Book Review with Zarra Okumephuna

Blessed Body

2017-02-08T07:19:00.003-08:00

It took me less than two days to read this 269-page book and I can tell you that it is one of the best books I have ever read so far. It is authentic, very captivating, unputdownable and above all shattered a myth that there are no gays in Nigeria! Darling there are too many gays in Nigeria, but please tell no one!

The stories are compelling and the publication of the book could not have come at a better time: barely a month since 49 people and more than 50 others were killed and injured in Pulse Gay Bar in Orlando, Florida.

Sometimes, it is very crucial to sit back and listen to the other side of the debate. This is one skill lawyers know very much about which unfortunately others do not yet understand and appreciate. Voltaire once said: “I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I couldn't agree more!

As a lawyer, I strongly believe that everybody should have the freedom to be who they are without fear of intimidation. Blacks should be proud to be blacks just as whites should be proud to celebrate their colour. Nigerians should be proud of their country just as Biafrans should not be denied the freedom to self-determination.

In the same vein, just as straight men are free to play rugby and talk about girls, so do gay men should be free to drink exotic cocktails, talk about boys and go to Beyoncé and Kylie concerts. That is the meaning of freedom. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot eat your cake and have it. You cannot go through a passage and block the exit for others. You must keep moving! You cannot have and enjoy your rights and prevent others from enjoying theirs. The Igbos of Eastern Nigeria captured this philosophy in a very pungent manner: let both the eagle and the vulture perch, but if either does not want the other to perch let him proffer an amicable solution. That is elementary logic and that is why I am very proud to write an afterword for this book!

This book is worth buying and reading in order to listen to, understand and appreciate the other side of this debate and argument. Making a judgment over an issue without going through the related debates is not just immature but a sign of uncivilized people and nation and in fact a complete illogicality. A logical mind would always listen and think before coming to a conclusion.

As already pointed out above, the publication of this book and my reading of it could not have come at a better time. I took a delivery of my own copy just hours after finishing Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. Both books share the same theme: oppression of a group of people: homosexuals and blacks.

I therefore encourage you to buy and read the book.

Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914-1918

2010-04-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

It is not often that an opportunity is found to reflect on small things of life in the midst of a raging war. This is because of the incompatibility of emotional and physical demands during the war. War is physically demanding and in the process little or no time is given to emotional demands. Just as little or no time is given to emotional demands during the war, so do few ever contemplate at all of translating those emotions into an intellectual work; certainly not in the midst of a raging war. Think of the coalition soldiers engaging in an intellectual work in the midst of the Taliban and Al Qaeda threats in Afghanistan and Iraq. That could be foolhardy because intellectual work demands a high level of concentration and devotion and therefore would demand an extraordinary ability to combine it-especially the art of crafting of a poem-with the intricate demands of the art of warfare. But a group of poets, despite all odds against them, defied all obstacles facing them and crafted poems that have been described as outstanding and among the best in the genre of war poems.

‘Up The Line To Death’ collected and arranged by Brian Gardner is an anthology of these heartrending, beautiful and moving poems. The poets who made it in this anthology includes already known and widely celebrated poets such as W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon and e.e. cummings, amongst others. Most of the poems were written in the midst of the First World War which lasted from 1914-1918 and which was orchestrated by the brutal murder of the Archduke Ferdinand of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Some of the poems were also written not within this period but before the war and others, after the war.

The poems featured in this collection are unique in their messages to their intended readers. For instance in ‘Mesopotamia’, Rudyard Kipling lamented the fact that the young men being sent forth to die for the nation shall not return. They are aware of this fate but then the love of their nation pushes them.

“They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,

The eager and whole-hearted who we gave:”

The fact that they shall not return never deterred the resolute young men from volunteering to defend their nation. The reason for this is because of their absolute belief in their country and the conviction and belief that it is worth dying for the nation. This is a belief aptly put in one of the poems in the collection titled ‘Happy is England now’ by John Freeman.

“There is not anything more wonderful

Than a great people moving towards the deep

Of an unguessed and unfeared future;”

The same courage was also exhibited by W.B. Yeats in his masterpiece titled ‘An Irish airman foresees his death’

“I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;”

Despite knowing his fate, he still went ahead to join the war and he met his fate somewhere among the clouds.

The collection is very interesting and I encourage you to read them.

Cover Photograph Courtesy Of Methuen Publishing.

Conspiracy 365

2010-02-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

Conspiracy novels are very dear to the heart of the children and a great hit with young people. Part of the reason for this development is because of the fact that young people are easily captivated by the concept of suspense and mystery. They want the freedom to explore for themselves the content of an object no matter how mysterious it is; novels inclusive. These two instruments, suspense and mystery were widely employed by Gabrielle Lord in the 'Conspiracy 365'.

The novel is filled with captivating and attention grabbing episodes of suspense and just like most mystery novels, 'Conspiracy 365' has its own wealth of violence, surprises and that feeling and usual motivation and urge to read one more page often associated with mystery and conspiracy novels. In a simple parlance the book is unputdownable and it is indeed.

The plot of the novel revolves round Callum, a lad who was confronted by a stranger who told him to go into hiding. According to the stranger, those who killed his father would definitely come after him due to what he called Ormond Singularity. Cal was not convinced and concluded that it might be another ranting from a lunatic. That night he was nearly killed and this eye-opening event led him to a wild goose hunt to decipher the clues his father left behind before he died. As usual with mystery novels we were left with many questions including deciphering the meaning of Ormond Singularity. The identity of those after Cal's life and if Cal could actually get things figured out before his family and friends get hurt.

The novel is a sequel meaning that there will be twelve books over the course of the year each covering one month in the life of Callum as he attempts to solve the mystery of the Ormond Singularity. January and February in the series saw the whole event unfolding and Callum being an object of police hunting for a crime he never committed. By February, he was still not anywhere near solving the mystery of the Ormond Singularity. Would Winter Frey be of any help? You guess is as good as mine until we read March!

A nice sequel indeed but I am particularly miffed that the plot of the novel is almost predictable but then what it lost there, it gained in its ability to keep readers in suspense before getting to that expected conclusion. Nevertheless, I am predominantly impressed with the ability of the writer to weave almost lively relationship around Callum and his friends especially Boges as well as his relationship with his mother and sister. He showed an absolute love for them and the desire to sacrifice even his own life for them.

This is a good book and a nice attempt on children thriller by Gabrielle Lord, one of Australia's bestselling crime writers for adults and I highly recommend it to young people!

Cover Photograph Courtesy of Hodder Children's Books.

The Power And The Glory: Inside The Dark Heart Of John Paul 11’s Vatican

2010-02-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

She may not have an extraordinary sounding name but her name no matter how it sounds made a history and set in motion series of events that opened a can of worms that revealed the darkest side of the Roman Catholic Church and which ultimately changed the public perception of the Church. By the time the dust generated by her revelations settled, the Roman Catholic Church especially that of the United States of America had lost millions of dollars in law suit which resulted in the closure of many dioceses, schools, churches, hospitals and similar institutions to raise settlement money. It never stopped there. Many hundreds of priests, nuns and religious were also sent to jail as a result of the scandal.

It was the greatest scandal ever to have confronted the Roman Catholic Church since it was founded over 2000 years ago allegedly by our Lord Jesus Christ. The scandal left the Roman Catholic Church reeling with a very battered image and in a very depressive mood. The scandal never stopped there and actually refused to stop; like a raging wildfire it travelled wide to the four corners of the earth from America to Europe to Australia to Asia and to Africa exposing shameful conducts of priests, nuns and religious and amazing huge lawsuits in its tail. It was a horrendous revelation that shocked not only the Roman Catholic community but non-Roman Catholics and even non-Christians as well. People simply could not understand that priest, nuns and religious entrusted with the care of the faithful especially the children could turn back and became predators and sexually molesting and abusing them.

However her story brought a sudden awareness of what young people as well as unmarried and married faithful goes through in the hands of priests, nuns and religious who are supposed to be their moral guardians. The story began in 1984 when a Los Angeles lawyer brought the first ever clergy malpractice lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church on behalf of Rita Milla.

Rita Milla was only sixteen and wanted to be a nun. In preparation for her vocation, she had to prepare herself properly in accordance with the catholic faith. While confessing to a priest named Father Santiago Tamayo, the priest reached through the flimsy screen within the confessional and began to caress her breasts. Over the next two years he systematically set about seducing Rita even to the extent of telling her that ‘God wants you to do all you can to keep his priests happy...it is your duty’, and Rita naively believed and kept having regular sex with Father Santiago. Father Santiago later persuaded her to makes other priests in the Parish of St. Philomena in Los Angeles happy too, and she ended up making seven more priests happy. None of the priests took any precaution and Rita became pregnant in 1980 at the age of 19.

When the news of her pregnancy reached Father Santiago, he contacted other priests and they quickly raised 450 dollars to send her to the Philippines to have the child. All this time the parents of Rita were unaware of what was happening. In fact she lied to them that she was going to the Philippines to study, however when she developed complications during the childbirth, her parents found out and brought her to the States where the Clergy Malpractice Lawsuit was filed after series of efforts to persuade the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to take care of her failed.

Faced with the law suit and the possibility of scandal the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, instead of bringing the seven priests out to face the law and bear the consequences of their actions ordered them to go abroad until further notice. It would be until 1991 before the role of the archdiocese in the cover up was made public by the guilt-stricken and remorseful Father Santiago Tamayo. Letters he made available confirmed that the archdiocese in a well orchestrated plan to cover up the scandal was regularly sending money not even to Rita and her new baby Jacqueline, but to the seven priests hiding in the Philippines. The Los Angeles Archdiocese actually urged Tamayo to stay in the Philippines after Jacqueline's birth and mailed cheques to him there. In three letters dating from June 1984 to August 1988 the archdiocese advised Tamayo not to reveal the source of the payments ‘unless requested under oath’ noting that he was ‘liable for personal suits arising out of your past actions’.

In August 2003 Rita’s baby, then 20 years, finally learnt that his father is Father Valentine Tugade, one of the seven priests who had sex with her mother. The initial cover up of the case was orchestrated by the then Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Timothy Manning and when he was succeeded by Roger Mahoney, the cover up and payments to the fugitive priests continued.

These cover ups and secrecy syndrome within the Roman Catholic Church especially at the highest level, the Vatican and more especially during the reign of Pope John Paul 11 is the main gist of this book ‘The Power and The Glory-Inside The Dark Heart Of John Paul 11’s Vatican’ by David Yallop. Yallop is a seasoned controversial writer. His ‘In God’s Name’ which was published before this, explored the allegation that contrary to widely held belief that Albino Luciani, the Pope John Paul 1 died peacefully in his sleep, he was actually murdered to cover up the scandal involving the Vatican Bank, some Italian banks and Mafiosos that use the Vatican bank to launder money to South America. According to Yallop, Pope John Paul 11 was aware of this and was even aware that the morning before his death, Pope John Paul 1 was about to announce series of plans to reform the scandalous Vatican Bank including the removal of the corrupt Bishop Paul Casmir Marcinkus as the head of the bank.

Pope John Paul 11, according to Yallop instead of going ahead with the plans retained the corrupt Bishop Marcinkus and actually promoted him to the rank of an archbishop thereby allowing the money laundering, organised crime and the embezzlement to continue. One of the reasons why Pope John Paul 11 refused to remove Marcinkus, according to Yallop in the book published in 2007, was the affiliation they had which could be very valuable to him in sending money to his homeland of Poland to aid the Solidarity, a trade union that has been in logger heads with the communist government of Poland. In fact through this arrangement Archbishop Marcinkus whose father was of Lithuanian origin was able to transfer huge amounts of money to the Solidarity in Poland as well using same opportunity to engage in other numerous illicit activities.

For instance, in 1973 Marcinkus was questioned in his Vatican office by the American Federal Prosecutor William Aronwald and Bill Lynch then head of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the United States Department of Justice, about his involvement in the delivery of 14.5 million US$ worth of counterfeit bonds to the Vatican in July 1971, part of a total request of 950 million US$ worth stated in a letter on Vatican notepaper. His name and the official letter surfaced during the investigation of an international gang which included Vincent Rizzo, who eventually served twelve years in prison. Marcinkus said he considered the charges against him serious but not based on enough fact that he would violate the Vatican Bank's confidentiality to defend himself. Back in the States it was agreed on the highest levels that the case against Marcinkus could not be pursued any further.

In July 1982, he was implicated in a financial scandal involving the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano. Marcinkus had been a director of Ambrosiano Overseas, based in Nassau, Bahamas, and had been involved with Ambrosiano's chairman and financier Roberto Calvi, for years. He was also involved with Michele Sindona, who had links with the Mafia. Calvi was later found hanging under London's Blackfriars Bridge in June 1982. In addition, a journalist Mino Pecorelli, who had been investigating Marcinkus, the Vatican Bank and its link to organized crime was found dead in 1979. Marcinkus later stepped aside as head of the Vatican Bank soon after and the Vatican eventually paid £145 million in a settlement with creditors, with Marcinkus observing in 1986 that ‘You can't run the Church on Hail Marys’.

This ugly development from an institution that is supposed to be above Caesar’s wife in virtue was a push factor for David Yallop in writing this book. Yallop levelled series of serious allegations against the late Pope John Paul 11 including the allegation of an accomplice in the cover up of the church sex scandal as well as the allegation that he never actually played a formidable role as widely believed in dismantling communism and the Soviet Union. He was of the view that Pope John Paul 11 was actually in sympathy with the Russian communism, hated with passion the Marxist movement and liberation theology in South America and was deeply nauseated by the American capitalism. As a result of his hatred for liberation theology he refused to see the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero as martyrdom, claimed Yallop.

David Yallop accused Pope John Paul 11 of being a show biz pope who derives pleasure from gallivanting from one part of the world to another despite the huge expenses on the host countries, the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church as a whole. He was very critical of the expenses involved in what he called ‘unnecessary’ trips.

“The financial cost is more difficult to evaluate. During November 1980 the Pope paid a five-day visit to the then West Germany; the cost to the West German taxpayers was officially put at $10 million. In 1982 the Pope made a six-day visit to the United Kingdom; the cost was officially put at £6 million. In 1987 the Pope made a ten-day visit to USA estimated at $26 million. The Vatican paid for the first-class air fares for the twelve members of the papal party, while American taxpayers and American Catholics paid the remainder. Long after the trip, many dioceses were struggling with huge unpaid bills. The cost of other overseas trips has also been officially estimated at $2 million per day. Taking these figures as an average, the cost of the Pope’s overseas trips since October 1978, a cost that was never paid by the Vatican, was in excess of $1.1 billion”, claimed Yallop.

He noted that the Pope felt more at home with the rich than the poor and with then military juntas of Chile, Philippines and Argentina than with democratically elected leaders and does not care what happens to the poor even as he refused to speak out in Mexico and other south American countries of evils being perpetrated against the indigenes and the poor in order not to offend the host governments. For instance in September 1990, the Pope flew to the Ivory Coast and in act that is very scandalous consecrated the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in the capital city of Yamoussoukro.

“No expense had been spared in this impoverished African country. At 525 feet it is the world’s tallest church. The cost of the building was between $150 million and $180 million. The pope described the building as a ‘visible sign’ of God’s presence on earth”, noted Yallop who was obviously irked that the pope never bothered to ask for the source of the money and if the basilica is what the Ivoirians needed at that point in time.

The about 700-page book is therefore more of refutations of allegations of good deeds ascribed to the late pope in the face of overwhelming evidence clearing suggesting otherwise according to Yallop. Yallop never hide his objections to most of ideologies being peddled by the Roman Catholic Church including its institutionalised homophobia despite the glaring fact that elevation in the Vatican is partly ascribed to homosexual relationship between the younger priests and older bishops. He questioned the exclusion of women from the priesthood and while noting that the Catholic Church always point to the fact that there was no female apostle also pointed out that there was no gentile there either. He queried in black and white the rationale behind the dispensation of the traditional five year period between the death of candidate and the commencement of his beatification process given to Pope John Paul 11 and described the whole drama as making mockery of the Roman Catholic Theology of sainthood.

He repeatedly asked what the Roman Catholic Church under Pope John Paul 11 was trying to achieve by making his papacy one of the most secretive in history to the extent that the fact that he suffers from Parkinson disease was also kept a secret by all concerned including the Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, a member of the secretive Opus Dei, an organisation that was controversially granted a personal prelature by Pope John Paul 11 and whose founder’s-Jose Maria Eschriva -canonisation process was unprecedentedly fast tracked.

The present Pope Benedict XVI was also not spared. Alleging that he was once a conscript of the Hitler Youth Movement, he alleged that Benedict brought his Nazi mentality with him to the priesthood and to the Vatican and was responsible for numerous witch hunting and reign of terror and intimidation in the Vatican. This reign of intimidation, he noted was responsible for silencing of notable critiques of the Roman Catholic Church including the celebrated theologian Hans Kung who never for once accepted the dogma of the infallibility of the pope.

Picture Courtesy Of Carroll and Graf Publishers.

One World

2010-01-10T04:13:00.000-08:00

This is one of the finest anthologies of short stories I have ever read. In fact am not a very good reader of short stories and writings; I used to think it is a lazy form of writing meant for mediocre writers and people who have got no good things to do with their spare time. Besides, because I have a major background in Mass Communications and minor in Print Journalism, I find it very difficult to read short stories and writings. As a Print Journalist you are wired to read and write as long as from here to Mount Kilimanjaro.

However, I am completely very wrong in my assessment of the short story genre of literature because with the ‘One World’, it is an entirely different experience altogether. I was completely proved wrong beyond whatever! Every single story featured in the anthology is quite mesmerising, interesting and reflects in detail the rich cultural backgrounds and experiences of the writers. It is a cornucopia of knowledge and an amalgamation of diverse interesting experiences and a melting point of cultural understanding and appreciation.

As a Nigerian, I am in fact fascinated by the fact that Nigerian writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Molara Woods, Jude Dibia and Ovo Adagha dominated the anthology with interesting and true-to-life stories that reflects everyday life Of Nigerians in Nigeria and Diaspora. That however made meaningless of the title of the anthology. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her unique style explored the struggle of a young Nigerian who was trying to shed her African roots and culture in the United States while Molara Woods delved into the ups and downs of being a partner of an activist in Nigeria during the military era. The contributions of other writers are better read than reviewed. The dominance of Nigerians in the book could not have come at a better time than this when Nigeria is being labelled a terrorist country due to an ugly incident that occurred in Michigan, United States December last. The book is therefore a testimony to the fact that something good can still come out of Nigeria despite all odds and a consolation to millions of Nigerians that despite the ugly incident, they are still a force to be reckoned with in other fields especially in the literary field.

It is fascinating too that the royalties from the book which is an anthology of 23 short stories from 23 different authors who came from 14 different countries in five continents would go to the healthcare charity, Médecins Sans Frontières. This is very interesting bearing in mind what the charity stands for. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an independent international medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid in more than 60 countries to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters or exclusion from healthcare.

The anthology is therefore a welcomed development and very good cum successful attempt to contribute to humanitarian work as well as bringing together different voices from different parts of the world for the purpose of entertaining with their various interesting short stories which cuts a across their various cultural experiences and milieu. The stories are simply fascinating and told in clarity and intensity of human experience. The book published by the New Internationalist features the work of such interesting writers like Elaine Chiew, Molara Wood, Martin A Ramos, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauri Kubuitsile, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Shabnam Nadiya, Ravi Mangla, Chika Unigwe, Dipita Kwa, Vanessa Gebbie, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Jude Dibia, Konstantinos Tzikas, Petina Gappah, Ken N Kamoche, Lucinda Nelson Dhavan, Adetokunbo Gbenga Abiola, Skye Brannon, Wadzanai Mhute, Ivan Gabriel Reborek, Ovo Adagha and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Cover Photo Courtesy Of New Internationalist.

Collected Poems

2010-01-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

I just finished a collection of poems by Chinua Achebe. Yes you heard me right, a collection of poems by Chinua Achebe. The collection called the Collected Poems by Chinua Achebe is quite interesting because not many people know Achebe as a poet. In fact, to those who are conversant with his work what readily comes to the mind is Achebe the novelist and ‘Things Fall Apart’ the novel that made him popular today is what they usually associate him with.

But the good news is that Achebe is also a poet and not just a poet but a well established poet. In his trade mark use of simple words and sentences to convey his messages, Achebe once again proved that reading poems doesn’t need to be a nightmare. One of the reasons why students and even graduates and others find it difficult to read and appreciate poems is because of the style of language used in writing some of these poems. Most poems we are accustomed to reading especially while in the schools are often written in modus loquendi that makes it pretty difficult to understand the essence of the poem; by the time you grab what the poet is saying in one line, you have forgotten what you have just read some few seconds ago. That is a great obstacle facing the reading and appreciating of poems and that seems to support the widely and wrongly held view that poems must be in ‘thou’ and thouest’ language to be called a poem. That is not true because Achebe in the ‘Collected Poems’ shattered that myth by condescending to the level of common people and used their language to write in such a manner that the common man is now afforded the rare privilege of reading and appreciating poems once more.

The ‘Collected Poems’ which are actually drawn from his three previously published books of poems included seven poems that have never been published before. The poems are so mundane and yet touch at the spiritual g-spot. The simplicity of the poems are awesome and the language is frankly tailored to the understanding of the layman. However, to the non-native Igbo language speakers, some of the language of the poems like in most of Achebe’s novels could be problematic when it comes to understanding the vernacular words and terms used in them; however with just little effort and less cranking of the brain one could easily understand them because they are self-explanatory.

In a poem like ‘A Wake For Okigbo’ Achebe did a pure transliteration of an Igbo funeral song into the English language even though he maintained the Igbo language refrain. The result of the effort was awesome with every aspect of the poem evoking the feeling of sadness and mysteriousness common with death. Anybody familiar with the Igbo culture and people of the South East of Nigeria would obviously see the close similarity between the poem and the traditional Igbo funeral songs and dirges.

There is no doubt that Achebe is a unique writer, an extraordinary storyteller and an awesome poet. The ‘Collected Poems’ bears witness to his grandiosity, eloquence and mastery of the language of the literature. He has a knack of using everyday feelings to evoke a feeling of sympathy. In the ‘Collected Poems’ he once again achieved that using the poems like ‘1966’, ‘The First Shot’, ‘A Mother In A Refugee Camp’, ‘Air Raid’, ‘Biafra, 1969’, ‘After War’ and ‘Remembrance Day’. These set of poems are remarkable in the sense that they are all war poems written to commemorate the Nigerian/Biafran Civil War. Achebe being an Igbo was naturally on the Biafran side during the war.

‘Collected Poems’ should be a must read for all lovers of poems. Achebe has a unique taste and style of writing and he proved it here. The ‘Collected Poems’ are a lifetime of poetic engagement and meddling with politics, war and love as well as Igbo language, culture and wisdom.

I strongly recommend the book to all lovers of poems and novices in the field and of course those who want to try their hand in the art of poetry writing.

Cover Photograph Courtesy Of Carcanet press.

The Greatest Show On Earth

2009-12-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

As youngsters we were taught that God made the world in just six days and rested on the seventh. Due to our childhood innocence and ignorance and adult fear of offending God, we never doubted it, after all our parents and pastors taught us that theological questions are meant to be accepted by faith and not by reason. Where reason stops, you are expected to apply faith. But as we continue to grow, our inquisitive mind began to wonder and meditate more deeply on the aptness of this assertion from the holy books especially Pentateuch books of the bible and Koran and even our traditional cum cultural beliefs.

However due to numerous opportunities opened up by wider access to numerous writings from various creationist and evolutionist writers, freedom of speech and access to information, our quest continued to grow unceasingly since what we were taught began not to make sense no more to us. We began to wonder aloud how God made the world in just six days considering the enormity of life on the surface of the earth, beneath the oceans, ionosphere and in fact everywhere including the other solar systems.

The good news is that we are not alone in this type of dilemma. Same question also bothered the father of evolution Charles Darwin and it was basically to answer it that he took the bold step of publishing his ‘On The Origin Of Species’, in 1859 which provoked a public outcry and condemnation upon publication. Darwin was very much aware of the consequences of the path he was toeing but due to his firm belief that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life with God having no part in it, he took the bull by the horn to write and publish the controversial book just to assert his belief, no matter who Ox is gored.

Exactly 200 years after the publication of the masterpiece, the storm it generated is yet to calm down. It still raises questions here and there and yonder. This is despite the fact that the hypothesis of evolution has come to be finally accepted as a scientific fact by all reputable scientists and even learned theologians. The main opposition to this hypothesis comes from the creationists. They strongly believe that God made the world in six days and are using all the resources they have including money, education and persuasion to convince us. This is not true according to the evolutionists and they have staunchly refused to succumb to the argument. They on their own part are using all available evidences including scholarly writings bamboozle us daily that the bible may have actually got it wrong when it claimed that God made the world in just six days and that even if there is any iota of truth in that assertion it should not be understood literally because it was never what the bible intended to say; evolution must have played a very crucial and formidable role too.

The evidence the creationists are using to buttress their point is the bible while the evolutionists on the contrary are using concrete evidences to support their assertion that evolution and not God is the reason why we and other living things are here today. This is exactly the argument Professor Richard Dawkins is making in this his newest book, “The Greatest Show On Earth”, published and released just couple of months ago. He thought that 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of his ‘On the Origin of Species’, is the perfect time for such a work. Like a detective who arrived at the scene of a crime after it has been committed, Professor Dawkins who is an emeritus Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at the Oxford University, relied on reconstructions using ‘time clocks’ of the tree rings, radioactive dating that calibrate a timescale for evolution, the fossil record, the traces of our earlier ancestors, confirmation from molecular biology and genetics to prove his point.

The book is actually a missing link between his two former books ‘The Selfish Gene’ and ‘The Extended Phenotype’ where he argued extensively in favour of evolution without bothering to use evidences to support those arguments. These missing evidences constitute the bulk content of ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’. Dawkins courted a lot of controversies as result of publication of this book. Just like every effort was made to silence Charles Darwin by the 1800 puritanical Britain, a lot of forces were also at it again to silence Dawkins especially the creationists.

In the 470-page hardcover edition, Dawkins strongly asserted that the earth and all its content are quite enormous, monumental and intricately designed to have come into existence by a pronouncement of a being. Just like other evolutionists, Dawkins found it difficult to swallow the assertion that God made man out of clay. He rather asserted that contrary to that, man evolved through the process of evolution to the present form aided by both natural or artificial selection. Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that makes it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations while artificial selection or selective breeding describes intentional breeding for certain traits or combination of traits.

The term artificial selection was utilized by Charles Darwin in contrast to natural selection, in which the differential reproduction of organisms with certain traits is attributed to improved survival or reproductive ability. As opposed to artificial selection, in which humans favour specific traits, in natural selection the environment acts as a sieve through which only certain variations can pass. Both are key mechanisms of evolution.

Professor Dawkins is strongly of the view that what we see today around us including green grasses and various animals with their peculiar modus vivendi are not as a result of a work of a remote being but due to intelligent design orchestrated through the process of evolution. By this he meant that the present state of living things are actually as a result of deliberate or environmental need to evolve and adapt with the needs of time and environment. As result of this he postulated that some animals of the same species found in different parts of the world have a slightly different or even a completely different features to enable them adapt to the environment where they found themselves. This he attributed to the process of evolution and never a work of any intelligent unseen being or designer.

His assertions may not make sense to the common man who is deeply rooted in his religious faith but Dawkins is strongly of the view that his own version of how the world and its content came into being through the process of evolution, do not only concur with the postulations of Charles Darwin but is in fact the whole truth of what happened.

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact”, he asserted.

Picture Courtesy Of Bantam Press.

Home And Exile

2009-11-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

For those who have not been to Africa before especially Europeans and Americans, they have a very negative perception of Africa. These negative perceptions could be forgiven for it was not intentionally developed. These ‘have-not-been-tos’ rely heavily on false information they were fed by their countrymen who have been here before and decided to give them the picture of Africa they think would appeal to them.

It is because of this reason that the western media and charities would prefer to portray Africa in a very negative way with pictures that would create an impression of poverty, conflict, disease and war in the mind of their western audience in order to attract attention of the audience with bogus headlines to maximise sales and for the charities to attract more money for their cause. These media and charities are wired not to see anything good in Africa. They would prefer seeing slums and ghettos instead of skyscrapers and the rich parts of Africa. Against this backdrop one begins to ask if they are blind that they cannot see good parts of Africa. Why are they only seeing bad parts of it? This is the argument and the questions Chinua Achebe is tackling in the ‘Home and Exile’.

In this book which is a product of three lectures he delivered as the 1998 McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard University, Achebe discussed the question of the west’s negative perception about Africa, her writers and literature. He is of the opinion that western writers do not see anything good in writers from Africa as a result of which they are ever ready in their reviews to dump writers from Africa to the literary bin or review their works in a highly negative way if they make up their mind to review them. He suggested that the west has already made up her mind that African literature and writers make no sense at all and consequently worth no attention. This phenomenon he pointed out was prevalent during the colonial period but in some quarters today is sadly still deeply entrenched.

He cited an instance, “When my first novel appeared in 1958 with the allusive title ‘Things Fall Apart’, an offended and highly critical English reviewer in a London Sunday paper titled her piece-cleverly, I must admit-‘Hurray To Mere Anarchy’! But in spite of the cleverness, she could not have known the cosmological fear of anarchy that burdened the characters in my novel and which W. B. Yeats somehow knew intuitively”.

While a young student at the University of Ibadan, he also encountered something similar. In the University of Ibadan modelled in those days after the University of London, most of the authors they read were English ‘with one or two exceptions’. He did not hide his hatred for one of the writers and his book and the book and author in question was Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary. According to Achebe, “My problem with Joyce Cary’s book was not simply his infuriating principal character, Johnson. More importantly, there is certain undertow of uncharitableness just below the surface on which his narrative moves and from where, at the slightest chance, a contagion of distaste, hatred and mockery breaks through to poison his tale”.

Continuing he said, “Here is a short excerpt from his description of a fairly innocent party given by Johnson to his friends: ‘the demonic appearance of the naked dancers, grinning, shrieking, scowling or with faces which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman like twisted bags of lard or burst bladders’”.

Against this background, Achebe posited that sensational writing about Africa and Africans by European travellers and writers has a long history. He buttressed his argument by quoting an account of the voyage to West Africa in 1561 by an English ship captain named John Lok. According to Achebe, this is what he said about Negroes, “a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion...whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastity...whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorous Siculus. They have no speech, but rather a grinning and chattering. They are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts”.

Achebe did not stop at criticising the west for this anomaly, he also lambasted African writers living abroad for also joining the west to lambast the Africa literature. He condemned the growing phenomenon of Europeanising and Americanising African literature which he described as an erosion of self esteem stressing that African literature is a rich goldmine that should be explored since it has a huge wealth of experience to offer adding that it only demands careful observation and the fact that no writer writes in vacuum to discover this wealth and appreciate it.

Cover Photograph Courtesy of Oxford University Press.

Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518-1865

2009-11-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

By the time the transatlantic slave trade was finally abolished in the late 19th century, an estimated thirty to forty million Africans had died in the immoral trade which left an indelible ink of guilt in the heart of mankind and civilisation. The story of the transatlantic slave trade touches the heart and pricks the conscience. For over 200 years Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery, not just by the white slavers but also by their fellow Africans. In the process families were separated; wives from their husbands, husbands from their wives, children from their parents and parents from their children. They were kidnapped and sold into slavery to work in plantations in the Caribbean, America and Europe.

Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518-1865 written by Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley about 50 years ago gave a glowing and step by step account of the origin, the dealings and the eventual abolition of the trade. Africans were reduced to an object of transaction, amusement and sexual satisfaction, completely stripped of their dignity, respect and esteem as human beings. They were subjected to the level of goods and wares and sold openly to the highest bidders in the slave markets in Europe, America and the Caribbean.

Their journey from their homeland was an arduous one. Packed in the slave ships just like goods are packed today in containers with little or no space for movement and breathing, they were forced to sleep, lie and eat in on their own defecations, vomits and urines. They were treated like wild pigs and forced to endure various harsh elements during the journey to the new world. The compartments where they were packed in the ships were very hot for them to bear in the tropical heat and as a result many of them died on board. Even while nearing their destination, the cold weather was very unbearable for them. Most of them that succumbed to the harsh elements and died before reaching the destination were simply tossed overboard. Even when they were able to endure these natural inclement conditions, the poor sanitary condition of the ships posed a great risk for them. They were parked so near to each other that there was no way fresh air could be circulated. In that condition a good number of them contracted contagious diseases which killed them.

In fact according to Mannix and Cowley, most of the slave ships did not reach their destination complete with all the slaves on board from the point of origin. Out of a ship of that carries about 1000 slaves, about 400 on the average were likely to survive the journey that took about 3 months to reach its destination. Most of these slaves came from areas controlled by native rulers notably the present day The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo and Nigeria on the west coast of Africa and the north and south of the Congo River as well as from the east coast rivers that flowed into the Mozambique Channel. All these areas, according to Mannix and Cowley, were very rich in slaves and the native rulers played a pivotal role in supplying the white slavers with their subjects.

The native rulers engaged in constant warfare amongst themselves just for the sake of capturing slaves to sell to the slavers. They invented punishments for many crimes even slightest ones in their kingdoms and made them punishable with slavery in exchange with rums, cottons and other European goods from white slavers that were not even up to the standard of ones they have in Europe. For instance, according to Mannix and Cowley, most of these rums were diluted with water while the cottons were just cheap calicos. Africans were duped and cheated into capturing their own and selling them into slavery and rewarded with substandard goods in return.

The white slavers who claimed superior knowledge and justified that trade using same knowledge failed to see something wrong with it. They carried on with the business with all impunity and disregard for human rights of their victims. Even the Africans shamelessly joined in the immoral trade of enslaving and selling their own brothers out of stupidity and greed. The trade would continue till opposition developed in Europe notably the United Kingdom. This school of opposition was led by the Quakers and prominently by William Wilberforce. These groups of abolitionists met a stiff opposition in their crusade to have the trade abolished not only in the United Kingdom but in all the British Empire. They fought with papers and whatever they could lay their hands on. William Wilberforce would later stand for election as a Member of Parliament which he won and used the office to campaign strenuously for the abolition.

According to Mannix and Cowley, the campaign was not in vain though William Wilberforce did not live to see the fruit of his efforts. He died couple of months after the trade was declared illegal in the whole British colony. The struggle to ensure that other nations followed suit in the abolition was literally a war between the United Kingdom and other powers notably Spain, Portugal and The United States. In fact at a point these powers enacted an international instrument to prevent one nation from boarding and searching a ship flying the flag of another nation just to scuttle the abolition. Even the local chiefs notably the Yoruba King of Badagry and King Gezo of Dahomey resisted the abolition vehemently. It was a blow to the abolitionist but they never relented till America eventually abolished the trade in the middle of 1800s and joined the United Kingdom in patrolling the West coast of Africa capturing the slavers and their ships and setting them free in Sierra Leone for the British and Liberia for the Americans.

This however did not dissuade the local chiefs including the King of Badagry. In 1851 the British with the support of Akitoye, a pretender to the local throne, sent in a squadron of six warships to bombard Lagos to submission. It worked and Akitoye was installed the King of Lagos. He would later reopen the slave trade leading the British to take over the whole area in 1861. In America it generated a huge controversy between the north and the south which would later indirectly lead to the civil war. The north saw slavery as evil that must be abolished while the south argued that, “The Negroes were ideally designed to serve and the whites were ideally designed to rule in leisure and cultivate the arts of life and government. Slavery in short was an absolute good and it was their patriotic and human duty to give it the widest possible extension”. The south lost the war.

Cover picture courtesy of Penguin Books.

Blood Diamonds

2009-10-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

After reading the ‘Blood Diamond: Tracing The Deadly Path Of The World’s Most Precious Stones’ by Greg Campbell, I was thoroughly ashamed of coming from a continent where leaders could be so brutal even to their own people for no other reason but greed and the quest to control resources and wantonly amass wealth.

Africans leaders with due respect to only handful of them are corrupt shameless lunatics and could be extremely schizophrenic, insane, out of their mind and completely mad when it comes to leadership tussle and the looting of the natural resources that should have been used for the development and advancement of their nation and uplifting of their own people. The war for diamond in Sierra Leone proves me 100% right and bears an everlasting testimony to this statement.

Africa is over blessed with abundant human and natural resources but these resources have turned out to be a curse on the continent. The war in Sierra Leone summarises how natural resources could be a curse on a continent or a nation. First discovered in 1930, the diamonds of Sierra Leone have turned out to be the source of the worst war, cruelty and brutality in African history as well as a good example of how a natural resources could erupt the wickedness of man’s heart and his inhumanity to his fellow men. The Sierra Leonean diamond funded the most notorious, brutal, animalistic and cynical rebel groups ever to have been known in the history of mankind and warfare.

Diamonds that come from conflict areas like those from Sierra Leone aptly called ‘blood diamonds’ accounts for about five per cent of global output. This may not sound as a huge amount but bearing in mind that even this small quantity has resulted in an estimated 3.7 million deaths and displaced more than 6 million Africans, it becomes worrisome.

Greg Campbell’s book set in Sierra Leone is an in-depth study of the history of diamond mining and the part it plays in fuelling civil wars in Africa especially in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo and in particular the one that ravaged Sierra Leone for over a decade. In telling the story Campbell traced the ugly and bloody part played by the militia and rebel groups in Sierra Leone especially its carnage and campaign of terror against their own people. The players including the local Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, The Revolutionary United Front and the Sierra Leone Army as well as the external ECOWAS Monitoring Group, Executive Outcomes, Liberians United For Reconciliation and Democracy and the then Liberian President, Charles Taylor all played a nasty role in the campaign of intimidations, killings, raping, amputations as well as the use of Child Soldiers in the conflict.

Shamefully those in position to stop this type of carnage actually encouraged it out of greed by buying these diamonds and smuggling them out of Sierra Leone which eventually appears as legitimate polished diamonds in the streets of London, Antwerp and New York and subsequently on the fingers of the newly engaged and married who are oblivious that the diamond they are wearing comes through a very brutal and bloody source. Campbell in particular pointed accusing fingers on the Lebanese merchants who would to go to any length to acquire the blood diamonds for its pecuniary gains. He opined that the war of diamond in Sierra Leone just like those of Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo was not an ideological or principled one but a war that is hinged upon corruption and greedy quest to amass and control wealth by all means which sadly at the end of the day was not actually used for their own benefit but for that of the western world. A stupid war amongst brotherly idiots!

The brutality of the war in Sierra Leone is perhaps an eye opener to the west on the role they directly or indirectly play to fuel events that leads to disaster in Africa. It is also an indictment of the weakness of the African Union in managing and handling conflicts in her own backyard. The Union played little or no role in resolving the conflict while the local ECOMOG drafted in to restore order was allegedly busy competing with the rebel groups in their campaign of terrors, intimidations, raping and amputations.

The war in Sierra Leone is also a clarion call to the west never to take any conflict in Africa as something unserious or another tribal war, a mistake the Clinton administration made leading to the over spiralling of events in the Sierra Leonean war and the huge amount of deaths and causalities recorded. The impact would ultimately be felt by millions, thousands of miles away from the scene of the conflict. For instance, Campbell in the book was able to successfully link the relationship between the blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and the September 11 attacks in the United States as well as other nefarious activities of Al-Qaeda. This is a link that is not within the grasp and understanding of the western world but Campbell went into great detail to discuss the link.

I therefore wholeheartedly recommend the ‘Blood Diamond: Tracing The Deadly Path Of The World’s Most Precious Stones’ by Greg Campbell to all avid readers seeking to enrich their knowledge of how things work in Africa and the role the way things work in Africa played in fuelling the conflict in Sierra Leone.

Cover Photograph Courtesy Of Basic Books.

Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles

2009-10-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

“Nigeria has a terrible reputation. Tell someone that you are going to Nigeria and if they haven’t been themselves, they offer sympathy. Tell anyone who has been to Nigeria and they laugh. Then they offer sympathy. No tourists go there”, says Richard Dowden in Chapter 16 of this classic called ‘Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles.’

Dowden’s frank assessment of Nigeria is not different from what other Europeans and Americans think of Nigeria and Africa in general. Mention to an European or American that you come from Africa, they will look at you with all the sympathy in the world because it evokes the feeling of fear, contempt, war, corruption, bigotry, backwardness and in a nutshell everything bad and backward to them.

This assessment may not be the whole truth but the fact remains that Africans and African leaders contributed a lot in feeding the west with this type of negative but frank perception of Africa. Think of the corruption and religious bigotry in Nigeria, the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Burundi, the war for diamond in Angola and Sierra Leone, the looting of the public treasury in Kenya, Zaire and Nigeria; all these go a long way to prove that the above assessment is correct and up-to-date.

Despite having the presence of all the mineral resources under the face of the earth, Africa has proved to be a failure, a total failure except for the North Africa which do not actually regard itself as part of Africa and then the South Africa, which still has intact the legacy left by the deceased apartheid regime. The argument being pushed by Dowden in this classic is that there is something intrinsically viral with being a leader in Africa and that is corruption. Corruption is a virus that eats African leaders. Africa leaders are so corrupt that they even lack human sympathy in the art of looting. They wantonly loot to the extent that they do not care about their dying population.

He cited Nigeria, Angola, Uganda, Zaire and Kenya as examples. For instance, while Nigeria is ranked one of the poorest countries in the world, the money coming out of the country proves otherwise. In fact experts are of the opinion that Nigeria has a lot of money to float all the ships in the world and as a witness to the primary election between Alex Ekwueme and Olusegun Obasanjo and the amount of money used to bribe delegates to the conference, Dowden opined that the west should witness this and reclassify most of these countries including Nigeria. He concluded that African problem is not poverty but corruption and to compound the whole situation, the west encourages it by pouring more funds and aids into the pocket of these corrupt leaders. Dowden rightly observed that these aids and funds are not used for the public goods but for the private good of the corrupt leaders which actually entices them to steal more. Aids corrupt and absolute aids corrupt absolutely.

He wondered aloud why the west condoned, supported and even encouraged very corrupt African leaders like Mobutu Seso Seko of Zaire, Ibrahim Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Paul Biya of Cameroun, Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and countless others even as he offered the reason as the complexities of the west in this crime of conscience.

Richard Dowden did not like other western writers blame all the evil of African backwardness on the African leaders alone opining that it takes two to tango. Citing the corrupt leaders again, he queried where they keep all these monumental loots from their countries. He offered the answer and the answer according to him is in the western banks with the United Kingdom and dependant territories bearing the biggest blame.

“Africa’s stolen money is often passed through the international banking system without question. Britain and its offshore territories are the worst offenders. Those who stole it are allowed to travel the world unhindered”, he said.

Dowden could not come to the terms that the west could allow this corrupt leaders to stash all these looted funds in their banks whereas millions of Africans are dying daily of hunger, thirst, disease, famine and various other reasons. He lambasted the west and actually heaped the majority of the blame of African woes on them. In a desperate attempt to prove himself right, Dowden evoked the ugly memory of the apartheid in South Africa and queried where the West was when the white minority South Africans were dealing with the black majority. He pointed the accusing finger to the West and pointedly to the Conservative Government of the United Kingdom.

According to Dowden, all efforts made to impose sanctions on the apartheid South African government proved futile due to serious objections from the Conservative Government under Margret Thatcher that the white rulers in South Africa are their kith and kin. He called this evil and wondered why Kenya gave her a rousing reception when she went their on a state visit-her first in Africa-to convince the Kenyan government not to support any regional sanction against the apartheid government. Kenya caved in.

On the political instability in Africa, Richard Dowden in his proverbial razor tongue did not mince words in accusing the west of all the political problems in Africa. He cited shameful roles played by the United States CIA, British M16, Russia KGB and many others in destabilising the African government. In fact at one time the CIA, M16 and KGB, were jostling over themselves in a desperate attempt to get control of the oil and diamond rich Angola and used all available resources to arm various militia and rebel groups in order to achieve their aim. They would repeat such in Sierra Leone and played vital part in overthrowing most of the democratically elected African governments between 1960 to the late 1990s when coup d’état became unfashionable.

Against this background then, Dowden opinionated that the west has no moral compass to condemn Africa for whatever happens in their own backyard even as he reprimanded the African leaders to wake up and take responsibility the survival and well being of their people. He lamented the erosion of good African qualities like brotherhood, honesty, uprightness and love he witnessed as a young teacher in Uganda in the early 1970s and traced it to the present problem besieging Africa as a continent at the moment.

He did not shy away from stating as a matter of fact that the pre-colonial African societies were marred incessantly by interethnic rivalries and wars but found it completely difficult to understand the Hutu genocide against the Tutsis, the internecine war for diamond in Sierra Leone, the greedy and hopeless war for diamond and oil in Angola as well as the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the black Sudanese by the white Arabian rulers. In fact at one time in the 1990s about 30 African states out of 53 states were either experiencing wars or one form of conflict or the other. After seeing all these, Dowden asked if Africa would ever be the same again. He answered in affirmative.

He postulated that Africa has finally come to that point where it has to take her future in her hands. Political interference by the west on African affairs is one of the major reasons for the present African turmoil and for Africa to rectify this she needs to eschew all forms of foreign interference in her domestic affairs. Against this background, he praised the African Union as well as the Peer Review Mechanism of the Union and noted strongly that if the dreams and aspirations of the Union is pursed vigorously by all African leaders, it would be a matter of time before Africa is transformed entirely into something more than Europe and America.

In a prophetic manner, Richard Dowden who is at the moment the Director of the Royal African Society after many years of journalistic endeavours with The Times of London, the Independent of London and the Economist, said that he sees a brighter future for the African continent but on the condition that the leaders begin to be accountable to the people and fight corruption by all means.

Having read this about 500 and something page book in a matter of few days, I do not have a doubt that it is among one of the best classics on Africa of the 21st century and I do not have any slight hesitation in recommending it to any serious scholar looking for something positive, critical and fresh out of Africa.

Cover Photograph Courtesy of Portobello Books.

The World’s Wife

2009-10-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

As soon as I began to read one of the poems the whole hall fell into a sullen silent. That was queer and unprecedented in the history of Poetic Platform of the Southwark Libraries in the United Kingdom; however I was well aware that the silence is a graveyard one. I thought that the poem I was reading was keeping all of them in sombre mood; alas it was the content of the poem that was actually making the audience very uncomfortable.

The title of the poem I was reading during the just concluded Poetic Week of the Southwark Libraries was Frau Freud and it was one of the poems written by Carol Ann Duffy and published alongside others as the ‘The World’s Wife’. A very interesting collection that proved yet again that the choice of Carol Ann Duffy as the first female, and first scot Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom was a choice made on earth and sealed in heaven.

Just as the name of the collection suggested, the poems were written by Duffy to introduce us into the mind of the wives of the famous people we knew only through history. These are women who were defined and dwarfed by the monumental and gigantic achievements of their husbands. What Duffy did in the, ‘The World’s Wife’, was to give them the voice that was denied them by the fame and achievements of their husbands. These are women we have not heard of or would not have heard of if Duffy did not avail us of this opportunity. Some of these women are Mrs. Pilate, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Faust, Mrs Quasimodo and Mrs Darwin.

Through Mrs. Darwin, the readers were informed that the wife of Charles Darwin was not just a house wife who derives joy only in being in the kitchen and at the service of her studious husband. She has got also a great sense of humour and to try that humour she one day told Darwin that a Chimpanzee they met in the zoo reminds her of him.

In Frau Freud, Duffy captured the attention of her readers by reminding them that even though she is a lesbian, she is also a cock-loving one. The reading Of Frau Freud was like a litany of the dick with Duffy listing various names by which the dick is known including ding-a-ling, cock, willy, love-muscle, night-crawler, dong, prick, the rammer, the slammer and many others. It was actually this litany of dicks that captured, held and sustained the attention of my audience and not because I was a good reader with a thick African accent.

Through Delilah, we were able for the first time to hear her own account of what transpired between her and Samson. The bible did not give her the opportunity to defend herself; it is therefore a very big consolation that Duffy did just that in this collection. “He fucked me again until he was sore”, says Delilah of what Samson did to her prior to her cutting off his hair.

In Queen Kong, we saw her lamenting the little size of her husband’s-King Kong-dick even as she confessed that it is still okay with her because, “there were things he could do for me with the sweet finesse of those hands that no gorilla could”, and upon his death, “I held him all night, shaking him like a doll, licking his face, breast, soles of his feet, his little rod”.

The World’s Wife is frankly speaking a very nice attempt by Duffy to bring to life the art of poetry and she succeeded in doing that using the dramatic monologue style. This collection is highly recommended for all lovers of poem. In fact I was literally laughing my ribs off even while in the bus when I was going through this collection.

Cover Photograph Courtesy of Picador.

Black Skin White Mask

2009-09-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading the, ‘Black Skin White Mask’, by the French-Martinican writer, Franz Fanon and once again Fanon has proved himself a master in Afro-Western racial relationship. I was first introduced to Franz Fanon by my Professor of Critical Writing back in days in the higher institution.

In actual fact, it just happened this way. This professor, Dr. Osita Nwosu was lecturing my class of Mass Communications/Journalism and made a reference to, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, another beautiful and classical masterpiece written by Fanon. He then stopped and asked if anyone knows him and I answered yes, the only person in the class of Print Journalism who knows him and have read the book. He then went over to the Broadcast Journalism class and asked the same question and nobody answered in affirmative. At that point, he developed a very serious doubt about my assertion.

When he returned to my class, he asked me to stand up and I stood up. He then asked me which of his work I have read and I replied, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ and he asked me to make 5 minutes summary of the book and being a great lover of Fanon, I ended up spending about 30 minutes discussing the book. At the end of the day, I did not only receive a standing ovation from the professor, the class and the passers-by, I also made a history in his teaching career as the first student to pass his course without sitting for any examination. He gave me 50 marks as a bonus and said that whatever I get in the examination would be added to my overall mark. At the end of the term, I ended up making about 98 marks in the course.

Against this backdrop of love for the works of Fanon I decided to revisit him nearly a decade after that episode. In this classic, ‘Black Skin White Mask’, Fanon once again took up the controversial topic of racial relationship existing between the whites and the blacks. His point in the classic is that the world would never witness that utopian world where the blacks would eventually become equal with the whites since the black race has a already accepted the status of a defeated race; and even if the Blackman makes series of efforts to achieve this equality, the Whiteman would always come up with terms to ensure that the equality is not achieved.

He posited that the theory that a Blackman is not capable of governing himself is a ploy deployed by the Whiteman to perpetually subjugate the Blackman unto himself. He referred to it as a psychological warfare on the psyche of the Blackman stressing that even though the Blackman is capable of ruling himself, he is always confused whenever the Whiteman comes up with the argument of him not being capable of governing himself. He was of the opinion that this is the greatest psychological barrier to the development and advancement of the Blackman which ultimately registers in his mind the picture of a defeated race, a second class citizen, a colonised race and as a result a race not capable of making it to the same level with the White race. The consequence of this is that the egalitarianism he is trying to achieve continues to elude him.

Fanon in this classical originally published in 1952, however stressed that for the Blackman, the struggle continues. He never backs up or relents and to measure up to the same level with the Whiteman; he has to transfer that effort and frustration to sex. This is what he, through the process of psychoanalysis, referred to as a psychosexual warfare of the Blackman against the Whiteman and this term he ostensibly borrowed from Sigmund Freud. Because the Blackman feels very inferior in the presence of the Whiteman, he tries to use a weapon, an exclusive advantage he has over the Whiteman to fight him and this advantage lies in his sexual prowess and the size of his dick. It is because of this reason that when the Blackman first arrives in Europe, he voraciously looks for a Whitewoman to have sex with and the act of sexually humiliating the Whitewoman and making her cry like a baby on the bed makes him a coloniser, a conqueror and an equal with the Whiteman. Through sex, he has been able to achieve two purposes; to prove to a Whitewoman that he has every power over her and to prove to a Whiteman that his sexual power and the size of his dick, is enough to intimidate him.

“As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children that they cannot even count them. Be careful, or they will flood us with little mulattoes...Our women are at the mercy of the Negroes. For the sexual potency of the Negro is hallucinating”, quoted Fanon of what the Whiteman thinks of the Blackman and quoting a French Journalist and film maker, Michel Cournot, he added, “The black man’s sword is a sword. When he has thrust it into your wife, she has really felt something. It is a revelation. In the chasm that it has left, your little toy is lost. Pump away until the room is awash with your sweat, you might as well just be singing. This is good-by...Four Negroes with their penises exposed would fill a cathedral. They would be unable to leave the building until their erections had subsided; and in such close quarters that would not be simple matter. To be comfortable without problems, they always have the open air. But then they are faced with a constant insult: the palm tree, the breadfruit tree, and so many other proud growths that would not slacken for an empire, erect as they are for all eternity, and piercing heights that are not easily reached at any price.”

Fanon is of the opinion that this feeling is deeply and jealously entrenched in the psyche of the Whiteman, hence the reason most of them fear and loathe the Blackman and measure up or retaliate-in order to dispel that fear-through degrading punishment and anger towards the Blackman. He fears the Blackman and the idea that the Blackman has got what he has not got builds up a tension in him which he must release through racial anger and humiliation of the Blackman. As for the white woman, he continually longs for this experience or to loathe it entirely. And because the Blackman has got what her white lover has not got, she goes into a long process that would eventually shape all these frustrations into racial hatred of the Blackman.

As for the Blackman, all these experiences worsens the whole situation by putting him deeper in a very serious dilemma which in turn leads him to further question the worth and acceptability of his colour and race. He seriously develops within him an utter rejection of his race and colour and longs to be like a Whiteman. This is inferiority complex in action. He begins to feel less human and less superior to the Whiteman and tries by all means to imitate his way of life. This, he manifests daily by the way he speaks the language of the Whiteman, the way he dresses like a Whiteman, prefers to go to an only white club, date a Whitewoman, drop his indigenous name and completely adopts a White-sounding name and in a nutshell, completely associates himself with the white race and in the process becomes what Fanon called the, ‘Black Skin White Masks’ through the process of epidermalisation.

This feeling gives him that sense of, ‘Yes we have arrived’, and eventually makes him to begin to look down on his fellow blacks or refer to himself as a super black above other blacks.

‘Black Skin, White Masks’, which is Fanon’s first book, is truly a classical in every sense, a great and an in-depth of psychopathology of colonisation and just at about 200 pages, it makes for easy reading too. From the nature of the topic the book delved into, it is little wonder the reason for the obscurity of the book in the western world and its popularity amongst freedom fighters especially the African-Americans. The book inspired anti-colonial movements in various parts of the world hence its being loathed and obscurity in the west.

Cover Photograph Courtesy of Pluto Press.

Things Fall Apart

2009-09-14T11:22:00.001-07:00

‘Things Fall Apart’, a 1958 English-language novel was written by the international acclaimed Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe. In 1962, it became the first novel to be published in African Writers Series. Just within the vicinity of about 250 pages, ‘Things Fall Apart’ is a classic in every sense and a very successful attempt in transliteration of the Igbo language into the English language.

Written shortly before Nigeria got her independence from Britain, ‘Things Fall Apart’, achieved fame as one of the few African novels that has been translated and read by many students worldwide. Presently it has been translated into over 45 international languages. The novel’s name is derived from William Butler Yeats' poem ‘The Second Coming’.

The story itself is based on a cultural conflict between the 19 century fictitious Igbo community of Umuofia of the South East of Nigeria and the coming of the white colonial government and missionaries into the territory. The arrival of the Whitemen in Umuofia wreaked havoc on the cultural ego of the community thereby destabilising the status quo ante and to return to that status quo ante is what the entire village wanted.

Since the entire village is reluctant or cowardly to confront the strangers, the brave Okonkwo who struggled to distinguish himself from his lazy and debt-ridden alcoholic father, Unoka, took it upon himself to cleanse the land of the influence of Whitemen. It was as a result of this bravery too that the village entrusted unto him the care of Ikemefuna, a lad given to Umuofia in exchange as a peace settlement with a neighbouring village. Despite an advice from a wise elder not to kill a lad who calls him father, Okonkwo out of fear of being labelled a coward killed Ikemefuna. That was the beginning of series of events that eventually brought about his downfall.

Okonkwo would later in an attempt to cleanse the land of the mess brought on it by the Whitemen, kill one of the messengers of the Whitemen and subsequently took his own life to avoid the consequences.

Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia would have been entitled to a village burial but since he took his own life which is a taboo in Igbo land and culture, foreigners were contracted to bury him in the evil forest to avoid the wrath of the gods on the whole land. He cannot be buried in his home as is the tradition because he committed suicide otherwise the gods would visit everybody in the village with a plague.

The death of Okonkwo was a tragedy for the whole village and because of the part played by the white intruders; he had to kill himself and had to be buried like a chicken.

Cover Photograph Courtesy of Anchor Books.