by Okey Ndibe
For me, one of the tender victims of the war, Soyinka’s experiences and memories of the Biafran War represented a metaphor of Nigeria’s blood-soaked, wretched struggle for self-definition.
Owing to Soyinka’s sometimes-inscrutable language, I did not always grasp what was happening in The Man Died. Even so, I was sustained by an acute sense of the immediacy and urgency of the book’s themes. On some level, I knew that the book spoke about—or to—my Biafran experience.
As the years passed, I went back, again and again, to the memoir. With each new reading, I was able to draw out more of the book’s moral implications. But even in my first readings, I had remarked the book’s brooding take on the plagues of raw power. I was also able to tease out what, I believe, is the fulcrum of the writer’s prison diary: that we die, our very humanity slayed, whenever we choose to remain silent in the face of tyranny.
It all planted a seed in my mind. Over time, the seed germinated and sprouted into vital life. Years later, when it came time to try my hand at fiction, it occurred to me that Soyinka had helped endow me with a ready-made subject. I set out to explore the relationship between silence and the excesses of power. In literature and life, I had encountered myriad occasions where the predations of the power drunk were met—often preceded or enabled—by the silence and acquiescence of the bystanders. Why was it that, all too often, those possessed of power succumbed to the temptation to use it to degrade and dehumanize others? Why—despite natural assumptions about the inherence of conscience and a moral compass in humans—why did so many inflict horrors on others or lend themselves as tools of an evil, antihuman agenda? Why did those sectors of a community that should lead in voicing opposition to injustice—the broad class of intellectuals—often lack the spine to do this duty?
I realized that the issue was ancient and ageless, ever present. Writers as divided by time, geography, and experience as Sophocles and Soyinka had probed the matter, the former in his chastening tragic drama Antigone. That play and Soyinka’s prison diary illuminated the terrain for my first novel.
That first novel’s central moral vision is encapsulated in a woman’s proclamation to her grandson, a journalist: “A story that must be told never forgives silence.” I fashioned that sentiment to echo Soyinka’s denunciation of silence. I sought to draw attention both to the rampancy of power abuse and to the repercussions of silence. Those who shut their eyes in order to see no evil, to denounce none, those who plug their ears and gag their mouths, should be under no illusion. They may delude themselves, but they cannot enter a plea of innocence in history’s great carnages, its galleries of gore and horrors.
In failing to speak up for Antigone, the people of Thebes leave the power-drunk King Creon to send her to an early, unwarranted, and callous death. And that deadly event ricochets and boomerangs, ending up birthing other deaths and tragedies.
To many writers of my generation and me, Soyinka had offered a contemporary lens for recognizing the nature of the beast that besieges and dooms Antigone, the inflated egos that fuel the Creons of the world, past and present. To me, he also gave a deeply personal gift on Christmas Day 2007.
Tarry awhile, if you don’t mind, as I dip back to October 1997.
Nigeria was in the grips of a dictator named Sani Abacha. When the bespectacled general first seized power, sacking a much-despised interim government headed by Ernest Shonekan, many Nigerians expected that he would quickly spring Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (M. K. O.) Abiola from jail and invite him for investiture as the president, honoring the sanctity of an election that took place on June 12, 1993. As events unfolded, it dawned on all that the expectations had been rather naïve. A coup d’état was grave business. Few, if any, army generals would risk their lives staging a coup in order to turn over the reins of power to an idle civilian!
Once Abacha showed his hand, a coalition of prodemocracy activists emerged to oppose his usurpation. Soyinka was one of the most prominent dissidents. Sensing injustice, he characteristically disavowed silence. Instead, he lent his considerable voice and global stature to the anti-Abacha coalition. The opposition, and especially Soyinka’s role in it, raised Abacha’s hackles. The dictator was a firm believer in the art of maximum power. His regime confected charges that the writer and his group were responsible for a series of deadly bombings, several of them targeted at soldiers. Nigeria’s security agents received orders to comb everywhere for the so-called bombers, especially the prizewinning writer.
Everybody knew that the dictator meant business. In November 1995, he had disdained national and international entreaties and ordered the hanging of eight environmental activists, including the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. To save life and limb, Soyinka escaped into exile—for the second time in his life. He traversed the world’s capitals and cities, denouncing the dictator and offering damning evidence that Nigeria groaned under a tyrannical ruler’s boots.
It was in these circumstances that the Five College Consortium (made up of Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Smith College, Hampshire College, and Mount Holyoke College) invited Soyinka to deliver a series of lectures over several days.
I chose to go listen to Soyinka the evening he spoke at Hampshire College. I wanted to offer him one or two words of encouragement and solidarity. I recognized the tragedy of being driven out of one’s country by men whose criminality and knavery could not be masked by their false cloak of patriots.
I confess: I also had a less-than-altruistic purpose for going to see Soyinka at Hampshire College that winter evening. I packed the manuscript of Arrows of Rain with me. I was going to ask if he could find time to read it. Given the subtle as well as direct ways in which his life and work had inspired the novel, I felt certain that any critique he offered would enrich my manuscript.
As I parked my car at Hampshire College, it dawned on me that the request I planned to make was neither easy nor reasonable. Indeed, I was struck by its rank inconsiderateness. A censorious inner voice seemed to agitate me. It reminded me that, at his age and stature, Soyinka was once again cast into the hard bargain of living abroad, a hounded exile. He had to live in constant terror of a regime determined not only to squelch dissent but, indeed, to eliminate dissenters like him. Numerous political groups, governments, and universities made incessant, sometimes-impossible demands on his time and energy. He constantly zigzagged the United States and flew around the world to drum up global attention to the tragedy in progress that was Abacha’s Nigeria. “Rest,” I knew, was a foreign word for him. His permanent address, as he often joked with friends, was in the air—a reference to the incessancy with which he flew from one location in the world to another.
Soyinka was not just an activist in the glib sense of that word; he was one of those who haunted Abacha, akin to a five-star general and commander of an army that was at war with the ruthless ruler. My inner voice reproved. I realized that, in the context of Soyinka’s regular political and social engagements, it was impudent to saddle the man with my manuscript. He would certainly be entitled to deem my request thoughtless and unbecoming, this voice cautioned.
I left the manuscript in my car. The auditorium was filled beyond capacity. Arriving too late to find a seat, I headed for the standing-room area in the back. I found Ifi Amadiume, author of several seminal feminist texts, who had traveled from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She and I exchanged small talk but fell silent once Soyinka was introduced.
As he delivered his lecture, Amadiume turned to me. In a rueful tone, she said, “Okey, is it not tragic that a man like this should be in exile while Abacha sits in Nigeria?”
I nodded in agreement.
Once the lecture ended, I walked briskly toward the podium. Soyinka stood there, surveying the appreciative, applauding audience. He recognized me. “Ah, Okey, you came!” he exclaimed as we embraced. Then he said, “One of your professors told me at lunch that you’ve written a fascinatin
g novel. I hope I can get to read it.”
It was hard to believe. I told him I happened to have a copy in my car and offered to run and fetch it. No, he said, he might lose it. It was safer to mail it to his address at Emory University, where he held an endowed visiting appointment.
The next day, I mailed off the manuscript. Over the next two months, I would periodically ring his number at Emory. Not once did I reach him there. His secretary would answer the phone and explain that he was away in one US city or another but, more frequently, outside the United States. I would ask the secretary to tell him I just called to know how he was keeping, or how the struggle against Abacha was going.
A few times, Soyinka rang me back—from France, Canada, the UK, some African country. “I hear you called,” he would say. “I know you’re anxious to know about your novel. I’m sorry, but I haven’t found time to read it. But I’m going to read it.”
Finally, on a Christmas Day marred by ricelessness, there was Soyinka’s voice on our voice mail. He wished my family and me a Merry Christmas. Then he said he had just read my manuscript. He found the work “highly evocative.” He looked forward to talking more about it when next we spoke.
I rewound and replayed the message. Then I turned off the stove.
“You ran home from the Fallas to eat rice,” my wife remarked. “So why did you turn off the stove?”
“That message from Soyinka is better than rice!” I said.
Crashing A Party, Changing Hearts
O n June 17, 1989, a Nigerian friend, Justin Ononibaku, had driven me to Northampton, where I did one of my favorite activities: scanning the shelves of used bookstores for some treasures. Afterward, driving back to Amherst, Justin disclosed that there was a party that night at one of the residential towers for students at the University of Massachusetts. The party was for a Nigerian graduate student, he said—her birthday celebration.
It was the kind of day, bright and summery, that left me keen for the charms of a social outing. It was a marvelous day to dance, quaff some drinks, mix with acquaintances, and meet new people. Justin, who had lived in Amherst a year or two before I arrived, was one of my guides in matters of revelry. He had a way of sniffing out where the best parties were happening. He had a reputation as a party hopper. Since we were friends, I often went along.
“So we’re going?” I said. It was not really a question; it verged on an eager declaration.
“They didn’t invite me,” he said in a pained, deflated tone. There was a note of sourness in his voice, a sense of resentment at being excluded by the mysterious, unspecified “they.”
What was he talking about? He and I were veteran crashers at parties. We’d sailed, uninvited, into parties thrown by Ghanaians, Cameroonians, South Africans, and Cape Verdeans. We’d been to a few parties thrown by Jamaicans, Barbadians, and African Americans. And we were never shy intruders. We’d sashay in and go straight for the food and drinks. And then we’d approach any cluster of women and invite whoever caught our fancy to dance. Often, the celebrants would go out of their way to welcome us to the party we had crashed. At any rate, we had a perfect record of crashing parties. We were always indulged, never repelled.
“It’s a Nigerian party, is it not?” I asked. “At least the celebrant is a Nigerian, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should just show up,” I urged. “That’s what to do. Nobody will throw us out of a Nigerian party.”
For a while, Justin drove on silently, his face scrunched up, closed. I read his silence as hesitancy, even resistance. I chattered on, my tone swinging between levity and seriousness, my playful arguments intermixed with earnest entreaty. Our reputation as party crashers was at stake, I declared. If, for any reason, we would chicken out tonight, balk at invading a Nigerian party, then our party-crashing credentials would be dealt a crushing blow. We would be finished.
Finally, my barrage of words forced him to speak. He affirmed that, like me, he rather relished going where he was not invited. He was at peace, in principle, with interjecting his presence at parties. The trouble, he explained, was this: he was acquainted both with the celebrant and several others who helped plan the birthday party. He was eminently entitled to expect an invitation to this party. The fact that an invitation had not come meant there had been a conscious decision—a conspiracy, in fact—to exclude him. It was one thing to intrude on a party where you knew nobody, nobody knew you. It was a different matter altogether when the “owners” of a party not only knew you by face, they also had your telephone number—and you, theirs. In that event, he contended, the badge of honor might lie in shunning the party, rather than barging in. A certain awkwardness, exclusively on his part, would attend his going out of his way to show up at the party.
Years later, I saw an episode of Seinfeld that captured the humiliating, vexed emotions that Justin must have felt when he tried to convince me to discountenance the birthday party. In it, the show’s eponymous star, Jerry Seinfeld, is left perplexed that dentist Tim Whatley has not explicitly invited him to a Thanksgiving Eve party, even though the dentist has telephoned him to get the addresses of two of his closest cohorts, George Costanza and Elaine Benes.
In the end, wavering between a near-crippling anxiety about being snubbed and a desperate desire to talk to some dentist about his injured, swollen jaw, Seinfeld decides to risk stealing into the party. When he suggests that he and George go together, the latter coldly rejects the proposal. Kramer, another member of the posse, is just as staunchly opposed to arriving at Whatley’s party with the emotionally dangling, beset Seinfeld.
In one of the episode’s funniest, oddest, and most emotionally charged moments, Jerry and host Whatley cross paths. The dentist chides the cowering, embarrassed Seinfeld.
I understood Justin’s argument. He’d been cast in a precarious position: people he knew well had not considered him worthy of an invitation to what was, in his reasonable estimation, one of the most desirable parties happening that weekend. Yes, I grasped Justin’s case, but rather abstractedly. On a primal level, I was desperate to go to the birthday party. It was as simple as that. I wasn’t wearing his emotional shoes. I faced no prospect of shame, and I bore no burden of self-debasement. Nobody had overlooked or slighted me. To invoke the drama of the sitcom, I did not have the slightest Seinfeldian emotional stake. So, the more Justin tried to demonstrate that crashing this particular party would be untenable for him, the deeper my curiosity grew. I had to see this party, had to mingle with the crowd that had excluded my friend from its guest list.
“We have to go to the party,” I said matter-of-factly. No, I was unable to marshal any argument that would dislodge Justin’s misgivings. All I had was that declarative impetus, that not-to-be-denied desire to dance, drink, mingle—a hunger for adventure. I doubt that Justin would have mentioned the party to me if, at some level, he didn’t entertain the idea of showing up or didn’t wish to be talked into going. “We just have to go.”
Whether in response to my persistence or his own repressed wish, he caved.
About 11 p.m., Justin and I arrived at Coolidge, a twenty-two-floor residential hall at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We took an elevator to the nineteenth floor. The moment we stepped out, the boom of music and the waft of spicy African cuisine led us to the venue. Justin opened the door to a wide, well-lit lounge that seemed bereft of furniture. The music, now at a deafening pitch, came from a room to the left of the lounge. From it, too, came stamping feet, the revelry of voices singing along to the music or attempting the impossible task of conversing. We composed ourselves, slipped on our accustomed mask of confidence. Justin led the way, and I followed toward the open door, which was more than halfway down the length of the lounge.
Suddenly, from the corner of my right eye I glimpsed a figure on a settee. Was this some hapless fellow who’d been bounced from the party we were in the process of crashing? I tu
rned to look, and instantly stopped, amazed.
Sitting there, seemingly oblivious to the chaos of music and dancing feet, his eyes trained on a book, was a man I would never have expected to find in that vicinity. His name was Babs Fafunwa. He was a towering figure in Nigerian and African education, often mentioned as one of the continent’s leading authorities in the field. His reputation extended far beyond the confines of academia. He was also a prominent public intellectual, much quoted by newspapers and magazines, a constant presence on TV. Besides, he frequently contributed editorial opinions to numerous newspapers. I had never before met him in person, but I felt I knew him.
Justin, no doubt dealing with his jitters, did not notice that I had stopped. He disappeared into the dancing room. I detoured to the Nigerian professor, but now racked by doubt. Perhaps, he would turn out not to be the man I supposed him to be. In that case I would apologize and retreat and chalk it all up to an eerie instance of striking resemblance.
“Good evening, sir,” I greeted.
His eyes stayed glued to the page of the book for a moment, a man who would not countenance an interruption as he coasted to the finish line of a sentence. When he looked up, his face had a warm expression.
“Good evening.”
“You look like Professor Fafunwa,” I said.
“I am.”
“What a surprise to see you here. Are you teaching at UMass?”
“No, I’m in the US for a conference. And I came to visit here for a few days.”
“So, what brings you to this place?”
“My daughter lives here. It’s her birthday party.”
I introduced myself. He knew me from my work in the Nigerian newspapers.
