By Oduwaiye Fela
In a wide-ranging interview with News-Portal Nigeria, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka paid tribute to Chinua Achebe, who died on March 21, 2013 at 82. Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, also spoke on his personal relationship with Achebe and other Nigerian writers; his regrets about Achebe's last book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra; and his attempt to talk the late Biafran leader, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, out of fighting a war.
How did you react to the death of Prof. Chinua Achebe?
My reaction? Well, you know the boa constrictor - when it has just swallowed an abnormal morsel, it goes comatose, takes time off to digest. Today's global media appears indifferent to such a natural entitlement. You are expected to supply that instant response. So, if – as was the case - my first response was to be stunned, that swiftly changed to anger. I suspect, mostly because I was to have been present at his last Chinua Achebe symposium just a few months earlier - together with Governor Fashola of Lagos.
Something intervened and I was marooned in New York. When your last contact with someone, quite recent, is an event that centrally involves that person, you don't expect him to embark on a permanent absence. Also, Chinua and I had been collaborating lately on one or two home crises. So, it was all supposed to be 'business as usual'. Most irrational expectations at one's age but, that's human presumptuousness for you. So, stunned I was, primarily, then media enraged!
How would you evaluate Achebe's role in the popularization of African literature?
As a literary practitioner, my instinct tends towards a suspicion of "ghetto" classifications - which I did feel this was bound to be. When you run a regional venture, it becomes a junior
relation to what exists. Sri Lankan literature should evolve and be recognized as literature of Sri Lanka, release after release, not entered as a series. You place the books on the market and let them take off from there. Otherwise there is the danger that you start hedging on standards. You feel compelled to bring out quantity, which might compromise on quality.
I refused to permit my works to appear in the series - to begin with. My debut took place while I was Gowon's guest in Kaduna prisons and permission to publish. The Interpreters was granted in my absence. Exposure itself is not a bad thing, mind you. Accessibility! Making works available - that's not altogether negative. Today, several scholars write their PhD theses on Onitsha Market
literature. Both Chinua and Cyprian Ekwensi - not forgetting Henshaw and others - published with those enterprising houses. It was outside interests that classified them Onitsha Market Literature, not the publishers. All in all, the odds come down in favour of the series - which, by the way, did go through the primary phase of sloppy inclusiveness, then became more discriminating.
What's the nature of Achebe's enduring influence and impact in African literature in your view?
In interviews as well as in writing, Achebe brushed off the title of "Father of African literature." Yet, on his death, numerous media accounts, in Nigeria as well as elsewhere, described him as the father - even grandfather - of African literature. As you yourself have observed, Chinua himself repudiated such a tag - he did study literature after all, bagged a degree in the subject. So, it is a tag of either literary ignorance or "momentary exuberance". Those who seriously believe or promote this must be asked: Have you the sheerest acquaintance with the literatures of other African nations, in both indigenous and adopted colonial languages? What must the francophone, lusophone, Zulu, Xhosa, Ewe etc. etc. literary scholars and consumers think of those who persist in such a historic absurdity? It's as ridiculous as calling me father of contemporary African drama, or Mazisi Kunene father of African epic poetry or Kofi Awoonor father of African poetry. Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.
Let me just add that a number of foreign "African experts" have seized on this silliness with glee. It legitimizes their ignorance, their parlous knowledge, enables them to circumscribe, and then adopt a patronizing approach to African literatures and creativity. Backed by centuries of their own recorded literary history, they assume the condescending posture of mid-wiving an infant entity. It is all rather depressing.
In your younger days as writers, would you say there was a sense among your circle of contemporaries - say, Okigbo, Achebe, Clarke, Flora Nwapa - of being engaged in a healthy rivalry for literary dominance?
This question - the omission of Flora Nwapa, Mabel Segun (nee Imoukhuede) - and do include D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, so it is not just a gender affair - is related to the foregoing, and is basically legitimate. JP and I were however paying a tribute to a colleague within a rather closed circle of interaction, of which these others were not members. Finally, and most relevantly, we are language users – this means we routinely apply its techniques.
We knew what we were communicating when we placed "pioneer quartet" in - yes! - inverted commas. Some of the media may have removed them; others understood their significance and left them where they belonged.
What do you have to say on Achebe's last book, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, and its critical reception?
Some critics charged that the book was unduly divisive and diminished Achebe's image as a nationally beloved writer and intellectual. I don't really wish to comment on the work at this point. It is however a book I wish he had never written - that is, not in the way it was. There are statements in that work that I wish he had never made. The saddest part for me was that this work was bound to give joy to sterile literary aspirants like Adewale Maja-Pearce, whose self-published book - self-respecting publishers having rejected his trash - sought to create a "tragedy" out of the relationships among the earlier named "pioneer quartet" and, with meanness aforethought, rubbish them all – Wole Soyinka especially. A compendium of outright impudent lies, fish market gossip, unanchored attributions, trendy drivel and name dropping, this is a ghetto tract that tries to pass itself up as a product of research, and has actually succeeded in fooling at least one respectable scholar. For this reason alone, there will be more said, in another place, on that hatchet mission of an inept hustler.
On Biafra, were Igbo indeed victims of 'genocide', and what is your view on the question?
The reading of most Igbo over what happened before the Civil War was indeed accurate - yes, there was only one word for it - genocide. Once the war began however, atrocities were committed by both sides, and the records are clear on that. The Igbo got the worst of it, however. That fact is indisputable. The Asaba massacre is well documented, name by victim name, and General Gowon visited personally to apologize to the leaders. The Igbo must remember, however, that they were not militarily prepared for that war. I told Ojukwu this, point blank, when I visited Biafra. Sam Aluko also revealed that he did. A number of leaders outside Biafra warned the leadership of this plain fact. Bluff is no substitute for bullets.
How would you describe your relationship with Achebe from the early days when you were both young writers in a world that was becoming aware of the fecund, protean phenomenon called African literature?
My first comment is that outsiders to literary life should be more humble and modest. They should begin by accepting that they were strangers to the ferment of the earlier sixties and seventies. It would be stupid to claim that it was all constantly harmonious, but outsiders should at least learn some humility and learn to deal with facts. Where, in any corner of the globe, do you find perfect models of creative harmony, completely devoid of friction? We all have our individual artistic temperaments as well as partisanships in creative directions. And we have strong opinions on the merits of the products of our occupation. But - "rivalry for domination," to quote you - healthy or unhealthy? Now that is something that has been cooked up, ironically, by camp followers, the most recent of which is that ignoble character I've just mentioned, who was so desperate to prove the existence of such a thing that he even tried to rope JP's wife into it, citing her as source for something I never uttered in my entire existence. I cannot think of a more unprincipled, despicable conduct. The word "enemy" is strong and wrong. The Civil War split up a close-knit literary coterie, of which "the quartet" formed a self-conscious core. That war engendered a number of misapprehensions. Choices were made, some regrettable, and even thus admitted by those who made them. But the war did end. New wars (some undeclared) commenced. Chief Enahoro and I would later collaborate in a political initiative - though I never warmed up to him personally, I must confess.
Well then, this prospect that "my 1986 Nobel Prize in literature poisoned my personal relationship with a supposedly resentful Achebe" - I think I shouldn't dodge that either. Even if that was true - which I do not accept - it surely has dissipated over time. For heaven's sake, over twenty-five people have taken the prize since then! The problem remains with those vicarious laureates who feel personally deprived, and thus refuse to let go. Chinua's death was an opportunity to pries open that scab all over again. But they've now gone too far with certain posturing and should be firmly called to order, and silenced – in the name of decency. It covers all aspects of interaction with others. Wherever you witness a case of 'It's MINE, and no other's', 'it's OURS, not theirs', at various levels of vicarious ownership, such aggressive voices, ninety percent of the time, are bound to be Nigerians.
This is a syndrome I have had cause to confront defensively with hundreds of Africans and non-Africans. It is what plagues Nigeria at the moment - it's MY/OUR turn to rule, and if I/WE cannot, we shall lay waste the terrain. Truth is, predictably, part of the collateral damage on that terrain. So let me now speak as a teacher, it is high time Nigerians were openly instructed that Achebe and Soyinka inhabit different literary planets, each in its own orbit. If you really seek to encounter - and dialogue with – Chinua Achebe in his rightful orbit, then move out of the Nigerian entrapment and explore those circuits coursed by the likes of Hemingway, or Maryse Conde, or Salman Rushdie and so on and on along those orbits in the galaxy of fiction writers. In the meantime, let us quit this indecent exercise of fatuous plaints, including raising hopes, even now, with talk of "posthumous" conferment, when you know damned well that the Nobel committee does not indulge in such tradition. It has gone beyond 'sickening'.
Lastly, what is your parting tribute to Prof. Chinua Achebe?
My parting tribute to Chinua will therefore take the form of the long poem I wrote to him when he turned seventy, after my participation in the celebrations at Bard College. I plan for it to be published on the day of his funeral - my way of taunting death, by pursuing that cultural, creative, even political communion that unites all writers with a decided vision of the possible - and even beyond the grave.
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