-- CONTINUED FROM PART ONE --
I first asked myself this question: Where were the Igbo when all this was happening? The answer was that they were there but they had no say. But that answer was not satisfactory. We must examine it well to see what we can learn about today and yesterday. The child who has been stung by a bee runs away from the big fly. It is true that the Igbo had no say at the first discussion at their place, but there is a way that the person who has no say will make his face look so that everyone knows immediately that he approves of what is being said.
The Igbo did not stand together and show that they disapproved. Some showed it, some did not. The white people from various places around Igboland wasted no time in using this matter to divide the Igbo: Onitsha, Owerri, Isuama, Bende, Arochukwu, etc. The question we should ask ourselves for today and tomorrow is this: Why was it easy for us to fight among ourselves, backyard squabbles, yet ignore the fight that was in the village square?
The C.M.S. opened Awka College for teacher training at the start of this century. In the year 1919 a man who was an unswerving supporter of Dennis went and asked the people of that college what they thought. According to this man, they took a vote that showed that 19 people supported the Union Bible, while 15 did not support it. This man came from the British and Foreign Bible Society in London. The vote of the Awka people made him very happy. But listen to what this man, whose name was Banfield, said about the discovery he made about the Igbo who did not support the Union Bible:
"You know as well as I do that the native has little stability of his own, and moves and thinks as his superiors do."What do we call it? Scorn!But what I want to point out is the thoughts of the college students who were going to spread the gospel and knowledge in Igboland. What one of them told Banfield was, "It would be good for us to learn to read the Union Bible and then we can be understood wherever we are stationed." This young man was at Awka College, but he didn't know that Awka people were touring all around Igboland without first learning a new language called Union. He didn't know that my mother's father, Iloegbunam, a well-known blacksmith, had traveled to Okigwe, married a woman there, and had children. Did he go and learn Union Igbo before he left on his trip to Awka? Don't blame the Ogidi woman who said that if you keep on reading books, you read yourself into the bag of stupidity!
Let's cut short the Dennis matter here. It is finished. The only thing we can do now is to bite our fingers in regret and say, "It is like a wrestling match, it will change."
There are two or three misunderstandings about the Union Bible. The first is that the Yoruba have a Union Bible that they all read. This is a big misunderstanding. What Bishop Crowther did was to take one dialect that the Yoruba spoke in Oyo to be the Bible language for spreading the gospel. He did not run to Ijebu and Ibadan and Owo and Akure and Ogbomosho and others in order to obtain Union Yoruba. He took a living tongue that was spoken, a tongue that had a home. Whoever wanted to know about it could go to its home and ask.
The second misunderstanding is to think that what Dennis did in Igbo was something languages do to themselves if they are left alone. Dr. Westermann wrote in 1929 that what Dennis did to Igbo was what some small European languages did to themselves on their own in ancient times. The only difference was that what Dennis did "was done by one person within a definite time, and not by slow and natural development." Dr. Westermann had several educational degrees--why then did he tell us that there was no difference between a living tree and a dried up one? Indeed, wisdom and foolishness are neighbors!
Archdeacon T. J. Dennis died on the ocean in the year 1917, as he and his wife were going on leave in the midst of the first German war. As I said earlier, I do not regard him as a bad man. Rather, he was a man strong in his faith. The work he came to do in Igboland was quite clear to him. He wasted no time and he struggled to keep that work as the most important thing. But his continuing disregard for the Igbo language and those who owned it led him to spoil things.
It was not only Dennis who committed this error. Those who committed it were everywhere in great numbers. One man who is world-famous, Albert Schweitzer--philosopher, theologian, musician, medical missionary--was curing the sick as well as spreading the gospel in Gabon while Dennis was at Onitsha and Egbu Owerri. As Schweitzer's work became known publicly, he was given the Nobel Peace Prize because of the way his work uplifted the brotherhood of nations. But all these things did not stop Schweitzer from opening his mouth and saying that the blacks were his brothers, albeit small brothers. You have seen the error of disregard that we have spoken of. Naaman was a commander of the army of the king of Syria and was well regarded, in view of the fact that it was by his hand that Yahweh gave victory to Syria. He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper (2 Kings 5:1). The attitudes of disregard on the part of those who were bringing the gospel were like marks of leprosy on the bodies of God's messengers. He did this, that and the other, but he came with disregard.
The story of Dennis and the Union Bible has been a great regret to me in several ways. But the greatest one of all is how the opportunity the Igbo Bible had to be the headwater of Igbo literature was thrown away. The opportunity was thrown away so Dennis could have a chance to experiment in someone else's language. The worst thing was that after finishing the experiment, he stopped those who were printing the Bible from bringing out the first Bible again: that is, he did not give the Igbo a chance to say whether they preferred the first one or the new one. Instead, what was demonstrated to the Igbo was that the foreigner had the knife and also had the yam.
This is how the Niger Mission, a hundred years ago, put Igbo writing in the situation where it is today. Archdeacon Dennis marked the trail that we are following, which is that one man can stay in his own place, smell his hand, and dictate how the Igbo will be speaking or writing their own language. If he wants to be gracious, he calls a meeting of a few people and they bring out various new words. If someone hears that experts were called and asks what it was about, he is told that apparently he did not come to the meeting that was held in March!
Please forgive me. I don't want to wrong anyone. What we are dealing with today is something that happened to us long ago. There is no one to blame.
What gives the most trouble is the teaching of Igbo children in the schools. We have come out of Union Igbo into Central, come out of that and entered Standard Igbo. But what happened then is still happening. Why? Because of Dennis. It is the law of Dennis that fills our heads. The law of Dennis is that everyone must speak or write the same Igbo dialect, come hell or high water!
The reason this matter is so difficult is that those who need instruction are not the children, but the teachers themselves. You will remember the teachers being trained at Awka in the year 1919 who said that Union Igbo would benefit them when they reached their stations. I don't know if it was only I who heard the voice of the District Commissioner in the mouths of these teachers. The only thing they thought about was something that would make their work easy.
One thing I want us to hear and understand well is that one person alone, no matter how important he is, can not enact laws about language. One hundred people can not give orders about language, even if their heads are in the clouds. Language goes along its own path. Sometimes it is very clear to us; sometimes it confuses us. If one studies language too avidly, it can be lost to him completely.
What is happening in schools these days is taking away from children some of the Igbo they spoke in their mothers' and fathers' houses. This is a very bad thing for which there is no precedent; a bad thing to say the least. What kind of person are you if you tell a person that he should not continue to use the language he was born with, that he should get rid of it, and start to speak the one that Dennis's followers brought out? The child who writes "fa" is told to cross it out and write "ha."
It seems to me that we have completely opened the bag of foolishness. But today is still soon enough. Even though a lot of time has escaped us, let us put an end to it and stop wasting another hundred years. Because when the old woman falls down twice, you count the things she is carrying in her basket. If you shoot once and strike a tree trunk, shoot a second time and strike a tree trunk, was that arrow carved specially for the tree trunk?
Those who teach Igbo should meet together and consult about how they will change the teaching of Igbo language so it will be a thing of joy, and not a heavy burden. When our children were small, I remember how their faces shone like the sun if I told them to come so I could tell them some folktales. Those who teach Igbo should be making efforts to bring out to the faces of children this sunshine that is in their hearts. What Dennis and his followers brought the Igbo was clouds that obscured the face of the sun like darkness.
The language that the child comes out into the world and hears is an ancient language, the way an elder's name was the name of the day he was born. The European calls it "mother tongue" - olu nne. To take a child's mother tongue away from him is like taking his mother's breast away from him, pulling his mouth from the breast.
Some of those who believe that everyone should be made to speak and write Standard Igbo have said that what caused Chinua Achebe to go against Standard Igbo was that they did not base it on the Ogidi dialect. Let me reply to them before all the Igbo here today. I do not want them to take it. Do you understand what I am saying? I say that I do not want them to take it! Do you know who I mean by "them"? It is the learned people, the followers of Dennis, those who think that language is "engineering." Language is a gift of God. I do not want to take his own from anyone; I do not want anyone to take mine from me. Perhaps some are thinking that Chinua Achebe does not regard Igbo the way he regards Ogidi. This is a lie, lie, lie!
One who has no regard for Igbo is someone who takes a matchet and chops up all of its branches. I love both Igbo and Ogidi.
My prayer is that we train a mass of workers who will use our language and place on people's faces the morning sunshine that God placed in their hearts, by writing various books of wisdom and discoveries, and books of plays, and stories of the land and folktales, funeral songs or poems, both old and new.
Those who want all of us to speak the same dialect are saying that there is no time to wait until the Igbo language on its own speaks what will be Standard Igbo. But they forget that it was in wanting a Standard Igbo that Dennis gave us Union Igbo, which gave birth to Central Igbo, which gave birth to Standard Igbo. Making changes now does not help. It is like the bachelor who wakes up one day and says that the search for a wife should begin one of these days--does he think that a woman is a cloth that you hang up? Yesterday has gone, let us take the short time remaining today and encourage ourselves to go forward before dawn arrives.
What can I tell you about the Igbo situation in Nigeria that you do not know better than I? Let me start with the edge in licking hot soup. Every place and every town has something it is known for, that is what others know it for. But most important is what people know themselves for.
If one could go back in history and ask the white people who trafficked in African slaves what they thought about the Igbo, they would tell you to go away, and they would agree that an Igbo would rather fall into the river than become a slave. That means that they were not profitable at all. They would tell you that there was a time that people who came in ships and were brought overland to South Carolina, turned
back--all of them, men, women, children and old people--turned back, as many as could do so, entered the ocean and wasted the money that had been used to buy them. The name given to the place where this calamity occurred is Ibo Landing, even until today. There is an African American spiritual called "Walking in the Water," which is still sung because of this happening of long ago.If you leave Ibo Landing and go back a bit farther in history and stop at two hundred years ago, you will find a man called Ekweano, from Iseke in Olu Division (as I myself discovered), captured during wartime at eleven years of age, taken and sold in the West Indies, in America, both on land and sea, until he became a young man. He struggled as Igbo people do and taught himself to read, worked for money
to free himself from slavery, then wrote a famous book in the year 1789 and called it "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olauda Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself."Ekweano was the first Igbo who wrote a book to tell the world that he did not come out of a jungle, that he was a well-born person whom the slave market had dragged through the mud. Every Igbo person should read Ekweano's book. Thanks to the publishers, anyone can buy it today. This book is a gold mine of learning for the Igbo and the Europeans and all human beings. Many things that Ekweano wrote will touch the hearts of all, but none surpasses the joy he felt when he freed himself from slavery and leaped up, crying, "I am my own master!" two hundred years before Martin Luther King, Jr. cried, "Free at last!"
The reason I talk like this is that some stories I heard concerning what is happening in Igboland showed me that some of our countrymen do not know, or have forgotten, what Igbo people are known for. I then thought that I should tell you or remind you. The Igbo do not want someone they must call nnamukwu or "master." The Igbo do not want someone who will make them slaves, someone who will use them as boy-boy. If the Igbo finds himself in the position of slave or boy-boy, he will be working and striving to come out of it and be free. When did we learn that a man who lived in his own home should leave his place and go to Abuja to chant that a chief should live forever?
Do you know why the Igbo have no kings? It is not that the Igbo don't know what a king is. Remember that the Igbo and the Bini are neighbors, and references to the Oba of Benin filled the folktales of the Igbo. Remember that Igalla and Igbo were neighbors on the other side.
The fact that the Igbo have no kings does not mean that an Igbo does not want to be a king. Any Igbo you see wants to be a king; but he does not want someone else to become a king while he himself lives under that person. So the Igbo says, "Fine, everyone should go home and reign as king in his own compound." Anthropologists did not come to the land of the Igbo to learn about them, because the Igbo knew what those people knew. But there was one American who went to Onitsha forty years ago to learn about their customs. He entitled the book he wrote about his discoveries "The King in Every Man."There is nothing that has been said about the Igbo that is more accurate than this. When did we start to think that there was no Igbo good enough to govern Nigeria, that it was only foreigners who should have kings?
When did the Igbo discover that what was good for Nigeria was dictatorship, government by heartless people? A friend of mine from home and I were conversing about it not long ago, at my house in America. What my friend said was that democracy was not for us, that what we needed was 'a strong man" like Abacha, one whom the white people would fear. I told him to please stop! This time he became specific. He told me that he did not understand what I was saying. It was I who wrote Things Fall Apart. Was not Okonkwo "a strong man," was he not the type of person the Igbo selected to rule them?
This should have come as a surprise to me, yet it did not, because it was not the first time I had seen someone misunderstand Things Fall Apart. Several years ago a professor from Germany came to see me. The question he asked me was not really a question; rather he was telling me how things stood. He asked me if Okonkwo was representative of the Igbo people.
I then told him that he was, but he was not--this confounded the man; all he could do was scold me. I laughed to myself because I understood the problem I had given this man; the man had already written his thesis on Okonkwo as a representative of the Igbo, had come to get confirmation, and I had thrown sand iinto his gari [grated cassava].
Igbo thought is not drawn from the top of the water; it is very deep. It is not a dance that you do after gathering snuff in the hand. My friend who was an Igbo came to my house and did not understand Okonkwo's situation, a scholar from Germany came and did not understand it. But above all, Okonkwo himself did not understand it!
Okonkwo was a strong, diligent man, who tried hard, spoke the truth, amassed wealth, took titles. All of those were things the Igbo said should be done. It was not only that people spoke to him this way, they spoke to him loudly. Okonkwo heard, then acted. But there is another thing the Igbo whispers in our ears. He says that if something stands, something else stands against it; if we take up guns and
knives, we should not criticize the flute and the gong and the calabash in the women's meeting, and those in Okonkwo's deepest thoughts did not hear this message that was sent in a small voice. Umuofia then did not support him on the day he broke his leg and fell into the fire.The Igbo teach that a man should not go home by the same path that another man takes. This is a good teaching. But if one misunderstands this teaching, he might think that all people are equally endowed in the various gifts of God. The town that thinks like this will not progress.
One who says that democracy is not good for the Igbo does not understand the Igbo nor does he understand democracy. The Igbo govern themselves town by town. If there is something important for the town to discuss the gong is sounded, all the men who are old enough to speak go and arrange themselves at the town square; the matter is discussed in public. The Igbo do not send a "representative"--someone who will speak out for them. It is obvious that this thing the Igbo were doing since ancient times is established as the first principle of democracy, or the father of democracy.
We cannot say that we should turn back and start to follow the ancient ways, because we are not the only ones who own our land. But one should not use this to argue that democracy is beyond us or that it is too much for us. Rather, what we should be considering, and considering strongly, is how we will learn to select the messengers who will be going to the various houses of assembly to represent us ably when they get there. When the debates over independence started in Nigeria, one young man with fire in his heart went to ?ka to seek votes to enter the "House of Assembly." At that time, that type of political oratory was not familiar to many people. The young man traveled around and spread his messages of war and fighting about how to chase away the white people immediately, take their positions and distribute them to our children. One elderly man then asked him this question: In designating the one you all will send, will mad people be included, or those who are sane?
What is important for us today is government by those who are sane. We don't want government by fools. It is true that suffering and hunger are in our towns today. But it is in times like this that a town falls into the traps of fools. That means that we shuld be very careful in choosing those we will send out to become our eyes and ears. A fool will not be our eyes and ears, but he will be our stomach, eating both his own share and ours. The writer Chinweizu used as an example the type of person on whom is placed a great masquerade who is controlled by a rope from behind, then comes out into the path and chases away the young men who hold it; then there is fear!
When I was very young there was a well-known strong man in our town. He grew to adulthood, was good-looking, could speak well, but he practiced thievery. However, he did not do it at home; he used to travel out. What he did was, in midday when everyone had gone to their farms, he entered our neighboring towns, carried away goats and went home. As he kept on doing this, the people of this town then got ready for him. When he came again and stole, as he was carrying off his loot, eight young men came out, surrounded him, took a six-inch nail, drove it into his head, and left him; he ran for his life toward home, and collapsed on the ground.
The man's people went and picked him up, arranged him properly, sat him down the way it was done at that time, took a red cap and put it on his head, and told the townspeople that he died a natural death. They then went to the house of bereavement, carried the corpse around, when the nail that was in the man's brain, as if he were sitting here and doing whatever, suddenly exploded and threw the red hat into the yard. Those who had come to the house of mourning, and the one who had carried the corpse around, forgave the man.
This is not a good story, but I tell it so that we may remember that foolishness is not new. Also, that humans are responsible for their own foolishness; that brothers who cover up their children's bad deeds are wasting their time, because you do not use the palm of the hand to cover up diarrhea.
The fools in our politics are those people in their towns who are responsible for speaking to their children, before something bad suddenly breaks out, and really sends everyone scurrying. I am not saying that nothing is going well in Igboland. There are many things that one can say are going well. The way Dr. Alex Ekwueme accepted the way things went in the presidential election shows the behavior of a good citizen. The politics of "all or nothing" is what is seen in a town that is uneducated, a hungry town, a town of people who do not know what to say.
Let us start by abandoning "all or nothing" and work together to lift up Igboland, so that it may shine like gold in the rising sun.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several things that I said about the work of T. J. Dennis in Onitsha came from a new book by John Goodchild which is being published, which he calls Dennis and the Ibo Bible. I thank him for this help.
Members of the Odenigbo arrangements committee and leader of the elders P. A. Ezikeojiaku, Ph.D., translated this essay into standard Igbo.
-- back to Achebe index page -- back to Igbo language index page --