The Education of a British-Protected Child (16 page)

So the real problem posed by leadership is that of recruitment. Political philosophers from Socrates and Plato to the present time have wrestled with it. Every human society, including our own traditional and contemporary societies, has also battled with it. How do we secure the services of a good leader?

A magazine columnist who doesn’t share my view on this matter published a picture of me with my chin resting on my hand and a caption below saying: “Achebe waiting for the Messiah.” Most unfair, of course! But even so, waiting for a messiah may not be as far-fetched or ludicrous as the columnist may imagine. For we have no fail-safe prescription for bringing the great leader into being. No people have had a monopoly in this. Great leaders have arisen in diverse places from every conceivable system: feudal, democratic, revolutionary, military, et cetera. Kemal Atatürk, Chaka, Elizabeth I, Lenin, Mao, Lincoln, Nkrumah.

Does it mean, then, that like the iroko tree the great leader will grow where he will and that the rest of us should just sit, put our hand under our chin, and wait? No! If we cannot compel greatness in our leaders, we can at least demand basic competence. We can insist on good, educated leaders while we wait and pray for great ones. Even divine leaders have needed precursors to make straight their way.

In traditional monarchical systems such as we would today dismiss as anachronistic, there were elite groups called kingmakers whose business was to keep an eye on all the eligible princes and choose the best when the time came. These kingmakers were specially qualified by tradition and by knowledge of the history of the kingdom, and no less by being themselves ineligible for selection so that they could be seen to be reasonably disinterested. Those of us who often doubt that we could learn anything from our traditional systems and usage should compare the scrupulousness of the kingmaker arrangement with the lack of it in our elections today!

Be that as it may, the universities and other elite centers with deep knowledge of national and world issues can play a role somewhat analogous to that undertaken by kingmakers of the past, not in selecting the king themselves but by spreading in advance general enlightenment and a desire for excellence in the entire constituency of the nation, including those who will aspire to national leadership.

We must admit that the Nigerian university has not acquitted itself too brilliantly in this regard in the past. The university man who has sallied forth into national politics has had a rather dismal record. No one can point to any shining achievement in national politics which the nation can recognize as the peculiar contribution of university men and women. Rather, quite a few of them have been splashed with accusations of abuse of office and other forms of corruption.

Those who have not sallied forth but remained in the ivory tower have hardly fared better. Many have cheapened themselves and eroded their prestige by trotting up and down
between the campus and the waiting rooms of the powerful, vying for attention and running one another down for the entertainment of the politician. For this and other reasons, the university has deservedly lost its mystique and squandered the credibility which it had in such abundance at the time of Nigeria’s independence.

To cap it all, we have had a zealous policy maker from the highest level of university administration whose sole preoccupation was a balancing act of applying the wealth of the nation to keep back the go-ahead, and reward and pamper the sluggard, in a mistaken and futile effort to achieve unity through discrimination, and parity in backwardness.

Who, then, is to champion that pursuit of excellence on which the university ideal is founded and which no people can neglect without paying a heavy price in stagnation and decay? The Nigerian university has so far shown little faith in its own mission. Is it any wonder that others should be lukewarm?

One remarkable feature of Nigeria used to be that no one who ruled it in its first quarter century had been to university. Did that say anything about our national preoccupations and values? Look around us and compare our record in this regard with that of our neighbors, even in Africa.

I do not suggest that the university is the only fountain of enlightenment and excellence. Far be it from me to suggest that. But not to have had one university man in eight, and not once in twenty-six years! Our traditional people would have sought the offices of
Afa
divination to explain that!

As the twenty-first century takes hold of us, we must take a
hard look at ourselves and ask why the intellectual leadership which the Nigerian nation deserves to get from the university has not been forthcoming. It is imperative that the Nigerian university set about cleaning up its act. It must go back to work so as to produce that salt of excellence which the nation relies on it to drop into the boiling soup pot of Nigerian leadership.

1988

I was intrigued to be asked to contribute a paper to a volume of essays in honor of Stanley Diamond. Dialectical anthropology is not a field in which I can wander freely and at ease. My accustomed turf is elsewhere. But I assume there was a reason for asking me; and for that very reason (if I have divined it correctly) I couldn’t refuse or let the occasion pass without a single word.

Stanley Diamond came to Biafra. In fact, he came twice during the terrible civil war that ravaged Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. For many of us embattled there, his coming meant so much. Why? He was only one of so many visitors we had. What made his coming so special?

Biafra had stirred deep emotions across the world. It probably gave television evening news its first chance to come into its own and invade without mercy the sacrosanctity of people’s living rooms with horrifying scenes of children ground to dust by modern war—a surrogate war fought with modern
weapons. Said Baroness Asquith in the British House of Lords: “Thanks to the miracle of television we see history happening before our eyes. We see no Ibo propaganda; we see the facts.”
¹

If governments were largely unmoved by the tragedy, ordinary people were outraged. I witnessed from the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons what was described as unprecedented rowdiness during a private member’s motion on Biafra. Harold Wilson, villain of the piece, sat as cool as a cucumber, leaving his foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, to sweat it out.

It was hardly surprising that many remarkable people would want to visit the scene of such human tragedy. Auberon Waugh came, and afterwards wrote a devastating book on Britain’s duplicitous policy. He also named his newborn child Biafra Waugh! Frederick Forsyth, a mere reporter then, was soon sacked by his employer, the BBC, for filing stories too favorable to Biafra. Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, the Swedish nobleman who became a legend in the 1930s when he volunteered to fight for Haile Selassie against the Italians, came back to Africa to embrace Biafra’s cause and threw Nigeria’s air force of MiG and Ilyushin fighters into disarray and panic with five tiny two-seater Minicon planes.

There was an American Air Force colonel (retired)—I cannot now recall his name—who came out of his retirement in Florida to fly food and medical supplies on behalf of Joint Church Aid from the Portuguese island of São Tomé into Biafra. He flew many missions into Uli airport—a segment of highway the Biafrans had converted with great ingenuity into a landing strip, camouflaged during the day with leaves and transformed into one of Africa’s busiest airports at night. One
stormy night, the colonel did not make it back. I called on his widow during a visit I made to Florida. It was a painful meeting. I didn’t really know the man and there was nothing I could say to this woman who sat so calm and courteous but remote. But before I took my leave she asked her question: “Tell me honestly, did he do any good coming?”

“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. He saved a few children.” She smiled then with tears in her eyes.

There was a small group of American writers who came to show solidarity with Biafra’s beleaguered writers—Kurt Vonnegut, Herbert Gold, and Harvey Swados. They barely got out again before Biafra’s final collapse and the closure of the airport. Each of these visitors and scores of others, many of whom I did not meet or know about, came in answer to the call of a common humanity. They came to the losers. I was told that when von Rosen heard of the defeat of Biafra he said it would take the world fifty years at least to understand what had happened.

Stanley Diamond came like all these others. But he also brought something additional—a long-standing scholarly interest and expertise in the territory. In her book
The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970
, Suzanne Cronje, onetime diplomatic correspondent of the
Financial Times
of London, makes the following point: “On the whole, the emphasis on suffering and the relief of it damaged Biafra’s chances of gaining international recognition. The problem came to be regarded as a humanitarian rather than a political dilemma; it was easier to donate money for milk than to answer Biafra’s international challenge.”
²

Stanley Diamond knew Nigeria well, having done extensive fieldwork in parts of it right from the last days of the British Raj, and followed its affairs closely through independence and after. He understood the ideological dimension of the conflict. He was not fooled by the strenuous effort of Britain to pass off her former colony as a success story of African independence when in fact it had only passed, with Britain’s active collaboration, from colonial to neocolonial status. He saw the bloody civil war not as Britain and other apologists for Nigeria presented it—that is, progressive nationalism fighting primitive tribalism—but as the ruining of a rare and genuine national culture at the moment of its birth.

It was advantageous to the federal Nigerian case to stigmatize Biafra for its alleged links with South Africa and Portugal. Stanley Diamond pointed out that in the first year of the war it was the Czechoslovakians and the Chinese, not South Africa or Portugal, who supplied the bulk of Biafra’s arms purchases, and that the Czech source dried up after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement by Soviet tanks and the fall of Alexander Dubček in 1968.

When the moment comes for us to ask the proper questions and draw the right inferences about what happened in those terrible years, the perceptions of Stanley Diamond will be a great help to us. These perceptions are rooted in prodigious learning and a profoundly humane sensibility.

I am happy that this remarkable man, who has searched far, who has found and reclaimed the uncluttered vision of the primitive at the crossroads of science and song, has bestowed on my country the benefit of his deep scholarly, humanistic,
and spiritual meditation.
The New York Review of Books
of May 22, 1969, carried a long article, “Biafra Revisited,” by Conor Cruise O’Brien on the second visit he made with Stanley Diamond. It was accompanied by a poem I had just written in memory of Christopher Okigbo, Africa’s greatest modern poet, who had recently died on the Biafran battlefield. It also carried a profoundly moving poem, “Sunday in Biafra,” by Stanley Diamond, which, like all his poetry, combines startling substantiality with a haunting ease and inevitability, and stamps on the mind like an icon of Africa’s tragedy an image and a logic that nothing will remove.

1992

I believe it was in the first weeks of 1989 that I received an invitation to an anniversary meeting—the twenty-fifth year, or something like that—of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in Paris. I accepted without quite figuring out what I could possibly contribute to such a meeting/celebration. My initial puzzlement continued right into the meeting itself. In fact it grew as the proceedings got under way. Here was I, an African novelist among predominantly Western bankers and economists; a guest, as it were, from the world’s poverty-stricken provinces at a gathering of the rich and powerful in the metropolis. As I listened to them—Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians—I was left in no doubt, by the assurance they displayed, that these were the masters of our world, savoring the benefits of their success. They read and discussed papers on economic and development matters in different regions of the world. They talked in particular about the magic bullet of the 1980s, structural
adjustment, specially designed for those parts of the world where economies had gone completely haywire. The matter was really simple, the experts seemed to be saying: the only reason for failure to develop was indiscipline of all kinds, and the remedy a quick, sharp administration of shock treatment that would yank the sufferer out of the swamp of improvidence back onto the high and firm road of free-market economy. The most recurrent prescriptions for this condition were the removal of subsidies on food and fuel and the devaluation of the national currency. Yes, the experts conceded, some pain would inevitably accompany these measures, but such pain was transitory and, in any case, negligible in comparison to the disaster that would surely take place if nothing was done now.

Then the governor of the Bank of Kenya made his presentation. As I recall the events, he was probably the only other African at that session. He asked the experts to consider the case of Zambia, which according to him had accepted, and had been practicing, a structural adjustment regime for many years, and whose economic condition was now worse than it had been when they began their treatment. An American expert who seemed to command great attention and was accorded high deference in the room spoke again. He repeated what had already been said many times before. “Be patient, it will work, in time. Trust me”—or words to that effect.

Suddenly I received something like a stab of insight and it became clear to me why I had been invited, what I was doing there in that strange assembly. I signaled my desire to speak and was given the floor. I told them what I had just recognized.
I said that what was going on before me was a
fiction workshop
, no more and no less! Here you are, spinning your fine theories, to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories. You are developing new drugs and feeding them to a bunch of laboratory guinea pigs and hoping for the best. I have news for you. Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people. Have you thought of that? You are brilliant people, world experts. You may even have the very best intentions. But have you thought,
really
thought, of Africa as people? I will tell you the experience of my own country, Nigeria, with structural adjustment. After two years of this remedy, we saw the country’s minimum wage plummet in value from the equivalent of fifteen British pounds a month to five pounds. This is not a lab report; it is not a mathematical exercise. We are talking about someone whose income, which is already miserable enough, is now cut down to one-third of what it was two years ago. And this flesh-and-blood man has a wife and children. You say he should simply go home and tell them to be patient. Now let me ask you this question. Would you recommend a similar remedy to your own people and your own government? How do you sell such a project to an elected president? You are asking him to commit political suicide, or perhaps to get rid of elections altogether until he has fixed the economy. Do you realize that’s what you are doing?