by Okey Ndibe
We shared family anecdotes. I told my hosts how, when we were young, my parents had made for my elder brother clothes that were too big for him. The idea was he would wear the clothes for several years, and then, once he outgrew them, he would bequeath them to me. The Tuckers laughed, and then revealed that they, too, did the same thing with their two sons, James and Phillip.
I retired to bed that night feeling a measure of inner warmth. The Tuckers and I had been able to put one another at ease. Even so, I turned and tossed, unable to sleep. It was as if I wished to dwell on the beauties of the day that just passed. Awake, I began to realize how natural it was that this Englishman and my father became friends, and yet how improbable.
Theirs was a friendship that breached several barriers. The most obvious was the ironclad sense of hierarchy in the army, perhaps the most hierarchical institution invented by man. There was also the taboo of race, embodying all the historical distrust between white and black. There was the line of religious affiliation: Tucker an Anglican prelate, my father a Catholic. Then there was the salient fact that, in the 1940s, Tucker’s country held my father’s in colonial subjugation. Were Tucker to visit Nigeria in those heated postwar years, there were many clubs in which my father would not have been allowed to drink with the Englishman.
What would my father have thought about this? I was impressed by the vast difference in social background between the two friends. My grandfather had been a wrestler; Tucker’s father had been an assistant keeper of printed books at the venerable British Museum, a polyglot who became the Chancellor’s Gold Medalist in Latin and Greek, prose and verse.
Yet, the more Tucker spoke about his early life, the more I realized that, like my father, he had known grim privations. His voice quavered as he recalled the time when his father sold his chancellor’s gold medals in order to see the family through a difficult patch. “It’s rather a pity,” said Tucker, noting that his father had treasured the medals. “I wish he hadn’t.”
Unlike my father, Tucker never saw action during the war. And just as well, he said. The Nazi attack on Europe had started just before he went in for officer training. Then, after his training, and “thinking I was going to start fighting the Japanese any moment, the bomb was dropped at Hiroshima and the Second World War finished,” he said. He abhorred the horror of the bomb but felt grateful that he had not been put in a position to use a gun. “I thank God that, apart from training people and being trained, I had not fired a shot in anger,” he told me.
After his time in Burma and Nigeria, Tucker had gone on to Magdalene College at Cambridge University, and then on to seminary. Ironically, his path to the priesthood had been paved by his African troops.
“Whilst at Prome in Burma, one day, sitting in the signals office, talking to some of the Africans there, our conversation turned to the Christian religion,” he said. “Those around me were all Christians, and English was their main language. These men had discovered that I was fairly keen on my religion. This interested them because so many of the European officers and British NCOs showed little or no interest in such matters. So they asked me: ‘How is it that so many Europeans show no interest in religion?’”
The experience opened his eyes in a startling way, he said. How was he to explain to these Africans the incongruity that Europeans, whose forebears had proselytized Africans, were themselves nonchalant about Christianity? Brooding on the question, he had heard “what I can only describe as a voice saying to me loudly, You have got to do something about it. No one else present heard anything, I am sure, but the experience, which was quite unexpected, took my breath away.” He had started on his journey to the Anglican ministry.
Throughout my first night, I processed this strange intersection of biographies and histories, Tucker’s and my father’s. The more I juxtaposed their lives, the more aware I became of certain shared patterns, of the quiet drama of their story, the splendidness of their friendship, and my debt to their example.
In the morning, I came out of the guest bedroom in cheerful spirits, even though I had slept nary a wink.
At breakfast, Tucker surprised me with the information that he and I would drive to Lyme Regis, a coastal tourist resort on the English Channel, for a picnic. As we set out in his car over cramped village roads, he seemed to read my mind. “When I returned from the war,” he said, “I found England so small, especially in comparison to the wide expanses of India, Nigeria, and Burma.” We drove on for a while in silence. Then, slightly turning to me, smiling, he said, “When I was in Nigeria taking northern troops back home, I never would have dreamt that Christopher’s son would one day be visiting me and my wife in Taunton.”
While he showed me around the resort’s museums, used bookstores, and shops that retailed fossils mined from the area, I permitted myself the fleeting fantasy that I was my father and Tucker was an unlikely friend I had met in Burma. I suspected that, had fate not interfered in the matter, the Englishman would have loved to be doing the rounds with my father. We later sat down among a bank of washed stones and other sea debris to eat sandwiches and to talk, touching on as many subjects as we could squeeze into the time we had.
That evening, back home, Tucker and I sipped tea while he answered my questions on tape. He had no recollection of the confrontation my father had told me about. Instead, he remembered my father as “very cooperative and very courteous and very nice in his manner of speaking, and a very intelligent person.” He recalled the pain of the moment when he parted from my father and other demobilized soldiers headed for the eastern part of Nigeria, because he had been assigned to travel with those going north. On arrival in Lagos, all the troops had stayed at a camp situated beside a railway line outside the city. “When the time came for my departure, it was almost a tearful farewell,” Tucker said. “I remember that, as my train slowly puffed its way out of the camp station, a number of my signalers ran full tilt alongside the track waving at me until they could no longer keep up.”
My father’s very first letter to his English friend was dated September 9, 1947. It was written against the backdrop of a sharp rise in nationalist activity in Nigeria. British colonial officials met the agitation with a stepped-up rhetoric that ridiculed the very notion of self-rule. Part of the vibrancy of nationalist agitation arose from ideas generated by World War II.
For colonial subjects, perhaps the war’s most inspiring document was the Atlantic Charter, a series of declarations issued in 1941 by America’s president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. The two leaders pledged to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Africans took the document as a promissory note for their own self-determination once the Allied forces secured victory. At the war’s end, Churchill, in an egregious act of revisionism, argued that colonial subjects were not included in the document’s idea of “peoples.” Africans, especially those like my father who had fought in the war, felt bitterly betrayed.
My father’s 1947 letter was a diatribe against the British. Yes, he wrote, we Nigerians as a whole used to be cheerful always and under all conditions with less money and amenities, but I can tell you that this is not true today. The cause for this is that we wake up daily only to see that our position, economical, social, or political, is worse than yesterday. We are denied all rights which every living creature should enjoy . . . Laws after laws are made whereby our lands and other God-given rights to the poor natives are taken from them. These make the whole population feel disappointed in our so-called protectors, hence every one here is now unhappy and disgusted with the British attitude . . . the flame of nationalism burning in the minds of almost all Nigerians cannot be quenched.
Twenty-two years later, in the midst of the Biafran War, my father wrote a letter to Tucker. The story of my family and my country for the past three years is a long and painful one. He described the pogrom, the blockage by air, land,
and sea, and the war of genocide and total extermination of Biafrans engineered by Harold Wilson’s [British] government and sustained by that government up to this day. He said the account of Britain’s complicity in the Biafran carnage will make a sorry reading for a Christian of your type. The letter’s only hopeful note was the remark that my wife, our five children—four boys and one girl—and I are still breathing God’s free air even though much suffering and hunger have had their effects on us.
When it came time to leave, I was deeply grateful to Tucker for the glimpses he had offered me of my father and of himself. What moved me even more was to see how two ordinary men had done extraordinary things; how they had salvaged something beautiful from the ravages of history; how, transcending their own narrow biographies, they enacted a friendship that could be quenched neither by distance, time, war, nor, for that matter, by death.
Following my father’s passing, Tucker and my mother agreed to take up correspondence. Mrs. Tucker’s parting words to me only deepened my gratitude. After hugging me once, twice, then a third time, she said, “You know, it feels like one of my sons leaving home.” In the silence of my heart, I thanked my father and his worthy English friend.
Wole Soyinka Saves My Christmas
In December of 1997, Deirdre Falla, my wife’s best friend, came up with the idea that our two families should spend the entire Christmas Day together at their home in New Britain. The plan was that we should attend Mass together and then head to their home for lunch and dinner.
I had no reason to object to the plan. The Fallas and my family had grown as close as a family since their older son, Ethan, and ours, Chibu, met at preschool and became best buddies. In Nigeria, Christmas was always the most festive, colorful, and social event on the calendar. It was a time when friends and families gathered to make merry. People, especially youngsters, went from house to house eating and drinking extravagantly and receiving small gifts of money, cookies, and sweets.
Time to insert an important cultural note. When I was growing up in a lower-middle-class home in Nigeria, rice was something of a rare dish. We craved rice, but most of our meals were riceless. Many meals were also meatless, or provisioned with the kind of minuscule pieces of meat that brought the mouth little satisfaction and much anguish, reminding the palate of the legendary portion of the orphan.
We deemed any meal that featured rice and chicken a treat. In my parents’ home as well as my friends’ homes, Sunday was the day to savor rice and thick, tasty tomato stews prepared with chicken. Some families would add fish, beef, or goat to the stew, but chicken was the most common, the most desired. Youngsters, my siblings and I included, looked forward to the prospect of rice and stew. I kid not: the sense of expectancy transported us, lent meaning and buoyancy to each week.
I kept in step with the tradition. Often, as I drifted through the drudgery of many a weekday, about the one thing that made it all worthwhile, the redemptive part of the tedium, was to make it to Sunday. For, then, one’s stomach would reap the culinary rewards of rice, chicken, and stew.
If rice-filled Sundays represented the crescendo of the week’s epicurean experience, then Christmas was the all-time culmination. When I was young, my theological interest in Christmas was at least matched—and often surpassed—by the culinary excitement evoked by the Christian feast. My friends and I banked on there being an excess of rice, an excess of chicken stew, an excess of fried beef or goat. But chicken was the center of it all. Yes, and we brought to the feast an excess of famishment, a product of all our accumulated, yearlong dreams for rice and stew and chicken that had gone unmet.
I felt no need to specify to our American hosts that rice and chicken had to be part—indeed, at the center—of our Christmas meals. The overindulging in that set cuisine had been deeply indexed in my psyche. So much so, in fact, that I could not imagine there being a single soul on earth that would awake on Christmas Day without his or her thought going, with alacrity, to the culinary bonanza of rice, stew, and chicken that awaited all men and women of goodwill. The menu was de rigueur. If there existed any beings that didn’t adhere to its unsurpassable delights, why, they had to be transients from Mars or something.
Nothing could have prepared me for the culinary fiasco that played out on Christmas Day 1997. And I have put it rather mildly. I had lived in the United States for exactly nine years. I had spent all my Christmases with relatives or friends who were Nigerian, who understood how indispensable were rice and chicken to the celebration. It had never occurred to me that anybody, on Christmas of all days, would choose mashed potatoes or lasagna or pasta over rice, or beef or pork over chicken.
We ate lunch at the Fallas; there was not a single grain of rice and no chicken. We ate dinner; rice and chicken didn’t show up. Both meals, riceless and chickenless!
To their credit, the Fallas produced a veritable smorgasbord, but the absence of rice and chicken spelled doom for me. Pancakes and pastas and pork roasts and lamb and beef and mashed potatoes and knishes have their place in the world, but that place is not Christmas. And, certainly, not as alternatives for rice, stew, and chicken. Once it dawned on me that the cuisines I most looked forward to were not about to materialize, I had the equivalent of a culture shock followed by a mild to serious panic attack. If I did nothing about the culinary mishap, it would be the first Christmas in my memory when I had not eaten my reliable rice and chicken—much less gorged on them, stuffed myself until I could eat no more. No, I wasn’t willing to grant that dubious distinction to the Christmas of 1997.
How was one to bear the trauma of a Christmas bereft of rice, stew, and chicken?
I pulled my wife, Sheri, aside and apprised her of my predicament. It was about 9:30 p.m. The Fallas’ plan was that we should stay at their home, savoring drinks and desserts and playing some games, till midnight. I had other, rather urgent plans.
“We must get home before midnight,” I told Sheri. “There’s no way I’ll let an entire Christmas Day pass without eating some rice. It’s going to take too long to cook chicken, but I must boil and eat some rice. And I have to do it before Christmas ends at midnight.”
Having secured Sheri’s complicity, we gave our hosts some excuse and drove away. Once home, I dashed straight to the kitchen. I found a small pot, measured out about a half cup of rice, and set the pot on a burner. As I waited for the rice to cook, I caught our phone’s answering machine blinking frenetically. Sheri and I listened—in my case listlessly—to greetings left by numerous friends, relations, and acquaintances.
I perked up only when I recognized Wole Soyinka’s deep, resonant voice.
Let’s pause and rewind.
I first came to know about Wole Soyinka when, as a secondary-school student, I read his satiric poem “Telephone Conversation” in a literature class. It became one of the first poems I ever memorized. I was charmed by the poem’s irreverent speaker, a vessel for the author’s acerbic wit and bracing send-up of a tight-lipped, racist English landlady tormented by the prospect of renting a flat to an African.
That encounter with a poem sparked a lifelong fascination with Soyinka, a writer who combined creative pursuits with a ceaseless crusade for social justice. His credentials in the two sectors were exemplary.
If Achebe—as I noted on the acknowledgments page of Arrows of Rain—“opened my eyes to the beauty of our stories,” Soyinka has been for me a model of a different, but equally vital, kind. For me and for many other African writers of my generation, he represents the quintessentially committed writer and intellectual. In many ways, his life and creative work bear out his proposition that “justice is the first condition of humanity.”
My first novel, Arrows of Rain, was stimulated in part by Soyinka’s disturbing prison diary, The Man Died. It is a book I first read in secondary school. Beginning with that early first encounter, I began to wrestle with the book’s haunting message and challenging style which I found both
intriguing and confounding. His courage, his deep distaste for injustice shone through in that first reading. Yet, as a young, inexperienced reader, I was baffled by the writer’s attempt to map the mental landscapes and contortions of the psyche of a social being—a writer to boot—cast into solitary confinement. I lost my way numerous times in the labyrinthine circuits of Soyinka’s rhetorical style. That style is marked by a rather liberal dose of ellipses, a tendency to deploy neologisms, and sentences sprinkled with rare, sometimes Latinate or arcane words.
My first reading of the book was an intimidating undertaking. I had a hard time grappling with Soyinka’s tasking stylistic quirks. My unfamiliarity with the writer’s references to myths, philosophers, other detained writers, brought its own punishment. Still, I never once felt tempted to give up, to toss the book aside.
The reason for my perseverance had to do with a certain intuition. I had a clear sense that the writer’s moral fervor was in play. I was a child of the Biafran War, a member of a generation that a poet friend of mine has aptly called Biafran babies. That colossally costly war—or the harrowing prologue to it—was at the center of Soyinka’s detention. As the war drew close, seemed inevitable, Soyinka had recognized the scale of the carnage to follow. Some intellectuals elected to remain indifferent or silent, or to play propagandist. Soyinka boldly condemned the unjust killings of southeasterners and opposed the impending war.
He undertook a self-imposed mission abroad. His goal was to enlist writers and intellectuals to lobby different European and North American nations against supplying weapons to either side of Nigeria’s looming war. The military regime headed by Yakubu Gowon was not amused. It saw Soyinka’s advocacy as altogether quixotic. Nor did the dictatorship care for the idealism that was at the heart of the writer’s audacity. The regime had the writer arrested and detained on his return to Nigeria. The author’s account of that detention gave me an early sense of the price this writer—who was then in his early thirties—had paid for his convictions.
