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Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold-flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.
John Pepper Clark-Bekederemmo, “Ibadan” (1961)
In the spring of 2007 I sent most of my office
library at Dartmouth to Dr. Folake Onayemi and her students and colleagues in
the Classics Department at the University of Ibadan. Margaret Graver and other colleagues at
Dartmouth also pitched in. Save for a few monographs on obscure themes that
somehow escaped our notice, most of the books were assembled for university
teachers and their students.
We had all met some years before when Folake was on a research leave in the
States and had remained in touch ever since.
About 1,200 volumes went by the slowest of slow boats—the container of
choice was the “M-bag,” the least expensive way in international shipping to
send printed material via the postal system—but they finally got there. It was
a quite something to see familiar old friends from our office shelves in
Hanover, New Hampshire now displayed in Classics offices in the Arts College at
Ibadan. I went to Ibadan at the end of
the week in November in which Barack Obama was elected President to give a
lecture and some classes.
Traveling to Ibadan on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is dangerous
and my host in Ibadan avoids the Expressway whenever she can.
I read later that the great Nigerian writer
Chinua Achebe was gravely injured in an accident on this very highway, from
which he has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. The roadbed is in poor
condition, with trucks and abandoned vehicles in every stage of being stripped
for parts strewn all along it; cars can be stopped and everyone robbed,
occasionally even killed. So can the pedestrians who wait to cross until there
is a break in traffic that when it can speeds along at 70 miles an hour or faster. We passed a number of police checkpoints
where nothing much seemed to be happening about controlling the traffic.
Drivers were indefinitely detained while their papers were checked until a
bribe could be collected.
As it turned out, these are basic tools for making ilyán, the pounded yam (ishu) that is a starch staple of Yoruba
cuisine.
Stewed fish, chicken, or goat is served in a peppery sauce that includes okra and hot peppers, a clear ancestor of Louisiana Creole and Cajun cooking.
Another favorite dish includes giant forest snails several times the size of their French cousins, les escargots.
Wole
Soyinka writes about collecting them when he was a child in Ake, his memoir of growing up in the
Nigeria of his grandparents. When fully cooked they’re chewy, and like
their French cousins bring to mind
childhood memories of the texture of pencil erasers. They are prepared by being
rinsed first in salt water to get rid of their slime, marinated in lime or
other citrus juice, then grilled and finally poached in a stew. Nigerians eat
with the right hand only, and with a minimum of mess I found impossible to
achieve. Knives and forks were
available. The left hand must never be
used. Even children born left-handed use
only their right hand in public; to do otherwise would reflect badly on their
upbringing.The year 2008 marked
two anniversaries for Ibadan. It is the oldest and largest research university
in the country and was founded in 1948, twelve years before independence from
Britain.
In its sixtieth year it has 19,000 students, a faculty of 1200 and
supporting and administrative staff of 3,300. Approximately 2,400 of these
students are in the College of Arts, the equivalent of humanities faculties in
American universities and colleges.
Ibadan is choked with traffic jams, urban pollution and a high population
density, with an urban infrastructure that is frequently overwhelmed, but the
University itself is a tranquil enclave inside a security perimeter guarded by
checkpoint entrances. In addition to classrooms,
libraries, labs and other kinds of academic centers Ibadan houses most of its
students and a large number of its faculty in what Americans would call its
campus, this one of 1032 hectares (roughly 2,500 acres).
In the rainy season in this part of Africa the storms can be torrential and last
for weeks, as this system of storm drains on campus suggests.
In early November Ibadan had just entered its
dry season, with high humidity and prevailing temperatures in the 80s and low
90s Fahrenheit. People often tell me I
should have no problem with this, since I’m originally from Texas. But Texas only exists as it does because it
is air-conditioned. Ibadan was, but
sporadically, because of power outages.
Some of Nigeria’s most
famous poets and writers studied at Ibadan, including Achebe, Soyinka, John
Okigbo, and J. P. Clark-Bekederemmo. The cityscape celebrated in
Clark-Bekederemmo’s 1961 poem “Ibadan” no longer exists; to see something like
that “running splash of rust…scattered among seven hills”you need to go to a
less overdeveloped city like nearby Abeokuta.
There are eight faculty members in the Classics department, plus four
administrative staff. Folake is the current Head of Department, and her special
area of research lies in readings of Classical and African poetry and
mythology. At present she’s at work on a
comparative study of Greek and Yoruban mythology in which she talks about the
trickster gods Hermes (Roman Mercury) and Eshu-Elegba and others who figure
importantly in the fiction of Ishmael Reed (Mumbo
Jumbo, Last Days of Louisians Red)
and such scholarly studies as Skip Gates’s Signifying
Monkey and Lewis Hyde’s Trickster
Makes This World.
The talk I gave was the
second in honor of Constantine Leventis (1938-2002), a Classical scholar
educated at Clare College, Cambridge; David Konstan of Brown gave the first in
2006. Constantine and the Leventis
family have been major benefactors of the department at Ibadan. My lecture
about African American writers and Classical tradition was drawn from my work
on a book that my friend and colleague Bill Cook and I have written for the University
of Chicago Press. Constantine’s son George represented the Leventis family. The
occasion was also honored by the presence of J. T. F. Iyalla, the Nigerian
ambassador to the United States during the Biafran war in the late 1960s. Ambassador Iyalla is a loyal alumnus of the
Classics department at Ibadan and one of its most important benefactors. Along
with the Vice Chancellor and the Dean of Arts and other university dignitaries,
the current ambassador of Greece to Nigeria Harris Dafaranos also attended.
Donations of every kind, whether of books, money, or any other benefactions are
crucial for the survival of higher education in the Humanities in Nigeria, and
this is largely what the event was meant to underscore.
The Leventis Lecture was a formal occasion, with twelve speeches, introductions,
forewords and afterwords surrounding my talk, all explaining why we were gathered together
and who we were, and why all this mattered. This tradition of carefully
explaining who is present at such an event, and why, carried over into African
American public gatherings, in churches and other institutions in the States
and remains a distinctive feature of African American public life today. As Bill Cook informs me, short cuts in such
ceremonies in African America are unthinkable.
In spite of this day’s heat and humidity, so were they here.
The other anniversary
at Ibadan in 2008 was a commemoration of the publication of the best-known work
in Nigerian literature, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. Achebe
took his title from Yeats’ 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” As a work of fiction,
Things Fall Apart could be classified
as an historical novel, set as it is in mid-nineteenth century at the time of
the first British missionaries’ arrival in the part of western central Africa
that eventually became Nigeria. But
thinking about literary genres will probably not be the first thing that occurs
to Achebe’s readers today. The intertwined
invasions of Christian missionaries and British colonial armies that come down
on the hero of the novel Okonkwo, his family, and everyone else about them
proves to be as deadly as the world of
“The Second Coming.”
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon
the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is
loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence
is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the
worst Are full of passionate
intensity. These famous lines could serve as a quick
plot summary of Things Fall Apart,
which has proven to be Achebe’s masterpiece: powerful, concentrated and
haunting to read.
Thereafter my lodgings were well-stocked with
morally improving evangelical fiction, dramas in which the chastity of young
men and women is cruelly tested but ultimately saved, and proselytizing
tracts. A television soap produced in
South Africa and widely popular throughout sub-Saharan Africa brought the same kind of message: adultery
does not pay, but it sure is popular.
People who commit sin suffer in
seemingly unending chains of family dramas that move back and forth between
traditional African settings and the suburban life of cars and condos that
modern Africa offers to those who can afford it. I found a new book by two historians at the
University of Texas at Austin to be good introduction to the whole history of
this part of western Africa, from earliest times, through the era of slavery
and colonialism, up to the present day.
In their History of Nigeria
(Cambridge, 2008), Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton don’t pull any punches in
a candid account of the kleptocracy that has steadily impoverished Nigeria
since it gained independence from the British in 1960. It has a larger population than any other
nation in Africa and became its second wealthiest after the discovery of vast
oil reserves in the Niger River Delta in the late 1950s. But decades of ethnic and religious conflict,
military coups and uncontrollable official corruption since independence have
reduced the average Nigerian to an income of scarcely two dollars a day. This kind of life if often cited as one of
the reasons why there is a proliferation of things like cults among Nigerians
of student age, as well as strong competition between Muslims and Christians
for supremacy. There is not adequate housing, the water supply is frequently
polluted and in most shanty towns sewage systems are non-existent. Power outages are a constant feature of life
both by day and by night, and anyone who can afford it has a generator at home
to kick in whenever the current goes, which can happen hourly. Everyone you meet not only has a cell phone,
but is also likely to be using it. The current abuse of
choice among the wealthy is the proliferation of high-powered armed convoys
escorting rich people around the city of Lagos,
as if they were the President of Nigeria himself.
By Falola and Heaton’s
reckoning General Sani Abacha’s regime (1993-1998) was the worst of all. Abacha was the last in a string of military
despots who reduced Nigeria to an international pariah state by hanging the
writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and seven other Ogoni activists in 1995. Since then civilian government of a kind has
returned, and Nigeria’s standing in the world has improved. It has elected its
second civilian president Umanu Yar’Adua (2007 to the present), the hand-picked successor of the first,
Oluseguu Obsanjo (1999-2007), but Umanu Yar’Adua’s presidency marks no
substantial change in a pervasive culture of corruption. He was recently spared impeachment by a 4 to
3 vote of Nigeria’s Supreme Court. No
one believes this amounted to a vindication; more likely he was acquitted
because he had already been in office for over a year, and elections are not
that far off. According to Will Connors’ recent report in The New York Times (December 13, 2008), “Yar’Adua’s pledge to end corruption was
undermined by the demotion and forced exile of the country’s popular antigraft
czar. After making the first concrete efforts to prosecute corrupt leaders,
several of whom landed in jail, the official was driven into hiding after two
attempts on his life.” The major source of corruption lies of course in oil. The reserves
of the Niger Delta are currently being fought over by Dutch Shell and other
foreign oil companies who have contracted rights to export; nominally protected
by the government, their refineries, pipe lines, and imported foreign workers
are increasingly the target of robberies, bombings, and kidnappings. The poor people in the countryside regularly
try to tap into oil pipelines, in a desperate attempt to get fuel oil that
often leads to massive explosions and loss of life. On the flight back from Lagos to Atlanta I
sat next to an American oil company executive who had just concluded one of his
regular visits to Nigeria to check on his company’s assets. He was from Houston but beyond that declined
to reveal which company he worked for.
He did allow that Nigeria was probably the most corrupt country
imaginable to do business in, as it is now one of the most dangerous. But his firm had no choice; too much oil is
at stake. Bad as it was, he added, Nigeria is not yet Iraq. This is the unavoidable world that surrounds the 1032 hectares of
the University of Ibadan and its Classicists.
To say that it makes realists of everyone would be an
understatement. When I arrived I did
find much optimism about the American elections, as in this letter to the
editor from a reader of the local newspaper The
Guardian: I thought it was a joke, I thought it may not happen in my life
time. It finally turned into a reality. A black man will occupy the White House
for the next four years. Yes we can and that is the result of hope. I must confess that
I lost a couple of bets. We need to pray
for Obama for the next four years. He is
holding the mandate of every black man all over the world. Perhaps this will open our eyes in
Nigeria. We need a radical departure
from the past. A sick nation, a sick
President. We have a nation of 419
thieving politicians without conscience. Awon omo oju ti ori ola ri.* Miscreants in
power. With tears in my
eyes at this moment for my beloved nation, I dare say, we need a change, a
radical departure form the past, we have been challenged and we can start the
process now. Let us commence the process
of networking to change this Nigeria.
Yes we can. (Bimbo Okulaja, Lagos) Mr. Okulaja is
guided by Obama’s inspiring rhetoric, much as those of us were who made it to
the Mall in Washington on January 20th to witness his
inauguration. A more critical comment on
what Obama’s election might mean for Africa could be read in Mohammed Haruna’s
column “People and Politics” in the same issue of The Observer. To know what Obama
may mean for Africa, Haruna argues, it is necessary first to know what his
election means in American politics. It is patronising to the black race to consider Obama’s victory on
November 4 as enough in itself. It is
not. The victory is, of course,
important, but unless he uses it to try and save America and the world from the
misadventures of the neo-conservatives, his victory will mean little or nothing
to humanity. Repudiating the economic philosophy of Bush and
Company will, of course, not lead to the dismantling of their legacies
overnight. But if Obama can achieve even
that, he would have done enough to justify the imagination with which his
presidential bid gripped Americans and the rest of the world. In his acceptance speech, Obama repeated the
slogan of his campaign, “Yes we can,” no less than half a dozen times. If his victory is to mean anything to America
and to the rest of the world, he must, of course, try and deliver on some, if
not all, of the promises he made. I hope and pray to God that I am proved wrong,
but chances are that he won’t be able to deliver much. The more important thing, however, is that he
must be seen to have tried. It is simply
not enough that he is the first Blackman to rule the most powerful nation on
earth. It seems to me
that Mohammed Haruna’s argument is also a good demonstration why the mission of
the Arts College at Ibadan is as crucial for the future of the country as any
other part of the University. He is nothing if not critical, and while he writes
about the news of the day he isn’t constrained to simply repeat it. One of the
most characteristic effects of studying such seemingly impractical subjects as
Classics or philosophy is the way they can make you more detached, more
critical. Liberal education can impart
the useful illusion if always not the fact of having some kind of critical
distance from the accidents of time and place you happen to have been born
into. As Nietzsche puts it, you learn how to regard things with hostile calm.
Besides the big public events I
taught several classes for Folake’s Latinists on the end of book 3 and the
beginning of book 4 of Vergil’s Aeneid.
Chosen at random from what was at hand and xeroxable in her office, these
passages show as well as any how you can take any part of this great poem as a
kind of DNA structure out of which the whole can be derived. The end of book 3
and the beginning of 4 juxtapose a hero’s voice (Aeneas’s) with a royal queen’s
(Dido’s), each of them locked in a growing intimacy marked by what will also
prove to be a tragic level of mutual incomprehension. Folake’s students knew
feminist theory as well as they knew their grammar. We spent roughly ten
minutes discussing the implications of the opening word of book 4, the
contrastive conjunction at (“but/on
the other hand”). As teachers always
think—and just as often, students don’t—the time just flew by.
They seem equally prophetic about current events in Zimbabwe, Darfur, or Somalia
as they are of Nigeria today. University students in
Ibadan, Lagos, and other centers have joined cult groups that can be as savage
as the American urban gangs made famous by the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood.
Evangelical Christianity is in evidence everywhere in the western part
of Nigeria where the Yoruba live, just as Islamic fundamentalism is in the
northern part where the Hausa people are.
At the University Guest Houses where I stayed, you were as likely to
hear a revival meeting underway in the tents outside as an evening of karaoke. When I reacted more or less charitably to an
hilariously catastrophic explosion in the bathroom plumbing, the attendant who
looked after things asked me as she left, “Are you a Christian?”
An editorial cartoon from The
Guardian of November 13, 2008 outlines the problem: the powerful people can
afford to hire policemen (on- or off-duty), military officers, or just plain
armed thugs to drive in force ahead of their Mercedes or BMWs, to clear out the
people, cars or anything else that may be in the way.
¬
One of Folake’s students Lilian Njoku was there;
she is the President of Ibadan’s association of Classics students, Hoi Phrontistai (Greek, meaning
something like “The Deep Thinkers,” “The Big Brains”).
¬
and Idoure Alade, a doctoral candidate in Roman
history who will be on a research fellowship at Brown later this academic year.
This natural rock citadel of about 100 meters above Abeokuta is
where local patriots in past times would take refuge from invaders. An elaborate series of three elevator towers
rivals Olumbo Rock in its monumental size.
They take you from ground level to the top reasonably quickly, though
it’s still possible to walk up. Among many attractions at this tourist Mecca
was one that would capture the eye of anyone interested in languages.
The Yoruba spoken
by 25 million people in western Africa resembles ancient Greek, Chinese, or
Vietnamese, in that its words have tones,
not stress accents such as the English way of saying “I-BAD-an,” as opposed to
“Ibadán,” with a higher tone on the last syllable, and no stress on the
second. Yoruba’s tones correspond
roughly to the markers that Alexandrian Greeks devised to help us barbaroi (barbarians) learn their
language: the grave (`), acute (´), and circumflex (ˆ), from which the French accent aigu, accent grave, and accent circonflexe
derive. There are many other diacritical
marks in the Yoruba alphabet that can indicate still further variations in
vocal inflection. The grammar I
consulted as well as this monument on the Olumo Rock uses the Italian musical tones do re mi to indicate the possible
sounds, each abbreviated to d, r, or m. And this installation illustrates the way meaning can change
simply by changing the tones of the word Ogun
itself. Spelled the same way in each
case, the shifting tones of Ogun can
also signify “god of iron,” “war,” “medicine,” “sweat or perspiration,”
“inheritance,” “longevity,” or “to climb.” On top of Olumo Rock I wouldn’t have
been surprised if these meanings were inspired by the imposing site itself:
figuratively speaking, perhaps “to do the Ogun-thing” would be to climb, to
sweat a lot, implicitly to be able to enjoy longevity, and, thinking of the
history of the site, to wage war.
Less a cause for speculation is where Ibadan’s Classics and Arts
College go from here. As a guide book Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton’s History of Nigeria seemed to me a
carefully considered one, even though it often makes for a grim read, and its
story is reinforced by what I got to see in the country around me. The last image in their book is of a throng
of Nigerian children, with the caption, “Nigeria’s Future.” What other
conclusion could there be after writing and reading a history with such
realities and such a past?
This future was easy to see in the many school
groups I met that were visiting the University’s Botanical and Zoological
Gardens. As Folake
said to me at one point in our travels, children are the most valuable thing
anyone in Nigeria can have. Their education at Ibadan is a fundamentally
optimistic enterprise, as education should be, and not least in the Arts
College and its Classics department. May
the Kumbe Oloasopes, Idouire Alades, and Lilian Nijokus of the next generation
be among them. ¯
* Dr. Onayemi kindly glossed this proverb for me in an e-mail of December 30, 2008: “The phrase refers to pedigree. Literally it means ‘Children of those who have never seen wealth.’ It is a figurative way of saying that poverty has been entrenched in their lineage so much that it affects the reasoning and the behaviour of a person, and it is often use to describe anybody that is grabbing, especially when in a public office. The indication is that such people steal so much because they have been so deprived by poverty. It is also use to describe someone who does not behave properly, especially in public. In this wise the wealth being referred to would be the wealth of proper upbringing or home training. The full phrase then is ‘omo oju o ro lari to npe rare ni olaniyonu,’ ‘A person or child who has never experienced wealth before who now proclaims that wealth is troublesome.’ It is a cultural phrase that needs an explanation or understanding of the Yoruba concept of good behaviour for full comprehension. It does not mean that the Yoruba despise the poor, but that they believe that misbehaviours are a result of some psychological deprivation or lack of proper training.”