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KWENU: Our Culture, Our Future |
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The Other in Literature: Ali Mazrui vs Christopher Okigbo (Reflections on the Okigbo International Conference 2007)
IHECHUKWU MADUBUIKE Abuja, Nigeria
@KWENU: Friday, February 8, 2008
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty views….They are written, as with a sun beam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of divinity itself, and can never be erased by mortal power”. --Alexander Hamilton, 1775
After listening to Ali Mazrui’s presentation at the International Multidisciplinary Conference on Christopher Okigbo in Boston on the 22nd day of September, 2007, I went home disturbed. This was after my official intervention at the conference on what I felt was an unfair criticism of Christopher Okigbo’s social engagement as a writer and the oversimplification of an individual’s fundamental rights and freedom. It was my first meeting with the eminent Professor, a regular visitor and consultant to the Nigerian government. I sought to know more about this otherwise well honed public intellectual. What disturbed me was his intellectual obduracy even in the face of popular dissent and disapproval of his position.
I turned my computer and searched through the engine of Google to see what further information I could get about the man, especially his background. Among other relevant things I found out is that:” Ali Mazrui is a radical Islamist who lectured last year at the Bin Laden funded ICPC….etc” ICPC means the International Centre for the Propagation of Islam. I have no quarrel with that. Other listings revealed that he was a man who apparently enjoyed controversies. He is variously listed as a left wing extremist and anti-Semitic. He has been detained in the United States of America for attempting to meet a radical islamist leader linked to terrorist activities. He had also once been reported to the US State Department as one whose visa should be rescinded” due to profiting from corruption”. Efforts to find out if he studied literature or literary criticism at any point in his career proved abortive. However, I know that some men who have made statements or taken actions that have debased humanity, from Darwin to Montesquieu, to Hegel, Hitler and others have been persons with a heavy dose of intelligence. All of them decided based on the exigencies of the time (compulsions of racial dictates, colonialism, political or religious persuasions) where to direct the might of their intellectual gift and what cause to serve.
Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his The Spirit of the Laws while commenting on black people said, inter alia: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we are ourselves not Christians”.
And Hegel (1777)-1831) in his The Philosophy of History (1831) said:
The Negro as already observed exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed nature. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character”.
The stereotyping is not limited to Europeans only. The Arab geographer Idrisi (1110-1165), while speaking about the blacks had said: “Their ignorance is notorious; men of learning are almost unknown among them” (See Lewis, Race and Colour in Islam, p 37).
It is this “single story of Africa”, to borrow the phrase of Chimamanda Adichie who was in the same panel with me and Mazrui at the conference, and of the black race, as the wretched of the earth that Mazrui is perpetuating. He is also extending to the epistemic frontier the intellectual warfare that opposes and separates African elites from different cultural persuasions and background, thus making uniformity of thoughts and vision very difficult. It is still racism at work. Or is it a Freudian slip when Mazrui asserts that “some lives are more sacred than others”? Or when he says that Okigbo’s poetry is the voice of universality heard from a village boy” or yet that universalism cannot be achieved through the vernacular language or that Africans marry many wives to achieve immortality? Is this scholarship or confirmation of old values and systems?
What is disturbing, again, is the fact that Ali, coming from Africa, chooses not to be on the side of the needlessly maligned and brutalized people of his continent, brutalized both by Western and Arab racism. What is equally troubling is the intellectual dishonesty which the Professor parades about as a universal critic without bias, the pseudo scholarship which contains a large dose of contaminated ideological hypocrisy.
Mazrui should be able to distinguish between literary criticism from pure propaganda or come out clean and tell us which one he is practicing. By not doing this Professor Mazrui undermines interpretative validity, professionalism and academic freedom. This has also led to inconsistencies in some of his ideas and pronouncements.
In one of his lectures titled “Islamic and Western Values” delivered at the Al-Hewar Centre, the Professor-at-Large at the School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Virginia, had this to say:
“Cultures should be judged not merely by the heights of achievement to which they have ascended but by the depth of brutality to which they have descended.”
This is quite interesting. Mazrui made this statement while comparing Western (European) culture with Islamic culture. The interesting point is that the same Mazrui refuses to point out the cruelty inherent in a culture that admits or condones the butchering of hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians in 1966 in what many has described as one of the worst forms of ethnic cleansing in post colonial Africa.
The measure of cultures is not only in their virtues but also in their vices. In the same lecture Mazrui justifies the ban placed on the Satanic Verses after enumerating other books that have banned in the West. Whereas it may be perfectly logical to ban the Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie because, according to Mazrui, it held Islam to ridicule does it occur to him that his Trial of Christopher Okigbo could be banned because it held the Igbos to ridicule! The Igbos whose distant in-law I understand he is could declare him a persona non grata and ask all their sons and daughters not to read his books.
Obviously the Igbo culture is more accommodating and more humane and that explains why the Igbo ethnic formation has never gone around subjugating anybody under its hegemony as many other empire builders do. That is not in their character.
If mankind must enjoy the fruits of an open society, it is not only the West and Islam that must be consulted, contrary to Mazrui’s illogic. Contemporary Africa must be in the thick of the confabulation. That is the only way, to quote Mazrui “the dialectic of history will continue its conversation with the dialectic of culture within the wider rhythms of relativity in human experience”. But Mazrui ought to have started this hypothetical conversation at home, with the Igbo culture, since he was a frequent visitor to Nigeria. But this would not have been in the interest of his mission.It might have helped him to understand Okigbo’s point of view, since that is part of the essence of the dialectics of cultures. It should have been clear to him that it was quite agonizing for some one like Christopher Okigbo, who was nurtured on a diet of national and trans- ethnic consciousness to take up arms against Nigeria. That act is metaphoric and is a measure of the level of the failure of statecraft in many newly independent states in Africa.
The point is that Professor Mazrui’s book on Christopher Okigbo is a strategic response to a situation of anomie which provided the functional background to an imaginative work, an unnecessary erosion of our Afro-humanism. As we shall show, Professor Mazrui’s work is not an attempt to understand a fellow intellectual’s predicament at the most critical point in his existence but an assay to ridicule him, and through him, his work and his people. It is the complicity of scholarship with state authority.
Now let us turn to Mazrui's charges against Okigbo .They are as follows:
1.” Okigbo’s poetry is the voice of universality heard from a village boy”. This is very condescending and patronizing. Okigbo, a village boy?
2. “Okigbo’s poetry is a case of promise cut short; a symphony interrupted”. A genuine, I hope, lament and regret at the death of Okigbo and the promise his poetry held for further development.
3. “All lives are sacred but some lives are more sacred than others”. How do you justify this? A writer should stand for the sanctity of all human lives. Mazrui’s position is an outrageous and revisionist stand to be taken by a third world intellectual or indeed by any intellectual for that matter.
4. Okigbo subjected his genius to parochial goals by acting as an Igbo first and a poet second. He asked “Did Okigbo sacrifice the universality of his genius to his parochial interest? Should a gifted human being have a right to sacrifice himself?” Before we proceed let us understand and explain the meanings of some of the key words in these charges, words like, parochial, universal, and sacrifice. They are strong and loaded.
Parochial means one who is only interested in the things that affect him and his local area and not in more important things. Universal, on the other hand, means something that is done or understood by everybody; something that includes or involves everybody. Sacrifice is the act of dying while fighting for a principle.
Unarguably, the above charges derive from a consciousness that is apparently nurtured on a bogus universal theology. They represent the focal point of the trial, even though there is more to it than is immediately apparent. It is therefore apposite to review briefly a lecture once given by Professor Ali Mazrui before proceeding.
In the lecture titled Pretender to Universalism: Western Culture in the Globalizing Age,” Ali Mazrui argues that even though western culture is the dominant culture in the world today it is not universal. He reasons as follows: The West’s triumph in the last two or three centuries has led to the claim that Western civilization has universal validity.
Such a claim, he argues, faces three challenges—the challenge of historical relativism (what was valid in the West a hundred years ago is not valid necessarily today); the challenge of cultural relativism (what is valid in the West may not be valid in other cultures and civilizations) and the challenge of empirical relativism (not only does the West fail to meet its own ethical standards, but these standards are sometimes better fulfilled by other cultures than by the West.). “If there is a universal ethical standard in the world, we have not yet discovered it. It is certainly not the Western ethical standard…” concludes Mazrui.Now, if the search for the universal is still ongoing, and it is not to be found in the West, to which universal principle is Mazrui subjecting Okigbo in his trial? Which universal ideals has Okigbo betrayed either as a writer or as a solder fighting on the side of Biafra? If he had fought on the side of Nigeria would he have been validating any universal ideal? The answer is no, since no such ideal exists, according to Mazrui.
Did Okigbo sacrifice his genius for a lesser ideal? Again, by whose standards do we determine what ideals are high and which are low? The principle of relativism, as proffered by Mazrui is enough to plead the cause of Okigbo here. There is no universal ideal and since we are still in the realm of relativism; ethical standards are also culture induced. The entire book, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is an ethical evaluation; a moral judgment. Ali is a prisoner of his own logic and cannot escape its application to him. The accusation that Okigbo sacrificed arts—a presumably higher universal ideal -- for a parochial interest , that is the defense of a people fighting for survival and self determination –cannot stand serious scrutiny.
Does an architectural hierarchy of life exist in the oriental literary critical canon or value system? In other words does the Islamic moral ideal have a scale of values for rating human lives? Does it distinguish between important and less important lives? Where does Mazrui derive the idea that some lives are more sacred than others? From western or oriental, or African, ethical canons? There are still strong debates over capital punishment in many civilizations today, showing the premium placed on human life. Even the lives of known criminals are not rated lower than those of nobles and princes. Abortion of yet to be born human embryos is highly resented in many circles.
Mazuri is yet to prove how Okigbo’s life was more “sacred” than the lives of a thousand others who lost their lives during the war especially when it is known that some of these were also artists? In other words, Mazrui should plead with evidence places where grading systems exit to determine the value attached to individual lives which warrants some lives to be more sacred or important or superior to others? And why should we tolerate such a system if it at all exists and why should we allow it to be extolled insouciantly in scholarly conferences?
We hold it that all lives are equal and sacred and that all men are born equal. It is only racists who hold and propagate such supremacist values. Okigbo obviously did not subscribe to this supremacist ethical idea, given his down to earth and vivacious life style.
Soldiers go to war to defend positions which they or their superiors believe in. However, not every soldier that goes to war dies. That is to say that the act of going to war is not necessarily an act of sacrifice in the sense that Mazrui understands it, since it may not result in death. It may certainly lead to other deprivations but not always to death. Okigbo did not voluntarily kill himself so that he will no longer write poetry. There are many people who fought the civil war who did not lose their lives. Mazru has not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Okigbo committed suicide in order not to continue with writing poetry.
Okigbo is modern, not universal. He took to politics of commitment based on a value system which essentially derives from his culture and from an objective assessment of the situation at the time of the war. Okigbo is not a tragic figure. His death is not the result of punishment by any god of art nor does it derive from any known hubristic act as is usually the case with classical tragedies. He was an “ecrivain engage” in the best usage of the word, representing best practices, a truly committed individual to the cause he believed in. He was responsible for his action, not pushed by an implacable foe or uncanny forces. There is no cathartic effect, nor pity. Okigbo died in the war because of the superior fire power of the opposition. He died in the discharge of his social obligation as a member of a deprived community; this is as valid as any other engagement. This action, rather than excite condemnation evokes admiration and celebration. We celebrate Okigbo today not only because of his poetry, but also because of his courage and his conviction, because of who he was: a man who did not allow his art to bar him from fulfilling his social responsibility, a man who knew that art can only be useful when it serves suffering humanity.
Much of Africa is still ethnic in organization and outlook. Universalistic values—so-called—do not give meaning to individual lives in transition Survival instinct is a strategic, pragmatic instinct. It goes for results, not ideals.
Okigbo found solace in traditional values which helped him to resolve his ambiguities. His message is clear: Culturally and morally I am superior to you. Under certain conditions even the elite will turn his back to western (so-called universal) values and return to a culture that he believes is more humanistic. Traditional values and ethnic solidarity provide shield and succor where foreign imposed values fail. Okigbo realized early enough that group survival was a precondition for individual survival and that ethnic pain has a way of rubbing off on its major stake holders and corporate citizens. If people like Mazrui had understood this and respected it the war in Nigeria might have been averted.
It is the pseudo universalistic and orientalists who are waging war against us and our heritage. It is their bigotry and cultural triumphalism that is at work in the Trial of Christopher Okigbo.It was George Orwell who said that those in power control the future by controlling the past. Universalism is a ploy used by agents of imperialism, through various guises, to control our future, often by degrading our past. It is a trap. In an ironic twist, it was only when Okigbo shed his “universal” garb, with its fuggy baggage, that he truly became a candidate for greatness. Before then he made little impression on a vast majority of his people. But after his wasted pilgrimage and romance with a foreign muse, after his return as a prodigal to drink from the fountains of Idoto and traditional poesy, he found form for his song and began to sing as the troubadour, the griot, and the town crier of his people. Rather than diminish in stature, he gained in craftsmanship and fame. Some of his early poems may have been sweet nothings, but they were pleasurable to the ear; where thy did not make sense they made music. His death has not stopped us from enjoying the music of his poetry and here in lies part of his immortality.
The Trial of a dead man, especially if it happens to be a revered dead man, a celebrity, is instant news. And Mazrui is exploiting this fact to the hilt to gain cheap popularity. It sets the tune for all manner of judicial intrigues and manipulations.
The case is, however, not properly pleaded because it did not meet the relevant requirements of the law of prosecution. The Trial is a literary farce, a political heist to reduce the influence of the poet by making him look like a tribal champion or writer. From that point of view it is a condemnation of the Igbo war effort and an inquisition against struggles for freedom, self determination and social justice.
The Trial of ChristopherOkigbo is technically faulty. It lacks the basic ingredients of judicial process, lacks substance and therefore inherent merit. The prosecutor, himself has no locus (not even as amicus curiae) and his court no jurisdiction (discretionary or original)> It is a moot case.
It would be important to find out what is Mazrui’s real motivation or interest in this matter. Ordinarily persons bring cases to court because of a direct personal or organizational interest they seek to advance. Now what is the direct personal interest that Ali is seeking to advance? According to Mazrui’s submission Okigbo would have won the Nobel Prize before Soyinka if he had continued to live, but this is only a speculation. Death cut short and obviated that possibility.
But not even Mazrui could have stopped Okigbo’s death. At the appointed time one must die, no matter what you are doing or where you may be, whether young or old. Besides Okigbo at a very young age had established himself as a great poet, one who had won and rejected literary prizes at home and abroad.
He has the distinction of being one of the most anthologized poets of the 20th century and has a great followership in Nigeria and elsewhere. Through the captivating beauty of his poetry, especially his later poetry, and by his exemplary life Okigbo is guaranteed immortality. He is forever ensconced among the pantheon of Ndiichie, in that extra terrestrial abode of great achievers in Igbo land.
Is Mazrui pursuing organizational group interest? The answer is definitely in the negative, if we are referring to African literary organization with acknowledged open door policy. This leaves us with one other motivation: political motivation. The motive of litigants in political litigation is the advancement, not necessarily of their self interest, but of policies they favour. There is no mistaking the position of Ali Mazrui in the war that opposed the Igbos against the Nigerian Government in1967.There is also no doubt about his orientalist hegemonistic sympathy. Politics, that is propaganda, is the real motive behind Mazrui’s action.
The anti-Okigbo project by Mazrui can also be examined from another angle in terms of human perceptions and psychology. As the French like to say,”L’enfer c’est les autres”, the other person is the devil. We must not underrate the space between Biafra and Kenya, between Ojoto and Mazrui’s Mombasa.where he was born in 1933. Even though both are Africans, the distance is very far, not only in terms of geography, but also in terms of biology and culture. Ojoto is traditional, Christian and contemporary; Mazrui’s Mombassa is Portuguese, Arab, British and African. Its contact with the Middle East dates back to 1st century. The distance is not only spatial; it is cultural and ontological. A gap exists and affects perception of realities. Therefore the theology of the concept of the other is crucial; it is critical and engaging if we must understand the currents that shaped the two personalities and their outlook. Okigbo is a catholic brought –up; he is also traditionally ancestral. He had a religious split, caught as he was between catholic religious orthodoxy and traditional religious ethos.
Mazrui is a fundamentalist Moslem and a thoroughbred Islamist. It is also clear from his writings that he is a crusader of sorts. He also has his immersion in Occidentalism by being educated in the West. Okigbo and Mazrui may be both writers and Africans but they do not share the same ontology. Okigbo read classics; Mazrui, Political Science. Whereas Okigbo wrote out of literary conviction and interest; Mazrui wrote out of political persuasion and controversy. The drama of existence in which both are involved is dissimilar. In Mazrui’s Trial of Christopher Okigbo what is at work is the use of a thinly disguised critical oriental canon to view the work of a person from a totally different culture .In the final analysis the case against Okigbo is not proved not only because of lack of sufficient facts to condemn him but also because of the quality of the advocacy in written and oral briefs. Wars of secession and self determination have continued to be fought all over the world in which both artists and none artists are taking part and playing prominent roles. Some have succeeded as in the break of the former Soviet Union. Some have not quite succeeded.
Professor Mazrui is like a rogue prosecutor who has misused the legal system to satisfy a personal agenda. It is a perfect example of what happens when a prosecutor acts from a base motive or malice. The prosecutor works from the answer to the problem, using judicial and literary activism without judicial restraint. Being innately controversial, he openly invites controversy where the courts would prefer caution.
Robert Jackson, one of America’s great attorneys-general once wrote (1948) that
“the prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America . While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives he is one of the worst.
At any level of reading the Trial of Christopher Okigbo betrays a consciousness of a biased author, one who is parti- pris and one who refused to see the incipient anarchy and civil disorder in Nigeria which Okigbo and his fellow writers confronted in both their literary work and social activities in order to have a better society.
But it would be wrong to let Mazrui and his fellow literary hangmen to get away without costs. even if the cost is tongue lashing. He is guilty of trivializing serious national issues that involve the lives of millions of peoples and the destiny of the largest black nation in the world. His meddlesomeness is a disservice to national aspirations, national healing and reconciliation, and an infringement on the fundamental rights of individuals seeking accommodation in a plural setting.
To condemn Okigbo for abandoning art in favour of a local cause is to unnecessarily mystify art. It reveals a consciousness that is warped and anti-social. It ignores the basic tenet of creativity—freedom untrammeled. The Trial is in service of a philosophy that is out to ridicule Africa, and present it as a continent of unserious writers. But it is a mock trial in which the author has also exposed his underbelly of prejudice. It is unbecoming to drag a dead man to the court of the living, where the author in reality is the prosecutor, and the judge. Indeed, in this literary parody, Okigbo was declared guilty before trial.
Okigbo is a writer who is also Igbo (Biafran). Indeed he is Igbo before being a writer. He did not descend from the clouds. He has commitments to both labels which he chose not to leave unfulfilled. He cannot deny any of the labels, nor shirk the responsibility each imposes on him. Okigbo’s commitment is best demonstrated in his choice to identify with his people. And it was a deliberate choice. To understand this is to understand Okigbo’s intellectual and literary project. To assess him purely from a disguised Islamist and tinted Eurocentric lenses is to misread him and reach conclusions that are misleading. Okigbo’s social activities and literary effort are an affirmation of self, and therefore of culture. No matter the resonance there is little difference between the affirmation of self and the affirmation of culture in his poetry. That culture is African. Okigbo is a man of culture tout court, the ambiguities of colonialism and his early posturing notwithstanding. Okigbo, the poets’ poet and the oracle of Idoto struck a near perfect accommodation for himself; he is not accountable to the outside world but to his people, hence his early retreat from abstract and hypothetical universalism. The synthesis of the modern and the traditional is a dimension of the life of the intellectual in a pristine culture.
It is also in this sense that the writer can be circumscribed by the society in which he leaves. The idea that the writer must at all the times be opposed to the system is a romantic one that does not always reflect African social reality. Okigbo consciously developed his poetry in the direction that will give him a role in the society.
Because our literary culture is still very much in the making, the concept of the artist and his social responsibility must be approached with caution. Whereas the western or Islamist artist may be seeking for a role for himself, the African writer does not have that problem yet.
Africa will continue to be "a single story” as long as critics like Ali Mazrui refuse to see literature as culture induced, and show some sensitivity to the people’s way of life. The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is a portrayal of misplaced angst against a people struggling for self survival. It is a scandal and an outrage against rational humanism. The critical response Mazrui received in Boston is the type usually reserved for those insensitive egg-heads who rush in where even proverbial angels fear to thread.
All the questions that African writers raise in their works are social in nature. Our literature represents life in the sense that life is a social reality. It is also in this sense that we can begin to perceive literature as a national biography, depicting social conditions of certain periods in our history. Biafra was and is still a social reality. The reasons why Okigbo died are social in nature. What drove Chimamanda Adichie to write her extraordinary novels and captivating stories about the human condition derive from social conditions. And even though she was not yet born when the civil war was fought, the effect of the war is still around. The open society for which Okigbo died is far from being achieved.
The fact that Mazrui’s work is imaginative does not exclude it from the point being canvassed. If it excites passion, the type we witnessed from the audience and participants at Harvard, several years after the war, it is because it is very close to reality. Fiction exists because there is reality and there is a link between the two. What is problematic, however, is the boundary in- between. The semblance between fiction and reality in African literature is a cause for disaffection. It should impel us to inquire more and more into the nature of reality and at the end of our effort we should be in a position to affirm that our knowledge of reality is incomplete. This should call for caution against dogmas and hard positions.
Reality is what we know and this knowledge is defined through the help of culture. The resolution of the human condition which is the leitmotif of African literature must, of necessity, be done within a cultural context. What we insist upon is that in appreciating this literature and its practitioners it must be done from a consideration that derives from a neo-culture of freedom and practical humanism. It must be based on a moral rather than a materialistic instinct. It must be a practice that questions injustice, oppression, racism and patronizing supremacist tendencies.
The smug, detached posture of know it all of the critic, smacks of arrogance and condescending superiority. A critic must not only demonstrate superior knowledge; he must approach a work of art with humility, empathy and passion. The Trial of Christopher Okigbo comes form a consciousness that is bereft of these imperatives.
What Africa needs is genuine critical appraisals, not flourishes and over dramatization. Because of the lives and works of people like Okigbo our warped national consciousness will be, at least, grazed, if not completely galvanized for change. Okigbo was an archetype that embodied our collective unconscious, reflecting our dreams betrayed, our hopes unfulfilled. He should be allowed to rest in peace.
IHECHUKWU MADUBUIKE, Abuja, Nigeria. October 2007 Dr. Madubuike, a two-time Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, writes from Abuja, Nigeria
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