Nigeria’s National Lassitude

Yet, in a land where most people go along to get along, Nigeria’s writers and performers have always been a feisty lot. For the generation that came of age at independence in 1960, art and politics mixed with a general optimism about the country’s future. And as the last decades of the last century unfolded amid greed, corruption and state-sponsored violence, they took it upon themselves to become the voice of the nation’s conscience.
The work of a new generation of Nigerian writers, by comparison, has grown inward-looking and politically remote, the inversion of the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s much-quoted admonition: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” It’s not that the writers of today are afraid to address the problems that plague our country – they do so with eloquence and compassion. But there is more gloom than hope in their writing. Their work is weighed down by a despair that stems from the fact that the people most in need of reading what they have to say are paying little or no attention.
This was not the case during the first decades of independence. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s campaign for the rights of the much-abused Ogoni people in the oil-rich Niger Delta drew worldwide attention. His organisation, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, became one of the largest in Nigeria. His artistic and political reputation spread far beyond his homeland, especially after Gen. Sani Abacha’s military government had him tried on trumped-up charges and executed in 1995. Amid the international outrage that followed, human rights activists brought a lawsuit against Shell oil company, and Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations for more than three years.
The reputation of Nigerian writers remains broad, but it is not deep. Wole Soyinka’s poems and plays earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986; novels like Saro-Wiwa’s ‘Sozaboy’ (about a young soldier caught up in the civil war), or Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ (which traces the cultural destruction of a village at the hands of well-meaning missionaries) are honored the world over; Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the musician who pioneered Afro-beat with songs of protest and rebellion, was the subject of a popular Broadway musical.
But Broadway is a long way from Lagos, and, high-minded as they might be, the opinions of the Nobel committee have little to do with the price of oil in Abuja. Our writers are celebrated overseas, but that’s because they write in English, only one of the 500 or more languages and dialects used by the country’s 250 ethnic groups. In any case, many Nigerians can’t read.
One may wonder why a government that draws much of its popular support by putting people on the payroll has never created a censorship bureau for printed material (there is a film censorship board). In fact, there is no need. Saro-Wiwa was hanged for his activism, not his literary work; Wole Soyinka, accused of supporting the Igbo people, spent two years in prison during the murderous Biafran war. In his memoir, ‘The Man Died,’ he saw with uncanny accuracy that postwar Nigeria would be governed “by a new military ethic – coercion.”
No Nigerian artist in any genre has been more scathing about the country’s colossal failure of leadership than Fela Kuti, who died in 1997 at the age of 58 but whose ironic, mournful music plays nonstop in dance halls, bars and cafes across the country. In songs like ‘Shuffering and Shmiling,’ he describes the lot of the great mass of Nigerians who live without running water or regular power as they struggle to get through the workaday world. In ‘Open and Close,’ he berates his compatriots for allowing themselves to be abused. In ‘Army Arrangeement’ – a play on a pidgin word – he rails against the underhanded dealing of politicians, bureaucrats and businesspeople.
And yet what irked the authorities even more than his politics was his lifestyle – smoking marijuana during live performances, wandering about in public in his underwear, living openly with his 27 wives. In all of this he seemed to challenge the illusion of order in a country that began falling apart even as it was gaining its independence.
Despite the outspokenness of these men, they seem to have had little domestic influence on a population that is still largely rural and woefully under-educated. A new generation of writers, singers and stand-up comics may draw urbane audiences. But to the politicians, what the artistic community says about them remains of little consequence.
“I’ve never voted in Nigerian elections and I won’t again this year,” A. Igoni Barrett, the short story writer, told me recently: “I’m less an apathetic voter than a thoroughly disillusioned citizen.”
Another writer, Eghosa Imasuen, admits readily enough to disillusion but finds himself struggling against apathy.
Comments like these raise age-old questions of artistic integrity and the writer’s duty to confront tyranny and injustice. Soyinka, Saro-Wiwa and others of their generation did not hesitate to do so. But things are different today. The climate has changed. Three decades of military dictatorship have given way to a listless democracy, where corruption rules, apathy spreads and a dangerous vacuum is filled with the likes of the murderous Boko Haram insurgency.
No amount of noise making from the chattering classes seems to reach our politicians, and that is exactly what makes our predicament so dangerous. If our leaders refuse to listen when our artists speak of ennui, anger and despair, they set themselves up for the fate that befalls all rulers who remain deaf to simmering discontent. We must break out of this national lassitude before it’s too late.
Adewale Maja-Pearce is a writer and critic. He is the author of the memoir ‘The House My Father Built.’

Source: The New York Times