Great Chinua Achebe: O Di Gbere By Qansy Salako



By Qansy Salako

Professor Chinualumogu Achebe passed on too early at 82. Given how the literary world remains insatiable drinking from his fountain of knowledge, he should have lived to 200. At least.


“Your love has spread all over my body as palm oil does on hot yam.” That was my quintessential line for toasting girls in my high school days. The first time I used the line, the girl looked at me first like I was crazy, then from head to toe like I was nothing, sucked in hot air through her teeth “ptscheww,” accompanied by the typical guttural sound “un hoon,” turned around and walked away. That incident turned out to be the first of uncountable nails I would be hammered by girls. However, on that particular occasion, I felt more bewildered than scorned.

I could not understand why the line didn’t work. It sounded perfectly accurate based on how I was feeling anyway. In those days, I literally memorized all the love dialogues in that Achebe’s novel. What was a Nigerian teenager in the 60s like me to do? Suddenly, I discovered myself with new emotions about girls that I couldn’t understand. No sex education talks by parents, teachers or anyone, and no television help either. All I’ve got was Achebe’s “A Man of the People.” But getting nailed by that girl only made me hone down my Achebe lines even more, and I easily became a reliable dictionary for my friends who came to collect lines for use on their object of lust, one statement at a time. I am talking about equally clueless but more shameless teenage boys who couldn’t hit on girls unless I was in the vicinity.

Yet, “Things Fall Apart” is by far my most cherished novel of all of Achebe’s works. That tells you the realm I am in as his fan. If I didn’t have all my marbles complete and in position, I probably would have grown up to become an Achebe stalker, just because I love his writings. Achebe wields enormous powers as a writer not only because of the unique quality of his verses and vivid familiarity of his literary characters, but also because the depth of intellection in his verses is bottomless. Reading “Things Fall Apart” for the first time at age 15 or so opened up many windows of awareness in my young brain and gave me spasms of aha moments all through my college years. It opened up a line of understanding for me of whom the “Ibo” are, the nature of their own resistance to European colonization right from when the first white man put his first albino foot on their land, and it made me ponder and search for equivalent Yoruba proverbs that matched many Igbo proverbs that Achebe tireless translated so effortlessly and so admiringly. Even in my young age at the time, I knew that the little novel would reach a near-scripture status in the years to come.

Ultimately, Achebe’s life and death is Nigeria’s loss. Nigeria is a country that has both everything and nothing, all at the same time. It reels in $224 million daily income ($81 billion annual) and GDP of $236 billion/yr putting it in the company of UAE, Denmark and Chile, but with citizen life expectancy of 52 years, child birth mortality better than only 10 countries in the world which includes Chad and Somalia, just over half the population has access to clean water, a third to a toilet and a whopping two-thirds living below the poverty line. Nigeria mismanages anything and everything of value it possesses. It subjugates sense for nonsense, manages potential national problems with emptiness, reveres mediocrity and attempts to develop without its finest. What Nigeria became today is a testimony to the level of ignorance by which the British ruled the world in their hey days.

If a developing country like Nigeria had assembled citizens of Achebe’s intellectual stature together and establish a whole university around them while still alive, we might have a world class ivy league on our land by now. Regardless of how self-styled Nigeria federalists analyze his citizenship, Achebe was a towering colossus in content and integrity over the feckless cabal who sits boisterously above the law in Nigeria today. I cheered each time Achebe rejected the so called national merit awards offered him by our kleptomaniac governments. After all, you should look at what the person giving you a shirt is wearing himself. Our national merit awards are not worth a cockroach poop anymore. As we now celebrate and reward corruption and incompetence, awardees are now mostly bums and dishonorable citizens. Just how should someone like Achebe value such a honor?

Events have overtaken time in Nigeria. Citizen Chinua Achebe loved his Biafra as much he loved Nigeria, and it showed in how he hurt over both throughout his life. The days of treasonable felony over the singing of Biafra anthem in a public toilet are long gone. Love of one’s own constituent ethnic nationality side-by-side love of Nigeria is a common reality in Nigeria today. Achebe’s retort to the vacuous Nigerian political elites throughout his life, was simple: “if Biafra must not stand, then make Nigeria livable for all and for the pursuit of happiness by all.” Today, practically everyone is making the same demand. Everybody is now clamoring for a sovereign national conference, so that the constituting nationalities may exchange their ideas of what nation they desire and renegotiate the current Nigeria experiment. If we must force ourselves to stay in Nigeria and co-exist with Boko Haram, we may as well make Nigeria work and secure for all. Else, every baby has the right to want to carry its own mother’s breast.

Those who sneered that Achebe died sad because he died abroad are talking from their feet. Such sentimental nonsense. If the world giving standing ovations to Achebe in life and in death implies sad life for Achebe, then I shudder to think what his adversaries would call happy life. Which one is better – live as a auto-accident disabled Nigerian professor in a wheelchair in Nigeria and die in Nigeria or live as a auto-accident disabled world scholar with two US renown colleges competing for your presence and die in their care? Caterwaulers! They probably would prefer the former.

Chinualumogu, o se’le aye re….Chinua, you did good on earth.
Bo d’orun, ko s’orun re….when you get to the land of the dead, do good there too.
Ma j’okun….do not eat the millipede
Ma j’ekolo…do not eat the earthworm
Oun ti won’nje laj’ule orun, ni ko ma ba won je…..eat whatever they eat there.
O di gba, O di gbere…..good bye for aye.
O di arinako, o d’oju ala…..till our encounters in the land of the dream.

Adieu, Great Achebe.
Tell Awojobi, Chike Obi, Olikoye and others that they are missing nothing.
You guys enjoy your deserved rest.
Nigeria will sort itself out, dead or alive.
Adieu, Great One.

kanzi@netzero.com

http://saharareporters.com/article/great-chinua-achebe-o-di-gbere-qansy-salako

Touching.....only if he was as gracious.

A lesson to all narrow-minded tribalists on NL. There are still many Nigerians who are ready to pay tribute to inspiration regardless of what colour in which it comes. I bet the Soyinkas and Ola Rotimis have equally inspired as many others east of the Niger.

Starlett: A lesson to all narrow-minded tribalists on NL. There are still many Nigerians who are ready to pay tribute to inspiration regardless of what colour in which it comes. I bet the Soyinkas and Ola Rotimis have equally inspired as many others east of the Niger.

A lesson Achebe failed to learn in all his years on earth.

Aigbofa:




A lesson Achebe failed to learn in all his years on earth.

There is no tangible lesson to learn from people who invented smokescreen. We will recognize their actions and reserve our comments.

Dede1:


There is no tangible lesson to learn from people who invented smokescreen. We will recognize their actions and reserve our comments.

Very well, don't learn. Ignorance is bliss anyway.

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