Poet, literary critic, and multi disciplinary researcher, Odia Ofeimun is happy about the controversy generated by excerpts from Chinua Achebe’s latest book There Was A Country.
Ofeimun’s happiness stems from the conclusion that the real story about Nigeria, and the contentious portions of her history and politics have not been given the kind of exhaustive treatment that would separate the hard facts from the fictitious narratives.
Ofeimun is therefore convinced that Nigerians should look at the writings, accounts and interpretations of the great figures of its history, and scrutinise them by testing them against hard historical facts of the times.
In this interview with ARMSFREE AJANAKU, Ofeimun attempts to set the records straight by debunking certain ‘falsehoods’ long peddled about the Nigerian Civil War, and the story of the pre and post independence struggle for the political space.
Let’s start from the outpouring of emotions, analysis and jibes over the excerpts in (Chinua) Achebe’s book; what do you make of it all?
Why not start by calling it anarchic overreactions to Achebe’s book? Usually, you would expect people to have some kind of level-headed approach to a book. Unfortunately, because of the kind of culture we are in, a country in which currencies do not behave like proper currencies, it was not possible for people to get copies of the book. We are not all literate electronically; very many people bought that book on Kindle.
I read parts of Kole Omotoso’s advance copy ,n Kindle which landed on the 27th... Unfortunately, I couldn’t go through the whole book before Kole traveled back to South Africa. It is not unusual for people to make the kind of responses that have taken place; in a country as fractious as Nigeria, you should expect it. I am actually happy that people are overreacting to Achebe’s book.
We have been behaving like a country that has no history, and to encourage that attitude, the universities have been frozen out of the history process. Our great historians have been knocked out of centrality, and all the people they brought up are into other things. Because of that, some of the most contentious areas in Nigerian politics and history are undiscussed; facts about them are distorted; people do it for various reasons.
A lot of people do not know the history; beer parlour discussions, which turn fiction into real history, is what we all live on. I have spent the greater part of my life trying to overturn this, and I realise that the reason I am not succeeding is not because I have not worked hard enough. It is simple because I am also trying to be careful not to be like the people whom I am criticising.
I mean, if we get the facts right properly now, it will be difficult to turn it upside down. One of the reasons Nigeria’s story is being written so badly today is because once upon a time, there was a book by James S Coleman, Background To Nationalism. It was the book in which that first lie was sold that tribalism made (Obafemi) Awolowo and (Nnamdi) Azikiwe quarrel in 1941.
The truth is that it wasn’t tribalism at all. Coleman misunderstood what he was writing about. But almost all the scholars who have written about Nigeria in relation to tribalism and things like that, have based their stories on Coleman’s lies or should we say, Coleman’s misunderstanding. Awolowo was campaigning, and actually voted for Ernest Ikoli, who was Ijaw.
Nnamdi Azikiwe campaigned and voted for Samuel Akinsanya who later became the Odemo of Isara. The Odemo of Isara comes from the same Remo Constituency as Awolowo. But Awolowo was opposed to him in the election. Awolowo insisted that the conventions of the Nigerian Youth Movement should be followed. That fight ought to have been considered the right fiber for building a national ethos, but it did not happen that way because the West African Pilot, which was the real Bible of the Nigerian masses at that time, touched upon it in terms of ethnic struggles. In fact, all the Igbos moved out of the Nigerian Youth Movement, following their leader.
Zik was not just their leader, Zik was supposed to be the leader of all Nigerians; but that was where it first clicked badly. Once Zik left the Nigerian Youth Movement and the Igbos moved out, the troubles, really were waiting. Awolowo was a nobody at that time, but by 1951, Awolowo was somebody. He became the Premier of Western Region. But that was where the second lie came.
The second lie was that the Yorubas in the Western House of Assembly crossed carpet and joined the Action Group. That is, NCNC members who were Yorubas crossed carpet and joined the Action Group. It was a lie, it never happened. Anybody who reads the Hansards of the Western House of Assembly at that time will discover that three people crossed carpet on the floor of the Western House of Assembly. None of them was Yoruba. I don’t want to go into telling you their names for now, and I won’t tell you my reasons for not mentioning their names for now. The truth is that very many of the people who ran in that election ran on the platform of ethnic organisations like the Otu Edo for people who came from Benin, and in fact, one of the representatives of Benin in the Western House of Assembly in that year, was actually an Igbo, Ekwuyasi, whom the Edo trusted enough to vote for. That will give you an idea of the way it worked. In those days, when ethnic organisations were running strong, an Igbo man who ran on the platform of Otu Edo, represented Benin in the House of Assembly. Nnamdi Azikiwe was Igbo, but it did not stop Lagosians from voting for him. TOS Benson, considered to be Ijebu because Ikorodu was then not (part of) Lagos.
But he was there; people from Ogbomoso, who were regarded as non-Lagosians ran and won elections into the Western House of Assembly. The NCNC was led by a very well known Igbo man called Nnamdi Azikiwe, yet, his party swept all the seats in Lagos. Now, the fact that a city predominantly Yoruba could vote a party led by an Igbo person into the House of Assembly ought to have suggested that, actually, the Yorubas who cast their vote were not tribalistic. But when the leader of that kind of party chooses to provide ethnic interpretations of it, that is where the worries really needed to come. I mean, Achebe wrote his book, The Trouble With Nigeria, claiming that he was there on the floor of the Western House of Assembly when the (alleged cross-carpeting of Yoruba legislators from NCNC to AG occurred. In my response to that book, which was published a few weeks after it came out, I said Achebe may have been there, but he did not see what happened because what happened has been very dramatically presented in photographs that were published.
The members of the Action Group (AG) who were coming to the house with their leaders in front, had badges on their chest, AG badges. When they got to the front of the front of the doorstep, the whole house was in a rowdy form, scatter diagrammatic. Awolowo insisted that in a proper democracy, parties stay on their own side, and he needed for all the NCNC members to go to one side before his party could enter. All the traditional rulers in the place came and started pleading that ‘this is a new dispensation, let us do it without (problems).’ It was the usual Yoruba way of doing things pele pele. But Awolowo refused; he insisted the NCNC must move to one side before he would agree to enter the house. It was that movement to one side that Achebe obviously saw from wherever he was sitting. The AG did not enter the house until the NCNC had moved to one side.
As I said, only three people crossed carpet on the floor of the Western House of Assembly. But because those lies were told, they formed the basis for the demonology that has encompassed the relationship between Awolowo and the Igbo. Zik was a very powerful orator, and he had a newspaper that was also very powerful. He repeated the lies so often that right through to the 1983 election, he kept repeating them, and if a man of Zik’s stature goes on repeating a lie and a very powerful author like Chinua Achebe goes on repeating it, book after book, you know what could happen. The biography of Chinua Achebe written by Ezenwa-Ohaeto, has it in almost in every chapter. You will come across a reference to the cross carpeting in every one of the chapters because the Igbo psyche has been ruined by such falsehood. It is difficult to find an Igbo young man or woman, old man or woman, who does not believe that the Yorubas swindled them at the beginning of our history . The Yoruba did not swindle the Igbo, it was their leaders who swindled them, and kept on consistently lying until the very end.
Unfortunately, intellectuals, supposed academics, who should have gone into the stories to unearth what actually happened, have refused to do so. Our historians have been lame duck in relation to those problems. Many of them have dodged and shunned those critical moments in Nigeria’s history. Read all the history books, you won’t see where those issues are treated normally. It is because the historians themselves abandoned their roles that in fact governments and politicians have been working very hard to remove them from the scene. If they wrote the truth, many of the politicians won’t be able to continue living their lives the way they are living. They (historians) have sold a history of fictions for their children to live by, and you find Yoruba and Igbo kids unable to sit down properly to do anything together because of the lies. If they successfully created a civil war out of the falsehoods in the past, it appears Chinua Achebe wants the next generation to start another civil war based on the same set of falsehoods. We must fight them; I think that it was time we actually allowed the civil war to end. Because it never ended. The civil war will not end until we deal with the veracities and the falsehoods that became part of that exercise.
I have not yet touched on Chinua Achebe’s book. So as far as I am concerned, I have merely responded to the idea of the civil war. But let me put it very squarely: the civil war like all wars, especially wars between relations always dredge up mythologies and falsehoods. The propaganda of war is one of the most terrible things that happen in war, not just the shooting. If the propaganda chiefs of Biafra told you that Enugu has not been captured, somebody with a radio tells his family, ‘let’s go back, they say they have not captured the town.’ When you get there and you find they are shooting, you can run, but you may get hit. A lot of people died during the civil war because of those propaganda chiefs, of whom our dear Chinua Achebe was quite a strong voice. What in my view needs to be done is for the rest of us to look all of them in the eye; if they are statesmen, big writers, or whoever they are, let us set what they are writing against facts that can be ascertained. Over that, they all played very despicable roles.
That, by the way, is why I wrote The Poet Lied because people by whose interpretation we have been interpreting our society turned out to be (mostly) people of clay feet when it came to looking at what they were doing during that war. Let’s not kid ourselves, the issues that Achebe has raised, especially in relation to Awolowo are issues he may not have raised if after the war, he bothered either to read what other people had written or he cared to tell us precisely what he saw and heard during the war. If Chinua Achebe did that, I tell you, he will not dare write the kind of book he has written. Many of them have deliberately blinded and deafened themselves to what the war gave them because if Achebe did that, he certainly would have discovered that the Igbos are just Nigerians, bloody Nigerians like the rest of us, and that they did horrible things to their own people, which they should be ashamed off, and for which their leaders ought to be tried.
And when I say that, I am not cracking a joke; many of the children who died in Biafra died because their leaders took stupid decisions, stupid decisions they could have avoided. The very idea of going to war was one decision they didn’t have to take at all. True, all the Igbos killed in the pogroms in the North are Nigerians, and their families needed to grieve and mourn, but if you want to grieve and mourn, do you slaughter the next generation of your family? No. You try to put them in a position that empowers them so that when the next war comes, if it comes, you will be safer.
But what did they do? All the generals in Biafra, the military establishment in Biafra told Ojukwu, ‘we don’t have the arms to fight a war, and we don’t have food, we don’t have the transportation to engage in a proper war.’ Many of those who said so, and who had the courage to look Ojukwu in the eye and say so, like Njoku, who was head of the army, many of them spent their lives either in jail or in the graveyard because they dared to. And because of the hyper-inflated ethnic gripe that was ruining minds at that time, you could not dare say anything different from what they were doing.
Achebe has overplayed the fact that the masses all wanted it. The masses? The masses never declare a war; it is generals who declare war. And a general who has no gumption enough to look into the future and assess the resources available for dealing with eventualities, is not a serious general. When you lead your people to suicide, that’s not heroism. The truth is that they knew they were not ready for war.
So you are saying their theory of survival does not arise…
It is not true; I will tell you why it (survival as an excuse for secession) is not true. Awolowo met Ojukwu, and Awolowo met Ojukwu because he felt there was a solution to the crisis. That very meeting with Ojukwu became a propaganda weapon that Biafra radio used throughout, and the impression was created across the world that Awolowo told the Igbos that he will join them to fight the Federal Government. Awolowo did no such thing, and in any case, if you want to go to war, do you depend on an old enemy to tell you he will fight with you? They killed your father and mother, and the only person you could trust to go to war with was the man you regarded as an enemy. Doesn’t that show a porosity of mind that should never happen to people who know that the lives of millions are in their hands? It did not occur to them.
Awolowo told Ojukwu, ‘if you and I agree, we can get the minorities, north and south, to take a common position, so that we can confront the core north about the issues they are raising.’ He (Awolowo) said he would take responsibility to get the minority groups. But Ojukwu did not want what Awolowo wanted. Awolowo insisted that there must be creation of states; Ojukwu did not want states created. That was why he went to war. If you want your people to be free, but you don’t want other people to be free, what kind of hero are you? What kind of leader are you? The other groups matter, so those people had it in their own interest to go where their lives would matter. Though Obasanjo rubbished himself and Nigeria by later making it look as if they saved the lives of the minorities in order to take their oil, the truth is that all of them, both sides, were fighting for the oil in the Niger Delta.
So we can see the Midwest invasion in that context?
The Mid West invasion was specifically for the purpose of getting food for Biafra. Don’t let anybody tell you any other story. Biafra moved to the Mid West because they needed food; they didn’t have it, they looked into the future, and they saw that there was going to be crisis. Everybody who sets out to go to war knows that soldiers move on their stomachs; you don’t feed them, they don’t fight. When the thing stared them in the face, they had to move to get food.
All that talk about going to Lagos to take it over, you can see there was a wooly headedness about all the plans because the real plan was to catch food, and they made quite a good job of it. But the truth is that if you move into a new theatre of war because of food, it is the business of the people on the other side to take that area from you so that you will not have food, that is number one part of the argument. When they had been driven back to Biafra, they were able to negotiate a food corridor for Biafra. Caritas was quite a character in that tale; but Ojukwu did not want the food corridor to be a land corridor. He wanted it to be an air corridor, and that will not be verifiable by anybody, so they could bring in ammunition and whatever they wished. If you are a general on the other side, will you allow it?
It is rubbish to expect that because we are brothers fighting, we have to allow idiotic things to happen in a war, at out own expense. But there was another side to that picture, even the Federal Government people that agreed to allow food to enter through Caritas or wherever, they knew they were acting like children because if food enters a war zone, only soldiers are in a position to hijack it. Awolowo who went there, expecting that food will actually be going to civilians, let me be honest with you, I think he went there just to confirm that what he believed was true was actually true. There is no way food will enter a war zone and it is not the soldiers who determine how the food is distributed. And if all you are doing as an opponent is to give food to the army fighting you, so that they can fight you harder, come on, if Awolowo did not say that starvation is a weapon of war, he needed to have said so because it is a weapon of war. I have never heard of a situation where you know that the other soldiers would surrender if they are starving, and you don’t deprive them of food.
It doesn’t make sense; all these ways of raking up emotion about the children who were dying, that is war propaganda because there was kwashiorkor on both sides of the war. If you took food away from Bendel, what did you expect the people to do? Weren’t they going to eat? All that rubbish of showing us children with ribs and swollen stomachs and the rest of it, what did you expect in a war? So you mean you declared secession without knowing that if it led to war, such things would happen?
The truth is that they were not ready for war; the Igbos are among the most energetic and ebullient people in Africa, one of the strongest nationalities in Africa. To have led them into a stupid war, where you now had to blame everybody except yourself, is an irresponsible thing for leaders to do. Even the intellectuals who refused to theorise it…read the books that they are all writing. It is an embarrassment to think that a whole people can actually go mad …because that was what happened. On both sides of the war, they were crazy.
Look, when you talk about the genocide in Biafra, as I said, first, we must blame those who went to war, knowing they put sticks in the hands of people to fight guns. At least, of all the writers, only Chimamanda Adichie has written about this in the way that show up the people’s General. You put sticks in the hands of people to go and face amoured tanks and machine guns; it is an irresponsible thing to do. But it is worse when you realise that while they were doing that, they were luring people with propaganda into zones where they would face more hardships. It is a most terrible thing to do. I was 18 years old, and a reporter with the Mid West Echo in Benin City. I was a reporter of the Rebel Atrocities Tribunal that was headed by Justice Omo Eboh. After Biafra was driven out of the Mid West, the Ogbemudia government set up this special commission because they wanted to deal with those who supposedly collaborated with Biafra.
One of the people they took to that tribunal to mess up was a very bright Oxford trained Solicitor General called S.I.O.Giwa Amu. It was while reporting that man’s testimony, with Obarogie Ohonbamu on the other side as his opponent, that I discovered things that eventually would lead to my writing of The Poet Lied. First, the cabinet of David Ejoor in Benin City, took a vote to allow the Biafrans to move in. That cabinet was dominated by Igbo speaking Mid Westerners, and they all voted for the Biafrans to move in. Ogbemudia voted for the Biafrans to move in because it was a cabinet dominated by people, who were obviously very influential in the circles in which he moved. But after they voted, they realised that what they were asking for was terrible; some of them ran away to Lagos. They found their way out of the Biafran held areas, and moved to Lagos. They joined the armies that were rooting the Biafrans out. There was nothing they did not do. It was when Giwa Amu successfully proved that he was not the only one that worked for Baifra…all of them, including the Chairman of that tribunal, Omo Eboh, also worked for Biafra, that the story changed. He (Giwa Amu) brought out a document to show that the Chairman delivered a judgement in Afuze, if I remember rightly, during the period. That was how the Omo Eboh Tribunal died. It did not write a proper report; up till today. We don’t know what they did in that place. God obviously wanted me at the age of 18 to see how the so-called leaders of society were ruining all of us.
If you really wish to save a people, it is important that you don’t get your facts wrong because at the end of the day, when people get the facts wrong, it changes their psychological make. My God! They ruined the Igbo populations by propaganda; they destroyed whole generations. You can see Igbo intellectuals, who are unable to perform normal civic acts with other Nigerians because of the lies that have been sown in their heads by generations of lying leaders. It is wrong for us to allow it to continue. If Chinua Achebe wrote that thing because he wanted to help his people rediscover their own identity, what he has also done for the rest of us as Nigerians is to help us discover why we must not allow people like him to sow falsehood. Even if Biafra was re-created tomorrow morning, the Igbos will not have a choice but to do business with other Nigerians. It was best they learnt to do that business as thinking human beings, not as cattle, who just follow any leader because he manages to speak some Oxford or Cambridge English.
I tell you why, for me, when you are discussing the starvation business, it is important to intervene. Why it is important to intervene is that all wars are like that. Wars are stupid things that should never happen in a normal society. The angle of debate in verbal confrontation or verbal gymnastics or whatever you may call it, is what makes tough and good societies. Once you resort to ammunition, the mind escapes, what remains is just techny, learning about the 136 ways of destroying a human being. I am telling you, that is what is left (during wars). And what Achebe seems to want to play up, is the necessity for us to continue in that mode. We should not allow it.
Would you then say all these are happening because there was no Nigerian Nuremberg trials?
The reason I said we need a Nuremberg-type trial for all of them, is so that we know who killed who. They were all murderers, and because the idea of war sanctioned what they did, is no reason for us to accept that what they did was right. I have read (Joe) Achuzia, one of the great murderers of the season. Very many Biafrans, who had no guns, who were reluctant to go to war, were killed for nothing. Don’t let’s excuse them. Look, all of us remember Black Scorpion, whom Obasanjo took over from in order to end the war. But what we must not forget is that that war could not have taken more than six to nine months.
The reason that it didn’t happen was that people on the Nigerian side, business men and soldiers were making so much money out of the war that they didn’t want it to end. There was another group, a political group headed by Murtala Mohammed, which wanted to extend the war, in order to use it to topple Gowon. So that both sides extended the war beyond what was necessary. I have just read a wonderful little manuscript by somebody who is now a traditional ruler in the East, who started asking in his own narrative, why was the Federal Government refusing to take over Biafra that was already dead. Because he saw that there was nothing left of Biafra. But, still, Biafra continued. That was because the Nigerians who were supposed to simply take over and snuff life out of the republic had their own agenda. Meanwhile, people were dying.
So, it was not just about what people wanted against the Igbo, it was simply that on the Nigerian side, there were also psychopaths who had their reasons for wanting to do terrible things. We should stop pretending that war is a heroic thing; there is nothing heroic about war. The demolition of other human beings is an evil thing, and we must see it as such.
Today, everybody is talking about Boko Haram. There were northerners who saw it as one way the northerners will reply southerners. That is thoroughly silly because the way to save the north is the only way that societies are saved. Give proper education to your children, give them good employment, and ensure that as they get old, they will get old age pensions and the rest. Not like these days when the only people who are getting proper pensions are governors and legislators. You have to draw up a proper income policy for your country. That defends the poor: so that it is within that policy that governors get what they must have. Governors now want five houses to be built for them, after they have left power; they want to, in fact, have the kind of things they had when they were governors, that kind of rubbish.
And we end up slipping deeper into the rough things of the day. Let’s look Achebe and all those old people in the face, and tell them that the lies that they told in the past killed so many people. We don’t want more lies.
Looking at the Igbos in contemporary Nigeria, they control a whole lot in economic terms…
That whole business about Igbo this and that is pure rubbish. The Igbos have always been great Nigerians; tell me that village in Nigeria in which you will not find an Igbo man…Igbo Nigerians forgot the Achebe story long ago. In the actual lives that Igbos live in this country, they are already more Nigerian than the rest of us because they also manage to make enough money because they know how to do it. And to claim that people who are so well endowed can be marginalized? Why are you expecting other people to integrate you? It doesn’t make sense.
It is not other people who will integrate you, it is you who will integrate yourself. And I am not talking about the kind of integration that they are all doing today, when you go to another person’s home town, you create your own chieftaincy title. Everywhere, that happens in Nigeria. People who do that should be thrown out and asked to go back to their villages. If you go to my hometown, bow down to the chief there, that is what you should do, not to come and create a chieftaincy title in another man’s hometown. And to worsen matters, some people are now saying that anybody who has spent 10 years in an area becomes an indigene. In another country, this may sound good.
Unless they first remove federal character, quota system and insist on merit, when that happens, let me tell you how it will work. If they are from Edo, you will have Edo indigenes in every state of the federation, and if oneday some crass Edo man comes to power as President of Nigeria, he would go around all the 36 states, picking all the Edo and making them ministers. That is when the trouble will come. We must anticipate the problem. We must protect indigenes in Nigeria until we are civilized enough not to have people who are Nigerians only to take what belongs to others…Do you know how they distribute oil blocks? You declare somebody else’s hometown an oil block, and you give that hometown to a friend of yours, some crony or character from outer space, who can sell his loot and live happily ever after while the hometown sinks into oil-muddy neglect. And that is supposed to be privatization for economic development. Forget it: as long as you have that, you have a civil war waiting to happen. We must fight those battles now in order to turn Nigeria into a proper country. It is wrong to turn the rubbishing of other people’s identity into means of economic bargains…
Would you say the way the Igbos have moved across Nigeria, other peoples could also have move into Igbo land?
No, it cannot happen like that. The first question you should ask yourself is why are Igbos always moving out of the Igbo heartland? It can explain to you why not too many people are moving to Igbo land because that is actually at the heart of the Nigerian dilemma. You see, it is about the kind of angst that Achebe has demonstrated. Nobody wants to live with that kind of angst on a permanent basis; it is wrong…Nobody is going to live with that on a permanent basis.
As for those Igbo people in America and elsewhere who are now organising for a proper Igbo identity, they are doing it wrongly. Let me tell you how to do it right: I am not saying this as an opinion. It is scientifically and logically proven. When Awolowo wanted to build the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, you know the ambition? The ambition was to transfer all the knowledge in English language into Yoruba, and all the knowledge in Yoruba to English. He urged every ethnic group in Nigeria to do it. But because of ethnicity, they accused the Yoruba of tribalism and the Yoruba retreated. They retreated and it damaged one of the finest positions on the basis of which we, I mean all of us, could have equalized with the white man. In the way that today, the Koreans can do nuclear physics in Korean.
Until you make knowledge transferable between different cultures in that manner, you are not building nations or civilizations. To call it a civilization, you must have that capacity. The Igbo wizened up only later; by the time they started reconstructing a national dress and doing all the other things, like Chinua Achebe’s bid to build a standard orthography for the Igbo language, they had done too much that was self-immolating. They should have followed the path that Awolowo and his group were laying out.
Knowledge is One, irrespective of the ethnic group that goes for it. Awolowo went beyond the rest and simply did what was and is right: put every child at school. Fight for full employment. The reason it could not be done at that time in the east was poor planning. Also, because Nnamdi Azikiwe was undemocratic in relating to the religious groups that owned the schools the East. Zik did not know how to deal with them. Awolowo was a bloody democrat through and through , if he was ever anything. If a plan was being made to take off in five years, he made sure that today, he started talking to the people he wanted to change. So, all the religious groups were on his side before free education came to the Western region. All the communities, after he defeated the riots against the levy he imposed for the scheme to take off, all of them, began to contribute to building community schools.
The Igbo were building community schools without having proper governmental involvement. Now, some Igbo have it as philosophy to take centrality of government off the agenda so that everything will go by private this private that. That is part of what is killing not only Igboland but all the other nationalities in Nigeria foolish enough to kill public school education in the name of enterprise. Or World Bank suasion. For that matter, see how the heads of government who killed public school education are building nursery, primary, secondary schools and universities! They are nation-wreckers!
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