By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
As the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website news report clearly indicated, this year’s was not the very first time that the world-renowned novelist, essayist, educator and thinker was turning down the Commander of the Federal Republic award from a Nigerian government. The first time was in 2004, when former military ruler turned civilian and democratically elected president, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, headed the Nigerian government. Professor Chinua Achebe was then 73 years old and already had some twenty-and-odd honorary doctorates from reputable and prestigious universities all over the world, both under his belt and on his mantle.
I observe the foregoing, of course, to emphasize the patently pedestrian fact that the name Chinua Achebe is virtually synonymous with the reception of well-deserved laurels. And so for President Goodluck Jonathan to claim to have been utterly surprised by the celebrated author of Things Fall Apart’s flat refusal to accept the second-highest national merit award from the leader of the most populous African country is what is actually surprising. This is because the calmly assertive Professor Achebe has never made any secret about the fact that the post-colonially organized and perennial chaos that masquerades as the country’s veritable political culture is definitely not one that frontline Nigerians like himself bargained for with the erstwhile British colonialists.
Besides, what particularly irks the former director of External Services of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) is the fact that even as the land of his birth struck enormous quantities of petroleum resources, the country, paradoxically, seemed to progressively have even less to show for such economic bonanza by way of the general welfare and material improvement in the lives of ordinary Nigerian citizens. Instead, the country’s political culture has been rife with one horrible story after another of individual politicians and/or their associates squirreling the common wealth of the country and its people abroad to the criminal enrichment of already industrialized and economically advanced nations of the West.
Indeed, in the spring of 1989, when I had him as my African Literature professor at the City College of the City University of New York (he was on visit as a Distinguished University Professor, to the utter displeasure of quite a slew of inward-looking white-American professors, many of whom seemed not to know what to make of the academic concept of African Literature), the versatile author of Hopes and Impediments never missed the least opportunity to emphasize the fact that he was indescribably disgusted with the leadership caliber of those who imperiously presumed themselves to be the anointed overlords of the people of his home-country. Already in his political novelistic satire titled A Man of the People, Professor Achebe had poignantly observed that those African politicians who succeeded the departing European colonialists were hardly ever the cream of their respective countries and societies. And that, in reality, what had simply and tragically happened was that sensing the imminent departure of their colonial masters, a handful of mischief-makers and plain opportunists had scurried towards the colonial governor’s mansion and craftily positioned themselves near the eaves of the same. And so when it soon began to rain and everybody began to run for shelter, these devious political off-siders had, naturally, become the first to arrive at and voraciously grabbed onto the seat of postcolonial power.
Needless to say, whenever I have come across the foregoing largely paraphrased passage from Professor Achebe’s Man of the People, I have never ceased thinking about the African Show Boy, BBC-African Service’s so-called Africa’s Man of the Millennium. Of course, it is debatable precisely who the Anambra-State native had in mind when he composed that strikingly picturesque and indisputably realistic composite portrait of postcolonial African leadership.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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