"Naija @ 52" Chinua Achebe: Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father, Nigeria is a child.
"But
it has occurred to me that Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father.
Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed
and incredibly wayward"
Nigerian
nationality was for me and my generation an acquired taste – like
cheese. Or better still, like ballroom dancing. Not dancing per se, for
that came naturally; but this titillating version of
slow-slow-quick-quick-slow performed in close body contact with a female
against a strange, elusive beat. I found, however, that once I had
overcome my initial awkwardness I could do it pretty well.
Perhaps
these irreverent analogies would only occur to someone like me, born
into a strongly multiethnic, multi lingual, multireligious, somewhat
chaotic colonial situation. The first passport I ever carried described
me as a “British Protected Person”, an unexciting identity embodied in a
phrase that no one was likely to die for. I don’t mean it was entirely
devoid of emotive meaning. After all, “British” meant you were located
somewhere in the flaming red portion of the world map, a quarter of the
entire globe in those days and called “the British Empire, where the sun
never sets”. It had a good ring to it in my childhood ears – a magical
fraternity, vague but vicariously glorious.
My
earliest awareness in the town of Ogidi did not include any of that
British stuff, nor indeed the Nigerian stuff. That came with progress in
school. Ogidi is one of a thousand or more “towns” that make up the
Igbo nation, one of Nigeria’s (indeed Africa’s) largest ethnic groups.
But the Igbo, numbering more than 10 million, are a curious “nation”.
They have been called names such as “stateless” or “acephalous” by
anthropologists; “argumentative” by those sent to administer them. But
what the Igbo are is not the negative suggested by such descriptions but
strongly, positively, in favour of small-scale political organisation
so that (as they would say) every man’s eye would reach where things are
happening. So every one of the thousand towns was a mini-state with
complete jurisdiction over its affairs. A sense of civic attachment to
their numerous towns was more real for precolonial Igbo people than any
unitary pan-Igbo feeling. This made them notoriously difficult to govern
centrally, as the British discovered but never appreciated nor quite
forgave. Their dislike was demonstrated during the Biafran tragedy, when
they accused the Igbo of threatening to break up a nation-state they
had carefully and laboriously put together.
The
paradox of Biafra was that the Igbo themselves had originally
championed the Nigerian nation more spiritedly than other Nigerians. One
proof of this: the British had thrown more of them into jail for
sedition than any others during the two decades or so of
pre-independence agitation and troublemaking. So the Igbo were second to
none on the nationalist front when Britain finally conceded
independence to Nigeria in 1960, a move that, in retrospect, seems like a
masterstroke of tactical withdrawal to achieve a supreme strategic
advantage.
At
the time we were proud of what we had just achieved. True, Ghana had
beaten us to it by three years, but then Ghana was a tiny affair, easy
to manage, compared to the huge lumbering giant called Nigeria. We did
not have to be vociferous like Ghana; just our presence was enough.
Indeed, the elephant was our national emblem; our airline’s was the
flying elephant! Nigerian troops soon distinguished themselves in a big
way in the United Nations peacekeeping efforts in the Congo. Our
elephant, defying aerodynamics, was flying.
Travelling
as a Nigerian was exciting. People listened to us. Our money was worth
more than the dollar. In 1961 when the driver of a bus in the British
colony of Northern Rhodesia asked me what I was doing sitting in the
front of the bus, I told him nonchalantly that I was going to Victoria
Falls. In amazement he stooped lower and asked where I came from. I
replied, even more casually: “Nigeria, if you must know; and, by the
way, in Nigeria we sit where we like in the bus.”
Back
home I took up the rather important position of director of external
broadcasting, an entirely new radio service aimed primarily at our
African neighbours. I could do it in those days, because our politicians
had yet to learn the uses of information control and did not
immediately attempt to regiment our output. They were learning fast,
though. But before I could get enmeshed in that, something much nastier
had seized hold of all of us.
The
six-year-old Nigerian federation was falling apart from the severe
strain of regional animosity and ineffectual central authority. The
transparent failure of the electoral process to translate the will of
the electorate into recognisable results at the polls led to mass
frustration and violence. While western Nigeria, one of the four
regions, was going up literally in flames, the quiet and dignified
Nigerian prime minister was hosting a Commonwealth conference to
extricate Harold Wilson from a mess he had got himself into in faraway
Rhodesia. But so tense was the local situation that the visiting heads
of government had to be airlifted by helicopter from the Lagos airport
into a secluded suburb to avoid the rampaging crowds.
Nigeria’s
first military coup took place even as those dignitaries were flying
out of Lagos again at the end of their conference. One of them,
Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, was in fact still in the country.
The
prime minister and two regional premiers were killed by the
coup-makers. In the bitter, suspicious atmosphere of the time, a naively
idealistic coup proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with
plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the east to take control
of Nigeria. Six months later, northern officers carried out a revenge
coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it
had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a tragic interlude
in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the northerners turned
on Igbo civilians living in the north and unleashed waves of brutal
massacres, which Colin Legum of the Observer was the first to describe
as a pogrom. It was estimated that 30,000 civilian men, women and
children died in these massacres. Igbos were fleeing in hundreds of
thousands from all parts of Nigeria to their homeland in the east.
I
was one of the last to flee from Lagos. I simply could not bring myself
quickly enough to accept that I could no longer live in my nation’s
capital, although the facts clearly said so. One Sunday morning I was
telephoned from Broadcasting House and informed that armed soldiers who
appeared drunk had come looking for me to test which was stronger, my
pen or their gun.
The
offence of my pen was that it had written a novel called A Man of the
People, a bitter satire on political corruption in an African country
that resembled Nigeria. I wanted the novel to be a denunciation of the
kind of independence that people were experiencing in postcolonial
Nigeria and many other countries in the 1960s, and I intended it to
scare my countrymen into good behaviour with a frightening cautionary
tale. The best monster I could come up with was a military coup d’état,
which every sane Nigerian at the time knew was rather far-fetched. But
life and art had got so entangled that season that the publication of
the novel and Nigeria’s first military coup happened within two days of
each other.
Critics
abroad called me a prophet, but some of my countrymen saw it
differently: my novel was proof of my complicity in the first coup.
I
was very lucky that Sunday morning. The drunken soldiers, after leaving
Broadcasting House, went to a residence I had recently vacated.
Meanwhile I was able to take my wife and two small children into hiding,
from where I finally sent them to my ancestral home in eastern Nigeria.
A week or two later, unknown callers asked for me on the telephone at
my hideout. My host denied my presence. It was time then to leave Lagos.
My
feeling was one of profound disappointment. Not because mobs were
hunting down and killing in the most savage manner innocent civilians in
many parts of northern Nigeria, but because the federal government sat
by and let it happen. The final consequence of this failure of the state
to fulfil its primary obligation to its citizens was the secession of
eastern Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra. The demise of Nigeria at that
point was averted only by Britain’s spirited diplomatic and military
support of its model colony. It was Britain and the Soviet Union that
together crushed the upstart Biafran state. At the end of the 30-month
war, Biafra was a vast smouldering rubble. The cost in human lives was a
staggering two million souls, making it one of the bloodiest civil wars
in human history.
I
found it difficult to forgive Nigeria and my countrymen and women for
the political nonchalance and cruelty that unleashed upon us these
terrible events, which set us back a whole generation and robbed us of
the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-rank developed
nation in the 20th century.
My
immediate response was to leave Nigeria at the end of the war, having
honourably, I hoped, stayed around long enough to receive whatever
retribution might be due to me for renouncing Nigeria for 30 months.
Fortunately the federal government proclaimed a general amnesty, and the
only punishment I received was the general financial and emotional
indemnity that war losers pay, and some relatively minor personal
harassment. I went abroad to New England, to the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, and stayed four years and then another year at
the University of Connecticut. It was by far my longest exile from
Nigeria and it gave me time to reflect and to heal somewhat. Without
setting out consciously to do so, I was redefining my relationship to
Nigeria. I realised that I could not reject her, but neither could it be
business as usual. What was Nigeria to me?
Our
1960 national anthem, given to us as a parting gift by a British
housewife in England, had called Nigeria “our sovereign motherland”. The
current anthem, put together by a committee of Nigerian intellectuals
and actually worse than the first one, invokes the father image. But it
has occurred to me that Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father.
Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed
and incredibly wayward.
Being
a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting. I have
said somewhere that in my next reincarnation I want to be a Nigerian
again; but I have also, in a rather angry book called The Trouble with
Nigeria, dismissed Nigerian travel advertisements with the suggestion
that only a tourist with a kinky addiction to self-flagellation would
pick Nigeria for a holiday. And I mean both.
Nigeria
needs help. Nigerians have their work cut out for them – to coax this
unruly child along the path of useful creative development. We are the
parents of Nigeria, not vice versa. A generation will come, if we do our
work patiently and well – and given luck – a generation that will call
Nigeria father or mother. But not yet.
Meanwhile
our present work is not entirely without its blessing and reward. This
wayward child can show now and again great intimations of affection. I
have seen this flow towards me at certain critical moments.
When
I was in America after the Biafran war, an army officer who sat on the
council of my university in Nigeria as representative of the federal
military government pressured the university to call me back home. This
officer had fought in the field against my fellow Biafrans during the
war and had been seriously wounded. He had every right to be bitter
against people like me. I had never met him, but he knew my work and was
himself a poet.
More
recently, after a motor accident in 2001 that left me with serious
injuries, I have witnessed an outflow of affection from Nigerians at
every level. I am still dumbfounded by it. The hard words Nigeria and I
have said to each other begin to look like words of anxious love, not
hate. Nigeria is a country where nobody can wake up in the morning and
ask: what can I do now? There is work for all.
