Achebe: Wole Soyinka, Stroking The Lions Tail? It is not a matter of the Lion and the Jewel this time around. It is a matter of bidding farewell to the deserving and by who should do it. ‘Sorry’ to an injured person does not in any way heal the wound. But it is held that if the person who should sympathize with one fails to do it, the injury pains the more. Yes! The Nobel laureate, Wole Soynika, was lambasted in the internet for being absent at Ogidi for Chinua Achebe’s funeral. The sleeping dog (at the internet) ought to have been allowed to lie. But then, the literary giant Wole, would not take it lying low. He came out with a reaction titled “Village Mourners Association.” Expectedly, he spoke all the grammar, poetry, prose and even acted out a drama piece there as to why he did not come to bid farewell to a supposed colleague in the literary world. In his reaction, Wole Soyinka came down hard on those he says are still caviling at his absence from the funeral of Achebe on May 23, 2013. “The choice to participate (in a funeral) or not belongs to the individual, including even those who arrogate to themselves the mission of imposing on others their preferred mode of bidding farewell (to a departed colleague).. These self righteous clerics are dangerous beings especially where they flaunt the credentials of secular learning and gather in caucuses of presumed humanities. Why make my absence from the funeral a subject of debate on the internet”, Soyinka queried. “I want to request the media to stop creating problems where there are none.” The Nobel Laureate is worried by the caption J.P. Clark., Soyinka shun Achebe’s funeral’ and says, “It is mischievous. If I didn’t go for the funeral, it is because I wouldn’t. There are reasons why I wouldn’t be there. But my presence was still there. As far as I’m concerned I was heavily there”. The literary giant lashed out at this internet critics as though he suspected they needed appropriate doses of the literary language to address the issue. “From the herd, the mindless internet fiddlers for whom the landing of a planetary probe or a medical breakthrough is simply discretion from fraudulent internet mailing, nothing less is expected. What menaces the collective health of society is when the deserving highs of intellectual application of the former become indistinguishable from the loutish low of the latter… I don’t pander to the expectations of the sanctimonious. For reasons personal to me I couldn’t be there”, Wole summed up. I have had an occasion to ask a friend thus; “did you attend so, so and so funeral” He said, “No, the funeral itself died. There was no need attending a funeral that would not be appreciated. Obviously, he would have an uphill task introducing himself to the mourners since it was only the deceased who knew him. And Ben Cooper a friend had this to say about funerals. “It is a matter of mutual reciprocity. When I’m bereaved, you pretend not to hear, and wouldn’t come to commiserate with me, when it is your turn I block my ears and proceed on summer holidays. It is a matter of give and take. This is our culture which enjoins that one good turn deserves another, though the cost of burying our dead is becoming rather high”. Often times, deaths and accompanying funeral rites provide opportunity to building bridges of friendship, mending tattered social fences and solidifying relationships. In spite of all the efforts by the Nobel Laureate to explain away the whys and wherefores of his inadvertent absence from Ogidi, I will still tow, though with great caution, the line of his internet critics if only to attempt to drive home the point the implications his inability to be personally present to bid Achebe farewell. Before doing this we need to be reminded that Wole Soyinka, a very young man then, gave us unequalled solidarity during the Biafran struggle for self-determination, the reason he was incarcerated by Nigerian authorities then. His solidarity and consequent detention reverberated in the airwaves all over the world, including the Biafra Radio. I can still conjecture with nostalgia the voice of Okon-Okon Ndem and his Igbo language counterparts Julius and Paddy Eke, rendering news talk on the then irrepressible Radio Biafra on the incarceration of the detribalized young Nigeria, Wole Syinka. It may have been, however, and perhaps, the last Wole Soyinka identified with a popular cause east of the River Niger. Between that time and now a lot of water has passed under the bridge. You could ask whether Soyinka, after the Biafra incident, was taken to the backyard and whispered to vis-a-vis his support for Biafra. I’m sure he wasn’t. As he said, he is not a person to pander to the expectations of the sanctimonious. Or is it true, one would ask, that the older one becomes the more conservative one becomes? Is it important to give Soyinka’s action on Achebe this kind of treatment, some people may ask? Yes! The ordinary people, no matter the level of their political sophistication, look on to the actions, steps and body movement of their leaders. It is their leaders that lead them to take whatever political decisions they take. Essentially why it is believed in many quarters that the one-man one-vote provision in the constitution of many democracies is a farce. There particle individuals. There are block individuals. When the big block is broken you have thousands of particles. Particle individuals have one vote each, but block individuals have more than one. Particles voters would, on the eve of an election, come round to ask their leaders, ‘which side would you want us to go’ And so, the action or inaction of leaders could tilt the socio-political balance or behaviour of their followers one way or the other. Is it therefore surprising that the Igbo across the Niger are critical of Awolowo; if not for forcing Azikiwe out of the politics of Yoruba land, it could be for his assertion that starvation is a legitimate instrument of warfare, a policy decision by Awo as the minister of finance of the Gown junta, which enabled kwashiorkor to decimate our people more than bombs, air-raids and artillery fire could do, in addition to settling the Igbo with one pound each at the end of hostilities in 1970, a tag on the Igbo as a conquered people. This leadership-followership situation is the other side which the renowned Nobel Laureate may have lost sight of. And by the way, Wole ought it have remembered that his Nobel Prize sparked off some controversy among the literary community in Nigeria and beyond. The opportunity of his physically attending Achebe’s funeral in flesh and blood, would have helped to mediate the misconception and douse some bush fires. Over here, east of the Niger, people have regarded Wole as Achebe’s opposite number and junior brother, who ought to have been one of the mourners. In fact, the aso-ebi mourning dress out to have been extended to him, or that he should have requested for some, far himself and a team of his colleagues he would have led to the east… But we lost that bridge-building opportunity. It was the late Ikemba Nnewi who queried thus; why wouldn’t there be a handshake across the River Niger. On the North-South (Nigeria) dialogue, Ojukwu had extended this possible handshake across the Niger by asserting that the opposite of North is South, not East and West. The Igbo have been offering this olive branch any time opportunity calls for it. At the demise of Awolowo, Ojukwu was personally present and wrote in the condolence register ‘here is the best president Nigeria never had’. Adeniran Ogunsanya was a life-time friend and political associate of the great Zik of Africa, the Rt. Hon Nnamdi Azikiwe. When he died, Ndigbo trooped out in their numbers to demonstrate that the late Senior Advocate of Nigeria who clung tightly to every political party NCNC, NPP and whatever, Zik was identified, was a true friend of the Igbo. Before he departed TOS Benson, first republic politician of Lagos extraction had the name of Zik in his mouth till he breathed last. At a stage he requested Nigerians to hand in to him whatever message they had for Zik so he could deliver them in the world beyond. The case mentioned related to Yoruba Lagosians who could not be deterred by perceived prejudices of their cultural area or tethered permanently to their ethnic homeland, and who always were ready to embrace what is good and excellent. How did we come this far, and courted tattered fences with our big brothers of the west? Zik won election in the west but was frustrated and asked to go home to his ethnic homeland. Igwe Peter Ezenwa of Oba in an interview told me narrated how Zik advised him, Peter, to go home to the east and contest election. “If I contest and win, and you too contest and win, all in Lagos and Yorubaland, the envy of the natives would be roused,” Ezenwa took that advice, came back to the east, contested and won. In spite of Zik’s effort to balance the socio-political equation, he still was frustrated and he returned to his Igbo ethnic homeland. The ripple effect was how to manage the crowded Eastern house of assembly, the rise in consciousness of the Cross River group, the pulling out of Western Cameroons from Nigeria. It was not for nothing that the National Council of Nigeria and Camerouns, NCNC, was renamed National council of Nigerian Citizens, still NCNC. You can trust Zik’s wittiness. Wole lost sight of all these bridge-building and fence mending efforts. In fact The Man Died. No attempt should be made to stroke the lion’s tail. The chorus is still Enyimba Enyi! Posted by Orient Daily on June 28, 2013
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 09:46:17 +0000
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