‘’Achebe is as good as Homer. But Achebe is not Archimedes. And that is final’’
By Jimanze Ego-Alowes
APRIL 24 2019-theG&BJournal-For those who love our missives one thing is perhaps noticeable. It is that we have tried the best we can to forgo the first person narrative. The idea is to foreclose on the author’s ego blotching or clouding his thoughts. Advisably, a third person pronoun, or the plural, we, gives one some handle on objectivity, in what admittedly must be a very subjective world. But today we are going to breach that rule and tell it personally.
I have never had the honour of meeting or knowing Segun Ayobolu, even as I write. But I know and have met with Odia Ofeimun severally. Ofeimum everybody knows is a famous and well connected polemicist and poet.
About last year, 2018, my latest book rolled off the press. It was titled: The University-Media Complex: As Nigeria’s Foremost Amusement Centre. In my well considered and sceptically adjusted opinion I rated the book not just as my best so far, but a landmark contribution to the sociology of development and power politics. However let it be on record that I rate Minorities as Competitive Overlords as my most seminal work.
The point of it all is that I wanted informed, independent third party assessments of the work. That was why I reached out to Ofeimun. I asked him to supply me any top Nigerian writer-thinkers who can exercise informed and independent judgements without giving a hoot. Ofeimum gave me a long list of 3 or 4 and their telephone numbers. And I texted all of them explaining myself and the Ofeimum connection.
Only Segun Ayobolu replied, obliging to do a review and assessment. So I Fedexed him a copy. It took some while, but on January 26 2019, he published part one of his reflections on my book. Part 2 is yet to come. Anyway, he writes:
”The same inexplicable silence, indifference and inertia has been the fate so far of an explosive new book, ‘The University-Media Complex As Nigeria’s Foremost Amusement Chain’ written by Jimanze Ego-Alowes and published by The Stone Press, Lagos, which was released into the market last year. By now, this book ought to have taken the nation’s literary scene by storm and its author, a polyvalent public intellectual, whose expositions reveal considerable multi-disciplinary grounding in areas as diverse as economics, literature and the arts, classical music, philosophy, mathematics and physics, rigorously engaged on his bold, robust, original but many times highly combustible and provocative submissions on Nigeria’s current socio-economic and condition. https://thenationonlineng.net/leaders-intellectuals-underdevelopment-nigeria-1/
About two weeks ago, a clip, https://youtu.be/0fOrcOFzisA, went viral. It was the video of Senator Olusola Adeyeye, APC/Osun State. Yet, not one din of discussion or column inch was heard or read about the fundamental issues of constitutionalism he raised. For many, if not most Nigerians, the senator who was a former university professor, was more like an entertainer, a stand-up comedian. Everybody listened to him and yawned.
The question is why the critical silence not just on my book but on the fundamental postulations of a ranking senator? The answer is the Professor Chinua Achebe connection. Achebe has almost completely undone and closed off the Nigerian mind. Practically, following the Achebe ”seizures” upon our minds, there shall be no development in Nigeria again. The issue is not whether these Achebe seizures were deliberate or incidental. The important point is that the consequences and outcome of the Achebe toxic influence is that Nigeria is currently finished as a developmental proposal. It is all over for Nigeria, no thanks to Achebe.
So how did Achebe do it? Perhaps a historical parallel will help nudge Nigerians towards clarity of perception. Mark Twain, an American Achebe, if one can so say, gave this insight: ”Sir Walter Scot had so large a hand in making southern character as it existed before the war that he is in a great measure responsible for the war.”
Today, if any person is responsible for how Nigerians engage or interrogate questions of national development, such a person is Professor Chinua Achebe. But that is not Achebe as a maker of myths and fables, a writer of fictions and rhymes. The Achebe that is indicted and now docked, is the Achebe that attempted or as he attempts to be thinker or analyst.
First of all the following. There is no shade of doubt that Professor Chinua Achebe is one of the supreme minds of our time. Achebe is as good as Homer. But Achebe is not Archimedes. And that is final. That is to say that the usefulness of Achebe as Homer is sufficient unto the world. But as a thinker, an analyst, a scientific mind… well, very well, Achebe is not seized of his subject matter. In fact, under exacting scrutiny, it may be sighted that Achebe is not even aware of the primary demands of the logics he is dabbling into. And here we restrict ourselves to his book – The Trouble with Nigeria.
There is also no doubt that Achebe’s book is one of, perhaps the most influential, tracks, on Nigeria. Everybody, academics, fools, thieving generals, thugs, coup makers, comedians etc., quotes Achebe that the trouble with Nigeria is leadership. Whether Achebe invented the idea is not exactly clear. But one thing is. It is that Achebe is its most quoted and prominent foster father and poster figure. In fact he is so quoted that even if he did not, nobody else would have.
Meanwhile, it is safe to state that the derivable analogue of the Achebe thesis is this. ”Since leadership is the only problem of Nigerian development, why waste scarce national resources, not excluding time, farming for new knowledge, or indeed anything besides. Or even discussing same.”
This apocryphal wisdom is the dark spring of the death-row silence, capitulation and inertia of the Nigerian mind before the eternal problems of existence. And that is in the authoring of for-never ending new scriptures. Thus, Achebe like a religious outlier has sealed-up development scholarship, with him as the last deity. And alas, the Nigerian publics are congregating, as the Achebe Leadership Zealots Fellowship, ALZF. Tufiakwa. Ugbumkwa.
So what is to be done? Since the morbid joke – if you want to hide anything from the black man put it in a book – may be true, we have decided to do a public service bypass. A consortium, The Bracenomics Institute, africanomics.org, The Stone Press publishers and the author, your dear correspondent, have jointly and severally agreed as follows.
That, key parts of the book shading new lights on the whys and hows of development, and thus in passing, the errors and wrongness of Achebe, is now free for viewing by the general public. Why have we done this? It is because as the sponsors say, a nation cannot develop upon its own blockheadedness. We need the opening of arguments, not the closing of the Nigerian mind.
If you are in on the Nigerian Development Question, kindly click: https://africanomics.org/achebe-nigeria-and-the-leadership-farce/ for excerpts of the book. It is free. And don’t forget to respond with your arguments. The time for the scriptures is finished. Now is the hour for open new arguments, for authoring new revelations. We are not senators or fools, governors or thieves… presidents or ex-coup makers. We are philologists and poets. We have come to make uncommon logic, common. Ahiazuwa.
Odia Ofeimun and Senator Olusola Adeyeye
Igbo cosmology: the greed for power invents a forged past [Excerpts.]*
Because this nation is blind, we shall begin in lightning. Because this nation is deaf, we shall conclude in thunder. All else is in humor. Mother A’Endu.
- Additionally Professor Agozino writes: ”Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze…. https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2018/07/18/seeking-atonement-adaobi-tricia-nwaubani-on-her-slave-trading-grandfather-by-biko-agozino/
- He gets it right and wrong again. In terms of urban translation eze as king is correct. But philologically, eze never meant kings in Igbo land. Eze means excellence. It is the modern day Igbo lexicographers, that conscripted or kidnapped eze to mean king.
- Interestingly, Igbo forefathers, deliberately never had or design-created kings and princedoms. That however is an inert detail. The active framework is that their choice and institution of republicanism, history has revealed, is prescient. Additionally, it has proven to be one of the greatest sociological and civilizational building blocks ever constructed by man….
For instance, what the Igbo forefathers instituted has a parallel with the genius of the ancient Greeks fathers…. Today, the Americans are latching on the Greek, Igbo-style genius, to come to things…. In fact, one can correctly conjecture that American greatness is in their Igboness writ large, as it were.
- The result of this open contests-constitutionalism, has a report card of the following. It generated and produced the most influential and thus greatest empire of all times – the Athenian Empire. Of modern times it has produced the greatest modern imperium, the American nation.
Finally, we are not Senators, we are historians and sociologists and are come to make uncommon sense. Ahiazuwa. CONCLUDED.
* For the full essay On Igbo Cosmology, 1, 2 and 3/conclusion click: https://africanomics.org/igbo-cosmology-3-the-greed-for-power-invents-a-forged-past/ It is free.
Coming next: 1. How Lagos is a no man’s land in Nwa-Ubani terms and Ubani, the Oru connection.
Jimanze Ego-Alowes (PhD) is Author and public commentator
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