For NoViolet Bulawayo: We need new names

Look at them leaving in droves, the children of the land, just look at them leaving in droves. Those with nothing are crossing borders. Those with strength are crossing borders. Those with ambitions are crossing borders. Those with hopes are crossing borders. Those in pain are crossing borders. Moving, running, emigrating, going, deserting, walking, quitting, flying, fleeing – to all over, to countries near and far, to countries unheard of, to countries whose names they cannot pronounce. They are leaving in droves. (p 145)

-        We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo

In the 21^st century, in the age of twitter and Facebook-induced ADHD, when a hard copy book is able to engage you nonstop for two days until you get to its end, all you can do is stand up at the end and give the author of such a miracle a rousing standing ovation. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut book, We Need New Names is such a book. Let’s just say the book did not make me cry but it certainly aggravated my allergies, something in the pages made a mess of my tear ducts. Bulawayo kicked this one way out of the ball park; dear writers, this is the book to beat. It is a beautiful book, in every sense; every sentence is pretty, you want to take each word home and cuddle up to it. The book may be dying, but Bulawayo is going to ensure that it doesn’t go down without a great fight. I have always thought that thanks to technology, the book at best would be relegated to an archival role, of dead history, etc. Nope, not with Bulawayo, this book is the most contemporary piece of literature I have read in a long time, it situates itself firmly in the 21^st century, firmly in our sitting rooms, in our laptops, tablets and smartphones and connects communities, countries and continents with muscle – and Skype. Now, that is how to write a book. Yes.

We Need New Names punches gaping holes in Africa’s boundaries and oozes lovely echoes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. So, what is this book about? Defiantly starting with the winning short story that ticked me off during the 2011 Caine Prize competition (see How not to write about Africa), Bulawayo takes the reader through the enchanting, disturbing and amazing journeys of six urchins growing up in a place one suspects is in Zimbabwe. Six ten-year old urchins dressed in NGO castoffs – Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho, Stina and the protagonist Darling, dream of escaping their hell, a place called, you wouldn’t guess it, Paradise. Paradise is hell, a desolate shanty town with a street pregnant with despair named Hope, a place where people simply wait to die, nothing but death and misery happens here. In this part of the world, children are born and they endure waves of war that they did not ask for. Example: Chipo is pregnant – with her grandfather’s baby – at age ten. They are always hungry and they raid the wealthy enclave of Budapest to steal guavas and fill their stomachs until they are too constipated to be hungry. I will never look at a guava the same way again, ever. You imagine six ten-year olds, dressed in the detritus of the West (used Google T-shirts, etc), one pregnant, feet dusty from constant trekking, exploring their devastation, dreaming and scheming of America, a world away where they think there is no hunger, and your heart stops, just stops, this is so wrong. Paradise. Hope. Despair. A deadly joke resides in there somewhere:

We all find places, and me, I squat behind a rock. This is the worst part about guavas; because of all those seeds, you get constipated once you eat too much. Nobody says it, but I know we are constipated again, all of us, because nobody is trying to talk, or get up and leave. We just eat a lot of guavas because it is the only way to kill our hunger, and when it comes to defecating, it becomes an almost impossible task, like you are trying to give birth to a country. (p 16)

We Need New Names is an unusual work of fiction – in a delightful sense. Every chapter has a name and the book reads like a collection of eighteen short stories, whose titles strung together collectively tell one delectable story: Hitting Budapest. Darling on the Mountain. Country-Game. Real Change. How They Appeared. We Need New Names. Shhhh. Blak Power. For Real. How They Left. Destroyedmychygen. Wedding. Angel. This Film Contains Some Disturbing Images. Hitting Crossroads. How They Lived. My America. Writing on the Wall.

And what a story. Each sentence throbs with understated passion. Bulawayo doesn’t use quotes; she employs a delicious neat trick – the dialogue melts into the prose. In effortless dialogue, remarkable since Bulawayo dispenses with the use of quotes, Bulawayo connects the West with Africa in the universality of wars and dysfunction. When the protagonist escapes the hell that was her Africa, she comes face to face with America and her issues, wars that are just as savage as the one she just left behind. And she wails about it in some of the best prose poetry I have ever read in my life. Paradise is hell, Budapest is hope and America, and the road that connects them is named Hope:

After crossing Mzilikazi we cut through another bush, zip right along Hope Street for a while before we cruise past the big stadium with the glimmering benches we’ll never sit on, and finally we hit Budapest. (p 2)

Budapest is the America that the children see on television:

Budapest is big, big houses with satellite dishes on the roofs and neat graveled roads or trimmed lawns, and the tall fences and the Durawalls and the flowers and the big trees heavy with fruit that’s waiting for us since nobody around here seems to know what to do with it. It’s the fruit that gives us courage, otherwise we wouldn’t dare be here. I keep expecting the clean streets to spit and tell us to go back where we came from. (p 4)

These are stories that tell of triumph over the basest of adversities. We Need News Names is unflinchingly disturbing and dark (there is an attempt at abortion by the ten year olds, and there is female genital mutilation). The old ways of Africa can no longer carry her burdens, and her proverbs and sayings are increasingly effete in a new world of twitter, unmanned drones and Wal-Mart. This is a very dark place, most of it a consequence of the rank incompetence of black rule, post-apartheid and independence, many thanks to the selfishness and self-absorption of the intellectual and ruling class. There is deep darkness in this book. Bulawayo’s mind draws intensely dark portraits; a dead woman hanging from a tree, for instance, and children stealing her shoes to go buy bread. Quietly the anger seethes and seethes and seethes in the pretty sentences.

There are daddy issues here, there are no real men here. There are strong whiffs of misandry; there are no real men here, Men are chief baboons in this zoo called Paradise, hapless men fleeing women and children to go to South Africa only to come home, not with bread but with AIDS, prosperity preachers, and men that impregnate their granddaughters and clueless men in the Diaspora shuffling about aimlessly. It is what it is. Here comes Virginia Woolf ululating out of the shadows, chasing men away from the playground:

Generally, the men always tried to appear strong; they walked tall, heads upright, arms steady at the sides, and feet firmly planted like trees. Solid Jericho walls of men. But when they went out in the bush to relieve themselves and nobody was looking, they fell apart like crumbling towers and wept with the wretched grief of forgotten concubines.

And when they returned to the presence of their women and children and everybody else, they stuck hands deep inside torn pockets until they felt their dry thighs, kicked little stones out of the way, and erected themselves like walls again, but then the women, who knew all the ways of weeping and all there was to know about falling apart, would both be deceived; they gently rose from the hearths, beat dust off their skirts, and planted themselves like rocks in front of their men and children and shacks, and only then did all appear almost tolerable. (p 77)

But then, with her enchanting way with words, she draws and paints harrowing pictures of a hell that strips men of their families and dignity with her evocative words. Hear her:

Two years ago, Makhosi went away to Madante mine to dig for diamonds, when they were first discovered and everybody was flocking there. When Makhosi came back, his hands were like decaying logs. He told us about Madante between bouts of raw, painful coughs, how when he was under the earth he forgot everything. He said all he knew inside that mine was the terrible pounding of the hammer around him, sometimes even inside him, like he had swallowed it. (p 23)

Bulawayo wrote this book with every ounce of her blood, the prose is so intense and personal, especially when she is writing about America, the protagonist’s adopted land. Bulawayo’s mind is a riot; it is as if she is a brainy lunatic. I love her quiet confidence, she does not italicize African terms and words, does not go all out to explain them either, reader do the research. I love that.

In We Need New Names, Bulawayo recreates the death of childhood innocence expertly. The details, seamy and dirty, seep out like shy determined children peeping at the world from behind walls of harried, abused mothers and at the end of the book, the portrait is complete – of human triumph over utter devastation. Rich complex imagery expertly folds into the reader’s consciousness in a manner that is just a wee bit more than matter-of-factly. The children’s studied indifference to pain is deliberate, as if to hunt, haunt and hurt the reader. It is what it is. Here are children raising themselves with the help of their mothers. In Bulawayo’s world, the fathers are absent, whenever they are around, they are no-good.

Bulawayo builds each character brick by brick like a master-builder and when she is done you are awed by the muscle of her gift. Bulawayo’s humor is quiet but insistent and once you think about it you burst out laughing in the darkness.  Here is a hilarious riff on the absurdity of imperial domination:

If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. That way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do, stealing not just a tiny piece, but a whole country. (p 20)

And the entire book is exquisite prose-poetry; here are my two favorite lines:

Paradise is all tin and stretches out in the sun like a wet sheepskin nailed on the ground to dry; the shacks are the muddy color of dirty puddles after the rains. (p 34)

And:

It’s light rain, the kind that licks you. We sit in it and smell the delicious earth around us. (p 89)

Steely-eyed and square-jawed, this pretty book that snarls takes careful aim at NGOs, liberal do-gooders and displays Bono-charity devastation on everyone’s conscience with exquisite attention to detail. Here is the new church, the new Christianity run amok. And her eyes do not miss Black Africa’s share of the caricature, of charlatanry. In this book, the new Christianity and AIDS link arms to bulldoze communities and countries. With the awesome power of words, Bulawayo performs a rare feat of bringing AIDS into the reader’s living room:

We don’t speak. We just peer in the tired light at the bundle of bones, at the shrunken head, at the wavy hair, most of it fallen off, at the face that is all points and edges from bones jutting out, the pinkish-reddish lips, the ugly sores, the skin sticking to the bone like somebody ironed it on, the hands and feet like claws. I know then that what really makes a person’s face is the meat; once that melts away, you are left with something nobody can even recognize. (p 101)

We Need New Names seems to go nowhere and it is on purpose. Like a hungry, angry urchin, it sort of wanders around with a certain poetry, the reader follows these children of many wars, wandering, wondering, what manner of God would allow this perversion? Bulawayo is the master artist of grief. This is a complex book, just like life. Here she documents the coming of the Chinese to Africa – the new conquerors:

It’s just madness inside Shanghai; machines hoist things in their terrible jaws, machines maul the earth, machines grind rocks, machines belch clouds of smoke, machines iron the ground. Everywhere machines. The Chinese men are all over the place in orange uniforms and yellow helmets; there’s not that many of them but from the way they are running around, you’d think they are a field of corn. And then there are the black men, who are working in regular clothes – torn T-shirts, vests, shorts, trousers cut at the knees, overalls, flip-flops, tennis shoes. (p 42)

Dambudzo Marechera lives in this book, primly flicking ash off the cigarette he bummed off his white benefactors. Bulawayo is edgy, unflinching, eyes dead set on your conscience until you gasp and look away in shame and disgust. This book can “pinch a rock and make it wince”, so says the book. The book makes it clear: The poor have inherited a new burden after apartheid and post-colonialism – home grown tyranny. Africa’s leaders are in a hurry to build Paris out of the slums, on the backs of the dead poor. Bulawayo describes the bulldozing of a shanty town in a voice so clinical you hurt from the pain. Yes, much of black rule is black on black crime. Bulawayo is supercilious, kneading condescension into the reader’s consciousness. You learn to hate Africa’s benefactors, as poverty monkeys for the NGO cameras. Fuck Bono, her muse seems to mutter in rage. Bulawayo’s skeptical eyes see everything and point out all the adjectives, Africa is about pejoratives and isms: Commercialism, capitalism, consumerism, rampant consumption and materialism, the clutter. There is a looming devastation; Africa is the nuclear waste dump of the West’s offal and detritus, a hellhole where the West’s bad ideas and products go to die.

Exile awaits migrating sprits as Africa empties herself of her beautiful children. When Darling the protagonist escapes Paradise for America, she soon finds that suffering and despair are universal conditions of mankind, exile is not much better than the hell that was Paradise in Africa. The second half of this book about life in America is what the gifted writer and fellow Zimbabwean Brian Chikwava should have written instead of his Harare North. Here, Bulawayo’s prose fairly sings, breaks into a beautiful trot and belts out haunting truths about life in Babylon for many immigrants. Even the entry is jarring:

A few days before I left, Mother took me to Vodloza, who made me smoke from a gourd, and I sneezed and sneezed and he smiled and said, The ancestors are your angels, they will bear you to America. Then he spilled tobacco on the earth and said to someone I could not see: Open the way for your wandering calf, you, Vusamazulu, pave the skies, summon your fathers, Mpabanga and Nqabayezwe and Mahlathini, and draw your mighty spears to clear the paths and protect the child from dark spirits on her journey. Deliver her well to that strange land where you and those before you never dreamed of setting foot. (p 150)

Finally he tied a bone attached to a rainbow-colored string around my waist and said, This is your weapon, it will fight off all evil in that America, never ever take it off, you hear? But then when I got to America the airport dog barked and barked and sniffed me, and the woman in the uniform took me aside and waved the stick around me and the stick made a nting-nting sound and the woman said, Are you carrying any weapons? And I nodded and showed them my weapon from Vodloza, and Aunt Fostalina said, What is this crap? And took it off and threw it in a bin, Now I have no weapon to fight evil in America.

The transition from Africa to America is expertly handled. The cultural shifts are jarring and alarming even. Even in America Bulawayo’s muse only sees darkness; there is little joy here, as if childhood trauma conferred a certain form of depression on her characters. But still there is much to laugh about. Bulawayo offers an unintended but hilarious update on Wole Soyinka’s epic poem Telephone Conversation in which Bulawayo explores the cultural and linguistic conflicts between immigrants and Americans as they negotiate the new land. (p 197) There is a good section in the book where there is an intense confrontation between two erstwhile friends; the African in the Diaspora (Darling), and the African at home (Chipo). This is simply brilliant writing, period; the most brilliant conversation on the anxieties of 21^st century immigration I have ever read, again, this section of the book is Chikwava’s Harare North with depth.

Here is coming of age in America:

We are cruising like that and I’m being forced to listen to this stupid Rihanna song that everybody at school used to play like it was an anthem or something. Well, maybe the song isn’t stupid, it’s only that I just got generally sick of that whole Rihanna business, the way she was on the news and everything, I know her crazy boyfriend beat her up but I don’t think she had to be all over, like her face was a humanitarian crisis, like it was the fucking Sudan. (p 218)

Here is alienation:

No matter how green the maize look in America, it is not real. They call it corn here, and it comes out all wrong, like small, sweet, too soft. I don’t even bother with it anymore because eating it is really a disappointing thing, it feels like I’m just insulting my teeth. (p 164)

Here is longing:

The uncles and aunts bring goat insides and cook ezangaphathi and sadza and mbhida and occasionally they will bring amacimbi, which is my number one favorite relish, umfushwa, and other foods from home, and people descend on the food like they haven’t eaten all their lives. They tear off the sthwala with their bare hands, hastily roll and dip it in relish and pause briefly to look at one another before shoving it in their mouths. Then they carefully chew, tilting their heads to the side as if the food speaks and they are listening to the taste, and then their faces light up. (p 161)

Here is culture clash:

When the microwave says nting, fat boy TK takes out a pizza and eats it. When the microwave says nting, he takes out the chicken wings. And then it’s the burritos and hot dogs. Eat, eat, eat. All that food TK eats in one day, me and Mother and Mother of Bones would eat in maybe two or three days back home. (pp. 156-157)

Now, that is brilliant, delectable writing. It gets better; you must read two chapters, How They Left and How They Lived. Bulawayo lapses into haunting, almost hallucinatory prose-poetry, the emotion and passion shake you to your core. She grieves and grieves and grieves and she will not be consoled, oh she grieves, this child that saw something awful. Read those chapters to the most stone-hearted immigration official in America and political asylum is yours. The words seep into your bones and slap you awake. Suddenly you just want to go home, except no one knows anymore where is home, the passages are so deeply emotive. America the hopeful morphs into America the prison. Illegal immigration is the lot of many immigrants and Bulawayo handles it beautifully.  It is the truth, for many immigrants, exile in America is a long lament and Bulawayo beats the drums for the living dead.

Let me just put it out there: This is probably the best book I have read in a very long time, perhaps in a decade, certainly the most poignant ode to identity, alienation and longing. You simply fall in love with the writing and the characters. Boundaries, communities and nations fascinate Bulawayo endlessly and she plumbs their depths and boundaries honestly and with conviction.  By the way, the characters text and IM – in an African novel, wow, what a concept. We Need New Names is the face of today’s fiction ported to yesterday’s media – the book.

There is not a whole lot to not like about the book. It is well designed and even though I had an advance review copy, there were precious few edits which I am sure would have been taken care of in the final copy. There is a sense though in which Bulawayo does not much depart from the protest art of post-colonialist literature. The book could fairly be called a political statement posing as fiction. But it is funny nonetheless even when Bulawayo is being supercilious:

I’m supposed to start teaching him my language because he says he and his brother are going to my country so he can shoot an elephant, something he has dreamed of doing ever since he was a boy. I don’t know where my language comes in – like does he want to ask the elephant if he wants to be killed or something? (p 268)

Bulawayo’s world-view is out there for all to see, she doesn’t pretend that this is just fiction and one must shy away from those things.

You should read this stunning book along with Chika Unigwe’s equally stunning essay in Aeon magazine, Losing my voice.  In this intensely personal and evocative essay Unigwe gives voice to the deep anxieties faced by many immigrants like her as they came face to face with the dislocation from home. Unigwe’s experience is immediately before the muscular bringing down of all walls by the Internet and social media, both works complement each other greatly, in style, outlook and vision. The difference is that while one senses that even beyond We Need New Names, the protagonists may be still immersed in despair, Unigwe’s story ends in hope and triumph, a warrior overcoming her fears and finding the light switch in the dark. But the pain in Unigwe’s journey is heartrending:

When I left Nigeria for Belgium, I made my husband’s home my own. But homesickness lodged like a stone inside me… When I began to write again, I discovered that I was not writing the kind of fiction I would have written back home. Certainly not at first. I wrote about displacement and sorrow. The voices of immigrants filled my head and spilled out on several pages of short stories and then a novel, The Phoenix. My characters were mostly melancholic women unable to return home but lacking the tools (or perhaps the temperament) to fit into their new home. They were victims browbeaten into silence by an alien culture and an alien climate. Perhaps it was me wanting to pass on what I had suffered to someone else. Maybe it is human nature to seek revenge even when there is none to be sought.”

The writer Taiye Selasi (of Ghana Must Go) has also forcefully fought against the pigeon-holing of “Africans” into predictable labels – and stereotypes. Under her fierce and passionate watch, the term Afropolitan has taken wings, as in, we are the sum of our life’s experience. Read her powerful and evocative essay, Bye-Bye Barber, and her powerful memoir-essay on being an African  and you will get the sense that a generation of Africans is breaking free from the literature of Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye. I don’t really care much for labels (Chimamanda Adichie has Nigerpolitans in her new book, Americanah) but I think it is a good thing that these writers are resisting pigeonholes.

We Need New Names is not a perfect book (but then, is there a perfect book?). Take this passage for instance:

When America put up the big reward for bin Laden, we made spears out of branches and went hunting for him. We had just appeared in Paradise and we needed new games while we waited for our parents to take us back to our real homes. At first we banged on the tin shacks yelling for bin Laden to come out, and when he didn’t we ran to the bushes at the end of the shanty, We looked in the thickets; climbed trees, looked under rocks, We searched everywhere. Then we went and climbed Fambeki, but by the time we got to the top, we were hot and bored. It was like looking for air; there was just no bin Laden. (pp. 288-289)

It is funny, but then if the book’s characters were about 14 years old in 2009 (when Rihanna was mauled by Chris Brown) they would probably have been too young in 2001 (when 9/11 happened),  to be that politically savvy. Who cares? I am smitten.

Finally, I must return to my anxieties about the single story, of despair, gore and war as I expressed in my essay, The Caine Prize: How not to write about Africa. This is what I said with regard to the shortlisted stories of the 2011 Caine Prize which Bulawayo eventually won, and I stand by it:

The Caine Prize for African Writing has been great for African literature by showcasing some truly good works by African writers. The good news is that the Caine Prize is here to stay. The bad news is that someone is going to win the Caine Prize this year. This is a shame; having read the stories on the short-list I conclude that a successful African writer must be clinically depressed, chronicling in excruciating detail, every open sore of Africa, apologies to Wole Soyinka. The creation of a Prize for “African writing” may have created the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa for glory.

Of Bulawayo’s entry, I said this:

Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has a fly-ridden piece, Hitting Budapest, about a roaming band of urchins, one of them impregnated by her grandfather – at age ten… Bulawayo would be my pick for the prize. She sure can write, unfortunately her muse insists on sniffing around Africa’s sewers… The tragedy is that these are good writers showcasing good prose and great dialogue.  But to the extent that literature documents the lived life, they are stuck in the fog of stereotypes.

For too long, there has been a disturbing trend in African literature in which Africa’s history is being distorted by a powerful minority of mercenary Diaspora African writers. Postcolonial African literature has been grossly distorted and unduly influenced by the self-serving narrative-for-rent hawked by this contingent of writers. Using their access to good publishers, their mediocre thoughts hide behind pretty covers to assault Africa’s sensibilities. I remain deeply concerned about the reality that much of African literature is defined by a certain type of fiction, as articulated in books, much of it predictable poverty porn. I propose again that those who seek to catalogue the robust range of Africa’s stories must in addition to books, look to Twitter, Facebook, online journals and blogs for relief. The book alone is a wretched barometer for gauging Africa’s anxieties and triumphs. The sum total of those stories shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize stamped a pejorative on Black Africa and I had a huge problem with that. Apparently the Caine Prize organizers were concerned enough to declare a moratorium on submissions that smelt of poverty porn in 2012. I am happy that they listened to these concerns. Bulawayo’s debut novel in my view does not qualify as poverty porn. Everything depends on context, taken as a whole it tells a powerful story of hell, identity, alienation, longing and the restlessness of life’s journeys in both worlds – Black Africa and the West. Bulawayo proves with stunning literary muscle that there suffering and savagery are universal dysfunctions. Bulawayo will be back with more stories. This reader can’t wait.

Presenting Victor Ehikhamenor’s luscious demons: Amusing the Muse – April 29 – May 31 2013

(Lagos, April 21, 2013) Temple Muse is proud to present Amusing the Muse, an art exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by Victor Ehikhamenor, one of Nigeria’s most progressive contemporary artists, who is also a celebrated writer and photographer.

Victor’s unique calligraphic style of black and white symbolic images presents  a fresh perspective on contemporary African art.  His style is influenced by the drawings he grew up with on the walls of sacred spaces in Udomi-Uwessan, Edo State, Nigeria. Over the years, we have seen his bold symbols encased in doors and window frames as in his Entrances and Exits series, or literally bouncing “off and through” vibrant, multi-layered, colorful paintings. His sculptures of repurposed mundane objects like old typewriters and generators are often thought provoking socio-political critiques, while his video art installations have seen art enthusiasts curiously intent on watching how he transforms blank spaces by completely covering them in a proliferation of symbols to become cocoons of fantastical imagery.

In Amusing the Muse, Victor presents an exciting new dimension to his art with his “Paintforation” technique that uses nail perforations on thick white handmade paper to create subtle relief work –  a new take on his popular face series. He explains that he has translated ancient rituals of body scarification evident in 16^th and 17^th century Nigerian bronze heads into his contemporary masks. But whether through his perforated “White Mask”, or his bold ink-color faces in which he uses symbols as highlights, almost like thoughts flitting across their minds, Victor’s art continues to tease and beckon.

”The face phenomenon dawned on me during the Occupy Nigeria protests, while I was photographing people,” explains Victor, who has a first degree in English Literature from Ambrose Ali University in Ekpoma, Nigeria, and two masters degrees in fine arts (creative writing) and technology management from the University of Maryland at College Park, USA. “I realized what really formed the mass of differences are the faces. People live and die by the look and shape of their faces. I believe faces define humanity. The face is the GUI (graphical user interface) of the brain.”

In three large canvas wall hangings spanning over 5 meters in length or width, Victor presents lone human forms completely engulfed in landscapes of symbols. “As a figurative-abstractionist I hate taming my style. I have started working on very large pieces, using charcoal on canvas. These works are stories and histories, myths and mythologies, tales and folktales, beliefs and disbeliefs, ” he explains standing in front of a work entitled Adam & Eve waiting for a flight out of Eden, an over 6 meter wide wall hanging,  which is his visual representation of  the entire book of Genesis told “in one fell swoop”.

Amusing the Muse is presented by Temple Muse, Nigeria’s foremost luxury design and lifestyle space, which may be one of Lagos’ best kept secrets. Temple Muse has been active in the highly competitive African design and fashion space since 2008.  It has established a quiet reputation of presenting cutting edge Nigerian fashion brands such as Tiffany Amber, LDA, Iconic Invanity and Ituen Basi, alongside global brands such as Emilio Pucci, Givenchy, and Matthew Williamson. Temple Muse has also taken part in internationally celebrated fashion fiestas such as Arise Fashion Week, Elite Model Look, as well as many other collaborations within Nigeria.

“In an effort to broaden our support of cutting edge Nigerian creativity, Temple Muse is starting specially curated art shows showcasing the hottest Nigerian visual artists in our pure white design space, ” explained the Creative Director of Temple Muse. “Victor Ehikahmenor’s exquisite and quirky drawings and paintings are the start of a dynamic synergy between contemporary art fusing with avant garde design and fashion.”

The show is curated by Sandra Mbanefo Obiago and is supported by Veuve Clicquot. It is open to the public from April 29^th to May 31^st, 2013.

Curatorial Statement: Sandra Mbanefo Obiago – Musing on Multiple Levels

Amusing the Muse, is a show of recent works by Victor Ehikhamenor, one of Nigeria’s most progressive contemporary artists. In describing Victor’s expressive energy, one must be willing to watch him perform on diverse creative platforms that reflect his unique perspective through paintings, photography, sculpture, mixed media works, graphic design, and writing.

I met Victor in 2008 when he returned to Nigeria from the United States to become the creative director of 234NEXT newspaper. What was immediately evident was that the pioneer NEXT team that brought us fresh investigative news and analysis were young Nigerians who were intent on breaking the cycle of conformism. Victor’s editorial and creative edge quickly attracted attention and had us watching him with keen interest as he impressed us with both his journalistic and artistic dexterity. His signature slogan Stand up, Stand out! encapsulates Victor’s aim to infuse his work with life changing dynamism.

Victor’s unique calligraphic style of black and white are symbolic images drawn deeply from his roots. His style is influenced by the drawings he grew up with on the walls of sacred spaces in Udomi-Uwessan, Edo State, Nigeria. Over the years, we have seen these bold symbols encased in doors and window frames as in his Entrances and Exits series, or created as black and white charcoal drawings, as well as literally bouncing “off and through” vibrant, multi-layered, colorful paintings and thought-provoking sculptures of repurposed mundane objects like old typewriters and generators. His video art installations have seen us curiously intent on watching how he transforms blank spaces by completely covering them in a proliferation of symbols to become cocoons of fantastical imagery.

In this exhibition, Victor shows us an exciting new dimension with his “Paintforation” technique that uses nail-like perforations on thick white handmade paper to create subtle relief work —  a new take on his popular face series. He explains that he has translated ancient rituals of body scarification evident in 16^th and 17^th century Nigerian bronze heads into his contemporary masks. But whether through his perforated “White Mask”, or his bold ink-color faces in which he uses symbols as highlights, almost like thoughts flitting across their minds, Victor’s art continues to tease and beckon.

I am particularly excited about how Victor’s recent works bring a new energy into the pure white design space of Temple Muse, Nigeria’s foremost lifestyle platform. His extra large charcoal on canvas drawings with human forms engulfed in a sea of symbols, are on the scale of pieces that were created for high vaulted international art galleries. These wall hangings bring an incredible energy and vibrancy to Temple Muse, known for its high end local and international luxury brands. What we have here is a synergy of contemporary art meeting bold and zesty design and fashion.

I hope you enjoy Amusing the Muse, Temple Muse’s first of many specially curated art exhibitions that will bring you some of Nigeria’s quirkiest new trends in cutting edge contemporary art.

Sandra Mbanefo Obiago

Curator

Lagos, April 2013

Emmanuel Iduma: In Conversation with Victor Ehikhamenor

EI: To start with, was your process for this body of work, in terms of materials and concept, different from other projects you have worked on?
VE: Not drastically different but I always push myself to see how my materials will react to the concept I want to execute. I like surprising myself and my viewers. I also strive not to bore my collectors.

EI: Why did you choose “Amusing the Muse” as title for this show?
VE:  Often times the muse amuse me, it is my turn to amuse the muse too by deviating a bit from what she wants me to do. It sounds cheeky, but trust me it is the truth. However it a tribute to that muse, not necessarily in the visual rendition but in the titles of the works. Some of the titles are serious, but hilarious at the same time. It’s a fun show for me.

EI: In a number of the pieces, there is a splashy quality to the way colours are used. Is this deliberate? Was there something you were trying to achieve?
VE: [Laughs] I guess what you see as splashy is what others may see as the energy with which the works were executed. Those particular “splashy” paintings were done furiously as though someone set my brains on fire and I had stamp out the furnace furiously. As a figurative-abstractionist I hate taming my style. Sometimes I do not control colour runs, I let things take their own live paths. But there is sanity in the madness of it all.

EI: You have always tried to break conventions in your work. In this show for instance, there are a number of works where there is a conscious attempt to introduce new techniques in using paper. Was this an important aspect of this work and what are the challenges so far?
VE: I like experiment and tinkering with the norm. I believe what you are referring to are the ones I call “paintforation” (Painting by perforation). Every so often, I look at African “traditional” art, and see what my ancestors had done well and I usually borrow from that. As you may well know, my entire style as an artist is based on the ancestral shrine wall designs in my village. I consumed a lot of the stylistics as a kid and I have stretched that experience as an adult. Coming back to paintforation, when you look at some Benin or Ife masks, you would see tiny holes in the works, a form of perforation in rendering but on harder surfaces like wood, bronze or metal. Many old Oshogbo artists also perforated metal sheet to form art. I want to explore that tradition on handmade papers which I have just started to do here. The only small challenge I am facing so far is the lack of handmade papers in Nigeria art stores. So far I have to import or buy them whenever I travel out of the country.

EI: If you don’t mind, can you add a few more comments on “White Mask”?
VE: White Mask is the very first piece I did in the style of paintforation. It’s a tedious process; it requires punching a lot of holes to make any meaningful pattern. White Mask is commenting on the histo-sociological idea of masks only being associated with “blackness”. It is also interesting to know that I have come across some Africans or even African Americans who desperately want to be white by constantly wearing that invisible yet vicinal white mask. So we can say I am subtly visualizing Frantz Fanon’s idea in his book, “Black Skin, White Masks.”

EI: One of the works that stand out – perhaps because of its size – is “Adam and Eve Waiting for A Flight Out of Eden.” Did you find it easy, or difficult, maybe even exhilarating, while you worked on it, especially because it seems to be imbued with so much detail?

It’s also a new dimension in my work, size wise. You can say it is a “size” of things to come. I have started working on very large pieces, using charcoal on canvas. These works are stories and histories, myths and mythologies, tales and folktales, beliefs and disbeliefs. This particular one is based on the biblical story of Adam and Eve and all that surrounds them before they departed the Garden of Eden. The work is the entire book of Genesis told in one full swoop.

VE: “Faces” continue to dominate your work, whether as paintings or drawings. Is there any reason why you have been fascinated by visages?
EI: Let’s call it my “faces phase,” like Picasso’s blue phase. Face is the oldest and still the most used form for human recognition. In a crowded place, it’s mostly faces you would really see. This face phenomenon dawned on me during the Occupy Nigeria protests, I was photographing people but realized what really formed the mass of differences are the faces. People live and die by the look and shape of their faces during wars. He is Gikuyu, she kikuyu, he is Igbo, she is Hausa, he is from the Congo, she is Ghanaian; we can throw such statements and mostly be right by one look at our subject’s facial features. Your face is also the most important part of your identity in a travelling document such as international passport. I believe faces define humanity. You can read emotions such as joy, happiness, sadness, love, hate – only on a face. You hear phrases like “Hide your face in shame”, “Your face look familiar”. The face is the GUI of the brain, period. Yes, you will always find faces in my paintings and drawings.

EI: Can you speak a little about viewer responses to your work, especially since you started showing in Nigeria after a long absence?
VE: I never showed in Nigeria before I left. However, it has been encouraging is all I can tell you.

EI: What are your expectations for the reception of this work?
VE: I hope the viewers’ find something interesting and educating to take away, something transient yet transcendent beyond the colours and shapes of my paintings.

EI: Did you draw strength from the work of any other artist while working on this show?
VE: The works of our greatly talented ancestors always come in handy. But you have to realize there are so many artists who are doing great things within and outside the country, and I draw a lot of energy from them. A few of the most engaging Nigerian artists today are my close friend, our pulsating discussions outside the studio space fuel me when I am in my studio.

VE – Victor Ehikhamenor | EI – Emmanuel Iduma

 Emmanuel Iduma is the author of Farad, a novel (Parresia Publishers, 2012). He trained as a Lawyer, and works as a writer, critic and manager of creative projects in Lagos.

for more information please contact:   sandraobiago@yahoo.com, 08034021901

Ominira’s room

Memories of my past, harried dad chasing after you, little one, you with the two teeth, come rushing at me in the cold bluster of England’s faux indifference. How are you, princess? Miss me, do you?

I step into Ominira’s room. It is a mess. She won’t clean her room, this princess of ours. We have tried everything, nothing works. She stands there, dreaming, like me her father, dreaming into space, traveling a world alien to us. We are tired of screaming at her. She is tired of screaming at us. Nothing works. Ominira’s room. It is a pretty room. If only she would clean it. It is a pretty room made for little girls who have no care in the world. There are pink colors everywhere. I pick up her things from the floor .Lots of things.  She is standing there in the middle of her mess with eyes that ruin a father’s resolve. She stares at me, the beginning of defiance and tears welling up in her eyes. The dam of tears will break without fail once the scream-fest begins. I have no screams in me this morning. Wordlessly I begin to clean the room. Relieved, she flees the room, to go stare at the world through the computers that litter the house. She has won this battle. Again.

 I pick up her things, she has too much. And she has forgotten what she has. Because she has too much I retrieve a video game console from deep within Christmas wrappings shredded by feverish little hands. She wanted that hardware so badly. And she stayed at the foot of our bed, begging until we gave in. There are pretty little dresses with the names of alien designers on them. She will be back to them. She loves dresses. I hold one dress and remember the Christmas of my childhood in Nigeria. I don’t remember buying “ready-made” clothes. We went to the tailor. It was cheaper. And boy, were they creative, those tailors.

 Our little girl has too much. We must build shelves for her things. In one corner she has two bags of old clothing. They are not really old. She does not want them anymore. I take them out of the room to go join their relatives – more bags of clothes waiting for the trip to grateful relatives in Nigeria, or to indifferent charities in America who swear we are only doing it for the tax deduction, charity be damned.

There is a poster on the wall. It talks about girls being princesses and boys waiting on their princesses. I hope she keeps up that attitude. I will need the bride price for my old age. There is a poster on the floor. It is a wordless poster, full of dogs. She wanted a dog. We said no. Actually, mom said no. And now, we are miserable. Because she wants a dog. Everywhere we go we see dogs. And she sighs. She asks us questions about dogs. It is always about a dog. Can we get a dog? When are we getting a dog? Daddy, let’s go to the pet store, please! We are not getting a dog for this little girl. She has two gerbils, Lunar and Ginger. Ginger is dead, frozen one cold night, because you-know-who forgot to bring the cage up from  the cold basement.. Lunar survived by a shivering whisker. We had fish once. You don’t want to know what happened to the fish. But a dog!  In America, a dog has the status of a child. It is a permanent status for as long as the dog is alive. It is the law. We don’t need another child. This one, Ominira, is a handful.

 We did not get Ominira a dog. We got a dog poster instead. She did not like the dog poster and she left it on the floor with the rest of the rejected sacrificial offerings to a finicky princess. I snatch the poster from the floor and I go looking for our daughter. Where do you want this poster, princess? Her eyes light up like a puppy’s and she asks: Are we getting a dog, daddy? I avert my eyes and I ask her again: Where do you want this poster? She sighs and points to a general area near her bed. She doesn’t care for mute dogs that live in one-dimensional posters. I put the poster up. I step out of the room, lean out the door, look in and the room is clean and pretty again. I ask Ominira, What do you think? Silence. I turn around, she is gone. I can hear her at the foot of our bed, tormenting her mother, my lover, with the same question over and over again: Are we getting a dog today, mummy?

 I step out of the room, lean on the door. I look in and the room is clean and pretty again. She’ll be back to torment me with the awesome noise of her willful silence. Sigh.

Lost in America: Self portrait

Who am I? I am glad you asked. I am an area boy. That is the sum of my essence. I have been loitering around the earth doing what, I don’t know. I expect that when I get to the pearly gates, Orunmila will ask me: So… what did you go do over there? And I would reply: I have no idea! Shebi you were the one that sent me over there!

 So I have told you that I don’t know what I am doing here. I have found myself floating lazily on bits and pieces of the flotsam and jetsam of life, sometimes enjoying myself, sometimes, just being miserable, call it a bi-polar existence. I have three sets of admirers: Those who love me when I am rolling with the joy of the ride, those who love me when I am rolling with the rage of my condition and those who love me anyway. I don’t like formal education; I am happily anti-intellectual. My most miserable times have been spent being miserable under classroom arrest, quaking in my boots before someone with enough gumption to call me a student. The forced structure of a classroom experience, the suffocating dictatorship of the classroom’s hierarchy, the sage on the stage silliness instead of that guide by the side paradigm, man that stuff eats me up. But I lived through it all, I survived (I think) the tyranny of Catholic Boarding School (five hellish years) and the phoniness of a university education.

So I have all these certificates but so what? Na book man go chop? I can honestly say that they have been worthless to my sense of self-worth – they read like an after-thought, an irritating footnote to everything that I hold dear. I still read a lot but I don’t read a lot <grin>. I mean, if you read something and you don’t remember that you read it have you been reading? I think that the book as a medium of communication is dead. I exaggerate slightly. The book is on life support. Who read reads books anymore? Why bother? A monkey with a credit card can bag a PhD off the Internet in two weeks flat. Money talks. Just click on the one you want, it goes on your electronic shopping cart and voila, in two weeks when the post office delivers your certificate, you are now Obo the monkey, PhD!

Books just confuse the hell out of me. Take Ben Okri’s books for instance. I am yet to finish any one of his books. My ego will not let me denounce them as unreadable. I wish I had Chinweizu’s courage. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Ben Okri is a genius. In his books, poetry shows up in many places. Okri is a survivor of a war. Westerners roaming Okri’s world would definitely find a magical world, albeit one that is a grimly overrated reality for many children of Africa- mute witnesses to a looming tragedy.  Okri is one brainy warrior determined to tell a story to the world. But I don’t get Okri. I started out with The Famished Road. Dropped it. Picked up In Arcadia and left it somewhere in the bathroom, awed by its incoherence. Picked up The Famished Road again. And I have just stopped reading it again. The Famished Road is a ship-wreck of a novel – shimmering like glassy pieces of brainy material glued together by Okri’s nightmares. The Famished Road immerses you in the despair that you already know of – a story that goes nowhere, fascinating in its mindlessness, but Westerners in America’s suburbs would find it riveting in its grounding with an imagined reality. They will see a society forced into mindless drudgery, its citizens worshiping the deities churning their dreams into nightmares. There will be a need for heavy lifting to shift from this paradigm of irredeemable despair. Hope assures us of the triumph of the will of the beautiful children of Africa willing themselves to survive the vat of hellish carcinogens that is the world they have been thrust in. You will not find that hope in Okri’s world. Despair sells like hot crumpets. I will probably be back because my friend (who is soooo smart) loves Okri. She is always saying, Ikhide you must read Okri, you must read Okri, he is a diviner! I will read Okri again because my friend says to read Okri. But I don’t get Okri.

 I haven’t read many real books lately. I read a lot of junk on the Internet. Every now and then one comes across some good stuff but I wonder if the author knows… Many moons ago I read this really nice piece by the brilliant writer Tolu Ogunlesi – Burn a Bookshop Today; here is an actual quote from this genius: “After the man who invented education, the guy who invented books and publishing deserves the title of Public Enemy No.1.” And I say, Amen! And one last thing, this visionary (Tolu Ogunlesi, that is, not me!) suggests: “If you can’t burn a bookshop, there’s something else you can do: Kidnap a writer, especially a published one! That will discourage the unpublished ones.” A double Amen! to that! I shall be back.

Lost in America – Coming to America!

I don’t know why I came to America. The year was 1982. Nigeria was a world super power, our embassies all over the world routinely denied white people visas to come to Nigeria (yes, we did!). Sisi Clara at the embassy in Washington DC would take one withering look at the pale jelly fish quivering in her presence at the embassy, stamp a lusty DENIED! on his passport and shoo him off with the sage words: “Gerraway jo! Olosi! Your father will not see Nigeria, your mother will not see Nigeria! You will not see the yansh of Nigeria! Olosi! Olori buruku! Moose from Alaska!” And the wimp would slink off wailing: “I want to go to Nigeria! Waaaaaaaaah!” Those were the days. The Naira was stronger than the American dollar and university graduates were paid N300 a month. That was a lot of money in those days. I would know. So, my friend Fat Stanley and I were really enjoying life. We walked around telling people that we were university graduates and people gave us things for being graduates; their money, their daughters, their chickens and their goats. Sometimes they tried to give us their wives. Life was good. The Gulder was flowing, the suya was on the barbecue grill everyday, man, life was good.

 So, I don’t know why I came to America. I am a Nigerian in America. I have been a Nigerian since escaping to America. I have been trying not to be an American since I came to America. The harder I try, the worse it gets, this Nigerianness. There was no reason for me to leave Nigeria. It was 1982, Nigeria was a world super-power, richer than even America. My best friend was Fat Stanley and we were members of a posse of irresponsible Nigerian youths. We were irresponsible because there was nothing to be responsible for and about. Anything we wanted, our parents gladly gave to us. But we were miserable; America was calling out to our restless souls. In Nigeria, like most Nigerians, I did not enjoy being a Nigerian. I wanted to come to America to be an American. Fat Stanley wrote me long letters about the heaven called America and the nightclubs and the women. He wrote about enchanting evenings with American women spent on a strange American activity called a “date”, a ritual that seemed to involve spending dollars. But not to worry, Fat Stanley wrote, the dollars are there. He wrote me in the winters of his exile and my despair and sent me pictures of himself, plump, well fed, leaning on his Cadillac, his winter jacket draped in the dreamy white of snow flakes. He complained a lot in his letters: about the stress of having so many girlfriends, white, black and brown! White girlfriends! He complained about the sex, sex, sex, too much of it, because, you guessed it, he had too many girlfriends! He complained about the food, the chicken that you could have all to yourself, how boring! And the turkeys, he said were of the mutant varieties, giant birds that would make our Nigerian turkeys look like distressed pigeons. I cried and refused to be consoled until my family, actually, my entire village came together and stole enough gofment money to take me to America.

And then I came to America. It was great to see Fat Stanley. For ten minutes. And then I found out a few things about Fat Stanley and America. The Cadillac was not his. Fat Stanley loved taking colored pictures of himself posing by other people’s cars in the parking lot of American shopping malls. Even the winter jacket was not his. Fat Stanley no longer liked us holding hands with me for long walks, any walk, even like we used to do over and over back home in Nigeria. He said it was too gay, whatever that meant. Fat Stanley got one thing right though; there were lots of huge women. I vividly remember my first iyawo. Her right arm alone weighed more than all of my skinny little self and she ate like a starved elephant. Fat Stanley’s Nigerian accent was no longer his. He spoke like a masquerade – through his nose and with his tongue tied in several alien knots. I loved that part about him. I loved his new accent. I simply could not wait to sound like him.

When I first came to America, whenever I opened my mouth, Only Fat Stanley could understand me. Americans avoided conversations with me; they would bribe me with hamburgers not to talk to them. My lecturers promised me top grades if I didn’t raise my hand in class; it was just too stressful for them to decode my guttural sounds. My situation was very stressful to Fat Stanley. Each time, I opened my mouth, Fat Stanley would whine thusly: “Abeg arrange your mouth! Dem nor go understand you!” Fat Stanley told me I had to take accent reduction classes if I was to survive in America. I took the accent reduction classes in Mazi Okezie Ekene Dili Chukwu’s one-room “apartment.” Mazi Chuck as we called him had been in America for twenty years; he spoke like a Made-in-Aba American. I liked that. I took his classes and now no one understands my accent. Not even me.  Whenever I open my mouth, Americans coo “I love your accent! Is that British?” I find this habit racist, definitely aggravating. The people that irritate me the most are the Nigerians that come to the restaurant where I work. They step into my fast food restaurant and even though my name tag says JEFF (not my real name, long story, you won’t understand, trust me!) these bad belle messiahs would go “Nna men, na where you come from?” I always say Pittsburgh! They don’t like that. But who cares? Fat Stanley and I are still here, middle-aged dreamers luxuriating in the wretched promise of America’s love that never shows up. Fat Stanley is now simply Stanley, gone scrawny from shoveling snow and America’s bullshit off his driveway and his dreams. But who cares? We are Americans!

The Oga at the Top in us

One learns something new about Nigeria every day. Apparently there is a governmental outfit called the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), it sounds like a uniformed service; I am not sure that it knows what it does, not that you could tell from its website (www.nscdc.gov.ng) but more on that later. Well, so one Mr. Obafaiye Shem, Lagos State “Commandant” of the NCSDC decided to grant an interview to Channels TV, my favorite Nigerian TV station, one that gives me hope that things might change for the better in Nigeria (witness here, the stellar work they did in shocking the world with gory visual of a dilapidated Ikeja Police College).

Well, it is now part of Nigerian folklore, the interview did not go well; actually it was an epic disaster. This video clip shows Shem trying to bluster his way through a seemingly simple question: “What is your website?” Every Nigerian on earth seems to have watched the clip so I won’t ask you to watch it. It was an awful interview and Shem blew it big time. A trained professional knows to simply say “Great question, I don’t have the answer to your question but I will be happy to provide the response later.” No, not this Nigerian civil servant, he hems and haws, claims that only his “Oga at the top” can authorize release of this super-secret website address and after relentless badgering by smirking, skeptical TV hosts, he blurts out a lie on national television: www.nscdc! And he ends with a flourish, ‘Dasall!” Yep, that’s all! That’s all!

And the rest is history; the ignorance of Shem the “Commandant” remains viral on social media, Oga at the Top! T-shirts are selling like hot cakes and several musical pieces have been birthed by creative Nigerian youths. This is a hilarious time for the Nigerian community online and on the ground. Shem was the visual embodiment of the pejorative that Nigeria is fast becoming: Here comes Nigeria, our masquerade, all decked out in the colors of borrowed plumage, of the ostrich. Fingers pointing here and jabbing there, feathers rising in protest to show her yansh, Nigeria, bullshit merchant. #MyOgaAtTheTop! Yep, faced with a looming immolation by young Turks, the hapless guy decided to bluff his way past the road block in a scene reminiscent of the confrontation between the leopard and the tortoise in that hilarious fable in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah:

Once upon a time the leopard who had been trying for a long time to catch the tortoise finally chanced upon him on a solitary road. ‘Aha,’ he said; at long last! Prepare to die.’ And the tortoise said: ’Can I ask one favour before you kill me?’ The leopard saw no harm in that and agreed. ‘Give me a few moments to prepare my mind,’ the tortoise said. Again the leopard saw no harm in that and granted it. But instead of standing still as the leopard had expected the tortoise went into strange action on the road, scratching with hands and feet and throwing sand furiously in all directions. ’ Why are you doing that?’ asked the puzzled leopard. The tortoise replied: ‘Because even after I am dead I would want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here.’” (pp. 117-118)

Let me concede that the video is quite simply hilarious. I have it on repeat and I keep watching and laughing and wondering about the chutzpah of our people. But lost in all that mirth is the unprofessional conduct of the journalists who served as hosts during the interview. What happened is just not done in respectable journalism; this was a gotcha, a high tech lynching. There is precedence for this. In 1988, George Will, the revered conservative American journalist, a bit peeved that America seemed to be taking the Reverend Jesse Jackson too seriously in his campaign for presidency decided (in my opinion and that of many) to embarrass him by asking him this technical question on television, “As president, would you support measures such as the G-7 measures of the Louvre Accords?” (The accords were technical agreements employed the previous year to stabilize exchange rates.) Of course Jesse Jackson did not know the answer and he looked pretty stupid on television. George Will suffered a backlash that endures to this day with many suggesting that his obtuse line of interviewing was racist (read one example here). The late African American journalist, William Raspberry asserted that Will seemed eager “to embarrass the candidate rather than to flesh out his policy position.”

Back to the Oga at the Top interview, both sides seemed unprepared for a substantive interview. Everything on that set smelled of mimicry, from the attitude of the hosts and guests to the faux set – the West is an asymptote. The attitude brays, This is how they do it in America, to be successful we must try to do it like them. The interview came across as a Nollywood comedy with Shem the guest as the best comedy actor of the lot with the hosts playing overwrought supporting bit parts. What happened here is also a conversation about generational disconnect, the older generation still has the power but is increasingly comically disconnected and long in the tooth when it comes to accountability and technological advances; the younger generation, on the other hand, long used to being ignored, abused even, has the new knowledge base.  They see the older generation as mostly bullshit artists, conmen who are busy running the country aground. The older generation in turn sees the young as smirking upstarts too quick to try to embarrass their elders. There is mutual disdain and disrespect between the flawed generations.

In my view, the hosts were guilty of embarrassing their guest. It seems to me unusual and unethical to keep badgering a guest for information, especially when you have clearly made the point that the guest does not have the information. In any case, professional interviewers do their homework; for such an important agency, the website’s address should have been obtained beforehand and scrolled across the screen for viewers.  When it became clear the guest did not have the answer, the polite thing to do would have been to move on. You could see in the eyes of the hosts and in their body language that they were sure the man was full of shit. They saw blood and went for red meat. It bears repeating: That interview was a cringe-worthy exercise in unprofessional journalism. It was not a good moment for Channels TV.  This was a high tech lynching of a clueless Nigerian civil servant by smirking leaders of a younger generation only too happy to humiliate a visible symbol of all that they have grown up to hate.

And so, what is the website of the NSCDC? The man gave the wrong answer, half of the address: “www.nscdc. Dasall!” He was technically wrong. But there is a real sense in which he was right. Have you been to the NSCDC’s website? It is disgraceful; the website is awful, just awful. It should actually be pulled down until someone can come up with a professional site. Yes, the real scandal is the state of the website. The website www.nscdc.gov.ng is a riot of mediocrity loudly advertising the sad fact that Nigeria does not respect herself, does not take herself seriously. Grammatically challenged sentences jostle with each other for bragging rights in Grammar’s Hall of Shame. There is no doubt that this pretend website was built at great cost to Nigeria by a semi-literate relative of the”Oga at the top” of the NSCDC. Go over to the website and see for yourself, many of the links take you to sites that are “under construction” in addition to the occasional broken link. This is consistent with the shoddy websites of virtually every Nigerian public institution I have ever visited as I chronicled in the essay, Viewing Nigeria through a web of broken links. What is wrong with our people? A well-prepared journalist would have done the research first and confronted this guest with hard questions about the sorry state of the website. No, we like to embarrass ourselves before the world.

Like our government, the website is a lurid investment in pretend processes and structures, empty portals with no indication when, if they will ever be filled with substance. And the website is comical in its shoddiness. There are several pictures of a well-fed “officer” on “a peace-keeping mission” – in Italy of all places. Apparently, Italy is a hot bed of insurrection; he is dressed in battle fatigues posing in what looks to me like a shopping mall. Estacode! If Jon Gambrell of the AP writes a snarky story about this buffoonery, Nigerian intellectuals will come out with their sharp pens screaming racism, whine, whine, whine. If you don’t respect yourself, what do you expect foreigners to do?

Shem had no business knowing the address of the website, because like most things with the Nigerian government, it is a pretend structure, no one goes there, except to “share money”, there is nothing there for anyone who is serious about knowing whatever the NSCDC does. It is just another website aping what happens elsewhere. All the website says is that NSCDC is of questionable value to Nigeria and Nigerians. That may well be the truth. Yep, Nigeria has carved for itself a shameful reputation as a rogue nation governed by rogues and managed by rogue civil servants. Our rulers and civil servants are ruining Nigeria through management by mimicry, all sizzle and no suya.

Let me observe that there is something really perverse about ridiculing a man for mangling the address of a website in the same week that the president of our nation proudly conferred a presidential pardon on a convicted criminal wanted in pretty much every serious country outside our borders. We are not a serious people; our outrage melts into mirth because laughter is an easy medicine for managing our condition.  By the way, we should also learn to respect each other. If that guest was white, you would see all the hosts falling over themselves to ask soft-ball questions, fawning and showing all their white teeth in obsequious subservience. But then, to be fair, the white person would have come prepared to respond to soft questions. I tire sha.

So why did we laugh so hard at the man’s discomfiture? Well, a few years ago, the most visual example of the caricature that Nigerian public education makes out of our beautiful children burst forth in the form of Rita, the kokolet of Koko Mansion. Rita managed to mangle every sentence that her lips uttered. Her video also went viral and the cruelty was something to behold. Many who laughed at Rita had managed to escape the gulag that was her lot in the public schools of Nigeria. Many who laughed at her were educated abroad from looted funds that were meant for the education of children in Nigeria’s public schools. Rita probably “graduated” from one of the public schools in this awful video documenting our decaying public schools, home only to the truly dispossessed.  We enjoy berating victims. As for this Oga at the Top video, we laughed because perhaps it helps us deny that the man in the mirror is us.  When we see Shem in that odious video, we see us, and like those young journalists, we recoil and shudder – with disgust and self-loathing. The cackle coming from us, the hoots of derision are for us, this is what we have become. Yes, for those of us who yell at Western journalists for only telling the single story about Africa, this is what they see, the mimicry that makes them mock us. This is what they see. We are who we are. I salute Nigeria. I salute “Commandant” Shem. I salute us.

[Guest Blog Post - Professor Pius Adesanmi] The Hunt for Francophonism

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

(Remarks at the Anglophone-Francophone Cultural Conversations Panel Convened by the African Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Penn State University, February 27, 2013)

First things first. I want to thank the usual suspects for inviting me back home to give a talk. For those of you who are new members of the Penn State community in this audience, I use the word home because this is where it all began – I mean my career – amidst wonderful colleagues and under the exceptional mentorship of Professor Carey Eckhardt, my Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor Thomas Hale who, at the time, was Chair of the French Department. Since I left to join other wonderful colleagues in another wonderful Department at Carleton University in Canada, every return to Penn State, for me, is an answer to the call of home, to the summon of origins. Penn State does to me what “the call of the river nun” does to the poet, Gabriel Okara, in his famous poem of the same title:

I hear your call!
I hear it far away;
I hear it break the circle of these crouching hills.

I want to view your face again and feel your cold embrace;
or at your brim to set myself and inhale your breath;
or like the trees, to watch my mirrored self unfold and span my days with song from the lips of dawn.

I hear your lapping call!
I hear it coming through; invoking the ghost of a child listening, where river birds hail your silver-surfaced flow.

That’s the river nun for Okara, that’s Penn State for me. Let me also ask this audience to join me in wishing Professor Eckhardt a wonderful birthday. Because she is present here, most of you may not have even suspected that it’s her birthday today! And while you are at it, you may also want to wish me a happy birthday. When my head obeyed the marching orders of my feet in the direction of Penn State after my doctoral degree, little did I know that I was coming to work and bond with a Chair whose birthday I share and who has been so instrumental to my development as a scholar. Yes, Carey Eckhardt and I were born the same day. Not the same year o!

I have modelled my title on a title and a concept. Everyone here, I’m sure, is familiar with the movie, The Hunt for Red October. That is where the hunt in my title comes from, given the resonance that the hunt for that elusive Russian submarine has for my own idea of a similar hunt for a particular kind of conversation across borders within the ranks of Anglophone African literary and cultural intellection.  Francophonism, I presume, oozes a whiff of the familiar for all of us here, given its immediate evocation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s atavistic struggle to rid African letters of the “parasite” (his word) he calls Europhonism.

I don’t need to belabour the meaning of that concept – Europhonism – for an audience such as this. Suffice it to say that if Europhonism, as coined and deployed by Ngugi, encompasses the entire corpus of modern African literatures produced in the language of the colonizer, it stands to reason that the concept must have component parts known as Anglophonism, Lusophonism, and, of course, Francophonism. To remain faithful to the theme of this panel, I have decided to focus only on the history of encounters, discoveries, and contact zones between Anglophonism and Francophonism. I will frame Anglophone African literature’s quest for a conversation with the Francophone text as the story of a hunt, not unlike the hunt for red October.

Although the coming into consciousness of the literary other across the iron curtain of language – the so-called Anglophone-Francophone divide – was a mutual process, I have decided to look at just one side of the story in a necessarily inexhaustive manner, while hoping that my talking point would lead to a fuller examination of both sides of the coin when we get to Q and A. For instance, since I will be addressing the conversations from the perspective of the Anglophones, I will not be talking about the journal, Présence Africaine, by far the most significant contribution to cross-border conversations in African literatures.

Luckily, my brother and colleague, Professor Ken Harrow is here. Ken and I have been having wonderful and productive conversations in recent years so it’s a good thing you have invited both of us to this panel. We have agreed to a division of labour. I will take us down memory lane and bring things up to the beginning of the third generation phenomenon in African writing. Ken will take over and flesh things out while also paying attention to Nollywood. My approach in this exercise is part literary history, part anecdote, and part theory. In other words, I am going to be touching various parts of the body of an elephant like Bernth Lindfors’s proverbial blind men, hoping that the various parts will come together seamlessly to give us a window into Anglophone African literature’s discovery of and conversations with her Francophone African counterpart across generations.

Francophonism came to global reckoning ahead of its counterpart, Anglophonism. I am thinking of Négritude galloping to European recognition and canonicity after its discovery by André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre and in the ambience of recognition afforded the Negro-African text by René Maran’s winning of the Prix Goncourt in 1921. However, contact zones emerged as soon as Anglophonism found her voice decades later. Sadly, the rich tapestry of Anglophonic voyages of discovery into Francophonism is always overshadowed by the story, so often told, of a foundational hostility. Everyone coming to the subject of how Anglophone African literatures discovered and processed the alterity of the Francophonic text always automatically thinks of Wole Soyinka’s famed outburst about the tiger and the tigritude. In essence, Anglophone Africa is said to have fired the first shot in what is then dressed up as an intractable sibling rivalry underwritten by the invisible leash of the coloniality – especially on the Francophone side.

Those persuaded by the thesis that Anglophonism rode to its first meeting place with Francophonism in an armoured tank love to present Eskia Mpahlele’s well-known hostility to Negritude as the younger brother of Soyinka’s foundational hostility. You will recall that Mpahlele was so vocal in his critique of Negritude in the 60s that he was eventually forced to defend himself against charges of “hindering or frustrating the protest literature of negritude its mission”. Hence, in his 1963 essay entitled, “On Negritude in Literature”, Mpahlele avers that his hostility to that Francophonic body of work is based on the fact that:

“Too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa-as a symbol of innocence, purity, and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. I am a violent person and proud of it because it is often a healthy human state of mind; someday I’m going to plunder, rape, set things on fire, I’m going to cut somebody’s throat; I’m going to subvert a government; I’m going to organize a coup d’etat; yes, I’m going to oppress my own people; I’m going to hunt the rich fat black men who bully the small weak black men and destroy them; I’m going to become a capitalist, and woe to all who cross my path or who want to be my servants or chauffeurs and so on; I’m going to lead a breakaway church there is money in it; I’m going to attack the black bourgeoisie while I cultivate a garden, rear dogs and parrots; listen to jazz and classics, read “culture”, and so on. Yes, I’m going to organize a strike. Don’t you know that sometimes I kill to the rhythm of drums and cut the sinews of a baby to cure it of paralysis? This is only a dramatization of what Africa can do and is doing. The image of Africa consists of all these, and others. And negritude poetry pretends that they do not constitute the image and leaves them out. So we are told only half-often even a falsified half-of the story of Africa. Sheer romanticism that fails to see the large landscape of the personality of the African makes bad poetry. The omission of these elements of a continent in turmoil reflects a defective poetic vision. The greatest of Leopold Sedar Senghor is that which portrays in himself the meeting point of Europe and Africa. This is realistic and honest and a most meaningful symbol of Africa: an ambivalent continent searching for equilibrium. This synthesis of Europe and Africa does not necessarily reject the negro-ness of the African.”

I am smiling as I read this long quote because Mpahlele reminds me so much of his contemporary incarnate, the Nigerian literary and cultural critic, Ikhide Ikheloa, whose reputation as the “Area Fada” of contemporary Nigerian letters is soaring. This is the sort of irreverent spanking Ikhide would have given Negritude were he a participant in the Anglophone hunt for Francophonism in the 1960s and 1970s.  Beyond these hostilities, however, the picture is actually neater and speaks of an Anglophonic spirit of curiosity mediated initially by the cultural hand of Europe. I am thinking of the roles played by the likes of Ulli Beier, Gerald Moore, and Janheiz Jahn in initiating a conversation by breaking linguistic boundaries to bring Negritude poetry into the world and consciousness of the literary generation they worked with in Anglophone Africa, notably Nigeria.

Significantly, the journal in which this conversation started bore no other name than Black Orpheus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous baptismal name for Negritude poetics. We can get into the nature of these initial conversations during our discussions. Suffice it to say that Soyinka, Mpahlele, and their generation owe their awareness of Negritude poetry largely to the translations and commentary of these pioneering European Africanists. Jahn’s Muntu, for instance, contains an exploratory section on Négritude and Surrealism and Negritude and Expressionism that were very useful for the Anglophone literati and culturati in the 1960s. And no one can forget the impact of Beier’s and Moore’s 1963 The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry in terms of the conversations it initiated between the major continental traditions in European languages: Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone.

I always like to think that this is what set the tone for the monumental work of cultural translation and literary conversation that Abiola Irele did in the 1960s. He almost single-handedly commenced the tradition of serious Anglophonic exegeses of the Francophonic text with his essay, “A Defence of Negritude” (1964).  Now, why would a contemporary of Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo, and JP Clark need to mount a defence of Negritude in the charged atmosphere of the sixties? And in whose court was Irele defending Negritude? Let’s hear Irele out:

“While the concept of negritude has met with considerable success in French intellectual circles, though not without inspiring some controversy among certain French African elements, it has met with either suspicion or open hostility (and even ridicule) among English-speaking Africans. Much of this attitude arises, I believe, from grave misconceptions about the real aims of the movement in general, and in some cases, from prejudice and complete lack of knowledge. It is in this respect that the recent separate publication of Sartre’s preface in an English translation comes as a welcome move.”

Nobody, I believe, should be surprised that Irele went ahead to publish two seminal essays in 1965, “Negritude: Literature and Ideology,” and “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism”, to reduce his Anglophone contemporaries’ ignorance of the concept, increase the love, and enhance the conversation. Irele’s efforts – and the antecedent efforts of the Europeans – paid off. Subsequent anthologies of African poetry, this time edited by African literati, included selections from the Negritude corpus, complete with very helpful introductions for an Anglophonic audience. I am thinking, in particular, of Donatus Ibe Nwoga’s West African Verse, the text from which generations of Anglophone West African school kids, including yours truly, learnt to chant, “Africa my Africa/Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs” in our pre-teenage and teenage years. Oh how we loved the intensity of:

The blood of your sweat

The sweat of your toil

The toil of slavery

The slavery of your children

We would turn it into music! In 1975, the hostile Wole Soyinka eventually allowed Senghor, Birago Diop, and David Diop to proclaim their tigritude to their hearts’ content in his edited volume, Poems of Black Africa.There is also A Selection of African Poetry (1976) edited by K.E. Senanu and Theo Vincent.

Since we are talking of the 1960s and 1970s, it is perhaps a good idea to mention the fact that the Anglophone hunt for Francophonism in the era was equally very productive at the level of thought. Anglophone African writers and intellectuals discovered and deployed Francophonic radical thought and intellection with considerable vigour. Frantz Fanon inspired generations of Anglophone African intellectuals, especially the neo-Marxist writers and literary scholars of the 1960s  – 1980s. Think of the essayistic careers of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Eskia Mpahlele, Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Niyi Osundare, Biodun Jeyifo. Through Fanon, the Anglophone world would also encounter his teacher, the Césaire of Discourse on Colonialism. Down the road, the Anglophones, especially those who trained in North American English Departments, would also discover the Edouard Glissant of Caribbean Discourse.

We could spend time talking about Anglophone discoveries of Francophonism in other genres – the novel, drama, and even music – but I’d like to talk about a doubly neglected genre: the short story. I did say that part of this presentation would be anecdotal. In the late 1990s, I made trips to South Africa on a Fellowship offered by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS). My research mandate was to study the attention paid to Francophone African Literatures in the curricula of select South African Universities. You can see that I’ve been involved in these literary conversations between Anglophone and Francophone Africa for a while. Here was France recruiting a Nigerian to go to South Africa and examine the health of Francophone African literatures in that post-Apartheid clime. During my visits to South Africa, I got the opportunity to meet many South African writers and formed lasting friendships. One of them was the novelist and poet, Stephen Gray. Stephen at the time was always complaining about the lack of attention to the short story in both the creative and critical aspects of African literatures. “Look at Nadine Gordimer”, he would exclaim, “She is always represented as a novelist. Nobody seems to remember that half her career is that of a short story writer.”

Stephen wasn’t just agonizing, he was organizing. He had proposed and was working with Picador on a book of African Stories. He had received original stories from some of the continent’s best writers: Ama Ata Aidoo, Nuruddin Farah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Yvonne Vera and so many others. But he wasn’t satisfied. One day, over lunch at his house in Crown Mines, Johannesburg, he complained to me about a second problem. According to Stephen, super-imposed on the marginalization of the short story is a second problem: a complete lack of conversation between the short stories of Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa. He was going to help overcome that problem by creating a common universe for stories from these traditions. “You’ll have to translate one of my French entries to English,” says Stephen, “a fantastic story by the Moroccan writer, Lotfi Akalay.” I acquiesced.

In 2000, The Picador Book of African Stories, edited by Stephen Gray, was published. Given the background I have provided about Stephen’s Anglophonic hunt for Francophonism and Lusophonism, you should not be surprised by this statement in his introduction to the volume:

“From the first I was determined that this Picador Book should not – as some recent anthologies of African writing have done – give the impression that all the literature in the continent worth reading is really written in English, with perhaps the odd translation attached. Only nineteen out of forty pieces were originally written in English, a fair proportion. French, being my reading language, I have always been able to keep abreast of French-language developments, and have convinced a team of translators to make rare, choice texts in French which I feel should not be overlooked available in English (in all thirteen pieces derive from the Francophone African world).”

Shortly after the publication of the book by Picador, one member of Stephen’s team of translators, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, was surprised to receive a cheque of one hundred pounds from the publisher for the translation role he played in Stephen Gray’s hunt for Francophonism! You can see that the financial aspect of my own participation in the Anglophone-Francophone literary conversation mirrors the story of Africa in a funny way. First, the French send me to South Africa to see if African literatures written in their language is being properly taught in that country’s Universities. In South Africa, I get involved in a project for which I am paid in the currency of the Queen of England. Those are the sinewy hands of Britain and France in Africa’s cultural work but, trust me, imperialism was nowhere near my mind when I got that cheque!

I am having to make a lot of shifts because of time constraint. Mentioning the year two thousand allows me to make another huge leap into what has been happening in terms of the Anglophone search for Francophonism. Although the phenomenon that is generally known as third-generation African writing was a phenomenon of the 1990s, it was discovered in the West and canonized only after members of that generation began to win international literary prizes. The Caine Prize was inaugurated and brought Helon Habila, Binyavanga Wainaina and Monica Arac de Nyeko to reckoning. Chris Abani got his break in the United States and so did Teju Cole. Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Lola Shoneyin all got their respective breaks. In Francophone Africa, a new generation emerged: Calixthe Beyala, Abdourahman Ali Waberi, Bessora, Alain Mabanckou, Kossi Efoui, Leonora Miano, Fatou Diome, and so many others.

I’ve heard many critical descriptions of this generation. For the Anglophones, I’ve co-edited refereed journals calling them the third generation; I’ve heard some use the term “post-Uhuru writers” for the East Africans; I’ve heard post-Apartheid for the South Africans. It’s a good thing that my very good friend, Gabeba Baderoon is here. She can tell us about her post-Apartheid contemporaries later. On the Francophone side of the divide, those writing Africa in my generation are known as “migritude writers” or, as my friend, Abdourahman Waberi describes them in a famous essay, “the children of the postcolony.”

In my opinion, it is now possible to talk of waves with third generation writing, especially in Nigeria. There is a sense in which the poets who blazed the trail in the 1980s-1990s cannot easily be lumped with the current twitter generation. I am thinking of a certain temporal and aesthetic distance between Chiedu Ezeanah, Toyin Adewale Nduka, Ogaga Ifowodo, Afam Akeh, Uche Nduka, Obu Udeozo, Olu Oguibe, Remi Raji, Amatoritsero Ede, Nduka Otiono on the one hand and much newer kids on the block such as Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Richard Ali, Eghosa Imasuen, Ukamaka Olisakwe Evelyn, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo, and Chinyere Iwuala Obasi on the other hand.

How do these waves of third generation writers handle Francophonic alterity? Alas, the news is not so good. I cannot point to anything close to the active hunt for Francophonism and the cross-border discourses which characterised the Soyinka era. This is strange considering the fact that the new writers inhabit the borderless world of social media and the blogosphere.  Beyond the Anglophonic provincialism of too many of my peers in contemporary Nigerian writing for whom African literature starts in Lagos and ends in Johannesburg via Nsukka, Ibadan, and Nairobi, I can point to patterns of awareness of our Francophone contemporaries by particular writers who are inspired to invest in literary knowledges across Africa’s colonial language borders. For instance, Chuma Nwokolo, author of The Ghost of Sani Abacha, has taken Francophonic content extremely seriously for his ezine, African Writing, and would often consult me on Francophone writing during production period of particular issues.

Lola Shoneyin’s interest in our Francophone contemporaries goes all the way back to our Ibadan years in the mid-1990s. She would go through my vast library of Francophone novels, making me tell her about Beyala, Mabanckou, Waberi and a host of others and yearning for English translations. Today, that nascent interest has morphed into active engagement. The author of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives counts Francophone writers – including Mabanckou – in her list of friends. Come November 2013, Shoneyin will be organizing a major book festival in Nigeria and she’s is paying considerable attention to Anglophone-Francophone conversations. Yours truly is billed to mount the stage with Alain Mabanckou at the event.

What I am saying is that the nature of the conversation has changed with the new generation of African writers on both sides of the language divide. While the writers in question have migrated en masse to social media, tweeting, Facebooking, and running very active blogs, that very medium fosters borderless co-presence more than it fosters serious conversation. Soyinka, Mpahlele, and others in their generation actively engaged Négritude and discoursed it. We cannot speak of that level of engagement of migritude by the new generation despite the increasing availability of migritude novels and commentary in English.  The Francophones are just as guilty of provincialism. As far as I know, Abdourahman Waberi and Patrice Nganang are among the very few who engage the works and discourses of their contemporaries in Anglophone Africa. Waberi has even featured yours truly in his blog after the Penguin Prize.

As far as conversations go, generational ezines fare generally better than blogs on both sides. Saraba Magazine, African Writing and other Anglophonic ezines pay some attention to Francophone material. Africultures, the famous internet age successor of Présence Africaine in the Francophone world, also pays the occasional attention to Anglophonic material. However, popular blogs by prominent literati on both sides create universes of Anglophonism and Francophonism respectively. Ikhide Ikheloa’s blog is doing incredible work for new African writing but it basks and waltzes in its Anglophonic non-attention to the other half of the continent’s literature, even in English translation. Apart from the already-cited Waberi who invests a lot in Anglophonic knowledges, the novelists Kangni Alem and Bessora run very popular blogs. Both blogs, like Ikhide’s on the Anglophone side, are monuments to Francophonic literary navel gazing.

Perhaps the privileging of social media co-presence over cross-border conversations is due in part to insufficient effort of cultural translation? If Abiola Irele robustly and relentlessly carried Négritude across to the Anglophone literati, who, in my generation, is doing the same for migritude today? Perhaps those of us with one leg in each world, Anglophone and Francophone, ought to do more carrying across work?  Perhaps we need to try harder to sustain the example of Abiola Irele? Perhaps somebody like me needs to return to the role I played for my generation in the Lagos-Ibadan axis of Nigerian letters in the 1990s?

Week after week, as a Special Guest Critic of the defunct Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS) edited by Nduka Otiono, I reviewed Francophone African novels, translated major interviews of Francophone African writers, wrote op-eds on burning issues in the Francophone African literary world, such as the Calixthe Beyala plagiariasm-of-Ben-Okri scandal, all for the consumption of my contemporaries. Sometimes, publications such as Glendora Review would lure me away from PELS and ask for reflections on current trends in Francophone African literatures. Sometimes, Odia Ofeimun, Harry Garuba, Akin Adesokan, Ogaga Ifowodo, Charles Ogu, Chiedu Ezeanah, Sola Olorunyomi, Nduka Otiono – folks I teased and taunted as one-legged writers because of the missing Francophone leg – would ask me to write about specific issues they wanted to know about the Francophone world.

I don’t do this kind of work anymore. I just do my thing. Abiola Irele still does. As recently as 2010, he published The Negritude Moment. This is what I mean by our failure to sustain his example. Is anybody doing this kind of cultural translation work for the wave of Nigerian writing represented by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Richard Ugbede Ali, Eghosa Imasuen, Olisakwe Ukamaka Evelyn, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo, and Chinyere Iwuala Obasi? I don’t know. Are these writers evolving in a world with sufficient inflatus for cross-border conversations? I don’t know. Shall we wake up one day to piquant and irreverent opinions about the Francophonic literary world on Ikhide Ikheloa’s blog? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

[Guest Blog Post - Professor Pius Adesanmi] Dowry: Managing Africa’s Many Lovers

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

(Keynote lecture delivered at the annual conference of the African Studies Course Union, University of Toronto, February 15, 2013)

I’d like to thank the African Studies Course Union of the University of Toronto for the honour of being asked to deliver the keynote lecture at your annual conference. Special thanks are due to Ms Lili Nkunzimana, President of the ASCU, for her solicitude and the impeccable efficiency with which she organized my trip here today. Her last name tells me she is Francophone so I can comfortably say in my other language, Mademoiselle Lili, merci beaucoup. Je vous en sais gré! We learn all the time. It was only after I received your invitation that it occurred to me that I was hearing for the first time about an African Studies Course Union in a Canadian University. Naturally, I dug around a little bit. I am grateful to Professor Thomas Tiéku of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, whose prestigious African Studies Seminar Series invited me here for a lecture just this past November, for giving me useful tips about your set up. However, I must say that if another University of Toronto academic unit invites me for yet another lecture in the next couple of months, you will have to start paying territorial fees to my employers at Carleton University and ownership fees to my country, Nigeria.

Because Professor Tiéku is always extremely busy crisscrossing Africa in matters of international mediation and capacity building for regional institutions (he cannot be with us this evening because he is on his way to Ethiopia), I was pleased that he found the time, between connecting flights in the continent, to warn me in an email that you “are super serious people” (I’m quoting him) and that your “conferences are usually attended by senior people” (again I’m quoting him). As it happens, Lili sent a programme which confirmed Professor Tiéku’s hints about the prestige of your events. I gasped in pleasant surprise when I noticed that your post-keynote lecture panel boasts such eminent colleagues as Professors George Elliot Clarke and Neil ten Kortenaar. That makes Professor Tiéku a master of understatement and the understated. By “senior people”, who would have imagined he was talking about George Elliott Clarke, one of Canada’s finest and most decorated contemporary poets, and Neil ten Kortenaar, one of the finest scholars of African literatures in this country? He should have warned me that you would go to the very top of the seniority shelf to assemble this panel. I thank these two illustrious colleagues for the privilege of their co-presence on this stage.

Dunno. Maybe it is completely fortuitous. Maybe the quiet hands of some benevolent ancestors willed it, designed it to happen this way. But I’m sure it has not escaped any of you that you  have asked me to reflect on Africa and the Black Diaspora today, February 15, merely a day after the entire world celebrated the feast of love known as Valentine’s day. No, I am not grumbling that you deprived me the opportunity of attending to matters of the heart yesterday as I had to spend Valentine’s day revising and cleaning up this lecture instead of buying roses and making arrangements for a candlelit dinner in a cozy, chandeliered environment. Don’t ask me how she reacted to seeing me glued to a computer on Valentine’s day. I won’t tell you.

Anyway, I am not complaining. I am just drawing your attention to the uncanny coincidence that I am delivering a lecture about love and lovers – Africa’s surfeit of lovers and the implications of that love affair for the Black Diaspora – only a day after the feast of love. Love is indeed in the air these days. Because I am a Nigerian and we are not usually accused by the rest of Africa of being dominant and having a tendency to suck the oxygen out of the room, I am not going to tell you proudly and boastfully that we have only just won the African Cup of Nations, the continent’s most prestigious soccer competition, and are therefore enjoying our moment as the continent’s beautiful bride within an overall atmospherics of continental love.

If you are still wondering what love’s got to do with it (apologies to Swiss singer, Tina Turner), a look at the title of this lecture would convince you that we are here to reflect on and share the love. You must know that he who talks dowry talks about transactions and imaginaries of love; about matters of the heart; and about a particular mode of translating that human arrangement into culturally-sanctioned nuptials in certain cultures. Dowry? In Africa? Those of you with an ear for nuance and distinction ought to be worried by now. Isn’t dowry mainly a Southeast Asian, especially Indian affair? Does this professor know what he is talking about?

I do. Admittedly, dowry is very often used whenever the speaker means bride price in many of the Englishes you hear in sub-Saharan Africa, that is not what is happening here. I have not fallen prey to that commonplace confusion. I am talking about dowry – money, goods, or estate that a woman brings to her husband at marriage – because that, precisely, has been the mode of Africa’s transactions with the throngs of suitors, fiancés, and lovers that fate, history, and oftentimes, self-inflicted vulnerabilities have thrown across her path in the last five hundred years and counting.

Indeed, it is safe to say that no continent has enjoyed more professions of love than Africa in all of human history. I don’t make this sweeping assertion lightly. In other continents, the conquered were very often spared the nicety and the hypocrisy of pretense. For instance, I am not aware that the European hardened criminals, condemned prisoners, and nut cases who would become the nemesis of the Aborigenes in Australia went there professing love for anything or anybody other than themselves. And we don’t even need to cite the case of our friends here in America. Didn’t Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, that tireless chronicler of the Americas who wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, inform us that Hatuey, a famous Indian Chief from the island of Hispaniola, declared before he was burned by the Spaniards that he would rather go to hell if heaven was where the European Christian conquerors of the Americas went? There is definitely no love lost between the violated owner of the land and the European immigrant in this picture. The more than five hundred pages of Hernan Cortes’s Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by Anthony Pagden, are a veritable testimony to this absence of love, pretext, and hypocrisy between conqueror and conquered in America.

The scenario was slightly different in Africa. The land and people were fictioned as a receptive female subject to be taken, penetrated, and had in the imaginaries of those driven to encounter the Other by the curiosities unleashed by the spirit of the Enlightenment. The dominant idiom of this taking, this penetrating, this having, was love. I am not so sure, for instance, that King Mutesa of Buganda shares Hatuey sentiments when he encounters Europe, at least not if we are to believe one of the most memorable fictional refractions of that historical encounter between African and European. I am talking about David Rubadiri’s great poem, “Stanley Meets Mutesa”. Permit me to cite the powerful last verse of the poem:

The gate of reeds is flung open,

There is silence

But only a moment’s silence-

A silence of assessment.

The tall black king steps forward,

He towers over the thin bearded white man,

Then grabbing his lean white hand

Manages to whisper

“Mtu Mweupe Karibu”

White man you are welcome.

The gate of polished reed closes behind them

And the West is let in.

White man you are welcome! Love, my friends, is in the air. In Africa, nobody is hurrying to hell to avoid contact with European Christians in heaven. If you are wondering why love is in the air, you have to consider the entire modes of discourse which preceded and framed this encounter. For such a framing of the politics of encounter, let us go to Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris in the heyday of empire and a staunch opponent of fascism. Describing World War II as a “crusade”, Cardinal Verdier enthused that “we are struggling to preserve the freedom of people throughout the world, whether they be great or small peoples, and to preserve their possessions and their very lives. No other war has had aims that are more spiritual, moral, and, in sum, more Christian”. Now, this is all very beautiful. You can’t possibly fault these sentiments. The problem begins once Cardinal Verdier thinks beyond the platitude that he calls “peoples”. Once he logs into more specific referents such as colour and geography, his humanism takes on the dimension of ecstatic love, hence this famous statement of his about the project of love that was the civilizing mission of France in Africa:

“Nothing is more moving than this gesture of the Frenchman, taking his black brother by the hand and helping him to rise. This hierarchic but nonetheless black collaboration, this fraternal love stooping toward the blacks to measure their possibilities of thinking and feeling…this art, in a word, of helping them progress through wise development of their personality toward an improved physical, social and moral well-being; this is how France’s colonizing mission on the black continent appears to us.”

Although our Roman Catholic Cardinal was talking about fraternal love in his framing of French colonialism and the subsequent régimes of coloniality it spawned, history teaches us that Africa was the object of all the manifestations of that intense human emotion throughout her history of encounter with conquerors. Name any kind of love – fraternal, agape, carnal – and you are sure to encounter a very rich cast of characters, sallying forth from their European homelands in waves after the Portuguese blazed the trail in the 15^th century, for picaresque adventures of love in Africa. So, in a way, Wole Soyinka is only partially right to have insisted in his latest book, Of Africa, that Africa possesses one unremarked distinction of having not been the subject of claims of discovery like the Americas or Australasia. Writes Soyinka:

“No one actually claims to have “discovered” Africa. Neither the continent as an entity nor indeed any of her later offspring – the modern states – celebrates the equivalent of America’s Columbus day. This gives it a self-constitutive identity, an unstated autochthony that is denied other continents and subcontinents. The narrative history of encounters with Africa does not dispute with others or revise itself over the “discovery” of Africa… Africa appears to have been “known about”, speculated over, explored both in actuality and fantasy, even mapped – Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, etc, took their turns – but no narrative has come down to us that actually lays personal or racial claim to the discovery of the continent.”

I say Soyinka is only partially right because Africa has a second distinction that even the Nobel laureate appears not to have noticed. She is the only continent whose modes of encounter with and insertion into modernity were fictioned almost exclusively through registers of love by those with a superior capacity to narrativize and globalize those love stories. Let me emphasize this point: Africa is humanity’s only labour of love. No greater love hath the Arab invader, the European explorer, slaver, colonizer, missionary, captain of industry, corporate CEO, Multi-National Corporation CEO, humanitarian aid worker, Christian charity worker, NGO worker, expert, expatriate, Hollywood celebrity serial child adopter; no greater love hath all these characters for Africa that they gave up the comforts of Arabia and Europe and came to risk mosquitoes and malaria in the heart of darkness. Even this imperative of love accounted for the obduracy of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on the question of sanctions against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. So great was their love for black South Africans that these two leaders of the free world opposed sanctions against the apartheid state for fear that their beloved blacks would suffer disproportionately.

These lovers introduced dowry as the only mode of transaction with the beautiful bride on whose account they travelled. Africa has been paying this dowry to her numerous lovers in the last five hundred years of her history. She has paid in cash and kind. She has paid dowries of land and territory to these lovers; she has paid dowries of copper, gold, diamonds, cocoa, coffee, rubber, ivory, coltan, uranium, crude oil. Africa is the bride fated to pay expensive dowry to lovers and fiancés who do not mind polyandry. Never mind the rivalry between today’s princes charming –America, Europe, China – seeking Africa’s hand in marriage. So long as the dowry payments continue to flow from Africa, these guys don’t mind polyandry.  Sometimes, Africa’s dowry payment has a name, a face, black flesh, and red blood. Patrice Lumumba was dowry and so were Eduardo Mondlane, Steve Biko, and Thomas Sankara.

Other times, the dowry is neither quantifiable nor measurable because it operates mostly as emotional jouissance for the career lover of Africa. The humanitarian aid worker, the Christian charity worker, the NGO development volunteer, the Hollywood celebrity serial child adopter, all kinds of organizations without borders, Bono, Jeffrey Sachs, Angelina Jolie, and Madonna are all career lovers of the continent functioning within a mechanism I have referred to in previous lectures and essays as the Mercy Industrial Complex. This category of Africa’s lovers does not demand the sort of dowry exacted by the colonizer or the CEOs of Shell Petroleum, Halliburton, and Siemens. Their dowry lies in the unmappable emotional satisfaction of the messianic complex. Another child adopted away from the poverty of mealie in Malawi offers more than an occasion for media razzmatazz. To the Hollywood celebrity serial child adopter, the gesture offers the psychic satisfaction of the hand that giveth.

Other times still, the dowry régime has yielded consequences that have altered the course of history forever. The lover of Africa who was a slaver carried his human dowry across the Atlantic for more than three hundred years. At the purely economic level, Eric Williams assures us in his monumentally important book, Capitalism and Slavery, that the labour of that human dowry paid by Africa informed the complexion of capitalism as we came to know it. In other words, Africa’s dowry produced a black diaspora in such a way as to profoundly inflect the topography of wealth creation and accumulation in the West.

Now, this is where this dowry business really gets interesting. We know that to create a diaspora is to create novel cultural life-forms, new imaginaries, new modes of being and apprehension, new modalities of sentience that are not just locked in the politics of emplantment in a new world but must also contend with that which cannot be disappeared: home. “That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time,” says Red in one of my favorite films of all times, The Shawshank Redemption. Pressure and time may dissolve the concrete geographical essence of home for the diaspora population but they never really empty it of psychic content, symbolic force, and matricial value. They never empty it of its capacity to mobilize and interpellate the diaspora population affectively in terms of articulations of identity. This explains why registers of tracery and connections underwrite the cultures of the black diaspora, of any diaspora: roots and routes, origins, sources, memory, remembering, re-membering become crucial to a telos of subjectivity that Brent Hayes Edwards refers to as “the practice of diaspora” in his magnificent book of the same title.

To animate the emotion of “home” or “source” despite the wear and tear placed on memory by pressure and time, to articulate modes of being in the present nurtured by the political and philosophical resonances of origins naturally involves a scrutiny of the transaction between the self-professed lover of Africa and the dowry-paying bride. This query is an epistemological obligation for the black diaspora population. Was dowry taken at gunpoint by a lover who would accept it only in human form capable of working on his plantations in the Americas or did Africa, the mesmerized bride, offer that dowry too quickly and too enthusiastically, carried away by gifts of rum, mirrors, and other industrial products dangled before her by the lover from across the seas?

The answer which various generations of black diaspora intellectuals have found for these questions have had profound implications for the genre of self-fashioning and self-writing known as the return narrative. If you look at a certain black radical tradition of home and memory, which encompasses the divergent and disparate intellection and praxes of, say, W.E.B du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Molefi Kete Asante, you will encounter imaginaries of Africa and return narratives which devolve from what appears to be a clear conviction that Europe exacted that dowry at gunpoint. It is not for nothing that Bob Marley’s Buffalo soldiers were “stolen from Africa”, not sold in Africa by Africans. And we know who Bob Marley is accusing of theft. No text articulates this position better than Césaire’s slim but powerful book, Discourse on Colonialism. For Césaire, the dowry was forcibly taken not just by Europe but also by the particular kind of Europe that the other encountered: a Europe that was at her most rapaciously and brutally capitalistic.

There is a second model associated notably with the Henry Louis Gates of the Wonders of the African World fame. I call it the dirty linen model. This model somewhat shifts the responsibility for slavery from the lover of Africa who went in search of slaves to the beautiful bride, Africa, who is deemed to have been too eager to offer the dowry. This model, obviously, has spawned more problematic imaginaries of Africa in the diasporic imagination. Lingering resentment of the home that sold you – if that is how you elect to see it – into slavery hardly allows for the romanticized memory-making of the first tradition. When Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the three founding fathers of Négritude, sings, “give me back my black dolls/so that I may play with them/the naïve games of my instinct,” I don’t think Henry Louis Gates would supply any chorus to that song. Rather, I imagine him quipping: pray, Monsieur Damas, how did your black dolls get to the Americas in the first place?

Despites these tensions, something unites these two modes of diasporic engagement of Africa and that is the desire to make Africa mean, to make her fundamentally mean something. Whether you are claiming Africa radically, romanticizing her, and longing for the day that your soul shall make the return journey to Guinée, like le vieux Médouze does in Euzhan Palcy’s great film, Sugar Cane Alley; whether you are probing history and memory in order to establish what you call Africa’s complicity in and responsibility for slavery, as is the case with Henry Louis Gates and those of his persuasion, you are involved, as a black diasporic subject, in a quest for meaning marked by an initial anxiety of contact. The anxiety here is not akin to the silence of assessment that brokered the encounter between Stanley and Mutesa. Rather, this is an anxiety spawned and fed by the fear and the undecidabilities of the unknown. She is been gone for more than three hundred years this black diasporic sister. Africa is now a narrative to her and she is apprehensive of what this narrative might portend. In a keynote lecture I delivered to the annual conference of the Stanford Forum for African Studies at Stanford University last year, I tried to map this anxiety using the example of Richard Wright. Permit me to quote from this lecture at some length:

“This anxiety is captured most vividly in the opening page of Richard Wright’s Black Power. “Now that your desk is clear, why don’t you go to Africa”,  Dorothy Padmore tells Mr. Wright. “Africa?” Mr. Wright’s dumbfoundment is italicized in the text. Then this bit of introspection: “Africa”, I repeated the word to myself (N.B: Africa is still only a word) then paused as something strange and disturbing stirred slowly in the depths of me. I am African! I’m of African descent… Yet I’d never seen Africa; I’d never really known any Africans; I’d hardly ever thought of Africa”. The entire opening section of Black Power is a paean to the anxiety of contact.”

The anxiety of contact, the fear of the unknown, which makes a dumfounded Richard Wright exclaim –Africa?- on hearing that word is also at the root of the torn and divided consciousness which powers Countee Cullens’s famous poem, “Heritage”. The poem speaks for itself and we need not remind ourselves more than its first stanza here:

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

The black Canadian novelist, Dionne Brand, who figures black diasporic anxieties as “a tear in the world”, underscores the double consciousnes in Cullens’s poem more poignantly. The business of remembering and re-membering that tear in the world of the Diasporic sons and daughters of Africa often involves, among other gestures of reconnection, symbolic voyages to Africa to visit the sites of memory. Those voyages to the Atlantic slave coast of Africa, those emotional narratives about returnee sons and daughters breaking down in tears in Gorée, Elmina, Cape Coast, and Badagry, are all part of a multilayered ritual of reconnection. There is, however, a problem with this mode of re-entry. If you explore the wealth of documentaries of re-entry, the literature, and even accounts that one collects in fraternal encounters with members of the black diaspora community, you will discover that the Africa that is most sought after is largely a synchronic one, imagined as ancestral, fixed in her past and ancient grandness.

Irrespective of the actualities of the continent, Africa is where you go to find your history. Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Bamako, and Luanda are just locations of passage, intrusions or distractions that you must deal with before your grand encounter with the sites of memory. On arrival from the United States, from Canada, from the Caribbean, Africa’s capital cities offer you an airport and a hotel to spend the night and prepare your trip to Africa – the Africa that is history, the Africa that is memory, the Africa that is ancient. You hardly have time to notice or connect with the postmodern whirl around you. You are in a hurry to get to sites of psychic communion with Kunta Kinte and Olaudah Equiano. You are more interested in Kumbi Saleh than Accra. Askia the Great and Mansa Kankan Musa speak to you more than Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the insipid Goodluck Jonathan. The African Union and NEPAD are ancient Greek to you. You are looking for slave forts and slave routes and you don’t want Africa’s present all around you to get in the way. What accounts for this apparent fixation with the part of Africa that is historic as opposed to her actualities and contemporaneous vistas of meaning in the diasporic imagination? Does this harbor a desire to reconnect with Africa precisely at the point at which one left in the 16^th century?

I think something deeper is going on and it is related to the postcolonial forms of dowry that Africa is paying to a nebulous lover we shall describe as Western desire for want of a better descriptor. I am talking about the desire which Chinua Achebe famously describes in his Conrad essay, “An Image of Africa”. Writes Achebe: “Quite simply it is the desire — one might indeed say the need — in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” The dowry of the image or the dowry of the single story – apologies to Chimamanda Adichie – is what Africa now pays to this lover, Western desire. Now, this is a much powerful lover, with considerable technologies of dissemination.

With considerable impunity, this lover takes only the single story of poverty, hunger, and disease and broadcasts it in Western imagination as Africa’s present. Mr. Western Desire singlehandedly determines what he wants to consume of Africa. A budding American scholar of African literatures and cultures, Mr. David Mastey, is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the privileging and consumption of African child soldier narratives in the United States. Mr. Mastey is working under my supervision and I am learning a lot from his work and inquiry into the hunger for African child soldier stories by the American public. There is a desire for the single story of trauma and vulnerability and Africa pays that dowry willy-nilly. It doesn’t even matter whether what is at issue concerns Africa or not, she is the continent that must keep on giving a singular idea of herself to feed Western desire. Witness Gail Collins, a columnist for The New York Times, assessing the Lance Armstrong tragedy in a January edition of her column:

“There’s always a chance. Armstrong could demonstrate his remorse by dedicating the rest of his life to fighting rural poverty in an extremely remote section of Africa, preferably one where residents are limited to a quart of water a day. His fans would come flocking back, although Armstrong would hardly notice because the critical part of the deal would be staying in Niger or Burkina Faso forever.”

Now, how did this columnist make the leap from Lance Armstrong to the idea of rural poverty in Africa? You could essay the explanation that deep in her subconscious lies the idea of Africa as a site of redemption for Western rejects and abjects but that would be cold comfort. It doesn’t account for the reflex. That reference is gratuitous and silly but such, often, is the first point of contact with what is constructed as Africa’s present for her sons and daughters in the Diaspora. Everywhere the Black Canadian or the African American turns to in terms of the imagery of Africa that is fed into Western imagination and consciousness, they encounter a depressing tableau of abjection, trauma, and tragedy. Africa’s past, recycled and romanticized in robust traditions of black intellection and identity making, comes to represent – at least in the diasporic imagination – a safe haven from the monolithically constructed ugliness of the continent’s present.

If you are an African American or a Black Canadian beginning to take a very serious interest in Africa, Gail Collins just made Niger and Burkina Faso (trust me, she won’t write about Burkina Faso’s recent story of triumph in soccer) very unpalatable for you. If your interest in Africa survives your encounter with Collins’s column, chances are you would prefer Négritude’s Africa of beautiful bucolic black dolls of the ancient times to Collins’s Africa of contemporary misery. And if you persist in tracing your origin, it is unlikely now you will claim to have discovered that your ancestors came from Burkina Faso or Niger. I wouldn’t blame you if you rigged things in favour of Botswana.

Sometimes, the single story of the African present comes from her own sons and daughters in the diaspora. Witness the damage done by Keith Richburg in his 1997 book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. This is one angry black man who spends years covering some of the continent’s most brutal conflicts for The Washington Post and arrived at the conclusion that he is extremely lucky that those African savages sold his ancestors into slavery. At least they are now Americans and have escaped Africa’s horrendous present. Make no mistake about this, I may grumble about Mr. Richburg’s book but I do perfectly understand where he is coming from. In fact, a Nigerian is not in the position to grumble too loudly about Mr. Richburg. To grumble too much is to elicit the question: so what have you guys made of fifty years of the Nigerian present? Have you not produced your own brood of postcolonial black Nigerian lovers of Nigeria who are now exacting dowry from the Nigerian people, leaving them in unbelievable poverty and corruption even with so much oil wealth? If you look too closely at Nigeria’s present as it has been produced since 1999 by Africa’s most corrupt and most cruel ruling elite, it is not too difficult to understand why a Black Diasporic subject may want to have nothing to do with the African present.

The responsibility of Africa’s ruling class in producing a present that could be so unpalatable for our Black diasporic cousins aside, what does Africa try to do about this postmodern dowry of the singular image that she keeps paying to the much more determined lover that is Western desire? How does she struggle to get past the impunity of silly and gratuitous negative referencing as exemplified by Gail Collins? Africa could offer counter-narratives into which the Black diaspora could plug for glimpses of a present much richer than what the single stories present. Despite the nightmare that is her ruling elite, this is what my country, Nigeria, has achieved for instance with the phenomenon that is Nollywood. I believe it is no news to anyone in this audience that Nollywood is the world’s third largest movie industry. And you also know, I presume, that Nollywood movies are not just immensely popular across Africa, they constitute a new cultural bridge between Africa and her diaspora. In Canada, in the United States, and across the Caribbean, Nollywood offers counter-narratives of the African present to the Black diaspora.

Sometimes the counter-narrative of the present comes in the shape of youth culture and agency. The Azonto dance, for instance, originates from Ghana, sweeps through the rest of the continent, especially Nigeria, and has become a cultural connecting point with the continent for young black and African diasporans in the West. I mention Nollywood and Azonto because Africans, hung up on science and technology, often underestimate the power of culture to globalize every area of their genius, including their technological innovations. There is no better narrative of the Japanese people – and her technology – than the statement that Sushi makes on Western and non-Western palates alike. Never underestimate what Gangnam style is doing for the South Korean brand on the global stage. Who in the West is developing a taste for Korean cars and technology after encountering Korea through Gangnam style? That is what culture has the potential and capacity to do.

The bitter truth, however, is that counter-narratives of the African present function in asymmetrical power relations with narratives of impunity which insist on Africa as a single story. Nollywood may have made inroads in Canada, for instance, and may have even gone beyond the black Canadian community since Nollywood movies are now often represented in Canadian film festivals, all it takes to roll back the gains is one powerful Canadian single story about Africa. Consider something as simple as language. The linguistic diversity of Nigeria, Ghana and other African countries is shown even through the deployment of various Englishes. Then one Canadian novel is published. This novel talks about language but constantly hints at “dialects”. For the perceptive reader, language comes across as an intrusion into a world of dialects. Language is only comfortable in its world whenever the plot shifts to Canada. Then this Canadian novel goes ahead and wins the 2012 Scotia Bank Giller Prize, by far Canada’s most prestigious literary prize.

That novel is 419 by Will Ferguson. Mr Ferguson is a travel writer. He has travelled extensively and published four travel books. He did not travel to Nigeria or Africa to research his novel. Africa is the place you can represent with impunity, especially if you have expatriate friends in Africa who “know” the culture. Says Mr. Ferguson:

“I was fortunate to have several superb early readers who provided insights, advice, and corrections: Kirsten Olson; Jacqueline Ford, who has travelled extensively in the francophone region of West Africa; Kathy Robson, who has lived and worked in Nigeria; and Helen Chatburn-Ojehomon, who is married to a Nigerian citizen and working in Ibadan, north of Lagos. Many thanks to all of them for the feedback! The depictions of Nigerian culture and customs are solely my responsibility…Helen and Kathy in particular gave me excellent advice on the English spoken in Nigeria but in the end I found the richness of the dialect too difficult to capture on the page. Instead, I added only the slightest touch, to give readers just a hint of the full flavor.”

I guess it is too much to expect Mr. Ferguson to get off his butt and go to Nigeria for this gigantic project instead of relying on a handful of expatriates for expertise on “Nigerian culture and customs?” There is mention of more sources on his website but I found none when I visited it. Well, let us examine the quality of the expertise offered Mr. Ferguson by his expatriate knowers of Nigerian culture and customs. No Nigerian would read this howler on page 117 by the omniscient narrator – with strong hints of authorial intrusion – without risking a heart attack: “Egobia was from the Yoruba language, the language Winston spoke with his grandparents. Ego meant “money,” and bia meant “come to me,” making Egobia more an incantation than an actual name. “Money come.””

The mislabeling of two Igbo words as Yoruba is not a one-time occurrence in the novel. Make no mistake about the gravity of this howler. There is a Sergeant Brisebois in the novel. As Canadian readers of the novel, this is the equivalent of your being told by the narrator that the last name, Brisebois, is from two Anglo-Canadian words, “briser” and “bois”. Imagine what our French friends from Québec would have done to Mr. Ferguson if this had happened. Sadly, there are more howlers in the novel. Of the January 1966 coup, Mr. Ferguson’s omniscient narrator informs his Canadian readers that this was “the same coup that left Nigeria’s prime minister dead and the regional premiers rounded up and imprisoned.” I wonder who, among his “superb early readers”, told Mr. Ferguson that Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the Premier of the Western region, was rounded up and imprisoned. Somehow, none of Mr Ferguson’s expatriate experts of Nigerian “culture and customs”, none of his editors at Viking Canada, none of the judges of the Giller Prize caught any of these howlers. I wager that Mr. Ferguson could very well have written that “Ego” and “bia” are two Gikuyu, Swahili, or Lingala words and nobody would have noticed. In Africa, we are interchangeable.

Yet, this is the canonized cultural artifact, an award-winning novel, that will shape Nigeria and Africa in the Canadian imagination, carrying the imprimatur of the Giller Prize and the considerable capital that comes with it, in the foreseeable future. Can Nollywood as a counter-narrative stack up to a novel that has won the Giller Prize in Canada? No matter how well spoken Desmond Elliot, Ramsey Nouah, and Genevieve Nnaji are, they and their ilk are now fixed for Canadian consumption as a bunch of dialect-speaking Africans.

When a black Canadian picks up this novel in a Chapters book store and encounters “Nigerian culture and customs” described by a powerful Canadian writer relying mostly on the second hand accounts of his expatriate friends, would this black Canadian wonder if Mr. Ferguson would not have spent months in France immersing himself in the culture and the language of that country if he was writing a novel about France? Would this black Canadian want to move beyond this novel to ascertain 419 is not Nigeria’s greatest innovation as Mr. Ferguson claims? And, most importantly, would the black Canadian understand that the Nigeria trapped in the 399 pages of this prize-winning Canadian novel is yet another dowry paid by Africa to one of her lovers in 2012?

I thank you for your time.

For Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani: Between her America and her Nigeria

In America, all men are believed to be created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. But Nigerians are brought up to believe that our society consists of higher and lesser beings. Some are born to own and enjoy, while others are born to toil and endure.

-        Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

The Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is at it again. Her February 9, 2013 op-ed piece in the New York Times (In Nigeria, You’re Either Somebody or Nobody) in which she referred to some Nigerian house helps as “smelly” and “feral” is living rent-free in my head. I wish it would just go away. Nwaubani’s piece, on the fate of “househelps” or “servants” in Nigeria, is a profound commentary on how the West continues to view much of Africa, with the active connivance of many African writers, who traipse the West, hawking tales of grime, gore, wars and rapes – what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the single story” of Africa in this riveting video. I would only add to Adichie’s profound observations that it just seems that it is mostly African writers propagating the “single story.” Imagine the New York Times publishing a piece by a white author that refers to her help as “smelly” and “feral.” Heads would roll – as they should.

Let me also observe that research would show that the vast majority of essays in Western newspapers written by African writers are narrow in range, oscillating between protest anthems and Stepin Fetchit silliness. Nwaubani’s essay is groveling Stepin Fetchit Blackface pantomime designed specifically to gain space in a Western newspaper – for pennies. It is especially tragic how she has trivialized an important subject. Our writers need to own some responsibility for how we are viewed in the West. Some of that may be changing; many writers are shunning the West and her appetite for silliness, and writing and publishing their own stories themselves. Fame is not everything. Indeed, the writer Teju Cole has distinguished himself by his thoughtful provocative pieces about his world, our world, that display a wide range of interests and anxieties. You may not always agree with Cole but you come away wishing many African writers would look out the window and write about the world as Cole writes in this intriguing piece about the African writer and US president, Barack Hussein Obama and his unmanned drones.

Okay, let me take a deep breath and start over. Generalizations aside, Nwaubani’s essay, as appalling as it is, (yes it is, folks, it is awful, let’s not pretend otherwise) does serve the purpose of depicting much of Nigeria’s middle class as crass, narcissistic and shallow apostles of materialism, mimic people, in the habit of treating “the help” as feral simians, sub-humans not to be allowed in their living rooms, except to clean them, definitely not to be allowed to use their china. Is this a fair assessment? Who knows? Nwaubani may have unwittingly started an intra-class war. On social media, depending on where you end up, she is either an unsophisticated villain according to her literary peers, or a heroine, according to the moneyed class who race to London and America for premium ice cream and return to find that the “help” has made off with their jewelry and Euros. For the latter subclass, you only have to go to Linda Ikeji’s blog (here) to read the comments. In broken sentence after broken sentence, the mostly anti-intellectual crowd (“the thing is too long jor!”) offers high praise and  unrestrained glee at every sentence in Nwaubani’s essay.

How bad is Nwaubani’s essay? It is bad, really bad. Where should we start? There is the naïveté in assigning silly utopian qualities to America:

“Bigots and racists exist in America, without a doubt, but America today is a more civilized place than Nigeria. Not because of its infrastructure or schools or welfare system. But because the principle of equality was laid out way back in its Declaration of Independence.”

You wonder if she deliberately wrote a damning indictment of the Nigerian moneyed class as vacuous, unfeeling and materialistic, considering this stunning outburst which makes this reader want to scream, you are shitting me!:

My father detested it when our househelps sang. Each time a new one arrived, my siblings and I spent the first few evenings as emissaries from the living room, where our family watched TV after dinner, to the kitchen, where the househelps washed dishes or waited to be summoned.

Then there is the patronizing condescension:

“Some years ago, I made a decision to start treating domestic workers as “somebodys.” I said “please” and “thank you” and “if you don’t mind.” I smiled for no reason. But I was only confusing them; they knew how society worked. They knew that somebodys gave orders and kicked them around. Anyone who related to them as an equal was no longer deserving of respect. Thus, the vicious cycle of oppression goes on and on.”

And then there is this, and words simply fail this reader who gasps, Is Nwaubani for real?

Melancholic singing was not the only trait they had in common. They all gave off a feral scent, which never failed to tell the tale each time they abandoned the wooden stools set aside for them and relaxed on our sofas while we were out. They all displayed a bottomless hunger that could never be satisfied, no matter how much you heaped on their plates or what quantity of our leftovers they cleaned out.

So, yes, I was appalled by what I thought was a shallow, poorly thought out essay that only served to diminish Nwaubani and all those like her that belong in that “high society” class of “the feral help stinks.” However after going through the comments in Linda Ikeji’s blog, I am beginning to think that Nwaubani may have unwittingly started a debate, even as she’s exposed her own narcissism. Everything has to have context. I have been away from Nigeria for decades and each time I visit, I am reminded of that fact. The things I witness when I visit sometimes make me shudder and the things I say as a result amuse my hosts. And their eyes go, “Dis one don loss for America!”

As Ebere Nwiro points out on ThisDay, here, child labor is a huge problem in Nigeria. Nwiro points out that what happens to the children of the poor and the dispossessed in many of those homes like those of the Nwaubani’s is unspeakable.

The Nigerian NGO’s Report reveals that a staggering 15 million children under the age of 14 are working across Nigeria. Many of these children are exposed to long hours of work in dangerous and unhealthy environments, carrying too much responsibility for their age. Working in these hazardous conditions with little food, small pay, no education and no medical care establishes a cycle of child rights violation.

Nwaubani missed an opportunity to showcase to the world the plight of poor children in Nigeria, In Nigeria, millions of children are simply born into wars that they did not ask for. In an unregulated labor market that is generally abusive of adults, children are worse off. Many are beaten, starved, yes, physically and emotionally abused by unfeeling adults. And many of them are fated to attend the schools depicted in this horrific video. Poor adults who serve as “househelps” fare slightly better. Compared to the US, where I could never afford help, labor is cheap in Nigeria. And those with the means take advantage. Drivers routinely ferry the middle class to parties and drinking joints and wait in the cars for hours on end until “oga and madam” are ready to go back home, or to the next joint. As Nwaubani points out, many of these children come from the hinterlands, places of little hope. As horrible as it sounds, for many of them, in a country like Nigeria, ruled by the unfeeling, stepping into the dangers of indentured servitude may be their best way out. Many have struck it rich by stealing from their masters and escaping into the darkness. Labor is largely unregulated in Nigeria and abusive child labor is the big gorilla in Nigeria’s living room. If this was the issue Nwaubani was trying to highlight, she chose a strange way to do so.

Again, if the New York Times had published an essay that described an American socio-economic class as “smelly” and “feral”, heads would have rolled. This is an outrage. But I have us only to blame. Nwaubani is smirking quietly somewhere, perhaps nursing a drink prepared by a “feral smelly help”; she knows the drill. This is all noise-making; it will pass. And she will live to write another silly piece again for the gleeful West. She knows that Nigerians are long on emotional outbursts and chatter but short on enforcing laws and abiding by good structures. In the absence of unenforceable laws, the hell that the dispossessed go through in Nwaubani’s Nigeria will continue. That is how we roll.

This is not the first time Nwaubani has gotten folks baying and howling for her head. She is a darling of Western newspapers because she routinely sends them absurd howlers that exaggerate her intellectual challenges and amplify Nigeria’s woes. Here is a piece she wrote for the New York Times, titled, In Africa, The Nobel Laureate’s Curse, in which she famously pronounced, “Ngugi, Achebe and Soyinka are certainly masters, but of an earnest and sober style.” As if that was not bad enough, she dismissed Ngugi’s call for writers to write in indigenous languages by uttering this baffling one:

Many fans have extolled his brave decision to write in his mother tongue, Kikuyu, instead of English. If he truly desires a Nobel, I can’t help but wish him one. But I shudder to imagine how many African writers would be inspired by the prize to copy him. Instead of acclaimed Nigerian writers, we would have acclaimed Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa writers. We suffer enough from tribal differences already. This is not the kind of variety we need.

This exasperating opinion inspired vigorous rebuttals like these ones from writers and blogs: Carmen McCain, Chielozona Eze, Chuma Nwokolo,  Kinna Reads, Nana Fredua-Agyeman on ImageNations, Kola Tubosun on NigeriansTalk, and Molara Wood. An uncharacteristically angry Eze, seeming to speak for the group railed: “To me though, what began as a promising essay somehow turned into a mishmash of cowardly ideas, the core of which sought to suggest that it is separatist for a writer to write in his native language or even to claim that he is a writer from his ethnic group.”

To be fair to Nwaubani, she does think a lot about these things and she is never shy about sharing her views, as in this piece in the UK Guardian about Nigeria’s reaction to the BBC documentary on Makoko, that squalid place where some of these “househelps” come from. In responding to the yelps of racism, etc, by many Nigerian intellectuals of stature, she said this:

The Nigerian obsession with image often approaches neurotic proportions. What people think of us appears to take manic precedence over who we really are. You might imagine that the rational response to some of the infamies we are accused of across the globe would be: “Are we really like this? If we are, then let’s do something about it – quick.” Instead, we perpetually harangue and speechify to “correct” the world’s impressions of us. If it isn’t moaning about the depiction of Nigerians as criminals in the movie District 9, it is berating Hillary Clinton for daring to describe the situation in our country as heartbreaking and our leadership as a failure, or boycotting Oprah for warning against Nigerian 419 scams on her show.

When all of the dust settles, it is quite possible that Nwaubani is in her own way, an incredibly honest commentator on Nigeria’s current condition. She had to know she was indicting herself and her family in this shame that is child slave-labor. There is no excuse for what happens to thousands of children in Nigeria daily, none whatsoever. There is no excuse for what passes for democracy in today’s Nigeria, none whatsoever. There may be an explanation; which is that we are undergoing a perverse form of Darwinism, the rich eating the poor. Our ruling and moneyed class is doing to Nigerians what the colonialists would not have dared do to them. Black-on-black crime is what I call it. At some point, the rich will run out of the poor to feast on. Maybe then, like Nwaubani’s America that was “founded” by those who saw the original owners as game to be hunted down and annihilated, maybe then we will all live in peace and liberty and prosperity. For now, the beat goes on.

For Mali: Hurrah to the French!

We were sent the wrong people. We asked for statesmen and we were sent executioners. – Wole Soyinka

I salute the French for rescuing Mali from her oppressors. A pox on the houses of those African intellectuals muttering into their navels about imperialism, prattle, prattle, prattle. I wish the French would land Nigeria and come and rescue my mother from this perversion called “democracy.” Actually, a “No Fly Zone” over her village would be very nice, thank you. Any African intellectual who doesn’t like my attitude should go find the largest rock in Olumo and hit it repeatedly with the head.

There is something profoundly hypocritical about today’s African intellectual. The African intellectual most probably lives in the West, is funded by Western largesse and structures, children and family members are far away from the scene of the crime, attending good schools and hospitals in the West, yes, receiving good Western education, protected by Western structures and processes of Western civilization, in effect living a lush life of Western colonization, yet, insisting that the liberation of less fortunate Africans, those who have no voices must be from within Africa. How hypocritical is that?

You are protected day and night in the cafes of Europe and America by unmanned drones and you rail against unmanned drones liberating your people from their people? You and your family are in effect luxuriating in the laps of the imperialist, enjoying the trappings of your capture and you deny your siblings the same privilege? How hypocritical is that? If your child cannot attend the primary school in this video, please do not come talk to me about “imperialism.” I pray every day that the French, anyone comes to rescue these children from the war they found themselves in. Someone should chase you from that Starbucks. Go get your own WiFi, free-loader. I said it. Sue me. *cycles away slowly*