Who is the brain behind January 15?
Part 2
M. O. ENE
egbedaa@aol.com
Monday, January 15, 2007
continued from Part 1
OF POETS & PROPHESIES
There will always be a need to revisit various aspects of the facts, as we know them. One thing is certain, someone somewhere came up with the idea to do something about the then prevailing political situation. The Igbo sage has it that the blacksmith who cannot decipher how to forge a metal gong should look at the tail of a kite. Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurosurgeon and father of psychoanalysis, said: “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” Poets are like Igbo spirits of ancestors (mistakenly marked ‘masquerades’); they speak the dialect of deities. Freud also stated, “Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”
Obviously, a poet, some social critic, or a writer of some shade must have written about things falling apart and the need to do something about it. This does not make him the brain behind the actions of adults who might have read the writings. However, we cannot dismiss any lead until it leads to a dead-end. If the words of Freud hold true, then we must be looking for a poet. Luckily, Nigeria had many acclaimed poets, playwrights, and novelists of the time, notably Chinua Achebe, J. P. Clark, Chris Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, etc. Could they all have been there before the soldiers, seen the situation, and explained it directly to Ifeajuna?
Achebe spoke
plainly in naming his novel
Things Fall Apart.
Things were falling apart; the old ways must give way to new ways. Achebe even
followed it up with telling tales of a polity headed for the rocks, as in the
timely A Man of the
People
(January 1966). The political satire showcases crude corruption and petty, power
struggle as Minister
of Culture Nanga (the man of the people) and regular guy Mr. Odili go at it for
reasons remotely nationalistic. The ensuing violence attracted the attention of
the military, which, as in January 15, 1966, intervenes and sacks the corrupt
government of Minister Nanga. Nigeria’s first republic had many Nangas, and
there were some Odilis willing to give back as much as they got.
Chris Okigbo was around; he and Achebe founded a publishing company in Enugu soon after the 1966 countercoup dislodged Easterners from other parts of Nigeria. Okigbo wrote poignant apocalyptic poems, and the event even consumed him at the Nsukka sector of the eventual Nigeria-Biafra War. Wole Soyinka was not only knee-deep in political jiggery pokey he had also plotted and executed a localized coup of sorts in 1965. {He would dabble into another coup plot in 1967]. In fact, I ascribe the leadership of the second Nigeria coup d’état to Soyinka (that of Awolowo’s Action Group being the first).
Beyond the two previous coup attempts and the rumor of an alleged plot by lieutenant colonels, these writers could have sown the seeds of sedition in the mind of military majors and even planted specific ideas. In his latest work,[8] Soyinka states of the January 15, 1966 coup, “Several of the killings, objectively considered, were not remotely essential to the success of the coup.” How could Soyinka be so sure? Was he present at the plotting? However, even if he had written a manual on how to take over power by force, no one should hold a writer responsible for the actions of his readers. Even when writing is particularly provocative, the writer or poet merely has his say because, as Plato said, “Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”
This takes us back to square one: Even if the writings of a particular poet triggered the actions of the five majors on January 15, 1966, it will be a stretching the truth to hold the poets responsible. Unless there is a clear-cut collaboration between the perpetrators and the poets, no one should point an accusing finger at poets who say things they themselves do not understand. Poets are like masquerades; only those versed in the semantics of spirit speak understand them.
Of
the “study suspects,” one will easily eliminate Chinua Achebe; he is not of the
radical mold, and he would have spoken if he had encountered the rough-and-ready
radicals that wrought the revolution. Thank God, he is still with us; the eagle
on iroko can clarify any misgivings. I do not know much about JP Clark, but he
was reportedly close to Okigbo at the time. Of Wole Soyinka, we know too well.
He was in the thick of post-January 15 perambulations and permutations. He
somehow got himself involved in the Third Force, as revealed in
The Man Died
and in
You Must Set
Forth at Dawn.
He even tried to recruit Chris Okigbo, who told him (Soyinka): “You
know, I learnt to use a gun right in the field. I had never fired even an
air-rifle in my life. But this thing [Biafra War], I am going to stay with till
the end. [9]
When historians write the story of the Biafra coup for which Brigadier Victor Banjo, Lt. Colonel Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Major Alale, and Mr. Sam Agbam were executed in Enugu on September 25, 1967, Wole Soyinka will feature as the only surviving, principal actor -- the one that escaped General Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s metallic retort and ended up General Gowon’s gulag. Thanks to the intervention of Awolowo, who warned Gowon that the West would heave if Soyinka died in jail, Soyinka lived long to become a Nobel Laureate.
From his own words and writings, on can deduce that Soyinka was in the midst of pro-Awolowo and anti-Akintola forces in the ‘wild, wild West’ era, and he was in Banjo-Ifeajuna Third Force scheme that tried to eliminate both Odumegwu-Ojukwu and Gowon. However, since he has not claimed any explicit role in the January 15 coup plot, it looks unlikely that Wole Soyinka was directly in the midst of whatever was cooking. Besides, he was in jail, awaiting trial. Nonetheless, he is not necessary off the hook, not yet.