Bye Bye Ekwensi

I last met the author of one a half dozen favorite novels and novellas of the 1960s – “The Drummer Boy”, “People of the City”, “Burning Grass” - half a decade ago, in 2001 actually, on the occasion of his 80^th birthday. His son George, a chartered accountant in neighboring New Jersey, had alerted his friends that his famous literary icon of a dad was around and they had in turn let the nearest pen fraternity types, know. When we arrived at George’s, there the great man was, seated, and chatting amiably with guests, his children and the US-born grandchildren.

He was like any other Igbo Nigerian elder, save for the surprisingly still booming voice and set face that suggested a no-nonsense mien. He was the same as I recalled him when as a school leaver interested in journalism, I had gone to his office in Enugu in 1974 where he ran the ‘Daily Star’, to ask what it would take. I could still see him behind his desk, busy, but patiently listening to the teenager about to start on his own journey. Even as he wondered if he could still remember that visit, what kept passing my mind as it probably did those of the two to three dozen guests crowding the room, was how on earth this author had kept the flow of creative fare going since the early 1940s!

From “When Love Whispers” in 1947 and “Jagua Nana” in 1954, the literary spigot was to gush nonstop. From this son of Nkwelle in Oyi Local Government Area of Anambra State, born September, 1921, came so many memorable titles - “Beautiful Feathers”, “An African Night’s Entertainment”, “Iska”, “The Passport of Mallam Ilia”, “Lokotown and the Highway Robbers,” and dozens more, down to the series he kept putting out even in his last decade, the latest being “Cash for Delivery” (2007), a collection of stories.

Deciding that the rare visit to the States deserved more than just a household gathering, delightful as it was, my team at African Profiles magazine, I organized a reception for the author at the Nigerian Embassy reception hall with the consent of the then ambassador – something we had done over the years for Flora Nwapa at one end and for Rev. Leon Sullivan, at another, and would, later for Nollywood stars along with the Nigerian Film Foundation USA. (For the creative or even spiritual types with a story to tell, we never believed in letting the opportunity slip.)

Reception at the Embassy

And, modest as ever, plain spoken and to the point, the author “King Forever!” and “Survive the Peace” let it be known that he was grateful for the gathering at short notice, given that he was about to depart for Nigeria – especially to the Americans who had come to see him, some with copies for autographs. As a writer, as a man with only one life to pass through, he was fulfilled. He had done his bit. He had followed his heart and all else was really, secondary. You got the impression of a man at peace with himself – but with one abiding regret: he wished he had come here more often or been invited. He wished people actually paid him for his various books being pirated and published all over America without royalties.

Apart from being an urban novelist with a talent for penning entertaining adventures – a clear attribute of a good novel, if it were not to be boring, and despite being accused of not developing his character more fulsomely, Ekwensi is in a class all by himself in another sense. He was the first and frankly only notable, practitioner of credible cross-ethnic writing. Several of his novels were among the Hausa-Fulani with whose culture he dealt tastefully but without any pandering, essaying on the zest for life, for good as well as evil, across the board.

On this score, it is debatable if you are likely to see any Nupe author of talent writing about a Yoruba murder mystery, or an Efik author with a setting in Kanuriland, just by the lake on the Chad border, or even another Igbo writer with a 300-page fictional work set in the Sokoto Caliphate on the eve of the Battle of Burmi - the last stand of the caliphate in the face of British cannon and machine guns with which they felled everywhere else. To see how far the land has regressed into semi-Bantustans, most Nigerians find refuge in their own sub cultural zone, for understandable reasons: in a land where people killed be killed because of a cartoon by a Danish artist of no distinction – calling into question our level of political insecurity in Africa, not the IQ of geneticist Dr Watson’s nonsense from a couple of weeks back – the talk of a national literature in Nigeria is no more than that, talk. Yet, as far back as the 1950s, Ekwensi had boldly marched into where few have found themselves going.

Nostalgia here: the country had once been one thing; today it is a far more cautious experiment. “I lived on Sarkin Arab Street, Jos,” he told an interviewer a year ago. “My father was in the North for 40 years, so I have a very loving attitude to the North.” How has the North changed since his time? Plenty, like the other regions, of course: but he fears that the intolerance on grounds of religion and politics will become counterproductive. “When I see them writing and fighting, I don’t know whether I can still call it the same North I used to know. I think there has been some poison injected into the system by politicians who are jostling for position. I also think there is a struggle between Islam and politics, or something, which can be resolved, but it’s been going on.”

President Yar’Adua’s Fitting Notice

At another level, it is fitting that the Federal Government found time to comment on the passing of this notable Nigeria who had served in various capacities in the emergence of the First Republic and the effort to create a national community. Information Minister John Odey, “speaking through” his media assistant Ajayi Rotimi (why not speak directly, when will President Yar’Adua acknowledge the giant?), said all the right things: "Chief Ekwensi was one of the Nigerian writers who had placed Nigeria on the world map through his literary works. His novels and literary works, which are of various genres, contributed immensely to our educational development in Nigeria," the statement stated. He particularly commended one of his books, “Divided We Stand”, a lamentation for the penchant for division among Nigerians – though in his words, it was a book “which promotes Nigerian unity.” He went on the ‘pray for the repose of the soul’ of the departed literary lion, noting in passing, his contributions “to the development of the country’s medical services and impacted pharmaceutical knowledge in many citizens.

I was glad to see the statement: that was one thing that had bothered him quite some as we stood at the foyer of Nigeria House looking at the traffic flow on Second Avenue: he’d let me know that one regret he had was that no Nigerian government had seen fit to give him a national honor, not one in the categories they had been dishing out to thousands of all sorts, all these years. I was scandalized enough to put out the word – I am not sure it went anywhere. But I was glad to know that a few years ago, he was on the National Honors list.

There is no question that over time, his countrymen were increasingly becoming fond of: in 2006, the ANA, (Association of Nigerian Authors) of Lagos State where he resided for the most part, honoured him at a reception. They were joined in that effort by CORA – the Committee for Relevant Arts. That the old warrior continued penning away – given that a writer writes until he is silenced by nature – was evident when he deadpanned that “a writer who no longer writes is a retired writer,” in an interview. He still had “five more books upstairs” he was known to be working on, apart from his biography tentatively titled “In My Time”, which he complained he just didn’t have the time he needed to work steadily on it. George and his siblings would have to find a way to get what would be one of the most fascinating African literary bios concluded and released to the world.

“A day with the master story-teller”

A lot can be revealed by a career writer when he is the mood to talk, as happened when Ekwensi consented to a long interview with Basil Okafor published with the subtitle “A day with the master story-teller” in The Sun of Saturday June 3, 2006; surprisingly, Okafor turned out to be a consummate artist with his colored sketch of the old man in repose, recalling drawings of Hemingway and George Bernard Shaw in their time.

Obviously well-informed, the journalist’s profile of the author of “Jagua Nana” was able to elicit from the then 85-year old himself, an interpretation of his career that might interest many who follow the history of the first wave of writers – those whom the author of “Those Magical Years” about the Ibadan school of writers (among them: Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, Nwapa, Segun, Clark, Okara, Ike, Uka, Echeruo, many others), apart from those like him who wrote consciously for the ‘reading public’, that is, the masses. Those others have often seemed to be far better known than the man who was far better recognizable on the streets by his popular audience.

Why had that not counted for much, when popularity was definitely a factor in gaining literary accolades as well. Ekwensi, now nearing the sunset of life, even if still vigorous, witty, informed and rearing to keeping roaring., bared his mind on the real reason he though the establishment critics in the universities chose to ignore his otherwise bestselling and well-received adventures. Indeed, it helps to read the question as posed, to grasp the answer he offers:

Okafor: Sir, you are a very gifted writer, one of the best that could be read anywhere, judging by the technical delivery of the works, yet you don’t seem to have gained the great recognition you so richly deserve. What could be responsible for this flaw, could it be as a result of the themes of the works?

Ekwensi: No, it isn’t that. There was a sort of gang-up. You will find that most of the famous writers were people who went to Ibadan University. You know, nowadays, people take JAMB in 236 centres, but in my time, JAMB was only one. It wasn’t even JAMB, it was London Matriculation. If you passed that London Matriculation, you could move on to any course you wanted, out of a choice of about three dozens – they were not many. The colonial government was nurturing and growing people who would work in the civil service so, all their attention was focused on the civil service and those who would work there There is an American critic called Bert Lindfors, who specialises on Tutuola and African writing. I think he was also one of those who said that I hadn’t seen the four walls of a university – something like that – but there was no university here then to see its inside walls…

Okafor: Now, why would he cast such aspersion on you, do you think it was racist?

Ekwensi: I wasn’t in the clique and I’m not sorry. We will all come to realise who’s genuine and who is not. No, it was not a racist thing.

At the other extreme was that while the Ibadan graduates were lionized in the West and adventure writers like Ekwensi were ignored, others, at the opposite extreme like Amos Tutuola, found themselves also being toasted as authentic voices. Incidentally, Ekwensi knew Tutuola well, and in response to Okafor’s wondering on the basis of the celebration of the man by Western critics, offered his own assessment as follows: “My honest estimation is that the man himself did not know what the whole commotion was about. I told you I was doing a BBC programme and during the course of that programme I went to his residence on Apapa Road, Lagos. All the answers to all the questions I put to him came in monosyllables of yes and no. You see, he was completely overwhelmed by the interpretation of what he was doing. After all, those were stories we were told everyday by our parents, which we also told our own children. It wasn’t anything particularly magical or ingenious, but it was quite a fascination for the white man.”

He went on to comment on those who went to Ibadan and their elevation to literary royalty; here was the crux of the matter – the unfair imposition of what is and what is not authentic African literature by outside judges. In the interactive session with his audience at my party for him at the embassy, I had asked him these very same questions, since I had been most puzzled. He had offered these same answers. This clearly was a grouse deeply felt. He would note emphatically that “much of this African writing stuff was manouevred by the white people because they brought the capital for producing the books, fiction and non-fiction, alike. So, they teleguided the whole course of events in the literary world but it was a great contribution because it brought out to the fore, a lot of hidden materials”

His larger point, I believe, was that luck and happenstances, rather than just pure talent alone, were factors: often attending conferences and events, a good writer meets friendly critics with powerful contacts in various literary settings, and the rest, as they say, could become history. Those critics build their careers, not in discovering new writers but in promoting their favorites as their new avatars of the emerging cultures. Books and articles, essays and more book chapters, monographs and conferences, awards, grants, fellowships and institutional honors – doctorates and keynote speeches tend to follow. The popular media, getting wind of the new elevation, send their gab-boys and the making of celebrities is afoot, with painters, sculptors and songsters, not too far behind.

By the same token, a writer deemed outside the loop, unfamiliar with these interlocking networks – what the German sociologist Georg Simmel would call the ‘web of group affiliations’ on a transnational cultural scale, and one in particular running afoul of the sensibilities of a visiting university-based critic, may become rather marginalized, unless he fancies the untutored experiences of those trying to mix English with local linguistics in unusual coinages as examples of how non-whites mangle European languages, amusingly. On their part, the grouse some of the literary critics have of Ekwensi's works, was that he wrote of Africa as an urban and not a tribal, village, phenomenon. He wrote of ‘homo africanus’ , as if these 20^th century town dwellers were real, rather than migrant villagers to European outposts. To speak of the protagonists in ‘When Love Whispers”. “Jagua Nana’ and “Beautiful Feathers” as if these were true urbanites in the same way those who parade along the promenades of the Thames in London or the cafes and salons of la belle Paris, or for that matter live their charmed lives out in the East Village in New York, was rather far-fetched.

But having said that, Ekwensi himself may also have underestimated his own impact. Leading scholars like Ernest Emenyonu, Charles R. Larson, Kole Omotoso, Juliet Okonkwo, Robert July, and many others, have all written well-received books, essays and major evaluations of his various works. But Ekwensi may end up with the last laugh: as the 1950s gave way to the 1980s and as, a quarter century later into the 21^st century, the urban reality, not the erstwhile village civilization, has become center stage. The grandchildren and their offspring are likely to live an urban existence, not one controlled by some wizened patriarch in some darkened corner of a forlorn homestead ‘far from the beaten path.’

I daresay the author of “Restless City and Christmas Gold” (1975) and “Gone to Mecca” (1991), will be visited repeatedly in the days ahead – especially as the video film tradition that we know as Nollywood, blossoms into a true cinematic project in the years ahead. I will not be surprised if filmmakers option the truly delectable stories of ‘Jagua Nana’ and “Iska’ and ‘Survive the Peace’ and the rest, hard to resist.

(An earlier version of this of this essay appered the author’s Sunday Champion Newspaper column, Nov. 11 and also in the November-December issue of the New York-based African Lifestyles News. Along with additional reviews of the novelist’s life, the essay will be repoduced in the African Profiles USA & Globe Magazine for Black History Month 2008. Photo above shows Ekwensi with Uwazurike at the New Jersey reception.)