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Subject:
From:
Madiba Saidy <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
The Gambia and related-issues mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 16 Nov 1999 20:38:39 -0800
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FYI.

Cheers,
        Madiba.
--
We shall all live. We pray for Life, Children, a good harvest and
happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good
for me. Let the Kite perch and let the Eagle perch too. If one says no to
the other, let his wing break. --Chinua Achebe, (Things Fall Apart).
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GUARDIAN

Tuesday, 16 November 1999

Achebe and our places of memory

By Don Adinuba

ADMITTEDLY, seldom can anyone who appreciates Chinua Achebe's greatness as
one of 20th century's most gifted personalities fail to be moved by the
spectacle of his present physical condition. We are only consoled by the
awareness that, as Christie, the writer's graceful and adorable academic
wife, has remarked pointedly, we recognise and pay homage to Chinua Achebe
not because of his legs but because of his writing, a concomitant of his
prodigious mental depth and philosophical range. His faculties are today as
penetrating as they have ever been, as they were in 1958 when he published
the world classic Things Fall Apart, at age 28. The more fascinating and
deeper part of a recent meeting between Achebe and Mbadinuju was the naming
of the road linking Government House in Awka with the legislative building
and the judicial offices for the writer of genius. With the naming of this
major road for him, Achebe has become, to the best of my knowledge, the
first Nigerian artist to have a street named after him in a capital city,
all the more so by the government.

Some people may not consider this honour a big deal. Nigerian streets, after
all, bear the names of all manner of people, including those who in a saner
society would have been dead or in jail for heinous crimes against their own
people. Some may even wonder whether Achebe needs to have a street named for
him in his state capital when he was in 1978 named the first recipient of
the National Merit Award, the country's highest honour for intellectual
achievement. Or when he has for decades been one of the very few foreigners
to be admitted into the highly revered cult of the American Modern Language
Association. Or when his books have been translated into scores of languages
and he is in high demand in the most important of places the world over.
Isn't Achebe the winner of numerous prestigious prizes and the recipient of
over 30 honorary doctoral degrees, by far the highest number for any African
after former President Nelson Mandela? Achebe is one of the few iconographic
figures in world history whose novels are compulsory reading for students in
fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy,
history, religion, comparative theology, political science, etc. For
instance, Claude Ake, the late eminent scholar of political economy, is
known to have insisted on his students reading Achebe's A Man Of The People
before taking them in courses on Nigerian politics and government. And in
several universities the world over, Achebe's novels are compulsory for
courses on African and Third World societies. Achebe, of course, remains the
greatest individual influence on an entire generation of African writers.
Declares distinguished Somali writer Nurudin Farah: "I've always held
Achebe's writing in the highest esteem, believing it to be the most singular
contribution the continent of African has made to world literature... He has
no equal among us and many of us owe a great deal to him."

Still, the honour done him by the Anambra State Government is significant.
Achebe is a world citizen who is very much conscious of his roots which he
regards as the source of his artistic accomplishment and virtuosity. At the
time of the car accident in 1990, he was the president of the Ogidi
Development Union, a post he took seriously, and he invested immeasurable
time, mental and intellectual resources in it. "One of the most appealing
aspects of Achebe's presence," says Michael Thelwell, the Jamaican professor
at the University of Massachusetts, "is the sense of his being anchored in
community. Within a personality of great complexity, an integrity of
identity: On the one hand, a charming and sophisticated man of our time,
travelled, worldly. On the other, the rooted dignity and calm of a
responsible African elder fully integrated into the daily life and rhythm of
community."

The honour to Achebe is significant for another reason: homage to a man of
learning, scholarship, wisdom and integrity rather than to a man of raw
power and money. Since 1985, major streets, institutions and monuments in
Nigeria have been named for the Babangidas and the Abachas in keeping with
the feudal and imperial concept of power and of conquer and subjugation. The
Kano State Government House was in the last few years named for Sani Abacha
until last June, though the state's stadium is still called the Sani Abacha
Stadium. A major Federal Government housing estate near Sheraton Hotel in
Abuja is still named for Abacha's first son, Ibrahim Abacha, just like a
public motor park in Owerri, Imo State. The press centre in Government House
in Lagos was named for him until Governor Bola Tinubu changed it recently.
Such examples are legion.

Our universities, supposedly centres of ethical integrity, have not fared
better. The University of Nigeria awarded, with great fanfare, an honorary
doctorate to Mrs. Maryam Babangida during her hey-day, and Nnamdi Azikiwe
University followed suit immediately Mrs. Maryam Abacha appeared on the
scene as the first lady. Jeremiah Useni used to receive degrees and
certificates from Nigerian higher institutions almost every weekend during
his days as the powerful minister of the Federal Capital Territory.
Abdulkareem Adisa got quite a number when he was the Minister of Works and
Housing. Dan Etete, Abacha's Minister of Petroleum Resources, received a
doctorate from the University of Port Harcourt at the height of the energy
crisis which paralysed the entire nation. Edo State University announced it
was conferring an honorary Doctorate of Letters on Abacha's pugnacious
Foreign Affairs Minister Tom Ikimi in appreciation of his "area boy"
diplomacy. Indeed, there is a "crisis in the temple," as venerable Pius
Okigbo has observed of Nigerian universities. Which is why it is surprising
that Ismaila Gwarzo and Hamza El-Mustapha, Abacha's ruthless security
operatives, have not been decorated by our institutions for their high
regard for the dignity of the human person. The duo of Babangida and Abacha
truly perverted our social values, the greatest calamity to befall a nation.
Under the duo, Nigerians became mammon disciples, worshipping at shrines of
gods that always fail, as Edward Said, the scintillating Palestinian scholar
at Columbia University in New York, observed in his BBC prestigious Reith
Lecture series, now published as a book under the title Representations Of
The Intellectual.

Do we ever reflect on the implications of holding up Babangida and Abacha as
well as their wives and children as role models? What legacy are our
universities creating when they honour such barely literate but wealthy and
ex-powerful government officials as Adisa, Etete, Useni, etc? Which of our
universities is today proud to have bestowed honorary doctorates on Ani,
Ikimi, and wives of Abacha and Babangida? No wonder, we are still stuck in
history, wedded to the primitive age of mankind. We canonise iniquity.

When we honour someone with an honorary degree or name an institution or
monument for him or her, we are, ipso facto, creating a value system which
will either ruin or salvage the larger society. "Every country," argues
Richard Bernstein, the engaging American journalist and social thinker, in
his seminal book, Dictatorship of Virtue, "has what the French historian
Pierre Nora has called les lieux de memoire, 'the places of memory.' Nora
defined them as the 'most striking symbols' that give a people their
identity, 'the holidays,' the insignia, the monuments and memorials, the
objects of veneration, the dictionaries and museums." The French, great
lovers of the intellectual and philosophical tradition, as of their wine,
name their streets and public places for writers, thinkers, scientists and
truly great statesmen and personages in their march of civilisation. Nora
records "historical moments as the anniversaries of the births of Voltaire
and Rousseau, the funeral of Victor Hugo, the centennial observation in 1879
of the great revolution" as some of the places of memory in France. It was
within this stream of consciousness that President Charles de Gaul
proclaimed about a radical writer and philosopher: "Jean Paul-Satre is
France!" As Chinua Achebe today marks his 69th birthday anniversary, we
stand in awe before the Eagle on the Iroko.

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