Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
In the stormy wellspring of a torrential national discourse, something useful has emerged. Suddenly, the written word as the expression of national memory has emerged in a flurry of memoirs. We are in the season of memoirs and recollections. Selective remembering in writing has since emerged as a distinctive genre otherwise known as the autobiography or memoir. The watered down or outsourced version is the biography, authorized or intentionally malicious.
In today’s Nigeria, the past seems to have suddenly come roaring back at us with a rampaging urgency and untidy vengeance.
“ restless past” has come alive as a dimension of time with historical urgency.
Suddenly, the older generation of Nigerians who played prominent roles in our national life are recalling their past deeds and misdeeds, their encounters with a jagged national history. It is as though something would be lost in the present if past leaders do not account somehow for their past roles. Maybe, we have been awakened by a collective subliminal impulse to come clean, compelling us to remember the past in order to come to terms with a troubling present and an uncertain future. Therefore, the memoirs of yesterday’s great men and women has become an avenue for self confession, for some sort of coming to terms with the self and the community.
Rightfully, the most topical memoirs are those by warrior leaders. A combination of military prominence and a taste of political leadership has created a mass curiosity which all memoirs need to attract attention. In Nigeria, we now live in an age of endless questions about the past because our present is so full of unresolved concerns about the past.
Unlike politicians and Generals, journalists and writers attract attention for a different set of reasons. We are history’s eternal chroniclers, those condemned by craft and occupation to bear witness to history in a hurry. We are the observers of history from the sidelines. Our comments, observations, reports and assessments shape the legacy of statesmen and warrior kings. We are the uncelebrated often silent observers from the fringes of history. Sometimes we are embedded in the theatre of active history but only as silent chroniclers and disappearing witnesses. Most of what we see and hear, we dare not tell all. The greatest journalists are those who die with most of the secrets they dare not reveal.
HOMAGE veers off this path somehow. Let me be honest. I inaugurated no war. I did not commit the hubris of dividing my compatriots into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ at a time when it was most fashionable to do so. I participated in no coup, counter coup , insurrection, rebellion or revolution. I commanded no army nor did I engage in such mundane atrocities as suspending constitutions, promulgating decrees or abrogating people’s rights by simple proclamation.
I dare not make the lofty claim of starting or stopping a war. But I cannot feign innocence that there was a war here. The wounds that will not heal, the homesteads that still lie in ruins, the lives and destinies that were forever altered and the truths that continue to be denied all testify to a season of nightmare and bloodshed. Nor can I turn my back to the many dead, the myriad orphans and widows that still litter our land. Nor can I dress up the scars and wounds that now define our identity as a people and a nation. HOMAGE is a testimony to these eternal truths and more.
This book is however based on one unalterable right that cannot be denied. The right to be an individual and to live, experience reality and witness history are perhaps the most inalienable. The testament of a private life mostly lived observing the public space of history from the spectators’ stand is one that no dictator has managed to eliminate or imprison. Dissenters may be locked up or put away. Torture may be deployed to silence deviants of power. But no dictator has been able to obliterate the power of private memory. In the torrent of fleeting time, in the deluge of depressing experience and the anguish of torment and tragedy, something remains alive. It is our right to remember times past and experience witnessed first hand.
But I have witnessed and helped to document moments of aberration in our land. I may have occasionally wined and dined with some who had the courage to decapitate the state and assume the throne in my line of duty. HOMAGE is not an adventure story about such exploits. It is something somewhat different. It is the story of a modest private life lived against the backdrop of national history in the process of earning a living.
The writing of a memoir is an act of both courage and self- reconciliation. It is the courage to overcome silence. It is the courage to breach the constraint of present quietude and think of the past as lived experience. Each life has a trajectory. The point of resolution is the moment of stock taking. It is at that moment when one feels that it is time to recall and remember significant moments. But a life must first be significant to a public in order for its reminiscences to be worth public attention.
Every life has a story of things remembered which the subject wants to share. But not everyone’s memory qualifies to be captured in a memoir let alone worth the attention of innocent others. Unconsciously, for those who qualify, sitting down at last to write a memoir signals some interim summation of the journey of a life time. But that life must have touched multiples of other lives in one way or the other in the public sphere. To be a writer that is read by a public-some of it-is to touch some lives.
Nobody wants to read the life story of a nobody. A memoir requires the readiness to relive a significant life journey and share personal experiences with the public. In a sense, then, writing a memoir presupposes that the life relived means something to an audience of ‘others’. it requires a readiness to share a life experience by living in three dimensions of time: the past as an experienced reality, a compelling present moment and envisage a future to which our past and present are hazy pointers. Therefore, a memoir is a journey to a familiar place that combines these dimensions of time. I call the ‘place’ Memoiristan.
Memoiristan is at once a strange and very familiar place. It is an abode of inestimable value, the repository of all memory in their most treasured form. It is a place that reminds us of our collective heritage. Memoiristan is simultaneously a place and a non- place. It is the unspoilt repository of all memory. Memoiristan is a place of selective return to familiar places to encounter once again familiar people and revisit familiar places and walk through the familiar paths which we passed to get here. The journey to Memoiristan is full of signposts, milestones and is populated by familiar personages that make us who we are.
In HOMAGE, I embark on a journey backwards and forwards simultaneously. My past is the abode of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. My journey to Memoiristan is in many ways a solitary personal voyage. In this book, I experience reality first as a child growing up in the most basic pastoral village setting of Umuguru. I am shocked later by the urban neon lights in Aba and early encounters with strange people from diverse backgrounds in diverse places like Port Harcourt, Obitsha and Lagos wherever I followed my father.
I travel the path of education through the forest of acquiring knowledge of the world and discovering myself . In this process, I became a pilgrim, a voyager. Part of the shock of higher education is the rude awakening that the modern civilization which the Europeans sold us was created by the thoughts of thinkers who had no surnames or, rather, thinkers ashamed of their fathers’ names: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Sophocles, Euripides, Heraclitus, Herodotus etc. Maybe, willful identity patricide is a requirement for philosophical revolt and breakthrough. But we are Africans. We carry the burden of our heritage and carry the dignity of our parentage and ancestry. We are the product of where we are coming from, born by all those who we touched and who touched us as we walked through the pathway of life.
Therefore, at a personal level, HOMAGE is a journey of tributes to those who touched me and I touched closest; those I see as my personal guardian angels. They range from my parents, grand parents other family members that were sent my way without my consent. I acknowledge also the external reality of the Nigerian nation, a land that we did not choose but appropriated us and lent us a name and a new identity.
In order to appreciate fully the journey that is HOMAGE, we need to understand how my personal life reflects the evolution of the nation in which I have grown up over these years. In this sense, HOMAGE is not just a guided excursion into my personal life experience. It is also the history of my country as I have experienced and tried to come to terms with it.
In the process, I pass through the promises of independence, the euphoria of a new nation in the making and the hopes of secondary school education. Then came the tragic disruption of war and the agony of national self -destruction. Community was suspended. Homesteads became theaters of war. Death was everywhere. As a nation, we died in order to be reborn from the ashes of our forgotten selves.
The return journey from the landscape of war and the place of death and destruction and back to a new normal in a reunited Nigeria in 1970 is more like a resurrection from the dead. From the ashes of ruin a new hope in a more inclusive nation was born . But the embers of hate and division have remained smouldering in the background even as time went by.
Only at this point of remembering and this journey backwards to Memoiristan did it occur to me that I have in one life time been a citizen of five different ‘nations’ and changing sovereignties. I was born a colonial subject of the British sovereign. At independence I became a proud citizen of the federation of Nigeria. Three years later, Nigeria became a Republic and I too became citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Crisis and the civil war converted me into a citizen of the Republic of Biafra. At the end of hostilities, I recall the most memorable line from Biafra’s surrender broadcast: ”The Republic of Biafra hereby ceases to exist.” With that hurtful and jarring finality, I was jolted back into being a citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It is my hope that I will not have to change my passport again in what is left of my life time.
The omens remain frightening. Decades of political bad manners have shattered the hopes of 1970. National unity is now merely the rhetoric of power mongers. The state has become an extension of revolving power oligarchies and clashing fiefdoms. Democracy has birthed power bastards and apprentice little emperors.
