Jeyifo's Truthful Lie

By Biko Agozino

Many congratulations to Comrade Biodun Jeyifo on his very well-deserved Honorary D.Lit award from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. I liked the way he dedicated the award to the Talakawa or the masses (to whom he often dedicates his newspaper columns) and I applaud his promise of restitution to the suffering masses of Nigeria in his opening paragraph of the award-acceptance lecture. He highlighted the various crises facing universities in the country from the higher administration to the faculty union and to the students' union governments that appeared delegitimized. This may be a taste of interventions to come from the recently retired Harvard University Professor.

I took the prompt from his acceptance lecture to go and read again the acceptance lecture for the first such D.Lit by the great Ife, awarded to Chinua Achebe. I wished that Ife had not politicized a similar award to Soyinka two years after Achebe's award, forcing him to withdraw his name from consideration (to which the ignorant administrators said, good riddance, according to Jeyifo) just before Soyinka won the Nobel Prize and they went begging him to accept but he gave them waka shege, the Nigerian equivalent of the middle finger salute that is shown with all five fingers spread apart and thrust in the face of the target. I would have loved to read Soyinka's acceptance speech too.

 The Truth of Fiction by Achebe  is considered by Jeyifo to be the best essay by Achebe and it makes the speech of Jeyifo appear dumbed down in scholarly quality by contrast. The scholarly quality apart, Achebe was not really talking about Truth and Falsehood but about 'good and evil'. He spoke in a university that was renamed after a genocidist intellectual (three years after Achebe's lecture there) who, the year before Achebe gave his lecture,  publicly defended his wartime assertion that 'starvation is a legitimate weapon of war'. A journalist, Mr. Oparadike, had asked Awolowo during his 1983 Presidential campaign town hall press conference if he was prepared to address the concerns of those who felt aggrieved by the policy statement 13 years after the end of the war when the gruesomeness of the genocide was no longer in doubt? Awo said that he still stood by his statement and that he was indifferent to those who disagreed with him. Achebe was wondering how intelligent human beings could stoop to such a low level of morality in defense of evil and yet hardly any voice spoke up from the University of Ife in heroic defiance during and long after the genocide? 

That was what Achebe was addressing in his speech in which he also cited the epidemiological theory of a former minister for health in the Western Region who crossed over to AG from NCNC and went on to spear-head the foundation of the University of Ife. Dr. Sanya Onabamiro had written a book in which he had argued that the epidemics of childhood mortality was due to germs, parasites, and malnutrition and not due to witches. Opposed to him, Awo had published an essay in 1939 in which he claimed that Africans use juju as a science to kill one another by saying their names from a distance. This was apparently a rebuttal of Azikiwe who had called for the scientific method to be adopted by Africans in his 1937 Renascent Africa. Achebe sided with Zik in his lecture and dismissed claims by crazy preachers that the devil was to blame for man-made disasters such as genocide and childhood malnutrition. Jeyifo also indirectly sided with Azikiwe (without citing Zik and Awo) in his essays on 'How I survived Ebola' in which he rebuked STEM Professors for insisting on spiritual exorcism before they could occupy an official residence vacated by a colleague suspected of practicing occultism in the 21st century. A genocidist Nigerian army general, Obasanjo, also sided with Awo by calling on Africans to fight apartheid with juju.

It is strange that Jeyifo tried to equate the theoretical essay by Achebe with the claim of his friend, Professor Isola - alias the only honest man in the world - that his transfer from University of Lagos to University of Ife was motivated by the desire to join his friends in Ife and yet the friends were not yet at Ife by the time Isola went there. This mix-up of the dates in the mind of an old retired professor should not have been described as falsehood by Jeyifo. Perhaps Isola, the honest man, forgot the sequence of the events but he may have negotiated with the University of Ife that the condition for him to transfer was that they also try and lure his friends to Ife. Perhaps he was too modest to claim that he was the one who attracted his friends to Ife but such team-building is not unknown in academia. 

True or false, the memory of the Honest Man is not at the same level of the evil 'malignant fiction' that Achebe contrasted with the 'beneficent fiction' that tries to make the world better by imagining the sufferings of others instead of hanging on to the falsehood that men are better than women, that one race, class or caste is better than others, or that some speakers of a certain language are the source of all the troubles in the land, or that the Palmwine Drinkerd drank 150 kegs of palm wine every morning and 75 more kegs every evening to help him cope with the land of the ghosts. Some fictions like the square-root of minus one remain powerful in Mathematics despite being fictional, Achebe said. Perhaps he was suggesting that Nigerians should use the fiction of the Palmwine Drinkerd to try and curb alcoholism as a disease that kills many instead of celebrating it as a sign of macho manliness similar to the abuse of power by those who are power-drunk and who showed no compassion for the suffering of their fellow human beings while being applauded by what Soyinka metaphorized as the leftwing and the rightwing of the Cockroach.

Achebe concluded his lecture just as he started. Although he started by citing Picasso on the view that all art is false, he went on to state the fact that the painting of the civil war scene, Gurnica, by Picasso was banned by the fascist Franco dictatorship in Spain. Similarly, Achebe's novel, A Man of the People was published two days after the January 1966 coup and just because the novel ended with a coup, some people suspected that Achebe must have been among the coup plotters. Achebe turned the table on a university teacher who questioned him in 1974 by asking if he was in on the coup? Achebe asked the teacher if he had read the novel? He gave a vague answer. Achebe asked him if he also thought that the novelist planned all the corruption and violence that accompanied Opertation Wetie that took place in the novel, did the novelist also plan the counter-coup that was narrated in the novel? He said that it was excusable for soldiers (who could say that they did not have time to read novels) to go after him to seek to arrest him after the counter-coup but it was unacceptable for a professor to display the same ignorance about the truth of fiction.

Jeyifo, a Marxist theorist of the people and for the people, appears to have trivialized the enormity of the classic essay by Achebe by invoking the Afro-Cuban mythology of the mutual beheading of Truth and Falsehood in a fight and the adoption of the head of Falsehood by the body of Truth. The Cubans may just be referring to the historical materialist thesis that it is being that determines consciousness, and not consciousness that determines being. Such a statement does not come close to the eye-witness testimony against genocide by Achebe. It is sad that Jeyifo has consistently denied the genocide against the Igbo that Achebe was condemning by repeatedly and consistently describing it as 'alleged attempted genocide' in his serialized review of There Was A Country by Achebe. 

Hopefully, the call for restitution by Jeyifo in his opening paragraph would be extended to the 3.1 million mostly Igbo who were killed in Biafra without apology and without reparative justice. Let us hope that Jeyifo will spend his retirement advocating for the masses who were subjected to genocide in Biafra instead of equating their suffering with mythology. Even if mythology is a safe falsehood with which to indict genocidal regimes, the examples of Jeyifo's friends, Ola Rotimi (who published The Gods Are Not To Blame at the height of the genocide against the Igbo in 1968) and Soyinka who reflected on that genocide in 1975 (Death and the King's Horseman) should encourage Comrade BJ to abandon his long held genocide denialism and add his voice to those calling for justice. He has nothing to lose by examining what his comrade, Edwin Madunagu, has repeatedly denounced as the crass opportunism of the left during and after the Nigeria-Biafra war.