Why my A Feast of Return portrays African dance steps in Nigeria tribes – Ofeimun

It was a story we had to tell in Britain while Europe was celebrating 500 years of the discovery of the new world. We had done Under African Skies. Since Mandela was out of jail, we needed to continue with the story. Under African Skies told the story of Africa ending with the release of […]

It was a story we had to tell in Britain while Europe was celebrating 500 years of the discovery of the new world. We had done Under African Skies. Since Mandela was out of jail, we needed to continue with the story. Under African Skies told the story of Africa ending with the release of Mandela. We needed to take the story of South Africa specifically from Chaka Zulu to the round table that brought the ANC to power. It was equally a way of celebrating Africans and we had to do it in such a way that it would show Europeans what is was like for Africans to go through what they went through at the same time give Africans in Europe the hope to go on with the struggles that brought them to the era of the round table. What we did in Britain was very South African oriented or Pan African in nature. We had to use dances from virtually all parts of Africa although we always ended with a Zulu war dance. When I returned from Europe to Nigeria, I decided that we needed to tell that story in a way that is Nigerian enough for the audience to follow. The only way we could achieve this was to see Nigeria as a country that was representative of all of Africa. It may sound cocky for any Nigerian to say this but it is only Nigeria that is ‘various’ enough to represent all the nationalities in Africa. If you want a dance from Uganda, Senegal, Malawi or wherever in Africa there is almost an ethnic group in Nigeria that has almost the same kind of dance. For a Zulu dance, for instance, we used a Tiv dance. Curiously, historically you can say there is a relationship between that flank of Nigeria and South Africa. For dances around Zimbabwe we used a Yoruba hunter’s dance. Instead of doing that Pan African thing we resort to doing a Pan Nigerian thing that can be very representative of Africa. It may be a form of self glorification to do that but you will find out through the story that in almost every country in Africa the same struggle was going on. First you had the internationality battles that the British waded into and in some cases resolved. Then that same involvement created problems and Africans had to resist British sovereignty. Once that began we were in a different era altogether. If you took the South African story altogether you will find out that the way we all resolved the crisis in our different domains resembled what happened in the South African case. In some societies the ethnic battles are not different from the struggle between blacks and whites. The change in skin colours may have ruffled the South African case but it was just another ethnic case in South Africa. The Boer were just another nationality. We simply have to learn how to reconcile the various nationalities and how to present a case for citizenship that is not hostage to any.

You did mention the aspect of optimism throughout the entire structure of the story from the colonial intervention to the triumph of the ANC at a point where Afro-pessimism became a central part of the African story especially in the last 30 years. Are you trying to reconcile the African to the reality of finding optimism against this sordid background?

I always begin every story from the most tragic end. Personally if I have a problem, I start by imagining the worst. I work from the worst to the most optimistic. Whenever I come across Africans who believe in the worst I start by telling them what you call the rock bottom of history and I ask; suppose we got to that rock bottom, can’t we work it back to something better? So whenever I attended conferences where this Afro pessimism flag was being hoisted I always resorted to this tragic vision. You will find out at the end of the day that there is no human being that cannot be brought to viability from penury. Africans may be portrayed as people being ravaged by poverty, AIDS and suffering but you will find out that they are a people that can be brought out from that low base. Part of the reason is this: I am a Nigerian. There is a velocity of achievement for Nigerians especially which makes it impossible for them to accept that they have come to the end of the road and that it has ended their journey. I have not met any Nigerian who believes that when a road comes to an end that means the end of the journey. The Nigerian journey does not end with the end of the road. My approach to social development is that a communal ethic is possible at all times which you can appeal to and which you can worship and which would enable you solve all problems. I don’t believe that there is any human problem that cannot be solved. I have not seen one African problem that is not soluble in my lifetime. Doing Under the African Skies and A Feast of Return is just like saying that is doesn’t matter what all of you are saying around me we are going to make it.

You have been known more as a poet in Africa. At what point did you begin to make the transition from writing the story in verse to the expressiveness of theatre?

Actually, I started by writing plays. I had never seen a play on stage except ‘This is our chance.’ I managed to read Shakespeare. I always wanted to be a playwright. However I had a very truncated education which made it not so easy to choose paths and stick by them. So I simply had to do so many things to earn my keep while studying. That somehow made it look like what I wanted was not what I was pursuing. But I always wanted to write stories. For now apart from publishing all the poetry I have written I am also publishing the prose ones. When I have finished the literary and political essays I will then move into the area of narratives. What I am actually doing now is cloning many of the fabulations that I have already adopted in my stories of the history of Africa. I decided to start form when things were so peaceful that the first African sat down to think. That is to say start the story of Africa from when there was no life. Move to when the matriarchal system took over and how the warrior tradition flushed out matriarchy and play it till when all the traditional systems collided with colonial corruptions. Once we get to that point all our stories are the same. It doesn’t matter how we tell them the African story is just the same no matter which country you enter. There is no African country that is not fragmented. We regard it as a form of crisis but actually it is actually the strongest part of us. The variousness of Africa is actually the source of so much creativity. Because we have not disciplined it into a format of action it can ruin the creativity itself. Once we find a way of moving the whole and not fractions through this we will find out that there is nothing on the continent that can make us go back to the doom people keep talking about. Today, when I am talking to people I tell them rather than fight your different ethnic battles why not fight it from the plane of West Africa as a region that started from the Gambia linking all the coastal cities passing through Cameroon and leading to the Congo and another one from Senegal linking all the Saharan cities and linking our own Abuja. We are fighting too many little battles. No matter how we fight we are doomed to live together. Instead of fighting why don’t we just develop a communal ethic…

Your analysis is interesting. You will recall that the Pan African movement also started outside Africa looking in from the beginning of the 20th century and coming down to the moment of the emergence of the nationalist movements. You had National Congress of West Africa so that people thought beyond a small colony. At what point do you think we lost that ability to think units to a broader vision and in a sense also how we are unable to make the transition from the native to the citizen?

The nationalists were very poorly educated in one very important sense. They were made to believe that to be modern you had to be European. That

notion made it such that they did not take their ethnic groupings serious enough to study and understand them. One point is simply to say transfer all the knowledge in the English language into your indigenous language and vice versa.

Do that for every other language and you will discover that it is possible to regard ourselves as doing the same thing. The Germans, French and English were able to do this because the enlightenment drew a common line across Europe. It simply said to them all of us belong to an ethic. The Europeans universalized knowledge within the language groups and therefore equalized them. We did not do the same. We too should have universalized knowledge within our language groups and that would have universalized us. We did not do that. The slow pace with which we transferred knowledge from English into our own languages made it possible for us to remain fractionalized and even make a culture out of it. If we are going to move we need to come down to it that way. We cannot escape universalizing knowledge in our individual enclaves no matter how we define them. When a Tiv farmer goes to Nsukka with his yams to sell and he begins to talk with his next door neighbour there he feels that the knowledge he has of yams is different from the one they have in Nsukka. When you have provided a universal way of viewing knowledge amongst the different ethnic groups they no longer see themselves as so different. Germans may be different from the English but at the level of having conversation about their culture they agree. You find some philosophers talking about an ethnic imperative being against an unammist African position. The truth is that the unanimist African culture is the true position. All Africans can be totalized under a common rubric. But because the rubric is not well educated people regret and fall back into the different ethnic holes and simply stay there. If they are well educated we won’t be falling into holes but into foundations. The average Kanuri man and the average Ijaw man who have not gone to school are not in the same century. They are in different worlds completely. If we give them the same education they become people on the same plane. When they talk they actually do so on the same wavelength. For instance we managed to get Wale Ogunyemi to translate ‘Things Fall Apart’ into Yoruba.  We need to raise our people to that level so that whenever we speak, we are speaking at the same level. Things Fall Apart has not been translated into Igbo as I speak to you. the backwardness of this project I am talking about must be looked at from that level. It is sad that we ourselves cannot read ourselves in our own languages. Our ignorance is basically the basis upon which we act. It is possible to educate ourselves to understand this. We are still a backward people when you look at it from that level. Koreans for instance study astro-physics in Korean. In 1960 they were not as developed as we were. Today the Koreans are preparing for space while we are still on ground. As things are, when we are even speaking in English language we are still not speaking in the same language. The knowledge base has been thoroughly fractured. We don’t have a dependable educational structure. To me the education we have today is like giving poor education to poor people in order to make them remain poor. The Europeans are about to enter trouble now as a result of the meltdown. Anytime they enter trouble they use Africans to solve the problem, so we are going to have leaders being told about so many funny ways of solving economic problems so that the Europeans can be happy. They are already doing it, all over Africa we have leaders who are being told funny ways of how to solve their economic problems. It is one of the many ways Europeans are using the so called poor African countries to solve their own peculiar problems.

When you mention Odia Ofeimun, people remember poetry especially ‘The Poet Lied.’ Between the 70s and the 80s it was always a point of joy to go to the Ife book fair. You got books from all over the world as the book shops were well stocked. Now if you look at the people especially the middle class everyone now goes for motivational or religious literature. What went wrong with the general reading culture? Isn’t it worrisome really that we have a ruling elite that is so unsophisticated?  
I have a huge collection of poetry that is unpublished. There are no good bookshops in the country. if you see a writer that just won a prize and you walk into a shop to pick up the book you won’t find the book. Anytime I go to London and visit public places when I go near those reading, especially Nigerians, what you usually find them reading are religious books. Nature has a way of cancelling certain things out. Those that are not being educated are treated as outside the pail in Nigeria. The Nigerian constitution actually says that unless you have school leaving certificate you can vote but cannot be voted for. This in my estimation means that if you do not have school certificate you are not a citizen. Unfortunately there is no strong movement to insist that every Nigerian must have a right to be educated up to school certificate level through funds from the common purse. In other words the society owes you a right to educate you to the level of a school certificate holder. Social movements that ought to question the provisions of the constitution are not yet politically oriented. There are many social movement organizations in the country today that have no party sense. Without party sense you don’t win battles. The civil society units just make use of media hype without effecting any change. The media is just a source of transmitting information and news. And that is what the civil society groups appear to be doing. A party sense means simply that you and I contribute to a central purse from which we organize civil actions that is in our interest. Until we begin to see ourselves in that view we remain stagnant. Because we are not doing that it is actually possible to have representatives who do not actually represent us. So far as I argue severally there have been no proper elections in Nigeria’s history. Okay one, I always have to say in 1954, the Action Group was in power and they lost the elections into the federal level to the NCNC. We can have that as proof that an election can be free and fair. The most annoying for me is the MKO Abiola one where everyone tells you that is the freest and fairest. Of course, from the standpoint of a bungled political history it might be the freest and fairest but really it was never free and fair. That was an election in which a dictator determined the constitution, manifesto, party leadership and the parties’ headquarters and when it came to the elections they said you had to line up without secret ballot. If you call that free and fair you are not being fair to the idea of free and fair elections. It was one of the most ‘unfree’ elections to ever take place. I always argue that the real reason why the election was annulled was because in previous election it was usually the organizers that rigged in their own favor but for that particular one the challengers were able to rig the elections in their own favor. It was the only election in which those who were opposing those in government won. That was why it was annulled. That is why in the current political process I am joining other Nigerians to say that we need a proper biometric system to be put in place. Those who do not want us to have it do not want a free and fair election to take place.

You try to encourage young writers by publishing their works especially in the 80s. Are you not worried about the state of writing amongst young people in the nation today?
No I am not bothered. What bothers me is the fact that the infrastructure for helping people to survive as writers is not in place. Also, we don’t have a class of editors that you can depend on. All the publishing houses are in a bad state so they cannot afford good editors. We have a jungle of energetic and talented writes but there is no sea for them to pass through. Thus you have a self publishing scheme that is thoroughly maddening. You see a talented writer who could have stunned the world with his work but editorial distance turns the work into hogwash. So many books in the market are bad. The ethnic imperative has also seeped into it. Many states now want their writers to be the writers read by people therefore you have so many of these bad books being thrown at children. It is a form of de-education for the children. In the past, you had committees in place which ensured that before a book is released for public consumption it is properly edited. Universities used to be very much involved in it. Today rather than use knowledge as a yard stick for qualification in the universities today people have to go and worship in their village shrines to qualify as professors. If you reduce education to that level, you have had it. When you look across Nigeria today most of the elite are not good for their own ethnic group in the first place. How can they be good for Nigeria?

You have done the media of poetry and theatre. It is a very audio visual way today. Have you thought of delving into video and cinema?
I have a video of A Feast of Return. There is no performance we do that is not on video. The film medium is one that has attracted me a great deal. But I don’t think I am prepared for it yet. I am hoping that before I die I will write a book which can be turned into a movie. Recently, a governor gave me a story, a sort of melodrama which he wants turned into a movie. I told him I will do that hopefully before the end of this August. I like what they do in Nollywood. I am a great defender of Nollywood. I have written a lot about it. There is something though that I simply cannot accept. The word, ‘verisimilitude’ is something every writer defends. Our film makers are simply not bothered about it. You see a filmmaker talking about farming in a dry season and you get shown a scene of a farm where everywhere is actually looking so green and luscious and then you see someone wearing a tee shirt with New York written all over it in a film about some traditional setting. European films try to be as true as possible to the historical setting and time their films depict.