Ikhide And His Fight With Nigerian Writers

Recently I had a lengthy conversation with a friend about Nigerian literature and one of the things we talked about was Pa Ikhide and his recurrent fights with Nigerian writers. And I have come to discover the problem with Ikhide is his role as a good man, who tries to raise dust about the things which everybody would rather keep down and pretend did not exist in a society where everything is going downhill. And when you become that character who everybody sees as one who loves to talk about what everybody else would rather not talk about, you are bullied into silence and when that fails, you are booted out and treated as an outcast.

Nigerian writers, especially some of the younger ones are fond of telling us that writers do not owe us anything. Some of them put it in a more reasonable way, saying, writers have the right to write about whatsoever they please. This is okay because of course, you can’t tell a writer what to write about. But what is not okay is that Nigerian writers want us to believe that the unusual silence from the literary sphere in the face of all the catastrophe we are facing is normal. They want us to believe that they are not questioning President Buhari’s directionless government simply because they aren’t interested in writing about it. Or the fact that everybody feigned ignorance when Nnamdi Kanu went missing and even now that Dadiyata is missing, doesn’t pass across a creepy message. Nigerian writers who talk about feminism and pretend they care about women because they keep shouting about ending rape, want us to believe that their silence when women and children were massacred and put in mass graves in Kaduna is not something that is sacrilegious. I made a series of post about Sheikh El Zakzaky’s movement earlier this year and I made my postulations and two Northern writers came to the post to disagree without salient points. One of them said she had seen a video where the Sheikh was encouraging his members to bomb the country. I asked for the video, till now, I haven’t seen it. Somehow, the people who dragged Biodun Fatoyinbo all over social media for a rape allegation are quiet in the face of people being killed in the country and the simple explanation should be that writers owe us no purpose?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in one of his interviews, talked about how writers loved to call themselves the conscience of the society. Chinua Achebe reiterated it in his last book, There was a country. Julio Cortazar, the foremost Latin American writer once said, he always wanted to write non-political stories, but it was the tyrants from his part of the world who gave him work to do, because of course, a man can’t be chasing rats while his house is on fire. Toni Morrison once said according to an advice a friend gave her, that true artists are those who create art in the midst of chaos, citing it was how civilizations were made. The writers we remember today, we do because of their impact on the politics of humanity and how they tried to shape the stories of the society where they were born. How they tried to question the status quo of things. Some of these things are an age-long philosophy. But then, what is art, without the freedom of the artist to explore wherever his/her heart wanders to? But then, what is a society without socially conscious artists? Or are writers no longer the rebels they used to be? If this is the case, why is it that it is writers who fight for gay rights, mostly? Why are they the people who keep trying, even in Nigeria, to shape the consciousness of people concerning religion or colonialism or some topics, largely irrelevant to Africans living in Africa like racism? If we no longer have socially conscious artists, why are these topics still discussed in our literary festivals in Nigeria? We could as well go on and write only about trauma and beautiful flowers, only that those are political too, because humans are by nature, political. So why are we pretending that our silence isn’t a loud one when the politics of the right of some of our fellow humans to security, and right to protest and hold harmless opposing views to the government is repressed.

Chinua Achebe reminded us in There Was A Country, that there is no particular way to write as a writer, but we have a moral obligation to not take sides against the oppressed. So at least, even if our vocations as writers isn’t enough to awake our conscience, what about our humanity? Nigerian writers have taken sides against people who have been murdered unjustly by keeping quiet in the face of these inhuman happenings. IPOB were massacred, not a word from them. Shi’ites were murdered and buried in mass graves, not a word from the circle, where in sane civilization, there ought to be an outburst. What does this say if writers are the conscience of the society? It says that Nigeria has a sleeping conscience and any entity without an alert conscience is an abode of cruelty and wickedness. It is a hopeless situation. Nigeria is a hopeless entity because the rulers of this contraption have the people who ought to hold them accountable in their pocket.

This is where I think of Ikhide. He is unfortunately, good in a situation where goodness is almost hopeless. He reminds me of the main character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. He sincerely loves Nigeria and wishes things would somehow turn to be better, but sadly, they never will. He singlehandedly led a campaign for the boycott of Kabafest two years ago, but unfortunately, what was to be eventually, was. I can’t even be sure I would turn down an invitation to the festival if I was invited. He keeps talking about the things which Nigerian writers should do, but unfortunately, the writers themselves have given up on the country and are only after going abroad (I am guilty of this ambition too) and whatever booty they can get by playing to the gallery when they are around. These writers know the country is hopeless. And they have accepted that fact, deep down. But they have clearly chosen their battles and it is not to fight against the people who are keeping the country hostage. The sides they have taken is to get their own share of the spoils so they can live only two steps below the elites and afford to go abroad too and send their children to the west. They have decided that the plight of the ordinary man is not their problem. After all, they owe us no purpose and everybody should carry their cross.

Recently, when the argument came on Twitter and I tried to talk about the fact that a writer could actually be anything and that they had responsibilities, an essayist whose name is Tolu Daniel accused me of being like Ikhide who liked to box all writers into one category. Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún also accused us of being Ikhide’s mindless minions. You can actually feel the rage with which they talk about him. You can feel the hatred. They have alienated the man from all their festivals and of course made him an outcast and because he speaks against the powers that be, he no longer feels safe to return to his country. Even when his mother was sick, before she passed on, the man could not return. But some of these writers live in a country where a certain Donald Trump is being criticized and abused and called all sort of names for having never committed a tenth of the atrocities President Buhari has committed. Yet nobody has been arrested. And they join in criticizing Donald Trump when some of them have never said a word about Buhari. It is baffling and says a lot.

Sadly, the battle is bigger than Pa Ikhide. The odds are overwhelming. He can’t turn the resolves of those writers and the fact that they are more realistic about the hopelessness of the contraption. Ikhide will lose the battle to salvage Nigeria alongside the very few ‘good men’ who tow this path with him, who have been branded his minions. But History will remember him as somebody who tried to do the right thing even when it didn’t make sense to do so.

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