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

BY BIODUN JEYIFO/GUARDIAN  

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.

Jeyifo: First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (3)

BY BIODUN JEYIFO/GUARDIAN 

Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today!

Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country, p. 236

IN the epigraph to this piece, we have one of the many instances in There Was A Country in which Achebe urges a strong, perhaps even determining link between what he deems, not without considerable justification, an endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbo people in pre- and post civil war Nigeria and the total collapse of meritocracy in our country. With the possible exception of the subject of mass starvation and the claim of attempted genocide during the Nigeria-Biafra war, I confess that within the comprehensive and capacious scope of Achebe’s new book, nothing startled me more than this particular topic. Let me explain.

Like most self-identified progressive commentators on the civil war and the events and crises that both led to it and came after it, I had assumed that the mass slaughter of Igbo people in their thousands in the pogroms before and after the July 1966 “Northern coup” constituted the core of what had to be engaged, analyzed, understood and positively transcended in that dire, tragic period of our history. In essence, this entails the thesis that dominant elements within the right-wing successor state that came into being after the July 1966 coup not only stood by while Igbo people were being slaughtered but were actually behind the pogroms. Any state that not only fails to provide guarantees and protection for the lives and properties of large segments of its population but actually oversees the perpetration of such crimes loses both its political sovereignty and moral legitimacy. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see that what we are experiencing right now in the generalized climate of terror and insecurity around life, freedom of movement and safety of possession in nearly all parts of the country - especially in the North - has its distant but effective roots in those pogroms of May and August 1966.

Against this background, the theme of the link between the ethnic scapegoating of Igbo people and the total overthrow of merit and excellence leading to a pervasive culture of mediocrity in contemporary Nigeria constitutes a related but separate topic, one that I personally have never encountered in the extraordinarily controversial manner in which Achebe approaches it in There Was A Country. In the genuine hope that I am not oversimplifying Achebe’s ideas and claims on this subject in his new book, here’s a succinct summary of what I consider his five interlocking ideas on the topic: (1) in a multi-ethnic nation like Nigeria, differences pertain not only to language, culture and customs but, crucially, also to rates and levels of effective absorption of education and currents of modern thought and culture; (2) by the time of the first decade of the post-independence period, the Igbos had surpassed all other ethic groups in Nigeria (and the African continent) in education, the professions, politics, trade and commerce; (3) this situation led to acts and expressions of thoughtless and exhibitionist arrogance among some Igbos and deep resentment and envy among non-Igbos; (4) the characterization of the January 15, 1966 coup as “an Igbo coup” provided the justification for an organized, systematic mobilization, across nearly all other ethnic groups in the country, of resentment of meritorious Igbo intellectual, professional, commercial and cultural achievements; (5) henceforth, merit was displaced as the benchmark for conducting the business of the nation in all areas, to be replaced by an all-pervading culture of mediocrity that was/is clothed in the garb of “federal character”.

The essential elements of Achebe’s ideas on this topic are contained in a short section of Part One of There Was A Country titled “A History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment” (pages 74-78). But this theme runs throughout all the four parts of the book like a leitmotif that undergirds the comprehensive and compelling ethnographic history of Igbo resilience and achievement under adverse historical and political conditions that Achebe celebrates throughout the book. In other words, though Achebe’s new book also extensively deals with registering the traumas and tragedies that came with war, defeat and post-war crises of reintegration into Nigeria, the central intellectual theme of the book is the loss that Nigeria sustained – and continues to sustain to this day -when mediocrity effectively replaced meritocracy with the purging of Igbos from the intellectual and professional centers of our public life in those fateful months between January and August 1966.

It is important to emphasize the fact that though the essential ingredients of this theme had been expressed in Achebe’s previous writings, notably The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile, the author had been more cautious, more restrained and more comparative in those two previous books. For example, in The Trouble with Nigeria, the essential argument was that though the Yoruba had the advantage of a great historical and geographical headstart over Igbos, the latter caught up with the former in education and the professions within three decades of the mid-20th century. And in Home and Exile, Achebe’s extensive reflections on the vigorous and enthusiastic embrace of modernity by Igbo people had been made within the wider framework of a powerful Pan Africanist celebration of the elements within all African cultures that made them sift and choose the good from the bad in the currents and forces of modernity. But in this new book, Achebe takes this same nexus of ideas and makes of them a part of his startling claim that in the crises leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war, the Igbos were made the collective ethnic scapegoat of a nation caught in the paroxysm of an Igbophobia that was really and effectively a mask, a pretext, a rationale for the overthrow of meritocracy.

In the fourth and final part of the book Achebe, as an illustration of the deliberate targeting of Igbo intellectual and professional achievement in the pervasive post-war culture of mediocrity, gives an account of how “a former president” of Nigeria deliberately unleashed on Achebe’s own home state of Anambra “corrupt politicians with plenty of money and low IQs” (p. 248). The “former president” in question was none other than Olusegun Obasanjo and the “corrupt politician with plenty of money and low IQ” was of course the hapless Andy Uba. In his account of this notorious case, Achebe makes much of the fact that this was happening in Igbo land and was connected to the fact that this “former president”, Obasanjo, had a strong and punitive aversion toward Igbo people. But what Achebe ignores, consciously or unwittingly, is the fact that Obasanjo had done exactly the same thing in Yoruba land in particular and, more generally, in the nation at large. For this is the same “former president” who imposed Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu, a professional thug, on Oyo State as the presiding political boss who, just like Andy Uba, had powers of patrimonial control and manipulation over the elected executive governor of the state. And it was the same Obasanjo that made Mrs. Ette, an inarticulate and barely literate hair dresser, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

In case the “moral” of this critique of Achebe’s link between ethnicity, meritocracy and mediocrity is missed, let me point it out: each ethnic group in Nigeria has its own “Andy Uba” and “Lamidi Adedibu”. This is because neither mediocrity nor meritocracy is innate in any ethnic group, each one being the determinate outcome of factors that pertain as much to class as to ethnicity. More pertinently, Achebe is grossly mistaken to trace the roots of the culture of mediocrity in our country to the purging of Igbo intellectuals and professionals in federal, regional and local public and private agencies, institutions and enterprises in those fateful months of 1966 before the Nigeria-Biafra war. For mediocrity preceded the crises leading to the civil war, as Achebe own novel, A Man of the People, powerfully and memorably demonstrates. Moreover, the culture of mediocrity in post-civil war Nigeria got exponentially much bigger when oil wealth replaced the pre-war export crop economy as the primary means of surplus extraction by the political class drawn from all of Nigeria’s ethnic groups, major and “minor”.

I have pondered long and hard on why Achebe in this new book seemed to need to place so much unalloyed triumphalism on the incontrovertible historic achievement of Igbos in education, the professions, the arts, commerce, politics and culture. The immediate historic context and justification for Achebe in this exercise seems to have been the indisputable fact that after the January 15, 1966 coup, there was a widespread but carefully manufactured fear of Igbo domination in all federal institutions and parastatals. This manufactured fear led the right-wing Northern and Western regional governments of the period to begin compiling data and statistics that seemed to reflect an orchestrated Igbo domination. Ironically, what Achebe’s own “list” in his new book does is to retroactively and inadvertently produce that alleged Igbo domination. This observation needs careful elaboration.

Achebe neither refutes nor impugns the accuracy of the figures and data in the Northern/Western lists; he merely “explains” them away by more or less implying that Igbo dominance was justified by achievement, by merit. The problem with this “explanation” is that it conflates class with ethnicity. For if the figures and data released by the NNA parties were accurate, this only reflects the fact that at that point in time, Igbo middle and professional classes enjoyed a clear advantage over the middle and professional classes of other ethnic groups, principally the Yoruba and the Hausa-Fulani who then used the crises of 1966 to opportunistically wipe out that advantage. End of story? No!

Partly because this intersection of fierce intra-class and inter-ethnic competition was so closely linked to the pogroms of 1966 and partly because the foreign audience that constitutes a large and significant part of Achebe’s intended readership of this book typically thinks of Africa in terms of “tribe” and ethnicity and hardly ever in terms of class, Achebe refuses absolutely to concede this class advantage of Igbo professional and middle classes in pre-civil war Nigeria; he prefers instead to reduce or keep everything to the singularity of “tribe”. In next week’s concluding piece in this series, we shall see how these same factors were deployed far more ominously in the most harrowing issue raised in Achebe’s new book, this being mass starvation and the alleged attempted genocide committed against the children of Biafra.

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu