of wetin he dey try talk. Enjoy yoursef..:-
"This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall
come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous,
boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents,
unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers,
false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that
are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures
more than lovers of God…"
– 2 Timothy 3: 1-4 [King James Version]
Fellow Africans, please forgive my lamentations today. I
have more than enough reasons to behave like the Biblical
Jeremiah at this moment. These troubled times have
compelled me to retreat into my spiritual past to seek
probable reasons and possible answers to the current
despair that has forbiddingly engulfed us all.
The world seems to be in turmoil. Even if we are yet to
witness a Third World War, the world seems to be at war
with itself. There's hardly any continent totally immune from
tragedies of monumental proportions. Unnecessary and
preventable deaths are rife. There is nothing like taking the
old and sparing the young. There are natural disasters. Famine
and flooding are raging and reigning side by side. It has
become too tempting to imagine and believe the world is
about to come to an end, sooner rather than later.
It would be foolhardy of anyone to imagine that any part of
the world is safe. There are strange things happening. Even
the face of news has changed. Nothing is too vulgar to be
discussed or published. Nations are getting engaged in
matters that should not concern them. I used to think sexual
preference was a totally personal and voluntary act. Not
anymore. Heterosexuals and homosexuals are at daggers
drawn. The latter have been invigorated by world leaders
helping to fight for their freedom of association. I would
have simply expected the matters to be handled by the
courts and allow it to end there. But world leaders are now
divided over satanic discussions. While the obscene debate
continues, serious problems of State are inexorably ignored.
Even in Nigeria, we are spending more time arguing over child
marriage and homosexuality as if we don't have enough
headaches already. Our students haven't been to school in
ages while graduates are roaming the streets in search of
jobs that don't appear to exist. In total submission to the
spirit of survival, the disgruntled and disillusioned folks have
turned around to become Masters of crime in a country
without punishment. Nigeria has just been named the hub of
scams and fraudsters in Africa.
Whether we disagree or not, such is the perception of the
world against us. There seems to be no light at the end of
our tunnel. We have become a strange place inhabited by
stranger people. I even saw an advert on television about a
forthcoming "One Year of Transformation Prayers", or
something like that. My conclusion was simply that when a
nation gets to this stage, the end must be close. The nature
it would take is what we don't know.
If you come from my kind of background, you're likely to
reason along with me invariably. I was privileged to have been
born in the Church of the Lord, an Aladura denomination, in
Obalufon, Ile-Ife, to a family of prayer warriors. My parents
would later migrate to another Aladura Church, The Holy
Church of Christ which was headed by the very spiritual
Apostle of Christ, Baba Ayoola Akeju. My childhood days
were thus steeped in some esoteric celestial fortification.
We read the Bible and could recite its verses the way
Muslims memorised and regurgitated the Koran. Knowing the
Bible in toto was a matter of competition in the Sunday
school and it came with a much coveted prize at that.
Life was different in those days. We prayed and
worshipped at the slightest opportunity. We supplicated
when we woke up, when we set forth in search of daily
bread, before we ate, after we finished quaffing the meal
(as gratitude for the provision), at the school assembly,
during break time, at close of school, at dinner and before
retiring to bed or mats, whichever was applicable or
available. In most homes, it was impossible not to know God.
There were criminals, no doubt, but they were few and far
between. And we knew them within the community. Most of
them were just rebellious and rascally. Civil servants and
politicians lacked the audacity to pilfer wilfully or steal
without limit.
Slowly but steadily, life changed, gradually and progressively.
Missions became ambitions. The falcon stopped listening to
the falconer. What used to be a game for the minority has
since become the pastime of the majority. It has become a
crime to be poor under our climate. It is a sin punishable by
banishment and abandonment from family and friends. If you
couldn't beat them, you were left with no option than to join
them. But something was bound to give ultimately. When the
time came, we lost the essence of our beings. Our souls
disappeared into rarefied air.
The journey has been long. And we've had to meander
through the labyrinth of formal and informal education. As
kids, we got enmeshed in all manner of contradictions. First
was a clash of tradition against modernity. Both had a
common enemy in Religion. The former was based on
supposedly crude doctrines while the other was anchored
on the fear of hellfire. The traditional religion united the
community.
The New Religions, Christianity and Islam were polarising. The
conflict was amplified because of the syncretic disposition
of Africans. Our people were no risk-takers and preferred
to try all religions and combined whatever concoctions
accompanied them. Their reason was simple, even if selfish.
No African was sure of which religion would lead him to
heaven or any such places. He had to play safe by joining
this and that. After all, many roads always lead to the
market place.
The confusion came in school as we read more books and
literature in particular. A taste of Philosophy and Logic would
complete my slide into sporadic cynicism and eventual
obfuscation. I was a greedy and voracious reader. I had read
the Bible from Genesis to Revelations. And I was fastidious
about my Faith. I went to a Catholic school, St. John's
Grammar School, in Oke-Atan Ile-Ife, where the fear of our
Principal, Reverend Father F. Cloutier, a French Canadian, was
the beginning of wisdom. His word was Law, and no soul was
allowed to flout the school rules. I enjoyed the school Mass
and all those songs interspersed with Latinisms.
I still hum Ave Maria till this day. I was green with envy each
time Catholic students and teachers received the
Communion, which we were persuaded to believe to be the
body and blood of Jesus. I often wondered why the privilege
could not be extended to all of us, after all the owner of the
body and blood never discriminated against anyone. That
was the height of my wild phantasmagoria.
All that soon gave way to a new experience. We got
introduced to African Writers' Series, published in those
good old days by Heinemann Books. Ile-Ife at that period
paraded some of the best bookshops in Western Nigeria and
this fed our appetite for literary gluttony. It should not be
surprising that the ancient city produced some Deles of
journalism, Dele Giwa, Dele Olojede, Dele Agekameh and yours
truly.
I was endlessly fascinated that the African man was able
to write better English than the original owners of the
language. Most people used to think English literature was
personified by William Shakespeare, Chaucer, William Butler
Yeats, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Samuel Butler, and
others. But Olaudah Equiano, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka,
Cyprian Ekwensi, Elechi Amadi, Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel
Okara, Mabel Segun, Flora Nwapa, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie,
Zulu Sofola, T. M Aluko, Chukwuemeka Ike, Amos Tutuola,
Buchi Emecheta, John Munonye, Kole Omotoso, Niyi, Abubakar
Gimba, Osundare, Femi Osofisan, Zaynab Alkali, and many
others changed that assumption.
Then we crossed the boundaries of Nigeria to other climes
and encountered George Awoonor-Williams (who later
changed his name to Kofi-Awoonor), Ayi Kwei Armah
(author of the stupendously famous The Beautiful Ones Are
Not Yet Born), James Ngugi (who also changed his name and
is now called Ngugi wa Thiong'o), Nawal El Saadawi (the
Egyptian feminist writer), Mariama Ba (Senegalese author
and feminist), Nuruddin Farah (the Somali novelist), David Diop
and Birago Diop (both Senegalese poets), Naguib Mahfouz
(Nobel Prize winner in literature from Egypt), Mongo Beti,
Ferdinand Oyono, and Mbella Sonne Dipoko (all three from
Cameroon), Okot p'Bitek (the great Ugandan poet and my
former teacher at the then University of Ife, now Obafemi
Awolowo University), David Rubadiri (the charming Malawian
poet who was also my teacher at Ife), Akinwunmi Isola (my
teacher, mentor and supervisor at Ife), Alex La Guma (South
African novelist; I enjoyed A Walk in the Night), Leopold
Sedar Senghor (1st President of Senegal, a poet of
distinction and leading member of the Negritude movement)
and many other great African writers. They provided great
reads and perpetual inspiration.
A few writers affected and influenced me so much. In
Philosophy, my all-time idol was Bertrand Russell, the British
mathematician, logician, historian, social critic and literary
giant who despite being a scientist was awarded the 1950
Nobel Prize in Literature, in celebration of his multi-
dimensional writings. His highly controversial work on religion,
Why I am Not A Christian, combined with Thomas Paine's The
Age of Reason nearly conspired to turn me into an atheist.
As if that was not enough, the works of Achebe, Soyinka,
Ngugi and Awoonor convinced me Africa had its own variant
of civilisation before the coming of the Whiteman. Ngugi and
Awoonor were not just talkers, they were doers. Both went
ahead to reject foreign names and embraced the Gikuyu and
Ewe names respectively.
Ngugi even went a step further. He stopped writing in English
and opted to write only in the Gikuyu language of Kenya,
leaving the choice to whosoever desired to translate his
writings into world languages. It was a decision that rocked
and shocked the literary world. Many of his global fans were
livid and seething with voluble anger.
Kofi Awoonor, on the other side of West Africa, faced his
own ordeal in Ghana. He was labelled an Ewe irredentist who
saw nothing good in other tribes. His predicament was
further compounded by his foray into politics. He was even
imprisoned for possibly aiding and abetting a military officer.
He was a Jerry Rawlings supporter and represented Ghana
as a Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Not
very long ago, he was Chairman, Ghana's Council of State,
but carried on with his academic life.
Let me now come to the climax of my sermon. I'm astonished
that Kofi Awoonor, an icon of African literature, travelled
last week to Ngugi's Kenya to participate in a literary
festival but he never returned to his country alive. He was
hacked down in a haze of bullets by terrorists who stormed
the Westgate Mall, in Nairobi, while he was visiting with his
last son, Afetsi, who managed to escape with bullet
wounds.
At 78, Professor Awoonor was full of life. The last time I
saw him two years ago, he was very handsome, agile and
spritely. He was happy to meet a Presidential candidate who
was a great lover of literature. I had read his most celebrated
work, This Earth, My Brother, several times over. Little did I
realise his mission on earth would end so abruptly.
In the next few days, he would be cremated, at his request,
and have the ashes sprinkled, perhaps over his Eweland. As
if waiting for death, he had meticulously prepared his own
funeral to the minute details.
An elephant has fallen and all Africa can do is to mourn. The
King has gone on a journey into eternity. Even the oracle must
die and leave behind his bags of divination. That is the fate
of Kofi Awoonor.
Life is indeed an irony and a jigsaw.
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