For Chinua Achebe

 

ONLY ONIONS BRING TEARS

Nigeria’s first university opened in 1948 as University College, Ibadan. The Department of Geography was there from the beginning and its foundation Professor was Keith M. Buchanan. Keith died at his home on the Kapiti Coast, Wellington, New Zealand in 2002 aged 78, much respected in his field.

 

Among the first student intake of the future University of Ibadan was Chinua Achebe who had been awarded a bursary to study Medicine. After an unhappy year, he switched to English, History and Theology. Chinua has recently died aged 82 – an acclaimed giant in world literature.

Both men influenced me and my understanding of the world – Achebe profoundly.  As you see from my header, when Queen Elizabeth II made a State Visit to Nigeria in 1956, she was heads and tails were palms. Chinua Achebe flipped the coin - and gave currency and voice to the African face.

And I find the interplay between the narratives of the two alumni fascinating.

Let’s start with Keith, my namesake.

Keith Buchanan [in collaboration with J.C. Pugh] published in 1955, what to a dreamy youngster like me was a wonderful book, ‘Land and People in Nigeria’. I can still remember poring over the text and illustrations during the long, dark winter’s evenings in our farmhouse in Cheshire.

For me, studying Geography was pure escapism. In my mind’s eye, I could conjure steam trains from the cross-hatched lines denoting railway lines; I could visualize camel caravanserai trekking into the desert where the isohyets ran thin; and a street map of Buenos Aires would see me there exploring the boulevards along Avenida 9 de Julio.

But Buchanan and Pugh did better. They provided line drawings of ‘euphorbia-girt villages’ on the Jos Plateau and they quoted Hausa Proverbs. It brought Nigeria to life to me.

For years, I would interject my favourite Hausa bon mots into conversations, when they flagged: ‘Komi kyaun ba ta yi tafannuwar, kamar albasa ba’ [or something that has some vague resemblance to that – we are talking 50 years ago].

Apparently, the proverb [in its true form] means something like: ‘However fine the garlic, it is not onions’.

And what you may ask is its point? It’s all about people and places and being in the right place with your kinfolk. If a stranger from a different tribe visits, he is fine – the highest quality garlic if you like. But he doesn’t know his onions – he doesn’t have a place around the cooking pot where your own people are king.

As a young regional planner / economist, in the period 1976-79I spent a good deal of time in Nigeria. Nobody ever understood me when I quoted the proverb but I grew to learn that it spoke of a deep tolerance of other cultures that went hand in hand with a pride in one’s own.

The really great thing about being a European in upcountry Nigeria in those days was that you were just from yet another tribe – a nuisance to be tolerated or a guest to be celebrated – but never the real McCoy, and therefore never worth taking over seriously.

 Of course, this had its dangers. As Chinua Achebe comments:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

RADICAL HUMANISM, POWER ELITES AND CULTURAL LIQUIDATION

But the unity of the Europeans is also skin-deep in places. Like the other Keith, I was a product of Britain’s fractured tribal identities, class distinctions and noblesse oblige burdens.

When I read some of what Keith wrote, I hear myself as a young man from The North in the 1960s full of crusading fervour, with no-shoulder unchipped. As for windmills, neither of us could pass one without trying to lance it.

 Writing as the descendant of Scots, who was born in England and got his first job as an academic in Wales, KB starts an essay on ‘Economic Growth and Cultural Liquidation: The Case of the Celtic Nations (1977)’ in the following uncompromising terms:

'This makes no claim to be a detached and objective paper. I write as one who has lost the Language my ancestors spoke many generations ago and who has only a slender knowledge of that other Celtic language my children learned in a tiny school close to the silver Welsh Sea.

'I write as one who has in many lands seen “the immeasurable destructive potential of indiscriminate economic growth who has seen, in the words of the greatest living Welsh poet:

 ‘Behind the smile on times’ face

The cold brain of the machine
That will destroy you and your race.

 [R.S Thomas]

... I write as one who (perhaps against all evidence), is unprepared to believe that our Affluent Society, our technologically sophisticated yet socially disintegrating society of Chrome, Cream and Crime, is the only possible type of society.

 'We have lost the old tongue, and with it

The old ways too ...
... the language, for us
Is part of the old abandoned ways’.

 [Herbert Williams]

 In ‘The Geography of Empire’ (1972), Keith rails like a half-starved, half-mad prophet:

‘At first sight, the seventeenth century writer John Donne would seem irrelevant to the analysis of modern imperialism. But the John Donne of whom I think is not John Donne the poet, the rumour-ringed, enigmatic, sensuous adventurer, but John Donne the preacher, the passionate, compassionate and probing Dean of St. Paul's.

‘And when I think of John Donne in the context of this paper I think of his sombre and fearsome warning: "Foole, this night they shall fetch away thy soule".

‘For, as I see it, these sombre words can be extended to the long night of colonialism and the tormented neo-colonial night which has followed. The physical spoliation of those who lived, who still live, in the dark night of imperialism, the filching away of gold and copper and foodstuffs and fibres, is something all can see - but this material impoverishment may well prove to be of less significance than the undermining of indigenous cultures, the destruction of the personality, the stealing of the soul of those colonised.

‘Moreover, as we shall see in this paper, this "stealing of souls", this cultural imperialism, is by no means a thing of the past, for, as the old forms of imperialism withered, new, more sophisticated and more subtle forms have taken their place ... The physical pillage of the world by the developed nations continues and to this has been added an even more destructive and pervasive intellectual pillage.

[See: http://www.big-lies.org/american-empire-and-other-empires/american-empire.html]

Keith was in the words of his NZ colleague Ray Watters a ‘radical humanist and polemicist, a socialist, a champion of the dispossessed, and an unrelenting critic of orthodoxy, capitalist regimes and power elites’ - or what I sometimes term myself a Left-Libertarian.

But another geographer R.D. Hill flips the coin here and is ambivalent in his praise:

'Buchanan’s research and fieldwork in China, undertaken from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, when both were difficult, were marred by his lack of Chinese. Nevertheless he was a notable student of the People’s Republic at a time of great interest, great ignorance and great polarization of viewpoints.

‘Buchanan was a fierce “Cold Warrior of the Left”, unpopular to the point of being perceived as a threat by the forces of reaction.

‘But he was far too individualistic and idiosyncratic ever to make a formal political commitment or develop a consistent political stance other than that of a romantic revolutionary, happy enough to feed the backyard furnaces of the Great Leap Forward and to be a thorn in the flesh of New Zealand and American politicians and bureaucrats of the Cold War –

 ... ‘but too comfortably bourgeois in his position as professor of Geography at the Victoria University of Wellington to “forsake all” in the manner of Rewi Alley and commit his life to the betterment of the proletariat and the peasantry.

So there we have it – passionate, opinionated Europeans both clever and foolish at the same time. Well meaning to an apostrophe but determined to have the edge in the argument and in worthiness. It only remained for Geography [and China for awhile] to be overwhelmed by the cleverness [and foolishness] of Marxism.

 AUTHENTICITY, DIGNITY AND A DIFFERENT ORDER OF REALITY

 “If you don’t like someone’s story,” Chinua Achebe told The Paris Review in 1994, “write your own.”

 This was as much advice to Europeans as it was to Africans.

 With a light mastery, he flipped the coin.

 In the words of the white South African writer Nadine Gordiner:

‘I read his work with the sense of extraordinary entry into a brilliant (I do not use that word fashionably or lightly) mind, a writer's continuing achievement of penetrating the variety, possibilities, mystery of being human in the presence not only of one's own people and country, but of the world’.

 And Nnaoma Cassidy Ibe has this to say:

'He wrote with passion without minding whose ox is gored. His pen was indeed relentlessly fearless, as he tried to communicate the deep thoughts that flowed from the innermost recess of his literary being.

‘He was simultaneously a novelist, poet, broadcaster, professor and critic. Achebe wrote more than 20 works, some of which were fiercely critical of politicians and a failure of leadership in Nigeria. The most widely acclaimed of his works, Things Fall Apart is generally regarded as the most widely read book in modern African English literature.

'Things Fall Apart is a story that transcends. It has classic qualities that a typical African can confidently say, “this is my story”: from Nigeria to Kenya, from Senegal to Zimbabwe, from Morocco to Tanzania, from Sierra Leone to Rwanda. If you want to know how proverbs are used in African literature, rush to Achebe.

‘He was a warrior, a literary ‘four-star general’, who went to the battlefield and emerged undisputedly ‘the champion’. All through his life, he was armed with every necessary ‘machinery’ a 20th century writer ought to be armed with. Truly, he paid his dues perfectly well. He was an embodiment of the fight against injustice, within and without.

‘He was a whistle blower. He blew the ‘whistle’ when it was most necessary. In his Things Fall Apart, he blew the whistle against Joseph Conrad (Achebe in 1975 went ahead to describe Conrad as a ‘bloody) and all those misinformed white folks that viewed Africa from subhuman lenses.

‘Today, Africans have understood that they can tell their own story and tell it so well. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has wonderfully demonstrated this fact).

'Twice, he was offered national honours (under Obasanjo and Jonathan respectively); twice he rejected it on two justifiable grounds: (a) because of the existence of a cabal, (in his own words “a small clique of renegades”) that has turned “my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom” (b) in my opinion, I believe strongly he did not want to share a national honour with personalities whose characters are ‘recurringly questionable’.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie herself writes:

 ‘Things Fall Apart’ is the African novel most read – and arguably most loved – by Africans, a novel published when ‘African novel’ meant European accounts of ‘native’ life. Achebe was an unapologetic member of the generation of African writers who were ‘writing back,’ challenging the stock Western images of their homeland, but his work was not burdened by its intent.

 ‘It is much-loved not because Achebe wrote back, but because he wrote back well. His work was wise, humorous, human. For many Africans, ‘Things Fall Apart’ remains a gesture of returned dignity, a literary and an emotional experience; Mandela called Achebe the writer in whose presence the prison walls came down’.

As for me, Dr Keith Johnson, the eager young technocrat and project manager for the preparation of the Kwara and Benue Regional Plans [and economist for the Bauchi-Gombe Slum Upgrading and Low Cost Housing Project], in the period 1976-79, I both loved and hated Nigeria. As my driver Lawrence once said [he was an Igbo like Achebe], there is ‘too much suffering in dis Nigeria’.

But you had to love the people – and reading ‘Things Fall Apart’ and ‘No Longer at Ease’ back then, I suddenly saw myself reflected. Well-paid, having made it, a global citizen ... insecure, cut-loose from my roots, facing a switch-back ride of social change, adrift in materialism and greed, threatened by anomie and dystopia.

 After all:

"It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning."

It was nice / is nice that well-meaning Europeans want to write other people’s stories but Chinua Achebe forced the onlookers to confront the images that fade away mirror upon mirror in Africa. We are not Black, we are White - but as the images recede it is clear that we are all simply human and that if I close my eyes, I can begin to understand.