And there was William Simpson, teacher of mathematics, who would have been greatly surprised if anyone had said to him in the 1940s that he was preparing the ground for the beginnings of modern African literature.
Or even that strange Englishman J. M. Stuart Young, who opted out of the colonial system in Onitsha and set himself up in competition against his own people in giant European trading companies. His ambition to open up commerce to African traders may have seemed quixotic at the time, but the people of Onitsha admired him and gave him a big traditional funeral when he died.
These people had reached across the severe divide which colonialism would have, and touched many of us on the other side. But more important, far more important, was the fact that even if those hands had not reached across to us we would still have survived colonial tribulations, as we had done so many others before them through the millennia. That they did reach across, however, makes a great human story.
In 1976, U.S. relations with Nigeria reached an all-time low in the face of particularly clumsy American handling of the Angolan—Cuban—South African issue. Henry Kissinger, whose indifference to Africa bordered on cynicism, decided at last to meet Joseph Garba, the Nigerian foreign minister, at the United Nations. In a gambit of condescending pleasantness, Kissinger asked Garba what he thought America was doing wrong in Africa. To which Garba replied stonily: “Everything!” Kissinger’s next comment was both precious and, I regret to admit, true. He said: “Statistically that is impossible. Even if it is unintentional, we must be doing something right.”2
That exchange could easily have been about colonialism.
1993
In its original form, this essay was delivered as the Ashby Lecture at Cambridge University, January 22, 1993. Eric Ashby, for whom the Ashby Lecture series is named, was master of Clare College at the university from 1959 to 1967. The lectures’ broad theme is that of human values.
*“Age-grade,” in the Igbo tradition, is an association of people within an age bracket, functioning largely as a village group. It begins in childhood and continues throughout the duration of the individual’s life. In Igbo tradition, it was unheard of for an age-grade to be named after a white man until Captain O’Connor.
The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen
Growing Up in the Ambience of a Legend
If you are blind, describing an elephant is easy. You can call it, like one of the six blind men in the fable, a huge tree trunk; or perhaps a gigantic fan; or an enormous rope, and so on. But having eyes, far from making such descriptions easy, actually complicates them.
So what do we do if we have to describe a phenomenon as vast as Azikiwe? Take a small part that you have a little knowledge of and tell all of it; but never pretend that what you tell is the story.
I am taking my own advice and reflecting on a very small segment of the Azikiwe story. But you can already see my difficulty in the fact that I can’t seem to decide which of two titles to use; and I sense a couple more looming in the back-ground —“Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe: Zik of Africa,” for example, the first president of Nigeria.
I remember, in exact and complete detail, the first day I saw Azikiwe’s name in print and realized that I had been calling it wrongly all my life. I must have been about six or seven. I had gone to visit the children of one of our neighbors, a church teacher who lived three houses down the road from us. Unlike my father, who had retired from evangelical work and now lived permanently in our village on a grand pension of one pound, ten shillings a month, this neighbor was still on active missionary service and only came home to Ogidi now and again. His house, like ours, was a modern affair: mud walls and corrugated iron roof.
As I entered the front room, called the piazza in the vocabulary of missionary architecture, I saw a new almanac hanging on the wall and went immediately to look at it. I was as curious about wall hangings and posters in those days as my father was conscientious in putting new ones on our walls every year at Christmastime. A great part of my education came from those wall hangings.
But the almanac I now saw on our neighbor’s wall was different from any I was familiar with at home. Ours were Church Missionary Society almanacs, with portraits of bishops and pictures of cathedrals. Our neighbor’s almanac, as far as I can remember, came under the banner of ONITSHA IMPROVEMENT UNION, or something like that.
Sitting in the front row in a group photograph was Nnamdi Azikiwe in a white suit. Azikiwe was the most popular nationalist freedom fighter against colonial rule in West Africa. I read that name, “Azikiwe,” over and over again in subdued surprise. I had never seen it written before, only heard it spoken. In fact, I had heard it spoken countless times, heard it invoked so often that I had come to think I knew it perfectly and was familiar with it. And now, face to face with it in print, I had suddenly realized that I never really knew it.
You see, I had up to that point called it like two names, Aziki Iwe. Two names—a foreign Christian name, Isaac, and an Igbo surname, Iwe. One of my father’s friends, another retired church teacher, was called Isaac Okoye and I had assumed that “Azikiwe” was the same kind of name—until that day of enlightenment on the wall of our neighbor’s house. I did not rush off to tell all my friends of my previous ignorance. I took the new knowledge in my stride, quietly, and kept news of it in my heart. It is one of the few memories I can recall in such clarity from those faraway days. And so I assume it must have been of considerable significance in my evolving consciousness.
A few years later, two or three years, maybe, I was judged old enough to take part in Empire Day celebrations in Onitsha, the famous River Niger town, seven miles away from my village. You had to be old enough in those days because if you wanted to go anywhere, you walked there. On the way to Onitsha I saw in the bush by the roadside a surveyor’s concrete beacon with the legend “Professor Nnamdi Azikiwe” imprinted on it. I believe it is the same site where his house in Onitsha stands today. I may be wrong; if so, who cares? Legends are not always where you think they are.
What I want to present in a nutshell is a brief personal reminiscence of the impact of this man who bestrode the world of this child like a colossus.
It is interesting and, I believe, significant and appropriate that I became aware of him in the oral mode, pervasive and nebulous, before he crystallized into the more sedate print for me. As it happened, Azikiwe himself was as comfortable in the one mode as in the other, deploying the resources of oratory as effectively as he did the powers of print journalism.
What I am struggling to convey is elusive by its very nature—the crossroads of history and legend at a time of transition. To say that Azikiwe’s name was a household word in my part of Nigeria during the first decade of my life would be true but insufficient. It was more in the general air we breathed than in the domestic chatter of our homes. There was an exhilarating touch of magic to it—a headiness, even a slight intoxication.
There is a story I heard much later, of Zik having applied when he returned from America to teach at the Yaba Higher College in Lagos and being rejected by the British colonial service. Whether this is true or not I don’t know, and don’t care! I like it; it ought to be true. There was an eccentric editor of the Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates in Britain. One day, goes the story, an angry member of Parliament stormed into the office of this editor, threw an open copy of the paper on the table, and said to him: “I never said that!” To which the editor replied quite calmly: “I know you didn’t, but you should have.”
I feel the same way about Zik’s application to teach at Yaba. If it didn’t happen, it should have. It would offer us one great incident of poetic justice over which we can gloat and say to colonialism: Ntoo; served you right!
Ten years before Azikiwe, another great African nationalist had returned home to West Africa from studies in America. His name was James Kwegyir Aggrey, Dr. Aggrey of the Gold Coast. The colonial service accepted him in Achimota College, not as principal, which he deserved, but a
s an assistant to a nice but colorless English cleric. So Aggrey was co-opted and contained by colonial rule.
Azikiwe escaped Aggrey’s fate and was able to design the strategy of his revolution—a sweeping educational project not constrained in institutions but unleashed on the streets and pathways of Nigeria’s towns and villages. “Show the Light and the people will find the way.” He showed and they found.
There was politics in Lagos before Zik arrived home in 1937. There were even newspapers before the West African Pilot brought its light. But the politics and the newspapers catered to a small coterie of well-educated, well-to-do city dwellers. It has been said that editorials in Lagos newspapers of those days were apt to be liberally spiced with long Latin quotations. Azikiwe turned his light loose among the people and transformed Nigeria overnight. Workers in government departments, teachers in missionary schools, students, clerks in European-owned commercial houses, traders in the markets—the educated and semieducated began to read newspaper stories about political freedom and the social affairs of their towns and communities. Popular singers made records eulogizing Zik nwa Jelu Oyibo, the child who journeyed to the land of the whites.
Our colonial masters were by no means novices in containing agitation among their subjects. Many school authorities banned Zik’s newspapers from their institutions, which only made them doubly attractive. I went to a more enlightened school, where the teachers did not talk of banning but showed you how badly written the articles were, which was not surprising in view of the low standard of American education. I remember my English teacher in my second year setting an exam for us in which we were expected to explain such incredible words as “gubernatorial” and “eschatological.” We all scored zero in that number, whereupon he revealed to us that he had taken the words straight out of a recent issue of one of Zik’s papers. I suppose it was a way of telling us what a sticky end we would all come to if we followed Zik’s bombastic example. It turned out, instead, to have been a very effective way of learning new English words and remembering them forever afterwards.
Those were, of course, early days in the anticolonial struggle. As Zik’s influence grew, so did the measures to contain him, the most effective method ultimately being what we might call, in retrospect, the Buthelezi complex: whereby the colonizer confounds the freedom movement by sponsoring factional leaders in its ranks. This was so skillfully done in Nigeria that independence from Britain in 1960 was virtually a trap, and has remained so to this day.
This may be an appropriate time to explain the rather fanciful title of this rambling essay. I recall one of Dr. Azikiwe’s First October garden parties at Government House Lagos in the early 1960s. Those were high-life days, and one of the bands that played that evening was the famous Eleazer Arinze and His Music. They played one of their best compositions, which saluted Zik the incomparable chef, the wonderful aroma of whose cooking was now floating in the wind to every corner of the land—to the north, to the east, and to the west.
The point of these lyrics, which would not have been lost on any Nigerian, was—if I may change the metaphor—that Zik had baked the cake of national independence and others had now crowded in to eat.
The lyricists may have been thinking of Zik’s political rivals, but the metaphor could apply just as well to the rest of us.
When Zik returned to Nigeria in 1937, it was impossible for a Nigerian to be appointed to a senior position in the civil service. These positions were in fact called European posts.
When I graduated from University College, Ibadan, in 1953, I did not bother to look for a job; a job from broadcasting literally came to my door, looking for me. Five years later, when Azikiwe was premier of Eastern Nigeria, I was, at the ripe age of twenty-eight, controller of Eastern Region stations of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. And so I understood the lyrics of sweet aroma and Zik’s kitchen.
It was then I had my first brush with Nigeria’s party politics. One morning as I was settling down to read the day’s routine reports, my secretary announced the arrival, without any warning, of a government delegation to see me. It was indeed a high-powered delegation, comprising two cabinet ministers, the private secretary to the premier, and a somewhat vociferous leader of the youth wing of the party in power in the region. They apologized for coming without notice and promptly laid their complaint before me. My station, they said, was supporting some useless persons who had recently broken away from the government party and were now challenging it in an electioneering campaign. The reason for making this serious charge against us was that we steadily broadcast the nonsense from these people, and that I even had one of my journalists traveling with the enemy campaign team. I explained that we were following the normal methods of news gathering at our station and assured my guests that as soon as their own campaign took off we would give them even bigger coverage, because they were a bigger party. They seemed satisfied and left, but that afternoon at their national convention they passed a vote of no confidence on my station, and went further to announce their plan to end the monopoly of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation by setting up a regional radio and television organization to drive it out of Eastern Nigeria.
Those were rough and difficult times. We were learning painfully the rules of rudimentary democracy. The British have always claimed that they taught us the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy and we blew it. Nothing could be more absurd. You might as well say you taught someone to swim by letting him roll in the sands of the Sahara. British colonial administration was not any form of democracy, but a fairly naked dictatorship. Dr. Azikiwe, who is basically a humane democrat, was surrounded at the critical transition phase by zealots reared under colonialism with little understanding of the willing restraint demanded of those who would practice the arts of democracy.
It is quite understandable that the blind man who has spoken most about Azikiwe so far has been the student of his politics. Azikiwe’s contribution to Africa’s liberation politics was enormous. But to define his work simply in terms of his politics is to drastically reduce his significance. What distinguishes him from all his rivals for Nigeria’s highest office and from all his successors in that position is the range and variety of his interests, enthusiasms, and accomplishments. I have already described him as a democrat and humanist. Let me mention my personal experience of him in the arts.
That same year that his party virtually declared war on the media house which I controlled was also the year in which my first novel was published. I sent a signed copy of the book to him and he sent me a most gracious letter (signed not by a secretary but by himself). And you knew he would read the book.
A few years later, when he had moved to Lagos as governor-general and I had moved also in my own little orbit, he authorized a command performance of a stage adaptation of the novel, and gave my wife and me the great privilege of sitting beside himself and his wife at the occasion.
At the risk of making this essay appear like self-advertisement rather than a celebration of Zik I must mention my receiving from his hand the first Governor-General’s Trophy for my second novel at the first anniversary celebration of Nigeria’s independence. That particular rite perished soon after Azikiwe inaugurated it, swept away in that flood of philistinism which seems more congenial to the mentality of Azikiwe’s rivals and successors.
I must conclude on the note of Azikiwe’s pan-Africanism, another feature that set him far apart from most of his fellows. From the earliest days of his journalism, he ensured the presence of the African diaspora on the pages of the West African Pilot. For example, anybody who read the paper got to know of George Padmore, a West Indian radical intellectual who wrote a regular and influential column there. When Azikiwe founded the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1960, he named schools and colleges and departments after the distinguished African-Americans Leo Hansberry, Paul Robeson, and Washington Carver.
It is right and appropriate that Lincoln University, which started this young man on this amazi
ng journey, should recognize in this way how far he has come.
1994
In its original form, this essay was delivered as an address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, April 1994, at a conference honoring Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. The conference was hosted and sponsored by Lincoln University’s president, Niara Sudarkasa.
My Dad and Me
My father was born in the 1880s, when English missionaries were first arriving among his Igbo people of eastern Nigeria. He was an early convert and a good student, and by 1904 was deemed to have received enough education to be employed as a teacher and evangelist in the Anglican Mission.
The missionaries’ rhetoric of change and newness resonated so deeply with my father that he called his first son Frank Okwuofu (“New Word”). The world had been tough on my father. He was an orphan child: his mother had died in her second childbirth, and his father, Achebe, a refugee from a bitter civil war in his original hometown, did not long survive his wife. My father therefore was raised not by his parents (neither of whom he remembered) but by his maternal uncle, Udoh. It was this man, as fate would have it, who received in his compound the first party of missionaries in his town. The story is told of how Udoh, a very generous and tolerant man, it seemed, finally had enough and asked his visitors to move to a public playground on account particularly of their singing, which he considered too doleful for a living man’s compound. But he did not discourage his young nephew from associating with the singers, or listening to their message.
The relationship between my father and his old uncle was instructive to me. There was something deep and mystical about it, judging from the reverence I saw and felt in my father’s voice and demeanor whenever he spoke about his uncle. One day in his last years he told me of a strange dream he had recently dreamt. His uncle, like a traveler from afar, had broken a long journey for a brief moment with him, to inquire how things were and to admire his nephew’s “modern” house of whitewashed mud walls and corrugated iron roof.