Tribute: Gimba as ‘patriot of Nigerian literature’ (II)

True, Gimba essentially concerned himself with the sore matters bedeviling society; issues of morality, integrity, corruption, abysmal leadership and visionless-ness in governance; are the front-burner of his creative enterprise and plottal/formal structures. Yet, as I have stated at the outset of the tribute, the fact that a substantial part of his fictional oeuvre derives from […]

True, Gimba essentially concerned himself with the sore matters bedeviling society; issues of morality, integrity, corruption, abysmal leadership and visionless-ness in governance; are the front-burner of his creative enterprise and plottal/formal structures. Yet, as I have stated at the outset of the tribute, the fact that a substantial part of his fictional oeuvre derives from his distillation of life into text-his personal experiences in life supply the material for many of his novels as they enable him to explore those matters of social degeneration in the polity.
Those social issues supply the critical fibres for character cultivation, such that the core personae in his texts carry the essential departures and the social alternatives that he prognosticates. The narratives that weave these protagonists outline the essential directions that society ought to go. We shall exemplify this perception/argument from some of the novels.
It is, however, germane to outline his expectations from his characters from some of his own admonitions of leaders of the real, Nigerian, society with regard to humane values of love, moral and ethical standards in governance; the ideal of truth, the power of forgiveness as fathomed in the principles and core tenets of the dominant religions and faiths that leaders profess publicly-either the Christian or the Islamic doctrines.
In the past two weeks or so, my friend Mohammed Haruna had pored over these intrinsic values in the character and personage of Abubakar Gimba as well as their enunciations in his sparse but eloquent polemical offerings. His challenge in the essay which Haruna re-issued for us, with post-humous permission I imagine. This was a letter which Gimba wrote to former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as the Oputa Panel, the poor copy of South Africa’s Truth Commission, raged.
In this incisive missive, Gimba revealed his perceptive insight on the models of leadership which he admonished Obasanjo to uphold, vide, to shun the temptation of deploying power for vindictiveness, reprisals, and vendetta. Instead, Obasanjo was entreated to espouse the essence, the heightened and elevated value of utilising acquired or bestowed power to heal the deep wounds inflicted on self and society through the power of forgiveness of sin and crime committed against self or society in order to etch true models of truth and humane-ness.
This is the kind of ideal leadership which Madiba Mandela extolled and effectuated, even as the most sinned against by the operators of the heinous Apartheid regime at the personal level and the dehumanisation of the entire black collective of South Africa by the hegemonic white supremacists of the regime. This is the kind of character cultivation that we find in palpably eloquent fictive narratives of Abubakar Gimba upon whom this tribute is found justifiable and worthy of bestowing.
 It is a moot point at this stage to tarry on whether Obasanjo heeded the admonition or not, as the entire nation knows the answer, as conscience, the apt antidote to hurt, was forever worn, like slippers, to borrow a Shakespearean image for dead consciences carried by the powerful in Africa, including OBJ!
It is also a matter for contestation as to whether or not the characters in Gimba’s over a dozen literary offerings, especially the novels, generated the sensibilities of the values of humane-ness, compassion in contemporary Nigeria in the present throes of partisan political carnival of electioneering-a hideous warfare over which the survival of the nation as an intact entity dangles, most precipitously!
Let us rapidly visit some of these fictive outputs-from the standpoint of their setting, impinging ideology and statements as well as the aesthetic, technical ideals carrying those preoccupations, especially the centrality of the author’s interrogation and mediation of the ideals of truth and justice in a society in which those ideals are in acute short supply but direly required for regeneration.
Only a few of these works can be reached in a short tribute such as this. Set in the fictive ancient space of Songhai in the Western Sudan, Innocent Victims ( and this conscious narrative locale has been taken as Gimba’s response to socio-cultural, socio-political and religious milieu), the novel is a statement of a committed stake-holder who finds himself engaged in the social reconstruction of his national and global environment. Again, the task is to transcend the sub-national setting to deal with national and inter-national concerns ideals.
The theme of nepotism and tribalism in the civil and public service of the Niger State as a microcosmic lens to ex-ray the nation’s bureaucracy, come to the fore in this novel. Mediocrity is rife and is manifested in the odious factors of jealousy and bitter hatred. Merit nose-dives on the altar of tribal/ethnic jingoism. The author replicates this dismal state of affairs in Sunset for a Mandarin where also, incompetence and idleness assume virtuous positions in the civil service that is idle and slothful. Envy is rife, merit is subdued.  
The state machinery grounds to a halt- as it does in the rest of the country, which the young Niger State typified. The military governor’s tough talk of the bureaucratic red tape and slovenness as praxis fell on deaf ears attuned to drudgery and tribal and religious in-fighting. The need to revolutionise the civil service culture for promptitude, effectiveness and dynamism or growth and development as espoused and instructed by the militocrat in the state house of Sunset for a Mandarin remained a wishful thought.
The two novels advocate and target the ideals of ‘living above board’ with a ‘selfless and well-organised, punctual, diligent’ service orientation’ and one which is ‘committed to work ethics’ that can salvage the civil service. But this can be done through a systematic re-orientation of the service culture, not the overzealous bravado of the military-a fiat-mentality which eventually ruined the civil service culture in Nigeria.
To be continued next week

It is in the character of the youthful Faruk, in his detribalised zest for radical transformation, justice and equity that the vision of the novelist emerges, most pointedly. He is intolerant of tribal sentiment and showers diatribe/invectives on its advocates. The young movement of de-ethnicised and detribalised citizens which he champions extols the ideal of righting the wrongs in society by “championing the cause of our people who are not privileged to partake in the machinery of government and its resource sharing mechanisms.”
Farouk’s movement drives positively towards social service, one which should propel “government to assist the rural people to give portable water, easy access to health facilities” an access to electricity, well-equipped schools and improved needs in the area of agriculture. The movement is subjected to frustrations, intimidations and strictures, including suspension from work, probe and so on under the scheming of the reactionary Zaalim.
Such political orchestration to stem change agency and its agents in Innocent Victims is amplified in Sunset for a Mandarin. Here again, the instrument of reaction-rabid tribalism, emotions of envy and bitter hatred are directed at a progressive youth, Hajj Hamza, who however, resists all the manipulative strategies to subdue and cow him to submission. His cause is helped by the appointment of an initially modest, humble and forward-looking military commander who at least tolerates the dynamism, if not the revolutionary anxieties of Hamza, until his inevitable clash with the commander, Abbud, when he finds Hamza’s intelligence too suffocating and gives him expected rebuff, frame-up, arrest and detention.
Characters of reaction and progress are set in antagonism in these novels and the vision of the novelist is woven into the narrative of the progressive character without over-bearing, palpable design and connivance, yet without equivocations to the over-riding transformative intent of the novelist’s vision.
This attempt to achieve a creative balance and equipoise between the informing politics of the novelist and narrative aesthetics often run into murky waters in the works of Abubakar Gimba, in spite of the success of his work analysed above. The plot- the formal organisation of the work- tends to give way to the anxiety to deliver the author’s artistic moral. This is often also manifested in his characterisation which tends to be deficient in maturity and development. This is with regards to the difficulty in attaining a convincing narrative conflict, creation of suspense in the plot and plot resolution. Some of the attempts to get resolutions through narrative plunge to the past present some difficulty and obstruct fluent construction of characters and their story of social transformation.  
This is not a Gimba typical example of the struggle in all creative artists with a progressivist bent. The task of delivering an urgent social message in the manner of a crusade leads most creative artists to place social vision above artistic excellence. By and large, Gimba has lent appreciable credence to the task of the creative artist to produce art that is socially relevant and one that is instrumental to the urgent business of social transformation in a neo-colonial state like Nigeria where he lived and for which he gave up the earthly flesh to join the ancestors and live eternally.