The transition of Ikemba

It has been encomiums, eulogies and praise songs galore. Everybody, from the highest, the President of the nation, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, former Nigerian Presidents, to the chairman of APGA, the party founded by the deceased Gburugburu, and the leadership of Ndigbo, Ohanaeze wants to outdo the other in showering praises on the Biafran leader, […]

It has been encomiums, eulogies and praise songs galore. Everybody, from the highest, the President of the nation, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, former Nigerian Presidents, to the chairman of APGA, the party founded by the deceased Gburugburu, and the leadership of Ndigbo, Ohanaeze wants to outdo the other in showering praises on the Biafran leader, a man who was once the butt of vituperation and the symbol of hate, shortly before and after the Nigerian Civil War. No doubt, in many respects, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu occupies a uniquely phenomenal position in Nigerian history.

Whatever we feel from whatever standpoints of the nation’s polity, politics and humanity, the Ikemba of Nnewi commands critical attention; the Oxford educated historian, with an incredible power of oratory and eloquence with a disarming oratorical gift, charismatic, with inimitable panache, incredible courage, larger-than-life alluring ego and above all, unquestionably the most notable spirit of the Igbo personality, occupies a place in history of modern Nigeria. What is also undeniable is the fact that the Nigerian Civil War, which he ignited through his declaration of a sovereign state for the Igbo people, had fundamental impacts on the, course and direction and path that the nation has trodden ever since.

From the perspective of literature, (and literature is both the living memory and soul of a nation with the primal purpose of conveying life experience of one nation to another as well as, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, ‘the irrefutable, condensed experience from one generation to another) I once wrote that the aftermath of the war gave rise to what I have referred to in my book, Nigerian Writers and the Nigerian Civil War as the authentic literature of Nigeria. In that modest work, I had proposed that the war transformed the nation from anguish to catharsis and generated (or compelled) the beginning of a Nigerian national literature in three significant ways.

First, as a result of the war, and the partisan engagement of most of our writers in the action, they suffered deeply and directly, physically and psychologically, with the rest of the citizenry. But being writers with an overdose of sensitivity and sensibility, they began to write with deep, tortured feelings in a way that revealed fundamental changes in our ways of looking at ourselves and our society at large.

Secondly, from their experiences of the war, Nigerian writers felt an urgent need to go beyond mere, lucid, descriptions of the horrors of war, to spread general enlightenment and sow the seed of spiritual and social regeneration in the nation ‘flesh’, after the disorientation and dislocation caused by the war. Now, numerous creative works have poured out from the pens of our writers since the war till now, which are complete departures from the pre-war literature; works which allow us to appraise the temper of Nigerians during the wars and which help us to grasp the emotional quality and sensibility of the nation during thereafter.

The death of Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, a symbol of that struggle for critical history of the evolution of the country in search of actualization, closes a critical chapter in the history of the nation; the plausibility of the deployment of ethnic nationalism to attain nationist ideals. He was a man destined to play an overarching and inimitable role in the nation’s history. An Oxford trained son of a business tycoon, Odumegwu, with a Masters degree, had no business going into the army, usually regarded, at that point of our history – the late fifties and the sixties – as a profession meant for the average at best and the bright children of parents who could not pay their ways through tertiary institutions.

The army was construed an abode for the average students or the brilliant children of the poor. Odumegwu was a bright son of wealthy man. Lt. Col. Odumegwu-Ojukwu, to obvious knowledge, was not an adept coup plotter, yet he became a Military Governor, among the first batch of military personnel in power. The cataclysmic events that began with the chaotic politics of the First Republic, culminating, first in the January 1966 coup and the retaliatory, counter-coup of July 1966, the pogrom against the Igbo and the dangling war of secession, placed Odumegwu Ojukwu in apparent (some would say avoidable with a less ego/ambition-packed personage than him) in an inexorable position to lead as the Commander of the war of sovereignty of the Igbo people.

Yes, the nation recorded incalculable losses in human and material terms—over a million people perished in that war and the loss in property remains unquantified. Yet, the war is a major pointer to the indivisibility of the nation’s essence—Ojukwu embodies the essential spirit of the Igbo and the unparalleled resilience for survival as an entity of the Nigerian nation. The fact that Odumegwu Ojukwu, after twelve years in exile, returned and made valiant effort to re-integrate with the nation’s polity—he entered into partisan politics, not the Igbo-based NPP but the NPN – demonstrates his belief in a reconstructed Nigeria beyond ethnic imperatives. When his bid for a seat in the Senate failed and the fortunes of party politics was halted by a military putsch, he suffered detention briefly and later bounced back by forming the APGA, a party in which he remained the sole pillar until death came calling.

As this glowworm departs; this brave officer, profound intellectual, war commander, a legendary moving spirit of his people, a startling orator and rhetorician, an indomitable politician and, in the end, a Nigerian patriot departs, the greatest tribute we can pay him; the great monument of immortalization we can erect for him; is to ensure that this country never indulges in a fratricidal war and carnage like the 1967-70 one by ensuring that we erect a nation in which everyone feels palpably included, through ensuring that all ethnic nations and polities in this nation are catered for equitably, fairly and justly.  This nation shall truly miss Ojukwu, a great man of history, loved and hated with equal passion but truly respected by most.