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Chinua Achebe is on
my mind. I must congratulate the brave warrior for scaling his 80th
year on this rugged earth. This card-carrying member of his ardent cult
of followers wishes him many more years of happiness, peace and
prosperity.

My father,
Papalolo, and I would not be where we are today without Achebe’s
fearless and nurturing leadership. More on that later, but there was a
time when people actually read books in Nigeria. Today, Nigeria is a
nation of mostly uncritical people reading, swearing and living by
“holy” books that were crafted by scheming, feuding brothers in ancient
times, siblings who could not stand the notion of living together in
peace.

Today in Nigeria,
the bible has become a weapon of mass destruction. Not only is it
destroying the lives and aspirations of the truly dispossessed, it is
destroying Nigerian culture, our ways of life as it should be. And
those that call themselves “pastors” are at the heart of this rampage,
presiding over this hell on earth that serves to create brick by brick
their own commercial heaven. I am not a Christian, but I sincerely hope
that there really is a mean unforgiving God and a hot hell and that all
our thieving pastors have seats reserved for them on the high table of
hell.

My favourite book
of all times is Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’. It is easily my security
blanket. Whenever I am stressed, I go to it like my bible and read a
passage; it never fails to console me. Until Facebook came along and my
parents Papalolo and Mamalolo befriended me, exile was hell and there
was a passage in ‘Things Fall Apart’ where Okonkwo was being consoled
in the wintry depths of his exile by his maternal uncle. That passage
is my favourite; I used to go to it many times a year until Facebook
came along. My father Papalolo is also an Achebe groupie. My dad did
not have a formal secondary school education, but a scrappy soul, he
educated himself. He got disillusioned about the experiment called
Nigeria very early in his life and the dark humour in his reading
choices reflected his disenchantment. A dashing warrior who spent a
career prepared to die for Nigeria, he now relies on the generosity of
his children to make it to the next day. The country that he fought
for, the leaders that he fought for, have long forgotten about him and
fellow retirees. Our leaders fight over loot, national resources, that
if shared equally among all of us, would make each Nigerian as rich as
Saudi Arabian oil sheikhs. There is no God.

My father loved
books and newspapers. He loved detective stories and so he subscribed
to magazines like ‘True Detective’. He was also a romantic and he made
sure to subscribe to romance magazines. I was addicted to pictorial
magazines like ‘Sadness and Joy’, ‘Boom’ and the antics of the
detective Lance Spearman and “bad man” Rabon Zollo.

I remember once
breaking down in tears when, as punishment, my dad would not buy me the
latest copy of ‘Boom’. The magazine featured a good looking warrior and
his elephant who always managed to vanquish his enemies. Some of the
enemies were man-eating plants! My father loved Agatha Christie’s
stories. I also distinctly remember the Inspector West series by John
Creasey. Inspector Roger West was a dashing young Scotland Yard
detective and several volumes of his exploits were housed in my
father’s cupboard. My father had a cupboard of books and as a young boy
I thought it was a thing of magic; no matter how many times I visited
that cupboard there was always a book I had never read. I travelled to
many worlds on the wings of my father’s cupboard – India, England,
America and faraway places that housed little impish boys that loved to
dream.

Achebe’s books spoke to my father because Achebe was of his
generation and he could identify with the issues that the books
wrestled with. My dad would always tell me that the books ‘A Man of the
People’ and ‘No Longer at Ease’ were fabrics torn from Nigeria. They
featured the uncritical acceptance of Western culture, what my Facebook
friend, Binyavanga Wainana the brilliant writer of Kenyan extraction,
once contemptuously called mimicry on his Facebook status. In the
books, Nigerian intellectuals, newly arrived from England would acquire
cars, fake accents and at dinner parties the favourite greeting was:
“How is the car behaving?” My dad loved that phrase. On certain days,
with a glass of Star lager beer in his hand, the keys of his motorcycle
twirling around his finger, and that twinkle in his impish eyes, he
would ask the mirror in our parlour: “How is the car behaving?” and we
would both break into long peals of laughter. Here is to you, Professor
Achebe for bonding my father and me with the glue of your powerful
words. You sir, are a man of the people.