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Slavery is an
emotive issue – and necessarily so too. Although it has been part of
every society since time immemorial, its late-modern manifestations
typified by the mass enslavement of millions of Africans on the
plantations of the Americas (the African Holocaust) is generally
regarded as the worst form of this strain of man’s inhumanity to his
fellow human.

Naturally,
discussions about slavery and its continued impact have been localised
more in the Americas than in Africa – after all, majority of the
descendants of this cruel dislocations are still located in these
climes. Plus, Africans had been too occupied with their fight for
freedom from colonialism and entrenching the benefits of their
independence to pay too much attention to this.

In the late 80s,
the late Moshood Abiola led a spirited campaign to redefine the terms
of slavery. This twisted the narrative from a search for meanings
behind the slave trade to one of confronting the beneficiaries of the
system. Reparation was top of the agenda – and it was being vigorously
pursued, to the discomfiture of some large corporations in the West,
especially in the United States. Of course there was always the tension
within the movement of who should benefit from this reparation if it
were ever to become a reality – the descendants of slaves still reeling
from its after-effects in the Americas or their kiths on the mother
continent who are, in several instances, materially worse off than they
are?

The fightback

Then the fightback
started. Part of the conspiracy theories surrounding Abiola’s inability
to assume the presidency he clearly won in 1993 was that some Western
agencies were not comfortable with a promoter of reparations assuming
the leadership of the world’s most population black nation. That is
probably fantastical.

But there is no
doubt that the slant of slavery scholarships took a sudden outwards
look in most campuses – with the US once again leading the charge.
Suddenly, attention is beamed on the roles played by the ‘others’ in
this sorry episode in the evolution of human society. Up for censure
were the African chiefs and their aides who sold away their people;
African kingdoms which were themselves slave keeping societies; and the
Arab slavers who equally took away large numbers of Africans to the
Arab peninsula and beyond.

No one could fault
the need for this. But it is apparent that the comparisons are not
quite the same. Take the age-long slavery customs in African societies.
This is little different from practices in other pre-modern societies
across the world and does not possess the calculated malevolency of the
modern one. In the Yoruba society, for instance, a number of received
idioms and proverbs would show that the practice was regulated to avoid
undue harshness to slaves. The system was also fluid, as a slave could
not only regain his/her freedom, but actually could become a leader of
the community.

It is not easy to
shrug off the complicity of African chiefs in the Western-run slavery
that ran from around the 15th century. Although some of them might be
little better than simple minds easily controlled to, at first get rid
of their enemies and criminals in their society for a little stash of
trashy materials, others were willing accomplices who actively sought
out people to sell – waging ruinous wars against their neighbours and
raiding their own subjects to feed the maw of the waiting, ever -hungry
ships. Some of them, such as the Jaja of Opobo, even fought western
government seeking to put a stop to the practice. Perhaps the best that
could be said to assuage this collective guilt is that the forces
acting upon the chiefs makes them little better than marionettes being
controlled by forces they neither understood nor could resist. For,
after all some chiefs less amenable to the trade were also rounded up
and added to the human cargo of the raiders.

Slavers from Arabia

The third leg of
these ‘others’ is the slavers from Arabia. These have received a lot of
attention lately from American scholars and some major African
intellectuals – including Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, Chinweizu and Naiwu
Osahon.

Mekuria Bulcha
estimates that over 17 million Africans were sold to the Middle East
and Asia between the sixth and twentieth centuries. This would appear
to be even more than the estimated 13 million people transported to the
Americas in a massive dislocation dating from the 1400s. Little wonder
the author also stated that the difference between slavery perpetrated
by the West and those of the Arabs (now usually referred to as ‘Islamic
slavery’), is largely figurative.

Ronald Segal wrote
in Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Diaspora, that the ‘islamic’ slave
trade began eight centuries before the Atlantic trade. He kindly
explained that this was motivated more by the need for domestic help –
including sex – and military service.

It quickly becomes
apparent that there is more to this than detached scholarship. For
instance, it beggars belief that more Africans were sold into Arabia
than those taken to the West, the timeframe notwithstanding. Two easy
factors would appear to support this. Take the mode of transportation
and the needs which the trade in slaves is organised to meet.

Logistics and economics

From around 1619
when a Dutch-run ship berthed at the Virginia colony at Jamestown with
20 enslaved Africans to 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S.
Constitution officially ended slavery in the US – a period of nearly
240 years – thousands of ships were deployed to move people to the new
world from Africa. Although Arab slavers also targeted ocean bounded
East Africa, they hardly possessed the technology or the means to move
humans on any particularly large scale. Even the more established trade
with Africa – which was in goods and minerals – was mostly carried out
on the back of camels across the forbidden wastes of the Sahara.
Dealing with the logistics of moving large numbers of people and
provisioning for their needs would seem to be beyond the ken of even
the most determined slaver, unless the profit makes this unavoidable.

This is not so. As
some of the promoters of the myth of ‘Islamic slavery’ themselves
agreed, slaves were not the engine behind Arab economies. Dry and
mostly uncultivable, Arab societies lack the equivalent of huge sugar
plantations where American slaves are forced to toil to the lash of a
whip. It is difficult to understand how the then equally backward Arab
society could digest the influx of millions of needy slaves.

Castrated development

Which also raises
the question: where are the people? The presence of millions of
Africans in the Americas is a lasting legacy of the Atlantic slave
trade. It is hard to find such large traces in Arabia. Scholars of
‘Islamic’ slavery have a ready answer: the men were castrated and the
women used as sex-chattels, such that over generations the offspring of
slaves – descended largely from the women – merged into general Arab
society. That must have involved a lot of castrations. Or it might be a
pointer to a truth that is difficult to accept for people trying to
shift the blame or spread the guilt – the level of slavery in Arabia is
too miniscule to shift attention from the industrial scale enslavement
perpetrated in the West. Not only are there no ghettos or prisons
holding African people in Arab society, there is no institutional
hindrance to the aspirations of descendants of slaves.

Of course there
are racist Arabs, such as Hanns Vischer who believed African “black”
skin made them a slave-race. But books such as ‘Tanwir al-Gabbash fi
fasl al al-Sudan wa al-Habash’ by Ibn al-Jahiz, and ‘Black and their
Superiority over Whites’ by Ibn al-Marzuban also affirmed the respect
that blacks enjoy in Arab society.

Scholars of
slavery should therefore stop chasing the red-herrings and concentrate
attention on the defining face of slavery in the modern area. That is
to be found mostly in the Americas.

‘The International
Colloquium on Slavery, Slave Trade and Their Consequences’ holds at the
Royal Park Hotel, Iloko-Ijesa, Osun State from August 23 to 26.

Two movies,
‘Holding Hope’ and ‘Bursting Out’ were premiered on August 8 at the
Silverbird Cinemas, Victoria Island. The premieres recorded a large
attendance of Nollywood actors, actresses and film makers, who came out
to support the stars and producers of the movies.

‘Bursting Out’,
starring Genevieve Nnaji and Ghanaian actor Majid Michael, was produced
by Emem Isong and directed by Desmond Elliot and Daniel Ademinokan.
Nnaji, caught for a brief interview on the red-carpet, gave NEXT a hint
of what to expect from ‘Bursting Out’. “It is a lovely story with
romance and suspense, a beautiful love story. You will see me in the
same role I have often played – a woman looking for love.”

Uche Jombo
expressed similar sentiments for ‘Holding Hope’, which she jointly
produced with Isong and Elliot. “If I could cut my hair for one scene,
then that should tell you how powerful the story is. Hope (the
character she plays) has an inner strength that I admire. The movie is
about faith, hope and about how we cannot change the things we cannot
change.”

All Isong would
say was: “‘Bursting Out’ is a fun kind of movie, while ‘Holding Hope’
is an intense [film] about cancer. Just come in and watch, I’m sure you
will have a good time.”

Deja vu

However, the
movies, sadly, proved to be not much better than the mean ‘Iweka Road’
offerings. We have all seen ‘Bursting Out’ before; we have seen it in
every story where rich girl meets poor boy and has problems getting
convinced that his ghetto background is good enough for her. We saw it
more recently in ‘Silent Scandals’, by producer Vivian Ejike, which
also stars Nnaji and Majid together.

Much as one may
have tried to find something to recommend about the movie, one would be
hard pressed to find any. I’ll settle instead for the easy camaraderie
that was achieved between Zara (Nnaji), Ini (Omoni Oboli) and Tina (Nse
Nkpe Etim). It is in scenes with the three of them that one derives
some form of entertainment, as they satirise the Nigerian aso-ebi
practice, “Burgundy dresses, Prada bags, Jimmy Choos, Gold gele”; and
disparage Zara’s love interest Tyrone, a mail dispatcher, with lines
such as: “This is so cute, you perched behind him (on his motorcycle)
riding away to a honeymoon”, “if we knew he was buying, we could have
gotten a cheaper restaurant so that at least he could buy water.”

My complaints are
however many: the party scene was lacklustre, the audience knows that
is not what a classy Nigerian party looks like; the big screen was not
friendly to the movie, as some of the motion was blurry. As for the
sets – come on, that office of Zara’s was so domestic it could have
been a tabby cat; That ex-girlfriend did act quite well, but was she
relevant to the plot? And if so, why was Tyrone suddenly rid of her?
Finally, one might need someone to explain those black and white scenes
as they obviously were not flashbacks.

Excruciating

Ending with
Tyrone, striking it rich by getting admitted to a foreign football
club; and his proposing to Zara after scoring a goal in a match at a
Nigerian stadium, ‘Bursting Out’ could have been better. While,
however, ‘Bursting Out’ was un-original and uninspiring, ‘Holding Hope’
with its cancer theme was quite frankly excruciating (and not just for
its terminal cancer sufferers). By the time the movie was halfway, the
cinema hall had been cleared of half of the viewers who had struggled
to get in.

Holding Hope tells
the story of Olumide (Desmond Elliot), a rich irresponsible
spendthrift, who though set to inherit a thriving business from his
mother, does not possess the acumen to keep it so. His mother
recognising his limitations, brings Hope (a lady we guess she met
through her cancer support society) forward to manage the financial
affairs of the company. The mother does not hide her hopes that Olumide
and Hope will end up together. And she gets her wish after she declares
that she is dying of cancer.

We think Hope and
Olumide might sail to blissful matrimony or that in the course of the
movie, we will find that the marriage is a sham; but the movie denies
us such meaningful conclusions. It exasperates us instead with several
contradictions: Olumide’s girlfriend (Nadia Buari) apparently thinking
he married Hope to secure his inheritance, approaches him after his
mother’s burial, only to be told that he’s in love with his wife – a
wife whom he begins to mistreat immediately after his mother’s will
requires that there be no divorce between them.

So much does
Olumide abuse Hope that we see her as an epitome of the saint
stereotype. Emem herself had at a recent film forum described a
‘Nollywood saint’ as: a person who is continually maltreated by a
boyfriend or a husband but who fails to take any constructive action
regarding the problem. Hope bears for a full hour the many injustices
her husband deems to throw at her – verbal, physical and emotional; and
then moans tearfully, “I heard you, you said you loved me; you said the
sun and the moon slept at my feet”.

After a number of
scenes the audience begins to have a hard time making sense of the
movie – In one scene Hope is chocking on her own blood, in the next she
is drowning in a pool then is quickly rescued by her husband, who
incidentally, is again suddenly in love with her. Finally, one day she
declares, “I am dying, I have leukemia, by which time the audience
thinks: come on, not everyone involved in supporting cancer research
falls ill with the disease!

Perhaps the only
redeeming factor of the movie is that we are offered no religious
placebos, a road often easily taken in other Nigerian films. The
delivery of the actors can also not be faulted, especially Buari’s.

However, the sequence of scenes need to be re-examined before the
movie makes a cinema run. The length also is unnecessary, and the pace
too slow – especially after Hope’s diagnosis. Conclusion: A passable
home video (for those who enjoy a healthy dose of human misery); but
certainly not one worthy of the big screen.

Iya Peju had a very
good drummer. His name was Ayonsola. It was his music that had helped
me to reach a deep participation in the ritual. Ayonsola had realised
this, and he had come to my house to thank me. A strong tie was quickly
established between the two of us: I felt helped by his music, and he
felt stimulated and protected by me. He started to send his children to
my house: this is a special way of communicating within the Yoruba
culture. The child comes in and says: “My dad wants to know if I can
come and play with you today”. I am always grateful when people send me
their children, even for a few hours. I became very attached to one of
his daughters, a 9-year-old little girl. People used to say she looked
like me, and I felt she was similar to me in her personality. She could
dance incredibly well, with a perfection of movements that was almost
frightening, and she was incredibly sensitive.

Ayonsola accepted
to come and play for our group. I was very strict with him, I asked him
not to allow anything or anybody to interrupt him once he had started.
My relationship with Ayonsola became very intense. We felt at first
that this was good for both of us. His music helped me to carry on the
rituals and to lead the group; my intensity helped him to reach a deep
level of concentration.

My divorce from
Ulli was by now official and I decided to get married to Ayonsola
according to the local custom. It looked like the most natural thing to
do. I was not discouraged by polygamy: I was aware that in a good
traditional Yoruba marriage polygamy meant independence and respect,
without jealousy and without possessiveness. Ayonsola had only one
wife, she was the mother of the 9-year-old girl who used to come and
play and dance with me. Jealousy was not an issue: we spent many
afternoons together, myself and his wife, making batiks and cooking and
talking about everything.

Ayonsola turned out
to be not a good traditional husband. I didn’t know that two previous
wives had already left him, which is very unusual in Yoruba culture.
Ayonsola’s need to dominate me turned out to be very deep and
destructive. Our relationship became a drama, actually a tragedy. What
was happening? The tension between the two of us was something more
complex and more destructive than jealously between the wives. He was
an incredibly intense musician, he would overwhelm me with power. I
needed him during the rituals. He needed me when he was playing, but he
felt controlled. We were so dependent on each other that we started to
feel resentful and enraged. He wanted to be stronger than me. Within a
short time our life became a struggle.

Maybe because of
his need to receive inspiration from another source, Ayonsola started
to smoke marijuana and to drink gin. He became more and more devious
and violent. He started to ask me to use some of his “magic mixtures”.
That time was past for me: now I knew that my strength consisted in not
using any magic mixture at all. It was from time of my solitary walks
in the woods in Igbajo, when I abandoned my scared chain in shrine, and
I saw the clear sky behind the trees. I felt had received a clear
message about what was good for me, and I always respected it. I was
resisting Ayonsola’s attempt to push me into drugs, drinks and magic,
but he was violent, and I was afraid.

Ayonsola knows
which is the most powerful, subtle, destructive tool he can use: to
spoil what is sacred for me. One day he takes the drum that we use in
our ritual, and says that he is going to sell it. For me this is
unbearable, I felt a flashing rage, and I throw myself on the drum. He
pulls it towards him and I pull it towards myself, then I fall on the
floor, still clinging to the drum. Ayonsola leaves laughing, I lie on
the floor in the house for a long time, and for a long time I can still
hear his laughter. I loose consciousness. When I wake up, I am not sure
I am still alive. After some time, I realise I am, but I am also sure
that something has been killed inside me.

I ask for the
divorce according to the local custom. This time I am really alone. But
there is in my nature a need for solitude, which in some way is for me
also a need for freedom. I have felt like this every time the tie with
a man was becoming too close. I now understand this about myself: I
have to live alone.

Excerpt published in commemoration of the 2010 Osun Osogbo Festival
(August 27). Taken from the book,‘Susanne Wenger: artist and priestess’
by Paola Caboara Luzzatto (Firenze Atheneum, 2009). Used with
permission.

After all those
attentive early childhood rituals – the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora
the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds – who
wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally
time to set off for school?

Suzanne Collier,
for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten
this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a
“transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active
child, Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of
classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian
hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest,
she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the
best.” Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new.
“Redshirting” of kindergartners – the term comes from the practice of
postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games –
became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of
waning.

In 2008, the most
recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children
were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand
tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising
even by the standards of a decade ago.

Blame it on No
Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third
grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the
new first grade.” What once seemed like an aberration – something that
sparked fierce dinner party debates – has come to seem like the norm.
But that doesn’t make it any easier for parents.

“We agonized over
it all year,” said Rachel Tayse Baillieul, a food educator in Columbus,
Ohio, where the cutoff date is Oct. 1. Children whose birthdates fall
later must wait until the next year to start school. But her daughter,
Lillian, 4, was born five days before, on September 25, which would
make her one of the youngest in the class.

With the wide age
spans in kindergarten classrooms, each new generation of preschool
parents must grapple with where exactly to slot their children. Wiggly,
easily distracted and less mature boys are more likely to be held back
than girls, but delayed enrollment is now common for both sexes.

“Technically,
Lillian could go to kindergarten,” Tayse Baillieul said. Moving her up
from part-time preschool would allow Tayse Baillieul to return to work
and earn income. But Lillian’s preschool teachers counseled her to hold
Lillian back. “They said staying in preschool a year longer will
probably never hurt and will probably always help, especially with
social and emotional development.” Regardless, a classroom with an
18-month age spread will create social disparities. “Someone has to be
the youngest in class,” pointed out Susan Messina, a 46-year-old mother
in Washington. “No matter how you slice it.” When Clare, now 9, entered
kindergarten at 4, Messina was aware of widespread redshirting.

“I thought, I’m not
breaking the rules, I’m not pushing her ahead, we’re doing exactly what
we’re supposed to do,” she said. “Then it dawned on me that in this day
and age, there’s a move to keep your brilliant angel in preschool
longer so they could be smarter and taller for the basketball team. But
my daughter doesn’t need a leg up. She’s fine.” Still, it bothers her
that children in the same class are as much as a year and a half older
than Clare. “She has friends who are 11 who are going to get their
periods this year, and she’s still playing with American Girl dolls.”
Another mother complained that her 4-year-old became hooked on Hannah
Montana by her aspiring-tween classmates. A 6-year-old wielding a light
saber can be awfully intimidating to a boy who still sleeps with his
teddy.

At the other tip of
the age span, parents who promote children to kindergarten before 5 are
often seen as pushy, “even ogre-ish,” Messina said. But suppose your
child is already reading at 4? Do you hold her back where she may be
bored to tears in preschool or send her into a classroom of hulking
6-year-old boys? In 1970, 14.4 percent of kindergartners started at age
4. That figure has dropped to less than 10 percent.

The self-esteem
movement has inspired parents to care as much about emotional
well-being as academic achievement, and with fragile self-images still
in the making, the worst fear for parents is setting up their children
for failure. One Connecticut mother in Fairfield County sent her
October-born son to kindergarten at 4, despite “the informal rule of
thumb that everyone holds back their September to December boys.”
Kindergarten seemed to go well, but when her son entered first grade,
she said,

“I got hit over the
head. They told me he was way behind.” She watched in horror as her
son’s self-confidence tanked. “He was spinning his wheels just to keep
up,” she recalled. “He even got pulled out of class for poor
handwriting.” At the end of a miserable second-grade year, she withdrew
him to repeat the grade at a private school. “It’s been a long and
difficult journey,” she said. “I totally regret starting him on
kindergarten at 4.” Many parents feel compelled to redshirt by what
they see as unreasonable academic demands for 4- and 5-year-olds. But
keeping children in preschool, according to both academic research and
parental experience, doesn’t necessarily offer every advantage.
Jennifer Harrison, a mother of two from Folsom, Calif., held her
October-born son, Elliott, back so he “wouldn’t get labeled as out of
control.” Overall, she said, it was the right decision. “But his math
skills are far above those of his classmates.” How to attend to a
child’s myriad needs, and which should be the priority? “There don’t
seem to be any rules,” said Rebecca Meekma, a mother of two from Laguna
Beach, Calif. “People are saying, ‘I want him to be big in high school
for sports!’ What is that? You can’t know who they’ll be in high
school.” And what about children who aren’t Leo the Late Bloomer? “I
have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a
year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They
say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that
right?

Is it fair?”
Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will
be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be
bored in class and then the bar will be set higher,

and the kids who
are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen
in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving
the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel
inferior.” Not all parents can choose when their children begin
kindergarten. “Though redshirting is common in the suburbs, in
Manhattan, it’s the schools – not parents – who decide,” said Emily
Glickman, whose company, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, advises
parents on kindergarten admissions. At New York City private schools,
the cutoff date is Sept. 1; in practice, summer babies, particularly
boys, generally enter kindergarten at age 6. “It’s a ramped-up world,”
Glickman said. “And the easiest way for schools to assure that their
kids do better is for them to be older and more mature.” Meanwhile, New
York City public schools have a firm age cutoff date of Dec. 31.
Kindergarten isn’t required by the state, so parents could keep their
children out, but then they would have to start the following year at
first grade. And not everyone can afford two to three years of nursery
school or day care.

“Among parents
here, there’s a tremendous demand for kindergarten earlier,” said Eva
Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem Success Academy Charter School, which
pushed its cutoff back to Dec. 1. “If these parents could start their
kids at 2, they would.” Not everyone, alas, defines academic privilege
the same way.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

The University of
Lagos campus came alive on August 11 when the Creative Arts Department
of the institution embarked on the fourth edition of its Afri-Caribbean
Festival. The Festival, a practical requirement for the 300 Level
course, ‘African and Caribbean Theatre Laboratory’, included a carnival
parade and several musical and theatre performances.

The festival began
with a procession around the university campus, which took off from the
main Auditorium at 11am. And just like popular Caribbean festivals, or
the Notting Hill of London, it had several African and Caribbean
cultures represented. Randomly selected into groups, each group
presented the cultures of countries like: Nigeria (Efik and Oyo),
Ghana, Jamaica, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, and South Africa.

The students were
adorned in colourful national costumes such as the Ghanaian Kente, Aso
Oke of south western Nigeria, The damask of the Efik, and ruffled satin
costumes embellished with plumage, masks, and garlands for the
Caribbean nations, each group bearing the colours of the country it was
representing.

The parade
proceeded down the campus road to the university campus gates, amidst
music and dance, bearing flags of their countries and employing other
carnival accoutrements such as horses (to bear the kings and queens),
tricycles, staffs, shields and umbrellas (which came in handy, as the
rains came just as the procession began).

Undaunted by the
weather though, the 300 Level students, ably supported by their course
mates in other years, formed a large procession that marched through
the campus; infecting students, lecturers and passersby alike with
their excitement and exuberance. Still the cynosure of eyes, causing
traffic on the roads as people stopped to stare, the carnival returned
to a park beside the Mariere Hostel to begin the performances.

History, music and more

If their dance and
acrobatics during the pageant had been wonderful to view, the students
really got into the carnival spirit at the performance ground. The
event anchor, Alex Oso, a 500 Level student of the department,
conducted the countries through national anthems, which was marred only
by Brazil’s inability to sing its anthem, due, they said, to the fact
that it was very long and in Portuguese (the Brazilian lingua franca).

The first
performance of the event was from Nigeria, a dance drama set in rural
Oyo of a town, which went to war, and conquered its enemies. If the
mime of the dancers was to be understood, news of war reached the king,
who consulted the town’s female priestess attended by four maidens clad
in white and bearing sacrificial calabashes; the priestess, apparently
having consulted the oracles, communicated its assent for the town to
proceed to a victorious war led by a fiery warlord reminiscent of Ola
Rotimi’s Odewale in ‘The Gods Are Not To Blame’.

Efik Nigeria was next on stage to depict its traditional marriage procedure, also in mime and dance.

Ghanaians,
resplendent in Kente and in the national colours thrilled the swelling
crowd to Ghanaian cultural dance routines, followed by choreography to
contemporary Ghanaian tune ‘I And My Shorty Are One’ by music group,
Praye. The dance routine, by four female dancers, was however not
effectively coordinated, as one dancer was notably faster in her
execution of dances. The dance steps were also rather mediocre.

During an interlude
to acknowledge the presence of faculty members, co-anchor Seyi Ajayi, a
400 Level student of Creative Arts, hailed his department as the
“heartbeat of University of Lagos”, and described the event as a
celebration of “unity in its diversity.” And truly, unified diversity
was evident in the performances that followed.

The Islands

Jamaica came on
first, with a narrative mime of its history, “On 1st August 1834,” it
was narrated, “the British government lifted abolition on slave trade.”
And the students mimed slaves as they were broken -body and spirit –
with the masters’ whips. The economic hardship that followed, it was
narrated resulted in socio political crises (mimed fights), until 5th
August 1952 when independence came, heralded by Bob Marley’s ‘One love’
and ‘Give Me Hope, Joanna’ by Eddie Grant, the victory and celebration
of the autonomy of Jamaica from its mother country, Britain, was
re-enacted.

South Africa’s
performance was ushered by a brief history of the country and its
achievements followed by acrobatics and paired dances to Mariam
Makeba’s soulful music, which had given South Africans hope when the
country was gripped by apartheid. A beautiful choreography to Shakira’s
‘Waka Waka’ was also performed, and in the spirit of the football theme
of the song, the female students, with abdomens tattooed with the
national flag, executed cheerleading dances with pompoms while a lone
vuvuzela blared in the background.

Brazil’s princess,
Ife, a younger sister of a student of the department thrilled audience
with her narrative of “the land of samba, rumba and salsa; of carnival,
food, sports and women.” The spectators were subsequently treated to a
Samba dance performance, which through brief was elegantly executed,
with pirouettes and dips, waltzes and ordered footworks, an admirable
departure from the shoddy performance recorded recently at a more
highbrow event.

Finally came the
twin Spanish and British colonised island-nation – Trinidad and Tobago
– with its beautiful women, exotic costumes and calypso. Female dancers
in orange satin tops, ruffled skirts, crowns and red and purple laced
shoes; with their equally grandly attired men folk, who wore orange
belled trousers with ruffled legs, face masks and body glitter,
performed an acrobatic dance display.

It was not all
dance and music though, as all the countries prepared national
delicacies – such as the Brazilian feiojioj and the South African’s
pito and peppered chicken drumstick – that were served to the lecturers
and participants.

Reactions

Giving closing
remarks and appreciations, the founder/organiser of the carnival and
course lecturer, Cornel-Best Onyekaba, who incidentally had also been a
student of the department, expressed his satisfaction about the event,
which had taken about three months to plan. “The challenges were there
but apart from the 2008 edition, which was very magical, this is a
supreme concert. But I know that the best is yet to come.”

He also expressed
appreciation for the efforts of his colleagues and students who shared
in the dreams of the carnival and expended no small effort to endure
that the festival was a success. In his words, “the individual efforts
of all cannot be described in monetary terms.”

He, however,
expressed his disappointment concerning the unwillingness of the
embassies of the countries represented in the festival to provide
support for the carnival despite several attempts to get them on board.

“The embassies did
not co-operate. Some insisted that the students had to sign
undertakings to return flags, which they should have been willing to
provide for free. We are not asking for money, just for costumes to
portray their countries better. What we are doing here counts; it is
their countries we are promoting, for crying out loud.”

Speaking with
theatre lecturer, Otun Rashid, it was revealed that the carnival and
performances will be graded on the basis of aesthetics usage, float
organisation, colour combination, and costumes and performance, for
which he indicated that Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil respectively
would gain top marks. He remarked though that the course is based on a
series of performances.

NEXT ran into Mo’Cheddah, female Nigerian musician, and 300 Level
student of the department, at the festival. Representing Brazil, she
remarked on the immense input the carnival had required, “I did
basically everything. I coordinated, and that is a problem because
nobody listens. I was in charge of costumes. I also danced the samba.
And this is the first time we are including Brazil in the festival, so
it was a bit difficult as we had no precedence to go on.” To which this
reporter teased, “Which was why you were unable to sing your national
anthem.” The artist behind the debut album ‘Franchise Celebrity’,
responded, slightly embarrassed, the “The anthem was long and in
Portuguese, we thought we should just stand like this (she demonstrates
anthem posture) while it played.”

I am in awe of the
power of the written word; and my first exposure to the written word
was in books. My father and the Catholic priests of my boarding school
taught me to love books. The school library was a sanctuary. I
travelled the world in books. In places like India and London, I found
boys that behaved like me. I immersed myself in cultures that would
have been alien without the powerful pull of books. I will never forget
my first visit to London. I kept seeing places that had appeared to me
before in books. As a precocious boy, the only way to keep me still was
to hand me a book.

The world has
changed from my childhood days. These days when I am reading a book, I
resist the urge to click on a word; I see the Internet anywhere.
Technology has radically redefined how I access ideas. I am not a fan
of electronic readers like the spindle. I view them as inchoate and
primitive. However, I believe that the iPad and its subsequent
reincarnations are going to spell the end of the book. In the West, the
library as we know it is preparing to go on life support; actually it
is already dead and now they call the reincarnation a media centre. My
daughter does not understand why we built a library in our community.
She says the books should all fit in a laptop. Think about how children
now live and it will give you digital pause. It is true that the book
is not going away anytime soon but it is dying. There are opportunities
for writers and thinkers to sell their ideas on the new formats
especially in the ubiquitous smartphones of Africa. People might just
read us if we put our thoughts on a Nokia. Now, that’s a brilliant
thought.

Newspapers and
magazines like The Washington Post and Newsweek are literally on their
last legs. The other day, someone bought Newsweek for one dollar. I
would have bought it, but I was broke. I subscribe to the Washington
Post but I find myself more and more these days picking the paper off
my driveway and dumping it in the recycling bin. This new technology is
the mother of all tornadoes, forcing her way into our lives and
changing things in mystifying and counter-intuitive ways. The new
technology is inquisitive and invasive. There are no boundaries that it
will not breach. It is relentless even as we proclaim the sanctity of
our present values and assumptions about the way things should be.
There are legitimate concerns about the implications for addressing the
economic divide between the haves and the have-nots in and between
countries

In Nigeria, the
divide is being perpetrated by her thieving leaders, aided and abetted
by their partners-in-crime, us intellectuals. If you ask my mother,
technology has actually freed her from the tyranny of Nigerian leaders’
greed, corruption, ineptitude and general foolishness. My mother now
has her own cell phone. I can reach her at the first ring, no drama.
You don’t want to know what it used to take to reach her before the
coming of the cell phones. On most nights, in her house, there is no
power; she is resourceful enough to use her Nokia cell as a flashlight
if she has to find the bathroom. Our black leaders should be shot. What
they are doing is black-on-black crime. My mother is sure that the
white man will soon discover a widget that you will wave around her
hut, and, there is light. She has spent a lifetime trying to trust the
rubbish ensuing from the mouths of Nigeria’s thieving leaders. Now, she
does not want to see them. They have lost credibility. My mother says
that soon, astral travel will be a reality and we won’t have to use
Nigeria’s “roads” and be ambushed by policemen and armed robbers. My
mother is a genius.

Yes, print media are dying, hanging themselves out to die on
decaying physical boundaries. Soon there will be children born who will
read about a time when the newspaper made a joyful thud on someone’s
porch. In the West, the newspaper boy is going the way of the milkman.
By the time my newspaper comes I have read most of the news on my
laptop. Traditional publishing is on the ropes. It won’t be for long.
Even as we speak, in the West, publishing houses are remaking
themselves, trying hard with some success to reclaim the space that is
being threatened by the democratisation that has taken place with the
advent of the Internet. They are competing with new tools of self
expression. People are voting with their feet in the millions and going
to the new medium as their primary source of information, education and
entertainment. Traditional publishing houses have a lot to be worried
about. They have historically depended on the book for their survival.
But the book is dying a long slow death.

The Association of
Nigerian Authors (ANA) appears to have reinforced the notion that
writers are bad managers with its poor handling of the colloquium held
to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the writings of poet and
dramatist, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo on August 13. Not only did the
opening at Afe Babalola Hall, University of Lagos, start behind
schedule, it was also poorly publicised such that less than 100 people
attended. Not a few people were surprised by the development, none more
so than Clark and his wife, Ebun, who taught English and Drama at the
university before they retired. Students could have been mobilised to
attend, observers noted.

However, the shoddy
organisation took nothing away from the stature of the eminent writer,
though almost every speaker referred to it.

Writing without bias

Chair of the
ceremony, Elechi Amadi, expressed his regret at the event’s
organisational failings, before recalling his and Clark’s undergraduate
days at the University College, Ibadan. Amadi disclosed that he was
first published in ‘The Horn’, a campus paper edited by Clark. He said
he has a soft spot for Clark’s poetry “probably because he writes about
the kind of environment I grew up in. Like him, I lived with my mother
in a thatched mud hut and when it rained at night we had to shift our
mats and belongings to avoid the leakages. Not surprisingly, I have
much empathy for his ‘Night Rain’”

The author of ‘The
Concubine’ also noted that Clark was fortunate to have started writing
when there were few literary prizes available to Nigerians because it
allowed him to write without undue influence. “It is my view that
foreign prizes come with a price. They can, and do influence our
writing in a subtle way. The donor of a prize cannot appreciate you
fully unless you wholly or in part share his mindset, worldview,
sensibilities and worse, his prejudices about Africa and Africans,” he
said.

He also made a case
for the protection of indigenous writing and local prizes. “Writing is
our intellectual menu and very much a part of our culture. We should
protect it from foreign interference no matter how subtle and well
meaning. Local prizes are better because we are the best judges of our
own culture.” The retired Army captain, however, explained that he is
not advocating the rejection of foreign prizes, but “In accepting the
dollars, we should be fully aware of the securely veiled intentions of
the donors. The donors are not necessarily evil but like everyone else
they have their interests to maintain and protect.” Amadi also paid
tribute to Clark with a parody of William Blake’s ‘The Tiger’.

Icon of the pen trade

ANA president,
Jerry Agada, apologised for the organisation’s lapses and described
Clark “as a great icon of our pen trade… His contributions to the
development of African oral literature through his dramatic and poetic
writing, nay the literature of the world, speaks for itself. He has put
in many years of also growing people who today represent a very
luminous expression of his genius and outstanding intellection. His
critical writings have shaped and also broadened the scope of global
understanding of Africa and her rich cultural heritage.”

In a goodwill
message he delivered on behalf of Emmanuel Uduaghan, Governor of Delta
State and the major financier of the conference with a N10 million
funding, academic, G. G Darah, said Delta is happy “to be part of the
heritage of JP who’s one of the world’s greatest writers.”

Vice Chancellor of
the University of Lagos, Adetokunbo Shofoluwe, who was represented by
Duro Oni, dean, Faculty of Arts, said it was a pleasure for the
institution to be hosting the event.

The Anti-palanquinist

Poet and Secretary
General, Pan-African Writers’ Association (PAWA), Atukwei Okai, in a
keynote address titled ‘Historical Chameleonisation and
Anti-palanquinity: Human Beings as Casualties of the Womb and Writers
as Murderers of the Gods – the Creational Marathon of J.P.
Clark-Bekederemo’ – dwelt on the non-conformist traits of Clark. He
explained that a palanquin is a covered litter carried by four people
but that Clark exhibited traits of an anti-palanquinist early in his
writing career when as an undergraduate, he challenged the colonial
establishment with his poem, ‘Ivbie: A Song of Wrong’. “From his very
first works, we see that Clark set out to distil into the psyche of his
people the spirit of anti-palanquinity. Witnesss ‘Ivbie: A Song of
Wrong’, ‘America Their America’ and ‘Casualties’,” the keynote speaker
said.

Continuing, he said
the anti-palanquinity generation which Clark belongs to “are of a
mindset that would question the status quo and subvert any order that,
by its precepts and preaching, would seek to continue to deceive and
manipulate, exploit and enslave the people, the citizenry or, in other
words, the masses. The anti-palanquinity generation, as a rule, start
from the viewpoint that whatever is subsumed as a country belongs, by
right, to the people of that country, that land.” He mentioned Festus
Iyayi and Femi Osofisan as examples of writers who have imbibed Clark’s
anti-palanquinity with the way they probe beyond the surface in works
like ‘Heroes’ and ‘Morountodun’.

Get organised

Clark, renowned
for his sarcasm, narrated the story of PEC Repertory Theatre he ran
with his wife years ago and the fluctuating attendance at its shows to
stress that he didn’t find the poor attendance strange. “We are used to
this, but what my wife and I particularly miss are our students.
Students of English and Drama are not here because they were not told.”
He disclosed that he and Amadi, his “comrade and friend at Tedder Hall”
had a great time at the University College. Amadi’s reminiscences, he
stated, “reminded me of incidents that I had consigned to a long, long
past.”

Switching back to
the poor organisation, the author of ‘Ozidi’, ‘The Raft’ and ‘The Boat’
amongst other plays, explained that it is not only in Nigeria that
writers organise events like ANA did. The same thing, he said, happened
to Okai when he organised a conference in Ghana.

Referring to his
biography on the programme, Clark told the organisers that he was not
born on April 6, 1935 as they wrote but on December 6, 1933 “which my
friend Wole Soyinka will not accept because it makes me older than him
by a year.” He also disclosed that he became a professor in 1972 and
not 1977. Clark added that though ANA has tried to “kill me off” by
saying that he last wrote in 1988, “I’ve been writing from 1988 to the
moment. I’ve written quite a few things since then.” Indeed, Clark
launched a collection of poems, ‘Of Sleep and Old Age’, as recently as
2004.

“Mr President, past
president, please get organised. Writers also can be good managers. I
appreciate this very much. My wife and I are very touched. Left to me,
I was going to call it off but I was reminded that people came from
Kano, Calabar and as far as from Accra,” Clark reiterated while
thanking the University of Lagos and Delta State government for
supporting the conference.

Poet and
polemicist, Odia Ofeimun who presented three copies of his ‘Lagos of
the Poets’, Femi Osofisan, Sam Ukala and Wale Okediran were among
guests at the conference.

Two papers, ‘Managing Linguistic Taboos in Clark-Bekederemo’s Songs
of a Goat’ and ‘Rethinking JP Clark’s Ozidi in the Light of
Contemporary Nigerian Experience’ by Joe Ushie and Sunny Awhefeada were
taken at the first plenary session after the opening. Writers Musa
Idris Okpanachi and Maria Ajima were among those who delivered papers
on the second day, before the conference ended with a dinner.