New Gong Anthology

"We, not foreigners, must be the judges of whether or not a particular book has told us something we need to know about our evolving tragedy – flawed elections admitted to even by the victors, an ex-president alleged to have slept with his daughter-in-law, two hours of electricity a day despite billions of dollars expended – except that we have bought into the notion that the real world happens elsewhere, and that what we think and feel are of no account. In other words, we believe in our own mediocrity, which is why, for instance, the established Nigerian publishing houses have signally failed to follow where the writers have led and are content instead to continue churning out sloppily edited textbooks for a guaranteed local market.

~

It was with this in mind that The New Gong was launched in 2005: to provide an indigenous platform for new Nigerian writing that made no excuses in terms of editorial values. We believe we have made a modest start in that regard but we wanted to extend it further by showcasing in a single volume the range of good writing coming out of Nigeria, hence this anthology. We simply put out the word and selected from the best that came in without regard to gender, theme or any of the other ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ which finally make a mockery of the thing itself. The reader will judge for themselves how far we have succeeded in our self-imposed task."

• The New Gong Publishers, introducing their new anthology, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, being launched at the 34th annual African Literature Association (ALA) Conference @ the Western Illinois University; 22 - 27 April 2008.

Things Fall Apart @ 50

International Events for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart @ 50

• London: 17 & 18 March 2008 - Symposium & Lecture @ Birkbeck, University of London.
• Nigeria: 12 - 26 April 2008 - Events across 5 States - Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, Anambra & Nsukka.
• London: 10 & 11 October 2008 - 2 Day Conference.

The Karaye Prize

Karaye Prize for Hausa Literature Debuts

Words by Sumaila Umaisha

Thursday, 25th October, 2007 was a special day in the annals of Hausa Literature, as the maiden edition of the Engr. Mohammed Bashir Karaye Hausa Literature Prize was awarded to the winners. In a colourful award ceremony, jointly organized by the awards committee and the Abuja chapter of Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, at the International Conference Hall, Abuja, three writers were announced as the winners of this year’s edition of the annual prize.

The three winners emerged from a total of nineteen contestants. The first prize was won by Ibrahim Sheme, first editor of ‘The Write Stuff’ and currently the editor of Leadership newspaper, for his novel, ’Yartsana. The second prize went to Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, a Kano-based writer and film producer for her Matar Uba Jaraba, while the third prize was won by Maje El-Hajeej Hotoro, a Kano-based writer, for his Kankana.

The winners went away with a cash prize of 300,000 Naira; 150,000 Naira for the first prize, 100,000 for the second and 50,000 for the third.

The event also featured fund raising for the sustenance of the award.

Chaired by Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, the occasion had in attendance prominent personalities particularly from the judiciary. They include the Chief Justice of the Federation, Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi, and two former Chief Justices, Justice Muhammadu Lawal Uwais and Justice Salihu Modibo Alfa Balgore. The presence of these august guests could be seen as a gesture of solidarity with the founder of the prize, the Executive Secretary of the Federal Judicial Service Commission, Hajiya Bilkisu A. Bashir, who instituted the prize in memory of her late husband, Engr. Mohammed Bashir Karaye. But more importantly, it could be viewed as a solidarity with the effort to promote Hausa literature. For, as the chairman of the occasion rightly pointed out in his speech, there is no much difference between literature and law as both are born out of man’s quest to resolve societal conflict.

The chairman expressed appreciation to all those who contributed to the event, which is aimed at reviving interest in Hausa literature, and congratulated the winners of the prizes.

Earlier in his welcome address, the chairman of the Abuja chapter of ANA, Dr. Emman Usman Shehu, highlighted the efforts of the chapter in promoting literature, of which this prize is a part. According to him, the Karaye prize came into being through the association’s proposal to Hajiya Bilkisu.

Dr. Shehu disclosed the chapter’s future plans, including having a writers’ cyber café, a proper office, a meeting facility for writers, a literary agency to help negotiate contracts for writers and a writers’ residency programme. To this end, he called on all concerned to "help us build an effective support network so that our literature, whether written in English or our indigenous languages, will have a consistent world-class quality".

In his own speech, Justice Kutigi noted that Hausa is the widest indigenous language spoken in West Africa, hence the need to promote it. He commended ANA and Hajiya Bilkisu for instituting the prize. He called on all to donate generously towards sustaining the prize and urged the winners to continue to write.

The keynote address was delivered by Anthony C. Oha of Benson Idahosa University, Benin City. Titled ‘Making Literature a Tool of Immortalisation: Reflections on the Karaye Hausa Literature Prize’, the paper featured a brief history of Hausa literary prizes, the importance of Hausa vis-à-vis indigenous literature and the role of the Karaye prize in the scheme of things.

Oha began by commending the efforts of those who were instrumental to the setting up of the prize. He specifically mentioned Patrick Oguejiofor, whom he said provided the link between Hajiya Bilkisu, who is his boss, and the Abuja chapter of ANA for the much needed partnership for the institution and administration of award. He then traced the history of literary prizes in Hausa literature to the colonial era when the Education Department of Northern Nigeria organized a creative writing contest in 1933. Stressing the significance of prizes in Hausa literature, he said the development and use of indigenous African language is of great advantage since the masses who do not understand foreign language could have access to the indigenous literature. He observed that the Karaye prize is the most outstanding prize in indigenous literature in Nigeria today, and commended ANA and Hajiya Bilkisu for making this possible.

The judges for the competition were Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu of Bayero University, Kano, and Malam Bello Sule of the Nigerian Television Authority, Abuja. Professor Adamu, who was the chairman of the panel of judges, explained the criteria used in assessing the entries for the contest. In a paper titled ‘Global Media as the Message: Hausa Prose Fiction in the Age of Technology’, which also highlighted the history of Hausa literature and Hausa literary prizes, he said cultural representation was one of the major criteria. According to him, "In this criterion we were looking at how the Hausa universe was portrayed in the novel". Other criteria included the author’s handling of the theme, the narrative structure and the character development.

Professor Adamu, whose paper was read on his behalf, because he had to hurry back to Kano due to the sudden death of his mother, expressed appreciation for Hajiya Bilkisu’s courage, determination, fortitude and intellectual foresight in instituting the award.

The Karaye prize is the first non-governmental intervention in the history of Hausa literary contest. It will run in a three-year cycle, covering fiction, poetry and drama.

Engr. Karaye had, before his death in October last year, held a number of top positions in the public service. He was commissioner for Information in Kano State.

• Words by Sumaila Umaisha; published in the New Nigerian Weekly, 27 October, 2007, p17.
• Images courtesy of ANA Abuja

More Than Just A Widow's Mite

On 25th October, 2007, three writers would emerge in Abuja as winners of a brand new literary contest. Almost four months ago, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Abuja Chapter, proposed to the Executive Secretary of the Federal Judicial Service Commission, Hajiya Bilkisu A. Bashir, to consider endowing a prize for Hausa literature in memory of her husband who had died in October, 2006. In a country where values have not just been misplaced but turned totally upside down, the Association was pleasantly surprised when Hajiya Bilkisu agreed to immortalise her husband through a prize for Hausa literature.

The Engineer Mohammed Bashir Karaye Prize for Hausa Literature will run in a three-year cycle covering fiction, poetry and drama. For starters, the top three contestants would share three hundred thousand naira. The first place winner gets one hundred and fifty thousand, the second collects one hundred thousand, while the third receives a consolatory fifty thousand naira. This too is unique in the annals of the country’s literary prizes because usually, including the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Literary Prize, the top winner carts all the money home and the runners-up don’t even get a handshake from the organisers. The approach adopted for the new Hausa literary contest will hopefully make the competition keener.

The Mohammed Bashir Karaye Prize is also significant because it is the first non-governmental intervention in the history of Hausa literary contests. Indeed the growth of Hausa literature seems to have been largely propelled, with one significant exception which shall be addressed later, by literary contests. The first competition took place during the colonial era. In 1933, the Education Department of Northern Nigeria, through the Zaria-based Translation Bureau headed by Rupert East, organized a creative writing contest in Hausa. The records show there were only five entries in manuscript format but this small field would provide the formative canon of imaginative prose-writing in Hausa. One of the writers, Abubakar Imam, would eventually have a dominant effect not only on Hausa literature, but also on the use of Hausa language in journalism.

The five entries were Bello Kagara’s Gandoki, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s Shaihu Umar, Muhammadu Gwarzo’s Idon Matanbayi, John Tafida’s Jiki Magayi and Abubakar Imam’s Ruwan Bagaja. Of the lot, Imam’s entry stood out and he was encouraged to put together a collection of stories which after several revisions appeared as the three-volume classic, Magana Jari Ce. The momentum generated by the contest led to the establishment of a publishing house - the famous Gaskiya Corporation, a newspaper (“ Gaskiya Tafi Kobo”), and the publication in the 50s of three novellas; Ahmadu Ingawa’s Iliya Dan Maikarfi, Garba Funtuwa’s Gogan Naka and Ahmadu Katsina’s Sihirtaccen Gari. From the 60s to the 70s, Gaskiya Corporation (later to become the Northern Nigerian Publishing Company) would publish four more novellas reminiscent of the pioneering five. These novellas were Sa’idu Ahmed’s Tauraruwar Hamada, Jabiru Abdullahi’s Nagari Na Kowa, Umaru Dembo’s Tauraruwa Mai Wutsiya and Dare Daya.

Another defining period was triggered by two contests that ran almost at the same time. In 1979 the Northern Nigeria Publishing Company organized a contest and got twenty-two entries out of which half were rejected. The top three entries were Suleiman Ibrahim Katsina’s Mallakin Zuciyata, Hafsatu Abdulwahid’s So Aljannar Duniya and Magaji Danbatta’s Amadi Na Malam Amadu. The next year a contest in some Nigerian languages was organised by the Federal Department of Culture with manuscripts as the entry format. Suleiman Ibrahim Katsina once again led the pack in the Hausa category with Turmin Danya. Three other noteworthy manuscripts were Musa Mohammed Bello’s Tsumangiyar Kan Hanya, Bature Gagare’s Karshen Alewa Kasa and Manir Mohammed’s Zabi Naka.

The two post-colonial contests heralded the emergence of a significant novelist, Suleiman Ibrahim Katsina. He would consolidate his prominence with a third novel in 1983 titled Tura Ta Kai Bango, a work described as radically different in content from the typical Hausa novel. The contests also signaled the arrival not only of female writers, but also of the love theme that would be the fulcrum for “Soyayya Novellas” boom in Kano and some other major Northern Nigerian towns. The preoccupation of these novellas, mostly written by women, with “love, passion, and the power relations between men and women” , as Graham Furniss has put, has generated much controversy. This is to be expected since traditionalists and purists are unsettled by the uncompromising reflection of contemporary existence.

The emergence of a new Hausa literary contest, this time emphasising published works rather than manuscripts, creates a number of challenges. First, publishing will be taken more seriously as the contest openly demands that entries must be well produced. Second, writers will need to be more skillfull in the realisation of their stories, poems and plays, so that the handling of contemporary issues will have more depth and the storylines will have realistic but imaginative motivations. Third the consistency of the contest may attract a variety of contests with even more lucrative prizes. The maiden award features a launching to sustain the funding, and a lot of heavyweights in government and business have promised to support the endowment, with the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mohammed Lawal Uwais giving the keynote address. If this becomes a watershed in the development of Hausa literature, then the Engineer Mohammed Bashir Karaye Prize for Hausa Literature will be more than just a widow’s mite.

Emman Usman Shehu
*Published in his GRAFFITI column, page 37, Leadership Newspaper, October 19,2007.
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• Shortlisted writers: Maje El-Hajeej for Kankana; Ibrahim Sheme for Yar Tsana; and Balaraba Ramat Yakubu for Matar Uba Jaraba.

The Yahoo Generation And The Triple Tropes Of Sleaze

BY DAMOLA AWOYOKUN

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” - Antonio Gramsci

“You, who was born for poetry’s creation,
Do not repeat the sayings of the ancients.” – Anna Akhmatova

“The will of man is beyond surrender.” - Wole Soyinka

“Why is the first window that opens out on this fictional world the consciousness of an idiot?” - J.P Sartre on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

I
A writer’s business is to voyage into and take up commands at the threshold of consciousness; and report back freely the news of what is there. This is why the writer in any society being a freelance explorer of spiritually dense zones gains a certain license to behave differently from other people, to be eccentrics in order to fulfil the singularity of his/her vocation in the society. The definition of madness is arbitrary and at most political. The term madness fixes limits and could be exploited for alienating and repressive use; the frontiers of madness define who is ‘Other.’ The exemplary writer is a broker in madness because therein lies the powers of the new. And so when a writer accuses the other of being mad, we should ask what is his definition of madness? In the service of what idea is this definition and in whose interest is this idea?

I read with dismay Odia Ofeimun in his poem Anarch of Hubris (Sunday Mirror, 25 June 2006) deeming Chiedu Ezeanah, a younger poet, a mad, drunkard, morally irresponsible individual who mortgages resources for his wife and daughter to red-light captains simply because Ezeanah self-assertively queries Ofeimun in a soki poem, The Spinner of Dialectics (Sentinel Poetry, #43, June 2006) on why Ofeimun had to release larger doses of himself into his private life. Interestingly, their use of poetry as such flows from the tradition of the neoclassical poets: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Congreve and such use had spun brilliant masterpieces like The Rape Of The Lock, MacFlecknoe, The Dunciad. Had I not reckoned the physics of paradigm shift and boundary maintenance, I would have disqualified my mind and pen from the fray. The godfatherly overstretch is a figuration in the process the older generation employs to pollute the progressive conditions that make vigorous, serious and necessary literature viable. The new Nigerian writer even before s/he is born or converted to one is already encumbered with the triple tropes of sleaze: enfeebling tuitions, philistine criticisms and standards, and insidious paternalism.

Unfortunately, Ibadan has yielded reluctantly its esteemed place as the capital of Nigerian literature and literary criticism to Lagos which unlike the days of Ibadan, is too considerate, obedient, compliant, kabiyesi-ish, worshipful, offensive to life of significant contentions, germane to received and comfortable positions and attitudes, and more about literary politics and self-posturing than critical vitality and qualitative literary tradition. In fact Lagos is an Absurdistan where to write and to line up are synonymous verbs; whereas continual rebellion is the driving force of aesthetic dynamism. Ever since this change of seat, there has being just one man, a Don, who does not entertain questioning, whose over dozen year dictatorship coincides with the inevitable loss called ‘the lost generation’ and his own inevitable literary leanness.[U1]

Says Helon Habila: “Odia Ofeimun was probably the most influential and the most visible poet in Nigeria. He was something of a cult figure among young poets, and few poetry books were published in Lagos during the 1990s without his name among the acknowledgements.” (Granta 80: The Group). He later adds: “Some of my friends advised me to get close to Odia Ofeimun, because in Lagos he decided who won which competition.”

Undeniably, Ofeimun cannot ‘blind himself to putrefying carcases in the market place pulling giant vultures from the sky’, nor can one refute that The Poet Lied is not a cherished addition to the Nigerian canon, nor that Ofeimun in Postmodernism and the Impossible Death of An African Author is not of obese intelligence, nor that Ofeimun of Imagination and the City is not a superb literary archivist. Chinua Achebe offers a good paradigm in Arrow of God where the people of Aninta set fire to and crush their god because he refuses to serve them and in its place installed another god. More pertinent here is the Yoruba mythological paradigm of Atunda, the first insurrectionary grand iconoclast. At the birth of time, his revolutionary initiative of rolling a stone over his master Orisanla (god of purity and father of the gods) disintegrating him - the original godhead into countless debris so that there is not just one god but many gods. That action liberated humanity from the divine tyranny of theism and monotheism. It inaugurated continued gustiness, revolution, fragmentation, individuality vis-à-vis heterogeneity and their other polysemic significations which in the Ibadan days of actively progressive scholarship were the impelling credos not only in spirituality but also the choice of literary teacher, mentor, critic, muse, discipline, genre of fiction or type of literature, worldview and epistemological system.

The scene changes to a venue of the Lagos readings of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come in October 2005. From the floor came a comment from the chairman of a big publishing house: that some days before he was terribly disgusted to see someone deliver a public lecture with a laptop. He was alluding to Dele Olojede, the Pulitzer Prize co-winner who rendered a lecture during NLNG award ceremony. The question is: what is bad in the new possibility of giving a lecture from a laptop? How come this ‘experienced mind’ in literature obstinately persistent in things of the past, whose interest is not magnetised by a dosage of custom-bending features which is what imagination and creativity is all about be a juror of literary prizes? Even more. His company feeding on past glory has not discovered any new writer in the last 20 years. The textbook publishing that is their staple is a process of recycling annually old textbooks that are long overdue for revision. The company like all others (Macmillan, Heinemann, Longmans, Evans, University Press) are yet playing notorious roles in keeping the WAEC and NECO literature curriculum reading lists caked. To mention a few. For African prose, on WAEC’s syllabus, the newest title is Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys Of Motherhood (1979) and on NECO’s (founded 5 years ago) Animata Sow Fall’s A Beggars Strike. For African Drama, on WAEC’s is Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and on NECO’s, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Mugo’s Trial Of Dedan Kimathi (1976).

Students are in all directions fed cognitively with information, themes and atmospheres that history has overtaken and left museum caryatids. Whereas when those books were enlisted, they were refreshingly and contextually relevant. When Odia Ofeimun first appeared in Idoto, the University of Ibadan English Department journal in 1975 and was again included in Wole Soyinka’s Poems of Black Africa (1975), the curriculum quickly accommodated the young poet as the latest happening to literature worth studying. Can the embalmed syllabus do the same today to bombs like Rotimi Babatunde, Kunle Okesipe, Tolu Ogunlesi or a Chimamanda Adichie?

II
Charles Nnolim’s essay, Contemplating Contemporary Nigerian Fiction (Guardian Friday, 5 August 2005) wherein he abducts new writers into a ‘flesh school,’ upbraids their works as flattering debauchery, corruption, irreligion and lacking fidelity to any serious theme or ideological commitment unlike the first generation of African writers (he broadens to Africa) who had as their theme: “the fight against apartheid and colonialism.” For the second generation, the fight is “for social equality, for feminism.” For the third, (he narrows to Nigeria) there is “no clear thematic focus. If anything they depict a people adrift, hedonistic, cowed…people lost in the imbecility of futile optimism, hoping that materialism and the pursuit of dirty lucre will compensate for the nation’s soul.” Nnolim discloses himself as a puritan like the Victorian critics who treat literature like a branch of moral argument. Any critic is entitled to his own wrong judgment, but certain lapses of judgment indicate a copious sensibility deficit. And they are not just isolated mistakes of judgement, but are proposing standards that call for assent.

Literature is special; it accommodates any level of language, any plot, any style, any ideas, any information. In short, it is open and free. Politics is ideological. Religion is dogmatic. Why should literature be stimulated along some predetermined patterns or goals even when the goals are considered desirable for the health of the society? Why should the fluid operations of the creative mind be constructed around certain frameworks of ideological intent or around the exigencies of engagement?

The responsibility of writers is to make an ingredient out of their immediate surroundings. Quality comes from the creative processing of this fund of ingredients, his speculative - probing relationship without declaring at once in advance ideological relations to this fund. To enlist literature at the service of an interest or ideology, in effect is bound to impose an intolerable strain on the imaginative faculty.

It is inaccurate to sum up the outputs of the first generation as motivated by a predetermined commitment; they were just prima facie interested in how the colonial encounter has shaped the culturalscape for good or ill. Ditto for the second generation. The honour of literature is its capacity to pay attention to and develop a quarrel with(in) the social order and this is the unifying sensibility at work in writings across the genres and across the generations in the trajectory of Nigerian literature. A body of literature from diverse writers historigraphically unified only by time is insusceptible to easy summaries and categorizations. It is replete with complexities, tensed with (sub) thematic contradictions and every of its walls are unavoidably fluid. The critic must have those in mind as an operational background.

The figures of this different generations have not stop writing. And more, many have published works in generations not designated as his/her own. Flora Nwapa, Gabriel Okara, Buchi Emecheta, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Festus Iyayi, Tess Onwueme, Femi Osofisan, have published works up till the later generation(s) and the have concerned themselves with realities, visions and anxieties of these later generations. This makes the man-made partitions of generational grand themes shift about and crumple making room for the project of intertextuality, collective dialogue across time. Such that when Nnolim says that the first generation burdened itself with ‘the fight against apartheid and colonialism’ it is easy to look at their later works and see no such fights but the current zeitgeist. When he says the second generation press their work as vectors of ideological theories, social justice, and feminism, it is easy to look at their later works as see no such thing but the status quo. And so when he says the new Nigerian writing is replete with hedonism, corruption and idioms of debauchery, it is easy to recognize the older works’s ‘grand themes’ resonating similarly. Ejike Eze’s dalliance with Ndidi in Omo Uwaifo’s Fattening House (2001) is no less debauched than the adultery involving Adisa and Obofun in Festus Iyayi’s Violence (1979). Chim Newton’s otherwise mediocre imitation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Under The Cherry Tree (2003) is no less about debauchery than Mongo Beti’s Mission to Kala (1958), or Matei Markwei’s 1964 poem, Life in our Village. Maik Nwosu’s Alpha Song (2003) is no less about a country adrift, prurience, and inveterate beering than Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965). In fact J.P. Clark, a first generation eminence, started off his non-fiction narrative, America, Their America (1964), “a book that established him as an able journalist, a keen social observer and critic,” with an account of himself, a willing participant, in bed with a call girl.

Alpha Song, the monstrance of Nnolim’s observations can be better assessed as a ceaseless quest of a deeper meaning to life than that given by the instincts and superficial affections alone or read as some allegory of a gnostic conflict of the spirit and body, the depletion of the possibilities of life of the mind by those in power whose day policies not only enlarge the army of the night but also lengthen night itself.

Soyinka in 1972 was part of the jury together with Lewis Nkosi and Martin Esslin that commended Jagjit Singh’s play for BBC African performance, Sweet Scum of Freedom, for “daring to [put] a prostitute into the centre of a play without moralizing about it,” and for “successfully point[ing] out that flesh seems to transcend the basic superficial prejudices.” The life of a whore is the most radical metaphor for the act of lending oneself to others. The ultimate the armed forces, the politicians, the religionists with the omnipotence of their God, the human rights and democracy activists at home and abroad, and the concerned international community could not execute to forestall the impending doom General Abacha was dragging to the nation, prostitutes did it. They offered liberation to a nation of 130 million people! The deed of course becomes a metaphor; a revalidation of the role of red light activity in the society and hence an asset to the literary imagination.

Charles Nnolim is a professor of authority who moulds young minds and he happens to be a judge of literary prizes so he matters. The coy self-textualization of the ravaging impact of the cancerous mushrooming of churches on himself is obvious when he urged on his view against the new literature in the final peroration with which his essay concludes. “In spite of the proliferation of churches,” he writes, “God is dead in recent Nigerian fiction, completely edged out by materialism and Epicureanism… No major character in new Nigerian fiction goes to a religious service on Sunday and none kneels down to pray for God’s intervention in moments of crisis.”

This ghastly religious newspeak criticism deserves a little ancestry. In Nigeria, every minute is being reworked into a Sunday and a Friday. A weirdly increasing number of offices devote enough time at mornings to praise worships. Once you dissent, you are linked to hubris and any failure in that office. Yet in these alternative religions – Christianity and Islam inhere the most powerful and most organized force for anti-intellectualism and ecumenical philistinism. Not in their fanatic varieties since no distinction is evinced between the mainstream and the fringe when it comes to their catechesis on matters of thought and the cultural heritage. While Islam proposes alarmingly growing limits to the influence of literary imagination and places veto on impermissible thoughts, Christianity proposes rigid moralism and spiritual correctness. According to the prevailing Christian diagnosis of the Nigerian socio-political and economic condition, the decay started in 1977 when Nigeria hosted the Festival of Black Arts And Civilization (FESTAC 77) and from far and near “we allowed evil spirits and gods to be brought and worshipped from all over. So God has decided to punish us.” The native mode is always divined to be in sinful competition to God, the disseminator of evil spirits and maledictions. In 2001, Obafemi Awolowo University Ife hosted the 7th World Congress of the Orisha. Barely a week after, different Christian groups comprising lecturers and students mobilized for a mass crusade to sanitize the campus of all horrendous principalities of cosmos the congress had invited, to prevent students’ deaths, secret cultism, exam malpractices, and all evils that allegedly blaze the heels of such gatherings. One of the neo-textual by-products of this prowling irrationality in the field of literary criticism is Nnolim’s charge. Again says he: ”even with the proliferation of churches, God is dead in…no major character in new Nigerian fiction goes to a religious service….none kneels down to pray for God’s intervention in moments of crisis.”

This is equivalent to a piece of cheap proselytizing for a mere metaphysical possibility. None in Nigerian literature has done such and there is nothing wrong in never doing it. Because in life and literature, the budding generation does not will to bend or kneel down and commune with an almighty, Prof Charles Nnolim like Papa Eugene Achike in Purple Hibiscus’s opening spark “flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère” just because his irreverent and irreligious son, Jaja “did not go to communion” on Sunday.

The intellectuals, military, politicians, civil servants, and business gurus who ravaged Nigeria and set a standard of thorns for the young actively grace churches and mosques yet do not reckon any sin in wrecking the country and to distract, they employ godot tactics by urging the masses - their victim, to call on God, a force outside of history for solution. Toni Morrison’s Nobel acceptance lecture captures the emerging fire precisely: “Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?”

Much of the continued authority of prevailing literary standards is devoted to upping the threshold of what is terrible. The 2004 maiden edition of the NLNG prize could not be awarded because the judges discovered that all their shortlist was complete with errors. The shortlist is included in the matrix of fiction Nnolim’s essay chastises for lacking ideological focus et al. Though the judges still noted that the plagues of the previous year were active, Gabriel Okara’s The Dreamer, His Vision emerged as a co-winner. It was praised for having “a moral and spiritual meaning,” and “does not shy away from making political statements on the civil war and the devastation in the [Niger] delta” [my emphasis]. With its extant engaged standards, neither Shakespeare, nor Kafka nor Garcia Marquez’s Love in Time of Cholera, nor Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, nor Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Compliant (a story strong on some details of masturbation and other sexual adventures) nor any book with anything homosexual no matter how splendid it is treated can win the NLNG Prize. And we wish to have a respectable literary tradition?

The Pat Utomi Prize states that no work that has won any award elsewhere should be tabled in order to help other writers - financially of course. If a book has won £1000 commonwealth prize, or a N30, 000 ANA third place prize, or won a non-cash Farafina Online award, it cannot win the Pat Utomi N1million prize. By saying that, the prize has little or nothing to do with fostering literary excellence enhanced by comparative evaluations that is the purpose of judges. All things being equal, even if all judges are geniuses, they are prone to subjectivities. That a French book wins the Goncourt does not imply the Prix Novembre is its. More if the intention is to make easy room for younger writers, it is ruinous. Every distinguished writing career started as a personal quest to beat the status quo.In the UK, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) trounced established writers like Nobel Laureate J. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie to the shortlist. Adichie’s trounced heavyweights like Margaret Atwood to the 2004 Orange Prize shortlist. If a book is really great, it deserves to garner all the prizes available. This enriches standards. Other writers should submit themselves to self-punishing tutelage and harder work. The architects of the Pat Utomi prize can create grants, sponsor advances and fund writers’ resorts instead of the current magun (don’t climb) practice. It spells a greater peril. A prize should be designed chiefly to boost the readership of a book rather than enhance the financial station of the author.

Deola Bello, an emerging voice of the Yahoo generation continues the narrativization of this new sensibility in her poem The Quest (Farafina Online, January 2006) which is not expressly an endorsement of an ideological vision or the valences of cultural exocentricity but of the quest for irreligion, creative autonomy, free education, and liberation from the seductive shackles of prizes. The Quest, a statue of liberty, is worth full quote:

If it is true that I am a weed without roots
Flowing on the river with the whims of the wind
If to the beat of Bata I won’t dance
But instead sit at the sides and observe
Then let me be
In peace leave me.
The bat that refuses to fly except at night
Must have a reason for keeping malice with Sunlight
Tarry with me a little longer in a little madness
And I will show you the wisdom of folly.

If it is true that I refuse to make a sacrifice
Of three wraps of pap sprinkled with palm-oil
And placed in a calabash made of mire
To gods I know not who tarry at crossroads.
I will rather eat my food late at night
And go to bed with a full belly
After sacrificing to my stomach
But what about that calabash and the pap
That I saw at crossroads
It is most disgusting, I refuse to touch it

This is the reason why I sit in your midst
Telling you a parable, the story of my life
Like a sword, I assure you its sides are two
For come nightfall the little dancer will surely dance
To the fine rhythm of a choice Samba by night
Gather round folks, let’s make merry
For here, behold the quest ends.

The new Yahoo writers must not allow themselves to be captured by critics demand to express engaged, seminary or Sunday school literature or refrain from writing ‘blemished’ or ‘debauched’ works. Since great works are the best resources for a revolution –literary, intellectual or political, the new Yahoo writers should resolutely stand for literary and intellectual beauty in wherever spheres their imagination can see it achieved. They must will to be vigilant against all species of philistinism masking as political, moral or religious values as indices of literature. They must decidedly project an eternal antagonism towards the forces that wish to normalize repression and popularize censorship. They must defend the nobility of free thought. Like charity that must first start at home, the new Yahoo writers must get rid of the inner censor. Dissent is an asset.

In his gusty poem, The Spinner of Dialectics, Ezeanah lacing strong accusatory vibes in his 14-line couplets suggests that Ofeimun is fond of just rising up and leading the side of those who matters; that he enters himself into any discourse, spit vituperation on everything in order to meet a vituperative need (which is not dissimilar to Nnolim who spits Christian tirade against the new because he must meet a Christian need); that everything to Ofeimun is about a power game, a power show;that he would ‘gossip’ and ‘meddle’ in his tender marriage whereas he squeezes juices out of oranges and toss the remains into the trash can.

Ofeimun in his 143-line Anarch of Hubris scores a direct hit on the refusenik and attempts to cut him to shape. He saturates the verse with significations of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Rimbaud who were alcohol laureates and severe eccentrics:

Neither love nor charity can save him
from the night that takes his mind
When frothing malady spirits him
To the vomitorium….

Poet of hubris, fallen angel of clap-trap!
Not for nothing is he the self-flagellator
who, to blind the sun overhead, throws werepe
up the skies unready for his stem’s collection
of body-scratches until, squirming naked,
he break-dances into market-squares.

Comparing Ezeanah’s stint in the bank and accommodation problems to Rimbaud who abandoned versification for gun running and slave merchandise in the jungles of Africa:

he turns love of poetry, so often betrayed,
into a licence to kill, sell a little daughter
to jungle alleys…

Poe and Rimbaud we must recall are each a genius of the word. Unlike others, the stories of their severe eccentricities could only live because of their everlasting contribution to language. When he harks back to when Ezeanah together with other progressives worked for Arishekola Alao, an Abacha goon and eventually succeeded in getting shot during the ferocious anti-Abacha riot in Ibadan on 1st May 1998, Ofeimun of the barricades rightly carries placard:

he turns love of poetry, so often betrayed,
into a licence to kill,…… dance to nation-wrecking,
taste blood with wolves in comradely toast
yet rise…

Setting forth with the highly emotive, highly pitched pronoun, ‘I,’ and the syncopating jolt resident in it so as to facilitate a sense of terrific pride and indeed grandeur in his affairs with oranges, coyly suggesting they could be held accountable for his literary leanness, Ofeimun begins the second section of the poem:

I was a poet before politics
set the women at the pump
to braid my hair…

they steeled my muse
to temper time and ward off hogs
muddying the healing waters

I remain the poet who stood
with the women at the pump…

…my solidarity endures
with the women at the pump
who taught me to see…

The third part of Anarch of Hubris is typically repetitive and deservedly insipid but it is not without its jewels. First, Ofeimun tries to be contrite but with celerity changes his mind. An act of contrition is a product of grace, of humility but not of self-abasement. It does not diminish; on the contrary it confers integrity. It also carries with it the burden of avoidance of the initial error, of greater caution in negotiating the Southern Lebanon that originally blew up in one’s face. Second, in terms of speed, rhythm, and assortment of images, this lean section arrives at a sombre steadiness. Third, in the preceding section Ofeimun alerts us to significance of ‘women’ and ‘pump’ in his career graph. In this sombre section he illustrates the leanness. God forbid the ageing Ofeimun suggesting he wants to persist sitting like the poem at the middle of page with an abundance of unused spaces all around it. Ezeanah tactically hints that his contemporary relevance as a ‘writer’ rests on ‘tons of dusty manuscripts,’ not even manuscripts of poems or prose but just manuscripts. Wole Soyinka foresaw this tendency of leanness in the then talented young promise. In My Tongue Does Not Marry Slogans, published in Mandela’s Earth and other poems (1989), he derides Ofeimun whether it is ‘a passing inhibition’ or ‘an overdose of reality’ that ‘stuns the mind and beggars lyrics.’ Soyinka insinuates further that maybe it is his ‘brain’s fevered contest with the world.’ That world no doubt includes his Mandela-ing of the Lagos literary politics and other things.

Ofeimun drops a reference that can be taken as his diagnosis of Ezeanah. He toss the line ‘He’s at war/with himself’ under the overarching line ‘never ask me why’ – which together with ‘I will raise a fist to your guts’ are the shield and sword of his dictatorship. Of course we have to ask you why and raise fists to your gut. How could Ofeimun take liberty with memory, with history, with epistemology? How could he prefer to forget that this war with oneself is the primordial ordeal that made Ogun, our shared comrade, brother and ancestor, the Him of creativity? That it was from this inner conflict, this tragic symptom of creativity that the world itself came into existence as Soyinka delineates in The Fourth Stage. Has Ofeimun now truly forgotten the process of inspiration to production? Every creative work of art is a blast of an artist’s war with the inner self, the abyss of dissolution, those caves of the collective psyche. To be there, it requires high voltage courage outwardly called madness. The madness of the brave is usually the wisdom of life. Walter Benjamin theorized on the concept of Hashish - a series of protocols of drug experiments to achieve a depth psychology or chemical exploration of consciousness to re/illuminate experience, provide alternative coordinates of perception, interpretive/interpretative perceptives, and to catalyse the powers of language in which the creative mass usually or occasionally indulge. To take up positions at the frontier of consciousness, couple the infinite aspect of being to the chthonic abyss, and survive its terrors, Ezeanah has had profound ordeals with green daemons of froth. Ogun, under the influence of alcohol, [perhaps because hashish and tough chemicals were alien then, trust Ogun would have spontaneously subscribed to them] murdered friends and foes alike in the Battle of Ire. This uncancelled error enriches earth and myth because Ogun is compelled in atonement to visit earth annually bringing the seasons of harvest.

Can’t an artist choose to fervently subscribe to the Surrealist’s faith in the access to wider consciousness afforded by alcohol, dreams, drugs, sex, and asocial behaviours? I am not conceding absolute authority to the irrational but apprehensively conceding legitimacy to it being a sure route towards a new necessary mental planet. This planet gives light to new truths, new awareness and new conceptions.

Character Chiedu Ezeanah is a multimania no doubts. In this atmosphere of consensus, of phoney characters, Character Chiedu is a rare real thing. He is a connoisseur of indefinite expansion of the possibilities of freedom, of pleasures. Like Nietzsche who has been mad before he became mad, or Nikolai Gogol who lived his short life as a long psycho-illness, the obligation Nigerian literature requires from Character Chiedu is to invent trophies from his experience. Michel Houellebecq is variously described as ‘a zombie back from the dead telling us what he likes,’ chemically challenged, a bore, a severe drunk, a Fela with women, a reactionary, nihilistic, repulsive, funny, melancholic, but no one accepts him as dull. He is the star of French literature, the best contemporary French writer. Houellebecq said until he met fellow writers the most interesting people were inmates of mental hospitals.

So numerous are memorably interesting characters, great citizens of literature with grossly weird possibilities of themselves common in other world literatures that Nigerian literature lack but myriad in its reality. Think of Cervantes’s Knight Quixote and Sancho Panza, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, Vladimir Nabokov’s Hubert Hubert, Gunter Grass’s Oscar Matzerath, Nikolai Gogol’s Chichikov and Aksenty Poprischin, Albert Camus’s Caligula, Garcia Marquez’s Femina Daza, Zadie Smith’s Samad Iqbal. Characters like these are priceless, sociologically, they are amunludun, without which existence will be bore or sore. How could writers of the new sensibility then be blind to literary possibilities of an ace like Character Chiedu Ezeanah and hence defend its right to exist?

III
Oh yes there is a fresh impulse and a new sensibility that fits well into and add to the theoretical framework of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. An ominous disposal of ‘fathers’ in emerging debut fictions are evocative of the new wave’s poise to belt fresh energies into the literary tradition come what may. Fathers or godfathers that lays down magun or embody ideas or fixes conditions with suppressive weight on the flowering of the new are necessarily murdered. I speak of Agu’s father, Commandant, and Luftenant in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005). The young hero, Agu, lost his parents when rebels of extraordinary brutality led by Luftenant and Commander raided his village. Agu is recruited like other children as soldiers. After Faustian ordeals, the child soldiers revolt and shot the fearful commander and a child prostitute knifed Luftenant to death. They became free. In Everything Good Will Come (2005) Sefi Atta makes the self-assertive protagonist Enitan call her father a liar, packs out of his house before getting rid of his existence ultimately.

And more: the murder of Eugene Achike in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004). The arrival of Purple Hibiscus marked this overdue materialization of the new Yahoo impulse and concurrently it is its first harvest. Eugene Achike has a domineering spread in the entirety of the novel. In him reside the polarities of progressive humanistic sentiments and retrogressive coagulants. He is a widely adored philanthropist, he wins a human rights award, only his newspaper stands up to the corrupt, repressive and brutal military government of the day. To his wife and children at home, he is religiously glitzy and a chauvinist; he despises his delectable father, Papa Nnukwu as ‘a heathen’ because he sticks to his indigenous Igbo religion. In the end Adichie obliterates the household tyrant to allow his wife and children to freely breathe and ‘for the new rains [to] come down soon.’

To mobilize the regenerative energies for the new rains to come, genuine giants of Nigerian literature and their achievements are never considered impediments to emerging voices’ aspirations to originality or qualitative outputs as Bloom’s theory posits, only the poseur figures of speech are. Their insidious authority clenches its fists around the minds of the young.

Now that the forces of conformism and fatuous acquiescence to authorities have certainly been strengthened by the introduction of bosomy literary prizes (the NLNG, Pat Utomi, Soyinka Prizes), the Yahoo writers and critics should sponsor scepticisms, formulate questions and construct counter-statements to reigning pieties. They should will to bravely and maddeningly symbolize and defend a higher standard of literature. The Yahoo generation should no longer allow Nigerian literature respond to Mathew Arnold’s notion of culture that defined arts as the criticism of life (understood as propounding and referencing with moral, political, religious precepts) but as the extension or reinvention of life (understood as representing clamorous modes of vivacity). There is no necessary denial of the role moral evaluation. Only that the scale must change. It should become less gross, and what it forfeits in discursive explicitness, it profits from subliminal power. It is a move toward Kafka, that is, a move from the phenomenal, to the nuomenal, to the plane of regard. This is perhaps why Kafka’s works has been squeezed rightly into diverse philosophical and theosophical movements. I see his works as telling the time before the clock strikes. J.P. Sartre claimed them for Existentialism. Albert Camus claimed them for Absurdism. Max Brod claimed they are elaborate quests for the unreachable. That is the essence of literature: to be many things and nothing else since it is not subordinate to anything.

--*[UI]Are you now visiting the sins of the sons upon the father?

• Damola Awoyokun, formerly an Associate Editor of Glendora Review & a former Managing Editor of Farafina Online - lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Endnotes: Muhammed Sule

Nigerian writer Muhammed Sule who passed away on 12th February 2007. A 2005 interview with Sule, conducted by Sumaila Umaisha (for the Nigerian Writers Talking series) - below.

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"I wrote The Undesirable Element in secondary School"

~ ~ ~

NNW: Though your name is well known as a writer and the author of the popularnovel, The Undesirable Element, not many people know you as a person. So let’s begin by knowing the man Muhammed Sule.

~

Muhammed Sule: I’m from Kano, I was born in Kano in 1957 and was brought upthere. The schools I attended include Kofar Nasarawa Primary School and Bayero University, Kano. Then I went to U.K to study Motion Picture Production andScript Writing and Directing. I worked with the Kano State Television Service(later taken over by the Nigeria Television Authority, NTA) and then Kano StateMinistry of Information. I retired in 1988 to set up my own business; Incorporated Links Films Limited. Presently I live in Kaduna.

~

How did you get into writing?

I was motivated by my love to communicate with people. I would have loved tohave been a teacher. So as that opportunity did not avail itself to me, I ended up writing. And I think that has in some ways satisfied my zeal to communicate and contribute to the development of the society at large.

~

When did this motivation come to you, was it when you were a student?

Yes, I was a student when I began to write. I wrote The Undesirable Element insecondary school; Government College, Kano. I started it in Form One. And by the time I got to Form Four I had finished it and sent it to Macmillan forpublication. It eventually got published after I had left secondary school. I was actually in London when it got published in 1977.

~

At what point did you write the second novel, The Delinquent?

I wrote it soon after I had finished writing The Undesirable Element. I thinkI wrote about seven chapters before I graduated from Government College. Icompleted it later on and gave it to Macmillan even when I was yet to know thefate of The Undesirable Element, whether it would be published or not.

~

How did you go about publishing the books?

I didn’t know how to go about it at that time. But fortunately, I took the right course without anyone telling me. You know, when you work on a book, eventually you get bored with it because you probably have read it over athousand times. When I reached that level I felt I had done enough and wanted toget rid of it. So I sent the manuscript to the Northern Nigeria Publishing Company (NNPC) in Zaria. At that time Macmillan was running the NNPC asco-owners. The management was provided by the Macmillan. The NNPC then had nointerest in publishing English works. So the MD, Mr. Taylor, a Briton, took the manuscript from me and gave it to his wife, who was teaching at the Government Girls Secondary School, Zaria, to go through. And when she had gone through shedecided that since it was the first book in English they had received and sincethere were no such writings from the North, they would take it to London. Luckily, she took it to Macmillan office in London at the timewhen it was planning to start the Pacesetter Series. They decided to include it in the series.

~

Let’s look at The Undesirable Element closely. What messages is it meant topass across?

One of the messages I intended to pass across is the importance of education. I’ve since realised that education is a key factor in every person’s life, so in all my writings you will find that in one way or the other the importance ofeducation is the central theme. The Undesirable Element in particular is areflection of what obtained in the Northern Nigeria of that period. The situation was that older men who were well-to-do were marrying young girls. And some of these girls were in school. They had to be brought out of school tomarry. That was the social trend that time. It was money. Marriage were based on "I’m rich, I can marry young girls.’’ Once you were rich you could do anything in the North at that time. It was so.

~

Is the trend increasing now or decreasing?

Socially the North is a bigger trouble now than that time. Now they are not marrying the girls, they are abusing them. The situation is compounded by thefact that the quality of education has collapsed. So even though many girls now go to higher institutions, they are not intellectually and morally sound enoughto maintain self-discipline. And so they are more liable to the evil machinations of the rich men these days.

~

The Delinquent is centred more on how the children of the rich easily getspoilt by the riches. How would you compare the level of such behaviour in those days with these days?

It has reduced drastically because these days children from rich families no longer think they have automatic ticket in life. They no longer think they don’thave to go to school, their parents’ money would see them through life. That has changed over the years as a result of many instances where children from poor background become rich and influential through education. So it is only in isolated cases that such mentality still exists.

~

Apart from these two books, what other books have you published?

I have published two other books: The Infamous Act and The Devil’s Seat. And I’m writing another one which will soon be published by Macmillan. The working title is The Libertine.

~

Is the theme of this one different from your usual theme of corruption?

No, it cannot be different because the situation in the North is still very alarming. As long as the situation persists in the way it is, a committed writerwill continue to pay attention to the social dynamics. We have numerous problems in the area of education, health and so on. And there is poverty everywhere due to the misuse of wealth. I have never seen a place where the rich of that area misuse their wealth like the North. It is a tragedy. You can’t see concrete investments that are capable of relieving the social tension as well astranslating into a huge economic benefit to both the owner of the business and those who lean on the business in terms of working or trading in the product of that business. So the North is a human failure in terms of the wealthy Northerners utilising their wealth for the economic sustainability of the area.

~

Are these problems the theme of The Libertine?

Not exactly. It is still the same problem of social education. You can view The Libertine as an indirect sequel to The Undesirable Element, it is along thesame line. But here we are not dealing with a secondary school girl. We are talking about a young lady in the university who has to drop out due to poverty. But not simply poverty, she also got herself involved in so many other things.Yes, she is also a delinquent, but in her own case she came from a poor family.And because the society is uncaring so many problems that would have been avoided happened. Nobody cares. And that is the most unfortunate thing about our society.

~

The criticism against most African writers is that they merely expose the problems rather than propound the right solutions to them. Is this new work in the same old expository style?

Well, whether a writer propounds solutions or not is not the issue. The most important thing is to expose the problem. When you expose a problem and people appreciate the fact that they have the problem, you have achieved about fiftyper cent towards getting the solution. People must be made aware of the problembefore they can solve it. So I think anyone who exposes the problem has done agood thing. The process of bringing about a solution is vast, everybody will play a part in bringing about the solution. In The Libertine I’m very critical of our society’s lack of respect for merit, where very hard working people could not make it anywhere because of certain reasons. Charlatans, idiots, praise-singers and boot-lickers can succeed to no limit because they know the people in the power circle. And the real people could be dammed because they don’t have any link-up to who is who. It is very unfortunate. A situation where the best could not take his or her right place is aterrible situation and we will continue to be in the loo. But the moment we are able to find our way, whereby people will be given their due, so many of the problems will adjust themselves.

~

Given our reading culture in this country, where those who are creating these problems have little or no time to read, how could the writers really change the ills?

The people who are causing the ills are in the minority while those who are reading are in the majority. So if you are able to reach the majority, if you are able to reach about a million people, they may have different perspectives about the book, but your preaching will get through. And then we are moving forward. Of course, I’m also aware of the poor reaching culture. When I was inprimary school, we had a library where we could read. It was the same in secondary school. And we read a lot. But these days, even some university graduates hardly read. So it is a fundamental problem. But I don’t believe theproblem cannot be solve if all those concerned wake up to their responsibilities.

~

To be able to write novels while you were in secondary school, you must have read hard and wide.

Of course, we used to read a lot those days. We were dedicated to our studies and were always thinking of what we wanted to be in life. From the start I havealways wanted to be a writer. And I was able to commit myself, and God in His mercy has made me realize my dream. You see, it is important to have a plan. Asat the time you put down the plan there maybe no prospect of achieving yourgoal. But if you diligently and patiently dedicate yourself to it, someday youwill be near it, one day you will be in it and one day you will go higher aboveit. But young people of these days don’t want to strive. They just want themoney. But I don’t know how you can get the money without working for it. Somepeople say there is no such thing as success in life because you have to work every minute of everything you want, so that by the time you achieve it, it isnot success, it is what you are due for. Unfortunately our own society don’t encourage that. But still that is not enough reason not to strive. It is just like when you are on a journey and you need afree ride. You don’t stand by the roadside, hoping that one of the motorists would just stop and give you a lift. You have to keep on moving, displaying a placard announcing your destination. Eventually someone will recognize your effort and stop to offer you a helping hand. That is how the world operates.

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Did you read literature in school?

Yes, I did. But that is not enough motivation for one to become a writer. Yousee, writing is very difficult, you need to have very strong motivating factorsto be able to write. It is so demanding that with simple commitment you can never write, the commitment must be very overwhelming, and there must beinterest, pleasure and other factors. The Libertine, for instance, I started writing it since 1993. I planned it for over one and half years, then I went toJos to write it, and I was able to write it within a month. I should havepublished it by now but my editor wasn’t comfortable with some aspects so I had to change it.

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What was wrong with the aspect; was it against the government?

It was not against the government. It was against social order, according tomy editor. And the publisher agreed on that. And he decided to send me just thechapter involved. Unfortunately, the chapter got lost in transit. For me toreplace that chapter, it took me seven years.

~

Seven years?

Yes. Because I have other things to do, and when I decided to write it, Iwrote two chapters instead of one. Now I have finished it. The reason why it isyet to be published is because I want a particular person in U.K. to go throughthe new changes and she hasn’t got the chance yet.

~

So how soon are we expecting it?

I hope to go to UK soon and get it published.Were your subsequent novels published in the same way The Undesirable Element and The Delinquent were published or they were self-published as it is the vogue these days? It is the same way; not self-published. I can understand those who doself-publishing. If you don’t have the opportunity of being published in the traditional way, why not. But if you have a publisher you are likely to reach out to a wider audience than when you do self-publishing.

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How have your efforts in writing been rewarded?

The Undesirable Element and The Delinquent were among the best-selling novels in the Pacesetter series, and they still are today abroad where the series are still being sold. And I do receive my royalties regularly from the sales. So, definitely I have benefited from the books. Though the benefit is not as much as I used to get before due to some problems. One of the problems is that of the inability of Macmillan to bring the books here due to the problem between the headquarters in UK and the Nigerian office. Secondly, the economy has restricted the importation of books; the cost of the books have gone so high due to high foreign exchange. So, even if they are imported here, readers can hardly afford them. And thirdly, piracy has wrecked havoc on the book industry so much that the benefits that should have gone to the writer have been diverted into the pockets of the pirates. Popularity is one of your major benefits. But you would have been more popular especially in the academic circle if you had got your works into the school syllabus.

~

Why were they not read in schools?

So many schools had The Undesirable Element and The Delinquent on their reading list. Sometime ago Ambassador Kabiru Rabiu who was a commissioner in Kano State during the Third Republic tried to see that my books, as a Kano indigene, is put in the syllabus, at least, in Kano State. Well, I didn’t know what went wrong but somehow that initiative fizzled out when he left the Ministry of Education. But all the same the books have found their levels as best-sellers. So many people I meet tell me they have read the books.

~

I read them while I was in secondary school.

We thank God for that.

~

Some writers talk a lot. But it seems you let your works speak for you. Is that a deliberate policy?

Well, by nature, I’m a very private man. And I feel if one has taken the trouble to write, he should let the writing do the talking and create the desired impact that would change the society for the better.

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Are you saying that though you are a radical, a moral crusader, you are not an activist?

Well, I don’t know what you mean by an activist [laughter]. But I am a man who simply wants to live in a very good surrounding, and who likes to contribute to his society the little he can. I think it is a sacred duty. If you are in a society where there is a lot to be done you have to contribute the little you can. At least that will console you. But if you are always getting angry at allsorts of things happening and you are not doing anything to advance any course toward the realisation of the solution, then you are part of the problem. And that is what most of the activists in this country are - part of the problem. They are just noise makers. But sometimes it doesn’t require noise, it requires positive actions. If we were making more positive actions than noise we would have changed the society by now.

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Does this mean your encounter with the Abacha regime some time ago has nothing to do with activism?

Well, it was in the line of business. Since my leaving the civil service I have been running the business of television documentary. So, what happened wasthat I was arrested while I was doing a documentary on the political and socio-economic aspect of Nigeria. I was interviewing the late General Musa Shehu Yar’adua when I, together with five others, was arrested.

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When did this actually happen?

It happened on the 8th of February, 1995. You see, the documentary is not only on the politics of that time. I had shot materials from way back; the Shagari period to June 12. Abacha regime was not the only government I was trying to portray. And I was fair. I allowed everybody a say. Whatever is said against a personality I would go to that person for his own side of the story. The producers who sponsored the project made it clear that they wanted something very objective, and I tried as much as possible to do just that.

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Who are these sponsors?

My friends in the UK. I had a sponsorship and support from an organisation in the UK. A friend of mine called Neil, who is a media expert and has a radio station there is the man behind it. He insisted it has to be objective. And like I said, that is what I tried to do. So my arrest was a surprise to me. However,I won’t go into details about it.

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But let’s…

No. I’m not going into much details because I have been making my own notes. So at a later date, God willing, I will be able to write a substantial account of what happened. But all the same I must say I was shocked by what I saw that day and the days after. Violence and brutality was brought into a matter which could have been simply sorted out. We had to spend 17 months in detention.

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What were the allegations leveled against you?

There were so many allegations, some of them very wild. So you don’t know which one to believe. The main thing is that they thought I was being sponsored by Yar’Adua to portray the regime in a bad light abroad. But it was share stupidity, for Yar’adua didn’t even know when the production started. His only relevance to the documentary was that he happened to be a political actor at that time.

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Seventeen months in detention is definitely a hell of time. Does it mean all this while none of your friends came to rescue you?

Which friend can rescue me from Major Hamza Al-Mustapha? (the Chief Security Officer to Abacha). Mustapha was responsible for it and he was like a tin-god; nobody could talk to him about anything of that nature.

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Who were those who stood by you in your days in detention?

So many people and organisations readily come to mind. Military police cellguard Corporal Oneya now Staff Sergeant who received me at Yakubu Gowon Brigade of Guard’s camp, my detention centre with human courtesy. And who a week later outrightly refused to take over duty because I was not given access to medical treatment for my uncountable open bleeding wounds by no other person than the officer in charge of the Guardroom, Military Police Major Adamu Argungu, who has since been retired for his excesses during the alleged Diya coup. I was destined to survive the rigour of those unfortunate days when, by some twist I met police S.P. Dr. Charles Ugbomah also detained for something to do with late Chief M.K.O. Abiola. Dr. Charles saw the state of my bleeding wounds and warned me that I need Anti-tetanus injection. He agreed to write prescription for me but refused to inject me. I got injected with ATS a week later through the intervention of Corporal Oneya. Only then did Major Adam come in person to escort me to the next door clinic for the treatment. I cannot help but compare the incivility of the great Professor of Law, Awalu Yadudu, who was then Legal Adviser to late Gen. Abacha. Yadudu was brought to the ceremonial gate of the Aso Villa where I was kept after my baptism with brutal torture on the expressed order of the CSO Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, CSP Abba Suleiman, who I did not recognize then brought me before Prof. Yadudu, the human right gladiator of that regime. My disappointment to date was that the Professor of Law could not even ask me why I was there? My pleasure of seeing him in my very woeful condition was shortlived as he looked at me with hatred and disgust, saying, "shine wannan?" meaning "is he the one?"in Hausa. Abba Suleiman confirmed in affirmative. As we stood there his eyes were smouldering as though he would spit on my face or I believe if he had a dagger in his hand, he would have mercilessly stabbed me to death, going by his expression. Only for me to meet Corporal Oneya, the following day and see the difference between a decent man of the other rank, not an officer, yet behaving unsavagely. That episode was an eye opener to me in my behaviour towards all people ever after. I must thank people like General Magashi; he really showed interest in helping us out. But, of course, the power-that-be did not allow him even though he was senior to those people. Also Mandy Ganner in collaboration with Babara traba of SWISS-German Ren Centre that arranged for me to leave through the NADECO route for exile. And also Civil Liberties Organisation contacted Toucher International Switzerland who provided tickets for me and my family to leave but I did not. Olu Akerelle, late Chief Abiola’s Personal Assistant joined us at Yakubu Gowon camp detention centre and we remained together for months. He was later to shoulder so much burden for me and many others. My professional associate in the UK Mr. Neil Kenlock was a formidable support. So was my publishers, Macmillan, who approved so much money as advance for me at that time, apart from their moral support. Mandy Ganner of international Pen London was a source of enormous inspiration and support to my family in my absence. Most of the awards I received came through the activities of Mandy Ganner. So was Mr. Innocent Awachukwu of Centre for Law Enforcement, Mr Richard Akinola, Tunde Rahaman of Centre for Free Speech, which I am in its Advisory Board, Clement Nwankwo of Constitutional Right Project, Barrister Okoye of Human Rights Law, Umaru Apai, Kabir Yusuf Ali and a host of other great humanitarian minds that I will ever remain grateful and thankful to. And finally I must mention a man of tremendous courage and guts, Umar Faruk Musa, former BBC Abuja correspondent now with the Bureau Chief of VOA Hausa Service, as the man who brought me out of the doldrums to the real world. This is a man I cannot find words to ever thank.

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In general, who were those responsible for your succeess in life?

First of all, I am thankful to Allah for being alive and in good health and the many more of His endowment to me as a person and the humanity. I am also indebted to my parents for all their good work towards making me a decent person; their sacrifice, their endurance at difficult times and their patience had all rubbed on my person. We were so close that I will certainly never free myself from the nostalgia of missing them until my own death. May Allah grant them eternal rest from an appreciating son. My teachers at all the levels of my schooling are also worthy of mentioning. Career wise, I recall the wonderful contribution of Alhaji Mohammed Ibrahimn, former NTA Director-General. He is the traditional ruler of his area now. He employed me as the then General Manager of Kano State Television Service and he was instrumental to my winning Kano State scholarship to study abroad. There was also Alhaji Mahmoud Yazid, my Director of Information in my days at the Kano State Film Unit and Mr Edet Uno, the then state director of Information who gave my career a real push. It was a rare privilege to work with Alhaji Ibrahim Ismail, a post Second Republic Information Commissioner. I have learnt a great deal through the confidence he had on me as we worked very closely at that timeand even afterwards.In terms succeess as a writer, my family has most of the credit for their support and understanding, especially my wife and children who were deprived of my company due to my chosen passion to write. Over the years I have also built good relationships with a number of good people in the Macmillan outfit. My friend and co-writer, former executive of Macmillan Nigeria, Mr Agbo Areo. Ms.Lizmet, the first Macmillan official I met in 1976 to discuss my royalty contract, Ms. Ann Price who edited The Undesirable Element and The Delinquent. Ann is still a good friend who was so kind to come to London to greet me after my ordeal with the Abacha regime. The MD/CEO of Macmillam, Mr Christ Harrison, a kind man and a long term supporter of relationship with his company, and indeed Mr. John Weston who took so much trouble to locate me in my most difficult days. Aman, who makes it a point to meet with me whenever I was out there in the UK or when he comes round here. And he does that often. I remain grateful to all of them.

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How would you describe the literary scene especially in the north?

I think there is progress. All over the country new writers are coming up and many of them are doing well. There are a lot of potentials. There are so many writers in the North also. But many of them will never get published in the system we operate now. Things can only get better when the system is changed and the big publishing companies come back to play the roles they used to play. But for now, writing is only an aspiration to so many young people. It is unfortunate. The most terrible tragedy of writing in the North is that there are so many educated people; professors, doctors etc who would have at least by now flooded our schools with their works, but because of lack of organisation what we read in the North come from outside. If the system were working, local governments could decide to introduce in primary and junior secondary schools syllabuses books by writers in the locality. And this would have impacted positively on our children because their understanding would be enhanced as there is an interelationship between the writer and the reader. The benefit is all-round. The writers will benefit, the local publishers and bookshops will benefit, and the students too.

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Amidst this chaotic situation, what is your advice for young writers?

Well, it is good to have the ambition. It is good to write. I’m sure soon the situation will improve. Nothing is forever, change will come somehow. And it isbetter to be found there waiting for the change. So writers must find a way of nursing their talents.

• Words and image are courtesy of Sumaila Umaisha, and the blogger thanks him.