By Anote
Ajeluorou and Kenechukwu Ezeonyejiaku
Father of
African literature, late Prof. Chinua Achebe, has left an impressive legacy in
the literary world. Perhaps, nowhere else is this legacy better felt and more enduring
than in his treatise of leadership problems that have continued to bedevil his
beloved country and continent. The issue of leadership was so close to his
heart that he devoted a slim volume to it in The Trouble with Nigeria after he’d delved into partisan politics
in the 1980s when he joined Peoples Redemption Party (PRP).
But even in his preceding literary works,
particularly Arrow of God, Achebe shows
concern for this critical problem of development. Although set in colonial
times, Arrow of God still speaks for
the current times in its pragmatic approach to how leadership is handled,
citizens’ response to it and obligations of those saddled with it. A re-reading
of the 50-year old novel yields interesting and compelling parallels with
Nigeria’s current democratic march; it also helpfully points the way forward to
ways of avoiding the pitfalls that have dodged Nigeria’s heels.
As the novel turns 50 this year since its
publication in 1964, drums were rolled out in its celebration in eight cities across
Nigeria – Ibadan, Utuoke, Abuja, Lagos, Awka, Port Harcourt and Sokoto. The
Ogidi event, hometown of the author, didn’t hold due to logistic problems. And
to underscore the core issue at the heart of the novel, ‘Literature, Leadership
and National Unity’ was chosen as theme.
Perhaps, no other novel by the venerable author
mirrors Nigeria’s leadership crisis more accurately than Arrow of God. Umuaro, just like Nigeria, is a federation of six
villages that came together to form one nation by a necessity of survival when
faced with the threat of extinction from Abami warriors, who were always on the
offensive. The six villages of Umuaro came together and created a powerful
medicine, Ulu, to protect them, Ulu’s
chief priest being Ezeulu. The Abami warriors could be likened to military
rule from which Nigeria’s current democratic dispensation emerged, with
democracy being the modern-day Ulu to
save the country from the onslaught the military wrought on the body polity.
Synonymous with democracy also is the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) that has ruled since 1999; and democracy or PDP’s chief
priests being Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Musa Yar’Adua and now Goodluck
Jonathan. How has leadership fared in the hands of these chief priests? What
has been the people’s response to their leadership styles? What precipitate
roles have the people played in helping to shape or derailing how they are led?
Have the leaders and the led play complimentary roles to advance development or
have they been at variance or at each other throats?
In Arrow
of God, Ezeulu suffers certain political reverses arising from antagonism
from Nwaka and Ezeidemili, perhaps akin to what All Progressive Congress (APC) is
giving to the ruling PDP. Ezeulu’s subsequent actions are defined by this
antagonism. He is imprisoned by the white, colonial overlord and is unable to perform
his duty of eating the remaining two sacred yams in service of Ulu; a spill over ensues and the people
are grounded. They cannot harvest their yam since their chief priest refuses to
eat more than one yam at a time, as required.
The issue of colonial overlord is also fresh
in Nigeria’s recent memory. International Monetary Fund’s boss, Christine
Lagarde visits Nigeria December 2011 and by January 1, 2012, petroleum subsidy
is removed to occasion the biggest people’s revolt against their government.
When Ezeulu fails to eat the sacred yams, the Christian Missionary Church makes
capital gain of it and asks faithful and pagans alike to bring their yams to
the church for their protection. This they gladly do, and it spells the end of Ulu and Ezeulu’s reign as sovereign god
and chief priest over them.
Indeed, Nigerian leaders who wish to make
impact on the lives of the people would do well to read Arrow of God and learn a lesson or two from Ezeulu’s political
ascendancy and eventual fall. Two of other of Achebe’s fictional treatises on
politics that leaders should advisedly read are A Man of the People and Anthills
of the Savannah. They are instructive if fictional works that plumb the
depths of leadership issues, particularly how the continent was still battling
with wrong leadership application, especially in Achebe’s home country,
Nigeria.
AT the
University of Ibadan (then University College, Ibadan, where Achebe studied)
where the 50th year celebration of Arrow
of God started, America’s Associate Professor of Conflict
Resolution, Human Security, Global Governance at University of Massachusetts,
Boston, Dr. Darren Kew, placed
emphasis on civil society groups, as key element in checking the excesses of
leaders and keeping them reined in, as they perform their civic duties to the
citizenry. Kew said Nigeria’s democratic march has been hampered by the absence
of a social contract between the government and the people.
As a result, the
culture of holding political leaders or government accountable for lack of
performance was yet to be entrenched in the country. What is needed, Kew noted,
is a viable opposition and a strong civil society group constantly on the look
out to make government live up to its electoral promises.
For Kew the absence
of social contract in Nigeria’s democracy between government and the people in
which the state only
exists to serve the will of the people, who are the source of all political
power enjoyed by the state, who can also choose to give or withhold this power
was reason for government acting with impunity, as if the people did not exist.
For instance, when outcomes of elections do not flow from people’s balloting
but through rigging and other election maleficence, it becomes difficult for
such government to genuinely serve the will of the people but that of its own
self-interests, as is currently the case in the country.
For Kew, who has monitored four
elections in Nigeria, democracy as a system of learning the best ideals to run
a society, needs a virile opposition as an essential element in creating a
balance of power for the polity so the ruling party does not ride roughshod.
Also because the opposition has interest in capturing power at the centre in
the contestation for power, Kew argued that the opposition always has interest
in ensuring clean elections and exposing corruption by reaching out to civil
society groups and mobilizing the public in a bid to win elections.
“Social contract is
what is missing in Nigerian democracy, as there was not yet a sense of
political contest, which takes time to be built”, he argued. He added that All
Progressive Congress (APC) was still terribly fragile at the moment to act as
the true opposition needed to put the ruling Peoples Democratic Party on its
toes in the contestation for power required of a true democratic society.
Kew described
Nigeria as semi-democratic in human development index (HDI) valuation. He
further noted that it was hard as yet for “ethical leaders to get into power
(in Nigeria). Civil society and the greater public are key groups in
determining governance, free and fair elections. Trade unions are still an
essential actor in the political process”.
In each of the
cities, the play adaptation of Arrow of
God either as When the Arrow Rebounds
or Ezeulu was staged to the delight
of audiences.
IN a
celebratory dirge performed for the African literary icon Achebe by former Head
of Department of English, University of Lagos and an award-winning author in
Lagos last week, Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo said of him: “Ude gi
na-ede n’Igbo na oru; ma n’onwu, ma na ndu”, meaning: “Your aura resonates
both at home and in the Diaspora, in life and in death.”
These
legacies, of which Arrow of God is one, has prompted a worldwide
celebration of the golden jubilee of the book’s publication in over 70
countries of the world which has been observed early in the year in India,
Bangladesh, United States of America, Russia, other parts of Asia and later in
the year in Africa, Europe, South America and many universities around the
world.
At
the Afe Babalola Hall, University of Lagos, venue of the celebration in Lagos,
students, literary enthusiasts, dignitaries, prominent foreign and local
writers and scholars turned out to pay tributes, present papers themed around
the re-appraisal of the book, Arrow of God in the light of the messages
and literary construct it has for pushing the concepts of literature,
leadership and national unity in the modern times for Nigeria and Africa.
While
speaking at the event, a retired Professor of African Literature at American
University, U.S., Prof. Charles Larson said the works of the late icon would remain
with us forever, adding that he’d taught in a small school in the then Eastern
Region in a town called Oraukwu in now Anambra State, and revealed how he went
to a bookshop in Onitsha where he discovered that Achebe had written his third
book, Arrow of God, which he immediately bought for three shillings.
Being
the first person in America to offer a class based on African literature,
Larson noted that prior to his coming to Nigeria in 1962, the American
curriculum was void of anything African, Asia and Latin America and that his
education was shallow as a result. He stated that his coming to Nigeria changed
his life just as he admitted that Chinua Achebe also changed his intellectual outlook
on life.
According
to him, “Arrow of God is the most complete novel and many of us think
this is his foremost novel. He wrote a great African novel, Things Fall
Apart and he wrote many other major novels and this makes him the
great African writer. But it’s not just because he wrote those novels, but what
he brought into these novels. He restored the African power; he recaptured
Africa’s heritage in those novels in a way that nobody had done at that time
and he restored pride in African culture.
“You
can say that Chinua Achebe shaped the literature of the African continent and I
can say that no writer anywhere else in the world has had such an impact on the
literature of his continent. He changed the shape of world literature. World
literature has never been the same because of Chinua Achebe and for me, he
changed my entire life but what I will really like to say is that what Chinua
Achebe gave was giving light to the African continent. He illuminated the
African continent in a way that had never been done before.”
Former
President, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) and former member of Federal
House of Representative who is the chairman, National Organizing Committee of
the celebration, Dr, Wale Okediran, said that the various programmes mapped out
for the celebration were designed to help reinvigorate the reading culture in
the country and at the same time encourage students and scholars to look at the
celebration’s theme which is “Literature, Leadership and National Unity.”
He,
however, noted that plans were underway to make the celebration of Achebe’s
life and legacy an annual event whereby students and visitors would be invited
to Ogidi to see the birth place of the writer, look at the primary school he
attended, visit his ancestral home as is done for other great writers around
the world.
IN Port
Harcourt, Okediran, said it was a challenging but very exciting assignment and
thanked organisers of UNESCO Port Harcourt World Book Capital for incorporating
Arrow of God@50 event, as part of its
programmes. He emphasized that celebrating the book would “rev up reading
culture and reawaken how we can adopt the book, as National Conference material
because of its leadership qualities”.
America’s Achebe scholar and professor of
Comparative Literature, Prof. Natasha Vaubel of Indiana University, said she
became Achebe convert after Achebe accused the west of never listening to other
people tell their own stories themselves. Vaubel stressed the need for people
to tell their own stories themselves, “because stories matter and they are not
innocent. Books and stories can be windows, but they can lie and lock us in a
box”.
She said countering the lies stories such as
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
tell about Africa and its people was Achebe’s lifelong mission as a writer, and
for which he became famous.
ALSO in Sokoto,
the emphasis was on women, their roles in society and how they can be helped to
achieve their destinies in a patriarchal society. Although women do not feature
prominently in Arrow of God, their
seeming silence is cause for concern of some feminine advocates, who feel that
Achebe was so crucial a writer to leave out women while discussing the all
important place of leadership in society.
However, a don at Usman Danfodiyo University,
Sokoto, Aisha Umar Mohammad, reinforced the presence of women in the novel by
the sheer passivity of their roles, as mothers, homemakers doing all the jobs
in the home that make their men engage in war pastime and in political affairs
of the community. In her paper, ‘Passivity and Identity: The Women in Achebe’s Arrow of God’, she argued that the
absence of women in the novel tallies with how women were held in pre-colonial
Africa, and still held even now to a large extent, as beings not deserving
attention.
Also, Ibrahim
Daniel of Department of General and Liberal Studies, Niger State Polytechnic,
Zungeru, spoke on ‘Slave Mentality and Gender Discourse in Contemporary
Nigeria’. He spoke on the need to empower the girl child in order to liberate
her from the slave mentality in which she is enmeshed. Muhammad Tahir Mallam,
while speaking on ‘(Mis)Conception of Leadership and the Tragedy in Arrow of God’ effectively tied leadership to the health of a nation,
noting that Umuaro as a federal system had its internal tensions, just as
Nigeria is currently undergoing and advocated strong leadership to help
overcome protracted problems.
Also on hand to weigh in on feminine issues in
Sokoto were House Committee Chairman on Diaspora, Hon. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, who
chaired the plenary session and former House member and Nigeria’s
Ambassador-designate to Ireland, Dr. Bolero Ketebo. While commending organisers
of Arrow of God@50 Celebration,
Dabiri-Erewa, said celebrating Achebe was particularly worth it. She asked that
women and girls be given all the responsibilities of leadership and they would
perform well.
She, however, noted that women attaining
their full potentiality in politics was an uphill task, as all the political
party structures in the country, where decisions are taken, were still not
headed by women, a situation she said was problematic for the growth of women.
She noted, “Leadership is our problem in this
country. We must demand for our rights. Things are falling apart, as Achebe
says. But during elections the women don’t go out to vote. Your vote is your
power; use it wisely. If leaders know your vote will get him or her in or out
of power, they will take you seriously. If they know your vote counts, they
will sit up”.
For Ketebo, women should fight for political
offices just like their male counterparts and not wait for anybody to hand over
power to them, as it was a pipe dream. She stated, “Nobody gives political
power to anybody! I prefer bottom-top approach to leadership issues. Which
woman is a local government council chairman? We ought to start from there and
climb upwards. We cannot shy away from our responsibilities. Women should try
and speak to the men in their lives.
“Also, the challenge is to Northern women;
you have more responsibility than women in the South. After Prof. Zainab Alkali,
no other Northern woman has become notable in writing ever since. So, for every
assignment for women in the South, Northern women have 10!”
Hon. Ketebo also praised the continent’s
ancestors for leaving their offsprings with the timeless proverbs that pepper
Achebe’s literary works. Prof. (Mrs.) Asabe Kabir Usman of Modern European
Languages and Linguistics had spoken extensively on the Igbo proverbs that form
the fulcrum of Achebe’s writing and how they foster societal unity, peaceful
coexistence and conflict management in Arrow
of God.
Ketebo noted, “We take these proverbs for granted
and pay little respect to our forebears’ foresight in coining these timeless proverbs”.
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