The importance of the pen, the brush and the voice of the artist as a social critic and as an interpretive lens to focus on the intricacies as well as the banalities of inter-human conflict may or may not carry less weight than they did in distant and not so distant past.
This
of course is a question of perspective; but even in the age of the saturation
coverage of wars and insurrections by the apparatus of the mass media, the
nuanced touches provided by the evocative poet and the erudite writer can give
new dimensions of insight into the background, the evolution and the effects of
the wars waged by mankind.
Certainly
those artists whose works have profoundly captured the imagination and which
have been indelibly marked in human memory thus becoming part of the general narrative
of historical consciousness have consistently spoken of the inherent baseness
of wars: its infliction of mass suffering and its capacity for unleashing the
demonic qualities that lie dormant in men.
The
destructiveness inherent in war; the anti-thesis of the creative impulse of the
artist has frequently cast the artist as being anti-war. But while Pablo
Picasso’s monumental Guernica, the
depiction of a Nazi air raid on a Basque city during the Spanish Civil War, projects
the pacifist’s angst at the evident traumas induced on a wretched and
defenceless civilian populace, the role of many an artist has not been confined
to one of conscientious neutrality. There are those who have used their talents
to extol the virtues of patriotism and the valour inherent in sacrificing self
in the cause of the nation. There are those who have taken unambiguous stances
for both belligerence and for resistance.
The
Nigerian Civil War fought between 1967 and 1970 was a war which engaged a
number of figures drawn from the nation’s cultural life. The dramatist and
later Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, made efforts geared towards creating what
he termed a ‘third force’ for compromise as the fractured nation hurtled
inexorably towards a military showdown. He was jailed for his troubles by the
military regime of General Yakubu Gowon.
Another
figure, one not widely known outside of literary circles, but whose status has
grown in succeeding decades, the poet Christopher Okigbo, was not content to
remain in civilian life and joined a regiment of the secessionist army of
Biafra. He met his death at the age of 37; an ending which inspired the Kenyan
academic Ali Mazrui to indict Okigbo for “wasting his talent on a conflict of
disputable merit” in his work The Trial
of Christopher Okigbo. “No great
artist,” he argued, “has a right to carry patriotism to the extent of
destroying his creative potential.”
For
Chinua Achebe, author of the seminal work Things
Fall Apart, the Nigerian Civil War was one in which he had no choice but to
involve himself. As he explains in his book There Was a Country: A Personal History
of Biafra, the
integration of art with the community in traditional African society formed the
basis of his war time ambassadorial role in promoting an international awareness
of the plight of the short-lived Biafran state which was composed in the main
of people of his Igbo ethnicity; a people who had endured a series of pogroms
in the lead up to the war.
Achebe
was in the vanguard of those artists who although initially absorbed with writing
about the effects of colonial society on the African psyche would later become
pre-occupied with the events in post-colonial Nigeria, events which took on
increasingly dysfunctional turns.
Indeed
his fourth novel, the unerringly prescient A
Man of the People, ends with a military coup, an event which for the first
time took place in Nigeria at the time of the book’s publication and which
served as a trigger that would lead to a concatenation of violence: communal
massacres, a second army mutiny and finally an armed conflict replete with the brutal
instruments and cynical policies of warfare.
It
is a war which was widely covered by Western correspondents and produced books by
the likes of John De St. Jorre and Frederick Forsyth, who in contrast to De St.
Jorre’s attempts at an even-handed approach was an unabashed polemicist for the
Biafran cause.
The
writers Arthur Nwankwo and Samuel Ifejika also contributed an important book
during the war, and later in the re-united Nigeria, as taboos associated with
dredging up the past began to relax, a plethora of books authored by former
stalwarts of the Biafran military machinery created an industry of memoirs.
Younger
generations of Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have used the
war as a backdrop to their work. Achebe for his part although far from reticent
about the ills which continue to plague Nigeria confined expressions of his war
time experiences to poetry writings; twelve of which are interspersed at
intervals in this his long awaited memoir of his wartime experiences.
The
war of course remains a sensitive issue in Nigeria for a great many reasons; the
narrative remains a contested one, but in the minds and the hearts of many
Igbos who have for long claimed to be marginalised from the centres of power
and influence, it signified more than physical and material defeat: It was a
wholesale destruction of the spirit; of the post-Independence-era zeitgeist of
optimism and aspiration in a society still operating with some semblance of meritocratic
values. Defeat represented the extirpation of all that they considered to be
morally right and just.
Achebe’s
book works around this central thesis: The Igbos were the willing acquirers of
Western culture and that the synthesis with their pre-existing cultural mores
of what he considers to be their ‘individualism’, democratic ethos and competitive
spirit enabled them to supersede other ethnic groups in the British created colonial
order. This led to tensions and their subsequent removal from positions of leadership
by forcible means which included a strategy of ethnic cleansing.
For
Achebe, the importance of the civil war had profound consequences which went
further than the territorial borders of Nigeria. It was he argues “a
cataclysmic event which changed the course of Africa.”
In
his typically direct, uncluttered style Achebe weaves a compelling literary reportage
of roots which were embedded in an ancient society existing within a colonially
imposed order and how that cultural dialectic shaped him and the wider destiny
of his people within the multi-cultural potpourri of the conglomerate state of
Nigeria.
The
dramatis personae of the era, their
backgrounds their motivations and his critique of their respective roles at
this most critical of periods are laid out: The rival colonels Yakubu Gowon and
Odumegwu-Ojukwu; the leader of the Yorubas, Obafemi Awolowo, as well as key
military and political figures on the Nigerian and the Biafran sides.
Achebe
also considers the role of the wider world in a conflict which in his view was
influenced foremost by the necessities of realpolitik and not by the objective application of moral
standards.
But
for all the moral weight behind it and sympathy that the plight of the Igbos
engendered, one of the key criticisms of the Biafran enterprise was that its
leaders did not provide a clear and distinct idea platform to serve as a
template for the rest of Nigeria and the African continent other than one which
was dominated by a tribal group seeking self-determination.
The
Nigerian Civil War has been typically viewed as one permeated by the ultimate
reality of naked tribal interests in conflict and not as a battle of ideas.
Achebe attempts to redress this by addressing the motivation behind the Ahiarra
Declaration of 1969 which he describes as an attempt aimed at expressing the
“intellectual foundation” of the new nation of Biafra.
The
effect of the declaration on world opinion at the time was limited and in
certain quarters, it was derided as an ill-sorted hodge-podge of ideas and
intentions. But the task of evolving a fundamental core of ideas and precepts
aimed at transforming an ex-colonial, multi-clan group into a self-constructed
modern nation deserves the sort of considered attention Achebe’s book is not
able to fully explore.
Granted,
Achebe’s explorations do take account some of the philosophical and
cosmological constructs of the pre-colonial Igbo and the effect these have had
on the Igbo psyche in the modern world. But a consideration of the efficacy of Igbo
nationalism and the collective identity of the people must acknowledge to a
greater degree the historical record.
From
the Igbo-Biafran perspective there have been few if any truly introspective
works which have considered the viability of a Biafran state from the point of
view of the historical reality that there was never a united Igbo nation which
operated as a cohesive national entity. A study of the period before colonial
conquest reveals not a united kingdom of Biafra but an aggregate of disparate
villages and hamlets whose communities became steeped in the conduct of the brutal
trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The
argument that by the dawn of the colonial era, the Igbos had not evolved to a
feudal level of social organisation and developed attendant indigenous
institutions of governance, akin to say to that of the neighbouring Edo people,
may of course be met with a riposte that the social organisation practised by
many Igbo communities manifested a form of ‘republicanism’ and ‘individualism.’
But
whatever the interpretation given to the underlying nature of the relative
sophistication of these descriptions, the reality was that tensions arose
during the civil war between Igbo-Biafrans based on their places of origin as
indeed they did with the non-Igbo minorities within the borders of the former
Nigerian Eastern Region without whose acquiescence the Biafran project was
doomed to fail.
The
unity of the Igbos based on their collective fortune as a successful people in
the post-colonial order as well as their ill-fortune through the trauma of pogroms
and abuse, understandably provided the strong, emotionally grounded impetus to
create a separate nation. Nationalism, a concept that is inherently grounded in
the practice of self-invention, can be a force for self-transformation. But while
emotion may serve as an excellent form of petrol, it is, in the final analysis,
a poor engine.
That
said, Achebe has produced an extremely readable personal history in which he
provides a masterful series of vignettes that greatly sensitize the reader to
the struggles, the triumphs and the tragedy of the artist and his people during
an era of rapid change and great turbulence.
(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2012)
Adeyinka Makinde is the author DICK TIGER: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal,
the story of a Nigerian world champion boxer of Igbo ethnicity who became
embroiled in the Biafran War. His latest book is JERSEY BOY: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie
DePaula.
Website: http://adeyinkamakinde.homestead.com/index.html
Website: http://adeyinkamakinde.homestead.com/index.html
