Chinua Achebe - Troubling awards and failed leadership
By SEGUN OHIMEH ORUAME
If
awards could improve national security, wipe off mass poverty
and reduce massive unemployment, writers would probably become
happy recipients of the Nigerian National Award particularly if
they were writers with Chinua Achebe’s reputation.
But for the second time, Achebe, the internationally acclaimed
author of novels including Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and
A Man of the People has declined to accept the Nigerian national
honour to become a Commander of the Federal Republic. Achebe
said accepting the honour would dilute his substantial
accusation of ineptitude and corruption against the country’s
political elites. He had first turned down the offer in 2004
when Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was in power.
A pained Achebe would tell the Nigerian press he was turning
down the award because “the reasons for rejecting the offer when
it was first made in 2004 have not been addressed let alone
solved. It is inappropriate to offer it again to me.”
Professor Albert Chinualumogo Achebe, poet, novelist, and one of
the most important living African writers, was 31 years when his
country, Nigeria, got political independence from the British.
Much of the 51 years of post independence Nigeria that has seen
the writer grown to become an octogenarian have been seasons of
frustrations, disappointments and somewhat eerie feelings of
failure that define the Nigerian enterprise. At 82, Achebe can
only weep for his beloved country as an exile in the United
States.
Achebe reflected upon all these in 1983 when he was 53 years old
and went on to publish his thoughts in a slim 68-page testament
he titled The Trouble With Nigeria. In his reflections, Achebe
blamed the failure of the Nigerian state directly on the
political leadership that he accused of administrative
ineptitude and intellectual shallowness. “The trouble with
Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is
nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is
nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air
or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or
inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility; to the
challenge of personal example with are the hallmarks of true
leadership.”
Achebe’s 1983 worrying conclusion on the State of the Nigerian
Federation has defined his engagement with those in power before
and after he left for exile in the United States in the 80s.
Opting to quietly adopt a combative intellectual response to the
troubles in his country and to repeatedly prove the point that
writers are under moral obligation to speak truth to power,
Achebe would tell Obasanjo in his rejection letter of 2004:
“Nigeria under your watch is too dangerous for silence. I must
register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept
the high honour awarded me in the 2004 Honours list.”
In The Trouble With Nigeria, the man who authored the world
famous Things Fall Apart in 1958 - his first of several classics
- translated into at least 45 languages, and has sold eight
million copies worldwide; would lament “Nigeria has been less
than fortunate in its leadership. A basic element of this
misfortune is the seminal absence of intellectual rigour in the
political thought of our founding fathers - a tendency to pious
materialistic woolliness and self-centred pedestrianism.”
Achebe weeps over a decomposed leadership that has effectively
ensured the systematic erasure of over 150 million Nigerians who
are unlikely to know what good healthcare means or what
pothole-free roads look like and what a good meal tastes like
before they finally die at 45 years; the age the World Health
Organisation has pegged as the average lifespan of a Nigerian
adult. The author himself is wheelchair bound today; the
consequence of a road accident he had in Nigeria some small
years back resulting from badly kept highways where tens of
thousands perish every year.
Like many other writers of his generation and the one after his;
Achebe has sought to blame the failure of his continent on
perverse political leadership bereft of vision. He first
examined this theme in A Man of The People in the 60s just
before the Nigerian civil war; and would later re-echo the same
sense of national distortion in Anthills of the Savannah in
I987. Ayi Kwei Armah had examined the same tragedy in The
Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born published in 1968. The novel
depicted the rot in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah but it typically
“expresses the frustration of many citizens of the
newly-independent states in Africa felt after attaining
political independence. Many African states like Ghana followed
similar paths in which corruption and the greed of African
elites became rampant.”
Ngugi wa Thiong'o also in exile like Achebe, and Armah, took a
swipe at post colonial Kenya under the new generation of
political elites. In the Devil on the Cross, literary critic
Jumana Farouky notes that Ngugi “exposes the plight of the
masses and the workers in the present-day political set-up in
Africa in consonance with the belief of his that African writers
should address themselves “to the crisis or conflict between the
emergent African bourgeoisie and the African masses.” Ngugi has
pursued similar themes in his other works including Wizard of
the Crow, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, and the very
troublesome I Will Marry When I Want, a 1977 play that critiqued
neocolonial Kenya.
Perhaps, no one has best exemplified the truism that writers
must become the conscience of the society than Nobel Laureate
and fellow Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who appropriately
remarked in his 1972 prison notes, entitled The Man Died that:
“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
Soyinka has remained one of the most outspoken voices against
military dictatorship and civilian despotism. Many of his works
including Kongi Harvest, and Opera Wonyosi satirize the abuse of
power by the few against the majority.
Part of the sad commentary on the continent is that a sizeable
number of its truly great writers are either fully or partially
in exile. That in itself reflects the tragic circumstances in
which post colonial Africa has found itself: a colony of
self-serving ‘homeboy’ colonialists too quick to employ the
vicious tools of tribalism and nepotism to sustain their grip on
power. Achebe laid this bare in his The Trouble With Nigeria:
“But whereas tribalism might win enough votes to install a
reactionary jingoist in a tribal ghetto, the cult of mediocrity
will bring the wheels of modernization grinding to a halt
throughout the land.”
For Achebe therefore, rejection of the Nigerian National Award
only reinforces the argument of his ilk that writers must use
opportunities such as this to loudly and clearly reject the
political elites that have made Africa one ‘long sad nightmare.’
For the silent millions battered and left to brood over their
hopeless homesteads, it is this rejection of their oppressors
that still tinder the fire of hope that Africa will one day wake
up from its nightmare. The more reason, Achebe’s rejection
resonated so loudly and widely from Lagos to Malabo, Gaborone to
Kampala and the other abodes where the right to happiness and
opportunities have been frozen by failed leadership.
For Achebe, rejection of the Award only reinforces the argument
of his ilk that writers must use opportunities such as this to
loudly and clearly reject the political elites that have made
Africa one ‘long sad nightmare.’
Achebe’s rejection resonated so loudly and widely from Lagos to
Malabo, Gaborone to Kampala and the other abodes where the right
to happiness and opportunities have been frozen by failed
leadership.
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