The (Nigerian) literary world might be entering a Prof Amechi Akwanya phase because Intervention understands that the Oxford University Press is coming out with an edited text on the priest – literati and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, (UNN)’s Professor of Literature. In that sense, the Festschrift under review here may be no more than the siren heralding the phase. It promises a big return to the conversation on subjectivity which has remained at the centre of the social science enterprise throughout the 20th and so far the 21st century.
Prof Amechi Akwanya, a man of triple heritage
Prof Akwanya provides an unsurpassable case study in subjectivity, successfully combining in himself three different realms of life – an academic in which he is of the professorial rank; a member of the literati and manager of one of the Achebe’s legacy called Okike and then he is a Catholic priest. Perhaps, the on-going attention on him is a demonstration of sensitivity to this combination of irreconcilable realms such as academia, priesthood and literature without any of them suffering, noticeably.
What it all means is that studying Akwanya from whichever realm is a challenging engagement with subjectivity, be it at the individual or the group level. That is, Prof Akwanya is a great specimen to engage with in the search for answers to a question such as whether the individual is an integrated entity or not OR whether it makes sense to talk of a concept such as identity and not ‘Difference’. And which identity might be Prof Akwanya’s if it makes sense to talk of such – Igbo, priest, literati, academic? The debate in post Cold War social theory has since moved the dominant answer to the loose notion that an individual has multiple identities.
There is no knowing how the Festschrift would be received in each of the spaces in which Akwanya has been unfolding – literati, academia generally and the priesthood. The Festschrift on the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at UNN has been in the making. Initially planned by the masterminds, many of whom were students of Prof Akwanya, to come out in late 2021, it has just made it early March 2022. Announcing the eventual coming of the text to the contributors in an email message, the co-editor, Dr. Ignatius Chukwuma, told them “We have finally got a good bye gift for Prof A.N Akwanya as he bows out of academia”, he added.
The reader is served an appetizer in an Introduction by Prof Ignatius Chukwumah, one of the editors. His synthesis is a full offering escorting the reader to the first section of the 17-chapter text, all dealing with one or the other of Akwanya’s literary outputs in the past. But the tempo changes in part two which extends the engagement beyond Akwanya to contrasting analysis of related works involving some major names in the field: Achebe/Helon Habila; Suemo Chia/ Terhemba Shija; Chimamanda Adichie/Ifeoma Okoye. This widens further in parts three and four before the text winds up with an interview with Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. The text is thus shared between the subject – Prof Akwanya and literature generally, perhaps out of deference to the requirement of inclusivity.
Across 17 chapters, this Festschrift offers various traditions of analysis, interesting points of departures and interesting conclusions that acquit the Festschrift of the academic ruralism structuring many such efforts in recent Nigeria. Two chapters will be arbitrarily singled out to exemplify this contention, though the two chapters also draw attention to themselves if the criterion of diversity is considered.
The first must be Prof Ibrahim Bello-Kano, (IBK)’s “Writing and the Representation of the Real: Critical Perspectives on “Fiction”, “Non-fiction”, and “Literature” which occupies the 13th Chapter. It draws attention to itself for bringing down the barricades between fictional and non-fictional or the literary and non-literary in modernist architecture of knowledge.
This work is where to find answers to certain questions such as “what makes a novel and a poem fiction or fictional and a biography or a memoir “non-fiction” or “non-fictional”? Do all fictional works share a single property – common to all “fiction” by virtue of which they are identified collectively as not “non-fiction”?, (pp. 213). By the Deconstructive lens he comes into his analysis, the chapter serves as a solid introduction to that theory of Literature or the literary, (depending on the reader’s point of entry). His breaking down of Derrida’s key concept of iterability on pages 213 – 216 is really recommended for beginners in the study of Deconstruction theory.
Of course, IBK’s chapter is an aggregation of Philosophy, History and Anthropology in arguing the topic he chose to write on. To that extent, the reader who is handicapped in basic elements of these realms might find it tough initially but the determined reader on the question of the literary and non-literary will get ahead and end up finding the chapter very, very refreshing and standing apart from jaded notions of the literary.
There is a sense in which Chapter 14 which is “Popular Culture and Emancipation Politics in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah” written by Adagbo Onoja of the Department of Political Science at Veritas University, Abuja connects to IBK’s chapter. This is in that both labour under Derrida. The chapter is a conversation among post-Marxism and orthodox literary criticism involving an ex-ABU, Zaria’s super graduate, Ode Ogede; ABU, Zaria’s Prof Tanimu Abubakar; Dr. Iyorchia Ayu in his “Creativity and protest in popular culture: The political music of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti” (published in the Obafemi Awolowo University based Revolutionary monographs on culture and society in Africa and Prof Biodun Jeyifo in his celebrated Marx and Africa Conference presentation “Literature and the Cultural Subsoil: the Conservative, Reformist and Revolutionary Approaches” delivered at the at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1983.
Synthesizing these different authors, the chapter argues against the possibility of a fixed meaning for any text, (be it a text message, a sermon, a text book, an image or a metaphor, amongst others), thereby contesting the Jeyifo schema of the conservative, reformist and revolutionary reading of the literary.
A much younger Kongi
A 1966 internet pix of Achebe
The intention of writers or the context of the production/readership of a literary text might not be dismissed but they are not crucial in determining the meaning or message of any text. What determines meaning is what the reader(ship) makes of the message encountered and this is why articulation of a text makes all the difference rather than the content being radical, reformist or conservative in itself. It is the articulation or politicization of the content that gives a text its meaning. Books which are made into a site of struggle tend to acquire meaning with political outcomes that are decidedly revolutionary and this can happen irrespective of the author’s intention although the two could coincide. This line of argument is why any texts (text messages, textbooks, cartoons, comedies & comedians, pictures, poem, films, novels, essays, theories, concepts, methodologies and so on) can be invested with radical or emancipatory outcome by any determined protagonists.
There’s an entirely different reason some of these texts have become extremely important. Africa must be about the one continent which does not have a systematic study of continental philosophy. There are numerous books on leading continental heroes, from Nkrumah, Lumumba, Machel, Ben Bella, Keita, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Thomas Sankara, Achile Mbembe, Kwame Appiah, Valentin Mudimbe, Achebe, Soyinka and so on and so forth but almost none of them has been authoritatively located in a mainstream school of epistemology/social theory. Nkrumah is Pan-Africanist but of which hue? The closest to this kind of work as far as this reporter knows is the 1972 Masters Degree thesis on Nkrumah at the Australian National University in Canberra. Why should a Masters student bother about the character of Marxism Nkrumah subscribed to but not the PhD students at Legon, Ibadan and Makerere? After all, Nkrumah was for the entire Africa. Legon, Ibadan and Makerere might have supervised thousands of PhD theses on these personages but if all these are only known to their supervisors and the students, then there is a problem somewhere. African Continental Philosophy as a core course unit across the continent is the next item on the agenda of the struggle for Africa’s liberation. No time is the great poser by the University of Aberystwyth’s Prof Ken Booth more relevant than today. As most powerfully captured by Pinar Bilgin, the notable Turkish IRs scholar, “Challenging students of International Relations to think past its ‘ethnocentric, masculinized, northern and top-down’ ways, Ken Booth encouraged them to question ‘the extent to which our sense of what we do as academics would have been different had the subject been founded in universities not by a Liberal MP in mid-Wales (David Davies) in the aftermath of the Great War, but instead by Dr Zungu, the admirable feminist medic she-Chief of the Zulus”
Good job by the two editors, Prof Ignatius Chukwuma and Martin Okwoli Ogba in getting it published in a respectable publishing outfit that gives the Festschrift the stature it deserves. Congrats to Prof Akwanya whose impending formal departure from academia is turning out to be a re-entry into academia.
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