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PeeCeeJay By Jideofor Adibe
Achebe and the ‘innocence’ of mortuary narratives
The recent transition of literary giant Albert Chinualumogu Achebe has led to an uncommon outpouring of encomiums. Achebe’s transition came less than a year after his last major work, There was a country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012) has stirred controversy in the country. His critics argued that the work diminished him from being Nigeria’s gift to the literary world to an ‘Igbo-phile’. This piece is not so much a tribute to Achebe as an interrogation of the mortuary respect that followed his transition with a focus on the contrarian perspectives of Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano whose intervention was couched in elegant academic aesthetics and published by several print and online media. Why do the dead, even those we have reservations about when they lived always attract adulation? There are two key explanations – one based on myth and the other on rationality. The rational explanation is that the dead cannot defend themselves while the myth is that if you say evil against the dead their spirit will continue to haunt you until you join them in the hereafter. Contrary to the belief in some quarters that respect to the dead is a specific African tradition, it is actually a universal practice, dating to antiquity. For instance the phrase ‘mortuary respect’ dates from the 4th century and is often attributed to Diogenes Laërtius’ work ‘Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers’ (ca. AD 300) where a Greek aphorism, ‘Don’t badmouth a dead man’ was attributed to Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. There is also the Latin phrase ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum,’ which roughly translates to “Of the dead, nothing unless good”. In English language there are several aphoristic phrases like: “Speak no ill of the dead”, “Of the dead, speak no evil”, and “Do not speak ill of the dead”. The 18th century English writer and poet Samuel Johnson was famously quoted as saying: “He that has too much feeling to speak ill of the dead…will not hesitate…to destroy…the reputation…of the living.” Should a public intellectual necessarily be bound by the custom of mortuary respect? I do not think so. I believe a public intellectual owes it to his craft (excuse my apparent lack of gender sensitivity here but it is all to make things easier), to detach himself from mass hysteria, outrage or encomium and search for and expand on anything he feels has been missed out in the flourish of emotionally-driven mass euphoria. If a public intellectual’s reasoning and choice of analytical categories lead him to a conclusion contrary to what is regarded as the popular position, then duty calls to take and defend that position. It takes courage to stand alone. It is in the above respect that the contrarian intervention of Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano receives my maximum respect. In that intervention, which is written in a compelling language that leaned here and there on the obscurantist literary form, he questioned the literary merits in Achebe’s novels. I agree with most of his comments, including some of his comments on Anthills of Savannah, Achebe’s last novel, generally thought to have been written when Achebe had either lost interest in writing novels or his skills in the craft had gone into terminal decline. Despite agreeing with most of Professor Bello-Kano’s critical comments on Achebe’s works, I must quickly add that none of those comments is original. As a matter of fact in 2006, my publishing firm, Adonis & Abbey Publishers (www.adonis-abbey.com) - a publisher of academic books and journals since March 2003 - published an even more critical work on Achebe’s writings entitled Achebe: The Man and His Works by Rose Mezu, a Professor of English, Women studies and Comparative Literature at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Between 2007 and 2010, the same company incubated and published the academic journal, African Performance Review for the African Theatre Association, where on every issue, I read with relish scholars ‘tearing apart’ the works of such great literary giants as Achebe, Soyinka, Osofisan and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Professor Bello-Kano’s critique of Achebe’s Trouble With Nigeria (1983) for neglecting the influence of system dynamics when Achebe claimed that the ‘trouble with Nigeria is squarely that of leadership’, is spot on. But it is also not original. In fact the structure-agency debate in the social sciences (the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices contra a patterned set of arrangements which influence or limit available choices and opportunities) has been ongoing since 1903 when the German non-positivist sociologist Georg Simmel published his seminal essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. The younger Achebe had in fact in No Longer At Ease (1960), through the character Obi Okonkwo, identified the trouble with Nigeria as being systemic. In that novel, Obi Okonkwo was such an independently minded character that when his community sent him to England to study law – at a time the voice of the elders approximated the voices of the gods – he disobeyed them, followed his heart and read English. Obi Okonkwo also had the courage to stand alone on several fronts, to the disappointment of his community: He married an ‘osu’- which was an abomination among his people, he refused to use his position in the civil service to favour ‘his people’ in employment and he hated to his marrows the deeply entrenched corruption in public life. However, despite Obi Okonkwo’s moral Puritanism, he was forced by certain societal pressures to take his own bribe and was caught. In this work therefore Achebe demonstrated that the problem with Nigeria, at least in terms of corruption, was systemic and not that of moral lapse or leadership. The type of contradiction between what Achebe saw as the ‘trouble with Nigeria’ in No Longer At Ease (1960) and in his booklet of the same title is not uncommon among great thinkers and writers. Karl Marx, generally regarded as one of the greatest political, social and economic thinkers of all time, grappled with such contradictions in his works. For instance in his ‘materialist conception of history’, Marx gave the impression that socialism would succeed capitalism independent of men’s will because capitalism, following the ‘immutable law of history’, would sow the seeds of its own destruction. By the time Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx had shifted his position and had come to believe that the socialist era would only come about through proletarian revolution. In the structure-agency debate (on which of the two is the key propellant of history), it could be argued that while the younger Marx, just like the younger Achebe favoured ‘structure’, the older Marx, just like the older Achebe, favoured ‘agency’. Several of Professor Bello-Kano’s critical comments on Achebe’s last work, There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, are legitimate. Certainly the book has flaws – on interpretation, generalizations and even proofreading. However one senses a desire by Professor Bello-Kano to hide behind academic aesthetics to soldier for the North. For instance I find his efforts to smell out any hint of the inferiorization of the North in Anthills of Savannah, quite stretched. The impression one gets is that the whole contrarian piece was inspired and animated by this desire to soldier for ‘his people’. Given the brilliance that shone in the Professor’s piece, this is most disappointing as it is an appropriation of the day-job of ‘area boys’, internet warriors, ethnic-watchers, one-dimensional journalists and such ethnic/regional contraptions as the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Ohaneze, the OPC and others. In advanced countries, Professors of Bello- Kano’s standing try to find new frameworks and theoretical constructs that will raise the level of the conversation and discourse such that bigoted ideas are marginalized. This is why in several such countries, racist organizations like the KKK or British National Party are never banned but the ideas they purvey are equally never mainstreamed because the acceptable analytical categories and frameworks ensure that they will remain marginalized. By electing to soldier for a piece of geography using the same ethnic and regional pedestals he inveighed against as his tools of counter narratives, Professor Bello-Kano becomes guilty of the same reductionism, of seeing issues mostly in terms of the static binary of ‘we versus them’ which he accused Achebe of. The irony is that most of those who soldier for pieces of geography in every part of the country dare not go to stay for a longer period in their village, and will, in private conversations, frankly tell you that ‘my people are terrible’. Since the ‘withering away’ of the Nigerian left, there has been a yawning dearth of efforts to develop an alternative vision of society and new analytical constructs away from this essentialist constructions of ethnicity and religion. And when public intellectuals, who ought to know, join the rat race of ethnic and regional finger-pointing, it becomes unfortunate. Achebe’s last book is flawed but it has already done a great service to the country. War propaganda on both sides of the conflict meant that each side has its own story, including of heroes and villains. Achebe’s book by generating counter narratives, has forced many of us to revise what we thought we knew about the war, which was led mostly by young radicals and rascals in their 20s and early 30s. |