ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

Growing up to ’11: A Nigerian Story

My first memories of elections in Nigeria takes me to June 1993 when the biggest political event of my generation took place. Before then, the most memorable memory I had was the death of someone called “The best president Nigeria never had.” That was Chief Obafemi Awolowo who, as the premier of the Western Region (another name for an area that covers all of Yorubaland), brought the first television station in Africa to Ibadan, my hometown, in 1959.

When Awolowo died in 1987, I was only six years old. Not technically though, since the man died around July – I think. My sixth birthday was to be in September. The most memorable thing I remembered from that day was lazing around my father’s living room and watching on television the lying-in-state of the man that came to define Nigeria’s postcolonial political history. The corpse laid in a glass casket. He had his wig on, and a pair of glasses. I also remember someone asking how they intended to inter someone with his spectacles on. I was too young to make sense of it all – the man’s political dominance and influence – but I heard his name a lot. It would take me years of research (reading his memoirs which my father gave me, among many other publications) to know all I needed to know. Father also made a record album in honour of Awolowo a few months later.

Now in 1993, I was much older. I was twelve and in secondary school. Much of my political consciousness came from rhetorics of elder brothers and their friends, and the media. MKO Abiola had promised to abolish poverty – sort of like promising to make it snow in Nigeria. When his election was annulled by the military dictator, and riots broke out, school was closed, and students spilled to the streets in protest. University students led protests and came to get us out of our schools. We all spilled in the street and fought with police and military men. It was exhilarating for me. I didn’t have much political consciousness to have been able to take sides, but the crises charged me up. We were tear gassed, and shot at. We walked great with friends and fellow rebels from school back home to the embrace of worried parents. It was the best of times for a curious almost teenager. It was also the worst of times for the country. A year later, there was a change of government, from one military dictatorship to another, and darkness descended on the country.

In 1998, I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Sani Abacha was dead, and I didn’t believe it. He had after all survived many rumours of death. A day before, Pope John Paul II had just left Abuja after a state visit (and also to plead for clemency for the lives of a bunch of military men sentenced to death for plotting a coup d’etaat.) The Pope wore white. Abacha wore black. They were both was on the NTA network news and Abacha looked as sick as Tell Magazine of a few weeks earlier said he was, but he looked strong and resolute as well, and mean. But he died. A few hours later, all the suya sellers were nowhere to be found. Their stalls and sheds had been destroyed by happy citizens giddy to be finally free from military dictatorship. Exactly one month later, MKO Abiola, the presumed winner of the election had died of poisoning after meeting with Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations and some other “American” visitors. Conspiracy theories abound, but by the end of the year, it was clear that the campaign message “Hope” from 1993 had gone forever.

And 1999 came, time for the new gentle looking military man to go. He had set machineries in place for democracy to return. I was out of secondary school. I was teaching in a primary school in Ibadan earning the lowest payable wage for that position and qualification while I waited for news of my admission into the University. The candidates were Olusegun Obasanjo (a former military ruler and a UN/Africa statesman), and Olu Falae, an economist: both Yorubas chosen to appease the region after the 1993 annulment and subsequent miscarriage of justice. The South-West voted for Falae. I wasn’t eighteen yet, so I didn’t vote, but I hoped that Falae would win. He didn’t. Obasanjo won from votes from all the other parts of the country. Again in 2003, Obasanjo won again for the second term. In 2007, he handed over to Yar’adua whose deputy was Goodluck Jonathan. Yaradua died last year in Saudi Arabia after a protracted illness. Goodluck Jonathan took over and has since consolidated his hold on power. I am here in the United States as a graduate student.

Last night, as I listened to the result of the votes in the primaries of the country’s largest political party, I was reminded of the memories of my participation in the politics of Nigeria: the sweat, the riots, the rhetorics, the fiery but always independent media, and the national obsession with the figures and players. It isn’t “Hope ’93” all over again, because now I can discern and see through songs and slogans of “MKO: Action! Abiola: Progress!! Na im be the hope for better tomorrow!!!” or Abiola=good and Tofa=bad etc. The coming election that will likely find me in an American class discussing language and society will be between candidates that we hope to get a chance to question, and examine. They will get to power again through our votes, but for the first time, I hope to get a chance to take them to task on what they would do: about Jos, about electricity, about health and higher education, and about a better environment for the people of the Niger Delta and other ethnic minorities. I have come of age, and so has my vote, and I am not giving it away for free, if I’m giving it away at all. I hope that there’d be televised and online debates as well as town hall meetings to question the candidates and ask them how they plan to move the country forward.

I’m proud of the progress taking place in Nigeria today and I hope that there would be public televised and online debates to listen to the candidates as well as town hall meetings to question them as to how they plan to solve problems. If I could go back in time, what a pleasure it would be to relive those experiences again, rebelling, challenging authorities and paying my dues of youth on the streets of a country that I love.

Scheduling a Semester

One of the more challenging parts of the beginning of a semester is figuring out a right schedule so as to prevent a case when each day is spent trying to catch up with the previous one. A graduate student who is also a graduate assistant faces the challenge of being able to balance his time in order to satisfy both his employers and his academic sponsors. It makes no sense to be a stellar employee and then become a poor student. I’ve always wondered how people who do more than one job (and have families, children etc) cope with being graduate students at the same time. Imagine having two young children, two or three jobs, and three classes a semester. But it’s America. Being resilient might just be the most important trait to possess.

I taught the first Foreign Language Yoruba class yesterday. It was mainly introductory, and it lasted an hour. In my experience, the first class is always the most crucial, especially for students hoping to see if the class is worth taking at all or not. The pattern is also always the same: the strange man walks in to a full class of staring students. They’re all silent and wait for him to break the ice. He stands there for a moment, thinks of the first words to say, and then walks back to the blackboard to write out a list of key words that they would need to remember – Yoruba, Nigeria, West Africa, 30 million speakers, Wole Soyinka, Hakeem Olajuwon, Sade Adu, Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje… – and then returns, by which time the words would come by themselves. “Hi. I’m Nigerian. Last year was my first time in the United States…”. From experience I know that it always helps to be seen first as the outsider.

I also attended my first class for the semester yesterday. It’s called “Discourse Analysis”, and I’m looking forward to all I can learn about how to analyse conversations and classify them on the basis of content, use, participants, context and many other variables. In the absence of a new commitment to the International Institute, I’m hoping that my class and work schedules will give me enough time to gain as much as possible knowledge from class interactions in a new course whose content looks promising so far.

Of Books and Used Books

I like books, but only to the extent that they don’t become a physical burden. When I was younger, I used to like the idea of a stacked bookshelf filled with books of different kinds – even when I didn’t get to read them all. My room when I was between fourteen and eighteen was filled with over two hundred books that I’d gathered from all around the house. I studied library archiving methods from books and made a list of all of them, delighting in the ability to monitor their movement whenever anyone borrowed them.

Much of those book were pass-me-downs from father and elder siblings. Father gave me tonnes of Readers’ Digest issues from the 60s and 70s along with series of novels from a writer called Dennis Robins. Sisters read James Hardley Chase and Harold Robins and a few Mills and Boons series. There were also books from the African Pacesetter series that provided an opening into a world of new adventures. The real heavyweight literature texts however were from Shakespeare (father gave me his copy of The Complete Works), Wole Soyinka (we had a copy of The Lion and the Jewel as well as The Jero Plays. I never did figure out who owned them. They could have strayed in somehow from borrowings. I remember vividly when father handed me his copy of Ake, saying, “This is one of his most accessible prose works. Even I can understand it. It turned out to be one of the writer’s most delightful reads.), Chukwuemeka Ike (The Bottled Leopard, The Naked Gods), D. Olu Olagoke’s The Incorruptible Judge, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child, Nkem Nwankwo (Danda and some other one I can’t remember now), Efua T. Sutherland’s Edufa, Chinua Achebe’s trilogies, and his outstanding Chike and the River which I read in primary school. I also remember Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge which I never read because at that time for a silly reason that it was too big a book to be read without accompanying pictures. Along with all of those were the Yoruba texts: all of D.O. Fagunwa’s books including the famous Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, Bamiji Ojo’s Menumo, Adebayo Faleti’s Ogun Awitele, Akinwunmi Isola’s Efunsetan Aniwura (which we read in the Yoruba class in secondary school), father’s own poetry and prose collections, among so many others.

The house was a wonderland of sorts with such very many ideas locked in the pages of creative texts that I delighted not only in reading, but in making mine. I called the home library The Virgo Library and made a catalogue of all borrower. I also made a rubber stamp out of flip-flops and branded all of them with coded numbers all starting with VL. Much of the said library became depleted between 2000 and 2005 of undergraduate studies through lending and book exchanges with friends. In turn, I exchanged them for an introduction into a world of new texts and so called “adult” literature of Rushdie, Joyce, Marquez and the rest of them.

Then there was the other realization that half of the books we should even be reading didn’t even get to Nigeria on time, except occasionally through professors (like Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji) who brought them in truckloads after every return trip. We read voraciously from the many book exchanges with such trusting professors. It was a good thing that books – like the sea – renewed their buoyancy after each use, and the knowledge in them went around. Sometime when I think about it now that I’m in the US with Amazon.com at my fingertips, I wonder how much we missed out of back then because we didn’t have anywhere to buy books, or sometimes even the means to do so. Great books were encountered only in random places either in the shelf of a travelling professor, or in the corner of a used bookstore by the side of the road.

Most of the books on Amazon.com today have used equivalents that cost between $0.01 and $1, excluding shipping. What a delight, especially to find out when they arrive that they actually look as good as new. But what if they didn’t? Who cares? A book is a book is a book. The content will remain the same through pawings, markings, note taking, and dogearings. I’ll read it, leave a few notes in some of the margins, and hand them over to the next reader. These days I don’t keep books with me anymore. I find the concept of a stationary shelf of books to be tiring and not just because of the cost to move them around through airport baggage weight scanners. It might be why the Kindle or the iPad have become the next best companion of the itinerant reader. As clichéd as it might sound, there’s still an allure to the feel of real books, and I won’t tire to buying and reading them. And this, my friends, is why those who take a look at my new Amazon wishlist will find a list of books I’ve wanted to read, along with a few gadgets that have stolen my interest, including the iPad. (Hint: Mr. Jobs, here’s your chance to win me completely over).

What is the value of books, or knowledge, or even Christmas gifts? A delight, I tell you. Or ask a fifteen year old boy discovering the world, discovering himself through the words of others in the dead of night.

__________________________

Picture source: http://www.binarydollar.com/category/frugal/, http://stkarnick.com/culture/category/culture101/

Goodwill Towards Men

If I could, I’d get a Santa hat to wear around this little town. The smell of snow and the colour of lights around houses in the neighbourhoods comes with a pleasant feeling of Christmas. If I could, I’ll get a Santa hat like the big American guy I saw early today at Walmart. He wore a pair of jeans, a tee shirt, and a Santa hat. He was not Santa Claus. Santa Claus doesn’t exist. He didn’t look good either. He looked goofy. But he had a Santa hat. If I could, I’d buy a Santa hat. But I won’t. I’m done with all things hats.

Hats are so last year, aren’t they? Let me leave that to Mohammed and Ameenah to project their Africanness wherever they go in the United States. They’re our new royalty of cultural exchange (although she still would not budge to my constant nagging that she takes off the religious head covering and replace it with something more culturally authentic – You’re Yoruba, for goodness’s sake. Get a Yoruba head gear. You’re and not from Saudi Arabia; and he would never stop complaining of how people become automatically distanced whenever they discover that he’s Arab. I wouldn’t suggest to him to wear a turban to class for his students either. Actually, now that I think about it, I would. Isn’t that the whole purpose of the exchange? Now that would be something). It is an interesting time to be here, learning good new lessons in cultural exchange through the eyes and experiences of some others standing at a different front line. Ameenah is Moslem from Nigeria. Mohamed is Arab from Morocco. Same continent, same religion, different people, a different outlook on life.

If I could get a Santa hat, I would. It is cold, and my hair (two months old) will soon become unable to provide needed protection. If my brain does eventually freeze itself off, I will have myself to blame, and lose the ability to do anything ever again. I should get a hat, again, truly. Ignore the fact that the last three I bought all got lost after the very first time I wore them. I ran into poet Eugene Redmond today on campus, almost by chance. An African-American writer from the United States, I met him in 2002 on the campus of my University in Ibadan and what struck me the most about his appearance was that he was always wearing an African-designed hat. Today was no exception.

If I could, I would get a Santa hat if only because it is the Christmas season. I could keep my head warm and fuzzy, and delight in the season, with goodwill towards men.

Why Nwaubani Was Wrong

Many commentators have already responded fittingly to a recently published op-ed in the New York Times by Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. (One of them was Carmen McCain in this blogpost). In “The Laureate Cause” which you can read on NY Times or on 234NEXT, Ms. Nwaubani argues a faulty logic that implies that having new authors write in local languages is detrimental to national unity and cohesiveness and thus bad for literature. To momentarily ignore the fallacy in assuming that writers write so as to further nationalistic goals rather than to justify their creative potential by creating using whatever means they have, the argument she makes insults intelligence. Language diversity is one of literature’s best assets as well as one of its most assaulted elements. It doesn’t need anymore drawbacks.

With an array of opinions and ideologies as many as the tools of translation available to linguists, it is already difficult to prevent one work from misinterpretation. (Orwell’s Animal Farm was translated into two different ideological interpretations in East and West Germany respectively during the cold war.) However, the pleasure of being able to read works written in the native thought and tongue of the writer has aways been unquantifiable, as can be seen from the feting of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mafouz, Gunter Grass, Mario Le Clezio and very many others including recent Mario Vargas Llosa who have all written in their local languages. If Ngugi Wa Thiong’o had won the Nobel this year, he would have been deserving of it, not just for the depth of his creativity, but for his contribution to the development of Gikuyu by choosing to write in it. We can only hope for more of those kind, and not less.

Many of the books I read as a child were in Yoruba and I can’t say it enough how much it helped my appreciation of English and all the other languages I have learnt to use. If tomorrow I choose to write in Yoruba – which I have certainly considered, I would represent an important a voice in literature as someone who decides to do it in Igbo or Swahili without care for English as an international language as long as I stay committed to the craft and say something new (or even something old, in a new voice and style) and say it well. We’ll have literary translators to do the rest. To make the case for English as the only medium of creative process is easily the biggest one of the many flaws of her essay, and a disingenuous take on the African literary present and future.

Cross posted at Nigerianstalk.org.

In Africa, the Laureate’s Curse

« Older Entries Newer Entries »