When the Catholic Church Names You

“Very generous of you, Dr. Mandi.” I spoke too brightly.

“Ah, there’s the issue of nomenclature to iron out. I’m quite happy with my initials. You must call me S. P. J. C.”

“That would be presumptuous. Besides, it’s such a mouthful! Ess Pee Jay Cee.”
“Well, that's what you get when the Catholic Church names you. Simon Peter came with baptism. Jude with confirmation. My parents threw in Chika to appease the ancestors. For years I didn’t know how to hold the names together. You don’t walk up to people and introduce yourself as Simon Peter Jude Chika Mandi. Somebody might fall asleep while you’re at it. But my chemistry teacher in secondary school solved the problem. He strung together the initials I have used ever since. Saved me a lot of headache, that wise fellow.”

Okey Ndibe
Arrows of Rain, 2015, p. 81-82.

Responsibility to Family--Extended

(By Okey Ndibe) - “The first time we sat down to talk, my parents remarked on the jumbo salary I was going to earn in America. I was not to become spendthrift, they cautioned. Instead, I was to cultivate a frugality dictated by an established practice within our extended family. That practice imposed an obligation on members of the family with the financial means t help pay school fees of those coming behind. It was a formula for lifting up everybody in the wider extended family. In that spirit, my parents said I was to take up responsibility for paying the school fees of my youngest brother, Oguejiofor, and two male cousins, Emeka and Ndubuisi. Once pronounced, the matter was settled; I proudly accepted the responsibility.

            My parents must have expected that I would regularly send money to support them. Parents made sacrifices to put their children through schools or into some profession. In return, once established in a job, trade, or profession, children were expected to cater to some of their parents’ needs in old age or after retirement. I recognized the sacredness of that obligation. My parents didn’t raise it explicitly because they knew that I knew my duty by them; it went without saying. . . .

"Don't Bring Us A White Woman for a Wife"

“At the farewell feast, my parents and other relatives piled me with advice, instructions on what to do, what not to do.

            ‘Make sure you don’t bring us a white woman for a wife,’ Auntie Eteti said. Her face bore a mischievous expression, a look that implied I was the sort of rebel to surprise her and other relatives by taking a Caucasian bride. Everybody fixed yes on me, reading my reaction.

            ‘What have white women ever done to you?’ I asked my aunt, laughing.

            ‘Did you hear me say they did anything to me?’ she said.

‘Don’t you think there are good white women?’

‘I am sure they are,’ she answered. ‘Every people have good and bad women. But we want a wife whose tongue we can understand.’

Eleti was the only one of my father’s siblings without a scintilla of formal education. She spoke no English, even though—like most Nigerians—she understood a few basic words of the language. I sensed that her stipulation that I not marry a woman with a foreign tongue was not exclusively—or even primarily—about language. Her concern was much deeper: she didn’t want me to have a wife who would disdain or reject the bonds of kinship she and other kinsfolk considered sacrosanct.

I promised not to bring home a wife she would not approve of.

‘Ehen!’ she exclaimed, relieved.”

Okey Ndibe

Never Look An American in the Eye, 2016, p. 33.

Nigerian Harmattan Vs. American Winter

(By Okey Ndibe) - "I was not altogether ignorant about winter. . . . I had always thought that winter was the American version of what the Igbo call ugulu, otherwise more widely known across West Africa as harmattan. Harmattan is a dry cold wind that emanates from the Sahara Desert and sweeps through much of West Africa from the latter part of the -ember month through to March.

            Growing up in Nigeria, I had witnessed many harmattan seasons. The harmattan brings fine granules of dust that cause coughs, redden the eye, color the skin ashy, and lend the atmosphere a patina of grey. It also gives the air a tinge—a mere tinge—of cold. At the height of the harmattan season, the temperature drops in the mornings, hovering around fifty-five degrees fahrenheits. In tropical Nigeria, that’s what we call cold.

            Whenever I had come across the word ‘winter’ in print, I mentally transposed ‘harmattan’ in its place. Why would I pack a special winter jacket for my trip to New York City when my people had never needed to invent harmattan jacket? The entire arsenal of our combat against ugulu-grade cold consisted of Vaseline (to sheen up dry, scaly skin), a sweater (usually worn by the very elderly and children), a handkerchief (to ward off dust), and a pair of sunglasses (to protect the eyes from airborne sand).

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.

Igwe Osita Agwuna III: For the Love of Culture

(Okey Ndibe)-- …It was in that ancient town [of Enugwu Ukwu] that my awareness of the depth, beauty and pageantry of Igbo language, customs and culture was awakened. Every traditional ceremony in the town was marked by an enchanting festive air featuring a parade of hundreds of masquerades of different sorts, sometimes including the majestic Ijele.

When Prayer is Not Enough

Source: informationng.com

More often, Nigerians imply that God is responsible for their desultory condition. Obasanjo squandered something in the region of $16 billion on electric power, only to achieve the magic of a worsened power supply in Nigeria. Rather than offer a sober narrative about the anomaly, he asked Nigerians to pray to God to improve the situation. When we intone “God is in control” or “We’re trusting God” or “In God’s time,” we imagine that we are demonstrating profound piety. In reality, we are putting our infantilism, false sense of sanctimoniousness, and refusal to take responsibility on full display."   Okey Ndibe

Nigeria's Witch Airways and Other Sad Tales

Let me warn you, reader, in advance: If you have a squeamish constitution, please do not read this piece. Just stop here and flee, for the story I’m about to tell is terribly ugly and disturbing. It is bound to leave you horribly unsettled, disturbed. In my career as a columnist I have written few essays that galled and upset me more. It is a piece I wish I didn’t have to write, but one that I feel compelled to write. A grandmother in my novel Arrows of Rain warns her son, “A story that must be told never forgives silence.”

I’m writing this piece in that spirit; it is a story, I believe, that must be told. It must be told despite its ugliness, or, in fact, because of it. Flee now, dear reader, if you can’t handle it.

The Selfie Meets The Peacock by Okey Ndibe

The dramatic rise in popularity of the so-called selfie—the self-taken photograph—strikes me as a symbolic way of understanding a dominant aspect of social behavior in the world. The selfie has, I suggest, further encouraged the inflation of the ego and spawned narcissistic attitudes. In making it chic to aim the lens of a camera at oneself, the selfie has helped to empower the cult of the self, even a form of self-worship.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a sourpuss out to scold people for cleaving to a fad. I’m interested in the craze at all only because I have recognized in it a metaphoric handle for explaining a particular malaise in Nigeria.

I have often argued that Nigeria is a form of peacock society, a society where the show-off is venerated. Anybody who attends a Nigerian party and sees the way people dress—men and women—would understand this aspect of social display. From the agbada that sweeps the floor to the gele (head wrap) that scrapes the sky, the scene at a Nigerian party often looks like a human attempt to recreate a gathering of peacocks. There’s the lushness of the Nigerian party scene, its unapologetic celebration of color, its unabashed air of gaudy exhibitionism, and the infectious gaiety of its atmosphere.

Apologies To The Past by Okey Ndibe

Last Wednesday—the 54th anniversary of Nigeria’s Independence—was a day of silence for me. I didn’t have the stomach to leave any comment on Facebook or Twitter. Two or three friends and family members sent me texts of felicitation. Demure, I merely wrote back: Thanks!

But at the back of my mind I was thinking, What is all the fuss about? What was one supposed to celebrate?

Last Wednesday, Nigeria reminded me of nothing so much as—to invoke the title of Wole Soyinka’s short polemical book—an open (festering) sore.

I know: many super-“patriotic” Nigerians now insist that, before one says a critical word about our dear, dear Nigeria, one must first pause to count the country’s blessings. So let’s count them.

Blessing Number One: We all woke up on October 1, 2014 and Nigeria was still there. As we Nigerians love to say, nothing spoil. We still had our transformational president sitting pretty in Abuja, he and his beloved wife amused to see all the “transformation ambassadors” staging rallies all over the country to draft him to run again, to win again (by a landslide of course), and to, once again, bestow on us that magic rule of his that created so much prosperity that Nigerians raced to the front ranks of private jet ownership in the world.

Nollywood and Nigeria's Rebased Economy

The Time Of The Gross Domestic Producers By Okey Ndibe

That Nigeria has passed South Africa as Africa’s largest economy—when calculated by Gross Domestic Product—is almost old news.  The coverage of that feat afforded Nigeria’s image a rare shining moment in the foreign media. As Uri Friedman wrote in The Atlantic, “Something strange happened in Nigeria on Sunday: The economy nearly doubled, racking up hundreds of billions of dollars, ballooning to the size of the Polish and Belgian economies, and breezing by the South African economy to become Africa's largest. As days go, it was a good one.”

But many Nigerian pundits were far from impressed. Some were skeptical about the whole “re-basing” rhetoric. Some went as far as suggesting that Abuja fudged and rigged its way to first place. Others sought to restore perspective to the triumph by drawing attention to Nigeria’s perennial and persistent woes—among them a dismal infrastructure, scant electric power supply, run-away rates of unemployment, and miserable wages for the lowest brackets of workers.
 


In a piece provocatively titled “Okonjonomics Or When a Finance Minister Turns Money-Doubler,” Ogaga Ifowodo, a poet, professor, lawyer and political activist, cut to the heart of the matter. He wrote: “So if Nigerians went to bed in the night of Saturday, 5 April 2014, with N42.4 trillion naira in their collective pocket, and woke up the next day to their statistician-general’s revelation that they had grown richer by N37.8 trillion while they slept, wouldn’t they be fools to believe it if they remain as hungry and angry, homeless and jobless, as they were when they closed their eyes the night before?