by Okey Ndibe
There was little I could do to change the state of affairs at the office. The most I could do—which I realized, thanks to the vision and can-do spirit of the staff—was produce a fantastic magazine. African Commentary consistently received rave reviews. Utne Reader and Library Journal named it one of the best new publications of 1989. It received positive critical notice from National Public Radio (in an interview with publisher Chinua Achebe), USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press, among others. After each issue came a rain of letters to the editor commending the magazine’s rich content.
Editorially, the publication was excellent. The trouble was that the whole magazine had been built on a shaky foundation, simple. Nnaji and Achebe and the magazine’s other founders had undoubtedly conceived a noble idea, but they had also miscalculated the funding.
I felt particularly sorry for Nnaji. He was saddled with the impossible task of running a magazine with a pittance of funds. It was more than a full-time job, since there was always some fire to put out. He spent a lot of time at the magazine’s office, ever busy at everyday tasks. Much of his time was taken up with cajoling our creditors—printers as well as phone and power companies, among them—to accept piecemeal, often minuscule, payment.
I often marveled at what he was able to accomplish, especially considering that he was also a first-class scientist and researcher. His robotics lab at the University of Massachusetts received substantial grants from General Electric and the National Science Foundation, among others.
Despite the magazine’s paltry budget, Nnaji knew full well that the company ran the risk of inviting costly lawsuits if the American staff was not paid. His priority was to stretch what little funds he had to ensure that payroll was covered. In spite of his best efforts, twice or thrice, the paychecks bounced. Whenever that happened, he had to summon his best crisis-handling skills. He would show up at the office to offer explanations and apologies to the usually irate staff. On one occasion, I watched with awe and sadness as the magazine’s production editor, an enterprising, cut-to-the-chase African American woman, dressed Nnaji down.
“I’ve got bills to pay, so I won’t take it if my check bounces. Make sure it doesn’t ever happen again, ever. If it does, you’ll hear from my attorney.”
A meek, chastened Nnaji promised it would never happen again.
For me, fresh from Nigeria, it was an illuminating experience. Two of the three publishers I had worked for in Nigeria paid their staff if and when it pleased them. Sometimes, my fellow workers and I were owed arrears of several months, even as the proprietors junketed around the world in the first-class cabin of major airlines. When we complained about unpaid salaries, we did so in hushed tones, in conspiratorial whispers—behind the back of the nonchalant, callous, delinquent employers.
Even though I sympathized with Nnaji—aware of the great sacrifice he made to keep a poorly funded magazine alive, if on life support—I found the workers’ assertive demands on their pay rather refreshing.
Not that the culture of worker assertiveness helped my situation. I had it worse than the rest of the employees. In fact, I was given a variant of the Nigerian treatment.
As I stated, Nnaji did whatever he had to do—sometimes borrowing from his personal account—to ensure that the American staff got paid. The fear of litigation was constantly at the back of his mind, propelling him. But he could safely bet that I would not sue the magazine. He knew that, being new to America, I didn’t know my way around labor laws and the whole business of retaining an attorney. I was an unlikely litigious threat. Beyond that, he must have figured that, as a product of a cultural ethos that valued forbearance, a culture that prized deference to “elders,” I would be extremely reluctant to initiate a lawsuit against an employer whose board was chaired by Chinua Achebe, not only an eminent novelist but also an—arguably the—Igbo cultural icon.
Since the magazine was cash strapped, Nnaji reckoned that he could get away with paying a skimpy fraction of my salary or even skipping my salary altogether when there was not enough money to go round. The weeks when I was not paid at all, Nnaji would drive me to the Stop & Shop and stock me up with cereals, milk, rice, black-eye peas, chicken, beef, some fruits. “At least you should have food to eat,” he would say to me.
My situation reminded me of those vagrants who haunt American street corners, a cardboard sign held aloft, inscribed with the plaintive proclamation will work for food. I was editing a widely acclaimed international magazine—and I was working, week after week, for groceries!
Owed months of salary at a time—or paid only a fraction of what was due me—I was often delinquent in my rent payments. The rental company took to sending me eviction notices. Each time I received an eviction warning, I made a torrent of desperate calls to friends and some members of the magazine’s board. I felt disheartened to have to narrate my woes, especially to the same people whose failure to pay my salary had put me in the humiliating position of begging for rent money.
My pleas always yielded sympathetic responses. Friends and members of the magazine’s board would pitch in various sums, anything from fifty dollars to two hundred dollars. Thanks to these benefactors, I was able, each month, to pay my rent. As I depended on the goodwill of donors, my rent, as a rule, was paid awfully late. No sooner did I pay one month’s rent than the next month’s rent fell due. I became an accumulator of eviction notices.
Oddly enough, my deeper concern was that I did not have the means to send school fees for my youngest brother and two cousins, who were at different universities. I was also worried that I could offer no financial support to my parents. How to meet those obligations kept me awake at night, lent an ache to my solitary moments. The last thing I wanted was for my parents to discover that things were not going well for me in America, that I was having a difficult time. If they knew, they’d agonize too much over me; they would suffer a lot on my account.
I had to come up with ploys to deflect their attention, leave the impression that I was doing well. Sometimes, I would take donations for my rent but send the cash to Nigeria for school-related fees. Other times, I would borrow from friends in order to send some money to my parents for their upkeep. When I spoke to them on the phone, I made a point of sounding upbeat.
All that borrowing and the staging of well-being devastated my ego. When I didn’t have food, I would time my visits to friends’ homes to improve my odds of getting a free meal. Even though I enjoyed the company of friends, I often chose to play recluse out of economic reason. When I was out, I made excuses when friends asked that I meet them at one bar or another in Amherst, Northampton, or Hadley. I cooked for my dates to avoid the expense of taking them to restaurants. A friend, Lloyd Thomas, helped me buy my first car in America, a Toyota Starlet, for two hundred dollars. Sometimes I had to park the car because I was late paying my automobile insurance fee, and coverage was removed.
The strain of financial hardship and other odds notwithstanding, I continued to work strenuously at the publication. I was fortunate that the rest of the staff shared my spirit. Somehow I hoped that some investor with deep pockets would take notice of the magazine and bring in the capital that would enable the publication to soar and achieve its potential.
I had also hoped that Achebe would use his wide contacts to entice investors. However, he appeared too engrossed in his literary activities to do more than contribute an occasional essay to the pages of the magazine. On several occasions, Nnaji and I would telephone him in Nigeria to report the dire state of the company. He would listen patiently and then ask that we send a courier message detailing the magazine’s immediate and long-term investment needs. We would do so, but he never found time to do much about it. He was always on the move, drawn to speaking engagements and literary conferences in different parts of the world. Those demands apparently left him little time for the magazine; in fact, they seemed to sideline the needs of the publication.
The m
agazine’s investment fortunes showed no signs of improving. Yet, Nnaji, the Jamaican novelist Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and I persevered in searching for ways to save the floundering publication. A veteran of the civil rights movement, close to the fiery revolutionary crusader Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), Thelwell was one of the staunchest champions of the magazine. He not only wrote some of the finest pieces in the publication, he also spread word about it to his numerous contacts from the civil rights movement. A great admirer of Achebe’s literary work and cultural capital, the Jamaican-born writer was determined that the magazine not collapse. Achebe also admired him, bestowing on him the Igbo name Ekwueme—“one who lives up to his word.”
One day, Bill Cosby, who was then at the height of his powers as an entertainer, came to town to give a talk at the University of Massachusetts, his alma mater. Thelwell asked the university’s chancellor to arrange a brief private meeting between the comedian and Nnaji, Thelwell, and me. Our goal was to persuade Cosby to invest in the magazine. But we were wary of a too-direct proposal, which, we feared, carried the risk of rejection. We were going to adopt an indirect, even circuitous, strategy.
We gave Cosby copies of African Commentary as well as a copy of Achebe’s book of essays, Hopes and Impediments, which had just been released. We then invited him to become one of the magazine’s columnists. He gently declined, citing his hectic schedule. Next, we proposed doing a cover on him. Again, he turned us down. He insisted that such a cover would serve little or no purpose.
What he said next took our breaths away. “Gentlemen,” he said, his large eyes sweeping our faces, “let me tell you how best I can be of help. I can invest in the magazine.”
We were swept, without warning, into an exultant state. It was all we could do to keep from breaking into laughter or wild applause. It all seemed a rhetorical ambush, worthy of a man rather familiar with the kind of sinuous path we were taking to arrive at our main point—a request for investment. We did our best to keep our voices controlled as we expressed our gratitude.
Cosby wrote out the name and address of his investment company and asked us to forward a formal proposal to the firm. We did as he asked. Close to two weeks later, we received a response. Cosby would not be investing after all, the firm wrote. We had felt buoyant after meeting with Cosby; now, with the rejection letter in hand, we came crashing down, mercilessly, on hard ground.
Nnaji and I made other efforts to find investors. The erudite Ghanaian writer Kofi Awoonor, who was then his country’s ambassador and permanent representative at the United Nations, tried to broker an investment deal with a group of Haitians, most of them doctors, based in New York City. They appeared interested in bringing in close to a half-million dollars in exchange for a significant stake in African Commentary. They also demanded that Achebe cede one of his two posts—as chairman of the board and publisher—to enable them to nominate one of their number to occupy it. Achebe was not enamored of the idea. The possibility of the Haitian group’s investment fizzled out.
Meanwhile, the magazine’s debt mounted. Nnaji found it more difficult to find the money to pay salaries. My finances became even more pitiful, my bank account parched. Week after week, I didn’t know whether I would be paid a fraction of my salary or Nnaji would drive me to a store and buy me groceries in lieu of payment.
I became an even-more-desperate borrower. From time to time, I was commissioned by Emerge magazine to write a piece on some African country or issue. Whenever I received any funds, whether borrowed or earned from journalistic work, I sent much of it home. I was anxious to sustain my parents in the impression that my personal and professional lives had few wrinkles.
But my relationship with some of our correspondents continued to deteriorate. One of them, Sam Nwanuforo, then a graduate student at Leicester University, met Achebe in London where the novelist delivered the Southbank Lecture. Even though we were friends and I had confided in him about the magazine’s financial troubles, he sent me an angry letter through Achebe in which he accused me of willfully refusing to pay him. According to him, Achebe had denied that the magazine had financial problems and had asked him to submit a list of what he needed to continue to do his work. I was mystified, for Achebe knew quite well that our financial condition was wretched. The publisher-novelist had made a stop at the magazine’s office the day he was leaving for London—and our electricity had been disconnected because we hadn’t paid the utility firm. Nwanuforo’s letter strained our friendship. It would be several years before we spoke again during my visit to the United Kingdom.
A few correspondents rebelled by balking at new assignments. I was in a helpless situation. I knew that, if I couldn’t wring assignments out of them, then the magazine was in the throes of death.
In the midst of the worsening crisis, we held a critical board meeting at which Achebe was absent. When Nnaji proposed that we aggressively look for new outside investors, one of the members—a classmate of Achebe’s at university—countered that the novelist’s permission was needed since he owned the magazine. At this point Nnaji disclosed that he, not the novelist, had come up with the original idea for the magazine. A few days after the meeting, he sent each board member a written account of the publication’s provenance.
That innocuous-seeming move proved fatal for the magazine. The next time the board met, in January 1992, with Achebe present, the members were riven in half over the argument of who founded the magazine. Neither faction was willing to invest more funds in a project that had soaked up so much of some members’ hard-earned savings but still needed a lot more money—in fact, a few million dollars.
The feud became intractable. A day after the heated board meeting of January 1992, Nnaji faxed his letter of resignation to fellow board members. With him gone, the doleful sign was writ even more large for me: there could no longer be any African Commentary to speak of, not even in the tottering sense that it had operated for more than three years.
I handed in my own letter of resignation. The letter brimmed with resentment and outrage. I had come to America to set up a magazine that held great promise. And that lofty potential had been torpedoed as much by the clash of egos as by the lack of cash.
Achebe called an emergency meeting at his home on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in upstate New York. I was not invited. The sole item on the agenda: the announcement of his resignation.
I had come to America filled with hope and great expectations for the magazine. I had sacrificed a lot, as had most board members, and it had all come to nought. An entire dream lay in a waste. One road had closed suddenly, even if with considerable augury, and I couldn’t yet see any other road opening up.
I was confused and incensed and at the edge of despair.
Lying To Be a Writer
T he demise of African Commentary early in 1992 cast me in a thick emotional fog. I was too devastated to see beyond the pain of the moment, too distraught to imagine the prospect of a path beyond the profound disillusion that was my reality. In many ways, I was a man adrift, unsure of what would come next; uncertain, even, that there was something like a future, a “next.”
My days were filled with endless dawdling, going in and out of used bookstores, seeking some kind of rejuvenation of spirits, some manner of comfort. It was entirely futile. I would open a book and gaze absentmindedly at its words, lifeless things strewn on the page, and then shut the book in pained resignation. Nothing spoke to me anymore, least of all books. Even so, with little else to engage me, I made a fetish of visiting dust-flecked used bookstores.
One day, I stepped out of a bookstore and saw the prizewinning writer John Edgar Wideman. He’d been a columnist for African Commentary and was quite close to Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. He and I exchanged greetings and made small talk. Then he remarked, “I’m sorry the magazine’s folded. It was very much needed.”
I agreed.
“A sad, sad loss,�
� he said. Then he asked: “So now that the magazine’s ceased, what do you plan to do?”
My mind ran this way and that, seeking some answer that would make a semblance of sense, some idea that would represent a coherent pattern between my immediate past as editor of an international magazine and the trajectory of a future, dimly glimpsed.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. It was a terse answer, the most honest I could manage.
Wideman looked me intensely in the eye. “You’re working on a novel, right?”
I wasn’t writing a novel. But Wideman’s tone suggested a confidence, an unmistakable certitude, that I was a budding novelist. How long did he hold me in that withering gaze, as if double daring me to declare I was not writing a novel? I feared that, should I state the truth, the man would never ever talk to me any more.
“Yes,” I answered, certain there was no other choice.
Wideman’s eyes softened, his expression became calm, unworried, as if my response had righted the day. “I’ve talked to Michael [Ekwueme Thelwell] about helping out. Why not get me fifteen to twenty pages of your manuscript—and let’s see if we can get you into the MFA program at UMass.”
The conversation with Wideman—culminating in my lie about writing a novel—was eerie, a near reprise of an earlier encounter in Nigeria.
That earlier event happened in 1988, the same year I relocated to the United States. I had boarded a Nigeria Airways domestic flight flying from Lagos to Enugu. Soon after, a lanky man walked in, his air of privilege unmistakable, and sat in the seat next to mine. I recognized him as Dillibe Onyeama, the author of a widely popular, edgy memoir, Nigger at Eton. A product of one of the best public schools in Britain, he was the scion of a legal luminary, Justice Daddy Onyeama, who served on the International Court of Justice at The Hague. I had heard him speak on TV with a perfect English elocution.
