Achebe Critiqued Okonkwo

By Biko Agozino

The interview of Achebe by Soyinka and Nkosi in 1964 goes to show why written reviews and the sort of interviews that James Eze did for The Sun should be accompanied with video documentaries for the archives. I work with video a little and I have won an award in this genre to my credit but we should do more. In this interview, Achebe critiqued the 'aggressive' masculinity of Okonkwo as representing the 'weakness' of an 'unbending' society.

I have always suspected that Achebe identified with Unoka, his fellow artist, more than with Okonkwo, the brute. Very reassuring to hear it from his mouth and see him dressed as a Hausa talakawa or onye nkiti, commoner, for the role. Okey Ndibe once wondered why Achebe presented his fellow poet, Unoka, in such poor lights but it is not the fault of Achebe that we live in a capitalist world where money talks and some talented artists tend to starve to death:

"I visited Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, the one who is responsible for introducing the word “agbala” in Cameroon. Due to him many secondary school children who were not macho enough ended up with the nickname “agbala” which means woman, and, it was a derogatory word for a man in Umuofia who had not taken any titles which was the case with Unoka. If some students did not get “agbala”, they got another name “efulefu” meaning worthless person, another word introduced in the Cameroon language arena from Things fall Apart", reflected Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang, while waiting to interview Achebe on the 50th anniversary of the novel.

This is not a diss against Unoka but a critique of Okonkwo who boasted of his many farms but allowed his single-parent father that raised him to be a strong champion wrestler to die of kwashiokor or malnutrition. It is an indictment against the society for which Unoka performed without charging a fee but they still had the bold face to go and hassle him for little loans whereas he had written on the wall, the bigger debts that his society owed him for his performances. 

When Okonkwo went to the Oracle of the Hill to divine why he was having a hard luck in life, he was told that it was the spirit of his father that was angry because he was yet to sacrifice a goat to him. The Efulefu that he was, Okonkwo did not chew on the proverb carefully but disdainfully asked the Oracle if his father left him a chicken when he was alive, how come he was demanding a goat? Okonkwo ended up dying like an ojugo chicken and was buried like the carcass of a dog because the fly without advisers follows the corpse into the grave.

Here Achebe said that despite the cruelty in colonized Igboland, there were also beauty and arts to be appreciated. Jimanze Ego-Alowes recently announced that Okonkwo was Achebe's alter ego but the honor goes to Unoka, the intellectual. He also tried to revive the allegation that Achebe got the story of Arrow Of God from Mr Nnolim just because the characters in the novel are similar to the characters in Nnolim's pamphlet. That is understandable because the story of Arrow of God is a historical event and Achebe admitted that Mr Nnolim was one of those he interviewed while researching the novel.

In the Arrow of God published the year of the interview, the year of the Civil Rights Act in the US, Achebe again chose to resolve colonialist conflict non-violently through the dialogues led by Ezulu against the historicism of Obierika who warned against confrontation with the white men. Instead of rushing into war with a machete in hand to chop off the head of the African messengers of the invading white men the way Okonkwo did, Ezulu went on a hunger strike as a decolonization strategy. Instead of overthrowing him in a bloody coup and installing a new priest who was ready to eat the sacred yam and declare the new yam festival to enable them to start harvesting their yam, the people of Umuaro simply converted to Christianity and started harvesting their yam in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Yet, Achebe called Okonkwo 'my hero' in the interview for he remained a tragic hero who had lost touch with his people following his alienation in exile in Mbanta, according to Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe. 

Today, African rulers idealize the genocidal masculinity of those that Ali Mazrui lionized as carrying on the 'warrior tradition'. Rather than admire the philosophical Igbo who prefer eating words with the palm oil of proverbs and instead of honoring hero-poets like Chris Okigbo, Mazrui tried the spirit of Okigbo and convicted him in the land of the ancestors after death for the crime of abandoning poetry to take up arms in defense of his people who were threatened with genocide. Unknown to Mazrui was the fact that Okigbo actually saw his participation in the resistance to genocide as a participant-observation methodology through which to gather new materials for his writing being the scholar-activist that he was (recounted by the literary theorist, Ben Obumselu, in an interview with James Eze; though Okigbo may have used that camouflage to avoid being dissuaded from going to the war front by his fellow intellectuals). 

The neocolonial genocidal states imposed on Africa by European colonizers are still in the business of killing Africans en-masse but that should not be called the warrior tradition of Mazrui, it is the genocidist tradition that started with the genocide against 3.1 million Igbo, the foundational genocide of postcolonial Africa orchestrated by the colonizers, as identified by Achebe in There was a Country and in Biafra Revisited by Ekwe-Ekwe and against which the Igbo mounted a heroic resistance just as they did to colonial conquest (Ekumeku War), indirect colonial rule (Ogu Umunwayi), resistance against wage theft (Enugu Colliery massacre), and the ongoing non-violent demand for a referendum on the restoration of Biafra by Igbo youth. Prior to colonization, the neighbors of the Igbo never committed genocide against the Igbo with the aid of such African 'tribes' as Shell BP, The British government led by the left-wing Labour Party, and by the Soviet Union, Walter Rodney observed.

By the way, the interpretation of Ikenga, by Achebe in the interview with Soyinka and Nkosi, as representing male virility is a mistaken patriarchal attempt to monopolize power. Every Igbo person is born with both aka Ikenga, right hand, or aka nri (food hand) and aka ekpe, left hand, or aka nshi (shit hand). The fact that both males and females hold the hoe with aka ikenga leading and aka ekpe following suggests that Ikenga is not exclusively male but that men fashioned an art object, Ikenga, to represent the essence of male dominance. It is only a simulacrum, signifier or sign signifying the referent or signified male authority. 

It does not follow that women lacked authority since Things Fall Apart emphasized the enormous influence of Mbanta, the mother's kindred, where Okonkwo, the child-killer and wife-beater, was schooled by the mother's brother that mother is supreme, Nneka. Moreover, the power of the female deities, Ani or earth mother and Agbala the Oracle of the Hills signifies that there could never be male power and authority without female power and authority among the radically democratic Igbo who say that when one thing stands, another thing stands beside it. 

In other words, the Igbo take it for granted that both men and woman are equally blessed with aka Ikenga even though some Ikenga pass others for strength just as the male hoe (for tilling) tended to be bigger than the female hoe (for weeding). The fact that Africans were forced into colonialism with machetes and hoes as farming implements and have continued to rely on these ancient tools for farming 60 years after the restoration of lumpen independence is part of the evidence indicating How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, according to Walter Rodney.

Brotherphobia is not Xenophobia

By Biko Agozino

Brotherphobia or sisterphobia is an ancient problem that should not be confused with xenophobia. Europeans attacked and killed fellow Europeans for centuries over who should get the lion's share of the colonization of Africa. The Semitic people are still at each other's throats even though they all claim to be the children of Abraham. Nigerians have been slaughtering fellow Nigerians like rams since the genocidal war orchestrated by the British against the Igbo for no other reason than that they speak what South Africans would call an incomprehensible kwerekwere language, probably a corruption of 'Igbo Kwenu!' For such excuses as they steal our jobs and take our women or they sell drugs and commit crimes, black South Africans loot the poor shops of fellow Africans and lynch their fellow Africans, inciting revenge attacks against multinational South African businesses in other African states. 

South Africans have been massacring one another in the struggle over crumbs from the table of apartheid colonizers since the reign of Shaka Zulu and especially during the confrontations between Inkhatha and ANC supporters. White farmers are fleeing in large numbers as they are targeted by those from whom they stole the land. Tanzanians and Swazis have been butchering each other to make money medicine or 'muti' just as Nigerians have been doing juju for get rich quick and some try to intimidate others especially when cattle is used as a modern 'colonization' scheme backed with weapons and charms of all sorts by people who claim to worship the same God. Somalis and Rwandans are still at it just like Sudanese, Egyptians, Libyans and Algerians as a result of the imposition of the genocidal state on neocolonial Africa by Europe. Africans trying to escape the quagmire are allowed to drown in their thousands in the Aegean sea.

The solution is Pan Africanism and the erasure of the borders that colonialism imposed on Africans. South Africa and Nigeria could follow the lead of Ghana and Ethiopia and invite the African Diaspora to return and be given dual Africana citizenship. With the coming of the African passport and the policy of free trade and open borders, Africans can travel where they choose and settle, marry, study, work, trade or run for office in any part of Africa just as the Americans do in the US. The African states recalling their ambassadors from South Africa should realize that US states do not have ambassadors in other states but are all represented outside the US by the Department of State. The US should extend this democratic experiment to the whole of the Americas who want to join the United States of the Americas instead of kidding around about buying Greenland.

Intellectuals and activists can help by thinking beyond their national consciousness as Fanon urged and realize that the people have voted with their feet in utter disregard for the artificial lines that colonizers drew on the sand to divide and weaken Africans as Azikiwe observed in his London 1962 speech on Pan Africanism.

The government has a role to play here by going beyond job creation towards the funding of cooperatives that would train Africans from wherever and grant them funding to start enterprises in partnership with fellow Africans. The Igbo have perfected this though their individual efforts in apprenticeship but with huge grants from the governments across Africa, there would be annual enterpreneurship grants to support emerging apprentices to set up their own shops in partnership with others to create wealth across Africa as Biko Agozino and Ike Anyanike argued in their influential paper, 'Imu Ahia: Traditional Igbo Business School'.

Achille Mbembe has a proposal on a borderless world but sees it as a utopia to be recovered. It was actually the indigenous map of the world and not a utopia. The world existed without borders when Africans discovered all other continents and populated them millions of years ago without passports and visas and with asylum for all who ask for one. One Peoples Republic of Africa or United Republic of African States for all Africans at home and abroad! Forward Ever! Organize, Do Not Agonize!