30th April, 2013
By Femi Osofisan
I know Kole Omotoso. Wrong. I used to know Kole Omotoso, the Nigerian writer. Some thirty years ago, when we were both at the dawn of our literary career, he was my friend. This week, on the 21st April precisely, he will attain the ripe age of 70; it is worth a celebration.
Many of the present generation will not know him. He has not been much around in recent years, nor featured in current debates. Kole left Nigeria in 1990, virtually in a state of desperation. His latest novel then, Just Before Dawn, had been more successful than his earlier works, but it was a mingled success, mired in controversy. Reactions generally were mixed, but in the quarters that mattered, Kole felt that the response was not only hostile, but increasingly menacing, to the point that he believed that, out of prudence, he should quickly get out, if only for a brief while.
There were other pressures of course at the time, mainly to do with the sad and foreboding plunge the country was taking already towards its current state of anarchy. But the threat of suppression or physical harm was the most dire. So Kole quit his job abruptly, took his family, and left. Abroad, he floated for a while, adrift like others, until he finally found anchor in the South African labour market, and settled there. He has been there since.
But misfortune sometimes has its gains. In that foreign country, fame came of itself to find him. In an extraordinary manner, and within a short time, Kole found incredible renown. Today, in South Africa, everyone will tell you that, next to Nelson Mandela, the most popular face is, unarguably, that of the Nigerian Kole Omotoso.
On huge billboards right from the gleaming airport to the city slums; and numberless times on the TV, Kole’s face will be there, with his close-cropped hair, his thin, pepper-and-salt beard, and his big eyes, soliciting you to become a client of one of the country’s mobile phone companies.
Most people probably do not know his real name; but ‘Yebogo’, his trade call, is known in every household. And it has become the name by which the whole population celebrates him.
It is a modern fairy tale. Forced out of his own country, out of the familiar ambience of his birthplace, here he was abruptly on the lap of incommensurable success. It was like King Oedipus, at the opposite end of his predicted destiny.
Except that, for some of us, it was not the right kind of honour he deserved. Kole deserves acclaim for many things–his unique creative talents, his fertile imagination and literary skill, his social and political vision, his commitment to the ideal of literature as a plausible weapon for communal restoration. But not, surely, for a cameo role in a phone commercial? Fate had obviously been both kind and cruel; in its munificence was a touch of mischief.
Indeed, fame in those days was not our goal at all, strange though it may sound now to say so. In our late twenties and early thirties, the only passion that burned in our hearts was that of changing the world, our world. And the most frequent word on our lips was ‘Revolution’.
Although we ourselves did not approve of sanguineous upheavals, our heroes were those who had inspired or led bloody uprisings–names like Lenin, Marx, Castro, Cabral, Fanon, and so on–men who, under the impulse of idealist visions, had burned their names onto the pages of history because of the urge to make the world better for the under-privileged. We yearned to be their reincarnations.
We longed to build a new society, liberated from the scourge of poverty and under-development. We wanted to obliterate retrograde superstitions, destabilise ancient but oppressive traditions, subvert obsolete hierarchies. And in our hurry to do these, time was an enemy, an obstacle. Twenty-four hours were just not enough for all that needed to be accomplished in a single day. Like Césaire’s King Christophe, we wanted our leaders to squeeze into a week, into an hour, the work that others had done in a century!
Returning in the 1970s to the country with our Ph.Ds, we forged friendships and alliances on this revolutionary vision alone; and avidly sought to mobilise kindred minds. We began to write poems, and plays, stories and essays and newspaper articles, with the sole aim of provoking a violent change in the consciousness of our people–and in particular of our ruling elite–such that they would be shaken to the pressing need to transform our society, create social justice, build modern institutions and infrastructure, and so on.
With time, we became a conspicuous presence in the Ibadan-Ife axis. In order to communicate fully, and be equally accessible to the educated elite as well as the common folk, we renounced the elevated jargon of our training as professional academics, and adopted ‘quasi-guerrilla’ tactics, in the form of performance poetry, ‘oral’ prose, popular travelling theatre, samizdat publishing, and so on. We established various organs such as the Positive Review, the Opon Ifa Chapbooks, the Akwei Circle, the APMON (Anti-Poverty Movement), the Kakaun Sela Kompany, and so on.
But among us, Kole’s writing was the most unique. His stories were the most startling in innovative strategies, and the most brilliant in the conception of fresh and astounding plots. Kole has always had this uncanny ability to design original narrative sequences and to fabricate totally novel techniques and story lines.
With the use of short, swift chapters, of simple diction and a handy vocabulary, Kole thought up the most arresting scenarios, again and again inventing, and effortlessly too, some truly ingenious approach to the art of story-telling.
He was, potentially then, the most appealing of all of us. And I say, ‘potentially’, advisedly. Because in this business, the successful weaving of plot, however deft or dazzling, is just never enough. But on this point, we quarrelled endlessly.
Kole’s problem, we thought, was his legendary impatience, his innate and incurable restlessness. He seemed born with an absolute inability to stay still for any length of time, and he brought the same restiveness to his creativity. Now, a work of art, like wine, requires time to mature. You need patience to complete the careful chiselling out, the polishing that would add refinement, the meticulous distillation that leads to mellowness.
But Kole had no such gift of serenity. His mind bubbling with a thousand turbulent ideas, all in a simultaneous rush to express themselves, he would abandon his story in the raw, in its crude and unpolished state of parturition, and hurry on to the next script. And inevitably this reduced the value of the works.
But examine his works closely, and you would see at once how much he was always in advance of the rest of us. In The (Golden) Cage, his first major play, he was the first on our stage to use symbolic ciphers for actual characterisation, much like in, say, Ionesco. His novel, Fella’s Choice, was the first to exploit the genre of espionage and crime fiction for a serious didactic intent. And Just Before Dawn was the first attempt to narrate the biography of our country in the disguised form of fiction, thus inaugurating here the literary category now known as ‘faction’. And so on.
But it was in the realm of laughter perhaps that the difference from the rest of us was most conspicuous. Admirably in Kole’s writing, his humour was never deliberately acidic, never designed to inflict a lasting hurt. No: his laughter was always meant to reconcile rather than annihilate, to admonish and not to humiliate; its subversive edge left a room for forgiveness and compromise. This was more than we others could ever concede, in our gushing, romantic élan.
Those were exhilarating days, no doubt. But it was obvious that the moment was just around the corner for the fissuring of the group. Especially also because, as Biodun Jeyifo pointed out not long ago, we were just as unsparing of one another in our disagreements as with our ideological opponents. The record of these fierce confrontations, interestingly, is there in Kole’s To Borrow A Wandering Leaf.
That moment of fracture came much earlier than we anticipated. Almost overnight, everything fell apart; and the world re-arranged itself around us. As the Cold War ended, and the Berlin wall went down, the entire socialist movement collapsed, even as the Soviet Union disintegrated. The era of Thatcherism and ‘market forces’ had begun.
In Nigeria, Obasanjo ordered a merciless assault on the leftists on campus, sweeping away iconic figures like Ola Oni and Bade Onimode. SAP soon followed, and the rash of ASUU strikes began. So did the mass exodus of intellectuals as the country plunged deeper and deeper into misery and squalor.
The vibrant Ibadan-Ife community collapsed: Soyinka, BJ, Folabo, Segun Osoba and several others caught the exile virus, with Kole ironically playing host to some of his erstwhile colleagues.
For it had become obvious not long after you left, Kole, that our dreams were not going to be fulfilled. And now I cannot but wonder how you must feel, as you look around on your return?
The younger ones you will meet are not in the least like we used to be. The serious dearth of employment, the horror of insecurity everywhere, the unprecedented brigandage in public offices, the festering corruption in the judiciary, the brazen cupidity of the rulers, all these and more have made our children and siblings more cynical, more callous, and completely self-centred. Nigeria is no longer the relatively compassionate society that we knew: the dreams of our youth float in the wind now like shredded rags.
True enough, you will see some ongoing rejuvenation efforts, especially in some of the southern states. You will see streets being cleaned and widened; new roads with glittering bridges; new markets; new classrooms; new universities.
But sadly however, just as rapidly as the new streets are built, so do new beggars clutter the pavements. The displaced vendors and hawkers only go to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Behind the giant billboards celebrating the ‘achieving’ governor grow new populations of the jobless. An ominous anger simmers unseen in almost every neighbourhood. Crime and violence have risen beyond control.
But still, as they say, home is home. And home is where the heart should be. Now that you have decided to come back to celebrate your birthday, I can only say—Welcome back, brother. Hope may be dim at the moment, but we must continue to wear it like a jewel. For it never dies.