For Oga BJ in Admiration
Biko Agozino
Cornelius Hamelberg
People’s Planet
Apart from the literary tittle-tattle and those wet areas covered by what could rightly belong to the department known as the “intentional fallacy", there’s much in Biko’s essay that's unpalatable, much in the tenor and tone that is below the belt, a perception and understanding that has apparently not been modified in the intervening years since he wrote it in 2018. There’s very much to disagree about as e.g Baba Kadiri would be compelled to do, in the name of setting the record right, since Biko among other things, more or less ascribes collective guilt to the rest of Nigeria, barring a few saints such as the great Nigerian Saint Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka - May the Yoruba Gods be pleased with him - and I say this meaningfully, bearing in mind that the Igbo saint, the so called “ father of African Literature” - and who is the mother? - was vociferously against the idea of the late Great Yoruba Chief Obafemi Jeremiah Oyeniyi Awolowo being accorded a national funeral, to quote the departed so-called Father of African Literature" on the grounds that as he said, AWO of blessed memory “was not an Igbo god”
So, who was being a big bigot?
Today there’s much splitting of hairs and maybe some excitement among Nigeria’s literary savants and , of course, Mr. Soyinka himself would not sign a testament that’s in essential agreement with the contents of Biko’s diatribe.
Consider :
Biko was only six years old when the Biafra War started on the 6th of July 1967 . and of course he was zero years old 2000 years ago which does not mean that he cannot tell you the story also told by one Bart Ehrman , the fascinating story of how Jesus became God
Ben Okri has recorded some of what happened at a certain boarding school. Cornelius Ignoramus does not know if Okri was writing fiction or autobiography, but, on the other hand there’s always a little of the auto-biographical even in works of fiction, works of fantasy, simulations of reality, superstition, miracles, magical realism, phantom reality, intellectual conceits, all kinds of sophistry, outright lies and deceit
Ah, the documentaries, stories, tales, first person witness testimonies !
In my view, some Igbos are traumatised, just as many of the children
of Holocaust survivors…
The saying is “Blood’s thicker than mud !”
I sometimes shudder to think what would have happened if it was a Palestinian that had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and much worse, what would happen if - God forbid - a Palestinian or a group of Palestinian so-called “ terrorists" or “freedom fighters” were to blow up the knesset or wipe out Netanyahu's entire right wing cabinet and his top brass military commanders.
I can imagine Trump and the folks at ISRAPUNDIT flying their flags at half mast whilst planning a credible, ever-lasting response.
At least in the popular imagination, short of Divine Intervention, it would mean that there was not going to be a Palestinian state in the foreseeable future. Some would even go further and predict an oncoming genocide of everyone identified or identifiable as AMALEK
It’s a very scary Middle East scenario at present - Iran says that if the US attacks, then they ( Iran ) God forbid, will wipe out Tel Aviv and Haifa - thereby creating a vicious cycle in which at least the Arab in the street would therefore like to see the US attack Iran so that their dreams would come true, i.e. the total obliteration of Tel Aviv and Haifa and all of their enemies therein.
Meanwhile in Nigeria, not much has changed - some or many of the Igbos, can’t say how many, are still prematurely waving their flags and dreaming of secession / Biafran Independence - but so far, there has been no referendum throughout the Federal Nation and on the more militant warfront, only a few skirmishes here and there, all kinds of news about Nnamdi Kanu holed up there in Sokoto, perhaps like the once upon a time Soyinka, Kanu perhaps currently writing his prison diary - “The Man Died” or for very different reasons, sorrowfully writing something akin to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s own prison diary, ”Detained”
Let's hope that some collateral damage via a stray US missile is not visited upon the facility where the IPOB leader is currently receiving his portion of daily bread.
Once more the indefatigable Biko has dredged up a piece he wrote back in 2018, dredged up Soyinka’s finest “ Death and the King’s Horseman “ and Soyinka’s equally fictional “Season of Anomy” as the scaffolding on which to passionately, relentlessly, and self-righteously hang all the misdeeds that led to the Igbo secessionist movement that chose to be named Biafra, within which timeframe Ojukwu was confident that no army on earth - or was it only “no army in Africa” was capable of defeating his Biafra…I almost wrote, perhaps according to ancient Igbo prophecy - or in reaction to some pogroms, especially in the true North and elsewhere on a much smaller scale - as a result of the heinous mass slaughters perpetrated by what was perceived to be an Igbo-led and Igbo-inspired coup in fledgling democratic Nigeria on January 15, 1966, causing some of his Igbo people to rejoice, and when the violent, very bloody reaction set in, caused the vast majority of them to recoil, withdraw and retreat to the ethnic enclave today forever associated with his / their God-given or not “God-given” promised or nor promised ancestral land, Biafra…
“The January 15, 1966, Nigerian coup resulted in the deaths of key political and military leaders, primarily targeting the Northern establishment. Major figures killed included Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Northern Premier Ahmadu Bello, Western Premier Samuel Akintola, Finance Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh, and senior army officers Brigadier Ademulegun, Col. Kur Mohammed, and Col. Raph Shodeinde. “
What repercussions should we expect if - God forbid - the same kinds of atrocities were to be visited on the current president of Nigeria, the Sardauna of Sokoto, and other prominent non Igbo leaders in the Federal Republic of Nigeria by an Igbo-led coup?
Again and again, we’ve returned to the uncertain theme
Somewhere here, Biko has already asked : War, what is it good for?
Donovan gives his synoptic view in Universal Soldier
Fela Kuti too, mourning his mother : Unknown Soldier
One of the beautiful things about this USA-Africa Dialogue Series is that it's a meeting place where from time to time one either meets or is introduced to some of those often referred to and known as Great Minds, whether from the mists of fabled antiquity or in contemporary reality. With regard to the latter, this contemporaneous reality is the place where we sometimes find , in tune with The Beatitudes, the creative energies of those who hunger and thirst in search of justice, including reparative justice, and in these matters, our own Biko Agozino is no exception. However, with regard to the historically failed, short-lived and painful experiment known as Biafra - which remains an aspiration for the many, we are yet to hear him go all the way, and to include in the general framework of reparations / reparative justice, notions such as war indemnity and other compensations such as received by the Jewish people who were victims of the Holocaust.
This is my view on a sensitive subject for which I claim sole responsibility. Unlike Groucho Marx, the occasional wisdom comedian, I do not say, “Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others”
I don’t want to waste more of your time
I don’t want to waste anybody’s time
anybody’s precious time; so many generations
have lived, suffered and perished, some have
even died since that Nigerian civil war which
started and inexorably continued until its final
bitter end with a defeated Ojukwu signing the articles
of surrender , ironically echoing Sir Winston Churchill
and that last word and its specific meaning in English
and in any other language may still continue be
controversial
Norman O Brown's " Loves Body” begins with a Chapter titled Liberty
“Freud’s myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story.
Freud seems to project into prehistoric times the constitutional crisis of seventeenth-century England. The primal father is absolute monarch of the horde; the females are his property. The sons form aconspiracytooverthrowthe despot, and in the end substitute a social contract with equal rights for all. This anachronistic history directs us to look for the recurrence of the archetype in the seventeenth century.
In the First Treatise of Civil Government, Locke attacks Sir Robert Filmer’s defense of absolute monarchy entitled Patriarchs. Sir Robert Filmer, like Freud , identifies patriarchy and monarchy, political and paternal power. Filmer, like Freud, derives constitutional structure from a primal or prehistoric mythical family, from the paternal powers of our father Adam. Like Freud, Filmer attributes to the primal father unlimited power over his sons ,including the power to castrate them.”
https://www.google.com/search?q=Norman+O.+Brown+on+Liberty&n
The wannabe Biafra could find the arguments made in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence useful, although when talking about the nation Nigeria we ought not to consider every ethnicity as a separate entity….
Biko’s polemical text is dense and must be milked for its ultimate clarity,
must be read carefully to be disentangled. I go to the heart of the diatribe that mentions willful genocide more thana dozen times ,go to this this one sentence at the epicentre of the clutter, the plum in the pudding :
There’s a Mandinka proverb which roughly means that when you slip and fall - retrospectively, you don’t begin with where you finally landed or ended, you begin your reflection with where the actual slipping began.
In the case of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, where the doctors are still diagnosing, left and right the various judges are passing their judgements and the rest of Nigeria and surrounding Africa , the jury is still out, refelecting…..
There are those who habitually take Lord Lugard as the convenient point of departure, just as author of this price would like us to believe that the Genesis begins with the igbos’ suspension from the original garden of Eden once known as Nigeria, and not a self-inflicted or forced exile:The Almighty parent Nigeria did not say - as those Roman citizens said to Coriolanus - your ass is now grass, you’re exiled - nor do those on the receiving end of the stick say, like Coriolanus , “ You common cry of curs, etc…. I banish you.”
Even if Wole Soyinka wrote it in stone before Huntington picked up on it with his ”Clash of Civilizations", there are a number of obvious problems arising, sticking even the impartial, the neutral, the heathen, the unbaptised and those who have not yet been initiated into the Arochukwu society, in the eye ,this one sentence - like a life sentence from the supreme court of Justice :
The sentence :
“The novel depicts the Marxists who were locked up in a mental asylum as phrase-mongers who fail to recognise the revolutionary situation in the country and instead rally in support of the genocidal military dictatorship, rather than turn the civil war into a liberation war.”
Cornelius Hamelberg
Footnotes ( so to speak)
Fela Kuti mourning his mother, more specifically in Army Arrangement ( part 2)
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaPWPdnEkkQ
Wondering what is the connection between The Ekpe society of Nigeria and what’s known as The Ekpe society in Sierra Leone
Biko Agozino
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Ibrahim Abdullah
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Dr. Oohay
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Professor Agozino,
There are all kinds of understandings and misunderstandings about the term “illiterate” especially in semi-literate societies.
As you may or may not know, the very first word of the Quranic revelation is the command IQRA - which is usually translated to mean “ Read” - and yet you have the Prophet of Islam Sallallahu alaihi wasallam, boasting - as per the various translations into English, of being the “illiterate Prophet” - the Arabic word is “Ummi” - which in fact does not mean "illiterate" in your sense of the word - at the time of that revelation, it actually meant someone who was not acquainted with the Hebrew Scriptures…
Your 2018 piece was straightforward enough, and direct. I got the points you were making. I must have given you the wrong impression when I wrote that “Biko’s polemical text is dense and must be milked for its ultimate clarity, must be read carefully to be disentangled.” - I was addressing the generality of US-Africa Dialogue Series readership, some of whom I supposed are not theatre critics or theatre goers, or even members of what I refer to as the literati - and for me, there’s something of a difference between the text on paper ( dead or alive) and the actual performance that's known as Theatre.
Wole Soyika told me that he loves the Drottningholm Theatre
When I go somewhere, whether it's Stockholm, Port Harcourt or Cairo, I first check out the artists. In Port Harcourt, Emma Wopara was a good friend
You are not the only one that is free to interpret Soyinka according to whatever whims, fancies , and caprices you may have, no matter the guidance, recommendations, or the feelings of approval / disapproval of the poet, playwright, philosopher and activist.
Please feel free to do so with e.g. Waiting For Godot, ditto with Samson Agonistes or Harry Martinson's Aniara
Cinema is another genre. Kenneth Harrow, how I wish you were here.
One of the best Hamlet I’ve seen so far stars Stellan Skarsgård as Hamlet , a very bloody, blood-filled and blood soaked Hamlet for that matter. ( Reminds me of Presidential Brother Muhammadu Buhari issuing this chilling warning to his fellow Nigerians back then in 2015, that if he was cheated this time around and did not win the election, “The dog and the baboon will be soaked in blood ! ” - a foreboding that you guys make that mistake just one more time and it would herald
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Until circa July 1971 , African Theatre was my major interest - I also toured around Ghana, with a concert party, before I departed….it was funny - when we arrived at a village near Koforidua with the obligatory theatre sewing machine etc the villagers said they didn’t want to listen to us or any amponsah , they wanted MODERNITY, they wanted none less than Soul Brother Number one JAMES BROWN - IN PERSON !!!!!!!!
Don’t forget that was after that seminal event, after which Ghana was never ever the same again , that SOUL TO SOUL music festival. Backstage, I watched the sunrise with Carlos Santana, immediately after he played “Soul Sacrifice”…Ghana was a real cultural experience.
N.B. Temperamentally, I’m far from Say Tokio kid, and even further from the character known as the Professor
I saw the production of Kongi’s Harvest at the Art’s Centre in Accra, a week after the Biafra War officially ended on the 15th of January 1970 ( There were sighs of relief and much rejoicing and bottles of beer consumed copiously on the Legon Campus). I wasn’t at all surprised that the theatre director ( James Gibbs) and producers felt artistically free enough to award themselves the leeway, were at liberty to adapt the play to the exigencies of their local environment and that since that was the prevailing mood among the bourgeoisie in Ghana that version of Kongi seemed to have resonated with that particular audience at the time, that on stage, Kongi was dressed up in a short-sleeved safari Maoist tunic and was even talking and gesticulating as Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah. (Yes, another literary term that rhymes with “intentional fallacy” is “biographical heresy”) Kwame Nkrumah had been toppled on the 24th of February 1966 - and in downtown Accra the main roundabout was named National Liberation Circle to commemorate that event; the circle has now been renamed The Kwame Nkrumah Circle
At Korlebu, discussing Nkrumah, our Ghanaian hosts, a medical doctor and his wife ( petty bourgeois) burst into tears, “There was no milk to be found on the shelves of the grocery stores, “ she wept
And by the way, a month later James Gibbs. produced a few scenes from The Caucasian Chalk Circle" - at the Courtyard of Mensah Sarbah Hall ( with some relevant chameleon-like cultural adjustments to suit the exigencies of the prevailing mood on campus) -after all my kind of theatre would be to provoke the sleepers from their slumber, but in uncertain claims it would be safer to not antagonise the audience
A scholar of your calibre expects Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday, “the aptest scholar there ever was.” to bag an ignoble Wole Soyinka prize for illiteracy?
Like Western Civilization’s hero from fabled antiquity, your Ignoramus luxuriates in this piece of verifiable knowledge, and you may call it evidence if you like,that "I know that I know nothing “ and I wear this ignorance as a badge of honour. Blessed are the poor in knowledge for they shall be called children of innocence.
As in “ as stubborn as an illiterate goat.”
Ignoramus understands that “illiterate” is a potent expletive in Nigerian English and those on the receiving end must rise again - as in And Still I Rise - as part of your ongoing class struggle, but unlike Soyinka’s school teacher Lakunle , I do not say
“If now I am misunderstood by you
And your race of savages
I rise above taunts
And remain unruffled.”
Who wants to bag the Nobel Prize for literacy ?
Re - “Soyinka's note at the end of Death and the King's Horseman”
You seriously expect an illiterate ignoramus to go to all the trouble to re-read “ the author's note” that “your opinion decoded”? Have a heart - Off head, I wrote a paper on just that tradition vs modernity theme in Soyinka, back then when Soyinka had been detained for holding up that radio station etc. That was some living theatre, some real activist drama. I was one of the first people to sign a petition - at Hans Zell’s bookshop for his immediate and unconditional release -
These are some of your specific wordings which I do not like:
“Why were highly educated Yoruba leaders the ones who cheered on the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra?”
“ I believe that Soyinka was directly and indirectly challenging his fellow Nigerian intellectuals to account for their opportunism in supporting a genocidal war that took 3.1 million lives in 30 months.”
“I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, Season of Anomy, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide. “
I could go but prefer to stop here: