It is becoming increasingly worrisome that Professor Chinua Achebe will end his long, glorious career just as it began - mired in controversy.
And that is not the best epitaph any patriotic Nigerian would want to read about a man who, to my mind, should in his characteristic humility accept the honour of being the greatest Nigerian alive.
At the beginning of his career, Professor Achebe spiritedly fended off charges of plagiarism from a fellow Igbo when he published his best known Things Fall Apart. His accuser had charged then that the then young Achebe reworked and took the credit for his own account of life in pre colonial Igbo society.
For very obvious reasons, Professor Achebe’s accuser was cajoled and persuaded to drop his charge rather than spoil the party for a rising star. In most Nigerian traditional societies, it is considered a taboo for a man to attempt to pour sand into the bowl of garri of another member of society.
But we are talking of the 1960’s, a time when the internet existed in the imagination of men. In today’s jet age, Professor Achebe would have had more explanation to do. When Professor Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, many Nigerian critics in the Yoruba speaking south west expressed indignation with the choice by positing that Professor Achebe, an Igbo, not Professor Soyinka who is ‘one of their own’, indeed a Yoruba man who globally campaign on behalf of Biafra was better suited for the award.
In fifty years, Things Fall Apart has become an all time classic and has turned to be one novel that placed Nigeria on a high pedestal. Take it or leave it: if ordinary Nigerians had a hand in awarding the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, it is most likely Professor Achebe would have picked it. Yet there were those who argued then, rightly or wrongly, that Professor Achebe was probably sidelined by the ‘unsettled dust’ over the plagiarism charge that greeted Things Fall Apart.
Nearly fifty years on, Professor Achebe is again in the eye of the storm. He has just published his war memoirs, There Was A Country, his own account, captured from a safe distance far from the trenches, of the 30 month long civil war that consumed an estimated one million lives. So far, the raging debate on the book is set to dwarf the controversy that surrounded Things Fall Apart. At issue and the portion of the book that has proved to be controversial is the role Professor Achebe said certain Nigerians played in an admittedly uncivil war that some Nigerians prefer to refer to as genocide.
Specifically, he hinted that Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first premier of the defunct Western Region and his principal, then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, displayed genocidal tendencies when the federal government adopted hunger as a weapon of war. For obvious reasons, we have to excuse General Gowon: he was the head but Chief Awolowo, his federal commissioner (minister) of finance is credited with initiating moves to end the war.
Truth is, there is nothing new or original in what Professor Achebe wrote; if anything, what he wrote should be a matter that appeared settled while Chief Awolowo lived. Way back in1979 and as he did in several publications before then, Chief Awolowo, typical of him, maintained his ground that, in war time there is no point feeding an adversary to fight you. He was convinced till the end that had the vital food supply lines to combatants in the trenches not been cut, chances were the needless war could have dragged far much longer and many more lives would have been lost.
Of course, the first casualty of the decision was the ordinary Biafran who, in any case was forced to cut his ration as sacrifice toward prosecuting the war. Expectedly, the unwilling sacrifice ended when supply lines were cut after which the hunger pangs that had been the lot of struggling and sacrificing Biafrans became pronounced among the combatants on the battle front. If truth be told, hunger-induced weak limbs, not shortage of firearms and certainly not the absence of young men to handle those firearms killed the Biafran dream. And that precisely was the aim Chief Awolowo said the federal government sought to achieve by cutting vital food supply lines to defunct Biafra.
To be continued
Written by Abdulrazaq Magaji
