By Anote Ajeluorou
When promoters of Moet and
Chandon Champagne decided to make a toast to the extraordinary life of Chinua
Achebe at Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos last Thursday, little did they know
what harvest the largely young audience would have for the late literary icon.
Although Achebe’s soul mate Prof. Wole Soyinka turned up, the late start of
event robbed the audience of his magisterial presence. But this didn’t dampen
the sheer enthusiasm to relive the life of the man who gave the continent a
literary voice. Tolu Ogunlesi curated the event.
Indeed, rather than the proposed ‘toast’ as stated in the
proceedings, Deji Toye’s déjà vu suggestion of ‘libation’ elicited sighs of
instant approval from everyone, as Ogunlesi stumbled over which was the proper
way to proceed. A libation was the only thing that could appropriately fit the
moving spirit of the continent’s literary age, a man who just became an
ancestor. And so glasses of Moet and Chandon Chanpagne were lifted up and
clinked after generous drops had been tipped to the marble floor in honour of a
worthy ancestor. But this was after almost everyone had had his say on what the
Achebe phenomenon really was, and will continue to be as a guiding light and
legacy to a continent’s writing.
Indeed, it isn’t always that such high-end product as Moet
and Chandon Champagne to hobnob with writers or even celebrate them, but Achebe
was such high-end personality that drew an audience that filled the Kongi
Harvest Hall. Also, it was the first literary event held in honour of Achebe in
Lagos since he died last April.
First, Ogunlesi pointed out the sheer symbolism of Achebe
being celebrated at an old Majesty’s former prison (now remodled Freedom Park)
on a day Nelson Mandela turned 95, a man who spent a better part of his life in
an imperialist’s prison. In opening the celebration, arts enthusiast Mr. Toyin
Akinosho said Achebe was the man who built the local content in Nigerian, nay
African literature, (not unlike the Petroleum Industry Bill - PIB – Akinosho,
an oil man, is the publisher of Oil and Gas magazine).
He went on to give background to the emergence of Achebe and
how his famous Things Fall Apart
(TFA) manuscript made its uneventful journey from Lagos to London and was
almost lost in the hands of the typewriters who found it odd that an African
upstart could arrogate to himself the whiteman’s craft of writing a novel.
Akinosho read excerpts from James Curry’s Africa Writes Back. TFA manuscript probably made the most convoluted
journey a manuscript ever made to come into world acclaim! It wasn’t until a
professor of Economics at London School of Economics gave it a seven-letter
word endorsement that it saw the light of the day, when he said: This is the
best novel after the war!
Those were the magic words that brought TFA into being. From
that point onward, Achebe’s personal chi said an affirmation and his eagle took a flight. Achebe soon became
editorial adviser to Heinemann publishers, and the rest, as they say, is
history.
Maxim Uzoatu (author of God of Poetry) regaled the audience with details of his trip from
Lagos to Ogidi for Achebe’s burial and how the man’s personality elicited
arguments from among the town’s folks who he really was, whether he was Pete
Edochie or Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart, the NTA 1980s drama series or just another politician. With massive
billboards and huge posters adorning every conspicuous space in town and the
invasion of thousands more, with two presidents in attendance, Achebe was
mythologised in his native birthplace. In sum, most people in Ogidi didn’t
Achebe, Uzoatu stated.
Uzoatu, who had the rare privilege of interviewing Achebe
years back, described him as an organised person, who took his writing
seriously from start, adding, “Some of us lack the courage of conviction, but
Achebe was a man of his own. Even when Europeans said the novel is dead, Achebe
will say, ‘no; we haven’t written our own yet; we haven’t told our story yet’.
The proverbs, the idioms are commonplace but the way he deployed them made a
difference.
“The initial efforts of Achebe, Soyinka, Ammos Tutuola made
them pathfinders. We should return to the original African story. That’s the
legend of Achebe!”
Like Ogunlesi, who first proposed the seemingly unthinkable,
the ‘what if’ Things Fall Apart had
not been written or the manuscript got lost from Lagos to London, Toye further
extended that improbability of TFA getting lost or not having been written and
the probable fate African literature. For Toye, Achebe, too, fell under the
spell of this improbability, when he said in his usual humility that another
person could have written TFA if he hadn’t written.
However, Toye would not be seduced by such reasoning even as
it came from the revered ancestor himself while he lived. For him and many
others, it could only have been Achebe who could have pulled off such literary
magic and no one else, saying, “What if? What if the manuscript had been lost?
Achebe had said if he hadn’t written TFA, somebody else would have written it,
which isn’t very true.
“He was a product of his era. The era itself produced the
writing. It was a gate-keeping era in which the architecture, historiography,
musicology, visual arts and literary art were wrested from European hegemony
and stranglehold”.
Eghosa Imasuen (author of To Saint Patrick and Fine Boys) said his first encounter with Achebe was A Man of
the People, a novel he described as
being ridiculously funny. He noted that as a writer was someone that might be
considered being a witness to history, it became something he yearned for,
especially from his reading of A Man of the People. Also for Ralph Tathagarta, Achebe was a
revolutionary who put up a fight just like his famous hero, Okonkwo in TFA, a
man who stood in defence of what was his even when it appeared indefensible!
A white member of the audience praised the historicity in
Achebe’s books as it helped him in understanding his identity, noting that
Achebe’s writing helps in “understanding the history of our fathers and that we
have obligation to our place in history and the choices that we make”.
ALSO, former editor of The
Guardian on Sunday, Mr. Jahman
Anikulapo expressed sadness over how Achebe’s last book There Was A Country:
A Personal History of Biafra sparked
off much heated debate and vilification of the man even from unenlightened
quarters and those who hadn’t even read the book joined the fray. He said it
was sad “the way we reduced Achebe to our ethnic narrowness. The way we
represented him wasn’t how he was. Achebe represented our own collective imagination.
The way we interpreted him was not how he set out to be. Many of us, especially
journalists, are just reductionists. Let’s restore Achebe to that status he
really was. He wasn’t in enmity with Soyinka or Clark. Achebe gave every
African a voice”.
Anikulapo narrated an encounter with Achebe after his
debilitating accident. The iconic writer was returning home and at the Lagos
airport during the Chief Ojo Maduekwe’s era as Minister of Culture and Tourism,
and there was the usual oversight and no armchair had been provided. Achebe had
to ride on the back of a woman to be ferried from the tarmac to a waiting car!
At that time also, overzealous journalists had whipped up so much dust about
his quarrel with late Cyprian Ekwensi.
Later when he (Anikulapo and one other journalist) arrived
Achebe’s Sheraton Hotel suite, in came Ekwensi; they almost wished the ground
would open and swallow them (journalists) up at the camaraderie of the two
elders who were believed to be at loggerheads with each other.
For Anikulapo, that momentous occasion provided a lesson in
humility and how larger than life personages are reduced to the ethnic or other
narrowness of those regarding them from their narrow perch.
Poet and teacher, Aj Daggar Tolar said the literary community
usually commits sin against acknowledged ancestor of African literature in the
wrong perception of his treatment of women in his novels. With the character of
Ekwuefi, Tolar said, women had an assured place in traditional African society
and that Achebe should be commended for placing women in such high priestly
office.
And like Okonkwo, who played the oppositional role in
standing alone in TFA till the very end, Tolar said Achebe also stood alone to
the very last as a strong oppositional figure in the battle to rescue the
sinking soul of his country from the cabal that hold it hostage.
“The life of Achebe and how he died raise some fundamental
questions of nationhood,” Tolar said. “He had principles that are entirely
missing in today’s Nigeria and that’s where we’re where we are today.”
A violinist from Crown Troupe of Africa very movingly
serenaded the audience with a classic tune from NTA dramatised Things Fall Apart.
Also, Lola Shoneyin (author of The Secret Lives of Baba
Segi’s Wives and organiser of Ake
Arts and Book Festival) stated that the worst thing to say about Achebe would
be that he didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature, saying, “He shouldn’t be
reduced to that level”. Shoneyin said Achebe awakened in her the issue of her
true identity, especially when she was a student in England at the age of six,
when she didn’t quite know the implication of race. However, after reading
Achebe, it reinforced her identity and she began to discern the racist insults
flung at her and her having to fling them back at her tormentors with equal
vehemence.
The evening ended with the libation, which was
enthusiastically embraced by all.
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