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.

Genocidal Self-Incrimination by Danjuma

By Biko Agozino

In an interview with the Vanguard Newspaper, Danjuma confessed that he lost control after arresting the head of state, Ironsi, that he was sworn to protect and that he conspired to assassinate him in retaliation for the January coup of 1966 that even Danjuma acknowledged that Ironsi helped to end, that Ironsi arrested the suspects and jailed them to await trial. Danjuma claimed that they assassinated Ironsi and his Yoruba host, along with numerous Igbo army officers, in retaliation because it was taking too long to bring the suspects to trial and the press were clamoring for their release as national heroes. 

Danjuma did not confess that he has since also lost control of his village and that the same narrative of retaliation is being used to justify the genocide against innocent civilians all over the country. He wondered why the coup makers also killed military officers if they were only after corrupt civilians as if military officers were immune to corruption (no excuse for the assassinations) but he did not say why his retaliatory coup did not go to the prisons to get the coup suspects if their motive was retaliation. He did not spare a thought for millions of civilians killed in his so-called retaliatory coup that he confessed to in self-incrimination. 

There is evidence that more of the Igbo fleeing the initial pogrom from the North were waylaid in Gboko (home area of Danjuma) and systematically massacred as Soyinka recounts in many of his works in different genres and as documented by Obumselu in the massacre of NdiIgbo in Northern Nigeria. The genocide against the Igbo was led by Christian army officers from the Middle Belt and from the West but then blamed on the Muslim Hausa Fulani who are yet to brag about it like Jack Gowon, Theophilus Danjuma, Mathew Obasanjo, Benjamin Adekunle, Anthony Enahoro, and Jeremiah Awolowo with the rare exception of the boast attributed to Buhari that he was ready to kill the Igbo again with no regrets. 

Contrary to the claims by Danjuma, it was not an Igbo coup that killed leaders of other regions and spared Igbo ones (if they also killed Igbo leaders, that would not make it less treasonable). Officers from other parts of Nigeria participated in that coup and their plan was to free a Yoruba leader from prison and put him in power, something that Danjuma and co fulfilled. Yet, the genocide singled out the Igbo for total destruction, forcing the East to secede even though they were the ones persuading other regions not to secede earlier. What have the Igbo done to Danjuma to deserve such unrepentant genocidal hatred when everyone knows that genocide is never justifiable? Other coups have been done by officers from other regions (including the region of Danjuma) and yet no one has tried to subject the people from such regions to the final solution. Why the Igbophobia?

The questions that The Vanguard journalists should have asked the self-confessed genocidist Danjuma are what was the retaliatory cause of the riots against the Igbo during the colonial rule in 1945 in Jos when the war-time scarcity imposed by the British was blamed on Igbo traders and on the NCNC-supported general strike by labour led by Michael Imoudu? How about the Kano massacre of the Igbo still during colonial rule in 1956 following perceived insults to Northern leaders by politicians from Western Nigeria arising from the motion for immediate independence and the amendment of independence when practicable, was that also retaliation against the Igbo for what? 

The use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war' and the indiscriminate defoliation with abundant supply of weapons by the UK Labour Party government and the indiscriminate bombing with jets supplied by the Soviet Union and flown by Egyptian pilots against Biafran civilians, were they also retaliation, for what? How about the extra-judicial killings of innocent youth who have only ever called for a referendum on the future of the country and for the democratic right to stay home and mourn their dead by flying a Black Nationalist flag (that is actually more beautiful than the lame green-white-green imposed by imperialism) in honor of their dead ancestors, how about their proscription as terrorists while 'foreign' cattle herders who have massacred civilians all over the country remain legit? Where are the responses of the Nigerian pseudo-intellectuals to the admission of fascist genocide by Danjuma and co?

As Achebe, Ekwe-Ekwe, Jacobs, Adichie, Emecheta, Uzoigwe, Nzimiro, Soyinka and a few others documented, the genocide against the Igbo was premeditated by ethnic warlords who feared that the Igbo would dominate the country in open and fair struggles for scarce resources and it was orchestrated by the British who sowed the fear of Igbo domination due to the fact that the Igbo led the struggle for the restoration of Independence in Nigeria as Shagari admitted in a 1945 poem urging the North to join the struggle to show Waka to Boko. The Igbo have since demonstrated that they are not interested in dominating anyone but only in pursuing their livelihood through their own efforts despite systematic efforts to deindustrialize their home region, quit notices from other regions, and their exclusion from top political positions. Unlike Danjuma and his fellow self-confessed genocidists, the Igbo are not looking for retaliation but they will welcome reparative justice any day as the Justice Oputa Panel on human rights violations recommended. Other Nigerians will not lose anything when the government finally admits that a great wrong was done to the Igbo and atonements are made.

Recently, Obasanjo was reported as surrendering in his efforts to conquer the Igbo when he allegedly admitted that the Igbo cannot be conquered because they are democratic and not constrained by feudal institutions in their tireless efforts to uplift themselves and their communities against all odds. Colonial anthropologists advised Obasanjo to subjugate the Igbo by imposing traditional leaders on them after the war to make them more submissive like people from other regions, a thing that the colonial authorities had attempted before being defeated by the Women's War of 1929, leaving the East with no House of Traditional Rulers unlike the North and the West.

Obasanjo got it wrong because the other sections of the country never had a single leader compared to the Igbo who supposedly have only individualism. There have always been majority and minority politicians in every region of Nigeria (Aminu Kano in the North West, Waziri in the North East; Tarka and Lar in the North Central; Akintola, Agbekoya, Fela, Soyinka, and Falae in the South West; Boro and Ita in the South South; and Chike Obi, SG Ikoku, CC Onoh, Arthur Nwankwo and even Ojukwu in the East) in line with democratic rights to freedom of association. 

The Igbo have consistently voted their conscience for presidential candidates from other regions even against Igbo candidates in the cases of Shagari, Obasanjo, Yaradua, Jonathan and Atiku (they also elected a Fulani man as the Mayor of Enugu and appointed a minority Eyo Ita as head of government business in Enugu while Chimaroke Nnamani included a Yoruba man in his cabinet from 1999-2007 in Enugu). 

Apart from the Plateau State support for Azikiwe in the second republic and the initial victory of Zik in the Western region, no other region can boast of a similar detribalized record in supporting presidential candidates and yet the Igbo are still suspected of being a threat to Nigeria (the appointment of Okonkwo Kano, Ojukwu's uncle, to the Northern Legislative Council, the alliances that Zik formed across the country, and the election of Igbo candidates to the Federal House of Representatives from Lagos - that attracted threats of drowning in the lagoon if the Igbo did not vote a certain way preferred by a traditional ruler - notwithstanding). 

It is the genocidist generals who have dominated the misrule of Nigeria who should apologize to Nigerians for scapegoating the Igbo while giving self-confessed terrorists oil blocks, hundreds of billions, and political appointments to placate them. The result is that when the rain falls, it will not fall on Igbo rooftops only. Danjuma has since lost control of his village after leading the genocide against the Igbo. 

The solution to the genocidist states that imperialism foisted across Africa is the dissolution of the colonial boundaries to make way for the United Republic of African States or the Peoples Republic of Africa for which the people have voted with their feet as they transgress the imaginary lines drawn at the Berlin conference in search of their livelihood. The neocolonial states in Africa beg to be restructured in Pan African directions to prevent any group of genocidal trigger-happy killers trained by imperialism to attempt another genocide in any part of Africa without being stopped by the people who will be busy rebuilding Africa in leaps and bounds. Do Not Agonize, Organize!

Crisis in Christian Theodicy

By Biko Agozino

Two years ago, a childhood friend sent me a copy of his manuscript on 'Christian Marriage' for comments. In the light of current controversies in the Catholic Church and Baptist Churches, I have decided to share my comments without naming the author of the manuscript:

Dear Brother,

Your book manuscript shows that you did a lot of research and it must have taken you a long time to draft but I have questions about the extent of the right-wing ideology you seem to share. My first question is whether you are trying to write one book or two different books? It seems to me that your focus on Christian marriage is a separate book from your critique of same-sex marriage. Writing both books at once may have introduced some contradictions in your reasoning. Concentrating on Christian marriage could have allowed you to critique the arbitrary rule imposing celibacy on Catholic priests and on women religious whether they like it or not (Pope Francis recently conceded that some priests and nuns from cultures that value familyhood can be allowed to marry). The Catechism book also stipulates that a girl of 14 years is old enough to get married in Igboland because their culture allows that but in the modern world, that is pedophilia. That section of the teachings about the sacrament of matrimony is in urgent need of revision.

Why focus on same-sex marriage as a part of a book on Christian marriage? Is Christian marriage being threatened by same-sex marriage in Africa or is sex abuse a greater threat? The fear of same-sex marriage comes across as homophobia in your book because the fear seems irrational. When Nzeogwu broadcast the first coup in Nigeria in 1966 by stating that homosexuals will be shot, people wondered why that was a priority for him; did the European officers rape the cadets to humiliate them in the military schools? 

But seriously, those of us who have chosen heterosexuality should not be like the Pharisee who prayed to thank God that he was not as sinful as the tax-collector who was on his knees showing repentance. We should pray for the forgiveness of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Boko Haram terrorists are also homophobic but have no qualms about kidnapping children for sex slavery.

Another question for you is why Africans never made any laws against same-sex relations until foreigners invaded Africa and imposed such laws? In other words, there was no homophobia in Africa until Arabs and Europeans introduced such irrational fear. For instance, Joe Nwa Nlecha (nick name for Joe the proud child) dressed like a woman in our village but nobody was afraid of him. Also in our village, there is a woman who is married to another woman and yet nobody is offended by that. If your book had focused on that woman who is married to another woman, if you had interviewed her and her female husband, you may have had something original to contribute to the same-sex marriage debate by emphasizing that the Igbo are more tolerant of different family orientations than Europeans and Arabs (see Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters: Female Husbands). 

Since Igbo men dress like women to bring out the Agbomma masquerades and Yoruba men do the same to bring out Gelede masquerades, it is obvious that our people had no homophobia as part of our traditions. When Gideon Orkar tried to justify his abortive regional coup in 1992 with allegations of a homosexuality-centered military administration, Nigerian masses wondered what he was banging on about. The law signed by President Jonathan outlawing same-sex marriage raises questions as to why this was a priority of the most corrupt and incompetent government in Nigeria where individuals stole billions of public funds with impunity and Boko Haram kidnapped 300 school girls to be raped without any outrage from Jonathan. In the Northern part of the country under Sharia law, men could be stoned to death for dressing like women. 

Criminologists suggest that such repressive laws tend to increase violence in the society by encouraging men to attack other men on the suspicion that they love other men. During the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra following the homophobic coup announcement of Nzeogu, 3.1 million people died but none of them was suspected of being gay. The ISIS terrorists were also mobilized with homophobia but hardly any of the hundreds of thousands killed was accused of being homosexual. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, said Martin Luther King Jr whose march on Washington was organized by an openly gay black man. Hitler started his campaign of intolerance by focusing on homosexuals but in the end, 60 million people died in the second imperialist world war over which European nation would have more colonies in Africa.

Our people had more important struggles to worry about than who people chose to fall in love with or how they loved others – we faced the genocidal slave raids for 400 years and we resisted by recruiting every able-bodied man and woman to help us to survive. During the Biafra war, we did not ask soldiers whether they were gay or straight because the only important thing was whether they were ready to defend our people. Bill Clinton was the one who tried to compromise the exclusion of gay people from the military by changing the law to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell but service men and women continued to be discharged if suspected of same-sex relations. President Obama ended that discrimination because what matters is whether troops were able to defend their country and not who they choose to love but President Trump reimposed the ban on transgender officers in the military. The US Supreme Court also ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act signed by Bush was unconstitutional for trying to prevent same-sex marriage because it deprived two consenting adults who love each other from being admitted to hospital as a family member to care for their sick loved one or from inheriting property or from filing tax returns as a married couple – not much to do with sex. If the Europeans who imposed homophobic laws on Africans have since abolished such laws in Europe, why are Africans who have bigger fishes of poverty, violence and corruption to fry so obsessed about retaining the homophobic laws of imperialism? Colonial Mentality!

You claim that Trump is on your side simply because he ended the order by Obama that schools should allow children to use the bathroom of their choice. But how is Trump going to enforce this policy change? Will there be an official in front of bathrooms checking the gender on the birth certificates of children before they are allowed to go to the bathrooms? Do you remember why Trump attacked the Pope on Twitter during his campaign for president? Pope Francis suggested that no one can be on the side of Christians if he hates immigrants, minorities, women and people with disability, is opposed to providing affordable healthcare to the poor, wants to grab women by their private parts, seeks to increase defense budgets and go to war to kill God’s children and is surrounded by arch racists. The man you claim to be on your side changed an Obama restriction on gun sales to people with mental illness to make it easier for gun makers to make a bigger profit at the expense of public safety. 

You rail against drug abuse while Trump has vowed to crack down on 10 states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use based on voter ballots even though 26 other states have decriminalized it for medical use; Uruguay in South America has legalized it for recreational use; The Netherlands has decriminalized it since 1976 and Portugal since 1992; Italian Army grows medical marijuana and South Africa will be the first African country to legalize it for recreational use since, it is much safer than tobacco and alcohol. What do you think?

Finally, I was expecting your manuscript to show some Christian virtues by avoiding harsh judgment against your fellow men and women just because of who they love. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I expect you to be more humble, to be more merciful, and to be more charitable as a Christian. God is infinitely merciful and if he uses his grace to show charity to people in same-sex marriage, no Christian should take it upon himself to play god and call them ‘filth’ or call for them to be murdered. If God forgave Lot for committing incest with his daughters to have children after the destruction of Sodom, if Joseph could forgive his brothers for selling him into slavery, if Christ could forgive those who crucified him, if the igbo could forgive those who killed 3.1 million of our people in Biafra, if people of African descent could forgive those who enslaved millions of our people for hundreds of years, if Mandela could forgive apartheid officials; Archbishop Desmond Tutu concluded that God will not punish a Bishop or laity who is in a same-sex marriage if the person serves God to the best of his ability by loving all of God’s children without exception. According to Tutu, everyone deserves forgiveness and there is nothing that is unforgivable. Pope Francis is being attacked for publishing Amoris Laeticia or the joy of love in which he said that everyone deserves to be loved and that divorcees should not be excommunicated. The sun shines on all and not only on one sect, class, gender, or race.

Although I do not want to judge others, I believe that men who claim to love God but go about raping men, women, little girls and boys are much worse than adult men and women who agree to love each other. Feminists are not women who hate men, rather they include women who love men but believe that women are oppressed in patriarchal societies due to their gender. Surely, it will be better to end all systems of oppression instead of preaching hate against people who are in love with each other. Do you disagree or agree; why or why not?

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.

OBASANJO’S BLOODY FINGERS

By Biko Agozino

“The lice of poor performance in government - poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed - if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality - are very much with us today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood’.” – Obasanjo

The press release by General Olusegun Obasanjo concerning the state of Nigeria is full of evasions and half-truths. It is not ‘lice’ that make the lousy ‘fingers’ of Obasanjo and his fellow genocidists ‘not to be dry of “blood”. Their fingers are dripping with fresh blood because the killings have continued unabated since the launch of the genocide against the Igbo who wisely voted massively against the Buhari regime that Obasanjo helped to impose.

For full disclosure, Obasanjo is expected to admit his complicity in the ongoing genocide and offer unconditional apologies to the Igbo in particular. He should join all well-meaning people to demand for atonement in the form of reparations. Obasanjo should admit that the gruesome killings by security forces, terrorists and herdsmen that he lamented follow the pattern of the genocide against innocent Igbomasses. Unless Nigerians admit and make atonement for this foundational genocide, the culture of genocidal violence will continue to wet the fingers of genocidist rulers with ‘blood’, according to the laws of karma.

However, despite all his human limitations and with all his involvement in crimes against humanity, Obasanjo remains exceptional for being the first head of state in Nigeria to hand over power to an elected successor and he did so twice though he has been accused of imposing flawed successors. He is also the first head of state to appoint more women to offices in his administration although some suspect that some of those women may wear the #MeToo pin against him.

He was able to settle the dispute with Cameroon over Bakassi without plunging Nigeria into a wasteful war with our African neighbors, though he could have better planned the resettlement of the Nigerians expelled from there or negotiated the admission of Cameroon to the opoen borders of ECOWAS. Similarly, Obasanjo had a magical way of resolving some political crises in other African states by, for example, persuading militarists to yield power back to civilians just as he persuaded Charles Taylor to step down in Liberia, though some suspect that he bargained corruptly with bags of public funds.

Despite the massive corruption in his administration, Obasanjo was and remains the only head of state to establish a special economic and financial crimes commission, EFCC, with which a sitting Inspector General of Police from his own ethnic group was convicted of corruption and jailed and some governors from his own party were indicted, though the EFCC under him allegedly went after mainly his perceived political opponents.

It is exceptional that apart from Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr. Obasanjo is the only Nigerian head of state to publish books even if they were allegedly ghost-written for him by his research assistants; nothing stops other politicians from appointing their own research assistants. He is the only Nigerian head of state to initiate a presidential library even if the funding involved massive corruption by governors who donated public funds, according to Gani Fawehinmi. Obasanjo remains the only Nigerian head of state, with the exception of General Yakubu Gowon whose arranged Ph.D. yielded no publication so far, to recognize his own intellectual limitations and return to school to pursue an advanced degree.

Obasanjo is also the only former Nigerian head of state to call for Nigeria to beg 'agitators to stop' because there is enough cake to be shared. Obasanjo should go ahead and lead by example by offering a personal apology of his own and by calling on his fellow genocidist commanders to join him in offering reparations from their fabulous ill-gotten wealth. Obasanjo should call on Britain and Russia which facilitatedthe genocide against the Igbo to offer apologies and reparations to the Igbo too.

The call by Obasanjo for a Coalition of Nigerians is too little too late since he also recognized how crucial it is for Nigeria to be involved in the leadership of Africa. The coalition-building should involve all other states in Africa towards the United States of Africa that the first president of the country, Azikiwe, called for in 1959 and which Nkrumah and others echoed. With almost all Nigerians demanding the restructuration of the country, focusing exclusively on the internal colonial boundaries of Nigeria is unsatisfactory.

As Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and Chinua Achebe remind us, the genocidal culture that was initiated against the Igbo in Nigeria has since spread throughout post-colonial Africa. Moreover, the African masses have transgressed the porous colonial boundaries in search of their daily livelihood in spite of heightened insecurities and genocidal threats. We need to recognize this reality and urgently build the Peoples Republic of Africa to guarantee the freedom of our people and collectively protect the masses against the imposed genocidist states ruled with blood-stained fingers across Africa.

The Withering Away of the Law and Decolonization of Criminology

The Indigenous Criminologist

Saturday, 9 December 2017

Professor Biko Agozino - keynote address to the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence Symposium 2016

The following blog contains a video - a keynote speech by Professor Biko Agozino (Virginia Tech) at the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence symposium Decolonising Criminal Justice: Indigenous Perspectives on Social Harm, held at the University of Wollongong 24-25 November 2016.

The title of the presentation is: The Withering Away of the Law: An Indigenous Perspective on the Decolonisation of the Criminal Justice System and Criminology. 

Fake Anti-Igbo Song

Fake Anti-Igbo Song

I doubt the authenticity of the song circulating online that calls for genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria. To say that I doubt the authenticity does not mean that it should not be taken seriously, otherwise why bother commenting? Even fake news and fake songs can have devastating consequences if gullible people swallow the propaganda and act it out. Correct me if I am wrong but I think that Africans should not believe everything they hear on the internet. We should engage in more critical thinking.

I doubt if Hausa/Fulani warlords would authorize a genocidal war song and rely on women to sing it for the men to act upon. The Hausa/Fulani are very patriarchal in their culture and although they have had warrior queens like Queen Amina of Zaria and the Boko Haram used women as suicide bombers, it is very unlikely that they would use the voices of women to declare war. Women may ululate to celebrate victory by their men but it is unauthentic for women to be the ones calling for the rape and genocide of Igbo women, children and men by Hausa/Fulani men.

I doubt the authenticity of the song also because the accent is not a native Hausa speaker accent. Although I do not speak Hausa (Ba na ji Awusa), the pronunciation of the genocidist term Nyamiri in the song as Nyamuri is an indication that the singers were not native speakers but agents provocateur trying to egg the Hausa/Fulani youth into a genocidal frenzy against the Igbo who have never done them any wrong, contrary to genocidist propaganda that the Igbo killed northern leaders in the past when the Igbo did no such thing.

Western Nigerian officers (including some Western Igbo) led the first bloody coup in the country to free their leader, Awolowo, from prison and impose him as the Prime Minister. They later blamed it on Eastern officers who actually foiled the coup. Then Western Nigerian and Middle Belt Christian officers led the genocidal war against the Christian Easterners and blamed it on the Muslim Northerners to ignite an endless religious war but the Igbo have managed to avoid buying this trap. Yet the hatred of the Igbo remains the major thing that unites all other Nigerians, according to Achebe.

The authenticity of the anti-Igbo song is also raised by the fact that the song made an exception for the Yoruba, calling for them to be spared in the genocide against the Igbo. Yet it will not be easy to tell who is Igbo and who is Yoruba in the absence of tribal marks that are no longer common among the Yoruba. When the rain falls, it will not fall on one man’s house top.

I doubt the authenticity of the song furthermore because the beat is not the traditional Hausa beat with traditional instruments. Rather it is a computerized disco beat that is actually danceable and I doubt that genocidists would prefer to use disco beats to issue genocidist calls even if their target audience is the Hip-Hop loving generation of today. Dem go de Pose, is what Baba Fryo called such a pretense.

I call on all Africans to disavow songs of hatred and proclaim the fact that the Igbo are not ‘a curse to Nigeria’ but a blessing to Africa. All Nigerians should reject genocidist propaganda and add their voices to the defense of those who are targeted by haters, no matter their ethnic groups. Choose roses than rape, choose Ubuntu than Ubulani, urges the people’s poet, Mzwakhe Mbuli.

Dr. Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061.

Decolonizing Criminology

By Biko Agozino

Do not let the smiles fool you. Yesterday and today, I have been privileged to see grown men and women shed tears profusely at the University of Wollongong, Australia, during the symposium on Indigenous Perspectives on Decolonising Criminology and Criminal Justice organized by Dr. Juan Tauri and colleagues in the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence. It is rare to see such raw emotions at a scholarly symposium but this one was not just scholarly, it was a scholar-activism symposium with participants from the community who shared their survival of the dehumanizing effects of imperialistic social control, reflecting my methodology of committed objectivity. 

I am honored to see my own work being affirmed and being extended by colleagues from around the world. I am hopeful that the work we all are doing will result in the deepening of democracy through the pushing back of the legacies of colonialism and the control-freak state to allow more diversity, equality, fraternity, and liberty to the majority of the people suffering the consequences of race-class-gender authoritarian populism. I also shared my own experience as a survivor of genocide in Biafra, a fact that the world was reminded of by Amnesty International on 24 November in a report on the killing of 150 nonviolent Biafra commemorators in Nigeria in 3 months since August 2016. Coincidentally, the AI report was released as I was presenting my plenary on the 'withering away of the law thesis' in which I wondered why the postcolonial states have tended to cling to the genocidal and other repressive fetishes imposed by colonialism rather than continue the push for decolonization to its historic conclusions. But more importantly, why are even critical criminologists and community organizers afraid to demand the further decolonization of civil society for the benefit of all?