18th July, 2023
By Nehru Odeh (Photos by Ayodele Efunla)
Professor Niyi Osundare, multiple award-winning poet, scholar and distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, in the United States makes no bones about issues that affect humans.
And in sync with his interventionist bent, he has taken a swipe at African rulers (he prefers to call them rulers rather than leaders), putting the blame for the current exodus of Africans to Europe and America in search of greener pastures right on their doorstep.
The exodus of Africans to overseas, which has led to untold dire consequences for both the migrants, their home country and the host nation is, in the Nigerian lingo, called Japa, an act of escape from hellish conditions that seem to be constricting, in order to relocate to a better environment.
Osundare was unequivocal. He averred: “Unfortunately the severity of this situation is lost to and on African rulers. I don’t call them leaders. They are rulers. Leaders have souls, they have hearts and they have wisdom. Rulers don’t. They have cruelty and they have all manner of wickedness. Unfortunately, we haven’t really had many leaders in Africa. And it is even worse n Nigeria. Rulers. These are the ones we have.
“Most of whom are too visionless, too comfortable, too nonchalant to appreciate the enormity of the tragedy that has befallen our continent. They are too busy scheming for the most devious ways of suborning the national constitution to suit their basest aspirations, especially their long-cherished dreams of muscling their way to the envious state of presidents for life.
“Add to this kind of political manipulation, is the economic corruption which manifests in the brazen looting of the national treasury. And the rank impunity which makes this crime unpunishable. And you end up with a national political elite rich enough to purchase justice at the courts and electoral victory at the polling booths.
“The consequence is a paralytic political system, an economy in utter ruins and a polity rife with all manner of anomie. Africa thus becomes a nest whose hatchling compels abandonment by its ablest birds.
“The scary tragedy is that most African rulers hardly see the link between their misrule and the perpetual pauperization of their people and the deterioration of their country into an uninhabitable site of pain and penury.
“Hardly do we see the connection between their action or inaction and the massive flight of some of their ablest citizens to foreign lands. Some of them even see the brain drain as a welcome development, considering the remittances in foreign currencies from the diaspora folks.”
Osundare made this statement while delivering the keynote at the launch of the Tejumola Olaniyan Foundation, which was held at the International Conference Center, University of Ibadan on Friday 15 July 2023.
The theme of the launch organized by members of the Teju Olaniyan Foundation to celebrate and immortalize the works of Teju Olaniyan, one of Africa’s foremost scholars, activists and writers who passed on at 60 was: “Celebrate Teju the Scholar, the Son and the Man.”
Indeed, Olaniyan was indeed celebrated in no small measure as Osundare who gave a very brilliant keynote entitled “Japa/Janun: The Other side of the Diaspora Story” set the ball rolling by paying tribute to him (Olaniyan) in whose honour the foundation had been established.
Osundare started by saying, albeit in a sober tone, “It is a curious violation of the order of nature that I should be here speaking about a younger person, a person that we all love so much. But at the same time, we are happy. I am particularly happy to be here to say a few words.”
And it is also instructive to note that the Omu Aran community led by the Olomu of Omu Aran, Oba Abdulraheem Adeoti came in large numbers to pay tribute and honour the memory of a worthy son of whose intellectual achievements they are very proud.
Olaniyan’s wife, Mojisola Olaniyan and other distinguished scholars, academics, journalists and writers including Prof. Biodun Jeyifo, Prof. Femi Osofisan, Prof Ropo Sekoni and many more graced the occasion.
Osundare described Olaniyan as a man who had no room for smallness. “His voice was large, his heart was even larger. His mind was capacious. For this was a kind of heart that had no place for pettiness. His was a mind endowed with infinite plenitude.
“That largeness, that boundless generosity, that quenchless light of the imagination, that almost monastic work ethic, that drives for diligence, for merit, for justice are the relentless drivers of the boundary-crossing scholarship that shot Teju to the forefront in the study of the theory, criticism and the pedagogy of literature and culture in outstanding diversity so bountifully reflected in the depth and range of his works Those works that he packed into every bit of his 60 years on Planet Earth.
“When he is not busy arresting the music of Fela or Fela’s rebel arts and politics, he is tracing the scars of conquest and mask of resistance in the cultural identities of African, African-American and Caribbean drama,” Osundare said.
Delving into his keynote proper, Osundare traced the current craze of Africans for greener pastures abroad to disillusionment, the erroneous belief that there is an El Dorado out there and that the only way out of the stiffing poverty and hard conditions which stare them in the face is to relocate abroad.
According to Osundare, a particular area on the African continent that has actually been affected by this Japa syndrome is the literary community. Many writers believe that the only way they can achieve fame and fortune is to ply their art abroad.
Osundare recalled a conversation with a literary journalist in Nigeria who believes foreign literary prizes such as the Booker, Pulitzer, the Commonwealth and Caine Prize for African writing are superior to local ones.
“My young interlocutor’s response was curt in its promptness. ‘Oh because those are the real prizes, the prizes that matter.’ When I then told him about the Noma Award whose pan-African spirit and purpose will continue to resonate beyond its unfortunate demise. His answer was: ‘Ehn But that is an African prize, a local glory.’
“Is it less significant then because it is African? When I then asked him about Nigeria’s mega literary trophy The Nigeria Liquid Natural Gas prize ambitiously called The Nigeria Prize, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, the journalist broke into laughter that rambling mocked what to him was my unforgivable naivety. Just African. A mere African … Those words sound like epithets from African Book of self-derogation and self-abasement.
“The mentality of people who trample what is theirs in the mud whilst stretching and striving for what is fatally beyond their grasp, people who excoriate their own assumed weakness by a mindless celebration and glorification of the ostensible strength of the other.”
Osundare then went on to lament the tragedy that has befallen many, including writers who in a bid to turn their dreams into reality, fall into this beguiling but constricting trap called Japa, as a way out of the harsh and from existential problems that stare them in the face in their home country.
“In my several contacts and interactive sessions with many young aspiring writers, I have come to appreciate their capabilities and anxieties. Here we have some of the most talented hardworking and ambitious persons in Africa but also some of the most insecure and most unsure.
“Many have the dream of making a name, of writing themselves out of obscurity, of contributing their own bit to the world literary patrimony. These without doubt are laudable legitimate aspirations. But it is the preferred path to their realization that keeps me awake at night. These aspiring writers believe that their dreams can never come to fruition as long as they remain in Nigeria or in Africa.
“Now, before you diagnose these young ones with acute alienation of unknown origin and sentenced them to a penitentiary for unrepentant renegade consider this. Their perilous journey from fear to phobia, from anxiety to angst, is fuelled by the present state of the knowledge industry in Nigeria, in Africa, particularly its repercussions for the literary enterprise.
“The bare truth be told: Africa today is still that abyss of marginal silence I bemoaned in my book, ‘Thread in the Loom’ some years ago. In many countries, the situation has got worse. And the urge for diaspora flight has intensified into a gripping compulsion. In many ways then, Africa has become a place to leave not to live, a place to shun not to cherish; the graveyard of dreams for the young and old especially the anxiously young.
“And so foreign embassies in Africa are swarming with young able-bodied men and women, mostly intelligent, energetic, enterprising, knocking on their doors, scaling consular walls, enduring countless indignities, struggling to escape the hell they see as Africans to foreign lands where most of the time they are compelled to pledge their boundless brains and energies to the lowest bidder. Africa’s loss has always been someone else’s gain.
“Pay a visit to the embassies of the advanced countries in most African countries today, and behold the endless queues of desperate African humanity, hordes of visa hunters and visa touts drenched in their own sweat by the unforgiving tropical downpour, pressing against the iron gate, their human dignity trampled in the mud, their tempers frayed and chronically inflammable.
“The most massively bombarded embassies of the United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, , France, Holland and Italy have had to reinforce their gates and raised their fences. And in recent times countries less fancied in the past such as Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary and until recently Ukraine are also raising their walls against the African menace. ”
Osundare also spoke about how African youths, in order to avoid the rigours of going through the embassies and the dehumanizing processes of acquiring visas, now take what they consider an easy route to Europe and America. But that easy route has become mass graves of African youths.
“Those mindful of the formal torture at the high-powered Embassies have opted for the informal peril of the trans saharan route. To the left and right of that route, buried under the sand dunes, or littering their shifting tops are countless corpses, skeletons of African migrants whose dreams terminated in the sandy purgatory of an indifferent desert.
“The fortunate ones who survive that terrible terrain graduate into slaves in Libya where they suffer all manner of indignity as they buy their time for the eventual cross over to Italy and other parts of Mediterranean Europe in rickety, overloaded boats which capsize at the slightest jolt, spilling their heartless human cargo into the sea.
“As was the case with the Atlantic ocean some 3, 400 years ago, the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea now swarms with the bones of Africans who perish with their dreams in the beautiful waters of that otherwise historic sea,” Osundare noted.
Still, the question then is: In spite of the hassles the African migrant has to go through and the indignities and humiliation he has to suffer as he tries to japa to Europe and America, is the grass greener on the other side? Osundare said emphatically no.
As soon as the migrant arrives in his host country and tries to settle down, grim and harsh realities hit him. It then dawns on him that gold is not found on the streets of Europe and America.
“Home is hell, yonder is heaven. There goes the saying that captures the chronic anemone of contemporary Africa. But is home really hell and yonder heaven? That is the question many people are not asking either because they are too desperate to care or too angry to give a damn.
“The young writers who are busy dreaming of laurels abroad and their counterparts who turn in ‘just help me get out of this terrible place at all cost,’ think the grass is always greener on the other side. As they measure dreams of the diaspora of desire. Again, I ask. Is the grass really always greener on the other side?
“But as the immigrant soon begins to learn that anonymity may go with a scary bout of dehumanizing invisibility and loneliness. The distance between availability and affordability of social amenities may be as long as the agony between a measly minimum wage and a buoyant bank account.
“The burden of exile or what I would like to call the diaspora debacle is heavier, much more pronounced and much more debilitating for exiles of the literary and intellectual category. I can say a lot about that because I belong to that tribe.
“There is something about art, about literature that hearkens almost ineluctably to the deep compelling call of the indigenous. The unfathomable depth of roots, the enduring method of memory, the illuminating faculty of remembrance that is the core of my concern.”
The truth then is: exile has not been kind to the African migrant, as Osundare rightly pointed out.
“Exile has not been kind to many budding Nigerian writers. I know it first hand. I knew the dreams and aspirations that flowed in this country in the 1970s, 1980s, up to the beginning of the 1990s. Who can forget in a hurry the Update Poets, who came to tremendous limelight through the agency of the irrepressible and ever-supportive Odia Ofeimun, during his tenure as ANA Secretary?
“All of a sudden these people have scattered, yes scattered, almost all of them off to different areas of the African Diaspora. Many with their unfinished scripts, many with their songs smothered by existential pressures of their new place of abode. In many cases therefore, material comfort is almost always accompanied by the kind of separation which provokes a vertiginous lightness of being, a certain rootlessness that sentences its sufferer to an interminable state of floating and flying with little possibility of salutary landing.
“The crises and confusion which inevitably result when the poet for instance plies his or her song in a market that understands neither the source nor the soul of their idiom. One that cannot really appreciate the prowess of their proverb nor break into a natural response to a call initiated by the performer. And how long can it last, that call which never gets the benefit of an informed response?
“There are many instances in which the African writer’s audience, cannot afford to be fiction. Instances in which the breathing touchable audience acutely needs to pump vital lifeblood into the dialogue and exchange that constitute the core of the performative communion.
“The attempt to achieve this bonding outside the cultural, social and epistemological origin of the work often results in the kind of laborious padding, glossing and footnoting that a couple of years ago led a colleague of mine to this curious, Impatient question: But Niyi why is Africa always bound to explain itself to the world and never vice-versa?
“But deeper and more insidious is the psychological cost of the anxiety emanating from the craving for acceptance in a foreign land. The hankering for its recognition, the desperate hustle for its definitive touted mainstream, the grovelling obeisance at the altar of its sacred cannon and its exclusivist demand that helps subjection to epistemic imperialism.
“The publisher’s rejection letter is the first humbler of the new arrivant, their reality gauge, the quiet moderator of their migrant audacity.
“The African brain drain, which began as a trickle in the 1990s and now coasting to the end has now swollen into a flood. The impact is already evident in most parts of the continent. And is likely to get worse unless something drastic is done to stem the flow.
What then is the way out of what seems to be a place of no return?
Osundare maintained: “First, Africa must get its politics right. Then it’s economy, then a holistic reappraisal and reconfiguration of its place in the world to confront the current pathology of forced or voluntary diaspora positioning.
“Africa must, first of all, be made livable, habitable: for as long as home is ugly, the foreign land will always look like a must-reach paradise.
“The African diaspora gives and it takes. And invariably it takes more than it gives. it is the nether world of oblivion and Nirvana of memory. unlike other diasporas in the world, that the world has come to know – the Jewish diaspora, Asian diaspora, Irish diaspora – the African variety falls short of the three-stage process of the diaspora phenomenon: Departure, arrival and return.
The third stage – extremely important – being the most difficult for the Africans. The third leg of the tripod is return. When you leave Africa, you hardly ever return. Africa remains the unreturnable toll place, the one you would rather flee than favour.
“And hear now a question in its historical perplexity: How can fatherland, motherland grow and develop when many many of its ablest are lost in the distant diaspora, which more often than not needs their abundant talents and capabilities less, far less than the home continent does. Who will develop the homeland when her children have fled abroad?
“The idea of the African diaspora has been romanticized and mythologized for far too long, mostly by denizens of that diaspora who send pictures of flashy cars and palatial residences to home-bound Africans whose lives are populated by dreams of possible flight and fancy.
Still, the highly respected scholar threw the ball at the court of African rulers.
“The bodies of these Africans exist in Africa but their minds live in America and Europe. But before we rush to judgment over the ones who departed, we must send a query to those who forced them to do so. We must ask the African rulers (again rulers, not leaders) why they have made the continent so inhabitable. We must ask them why they feel so unconcerned, so helpless about so many of their brightest minds dying in the desert queue, at foreign embassies or in their home countries.
“Time we told the African Union, yes the African Union, to take a count of the thousands of Africans who in the past decade have perished in the Sahara Middle Passage and the unwilling waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Then take responsibility for the corrupt, incompetent and inhuman rulership that is the cause of these avoidable tragedies.
Osundare also had a few questions to ask the advanced nations in the world.
“We need to ask again this frequently asked but never answered question: How can a continent so richly endowed be so inhumanly poor? Can these powerful nations see the link between their actions and inactions past and present?
As I pointed out in a recent public lecture in Lagos, our present world is too unequal to be just, too unjust to be peaceful. The rich and powerful nations must never fail to see the connection between their abundant prosperity and the comparative impoverishment of those parts frequently dismissed as the wretched of the earth.”