For Oga BJ in Admiration

On A Soyinka Prize In ‘Illiteracy’, By Biko Agozino

by Premium Times  July 14, 2018 Reading Time: 11 mins read

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I will admit to a ‘strategic misreading’ that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial.

On July 13, 2018, the 84th birthday of Olumo Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, I honoured him by revisiting a debate that is raging on the internet over what many call my misreading of his work, especially with reference to my interpretation of his play, Death and King’s Horseman. Literary experts have been marveling about the ‘Author’s Note’ that accompanies Death and the King’s Horseman. Most playwrights leave it to the directors and producers of their play to interpret it as they wish but Soyinka was worried that most experts would misread the play. He took the unusual authoritarian step of stipulating how the play should be interpreted but the critics appear not to notice and have continued to misread the play, in my own humble opinion. Soyinka leaves clues that would guide readers to decode his original intention in writing the play but most literary critics miss the point and some accuse me of being the mis-reader.

The very first sentence in the Author’s Note may have led many critics astray by stating that the play is based on real historical “events which took place in Oyo”, which the author defines as “an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria”. This is misleading in a number of ways that literary critics should have been able to understand. To say that the events took place in 1946 would be to localise the time and space of the dramatic events, whereas in the world of theatre, events do not take place exclusively in the setting but also on every stage where the play is produced. Soyinka expected that literary theorists would understand that the playscript is not simply an archival document or ethnographic report but the work of original creation, even when based on real events. The play was not expected to be read as the verbatim report of a tragic case that took place once upon a time. This is true of all works of creative writing that are supposed to be inventive, no matter how much resemblance there may be between fiction and reality. In fact, many writers include a disclaimer that any resemblances to real events are unintentional. As a matter of fact, the same can be said about reality genres that are full of inventions too. Soyinka clearly states in the first paragraph of his Author’s Note that he made “changes” in the narrative “in matters of detail, sequence and of course characterisation.”

He also informs the illiterate critics that he deliberately set the play back a few years “while the war was still on, for minor reasons of dramaturgy.” Here, Soyinka is guiding the would-be producer away from a simplistic historical interpretation of the play as being only relevant to the case of 1946, given that dramaturgy grants artistic license that defies the laws of historical specificity. In addition, Soyinka may have misled the interpreters of the play by saying that Oyo was an “ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria.” Here he could be challenged by historians who may point out that Oyo was an ancient Yoruba Empire and not simply a city and that by 1946, it was no longer simply a Yoruba city but a multicultural one. Moreover, nothing ‘of Nigeria’ can be said to be ancient because Nigeria itself is a modernist invention by colonisers. The hint about the Nigerian setting of the play should have encouraged the critics to understand that the play is not only about a Yoruba tragedy but about a Nigerian tragedy. The reference to “while the war was still on” should have massaged the memory of the critics to remind them that the play was published only five years after a tragic genocidal war in Nigeria in which Yoruba elites played a leading aggressive role, along with other ethnic elites in Nigeria. This play, in my lay opinion, is better understood as part of the soul-searching by Soyinka after he was released from solitary confinement for opposing the genocidal war against the Igbo. Why were highly educated Yoruba leaders the ones who cheered on the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra?

Also, Soyinka indicates that those who were interested only in the factual account of the case of 1946 should go and read it in the British National Archives in Kew. He also points out that those who want to read a more exact historical reenactment of the case should consult the “fine play in Yoruba (Oba Waja) by Duro Ladipo.” In other words, Death and the King’s Horseman is not that kind of historical re-enactment nor is it the kind of ‘misbegotten’ German television film about the case. The play was a more urgent intervention while Soyinka was in exile following the end of the war and his release from solitary confinement for having the audacity to oppose tyranny. Unlike his other plays, he did not wait for the play to be produced before he published it. I believe that Soyinka was directly and indirectly challenging his fellow Nigerian intellectuals to account for their opportunism in supporting a genocidal war that took 3.1 million lives in 30 months.

I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, “Season of Anomy”, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide.

In the third paragraph of the author’s note, Soyinka declares that the “bane of themes of this genre” is that once the text appears, ‘they acquire the facile tag of “clash of cultures”’. He rejected such a label as “prejudicial” in the sense that it is prone to “frequent misapplication” and also because the label “presupposes a potential equality in every given situation between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised ‘on the actual soil of the latter’”. Soyinka went on to award “the overseas prize in illiteracy and mental conditioning” to the writer of the blurb of the American edition of his novel, Season of Anomy, for ‘unblushingly’ stating that the novel is about the “clash between old values and new ways, between western methods and African traditions”. Soyinka explains that it is due to “this kind of perverse mentality” that he was forced to warn future producers (and critics) of the play to avoid “a sadly familiar reductionist tendency” and instead attempt to capture “the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence.” Experts on the work of Soyinka are baffled by this injunction and wonder openly what he was banging on about? What is Soyinka trying to hide, asked Anthony Kwame Appiah? He was trying to reveal something, in my own opinion.

To repeat, I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, Season of Anomy, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide. In that novel, he mocked the archeologists for poking around in search of fossilised bones while fresh blood flowed like river Niger in the country and they did not seem to be bothered. He also challenged the sociologists who came with ‘erudite irrelevances’ about marriage and divorce but refused to join him in opposing a genocidal war. The novel depicts the Marxists who were locked up in a mental asylum as a phrase-monger who failed to recognise the revolutionary situation in the country and instead rallied in support of the genocidal military dictatorship, rather than turn the civil war into a liberation war. To suggest that the novel was about the clash of cultures was a strategy to condition the mentality of Nigerian intellectuals towards the acceptance of the propaganda that the Igbo who led the struggle for decolonisation were primitive tribalists, perhaps because they had no chiefs, while the ethnic groups that ganged up against them were more civilized because they were monarchical, according to the ideologues of colonial domination, such as the Oxford colonial anthropologist, Margery Perham, who advised the military dictators to impose chiefs on the radically democratic Igbo in order to control them better. Walter Rodney also observed that to call the genocide against the Igbo a tribal war would be to call Shell BP an African tribe (along with the Labour Party government of the UK and the Soviet Union that generously supplied the weapons of mass destruction). Ikenna Nzimiro argued that the Marxists in Biafra were engaged in class struggles while the Marxist in Nigeria were engaged in national defencism. 

The ‘threnodic essence’ of the play refers to funeral songs in Greek tragedies and I believe that Soyinka was inviting the producers of the play to imagine a national mourning for the 3.1 million killed in Biafra that the country has refused to mourn. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo had been calling for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be recognised by the Nigerian government as part of the atonement.

In the final paragraph of the Author’s Note, Soyinka observes that an alternative structuralist interpretation of the play is to see it as a cruel joke on the British colonial District Officer. He quickly dismisses such a reading as distasteful and adds that he deliberately avoided writing dialogue or scenes that would support such a misinterpretation. He dictates that “No attempt should be made in production to suggest it’. This sounds like an angry response to critics who choose to misread his works for ideological reasons while ignoring the concrete conditions that his works address. 

A prominent Marxist literary theorist that I admire, Biodun Jeyifo, who is an expert on the work of Soyinka, was invited by the BBC to write about any work of literature that he saw as being representative of global culture. He chose to write beautifully about Death and the King’s Horseman as an anti-colonial play that tries to subvert the use of the Queen’s English by creating a ‘future’ tradition of the Anglophone that is more figurative than the English language. He invoked the work of Marxist Cultural Studies by Raymond Williams (but without mentioning the more relevant anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist work by Stuart Hall) to suggest that the other Englishes around the world serve to subvert the domination of the world by standard English. 

I pointed out that Jeyifo's interpretation is too superficial for a Marxist because the ‘thredonic essence’ of the play is not to show that Africans can speak English better than the English. I suggested that a Cultural Studies reading of the play would not have focused exclusively on the beautiful writing or language of the play but would have tried to see the challenge to monarchism and oppressive traditions in the play. Jeyifo told me privately that I should go and read the play again because it is not against the monarchy or against ritual suicide but simply against the colonial domination of African cultures. Moreover, the melodrama about the coveting of the virgin bride of another man as a right in Esin Oba's rites of passage to ritual suicide appears to be the ridiculing by Soyinka of the rapaciousness of the genoicidist troops that forcibly took underage girls and the wives of other men and claimed them as 'wives', as Achebe recounted in There Was A Country, and as Boko Haram continues to do. I admitted that I could be accused of misreading the play but I called it a strategic misreading and wondered if it is possible for an expert on the work of Soyinka to misread it? Soyinka seems to think so and that is the whole point of his detailed telling off of the experts in his Author’s Note.

I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Contrary to the claim that Death and the King’s Horseman is only an anti-colonial play, Soyinka concludes his Author’s Note by stating that “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely.” To him, the central ‘confrontation’ or conflict that he tried to resolve in the play was ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it played out in the world of “the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passages which links all: transition.” Soyinka was puzzling about the metaphysics of the Yoruba worldview that made it possible for the best educated characters in the play to be the ones who cheered most vociferously for Elesin to abide by the tradition that expected him to kill himself in honour of a dead king. Similarly, Soyinka was wondering why the best educated Yoruba were the cheer-leaders of the genocide against the Igbo. 

Soyinka advised producers to try and capture this tragedy by using music to represent the macabre dance to the “music from the abyss” by the intellectuals who danced while millions were being slaughtered in Biafra. In his Talakawa column, Jeyifo once wrote that while blood was flowing in Biafra, (1967-1970) he led his secret Pyrates fraternity, that Soyinka founded as a student at the University of Ibadan, in chanting, 'Give us this day, give us this day, our daily manya' (wine in Igbo). Were the elites drunk on power during the genocide? The play symbolizes this with the 'Not I bird' and the hunter who consumed many gallons of manya before trying to kill the innocent Not I bird.

I am not an expert in dramaturgy but I love the work of Soyinka. I cited his essay on Neo-Tarzanism in my criticism of the film, Black Panther, which I called an example of neo-Tarzanism. Following the serialisation of the criticism, I was invited by Assumpta Oturu to the KPFK public radio in Los Angeles to discuss the film with an Ethiopian publisher and an African American director of the Pan African Film Festival. During the discussion, the Ethiopian said that we should not condemn the presence of monarchies in Africa because there were popular emperors such as Mansa Musa and Haile Selessie who were admired by Africans and by the African diaspora. The director of the Pan African Film Festival questioned my reference to Soyinka because he saw Death and the King’s Horseman as an indication that Soyinka was a monarchist who supported even the tradition that the horseman should commit suicide to honour the dead king. 

As Killmonger asked derisively in the film, I asked, “This is your king?” Why must African brothers be expected to fight to the death to determine who should be the next king when we can just hold elections to select our leaders with term limits? I stated that Soyinka used that play and almost every play of his to undermine the institution of the monarchy and call for democracy, which he is on record as admiring in Igbo culture. He tried to spare the life of the horseman in the play and his other tragedies – Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, King Babu; his novels, his poetry and his memoirs all support my interpretation of his anti-monarchical orientation. Since the experts who have studied his work have focused almost exclusively on the structuralism, I propose to offer a post-structuralist or deconstruction radicalisation of his body of work to show that the tragedy of state violence, especially against the Igbo, is at the centre of the conflicts that he has been trying to resolve. Just as the genocidal war was waged without a cease fire for humanitarian interventions, the author coincidentally instructs on page 8 of Death and the King’s Horseman that ‘The play should run without an interval.’

I agree with critics who will charge that I am misreading Soyinka here. If so, I will admit to a strategic misreading that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial. Sociologists approach the work of writers by taking into consideration, the context of the private and the public lives of the authors, whereas literary theorists may concentrate exclusively on the technical, language, or structural aspects of the script as instructed by T.S. Eliot in his foundational essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. 

To reiterate, what I am offering is a sociology of literary interpretation of Soyinka and I am certain that the rebel in him may force him to disagree with my interpretation and award me a national illiteracy prize. I am not contending that all existing interpretations of Soyinka are wrong. I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Biko Agozino is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences in Virginia Tech, USA.

Originally published in massliteracy.blogspot.com. Republished as a tribute on the passing of Biodun Jeyifo at the age of 80 years.

Life and Times of Chinua Achebe

By Biko Agozino 

 I was privileged to preview this new book released by the Toyin Falola ‘Global Africa’ Series with Routledge. Dr. Kalu Ogbaa’s book will be an eye-opener even for established scholars who may not have had the author's long history of association with the great Achebe. 

Early on, as an undergraduate student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he canvassed for Achebe to be appointed as a Professor in English rather than be ghettoized as a researcher in African Studies just because he did not have a doctoral degree in English even while his books were being used to teach students in English. Kalu Ogbaa went on to complete his doctoral dissertation on Achebe at the University of Texas, Austin, and his ground-breaking dissertation yielded multiple influential publications. 

He is exceptionally qualified to write about his friend, Achebe, and thereby enlighten scholars and the general public about lessons that we can learn from Achebe’s leadership and scholar-activism while correcting the misconceptions about his works. This new book is a tour de force on the life, times and works of Chinua Achebe. 

Dr. Ogbaa has delivered a work that is rich in what C.W. Mills termed The Sociological Imagination by tying the biography of the famous author and his influential works to the major public issues of his troubled times. Mills predicted that the obsession with abstract grand theory and disjointed empiricism by sociologists was likely to result in the best sociologists being journalists. 

That prediction was indirectly echoed by Achebe in his last book, There Was a Country, in which he flung an njakiri (or played the dozens) by reminding possible critics that he did not claim to be a sociologist, political scientist, human rights lawyer, or government official and that all he was offering was his modest personal history of Biafra. 

This is a joke on the social scientists and lawyers in Nigeria who went through a major genocidal war that claimed 3.1 million people in 30 months but never found the courage or the will to research such a huge disaster and abandoned the task to soldiers and creative writers. 

 The rare exceptions include Ikenna Nzimiro’s sociological thesis stating that the war involved class conflict and not just ethnic sentiments (as Walter Rodney also observed in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa). The political theory of the imposed neocolonial ‘genocidist state’ by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and the historical texts of Arthur Nwankwo on the lessons to be learned from Biafra by a Nigeria that was doomed were among the exceptions that were not doctoral dissertations or edited volumes of essays. 

 Having interviewed Achebe extensively when he was alive, Dr. Ogbaa has the benefit of understanding Achebe’s leadership philosophy, personality and moral character better than those who only knew him from his literary and political works or from secondary interpretations that may be flawed. 

 I recommend this book without spoilers to all levels of readers because it is written in accessible language and promises to reveal many little-known details of the times, life and works of Chinua Achebe. 

Ask your libraries to order copies if you cannot afford a copy and invite Dr. Ogbaa to bring his book tour by Zoom or in person to your campus or community to engage your students, colleagues, and community members with his inspiring work.

My Great-Grand Father Fought for Justice

By Biko Agozino

 

Senior colleagues in Africana Studies have been asking me to explain if it is true that Africans sold their own people during the Trans Atlantic slavery as alleged by Henry Louis Gates in his BBC series, Wonders of the African World. This renewed interest follows the historical fiction by a Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani, who published a story in New Yorker, ‘My Great-Grandfather - the Nigerian Slave Trader’ and another on the BBC website, ‘My Nigerian Great-Grand Father Sold Slaves’. The BBC presented her as a ‘journalist’ to legitimize her invented stories but she is better known as a novelist who makes things up. I blogged a response to her New Yorker article but I was told off for going soft on her supposedly because she is a fellow Igbo. Here is my slightly tougher but hopefully shorter response to her imaginary BBC story:

 

For full disclosure, Adaobi advertised on her own website that while growing up in the 1980s, she had the strange saboteur dream of becoming a CIA or KGB agent presumably to work against the interests of Africa. She may still be looking for such jobs by writing eagerly like a character witness for European enslavers of Africans against the pending legal writ for reparative justice by people of African descent. First of all, she keeps calling her notorious great-grandfather a famous Nigerian but he pre-existed the invention of Nigeria by the British. Secondly, Africans were not slaves but kidnapped people being trafficked. She is not a historian, so I will not go hard on her.

 

Adaobi correctly translated the Igbo word, ohu, as slave but being neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist nor a historian, she did not know that the context and contents of igba ohu or slavery in ancient Africa were nothing like chattel slavery. As a matter of fact, there was no slave mode of production in Africa, said Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. That was why Amanyanabo Jo Jo Ubani, King Jaja, could rise to be King of Opobo and Joseph became Prime Minister in Kemet. They were servants or odibo and not slaves or ohu.

 

Adaobi may also be right that some cruel families like hers insisted on burying their dead patriarchs with living human beings but that was never part of Igbo culture. During the World Court case over the disputed Bakassi peninsula that was allegedly ceded to Cameroon earlier by Nigeria to blockade and starve the Igbo in Biafra, a Calabar ruler, Obong of Calabar, was a witness for Nigeria around the year 2005. He told the court that there was a similarity in the culture of the Efik of Nigeria and the Bakassi of Cameroon who were one people, in his view, because they buried their King or Obong with four human heads. Nigeria promptly lost the dispute to Cameroon who may have rebutted that such barbarity was not allowed in Cameroon. Neither is it part of the radically democratic Igbo culture where all heads are equal and the Igbo say that they know no king!

 

I responded in detail when Adaobi displayed ignorance about Igbo language and mistranslated her family name in an earlier version of her historical fiction for the New Yorker. The proverbs that she mistranslated for the BBC would say servants or odibo and not ohu, when referring to the ability of servants to learn from the instruction of sons by fathers. The Igbo may say that a man who owns no servant owns himself since inwe onwe is self-ownership or freedom. Yes, the word slave means ohu in Igbo but the Efik still call civil servants the white man's slave or ntop mbakara while the Igbo call them those who do the white man’s work or ndi olu bekee. Even when the word ohu is used to warn children about slave-traders, everybody knows that Europeans warn their children that there is a monster or bogeyman under every bed ready to devour naughty children but it is the pervert uncles, priests, and parents that the children should beware.

 

If Adaobi’s great-grand father was a slave trader, then he was obviously a lumpen scum bag who must have been shunned by the masses that resisted the kidnappers whom she said that her great-grand father hired to go and kidnap people from distant places for sale by him. That may have been why the colonizers made him their paramount chief and tax collector, a deplorable role that led Igbo women to declare war against colonialism in 1929 and force the abolition of Warrant Chiefs among the Igbo who still believe that all heads are equal and boast that the Igbo know no king.

 

Notice that Adaobi ignorantly reported that her great-grand father did not appear to have an extended family, friends, age-grade members, in-laws, or community supporters that rallied around him when his possessions, including ten wives and slaves, were seized by the colonizers who only returned them when he showed the certificate issued to him as a trader by the Royal Niger Company. He was surely a sad lonely figure in a society that valued people more than wealth and still name their children Nwakaego or Ndukaku meaning, child is greater than money or life is greater than wealth. No wonder his name was also Oriaku – a pejorative title by the Igbo for a parasitic wife who only consumes wealth, a title that Igbo women rejected in preference for Odoziaku or wealth manager.

 

In the New Yorker, Adaobi exposed her motivation for her hagiography when she wondered if Africans deserve reparations given that her great-grandfather was a highway robber and kidnapper. Fallacy of the straw man. She also claimed that her family was facing mysterious disasters attributed to the sins and abominations committed by her great-grandfather, forcing the family to contemplate changing their name, to chant psalms annually and pray for forgiveness, and to destroy some family juju pots, perhaps to attract rich wives and husbands for their beautiful children (the thinly disguised theme of her debut novel about 419 fraud, I did not Come to You by Chance).

 

I advised Adaobi in my earlier blog response to tell her wealthy family to set up scholarship funds for her cousins who descended from those that her great-grandfather oppressed instead of simply praying to be washed as white as snow for as she reported, schooling is a great leveler of social statuses – school children make friends without being constrained by ancient claims to status, wealth or caste.

 

In the BBC story, Adaobi quoted the eminent historian, Adiele Afigbo, to give credibility to her amateur psychoanalysis of her dysfunctional family by suggesting that the residues of the slave trade continued until the 1950s before the British finally ended the crimes against humanity that they themselves initiated and ran for hundreds of years without apology or reparations, charged Chinweizu in The West and the Rest of Us. Not being a historian, Adaobi failed to interpret this riddle from Afigbo who was obviously inviting scrutiny of the fact that Africans were to blame for their inability to mobilize and end the slave raids by themselves for more than 400 years. Look how long! For that, Mathew Kerekou, president of Benin Republic, rightfully took a knee at an African American church and apologized for the despicable roles that some African chiefs were forced to play in the inhumane crimes against humanity but Rodney insists in The History of the Upper Guinea Coast that Africans were mostly warriors against slavery.

 

Afigbo was reminding us that since Africans were conscripted as enslaved people to fight for the British during the European tribal wars as if they were slaves, the British cannot claim to have ended slavery. When unarmed African women demanded not to be taxed without representation in the colonial government, the British massacred dozens of them as if they were homo sacer or slaves whose lives could be taken with impunity, wrote also Afigbo in The Warrant Chiefs. And when coal miners demanded for a living wage in Enugu, the colonizers massacred dozens of them in 1949 to prove that it was never their intention to end slavery in Africa, they only wanted to transform it into colonial slave labor and Africans continued to resist, wrote Du Bois, Azikiwe and Rodney. How can the British claim that they ended slavery and barbarity in Africa when they orchestrated the genocide that took 3.1 million Igbo lives in Biafra?

 

All I know is that my great-grandfather was not a slave trader, he was a resistance warrior for justice quite unlike Thomas Jefferson who raped little African girls and then sold his own children for money. When will Adaobi write about American Founding Fathers who were perverts like her great-grandfather and who raped children and called them his ten wives like Boko Haram? 

Maybe I should write that book in answer to the bewildering question repeatedly posed by African Diaspora colleagues: were you not the ones who sold us? No.

 

HARRIET AS IGBO

By Biko Agozino

This is not a spoiler. Harriet is a film without spoilers because the audience already can tell how the movie was going to end. What I would like to comment on are the symbolic representations that the Director, Kasi Lemmons, brought into the narrative that will not make sense to viewers who are not familiar with the background Igbo world views of both Harriet Tubman and the actress who played that role, Cynthia Chinasaokwu Erivo.

Some critics reportedly protested against the casting of the award-winning ‘British’ actress and singer to play the role of the iconic African American hero but if only the protesters knew that it is a case of an Igbo woman being portrayed by another Igbo woman... Besides African Americans have played the roles of Africans in Hollywood without protests from Africans who simply admire good acting by our black brothers and sisters.

There was a carving that the father of Minty, short for Araminta, gave her when she went to tell him that she was fleeing to freedom from slavery. She kept it with her always just as Frederick Douglas kept a piece of wood that an elderly enslaved man gave him after he was beaten by an overseer. According to Douglas, no one ever beat him again in his life for he kept that piece of wood with him, just as the old man told him. The Igbo call such a piece of wood or carving, Ofo na Ogu, the symbol of innocence and blessings. The Director, Kasi Lemmons, was probably reminding us throughout the movie that Harriet Tubman held Ofo and Ogu as a blessed innocent person and that that, in addition to her strong faith in God, was part of the reasons why she was bold in fighting for freedom from slavery for all, unlike Django who only went back to unchain his boo.

Harriet repeatedly claimed that she heard the voice of God but that was attributed, even by black abolitionists, to ‘possible brain damage’ from her head injury as a child when she was found in a barn with the white boy. The Igbo will agree with her claim that she heard the voice of God because the Igbo also believe that God is present in everyone as Chi, or God, a part of the Great God or Chiukwu, also known as Chineke, God the creator. Such a God or Chi would never subscribe to the pro-slavery gospel that the black preacher was paid to preach to the congregation of the enslaved who were called upon to obey their masters and work hard for them as an honor to a white God. Harriet did not say amen to that prayer.

It is a shame that the leading actress, Cynthia Erivo, chose to go by her English first name when her Igbo name would have been more appropriate to the role. Chinasaokwu, the name that her Igbo parents gave her in England when she was born, means God answers accusations. Just as Minty dropped her slave name and chose a free name, perhaps to evade slave catchers who continued to search for runaway enslaved people especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Cynthia should be challenged by her fans to drop the slave name and adopt her Igbo name, Chinasa, as her first name in honor of Harriet if not in honor of her own family. Her real last name, Erivo, literally translates as the unfed or the starving, a strange name that echoes memories of the mass starvation of the Igbo in Biafra during which 3.1 million died. The actress owes it to herself to recover her Igbo name as her first name.

Incidentally, the name Harriet and her original slave name, Araminta, may have onomatopeic meanings in Igbo as Ha aya eti – they will never beat us and Ala mu nta - my little land, or Aninta, a common Igbo name. Hayeti is, by coincidence, similar to the name that the Haitian Igbo revolutionaries gave to their new republic – Ayeti – and that is the way they still spell it in creole today, like the way that Harriet said that people pronounced Rit, her mother's name that she took. It means in Igbo, they will never beat us. Even the name of the Director of this movie, Kasi, also transliterates in Igbo as to console, suggesting the consolation for those who have suffered great injustice without being offered reparative justice.

Moreover, the name Moses that was attributed to Harriet by almost everyone, may also have an Igbo-sounding meaning – Moshishi, or the spirit said to say. The enslavers could not believe that an African woman was capable of leading such daring raids to free the enslaved and lead them to freedom in their hundreds. They claimed that she was a white abolitionist in ‘black face’ which must have been a popular pastime of influential white men then and even now. 

The Harriet model of womanist activism can be found in Ogu Umunwanyi during which Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929, only sixteen years after Harriet passed away; the Abeokuta women’s rebellion against taxation in 1945, the Kikuyu women’s uprising against forced labor in the 1950s, the South African women’s defiance against the pass laws of apartheid in the 1950s, and the Liberian women’s praying of the devil back to hell to end the bloody civil war in the 1990s.

Unlike Western feminist activists who seek gender-separatism, the Africana womanists are exemplary in the sense that their demands always included the interests of suffering men and women in articulation or intersectionally instead of seeking divisive gender essentialism. This is part of the reasons why Professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi theorized that womanism was more appropriate than feminism as a description of the interests of African women within cultures that also inevitably include men as allies who can also be opponents in some ways but cannot be pigeon-holed essentially as all the enemies of ‘womandom’. The film, Harriet, showed that not even all white men were enemies during slavery given the important role played by white abolitionists, though some white women were among the worst enslavers and some black men worked for the slave catchers to earn some money.

Harriet was fond of singing the freedom song, ‘Go down Moses, go down to Egypt land and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go’, as a rallying signal for the enslaved to join the underground railroad to freedom. The biblical Moses was called an Egyptian and so, Harriet was not a black Moses – the biblical Moses was obviously not white. The fact that Harriet was suspected to be a man goes to challenge the western invention of women as gendered in submissive relations under patriarchy whereas gender is not a central feature of the conception of people in African cultures where generation, not gender, is more deferential and hegemonic, according to Oyeronke Oyemumi in The Invention of Women.

Harriet carried a gun with her for protection and used it to threaten some of her own family members who were too scared to go with her to freedom. But when she had the opportunity to shoot and kill her enslavers, she chose not to kill. This may seem strange to many fans of Hollywood who have come to expect the hero to be a blood-thirsty maniac in Tarantino movies. However, to the Igbo who suffered genocide, pogroms and mass killings in Nigeria without resorting to retaliatory killings, it is normal to leave the gravest wrongs in the hands of our Chi and instead invest our energies into rebuilding our beloved communities in accordance with the African philosophy of nonviolence that Gandhi admitted that he was taught in Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. followed to lead the Civil Rights Movement.

A puzzle that the film tried to solve was why many poor whites who did not enslave Africans continued to fight in support of what the film called the ‘lost cause’ of slavery even after the Africans had asserted their right to freedom as fellow human beings. W.E.B. Du Bois explained this with the theory of the psychological wages of whiteness. However, the film differed slightly from the conventional interpretation of this theory by explaining that, according to Du Bois, it was not just psychological wages because there were huge structural privileges to even poor whites that they would like to defend; not to mention the hefty rewards placed on the heads of ‘Moses’ and the runaway enslaved people to motivate poor whites to join the posse to try and recapture them. Also, the young white men were motivated by their lust for the bodies of young black girls who were gang raped even ‘before their first blood’ perhaps because they were brought up to think of black girls as ‘pigs to be sold or eaten’ but never to be loved by white men who fathered children that looked exactly like them and still enslaved their own flesh and blood or sold them for money.

The film represented Harriet leading a unit of African American soldiers in battle during the Civil War at the historic Combahee River point of the Black Womanist Rebellion statement. This was the only time that a woman commanded men in battle during the civil war. It came to pass in fulfillment of the vision that Harriet shared with the young white man who was trying to recapture her as his property even though she prayed for him to survive typhoid as a child. She had disarmed him and made him climb down from his white horse, knelt him down and aimed his own rifle at him, and told him to listen to the coming sounds of the civil war even before the war started. She prophesied that he was going to die with thousands of other young white men fighting for a lost cause. Then she rode off on his white horse which did not discriminate between a white male rider and a black female rider. That war soon took an estimated 750,000 lives but it could have been avoided if white people simply accepted the fact that black people were equally human and not property. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.

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.