Who is the brain behind January 15?

KWENU! Our culture, our future

Who is the brain behind January 15?

Part 3 M. O. ENE

Monday, January 15, 2007

ZEROING IN ON OKIGBO

Christopher Okigbo appeared to be a man who loved life and lived it. He was not a violent person by his own admission. Yes, he did not like what was going on after the colonists left. Yes, he wrote about coming ‘thunders’ and about politicians getting jail terms for their dishonorable mismanagement and mean debasement of fellow citizens, but there was nothing to suggest that he was going to do something about it himself. According to Robert Frost, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Okigbo’s emotion found its thought in poetry, and the thoughts found words that expressed his feelings freely. There is no finding faults with arts as expressed; we merely try to figure out the artist’s intent. Most importantly, Okigbo’s emotion is not cast in the same mold as Soyinka’s, even though their thoughts found words in poetry.

It is no secret that some critics have fingered Christopher Okigbo as a behind-the-scene collaborator in the events of January 15. If he had anything to do with the coupists, no matter how remotely, was he on his own? Is it likely that Soyinka knew a lot more than he has revealed? Is it possible that he and Okigbo talked about it while he was cooling his heals in jail in the aftermath of his treason charge for taking over the Ibadan radio station at gunpoint and making an unauthorized announcement? These questions beg for answers from those who knew both men very well at the time and who are willing to write about it. It will be a farce to depend on such write-ups as was published in Daily Independent by an unnamed author implicating a University of Ibadan campus “writer-alumni cast” of Obumselu, Okigbo, and even Achebe as possible participants. ^[10]

OF MIRACLES & PROMISES

Writing about Okigbo’s works in “Understanding African Poetry,” Ken Goodwin observes the constraints in not making “the personal and the national meanings … [n]or the religious and the poetic meanings of his myth cohere.” He continued:

“These constraints did not apply to the poems he wrote after the first Nigerian military coup and the first massacre of [the Igbo] in the following May. :::: ’Thunder Can Break’ welcomes the 15 January coup… with unalloyed delight. The story of what has happened is still unclear to Okigbo. But he is certain that a miracle, made, alas, with iron, but still a miracle, has been wrought, and he would like the ‘Faces and hands and feet’ behind it to be revealed. ‘Obduracy, the disease of elephants,’ that is, the harsh unyielding attitude of the former political regime, has been broken by the thunder of a military coup.” ^[11]

The unfolding event was not “unclear” to Okigbo; the clarity of his poems suggest that he knew a whole lot more than literary critics are willing to admit. Goodwin writes that the second part of ‘Hurrah for Thunder’ “looks beyond the coup, and uses the style of Igbo proverbs to refer to the dangers of seeking spoils from the coup and following in the wake of the discredited politicians by making impossible promises.” ^[12]

Now, hear what Nzeogwu promised:

We are not promising anything miraculous or spectacular. But what we do promise every law-abiding citizen is freedom from fear and all forms of oppression, freedom from general inefficiency and freedom to live and strive in every field of human endeavor, both nationally and internationally. We promise that you will no more be ashamed to say that you are Nigerians. ^[13]

Goodwin continued on ‘Hurrah for Thunder’:

These are poems with little to obstruct the reader in the way of recondite imagery. They are directly related in statement, imagery, and lament to the situation of 1966. Many readers found this a refreshing change and hailed his last poems as his best. Even Chinua Achebe thinks that this opinion

‘has substantial merit … there is that undeniable fire in his last poems which was something new. It was as though the goddess he sought in his poetic journey through so many alien landscapes and ultimately found at home had given him this new thunder. Unfortunately when he was killed in 1967 he left us only that little, tantalizing hint of the new self he had found.’ ^[14]

Either Okigbo’s poetry of post-independence pessimism naturally gave way to a dawn of post-coup optimism, which he hailed as a miracle sadly wrought with iron, or there is much more to his actions and writings that we do not know. It is certain that the coup of January 15 marked a rite of passage, a transition from obscure disillusionment to objective clarity. Whatever the truth, and we may never really know the whole truth, Okigbo became an open and active part of the new beginning, a beginning that became his end and produced the same putrid polity… if not worse.

Continued:::>