There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (6 page)

Post-Independence Nigeria

By the late 1950s the British were rapidly accepting the inevitability of independence
coming to one of their major colonies, Nigeria. Officers began to retire and return
home to England, vacating their positions in Nigeria’s colonial government. They left
in droves, quietly, amiably, often at night, mainly on ships, but also, particularly
the wealthier ones, on planes. The British clearly had a well-thought-out exit strategy,
with handover plans in place long before we noticed.

Literally all government ministries, public and privately held firms, corporations,
organizations, and schools saw the majority of their expatriate staff leave. Not everyone
left, however; some, particularly in the commercial sector and the oil businesses,
stayed. The civilized behavior of their brethren made this an acceptable development.

While this quiet transition was happening a number of internal jobs, especially the
senior management positions, began to open up for Nigerians, particularly for those
with a university education. It was into these positions vacated by the British that
a number of people like myself were placed—a daunting, exhilarating inheritance that
was not without its anxieties. Most of us felt well prepared, because we had received
an outstanding education. This is not to say that there were not those racked with
doubt, and sometimes outright dread. There were. But most of us were ready to take
destiny in our own hands, and for a while at least, it worked quite well.

This “bequest” was much greater than just stepping into jobs left behind by the British.
Members of my generation also moved into homes in the former British quarters previously
occupied by members of the European senior civil service. These homes often came with
servants—chauffeurs, maids, cooks, gardeners, stewards—whom the British had organized
meticulously to “ease their colonial sojourn.” Now following the departure of the
Europeans, many domestic staff stayed in the same positions and were only too grateful
to continue their designated salaried roles in post-independence Nigeria. Their masters
were no longer European but their own brothers and sisters. This bequest continued
in the form of new club memberships and access to previously all-white areas of town,
restaurants, and theaters.

—

This account about the handover of power I have just provided is perhaps too wonderful
to be absolutely true. History teaches us that people who have been oppressed—this
is the language of the freedom fight, and it was a fight—are often too ready to let
bygones be bygones. Clearly it was more complicated than that; it was a long struggle.
Having said that, I think most who were there would admit that when the moment came,
it was handled quite well.

One example that I will give to illustrate the complexity of that moment of transition
occurred at the very highest level of government. When Britain decided to hand over
power to Nigeria, they also decided to change the governor general. They brought a
new governor general from the Sudan, Sir James Robertson, to take the reins in Nigeria.
Now that Independence Day was approaching a number of onlookers were wondering why
there was a new posting from Britain, and no provision made for a Nigerian successor.
It became clear that Sir James was going to be there on Independence Day and, as it
turned out, wanted to stay on as governor general for a whole year into the period
of freedom. One wondered how he was going to leave. Would it be in disgrace? Would
he be hiding, or something of the sort?

It is now widely known that Sir James Robertson played an important role in overseeing
the elections (or lack thereof) at independence, throwing his weight behind Abubakar
Tafawa Balewa, who had been tapped to become Nigeria’s first prime minister.

I remember hearing Azikiwe comment years later on those events. He was asked in a
small gathering: “Why did Sir James Robertson not go home, like the other people who
were leaving?”

Azikiwe made light of the question: “Well, when he told me that he was going to stay
on, I said to him, Go on, stay as long as you like.” The laughter that followed did
not obscure the greater meaning of his statement.

—

Later it was discovered that a courageous English junior civil servant named Harold
Smith had been selected by no other than Sir James Robertson to oversee the rigging
of Nigeria’s first election
“
so that its compliant friends in [Northern Nigeria] would win power, dominate the
country, and serve British interests after independence.” Despite the enticements
of riches and bribes (even a knighthood, we are told), Smith refused to be part of
this elaborate hoax to fix Nigeria’s elections, and he swiftly became one of the casualties
of this mischief. Smith’s decision was a bold choice that cost him his job, career,
and reputation (at least until recently).
¹

In a sense, Nigerian independence came with a British governor general in command,
and, one might say, popular faith in genuine democracy was compromised from its birth.

The Decline

Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption
and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections
were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed;
judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians
themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.
¹

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of
the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups,
and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest
way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they
were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.

The original idea of one Nigeria was pressed by the leaders and intellectuals from
the Eastern Region. With all their shortcomings, they had this idea to build the country
as one. The first to object were the Northerners, led by the Sardauna, who were followed
closely by the Awolowo clique that had created the Action Group. The Northern Peoples
Congress of the Sardaunians was supposed to be a national party, yet it refused to
change its name from Northern to Nigerian Peoples Congress, even for the sake of appearances.
It refused right up to the end of the civilian regime.

The prime minister of Nigeria, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who had been built up into
a great statesman by the Western world, did nothing to save his country from impending
chaos. The British made certain on the eve of their departure that power went to that
conservative element in the country that had played no real part in the struggle for
independence. This was the situation in which I wrote my novel
A Man of the People
.

Nigerian artists responded to these events in a variety of ways. The irrepressible
Wole Soyinka put on the stage a devastating satire,
Before the Blackout
, which played to packed houses night after night in Ibadan. The popular traveling
theater of Hubert Ogunde and his many wives began to stage a play clearly directed
against the crooked premier of Western Nigeria. The theater group was declared an
unlawful society and banned in Western Nigeria. Things were coming to a head in that
region. Violence erupted after an unbelievable election swindle, as a result of the
anger and frustration of Western Nigerians. It was in these circumstances that Wole
Soyinka was charged with holding up the Ibadan radio station and removing the premier’s
taped speech!

Creative writers in independent Nigeria found themselves with a new, terrifying problem
on their hands: They found that the independence their country was supposed to have
won was totally without content. In the words of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria was given
her freedom “on a platter of gold.” We should have known that freedom should be won,
not given on a plate. Like the head of John the Baptist, this gift to Nigeria proved
most unlucky.

The Role of the Writer in Africa

What then were we to do as writers? What was our role in our new country? How were
we to think about the use of our talents? I can say that when a number of us decided
that we would be writers, we had not thought through these questions very clearly.
In fact, we did not have a clue what we were up against. What I can say is that it
was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue.
A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves
and our continent, and to recast them through stories—prose, poetry, essays, and books
for our children. That was my overall goal.

When a number of us decided to pick up the pen and make writing a career there was
no African literature as we know it today. There were of course our great oral tradition—the
epics of the Malinke, the Bamana, and the Fulani—the narratives of Olaudah Equaino,
works by D. A. Fagunwa and Muhammadu Bello, and novels by Pita Nwana, Amos Tutuola,
and Cyprian Ekwensi.

Across the African continent, literary aficionados could savor the works of Egyptian,
Nubian, and Carthaginian antiquity; Amharic and Tigrigna writings from Ethiopia and
Eritrea; and the magnificent poetry and creation myths of Somalia. There was more—the
breathtakingly beautiful Swahili poetry of East and Central Africa, and the chronicles,
legends, and fables of the Ashanti, Dogon, Hutu, Kalanga, Mandingo, Ndebele, Ovambo,
Shona, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Tutsi, Venda, Wolof, Xhosa, and Zulu.

Olive Schreiner’s nineteenth-century classic
Story of an African Farm
and works by Samuel Mqhayi and Thomas Mofolo, Alan Paton, Camara Laye, Mongo Beti,
Peter Abrahams, and Ferdinand Oyono, all preceded our time. Still, the numbers were
not sufficient.
¹

And so I had no idea when I was writing
Things Fall Apart
whether it would even be accepted or published. All of this was new—there was nothing
by which I could gauge how it was going to be received.

Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation.
A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that
dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story
from an African perspective—in full earshot of the world.

The preparation for this life of writing, I have mentioned, came from English-system-style
schools and university. I read Shakespeare, Dickens, and all the books that were read
in the English public schools. They were novels and poems about English culture, and
some things I didn’t know anything about. When I saw a good sentence, saw a good phrase
from the Western canon, of course I was influenced by it. But the story itself—there
weren’t any models. Those that were set in Africa were not particularly inspiring.
If they were not saying something that was antagonistic toward us, they weren’t concerned
about us.

When people talk about African culture they often mean an assortment of ancient customs
and traditions. The reasons for this view are quite clear. When the first Europeans
came to Africa they knew very little of the history and complexity of the people and
the continent. Some of that group persuaded themselves that Africa had no culture,
no religion, and no history. It was a convenient conclusion, because it opened the
door for all sorts of rationalizations for the exploitation that followed. Africa
was bound, sooner or later, to respond to this denigration by resisting and displaying
her own accomplishments. To do this effectively her spokesmen—the writers, intellectuals,
and some politicians, including Azikiwe, Senghor, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Lumumba, and Mandela—engaged
Africa’s past, stepping back into what can be referred to as the “era of purity,”
before the coming of Europe. We put into the books and poems what was uncovered there,
and this became known as African culture.

This was a very special kind of inspiration. Some of us decided to tackle the big
subjects of the day—imperialism, slavery, independence, gender, racism, etc. And some
did not. One could write about roses or the air or about love for all I cared; that
was fine too. As for me, however, I chose the former.

Engaging such heavy subjects while at the same time trying to help create a unique
and authentic African literary tradition would mean that some of us would decide to
use the colonizer’s tools: his language, altered sufficiently to bear the weight of
an African creative aesthetic, infused with elements of the African literary tradition.
I borrowed proverbs from our culture and history, colloquialisms and African expressive
language from the ancient griots, the worldviews, perspectives, and customs from my
Igbo tradition and cosmology, and the sensibilities of everyday people.

It was important to us that a body of work be developed of the highest possible quality
that would oppose the negative discourse in some of the novels we encountered. By
“writing back” to the West we were attempting to reshape the dialogue between the
colonized and the colonizer. Our efforts, we hoped, would broaden the world’s understanding,
appreciation, and conceptualization of what literature meant when including the African
voice and perspective.
²
We were clearly engaged in what Ode Ogede aptly refers to as “the politics of representation.”
³

This is another way of stating the fact of what I consider to be my mission in life.
My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this universal storytelling before
we can say, “Now we’ve heard it all.” I worry when somebody from one particular tradition
stands up and says, “The novel is dead, the story is dead.” I find this to be unfair,
to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is
dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.
⁴

There are some who believe that the writer has no role in politics or the social upheavals
of his or her day. Some of my friends say, “No, it is too rough there. A writer has
no business being where it is so rough. The writer should be on the sidelines with
his notepad and pen, where he can observe with objectivity.” I believe that the African
writer who steps aside can only write footnotes or a glossary when the event is over.
He or she will become like the contemporary intellectual of futility in many other
places, asking questions like: “Who am I? What is the meaning of my existence? Does
this place belong to me or to someone else? Does my life belong to me or to some other
person?” These are questions that no one can answer.

Ali Mazrui famously restated this position in his novel
The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
in which he takes my friend, the great poet, to task for, as Mazrui believes, “wasting
his great talent on a conflict of disputable merit: ‘The Nigerian Civil War and all
its ramified implications [can be] compressed in the single poetic tragedy of the
death of Christopher Okigbo.’”
⁵
In Mazrui’s fiction Christopher Okigbo finds himself charged with “the offence of
putting society before art in his scale of values. . . . No great artist has a right
to carry patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential.”
⁶

Christopher Okigbo believed, as I do, that art and community in Africa are clearly
linked. African art as we understand it has not been distilled or purified and refined
to the point where it has lost all traces of real life, lost the vitality of the street,
like art from some advanced societies and academic art tend to be. In Africa the tendency
is to keep art involved with the people. It is clearly emphasized among my own Igbo
people that art must never be allowed to escape into the rarefied atmosphere but must
remain active in the lives of the members of society.

I have described earlier the practice of
mbari
, the Igbo concept of “art as celebration.” Different aspects of Igbo life are integrated
in this art form. Even those who are not trained artists are brought in to participate
in these artistic festivals, in which the whole life of the world is depicted. Ordinary
people must be brought in; a conscious effort must be made to bring the life of the
village or town into this art. The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There
is constant change in the world. Foreign visitors who had not been encountered up
to that time are brought in as well, to illustrate the dynamic nature of life. The
point I’m trying to make is that there is a need to bring life back into art by bringing
art into life, so that the two can hold a conversation.

In a novel such as Amos Tutuola’s
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
you can see this vitality put to work on the written page. There is no attempt to
draw a line between what is permissible and what is not, what is possible and what
is not possible, what is new and what is old. In a story that is set in the distant
past you suddenly see a telephone, a car, a bishop—all kinds of things that don’t
seem to tie in. But in fact what you have is the whole life of the community, not
just the community of humans but the community of ancestors, the animal world, of
trees, and so on. Everything plays a part.

—

My own assessment is that the role of the writer is not a rigid position and depends
to some extent on the state of health of his or her society. In other words, if a
society is ill the writer has a responsibility to point it out. If the society is
healthier, the writer’s job is different.

We established the Society of Nigerian Authors (SONA) in the mid-1960s as an attempt
to put our writers in a firm and dynamic frame. It was sort of a trade union. We thought
it would keep our members safe and protect other artists as well. We hoped that our
existence would create an environment in Nigeria where freedom of creative expression
was not only possible but protected. We sought ultimately through our art to create
for Nigeria an environment of good order and civilization—a daunting task that needed
to be tackled in a country engulfed in crisis.

The notion of beneficent fiction is simply one of defining storytelling as a creative
component of human experience, human life. It is something griots have done in Africa
from the dawn of time—pass down stories that have a positive purpose and a use for
society, from generation to generation. Some people flinch when you talk about art
in the context of the needs of society, thinking you are introducing something far
too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn’t
be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from
the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed,
to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.
Still I think that behind it all is a desire to make our experience in the world better,
to make our passage through life easier. Once you talk about making things better
you’re talking about politics.

I believe that it is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment,
some kind of message, some kind of protest. In my definition I am a protest writer,
with restraint. Even those early novels that look like very gentle re-creations of
the past—what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past. That was the protest,
because there were people who thought we didn’t have a past. What I was doing was
to say politely that we did—here it is. So commitment is nothing new. Commitment runs
through my work. In fact, I should say that all of our writers, whether they’re aware
of it or not, are committed writers. The whole pattern of life demanded that one should
protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your traditions, your religion,
and so on.
⁷
The question of involvement in politics is really a matter of definition. I think
it is quite often misunderstood. I have never proposed that every artist become an
activist in the way we have always understood political activity. Some will, because
that’s the way they are. Others will not, and we must not ask anyone to do more than
is necessary for them to perform their task.

At the same time it is important to state that words have the power to hurt, even
to denigrate and oppress others. Before I am accused of prescribing a way in which
a writer should write, let me say that I do think that decency and civilization would
insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly there is no moral obligation
to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally
oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word,
would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
⁸
If one didn’t realize the world was complex, vast, and diverse, one would write as
if the world were one little county, and this would make us poor, and we would have
impoverished the novel and our stories.

The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred
years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge
it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand.
The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened
by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood. The writer
is often faced with two choices—turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating
complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the
former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
⁹

The Igbo believe that art, religion, everything, the whole of life are embodied in
the art of the masquerade. It is dynamic. It is not allowed to remain stationary.
For instance, museums are unknown among the Igbo people. They do not even contemplate
the idea of having something like a canon with the postulate: “This is how this sculpture
should be made, and once it’s made it should be venerated.” No, the Igbo people want
to create these things again and again, and every generation has a chance to execute
its own model of art. So there’s no undue respect for what the last generation did,
because if you do that too much it means that there is no need for me to do anything,
because it’s already been done.
¹⁰