Dispatches from Okigbo Conference (Part 1)
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo
New York, USA
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The Laureate, the Legend & the Enigma
The
greatest advice I ever heard was one given to a young man about to embark on a
lifelong venture of playing pool in those small kiosks off the main streets of
Nigeria. “Look at those old men who gather around a wooden radio listening to
results of England’s soccer premiership games on Saturdays and cross-checking
the results against the red and white draws slips in their hands,” an elder
counseled. “If after looking you really want to be like them, by all means, go
and play pool.”
Last weekend, I went to Harvard University, one of the venues of the Okigbo Conference to once again look at African writers and to decide for myself if writing was really what I would like to do with life.
In 2000, at the events marking the 70th birthday of Chinua Achebe at Bard College, I was opportune to meet most of our great writers – Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Chinweizu, Mazrui, Morrison, etc. By then, I had attempted a novel. But I had not written a short story. I had not reached the point of no return.
Going to Harvard last weekend was special because it would be for me the definitive encounter. In Soyinka and Achebe, we had a laureate and a legend. But in Christopher Okigbo, we had an enigma. The three covered the whole spectrum obtainable in the writing world, the writer as a teacher, the writer as an activist, and the writer as an artist-socialite. The fourth spectrum, the writer as a recluse is all but dead.
As I drove up New England, I recalled what Obi E. Egbuna wrote in his novel, The Madness of Didi, about the role of a writer. He wrote:
“Writers are men who dream impossible dreams, my boy. Anyone can be a writer, if he wants it badly enough. And if he is willing to pay the prize.
“The mistake people generally make is to romanticize writers as giants with two heads: Superman, Human gods who live in a world of absolute freedom, with no master to boss them around. The truth of the matter is that this is pure fiction. The opposite is in fact the case.
“My guess is that you’ll be finding this out yourself one day, Obi, my friend. You may find from personal experience that a writer is no more free than a common laborer or a petty messenger, slaving away for a master in unquestionable obedience. It is true, Obi.
“A writer is only a typist in the employ of Truth. He takes dictation from Truth just as any other typist takes dictation from his boss. Truth is a ruthless employer who demands nothing short of everything, including your soul.
“In the writer’s job, there is nothing like clocking out, because your office is between your ears, and you can’t clock out from your head, can you, Obi? In the writer’s job, there is no resignation because the contract terminates in the grave.
“In the writer’s job, there is no real pay, or payday, for Truth is the only employer who expects payment from his employees. Some pay with their lives, some with their sanity, some with unrequited love, others with years of imprisonment. Yes, it’s true Obi, my young friend. The history of World Literature is littered with great names who have made such payments. They will do it in different ways, but they all do pay in the end.”
On getting into Thompson Room at the Barker Center, I was very anxious to finally find the answer to my questions more of which were about ‘how to be and how not to be’ rather than ‘to be or not to be.’
I walked in when Soyinka was taking questions from the participants following his keynote speech. Being Soyinka that he is, he was made to answer questions about Nigeria and not just about Christopher Okigbo. It was guaranteed to happen for the life of Okigbo perfectly entwined with most of the transforming events of the young independent Nigeria.
Asked why he had not used his influence to plea for Ralph Uwazuruike’s release, Soyinka said, “If I have that much influence, by now we should be having a National Conference.” He described the years since Sani Abacha as wasted. “We wasted those years,” he said, “because Obasanjo refused to accept the necessity for a National Conference. Obasanjo is my town’s man, but he is an idiot.”
Soyinka expressed hope that Yar’Adua whom he said he would be meeting with in New York might be receptive to changes. “I want him to first accept the fact that he is there illegitimately. Then we can sit down and talk,” he announced. “I’m hoping that this man who I consider a reasonable man stands the chance to build a nation.”
On whether Awolowo had guaranteed Odumegwu-Ojukwu that if the East seceded that the West would, Soyinka said that “the feeling of the Igbo is misplaced.” Odumegwu-Ojukwu had never given a straight answer to that, he said. Soyinka said that he had asked Odumegwu-Ojukwu and all that Odumegwu-Ojukwu said was “I have refused to join those who try to blame Awo.” Pressed further, Soyinka said that Awolowo had asked for two-week advance notice from Odumegwu-Ojukwu before he declared Biafra but got none. “There was also the issue of the occupation forces in Western Nigeria,” Soyinka added.
I remembered asking the same question to Odumegwu-Ojukwu in an interview in Boston in July 9th 2001. And here was the answer he gave:
“We’ve said this over and over again, so many times, and people don’t understand; they don’t want to actually. If you remember, I released Awolowo from jail. Even that, some people are beginning to contest as well. Awo was in jail in Calabar. Gowon knows and the whole of the federal establishment knows that at no point was Gowon in charge of the East. The East took orders from me. Now, how could Gowon have released Awolowo who was in Calabar? Because of the fact that I released him, it created quite a lot of rapport between Awo and myself and I know that before he went back to Ikenne, I set up a hotline between Ikenne and my bedroom in Enugu. He tried like an elder statesman to find a solution. Awolowo is a funny one. Don’t forget that the political purpose of the coup, the Ifeajuna coup that began all this, was to hand power over to Awo. We young men respected him a great deal. He was a hero. I thought he was a hero and certainly I received him when I was governor. We talked and he was very vehement when he saw our complaints and he said that if the Igbo were forced out by Nigeria that he would take the Yoruba out also. I don’t know what anybody makes of that statement but it is simple. Whether he did or didn’t, it is too late. There is nothing you can do about it. So, he said this and I must have made some appropriate responses too. But it didn’t quite work out the way that we both thought. Awolowo, evidently, had a constant review of the Yoruba situation and took different path. That’s it. I don’t blame him for it. I have never done.”
Participants
who believed that writers of Ibadan school gave the 1966 coup its intellectual
backing pressed the Nobel laureate further on his mission to Biafra. One even
suggested that Christopher Okigbo and some others within the Ibadan group wrote
the speech that Emmanuel Ifeajuna was to make had the coup succeeded in Lagos.
Chike Momah, a colleague of Okigbo, one of many the poet locked up and forced to listen as he recited his poems stood up to clarify that those killed in the 1966 coups were essentially those the coup plotters considered a clog in the wheel of progress of the nation and not merely chosen for their ethnicity. Dismissing the ever-suggested tag of the 1966 coup as "Igbo coup," he reminded the audience that those who squashed the coup were Igbo officers.
Despite moderators’ effort, the life of Okigbo as a participant in key events in Nigeria’s political life caught the interest of most participants than his life as a poet.
Chinua Achebe, who gave the second keynote speech painted a humanist picture of Okigbo with tales and poetry. He described Okigbo as a man “greedy for experience.” He punctuated his talk with a deafening silence that pierced through the thickened emotion floating in the hall.
In a political question by Henry Louis Gates Jr. to Soyinka and Achebe about the future of Nigeria, both writers agreed that Nigeria in its present form is at best undesirable. “If I have my way,” Achebe said, “Nigeria will be reconstructed to survive. Whether I want it to survive or not is irrelevant because if it is not restructured to function as a proper nation it will not survive.” Soyinka went further to suggest that he does not feel anything Nigerian. “I can’t grasp Nigeria at all. My sense of nation is very thin.” He said just for the convenience of not having to get visa just to visit Enugu or Port Harcourt, he would want a restructured Nigeria to exist.
Speaker after speaker recounted their memory of Christopher Okigbo. “One mistake I made was not to have asked him about Anuebunwa,” said Achebe. Anuebunwa, Achebe recalled was an Ojoto man who wrote a poem where the nativity story was brought to Ojoto. Achebe wondered if Christopher Okigbo knew about Anuebunwa and his poem. “You don’t blame us,” Achebe said, “for Christopher was never there. He was so busy involved in so many things. Moreover, we did not know that he won’t be there in just weeks.” He warned that in appraising Okigbo we should stick with what we know and avoid the danger in trying to conclude unfinished life.
That would soon be challenged when “Thirsting For Sunlight: Life & Times of Christopher Okigbo” by Obi Nwakamma is published. The over 600-page book, almost 20 years in the making, will illuminate the life of Christopher Okigbo. From some of the pages I was privileged to read and stories from it that was shared by Nwakamma, in many ways, the book will solidify Okigbo’s enviable position as an enigma – for the more you look, the less you see.
Oh, well, as to what my impression of African writers are, I return to Okigbo to give expression to what I think:
BEFORE YOU, my mother Idoto,
Naked I stand;
Before your weary presence,
A prodigal
Leaning on an oilbean,
Lost in your legend
Under your power wait I
On barefoot,
Watchman for the watchword
At heavensgate;
… Coming next, THE DAY I SAW GOD (The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Day at Okigbo Conference)
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Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo is the author of Children of a Retired God