First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

[Chido Onumah]

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed “an Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar” is none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book with the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s “explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly driven by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter. Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain of events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central subject of Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the January 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives” or “interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was it not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a “southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political and military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were, overwhelmingly, either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to the NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring - and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form the complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of ethnicity or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. This may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against Igbos in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more than forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case: “By the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here was that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes. Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and anti-socialist. A brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared – wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these facts and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly, Akintola and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which they called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate” the singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the January 15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other modes, forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that typically and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how things actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only the most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging that gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In next week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if only speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was A Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.

Concluded.

bje...@fas.harvard.edu

 

[kenneth harrow]

this is probably not the place to argue this, but i feel my friend bj is not correct in his definition of realism. it is a genre, a construct, like all others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more obvious their constructions of "reality."
achebe's title as the greatest realist in the past 150 years is overblown, in my view, regardless of the definition of realism employed.
further, the issue of ethnicity here should take into account not simply the politics of the coup plotters or the leadership of the regions, but how the events were presented by the population to themselves: did people say, "those igbos in biafra want to secede"? did the biafrans, like achebe, say the same?
it isn't a question of whether this or that individual came from the north or spoke hausa or wore robes: it is how he represented himself, and how he was taken by others.
ken

On 12/29/12 9:43 PM, Chido Onumah wrote:

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s New Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed �an Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar� is none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book with the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s �explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly driven by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter. Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain of events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central subject of Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the January 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives� or �interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was it not, �an Igbo coup�.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a �southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political and military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were, overwhelmingly, either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to the NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring - and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form the complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of ethnicity or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. This may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against Igbos in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more than forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case: �By the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here was that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes. Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and anti-socialist. A brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared � wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these facts and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly, Akintola and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which they called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate� the singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the January 15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.

In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other modes, forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that typically and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how things actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only the most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging that gap.

In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In next week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if only speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was A Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.

Concluded.

bje...@fas.harvard.edu

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kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
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har...@msu.edu

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

You are correct, Kenneth Harrow,  in discussing in  the same context,   the larger theoretical question of the relationship between writing and reality and the question of self representation as opposed to perception by others.

These two subjects meet in the questions about Achebe's efforts to render an account of the Nigerian Civil War and related developments.

The entire crisis being discussed may also be describes as framed by issues of self-representation and mutual perception. 

Self Representation in Speech and Self Representation through Action :Problematics 

Noted-'it is how he represented himself, and how he was taken by others.'

But in this issue, self representation is problematic.

The coup actors claimed to be nationalists but killed

Yoruba and Northern Nigerian politicians

Yoruba and Northern Nigerian high ranking military officers 

and spared 

The Igbos in related  positions. They killed one Igbo person- an officer who was not of high rank.

This contradiction between self representation and action in a coup led mainly by Igbos, was central to the notion that the coup was an Igbo plot or, as I would put it, a coup that served Igbo interests, as demonstrated in its execution as different from the verbal claims about  its vision. 

Some analysts claim that Nzeogwu, the most prominent leader of the coup, was betrayed by the other coup actors who ethnicised the coup.

Ironsi, the most senior army officer, presented himself as working for national interests by passing a unification decree after the coup, concentrating power in his hands at the national centre, but , coupled with the time it was taking him to bring the coup murderers to justice, and the fact that he was Igbo, contributed to his actions being   seen as a continuation of the Igbo favoured strategy created by the coup.

These disjunctions between self representation and action in the eyes of many torched off the counter coup and pogroms that followed.

Realism as Fidelity to Reality or as Ideological Construction of Reality

On realist writing, even if one argues that realist writing is also an ideological construct, a point of view I think needs to be qualified, Jeyifo's point could still hold. 

I think your description of realist writing is one view and Jeyifo's  another. 

You are arguing for a reflexive relationship with the very concept of realism. 

I think, though, that you overstretch the possibilities of that perspective  in arguing that realism, with particular reference to the phrase I highlight,  " is a genre, a construct, like all others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more obvious their constructions of "reality."

Jeyifo is describing his understanding of a vision represented by realism as fidelity to reality. Some  writers  such as Emile Zola are described as aspiring towards that goal. 

We may contextualise their efforts by describing them as representing another ideological position but that will not detract  from the fact that a writer pursuing such an ideal is operating  on a different  point of the continuum dramatising the relationship between art and lived experience than a magical realist/fantasy writer, for example.

In the light of such an ideal as demonstrated  by the writer's work, one may expect certain possibilities from that writer as different from other possibilities more in keeping with other  kinds of writing that writer  is not known for.  

Perhaps Jeyifo ought to have qualified his understanding of realism in art against the background of the understanding of all constructed forms as ideological constructs mediating the perspectives of reality that they privilege as opposed to other possibilities they downplay or exclude. 

Even then, Jeyifo could be understood as describing realism as an artistic ideal that tries, within the form of the transformative  character  of art, to demonstrate historical  actuality. 

Between Achebe and the Plane or Trick Mirror 

One may argue that the point of departure between the view of realism you present and that of Jeyifo's is the crux of the disappointment  many have with Achebe's stance on this subject- he conveniently  hones in on perspectives that ignore the complexity of the subject he deals with. 

People looking up to him as the equivalent of a  statesman were expecting a more robust treatment of the subject, yet, in the essay that previewed  the book, he was content to make grave allegations without trying to justify them, or  when making such justifications, employing shallow ahistorical justifications,  a disturbing act on account of the weight of his reputation and the consequent carrying power of his words. 

  People are arguing that his book continues  a similar trend by ignoring the various strands of the issues he addresses, while focusing on those strands that suit his problematic "Nigeria is anti-Igbo" vision. 

So, Jeyifo expected a thorough Achebe but perhaps he has encountered what some have described as the parochial storyteller  Achebe, whose  interest is not in an effort to arrive at reality but to construct a view of reality  he finds convenient for his narrow purpose. 

Thanks

toyin 

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 3:42 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

this is probably not the place to argue this, but i feel my friend bj is not correct in his definition of realism. it is a genre, a construct, like all others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more obvious their constructions of "reality."
achebe's title as the greatest realist in the past 150 years is overblown, in my view, regardless of the definition of realism employed.
further, the issue of ethnicity here should take into account not simply the politics of the coup plotters or the leadership of the regions, but how the events were presented by the population to themselves: did people say, "those igbos in biafra want to secede"? did the biafrans, like achebe, say the same?
it isn't a question of whether this or that individual came from the north or spoke hausa or wore robes: it is how he represented himself, and how he was taken by others.
ken

On 12/29/12 9:43 PM, Chido Onumah wrote:

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed “an Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar” is none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book with the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s “explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly driven by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter. Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain of events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central subject of Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the January 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives” or “interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was it not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a “southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political and military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were, overwhelmingly, either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to the NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring - and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form the complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of ethnicity or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. This may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against Igbos in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more than forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case: “By the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here was that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes. Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and anti-socialist. A brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared – wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these facts and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly, Akintola and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which they called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate” the singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the January 15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other modes, forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that typically and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how things actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only the most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging that gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In next week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if only speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was A Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.

Concluded.

bje...@fas.harvard.edu

 

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-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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--
Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

[Ibrahim Abdullah]

I also suspect that BJ has gone overboard in his quest to red card
Achebe. The point about realist writings is that they come up straight
as mothers' milk--ideological constructs, easy to swallow as faction(
fact plus fiction) not fiction! What you read in achebe can be
reproduced ad infinitum for almost all Nigerian intellectuals. And
this is the point that should interest us, not what achebe said today
or what Kongi will say tomorrow. What undergirds all these literary
effusions/discourses et al is the simply the historical accident of
how citizenship is constructed/reproduced/experienced/consumed in
post-colonial Nigeria. Nigerians experience citizenship as truncated
ethnicity--the original sin--and this gets reproduced in whatever they
do or say. This is as true of the left as it is true for the
right/centre.

How do we transcend/subvert this original sin without reproducing it
in its multi-layered ccomplexity is what we should be discussing. As
BJ himself has repeatedly made clear in the two postings there is
nothing new in what Achebe has to say!!!

IB
============================================

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 3:42 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

> this is probably not the place to argue this, but i feel my friend bj is not
> correct in his definition of realism. it is a genre, a construct, like all
> others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically
> presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that
> regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more
> obvious their constructions of "reality."
> achebe's title as the greatest realist in the past 150 years is overblown,
> in my view, regardless of the definition of realism employed.
> further, the issue of ethnicity here should take into account not simply the
> politics of the coup plotters or the leadership of the regions, but how the
> events were presented by the population to themselves: did people say,
> "those igbos in biafra want to secede"? did the biafrans, like achebe, say
> the same?
> it isn't a question of whether this or that individual came from the north
> or spoke hausa or wore robes: it is how he represented himself, and how he
> was taken by others.
> ken
>
>
>
> On 12/29/12 9:43 PM, Chido Onumah wrote:
>

> First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New

> Book (2)
>
> By Biodun Jeyifo
>

> Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed “an
> Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are

> discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in

> name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner,

> spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress
> when not in uniform.
>
> Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country
>
> In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power
> over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange
> stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.
>
> Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
>

> If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

> narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
> book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and

> discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar” is

> none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book with

> the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
> “explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly driven

> by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter.

> Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

> speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
> inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
> excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure

> from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

> book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
> subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
> particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
> book.
>
> The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

> January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain of

> events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central subject of

> Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both

> general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

> indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section

> of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the January

> 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives” or
> “interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
> that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was it
> not, “an Igbo coup”.

>
> There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

> “southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political and

> military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were, overwhelmingly,
> either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More
> pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
> plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant
> in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
> Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class
> parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the
> United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
> Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to the
> NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
> chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
> assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was
> spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of
> fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

> intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime

> Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far
> more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and
> conservative allies of the NNA.
>

> Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

> factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or

> was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring -
> and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form the
> complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of ethnicity
> or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. This

> may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against Igbos
> in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
> completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

> incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more than

> forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
> hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this
> reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that
> Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to

> ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

> other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.
>
> At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two
> examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
> between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

> Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case: “By

> the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper
> outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in
> the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
> situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all

> over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

> fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
> realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to
> carefully state what these other facts and realities were.
>
> First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here was
> that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic
> Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
> government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
> post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and

> fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
> Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

> anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and anti-socialist. A
> brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly
> satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
> composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic

> visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

> wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not the
> slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these facts
> and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly, Akintola
> and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions
> and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
> founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which they

> called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried, unsuccessfully,

> to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

> Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

>
> It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and
> realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
> ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
> simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
> pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which

> no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate” the

> singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
> quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to

> this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the January
> 15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.
>

> In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

> Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
> last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion
> to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is
> that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work
> of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to

> the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

> formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other modes,

> forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art
> or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
> happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that typically
> and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how things
> actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only the
> most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging that
> gap.
>

> In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he

> had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
> practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality
> had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No
> Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble
> with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country

> marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in

> which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
> considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense
> of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a
> fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
> choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In next

> week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if only

> speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I
> personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was A
> Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he
> deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter
> collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.
>
> Concluded.
>
> bje...@fas.harvard.edu
>
>
>
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa
> Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit
> http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsub...@googlegroups.com
>
>
>
>

> --
> kenneth w. harrow
> faculty excellence advocate
> distinguished professor of english
> michigan state university
> department of english
> 619 red cedar road
> room C-614 wells hall
> east lansing, mi 48824
> ph. 517 803 8839
> har...@msu.edu
>

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

wow-

'Nigerians experience citizenship as truncated ethnicity--the original sin--and this gets reproduced in whatever they do or say.'

Superb summation.

The same point being made by Shina, it seems.

Is this true of everyone, or its seen as a largely valid generalisation?

toyin

[Seun Odeyemi]

Hello Mr. Abdullah,

Please can you explain further what you mean by the construct "truncated ethnicity" as it applies to Nigeria? Is it that Nigerians consider themselves, first, foremost and primarily, as part of a particular ethnic collectivity--say, Ibo, Ibibio, or Itsekiri--and only secondarily, as a member of that historical-political construct called the Nigerian state? 

Seun.  

[kenneth harrow]

dear toyin, i take your points, which i have highlighted below. they are good points.
however, they don't get to my real concern, which i hesitated to express because i didn't want to immerse us too much in issues of literary theory.
where i agree w you is in the aspiration of realism to bring us closer to reality.
where that fails is in 2 ways: i signaled, one, the notion of ideology. i am following althusser, with the notion that realism is a mode of interpellation of the reader, and the interpellation is always in ideology. let me not turn this into a lecture, with more explaining of that point. it is simply there, how ideology marks all communications: some, as you note, are self-reflexive. realism is the least self-reflexive since its aspirations to mimesis blind the reader to the implicit ideology it embraces in presenting the world as it does.
that is the second point: the world is perceived by us, always,through the mediation of language. that mediation is, let us say, coded.
we decipher codes in structuralist analyses, or, really, following barthes, in poststructuralist analyses. codes in literature are constructed in the way language is used, in the forms or genres, like realism.
my favorite analysis of realism is in an older work by catherine belsey whose book, Critical Practice, has been my bible for teaching literary theory to students for many years. her point about realism is that it is a genre that reinforces dominant codes by presupposing them at the outset of the text. they come to be challenged, and reinforced by the end. they state, as bj was implicitly stating, "this is the way things are, or were," not, "this is how we construct this understanding of how things are, or were."
so, you can be a reformer like zola, and simply use the dominant tools of understanding values and perceptions to make your case: you are replicating those underlying values that normalize dominant modes of comprehension, and that is the key: you are normalizing a way of seeing the world, and the values that undergird that way of seeing the world, as you present it as if it were "just there," "just the way things are," rather than, in fact, constructed.

achebe is a key example of this.he wrote, early in his career, of his desire to present the world as seen clearly, through a pane of glass, not distorted through rose colored class. he was opposing the distortions of colonialist discourse.
he did not see that he was, also, presenting a vision of the world, rather than the world itself.
he thus viewed himself as an educator.
i love his work; but i oppose this role of educator for us;
i view that role as similar to that of the old-fashioned teacher in europe who stood on a podium and lectured to students, giving them the truth.
aside from my innate distaste for "truth-tellers," i dislike even more "masters" who give us this magisterial structure of those who know and those in need of the truth given by those who know.
i prefer the kick 'em style of this forum, where we debate rather than kowtow, we argue, don't defer.
and sometimes we say, "you have a good point," but also, did you think about....
ken

On 12/29/12 11:58 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

I think, though, that you overstretch the�possibilities�of that perspective �in�arguing�that�realism, with�particular�reference to the phrase I�highlight, �"�is a genre, a construct, like all others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more obvious their constructions of "reality."

Jeyifo is�describing�his�understanding�of a vision represented by realism as�fidelity�to reality. Some �writers� such as Emile Zola are�described�as�aspiring�towards�that goal.�

We may contextualise their�efforts�by describing�them�as representing another�ideological�position�but that will not detract �from the fact that a writer pursuing such an ideal is�operating��on�a different �point of the�continuum�dramatising�the relationship�between�art and lived�experience�than a magical realist/fantasy�writer, for example.

In the light of such an ideal as demonstrated �by the writer's work, one may�expect�certain�possibilities�from that writer as�different�from�other�possibilities�more in�keeping�with�other �kinds of�writing�that writer �is�not�known for. �

Perhaps Jeyifo ought to have qualified his�understanding�of�realism�in art�against�the background of the�understanding�of all constructed forms as�ideological�constructs mediating the�perspectives�of reality that they privilege as opposed to other�possibilities�they�downplay�or�exclude.�

Even then, Jeyifo could be understood as describing realism as an�artistic�ideal that tries, within the form of the�transformative��character� of art, to�demonstrate�historical �actuality.�

[Ibrahim Abdullah]

You check it out; that is what I get out of reading Nigerian history.
There was no Yorubaland; no Hausaland(kasar Hausa?); no Igboland; no
Itsekriland; and suddenly there are!!!! There were Oyo, Ibadan;
Ijesha; Kano; Katsina; Zazzau; Kanem-Borno; then the Sokoto
Caliphate...then Northern Nigeria; Southern Nigeria; Mid-West; East;
West; then South-South; then this that.......Where is Ngeria???

Hope this helps.

IB
=============================

[shina7...@yahoo.com]

Ibrahim,
You got this summation right about Nigeria:

"Nigerians experience citizenship as truncated
ethnicity--the original sin--and this gets reproduced in whatever they
do or say."

This has always been my point especially with regards to Nigeria's puny efforts at nation-building or national intergration. We are more a contrapted hodgepodge of ethnicities and religions than a nation with dreams of national greatness.

Most of the times when I am confronted with a document asking for my 'nationality', I face afresh the dilemma of living in Nigeria. Am I really a citizen and recognised as such or just plainly a Yoruba guy making my ends meet in my own informal ways? Most times, I feel a rebellious prompting to indicate 'Yoruba' in such column than 'Nigerian'.

I am sure that beyond those who have found hook-and-crook ways to latch on to the neck of this frail and dying political entity, most 'Nigerians' don't have any iota of attachment to Nigeria. The informal sector of the economy is the burial ground of patriotism in Nigeria. That is where the people labour outside and beyond the care of the state. And that is where the toga of ethnicity adorn their activities.

So, ask me: "Afolayan, are you a Nigerian?"
Honest answer? I don't know.


Adeshina Afolayan
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

[kenneth harrow]

dear shina and ibrahim
i too like ibrahim's formulation, but i think in a sense he has the
chronology wrong.
the nation state in africa is weaker, not stronger, than what it was 50
years ago. 50 years ago you could travel across the terrain of most
states, virtually all, with the state itself in control of security and
resources. even if it was a neocolonial state, it was, for all that, a
dominant force. the authoritarianism of the 70s and 80s weakened the
hold of the state over citizens by eliminating considerable
participation in the organs of the state, and the neoliberal
dismantlement of state organs completed that. we now live in a situation
where what the global economic forces command is what happens,
everywhere from greece and spain and france to mali and somalia and
elsewhere. that "command" is a neoliberal economic order, one where
decisions are not made by the state, but by the international instruments.
for instance, the imf loans money to an african state, like senegal
whose case i know; it says, you can devote 16% of the budget to
education--not a penny more. the student body grows, the buildings are
overcrowded and old and falling apart; no more budget for more
professors or new buildings or labs or books. nada, nothing, rien.
the decision is out of the hands of the state entirely.
and this is true of all of it.
i know the state still functions, still siphons money through its
agencies, but its powers, even as a nepotistic state, is reduced. this
is mbembe's point in On the Postcolony. and we see it translated into
greater business tycoons, greater impoverishment of the masses; greater
interference in state security by militias or un peacekeepers or oau
forces or ecowas
weapons flow from one dismantled state into another, and mali collapses;
e congo has collapsed for 20 years; who would drive from port harcourt
over to cameroon these days, or throughout the north of nigeria at
night? in the 70s that wasn't a problem.

in this context, doesn't it make sense that the ethnic enclave seeks its
own economic and security forces, and to do so mobilizes the population
around local, i.e. ethnic identities, pumps them up whenever possible,
vilifies the others as threatening one's own community?
voila the seeds for genocidal, fraternal wars over resources, fed by the
conditions of a helpless state, or a corrupted state, too weak to enable
the national population, national identity to form and take hold.
ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness
ken

>>>> First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s

>>>> New
>>>> Book (2)
>>>>
>>>> By Biodun Jeyifo
>>>>
>>>> Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

>>>> �an
>>>> Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

>>>> are
>>>> discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
>>>> in

>>>> name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

>>>> Northerner,
>>>> spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
>>>> dress
>>>> when not in uniform.
>>>>
>>>> Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country
>>>>
>>>> In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
>>>> power
>>>> over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
>>>> arrange
>>>> stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.
>>>>
>>>> Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
>>>>

>>>> If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the

>>>> narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
>>>> book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
>>>> and

>>>> discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar�

>>>> is
>>>> none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
>>>> with

>>>> the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s
>>>> �explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

>>>> driven
>>>> by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
>>>> matter.

>>>> Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and

>>>> speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
>>>> inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
>>>> excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
>>>> departure

>>>> from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published

>>>> book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
>>>> subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
>>>> particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
>>>> book.
>>>>
>>>> The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

>>>> January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain

>>>> of
>>>> events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
>>>> subject of

>>>> Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

>>>> both
>>>> general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

>>>> indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

>>>> section
>>>> of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
>>>> January

>>>> 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives�
>>>> or

>>>> �interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
>>>> that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was
>>>> it
>>>> not, �an Igbo coup�.

>>>>
>>>> There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

>>>> �southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political

>>>> and
>>>> military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
>>>> overwhelmingly,
>>>> either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
>>>> More
>>>> pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
>>>> plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
>>>> significant
>>>> in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
>>>> Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
>>>> class
>>>> parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
>>>> the
>>>> United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
>>>> Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
>>>> the
>>>> NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
>>>> chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
>>>> assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
>>>> was
>>>> spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
>>>> of
>>>> fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

>>>> intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

>>>> Prime
>>>> Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
>>>> far
>>>> more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
>>>> and
>>>> conservative allies of the NNA.
>>>>

>>>> Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

>>>> factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
>>>> it, or

>>>> was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in
>>>> exploring -
>>>> and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
>>>> the
>>>> complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of
>>>> ethnicity
>>>> or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

>>>> This
>>>> may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
>>>> Igbos
>>>> in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
>>>> completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

>>>> incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more

>>>> than
>>>> forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
>>>> hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
>>>> this
>>>> reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
>>>> that
>>>> Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
>>>> to

>>>> ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

>>>> other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.
>>>>
>>>> At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
>>>> two
>>>> examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
>>>> between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

>>>> Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case:
>>>> �By

>>>> the time the government of the Western region also published a white
>>>> paper
>>>> outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
>>>> in
>>>> the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
>>>> situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
>>>> all

>>>> over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a

>>>> fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
>>>> realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
>>>> useful to
>>>> carefully state what these other facts and realities were.
>>>>
>>>> First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
>>>> was
>>>> that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
>>>> Democratic
>>>> Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
>>>> government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
>>>> post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
>>>> and

>>>> fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
>>>> Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently

>>>> anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
>>>> anti-socialist. A
>>>> brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
>>>> tirelessly
>>>> satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
>>>> composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
>>>> parodic

>>>> visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared �

>>>> wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
>>>> the
>>>> slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
>>>> facts
>>>> and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
>>>> Akintola
>>>> and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
>>>> tensions
>>>> and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
>>>> founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
>>>> they

>>>> called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried,

>>>> unsuccessfully,
>>>> to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

>>>> Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

>>>>
>>>> It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
>>>> and
>>>> realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
>>>> ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
>>>> simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
>>>> pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
>>>> which

>>>> no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate�

>>>> the
>>>> singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
>>>> quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
>>>> to

>>>> this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the
>>>> January

>>>> 15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.
>>>>

>>>> In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

>>>> Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
>>>> last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
>>>> assertion
>>>> to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
>>>> is
>>>> that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
>>>> work
>>>> of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
>>>> to

>>>> the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s

>>>> formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other

>>>> modes,
>>>> forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
>>>> art
>>>> or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
>>>> happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
>>>> typically
>>>> and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
>>>> things
>>>> actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
>>>> the
>>>> most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
>>>> that
>>>> gap.
>>>>

>>>> In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

>>>> experience, he
>>>> had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
>>>> practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
>>>> individuality
>>>> had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
>>>> No
>>>> Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
>>>> Trouble
>>>> with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
>>>> Country

>>>> marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture

>>>> in
>>>> which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
>>>> considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
>>>> defense
>>>> of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
>>>> a
>>>> fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
>>>> choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
>>>> next

>>>> week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

[Ikhide]

"In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively."

 

- Professor Biodun Jeyifo on Achebe's There Was A Country.

 

There is a reason why Professor Biodun Jeyifo's tortuous (so far) serial analysis of Professor Chinua Achebe's book is so far flying like a lead balloon; it makes little sense because it is poorly researched. Take the above statement, I just wonder how many of these books of Achebe's he has read. If he has read them closely, then he has a curious way of showing it. I also am quite suprised how little of Achebe's books beyond TFA many of our star intellectuals have read. It is a shame really.

 

As Achebe carefully footnotes ad nauseam in his book, much of the new book can already be found in, yes, No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. So how can you say that "ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored" in those books, when much of the same thoughts are basically the new book? 

 

Jeyifo is trying awkwardly to hide his huge ethnic bias by accusing Achebe of the same and of a lack of objectivity, it is comical, really. The only reason we are reading all this wahala (or trying to, my eyes glaze over the ancient history of alphabet soup parties, UPGA, NNA, blah blah blah) is because Achebe trained his rage on Awolowo. So all the Awoists are being trotted out to write absolutely dreadful "book reviews."

 

Finally all that mumbling about ethnicity and tribalism is beyond baffling. It makes little sense in the 21st century and I am now convinced that Jeyifo and I read two different editions of Achebe's wondrous book. Jeyifo and I live in a free country, the great USA and so I would say feel free to keep writing about Achebe if it rocks your boat. But if you are looking for a clear-eyed review of Achebe's books, do not look to Jeyifo :-D LOL!

 

- Ikhide 

 

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

"Most times, I feel a rebellious prompting to indicate 'Yoruba' in such column than 'Nigerian'."

The response vividly instantiates what Arjun Appadurai once aptly characterized as the paradox of constructed primordialism. Shina, your "Yorubanness" is inextricably linked to your "Nigerianness." There probably won't be "Yoruba" if there was no Nigeria. Yoruba is as much a constructed identity as Nigeria is. People in what is today southwest Nigeria never collectively referred to themselves as "Yoruba" until relatively recently. The contemporary manifestations of "Yorubaness" is a colonial creation--just like most of other contemporary collective ethnic identities in Nigeria. You should probably more correctly refer to yourself as "Ibadan," Ijesa," "Egba,"Ekiti," or such other identities that actually predated the idea of "Yoruba," which is actually a word Hausa people used to refer to people in present-day Oyo, Osun, parts of Lagos and parts of Kwara state..

Farooq

Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

I am a Nigerian through and through.

I am not Yoruba although I have a Yoruba name.

I can speak a little Yoruba and a little of my mother tongue, Okpamerri.

The two Nigerian languages I am fluent in are Standard English and Pidgin English.

I achieved maturity in Benin and consider it my spiritual home but am not Bini, and sadly dont understand the native language, although I have Bini friends with whom I communicated in English.

I can find my way to Benin easily but will have to ask for directions to my native village.

I have lived in and attended school in  Ibadan, Auchi, Sabon-Gida Ora, Lagos, and Port-Harcourt.

I identify very positively with Nigeria because my history there contains the roots of all I am and all I will be.

Those who identify primarily with their ethnicity cannot speak for all Nigerians.

Tony Umez, a Nollywood actor, told me when were both youth corpers at the University of Benin, that even though he was Igbo he could not speak Igbo, but having grown up and schooled in Lagos, he was fluent in Yoruba, Standard English and Pidgin English.

What is the percentage of Nigerians whose identification is ethnic as opposed to Nigerian?

thanks

toyin

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Ikhide,

Sorry, but you are not really saying much about the Jeyifo contribution.

Your comments do not achieve much beyond express an unsubstantiated displeasure.

If you are to be taken seriously as a pro-Biafra critic, which you see yourself as being, you need to do better than just display displeasure and be seen to engage in serious and informed analysis of the subject you address.


toyin

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

"I am now convinced that Jeyifo and I read two different editions of Achebe's wondrous book."Ikhide

So which edition did you read? The latest?
ha ha ha!

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
www.africahistory.net<http://www.africahistory.net/>
www.vimeo.com/user5946750/videos<http://www.vimeo.com/user5946750/videos>
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ikhide [xok...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2012 1:42 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

"In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively."

- Professor Biodun Jeyifo on Achebe's There Was A Country.

There is a reason why Professor Biodun Jeyifo's tortuous (so far) serial analysis of Professor Chinua Achebe's book is so far flying like a lead balloon; it makes little sense because it is poorly researched. Take the above statement, I just wonder how many of these books of Achebe's he has read. If he has read them closely, then he has a curious way of showing it. I also am quite suprised how little of Achebe's books beyond TFA many of our star intellectuals have read. It is a shame really.

As Achebe carefully footnotes ad nauseam in his book, much of the new book can already be found in, yes, No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. So how can you say that "ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored" in those books, when much of the same thoughts are basically the new book?

Jeyifo is trying awkwardly to hide his huge ethnic bias by accusing Achebe of the same and of a lack of objectivity, it is comical, really. The only reason we are reading all this wahala (or trying to, my eyes glaze over the ancient history of alphabet soup parties, UPGA, NNA, blah blah blah) is because Achebe trained his rage on Awolowo. So all the Awoists are being trotted out to write absolutely dreadful "book reviews."

Finally all that mumbling about ethnicity and tribalism is beyond baffling. It makes little sense in the 21st century and I am now convinced that Jeyifo and I read two different editions of Achebe's wondrous book. Jeyifo and I live in a free country, the great USA and so I would say feel free to keep writing about Achebe if it rocks your boat. But if you are looking for a clear-eyed review of Achebe's books, do not look to Jeyifo :-D LOL!

- Ikhide



From: Chido Onumah <con...@hotmail.com>
To:
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 9:43 PM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2) <http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=108971:jeyifo-first-there-was-a-country-then-there-wasnt-reflections-on-achebes-new-book-2&catid=38:columnists&Itemid=615>

By Biodun Jeyifo
Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed “an Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress when not in uniform.
Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country
In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar” is none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book with the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s “explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly driven by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter. Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the book.
The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain of events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central subject of Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the January 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives” or “interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was it not, “an Igbo coup”.
There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a “southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political and military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were, overwhelmingly, either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to the NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and conservative allies of the NNA.
Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring - and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form the complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of ethnicity or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. This may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against Igbos in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more than forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.
At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case: “By the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to carefully state what these other facts and realities were.
First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here was that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes. Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and anti-socialist. A brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared – wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these facts and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly, Akintola and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which they called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.
It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate” the singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the January 15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.
In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other modes, forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that typically and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how things actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only the most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging that gap.
In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial experience, he had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising defense of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in a fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In next week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if only speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was A Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.
Concluded.

bje...@fas.harvard.edu<mailto:bje...@fas.harvard.edu>

[Ikhide]

Dear Oluwatoyin Adepoju,

You are obviously poorly read in all the right things, that is not my problem, and no amount of faux scholarship can hide your ignorance of matters that you should know stuff about. It is not my fault that at your age you only came across serious scholarship about Biafra this year. You ought to be grateful to people like me, your real lecturers who try gamely to salvage you from your pit of ignorance. I have spent much of my life educating myself on that which is important to my future and that of people that look like me. You on the other hand, only your God knows what he did to you.

Read my submission again, Biodun Jeyifo's analysis is dead in the water because he clearly does not realize that much of Achebe's new book is recompiled from all the books he listed. Which renders his analysis inchoate, if not entirely worthless. Opinions I respect, but they must be based on facts.

And you know, you and your ilk take me seriously and I keep you up at night while I dance to my gods and enjoy the occasional glass of cognac. My gods have been good to me, on the other hand, your gods were cranky and distracted when they glued you together. Now go to your next class where they teach you how to be a misgynist.

- Ikhide

 

- Ikhide

 

Stalk my blog at http://www.xokigbo.com/

Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide

Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

 

Ikhide,

 

Thank you setting a trap for yourself and falling into it.

 

I knew you were headed there and allowed you to do yourself in.

 

Well done.

 

How can you, in the name of Jesus Christ of Oyingbo, equate The Trouble with Nigeria, Anthills of the Savannah, Hopes and Impediments and even go further and equate them with  There Was a Country :A Personal  History of Biafra?

 

Haba!

 

I bin tink say you be literary critic.

 

Let me take your hand and lead you though this since you are not getting it.

 

Are those books identical in form and content?

 

Are you arguing with a straight face, that a work largely fictional, Anthills of the Savannah, is identical with a collection of expository  essays on a broad range of topics, Hopes and Impediments and that these two are identical with  a book that, unlike Anthills,  focuses  on one subject from a non-fictive perspective,The Trouble with Nigeria, and does not involve movement into abstract metaphysics as Achebe does superbly in the essay "The  Igbo World View and its Art"  in Hopes and Impediments?

 

Are you standing straight and arguing that this diverse body of books is identical with an effort to present  a realist narrative  of a historical  period from a personal perspective   in  There Was a Country:A Personal  History of Biafra?

 

Is this the kind of mish mash conflation you are demonstrating in gleefully declaring : "It is stunning to me that a scholar of Jeyifo's calibre could not see that Achebe's new book TWAC is pretty much a compilation of all he has been saying all these years."

 

Is Achebe simply rehashing the content of those books? 

 

At this point, one has to ask-have you read these books? If so,what went wrong?

 

You might do well to enrol in my adult education class.

 

I will craft a special curriculum for you.

 

It will begin with a foundation in theory of genres and proceed to discussing  creative transposition from life to art.

 

You need it, brother.

 

Based on the differences between these books and the fact that even if they were similar in all aspects, unless you are arguing that There Was a Country is a direct repetition of one of those books,you need to address the new imaginative and narrative nexus constituted  by the new work, as Jeyifo is rightly doing, seeing it as a new development, not identical with the old productions,  as your one eyed criticism is too  short sighted to understand 

 

Pull your ears tight and assimilate that first.

 

What is this thing you are trying to say about musings after a driver stole Achebe's car?

 

If you are drinking or sleepy, please go and wash your face and sit up. 

 

Jeyifo states categorically that Achebe takes to task issues of class in Nigeria but does not do that in Biafra. 

 

At that point,we move beyond incidental musing resulting from the theft of a car.

 

Let me leave you there for now.

 

toyin

 

 

 

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 3:56 AM, Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Oluwatoyin,

 

You are trying to immerse yourself in depths beyond your intellectual competence and the more you open your mouth I am convinced you are a waste of my time. I am tired of giving you lectures for free and you are ungrateful to boot. I paid dearly for my education but I spent my money wisely - on the right tyoe of education. Have you read Professor Chinua Achebe's book? Where is your own "critical analysis"? No amount of pompous pretensions to scholarship will hide your ignorance of literature and Nigerian history..

 

Go get your bifocals and read what I said about Professor Biodun Jeyifo's "critical analysis." Here, let me help you unpack my one-line.

 

1. Three quarters of Achebe's book, There Was a Country is from his previous books, The Trouble with Nigeria, Anthills of the Savannah, Hopes and Impediments, etc. as Achebe carefully footnotes ad nauseam in his book.   So how can Jeyifo say that "ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored" in those books, when much of the same thoughts are basically the new book that is pretty much 3/4s of the book Jeyifo cites?  Does that make sense to you?

 2. It is stunning to me that a scholar of Jeyifo's calibre could not see that Achebe's new book TWAC is pretty much a compilation of all he has been saying all these years. He obviously did not see that. That alone makes his "critical analysis" worthless scholarship. How can you ask me to take seriously such critique.

 

3. Has Jeyifo read Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun? That book is the most updated and elegant discussion of class not only in Biafra but in Nigeria. Have you read Half of a Yellow Sun? Have you, Toyin? What, for heaven's sakes, have you read?

 

4. How can Jeyifo in all seriousness say that Achebe did not discuss class in TWAC? He must be reading a pirated copy of the book with the substantive pages ripped off. Achebe makes clear that he was part of the intellectual elite, he was traveling the West, doing propaganda on behalf of Biafra. He had a "driver" who made off with his car and belongings one day. The resulting musing is as lucid a discussion of class as you'll ever get. It is the job of the astute reader to deduce these things. I honestly have no idea what Jeyifo is talking about. He needs to read the text more closely before any more "critical analysis" or whatevr pablum passes for scholarship around here.

 

Look, Toyin, if you are going to engage me civilly, I am happy to reciprocate, but trust me I am good at throwing punches and they land where I want them to land. Don't get me started on you, because I have all day and all night. Go and read TWAC. Go and read Adichie's HOAYS and then come back and talk to me. Until then sit down before me. And learn something.

 

Happy New Year.

 

- Ikhide

 

Stalk my blog at http://www.xokigbo.com/

Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide

Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

From: OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com; xok...@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2012 8:58 PM

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

Ikhide, 

Please, come off it.

You wont escape through that door. 

If you really think you are in a position to criticise Jeyifo, do us a favour and do a critical analysis of the Jeyifo essay with close reference to the Achebe text you are both referring to.

All you have provided so far is a one line  dismissal, an effort  I can easily show as of little illumination if I were bothered to do so.  

You might not like my thinking, but you will observe my consistent painstaking efforts to present my case, often using a range of scholarly references.

Are you giving us a serious analysis or not?

If you persist in presenting uncritical denunciation, I will persist in calling out your actions for what they are.

toyin 

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Ikhide, 

Please, come off it.

You wont escape through that door. 

If you really think you are in a position to criticise Jeyifo, do us a favour and do a critical analysis of the Jeyifo essay with close reference to the Achebe text you are both referring to.

All you have provided so far is a one line  dismissal, an effort  I can easily show as of little illumination if I were bothered to do so.  

You might not like my thinking, but you will observe my consistent painstaking efforts to present my case, often using a range of scholarly references.

Are you giving us a serious analysis or not?

If you persist in presenting uncritical denunciation, I will persist in calling out your actions for what they are.

toyin 

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[Ikhide]

Oluwatoyin,

 

You are trying to immerse yourself in depths beyond your intellectual competence and the more you open your mouth I am convinced you are a waste of my time. I am tired of giving you lectures for free and you are ungrateful to boot. I paid dearly for my education but I spent my money wisely - on the right tyoe of education. Have you read Professor Chinua Achebe's book? Where is your own "critical analysis"? No amount of pompous pretensions to scholarship will hide your ignorance of literature and Nigerian history..

 

Go get your bifocals and read what I said about Professor Biodun Jeyifo's "critical analysis." Here, let me help you unpack my one-line.

 

1. Three quarters of Achebe's book, There Was a Country is from his previous books, The Trouble with Nigeria, Anthills of the Savannah, Hopes and Impediments, etc. as Achebe carefully footnotes ad nauseam in his book.   So how can Jeyifo say that "ethnicity, class and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored" in those books, when much of the same thoughts are basically the new book that is pretty much 3/4s of the book Jeyifo cites?  Does that make sense to you?

 2. It is stunning to me that a scholar of Jeyifo's calibre could not see that Achebe's new book TWAC is pretty much a compilation of all he has been saying all these years. He obviously did not see that. That alone makes his "critical analysis" worthless scholarship. How can you ask me to take seriously such critique.

 

3. Has Jeyifo read Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun? That book is the most updated and elegant discussion of class not only in Biafra but in Nigeria. Have you read Half of a Yellow Sun? Have you, Toyin? What, for heaven's sakes, have you read?

 

4. How can Jeyifo in all seriousness say that Achebe did not discuss class in TWAC? He must be reading a pirated copy of the book with the substantive pages ripped off. Achebe makes clear that he was part of the intellectual elite, he was traveling the West, doing propaganda on behalf of Biafra. He had a "driver" who made off with his car and belongings one day. The resulting musing is as lucid a discussion of class as you'll ever get. It is the job of the astute reader to deduce these things. I honestly have no idea what Jeyifo is talking about. He needs to read the text more closely before any more "critical analysis" or whatevr pablum passes for scholarship around here.

 

Look, Toyin, if you are going to engage me civilly, I am happy to reciprocate, but trust me I am good at throwing punches and they land where I want them to land. Don't get me started on you, because I have all day and all night. Go and read TWAC. Go and read Adichie's HOAYS and then come back and talk to me. Until then sit down before me. And learn something.

 

Happy New Year.

 

[Okwy Okeke]

Finally all that mumbling about ethnicity and tribalism is beyond baffling. It makes little sense in the 21st century and I am now convinced that Jeyifo and I read two different editions of Achebe's wondrous book. Jeyifo and I live in a free country, the great USA and so I would say feel free to keep writing about Achebe if it rocks your boat. But if you are looking for a clear-eyed review of Achebe's books, do not look to Jeyifo :-D LOL!

 

- Ikhide 

Oga Ikhide,

I think there is room for Biodun Jeyifo's review in this conversation. For good or for bad, it is a window into a mind that may as well represent a chunk of Nigerians' thinking. Recall that an Adeshina Afolayan claimed that the toga of ethnicity adorns the activities of the informal sector, the burial ground of patriotism, a claim that couldn't be further from the truth even if he tried, then, we have been put on notice that he would surpass his mentors being unfettered by the minimum acceptable standards of western scholarship, and why shouldn't he, those that played that card post-July 1966 have mansions on hills.

Nigeria's informal sector, where creed or ethnicity counts for nothing (Adichie captures this brilliantly in HYS where she described the life of the cheerful cobbler merchant that got transformed into a dagger wielding killer during a riot that was started from afar off, in essence, for reasons he didn't understand but had to identify with) continues to mock the formal and public sector which by the way represents the narrow world of our elites, which in their mind defines all of ours. I digress.

Jeyifo's review is a study in emotion and defending at the barricades, not scholarship. The scholar's version of "they pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." Then, our daily lives, and survival in Nigeria depends largely on how well one navigates such chicanery as seen in the Adeshina Afolayans working back to the answer; a product of the end justifying the means world we lives in. 

Beyond the call to arms review you called Jeyifo out on, and Bolaji Aluko's distasteful mail to Folu Ogundimu that was posted here few months ago, there are very good points in what may be called extreme right wing Action Groupies review of TWAC. Jeyifo's argument that the issues to discuss about the January 15, 1966 coup should be beyond ethnicity rings true, as much as his disregard for the title of the memoir, and all other issues discussed in it besides the issue of Awolowo's place in the history of Nigeria.

It is true that in 1966 about every adult Nigerian, especially the educated class, was for one of the 2 big alliances - NNA or UPGA, or in the minimum had sympathy for one against the other in the event of belonging to one of the other political parties, then Jeyifo also misses the point by focusing on the story as if the killing of Easterners started in May 1966, a literary equivalent of playing highlife music without guitar, and that is where Achebe's narrative in TWAC rides over the shrew Jeyifo would want us pay attention to, rather than the elephant that is Nigeria in a period of madness perpetrated unspeakable crimes over several years with the backing of some of her finest brains.

There isn't a single narrative of the Nigerian story. Our history and understanding of the past is better served with as many views as we can get, but to insist that a "personal history" which has not been faulted on factual grounds, but on slant (what is personal if not slant, and that is in the minimum and for the sake of academic discussion) is just as bald-headed as the logic of starving a population, including denial of vaccination for infants in order to weaken a resistance to unprovoked and indefensible killing.

With hindsight, is there an admirer of Awolowo that wouldn't prefer he stayed away from a junta that included Yakubu Danjuma and Murtala Mohammad? Is there any democrat that wouldn't have proudly identified with the refusal of Awolowo had he spurned the invitation of the killers of July 1966? And therein lies sum total of this debate, Awolowo's original sin if you like for the progressives that saw an alternative in him. Indeed, what lies behind us and what lies before us are little matters compared to what lies within us.

Cheers,...Okwy

------------------------------------------
We face forward,...we face neither East or West: we face forward.......Kwame Nkrumah

---

From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com>
To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, 31 December 2012, 19:42
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

[xokigbo]

Oluwatoyin,

You are like an antelope skating on thin ice. Now you understand why I ignore your attempts at scholarship, they are largely bereft of substance.

1. You have not read Chinua Achebe's book, There Was a Country, that much is obvious. In order to be a referee in a game, you must understand the game. You have no idea what you are babbling about.

3. I doubt that you have read any of Achebe's books beyond Things Fall Apart. That much is obvious,

2. You obviously have not read Chimamanda Adichie's book, Half of a Yellow Sun.

3. Which leads to the question: Have you read anything in contemporary African literature?

4. You are too ignorant for words. Plus you have issues with simple comprehension. It was Professor Jeyifo that was comparing TWAC with Achebe's previous works and I said, he clearly cannot see that much of TWAC is from those works. Go and buy the books yourself and read them and come back to talk to me intelligently. Or since you are lazy, go read Adichie's review of TWAC. I don't open mouth unless I know what I am talking about.

5. Jeyifo is wrong about Achebe not talking about class in Biafra and I have proved it with at least one fact. It is stunning actually, his superficial reading of the text.

6. Achebe does not need me or anyone defending him. He has defended himself and our race all his life. Even in the winter of his life he is still teaching us how to write, with rigor and scholarship. I am only defending the need for intellectual honesty and true scholarship in my generation. 

7. I did fall into your trap; I was under the mistaken impression that you are actually reading these books. Why should I engage your ignorance. I am a busy man, I have no time for this.

8. Happy New Year. Honestly.

- Ikhide

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

There is a problem here-

'There isn't a single narrative of the Nigerian story. Our history and understanding of the past is better served with as many views as we can get, but to insist that a "personal history" which has not been faulted on factual grounds, but on slant (what is personal if not slant, and that is in the minimum and for the sake of academic discussion) is just as bald-headed as the logic of starving a population, including denial of vaccination for infants in order to weaken a resistance to unprovoked and indefensible killing.'

The question is-what is the scope of responsibility Achebe owes his readership in presenting an account of an event so charged with meaning and still live as the Nigerian Civil War?

What is  his responsibility to himself, to those who took part in that war and to those countless others beyond those groups for whom his word has such weight?

What is his responsibility to his own record as a writer and thinker?

Are these responsibilities adequately discharged by presenting views that indicate a slant that makes little effort to be inclusive of the various issues at stake?

Are these questions best addressed by being dismissed as not relevant to a book titled 'A Personal History'?

What is the rationale for this-

'Jeyifo's review is a study in emotion and defending at the barricades, not scholarship. The scholar's version of "they pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." T.'

A truncated style of reading history:

'With hindsight, is there an admirer of Awolowo that wouldn't prefer he stayed away from a junta that included Yakubu Danjuma and Murtala Mohammad? Is there any democrat that wouldn't have proudly identified with the refusal of Awolowo had he spurned the invitation of the killers of July 1966?'

Before the war began, Awolowo had the respect of an elder statesman who was on good terms with Ojukwu, on account of which the government asked him to lead a team to  Ojukwu to help avert war.

There was no one else who could have done that job. Zik was on the Biafran side, even though sidelined by Ojukwu, as testified by Ralph Uwechue, Biafran ambassador to France in his book and Ebie in Unspeakable Events in Biafra testify.

Would it have been better for the nation of Awolowo had refused such a mission?

That mission gave Ojukwu a last chance to negotiate  his way out of a potentially disastrous situation, going into a war highly unprepared,   a stage where the windows of opportunity were rapidly closing, though he did not appreciate that, a limitation of vision  that would follow him even until he fled into exile in January 1970,expecting the brutal losing war to continue as his successor  Efiong asserts in his book. 

That argument that Awolowo should not have joined the government also ignores the fact that by the time the civil war began, events had escalated  beyond the counter coup of 1966, largely though the efforts of Ojuwku.

There existed a groundswell of sympathy for Igbos and Biafra on account of the 1966 pogroms but Ojukwu destroyed that by his invasion of the Midwest and move to capture the Southwest and the capital, Lagos.

That move united the country against Biafra. That  was the beginning of the end for Biafra.

 Yakubu Danjuma and Murtala Mohammad played central roles in the counter coup massacre, and Muhammed in the Asaba massacre during the war, all  strikingly described by Siolloun but these men also played central roles in the war on behalf of Nigeria. So, they cannot be demised as murderers  pure and simple. 

I dont think Jeyifo can be faulted on this-

'Jeyifo also misses the point by focusing on the story as if the killing of Easterners started in May 1966, a literary equivalent of playing highlife music without guitar'

True, there pre-1966 murderous riots. Does that necessarily  factor into the issues Jeyifo discusses?

thanks

toyin

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Ikhide,

Debate is not identical with repeating oneself.

When you are prepared  to take a step forward in first addressing how you could make the gross blunder of lumping books of various genres into one pot, and presenting another work as a rehash of those books, then you let me know.Then we can talk.

 Jeyifo is not an Ikhide kind of critic. Jeyifo is Jeyifo.

Jeyifo recognises the artistic integrity of the new work as a distinctive development and is treating it accordingly. He is disturbed that a writer who has demonstrated a greater degree of reflexivity in  his past works is so blind in his latest work.

You  are  arguing that Achebe's new book is composed largely of his old works.

 Is the new book an anthology?

Now, on the issue of class in Biafra which you are argue is well served by Achebe's musing about a driver stealing his car and Achebe referring to his ambassadorial work. 

Adapting a Yoruba proverb, translated by Soyinka  in Death and the Kings Horseman- in describing an elephant, we do not declare we saw something in a flash-that is unworthy of the elephant.

The class issue is at the heart of the painful paradox of Biafra and cannot be adequately served by the cavalier invocations you summon. It cannot be adequately served by unreflective  descriptions by Achebe of his work as an ambassador.

At the heart of this issue is the question-to what degree did class play a role in creating both a bond  and a chasm between Biafrans so that different experiences of the war may have enabled the continued  prosecution of a losing war by an elite who were not suffering its pains?

That is at the core of the controversial Awolowo summation about food for the people being siphoned by the elite, of which the military may be described a part of that elite in relation to non-combatants,   that is what is evoked by Achebe himself in "Girls at War" on underground food markets for the elite in Biafra while the majority were left to fend for themselves  through desperate measures, that is what is discussed by Ebie  in  Broken Back Axle: Unspeakable Events in Biafra, in his  claims about fears of  being second class  citizens in Biafra by members of the osu caste who are discriminated against by other Igbos as being central to the fall of Biafra,a fear of second class citizenship  being also central to ambivalence about Biafra  by non-Igbo minorities, a concern of being co-opted into the Biafra  arrangement invoked by Gowon in dividing the country into 12 states, thereby empowering minorities with political  structures that diluted the appeal of Biafra and, from one account,  forcing Ojukwu and his team to counter with the creation of Biafra as a means of retaining the political structure and power base Gowon was trying to dissipate.

If you want to educate yourself on this slant about ethnicity in relation to class in connection with political strategy between Ojukwu and Gowon, you may  see Roy Samuel Doron, Forging a Nation While Losing a Country : Igbo Nationalism, Ethnicity and Propaganda in the Nigerian Civil War 1968-1970 who quotes a poignant comment from the famous Joe Achuzia of the mood at the meeting when they got the announcement from Gowon which one could contrast with Ntieyong Udo Akpan who argues in The Struggle For Secession, 1966-1970: A Personal Account Of The Nigerian Civil War  that the vote to declare Biafra  was achieved through manipulation of  the delegates by Ojukwu. 

Its not about coming to the market place to list the books you claim to have read. Its about constructive use of that knowledge. 

Your struggle to invoke Adichie like a talisman  in a discussion that does not involve  Adichie  is what an examiner would call out-of-point and you could be penalised for it.

Try and get training in scholarship.It will help you. You might also learn the culture of disciplined response that marks scholarship.

 There might  be private teachers or classes near you.

Thanks for the entertainment.

I knew you were in trouble from the  moment you refused to respond in a civil manner to a civil exchange. 

Esu is permanently lying in wait in such moments to aid in the crushing of hubris by leading blindness into the pit of self contradiction. All I needed to do was remain alert and pick up the spoils. 

toyin

[shina7...@yahoo.com]

Making Our Suffering Sufferable: National Integration and the Logic of Informality

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of

insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.

Adeshina Afolayan

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

-----Original Message-----
From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:36:04
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

>>>> First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s

>>>> New
>>>> Book (2)
>>>>
>>>> By Biodun Jeyifo
>>>>
>>>> Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

>>>> “an
>>>> Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

>>>> are
>>>> discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
>>>> in

>>>> name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

>>>> Northerner,
>>>> spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
>>>> dress
>>>> when not in uniform.
>>>>
>>>> Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country
>>>>
>>>> In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
>>>> power
>>>> over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
>>>> arrange
>>>> stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.
>>>>
>>>> Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
>>>>

>>>> If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

>>>> narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
>>>> book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
>>>> and

>>>> discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar”

>>>> is
>>>> none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
>>>> with

>>>> the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
>>>> “explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

>>>> driven
>>>> by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
>>>> matter.

>>>> Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

>>>> speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
>>>> inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
>>>> excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
>>>> departure

>>>> from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

>>>> book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
>>>> subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
>>>> particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
>>>> book.
>>>>
>>>> The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

>>>> January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain

>>>> of
>>>> events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
>>>> subject of

>>>> Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

>>>> both
>>>> general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

>>>> indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

>>>> section
>>>> of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
>>>> January

>>>> 15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives”
>>>> or
>>>> “interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
>>>> that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was
>>>> it
>>>> not, “an Igbo coup”.

>>>>
>>>> There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

>>>> “southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political

>>>> and
>>>> military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
>>>> overwhelmingly,
>>>> either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
>>>> More
>>>> pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
>>>> plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
>>>> significant
>>>> in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
>>>> Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
>>>> class
>>>> parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
>>>> the
>>>> United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
>>>> Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
>>>> the
>>>> NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
>>>> chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
>>>> assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
>>>> was
>>>> spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
>>>> of
>>>> fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

>>>> intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

>>>> Prime
>>>> Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
>>>> far
>>>> more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
>>>> and
>>>> conservative allies of the NNA.
>>>>

>>>> Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

>>>> factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
>>>> it, or

>>>> was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in
>>>> exploring -
>>>> and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
>>>> the
>>>> complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
>>>> ethnicity
>>>> or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

>>>> This
>>>> may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
>>>> Igbos
>>>> in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
>>>> completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

>>>> incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more

>>>> than
>>>> forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
>>>> hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
>>>> this
>>>> reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
>>>> that
>>>> Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
>>>> to

>>>> ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

>>>> other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.
>>>>
>>>> At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
>>>> two
>>>> examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
>>>> between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

>>>> Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
>>>> “By

>>>> the time the government of the Western region also published a white
>>>> paper
>>>> outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
>>>> in
>>>> the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
>>>> situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
>>>> all

>>>> over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

>>>> fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
>>>> realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
>>>> useful to
>>>> carefully state what these other facts and realities were.
>>>>
>>>> First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
>>>> was
>>>> that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
>>>> Democratic
>>>> Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
>>>> government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
>>>> post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
>>>> and

>>>> fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
>>>> Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

>>>> anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
>>>> anti-socialist. A
>>>> brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
>>>> tirelessly
>>>> satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
>>>> composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
>>>> parodic

>>>> visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

>>>> wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
>>>> the
>>>> slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
>>>> facts
>>>> and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
>>>> Akintola
>>>> and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
>>>> tensions
>>>> and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
>>>> founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
>>>> they

>>>> called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried,

>>>> unsuccessfully,
>>>> to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

>>>> Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

>>>>
>>>> It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
>>>> and
>>>> realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
>>>> ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
>>>> simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
>>>> pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
>>>> which

>>>> no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate”

>>>> the
>>>> singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
>>>> quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
>>>> to

>>>> this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the
>>>> January

>>>> 15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.
>>>>

>>>> In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

>>>> Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
>>>> last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
>>>> assertion
>>>> to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
>>>> is
>>>> that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
>>>> work
>>>> of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
>>>> to

>>>> the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

>>>> formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other

>>>> modes,
>>>> forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
>>>> art
>>>> or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
>>>> happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
>>>> typically
>>>> and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
>>>> things
>>>> actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
>>>> the
>>>> most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
>>>> that
>>>> gap.
>>>>

>>>> In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

>>>> experience, he
>>>> had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
>>>> practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
>>>> individuality
>>>> had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
>>>> No
>>>> Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
>>>> Trouble
>>>> with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
>>>> Country

>>>> marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture

>>>> in
>>>> which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
>>>> considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
>>>> defense
>>>> of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
>>>> a
>>>> fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
>>>> choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
>>>> next

>>>> week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Shina,

Deep food for thinking. You have really given flesh to your theory in a way that one can recognise in various contexts, including the various Nigreian centred listserves.

Could you suggest how this could be done?

"The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. "

thanks
toyin

On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 3:24 PM, <shina7...@yahoo.com> wrote:

The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition.

[kenneth harrow]

dear shina
this is a pretty great answer. you fill out the notion of the informal
really nicely, convincingly.

i have been reading johannes fabian, who writes some pretty interesting
stuff concerning ethnicity identities in the congo, that i thought i
would share with you. i do want to repeat that the notion that ethnicity
is "constructed" doesn't imply it isn't "real," that people don't
understand themselves and others to belong to some group, be it
religious or tribal or whatever you want to call it. it is given a
reality; it isn't somehow buried in their bones. but being given a
reality doesn't negate its reality: my memory of a discussion on this
point a year or so ago points to this assertion.

anyway, here is fabian:
"By the late 60s it wasa clear tha most forms of ethnicity , certainly
those that posed social and political problems and became the target of
funded research, were invented (no pejorative sense intended) by groups
of displaced people after they had migrated or for other reasons lost
their place in their societies owing to wars, the collapse of
nation-states, or the demise of colonial regimes. Ethnics are people, we
were told, to whom separation from their territory of origin and their
past has become a problem of identity in relating to their new
surroundings. As an assemblage of cultural symbols and practices that
ethnics brough along, remembered, and more often than not (re) invented,
ethnicity could be construed for the purpose of organizing action such
as claiming civil rights, access to jobs, economic resources, and
political power. Paradoxically, though somehow died to displacement, to
separation of place from identity, ethnicity could also become a
desirable, or inescapable, idiom of cultural, social, and political
practices for populations that had remained in place and had never
thought of their habits of speech, dres, or cooking as 'ethnic..' As it
turned out, it did not take long for invented ethnicity to become
commoditized in a vast array of goods for consumption, from food and
fabric patterns to music and therapeutic rituals.
It cannot be denied that, in the situations that produced African
popular culture, elements appeared in the past and continue to exist in
the present that seem to fit what has been conceptualized as ethnicity.
But closer examination reveals that african 'tribalism' (to use a term
that has more currency among those concerned than 'ethnicity')has been
different in its origins as well as its later development. One way to
probe these differences is to ask in what sense theories of ethnicity
can be counted among conceptualizations that pprivilege space over time.
In Zaire many, if not most, of the ethnic identities (symbolized, for
instance, by a label supposedly marking common descent, or by languages
purported to be distinctive of a group) were demonstrably colonial
impositions, administrative and missionary. The overriding concern of
colonial regimes was to define colonial space and to map territorial
divisions on various levels down to localities. How arbitrary these
impositions were can be seen from the fact that they were easily ignored
when the colony faced the problem of securing its external frontiers.
When these wet set, most of them cut through linquistic and cultural
areas; when cultural specificity could not be assigned a territory, it
was ignored." (74-5, in Moments of Freedom).

given this, one might reflect on one or two points: the scuttlebutt in
cameroon was that ahidjo wasn't really fulani, but only pretended to be
so in order to advance socially. this notion of "choosing" to be fulani
or hausa, so as to get a job or advance, was commonplace.
the other point i have is more a question: if the assignation of
ethnicity to a people is driven by the desire to control them, and
therefore is tied to where they come from (territory), then can it be
said that driving them out of the lands to which they disperse is an
attempt to reassert a weakened control. (ex. igbos dispersing throughout
nigeria, especially to the north)?
third point (last one, i promise). in the film Bhaji on the Beach, by
Gurinder Chadha (a great film), she sets two groups in opposition: the
indians living in england, and the indian woman who has just arrived
from asia. guess who dresses in saris, versus dressing in sharp skirts
and blouses? the indian woman from the continent berates her sisters in
england and says, you people are living in the dark ages, as though
nothing from home, or yourselves, ever changed, while we have modernized
far more than you.
!
ken

[Ibrahim Abdullah]

Shina:
E se gan! Thanks for this intervention. Ken's point about chronology
is neither here nor there! I did not set out to map any chronology;
what I did was simply to plot the trajectory of the withering away of
the Nigerian state: from the creation of the mid-west region to the
proleration of states/local government to underline my point about
truncated ethncity. And this has nothing to do with seccurity in West
Africa or with Achille. The issue here is the hisoricity of the
colonial post-colonial state; what Crawford Young dubbed 'bula matari'
in the context of Zaire/Congo. Once more thanks Shina for making this
clear to Ken.

The piont of departure for this investigation is what Basil Davidson,
that tireless africanist, once christined the curse of the
nation-state: how different polities and different peoples were
stitched together by the colonialists through violence. Peter Ekeh
dubbed it the two publics: the civic and the ethnic. And Mahmood in
his trilogy--from citizens to subject, when victims become killers,
and Saviour vs Survivor--it appears as the bifurcated state. This is
what is at issue here!

Why cant Nigerians have a single right that applies in Sokoto, Taraba,
and Yobe as it would apply to my 'home' state of Kogi. This is the
issue. Why would an american pack up from Michigan and settle in
Dakota without questios being asked? Why should this not happen in
'our dear own fatherland'?

To understand why it wont happen is to go back to the original sin:
the stitching of different peoples and the invention of ethnicity and
the restricted civic sphere! Is it any wonder that Cabral recommended
the dismantling of the colonial/post-colonial state?

IB
=========================================

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

An exchange relevant to this debate just took place  on another group and I post it here-

1.  

Aliyu U. Tilde

IS THE SOUTH FINALLY SET TO COLONIZE THE NORTH?

By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde

I received a text message yesterday that read, "Senate Committee on constitutional Review is collating people's vote via text on replacing state of origin with state of residence. Text 'Yes' or 'No to 20052"."

Then an advice followed in the text:

"Let me advise pls, txt 'NO". Ur vote is important to rescue the North. Circulate this msg to all Northerners. Be warned, a grand agenda is to colonise d North. How many northerners reside outside d North compared with them. Your vote will be processed accordingly. For more visit: www.constitutio­nreview.org."

I clicked at www.constitutio­nreview.org naturally as I know you would do now too. This is what came up:

“Welcome! This domain was recently registered at namecheap.com. The domain owner may currently be creating a great site for this domain. Please check back later!”

Naturally, one will be inclined to discard the message and move on with life. But in a country where government has turned into a cult, with policies formulated by groups behind doors in order to gain advantage over others, only a fool would shrug the message off his shoulders. The safest thing, I said to myself, is to hold the content of the message as true and send my vote to the provided number. Of course you know what that vote is: a big NO. The message was replied instantly, saying:

“Senate Committee on Constitution Review appreciates your input. Your vote will be processed accordingly. For more visit: www.constitutio­nreview.org."

In this discourse, I intend to discuss the reasons behind my NO vote. They are very clear and in the best interest of the nation.

Ordinarily, I would have jumped at the idea because it would allow my nomadic ethnic group the right of belonging to any place in the country including the Niger Delta where it reached during the last two decades. I am not alone though. It would also favour the other highly mobile ethnic groups – Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba – as they disperse away from their homelands due to desert encroachment, limitation in space or in search of business opportunities. That would not be fair. We belong to a nation of many tribes and so many of them are not spatially mobile. They would be put at a disadvantage or wiped out altogether from our demographic map. The issue is in fact more complex than that.

The whole indigene problem has been brought into sharp focus recently by the ethno-religious­ crises in Plateau where the native population – mostly those present at the time of colonization in early 20th Century – attempt to exclude other Northerners in the state from claiming ‘indigeneship’ of the state and enjoying the rights and privileges due to that status. At a point in the beginning of the crises, former Governor Dariye bluntly said that the Hausas would be expelled from Plateau unless they drop their claim to its indigeneship.

The settler indigene issue thus became the bone of contention in the crises and in all proceedings of panels of inquiry set up in their aftermath. Thousands of people have died or injured on this matter, thousands have been displaced and dozens of settlements have been wiped out from the map completely. Yet, we are not any inch closer to resolving it and, true, the country cannot continue to bleed from its wound.

The pain of that recurrent crisis has tempted many to think of removing the concept of indigene completely from our constitution and official matters and replacing it with something more liberal like citizenship or residency. Many would quickly buy the idea thinking that it will solve the problem. It would not. It will only aggravate it by nationalizing it. In the end, every state would turn into a Plateau or worse.

I am of the strong opinion that despite the problem on the Plateau, the status quo should be maintained while we collectively try to help Plateau solve its problems. The indigene concept as we know it is a culmination of a long journey of affirmative policies in various parts of the federation. It started in the former Western Region when it wanted to exclude the Igbo from its civil service and politics. Later, Sardauna would apply it in the defunct northern region as a shield from southerner domination.

Generally, the Igbo have been the foremost proponents of a unitary Nigeria. This flows from their initial numeric advantage in the federal civil service and, perhaps, eagerness to settle in other regions without suffering any political hindrance given their high population density, very limited home space, and aggressive trading culture. The concept of a unitary Nigeria is the single most important goal of the Ironsi administration.

Aguyi Ironsi, it is said, was so ultra-nationali­st in his approach to governance that in an attempt to dissolve the bad blood created among Nigerians as a result of regional differences during the First Republic, he even wanted to carry it to where chiefs would be transferred between regions, like where the Sultan of Sokoto would be transferred to Onitsha or Calabar, for example, and the Obi of Onitsha or Oba of Benin brought to Borno or Kano. Others saw things differently. Northerners in particular saw his moves as an attempt to pave the way for Igbo colonization of the North. Whether it was true or not, that fear contributed to the July 1966 coup just as did the brutal killing of top northern politicians and military officers six month earlier.

Ironsi was killed in that coup and he left the North intact, with its vast land accounting for three quarters of the Nigerian map. But traces of his dream would be pursued in another form this time in combination with that of others. The south has always complained of the unequal size of the three regions that formed Nigeria, saying that the arrangement gave the North a clear advantage in political and administrative matters.

So, one thing was settled for, in collaboration with northern minority groups that have been in opposition to the ruling Northern Peoples Congress during the First Republic. If the ‘big’ North cannot be colonized as per Ironsi’s dream, it should be broken into pieces called states. The agenda of state creation has been a long dream of the two groups and the ascension of the pacifist Gowon as the Head of State and the prominent role of clever Awolowo as his chief planning officer offered a golden opportunity for the realization of that dream. How Nigeria now became 36 states does not need any review here. It took only the first step of creating twelve and the strong thirst for each group to have its own state, no matter how unviable it would be, has never been quenched.

The states created carried as their takeoff baggage the virus of indigenisation.­ Whenever one is partitioned into two or more, assets of the old state are shared among the new ones and its civil servants are redeployed each to his own state of origin. States have undoubtedly brought government closer to the people. Along with federal statutory allocations they have also brought about a more even distribution of physical development in the country.

However, it is very doubtful, even by the mere reading of “them” in the above text message, whether states creation has brought Nigerians closer to one another. The old North/South divide remains and northerners are often reminded of their common name regardless of the state they originate from in the North or the religion they profess. They are made to equitably share the fate that befalls them especially in times of crisis when the axes of OPC and MASSOB are let lose on the streets of Lagos or Aba respectively.

Beyond their inability to dissolve past differences, states have also multiplied corruption and spread unrest to hitherto peaceful areas. The case of Plateau is a good example to cite. All was well during the former Benue-Plateau and Plateau States. Hausas in Jos North then, for example, were enjoying scholarships and other privileges. But as soon as Nasarawa State was created, a new power equation emerged to the disadvantage of the Hausas. Those favoured by that equation decided that it is now time to get rid of “the settlers” from our land.

The issue of indigeneship is therefore entrenched in our psyche and it will be difficult to remove or replace it with the more liberal identity of residency. That idea will definitely not be accepted in any of the Northern states, if I must put it bluntly. We are okay with the status quo. If I will move to Umuahia to stay for any reason, for example, I will be proud to answer my Bauchi origin and under no circumstance would I claim to be an indigene of Abia. I should be contented with my constitutional rights as a citizen. And those rights, mind you, are many.

I have the right to live in anywhere in the country, to run any business, to associate with anyone, to practice any religion, to hold any belief, all without hindrance, says the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. As a tax payer and a statistic in the demography of the state, I am also entitled to any welfare benefit that might accrue to any of its residents, like electricity, water, healthcare, roads and basic education for my children. I do not think there is much contention on these things.

However, if I need any extra-privilege­ for myself or for my children, I should seek same from my state of origin, which I should be proud to identify with anyway. Come to think of it: What pride is there in a child that would not answer his father’s name? I do not think that would hinder my development in any way. In my view, this is the most equitable arrangement that we can arrive at given our antecedents and existing realities. Since the shift of power to the south, there have been so many genuine complaints of marginalization­ of the docile North in appointments and general affairs of government. State indigeneship is the only remaining domain for the common man to claim a right that is beyond the reach of anyone that would be tempted to use his economic and political power to dominate him. It is also the only way an equitable representation in the management of affairs of this nation could be achieved as envisaged by the provision of the Federal Character in our constitution.

The desire of the south to ‘colonize’ the North cannot be dismissed just as the fear of that colonization has refused to leave the minds of Northerners. The desire of the south could be innocent and natural, arising form the pressure of limited space and the hope to share in present and future prospects that the region could offer. The North, on its part, is aware of its vulnerability that arises from its heterogeneous composition and of its backwardness in literally every human development index. It has not also lost sight of the fact that the south, though very much smaller in number and landmass, is generations ahead of it in education and economy. It is therefore natural for it to avoid the residency pill. I doubt if for the sake of the Plateau crisis the rest of the north would buy in to this trick.

Therefore, the question of Plateau would still remain. In my previous writings I have clearly stated how it could be resolved amicably. After a long analysis in my series called The Plateau Crucible (available on my blog) where I drew lessons from indigene policy and practices in other northern states, I reasoned that not all Hausa or Fulani living in the state now can claim to be its indigenes just as I dismissed the attempt to disenfranchise all of them of that status by the recent administrations­ in the state. If I were a party to the conflict, I would have advocated for a Plateau indigeneship based on the following criteria as found in other northern states:

1) All natives inhabiting the area covered by the state now at the onset of colonial rule

2) All northerners – and their progeny down the ladder – who were living in the state, if they choose to remain its indigenes and can prove such residence through documents like tax receipts and land or property ownership, that were resident in the state as at the date when the defunct northern region was disbanded, i.e. 1967

3) Any Nigerian certified in the past as indigene of any local government in the state after following its due process of verification or awarded that status on sympathetic grounds by a local government of the state.

By the above criteria, anyone who migrated to Plateau state after 1967 cannot claim its indigeneship, just as it obtains in other northern states.. However, it takes care of those who were part of the building of modern Plateau, including those who were forcefully transferred there to work in the mines during the colonial era and who cannot even trace back their origins. A situation where every Hausa or Fulani resident in Plateau is considered an indigene is not tenable, as it also does not apply in other northern states.

Today, we have many indigenes of defunct provinces of Kwara, Kabba, Benue, Plateau, etc, who are indigenes of Bauchi, Adamawa, Sokoto, Kano and many northern states. Some are my personal friends since childhood; others we have once served in the same cabinet. Plateau should embrace the same formula for the sake of peace.

However, I cannot claim to be an indigene of Sokoto when I was a lecturer there some two decades ago, even if I had wished, I should not expect more from Plateau were I to stay there any day. An indigene of Wase Local Government in Plateau State who migrated here four years ago yesterday came requesting me to sign an attestation that his children are indigenes of Toro Local Government Area of Bauchi State. I refused and politely advised him to allow his children retain their original identity for a number of reasons. I was glad he left convinced that it was the right thing to do.

What I abhor in the Plateau crisis is the use of violence by the indigenes as a tool of dialogue. Expelling Nigerians of any origin from a state for any reason is not constitutional.­ It is rather a recipe for unending violence in various ways. Now even the indigenes are feeling the brunt of the violence. Consumed in the prevailing vicious circle of violence nobody is even thinking that an amicable solution is possible.

So the Plateau claims and counterclaims of indigeneship that seem intractable could be resolved amicably without dragging the whole country into the mud. So ‘No” to residency and ‘Yes’ to indigeneship. That is the best choice of Nigerians in the long run. Whether it is an agenda to colonize the North or not, I have sent my vote.

Let me – the North – be left alone. With my illiteracy, poverty, almajiri, ethnic conflicts, etc. Oho dai! Samu ya fi iyawa. I welcome all Nigerians to my vast land and together, under the present arrangement, we will live in peace, free from fear of domination by any.

Long Live Nigeria.

2 January 2012

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=112325345607895&id=211144139020169&refid=17

2.OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU
Interesting.

Thought provoking and informative.

I find striking the effort to proffer a solution to the Jos crisis.

The problem with Tilde and Adamu Adamu,whose writing I admire so much, is that their stance of 'North is under siege mentality' is recurrent in their writings.

He states that the belief that Ironsi wanted to colonise/divide ( I doubt if Tilde distinguishes between these two) the North is conjectural.

He attributes the state creation in Gowon's time to an effort to divide the North by the craft of Awolowo working on the pliability of Gowon.

He makes no reference to the description by historians that state creation was used by Gown to checkmate Ojukwu by giving their own states to minorities and thereby diluting the appeal of Biafra.

He now jumps from that point to attributing a consistent Southern agenda to colonise  the South.

Is Tilde  a loyal Northerner but  belonging to an old school in  Nigeria that has difficulty of thinking of the North and South except in terms of conflict?

thanks

toyin

3.Nafata Bamaguje

This is the kind of shortsighted narrow-mindedness that has in recent times fuelled Southern agitation for separation from the North a la South Sudan. Northerner propagandists (particularly core northerners) can’t eat their cake and have it – insisting on one Nigeria (because of oil revenues), yet resisting full integration of Nigeria’s diverse peoples that would consolidate our oneness as a nation.

 

If we are to evolve into one truly united prosperous nation where all Nigerians feel at home in whatever part of the country they reside, indigeneship will have to go. The distinction between indigeneship and citizenship is utterly nonsensical and retrogressive. Every citizen (even naturalized ones) ought to be an indigene.

 

Having said that, I don’t think the issue can be easily resolved by simply legislating citizenship to replace indigeneship. It’s one thing for National Assembly to pass legislation to that effect, but the deep seated ethno-religious & state biases of Nigerians (and that is what matters) won’t change just because of some new law in our statute books. Our people will device ways to circumvent laws that they deem contrary to their conscience.

 

Methinks integration will happen naturally and the notion of indigeneship will disappear within a generation if our leaders can do the right thing and transform this potentially great nation into a prosperous land of abundant opportunities.

The key word here is “opportunities.” Our inordinate preoccupation with indigeneship is largely driven by unhealthy competition for scarce resources and few opportunities in our failed dysfunctional nation. When you have 300 people applying for just 10 job vacancies or university admission places, those in authority will tend to favor their own tribe, co-religionists, state indigenes.

 

Conversely when opportunities are abundant - in excess of applicants - it becomes pointless to discriminate. You employ whatever applicant is available regardless of ethnicity, religion or state.

Within 2 or 3 decades of such secular detribalized prosperity, a new generation of detribalized Nigerians who know nothing of “indigene” in job applications or school admission, would emerge to consolidate a truly unified Nigeria.

 

This is not at all high minded speculation. We were close to it during the oil boom of the 1970s when graduates were recruited straight from the universities. I remember the Chief Justice of Borno was a Yoruba Judge.

Back then opportunities abounded and discrimination based state of origin, religion or ethnicity was minimal.

There was no divisive agitation for Sharia, derivation or resource control.

 

So let’s put the horse before the cart and enthrone responsible visionary leadership that can positively transform Nigeria into a land of abundant opportunities. Indigeneship will gradually disappear on its own.

 

Nafata

4.
 Response by maxim...@yahoo.com on Yan Arewa


Reading AUT's argument, are the following points made the bases for the "NO' vote?:

1. The South is much smaller than the North in land mass?

2. The North is less developed than the South?

3. Indegene problems have plagued the country for a while in the North and South and led to bloodshed and no peace?

4. The West rejected residency because of Igbo domination?

5. The South wants to dominate the North?

6. Nomads are being persecuted by indigenes?

7. The purpose of the creation of States was to weaken the North and make the South dominate?

8. The Fulani are being marginalized by the destruction of Northern unity?

9. The South is at the center of the conspiracy to destroy the North's Unity?

However, these arguments leave a lot of questions.

1. If the creation of states was to make the South dominate the North (especially since it was plotted by the "clever" Yoruba and the "docile" Gowon), why is everyone, the Yoruba and Fulani included, complaining about marginalization? At least, the Yoruba would have achieved their aims and should not be at the forefront of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC).

2. If the Yoruba were afraid of domination by the Igbo and expelled the Igbo from Yoruba governments, why is it that the Igbo get killed in the North, with no history of the same occurring in the West?

3. If the Nomads would claim a specific origin, would it not then be logical, from the arguments above, for them to stay in their states and not move around to other states?

4. If that were the case, how would this support their lifestyle of moving from one place to another in search of "greener pastures" literally?

5. If states were created specifically to weaken the North, why are the Igbo the ones complaining most about it, especially with regard to the ill-fated Biafra? And why have they been the ones most vocal against it?

6. Agreeing that State formation, has brought government closer to the people and made development more evenly distributed, is that the problem? more evenly distributed development and government being closer to the people?

7. If the state have not been able to resolve their past differences, isn't it specifically because of the "indegene" perception? The perception that if I am an indegene elsewhere, I really have no obligation to develop my immediate surroundings because it is not MY land/home?

Isn't this what has informed the basis for the justification of what we all now call corruption? "I hate these people because they are NOT MY people. They are Nigerians but they are aliens, since they don't belong to my ethnic group/origin? If I am Yoruba, I don't have to do anything to develop Kano, because I'm not from Kano, thus, I have no compunction about setting up shop in Kano, so I can make money to go settle down in Oshogbo? If I am Hausa, then I can make sure the money from the oil in Ogoniland comes to me, but I have no obligation to make sure Ogoniland benefits from the oil that comes out of its ground? If I am Igbo, I must make sure nothing I do helps Kontagora because I am not from there? If I am Fulani, all these people talking about me grazing are nothing but uncivilized unbelievers and so they don't deserve any respect? How does this address Kano's, Enugu, Oshogbo, Jos, Kontagora and Bauchi Town's needs for infrastructure, economic and social development? 

And how is this mentality different from the british and their United African Company, that they used to exploit the resources of the colony on the Bight of Benin, extending to lake Chad and going North along the banks of the Niger and Benue rivers, and everything around these landmarks? Is this not what made the british empire and impoverished the colonies? Is this not what we are all struggling with, even over one hundred years after?.

The arguments given for a "NO" are actually the same arguments that should be used to look more closely at the "indegene/resident" dichotomy. The emphasis on indegene has been a very destructive thing for "Nigeria" as an entity.

If we want to keep "indegene" and use that to exclude (as AUT's arguments seem to suggest), then there is no real basis for a "Nigeria." If the "North" is so afraid of the "South" that it hires arabs, indians and others to help with its development, why has the north remained so much different from the lands that these people come from by all "development" measures?

They, more than the unsuspecting "Northerner" or "Southerner," recognize the "alienity" of the "Northerner/Southerner" to themselves and so they really have no obligation whatsoever, to develop the "North" or "South;" nor do they recognize the difference we are all so fixated upon. The only obligation they have is to feed their families with the pay they receive from this "North."

The human persona operates by reflection. It reflects itself from its surroundings. That requires identification with that surrounding. Thus a person who does not identify with his/her surroundings will turn out to be a colonizer, just as the europeans have done for the past 1,000 years. This is why the Fulani herders cannot feel at home anywhere, or the Igbo don't respect the customs of the people they live amongst. Thus if the Nigerian does not have the burden of "Indegene" to struggle with, he/she can settle down to identifying with, and developing his/her residence and its surroundings, creating the conditions to make life more liveable, comfortable and abundant where he/she is. A person who feels the opposite of this will spend a lot of time trying to generate resources they will not use in the place they got them from, and then have little time to use the resources acquired to enhance the place they believe they are from and want to develop. Ask Nigerians in diaspora, and Nigerians who, because they carry the "virus" of indegenes, are actually living as displaced refugees in other parts of Nigeria, hoping one day to go back "home", not developing where they are, and having no time left to develop anything back at "home."

The indegene "virus" has prevented us from identifying with one another even before colonialism. More destructively, it has created displaced people, who have no obligation to develop their surroundings. Just as, for example, the Fulani have not been known to work with farmers along their grazing routes (from the Sahel to the Sea), to develop better feed and sell to them. Then Fulani cattle production can feed larger areas and bring more prosperity to the Fulani and the people who support their enterprise as well as their lifestyle. Who would not benefit from such a relationship? More tellingly, we all have the intelligence and the know how to make this and many other wonderful things happen, because, regardless of your ethnic origin, when you left Nigeria or left your "home" for "other places" you have been part and parcel of the development of the places you went after you left. Why then not Nigeria?

We have, because of fear, been held from moving forward to our destiny as prosperous and prospering peoples. It is time to look closely and address our inner fears and see that the only thing we have to fear is the domination of poverty and privation in the lives of our people. 

To be sure, others will use what we have to feed their own people and keep us in fear of one another. The europeans and arabs have done it with religion and false education, the chinese are just beginning, with the false promise of poverty reduction. 

There is no vacuum in nature.

The above is not an argument for "yes" or "no." 

It is a call to reflection, to assess critically

It is a call to free ourselves of fear

it is a call to make the best decisions

It is a call to make our own heaven or hell right here on earth

It is a call for us to boldly go and face our destiny

What our fears have made so far, we can see, 

And we all don't like what we see and feel...

Those who have ears ...

O.E.

[shina7...@yahoo.com]

Toyin,
The question is a bit difficult especially within the context of Nigeria where the requisite will for governance has been lacking for how long. It is indeed the absence of political will and sincerity-or, in democratic parlance, the responsibility and responsiveness-of government that necessitated the exit option represented by informality.

Even now, what we have as the current situation is the government imposing its will even on the informal organisation of life, rather than enabling it and insinuating its good will on the informal process. The keyword is enabling.

This is my hypothesis: As it is, given our socio-economic situation, the informal sector is irreversible. The government would have to do its best-if it's able to-to draw the people themselves into the process of governance through the enablement of their initiatives. In other words, the government must see informality as the test of its responsiveness. It must therefore attempt to build a civic bridge of trust across the chasm of alienation and disinterestedness that characterise informality.

Let me also hazard a guess: the local government is the most immediate inroad into informality; the first signpost to an imminent grassroots awakening around which the national carpenters can commence the task of integration.

If informality is enabled, in what sense would ethnicity still function as a site of socio-economic meaning?

Adeshina Afolayan

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

---

From: OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com>

Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 19:47:06 +0000

To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

[shina7...@yahoo.com]

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner.

Even now, I still feel some form of uneasiness when we read too much instrumentality into ethnicity. Of course, ethnicity is malleable, but is that all there is to it? For instance, I have been thinking about the connection between Achebe's childhood upbringing in Ogidi (narrated in the first parts of TWAC) and his purported ethnic jingoism. Aren't we all born with some form of primordial fibre, as Herder believed, that somehow influences our worldview one way or the other?

[shina7...@yahoo.com]

Ibrahim,
Another good point:

"Why cant Nigerians have a single right that applies in Sokoto, Taraba,
and Yobe as it would apply to my 'home' state of Kogi. This is the
issue. Why would an american pack up from Michigan and settle in

Dakota without questions being asked? Why should this not happen in

'our dear own fatherland'?"

And I will add a point too to the idea of a 'restricted civic sphere'. Take a question: What has happened to citizenship in Nigeria? An honest answer? Nothing. It remains a stunted idea, a mere stilt on which a wobbly and 'nervous state' (apology to Bhabha) is erected.

You are only a citizen within your locality. Move beyond that locality and you face the permanent possibility of persecution and possible death. If it has not happened where you are, then you may be lucky to be living within the circumscribed portion of the restricted civic area where the eyes of government still roam. And your luck may soon turn for the worse. Your friend, like Cornelius Hamelberg's Malian 'friend', may just be waiting for the Prophet to give an order for a beheading!

Citizenship is, for the few, only a status ennobled by the force of political power. It's a restricted marketplace for those who have the capacity to press into it (like the kingdom of God, if you permit that analogy). For others, we are 'Nigerians' by circumstance alone. We inhabit a space devoid of any normative and democratic content that confers citizenship. The government has consistently failed to achieve what someone called 'empeoplement'.

Adeshina Afolayan

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

-----Original Message-----
From: Ibrahim Abdullah <ibdu...@gmail.com>
Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 22:16:05
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

[shina7...@yahoo.com]

"Methinks integration will happen naturally and the notion of indigeneship will disappear within a generation if our leaders can do the right thing and transform this potentially great nation into a prosperous land of abundant opportunities.

The key word here is “opportunities.” Our inordinate preoccupation with indigeneship is largely driven by unhealthy competition for scarce resources and few opportunities in our failed dysfunctional nation. When you have 300 people applying for just 10 job vacancies or university admission places, those in authority will tend to favor their own tribe, co-religionists, state indigenes."

Nafata

The best summation I have seen so far! So, apart from enabling informality, let the government expand the possibilities of opporunities. Then we can begin to hope that the planks of integration will fit together.

Adeshina Afolayan

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

---

From: OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com>

Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 23:37:02 +0000

To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

This is an exaggeration:

'You are only a citizen within your locality. Move beyond that locality and you face the permanent possibility of persecution and possible death. If it has not happened where you are, then you may be lucky to be living within the circumscribed portion of the restricted civic area where the eyes of government still roam. And your luck may soon turn for the worse. Your friend, like Cornelius Hamelberg's Malian 'friend', may just be waiting for the Prophet to give an order for a beheading!'

toyin

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Very good:

'The government would have to do its best-if it's able to-to draw the people themselves into the process of governance through the enablement of their initiatives.'

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 7:42 PM, <shina7...@yahoo.com> wrote:

The government would have to do its best-if it's able to-to draw the people themselves into the process of governance through the enablement of their initiatives.

[kenneth harrow]

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is
about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter.
ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular
culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant,
ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the
popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in
society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like
smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our
parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this
determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture
above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and
disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom
our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and
acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make
something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it
interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and
we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic
definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos
are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted
these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and
it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not
have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave
owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a general sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the  concept of  'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of  what their culture consists of as a democracy where certain things are believed not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I remember well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification with what was described as an English way of life?

I found it very interesting that while waiting at  train stations in London, the Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know- , particularly the women, would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the available space on the bench. They would wait until you noticed them standing and interpreted  themas waiting for you to move so they could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my experience in England, people, particularly women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in passing without flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious   that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant  ethnicity be  one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

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--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
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[kenneth harrow]

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a�general�sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the �concept of �'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of �what their culture consists of as a�democracy�where certain things are�believed�not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I�remember�well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification�with�what was described as an English way of life?

I�found�it very�interesting�that while waiting at �train stations in London, the�Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know-�, particularly the women,�would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the�available�space�on the bench. They would wait�until you�noticed them standing and�interpreted� themas waiting for you�to move�so they�could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my�experience�in England, people,�particularly�women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in�passing�without�flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious � that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant �ethnicity be �one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest �Gellner.

� � � It cannot be denied that, in the situations that produced African

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of �Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

� � � � Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

�an
Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar�

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s
�explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives�
or
�interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was
it
not, �an Igbo coup�.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

�southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of
ethnicity
or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case:
�By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared �

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate�

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the
January
15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.

In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s
formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

only
speculatively with this choice, with particular reference to what I
personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was
A
Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what
he
deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the
utter
collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.

Concluded.

bje...@fas.harvard.edu




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michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu


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[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to include a circumspect approach to social relations, a culture of diplomacy, a sensitivity to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of communities. ethnicity refers to a particularly  kind of community that demonstrates relatively close kinship bonds compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as societies achieve greater cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become increasingly mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations between israeli jews and israeli arabs and that Israeli jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of those situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its ethnicity unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish identity as  the essence  of their state is the dominant ideology there

on queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people  struggling with each other to catch taxis almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a general sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the  concept of  'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of  what their culture consists of as a democracy where certain things are believed not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I remember well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification with what was described as an English way of life?

I found it very interesting that while waiting at  train stations in London, the Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know- , particularly the women, would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the available space on the bench. They would wait until you noticed them standing and interpreted  themas waiting for you to move so they could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my experience in England, people, particularly women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in passing without flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious   that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant  ethnicity be  one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest  Gellner.

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of  Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

“an
Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar”

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
“explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives”
or
“interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was
it
not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

“southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
ethnicity
or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
“By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate”

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the
January

15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

--
Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

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Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

[kenneth harrow]

the truth is people queue for buses in some places and not in others.
here at michigan state, students kind of hang around the bus station, and stumble on when the bus arrives. we don't form lines as in england. in new york i have actually seen more lines forming, but that's because there are more people and they are more stressed about getting on the bus, getting a seat, and getting where they need to be.
the same with driving: here in the midwest, we are probably the most considerate drivers in the world. but as you get closer to any big city, detroit, chicago, new york, the tension rises, people tend not to let� you in when trying to change lanes or merge, the start stop is much much faster, and the experience is tenser. it is even worse because the traffic gets thick, and then stops, and no one wants anyone to get ahead of them.
we are not like that in mid-michigan
we are a more polite community!

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.
ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to�include�a�circumspect�approach to social relations, a culture of�diplomacy, a�sensitivity�to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell�us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of�communities.�ethnicity�refers to a particularly �kind of�community�that demonstrates relatively close kinship�bonds�compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as�societies�achieve�greater�cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become�increasingly�mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations�between�israeli jews and israeli arabs and that�Israeli�jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of�those�situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its�ethnicity�unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish�identity�as �the essence �of their state is the�dominant�ideology there

on�queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people �struggling with each other to�catch�taxis�almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a�general�sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the �concept of �'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of �what their culture consists of as a�democracy�where certain things are�believed�not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I�remember�well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification�with�what was described as an English way of life?

I�found�it very�interesting�that while waiting at �train stations in London, the�Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know-�, particularly the women,�would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the�available�space�on the bench. They would wait�until you�noticed them standing and�interpreted� themas waiting for you�to move�so they�could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my�experience�in England, people,�particularly�women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in�passing�without�flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious � that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant �ethnicity be �one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest �Gellner.

� � � It cannot be denied that, in the situations that produced African

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of �Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

� � � � Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

�an
Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar�

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s
�explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives�
or

�interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was
it
not, �an Igbo coup�.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

�southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of
ethnicity
or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case:
�By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared �

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate�

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the
January

15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.

In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s

formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

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�

[kenneth harrow]

meant to write oyibo, not oyiba. (or, if you prefer, oyimbo)

ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to�include�a�circumspect�approach to social relations, a culture of�diplomacy, a�sensitivity�to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell�us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of�communities.�ethnicity�refers to a particularly �kind of�community�that demonstrates relatively close kinship�bonds�compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as�societies�achieve�greater�cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become�increasingly�mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations�between�israeli jews and israeli arabs and that�Israeli�jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of�those�situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its�ethnicity�unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish�identity�as �the essence �of their state is the�dominant�ideology there

on�queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people �struggling with each other to�catch�taxis�almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a�general�sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the �concept of �'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of �what their culture consists of as a�democracy�where certain things are�believed�not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I�remember�well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification�with�what was described as an English way of life?

I�found�it very�interesting�that while waiting at �train stations in London, the�Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know-�, particularly the women,�would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the�available�space�on the bench. They would wait�until you�noticed them standing and�interpreted� themas waiting for you�to move�so they�could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my�experience�in England, people,�particularly�women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in�passing�without�flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious � that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant �ethnicity be �one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest �Gellner.

� � � It cannot be denied that, in the situations that produced African

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of �Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

� � � � Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

�an
Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar�

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s
�explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives�
or

�interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was
it
not, �an Igbo coup�.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

�southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of
ethnicity
or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case:
�By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared �

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate�

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the
January

15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.

In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s

formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

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[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Wikipedia

Opposition to intermarriage

Intermarriage is prohibited by the Jewish Halakha.^[202] In the case of mixed Arab-Jewish marriages, emotions run especially high. A 2007 opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage was equivalent to national treason. A group of Jewish men in Pisgat Zeev have started patrolling the town to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of Petah Tikva has also announced an initiative to providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to report Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling. The town of Kiryat Gat launched a campaign in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men.^[203][204]

All the claims made are referenced and linked in the essay.

Also : Israel's Fear of Jewish Girls Dating Arabs; Team of Psychologists to "Rescue" Women

Also helpful-For Netanyahu, Jewish Israel Comes Before Democratic Israel

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 7:52 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:

will look into this- 

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

the truth is people queue for buses in some places and not in others.
here at michigan state, students kind of hang around the bus station, and stumble on when the bus arrives. we don't form lines as in england. in new york i have actually seen more lines forming, but that's because there are more people and they are more stressed about getting on the bus, getting a seat, and getting where they need to be.

the same with driving: here in the midwest, we are probably the most considerate drivers in the world. but as you get closer to any big city, detroit, chicago, new york, the tension rises, people tend not to let  you in when trying to change lanes or merge, the start stop is much much faster, and the experience is tenser. it is even worse because the traffic gets thick, and then stops, and no one wants anyone to get ahead of them.

we are not like that in mid-michigan
we are a more polite community!

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.
ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to include a circumspect approach to social relations, a culture of diplomacy, a sensitivity to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of communities. ethnicity refers to a particularly  kind of community that demonstrates relatively close kinship bonds compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as societies achieve greater cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become increasingly mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations between israeli jews and israeli arabs and that Israeli jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of those situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its ethnicity unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish identity as  the essence  of their state is the dominant ideology there

on queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people  struggling with each other to catch taxis almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a general sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the  concept of  'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of  what their culture consists of as a democracy where certain things are believed not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I remember well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification with what was described as an English way of life?

I found it very interesting that while waiting at  train stations in London, the Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know- , particularly the women, would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the available space on the bench. They would wait until you noticed them standing and interpreted  themas waiting for you to move so they could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my experience in England, people, particularly women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in passing without flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious   that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant  ethnicity be  one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest  Gellner.

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of  Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

“an
Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar”

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
“explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives”
or
“interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was
it
not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

“southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
ethnicity
or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
“By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate”

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the
January

15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

--
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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

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michigan state university
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-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

will look into this- 

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

the truth is people queue for buses in some places and not in others.
here at michigan state, students kind of hang around the bus station, and stumble on when the bus arrives. we don't form lines as in england. in new york i have actually seen more lines forming, but that's because there are more people and they are more stressed about getting on the bus, getting a seat, and getting where they need to be.

the same with driving: here in the midwest, we are probably the most considerate drivers in the world. but as you get closer to any big city, detroit, chicago, new york, the tension rises, people tend not to let  you in when trying to change lanes or merge, the start stop is much much faster, and the experience is tenser. it is even worse because the traffic gets thick, and then stops, and no one wants anyone to get ahead of them.

we are not like that in mid-michigan
we are a more polite community!

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.
ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to include a circumspect approach to social relations, a culture of diplomacy, a sensitivity to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of communities. ethnicity refers to a particularly  kind of community that demonstrates relatively close kinship bonds compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as societies achieve greater cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become increasingly mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations between israeli jews and israeli arabs and that Israeli jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of those situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its ethnicity unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish identity as  the essence  of their state is the dominant ideology there

on queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people  struggling with each other to catch taxis almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a general sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the  concept of  'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of  what their culture consists of as a democracy where certain things are believed not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I remember well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification with what was described as an English way of life?

I found it very interesting that while waiting at  train stations in London, the Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know- , particularly the women, would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the available space on the bench. They would wait until you noticed them standing and interpreted  themas waiting for you to move so they could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my experience in England, people, particularly women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in passing without flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious   that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant  ethnicity be  one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest  Gellner.

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of  Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

“an
Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar”

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
“explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives”
or
“interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was
it
not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

“southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
ethnicity
or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
“By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate”

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the
January

15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

--
Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

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michigan state university
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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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[kenneth harrow]

hi toyin
you cited wikipedia stating that israel did everything to prohibit intimate relations between israeli jews and arabs. that didn't make sense to me. however, what you cite below does strike me as perfectly believable. the point is that if half of israeli jews are opposed to it, half are not. that split reflects the split between the orthodox and more secular jews, with the group of men cited below no doubt orthodox. if there is a movement to stop it, it is because it is, in fact, happening, at least somewhat.
in the u.s. at least half jewish marriages are now mixed, if not more. fewer in israel, to be sure, but the mixing is still real
what strikes me is the hatefulness of the purists, the self-righteous group that polices the ties of others.
i guess i am self-righteous myself in condemning them.
ken

On 1/4/13 3:05 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

Wikipedia

Opposition to intermarriage

Intermarriage is prohibited by the Jewish�Halakha.^[202]�In the case of mixed Arab-Jewish marriages, emotions run especially high. A 2007 opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage was equivalent to national treason. A group of Jewish men in�Pisgat Zeev�have started patrolling the town to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of�Petah Tikva�has also announced an initiative to providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to report Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling. The town of�Kiryat Gat�launched a campaign in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men.^[203][204]

All the�claims�made�are referenced and linked in the essay.

Also�:�Israel's Fear of Jewish Girls Dating Arabs; Team of Psychologists to "Rescue" Women

Also�helpful-For Netanyahu, Jewish�Israel�Comes Before Democratic�Israel

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 7:52 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:

will look into this-�

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

the truth is people queue for buses in some places and not in others.
here at michigan state, students kind of hang around the bus station, and stumble on when the bus arrives. we don't form lines as in england. in new york i have actually seen more lines forming, but that's because there are more people and they are more stressed about getting on the bus, getting a seat, and getting where they need to be.

the same with driving: here in the midwest, we are probably the most considerate drivers in the world. but as you get closer to any big city, detroit, chicago, new york, the tension rises, people tend not to let� you in when trying to change lanes or merge, the start stop is much much faster, and the experience is tenser. it is even worse because the traffic gets thick, and then stops, and no one wants anyone to get ahead of them.

we are not like that in mid-michigan
we are a more polite community!

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.
ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to�include�a�circumspect�approach to social relations, a culture of�diplomacy, a�sensitivity�to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell�us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of�communities.�ethnicity�refers to a particularly �kind of�community�that demonstrates relatively close kinship�bonds�compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as�societies�achieve�greater�cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become�increasingly�mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations�between�israeli jews and israeli arabs and that�Israeli�jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of�those�situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its�ethnicity�unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish�identity�as �the essence �of their state is the�dominant�ideology there

on�queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people �struggling with each other to�catch�taxis�almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a�general�sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the �concept of �'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of �what their culture consists of as a�democracy�where certain things are�believed�not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I�remember�well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification�with�what was described as an English way of life?

I�found�it very�interesting�that while waiting at �train stations in London, the�Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know-�, particularly the women,�would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the�available�space�on the bench. They would wait�until you�noticed them standing and�interpreted� themas waiting for you�to move�so they�could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my�experience�in England, people,�particularly�women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in�passing�without�flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious � that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant �ethnicity be �one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest �Gellner.

� � � It cannot be denied that, in the situations that produced African

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of �Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

� � � � Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

�an
Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar�

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s
�explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives�
or

�interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was
it
not, �an Igbo coup�.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

�southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of
ethnicity
or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case:
�By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared �

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate�

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the
January

15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.

In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s

formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

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[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

thanks.

the wikipedia article has links to its sources which one can check to assess their validity.

why should you think you could be be  self righteous in condemning the purists? 

are all possible responses as good as  each other?

are there no criteria by which we can assess your response in comparison with theirs? 

i expect the implications of other mixed jewish  marriages are much  less challenging than  mixed marriages between Israeli jews and arabs  bcs the stakes are much higher in the latter case 

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 3:22 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

hi toyin
you cited wikipedia stating that israel did everything to prohibit intimate relations between israeli jews and arabs. that didn't make sense to me. however, what you cite below does strike me as perfectly believable. the point is that if half of israeli jews are opposed to it, half are not. that split reflects the split between the orthodox and more secular jews, with the group of men cited below no doubt orthodox. if there is a movement to stop it, it is because it is, in fact, happening, at least somewhat.
in the u.s. at least half jewish marriages are now mixed, if not more. fewer in israel, to be sure, but the mixing is still real
what strikes me is the hatefulness of the purists, the self-righteous group that polices the ties of others.
i guess i am self-righteous myself in condemning them.
ken

On 1/4/13 3:05 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

Wikipedia

Opposition to intermarriage

Intermarriage is prohibited by the Jewish Halakha.^[202] In the case of mixed Arab-Jewish marriages, emotions run especially high. A 2007 opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage was equivalent to national treason. A group of Jewish men in Pisgat Zeev have started patrolling the town to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of Petah Tikva has also announced an initiative to providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to report Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling. The town of Kiryat Gat launched a campaign in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men.^[203][204]

All the claims made are referenced and linked in the essay.

Also : Israel's Fear of Jewish Girls Dating Arabs; Team of Psychologists to "Rescue" Women

Also helpful-For Netanyahu, Jewish Israel Comes Before Democratic Israel

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 7:52 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:

will look into this- 

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

the truth is people queue for buses in some places and not in others.
here at michigan state, students kind of hang around the bus station, and stumble on when the bus arrives. we don't form lines as in england. in new york i have actually seen more lines forming, but that's because there are more people and they are more stressed about getting on the bus, getting a seat, and getting where they need to be.

the same with driving: here in the midwest, we are probably the most considerate drivers in the world. but as you get closer to any big city, detroit, chicago, new york, the tension rises, people tend not to let  you in when trying to change lanes or merge, the start stop is much much faster, and the experience is tenser. it is even worse because the traffic gets thick, and then stops, and no one wants anyone to get ahead of them.

we are not like that in mid-michigan
we are a more polite community!

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.
ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to include a circumspect approach to social relations, a culture of diplomacy, a sensitivity to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of communities. ethnicity refers to a particularly  kind of community that demonstrates relatively close kinship bonds compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as societies achieve greater cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become increasingly mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations between israeli jews and israeli arabs and that Israeli jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of those situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its ethnicity unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish identity as  the essence  of their state is the dominant ideology there

on queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people  struggling with each other to catch taxis almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a general sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the  concept of  'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of  what their culture consists of as a democracy where certain things are believed not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I remember well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification with what was described as an English way of life?

I found it very interesting that while waiting at  train stations in London, the Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know- , particularly the women, would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the available space on the bench. They would wait until you noticed them standing and interpreted  themas waiting for you to move so they could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my experience in England, people, particularly women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in passing without flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious   that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant  ethnicity be  one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest  Gellner.

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of  Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

“an
Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar”

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
“explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives”
or
“interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was
it
not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

“southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
ethnicity
or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
“By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate”

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the
January

15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

--
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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

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distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

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michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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[kenneth harrow]

hi toyin
i can't pretend to expertise on the conditions in israel. i know that mixing of various kinds has been characteristic of non-orthodox; i know the orthodox are purists who impose misogynistic controls on women, and it makes sense to me that they would try to impose their order on the rest of the country, as they have done with sabbath rules and other public obligations.
everything i hear these days--and this is not scholarly, just anecdotal, so i can't cite sources--suggests a greater anti-arab sentiment than every before. and your last comment strikes me as sensible: that mixing between jews and arabs in israel is far more contentious an issue than mixed marriages here
as for my self-righteousness, it is testimony to the acrimonious relations between those more secular jews like myself and the� orthodox whom i dubbed the purists.

ken

On 1/4/13 11:50 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

thanks.

the wikipedia�article�has�links�to its sources which one�can�check to assess�their�validity.

why should�you�think you�could�be be �self�righteous in�condemning�the�purists?�

are all possible�responses�as�good�as �each�other?

are there no�criteria�by which we can assess�your�response in�comparison�with�theirs?�

i expect the implications of other mixed jewish �marriages are much �less�challenging�than��mixed�marriages between�Israeli�jews and arabs �bcs the stakes are much�higher�in the latter case�

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 3:22 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

hi toyin
you cited wikipedia stating that israel did everything to prohibit intimate relations between israeli jews and arabs. that didn't make sense to me. however, what you cite below does strike me as perfectly believable. the point is that if half of israeli jews are opposed to it, half are not. that split reflects the split between the orthodox and more secular jews, with the group of men cited below no doubt orthodox. if there is a movement to stop it, it is because it is, in fact, happening, at least somewhat.
in the u.s. at least half jewish marriages are now mixed, if not more. fewer in israel, to be sure, but the mixing is still real
what strikes me is the hatefulness of the purists, the self-righteous group that polices the ties of others.
i guess i am self-righteous myself in condemning them.
ken

On 1/4/13 3:05 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

Wikipedia

Opposition to intermarriage

Intermarriage is prohibited by the Jewish�Halakha.^[202]�In the case of mixed Arab-Jewish marriages, emotions run especially high. A 2007 opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage was equivalent to national treason. A group of Jewish men in�Pisgat Zeev�have started patrolling the town to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of�Petah Tikva�has also announced an initiative to providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to report Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling. The town of�Kiryat Gat�launched a campaign in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men.^[203][204]

All the�claims�made�are referenced and linked in the essay.

Also�:�Israel's Fear of Jewish Girls Dating Arabs; Team of Psychologists to "Rescue" Women

Also�helpful-For Netanyahu, Jewish�Israel�Comes Before Democratic�Israel

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 7:52 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:

will look into this-�

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

the truth is people queue for buses in some places and not in others.
here at michigan state, students kind of hang around the bus station, and stumble on when the bus arrives. we don't form lines as in england. in new york i have actually seen more lines forming, but that's because there are more people and they are more stressed about getting on the bus, getting a seat, and getting where they need to be.

the same with driving: here in the midwest, we are probably the most considerate drivers in the world. but as you get closer to any big city, detroit, chicago, new york, the tension rises, people tend not to let� you in when trying to change lanes or merge, the start stop is much much faster, and the experience is tenser. it is even worse because the traffic gets thick, and then stops, and no one wants anyone to get ahead of them.

we are not like that in mid-michigan
we are a more polite community!

as for the policing of separation between jews and arabs in israel, i wonder if anyone could actually corroborate that story. seems like a myth more than reality.
ken

On 1/4/13 1:32 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

omoluabi connotes a group of values that define a person of good breeding in yoruba culture.

i understand such values to�include�a�circumspect�approach to social relations, a culture of�diplomacy, a�sensitivity�to how one presents oneself in public etc

those better informed could refine this or tell�us more

Oyiba- not come across it.

whats its source?

community is too general. there are different kinds of�communities.�ethnicity�refers to a particularly �kind of�community�that demonstrates relatively close kinship�bonds�compared to humanity as a whole.

england is a country, like nigeria is.

nigeria does not constitute one ethnicity.

but both countries can be said to be composed by ethnic clusters.

as�societies�achieve�greater�cosmopolitanism and become more open, however, such ethnic lines become�increasingly�mixed.

in israel for example,wikipedia states everything is done to prevent intimate relations�between�israeli jews and israeli arabs and that�Israeli�jews who 'fall' into such unsanctioned alliances, as 'assisted by special 'counselling centres' to come out of�those�situations

that is one group described as doing everything to keep its�ethnicity�unmixed. i have not crosschecked it, but its what i expect the israeli jews to do since their jewish�identity�as �the essence �of their state is the�dominant�ideology there

on�queuing, im struck too see in hitchcock's north by northwest and up till sex and the city people �struggling with each other to�catch�taxis�almost like in nigeria.

it would not happen in england.

dont they que for buses in the US?

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:05 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a�general�sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the �concept of �'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of �what their culture consists of as a�democracy�where certain things are�believed�not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I�remember�well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification�with�what was described as an English way of life?

I�found�it very�interesting�that while waiting at �train stations in London, the�Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know-�, particularly the women,�would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the�available�space�on the bench. They would wait�until you�noticed them standing and�interpreted� themas waiting for you�to move�so they�could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my�experience�in England, people,�particularly�women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in�passing�without�flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious � that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant �ethnicity be �one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest �Gellner.

� � � It cannot be denied that, in the situations that produced African

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of �Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

� � � � Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn�t: Reflections On Achebe�s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

�an
Igbo coup�. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only�he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country �a Nigerian ruling class� only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This �architecture�, this �grammar�

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe�s
�explanations�, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that �explanations� and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe�s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the �opening shot� in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe�s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe�s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of �motives�
or

�interests� that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, �tribe�: Was it, or was
it
not, �an Igbo coup�.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

�southern coup�, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or �forcing� Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe�s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, �an Igbo coup�? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving � in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d��tat, this single thread of
ethnicity
or �tribe� is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe�s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or �tribalism� while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe�s own words, is the particular case:
�By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable� (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government�s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola�s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared �

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called �Egbe Omo Olofin�. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde�s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to �contaminate�

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo �in name only�, the
January

15 coup could not have been �an Igbo coup�.

In last week�s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman�s

formulation of this �big grammar�, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe�s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe�s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week�s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

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[G. Ugo Nwokeji]

Toyin Adepoju, you wrote:

"[The coup plotters] killed one Igbo person- an officer who was not of high rank."

I don't know if it is blind bias or pure ignorance or both that is driving your usual vitriol on the coup/civil war issue. 

The officer killed was Lt. Colonial Arthur Unegbe, regarded as one of the most senior and most high-profile officers of then Nigerian army of one major-general, two brigadiers and a handful of full colonels. 

At the time he was killed, Unegbe held a general staff position as Quartermaster-General, a position held these days by generals. Is it that you don't know the meaning of quartermaster-general?

He was as senior as Ojukwu and Gowon (unless they too were junior officers!), was I think the first indigenous Commanding Officer of the 5th Infantry and swapped positions with Ojukwu when the latter was posted the 5th. 

You can keep all your biases, but you have no right to make up facts to support them. If it is ignorance, shouldn't you first educate yourself on the elementary facts first?

G. Ugo Nwokeji

Twitter: @UgoNwokeji

Facebook: facebook.com/ugo.nwokeji

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:58 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:

They killed one Igbo person- an officer who was not of high rank.

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Get real.

Death is horrible.

Even more gruesome is cold blooded murder of defenceless people. 

The cold blooded murders that characterised   the January 15, 1966 coup and the counter coup and pogroms are most regrettable.

One does not wish there were more deaths.

 I can appreciate correcting a historical fact, but, in  the name of decency, is bringing up this point with this associated fanfare and combative taunts  necessary at this time since your point does not alter the configuration of the historical reality being discussed?

Are we to now lapse into further counting of dead bodies tribe by tribe? 

Lay them side by side and weigh the rank of one against the other to further evaluate the social scope of the massacres? 

Has that not been sufficiently done and the point made?

Even if you are correct on the gentleman's rank, your point does not tell us anything new about the character of the January 15,1966 coup and does not  modify the point I was making.

Since you have  brought that effort at correction to our attention, I will leave it for members and myself  to corroborate but I will not expound on why that point does not change the configuration of the coup because I am tired of the sheer morbidity of this debate, based as it is on resurrecting ancient sufferings and struggling to project them into the future,  in arguments where positions do not shift.

 I will not let myself enter into the game of counting dead bodies in terms of number and rank according to tribe.

I am adding nothing more to my response because I am convinced that much of the  capacity for illumination on these issues at this time has been exhausted.

I want to return to emphasising humanistic bonds, not dwelling on events of more than 40 years ago on which we have jaw jawed endlessly while positions hardly shift.

If you have something substantial, however, that throws new light on the issues or is capable of doing so,  I am prepared to respond to it.

thanks

toyin. 

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--
Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

[G. Ugo Nwokeji]

Toyin,

I actually agree with the point you made in your response to my retort, namely, that it is not necessary to "enter into the game of counting dead bodies in terms of number and rank according to tribe." But that is exactly what you did when you wrote that the "[ coup plotters] killed one Igbo person- an officer who was not of high rank." And you now make it to sound that I started the counting? 

I only reminded you that if you had to count (as you actually did), you had to do it right.

The correction I made matters because that claim (and variations of it) is the cornerstone of the argument that the January 1966 coup was an Igbo coup, and you deployed that argument precisely to drive home that point.

If you had not "counted the dead", I would not even have written anything. As usually happens, those who are quick to accuse people of tribalism should examine themselves first.

If you made your argument out of 'tribal" sentiment, you have no reason to put the same to me. You made a mistake that somebody who is spending much of his time on this matter should not make and which is convenient to your argument, and you were corrected. What does it tell you and anybody else reading that up to now, you are still waiting for "other members ... to collaborate" that Arthur Unegbe was the Quartermaster General of the Nigerian army? There was only one!

This goes to show the level of misinformation about the events of 1966 and ready willingness to ignore basic facts.

Your assertion that the correction "does not modify" the very point you made it to support just reveals how too willing you are to not let the facts get in your way.

Ethnic sentiment had no place in that correction. If I may add, the killing of Arthur Unegbe is personal to me; my mother never mentioned him (she called him Chinyelu) without tears in her eyes, but I don't let that color my analysis of the motives of the coup plotters. His colleagues who targeted him knew he was Igbo, but they claimed they killed him because of his political affiliations, which is identical to what they claimed about other victims from other ethnic group. The misrepresentation of his true identity by others -- which was deliberate at the beginning -- is an ever-present reminder to me how these facts are distorted.

Ugo

[Ikhide]

Folks.

This is not addressed directly to Toyin Adepoju, he does not need it and I am convinced he is not in a position to be swayed by what I have to say. I first noticed his take on Biafra in another forum. His views, about the pogrom and the genocide were, in my view, evil and abnormal.

I was shocked to find that this man was so abysmally ignorant about a part of Nigerian history that has to be the most important since her birth. In that forum we were all as a group taken aback by the ignorance and the bigotry Toyin displayed with each posting.

Once Toyin started speaking about Biafra and spewing what are easily the most shocking statements anyone would utter in my presence about fellow human beings, I decided that there was a darkness there that was beyond his control. And I stopped engaging him.

Folks, if you think Toyin's views about Biafra are odious (they are) then I am not sure what you would characterize the views that got him expelled from the forum we both shared. No one should be exposed to that carcinogen that Toyin offered up. Believe it or not, his views about Biafra today are a lot more civil than those dark days when I shivered from the e-ethnic cleansing that he so gleefully executed on the Internet.

Curiously, the same accusations have been leveled against his "scholarship" on women. Misogyny is the word a noted scholar used to describe Toyin's world views against women when she declined Toyin permission to use her work on his blog or website. And understandably so, if you are familiar with Toyin's "work" on women's private parts. His "scholarship" on women's issues is beyond demeaning, I am surprised there has been no organized outrage. It is disgraceful actually. His Facebook page will convince you of the darkness that resides in him.

As for Biafra, I honestly believe it is not normal, what I read from Toyin. Let me put it this way, there are many people I disagree with on this forum when it comes to Biafra. I can however honestly say, they are disagreements. As for Toyin, to call his views wrong-headed would be to dignify a rabid dysfunction.

I have engaged Toyin a couple of times on this forum because I wanted to be on record as abhorring whatever he stands for. Nobody that I respect views his position as sane. And that is why you hardly see anyone publicly agreeing with him. There is no method to this madness.

- Ikhide

---

From: "G. Ugo Nwokeji" <u...@berkeley.edu>

Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2013 07:16:39 -0800

To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

You have led yourself onto dangerous ground.

You have trapped yourself. 

How?- I will give you one clue-

The Igbo politicians were part of the alliance with the Northern power bloc behind the troubles of the time before the January 15, 1966 coup. 

Also, Northern soldiers were  killed by their fellow Northerners in the clearly Northern led and Northern domination agenda counter coup.

Siollun's book and Omoigui's online account of the coup present this. 

I believe these points speak for themselves against the arguments you are struggling to conjure. 

If you dispute these facts  let me know.

Also, note, I did not state the coup was an Igbo coup.

I stated it was a coup that favoured Igbo interests, interests dealing with self preservation.

Why was that so?

The question remains controversial. 

The more some of these issues are dug up, the more unsavoury they are shown to be.

The interests you see yourself as protecting are worse off in such a scenario.

toyin 

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

On Nwokeji

I have just responded to Nwokeji.

Not only does he not have an argument, he leads himself onto  deadly ground and traps himself there. 

A detailed analysis of the January 15, 1966 coup does not help the case of anyone arguing from Nwokeji's perspective.

I chose to present the issues succinctly in my response to him because if I were to go into detail the  unsavoury character of the situation would be too gross.

On Ikhide

For anyone wishing to read  my brutal experience on the literary group Ederi,which Ikhide alludes to, you may see my essays "Countering the Threat of Pro-Biafra Fanaticism :  Part One" and " "Countering the Threat of Pro-Biafra Fanaticism :  Part Two", which I have earlier posted on these and other fora. 

In those essays, every single contribution, by every contributor  to  the incident in question is quoted in full, with corroborative links to the message archives of Ederi ,  and carefully analysed, so  everyone can judge for themselves.

I am still working on the third part because I was so moved by the notion I encountered in that experience, of Biafra/Nigeria citizenship as a simultaneous  and yet antagonistic self-identification, in which a person sees themself as embodying citizenship of  two nations which they see as in perpetual warfare against each other,  I became convinced I needed to move my analysis beyond Biafra discourse per se into discussing this paradoxical form of dual citizenship, and events of last year bear this out. 

As for the rest of Ikhide's wounded diatribe on Biafra, a man who does not know that you dont enter a fierce fight wearing only a loincloth did that on the Jeyifo critique  and no time was wasted in demonstrating before all that he was not serious. 

He seeks to assuage his wounds. 

Ogbeni, take am easy. Everybody here can read.You dont need to tell them what to think. 

This looks like unsubstantiated gossip to me:

"Curiously, the same accusations have been leveled against his "scholarship" on women. Misogyny is the word a noted scholar used to describe Toyin's world views against women when she declined Toyin permission to use her work on his blog or website. And understandably so, if you are familiar with Toyin's "work" on women's private parts. His "scholarship" on women's issues is beyond demeaning, I am surprised there has been no organized outrage. It is disgraceful actually. His Facebook page will convince you of the darkness that resides in him."

Who is the "noted scholar?"

Can you direct us to her 'refusal'? How do you know about it?

What exactly is the nature of "Toyin's "work" on women's private parts"?

What is "His "scholarship" on women's issues" [that is]   beyond demeaning" ?

What is the content of this "scholarship" and why is it demeaning?

How does his "Facebook page...convince you of the darkness that resides in him""?

Ikhide Ikheloa, God/Goddess  has done well by sending you.

Please make my week by a response to those questions.

toyin 

[G. Ugo Nwokeji]

Toyin,

Nice try.

In plain English, all I said was that your assertion that the one Igbo officer killed by coup plotters of January 1966 killed "was not of high rank" is a pernicious lie.

And that is what it still is. 

The only person this fact paints into a corner is you and co-travelers.

Twitter: @UgoNwokeji

Facebook: facebook.com/ugo.nwokeji

[Chidi Anthony Opara]

This tendency to engage in unnecessary war of words here (yabis in
motor park parlance) as exemplified by this current Ikhide/Toyin face
off, at the slightest provocation have far reaching implications, one
of which is that persons who are supposed to close ranks and be the
watchdogs of our sick polity are busy tearing at themselves, while our
so called leaders, who are the real enemies are busy feasting on our
collective patrimony unhindered.

Ikhide, Toyin and others, in spite of their limitations as human
beings, are in my opinion, important instruments in the efforts to
normalize our sick polity.

This mindset has always moderated my actions whenever I am provoked
here.

-------CAO.


On 9 Jan, 04:34, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *On Nwokeji*

>
> I have just responded to Nwokeji.
>
> Not only does he not have an argument, he leads himself onto  deadly ground
> and traps himself there.
>
> A detailed analysis of the January 15, 1966 coup does not help the case of
> anyone arguing from Nwokeji's perspective.
>
> I chose to present the issues succinctly in my response to him because if I
> were to go into detail the  unsavoury character of the situation would be
> too gross.
>

> *On Ikhide*

>
> For anyone wishing to read  my brutal experience on the literary group
> Ederi,which Ikhide alludes to, you may see my essays "Countering the Threat
> of Pro-Biafra Fanaticism :  Part

> One<http://www.scribd.com/doc/75681526/COUNTERING-THE-THREAT-OF-PRO-BIAFR...>"

> and " "Countering the Threat of Pro-Biafra Fanaticism :  Part

> Two<http://www.scribd.com/doc/75924934/COUNTERING-THE-THREAT-OF-PRO-BIAFR...>",

> On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:35 AM, Ikhide <xoki...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > **

> > ------------------------------
> > *From: * "G. Ugo Nwokeji" <u...@berkeley.edu>
> > *Sender: * usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> > *Date: *Tue, 8 Jan 2013 07:16:39 -0800
> > *To: *<usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
> > *ReplyTo: * usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> > *Subject: *Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country;

> > Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)
>
> > Toyin,
>
> > I actually agree with the point you made in your response to my retort,
> > namely, that it is not necessary to "enter into the game of counting dead
> > bodies in terms of number and rank according to tribe." But that is

> > exactly what you did when you wrote that the "[ coup plotters] *killed
> > one Igbo person- an officer who was not of high rank*." And you now make

> ...
>
> read more »

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

That is my Chidi!

The other day, in the midst of all those gyrations, I had to check myself and ask-is this not the same Chidi....? This moved me to  to pull back. No point in dancing to drums that prevent one from picking faces from the crowd, as J.P. Clark (?)  put it? 

But....really.....

Even though the context of presentation is problematic, I see what Ikhide is referring to on the research on women issue and am waiting eagerly for him to respond.

I can see the angle from which such a view could be seen as tenable. 

Most tantalising : " And understandably so, if you are familiar with Toyin's "work" on women's private parts."

I am so excited by this : " His Facebook page will convince you of the darkness that resides in him.".

Frankly, Ikhide's  views may be held even outside the combative context he is presenting them.

I have been postponing writing an essay on the subject for some time and see this challenge as providing me with the opportunity.

I have been looking forward to a good time on it.

I would like Ikhide to proceed to respond to my questions.

The tone of his response is up to him.

Seriously.

toyin

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[xokigbo]

Toyin,

Many thanks for yours. I doubt that I would ever engage you in serious scholarship again, ever. I was only situating your offensive views on Biafra and women in context. And I do not engage in gossip; I am data-driven - and driven. The information on the female scholar, you provided yourself - the entire exchange between you and the scholar. And you should be familiar with the contents of your Facebook page. I see you have realized that and re-configured your earlier views.

Be well, man. Of course.

- ikhide 

[Olayinka Agbetuyi]

 Before we go too much in the direction of hair splitting analysis of such terms as ethnicity, may I state my wholesome agreement with BJ's thesis of a departure in focus from Achebe's earlier stance on Nigeria in which ethnicity was played down in favour of nation building ethos as presented in the Nangamangs as a class text and anti hero of No Longer at Ease. I may actually preempt BJ in venturing a reason for the volte faced ideological stance of Achebe just as one of his supporters on the forum attempted to guess BJ's reason for his 'attack' on Achebe, i.e.  Achebes comment on Awo.  First I dont think BJ is any more an Awoist than my late dad who was a Zikist till his final days.

 

To my mind the reason for Achebes change of focus is none other than his current place of sojourn/permanent residence.  He found it convenient and irresistable to succumb to the Holocaust model being canvassed by a voluble section of the Igbo diaspora who wanted a big catch to champion their cause for reparations.  Problem is that the model being canvassed is ill-suited for the Nigerian experience.  In the Holocaust example as I maintained in my earlier posting the Nazi policy from the start was anti-Jewish and in the face of allied bombardment culminated in the Holocaust.  In the Nigerian case, the pogrom happened as a REVENGE for the beheading of a preponderant section of the country ostensibly by members of another group still having their leadership largely intact.  This reaction is not logically justifiable; but the whole situation was mismanged by the leadership on either side.  In the case of the |Holocaust millions of unarmed people were herded into gas chambers without raising a finger to defend themselves in the context of war.  In the Nigerain case there was a military wing for the secessionists just as in South Africa that had a military wing that was weaker than their enemies. It was because the South Africans knew they gave as much as they got relative to their strength that they did not invoke the Holocaust model.(the Jews never raised a standing army to fight the Nazis, but died unarmed) 

 

The Igbo case to my mind is better addressed by the South African model rather than the Holocaust reparations model.  If the Holocaust model fits the bill, the late Ikemba would not have agreed to come home but would have canvassed that model to the end of his life.  The Will of the Ikemba demonstrated that with the good will of his compatriots he recovered, so did many of his Igbo compatriots.

 

Finally, it seems that much of the sabre rattling is coming from one part of the gender divide in the diaspora.  What is needed is the moderating yet assertive voices of the other gender  in the dispora and on this forum regarding this issue, to rein in their dogs of war.

 

Olayinka Agbetuyi

---

Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 23:05:48 -0500
From: har...@msu.edu
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

toyin
(to shorten things up-it is getting late)
1. i hate "caucasians"--it seems an awkward, historically repulsive term, to avoid the directness of "the whites." les blancs; the whites. whiteness; whitey.
if you don't like it, try oyiba, that works perfectly well
2. what is omoluabi?
3. what exactly do we lose if we use the term "community," instead of ethnicity?
no one would call the English an ethnicity; but they do form a community, with its own cultural values, its own exclusions and inclusions, etc. you are perfectly right to describe the quaint customs of their community at train stations. i once stood outside a cordoned off area, patiently waiting with thousands outside victoria station, while the police ascertained that the bomb threat from the ira was gone, before we could get inside.
gotta tell you: the calm lines of people did not have anything whatsoever to do with what it would have been in new york! we don't even have a word for what those strange englishers do when they wait for buses--"queuing"--all i know from queus is that they are tails in french, another white people who don't wait in lines either
ken

ken

On 1/3/13 6:42 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:

ideally or to a large extent?-beautiful

'.... citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.

striking thought in this context- 'that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.'

is this completely true-

'i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.'

Various people may have pervasive among them, a conception of what it means to be Yoruba or English, for example, in a general sense.

The Yoruba conception/s for example, may perhaps be summed up in the  concept of  'omoluabi'.

In English general culture, these ideas also emerge along with people's views of  what their culture consists of as a democracy where certain things are believed not to be possible even if they could be elsewhere.

What of the drive in England-if I remember well- to get immigrants to demonstrate a degree of identification with what was described as an English way of life?

I found it very interesting that while waiting at  train stations in London, the Caucasians-if anybody knows of a better term please let me know- , particularly the women, would almost never ask you to move so they could sit on the available space on the bench. They would wait until you noticed them standing and interpreted  themas waiting for you to move so they could sit.

I found this amazing, coming from a country where you ask rather than wait.

I have also found it striking that in my experience in England, people, particularly women, referring to people one does not know,do not look one in the face in passing without flashing a polite smile. Amazing! It must something learned.

It should be obvious   that peoples may be described in terms of cultures and why cant  ethnicity be  one way of looking at culture?

thanks

toyin

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear shina
the long extract was from johannes fabian's Moments of Freedom, which is about popular culture.
it echoes his other work on time, which you mention, in one chapter. ethnicity is not central to this book, but it figures in to it.
the core is the cultures he discusses in Shaba, and the way popular culture (like the informal sector) functions outside the dominant, ordered, state, high, etc culture. for him freedom characterizes the popular, and its political resistance is a function of its placement in society as unofficial, unvalued, etc. like for instance things like smoking! or storytelling, vs publishing a novel, say
as for ethnicity, i do not think it is the same as genes.
we have genes, we inherit lots both genetically in the culture our parents place us into, in the world, which mark us. but none of this determines us, like a fiber we can't resist.
we are, i would hazard, a combination of the same things as culture above: ordered and controlled by larger forces than our will, and disordered, unofficial, resistant.
i postulated something like that earlier, citing judith butler, for whom our agency comes from a subjectivity formed both in resistance and acquiescence to the forces that govern our psyches, like our parents.
i made that claim concerning colonialism; but here we can simply make something similar re ethnicity: we are in it, especially as it interpellates us and we respond to it; and we resist or refuse it; and we find our agency in the play of both this acquiescence and resistance.

i strongly believe that it is colonial thought that gave ethnic definitions to africans as if they were objects: wolof are this, igbos are that, etc. i despair to think that africans would have accepted these designations as if they were innate, as if the colonialists won.
that doesn't mean ethnicity doesn't exist; it means it isn't innate. and it means no one is defined by it, because if they were, they would not have agency.
to be human is to have agency--the very thing colonialists and slave owners and early anthropologists and historians all tried to deny africans
ken

On 1/3/13 3:10 PM, shina7...@yahoo.com wrote:

Prof.,

I must say I enjoy reading the Fabian extract you posted. I am certainly interested in reading the whole essay if I can lay my hands on it. Is he the same Fabian that wrote a book on anthropology and time or something?

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated, especially by the debate in nationalism studies between the primordialists and the constructionists. I took a serious interest in the debate on ethnic configuration between Anthony Smith and Ernest  Gellner.

Let me thank the moderator for calling all of us to task on the informal sector as an important aspect of  Nigeria's national existence. I am all too glad I could lay my hands on something on which I can be educated and which can contribute to the ongoing debate about the national well being of Nigeria. All I think I have done is simply to identify what I've observed for a while as a 'citizen' of Nigeria. I am therefore also waiting for Prof. Olukotun to contribute a magisterial piece that will move the debate forward and enable small fry like me learn from the mouth of the elder.

While we await that contribution, permit me to share an elaboration. I will do this by responding in part to Prof. Harrow's historical reconstruction of Ibrahim's graphic statement. For Harrow, ethnicity should be seen more as a construct rather than an original sin.

"ethnicity wasn't an original sin; it is the current sin, reconstituted
as if it were an originary identity, a response to a period of
insecurity and weakness".

I agree with this historical trajectory and it gives us the foundation for arriving at where we are now as a 'developing' state. By 'original sin', I think what Ibrahim meant is simply that the foundation for the construction of ethnicity was laid at the emergence of the Nigerian state by both the colonisers and the postcolonial leadership. The failure of that leadership as well as the dynamics of postcolonial politics in Nigeria compromised the promises of independence for the majority of the anticolonial masses in Nigeria. That, we can say, is the beginning of the fundamental problem of suffering in Nigeria. Philip Zachernuk, in Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000), gives a very damning analysis of the pre-and post-independence roles of our 'founding fathers' that contributed, in a large part, to where we are today.

I hazard the hypothesis that the dream of national integration became fatally aborted with the inability of the nationalists to come to term with the question of how a law and order state founded on an exploitative logic could birth social transformation. From then on, the imperative was to attend more to what can be called the national, rather than the social, question. The former concerns how the unruly diversity created by the Lugardian amalgamation can be brought under a mechanical unity. The latter concerns how that diversity can benefit from the social transformation of their lives. Unfortunately, the leadership failed to see the intimate connection between the fulfilment of the latter and the achievement of the former. It is in this sense, for me, that nationalism became an elitist bubble that burst every time it confronts the raw edges of the people's deprivation and suffering. What has happened to our beloved NYSC and the Quota system?

How are the hapless masses expected to react to the volte-face of the nationalists after independence as well as the gradual but steady impoverishment of their existence through the steady and inexorable collapse of formal structures? Of course, find their own meanings within an informality that answers to a Geertzian logic of commonsense and ontology. The informal sector is, for me, a penumbral, elastic and contradictory site of confrontation for, and enactment of, meanings. To follow Geertz, it is a web of significance individuals have spun for themselves to enact their understanding of what they are capable of doing in socio-economic terms.

Remember, as far as I am concerned, informality was created from the imperative of suffering. It is an ongoing attempt to make suffering sufferable. And its structures are therefore not erected to deny that suffering, but to deny that "life is unendurable" and meaningless outside the spheres of the state. The informal sector therefore speaks to an instrumental social existence and the ontology of survival that attends it.

It is within this penumbra of informality that all kinds of activities-white, black, grey, paradoxical-operate The realm leaves the beast of ethnicity to roam largely unfettered. It is the realm where jokes abound about the owambe Yoruba, the cunning Ibo, the Hausa who is eternally a 'mola' (a dunce, largely a perjorative corruption of 'mallam') and the rascal Warri guy! Within the realm, my constructed 'Yoruba' identity sits snugly with me than the fact that I am an igbomina person. Ethnicity enables the struggle for existence beyond the vale of tears called the state! We mend our roads (for instance, like my own axis of the network that broke down barely three months after it was 'mintly' commissioned), organise our own security, provide our own foods and enact our own existence. We also freely and ethnically caricature and confront anyone who attempt to hinder such meaningfulness.

Outside of this loose realm, of course we come together for the sham ritual of integration when Nigeria confronts, say, Brazil in an international soccer match. After this-and woe to the leadership if we are beaten silly-we return to burrow in our informality beyond the lures of patriotic zeal. I give you an instance: Do you imagine there can be a comparison, in terms of attendance, between a Man U versus Barca match (on the one hand), and a Nigeria versus Togo match? I don't think so. If I watch the Nigerian match, it is likely for the reason that I am a football addict, not because of any patriotic zeal. The informal sector, I repeat, was constructed from the deadwoods of nation-building.
For proper national integration to commence, it must commence at this level of informality, paradoxically. It is paradoxical because informality is meant to operate beyond the scope of government and in opposition. Nation building must commence there because it packs an untapped national energy that our leadership have failed to see all the while beyond their instrumental perception of informality as another avenue to increase revenues and line the already obscenely bloated pockets.

Thus, if I must be patriotic, the state must come to my rescue in answering the social question that confronts me daily. If it does not, to hell with patriotism! The leadership can go on singing their lonely songs of national unity.


Adeshina Afolayan

First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s

New
Book (2)

By Biodun Jeyifo

Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed

“an
Igbo coup”. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors

are
discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo
in

name only…he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a

Northerner,
spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern
dress
when not in uniform.

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country

In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute
power
over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can
arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

If in There Was A Country “a Nigerian ruling class” only appears in the

narratives and reflections of the author in the final fourth part of the
book, this is only the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual
and

discursive architecture of the book. This “architecture”, this “grammar”

is
none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book
with

the exception of that concluding fourth part, all of Achebe’s
“explanations”, all of his speculations in the book are relentlessly

driven
by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter.

Logically, inevitably, the corollary to this is that “explanations” and

speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra-class and
inter-class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately
excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable
departure

from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published

book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete
subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was A Country with two
particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the
book.

The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the

January 15, 1966 coup itself, arguably the “opening shot” in the chain

of
events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the central
subject of

Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of

both
general and academic writings and discourses on this signal event. And

indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic

section
of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the
January

15, 1966 coup. It is therefore baffling that of the variety of “motives”
or
“interests” that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one
that Achebe addresses in his book is ethnicity, “tribe”: Was it, or was
it
not, “an Igbo coup”.

There have been suggestions, there have been speculations that it was a

“southern coup”, this in light of the fact that most of the political

and
military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were,
overwhelmingly,
either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders.
More
pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been an even more
plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were
significant
in the motives of influential members of the coup plotters like Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling
class
parties of the First Republic, the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and
the
United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), with the exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, all those assassinated belonged to
the
NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was
assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region,
was
spared because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter
of
fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the

intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of

Prime
Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were
far
more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern
and
conservative allies of the NNA.

Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable

factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was
it, or

was it not, “an Igbo coup”? That is all Achebe is interested in
exploring -
and disproving – in There Was A Country. Of the many threads that form
the
complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
ethnicity
or “tribe” is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book.

This
may be because by the time of the terrible pogroms of May 1966 against
Igbos
in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost
completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had

incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. But Achebe’s book was written more

than
forty years after the event and it had the advantage of both historical
hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For
this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding
that
Achebe almost certainly has a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to

ethnicity or “tribalism” while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all

other plausible, and in some cases factual, factors.

At any rate, this is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our
two
examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the

Nigeria-Biafra war. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
“By

the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper
outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions
in
the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the
situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all

over Nigeria in general had become untenable” (p. 77). This is indeed a

fact, but it is a partial fact, one aspect of a complex of facts and
realities many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is
useful to
carefully state what these other facts and realities were.

First, the government of the Western region that Achebe alludes to here
was
that of Chief S.L. Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National
Democratic
Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most perniciously right-wing
government and party in southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and

fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes.
Secondly, Akintola’s government and party were not only virulently

anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-welfarist and
anti-socialist. A
brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly
satirized a range of targets and issues of which Igbos were only one
composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted,
parodic

visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared –

wives, children, family heirlooms and personal belongings. There is not
the
slightest doubt in my mind that Achebe had to have been aware of these
facts
and realities; but he ignores them completely. Thirdly and lastly,
Akintola
and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic
tensions
and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups and they took this as far as
founding a rival Pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which
they

called “Egbe Omo Olofin”. And for good measure, they tried,

unsuccessfully,
to instigate the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter

Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.

It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts
and
realities were so well-known at the time that Achebe could not have been
ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than that Achebe
simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a
pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in
which

no other aspects of social identification are allowed to “contaminate”

the
singularity of ethnicity . This, I suggest, is what we see in its
quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs
to

this essay to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo “in name only”, the
January

15 coup could not have been “an Igbo coup”.

In last week’s beginning essay in this series, I made the assertion that

Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the
last century and half. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that
assertion
to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism
is
that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a
work
of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest
to

the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s

formulation of this “big grammar”, this means that above all other

modes,
forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of
art
or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually
happened. Another way of putting this across is to suggest that
typically
and unavoidably, there being always and forever a big gap between how
things
actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing, it is only
the
most gifted and talented realist writers that come close to bridging
that
gap.

In all of Achebe’s books on our pre-colonial and postcolonial

experience, he
had come closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and
practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class and
individuality
had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as
No
Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The
Trouble
with Nigeria and Home and Exile. Thus, in my opinion, There Was A
Country

marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture

in
which the realist rigour of his previous writings gives way to, or is
considerably modified by a mystique, an apologia, an uncompromising
defense
of Igbo ethno-nationalism. I do not think that Achebe took this path in
a
fit of absent-mindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a
choice he made in this new book quite deliberately and purposively. In
next

week’s continuation of this series, I shall deal extensively even if

--
Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

--
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[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

I dont get this

 'And you should be familiar with the contents of your Facebook page. I see you have realized that and re-configured your earlier views.'

My Facebook page has not changed. 

I have also not reconfigured my  views on issues being debated. 

Kai!

Ikhide has cheated me of a good time.

This thing really pains me.

I was all set to stage a small drama about my religious views being disrespected bcs they are not understood, like the Europeans  saying Africans were idol worshippers,  to discuss abstract and concrete signification and the unity of form and symbol, to quote  immortal lines of  the great Tantric master  Abhnivagupta, the Tantric classic the Yoni Tantra, to present Tantric cosmogensis and becoming, quoting various literature......  etc etc

Jesus Christ! Olodumare ..Eleda oooo! 

Ahhhhhhh......not happy...... I thought God/Goddess  had sent Ikhide to help me.....

Well.... cycling away(Ikhide imagery-for those who dont know)

toyin

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Thanks for this effort.

Could you please explain the South African model you mention?

Can you recommend any text one may read on this?

Now, while your reference to Ikemba is on point, does this not need modification: 

'   It was because the South Africans knew they gave as much as they got relative to their strength' ?

A  problem with the Biafran issue was the manner in which the civilian population was managed by both sides in the conflict. I think that will always be controversial.

Side A- If you dont surrender, we shall starve you

Side B- We are starving, children and other non-combatants are dying in large numbers but we shall hold on as long as possible in case we can still wrest victory out of our overwhelmed situation

toyin

[franklyne ogbunwezeh]

Ikhide:

You have addressed the point at issue very well. Toyin Adepoju has shown himself to be a genocidare in the most proximate potency. All you need to do is to give him the platform and he will ventilate the repressed angst that has been propelling his genocidal intentions. A failed professor (in the sense of peddling) of vagina studies, simply latched onto another ideological platform to make cheap points that will gain him the attention of serious minded people. That shows what failure can really convoke in the mind of a mediocre. I have read with amusement his feeble attempts to analyse Achebe's book; a book that he and his many campfollowers did not even read. It shows you the mindset that really informs some of the cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense.

Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

* ************** *************** ****************** *************** ***********
What constitutes a disservice to our faculty of judgment, however, is to place obstacles in the way of assembling truth's fragments, remaining content with a mere one- or two-dimensional projection where a multidimensional and multifaceted apprehension remains open, accessible and instructive.

Wole Soyinka, Between Truth and Indulgences

---

From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com>
To: "USAAfric...@googlegroups.com" <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 9, 2013 3:35 AM

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

"I was shocked to find that this man was so abysmally ignorant about a part of Nigerian history that has to be the most important since her birth. In that forum we were all as a group taken aback by the ignorance and the bigotry Toyin displayed with each posting."

 

ikhide

 

 

Ikhide,

 

You must know now that there are individuals who are completely oblivious of the limits of their knowledge, the depth of their ignorance, and their plain inability to be other than subjective, but will nevertheless jump body and soul into conversations that are roundly outside their learning, training, interest, and experience scales and scopes. They know that comment is free. They are determined to take full but misguided advantage of it. How else does one contemplatively understand the open season abuse and insult that has followed Chinua Achebe's new book?

It seems to me that a challenge of scholarship is the lack of awareness on the part of a "scholar" of the limits of their knowledge. True scholarship is underscored by disciplined specialization. Some scholars carry on as if there are no limits to their specialized knowledge and intellectual expertise. This causes such "scholars" to pulpiteer even in unconcealed ignorance sometimes. It also causes them to not know when and how to seek, find, and value edification that comes among others through humility, and deference to more knowledgeable and practiced scholars. There is no shame in not knowing. There may be however, when the one who does not know should know that the one does not know. It is preferable and more self-respectful that one has strong views on a subject that the one is well informed about.    

Have you not noticed that most Nigerians public affairs' commentators are, to borrow a much belabored expression "jacks of all trade and masters of all"?  Is it much surprise that Nigeria has the challenges and failures that she has?

 

oa

 

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ikhide [xok...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 8:35 PM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Ahhhhh.... my fans have been motivated into action. 

I am compiling what I describe as examples of the poetry of invective from Nigerian centred listserves. 

This piece from Franklyne Ogbunwezeh is an impressive addition.

Imagine the learnedness in this coinage:

 "a genocidare in the most proximate potency."

Does that word 'genocidare' exist?

Google shows he meant "Genocidaire"

But thats allright. Its a striking English which I am pleased to come across for the first time.

See his other lines:

"All you need to do is to give him the platform and he will ventilate the repressed angst that has been propelling his genocidal intentions."

...

...the mindset that really informs some of the cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense."

Beautiful-

'cryptic murderers'- how can murderers be cryptic? Not simply hidden or concealed but cryptic?

Wow.

Cryptic...crypt- physical space- [en]crypt-method of shaping virtual, digital space through presenting information in a concealed  manner- creating the virtual analogue to the subterranean  space of the crypt, where perhaps rites that blaspheme humanity  are performed  in an evil church as evoked in Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt or where the holy space of the church, evoking the womb of human being, Dennis Brutus's  "lambent flame of man's inherent humanity", becomes the space of scriptic- significators-in virtual space-  activity that seeks to raise an altar to the inhuman, to adapt Dennis Wheatley's novels on magic and Algernon Blackwood's "Strange Worship".

See the almost incantatory rhythm at play here:

"cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense."

Hmmmm.....peddle...fine word...peddler, a street hawker, evoking here, not just the sense of determined  labour but  of ignominy....the line comes to rest in the final noun phrase " unvarnished nonsense".

With the movement from 'inspiration for mayhem', culminating in the sheer dismissal of the offerings of the peddler, " unvarnished nonsense", linking back to "cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade", the whole sequence evokes an almost Shakespearean sense of gravitas and outraged humanity.

That was fun.

toyin 

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Addition-

the Holocaust model is certainly not valid in the Biafran case, Olayinka, for the reasons you describe, but is routinely invoked, because it helps speedy mobilisation of  sentiment and avoids the less than unsavoury questions emerging from a close look at the role of the Biafran leaders in the catastrophe.

Trying to capture the Biafran case in terms of a simple, representative verbal or visual  image, such as is achieved by the historical resonance of the term 'Holocaust' or the pictures of the starving inmates of the Nazi death camps, which people may be seen as trying to create an equivalent of in the image of the stomach bloated Biafran child, does not succeed in a manner that is adequately sensitive to history.

A battle for the iconicity  of images....

"Starving child, yes...but what is the burden of culpability for that starvation...?"

'Genocide? Hmmm...in terms of what criteria?'

It goes on and on....

toyin

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

APOLOGIES FOR REPOSTING.

CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS  IN LINE 8 AND PARAGRAPHS 15,  18 AND FINAL PARAGRAPH 

Ahhhhh.... my fans have been motivated into action. 

I am compiling what I describe as examples of the poetry of invective from Nigerian centred listserves. 

This piece from Franklyne Ogbunwezeh is an impressive addition.

Imagine the learnedness in this coinage:

 "a genocidare in the most proximate potency."

Does that word 'genocidare' exist?

Google shows he meant "Genocidaire"

But thats allright. Its a striking English word which I am pleased to come across for the first time.

See his other lines:

"All you need to do is to give him the platform and he will ventilate the repressed angst that has been propelling his genocidal intentions."

...

...the mindset that really informs some of the cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense."

Beautiful-

'cryptic murderers'- how can murderers be cryptic? Not simply hidden or concealed but cryptic?

Wow.

Cryptic...crypt- physical space- [en]crypt-method of shaping virtual, digital space through presenting information in a concealed  manner- creating the virtual analogue to the subterranean  space of the crypt, where perhaps rites that blaspheme humanity  are performed  in an evil church, as evoked in Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt or where the holy space of the church, evoking the womb of human being, Dennis Brutus's  "lambent flame of man's inherent divinity", becomes the space of scriptic- significators-in virtual space-  activity that seeks to raise an altar to the inhuman, to adapt Dennis Wheatley's novels on magic and Algernon Blackwood's "Strange Worship".

See the almost incantatory rhythm at play here:

"cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense."

Hmmmm.....peddle...fine word, simple but learned in its metaphoric use here, such use not common perhaps in the  register of general users of the language..peddler, a street hawker, evoking here, not just the sense of determined  labour- an ironically  unholy labour- but  of ignominy....the line comes to rest in the final dismissive  blast in the compound  denunciation  " unvarnished nonsense".

With the movement from 'inspiration for mayhem', culminating in the sheer dismissal of the offerings of the peddler, " unvarnished nonsense", linking back to "cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade", the whole sequence evokes an almost Shakespearean sense of gravitas and outraged humanity.

That was fun. 

 

Salutations to Professor Ogo Ofuani for his lectures in stylistics to our third year class at the University of Benin, where he seemed to perform wonders of literary analysis but demonstrated how this wonder was performed, to Niyi Osundare for the fantastic analyses of "Words of Iron, Sentences of Thunder : Soyinka's Prose Style", to George Steiner's love of language as in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, to David Crystal and Michael Halliday on stylistics. 

 

thanks

toyin 

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 9:19 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tva...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ahhhhh.... my fans have been motivated into action. 

I am compiling what I describe as examples of the poetry of invective from Nigerian centred listserves. 

This piece from Franklyne Ogbunwezeh is an impressive addition.

Imagine the learnedness in this coinage:

 "a genocidare in the most proximate potency."

Does that word 'genocidare' exist?

Google shows he meant "Genocidaire"

But thats allright. Its a striking English which I am pleased to come across for the first time.

See his other lines:

"All you need to do is to give him the platform and he will ventilate the repressed angst that has been propelling his genocidal intentions."

...

...the mindset that really informs some of the cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense."

Beautiful-

'cryptic murderers'- how can murderers be cryptic? Not simply hidden or concealed but cryptic?

Wow.

Cryptic...crypt- physical space- [en]crypt-method of shaping virtual, digital space through presenting information in a concealed  manner- creating the virtual analogue to the subterranean  space of the crypt, where perhaps rites that blaspheme humanity  are performed  in an evil church as evoked in Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt or where the holy space of the church, evoking the womb of human being, Dennis Brutus's  "lambent flame of man's inherent humanity", becomes the space of scriptic- significators-in virtual space-  activity that seeks to raise an altar to the inhuman, to adapt Dennis Wheatley's novels on magic and Algernon Blackwood's "Strange Worship".

See the almost incantatory rhythm at play here:

"cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade hoping that some nutjob will gain inspiration for mayhem from their unvarnished nonsense."

Hmmmm.....peddle...fine word...peddler, a street hawker, evoking here, not just the sense of determined  labour but  of ignominy....the line comes to rest in the final noun phrase " unvarnished nonsense".

With the movement from 'inspiration for mayhem', culminating in the sheer dismissal of the offerings of the peddler, " unvarnished nonsense", linking back to "cryptic murderers that hide in cyberspace to peddle their trade", the whole sequence evokes an almost Shakespearean sense of gravitas and outraged humanity.

That was fun.

toyin 

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

I had hoped for some fun with Ogugua's piece but it seems resistant.

What I find stimulating about it is the effort to postulate an approach to learning.

"True scholarship is underscored by disciplined specialization. Some scholars carry on as if there are no limits to their specialized knowledge and intellectual expertise. This causes such "scholars" to pulpiteer even in unconcealed ignorance sometimes."

The underlying supposition of this  approach might seem to come close to  being outdated.

Why?

Has its central supposition ever really been universally accepted, even in Western scholarship,  as it certainly was not in Arabic and Persian scholarship, as the examples of the great polymaths demonstrates, and as suggested even by  classical African thought?

A summative question arising from this brief journey in cognitive configurations-

To what degree may one achieve depth in various disciplines and how does one go about it?

Read it up. Engage with its lived experience. Study various perspectives on the issues in question. Understand the ideational and research configuration of the field. Gain grounding in the methods of enquiry relevant to the field. Marshall understanding through critical writing.

A recent view suggests a modulated  approach:

It is as if, in our drilling down into the bedrock of knowledge, our drill bit strikes open air-revealing a cavern with a variety of wonders, but with no imperative concerning which direction we should head.xxxiv

...

Confucius claimed: 'to know that you know what you know, and to know that you don't know what you dont know, is true wisdom'. The problem with this dictum is that it is very hard to draw the boundary between one and the other. Any knowledge that we possess-with the exception of those domains that we construct ourselves, such as the deductive geometry-is intrinsically fallible, proximate, and unbounded. Attempts to understand the world or any part of it need to be inter- and transdisciplinary in nature-even if this means that we lose the comfort of disciplinary guarantee of expertise. xxxiv-xxxv

...

...success at integrating different perspectives and  types of knowledge...is a matter of manner rather than of method, requiring a sensitivity to nuance and context, a flexibility of mind, and an adeptness at navigating and translating concepts. xxxi

From "Introduction"by Robert Frodeman in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, ed.Robert Frodeman et al. Oxford : Oxford UP, 2011.

The following is beautiful but it is sad that it is morally empty in terms of the history of the person writing in relation to the context:

"It also causes them to not know when and how to seek, find, and value edification that comes among others through humility, and deference to more knowledgeable and practiced scholars. There is no shame in not knowing. There may be however, when the one who does not know should know that [they do] not know. It is preferable and more self-respectful that one has strong views on a subject that...one is well informed about."   

All these beautiful summations apply only as a means to critique those not in your camp. Sad.

A  possible reconfiguration:

Recognizing one’s

 

limits of knowledge,

depth of ignorance,

plain inability to be other than subjective

conditions that define human being 

 

one may jump body and soul

 

into expanding

 

one’s

 

 learning,

training,

 interest,

and experience scales and scopes. 

Thanks

Toyin 

[Ifedioramma E. Nwana]

Actually some of the postings on this topic remind me of the little story about the fly that had perched on the horn of a cow that lay down chewing the cord.  When the fly expected the cow to complain and did not get the privilege of one it shouted, 'Cow Cow if I am weighing you down so much please tell me when you would like to stand up'.  Then the cow said to the fly, 'Oh dear I did not even know that you were there'.  Some of these comments should not bother any one.  They simply reveal the deep prejudice that rocks Nigeria, which is indeed the main problem with Nigeria. 

Ifedioramma Eugene Nwana

From: "Anunoby, Ogugua" <Anun...@lincolnu.edu>
To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 9 January 2013, 19:40
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

"I was shocked to find that this man was so abysmally ignorant about a part of Nigerian history that has to be the most important since her birth. In that forum we were all as a group taken aback by the ignorance and the bigotry Toyin displayed with each posting."

 

ikhide

 

 

Ikhide,

 

You must know now that there are individuals who are completely oblivious of the limits of their knowledge, the depth of their ignorance, and their plain inability to be other than subjective, but will nevertheless jump body and soul into conversations that are roundly outside their learning, training, interest, and experience scales and scopes. They know that comment is free. They are determined to take full but misguided advantage of it. How else does one contemplatively understand the open season abuse and insult that has followed Chinua Achebe's new book?

It seems to me that a challenge of scholarship is the lack of awareness on the part of a "scholar" of the limits of their knowledge. True scholarship is underscored by disciplined specialization. Some scholars carry on as if there are no limits to their specialized knowledge and intellectual expertise. This causes such "scholars" to pulpiteereven in unconcealed ignorance sometimes. It also causes them to not know when and how to seek, find, and value edification that comes among others through humility, and deference to more knowledgeable and practiced scholars. There is no shame in not knowing. There may be however, when the one who does not know should know that the one does not know. It is preferable and more self-respectful that one has strong views on a subject that the one is well informed about.    

Have you not noticed that most Nigerians public affairs' commentators are, to borrow a much belabored expression "jacks of all trade and masters of all"?  Is it much surprise that Nigeria has the challenges and failures that she has?

 

oa

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ikhide [xok...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 8:35 PM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

Folks.

This is not addressed directly to Toyin Adepoju, he does not need it and I am convinced he is not in a position to be swayed by what I have to say. I first noticed his take on Biafra in another forum. His views, about the pogrom and the genocide were, in my view, evil and abnormal.

I was shocked to find that this man was so abysmally ignorant about a part of Nigerian history that has to be the most important since her birth. In that forum we were all as a group taken aback by the ignorance and the bigotry Toyin displayed with each posting.

Once Toyin started speaking about Biafra and spewing what are easily the most shocking statements anyone would utter in my presence about fellow human beings, I decided that there was a darkness there that was beyond his control. And I stopped engaging him.

Folks, if you think Toyin's views about Biafra are odious (they are) then I am not sure what you would characterize the views that got him expelled from the forum we both shared. No one should be exposed to that carcinogen that Toyin offered up. Believe it or not, his views about Biafra today are a lot more civil than those dark days when I shivered from the e-ethnic cleansing that he so gleefully executed on the Internet.

Curiously, the same accusations have been leveled against his "scholarship" on women. Misogyny is the word a noted scholar used to describe Toyin's world views against women when she declined Toyin permission to use her work on his blog or website. And understandably so, if you are familiar with Toyin's "work" on women's private parts. His "scholarship" on women's issues is beyond demeaning, I am surprised there has been no organized outrage. It is disgraceful actually. His Facebook page will convince you of the darkness that resides in him.

As for Biafra, I honestly believe it is not normal, what I read from Toyin. Let me put it this way, there are many people I disagree with on this forum when it comes to Biafra. I can however honestly say, they are disagreements. As for Toyin, to call his views wrong-headed would be to dignify a rabid dysfunction.

I have engaged Toyin a couple of times on this forum because I wanted to be on record as abhorring whatever he stands for. Nobody that I respect views his position as sane. And that is why you hardly see anyone publicly agreeing with him. There is no method to this madness.

- Ikhide

[Segun]

I think some of our Ibo writers simply don't want to accept the truth apart from falsehood told by Achebe. 

Toyin should end the conversation or the controversy for now. Let the fly know that the world goes on with or without it. 

Segun Ogungbemi. 

Sent from my iPhone

[ojod...@gmail.com]

I quite agree with you in this regard, I think that we sometimes tend to magnify certain issues like this. I, personally, have learnt my lessons on how to respond to minor and major national issues from the little exchange I had sometime in 2012 with Professor Kperogi on Rueben Abati's interpretation of metaphor, etc. I pray this makes some sense to some people. Shalom.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.

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From: "Ifedioramma E. Nwana" <ien...@yahoo.com>

Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:41:55 +0000 (GMT)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

[Olayinka Agbetuyi]

Toyin:
By the South African model of restitution one alludes to the whole spirit of reconciliation and truth committee that ensured that South Africa to quote Cyprian Ekwensi 'survived the peace.'  This was the original plan of Nigeria at the cessation of hostilities; this was the spirit in which the Ikemba was welcomed back home as a hero and not hounded internationally;  this is the spirit in which the Igbo diaspora must continue to engage with Nigeria in the interest of peace of all Nigerians including the overwhelming majority of Igbos resident in Nigeria.  South Africa learned its lessons from Nigeria, and what we now get from a section of the Nigeria diaspora is that that lesson is not worth learning.
 
As a high profile citizen ot Nigeria, Ogbuefi Achebe can do no less that encourage them along this path in word, deed and publication He owes the majority of the Igbos on the planet, who incidentally are resident in Nigeria actions that promote their well being within the nation.  If the average Igbo are left to feel that if even Achebe can give up, why not us, then all is lost.  He cannot afford to be tired in spite of the myriad frustrations of Nigeria.  No effort is too great for the peace dividend.  This was why, Obasanjo, in the face of all the frustrations attending the annullment of the June 12 elections, and murder of the winner, resisted the pressure from other Yoruba generals not to rule war out as solution.  In spite of his many warts, the wily general at least got that right; and no one could accuse him of cowardice, as a battle-tested victorious general (unlike internationally-ensconced internet warriors).
 
So Nigeria should continue its well=taught out position of peace and reconciliation among its various groups.  a national conference can be convoked as has been variously canvassed if there are thorny structural issues to be ironed out.  The Holocaust reparations model would not work because it has to start with all the South first paying reparations to the North the first batch of the overwhelming victims of the January 1966 coup; then the West and finally part of the East itself!  Nigerian diasporic warriors of reparations must therefore sheathe their swords.
 

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Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2013 19:59:40 +0000

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (2)

From: tva...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Thank you very much, Olayinka.

The South African achievement  is a massive historical milestone.

I like your measured tone.

May I suggest that perhaps you might have missed a word here in the speed of typing:

"This was why, Obasanjo, in the face of all the frustrations attending the annullment of the June 12 elections, and murder of the winner, resisted the pressure from other Yoruba generals not to rule war out as solution."

The sentence seems to suggest that he saw war as one solution but the next line suggests that he did not think war a wise idea.

Thanks

Toyin

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

“Confucius claimed: 'to know that you know what you know, and to know that you don't know what you dont know, is true wisdom'. The problem with this dictum is that it is very hard to draw the boundary between one and the other.”

 

oluwatoyin

 

Confucius seems to me to have it right. Wisdom is the denominator. When an opinion peddler is not wise, they are more likely to be unaware of their knowledge limitation. They may mislead others without intending to do so. This among others is why arrogance is vain and folly, and humility/modesty are enlightening and virtuous.  

I dare to add that all knowledge is contextual and therefore intrinsically fallible. It is not known for example that there is a state of absolute and complete knowledge in the human realm? Is it any surprise therefore that theories are effected by assumptions, laws have exceptions, culture changes, poisons have antidotes, and beliefs guide believers even when believers know they are not proven truths.

oa

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

Why is it near impossible for some forum participants to see things through the ethnic prism only? “Falsehood” is a word that experienced, knowledgeable, and serious commentators know to use with great caution. To state that an assertion or claim is false implies the certainty that the truth is categorically different.

Commentators familiar with historical, literary, political, and religious conversations and discourse know to be slow to describe any expressed position as false. That one disagrees with another does not necessarily make another’s position false. Both positions may in fact be partly false and partly true.

If one remembers that the truth is the first casualty in politics and war, one would be more hesitant to take an entrench position in related matters.

 

oa  

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Ogugua,

So we may move beyond the abstract, 

Since this is your second time of making this point on this thread, 

Would you like to present where this behaviour is   manifest that informs your conclusion so we can assess it ourselves?:

'When an opinion peddler is not wise, they are more likely to be unaware of their knowledge limitation. They may mislead others without intending to do so. This among others is why arrogance is vain and folly, and humility/modesty are enlightening and virtuous.'

You know I am always ready to analyse issues, even invoking an entire library in support of my case if necessary.

Please do not equivocate, or plead any reason not to substantiate your case. 

Just give us the examples of the specific presentations of the 'opinion peddler', anywhere you have encountered it, so we can see if your assessment of their peddling is accurate.

I will not respond in kind to any effort, by anybody, to prevent such a straightforward  presentation, devoid of taunts, uninformative denigrations  or other distractions.

We might still have fun after all.

thanks

toyin

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

My brother Ogugua,

The wise man who never sees anything wrong with members of his own household when they are involved in conflicts with other households  has a problem with  his wisdom.

You are forever ensconced in the right-wing pro-Biafra net.

You never take them to task for  unwarranted personal attacks, unprovoked, foul mouthed insults,  and plain refusal to engage in balanced analysis, instead you consistently jump in  to reinforce their behaviour.

Yet, you shape a mask for yourself on which you inscribe claims of 'truth','balance between truth and falsehood' etc.

I prefer the debates on the  general Nigerian centred groups  bcs the pro-Biafra advocates on those groups are more honest and down to earth.

People like Peter Opara, Kingsley Nnaguaba, Wharfksnake of Idioro, among others. 

What Segun is stating is that the right wing pro-Biafra lobby, most of whom are Igbo, are unable to acknowledge any possibility of credibility to views that contradict what he, Segun, understands as the lies of Achebe. 

He did not go into detail as to why he thinks Achebe dealt in falsehood, bcs he has no faith in the spirit of the pro-Biafra lobby as ready to engage in balanced analysis that reaches after truth in whatever form it is found. 

Did Achebe himself not declare fantastic denigrative assertions of Nigeria without any effort at justification in his Guardian essay, an essay  which he now seems to have wisely  seen fit to remove from its place on the Guardian website? 

What do the right wing pro-Biafra group and Achebe have in common?

A view,  largely  delusional, in my opinion,  that they speak for Ndigbo as a victimised group. 

You and I are engaging now bcs you are struggling to present yourself  as a person who has something to say that does not begin and end with the Biafra-redmail-of  Nigeria-agenda.

I eagerly await any further  point you have to make.

If you dont wish to continue just say so,and  avoid the tactic of ducking behind one excuse or trying to stir up the smoke of distraction as some members of the right wing pro-Biafra school do when the ground on which they stand has become slippery.

Thanks

toyin