By Sunny Awhefeada
I apologize to readers of this column that became irregular in the last couple of weeks. I ascribe it to that popular Nigerian phrase “circumstances beyond my control”. The last four months have been quite tumultuous. I found myself in a whirlpool of events that robbed me of the time and stability to write.
My appointment as Vice-Chancellor of the Southern Delta University, Ozoro, Delta State, is no longer news! The weeks and days leading to the interview, combined with my work as Dean of Postgraduate School and delivering an inaugural lecture were hectic beyond what words can describe.
Even more hectic and physically debilitating was the aftermath of the appointment. Calls and messages to my phone ran riot. Preparations towards handing over at the Postgraduate School and resumption at my new post compounded my ordeal which a friend called “ordeal of transition to a new phase”. The victims of this “ordeal of transition” were many and one of them was this column! This explained the recent irregularity.
The new reality is a discontinuation of this column as it is unimaginable to combine my new assignment with writing a weekly newspaper column. I must admit that I feel a sense of dispossession as I let go of the column, but I am helpless. When this column debuted in December 2017, it was the realization of a dream of three decades. As I sign off today, I hope to return to this page at the end of my tenure.
That is why the caption of this piece is “A Valediction Forbidding Farewell” after John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”. There is thus no farewell.
It all began forty years ago! It began in Evwreni. When we read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and George Orwell’s Animal Farm as Class Three students at Eni Grammar School, Evwreni, in 1986, I doubt if anyone imagined the impact the novels would make in the life of one of the students in that class. But that was how it all began. Mrs. Grace Ejoh our Literature teacher recommended both novels and read them along with us. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart had a magical effect.
It took us to the world we neither knew nor imagined. Reading that novel made us realize that we had worthy ancestors and we saw them in Okonkwo, Obierika, Okoye, Ezeudo, and even Unoka the music maestro. We quoted interminable sections of the novel among ourselves. We claimed ownership of the proverbs and used them imagining we were the old men in the novel.
Evwreni was then primordial and pristine and so the setting of Things Fall Apart with its dense vegetation manifesting in farmlands, shrubs, forest and streams and shrines were familiar to us. Aigboje Higo, the famous henchman at Heinemann, wrote an inspiring introduction that complemented the mellifluousness of Achebe’s diction. The novel intoxicated us.
The next term saw us reading Orwell’s Animal Farm. The novel’s revolutionary thrust had the better of us. We sang the song “Beast of England” as if our lives depended on it.
Even at home we tormented our parents and guardians with, “Beast of England/Beast of Ireland/Beast of every land and clime/Hearken to my joyful tidings of the golden future time”. Our souls embraced the ideals of freedom enunciated in Orwell’s novel. Sadly, our excitement got deflated when the guild that fought for freedom turned out to be the very agency that subverted the ideals of that same freedom in the novel. It dampened our enthusiasm and ruptured our naivety that life was not that simple. In those days, we took great pride in reading and the number of literary works you read conferred a kind of status on you. Evwreni was then a region of innocence with very little distraction for young people.
It was for that reason that reading and farm work preoccupied us. Living in a college quarters ensured that there were always books, news magazines and newspapers to be read and read we did.
Despite the suffocating grip of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) of that era, the economy was permissive enough for the teachers to buy newspapers and news magazines.
Ensconced in the monastic ambience of Evwreni, reading the newspapers and magazines brought Ibadan, Lagos and Abuja to us. The foreign news sections of the newspapers also brought to us Pretoria, Accra, Ouagadougou, London, New York, Moscow and almost everywhere humanity registered its presence.
We were thus abreast with Dodan Barracks politics, the Anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the treachery of Compaore and the tragedy of Sankara, the Lockerbie bombing, Perestroika and Glasnost, the Berlin Wall and other events that account for the multiple chapters of human history as memorialized by the news media. The newspapers and magazines were alternative schools that tutored our minds and enraptured our souls.
Of significance was the brilliant array of columnists we encountered on the pages of the newspapers and magazines. My first experience of this phenomenon was with the Newswatch magazine. The edition of the magazine I first read was for January 1986 that reported the Vatsa coup. I still remember Dan Agbese’s essay titled “The Adventurers”. Dele Giwa and Dare Babarinsa also wrote in that edition. The essays by Agbese, Giwa and Babarinsa were so beautifully written that I could not drop the magazine. I pored through it over and again for about two months. That magazine is somewhere in my study as I write. I saw it last December. As if by coincidence, I became conscious of other newspaper columns after the Newswatch epiphany. I remember the thrill I felt whenever I saw a copy of Nigerian Observer, The Guardian, Vanguard, Concord, Sunday Times, and others that were on the newsstand in the 1980s and early 1990s. What came out of these encounters were acquaintances with newspaper columnists that defined our worldview, shaped my consciousness and pointed at the direction I should go.
Many of the columnists were university dons and that reality was an inspiration for me. Some of the columnists whose pictures appeared in Newswatch, African Guardian, African Concord, looked austere, bespectacled and bearded. We got to know that they were Marxists and public intellectuals. They charmed many of us. Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, G.G. Darah, Godwin Sogolo, Ogoh Alubo, Ahmed Abdulahi (pen name for Patrick Wilmot?), Adebayo Williams, Eddie Madunagu, Fred Onyeoziri, Femi Otunbajo, Emevwo Biakolo, Hope Eghagha, among others. I read occasional interventions by Claude Ake, Yusuf Bala Usman and Bade Onimode. Those interventions allayed hunger and energized me. The essays were always “sweet” laced with sarcasm and wit. They were excursions into the very depth of knowledge in different fields.
The columnists were fearless and they courageously pointed at the emperor’s nakedness and told him about the smell oozing from his mouth. Their apprehension and engagement of the Nigerian condition remain germane today as they were when they wrote decades ago.
My introit in the newspaper space was via a September 2000 edition of the Post Express Literary Series (PELS). My endearing teacher, Professor Remy Oriaku, who read my review of Tade Ipadeola’s A Time of Signs insisted that I should send it for publication in PELS. I wrote a few more and moved on. I started contributing to The Guardian, Vanguard, Urhobo Voice and others.
The first two opened talks with me on being a member of the editorial board and a columnist respectively, but “circumstances beyond my control” then deterred me. However, I became the editor of the revived The Guardian Literary Series in 2015 when Abraham Ogbodo was editor of The Guardian. By 2017, Daily Independent offered me the back page on Friday. That was how this column was born! I must confess that writing a column is not a walk in the park. It is tasking in many ways, but it has its allure. It earns you respect, privileges and friendships. It also gives you knocks from people who feel offended by your standpoint and the way you expressed it.
I have received praises and threats, kudos and knocks. I get calls, messages and emails from people within and beyond Nigeria. Writing this column was a kind of therapy for me. Each piece I wrote enlivened me and made me happier than I was the previous hour. The column facilitated my engagement with my beloved country.
I must thank His Excellency, Chief James Onanefe Ibori, former Governor of Delta State and proprietor of Daily Independent for his non-interference despite my harsh criticism of the government headed by his great friend. Chief Ibori remains kind and avuncular with occasional “I enjoy reading your column” when it started running years ago. The incumbent Governor of Delta State, His Excellency, Rt. Hon. Sheriff Oborevwori, also deserves plaudits for demonstrating sound judgment in making my new appointment a reality.
To all my gentle readers, I say thank you for your support and kind words. I do not know how to say goodbye! I quiver and my eyes well up with tears! This is not the end. I shall return in the future. Here then is my “valediction forbidding farewell”! Wadoooooo!!!
