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| Prof Wole Soyinka |
Nigerians who are old enough will surely
recall the source of the above title. For others, I ought to narrate
its origin. Fortunately, early this year, I delivered a lecture at the
University of Ibadan, where I made a passing reference to the true
owners of that copyright. Here is the relevant section:
“At the passing of a short-lived
dictator, his successor decreed two weeks of mourning, two weeks during
which the nation went into a coma.
Even the television and radio
stations closed down – nothing but martial and funereal music was
played, while churches and mosques took over the abandoned airwaves to
drown the nation in suras and canticles of lachrymose outpouring. A very
sharp group quickly formed something that was called the National
Mourners Association – clever lot! While the nation was quarantined and
bogged down in the orgy of lamentation, they were touring the world,
sponsored by government, to take the gospel of anguish to every corner
of the world that boasted a Nigerian diplomatic mission.”
Yes, that was at the death of General
Murtala Mohammed. But now, we turn to address the latest progenies of
that association, operating in a different clime and context, but
cacophonously enmeshed in variations on that ancient tune.
When that day comes that individuals
encounter hostility over their sensibilities in dealing with loss in
their own way, privately, away from public eye, with or without symbolic
public gestures, then we are witnessing the end, not simply of plain
civility, but of civilization, and the enthronement of Fascism. It is
not the intolerance and excess of a moment’s excitation, but of a
cultivated arrogance and will to imposition, one that attempts to
dictate the private responses of others to shared events. Once again we
are confronted with the Nigerian phenomenon of the egregious
appropriation of what is not on offer and thus, is not subject to
dispute. Where frustrated, these claimants reel out chapters from their
Book of Imprecations.
Let it be stated here, for the avoidance
of doubt, that I am a solid believer in the collective rites of
Farewell. I believe in Ritual. Humanity is often assisted to reconcile
with loss in a collective, and even spectacular mode. The choice to
participate or not, however, belongs to each individual, including even
those who arrogate to themselves the mission of imposing on others their
own preferred mode of bidding farewell. These self-righteous clerics
are dangerous beings, especially where they flaunt the credentials of
secular learning and gather in caucuses of presumed Humanities. From the
herd, the mindless Internet fiddlers for whom the landing of a
planetary probe, or a medical breakthrough is simply distraction from
fraudulent internet mailing, nothing less is expected. What menaces the
collective health of society is when the deserving highs of intellectual
application of the former, become indistinguishable from the loutish
low of the latter.
I do not pander to the expectations of
the sanctimonious. I can absent myself from any event, for reasons that
are personal to me. I can absent myself as the result of a mundane
domestic situation, as legitimately as from a visceral rejection of
occupancy of the same space, at the same time, in the same cause, with
certain other participants. I may absent myself for the very reason of
my disdain for that breed which is certain to cavil at the very fact of
my absence. Such specimens pollute the very space they claim to honour.
Sputter and rage they may, but even the most illustrious of that ilk
cannot control that choice, neither will they be permitted free passage
to encroach upon, and abuse the private spaces of human responsiveness.
I shall speak to them directly: your
psychological profile is commonplace. It is not the honour to Chinua
that agitates you, no, it is your own self-regarding that seeks to be
reflected in the homage to a departed colleague. It does not take a
psycho-analyst to recognize this phenomenon of greedy acquisitiveness,
even of immaterial products. Like emotional parasites, you feed off
others, but you have never learnt to value what others give, or be
thereby nourished. I recognize you, atavistic minds – was it not your
type that once disseminated an unbelievably primitive accounting for
Chinua Achebe’s motor accident? Here goes the story, for those who seek
light relief from ponderous unctuousness:
What happened was that I found myself
unable to return to Nigeria for a Colloquium in honour of Chinua’s
sixtieth birthday. My dramatic mind immediately scrambled for some
striking manner of compensation. So I telephoned a business friend who
had some agricultural connections in Delta State and told him: find the
chunkiest, spotless ram in Delta State – all white or all black, but a
thoroughbred of striking physique. Find a leather pouch, tie it to its
neck with the following message and deliver it at the venue of the
Colloquium. I no longer recall the exact dictated wording, nothing
inspirational, just the usual felicitations and injunctions to turn that
ram into asun for general feasting.
Those who attended the event will recall
the grand entry of the gift – as reported by one and all, including the
foreign visitors, and Chinua’s reported reaction, seated on the podium.
He shook head and said, “Typical of Wole”. The ram was then led off to
meet its destiny at the hands of the gathered. (As a side note, it was I
who took a gift away from his seventieth at Bard University – a
sobering flash of time past that resulted in my ELEGY FOR A NATION. I
had that poem re-published to mark the day of his funeral.)
Our story is only beginning. On the way
back from that celebration, Chinua had his accident and was flown to the
United Kingdom. At the first opportunity, I made my way there and
called up the High Commissioner, Dove-Edwin, who was certain to know the
hospital location. It turned out that he also planned a visit that
afternoon, and he agreed to give me a ride. We waited – I was joined by
two others – waited, and waited, then a phone call came from him that
the visit had been called off. The High Commissioner would explain why,
on arrival – over a promised dinner, as compensation.
That explanation was this: Dove-Edwin
had received communication that some of “Chinua’s people” – a university
professor among them, who was named – had pronounced publicly that
“Chinua should have known better than to accept a spotless ram from his
enemy” – yes, that was the word used – “enemy”. I verified this report
from various other sources. Later, an alternative diagnosis surfaced:
“Chinua had been too long away from the chieftaincy politics of his
hometown, otherwise he would have realized that the title that he took
was coveted by some others – and these were deeply steeped in
traditional psychic combat”. In short, those rivals “did him in”. Both
diagnoses competed for dominance for a while, petering out eventually.
Before the promotion of that alternative
cause-and-effect however, Dove-Edwin had re-scheduled, and we had a
most bracing, optimistic afternoon with Chinua. Yes, our patient was
eventually told the cause of the earlier postponement, and he had a good
laugh. On my return to Nigeria, I could not wait to take the
opportunity of a public lecture to invite all desperate enemies to
please send me their rams of choice – spotless, spotted, piebald,
striped or nondescript – so I could treat starving writers to free meals
in my home for the rest of the year. And I promised to taste a piece of
each ram before serving.
Yes, it is that same breed that
continues to sow poison in the minds of the susceptible. Alas for you,
it so happens that some of us insist on our own way of commemorating, of
being there, even when absent. You, by contrast were never there,
however ostentatiously you position yourselves at the event, or at
vicarious gatherings to denounce, attribute sinister motivations, and
inseminate hate against those whom your pedestrian vision cannot see.
Your very loudness proclaims your absence. You were always absent. You
will always be absent. So, this communication is not really meant for
you but for those potential almajiri – whose minds you corrupt daily
with your jeremiads in that accomodating madrassa known as Internet. As a
teacher, I lament your failure to use the opportunity of the passing of
a revered writer to turn your younger generation in enlightened
directions. You have chosen instead to coarsen their sensibilities and
breed in their minds misunderstanding, suspicion and above all – hate!
You will have understood by now how I
have come to view you as no different from the homicidal clerics who arm
youths with kerosene and match, cudgel and knife, a few Naira in their
beggars’ bowls, and dispatch them to set fire to structures of comradely
cohabitation, of reflection, of mind enlargement, and destroy
communities of learning. Your gospel of separatism goes beyond the
geographical – in which I have not the slightest interest! – but the
humanistic. The difference is in the weapon – in your case, poison,
mind corrosion. The means – Internet, and its wide open,
undiscriminating generosity. That is where you lay spores of poison, and
doom future generations to a confinement of human relationships within
the darkest corners of the mind.
You are beyond pity. Kindly absent your selves from my funeral, when that event finally intrudes.
Wole SOYINKA
Wole SOYINKA
- Saharareporters
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