Chinua Achebe: A man and his people

It is becoming increasingly worrisome that Professor Chinua Achebe will end his long, glorious career just as it began - mired in controversy. And that is not the best epitaph any patriotic Nigerian would want to read about a man who, to my mind, should in his characteristic humility accept the honour of being the greatest Nigerian alive. At the beginning of his career, Professor Achebe spiritedly fended off charges of plagiarism from a fellow Igbo when he published his best known novel, ‘Things Fall Apart’. His accuser had charged then that the young Achebe reworked and took the credit for his own account of life in pre-colonial Igbo society. For very obvious reasons, Professor Achebe’s accuser was cajoled and persuaded to drop his charge rather than spoil the party for a rising star. In most Nigerian traditional societies, it is considered a taboo for a man to attempt to pour sand into the bowl of garri of another member of society.

But we are talking of the 1960s, a time when the internet never even existed in the imagination of men. In today’s jet age, Professor Achebe would have had more explaning to do. When Professor Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, many Nigerian critics in the Yoruba-speaking south west expressed indignation with the choice by positing that Professor Achebe, an Igbo, not Professor Soyinka who is ‘one of their own’, indeed a Yoruba man who globally campaigned on behalf of Biafra, was better suited for the award. In fifty years, ‘Things Fall Apart’ has become an all time classic and has turned to be one novel that placed Nigeria on a high pedestal. Take it or leave it: if ordinary Nigerians had a hand in awarding the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, it is most likely Professor Achebe would have picked it. Yet there were those who argued then, rightly or wrongly, that Professor Achebe was probably sidelined because of the ‘unsettled dust’ over the plagiarism charge that greeted ‘Things Fall Apart’.

Nearly fifty years on, Professor Achebe is again in the eye of a storm. He has just published his war memoirs, ‘There Was A Country’, his own account, captured from a safe distance far from the trenches, of the 30-month long civil war that consumed an estimated one million lives. So far, the raging debate on the book is set to dwarf the controversy that surrounded ‘Things Fall Apart’. At issue, and the portion of the book that has proved to be controversial, is the role Professor Achebe said certain Nigerians played in an admittedly uncivil war that some Nigerians prefer to refer to as genocide. Specifically, he hinted that Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first premier of the defunct Western Region and his principal, then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, displayed genocidal tendencies when the federal government adopted hunger as a weapon of war. For obvious reasons, we have to excuse General Gowon: he was the head but Chief Awolowo, his federal commissioner (minister) of finance is credited with initiating moves to end the war.

Truth is, there is nothing new or original in what Professor Achebe wrote; if anything, what he wrote should be a matter that appeared settled while Chief Awolowo lived. Way back in 1979, and as he did in several publications before then, Chief Awolowo, typical of him, maintained his ground that, in war time there is no point feeding an adversary to fight you. He was convinced till the end that had the vital food supply lines to combatants in the trenches not been cut, chances were the needless war could have dragged for far much longer and many more lives would have been lost. Of course, the first casualty of the decision was the ordinary Biafran who, in any case was forced to cut his ration as sacrifice toward prosecuting the war. Expectedly, the unwilling sacrifice ended when supply lines were cut after which the hunger pangs that had been the lot of struggling and sacrificing Biafrans became more pronounced among the combatants on the battlefront. Truth be told, hunger-induced weak limbs, not shortage of firearms and certainly not the absence of young men to handle those firearms, killed the Biafran dream. And that precisely was the aim Chief Awolowo said the federal government sought to achieve by cutting vital food supply lines to Biafra.

Aside from advocating hunger as a weapon of war, Chief Awolowo and by extension, the Yoruba people (Awolowo was the Asiwaju or Leader of Yoruba) are still to be ‘forgiven’ for not supporting the Biafran cause. While in the federal cabinet and after, Chief Awolowo maintained an earlier vow while on a ‘thank you’ visit to General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu to the effect that there would be no basis for the Yoruba speaking people of the south west to remain in Nigeria if any part of the country was allowed to secede. The visit, in the words of General Ojukwu, took place in Enugu after he released Chief Awolowo from Calabar prison few days before the war started. Even to his bitterest critics, Chief Awolowo was unequivocal in his belief in the oneness of Nigeria. Like Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late premier of the defunct Northern Region, Chief Awolowo was a Nigerian leader who was revered by his people. Sadly, his patriotic wake-up call against allowing a section to secede rather than being taken to be what it was meant to be was given a different interpretation.

Of course, Chief Awolowo paid for his actions nine years after the end of the war. In the heat of the 1979 presidential campaigns and despite picking Chief Phillip Umeadi as his running mate and having the erudite Chief MCK Ajuluchukwu as the main spokesman of his Unity Party of Nigeria, Chief Awolowo was forced to cancel scheduled campaigns in some parts of Igboland and once, during the campaigns, he was hurriedly ferried to safety in his waiting helicopter when he was attacked by angry stone-throwing Igbo youths. Till he died, the Biafran leader never shared the anger of many of his fellow Igbos and never wavered in his description of Chief Awolowo as an authentic Nigerian hero. But for his own admission, the world would not have known that Chief Awolowo was a childhood hero of General Ojukwu. At the burial of Chief Awolowo in 1987, General Ojukwu must have angered some of his fellow Igbo when, besides his prominent presence at the final rites for the Asiwaju of the Yoruba in Ikenne he proposed an enduring epitaph for Chief Awolowo as ‘the best president Nigeria never had’. Probably taking a cue from General Ojukwu, numerous failed efforts were made by well meaning Nigerians to extend a political handshake across the Niger which, in a manner of speaking, would have promoted a rapport between the Igbo speaking people of the south east and Yoruba speaking people of the south west.

Nigeria has come a long way since the end of the war nearly 43 years ago. At the end of the war, Nigerians were told not to see one section of the country as the victor and the other as the vanquished. Like the Igbo, many Nigerians harbour the feeling that many things are wrong with their country and, the Igbo, despite having one of their own as vice president less than ten years after the civil war, have genuine cause to complain about the slow wheel of their integration. Indeed, it was General Ojukwu who, in the heat of the June 12 crisis in 1993, told Igbo traders to resist attempts by street urchins to push them out of Lagos. The message was simple and clear: if a war was fought to unify the country, then every Nigerian should feel safe to live and do business in any part of the country. But again, we have General Ojukwu to thank for advocating the emergence of the right type of leadership, not the façade of a national conference, which he once said is another way of attempting to break up the country and which, in effect, is another way of sending young men to their untimely death.

Ordinarily, ‘There Was A country’ should be a fresh addition to libraries if the intention of Professor Achebe was to publish a war memoirs which he pieced together from a safe distance. But in rehashing well-known but better forgotten facts to whip up sentiments, Professor Achebe runs the risk of treading a weather beaten path which for thirty months led to the death of some one million Nigerians. Incitement? General Ojukwu made his inciting speeches when he embarked on the Biafran project at the age of 33; for the next 45 years, he espoused moderate, integrationist views and would probably have balked at ‘There Was A Country’. Understandably, the comets blazed forth when he died at 78, the age at which his life long hero, Chief Awolowo, died and, just as his hero, General Ojukwu got a deserved hero’s burial. So, when did incitement become the pastime of respected elder statesmen?

This is one controversy Professor Achebe can ill afford, especially in the evening of a long and glorious career. Talk is cheap and one of the cheap talks we bandy around to resolve conflicts is to bury the hatchet. Problem with hatchets is that while many would genuinely wish to bury them, there are some who will always go back to exhume them. In ‘Things Fall Apart’, Professor Achebe created an enigmatic character, Okonkwo, who started well but ended tragically. That Achebean creature reinforces an Igbo proverb that it is the evening of man, not his morning, that decides his greatness.

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* Abdulrazaq Magaji, journalist, author and former history lecturer, lives in Abuja, Nigeria, and can be reached at [email protected]