Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

So important have such stories been to mankind that they are not restricted to accounts of initial creation but will be found following human societies as they recreate themselves through vicissitudes of their history, validating their social organizations, their political systems, their moral attitudes and religious beliefs, even their prejudices. Such stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains a people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existential journey through the world; but they also serve to sanction change when it can no longer be denied. At such critical moments new versions of old stories or entirely fresh ones tend to be brought into being to mediate the changes and sometimes to consecrate opportunistic defections into more honourable rites of passage.

One of the paradoxes of Igbo political systems is the absence of kings on the one hand, and on the other the presence in the language and folklore of a whole range of words for “king” and all the paraphernalia of royalty. In the Igbo town of Ogidi where I grew up I have found two explanatory myths offered for the absence of kings. One account has it that once upon a time the title of king did exist in the community but that it gradually fell out of use because of the rigorous condition it placed on the aspirant, requiring him to settle the debt owed by every man and every woman in the kingdom.

The second account has it that there was indeed a king, who held the people in such utter contempt that one day when he had a ritual kola-nut to break for them he cracked it between his teeth. So the people, who did not fancy eating kola-nut coated with the king’s saliva, dethroned him and have remained republican ever since.

These are perhaps no more than fragmentary makeshift accounts though not entirely lacking in allegorical interest. There is, for instance, a certain philosophical appropriateness to the point that a man who would be king over his fellows should in return be prepared personally to guarantee their solvency.

Be that as it may, those two interesting fragments of republican propaganda played their part in keeping kings’ noses out of the affairs of Ogidi for as long as memory could go until the community, along with the rest of Nigeria, lost political initiative to the British at the inception of colonial rule. Thereafter a new dynasty of kings rose to power in Ogidi with the connivance of the British administration, thus rendering those mythical explanations of republicanism obsolete. Except perhaps that they may have left a salutary, moderating residue in the psyche of the new rulers and those they ruled.

I shall now, with your indulgence, present two brief parables from pre-colonial Nigeria which are short enough for the present purpose but also complex enough to warrant my classifying them as literature. I chose these two particularly because they stand at the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Once upon a time, all the animals were summoned to a meeting. As they converged on the public square early in the morning one of them, the fowl, was spotted by his neighbours going in the opposite direction. They said to him, “How is it that you are going away from the public square? Did you not hear the town crier’s summons last night?”

“I did hear it,” said the fowl, “and I should certainly have gone to the meeting if a certain personal matter had not cropped up which I must attend to. I am truly sorry, but I hope you will make my sincere apologies to the meeting. Tell them that though absent in body I will be there with you in spirit in all your deliberations. Needless to say that whatever you decide will receive my whole-hearted support.”

The question before the assembled animals was what to do in the face of a new threat posed by man’s frequent slaughtering of animals to placate his gods. After a stormy but surprisingly brief debate it was decided to present to man one of their number as his regular sacrificial animal if he would leave the rest in peace. And it was agreed without a division that the fowl should be offered to man to mediate between him and his gods. And it has been so ever since.

The second story goes like this:

One day a snake was riding his horse coiled up, as was his fashion, in the saddle. As he came down the road he met the toad walking by the roadside.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the toad, “but that’s not the way to ride a horse.”

“Really? Can you show me the right way, then?” asked the snake.

“With pleasure, if you will be good enough to step down a moment.”

The snake slid down the side of his horse and the toad jumped with alacrity into the saddle, sat bolt upright and galloped most elegantly up and down the road. “That’s how to ride a horse,” he said at the end of his excellent demonstration.

“Very good,” said the snake, “very good indeed; you may now come down.”

The toad jumped down and the snake slid up the side of his horse back into the saddle and coiled himself up as before. Then he said to the toad, “Knowing is good, but having is better. What good does fine horsemanship do to a fellow without a horse?” And then he rode away in his accustomed manner.6

On the face of it, those are just two charming animal stories to put a smile on the face or, if we are fortunate and have a generous audience, even a laugh in the throat. But beneath that admittedly important purpose of giving delight there lies a deep and very serious intent. Indeed, what we have before us are political and ideological statements of the utmost consequence revealing more about the societies that made and sustained them, and by which, in the reciprocal rondo of creativity, they were made and sustained, revealing far more than any number of political-science monographs could possibly ever tell us. We could literally spend hours analysing each story and discovering new significances all the time. Right now, however, we can take only a cursory look.

Consider the story o

f the delinquent fowl. Quite clearly it is a warning, a cautionary tale, about the danger to which citizens of small-scale democratic systems may be exposed when they neglect the cardinal duty of active participation in the political process. In such systems a man who neglects to lick his lips, as a certain proverb cautions us, will be asking the harmattan to lick them for him. It did for the fowl with a vengeance!

The second story is, if you will permit a rather predictable cliché, a horse of a different colour altogether. The snake is an aristocrat in a class society in which status and its symbols are not earned but ascribed. The toad is a commoner whose knowledge and expertise garnered through personal effort count for nothing beside the merit which belongs to the snake by some unspecified right such as birth or wealth. No amount of brightness or ability on the part of the toad is going to alter the position ordained for him. The few but potent words left with him by the snake embody a stern, utilitarian view of education which would tie the acquisition of skills to the availability of scope for their practice.

I have chosen those two little examples from Nigeria’s vast and varied treasury of oral literature to show how such stories can combine in a most admirable manner the aesthetic qualities of a successful work of imagination with those homiletic virtues demanded of active definers and custodians of society’s values.

But we must not see the role of literature only in terms of providing latent support for things as they are, for it does also offer the kinetic energy necessary for social transition and change. If we tend to dwell more on stability it is only because society itself does aspire to, and indeed requires, longer periods of rest than of turmoil. But literature is also deeply concerned with change. That little fragment about the king who insulted his subjects by breaking their kola-nut in his mouth is a clear incitement to rebellion. But even more illuminating in this connection because of its subtlety is the story of the snake and the toad which at first sight may appear to uphold privilege but at another level of signification does in fact contain the seeds of revolution, the portents of the dissolution of an incompetent oligarchy. The brilliant makers of that story, by denying sympathetic attractiveness to the snake, are exposing him in the fullness of time to the harsh tenets of a revolutionary justice.

I think I have now set a wide-ranging enough background to attempt an answer to the rhetorical question: What has literature got to do with it?

In the first place, what does “it” stand for? Is it something concrete like increasing the GNP or something metaphysical like the It which is the object of the quest in Gabriel Okara’s novel The Voice?

I should say that my “it” begins with concrete aspirations like economic growth, health for all, education which actually educates, etc., etc., but soon reveals an umbilical link with a metaphysical search for abiding values. In other words, I am saying that development or modernization is not merely, or even primarily, a question of having lots of money to spend or blueprints drawn up by the best experts available; it is in a critical sense a question of the mind and the will. And I am saying that the mind and the will belong first and foremost to the domain of stories. In the beginning was the Word, or the Mind, as an alternative rendering has it. It was the Word or the Mind that began the story of creation.

So it is with the creation of human societies. And what Nigeria is aiming to do is nothing less than the creation of a new place and a new people. And she needs must have the creative energy of stories to initiate and sustain that work.

Our ancestors created their different polities with myths embodying their varying perceptions of reality. Every people everywhere did the same. The Jews had their Old Testament on account of which early Islam honoured them as the people of the Book. The following passage appears in a brilliant essay in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America:

The ideals that Homer portrayed in Achilles, Hector and Ulysses played a large role in the formation of the Greek character. Likewise when the Anglo-Saxons huddled around their hearth fires, stories of heroes like Beowulf helped define them as a people, through articulating their values and defining their goals in relation to the cold, alien world around them.7

In the essay from which I took that passage the authors set out to demonstrate in detail the potentiality of literature to reform the self in a manner analogous to the processes of psychoanalysis: eliciting deep or unconsciously held primary values and then bringing conscious reflection or competing values to bear on them. The authors underscore the interesting point made by Roy Schafer that psychoanalysis itself is an essay into story-telling. People who go through psychoanalysis tell the analyst about themselves and others in the past and present. In making interpretations the competent analyst reorganizes and retells these stories in such a way that the problematic and incoherent self consciously told at the beginning of the analysis is sorted out to the benefit and sanity of the client.