BENIN OLOKUN SYMBOLISM AND THE DEPTH OF BEING 2
toyin adepoju
[This] symbol "Owen Iba Ede Ku" means the sun never misses the day.The symbol [represents the]sun and therefore...Olokun and Osalobua,covering the world with radiant light:Without the sun, there can be no day [ Without day there can be no division into the four parts of the day]
The lines radiating from the center can...be viewed as early morning - sun rays casting shadows or outlines around objects.
The central intersection represents "201 junctions"....The number 201 is traditionally associated with infinity,and the design describes the infinite power of spiritual beings.
I ye erhunmwun na tue b ebo okpa yan uri no bie mwen
With this prayer, I salute 201 deities who gave birth to me
I entered into unknowing,
And there I remained unknowing,
Transcending all knowledge.
I entered into unknowing
Yet when I saw myself there
Without knowing where I was
I understood great things;
I shall not say what I felt
For I remained in unknowing
Transcending all knowledge.
That perfect knowledge
Was of peace and holiness
Held at no remove
In profound solitude;
It was something so secret
That I was left stammering
Transcending all knowledge
I was so whelmed,
So absorbed and withdrawn,
That my senses were left
Deprived of all their sensing,
And my spirit was given
An understanding while not understanding,
Transcending all knowledge.
He who truly arrives there
Cuts free from himself;
All that he knew before
Now seems worthless,
And his knowledge so soars
That he is left in unknowing
Transcending all knowledge.
The higher he ascends
The less he understands
Because the cloud is dark
Which lit up the height
Whoever knows this
Remaining always in unknowing
Transcending all knowledge.
This knowledge in unknowing
Is so overwhelming
That wise men disputing it
Can never overthrow it
Whoever knows this
For their knowledge does not reach
To the understanding of not understanding.
Transcending all knowledge.
And he who does arrive
collapses as in sleep,
for all he knew before
now seems a lowly thing,
and so his knowledge grows so deep
that he remains unknowing,
rising beyond all science.
The higher he ascends
the darker is the wood;
it is the shadowy cloud
that clarified the night,
and so the one who understood
remains always unknowing,
rising beyond all science.
This knowledge by unknowing
is such a soaring force
that scholars argue long
but never leave the ground.
Their knowledge always fails the source:
to understand unknowing,
rising beyond all science.
This knowledge is supreme
crossing a blazing height;
though formal reason tries
it crumbles in the dark,
but one who would control the night
by knowledge of unknowing
will rise beyond all science
And this supreme knowledge
Is so exalted
That the power of man or learning
Can grasp it;
He who masters himself
Will,with knowledge in unknowing,
Always be transcending.
And if you should want to hear:
This highest knowledge lies
In the loftiest sense
Of the essence of God;
That is a work of his mercy,
To leave one without understanding,
Transcending all knowledge.
Benin Olokun Aghadhgada image from "Benin Olokun Symbols" by Iro Eweka at The Institute of Benin Studies.
Explanatory text by Iro Eweka in "Benin Olokun Symbols" and Norma Rosen from "Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship" in African Arts, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1989), pp. 44-53+88:
Benin Olokun devotee's prayer and translation from Norma Rosen, "Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship".
St.John of the Cross,'Stanzas concerning an ecstasy experienced in high contemplation'
Accessed on 03/07/10
from
St. John of the Cross: The Collected Works Trs.Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez, Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1964, pp. 718-719
Interspersed with extract from
St.John of the Cross,'Stanzas concerning an ecstasy experienced in high contemplation'
from To Touch the Sky: Poems of Mystical, Spiritual & Metaphysical Light,
Translated by Willis Barnstone
Biko Agozino
|
ODE TO BABA SHO AT 76 By Biko Agozino ‘Unlike societies right next to the Igbo for instance – more famously the Benin, or further West, the Yoruba or, all the way southwards of the continent, the Kwazulu of the legendary Shaka – the Igbo, with their strong social formation rooted in republicanism, would appear to belie my general claim. The Igbo have no history of expansionism, being content with a strong organization around autonomous clan entities that made contact – friendly or unfriendly with one another as the need arose (Wole Soyinka, Distinguished Nyerere Lecture, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 2010: 1). Soyinka may have helped to answer a question that I have been longing to ask him for a long time: Why does he love Igbo culture so much when almost everyone else appears to hate the Igbo? I found clues to this answer that his 2010 Nyerere Lecture confirms starting with his childhood autobiography, Ake, where as a kid he refused to lie down to the elders as is expected in Yoruba culture and reasoned that if he was not expected to lie down to God, why should he lie down to anyone? Before the publication of Ake, he had already fictionalized this biographical sketch in his novel, The Interpreters that a Youth Corps teacher, Adamu, tried to get my form four High School class to understand without much success perhaps because of the fractal elliptical structure that is characteristic of Soyinka’s work.
What
Adamu taught us effectively was always to look for a deeper meaning in the work
of Soyinka and not to read it at the surface level. In that novel, there was a
university lecturer, Soyinka’s alter ego, called Egbo, who delivered exactly
the same defiant line of prostrating to neither God nor man. Now I wonder if
Egbo was a suggestive code for Igbo because Soyinka may have been rebuked as a
child by elders for being an uncultured bush man or Igbo man, ‘igbo’ means bush
in Yourba language, all because he admired the Igbo concept of all heads being
equal. Maybe Soyinka actually witnessed an Igbo man perform this indomitable
spirit and admired it enough to adopt it himself.
Soyinka
said that he sat in Awolowo’s chair and persuaded the mobile broadcasters to go
back to Enugu because security agents were searching for them frantically but
he himself was not afraid to wait alone for the security agents that desecrated
the library of Awo in search of incriminating evidence to return and face his
resistance. That took some courage and is indeed part of the democratic trait
that Soyinka has identified in our own African culture that is worthy of
emulation. This Igbophilia is found in his collection of poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt and in the prison
diary, The Man Died, where he bore
witness to the oppression of the Igbo during the civil war and his one-man
attempt to stop the carnage, earning him solitary confinement. Then he capped
it all with that eye-popping witness-like harrowing account of the pogrom
against the Igbo that he detailed in Season
of Anomy. In Ibadan, he said that
he traveled the country to conduct ethnographic observations of traditional
theatrical performances and in Season of
Anomy, the hero also travels the country searching for traditional
socialist roots but ended up being confined in a psychiatric hospital as a mad
man. Did Soyinka witness the pogrom in the North and could he have achieved
more in preventing the tragedy if he had worked as part of a popular democratic
organization instead of always tending to perform his one man shows apart from
that stint with the Peoples Redemption Party as Director of Research in the
1980s?
Please
note that Soyinka's praise for the Igbo culture of radical republicanism in the
epigraph above and his critique of empires and kingdoms echoes that of Walter
Rodney in Groundings with my Brothers
where Rodney told poor Jamaican youth to be skeptical of African histories that
emphasize only kingdoms and empires given that many parts of Africa had no
kings or queens but practiced direct democracies of the sort that Soyinka
appears to be recommending as a better alternative for the whole of Africa. Europeans
simply assumed that such societies were primitive ‘headless societies’ and
proceeded to impose chiefs on them but Igbo and Ibibio women declared war on
such Warrant Chiefs as Adiele Afigbo documented.
Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. |
Chidi Anthony Opara
treasure, despite attempts(most times unknown to him), by a tiny
Nigerian and International cultural cabal to appropriate his
personality. Happy birthday Prof.
Chidi Anthony opara
kenneth harrow
i was very surprised to read biko's claim that there is so much animus toward the igbo. biko, do you mean by other nigerians? as much of igbo life and culture is vectored to outsiders through literature, it surely doesn't apply there: in fact, achebe has guaranteed international admiration for things igbo, esp language, for years; and he's been joined by a host of other igbo or mixed writers, artists, musicians, etc. where does this hatred reside now that the biafran war is 2 generations behind us?
secondly, peripherally, WS has been the champion of open, free, unimpeded speech. i don't wish to start a diatribe against those who would censor nollywood, but it is perhaps a marker of our times that narrow nationalist movements seem to exercise great power in censoring the arts. thus 2 russian exhibitors today condemned to 3 years of prison for exhibiting art felt to be offensive to the russian orthordox establishment and their ultranationalist supporters. i associate this sensibility with many nationalist movements around the world; including the impending law against the wearing of the burka and niqba in france, and soon to be elsewhere in europe.
doesn't soyinka's free spirit of critique apply here, and if so, are there limits?
i would have censored, indeed bombed, radio milles collines in rwanda as it incited its listeners to genocide. i am not american enough to accept totally free speech; are there any countries without laws against libel? apply the concept to groups, and you have reason for censorship when the line between speech and incitement to violence is crossed, or blurred.
but there is a difference between a line in a play, a poem, on a canvas, and a line that crosses out people. i think WS always recognized that difference
ken
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Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
Biko Agozino
| Bro Ken, Thanks for affirming your love for our culture and you are right, you are not alone! Wole's celebration of democratic speech is applicable to himself and he tolerates criticism much more than the dictators who would repress people sometimes for telling an uncomfortable truth. But on any scale, his positive attributes far outweigh any defects in his scholar-activism. This is the most important lesson that Malcolm X taught us in his autobiography, according to bell hooks. When Malcolm discovered that his hero, Elijah Mohamed, was human - all too human - he nearly lost his faith but one of Elijah's sons invited him to study the Bible with him and they came to the conclusion that none of the holy men in the bible was without sin and yet they are honored for the things that they did right. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone! On the love of Achebe along with the hatred of the Igbo, think about the worship of the Bible and the simultaneous hatred of Jews or the fact that every currency in the world is adorned with Arabic numerals while Arabs are hated with passion by some but not by all. The uniqueness of Baba Sho is that he went out of his way to show solidarity with a people that no one liked even at the risk of his own neck while it was reported that some of the traditional rulers from his Yoruba culture toured the killing fields in the North to congratulate the killers for sparring Yoruba lives during the Igbo pogrom before the war. It is a puzzle that at the height of the cold war, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc teamed up with Arabs to engineer genocide on an unprecedented scale against a people who had no hatred towards any of these blocs. Mahmood Mamdani recently suggested that anti-Muslim bigotry is awash in the literature found in Eastern Nigeria but provided no evidence for such. Soyinka's insensitive line in The Jero Plays making fun of some revered Muslim chants - 'Lie lie all na lie' as he put it - is an exercise in poetic license equaled only by Baba Fela Kuti's mocking Shuffering and Shmiling in which he took on the African adherents of both Christianity and Islam. No similar irreverence of other cultures is found in Igbo literature where the Achebean dictum that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it to make a forest appears to be the predominant democratic philosophy of tolerance but not license to kill. Of course, you are right, the Igbo are not hated by everybody. I said 'almost'. The surprising thing is that given their potential contributions to democratisation and progress, they should be admired and beloved by many more and not just by yourself and perceptive iconoclastic heroes like Baba Sho, our very own WS. Yes, other cultures have their unique admirable qualities too but none of them comes close to the paranoia that appears to be the lot of the Igbo wherever they are found, not just in Nigeria, but with no cause for all that alarm. In South Africa for example, a recent book asserted that the Igbo are responsible for all the drugs trade there and the evidence? 'Look how many of them are in jail'! On your fantasy about bombing a Rwanda radio station the way some say that the rail links to Auschwitz should have been bombed by America to save more lives, remember that many of those radio workers were innocent and that bombing the radio station would not have eliminated the more powerful radio without battery or word of mouth communication of la haine. The Rwandese Patriotic Front, backed by Ugandan troops, marched in and chased the genocidists out the way Nyerere's troops marched in with Ugandan patriots and chased Idi Amin out. The example of reconstruction in Rwanda with the marvel of having perhaps the only parliament in the world in which women are predominant is a far better lesson than any post-morten wish to commit postmodern genocide against genocidists. In other words, Russia, Britain, Egypt and the Nigerian governments should be lobbied to start paying reparations for the Igbo genocide instead of seeking revenge as any part of international policy. In the final analysis, the situations that make genocide possible - the balkanization of Africa along colonial lines - could be effectively remedied by uniting all African people into one republic where no forces, alien or local, would ever attempt to commit genocide without being successfully stopped by the united peoples republic of Africa. The US could have been a more bloody terrain for the reviled people of African descent and other minorities were it not that the federal might is there to attempt equal protection for all, the way Obama is going after Arizona on immigration law after offering increased health care coverage to all Americans despite resistance from some state governments that would prefer to continue with a discriminatory health care system that risked the lives of millions of Americans. Biko --- On Mon, 7/12/10, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote: |
laolu akande
'DISTINGUISHED 50' AT NIGERIA'S 50TH INDEPENDENCE ANNIVERSARY
Empowered Newswire is compiling a list of top 50 Nigerians based in the US and Canada to commemorate Nigeria's 50th Anniversary.
The outcome of the list and stories will be used and published in a number of media outlets and avenues in North America and Nigeria.
Here is a call for open-nomination of such distinguished Nigerians who are based either in the US or Canada. All forms of nominations are welcomed as we try to compile the top 50.
Three things are however required of all nominees:
1. EVIDENTLY OUTSTANDING: The individual must be evidently an outstanding professional in an area of human endeavours, including but not limited to academia or business.
2. WELL NOTED IN A US OR CANADIAN COMMUNITY: The individual should belong to a community, be it city, state, industry, field, calling, etc-and should be well noted and known in any such community or association
3. SIGNIFICANT IMPACT: Such an individual should not only be outstanding and noted, there has to be evidence of significant impact in North America first and foremost and/or elsewhere as it may be.
ALL NOMINATIONS SHOULD BE SENT TO EMPOWERED NEWSWIRE, PO BOX 1031 WYANDANCH NY 11798 or emailed to empow...@gmail.com
Deadline is July 31
*FEEL FREE TO CIRCULATE THIS TO AS MANY NIGERIAN GROUPS AND ASSOCIATIONS IN NORTH AMERICA
ABOUT US:
Empowered Newswire is a US-based independent Nigerian news agency founded by Laolu Akande, a long-standing Nigerian journalist currently based in New York. Both Empowered Newswire and Akande have longed reported on the activities of Nigerians abroad for well over a decade including news reports that celebrate the achievements of top-ranking Nigerians abroad.
Akande is indeed the only Nigerian journalist so far to have interviewed a sitting US President in White House and the longest ever Nigerian Correspondent at the United Nations.
--- On Mon, 7/12/10, Biko Agozino <biko...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
Ikhide
- Ikhide
From: Biko Agozino <biko...@yahoo.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, July 12, 2010 9:27:03 AM
Biko Agozino
| Ikhide, You are neither Yoruba nor Igbo but you do sound like a goat! Just because you are ideologically opposed to a united Africa, you start by imputing motives that do not exist in my heart in terms of being anti-North or pro-Biafra. Listen to yourself about Africa being a foreign concept. The grammar that you are blowing here, is it indigenous? Ewu indigenous! So you have never heard the term Igbotic as a Yoruba-derived term of abuse denoting primitiveness in Nigeria? So a learned man like you thinks that because Ake was set at age 3, then Baba Sho must have written it even before he started counting ABC and 123? No my brother, he wrote that book or at least published it long after The Interpreters was written and that vignette of not bowing to anyone appeared first in The Interpreters but he has the license to borrow from himself without being accused of plagiarism. Oga Ikhide, I never alleged that because Baba Sho loves NdIgbo he must have been a Biafra supporter. No, I said that he wanted to end the carnage and he did so by visiting the East to persuade Ojukwu and his friend Okigbo to return to Nigeria peacefully and negotiate a better future. That did not work but the irony is that none of the radical scholars joined him in this principled attempt to apply the African philosophy of non-violence to prevent a tragedy of genocidal proportions. Soyinka was in favor of a united Nigeria that was progressive and so he could not have been in support of Biafra but that does not mean that he did not love the Igbo and vehemently oppose the genocide against them as he has opposed genocide wherever it has reared its ugly head. You see, you are even uncomfortable with the fact that someone like Soyinka would love the Igbo while you are asking me to show you the evidence that Igbophobia abounds.You sound like you must have been old enough to witness the pogrom and the genocidal war or know about it at the time. Show me where you have written a word condemning of the lives of three million of your fellow citizens in any genre of your corpus... Ikhide, there is no doubt about the fact that tens of thousands of the lives of our fellow Africans were wasted in the pogrom in the North before the genocidal war that cost us another three million lives. Soyinka and Iyayi (Heroes) are the only creative writers to devote large bodies of work to this tragedy until the more recent retelling by Adichie. Literary theorists like you are yet to say a word about this central theme in Soyinka's work and just because a non-literary theorist like me points it out is no reason for you to remove your shirt and start doing shakara. If you are into genocide denialism, come out and tell us because then we can point you in the direction of the evidence you pretend does not exist. Will Soyinka love the Igbo if they committed pogrom against the North? Well, bros, they did not and that is part of the reason Soyinka loves the despised Igbo. Does Soyinka hate the North? Of course not, he worked with Malam Aminu Kano as the Director of research for the Peoples Redemption Party while Achebe was the National Chairman of the Party and another Igbo man, S.G. Ikoku was the national secretary. And neither do the Igbo hate the North for all over the North, you will find Igbo artisans providing services that are essential to the livelihood of their fellow citizens. Before the war, Ojukwu's uncle, Okonkwo Kano, was an elected member of the Northern House of Assembly while a Kano man was the elected Mayor of Enugu. Will paying reparations for the Igbo genocide hurt the North or the Yoruba? Of course not, just as the budgeting of billions for the Niger Delta amnesty is not seen as a loss to anyone from other parts of the country. Oh yes, the Northern Talakawa also deserve reparations for the deliberate denial of educational opportunities to them by the mis-rulers of the country. Oga Ikhide, it seems that you have followed the suggestion of Biodun Jeyifo in his Talakawa column in The Guardian yesterday (Sunday) to start listening too much to that yeye WAZOBIA FM radio with their invention of the virtual koboko with which to flog people they disagree with. Thanks for the advice to tear my Ode to Baba Sho to pieces. The little dictator in you is calling on Soyinka to censor my Ode to him but your little fantasy cannot hold in the age of the internet where the ode has already gone viral. I agree, I do not know book like you, that is why my tribute is full of grammatical errors and you, the village headmaster, would like me to tear it into a thousand pieces and start afresh. Make you go siddon, o jare. The Pan African solution to our problems are no-brainers but those you call the looters of Nigeria and elite scholars like you are too self-centered to see it. Almost all the debates in Nigeria will start and end with internal Nigerian problems while smaller countries in Africa are leading the intellectual and moral struggles towards unification. The USA where many of us live and work, with all its flaws, is a good model for our people to follow so that Africans can move to any state in their fatherland without fear of brotherphobic violence. Yes, the US also owes us reparations especially for the fact that the Igbo were the dominant group of Africans enslaved in America, according to Douglas Chambers (Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo of Virginia). Biko --- On Mon, 7/12/10, Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
xok...@yahoo.com
Biko! Biko! Biko! How many times have I called your name? Ah! Ah! You are hyperventilating simply because I told you the truth, to wit, that your patronizing oriki to Soyinka is nonsensical and filled with errors of fact. Abeg don't get a heart attack on my account.
You are all over the place in this drunken response to mine. Is everything okay with you? You are not making sense! You obviously do not know your material. How else can you explain declaring that only Soyinka and Iyayi have written fiction about the Biafran war? That's embarrassing; how do I respond to that?
I proved to you that you were inputing motives that Soyinka did not think of in Ake and you head off in a zany direction! How can you say I am a "pogrom denyer(!!!) simply because I have pointed out that your essay is innocent of simple facts? You do not even know me, for heavens' sakes! This is not about scholarship, this is about common sense, your essay makes absolutely no sense. Na wa!
How can you say that the term "igbotic" was coined by the Yoruba? What in the world are you drinking? I want some! Haba! This is absurd! I give up!
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
xok...@yahoo.com
One final point, just to show you how ahistoric your essay is, when Soyinka wrote Ake and The Interpreters, there was no njakiri word like "igbotic." Besides nor be yoruba people discover "igbotic", yeye man ;-)))))
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Chidi Anthony Opara
visiting the East to persuade Ojukwu and his friend Okigbo to return
to Nigeria peacefully and negotiate a better future".
It is also on record that Wole Soyinka after the visit to the East
became the middleman between Victor Banjo, the Biafran commander at
Ore and Olusegun Obasanjo on the Nigerian side, in a rapproachement
meant to explore the possibilty of getting Ojukwu and Gowon out of the
way as prelude to a declaration of Oduduwa Republic which would
recognize Biafra, an idea, Obafemi Awolowo was from records, not
opposed to. The execution of Banjo by Ojukwu ended that plan.
Chidi Anthony Opara
On Jul 12, 10:19 pm, Biko Agozino <bikoz...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ikhide,
>
> You are neither Yoruba nor Igbo but you do sound like a goat! Just because you are ideologically opposed to a united Africa, you start by imputing motives that do not exist in my heart in terms of being anti-North or pro-Biafra. Listen to yourself about Africa being a foreign concept. The grammar that you are blowing here, is it indigenous? Ewu indigenous!
>
> So you have never heard the term Igbotic as a Yoruba-derived term of abuse denoting primitiveness in Nigeria? So a learned man like you thinks that because Ake was set at age 3, then Baba Sho must have written it even before he started counting ABC and 123? No my brother, he wrote that book or at least published it long after The Interpreters was written and that vignette of not bowing to anyone appeared first in The Interpreters but he has the license to borrow from himself without being accused of plagiarism.
>
> Oga Ikhide, I never alleged that because Baba Sho loves NdIgbo he must have been a Biafra supporter. No, I said that he wanted to end the carnage and he did so by visiting the East to persuade Ojukwu and his friend Okigbo to return to Nigeria peacefully and negotiate a better future. That did not work but the irony is that none of the radical scholars joined him in this principled attempt to apply the African philosophy of non-violence to prevent a tragedy of genocidal proportions. Soyinka was in favor of a united Nigeria that was progressive and so he could not have been in support of Biafra but that does not mean that he did not love the Igbo and vehemently oppose the genocide against them as he has opposed genocide wherever it has reared its ugly head. You see, you are even uncomfortable with the fact that someone like Soyinka would love the Igbo while you are asking me to show you the evidence that Igbophobia abounds.You sound like you must have been
> old enough to witness the pogrom and the genocidal war or know about it at the time. Show me where you have written a word condemning of the lives of three million of your fellow citizens in any genre of your corpus...
>
> Ikhide, there is no doubt about the fact that tens of thousands of the lives of our fellow Africans were wasted in the pogrom in the North before the genocidal war that cost us another three million lives. Soyinka and Iyayi (Heroes) are the only creative writers to devote large bodies of work to this tragedy until the more recent retelling by Adichie. Literary theorists like you are yet to say a word about this central theme in Soyinka's work and just because a non-literary theorist like me points it out is no reason for you to remove your shirt and start doing shakara. If you are into genocide denialism, come out and tell us because then we can point you in the direction of the evidence you pretend does not exist.
>
> Will Soyinka love the Igbo if they committed pogrom against the North? Well, bros, they did not and that is part of the reason Soyinka loves the despised Igbo. Does Soyinka hate the North? Of course not, he worked with Malam Aminu Kano as the Director of research for the Peoples Redemption Party while Achebe was the National Chairman of the Party and another Igbo man, S.G. Ikoku was the national secretary. And neither do the Igbo hate the North for all over the North, you will find Igbo artisans providing services that are essential to the livelihood of their fellow citizens. Before the war, Ojukwu's uncle, Okonkwo Kano, was an elected member of the Northern House of Assembly while a Kano man was the elected Mayor of Enugu. Will paying reparations for the Igbo genocide hurt the North or the Yoruba? Of course not, just as the budgeting of billions for the Niger Delta amnesty is not seen as a loss to anyone from other parts of the country. Oh yes, the
> Northern Talakawa also deserve reparations for the deliberate denial of educational opportunities to them by the mis-rulers of the country.
>
> Oga Ikhide, it seems that you have followed the suggestion of Biodun Jeyifo in his Talakawa column in The Guardian yesterday (Sunday) to start listening too much to that yeye WAZOBIA FM radio with their invention of the virtual koboko with which to flog people they disagree with. Thanks for the advice to tear my Ode to Baba Sho to pieces. The little dictator in you is calling on Soyinka to censor my Ode to him but your little fantasy cannot hold in the age of the internet where the ode has already gone viral. I agree, I do not know book like you, that is why my tribute is full of grammatical errors and you, the village headmaster, would like me to tear it into a thousand pieces and start afresh. Make you go siddon, o jare.
>
> The Pan African solution to our problems are no-brainers but those you call the looters of Nigeria and elite scholars like you are too self-centered to see it. Almost all the debates in Nigeria will start and end with internal Nigerian problems while smaller countries in Africa are leading the intellectual and moral struggles towards unification. The USA where many of us live and work, with all its flaws, is a good model for our people to follow so that Africans can move to any state in their fatherland without fear of brotherphobic violence. Yes, the US also owes us reparations especially for the fact that the Igbo were the dominant group of Africans enslaved in America, according to Douglas Chambers (Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo of Virginia).
>
> Biko
>
> From: Ikhide <xoki...@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
> To: bikoz...@yahoo.com
> Cc: har...@msu.edu, USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
> Date: Monday, July 12, 2010, 4:14 PM
>
> "I found clues to this answer that his 2010 Nyerere Lecture confirms starting with his childhood autobiography, Ake, where as a kid he refused to lie down to the elders as is expected in Yoruba culture and reasoned that if he was not expected to lie down to God, why should he lie down to anyone?"
>
> "... [What Adamu taught us effectively was] always to look for a deeper meaning in the work of Soyinka and not to read it at the surface level. In that novel, there was a university lecturer, Soyinka’s alter ego, called Egbo, who delivered exactly the same defiant line of prostrating to neither God nor man. Now I wonder if Egbo was a suggestive code for Igbo because Soyinka may have been rebuked as a child by elders for being an uncultured bush man or Igbo man, ‘igbo’ means bush in Yourba language, all because he admired the Igbo concept of all heads being equal. Maybe Soyinka actually witnessed an Igbo man perform this indomitable spirit and admired it enough to adopt it himself."
>
> - Biko Agozino
>
> Citizen Agozino,
>
> Where to begin? I guess I should first thank you for attempting an oriki of Professor Wole Soyinka on his 76th birthday. But I must be honest and say that your analysis leaves me bewildered There are so many errors in the rendering, I am afraid it reduces to tatters the credibility of the essay. Let us start with the above musing of yours. In Ake, Soyinka started out his story as a precocious 3-year old, filled with wonder and fascination at the world around him. At that age, the concepts of ethnicity, ethnocentricity, blah, blah, blah are hardly formed, at least not of the sort that you are inputing above. At that age how would he know an "igbo" from a "Yoruba?" Yet, that is the central backbone on which your baffling essay flounders.
>
> And it is news to me that the Yoruba regularly deride children as "uncultured bush man" or "igbo man." This is an outrageous distortion of history. And it is quite honestly a bigoted lie. And to say that Soyinka supported the Biafran cause because of his "igbophilia" is over the top. Would he have chanted the praises of the Igbo if they had executed a pogrom on the North, because he hates the North? What kind of analysis is this?
>
> And what is this nonsense about most people hating the Igbo? What does that mean? You make all these wild statements that seem pulled straight out of the air and then you end up in some Pan-Africanist fantasyland about the United Nation of Africa. Is the term "Africa" an indigenous construct? Why must we be "Africans"? My point in all of this is you need to take your essay, tear it up into one thousand bits and start all over. But first get your facts straight.
>
> And if I had to advise you, I would say that at least in a perverse sense, your analysis is filled with dated concepts. I have news for you. The Northern cabal no longer exists. There is a new cabal - an equal-opportunity cabal of thieves from the East, West, North and South, raping Nigeria blind, while our intellectuals continue to write pieces like yours. I think you should think about these things some more, think of the current order, imagine the new world that our Nigerians live in today, a world with expanding boundaries and brand new challenges and write about that. And dream of a desired state for our country and force our mis-rulers to do the right thing.
>
> For you to write the below, eg, stating that Yoruba leaders went to the North to thank Northerners for sparing their bretheren and killing the Igbo, for you to say that without providing a source (not one!) is plain irresponsible. Professor Soyinka would be the first person to dissociate himself from this bigotry of yours that comes clothed in praise for him. And no, I am neither Igbo nor Yoruba.
>
> - Ikhide
>
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Mon, July 12, 2010 9:27:03 AM
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
>
> Bro Ken,
>
> Thanks for affirming your love for our culture and you are right, you are not alone!
>
>
> read more »
Pius Adesanmi
| Alagba Agozino: Deopka Ikhide is right. The man sef must be getting tired to have reviewed your work so positively. Many bad books and bad pieces of writing have been lucky to live to tell the story after being reviewed Deopka Ikhide. But, abeg, biko oga Biko, is this not the annoying blog I advised you to rework? Is this not the text that even Nwanna Obi Nwakanma - of all people! - was careful to avoid in this forum - not wanting to run the risk of encountering the sjambok I had ready for him? The trouble with this blog is squarely one of wild, runaway claims. You cannot just cobble together every sentence Soyinka has ever written about the Igbo and the Igbo world, declare him an Igbophiliac - like he is any less Fulaniphilic or Zuluphilic or any ethnicityphilic -, make him sound like a two year-old in a candy store in his contemplation of Igboness, make him sound almost apologetic for not being Igbo, declare that his Igbo praxis is central to his oeuvre - poor peripheral Ogun! - and rush this sort of patronizing text out in celebration of his 76th birthday. Maybe its your triumphalist tone. Something ain't jelling in this your work. And what is a man like Deopka Ikhide to do? He knows that a huge chunk of Soyinka's essayistic efforts in the last two decades have been about the Nigerian conundrum - with the Niger Delta and religious clashes in the North as recurrent thematic bases. So, should Ikhide now jump up to celebrate Soyinka's Ijawphilia, Ogoniphilia, and Itsekiriphilia? Should the Hausa-Fulani talakawa, whose plight he constantly regrets because they are instrumentalized by the Hausa-Fulani elite, jump up to declare him a Hausa-Fulaniphiliac? My friend, Soyinka's praxis and humanism cannot be reduced to any patronizing "...philia." Not even Yorubaphilia. A de nso o lo gbo (we dey talk am since you say you no hear)! Pius --- On Mon, 12/7/10, xok...@yahoo.com <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
Moses Ebe Ochonu
A few points:
1. Ikhide has already pointed to the contradiction of your awkward transitions from implacable Igbo nationalist to Pan-Africanist wonderland. I, too, have noticed that with you, but it is your prerogative, so let's not dwell on it.
2. Your template is as simplistic as it is quite disturbing. The Igbo are/were wronged by everyone and deserve compensation from everyone. Everyone hates the Igbo. The Igbo are helpless, noble victims in every historical epoch. This about sums up your slant on every issue even when the issue of Soyinka's birthday! You never miss an opportunity to smuggle a few sentences of these reductive claims in.
The pogrom committed against the Igbo has not been properly addressed. And the 20 pounds post-war "compensation" given to Igbo for their property loss amounted to piling on insult on their misery. I see it as an act of ultimate humiliation, the intent of which was to dramatize the shame of defeat and the Igbo's submission to federal Nigeria. There has been no closure to the civil war. Most reasonable people know that. But I don't think that you can take off from that painful premise and suddenly arrive at a simplistic bromide of "everyone hates the Igbo." I am not even sure that such paranoid discursive endpoints call rational attention to the legacy of the civil war or to its lingering impact on the Igbo today. It is actually appalling that you appear to be using the legitimate grievances of the Igbo to spin ridiculous, untenable tales of anti-Igbo hate. Why introduce absurd extrapolations, far-fetched interpretations, and fantastical imagery into the serious business of accounting for the documented atrocities committed against the Igbo. Does this not play to the advantage of those who actually wish the Igbo ill?
3. Listen to yourself for goodness sake! "Igbotic" is derived from Yoruba and connotes "bushness"? Haba Biko! I grew up in Nigeria hearing this word and every time I've heard it used it designated what the speaker thought was a crude Igbo-accented way of speaking English. Nothing more. It's no different from its close analogues--what non-Hausa Nigerians mockingly call Mallam (or Malo) accent or what non-Yoruba folks would call "Ngbati" English. People even go into specifics, mimicking the inflections and tonal manifestations of these "accents." This mutual mocking is only mildly offensive and is a characteristic of the joking relationships that Nigerian groups have with one another. In fact in this province of ethnic speech stereotypes the Hausa are the most frequent targets. I can't count the number of times I've heard (or read) Southern Nigerians and Middle Belters mock the "Mallam" accent by dramatically saying words like "fiful," "froblem," and "fazer" father, etc--sometimes for sheer entertainment. Please Biko, desist from making a big deal out of nothing, from reading anti-Igbo hatred into every benign piece of linguistic invention that you don't fully understand. Anyway, sha, I am not terribly surprised. After all I have read articles that engages in an egregiously implausible sociolinguistic analysis to arrive at bizarre claims about the Igbo. One of them claims that "Igbo" is a corruption of "Hebrew" and that the Igbo are of Jewish origin. Another piece that I read several years ago claims that the "Igbo" in Ijebu-Igbo is indicative of the Ijebu's Igbo origins. It's pathetic when lazy conjecture is stretched into scholarly interpretation. But that's what happens when you start from a frozen set of preconceptions and then start working your way back to them by selectively perceiving and twisting banal appearances into illuminating evidence. Why is it necessary to theorize the Igbo into all sorts of supposedly glorious histories, antiquities, and noble victimhoods in order to advance the injustice meted to them in Nigeria or to underscore their remarkable enterprise?
4.I do think that this is all symptomatic of a serious problem in your understanding of Igbo suffering. It admits of no scenario in which other people are also victims and also suffer and deserve pathos. I read in dismay your take on Mamdani's claim about Islamism in Nigeria recently. Not dismay at your take on Mamdani's problematic postulations, but dismay at the ethnic spin you put on your refutation. You specifically mentioned Kano as a scene of repeated murder of Igbos by Islamists. I couldn't help but wonder at your claims that Igbo were targeted. This is because I went to school in Kano and I know it like the back of my hands. The attacks have been against Christians, not against Igbos. The Igbo are not the only Christians in Kano. They are even indigenous Kano Hausa Christians who are often targeted by these misguided Islamists! Even some "Christian-looking" Southerners are often targeted unless they have the time to recite esoteric Islamic scripts before they are attacked. The combined population of non-Igbo Christians in Kano exceed that of the Igbo. In fact, if you know Kano well, you'd know that only in the 1953 ethnic (not religious) riots were the Igbo targeted specifically. Beginning with the so-called Reinhard Bonkke riots in 1991, every religious massacre in Kano has claimed more non-Igbo Christian victims than they have Igbos. The reason is simple. The Igbo mostly live in Sabon Gari, which is heavily fortified. Maybe it's the lesson of 1953, but the Igbo enclave of Sabon Gari is often so well protected by the armed vigilantism of the residents that no Islamist mob has dared to attack it. So, most attacks focus on the suburbs where Christians live among majority Muslims, exposed, unarmed, and isolated. That is why the hardest hit areas in these massacres have been Brigade, Tarauni, Shagari Quarters, Kabuga, Rijiyar Lemo, etc--all of them suburbs where non-Igbo Southern and Middle Belt Christians tend to live. Many Igbos have been killed in these riots, of course, but only the very few of them who, like their non-Igbo Christian counterparts, couldn't find accommodation in the overcrowded, expensive Sabon Gari and had to live in less secure parts and those who were at work or away from Sabon Gari at the time of the crisis. The loss that the Igbo have suffered more than any other Christians in Kano has been property loss, and this is because they dominate the trading sector in the city center, especially the Central Market, which is a predictable target of the Almajiri mob in every Islamist riot.
My point in all these is to caution you against the offensive and reductive habit of monopolizing victimhood, confining it only to the Igbo. It is good that you're acutely conscious of and sensitive to Igbo suffering, but in doing so, you're denying the suffering of others and erasing them from Nigeria's long history of ethno-religious atrocities. The recognition of non-Igbo victimhood should not take away from the peculiarities of specific anti-Igbo atrocities.
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---Mohandas Ghandi
Pius Adesanmi
| By the way, Ken, I should add that one's reaction to Alagba Agozino's text is not a put-down of your own enthusiastic reception of the same text. Because you are more Cameroonian and Senegalese than you are Nigerian, there are just too many sinewy hands of Naija-specific subtexts playing clever underground footsie with meaning in that short text that you may not be able to see. So, you can be forgiven for thinking that this is an excellent tribute to Wole Soyinka. It isn't. In some Nigerian fora, to even say that you want to problematize Agozino's statement - Igbos are universally hated - could get you into serious trouble. That's how raw the sentiments packed into it still are. When Alagba Agozino says that the Igbos are universally hated, for instance that is a wild, careless claim that has no meaning outside of Nigeria. If the Pashtuns and some of our friends in the Torah Borah mountains are part of this "universal", how can they possibly hate the Igbo? So, "universally" here is the author's careless way of describing every other non-Igbo Nigerian - including my two year-old daughter, excluding only Soyinka - as Igbo haters. That sentiment is a fallout of the pogroms in the North, the Civil War, and other Naija dynamics. This is not the place or time to problematise the "blanketness" of that claim. Being a literary theorist, you know all the jazz about essentialism anyway. So, Alagba Agozino, has loaded a lot of Naijanese into this text. Don't be surprised by Deopka Ikhide's and my reaction to it. Pius --- On Tue, 13/7/10, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
kenneth harrow
thanks for the note. actually, i was being polite in saying nice things--having been burnt too much for sticking my nose in places where it wasn't welcome.but i did ask about the everyone hates the igbo remark since it seemed so out of line; and i did surmise he meant other nigerians.
en tout cas, outside of that, celebrating WS these days seems an important thing on the list, which is ok by me
see you soon
k
- From: Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com>
- Alagba Agozino:
- Pius
- From: xok...@yahoo.com <xok...@yahoo.com>
- Citizen Agozino,
- - Ikhide
- From: Biko Agozino <biko...@yahoo.com>
- Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
- To: Ikhide<xok...@yahoo.com>
- ReplyTo: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
- Cc: <har...@msu.edu>; <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
- Ikhide,
- Biko
- From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com>
- - Biko Agozino
- Citizen Agozino,
- - Ikhide
Amatoritsero Ede
Biko Agozino
| Impish-Childish Payos and his boys, It seems like you people like my name so much that you must call it multiple times and find excuses to reply multiple times to my single Ode to Baba Sho. If the name sweet you so, make you name your son after me. You hear? What makes you think that you call the shots on this or any other forum? You must think very highly of yourselves and we all agree that you are a great writers but you have no power to censor anyone who has something to say that you might find annoying. What annoys you so much is that I said that our Baba loves our people and that this love affair has been going on since his childhood. Why do you find that annoying? Are you annoyed because this love affair seems scandalous to you or are you annoyed because I simply stated the obvious? Now, you should take your koboko and self-flaggerate yourselves for being so arrogant that you assume that you could tell folks what to write about and how. Your boy Ochonu, the mouthseeker-jobseeker who appears to be looking for a mouth to echo with no original thought of his own in his job-seeking (as his name implies), joins you in opposing the Pan African solution to the genocidal state that imperialism imposed on us by imputing to me a micro nationalism that I do not subscribe to. Ocho mouth, say your own and let me say my own as Osadebe advised. At least you agree that the Igbo genocide has yet to be addressed in the interest of justice. How have you addfressed it with your own mouth, Mr Mouth-job-seeker? Ochonu thinks that everything I have written is about the Igbo but he must be unfamiliar with my work as a criminologist. A simple bibliographic search will tell him that my scholarly focus is on injustice and the injustice against NdiIgbo just happens to be one of them. From the Middle East to the Congo, Zimbabwe, Caribbean, the US, Ivory Coast, Bakassi, Nazism, black women, apartheid, slavery, corruption, neocolonialism, Liberia, death penalty, war on drugs to football law and the elimination of poverty, I have made my voice heard with clear emphasis on my preference for a united Africa as the terrain for better possibilities for us Africans. I have not addressed every injustice but then who has? Mr Ochomouth aka Ochojob wants to speak for Mamdani on his false claim that bigotry against Islam is everywhere to be found in Enugu but Mamdani is quite capable of speaking for himself. Mr. Mouthseeker-Jobseeker claims that he grew up in Kano and knows for a fact that the Islamic militants only target Christians and then asks if the Igbo are the only Christians in Kano. I do not know how he got the information that only Christians are targeted by militants (Bala Mohamned was lynched in Kano for his progressive ideas and he was neither Christian nor Igbo) and presumably Igbo pagans would be spared but he must know that the Igbo are the predominant group in the migrant quarters in Kano and so whenever that quarter is targeted, Christian or not, the Igbo would be the most vulnerable to attack. This has happened again and again starting with Jos in 1945, then in the far North in 1956 before the 1966 major events and has continued ever since periodically. What solution does the mouth-seeker-job-seeker proffer for what is obviously one of the Open Sores of A Continent? I have advocated mass education and empowerment of the masses of poor Talakawas in the North to help them see that their Igbo neighbors are not their enemies. I have also advocated fair reparations tp be paid to the Igbo for their losses over the years. Finally, I have advocated that the peoples republic of Africa should be supported as a way of offering our people the democratic space to move freely, settle anywhere, run for office, trade, work, play, study, marry and raise a family without molestation the way it is in the USA today. If you disagree with any of these prescriptions of mine, present your own prescriptions and let us examine them but none of these prescriptions of mine comes close to being an ethnic nationalist agenda. For your information, what I advocate is not a prescription but a recognition that our people have already voted with their feet and can be found throughout Africa as they collectively disregard the disdainful colonial boundaries. What is left is for the elite to recognize this reality and reconstitute the peoples republic accordingly. Crossed-Out Okigbo wannabe, XOkigbo, alias Nnamdi, Ikhide, thanks but no thanks for the dated bibliography from Kwenu.com and for your multiple responses to one post of mine that you claim does not make sense to you. If you go through that list of 80 publications or more, you will not find an item from Soyinka or Iyayi, the two significant progressive creative authors who are not of Igbo origin that found the creative energy to address this monumental tragedy of ours. None of the items on your list is a literary theory of the genocidal war and the pogrom before it but you claim to be an expert on literature without a single publication on what is arguably the greatest tragedy that ever visited your country. In fact, Adichie provides a better bibliographic list as an appendix to her Half of a Yellow Sun which is pretty unusual for a novel but she was probably reassuring the reader that although she did not experience the war, she read the mostly memoirs that document the history. But the question for you is what you intend to do with your bibliography? Are you going to develop a curriculum to teach the lessons to be learned from this tragedy as part of the efforts to prevent future repeats? Or are you just going to continue pretending that you are the judge of literature who is out to correct the grammar of even Baba Sho and Ngugi without addressing the serious issues of injustice that they have been tackling for us? When next you visit kwenu.com, look beyond bibliographic lists and visit their page on the wounded war veterans who are still left to languish in misery at Orji River with no program of rehabilitation and only manage to survive on alms in a country that is celebrating the 50th anniversary of failed leadership with billions of naira. Are you against the call for reparations to be paid for the Igbo genocide and if so, why? This is not an academic question that will be solved with footnotes, book reviews and bibliographic lists, just add your voice if you care. Baba Sho got it right when he said that the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyrany. For Ken, I would say thank you for being nice in saying that my Ode to Baba Sho is an excellent tribute. I appreciate it even if you said it to be nice but you are also right in implying later that excellence is overrated as a virtue given that perfection is often a mirage and there is always room for improvement, hence new editions of publications. If it is any comfort to you, others have also told me that the tribute is excellent and that they would be proud to attract such a tribute as a birthday wish. It is not often that the birthday wish for a great writer-activist charts a new territory in the interpretation of his work. The shock that the pretentious literary tyrants are expressing here is because they did not perceive this theme in Soyinka's work before I alerted them. Instead of thanking me for educating them free of charge and asking their graduate schools for refunds, they started shouting that I appear to be an illegal immigrant in their imaginary literary country and that I must be deported from the discourse that they wrongly see as exclusively theirs. Go and check out the large body of secondary theories on Soyinka's work and you will find nothing that comes close to my perspective on the centrality of the Igbo motif in his work. That is what is called an original thesis and I await to read the many doctoral dissertations that will attempt to develop this theme. Payos and his boys are blinded by bad belle hiubris and so cannot see clearly. na jealousy dey worry them because now their students will have to cite me in their bibliography. For Baba Sho, I say no mind them. Thank you for loving our people. We want you to know that we love you too and we wish you many more happy returns. Biko |
--- On Tue, 7/13/10, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
xok...@yahoo.com
Many thanks for the personal insults. You are obviously responding to win an imaginary war. I concede that victory to you, don't worry about it.
I am writing this on my blackberry in my dentist's office and my recollection is good but there may be an omission here and there. But time is not on my side and I feel a need to come to closure on this wherever I have the time. A few points and I will retire my e-pen from bothering you:
1. You keep saying it, but I did not scoff at your grammar. I was deeply troubled by your thinly veiled bigotry and ethnocentrism and the fact that your essay was innocent of basic facts and I carefully pointed this out to you. I was silent on your English skills. I regret that you lack confidence in your grammatical and editing skills. Perhaps you may wish to partner with someone with those skills before strutting your stuff. I do and it has saved me embarrassment many times. From the testimony of Citizen Pius Adesanmi, it is obvious that valuable advice was offered to you before my intervention and you chose to ignore it. When you write sloppily (as you have admitted) it comes across as rude and insensitive to the dignity of the intended target (in this case Professor Soyinka).
2. I provided Dr. Awduche's Biafra bibliography in response to your ludicrous claim that not much had been written in books about Biafra (save for the efforts of Soyinka, Iyayi and Adichie). I knew of Awduche's bibliography and so I simply provided it. A little history: I was a founding member of Igbo-Net that in 1994 or early 1995 spun off from the pioneer internet social network Naijanet. Naijanet was founded out of MIT's servers by the legendary Dayo Ogunyemi in 1991. There had been a violent argument about the Biafran war and Uzo Okoroanyanwu left with a bunch of folks and founded Igbonet. I stayed on both lists. I believe that out of that penkelemesi came Awduche's helpful bibliography that you have tried to dismiss as "dated." Indeed, I see that it has been faithfully updated since then for which I applaud Dr. Awduche. You are rightAdichie's book has a helpful reference list of 30 books compared to Awduche's 80. Where Awduche's is focused on books directly about the war, Adichie's list is a broader focus. Virtually all the books directly on the war on Adichie's list are also on Awduche's list. Clearly you are not saying that a list that contains 80 books on Biafra does not compare favorably with a list that contains 20 books? Haba ;-) I am not familiar with books on Biafra that Soyinka wrote (he touched on the subject in his autobiographical books). Perhaps a Shuttle in the Crypt. Neither Awduche or Adichie has Soyinka and Iyayi on their lists, shame on them ;-) Perhaps you could partner with them and create a master list of all the books that have touched on Biafra directly or indirectly.
3. No one is censoring you. You produced material in the public domain and you were expecting feedback. You got it. What is your beef? In response you have personally attacked those who have expressed their outrage at your piece. I don't take it personally; I have been treated worse. Hell, if in your oriki to Soyinka you can be so rude as to call Soyinka the master of bombast and accuse him of being a one-man crusader, who am I to be offended by your rude behavior?
4. We can be rude to each other but I always thought that there is an unwritten rulr that those that have fought for us literally on all fronts, folks like Soyinka and Achebe, etc have been exempted from bolekaja tactics. This may be the age of the Internet but we were brought up to respect age and honest achievement. Let us disagree with their ideas but fight hard to protect their name and dignity. Professor Soyinka did not deserve your outburst. Certainly not on his birthday.
5. Please check the archives, I have never represented myself as what I am not. I am a simple reader of books and things on the Internet, no more no less. I do not define myself by my academic achievements because I don't remember much beyond my primary school days. I read an idea and I share my personal opinion. I respect positions that are molded from facts. Facts are facts. Sometimes we allow our ideologies and prejudices to blind us to the facts.
6. Finally, it is obvious that you are not interested in dialogue; you simply wish to give your lectures and may Providence help anyone who dares to disagree with you. I did not realize that earlier, for which I apologize to you profusely for putting my mouth where it does not belong. It will not happen again, trust me.
7. My dentist is now ready for my son Lion Cub. God help you if this procedure doesn't go well!
Be well.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Biko Agozino
| Ochonu Ebebe-Ebebe, The endless jobseeker, why do you see my calling your name as an insult? If you have a problem with the name, just take it up with your papa and he will explain to you why you were given such a servile name. Do not come to me like Mohamed Ali with jabs, 'What is my name?' because I will respond without missing a beat; 'Wha do ya mean what's your name, go ask your mama!' jab-jab. The detailed facts you present can only come from an insider who may have participated in the sectarian violence. What you have succeeded in proving is that Bob Marley was right; when the rain falls, it won't fall on one man's house top, remember that. Or as the Igbo say, the dibia that concocts diarrhea, is he keeping his own ass in the sky? In other words, politically motivated mass violence whether disguised as religious or partisan would hurt the whole society and not just the group that was originally targeted. Hence my advocacy of ways to end them for the benefit of our people. The whole point of explaining the world is to change it for the better not just to write papers for promotion! According to an old Igbo saying, when you tell a mad man that the reverend father died in a fire, he will ask if the fire also consumed his long beard? Bros, I asked you where you have written anything condemning the Igbo genocide and calling for reparations. Without answering a word, you turn round to ask me if I am allergic to facts. You are reputed to be an expert on colonial and post-colonial history of the North but the greatest tragedy in the history of the North is yet to receive a scant mention in your famed publications because of your opportunistic hustling for jobs in accordance with your name, Ochonu Ebebe. Brother Ikhide, Kpele o! Ndo nu! Eiyaa!
Sorry to hear about your bad teeth. It is touching to know that you found time to squeeze in an email from you strawberry just before undergoing the torture of the dentist. If my alleged poor grammar was the cause of your grating teeth, I humbly apologize and promise to collaborate with you in the future to help improve my writing! What can I do without advisers like you, Ochojob and Payos who are so wise that only fools would disregard their advice and risk humiliation over their writing. Many thanks for your kindness. Get well soon.
But Ikhide, the self-proclaimed creator of Igbo (Net), make we clap for you for
helping to create the Igbo! You are really a troubled soul. Are you sure that
you needed a dentist rather than a shrink to cut your big ego down to size? While
you were drugged up with morphine by your dentist, you could not resist the
temptation to drift out of your unconscious stupor to write that delirious drivel from your Black wetin call. How can a sane adult threaten another one to pray that the extraction of his long overdue milk teeth (alias Lion Cub, this clown has a nickname for his teeth just as he has multiple guy-names for himself) would go well otherwise… Hic, hic, hic. I am so scared of the defanged Dracula. If na juju you dey try, o tu nne gi. Wetin concern me with your yeye rotten teeth? Na my grammar cause your teeth to rot from all those candies that aje butter like you was raised with while some of us ate lizards and grass to survive a genocidal war that was fought with starvation as a 'legitimate weapon'? Mechie onu and let the dentist put you out of your misery. You said that you have opted for selective mutism, a mental illness that makes patients to select when to play dumb, so be it. Fu mi leh!
You must be really deluded if you think that I am afraid of
making any mistakes. No brother, as a scholar-activist, I
would rather try to create value and make mistakes than sit back and do nothing
for fear of making grammatical errors, not least in a foreign language. As Baba
Shake would put it, ‘Better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at
all.’ And the critics also said that Shakespear no sabi book during his own days just as the Troika said that Soyinka no sabi write long before he won the Nobel Prize. If I may borrow from Baba Sho, your village-headmaster posturing here is just a form of Neo-Tarzanism; Mr Oyibo Gramatika has come to save the noble savage again. But to help to correct your crazed head, please note that I have
absolutely no need to be embarrassed about my accomplishments in writing. I am the proud holder of a first dividsion certificate from WASC and a first class honours degree in sociology to prove that my wasc achievement was no fluke while you claimed somewhere that you were the class clown as a student. Now you confess that you found someone to collaborate with to improve the quality of your writings but have you ever acknowledged your ghost-writer as a co-author? I am
not on an ego trip when I say that as a prolific author of critically acclaimed scholarly books,
numerous peer-reviewed articles in English and in Igbo, broadcast radio plays and produced television scripts broadcast internationally,
stage director and actor, anthologized poet, studio-producer of own songs, weblogs wordsmith, newspaper columnist and policy
interventionist on air and through community activism, editor of book series and scholarly journals, I am not afraid of
grammar and only a lunatic would be scared of such a monster. How about you, Okigbo wanna-be? You must be terrified of something more than the sight of blood that you used as an excuse to escape your father's insistence that you become a medical doctor and
only a psychiatrist could help you figure out your irrational unconscious fear as you sat on the dentist chair. As for me, I have no cure for madness.
You were reminded that 3 million of your fellow citizens were unlawfully killed in a genocide and all you can offer is to say that my subject does not agree with my verb and that you are sorry for me about my grammar. If I cross my t's and dot my i's, will the fallen millions rise and take their stands again? Ikhide, you are capable of using your self-professed powerful command of the white man's language to speak up for reparations as a matter of justice for your fellow citizens. If you have already done so in your bibliography-junkie hobby, excuse my ignorance but cite it so I can be corrected. It was reported that Soyinka refused to pursue a PhD because he believed that no one was qualified to examine his thesis. If I were to do another PhD today, I would definitely not select upstarts like you, Ochojob and Payos to be on my dissertation committee even though I agree that you talk oyinbo pass English man. That does not mean that I will not listen to your unsolicited advice but do not expect me to follow every diversionary advice from you reactionaries unless you see yourselves as tin-god dictators that Zeburudaya would dismiss as stupendous ignoramuses with reference to my field of specialization, social justice.
Your inflated ego makes you think that Baba Sho would appoint you as his watchdog to go and bite those who question his Ogun-like tendency to go it alone most of the time, a crime that you yourself committed in your review of his To Set Forth at Dawn book in 2006. As you may know, Soyinka specified that Europeans wrongly assert that Yoruba cosmology was copied from Greek cosmology without realizing the crucial difference that in Yoruba culture, even the gods are held accountable by themselves if they misbehave while the Greeks reserved their retributions for the mortal minions of their reprobate gods, how much less Kongi himself. For me, it is not enough to accept crticism, I always ask for more criticism especially when it is constructive. Thanks for yours. Finally to Amoritse the Amorite, listen to your silly logism that is a poor excuse for logical syllogism: 'Biko mistakes Soyinka's humanism for love of the Igbo' - So Soyinka loves humanity, therefore Soyinka does not love the Igbo, therefore the Igbo are not human or what were you trying to suggest? Soyinka loves humanity, Igbo people are human, therefore Soyinka loves the Igbo not? This kind of illogical thought is only the product of phobia but what are you afraid of? Baba Sho loves us, we love Baba Sho, no circumstances can change our opinion! --- On Wed, 7/14/10, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote: |
|
|
|
Moses Ebe Ochonu
How does one reason with a man like you? You can't deal with logic. One points out your egregious factual errors and wild, outlandish claims and you become agitated and throw unimaginative ad hominems around. One comes back with more facts and tries to reeducate you out of your factual wilderness and you snap, unleashing more personal insults. So I ask again: are you okay or is this just a bad time in your life to try and have a discussion with you?
Your thinking is shallow and pedestrian. You have neither facts nor experiential knowledge to back up your fantasies and your claims about Islamist violence in Kano. Your interpretations are silly, implausible, and untenable. They are a disgrace really, especially coming from a scholar. You take offense when one patiently corrects your errors instead of showing gratitude. For the sake of the uninformed, one does a little digging into history and into the details and nuances of contemporary Kano conflicts and your shockingly unscholarly comeback is that since one knows so much about Kano crises, one must have been a participant! You spew banal and infantile panAfricanist rhetoric without even the most elemental familiarity with Pan-Africanism's ontological and philosophical underpinnings and contestations.One tries to point this out and to call your attention to the incongruity between your rabid Igbo ethnic nationalism and this naive panAfricanism of yours and you explode into a cyber rage.
You have no class, no facts, no analytical sophistication and won't admit your handicap.
What then are you good for, Biko? And how can one engage you without losing one's rationality?
I won't humor you any longer. Enjoy your fantasies and fabrications.
Amatoritsero Ede
Amatoritsero Ede
"
Finally to Amoritse the Amorite, listen to your silly logism that is a poor excuse for logical syllogism:
'Biko mistakes Soyinka's humanism for love of the Igbo' - So Soyinka loves humanity, therefore Soyinka does not love the Igbo, therefore the Igbo are not human or what were you trying to suggest? Soyinka loves humanity, Igbo people are human, therefore Soyinka loves the Igbo not? This kind of illogical thought is only the product of phobia but what are you afraid of?
Baba Sho loves us, we love Baba Sho, no circumstances can change our opinion!"
Chidi Anthony Opara
Coming from the Ekeukwu Owerri main market and Arugo motor park axis,
I would not know if "put down" is a normal practice in intellectual
discourse. What I know is that if you put someone down in any way, in
the name of intellectual or whatever disagreement, especially in
public, the person's esteem would be lowered and since no person
cherishes low esteem, this would activate the kind of fightback we are
witnessing between Biko, Ikhide, et al.
Can't we disagree without putting the other person down like we now do
in Ekeukwu and Arugo? I asked because I do not know
Last line to Biko: The name Wole Soyinka is a patent, the patent
owners will soon descend on you.
Chidi Anthony Opara
"The best way to serve God is to serve humanity".
On Jul 15, 11:27 am, Amatoritsero Ede <esula...@gmail.com> wrote:
> dis man,
>
> in your la-di-da, self-adulatory indignation, you keep writing, "Baba Sho."
> On the one hand you laud; on the other you demean. Are you Soyinka's bosom
> friend to be labeling him with nicknames? Do you know the shock in prof.
> soyinka's part of the world when you do this. Or are you an American
> fronting as an igbo defender? Stop dis yama-yama i beg.
>
> Amatoritsero
>
> > From: Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com>
>
> > Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka @ 76
> > To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> > Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2010, 9:51 AM
>
> > Alagba Agozino:
>
> > Deopka Ikhide is right. The man sef must be getting tired to have reviewed
> > your work so positively. Many bad books and bad pieces of writing have been
> > lucky to live to tell the story after being reviewed Deopka Ikhide. But,
> > abeg, biko oga Biko, is this not the annoying blog I advised you to rework?
> > Is this not the text that even Nwanna Obi Nwakanma - of all people! - was
> > careful to avoid in this forum - not wanting to run the risk of encountering
> > the sjambok I had ready for him?
>
> > The trouble with this blog is squarely one of wild, runaway claims. You
> > cannot just cobble together every sentence Soyinka has ever written about
> > the Igbo and the Igbo world, declare him an Igbophiliac - like he is any
> > less Fulaniphilic or Zuluphilic or any
>
>
> read more »- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Pius Adesanmi
| Amato, Ikhide, and Moses: You guys have grossly under-estimated the problem we have on our laps here. I have seen people have their low moments in the history of this listserv. I've seen terrible performances. I've had mine. We've all had ours. But it is painful to know that were Professor Toyin Falola ever be inclined to establish a USAAfricadialogue Hall of Shame for low moments and disgraceful performances, the first inductee-emeritus would undoubtedly be a Nigerian, Biko Agozino, for his truly shameful and disgraceful behaviour in this thread. So, don't think that this is just his problem. The man don disgrace us finish. You have your work critically trounced as it should be - because it is a bad piece of writing - and you suffer a disgraceful teleportation back to your pre-adolescent school yard days, throwing juvenile tantrums. I hope none of your doctoral students is here to witness your behaviour. Not even my friend, Maurice Amutabi, would insult me this much were I ever to break the rule again by asking him to stop decreeing that this and that does not exist in Africa. This must be the most insulting, most patronizing "tribute" to Wole Soyinka ever written. And because Alagba Agozino thinks the world of his horrible text and the sky would fall were he ever to respect critical opinion and rework it, I won't put it beyond him to keep it as is and brandish it 40 or 50 yearsdown the road as funeral oration when Soyinka's work is done and he flies away home one bright morning. You are celebrating a man at 76 and it is the occasion to make the man's cultural matrix cleverly inferior to yours and, worse, attribute authorship of this inferiority to him! Poor exercise of judgment if you ask me. In a heady fit of cultural triumphalism, you throw facts out of the window, make wild claims in every sentence, cobble together everything he has ever said about your world and arrive at the conclusion, via a thoroughly disgusting ..philia, that the Igbo world is the central thematic in Soyinka's oeuvre! And this is supposed to be the insulting discovery of the century that every literary critic has missed or repressed until God so loved the world that he gave us his only begotten sociologist to deliver the epiphany. I hope you will extend the same courtesies to Maazi Chinua Achebe on his next birthday by stringing together any and everything he has ever written or had to say about the Yoruba, Hausa, or Zulu and attach the appropriate philia to those ethnicities as the central thematic of Achebe's work. Ah, lest I forget, I know the drill. Let me help you with the opening line of your response - to take you on this way is Igbophobia. I am familiar with that song. Pius --- On Thu, 15/7/10, Amatoritsero Ede <esul...@gmail.com> wrote: |
Anunoby, Ogugua
oa
________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chidi Anthony Opara [chidi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 3:50 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
----------Biko Agozino
Chidi Anthony Opara
--
Amatoritsero Ede
Chidi Anthony Opara
The Ekeukwu Owerri Market and Arugo motor park Literary confraternity
is at the concluding process of the Wole Soyinka patent, so take note.
Pius,
The day Falola makes the mistake of taking your advice on the "Hall of
Shame", I would suggest that he would be the first to be inducted for
his failure to curb all the Intellectual gra-gra you and your ilk
harass us(lesser mortals) with in this forum.
Ikhide,
My main man, as we say here, "maintain"!. He who fights and runs away,
lives to fight another day(Bob Marley).
Falola,
Please outsource the moderating of this forum to us at Ekeukwu and
Arugo and you will see discipline. The fees would be moderate I assure
you. Nobody talks down on another when Dejango, Oba, Tenkobo and
ofcourse my humble self are arround.
Chidi Anthony Opara
"The best way to serve God is to serve humanity".
> Chidi,
>
> I know you are taking a swap at me. Wole Soyinka's name is not a patent. I
> dont care for your insouciance! In the Yoruba world a younger man does not
> begin to give nicknames to an elder. I know in Igbo culture you dont care
> much for age. I was pointing out that cultural fact. "The patent owners will
> soon descend on you", 'the patent owners' being Yoruba is what you
> insinuate? Must everything be given a tribalist slant. Dont you folks ever
> get tired?
>
> Amatoritsero
>
Pius Adesanmi
| Chidi my bro: You see now? You see? You jus open your burukutu mouth and slam "Falola" on his head gbam gbam just like dat! Say, did you and your buddy, "Falola" share a beer or two in Texas yesterday? If I describe this your nonsense talk as Chidi Opara's Derridean differance of the age gap within a doubly anti-epistemic conjecture of cultural deracination, you will say that I have come again with intellectual gra-gra! Abeg go siddon for corner and savour the lovely poem wey Deopka Ikhide dedicate to you. Cheers, Pius --- On Fri, 16/7/10, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote: |
Anunoby, Ogugua
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Amatoritsero Ede [esul...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 6:53 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
ukag...@umn.edu
This is a very original and insightful piece. Can you please revise ...as you find necessary and appropriate...taking into consideration some of the feedback you have gotten...and then email me the revised version for possible publication as commentary in the International Journal of Nigerian Studies and Development.
Regards,
Okey Ukaga
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
|
ODE TO BABA SHO AT 76 By Biko Agozino ‘Unlike societies right next to the Igbo for instance – more famously the Benin, or further West, the Yoruba or, all the way southwards of the continent, the Kwazulu of the legendary Shaka – the Igbo, with their strong social formation rooted in republicanism, would appear to belie my general claim. The Igbo have no history of expansionism, being content with a strong organization around autonomous clan entities that made contact – friendly or unfriendly with one another as the need arose (Wole Soyinka, Distinguished Nyerere Lecture, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 2010: 1). Soyinka may have helped to answer a question that I have been longing to ask him for a long time: Why does he love Igbo culture so much when almost everyone else appears to hate the Igbo? I found clues to this answer that his 2010 Nyerere Lecture confirms starting with his childhood autobiography, Ake, where as a kid he refused to lie down to the elders as is expected in Yoruba culture and reasoned that if he was not expected to lie down to God, why should he lie down to anyone? Before the publication of Ake, he had already fictionalized this biographical sketch in his novel, The Interpreters that a Youth Corps teacher, Adamu, tried to get my form four High School class to understand without much success perhaps because of the fractal elliptical structure that is characteristic of Soyinka’s work.
|
What
Adamu taught us effectively was always to look for a deeper meaning in the work
of Soyinka and not to read it at the surface level. In that novel, there was a
university lecturer, Soyinka’s alter ego, called Egbo, who delivered exactly
the same defiant line of prostrating to neither God nor man. Now I wonder if
Egbo was a suggestive code for Igbo because Soyinka may have been rebuked as a
child by elders for being an uncultured bush man or Igbo man, ‘igbo’ means bush
in Yourba language, all because he admired the Igbo concept of all heads being
equal. Maybe Soyinka actually witnessed an Igbo man perform this indomitable
spirit and admired it enough to adopt it himself. |
|
Soyinka
said that he sat in Awolowo’s chair and persuaded the mobile broadcasters to go
back to Enugu because security agents were searching for them frantically but
he himself was not afraid to wait alone for the security agents that desecrated
the library of Awo in search of incriminating evidence to return and face his
resistance. That took some courage and is indeed part of the democratic trait
that Soyinka has identified in our own African culture that is worthy of
emulation. This Igbophilia is found in his collection of poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt and in the prison
diary, The Man Died, where he bore
witness to the oppression of the Igbo during the civil war and his one-man
attempt to stop the carnage, earning him solitary confinement. Then he capped
it all with that eye-popping witness-like harrowing account of the pogrom
against the Igbo that he detailed in Season
of Anomy. In Ibadan, he said that
he traveled the country to conduct ethnographic observations of traditional
theatrical performances and in Season of
Anomy, the hero also travels the country searching for traditional
socialist roots but ended up being confined in a psychiatric hospital as a mad
man. Did Soyinka witness the pogrom in the North and could he have achieved
more in preventing the tragedy if he had worked as part of a popular democratic
organization instead of always tending to perform his one man shows apart from
that stint with the Peoples Redemption Party as Director of Research in the
1980s?
Please
note that Soyinka's praise for the Igbo culture of radical republicanism in the
epigraph above and his critique of empires and kingdoms echoes that of Walter
Rodney in Groundings with my Brothers
where Rodney told poor Jamaican youth to be skeptical of African histories that
emphasize only kingdoms and empires given that many parts of Africa had no
kings or queens but practiced direct democracies of the sort that Soyinka
appears to be recommending as a better alternative for the whole of Africa. Europeans
simply assumed that such societies were primitive ‘headless societies’ and
proceeded to impose chiefs on them but Igbo and Ibibio women declared war on
such Warrant Chiefs as Adiele Afigbo documented.
Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. |