Okposalebo: Of Famed Palm-Wine and Braggart Drinkers

“It had happened on the festival day that as Obika and Ofoedu drank with the three men at the market place, one of the men had thrown a challenge to them. The conversation had turned on the amount of palm-wine a good drinker could take without losing knowledge of himself. 

     'It all depends on the palm-tree and the tapper,’ said one of the men. 

     ‘Yes,’ agreed his friend, Maduka. ‘It depends on the tree and the man who taps it,’ 

     ‘That is not so. It depends on the man who drinks. You may bring any tree in Umuaro and any tapper,’ said Ofoedu, ‘and I shall still drink my bellyful and go home with clear eyes.’ 

     Obika agreed with his friend. ‘It is true that some trees are stronger than others and some tappers are better than others, but a good drinker will defeat them both.’ 

     ‘Have you heard of the palm-tree in my village which they call Okposalebo?’ Obika and Ofoedu said no. 

     ‘Anyone who has not heard of Okposalebo and yet claims to be a good drinker deceives himself.’ 

     ‘What Maduka says is very true,’ said one of the others. ’The wine from this tree is never sold in the market, and no one can drink three hornfuls and still know his way home.’ 

     ’This Okposalebo is a very old tree. It is called Disperser of a Kindred because two brothers would fight like strangers after drinking two hornfuls of its wine.’

Unoka: Self-Indulgent Fellow, Rapturous Artist, and Wretched Farmer

“[Okonkwo’s] fame rested on solid personal achievements. … [Okonkwo] had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with is father. 

     Unoka, for that was his father’s name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm-wine, called round his neighbours and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a dead man’s mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime. Unoka was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbour some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts. 

     He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute. He was very good on his flute, and his happiest moments were the two or three moons after the harvest when the village musicians brought down their instruments, hung above the fireplace. Unoka would play with them, his face beaming with blessedness and peace. Sometimes another village would as Unoka’s band and their dancing egwugwu to come and stay with them and teach them their tunes. They would go to such hosts for as long as three or four markets, making music and feasting. Unoka loved the good fare and the good fellowship… 

     Unoka, the grown-up, was a failure.

Things Fall Apart: The Stories Nwoye Loves

"Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son's development, and he knew it was due to Ikemefuna. He wanted Nwoye to grow into a tough young man capable of ruling his father's household when he was dead and gone to join the ancestors. ...
          "So Okonkwo encouraged the boys to sit with him in his obi, and he told them stories of the land -- masculine stories of violence and bloodshed. Nwoye knew that it was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still preferred the stories that his mother used to tell, and which she no doubt still told her younger children -- stories of tortoise and his wily way, and of the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged the whole world to a wrestling contest and was finally thrown by the cat. He remembered the story she often told of the quarrel between Earth and Sky long ago, and how Sky withheld rain for seven years, until crops withered and the dead could not be buried because the hoes broke on the stony Earth. At last Vulture was sent to plead with Sky, and to soften his heart with a song of the suffering of the sons of men. Whenever Nwoye's mother sang this song he felt carried away to the distant scene in the sky where Vulture, Earth's emissary, sang for mercy. At last Sky was moved to pity, and he gave to Vulture rain wrapped in leaves of cocoyam. But as he flew home his long talon pierced the leaves and the rain fell as it had never fallen before. And so heavily did it rain on Vulture that he did not return to deliver his message but flew to a distant land, from where he had espied a fire. And when he got there he found it was a man making a sacrifice. He warmed himself in the fire and ate the entrails.
          "That was the kind of story that Nwoye loved. But he now knew that they were for foolish women and children, and he knew that his father wanted him to be a man. And so he feigned that he no longer cared for women's stories. And when he did this he saw that his father was pleased, and no longer rebuked him or beat him."

Chinua Achebe, 1958 [2010], 39-40

Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy)

African Literature is a Country

Image credit Suad Kamardeen

(By Lily Saint and Bhakti Shringarpure) - African literature is a country

          What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Only a few canonical ones continue to dominate curricula. 

          This is the first post of the series “African Literature is a Country” which asks how we decolonize literary studies today.
          We would like to thank Henry Vehslage for his assistance in organizing and gathering all the information and Dr. Erin Butler for help in interpreting the data. An additional heartfelt thanks to the late Professor Tejumola Olaniyan for his support and advice on this project.

          African literary studies today is a site of deep paradox. On one hand, the last two decades have seen astonishing growth for African literature in the global North and South, evidenced by lucrative publishing deals; new prizes and grants; literature festivals; the establishment of many new presses and imprints; and an increase in blogs and platforms that disseminate and discuss these developments. On the other hand, African literature continues to exist on the margins of the academic mainstream and is also underrepresented within larger reading publics.

Biafra: We Remember and We Pray #Ozoemena

(By Emmanuel Iduma) – ‘Gone Like a Meteor’: Epitaph for the Lost Youth of the Biafran War

In 1967, Nigeria had been an independent country for just seven years. The declaration of secession that year by an Igbo majority in the southeastern region of Nigeria, and the war that followed when the federal government decided to keep the country as one, was already the culmination of a bloody sequence of events. By May 1967, two coup d’états had taken place, and the Igbos of northern Nigeria had been killed in the tens of thousands. 

The Biafran War, otherwise known as the Nigerian Civil War, lasted from July 6, 1967, until January 15, 1970. The men who led each side—Yakubu Gowon on the federal side and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu of Biafra—were in their mid-thirties. Boys, some barely teenagers, volunteered to fight for the breakaway Republic of Biafra. Many of the civilian casualties were children: in September 1968, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that almost ten thousand people died daily from starvation caused by Nigeria’s blockade of Biafra. An entire generation was wrenched from the future.

Of Kannywood, Okada, Danfo: Nigerianisms and Language Evolution

(By Danica Salazar) - Release notes: Nigerian English

My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English.

          This is how acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes her relationship with English, the language which she uses in her writing, and which millions of her fellow Nigerians use in their daily communication. By taking ownership of English and using it as their own medium of expression, Nigerians have made, and are continuing to make, a unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language. We highlight their contributions in this month’s update of the Oxford English Dictionary, as a number of Nigerian English words make it into the dictionary for the first time. 

The majority of these new additions are either borrowings from Nigerian languages, or unique Nigerian coinages that have only begun to be used in English in the second half of the twentieth century, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.

One particularly interesting set of such loanwords and coinages has to do with Nigerian street food. The word buka, borrowed from Hausa and Yoruba and first attested in 1972, refers to a roadside restaurant or street stall that sells local fare at low prices. Another term for such eating places first evidenced in 1980 is bukateria, which adds to buka the –teria ending from the word cafeteria.

1980s Nigeria: The More Things Change...

"Nigeria: A squandering of Riches," a World About Us Documentary by Onyeka Onwenu

After Empire: Achebe and African Novel

(By Ruth Franklin) – After Empire: Chinua Achebe and the Great African Novel

          In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chukwu, the supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which had been eavesdropping, reached Chukwu first. Wanting to punish man, the toad reversed the request, and told Chukwu that after death men did not want to return to the world. The god said that he would do as they wished, and when the dog arrived with the true message he refused to change his mind. Thus, men may be born again, but only in a different form.

          The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe recounts this myth, which exists in hundreds of versions throughout Africa, in one of his essays. Sometimes, Achebe writes, the messenger is a chameleon, a lizard, or another animal; sometimes the message is altered accidentally rather than maliciously. But the structure remains the same: men ask for immortality and the god is willing to grant it, but something goes wrong and the gift is lost forever. “It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose!” Achebe writes. “For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth . . . horrors can descend again on mankind.”

Chinua Achebe: Nneka - "Mother is Supreme"

The Achievement of Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe at his house in Enugu, Nigeria, 1959

(By Kwame Anthony Appiah) - 

The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis. If we could explain it fully, we could reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an achievement that starts with the fact that Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them—Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), to name but two also written by Nigerians—remain eminently worth reading. But place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing something magnificent and new was going on.

One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural—transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.

Adichie, Anambra, and the Core of Igbo Society

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - I am from Abba, in Njikoka LGA. My mother is from Umunnachi in Dunukofia LGA. I grew up in Nsukka, in Enugu State, a town that remains deeply important to me, but Abba and Umunnachi were equally important to me. My childhood was filled with visits. To see my grandmother, to spend Christmas and Easter, to visit relatives. I know the stories of my great grandfather and of his father, I know where my great grandmother’s house was built, I know where our ancestral lands are.
          Abum nwa afo Umunnachi, nwa afo Abba, nwa afo Anambra.

          I am proud of Anambra State. And if our sisters and brothers who are not from Anambra will excuse my unreasonable chauvinism, I have always found Igbo as spoken by ndi Anambra to be the most elegant form of Igbo.
          Anambra State has much to be proud of. This is a state that produced that political and cultural colossus Nnamdi Azikiwe. This is a state that produced the mathematics genius Professor James Ezeilo. This is a state that produced Dora Nkem Akunyili, a woman who saved the lives of so many Nigerians by demonstrating dedicated leadership as the Director General of NAFDAC. (May her soul continue to rest in peace)

          This is a state that produced Nigeria’s first professor of Statistics, Professor James Adichie, a man I also happen to call Daddy. This is a state that produced the first woman to be registrar of Nigeria’s premiere university, UNN, Mrs Grace Adichie, a woman I also happen to call Mummy.
          This is a state that has produced great writers. If Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa and Chukwuemeka Ike had not written the books they did, when they did, and how they did, I would perhaps not have had the emotional courage to write my own books. Today I honour them and all the other writers who came before me. I stand respectfully in their shadow. I also stand with great pride in the shadow of so many other daughters and sons of Anambra State.

Adichie, Achebe, and A Country

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - Chinua Achebe at 82: “We Remember Differently” 

I have met Chinua Achebe only three times. The first, at the National Arts Club in Manhattan, I joined the admiring circle around him. A gentle-faced man in a wheelchair.

“Good evening, sir. I’m Chimamanda Adichie,” I said, and he replied, mildly,  “I thought you were running away from me.”

I mumbled, nervous, grateful for the crush of people around us. I had been running away from him. After my first novel was published, I received an email from his son. My dad has just read your novel and liked it very much. He wants you to call him at this number. I read it over and over, breathless with excitement. But I never called. A few years later, my editor sent Achebe a manuscript of my second novel. She did not tell me, because she wanted to shield me from the possibility of disappointment. One afternoon, she called.  “Chimamanda, are you sitting down? I have wonderful news.” She read me the blurb Achebe had just sent her. We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. She is fearless or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war. Adichie came almost fully made. Afterwards, I held on to the phone and wept. I have memorized those words. In my mind, they glimmer still, the validation of a writer whose work had validated me.

Things Fall Apart - Another Look

Onitsha, Gift of the Niger, By Chinua Achebe

"Onitsha is such a phenomenon. ...

Onitsha is an Igbo town which claims Benin origin. If we are to believe historians, this claim is not very well founded. But what really matters is that Onitsha feels different from the peoples and places in its vicinity. And it is different. It sits at the crossroads of the world. It has two faces—a Benin face and an Igbo face—and can see the four directions.... Its market, which had assembled originally on one of the four days of the Igbo week, had likewise grown ‘big eyes’ and engulfed every day in the sky....

Because it sees everything, Onitsha has come to distrust single-mindedness. It can be opposite things at once. It was both a cradle of Christianity in Igboland and a veritable fortress of ‘pagan’ revanchism. Many hinterland peoples ... would often say with a sad shake of the head that an Onitsha man had too much of the world in him to make a good Christian.

There is a story about one of the earliest converts in Onitsha at the turn of the century who did so well in the new faith that the Church Missionary Society decided to send him to England for higher studies and ordination. While in England he quickly lost the faith that took him there and returned to Onitsha where he obstructed the work of evangelization by his nefarious example. Why did the church preach so vehemently against heathen titles, he asked? What were all those knights and barons and dukes if not hierarchies of ozo? He took all the titles he could find and died a pagan.

How Achebe Saved Me From James Hardley Chase

(By OkeyNdibe)--Two Saturdays ago, I had the privilege of giving a keynote at an international conference organized at the Senate House of the University of London to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. 

Okey Ndibe The two-day celebration was an impressive gathering of scholars who have devoted time to the study and explication of Achebe’s work as a novelist, cultural activist and intellectual. Among the luminaries who offered stimulating papers were John Gikandi of Princeton University, Harry Garuba (who traveled from his South African location), and T. Vijay Kumar. The first day of the conference, Femi Osofisan, a polyglot who is at once an incisive scholar, extraordinary dramatist, and novelist directed a dramatization of Arrow that brought home in a powerful way the millenarian tension in Achebe’s most important—even if not most well known—fictive work. Akachi Ezeigbo, a novelist and professor at the University of Lagos, capped off the second and final day of the event by performing an Igbo dirge for Achebe. 

The two-day conference was altogether moving. The brilliance of many of the presentations was matched by the conference’s festive air. It all showed the potential power of rich, deep cultural production. In their wide-ranging, multidisciplinary engagement with Achebe’s grandest novel, several presenters sought to underscore how literary creativity can illuminate a people’s social experience and embody a broad range of their dreams.

The Madman by Chinua Achebe

(Chinua Achebe)—He was drawn to markets and straight roads. Not any tiny neighborhood market where a handful of garrulous women might gather at sunset to gossip and buy ogili for the evening’s soup, but a huge, engulfing bazaar beckoning people familiar and strange from far and near. And not any dusty, old footpath beginning in this village, and ending in that stream, but broad, black, mysterious highways without beginning or end.

After much wondering he had discovered two such markets linked together by such a highway; and so ended his wandering. One market was Afo, the other Eke. The two days between them suited him very well: before setting out for Eke he had ample time to wind up his business properly at Afo. He passed the night there putting right again his hut after a day of defilement by two fat-bottomed market women who said it was their market stall. At first he had put up a fight but the women had gone and brought their men-folk—four hefty beasts of the bush—to whip him out of the hut. After that he always avoided them, moving out on the morning of the market and back in at dusk to pass the night. Then in the morning he rounded off his affairs swiftly and set out on that long, beautiful boa-constrictor of a road to Eke in the distant town of Ogbu. He held his staff and cudgel at the ready in his right hand, and with the left he steadied the basket of all his belongings on his head. He had got himself this cudgel lately to deal with little beasts on the way who threw stones at him and made fun of their mothers’ nakedness, not his own.

Igbo People, Culture, and History

And Okonkwo Goes Viral!

(Pius Adesanmi)--Thank You, Millennials!

Despite sorrow, despite anguish, despite depression over Kogi state, Nigeria, today, I somehow had to find the strength to go and teach that introduction to African literature second-year class.

Discussions came to the cultural and contextual bases of similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech. I take an example from Things Fall Apart:

"During this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan"

The Ancestors and the Dialogue of Religions

Source: timeslive.co.za

"My father was a man of few words, and I have always regretted that I had not asked him more questions. But I realize also that he took pains to tell me what he thought I needed to know. He told me, for instance, in a rather oblique way of his one tentative attempt long ago to convert his uncle.

It must have been in my father’s youthful, heady, proselytizing days! His uncle had said no, and pointed to the awesome row of insignia of his three titles. “what shall I do to these?” he had asked my father. It was an awesome question. What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?

An orphan child born into adversity, heir to commotions, barbarities, rampant upheaveals of a continent in disarray: was it all surprising that he would eagerly welcome the explanation and remedy proffered by diviners and interpreters of a new word [i.e., Christianity]?

And his uncle Udoh, a leader in his community, a moral, open-minded man, a prosperous man who had prepared such a great feast when he took the ozo title that his people gave him a unique praise-name for it: was he to throw all that away now because some strangers from afar came and said so?

Those two—my father and his uncle—formulated the dialectic which I inherited. Udoh stood fast in what he knew, but he left room also for his nephew to seek other answers. The answer my father found in the Christian faith solved many problems, but by no means all.”

Chinua Achebe (2009: 37), The Education of a British-Protected Child

Discovering Things Fall Apart

Source: reading.cornel.edu

(Chinua Achebe)--"Soon after [an] encounter with my future father-in-law I moved to Lagos to interview for a new position at the headquarters of what was now called the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). The Talks Department hired me to maul over scripts and prepare them for broadcast. A tedious job, it nevertheless honed my skill for writing realistic dialogue, a gift I gratefully tapped into when writing my novels.

In my second or third year at University College, Ibadan, I had offered two short stories, 'Polar Understanding' and 'Marriage is a Private Affair,' to the University Herald, the campus magazine. They were accepted and published. I published other stories during that time, including 'The Old Order in Conflict with the New' and 'Dead Men's Path.' In my third year I was invited to join the editorial committee of the journal. A bit later I became the magazine's editor.

At the University College, Ibadan, I was in contact with instructors of literature, of religion, and of history who had spent several years teaching in England. Studying religion was new to me and interesting because the focus went beyond Christian theology to encompass wider scholarship--West African religions.