled with strife and back home, he was the sinew that held the various colours of his rainbow nation together in one piece.

But our world resents absolutism. And not even Mandela is ripe enough for such honours. The voices against him may not be many but they are strident enough to deserve attention. There are people who blame him for focusing so much on political power that he failed to get a good economic deal for black South Africans. Such people often forget that as at the time, Mandela and his generation were overwhelmed by the brutal way the Apartheid regime wielded political power. Economic power is potent but non-threatening. Besides, if Mandela had wished to do a Mugabe, he would have done that quite easily and the world would have applauded him under the political climate of the time. But would it have set the moral tone for the rest of humanity as his restraint did? It’s doubtful.  Zimbabwe’s scandalous condition today is proof that Mandela was a better thinker by the distance. Those who criticize his personal failings and failed marriages must have closed their eyes to the price of being Nelson Mandela or the fact that those flaws and errors of judgment actually humanize him. It is always easy to judge a man from a distance. 

In Mandela's Living Room in Soweto

My first visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg made me realize what it meant to live in Apartheid South Africa but less so what it took to be a Nelson Mandela. My subsequent visit to his Soweto home did all that to me. When I stood in his tiny living room and raised a clenched fist in Amandla salute beside a big portrait of him, when I strolled into his bedroom and beheld the narrow bed he shared with Winnie in the turbulent years of the struggle, I wondered how any man in such condition could have believed himself.

As I wandered around the quaint, little compound and read sign after sign on the walls, I marvelled at God’s infinite wisdom to have raised a shepherd boy in the remote village of Qunu to shepherd the majority blacks of South Africa out of the cruelties of man’s inhumanity to his kind into the brilliant dazzles of the rainbow. I nodded to myself for the only symbolic thing I have ever done to honour him - the naming of my four-year old son, Madiba, after the great one. And now, I feel content when he my little Madiba does little things that echo his namesake. Like when I came home from work one day and hugged my wife and children and left out my house girl and he looked up pained and insisted that I hugged her; like when he insists that no one leaves the house until we were already to go out anytime the family is going to church or on a day out. Of course, my son is not Nelson Mandela but those little acts lift me up.

And while the world may never see another Mandela, it just might be that the world has made a tremendous leap from the moral universe that created him. And the more I think of it, the more I feel content about one thing - God made me a member of a race whose humanity the world loves to deny, but God made the world accept my humanity when he made Nelson Mandela a member of my race.

Adieu Madiba!

 

Anambra 2013: Obiano and the Symbolism of Ojukwu’s Legacy



Chief Willie Obiano

There are many reasons why observers of the intense political activities leading to the November 16, 2013 gubernatorial election in Anambra State believe that Chief Willie Obiano will win the race. Some of the reasons are easy to see. But some are intricately embedded in the intriguing world of symbols.

What is easy for all to see is that the APGA standard bearer is the most outstanding of the crop of candidates jostling for Governor Peter Obi’s job.  Obiano, a CKS Onitsha old boy and UNILAG MBA comes with a blend of professional experience and international exposure that gives hope that finally, Nigeria may begin to have political round pegs in round holes. Obiano’s career profile is the stuff of high achievers. After working with one of the oil majors; Texaco Nigeria plc, for over 9 years during which he rose to the post of Chief Auditor with supervisory powers on the company’s internal processes in Nigeria and overseas, Obiano berthed at Fidelity Bank Plc where he had a meteoric rise to the position of the Executive Director, Business Banking. In that capacity, Obiano deployed his enormous knowledge of financial engineering to ensure that the bank had a steady rise from a mid-level enterprise into one of the best run financial institutions in Nigeria today. Obiano’s technical depth found resonance with Reginald Ihejiahi’s cerebral approach to banking and in no time, Fidelity had swallowed two big banks; FSB International Bank and Manny Bank to emerge a formidable financial power house from the last banking consolidation.

In a country where many celebrated bankers have fallen by the wayside for gross professional misconduct and crimes bordering on public trust, Obiano stands out once again for retiring from a glorious banking career with an unblemished record. People who knew his time at Fidelity remember him as the quintessential manager who effectively combined the carrot and the stick approach to management to astonishing results. Beyond that, the sheer force of his personality ensured that anyone who worked under him drew a natural inspiration from him. He is charismatic, stylish and humorous with a razor-sharp intellect to boot. It was these qualities that drew the young Turks in the bank to him and made him the life of the party during AGM dinners and other milestone celebrations of the bank. Indeed, Obiano’s background is fascinating and inspiring as his victory in the coming polls will ensure that peter Obi’s years of laying a solid backbone for the rapid development of Anambra State will not be washed away by the corrosive touch of candidates of questionable pedigree.

For anyone with a modicum of discernment, it is difficult to miss the first symbolism of Obiano’s involvement in the Anambra gubernatorial race – the right people are finally joining the political fray in Nigeria. Hitherto, Nigerian politics has been the typically absurd theatre where only men with tainted profiles and a confirmed absence of scruples held sway. Anambra particularly has had an unfair share of political brigands and underworld characters that held the state prostate for years, diverting public funds to their private use while the institutions of governance went to seed. The state made headlines for the wrong reasons including the kidnap and disappearance of a sitting governor as well as the widely reported fetishist oat taking by political desperados who wanted to grab power by any means necessary.

That thoroughbred professionals like Obiano are filing out today for the Anambra gubernatorial race is an indication that Anambra may finally be headed to that bend in the river where its most accomplished citizens are no longer turned off by the rough and shadowy men that have defined Anambra politics in recent times. It is also attributable to the shining example set by Governor Peter Obi whose heroic struggles to reclaim his stolen mandate from Chris Ngige has been fully validated by the enormous legacy he will leave behind when he exits office in the next few months. For most Anambrarians, Obi’s legacy is so monumental that the greatest challenge the state faces at the moment is to find a suitable candidate that will preserve and expand it. Happily, many people believe that Obiano’s emergence as APGA’s flag bearer represents the best hope for the survival of this legacy.

Interestingly, beyond the symbolism of a break from the belief that politics is reserved for thugs and the blood-thirsty amongst us lies another symbolism – the symbolism of Ojukwu’s place in Igbo memory and its political leadership. It is a known fact that no political leader in the last half century has embedded himself in Igbo memory quite as completely as the late Ikemba Nnewi, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Interestingly, with his passage and burial last year, it became even clearer that Ojukwu was more than an Igbo hero. Ndigbo know that Ojukwu’s twilight years were spent envisioning a future for them and constructing a roadmap to Igbo renaissance within the larger Nigerian family.

The All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) was a major part of Ojukwu’s grand plan to give Ndigbo a metaphorical political roof to shield them from the torrential rainfall of Nigerian misgovernance. He fought tooth and nail to establish the party and ensure that it took roots in the 5 states of the South East, arguing that in time, it would become a bargaining weapon with which Ndigbo would negotiate their way through the nebulous theatre of Nigerian leadership. In fact, Ojukwu is reported to have thrown his enormous influence behind the party and had even implored Ndi Anambra to grant his final wish by voting Governor Peter Obi into office for the second term.

His people granted him his wish and Obi triumphed at the polls. But Obi has also validated Ojukwu’s confidence with a 5-Star performance. So, it is easy to see that among the many issues that will swing voters’ sympathies in the coming election is the symbolism of Ojukwu’s legacy and his ideals. An APGA loss at the polls in November, barely one year after Ojukwu’s heroic burial, will cast Ndi Anambra in the mould of a people without memory. And in today’s world as in worlds before, a people without memory are doomed. In the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator and political theorist, “memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” And being a society of highly enlightened people, Ndi Anambra will certainly vote with a strong memory of their hero.

Another symbolism is also the symbolism of the party APGA as the only standing political structure that Ndigbo can lay claim to in Nigeria as their own. Some Igbo people would quickly point at ACN now turned APC as a Yoruba party and the ANPP as the Hausa-Fulani party while APGA is for the Igbo. There is this sense of ownership that APGA represents to them.  It would amount to political suicide for Ndi Anambra to allow the political parties of rival ethnic groups therefore to provide leadership in the state.

As it were, Anambra is the only surviving turf for APGA and the only reason it still exists. Governor Peter Obi has proven that a thoroughly prepared leader can leave a resounding legacy even as a member of a minority party. Willie Obiano’s emergence as the APGA candidate has re-assured Ndi Anambra that there will be continuity in competent leadership and vision after Obi. When all these symbolisms are considered, it is hard not to see that Chief Willie Obiano is simply waiting to take over from Governor Peter Obi as the next governor of Anambra State.  

 

 

 

We Need New Names: Bulawayo’s Love Song for Zimbabwe

There are some writers for whom storytelling seems almost effortless. NoViolet Bulawayo is one of them. We first encountered her in her Caine Prize winning short story, Hitting Budapest, an amazing tale of dispossession and longing, told through the eyes of six Zimbabwean children brought together by internal dislocation and grinding poverty. In We Need New Names, Bulawayo continues this narrative with loads of ironies and startling craftsmanship.  

 In more than one way, Bulawayo’s book is reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies, a dystopian novel by William Golding, about a band of British boys who found themselves marooned on a desolate island and tried to run their affairs with disastrous consequences. Indeed there is something Goldingsque about this book. Not only in the use of child characters but in the development of these characters. In Bastard, we find echoes of Jack Merridew of Lord of the Flies who is intensely driven by his love of power and control. There are also occasions when we hear the voice of Golding’s Piggy in Bulawayo’s Godknows. However, while Golding’s book is a profound allegory on the death of innocence and the darkness of a man’s heart, Bulawayo leads us into the complexities of internal and external dislocations and the question of identity and belonging.

We Need New Names is a story of two parts. The first part captures life in a country that is falling apart; the pervading bleakness, the violent protests, hunger and death and the mass exodus to safer places. Part two chronicles the suspended lives of the exile; cast adrift in the cruel interplay of fate and mistake, they inhabit the nebulous margins of our world, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

 

With a narrative voice that rings loud with laughter, We Need New Names paints a lush picture of the two worlds that sit side by side in Zimbabwe. The world of the rich and comfortable white folk in Budapest and the wretched universe of black Zimbabweans in a settlement of shacks, ironically named Paradise. Yanked off their once comfortable homes and away from the nurture of schools, the narrator, Darling and her five friends; Chipo, Sbho, Godknows, Stina and Bastard roam the sun-scorched streets of Paradise. They live by the hour, scrounging for food and guavas to quell the rumble of hunger in their stomachs. Guava can be loosely seen here as a paradox – it can douse the fire in the stomach but it can also cause constipation if taken too much. A dilemma is subtly suggested here – to eat or not to eat? This also foreshadows one of the themes of the story; is exile a wise choice for citizens of crumbling societies?

The hungry children hit Budapest again and again and ironically remain the only link between these two close communities that are forced apart by the gulf of possession. Darling, the narrator’s child voice guides us into the tumultuous life in Paradise; so named for the reason of its being the exact opposite of what its name suggests. Through her omnipresent eyes, we encounter quaint characters with outlandish names like Mother of Bones, Mother Love, Forgiveness, MaMoyo, Freeborn, Vasco da Gama, and perhaps the most colourful of them all, Tshaka Zulu and Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro.

Bulawayo’s fiction is a story of innocence. But it is also a story of loss. In a piquant child voice, Darling tells us of the crumbling walls of Zimbabwe; of fathers deserting their families for neighbouring countries and of HIV/AIDS spreading like a bushfire in the broken communities. After years of waiting for her runaway husband, Darling’s mother welcomes another man into the pleasures of her bedroom.  A faint reminder that more often than not, when things begin to fall apart, the family, which is the center of society never really holds. Bulawayo captures the nightly visits of the lover in a most lucid prose – “Now mother is moaning; the man, he is panting. The bed is shuffling like a train taking them somewhere important that needs to be reached fast.” We see the picture of total dysfunction in Darling’s playmate, Chipo, a ten-year old, pregnant for her grandfather and in false prophets like Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro who assert themselves in the community; offering voodoo solutions for purely economic maladies. For this brood of social renegades, Bulawayo deploys a caustic tongue in her description – “the evangelists and Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro arrive after everybody, like chief baboons…” (page 32). Their comical appearance and exaggerated piety all hint on the falsehood that swaddles a fallen society - things are not always what they seem. But these characters are also veritable sources of humour which Bulawayo mines to hilarious effect. We see a bit of this when Darling’s father returns from South Africa, a living skeleton, stricken with HIV/AIDS. Prophet Bitchington arrives with a religious flourish and begins to cast out the grandfather’s spirit, which he claimed was the cause of the ailment.  Then, he goes on to name his fee in dollars and two fat virgin goats. On hearing this, Darling’s mum boils out of their shack, slamming the door hard behind her. “God also told me that the wife is possessed too, by three demons. One causes her to be unhappy all the time, one is the spirit of the dog, and the last one gives her a bad temper, rendering her a dangerous woman. But now we have to deal with the husband,” Bitchington intones in a solemn prophetic voice, drawing instant laughter from the reader.

We Need New Names is layered with meaning. Sometimes, weighty issues are given a most subtle treatment. Godknows startles the reader when he says “China is a red devil looking for people to eat so it can grow fat and strong.” But this is a seemingly innocent child-talk that casts a hard look at the spread of Chinese influence across the world but especially Africa where most construction jobs are easily snapped up by Chinese firms. Similarly, Bulawayo deftly deploys the “Country-game” played by the children to devastating, satirical effects. In the game, the players fight to assume the names of prosperous countries like the USA, Canada and Britain. And then she tells us that “Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka and not even this one we live in – who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?” The narrator also nicely foreshadows the turn of events in part two of the story with Darling emerging the winner of the fight to assume the persona of USA in the game. Darling would eventually relocate to USA to live with Aunt Fostalina.  

The first part of We Need New Names ends with the death of Bornfree Lizwe Tapera. His passage hangs over the dying community like a lunar eclipse. Before that, we see a mob sweep through Budapest like an angry hurricane, dislocating comfortable white folks in their sheltered world and leaving the provocative sign - Black Power in caking feces on the wall.  Darling, soon leaves for the US to live with aunt Fostalina in Detroit, Michigan. And then begins a new vista of hope and despair. She discovers to her chagrin that America is not the perfect picture of her dream. This sudden realization is captured in a single striking line – “no matter how green the maize looks in America, it is not real.” She finds out that her Auntie Fostalina’s life is far from perfect; that she scraps a living by working multiple jobs and lives with Uncle Kojo; a man who has spent many years in America without becoming a permanent resident, who is nostalgic about his native Ghana, and has become an emotional captive in cold America. We are also made to realize that there are two types of hunger; one for food and the other for belongingness, for identity and both are just as important. Again, Bulawayo captures this masterfully  – “there are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find that food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix it.”

Things soon take a humorous turn as we encounter Tshaka Zulu in America. Zulu is perhaps one of the most admirable characters in the book. Against the wishes of his father, Zulu sells the old man’s cows to finance a flawed dream of abundance in America. Pressed against the hard realities of America, Zulu’s dream turns to nightmare and cost him his mind. Zulu represents the hordes of dream-chasing immigrants who are stranded in America with no hope of either returning to their roots or becoming fully accepted in their adopted country. But Zulu never truly arrived America; trapped in the interstices of home and exile, Tshaka becomes a metaphor for belonging. He is quick to brandish his shield and shout greetings into space in his native tongue. Bulawayo captures this perplexity of migration and adaptation in the following lines – “we could not use our languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths and staggered like drunken men… In America, we did not always have the words. When we are alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscappers.”

 Bulawayo’s lyrical prose is in itself a fascinating discovery. Joyous sentences dance to rhythmic royal African drums on every page as every line sparkles with life. We come across gems -   “When you look into their faces, it is like something that was in there got up and gathered its things and walked away.” We also read - “Look at that drum of a stomach, it’s like he has swallowed a country,” lines that make you want to leap up and punch the sky.

The narrator’s voice acquires a new stridency as Darling begins to adjust to her new home in America.  She makes new friends in Kristal and Marina and begins to acquire American accent. Laughter lurks behind the narrative voice as Darling and her new friends discover the magic world of sex from the computer screen in the basement of her new home. But even so, she is never truly weaned of her longing for home. Déjà vu soon strikes again all around her as Tshaka Zulu finally goes down in a blaze and Uncle Kojo loses his mind, pinning away from his only son’s departure to Afghanistan as a combatant in the US Army. Darling returns home  from work one day to catch Aunt Fostalina with another man in the house while Uncle Kojo sits listless in the living room, gazing blindly at the images of fighting soldiers on a TV screen. What flashes across the reader’s mind here is the image of Darling’s mum, welcoming a lover into her bedroom at night with her father away in South Africa.

Darling’s longing for home begins all over again and she pulls up her Mac for a Skype session with her mother but instead, Chipo, her childhood friend picks the call. In the ensuing exchange, Darling learns of what has happened to her group of six friends. But she also gets to know that in fleeing crumbling Zimbabwe, she has lost whatever right she had to sit in judgment over those that preside over her affairs. This, to my mind, is a piquant rebuke of African exiles that are quick to hurl stones at blundering leaders back home in whose hands the flower of Africa’s promise at Independence has long wilted. Bulawayo delivers this rebuke in the voice of her most unlikely characters – Chipo. “It is the wound that knows the texture of the pain; it is us who stayed here feeling the suffering so it is us who have a right to even say anything…why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? If it is your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it to make it right. Do you abandon your house because it is burning or do you find water to put the fire out?”

Without a doubt, NoViolet Bulawayo has had an auspicious beginning in her writing career, but this may well be her best offering ever. Of course there are flaws in We Need New Names. Certain things seem a bit overlaid in the book. For instance, while incest is common in every society, the likelihood of a grandfather impregnating his ten-year old granddaughter is farfetched in most parts of Africa. Again, the theme of poverty and hunger also seems over-stretched.  But these are minor flaws that round off a thoroughly realized narrative.

In all, We Need New Names is a song of enchantment capturing the dilemma of identity, dislocation and belongingness. But it is also a sad love song for the bedraggled motherland whose children are scattered across the face of the earth, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

Douglas Ude: Of Meteors and their Ephemeral Sparkles

Tribute



Big Doug

Until he fell to police bullets on Thursday July 4, 2013, Douglas Akachukwu Ude was what you would call a Renaissance man. He had wide ranging interests covering writing and painting, music and other art forms. But this description does very little to capture the effervescence of Douglas Ude.

I had no inkling what lay before me when I walked into his office that balmy October evening, seven years ago. I had gone through all the stages of the interview that took me to Fidelity Bank and Douglas was the last man in a long hierarchy of officers who would decide my suitability for the position or otherwise. He struck me as a fairly large man with expansive ways and when his eyes lit up in response to my greeting, I was immediately startled by what seemed like a large sluice of goodness in him that I was certain would announce itself in time. I didn’t have long to wait to know just how right I was.

When I finally resumed at the Marketing Communications department of the bank, I met a team of bright young men and a woman, who were not only brilliant on their jobs but had a remarkable sense of humour. Among them were Kelechi Ogbamgba who often wore the inquisitorial look of one who wished to ask life a few difficult questions, Kelechi Eulwa who never seemed to run out of entrepreneurial ideas and Idris Salihu who combined exquisite tastes perfectly with disarming gentility. There was also Ronke Aina-Scott; the painter and visualizer - the only lady in the team and Rotimi Mathews who in Doug’s words was the Asiwaju of visas, being the bank’s protocol officer. In Emma Esinnah, our Group Head, we had an extremely wise and brilliant man with as much charm as amazing self-discipline.  Then, there was Douglas Ude. Big Doug! Douglas was big; physically and mentally. He used both well. His enormous size always arrested the attention of his environment while his impressive intellect burned deep impressions of his whirlwind personality on people who encountered him. He was humorous in a way that, perhaps only he could possibly be. We had an exciting team. Everyone had something to drop on the table, as it were.

I met a crop of excellent talents in the team; people who were accommodating, loving and supportive. It took me no time at all to come into the team’s heritage of humour. The team worked hard and played hard. We never lacked laughter at any moment in time. Between Emma and Doug, we had an amazing fountain of humour from where laughter sprouted without ceasing. Big Doug could tell a story with a perfect mimicry of the voices of all the characters in the tale and leave his audience bending over with laughter. No one was ever sufficiently prepared for his jokes. It always took you by surprise. You could tell that it was Friday when the door to the office swung open and the first thing to hit you was the metallic blast of the instrumental version of Bruce Hornsby’s’ That’s Just the Way it is; a song that the rapper 2Pac pressed his enormous genius upon to squeeze out the massive hip-hop hit of the same title.  Doug was always in the office before anyone else and more often than not, he was already perched behind his desk at 6 o’clock in the morning playing classic songs. Most days though, you would step into the office to the clicking sound of his keyboard as he hammered out mails after mails. A lot of times, these mails flooded our mailboxes before breakfast was over. He had so much passion for his work; so many ideas to share on almost anything; from the latest marketing strategies to the foundational theories in communication to football and boxing history. It was evident that he was the living spring of the team, although much of what we had then trickled down from the sagely leadership provided by the Managing Director and Chief executive Officer of the bank, Reginald Ihejiahi. Often referred to as the “intellectual in the banking hall,” Ihejiahi had largely succeeded in creating an atmosphere that made knowledge something to covet and display in Fidelity Bank. Through the bank’s weekly lecture series and the numerous offshore training opportunities for staff as well as the sponsorship of the famous international creative writing workshop series, the employees were drip-fed the notion that knowledge was a beautiful bride worth wooing and possessing. It was this atmosphere that fuelled the flowering of ideas and expressions that were to later coalesce into the larger culture that has become the distinguishing feature of the bank. Even so, there was something unusual about the marketing communications team of that period; something that felt like an extra-ordinary kindred spirit or something close to it. And looking back now through the misty layers of time, it all seems incredible how fate had melded that team together, almost on a whim.             

It has to be said of Douglas Ude that his peculiar charisma was essentially transcendental. It had this remarkable quality of exulting in itself and feeding on its own strength. If you saw him sweeping along the corridor like a cyclone, flashing a sparkling and almost ethereal smile at everyone, including drivers and cleaners, you would almost conclude that he belonged with the downtrodden. His humane touch was such that his act of kindness to the driver of our pool-car at the time, Johnson Otti, moved the fellow to name his son Douglas. Yet, Doug was so intellectually deep that he fittingly belonged with the best in the business of introspection. I had often heckled him to put down his thoughts in a more permanent form as his writings were so provocatively rich and engaging that I often wondered if he wouldn’t have been more useful to humanity outside the banking hall.

I was to  encounter his deep intellectual side fully when he joined Revolution Now, a Blackberry Messenger group of some feisty and engaging Nigerian professionals at home and in the Diaspora to which I and a couple of friends belong. Doug’s entry into the group brought a new scholarly steam to our conversations as he infused his comments with zany humour that had everyone reeling with laughter while absorbing some new paradigms. He wrote in the manner he spoke, clipped and cadenced and striking. In the opening paragraph of his tribute to Aluu Four, Doug wrote - “Who would have thought it, that deep within the serene green canopied woods that blanket the Choba campus of UNIPORT; such a macabre, grisly ritual would unravel before us; that in an ivory tower of learning, we would find the heart of darkness.”  Indeed Doug loved words and knew just what to do with them. If there was a new word in town, you were most likely to hear it first from Douglas Ude. There were times, though,  when his writing took a prescient tone; like the piece he wrote on the intriguing resentment of his first son of the arrival of his little brother – “Suddenly, there’s another guy in his woman’s life – he’s no longer the only dog in the manger… How shaky the foundations ‘pon which we build: - that there will be a tomorrow in which we remain relevant; that our dreams will persist; that our loved ones remain immune to sudden violence from a total stranger; that this flawed entity called Nigeria will endure…? We will learn, as my son Ikem surely has, that in this life, even surrounded by love, there are just no guarantees… “ I came across those haunting lines with a sense of foreboding. Was there a split moment; a little crackle in eternity when Douglas Ude had a glimpse of what lay ahead of him?

I am not one for superstition or premonition but when I also listened to the officiating priest at Doug’s Service of Songs the other night recall that he actually ran into the armed robbers in whose hands he lost his life after making a wrong turn on the road that fateful night, I felt something stir inside of me. Could it be fate? Somebody tell me it is. That is the only way Doug’s mid-day exit would make sense to me.

But how did we lose a man like Douglas Ude? Interestingly, there are two accounts of how it happened. One account says that he took his wife, Chioma out on a movie date and was coming back in the late night when he drove straight into the armed robbers at Jibowu, Lagos. Another version of the story claims that he and his wife had gone to the popular Jibowu bus station to pick up a visiting relative. Both accounts are correct. A close source informed me that Doug and his wife had gone to pick up a visiting relative at Jibowu. Halfway through the journey, the relative had called to inform them that the arrival in Jibowu would be delayed by some hours on account of a terrible traffic build up on the way. Consequently, since they were already out of their home, Doug and Chioma decided to head to the cinemas and spend those hours watching a movie. When the movie ended, they drove to Jibowu not knowing that they had just had their last beautiful moment as a couple. They met armed robbers on the way and were promptly taken hostage in their own car by the robbers who went on an ill-fated shake-down of the city. It wasn’t long before they ran into the police and Doug was hit in the ensuing crossfire by three bullets that homed in on his abdomen and diaphragm. The robbers escaped from the scene and dumped them on the way. Doug survived a surgery and lived all of four days before he gave up the fight on the tarmac of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos when he was being wheeled into an air ambulance to be flown overseas for a better medical attention. Some people have argued that a man who took three bullets and hung on to life for four days should not have died. That may be true; so long as we rule fate out of the equation.  

Until he drew his last breath, Douglas Ude was one of those people whose mere appearance gave life a specter of certainty; you felt justified to mock death by drawing strength from sheer force of his presence. It was difficult to associate him with physical weakness of any type. He was very hard to ignore. I remember how he stepped into the closing ceremony of the 2008 edition of Fidelity’s International Creative Writing Workshop and swiftly “kidnapped” the show. I was gradually bringing the event to an end as the compere when I asked Doug to give a vote of thanks. He stood on the stage and loomed over the audience like the statue of a Buddha over a desolate landscape. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a high-pitched voice, “you have done so well that I think you all deserve a locomotive clap. This is how we shall do it. You watch me. If I raise my right hand, you clap. If raise the left, you clap again. The more often I raise them, the more you clap. Oya, let’s go!” With that he raised his hand once and the audience responded with a thunderous clap. He raised the second and they responded. And when he increased the speed with which he raised his hands, the regularity of the clap produced a chugging rumble that sounded very much like an old locomotive engine wheezing and puffing down a creaky old track. When he finally raised his hand to bring the human locomotive to a halt, the hall erupted in euphoria. While the crowd exited the hall, it was clear to all that Doug’s locomotive clap would stand out in their memory of the evening.

Ironically too, when I looked at the crowd that gathered at Doug’s wake the other night, I shook my head in sudden realization that even in death, Douglas Ude had continued to draw people to himself. For a flitting moment, I wondered what thunderous sound would arise from the hall had the officiating priest suddenly stopped and asked the crowd to do a locomotive clap for Big Doug. His painful exit has indeed made the world a poorer place.

As I stretch my mind across the years that I have known Douglas Ude, a central image dominates the universe of my thoughts – the image of a shooting star, blazing across the evening sky, releasing a burst of glorious sparkles that fade into the distance after their job of lighting up the horizon is done. The remains of the Big Doug will be interred tomorrow, July 26, 2013, in his home town of Mgbowo in Augwu, Enugu State. Farewell Dude!

There was a Writer: Re-mapping my Cultural Rebirth under Chinua Achebe

 

 

I have difficulties associating Chinua Achebe with death; accepting that he is no more and re-imagining him as the voice of a most illustrious ancestor whose guttural wisdom will accompany me till I draw my last breath. Since Chinua Achebe’s passage, I have had long occasional spells of uncertainty; moments when news of his death sounded like one of the many cruel jokes our politicians play on their opponents, announcing their deaths in the social media to cause them a little discomfort. And at such moments, I wonder if I shouldn’t be grateful for the devilish fabricators of those digital hoaxes. At other moments though, I chide myself for asking too much of Chinua Achebe; for wishing that a proud man like him had continued his grim wrestle with fate that had confined him to the wheelchair for twenty three long years, after he had left us a body of works to guide our slow, cautionary steps in a world where prejudices lay ambush at every turn, where the story-teller has as much power to heal as to kill and after he had left his testament in that monumental book - There was a Country. And though it might sound odd, there have been also times when I saw Achebe’s wheelchair as the metaphorical throne upon which he sat in judgment over Joseph Conrad and his band of early explorers who disingenuously generated a vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa to justify slave trade and colonialism and sundry other inhuman treatment of black people across the world.

 I often shake my head ruefully at friends who do not understand why I mourn Chinua Achebe; why I have personalized his death as a cruel hand dealt on me by fate. Perhaps they will understand if they knew my story. Growing up in the serenity of Nsukka, my childhood brimmed with fantasies of the world beyond the rolling green hills that hemmed us in. My first peek into the world beyond the hills was through Chike and The River, Chinua Achebe’s novel for boys. I read Chike and The River with all the innocent longings of childhood, imagining myself in Chike’s adventurous world, standing on the bank of River Niger and casting a languorous look across the shimmering water to the outlines of Asaba in the distance or seated before the money-doubler; waiting for my pockets to swell up with magical coins. Chike’s daydreams ignited mine and since I had no river in the immediate environment of my childhood, I longed for a trip to Onitsha and the banks of the great Niger. Although I never quite made it to the Niger of my boyhood reverie, my ceaseless longing finally took me to the figurative river of books and the brave new worlds that heaved with scented lives within their covers.

I had read a number of other novels before I read Things Fall Apart. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines had taken me through the Kraals of Southern Africa and in the iridescent eyes of fortune hunter Allan Quartermain, I had seen King Twala in his grotesque hideousness and recoiled from his fiendish savagery. I had taken sides with the liberating white angels in Captain John Good and marveled at the dark sorcery of Gagool in that long disheveled tale. I had also read Montezuma’s Daughter by the same author as well as the detective tale, Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers and then, perhaps one of the most enchanting of all, Treasure Island by the Scottish, Robert Louis Stevenson.  But in Things Fall Apart, I met myself for the very first time. Looking back, it was perplexing how suddenly, I witnessed a shift in my paradigm; everything I had seen of my culture took a dazzling knew sparkle, everything suddenly made more sense. I understood in a fuller scope, my grandfather’s early morning libations and invocation of the protective spirit of our ancestors with palm wine and a lobe of kola nut.  I experienced the same epiphany of the insomniac who sat on a low hill and watched the sun rise, its delicate rays poking through the milky gray skies to announce another beginning. From that moment, I knew that I had a lot of catching up to do with myself and I regret to admit that I am not quite sure I have caught up with me to this day. Quite naturally, Things Fall Apart led me to Achebe’s subsequent works. I read Arrow of God with so much relish. I found in Ezulu a magnificent character in his glorious stubbornness. I considered Obika his son one of the finest characters in fiction with all the tragic charms of youthful foolishness and unbridled maleness. I found in the great, fire-spitting orator, Nwaka of Umuneora whose wives were given to other men to father his children, the deepest ironies of being. I found the grand dialogues in Arrow of God a matchless work of genius.

If Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God handed me a cultural frame of reference to aid my understanding of myself, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People led me through the social labyrinth of Nigeria with its underbelly of corruption and receding morality. Chief the Honorable M.A Nanga emerged from Achebe’s satirical Man of the People, a towering fictional character whose archetypal shadow continues to haunt Nigeria’s political space to date. While I grappled with the tangled emotions of my formative years, I realized that Nigeria had gone beyond Obi Okonkwo’s hesitation when he was offered a bribe in No Longer at Ease. Most of what I gleaned of the dominant strains of logic and tendencies that ruled post-colonial Nigeria came from my reading of Anthills of the Savannah. The ideological ferment that pitched military adventurers, do-good journalists and the fickle Nigerian masses in a bizarre cockfight and the whimsies of modern Nigeria and all, I learned from Anthills of the Savannah.

 I came across The Trouble with Nigeria rather late - twenty years after its publication. Regardless, it instantly lent me a rare insight into the philosophical flaws that marred the formation of a truly responsible and accountable leadership in Nigeria. I learned for instance that while their contemporaries were sculpting crucial ideological foundations for emerging African countries, our founding fathers were expressing a crass wish to accumulate enormous wealth and enjoy the highest standards of living. “An absence of objectivity and intellectual rigor at the critical moment of a nation’s formation is more than an academic matter. It inclines the fledgling state to disorderly growth and mental deficiency,” Achebe had reasoned in The Trouble with Nigeria. I learnt from this book that as independence was dawning, Nnamdi Azikiwe had declared – Henceforth I shall utilize my earned income to secure my enjoyment of a high standard of living and also to give a helping hand to the needy while Chief Awo who was widely regarded as a sage had this to say – I was going to make myself formidable intellectually, morally invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man of my brain and brawn to make in Nigeria.” I shuddered at the mercantile hollowness of these statements the first time I read them and I haven’t stopped shuddering to this day. My discomfort deepens whenever I recall that their contemporary, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania led his people so well that in the 1960s, Nyerere as the President of Tanzania was reported to have asked his bank for more months of grace on the repayment of his mortgage loan to enable him recover from paying his children’s school fees. Picture that!  

The more I read Chinua Achebe, the more knowledgeable I become, of myself, my immediate environment and the universe, ascribed to people like me.  My sense of the peculiarities of my world heightened under his careful gaze. So did my wonderment about the many odds that seemed stacked so high against the small people of the world – the threat of dying tongues and mangled identities, the constant straining against the leash of inferiority, the burden of explanation and proof of our humanity. 

The world as I knew it exploded when I began to read Chinua Achebe’s essays. My understanding of Mbari, the extravagant artistic heritage of the western Igbo and its deep philosophy of the beauties of ephemeral arts took its beginning from Achebe’s Regents’ lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1984. The Novelist as Teacher, his 1965 essay, offered me a rare insight into the basic ideology that fired Chinua Achebe’s writing. In that essay, Achebe outlined his mission in a one liner that rings Achebesquely as usual – here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse – to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. Chinua Achebe’s entire life centered on this philosophy: the ceaseless striving to bring diverse peoples of the world to the communal table of mutual respect and acknowledgment of a shared humanity.  Achebe was particularly piqued that the black man, especially black Africans had been stranded at the bottom of things for too long. Of particular significance to him were the efforts of writers and adventurers like Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary whose rare pieces of poisonous literature on Africa; sought to validate the heinous crimes of slavery, racial bigotry and colonialism. To this band of immoral writers, Achebe’s singular wish was that his novels, especially the ones set in the past would teach African readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. His rebuke of Conrad in the infinitely famous 1975 lecture at the University of Massachusetts, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is so profound that its echo continues to ricochet across the decades to eternity. In his seminal 1978 convocation lecture at the University of Ife ominously titled The Truth of Fiction, I gleaned that art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him; an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination. More importantly perhaps, I also learned that there are fictions that help and fictions that hinder. One is beneficent fiction and the other malignant.

My journey through Chinua Achebe’s collections of essays in Home and Exile, The Education of a British-protected Child, Morning Yet on Creation Day as well as Hopes and Impediments has swept aside all shades of doubt and offered me an insight into the reason why he could never have won the Nobel Prize for literature, had he lived a hundred years longer. By my reckoning, no African writer has ever stood up to the racial malignment of the black-man as Chinualumogu Achebe did. Nor has anyone else flung a wider window open for the flowering of African artistic expressions than he did with the African Writers Series. That was why I laughed when Bello Kano, the Bayero University professor, sought to mock Achebe’s literary achievements in a terribly flawed piece he published in the wake of his passage. I thought it was understandable though; Chinua Achebe’s legacy is beyond the grasp of the simple minded, the provincial scholars who have yet to do a good job of understand their own decaying neck of the wood. 

In a 1988 tribute to James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe sought to offer useful insights to Africa’s unknown past and proffer explanations for what Baldwin had assumed was an inheritance of loss as he espoused in the famous statement; Stranger in the Village where he had ruefully contrasted his African heritage with that of a humble Swiss peasant. Baldwin had concluded that while the forebears of modern Europe were busy building empires and producing Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Da Vinci and Beethoven, his African ancestors sat idly, watching the conquerors arrive. Achebe’s response dwelt mostly on the need for black people to take possession of their story and tell it themselves. He did not think that the African humanity needed to be justified through the fabrication of lofty stories of a heroic past. Nevertheless, he pointed out that a Dutch historian who visited the ancient Benin Empire in A.D. 1600 had observed that what he saw of the city compared quite favorably with the city of Amsterdam at the time. Remarkably, this same city with all its high art and splendid civilization was whimsically condemned as the “City of Blood” by imperial British who set upon it, about two hundred and fifty years after the Dutch explorer’s chronicle and brought that great empire to its ruin. In that same lecture, Achebe further dug up the fascinating story of Dom Afonso of the Bukongo kingdom (1506 - 1543) who built a remarkable a society that was far more civilized than the Portuguese society of the time. Dom Afonso was so humane and urbane that when the Portuguese missionaries that he had warmly accepted into his kingdom to win souls for Christ eventually abandoned their preaching and became slave raiders, he wrote a letter in 1526 to King John III of Portugal in protest over the savage behavior of the Portuguese missionaries in the Congo. I would probably never have known this but for Achebe.

Indeed, the life and times of Chinualumogu Achebe constitute an incredible epoch in the enlightenment of the black world which is very unlikely to re-occur on this side of eternity for a long time to come. And because Chinua Achebe lived among us, no conscious African can lean back in absolute comfort of blissful ignorance when our collective roof billows with smoke. Indeed no one who takes himself seriously will find it comforting to live with all the mis-education or utter silence on who we once were and who we can become. And when I think of Chinua Achebe and the life he led, when I contemplate the scale of his legacy, his ceaseless struggle for a kinder and richer humanity, when I find myself musing on his immortality, I am consoled in the realization that his was a life led in full. There are no missing chapters in Chinua’s life, from the paradigm-shifting Things Fall Apart to the volcanic There was a Country. I am consoled by the fact that I cannot unknow what Achebe has made me know.

Nna anyi, naa n’udo!      

In You I've found a new Me

In you all roads kiss; all thoughts tangle

All puzzles solved; all dreams met

In you all longing dies!

In you I find the resolve to dissolve –

Soap-like, and produce the bubble for our cleansing

In you all songs find resonance and all notes chime

In you my fire finds its flame; the trigger to my gun

In you the winds find the voice to whisper to the trees;

The thunder finds its liquid anger

In you the waves find the feet to race to the shores for a watery embrace

In you I am the hunter and the game;

The disillusioned dog baying at the overcast of my shadow from the moon

Let me be the song on your lips today;

Melting with every verse to resound in the refrain

The echo in the wind; haunting and pleasant

The love poem; dragging tears down your cheeks

The voice of a child; angelic and pure

The fragile wings of scented butterflies;

Flitting across the firmament of your heart

Let me be your melody and your song;

For in you, I’ve found my river’s complex course

No Better Time to be Young and Nigerian



Lagbaja, the masked one in performance in Lagos

If you are young and gifted, this is your best time to be a Nigerian. And this is not some patriotic prattle. Of course it is hard to admit it. What with electricity supply still as it was twenty years ago and airplanes dropping off our skies every now and then and sudden death stalking our streets and highways in fatal crashes and bomb explosions. That is our reality.  But never before has the Nigerian youth found himself suddenly capable of so many things. Yes. The young Nigerian has finally cut himself loose from the exasperating hand-wringing that drove his uncles and older brothers to Europe and America as economic exiles. This is his finest hour. After years of begging to be given a little space in the Nigerian milieu, the Nigerian youth has finally come to self-possession.  He has weaned himself of the comfort zone of habitually blaming his misery on crass political leaders who are cosmopolitan enough to know what is best for their people but lack the grace to bestow it on them. The young Nigerian has therefore stopped gazing into the horizon in search of redemption. He has gazed inwards and discovered his unbridled power and infinite possibilities. He has discovered that in blessing him with lousy leaders God had made things up by blessing him with amazing gifts that would make a way for him. He has quickly taken back his life with a burst of creativity that has astonished the world.

It is not certain that most Nigerian youth know it but the future is finally here. Of course this might not look like the future we all prayed for but, if we cast our minds back a bit, we might be able to see our future in its truest of colours. Nigeria has always been the home of diverse artistic creativity. Truth be told, imaginative thinking and artistic production did not come to Nigerian youths by chance. Many first generation Nigerian writers have won global acclaim with the offerings of their minds. In fact, much of what is known today as African literature began with them. Ben Enweonwu, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Yusuf Grillo gave contemporary Nigeria the visual direction to her arts. Before them, the carvers of Ife and Benin bronzes, the terracotta arts and the ethereal Nok Culture as well as the Igbo Ukwu Bronze had bequeathed us a heritage of unmatched artistic excellence. Before them too, the Ejegham people of present day Cross River State and the surrounding Efik and Igbo areas of the South East had demonstrated astounding craftsmanship with the evolution of Nsibidi writing which dates back to over one thousand years. Glorious as these proud beginnings seem, they counted for nothing in the intervening years of military dictatorship.

It is not clear whether there’s any correlation between the stifling atmosphere of military iron rule and shriveling artistic production but there was something the matter with the Nigerian imaginative field under the military rule. In the mid-80s to early 90s, Shina Peters, Majek Fashek, Ras Kimono and Daddy Showkey all made dramatic entries into our national entertainment space but the glory days were long in coming . Their hold on the music scene was tenuous if anything at all. America’s stranglehold on the entertainment scene remained strong with the flowering gangster rap and its gun-culture, fuelling gang-wars between rival cults on Nigerian campuses. Out of this ferment sprung icons like Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls (the Notorious BIG) and Snoop Doggy Dogg. The latter’s numerous misogynic tracks fanned the murderous embers of many campus killings in Nigeria.  So did African-American movies like Menace II Society by the Hughes brothers and Juice by Ernest Dickerson among others. These films brought home vivid images of gang-related crimes in inner city America which caught on with the Nigerian youth. The scenario was further deepened by the East Coast – West Coast rap wars in the United States with lyrics that glorified gun violence and deep contempt for women.  Interestingly, as families mourned the loss of their sons cut down in the poisonous atmosphere induced by this American pop culture, the yearning for a Nigerian version of street reality began silently in some circles. People wished for rhythms and lyrics that had resonance with the Nigerian experience. It was helpful that a silent fire had already been lit in a corner by Kenneth Nnebue whose classic movie, Living in Bondage had captured popular imagination and was gradually wrenching attention away from bootlegged Hollywood films that flooded the Nigerian market. It was also helpful that the rap duo; Junior & Pretty had softened the ground for the emerging hip-hop scene with lyrics that captured popular idioms and codes of the street. It was in this social and cultural ferment that the musical rupture, Innocent Idibia, Tuface, emerged on the Nigerian entertainment scene.

Energetic Nigerian youths

We must of necessity, acknowledge the power and influence of music on popular culture. It is almost self-evident that of all cultural vehicles, music has the most advantage of spontaneity and resonance. Movies, dance and fashion don’t quite match the pace and sweeping enchantment of music. Little wonder therefore that the fledgling mosaic of Nigerian comedy and movies of the early 90s sired by Ali Baba and Kenneth Nnebue had to wait for the vocal grace of Tuface to gain wider acceptance in Nigeria and across the world.

It goes without question, that looking back to the last fifteen years, no Nigerian act has defined our popular culture like Tuface Idibia. His entry into the entertainment scene represents a ground-shift in much the same way as Chimamanda Adichie’s grand entry into Nigerian literature. Tuface’s sweet innocent looks, unassuming personality and extra-ordinary vocal gift have animated public conversations across Nigeria for over a decade. His vulnerabilities each time he fell to the wiles of young women, echoed our collective humanity. All these swelled his legend and hoisted him firmly on the saddle of almost universal accolade and stunning financial success. Tuface made young Nigerians realize that they could take charge of their lives through music, that what lay inside them was far stronger than the limitations of their environment. With African Queen, his awesome classic, he forced many international windows open to Nigerian music and waltzed his way into Hollywood when the song was chosen as the soundtrack to Phat Girls, a 2006 comedy movie directed by Nnegest Likke, starring Mo’Nique and Jimmy Jean-Loius.  A lot of hugely successful artistes in Nigeria today owe their courage to ride the rough waves of musical career to Tuface. The monstrous success of African Queen flung wide the floodgate of creativity, spanning music production, music video production, make up artistry, artiste management, endorsements, brand ambassadorships etc.

Interestingly, the comedian, Ali Baba exerted almost the same influence on Nigerian humour. It is doubtful however, that Ali Baba would have had any real impact at all without the entrepreneurial vision of Opa Williams whose Night of a Thousand Laughs offered a pioneering platform for the entrenchment of the comedy culture in Nigeria and the birth of the Nigerian humour. The sprouting of home grown stand-up comedians and the resilient evolution of Nigerian humour with a heavy slant to the Warri outlook on life helped force Nigerians to recognize the hidden beauties of the Nigerian pidgin English which all along had dangled between acceptance and outright scorn. Nigerian humour has now taken a firm position in our cultural tapestry, along with our music and movies. Nigerian comedians have continued to pack audiences at shows in London’s 02 Arena, Johannesburg, Accra, Kenya and across many states in the US. And from Kenneth Nnebue’s ground-breaking 1992 film; Living in Bondage that laid the foundation, Nollywood has cast a spell on Africa and the entire black Diaspora. The phenomenal success of Nollywood is such that Nigeria is known to the outside world solely through the magic lenses of Nollywood. Today, Nollywood actors and actresses are outstanding sex-symbols across the world. Quite naturally, the blossoming of the local entertainment scene also necessitated the emergence of a high street fashion industry to match the eclectic tastes of the music and movie stars. Through the publication of Arise magazine, Thisday newspapers played a formidable role in forcing attention on the amazing talents of Nigerian fashion designers. The mushrooming of gifted designers and fashion houses across the length and breadth of Nigeria, the growing number of fashion shows and the thriving of modeling agencies all fit snugly into the emerging landscape of a cultural powerhouse. 

Amarachi Uyanne, winner of the maiden edition of Nigeria's Got Talent.

Although the world might not know it or accept it, but this is Nigeria’s defining moment. This is finally the moment when the motherland begins the fight back for a gradual repeal of America’s cultural dominance through music, movies and fashion with the sudden explosion of popular youth culture which shatters provincial slurs and stereotypes to mainstream acceptance. Growing up in the 90s, urban Nigeria looked up to America to define social trends and street ethos through music, dance, fashion and movies. Today, the shoe is on the other foot – American cultural icons look forward to playing shows in Nigeria and collaborating with Nigerian stars. Nigerians with a gift of singing or entertainment creation across the world are migrating back to the country every day. Actors and screen writers are returning from   Nigerian jeweler, Chris Aire is a Hollywood celebrity designer. Frontline Nigerian acts are in serious creative and business partnerships with their American colleagues. Wizkid and Dbanj are signed on to Akon’s Konvict and Kanye’s G.O.O.D Music while PSquare and Tuface have done duets with Akon, Rick Ross and R. Kelly respectively. The exchange might not have attained the desired level but it is gratifying to know that it exists at all. Besides, the real fascination of Nigeria’s emerging cultural super-power status is the fact that its creative energy is forceful enough to compel acceptance in distant places. Critical alliances with American and the cultural icons of other countries are important but not necessary. Nigerian acts do not need American influence to capture African, European and Asian audiences. What we have is authentic and infectious enough to capture the imagination of diverse audiences.

In recent times, nothing perhaps, is as gratifying as the growing acceptance of Nigeria as a cultural force across Africa and beyond. It is now common to hear Psquare’s Alingo boom out of the woofer speakers of a pimped up BMW saloon car in down town Johannesburg and bounce to the rhythm of Tuface’s Implication in a club in Dubai just as it is common to walk into a Mudi shop in a Nairobi high street or listen to Zimbabwean children innocently mime the lines of Flavour’s Ashawo Remix without knowing its explicit meaning. It almost gives a heady feeling to recall that there was once time when the only thing the world had only one narrative on Nigeria - 419. With our entertainment industry, Nigerian youths have saved Nigeria from the dangers of a single story.  No longer will a cynical foreigner shake a rueful head at us and remind us about 419. We can always retort that, yes, there’s 419 but there’s also Tuface, Psquare and Dbanj and that Genevieve Nnaji was on Oprah Winfrey’s Meet the Famous People in the World show the other day; that in our own time, Nigeria has become a tale of two narratives – the good and the bad; just as is the case with most countries of the world.

Another most gratifying thing is that with the plethora of reality shows and musical festivals in the country, the production line that will supply raw materials to this industry will continue to rev.  

Naturally, what may be hard to accept to most cynics is the fact that in our own time and with our peculiar limitations, young Nigerians have in one huge splash of creativity, reversed the cultural imbalance between Nigeria and America, the world’s cultural behemoth and imposed the Nigerian way on the world. In all honesty, it is difficult to find a better time to be young and Nigerian.       

To be a Nigerian

I became fully aware of what it meant to be a Nigerian during my NYSC experience in Lagos in the late 90s. I was young and foolish. My head swarm with fuzzy ideals. Nothing in particular seemed to take any real shape. My vision lacked clarity. But I was not alone. I was one with Nigeria. Fate had played mind games with Naija; MKO Abiola and the dictator, Sani Abacha had just died in quick succession and Nigeria was in transition. So were the hopes of hordes of youngsters who had finally graduated from the universities after losing interminable years to spates of purposeless strikes by university teachers. Everything seemed suspended, deferred; our aspirations, our dreams, our laughter.

 True; Head of State, General Abdulsami Abubakar who took charge of government business after Abacha’s death had promised to hand over. But there was nothing in our collective memory to nudge us into grasping at that promise with any seriousness. In the prevailing anxiety and growing confusion, I watched my childhood friends and school mates flee the country. It seemed the sensible thing to do then. Anyone who had a reliable friend or relative outside of Nigeria thought seriously about their chances. A friend of mine, I imagined, aptly captured the mood of the country then when he referred to Nigeria as the “world’s leading cemetery of dreams.” It was not so much a question of the fewness of options for the youth as it was a summation of the bleakness of the national climate of the time.

All along, I had pined for the freedom of the open air, to test the waters, to see life in its hideous nudity away from the boisterous laughter of the classrooms. Life at the NYSC Orientation Camp in Iyana Ipaja, Lagos had been like a tang of fine champagne on the tongue of a connoisseur. There in the company of dreamers, I had imagined the world was too narrow a canvass for the immense size of the gifts we carried. But when I began to pound the forlorn streets of Victoria Island in the blazing sun, peeping into office windows and dropping application letters, I also wondered if I my talent wouldn’t find a quicker expression outside Nigeria. Jobs were a rarity then. But so were other things that made for a contented citizenry. The wave of migrant Nigerians fleeing the country for economic and political reasons was at its very peak. Most of them were university teachers, medical and health workers, human rights activists, writers and other workers in symbol; society’s very conscience. They all fled in droves.

All across the land, people sang different dirges for the country. Nigeria seemed split dramatically across the usual fault lines. There were talks of separation as diverse ethnic militia carved up the country into separate fiefdoms for themselves with ease. In the North Arewa People’s Congress spoke their usual language of entitlement and dominance but in the South, a loud cacophony of war held sway. Egbesu Boys of Africa brandished potent charms and amulets in the creeks of the Niger Delta. Myth-makers went to town with stories of how the Egbesu goddess had granted the boys invisibility before their enemies. In the South East, the rhetoric was as expected. The marginalization of the last thirty years had got to stop or else, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) would reenact the return of the “land of the rising sun. MASSOB leader, Chief Ralph Uwazurike’s pampered beard had begun to grow wild in a manner reminiscent of the revolutionaries of yore.

 In the South West, the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) spat fire! The death of Abiola and the cheeky shoving aside of Ernest Shonekan, the Interim Government leader who had assumed power after the annulment of June 12 elections had rubbed the Yorubas the wrong way and the young militiamen that peopled OPC felt a need to assert their manhood. Before long, their long suppressed angst began to keel over into malevolent tendencies. Soon enough, Dr. Fredrick Fasehun’s strenuous effort to rein in exuberances that were out of kilter with his vision for the group led to a split and out sprung the dreaded Gani Adams’ faction of the OPC that pushed Lagos dangerously close to the edge.

 It wasn’t long before their muted gong of war began to take on the guttural timber of violence. Soon enough, the vegetable and fruits market in Mile 12 and Ketu axis where merchants from the North sell their wares became the touch-point for a rage long deferred. The ensuing clashes between OPC and some Hausa traders began in that axis and suddenly snow-balled to Idi Araba, Agege and other parts of Lagos. The climate of fear that reigned then was such that most Lagos residents soon cultivated the habit of tuning in to radio stations to get a reading of the “temperature” of the city before leaving their homes each morning.  Violent clashes roused most mornings and it was so easy to get caught up in the storm. The prevailing sense of justice or lack thereof was intense. And all around Nigeria, there was a strong feeling that the ship of state was adrift in a fast current. Not many people reasoned in terms of nationhood or collective survival or unity. Happily, it was only for a while. A typical Nigerian while.

Almost as everything Nigerian, the pull-back from the razor-edge was dramatic. In a rare display of foresight, Olusegun Obsanjo was dug up from the dungeon where he lay rotting away. For a while it seemed almost preposterous for Nigerian leaders to seek to create our own version of Mandela’s prison-to-presidency narrative but that was what we got. And in a manner almost reminiscent of the biblical rebuke of the storm by Jesus, Obasanjo’s assumption of power served as a calming balm on the searing turbulence.

Looking back now, it also seems like they never happened; as though my mind is playing tricks on me and I am dredging up memories from across the river bank of my childhood. But this is Nigeria. Children born in 2005 may never have heard of OPC or APC or Egbesu Boys of Africa. They may only have heard of MASSOB after Emeka Ojukwu’s death last year when Uwazurike and his men had to make some noise to re-assert their relevance. It all seems so distant, so vague and so inconsequential now that one would be tempted to wonder why we ever worried about them, but those were dreadful moments in our contemporary times.

Indeed, recent Nigerian history is replete with imageries that echo the above scenario. We have had too many close shaves, countless dances on razor-edge and too many bewildering moments that tug on the consciousness and make one re-evaluate one’s belief in Nigeria. It happens all the time; from Jos to Mumbi and from Aluu to Madalla.

Increasingly though, a crucial lesson is emerging from our social mosaic - to be a Nigerian is to master the art of living on the edge. To weed one-self of all emotions that have to do with all kinds of losses since we are the planet’s true inheritors of loss. It is to develop a strange short memory and a neurotic craving to move on, to rush through unpleasant experiences as though they have nothing to teach us and to pick quarrels with anyone who calls our attention to the past.

You may call it living in denial if you wish.