2nd April, 2013
By Tunde Olusunle
Over the years, Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo and I have had the good fortune of regularly hosting a good number of senior colleagues and contemporaries in the fraternity of the pen in our Abuja base. Our engagements often get so intense, we would have to remind ourselves the night has melted into another day and it was desirable to go catch a nap! Thursday 21 March 2013, was another such opportunity. Ojo had called me early evening that day, to announce that Professor Obafemi was in town, with Jare Ajayi, another writer and culture activist, in tow. He said it would be nice to meet with them later.
Ojo relayed an experience we both had as aides to former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2004, when we sent to our erstwhile principal, a memo containing the names of select deserving writers, scholars, journalists and activists, who had done Nigeria proud at home and abroad, and who qualified to be conferred with national honours. Top on our list was Professor Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. Obasanjo approved our recommendation and adopted three other names from our list of nearly four dozen. By no fault of ours – Ojo and I – however, things turned awry, once Obasanjo’s approval of the honour was made public.
From his base in the United States of America where he has lived for the better part of the past three decades, Achebe declined the offer in very strong terms. He decried the subsisting distortions in the socio-economy and condemned the “state-supervised” brigandage in his home state of Anambra, where agents of government were procured to abduct a sitting governor at the time!
Once it became public in the social media Friday 23 March that Achebe had transited almost as we talked the previous night, at the age of 82, Obafemi, Ododo and Ojo were the very first I sent text messages, notifying them of the development. Ojo, however, was buried in his personal library, oblivious of what transpired out there, until he received my text. “This is the same Achebe we were discussing last night,” Ojo said when he called to acknowledge my message. “Absolutely,” I replied. “God has been kind to the old man, I believe,” was my continuation of the dialogue. “To imagine he survived 22 years after that road mishap in 1990.” “He was able to stretch it this long because he was out there in the West,” Ojo added. “He would probably have been long gone if he remained here with the incompetence and sloppiness in the system.”
As President of the English Readers Association, ERA, the body to which all students of English literature and language belonged in the University of Ilorin in 1984, the congress had taken a decision for us to have an excursion to three states in the South of Nigeria at the time. These were the old Bendel (which subsequently became Edo and Delta states during the August 27, 1991 states creation exercise); the old Anambra (bifurcated into Anambra and Enugu states in the same exercise) and Rivers State (which became Rivers and Bayelsa in the 1996 state creation exercise).
Beyond the potential touristic appeal of the proposed excursion, we thought to get some added literary experiential value by meeting select icons of our national literature in the course of the trip. To this extent, it was agreed that we seek audiences with Achebe, who was then a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; Professor Ola Rotimi, who was at the University of Port Harcourt; and Professor Femi Osofisan, who had temporarily relocated from the University of Ibadan to the University of Benin, as we voyaged through their domains.
Armed with letters introducing our proposed mission, I set out to meet these three great minds. There were no prior telephone contacts, no exchange of e-mails, absolutely no communication before I set out in search of these literary personages.
As students of literature with some of us taking electives in Performing Arts, we were familiar with Osofisan’s plays such as A Restless Run Of Locusts, The Chattering And The Song, Once Upon Four Nobles and Morountodun. Indeed, for the 1983 convocation ceremony of the University of Ilorin, we had performed Morountodun, directed by Olu Obafemi, where I played the role of “Corporal”. It would be a great delight meeting the playwright on our trip, we reasoned.
Fortuitously, Osofisan was busy directing a rehearsal of Midnight Hotel, when I arrived the Theatre Arts Department of the University of Benin. I mingled with the audience, my travel bag slung over my shoulders, waiting for an opportunity, possibly a break time during the performance, to see Osofisan.
Once the chance provided itself, I moved over to him, introduced myself, conveyed warm greetings from my schoolmates and his good friend, Obafemi, and told him my mission. He took the letter addressed to him detailing our intended itinerary, checked his calendar and consented to our proposed appointment. “You may be among the first audience to watch Midnight Hotel, which you just saw us rehearse,” he told me.
I sauntered out of his office with a sense of accomplishment and headed for Uselu Park in Benin City, where I was to begin a two-legged journey to Nsukka. The first vehicle would usually take you to Onitsha, the legendary commercial hub of the South-east, while the next one takes you to your choice destination in what we have come to know as the South-south.
Nigeria was definitely a much better place in those days, where in 1984, just three decades ago, would fall in the bracket of those years of yore.
I remember arriving the Nsukka campus of the University of Nigeria late in the evening and somebody was gracious enough to direct me to the senior staff quarters, where Achebe lived with his family.
I knocked on the door of the bungalow that evening when darkness had descended. I recall I was received by one of Achebe’s sons, who ushered me into the living room as I introduced myself. While I sat and waited for the young man to get his father – and I did not have to wait for long – I tried to take in as many photographs as I could as my gaze panned across the room, mystified I was in the shrine of the oracle of African literature.
Achebe himself emerged from one of the doors leading to the sitting room. I rose to greet him. I can’t remember if I courtesied when I greeted him or prostrated. None of these would have been out of place anyway, he being older than my biological father! But more importantly, it was my way of paying respect to a literary legend whose name and profile was synonymous with the growth of African literature, to ease my passage as it were.
I introduced myself, transmitted the greetings of Professor David Cook, the British-born literary scholar and critic, who was our head of department at the University of Ilorin at the time and who Achebe had definitely encountered at many national and international seminars and conferences on African literature.
A very meticulous man, he reached for a calendar, cross-checked it with his diary of appointments and confirmed his availability during our planned visit. He asked what arrangement I made for accommodation that night. I told him I had to be in Port Harcourt the next day, so I needed to race for time. He shook hands with me, bade me a safe trip and I navigated my exit to Nsukka town and henceforth to Enugu, where I stayed the night.
If it were possible, I probably would have “laminated” that right hand with which I shook hands with Achebe that evening. The feeling was akin to that of a Catholic, who had the privilege of a handshake with the Pope!
Onwards to Port Harcourt, I also met Professor Ola Rotimi, who I had earlier encountered in The Gods Are Not To Blame, his classic play, in which I acted “King Odewale” in 1981, as a student at the School of Basic Studies of the Kwara State College of Technology, Ilorin. I had also watched a production of his comic play, Grip Am, in which I was later to play “Death” during the mandatory one year National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, in Imo State, from 1985 to 1986.
I returned to Ilorin to brief members of the executive of my association and the congress about what was a successful exploratory visit. The excitement was palpable, as even those who had not paid up for the excursion quickly did!
The week before our proposed trip, however, the university authorities, under the leadership of the late Professor Samuel Afolabi Toye, the Vice-Chancellor, ruled against group travel for a while. This was on account of a vehicular breakdown suffered by a group of students on excursion, which kept the poor youngsters on the road for a few days. The authorities decided that a comprehensive check of all mass transit vehicles in the transport department be undertaken to ascertain their state of health before any further travels. Those were the days when Nigerian universities were true centres of committed excellence.
Our excursion was not to be, unfortunately so, for my other colleagues and school mates who had salivated at the prospects of our proposed trip. The long-sought opportunity to meet Achebe, Rotimi and Osofisan was lost, after all.
Down the line in 1990 as a staff writer with the Daily Times, I found myself once again involved in another Achebe project. The management and the editorial team of Daily Times of Nigeria plc aggregated some of Nigeria’s finest literary minds. Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, who had made a name as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist and initiator of The Guardian Literary Series, was Chief Executive Officer of the organisation. On the editorial board were very well known literary figures like the radical scholar, Dr. Chidi Amuta and Dr. Godwin Gabriel Darah. Osofisan and Ken Saro-Wiwa were contributing columnists, while in the newsroom were up-coming creative writers and critics like Afam Akeh, Dapo Adeniyi and myself.
By the joint decision of the management and editorial board, therefore, it was resolved that all major publications in the Daily Times stable devote considerable attention and space to the celebration of Achebe at 60, in November 1990.
It was a great honour, to find myself collaborating, as a much younger colleague, with Chidi Amuta on an essay titled “Achebe: Eagle Above Seasons”, published by the Sunday Times of 11 November 1990, five days before Achebe turned 60.
A broadcaster, novelist, story teller, poet, essayist, theorist, scholar, critic, activist, Achebe was easily one of the most prolific writers to have come out of Africa. At the last count, there were well over two dozen titles to his name. It is a testament to his pioneering role in nurturing the growth of African literature that Achebe was the first published Nigerian and African writer in the elite African Writers Series, AWS, published by Heinemann Books.
From the initial tentativeness of the series, which drew contributors from the ranks of the very best writers across the continent, the AWS spawned about 400 titles and provided a veritable voice for no less than a third of that number of writers as contributors to the production and discourse of contemporary African literature.
And until his demise, Achebe was venerated as the founding editor of the series, which also published legends like Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nelson Mandela, Dennis Brutus, Ayi Kwei Armah and Nadine Gordimer, among others.
Commenting on Achebe’s enterprise as an essayist, and theorist, Amuta and Olusunle opine that it is through his essays that we get a coherent and systematic view of his convictions in the major issues that define the world of his art and being.
For his untiring commitment to his vocation, Achebe won practically every known literary award except the Nobel Prize for Literature.
With this intimidating resume, it remained a topic of regular discourse until his death, why he never won the coveted Nobel Prize.
– Tunde Olusunle, poet, journalist and Public Relations practitioner, is studying for a doctorate in Media Arts at the University of Abuja.