Sunday 31 March 2013

Martina D’Lite sings salvation to a corrupt generation



By Anote Ajeluorou
 
A new gospel music sensation, Martina D’Lite, with innovative rhythms and messages of salvation ministration and a mandate to encourage people in hopeless situation,s with the aim of transforming lives, has consolidated her position with the grand entry of her second CD entitled, With Love. She had her first foray into gospel music in 2005. With her current effort, which was launched recently, Martina D’Lite may just have hit the right cord in a career brimming with promise.
  Back in 2005, she came out with a CD, Thy Word as she sought to feel the gospel music water. Now, however, Martina D’Lite (Martina Adeseye Ebor) has overcome the tentative steps she took some seven years ago and has boldly announced her entry into mainstream music, as she hopes to cause a revolution of sorts through proper packaging of her music and deploying it to serve society better.
  In a recent chat, Martina D’Lite said she hopes to use her music to minister salvation to as many of her countrymen and women, which many of them urgently needed, especially with low morals that had become so prevalent. She said her six tracker, a hiphop gospel fusion with African style, brings a message of salvation ministration, saying, “In today’s Nigeria, people die without being saved; and if we have people that are saved in government, it will reduce selfishness and corruption and most of the greedy tendencies they exhibit.
  “Once one is saved, he could be transformed as well to impact positively on society. That is my message in my music to today’s Nigerian society, which is in dire need of God’s healing from its immorality, self-hate, all forms of bigotry and anti-social tendencies that tend to negate God’s word. We need to change from how we are to what God wants us to be. It’s the only way we can fulfill God’s mandate for us as a country and people”.
  Martina D’Lite’s With Love has such tracks as ‘King of kings’, ‘Chineke Nke Igwe’, ‘Baba’, ‘Follow Jesus’, ‘See you through’ and ‘With love’. It’s produced under D’Lite Entertainment label, with the music already enjoying airplay on radio.
 Martina D’Lite said she had been singing from childhood and later joined a choir at Ambrose Ali University, Edo State, where she studied accounting education, and she eventually rose to choir leader. That was when she felt she needed to take her music seriously, and began to write her own songs, which got the choirmaster thrilled. With stars as Cece Winnas, Mary Mary, Lara George and Sammie Okposo as music models to follow, Martina D’Lite has her music path cut out for her.
  Having experienced a certain profound music education and inspiration from her mentors, Martina D’Lite is not only set to dig her heels in she desires to make a difference both in gospel music rendition and stylistics. While gospel music should minister the word and encourage people, Martina D’Lite is somewhat dissatisfied with what obtains in Nigerian gospel music as currently being performed by some artistes on the scene. With the exception of Lara George, who has her own definitive, unique sound and Okposo, who has successfully executed a cross-over in his music idiom, Martina D’Lite thinks the rest are jokers of sorts, as “they just come up with what they like without the holy spirit’s influence; and they call it gospel. They sound like a joke”.
  On the other hand, Martina D’Lite attributed the rise in Nigeria’s circular music to its dynamic beat, as it is much more lively than what most gospel artistes use in their music. She noted that Sammie Okposo’s success as a gospel musician also derives from such dynamic use of sound beat that takes cognizance of what currently obtains in the local scene. She stated that such appropriation of dynamism was what Nigerian gospel music needed to lift it from its current tepid tempo to limelight. This is precisely what her music, With love has come to do, Martina D’Lite enthused.
  As she noted, “Gospel music should get to that level where you can play it anywhere like Sammie Okposo’s music and not just in a church setting, but at any place that unbelievers can be reached and saved. Martina D’Lite also noted that she is passionate about the plight of orphaned children and would use her music to bring succour to them through her performances and other means that would encourage them to live normal lives.

Chinua Achebe… Still celebrating the passing of iconic writer, humanist


By Anote Ajeluorou

The passing into ancestry of Africa and world-renowned author and political activist has left the writerly race still reeling from so tremendous a loss. What has emerged is the unrestrained outpouring of emotions from all spectrums of the human divide. From among Nigerian writers, Prof. Achebe is indeed another flight of the eagle on the iroko into celestial abode, nay, into ancestral council where he will still preside over the race of writers, his children whom he left behind to continue in the creative path he charted for them to follow.
  Among those who continued to pour their heartfelt, celebratory emotions include erudite poet and Distinguished Professor of English at New Orleans University, Niyi Osundare, poet and essayist, Remi Raji-Oyelade, poet and activist, Ogaga Ifowodo, king and novelist, Chukuemeka Ike, essayist, Olúwáfirópò Ewénlá, novelist, publisher and book convention organiser, Dilibe Onyeama and novelist and teacher, J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada.


Prof. Niyi Osundare (poet, essayist and Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans, U.S.)

Chinua Achebe: Death, where are thy claws?

Chinua Achebe is one of those epically unique individuals whose lives have been so full, so purposive and so impactful that we begin to pray that they will never die. But who doesn't know that that is mere wishful thinking? To be sure, the Eagle on Iroko didn't die young, but he left when we still need him urgently and acutely. He has gone, but he left so much of, by, himself behind...
  Achebe shook up the literary world with Things Fall Apart when he was barely in his late twenties. He told Africa's story and gave humanity a song. Since that day in 1958 when that epochal novel intruded upon the world to this very day, hardly any week has passed without the author's name being mentioned somewhere in this world of books and ideas.
  But if the sheer force and range of Achebe's fiction gave Africa a voice, the fearless truth of his critical interventions challenged so many myths and deliberate falsehoods about the most misrepresented and recklessly abused continent in the world. Achebe knew, and he tried to get us to know, that Africans will remain mere objects of the stories told by others, until they, Africans,  have started to tell their own story their own way - without shutting out the rest of the world. Achebe challenged the 20th century philosophy of fiction as a pretty object d'art, arriving with works, which foregrounded the human condition and told the wondering world that the clotheless Emperor was, indeed, naked! He entered a plea for the urgent necessity of an entity called 'applied art' and emboldened us to look triumphalist Formalism in the face and demand to see its passport. Yes, Achebe told a world sold to the art-for-art's-sake mystique that it is, indeed, possible to be an accomplished novelist who is also a teacher.
  Controversy hardly ever parts company with a writer and thinker of his brand. He took almost as much criticism as he gave; for he was a man who never ran from a fight.
  The world celebrates the LIFE of this distinguished story-teller and thinker. (Yes, celebrate, for to mourn is to concede supremacy to Death - and Oblivion, its Mephistophelean factotum).
  Rest well, Chinualomogu. Rest well, Obierika, the man who thought about things. Posterity will never let you die. We regret your passing. We celebrate your Life.

Prof. Remi Raji-Oyelade (Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan; President,
Association of Nigerian Authors and poet)

Here in Germany, phone calls and questions about the truth of the passing of the grand patron and first President and Trustee of ANA jolted me into disbelief.
  Chinua Achebe, foremost African thinker, hugely popular on the strength of his revolutionary novel and the other seminal prose works he produced over five decades, Chinua Achebe, the absolute and consummate prose maestro is no more. His name, alongside others of his generation, was key to accessing the world literary stage.
  Here was a man who chose the profession of writing early and above the more fashionable or prestigious calling of the medical profession. A pioneer student of the Ibadan school of creative writing, a dogged and unyielding fighter to the very end, and a true mentor to a generation of writers across the world.
  Even in my country now, the fact of his death is dissolving into reality. Eagle on Iroko, the master-artist, the compelling stylist of the English language has left the world of the flesh, he left in the middle of a revived discourse of the fate of our Nigerian nation.
  And it was a symbolic day. In the commemoration of the UNESCO World Poetry Day, things fell apart in the firmament of Nigerian and African Literature. A bleak day indeed, the devastating reality, the ending of a huge chapter in the history of African Literature. 
  Adieu Chinua Achebe, adieu irreplaceable son of Africa!

Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo (Poet and Assistant Professor of English, Texas State University, U.S.)

Achebe on his Transfiguration into Ancestordom

The news of Achebe's transfiguration into an ancestral spirit reached us in Charleston, North Carolina, in the middle of this year's annual meeting of the African Literature Association (ALA). As is to be expected, we -- writers, critics, publishers, readers -- were thrown into deep mourning. But we mourned with one hand drying tears and the other waving jubilantly to Achebe's spirit, looking even more resplendent dressed for his triumphant entry into ancestordom, beaming benevolently at us as he bid us farewell.
  At 7 PM last night, all the participants gathered to pay homage to a Titan of world -- note, I said world, not merely African -- literature.
  I first read Achebe as a twelve-year-old at Federal Government College, Warri. It was appropriate, I think, that my introduction to the fabled Achebe-lore, was through Chike and the River, a story for children replete with magic (for good measure, it has a character named Professor Chandus), curiosity and dream, all borne of the self-enlarging wish not to remain in one place; of the desire to avoid the mind-numbing that comes with an inability to imagine other places and their ways of being in the world.
  Because I read the imperishable Things Fall Apart two years later, as any of the works of the three others of the Fabulous Four of Nigerian literature -- Christopher Okigbo, J.P. Clark and Wole Soyinka -- it is clear to me that Achebe had the earliest shaping influence on my desire to become a writer. The magic of story-telling, of creating imaginary worlds and making them rival the real world in plausibility, had cast its spell on me and even though I didn't know it at the time, I would never want to be free of it!
  Achebe's exit, like the fall of an iroko, denudes our socio-cultural landscape: the grass is exposed and thinner, the leaves are less green, but I take solace in the fact that further down in the forest are other irokos; that Achebe, now an ancestor is an even more potent force for regeneration. If I have any lament, an inconsolable grief, it is that Achebe died in exile. And, worse, that The Trouble with Nigeria, the conditions that led to "one of the greatest sons of the land" dying so far away from home twenty-two years after he was crippled in a road accident and became bound to a wheelchair have not changed for the better by a jot. Indeed, that they have grown even worse with no promise of a halt to the slide into a state ruled by a buccaneer ruling class defined by two words only: ineptitude and corruption.
  Still, I rejoice in having a literary father such as Achebe, sitting now on his hallowed stool among the ancestors. I trust Christopher Okigbo is crying tears of the laughter of reunion at this moment!

Eze Prof. Chukuemeka Ike (renowned author and Ikelionwu XI, Eze Ikelionwu, Anambra State)

Chinua was phenomenal. We met are Government College, Umuahia and although he and Chike Momah were one year ahead of me, we struckc up a friendship that was a lasting lifetime brotherhood thereafter. Chinua inspired my desire to write and write well. He was always honest and his integrity was reflected in all he did. Chinua is truly brilliant, an international role model and icon. He was a lovely person, a caring friend and mentor to many.
  To his family, he was the ideal husband, father and grandfather, as well as the good uncle, brother and son. We shall all miss this great citizen of the world whom we are proud to have shared the same nationality with. We will always celebrate Achebe the icon as his inimitable works continue to enrich our world for centuries to come.

Olúwáfirópò Ewénlá (Poet, essayist and Secretary, PEN Nigeria Centre)

Achebe lives forever even in death

We at PEN Nigeria Centre are shocked to hear the news of the death of Chinua Achebe who even after this transition is very much an icon of the Nigerian literati. Sad as we are at this rude news, we are comforted that he lived a life worthy of emulation in the ideals he and his works stand for. Our body of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists, all extended children of Chinua Achebe, commiserate with his immediate family and the clan of writers all over the world.
  Achebe represents one of the brightest sources of inspiration for young and old writers across the world of literature. His ideals, the greatest assets he has bequeathed to us, will be cherished forever. It is our plan to, in the nearest future, join other well meaning Nigerians and international body of writers to immortalize him.
  It is our prayer that the spirit of life eternal will guide his departed soul.

Dilibe Onyeama (author, publisher and convener, Coal City Book Convention)

Chinua Achebe was outstanding in more ways than one. Despite the agony of a near-fatal accident that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life off-shore, he remained in high spirits and kept pushing that prolific pen with great vigour and liveliness of mind, and the world bowed to his every literary output. He was never a mere armchair critic of world events. When he was in Nigeria and able to walk, he sought to demonstrate in practical terms his disenchantment with his motherland by going out into the political campaign trail, albeit not with the desired results. So with his literary tour de force The Trouble with Nigeria, he did with the pen what he could not do on the campaign trail.
  Diplomacy, though a globally-recognized essential for social interaction, was not Achebe's watch-word. He believed in the power of truth and hurled it with as much passion as his written words, and some, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria, were not too comfortable about it, as they were often his target. He was not daunted by the power of government, and rejected with contempt the two separate attempts by the Federal Government of Nigeria to glorify him with a National Honour for cogent reasons that he was not afraid to voice out.
  Achebe was a highly principled man, and the world loved him for it. He recorded a 'first' by being the pioneer author of a subject that addressed the challenges of a traditional African society in the painful throes of transition, and became Africa's biggest selling author as a result. That, of course, was his first oeuvre Things Fall Apart. He has inspired many authors, and his Igbo people have been blessed with many promising pen pushers who will follow in the trail that he has blazed. He was the founding father of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Nigeria's apex literary association. So many Nigerian authors have a lot to be grateful to him for. Well-lived, great storyteller!

Prof. J.O.J.Nwachukwu-Agbada (Novelist and teacher at Abia State University, Uturu)

Professor Chinua Achebe’s death is a hard pill to swallow. Not that I had thought he would not die. What I had thought and wished him was a death into ripe old age like a Winston Churchill, a CLR James, a Du Bois, a Ronald Reagan, an Azikiwe, a Mandela or as I write, an M. H. Abrams who clocked a hundred years last August, and is still counting. We have just been reading and re-reading his last book, There was a Country, an artistic tour de force, when the sad news came. From hindsight, it would seem that he had written the book as a valediction, somewhat aware that it was going to be his last offering. The controversy the book generated camouflaged its aesthetic delight as a creative statement, notwithstanding that it is non-fiction.
  Achebe operated at many levels in the course of his life. He was a pioneer articulator of his people’s way of life, artist par excellence, creator, critic, teacher, leader, organizer, politician and activist, to mention these few preoccupations. His novels and writings sought to restore not just the dignity of the African but also that of the denigrated man-in-the-universe, wherever such a mythical beast resided. He was an active Nigerian, keen to observe his country’s foibles, and being unsatisfied, vented his spleen on her poor performance. He contributed immensely as an educationist, he having created and taught African Literature at home and abroad. Not only did he establish the Association of Nigerian Authors in 1981, he equally operated at the clan level for many years as the President-General of the Ogidi Town Union. A case of backward integration, one could say. He was thoroughly a man of culture.
  Chinua Achebe will not be forgotten in a hurry. Even if we want to do so as we normally do, his writings and his numerous quotable quotes will not allow us. We will not forget him because he returned our humanity to us taken away by the deliberate subjugation of our ‘civilizers’. I dare say that the emergence of the Obamas into world reckoning had something to do with the assertive triumph of African literature, of which Achebe’s authorship marched right in front. He didn’t work alone though; he ‘sired’ many writers who could either be identified as his ‘sons’ or his ‘daughters’ – to cite Nnolim. Even where some of them disagreed with him, particularly his misunderstood portrayal of femininity, they turned out victims of ‘anxiety of influence’, his influence. Achebe’s death marks the end of an era, and the beginning of another. His place is well assured in African literary history!


Committee for Relevant Art
Achebe: The African Perspective in the Global Conversation

The Committee For Relevant Art (CORA) commiserates with the family of Professor Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian arts community as well as the entire nation on the occasion of the death of the man deservedly referred to as ‘the father of the African Novel’ and founder of the Association Of Nigerian Authors (ANA).
  Everything about Achebe’s career was geared towards contributing the African perspective to the global conversation on humanity’s ways of being. First, his Things Fall Apart (TFA), published in 1958, when he was 28, was the first novel to engage with European colonialism from an African perspective. The story spoke to an international audience.
  As he worked on his second novel, Achebe took some time to bringing, into the literary pantheon, a vast number of other young, talented African writers through the African Writers Series, which he edited for Heinemann of London. He was always about us doing things in our own way.
  Achebe led the way in the campaign for robust, world class, indigenous publishing. With the phenomenal success of TFA which gave him enormous influence over the British-owned Heinemann’s Africa Writers Series, and three other successful novels, Achebe could, by 1971, demand that his books would henceforth be published, first by a Nigerian publisher, from whom a reprint could be requested by any British or American publisher. Granted, a tradition of request for rights to books from Nigerian publishers, by overseas publishing houses, had been established much earlier – the throbbing literary scene in Ibadan in the 1960s provided the impetus for foreign publishers to have a look in and buy rights to works of the emerging writers of that period, from the Mbari Club (which doubled as a society and a publisher) – but Achebe returned from the civil war certain that homegrown Nigerian publishing ‘will make its way in the world’. 
  It is that same lifelong pursuit of ‘our own thing for us’, that propelled his invitation of Nigerian writers to Nsukka, in 1981, to reconvene the body of writers now known as ANA.
  The almost unanimous expression of grief by the entire nation at Achebe’s death, coming so soon after the frenetic debates over certain facts and opinions contained in his last book, the memoir There Was A Country, shows that, while opinions might be divided on the literary icon’s recollection of Nigerian history, his place in the pantheon of our men of ideas and ideals remain undiminished in the estimation of an appreciative people.
  The Committee understands the grief that the family, the community of artists and the entire nation are going through. We share the feeling of loss and mourn the passing away of this true icon of the contemporary arts of Nigeria. We know that he is resting in peace.


Prof. Dan Izevbaye (teacher and foremost literary critic)

The death of Achebe at 82 is certainly a painful event and a loss for everyone. Every African - or rather everyone who was once politically or mentally colonized - is indebted to Achebe for he, perhaps more than anyone else, has contributed to the liberating content and style in the literary education of the colonized - as well as the colonizer. Once upon a time, for example, did everyone not agree with the critics that "Heart of Darkness" was the greatest short story in the English language until Achebe said, ‘Not so’, and showed why, in his novels?
  The death of a great author at any age is a great loss. What gives the news of Achebe's death its painful edge is his heroic endurance of all those years in a wheelchair, and the needless controversy that dogged the last work of a writer whose life and works had been uncontroversial. All that is now behind him. He lives on in his works. The pleasure they give and their liberating effect are his memorial.

Sunday 24 March 2013

Chinua Achebe’s passing: Elegies from fellow writers, critics


Chinua Achebe’s passing: Elegies from fellow writers, critics

By Anote Ajeluorou

Wale Okediran (former President, Association of Nigerian Authors)

What can I say? It’s very shocking although we shall all have to go one day. His is a great loss to the Nigerian literature and country. He’s done very well, played his part, left behind great works; he was even controversial at the very end. I’m proposing a state burial for him. As a giant literary figure, he deserves a state burial. FG should name something after him; maybe a stadium or one of the great universities.
  The controversy that trailed his last book, There Was a Country shouldn’t take a thing away from him. As a writer, he was bound to open a Pandora box, but that shouldn’t reduce the honour he richly deserves. We shouldn’t use that to judge his contributions to national discourse and culture development.

Prof. Charles Nnolim (University of Port Harcourt-based teacher and literary critic)

I was shocked; I didn’t know he was ill at all. But we have to look at the bright side of his life. He was our icon in the area of literature; he was very original and courageous. He lucky in that he had advantage of early start; he was original and didn’t have anybody to copy from. He was courageous in attacking Nigeria in his book, The Trouble with Nigeria, A Man of the People.
  Like I said, he was courageous in attacking Nigeria’s corruption; he was a leader in the first class order. He pioneered African Writers Series (AWS), Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA); he started Okike magazine, which is still running. He had to reject an honour from Nigerian government on account of bad leadership. He is the man from who all Africa learnt from, a writer of world-class.
  Things Fall Apart is one the best 100 books in the world. We hope that writers coming after him will have his genius and courage.

Prof. Abiola Irele (literary critic and Dean, College of Humanities at Kwara State University, Ofa)

Well, Achebe’s death is a great loss to us in Nigeria. As one of pioneering writers, he gave Africa a decided image, a high profile. My only regret is that he did not get the Nobel Prize! It would have been a great honour to him and Nigeria. But his works will endure.

Prof. Femi Osofisan (retired academic, playwright, poet and novelist)

It is still a shock even though he was old enough. Achebe was one of the truly great minds of his generation, who could be both grandly right and grandiosely wrong. That is perhaps why he has ended amidst a burning controversy, for such is always the paradox of genius. Only the small stars die without a noise. I am convinced that Achebe will continue to speak to us, perhaps even louder now from the grave.

Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo (two-time Vice Chancellor, University of Ibadan)

We have lost the most outstanding writer our country has produced. He started a tradition, which many people admit is unique. This was somebody, whose influence has been very strong in Nigerian literature over the last 50 years or so. He started a tradition in Nigerian literature in English language, which has inspired many people to write. It’s unfortunate and regretful that his life was characterized by controversy. But that doesn’t taint the contributions that he has made to African. He’s among the heroes of Nigeria literature; and he’s go to go on inspiring Nigerian literature in the future.


Nkanu Emori (Former ANA Legal Adviser)

Oh my God! African literature is finally down.
First, it was strapped to a wheelchair. And now it is strapped to a casket. May his golden soul rest in the Lord. Selah.

Unoma Azuah (novelist and U.S.-based academic)

Achebe's passing has left a huge void in my life as a writer. I met him at Nsukka as an undergraduate student at University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His daughter, Nwando, is a friend and, of course, the affirmation he gave me and continues to give me as a Nigerian writer lives on. He taught me the need to have my own voice and to tell my own truth no matter how peculiar it may seem. He was a warrior who defended and protected our stories. He was a warrior that fortified and celebrated our literature. Like he said, and I paraphrase: if the hunter is left to tell the story of a hunt, he'll always proclaim himself the victor. Achebe will be greatly missed.

Odia Ofeimun (poet and social critic)

He gave his best. His best remains forever phenomenal. We can quarrel as we please with aspects of his works and days. What we all owe him makes him triumphant. I wished we argued more with him than we did. But he was always treated like the wise old one even when he was 30, and not quite right. He will be remembered for as long as stories are told.

Hyacinth Obunseh (former Association of Nigerian Authors General Secretary and promoter of African Writers Forum)

Achebe is Dead! Grant State Pardon to Vatsa, Saro-Wiwa

Achebe, Africa’s, nay, the black world’s biggest and most celebrated novelist, has passed on.  He was one of the finest minds of his generation.  He will be greatly missed by his family, friends and the literary world. In his lifetime, he was humble, self-effacing, and lived the life he preached. He loved and believed in his people and Nigeria.
  For so many years he lived abroad as a result of a fatal accident he sustained several decades ago.  Had he stayed back home in Nigeria, chances are that he would not have lived long enough to make the contributions he made to world literature since then, till he passed away, as a result of our poor health and medical facilities, which has led influential members of this and previous administrations as well as the rich to go abroad for medical reasons.
  We call on the Federal Government of Nigeria to declare a State of Emergency in the health sector to arrest the situation and save Nigerians.
  We also seize this opportunity to call on the Federal Government of Nigeria to grant State Pardon to General Mamman Jiya Vatsa and Mr. Kennule Saro-Wiwa, in the spirit of national reconciliation. Their contributions to Nigerian and African literature and environmental struggle cannot be over emphasised.
  Issues concerning their deaths at best remain complicated and inconclusive. Indeed, this government has in the very recent past granted State Pardon to state terrorists and other persons convicted of crimes against the state.  Granting Vatsa and Saro-Wiwa State Pardon at this time will go a long way to show government’s seriousness in ‘not wanting people to suffer for too long’ for whatever crimes they may have committed against the state.
  The families, friends and associates of Vatsa and Saro-Wiwa have suffered so much these past years, and we believe the government should dry their tears and end their sufferings at this time by pardoning them officially for whatever crimes they were accused of committing, even as those crimes were not proven then and now.

Prof. Niyi Osundare (Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans, USA)

Chinua Achebe: Death, where are thy claws?

Chinua Achebe is one of those epically unique individuals whose lives have been so full, so purposive and so impactful that we begin to pray that they will never die. But who doesn't know that that is mere wishful thinking? To be sure, the Eagle on Iroko didn't die young, but he left when we still need him urgently and acutely. He has gone, but he left so much of, by, himself behind...
  Achebe shook up the literary world with Things Fall Apart when he was barely in his late twenties. He told Africa's story and gave humanity a song. Since that day in 1958 when that epochal novel intruded upon the world to this very day, hardly any week has passed without the author's name being mentioned somewhere in this world of books and ideas.
  But if the sheer force and range of Achebe's fiction gave Africa a voice, the fearless truth of his critical interventions challenged so many myths and deliberate falsehoods about the most misrepresented and recklessly abused continent in the world. Achebe knew, and he tried to get us to know, that  Africans will remain mere objects of the stories told by others, until they, Africans,  have started to tell their own story their own way - without shutting out the rest of the world. Achebe challenged the 20th century philosophy of fiction as a pretty object d'art, arriving with works, which foregrounded the human condition and told the wondering world that the clotheless Emperor was, indeed, naked! He entered a plea for the urgent necessity of an entity called 'applied art' and emboldened us to look triumphalist Formalism in the face and demand to see its passport. Yes, Achebe told a world sold to the art-for-art's-sake mystique that it is, indeed, possible to be an accomplished novelist who is also a teacher.
  Controversy hardly ever parts company with a writer and thinker of his brand. He took almost as much criticism as he gave; for he was a man who never ran from a fight.
  The world celebrates the LIFE of this distinguished story-teller and thinker. (Yes, celebrate, for to mourn is to concede supremacy to Death - and Oblivion, its Mephistophelean factotum).
  Rest well, Chinualomogu. Rest well, Obierika, the man who thought about things. Posterity will never let you die. We regret your passing. We celebrate your Life.

-New Orleans, March 22, 2013.    



Prof. Remi Raji-Oyelade (Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan and President,
Association of Nigerian Authors)

Here in Germany, phone calls and questions about the truth of the passing of the grand patron and first President and Trustee of ANA jolted me into disbelief.
  Chinua Achebe, foremost African thinker, hugely popular on the strength of his revolutionary novel and the other seminal prose works he produced over 5 decades, Chinua Achebe, the absolute and consummate prose maestro is no more. His name, alongside others of his generation, was key to accessing the world literary stage.
  Here was a man who chose the profession of writing early and above the more fashionable or prestigious calling of the medical profession. A pioneer student of the Ibadan school of creative writing, a dogged and unyielding fighter to the very end, and a true mentor to a generation of writers across the world.
  Even in my country now, the fact of his death is dissolving into reality. Eagle on Iroko, the master-artist, the compelling stylist of the English language has left the world of the flesh, he left in the middle of a revived discourse of the fate of our Nigerian nation.
  And it was a symbolic day. In the commemoration of the UNESCO World Poetry Day, things fell apart in the firmament of Nigerian and African Literature. A bleak day indeed, the devastating reality, the ending of a huge chapter in the history of African Literature. 
  Adieu Chinua Achebe, adieu irreplaceable son of Africa!



Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo (Poet and Assistant Professor of English, Texas State University, USA)

Achebe on his Transfiguration into Ancestordom

The news of Achebe's transfiguration into an ancestral spirit reached us in Charleston, North Carolina, in the middle of this year's annual meeting of the African Literature Association (ALA). As is to be expected, we -- writers, critics, publishers, readers -- were thrown into deep mourning. But we mourned with one hand drying tears and the other waving jubilantly to Achebe's spirit, looking even more resplendent dressed for his triumphant entry into ancestordom, beaming benevolently at us as he bid us farewell.
  At 7 PM last night, all the participants gathered to pay homage to a Titan of world -- note, I said world, not merely African -- literature.
  I first read Achebe as a twelve-year-old at Federal Government College, Warri. It was appropriate, I think, that my introduction to the fabled Achebe-lore, was through Chike and the River, a story for children replete with magic (for good measure, it has a character named Professor Chandus), curiosity and dream, all borne of the self-enlarging wish not to remain in one place; of the desire to avoid the mind-numbing that comes with an inability to imagine other places and their ways of being in the world.
  Because I read the imperishable Things Fall Apart two years later, as any of the works of the three others of the Fabulous Four of Nigerian literature -- Christopher Okigbo, J.P. Clark and Wole Soyinka -- it is clear to me that Achebe had the earliest shaping influence on my desire to become a writer. The magic of story-telling, of creating imaginary worlds and making them rival the real world in plausibility, had cast its spell on me and even though I didn't know it at the time, I would never want to be free of it!
  Achebe's exit, like the fall of an iroko, denudes our socio-cultural landscape: the grass is exposed and thinner, the leaves are less green, but I take solace in the fact that further down in the forest are other irokos; that Achebe, now an ancestor is an even more potent force for regeneration. If I have any lament, an inconsolable grief, it is that Achebe died in exile. And, worse, that The Trouble with Nigeria, the conditions that led to "one of the greatest sons of the land" dying so far away from home twenty-two years after he was crippled in a road accident and became bound to a wheelchair have not changed for the better by a jot. Indeed, that they have grown even worse with no promise of a halt to the slide into a state ruled by a buccaneer ruling class defined by two words only: ineptitude and corruption.
  Still, I rejoice in having a literary father such as Achebe, sitting now on his hallowed stool among the ancestors. I trust Christopher Okigbo is crying tears of the laughter of reunion at this moment!

Assistant Professor of English
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX 78666
USA

Badagry unveils logo, ready to host LBHF


By Anote Ajeluorou


The people of Badagry are bracing up to tap into the huge potential in tourism located in their doorsteps. This year, a new logo, encapsulating Badagry tourism potential and its cultural heritage, as bequeathed by a sad historical past, await visitors to the two festivals the ancient town will host.
  From March 25, when the Lagos Black Heritage Festival (LBHF) opens, Badagry will be at the centre of activities, with Day 3 devoted to Badagry alone, to mark mainstreaming the town into the festival’s calendar for the first time. Until now, Badagry had been on the fringe of the Lagos festival.
  Indeed, for most Badagry people, Lagos Black Heritage Festival is a derivation from their original Badagry Festival, which had existed for almost 10 years before the state government decided to organise its own to over-shadow it. Lagos State Government had repeatedly refused to fund or participate in the Badagry festival, only to start its own years later.
  Badagry Local Government chairman, Hon. Disu hinted at the state hijacking Badagry Festival from them, even when he minimally participates in it himself. Even now, initiator of Badagry Festival and boss of African Renaissance Foundation, Mr. Babatunde Olaide-Mesewaku is shopping abroad among the American Caucus of Black Mayors for sponsorship and participationin the festival in August, as a way of giving it the international stature and exposure it deserves.
  But now, Consultant to LBHF, Prof. Wole Soyinka has seen reason for the active involvement of Badagry because of the sheer historical and cultural importance of the town to the festival. At this year’s festival, Badagry council sponsored 55 school pupils to participate at the Vision of the Child Art Competition out of which six pupils are in the running for the top prizes.
  But this involvement is with its sets of fits and starts on the part of the state government in harnessing the tourism potentials of Badagry. Construction of facilities in the ancient town that would facilitate patronage of tourists is still half done. From the world-class golf course along the Marine Beach to Vlekete Slave Market, where slaves were sold during the period of the infamous slave trade to the Slave Tunnels and other landmark slave trade relics, Lagos is yet to deliver to enhance tourism. Badagry has, therefore, remained a rustic community and is perhaps the poorest for it among its sister towns with heavy slave trade past along the West Africa coast.
  But in spite of these setbacks for the ancient town, the local people are upbeat about the cultural resource at their disposal. And so amidst a gathering of all the chiefs of Badagry except the Akran himself, Dosu unveiled Badagry Tourism logo to wide admiration. It consists of a curving coconut tree (symbol of Badagry town and main agricultural resource) and the giant traditional sato drum set against a background of a golden sunset, with Badagry Tourism blazoned beside it.
  Stickers with the logo were distributed among those in attendance to openly display as means of promoting Badagry tourism. The gesture elicited wide commendation from virtually everyone. But the council boss was also urged to go beyond merely producing logo to further market Badagry as a tourism haven by taking a stand at the Lagos airport to help visitors to the two festivals on how to easily get to Badagry without much trouble.
  The council boss was also enjoined to create tourism facilities in the town that would attract visitors beyond what Lagos State Government was doing that could also generate funds for the council and the local people. Such facilities like boat route from Apapa to Badagry and neighbouring states of Togo and Benin Republic to Badagry, it was canvassed, would give the town international attraction, especially now when the road leading these other places from Badagry was in bad shape.

Assessing The Impact of The 2012 Flooding In Delta State… A Special Report


By Anote Ajeluorou
 
“…Following the devastating consequences and unprecedented humanitarian crisis occasioned by the ravaging flood, the Government of Delta State began emergency rescue and relief operations immediately in an effort to ameliorate the excruciating conditions being faced by victims of the flood, by setting up temporary camps to accommodate and provide for the basic needs of the internally displaced persons (IDPs)…
  “Arising from the need to provide a more pragmatic basis for dealing with the problems arising from the flood disaster, as well as developing a framework for dealing with such incidents in the future, the Governor of Delta State, His Excellency, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, inaugurated a Technical team Committee on Flood Impact Assessment – drawing on the research capacity of Delta State University…”
 The result of this research is what the Delta State University, under the leaders of its Vice Chancellor, Prof. Eric A. Arubayi, published as under the telling title, ‘The Impact of the 2012 Flood on Affected Delta State Communities’. The committee was set up while the flood was still ravaging parts of the state last October. Indeed, the setting up of this committee at the heart of the flood was a commendable effort by the Delta State Government. Expectedly, its conclusions and recommendations should have far-reaching effects both for the state and the entire nation or parts of Nigeria that went through that traumatic experience, of devastation, loss of lives and property and the emotional stress.
  The committee’s terms of reference included determining the extent of the flood; effect of the flood on the environment, social and health; determining the receptors of the flood; determining the magnitude of the impact of the flood; assessing the emergency response and intervention measures already put in place, in order to ameliorate the living conditions of IDPs; estimate the cost of the flood damage, and make necessary recommendations on short and long terms strategies to be adopted for ameliorating the impact of the flood in the future.
  With these terms, the committee plunged head on into its task and made visits to more than 12 Local Government Areas (LGA) mostly affected by the devastating flood. The LGAs include Udu, Ughelli North, Ughelli South, Ndokwa East, Ndokwa West, Oshimili North, Oshimili South, Bomadi, Burutu, Isoko South, Isoko North and Patani. Aniocha South and Warri South were also affected by the impact in those areas were said to be minimal.
  According to the report, “These areas affected by the flood have some common geographic characteristics. First, they are all located within the lower Niger flood plain, with its distributaries criss-crossing a large proportion of the lan mass. They are also located within the tropical rain forest belt, and sharing similar characteristics in terms temperature, relief and soil characteristics. The impact analysis covers such areasinter alia:
  Extent and duration of the flood, environmental, social and health effects, agricultural and other economic activities, infrastructural, educational and other public facilities, as well as estimation of the cost of the flood damage.
  The committee made on sight visits to affected communities and interviewed respondents, who were usually victims of the flood; it also relied on information provided by government officials, Non-Governmental agencies and individuals providing relief materials to victims of the flood disaster. These approaches gave the committee a holistic view of the extent of damage the flood had on communities, which invariably informed its thorough analysis of the flood impact and eventual recommendations to the state government.
  The team stated in its analytical framework thus: “A major task of this study was to develop a framework that would assist the government in making decisions on the efficient and effective allocation of resources for the management of the humanitarian crisis arising from the flood that ravaged the entire flooded plain of the lower Niger River in the state between late August and October 2012. The second task was to make use of the field experience of the team to develop a strategy for disaster risk management (DRM) for the future”.
  Delta State is largely an agrarian society and so those affected by the flood suffered great losses in farm produce (yams, cassava, plantain, banana, vegetables, okro, sugar cane, cocoyam, sweet potato and groundnut), fish produce and livestock. Residential and business property was also lost including the deaths of many persons. Also, during the flood period that lasted for about four weeks that the flood persisted, both businesses, social and school academic activities were temporarily halted in the 12 LGAs that were most affected.
  In all, Ndokwa East, Ughelli North, Ughelli South, Isoko South and Burutu were the most affected areas, as farm produce, live stock and fish produce were virtually all destroyed. Apart from this, the impact of the flood on the environment, with the attendant health implications was grave, as sanitation in the affected areas was at its lowest. Reported cases of disease infection were rampant. All these the committee painstakingly recorded with graphic charts and tables.
  The flood’s impact on transportation (the road from Delta to Rivers States was cut off at the height of the flooding, constraining motorists to get to Port Harcourt through Onitsha and Owerri), places of worship, electricity and telecommunication and the number of deaths put at 30, general insecurity and social dislocation are all presented in the study. The study also focuses on the emergency response measures taken both by the state government and non-governmental organisations and philanthropic individuals to alleviate the suffering of victims.
  The committee put the estimated total cost of the flood on food crops at over N3 billion; N2.614 billion is for aquaculture (fish farming); poultry is put at N0.263 billion while piggery is N26 million. On the whole, N9.602 billion was lost in the flood as tangible cost!
  With facts and figures, bar and pie charts in all segments of the analysis of areas covered, the technical team largely made up of professors of Delta State University brought their research ingenuity to bear on the report. What comes through is a painstaking study that leaves nothing to chance, as all affected parts of the state, including extent of damage and cost implications are laid bare for government to act both retroactively and proactively upon. The overall aim is a wake up call to assist those most affected to enable them return to a relative level of normalcy and a strategy of action in case of future occurrence.
  The wider application of the report goes beyond the impact of the flood on Delta State alone. While Delta State Government should be commended for initiating the study so as to enable it assist its citizens, how the state respond to the report is another matter. Given government’s penchant for committees for their own sakes, committees that easily become mere academic exercises to assuage egos of government officials, it’s indeed yet to be seen how much help government is willing to give the flood victims. Beyond the N3,000 or so that was given to some victims in some relief centres, nothing more has been heard or has been done for the victims, an indication that this report was, afterall, just another government-sponsored report that has ended up in government’s archives or some bureaucrat’s drawer.
  However, it’s a report that can be adopted in other parts of the country as well, and as an opportunity for government to see reason for once and assist its citizens for whom government ordinarily maintains a far distance in terms of policy implementation. Across the nation, billions of Naira were donated both by government and public-spirited individuals both as relief and rehabilitation funds to help cushion the effects of the flood on affected Nigerians. It would seem those billions only appeared on the pages of newspapers or have even become means of political patronage, as most of those affected by the flood are still reeling in agony and waiting for promised assistance to start off all over again.
  Also included in the report is Workplan on Quick Win Intervention and Post Flood Rapid Food Programme as an Intervention Measure in Addressing the Imminent Food Crisis as a Result of the Flooding Disaster in Delta State’ addressed to Prof. J. Agbamu, Dean, Faculty of Agriculture of Delta State University by the Permanent Secretary of the state’s Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Mr. J.N. Ochonogor. How much of this beautiful workplan has been implemented since October 24, 2012 when it was written? This remains to be seen.
  And until government proactively responds to its citizens that have laid prune by a natural disaster of this magnitude, such government, whether local, state or federal, would have lost any claim to legitimacy!

Kalakuta Dairies… Reliving The Fela We Know


By Anote Ajeluorou

No single writer will ever be able to tell completely the story of Fela. Like the elephant visited by 10 blind men, there would always be different aspects to the quintessential Fela narrative. What comes out clear is that no matter the narrator, Fela’s story will forever be fresh, stimulating, engaging and favourite bed time tale, with which grandmothers regale their grandchildren, albeit the discerning. This is Fela, the unknowable, the enigma, the legend, who left unmatched legacy in musicmanship, intellectual non-conformity in politico-cultural activism!
  And so out of the many books on Fela yet to be published, a new one Kalakuta Dairies (AuthorHouse, U.S.; 2012) by Uwa. It will be another gathering of the Fela intellectual clan, who will reminisce on the man whose life was a vast canvas of the most improbable.
  Kalakuta Dairies offers slices of life as it was lived at the empire and commune that the musical legend created both for himself and a vast number of the Lagos homeless that thronged it. Kalakuta was home to the good, the bad and the ugly. But in all these, there was order, there was government of sorts, there was organization because there were established rules that had to be followed. Enforcing some of these rules was one of the jobs of this new author, Erhabor, whose meeting with Fela was as dramatic and whimsical as the Fela persona ever was.
  The Erhabors lived a few paces from the old Benin City prisons and young Erhabor used to blar Fela’s music from his father’s stereo to the listening pleasure of Fela who was an inmate at the prison. Fela saw young Erhabor from his perch inside the prison and took a liking to the young man instantly. He reached out to him at once and thus began an association that was to last from 1983 to Fela’s last days on earth. It was with the same impetuosity that Fela married his 27 wives that he took on Uwa and assigned him a role in the orderly running of his vast musical empire.
  Erhabor lived through some of the turbulent times of the life of Fela in his many brushes with authority. As Erhabor states in his introduction, “Kalakuta Dairies is a personal narrative of events and characters that propelled and defined an African social-political setting (personality, enigma) in the heart of Lagos. Kalakuta was a creation of an icon rare-breed (sic) par excellence, whose legacies has (sic) left an indelible footprint in the sands of African and the world’s political times and consciousness.
  “This narrative is an attempt to emphasise the roles played by different characters that shaped the actions and policies of a die-hard pan-Africanist, who had an uncanny ability to read and predict exactly outcomes of diverse political and economic actions of the ruling elite years ahead of most of his fellow countrymen”.
  In this wise, Erhabor has provided an insider knowledge of Fela’s music empire, the goings on, who did what and why and Fela’s responses to most things. In diairic fashion, Erhabor records daily occurrences in the empire, the police raids, how Fela lived with his wives, who they actually were and how they related to each other, the band members, the musical tours within Africa and in Europe and America.
  Indeed, Erhabor’s Kalakuta Dairies is vintage, perch reading of the workings of Fela’s vast commune, of the sane and insane, and how, from this seemingly incongruous, contradicting setting, was to emerge the most unflagging cultural philosophy and political vision ever espoused, an unmatched rereading and reappraisal of a much maligned continent that has severally been raped raw both its own children in collusion with white foreigners!
  Like Fela, Erhabor’s book dispenses with the need for a table of content, even though Kalakuta Dairies has four chapters with an introduction. In Chapter 1, titled ‘Roots, Radicalism, Music and Mysticism’, Erhabor gives background to the Fela phenomenon, from his studies abroad to his musical journey till the discovery of Afrobeat that was to define him, with his activist mother as prompter to his musical direction. Erhabor refutes claims that Fela originally enrolled to study music and not medicine as has become the popular lore.
  In Chapter 2, ‘The Talisman: Origins and Journey into Kalakuta’, the author narrates his encounter with Fela in Benin City and how he came to be part of the inimitable republic. Here, he plays up the role of Fela’s late younger brother, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti in Fela’s life. Beko pulled a lot of strings behind the scenes just as Lagos lawyer, Femi Falana also played a significant role in Fela’s legal tussle with the autorities he frequently dared. But in retrospect, Fela it was who played a defining role in the legal career of Mr. Falana, with a Fela who was already established as a musical superstar. Fela’s brush with the authority gave Falana moments to shine.
  ‘Peoples and Personalities in the Last Empire’ is how Chapter 3 is entitled. Here, Erhabor gives Fela’s musical itinerary and the personalities that made it thick and those that gave it a bad name. He also gives the biodata of Fela’s wives and almost everyone that worked with Fela, particularly their temperaments and how their many intrigues plagued the great one’s empire. Chapter 4 Erhabor titles ‘Tours: The Sweet, The Sour, The Political’ and continues on the tour strain peppered with other communal life details at the republic until the last days with Fela finally succumbing to the dreaded diseases, for which the author strongly holds two ladies responsible, a lady of dubious reputation whom Erhabor simply calls Jq, through whom Fela’s increasing spiritual quest finally found outlet…
  Erhabor’s Kalakuta Dairies is an insider’s expose and makes for delightful reading. Fela’s life would always excite, and coming from an insider like Erhabor makes it all the more stimulating.
  However, Kalakuta Dairies is badly edited. Indeed, the book needs rewriting entirely to make it a truly great narrative, especially as it is about a man of the stature of Fela. Poor grammar and poor narrative flow mare an otherwise serious writing. It’s hoped that the author will take advantage of a reissue to remove these inhibiting errors so the book can truly warm its way into the hearts of the many lovers of Fela. Indeed, Erhabor’s Kalakuta Dairies is a commendable book waiting to be properly written!

‘Fela was a big gift to the human race’


By Anote Ajeluorou

Afrobeat music legend and revolutionary social crusader, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, took centre-stage on Tuesday when friends, family and fans gathered at Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, Lagos, to reminisce on the man and his extraordinary life. The occasion was at the launch of a book entitled Kalakuta Dairies, written by Uwa Erhabor, one of the boys at Fela’s famous shrine.
  With an eye for details and keen to document the lifestyle of the master musician for posterity, Erhabor’s book has come as a forerunner to several already in the works on the enigma known as Fela.
  Not least in the audience that came to honour Fela, now immortalised yet again in the written word were Fela’s earliest musical and revolutionary soul mate, Chief Rasheed Gbadamosi; Fela’s inimitable lawyer in his many years of travails in the hands of Nigeria’s military authority, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN); rights campaigner, Mr. Yinka Odumakin and MD, Cowbell Plc and author of Insider Outsider, Mr. Keith Richards. Others were Mrs. Bose Kuti, and Fela’s sons - Kunle and Seun.
  Gbadamosi said he counted himself extremely lucky to chair the event, especially going by his long-standing relationship with Fela both as rivals in different secondary schools, academic sojourn in London and later as a trio in a musical and revolutionary group with one Wale Bucknor, now late. He said Fela was such an important individual to him that he would always say ‘yes’ to anything concerning him.
  The business technocrat and art patron then traced their paths together through their teenage years to studies in London and their revolutionary group back in Nigeria in the 1960s. Gbadamosi said Fela was very shy as a schoolboy and had hid himself after his school, Abeokuta Grammar School, lost out in a tennis contest. He recalled further, “It’s difficult to be part of Lagos in the 1980s and not have been infected by anything Felaism. The life of a schoolboy without Fela wasn’t it. As students in the U.K., Fela used to entertain with his Koola Labito band at Pancreas Hall. He used to play at Maharani Hotel as a jazz trumpeter, where the seed of Afrobeat was sown.
  “It was at Empire Hotel that Afrobeat took root. His mother had challenged him to invent his own music and stop playing oyinbo music. Three of us formed an association of music and political radicalism and we used to meet at Yaba College of Technology and punching solidarity fists in the air. But I had to pull out when I became part of Lagos State Government, especially when he started pouring invectives on government officials”.
  Gbadamosi also recalled Fela’s sad end, how he prevailed against MUSON Centre to allow Fela perform at that conservative music spot. Fela typically made everyone nervous with his usual yabis; but by then, he had begun to deteriorate, a situation Gbadamosi said his wife alerted him on. But Fela believed so much in the African way of doings things, so much so that he would not seek orthodox medical help even when his two brothers were medical specialists.
  It took Fela’s protégé, Dede Mabiaku’s insistence for Gbadamosi to impress it on Fela, after so many long arguments and his having to camp out at Fela’s Shrine, the need to seek medical help; which he eventually did. Fela’s last request, Gbadamosi said, was to be served jollof rice. “Then he passed on,” he recalled. “But even to the end, Fela’s humour and radicalism did not desert him. Then the aftermath, the glorious accolade and public applause, the great glory that Fela got at death, not even heads of state can compare with it; it was very memorable.
  “Fela was a great mind, a wonderful human being, who made great impact on all who knew him. We must thank Uwa for helping us to remember Fela today.”
  His lawyer, Falana, on the other hand, brought the iconoclasm of Fela home to bear on Nigeria’s current political reality, and how Fela’s voice still echoes stridently through the grave to impact on current, sordid affairs. Falana praised the author for producing a timely book on Fela, adding that Fela was a big donation from the Kuti family to the African project.
  Fela’s classic ‘Authority stealing’ music that was recorded in 1988, Falana recalled, captured the essence of the current state of corruption in the political life of the country. “What Fela was saying then was that you should not talk of armed robbery but of pen robbery, which is very sad. Now, pen robbery is not in millions as in Fela’s days, but in billions. Fela was indeed a prophet. Africa is the richest continent but our riches have been cornered by a few people.
  “These were the things that Fela tried to tell us but he was branded a madman. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Under-Developed Africa was a catechism for Fela. What the author of Kalakuta Dairies has done is to capture the essence of life at Kalakuta; nobody has done it before now. It’s going to the innermost part of Kalakuta”.
  Falana also shed light on the many legal battles he waged for Fela who frequently had brushes with the military government of the day. He recalled an incident when he insisted that as his client, Fela should see him in his chambers for his briefs rather than being invited to Kalakuta, as he was wont to do. So one day, Fela went to his chamber with about 5,000 of his followers and caused a major scene on Awolowo Road, Ikeja. From then on, Falana never asked Fela to see him in his office.
  Falana described Fela as the “most intelligent, interesting client I’ve ever had; he would deliberately commit an offence. Fela’s cases were the toughest and easiest of cases to handle. Fela has been the best suspect I’ve ever had. You’ll find in Erhabor’s Kalakuta Dairies what Fela was; he was generous. He didn’t leave riches behind but he left a good legacy”.

FELA’s split image, who has also taken after his father as a musician, Seun, commended the author for writing a book about his father’s musical journey. He described Erhabor as being close to the family, who has been like a big brother to him, and has written from a vintage position. He recalled the author giving him a toy as a birthday gift when he turned eight. He said Erhabor always kept them informed about the book’s progress while it was being written.
  The young Kuti also said, “the integrity of the book is intact, nothing exaggerated; it will make a great read for anybody who wants to see what happened in Kalakuta”.
  On his part, Odumakin praised the Kuti family for being the source of “great blessing to this country”. He recalled seeing Seun performing one of his father’s great hits, ‘Sorrow, tears and blood’ so dexterously, when he was just six years old, a musical tradition he has kept alive ever since. The human rights activist said “Generations yet unborn will remember Fela; he has left a good legacy. He didn’t leave riches, but he left a good name”.
 Richards is the author of Insider Outsider, an outsider’s view of Nigeria. He has lived in Nigeria a long time and have managed Guinness Nigeria and now Cowbell Plc, noted that he regretted not having met Fela even though he used to visit Nigeria while the iconic musician was alive. Richards humourously said how ironic it was that he, Fela’s typical colonialist, was at a Fela’s event spotting a jacket, something Fela always frowned at.
  He lamented the dearth of social history on Nigeria’s intellectual space and said it did not make for coherent information gathering about the country. “If we are to break stereotypes, we need more of Kalakuta Dairies. If we are to disseminate correct information about Nigeria, we need more of this. What Fela fought for is the true situation today. Fela should be a role model for Nigerians today. To understand more about Fela, we should read the book”.
  The author Erhabor, who lives in Germany, said it was “sad that people in Europe were the ones that usually reminded Nigerians about how great Fela was. The relevance of Fela’s music has never been so real today than back then when he sang it. The more people shout corruption, the bigger it gets. When Fela was talking about corruption, it was then in millions; now, it’s in billions and growing to the trillion mark. Well, what I know is that the Fela clan will always do what Fela expected of us”.

In Ekeghe’s Overwhelming Treasures, performance poetry finds a rhythm


By Anote Ajeluorou

Spoken word poetry, or indeed, the pop version of poetry, is fast gaining ground in Nigeria, especially in the Lagos performance circuit. So much so that clubs or performance arenas to that effect are beginning to spring up.   
  Paul Efe Azino, Pumbline and Atilola Moronfolu are frontline artists giving verbal authority to spoken word art. Azino has taken the spoken word art to a revolutionary level with the verbal audacity of his performance. Moronfolu is less daring as she engages religion taken to a noisome level and other domestic issues.
  But giving a solid, intellectual angle to spoken word art is Dr. Chiemeka Nduka Ekeghe, with his new collection of poems, Overwhelming Treasures: Poems on Love, Life and Nigeria (Createspace Publishers, U.S.; 2012). While the popular artists’ spoken word art still exists in their imagination, Ekeghe has stepped up the rhythm in a book form. This is a major leap for the spoken word art; what remains to be seen is Ekeghe stepping forward to also thrill his audience with his verbal art. This would be icing on the cake.
  However, for the non-initiate to spoken word poetry, Ekeghe’s book as a work of poetry would sorely disappoint on account of its prosaic language, which is only relieved, and indeed, redeemed by his consistent use of rhyming couplets, which solely lend a measure of poetic sensibility to the collection.    
  Nevertheless, there are flashes of brilliance here and there for those not familiar with spoken word poetry, especially in pieces like ‘Human sympathy’, ‘Blessed Nigeria’ and ‘Corruption! Corruption!’ This is more so because of the topicality of the issues Ekeghe treats.
  Overwhelming Treasures brims with the poet’s vision of love for his beloved woman, his sense of enjoyment of life, his disappointment with the perennial failings of his beloved country, Nigeria and God’s unfailing love for mankind and His desire to draw man close to Himself so he can escape the path of self-destruct man seems set by his rejection of God’s love for him. These are the concerns of the poet, which he has put together in the spoken word tradition.
  He calls the first season ‘Filos’ and the first poem is ‘Love or infatuation? (A love song) in which he pours out his love for a female persona (his wife), as he shuns love outside marital contract.
  The poem drips with love syrup that sweetens to the point of boredom: Oh fair maiden, pure and sweet/How I long for us to meet/And share a love song so full of heat/That gives a melodious everlasting beat/On Facebook and Twitter, start to tweet.
  The poet pours so much praise on this woman and recounts her many virtues and qualities and why she is the one woman that matters to him in the wide world. This poem traces a man’s quest for union with the woman he adores and a forecast of what their union will be if she agrees to marry.
  Ekeghe concludes it thus: Little time remains/Please marry me in time so we make gains/Let’s give birth to beautiful kids named Junior and Jane/Who’ll never slack but be in the main/Of the faith, so demons are slain.
  In a poem reminiscent of Odia Ofeimun’s dance drama, Nigeria the Beautiful, Ekeghe’s poem ‘Abiriba, the Beautiful’ praises his hometown and the milestone developments it has recorded in its march to the future. Here, however, Ekeghe succumbs to the lure of ostentatious wealth that seems to abound in Abiriba, a phenomenon that has bred the corruptive tendency so prevalent in Nigeria that he condemns.
  In ‘Blessed Nigeria’, the poet gives a panoramic overview of the many fine qualities that set Nigeria apart as land of splendour and infinite possibilities. It enumerates the tourism attraction that abounds in the country, as he sings: To Zuma rock/The people flock/The amazing Gurara falls/Displays a great water wall/…
  Ekeghe gets into his finest element in denouncing Nigeria’s biggest enemy to development: ‘Corruption! Corruption!’, which he calls ‘society’s disruption’ and the ‘nation’s dissolution’. He further writes: Conscience has gone to snore/To chop belle full is at the fore/Greed is the aetiology of this sore/Honesty she mercilessly tore/Wealth for unborn generation is the lure/Vanity sits at the very core/Naira is what they want more/The refuse to open the door/Of basic necessities to the masses…
  Other poems in this section include ‘Rape of a nation’ and ‘The godfather’, which extend the corruption metaphor further.
  The last season, ‘God is crazy about you’ is the poet’s vision of God’s love for mankind. It is his evangelical treatise to his readers to heed God’s free and unconditional call to repentance so the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ would not be a waste. For the Christian reader, Ekeghe has touched a core of belief and he is a lot more lyrical in this section as well.
  Indeed, Ekeghe’s Spoken Word Art is virgin poetic territory in this clime. His effort is to be commended. He would do well next time to be a bit more ‘poetic’ so as to win the hearts of core poets and not just those that hanker after pop art that spoken word poetry really is. Perhaps, Ekeghe mistook simplicity for simplistic or ‘prosaic’ writing, which is reflected in this collection. That way, spoken word art can also be made more enjoyable.