Ndi Anambra na ndi obia, ekenekwa m unu.
Good afternoon.
I feel greatly honored to be here today. I want to thank our
governor, Chief Willie Obiano, for inviting me. As we mark the first one
hundred DAYS of his term, I would like to commend him for his vision and
ambition in the areas of education, health and agriculture. And particularly
security. Most of us know how, for a long time, Onitsha has been a security
nightmare. If you are travelling, you do NOT want to be in Upper Iweka after 6
PM because of the fear of armed robbers. But today, because of our new
governor’s initiative, people in Onitsha no longer live in fear. True freedom
is to be able to live without fear. A relative told me that you can drop your
mobile phone on the ground in Upper Iweka and come back hours later and still
see it there, which was NOT the case in the past. And which is one of the best
ways to measure leadership – by the testimony of the ordinary people. My
sincere hope is that, under the leadership of Governor Obiano, Anambra state
will continue its journey of progress with strides that are wide and firm and
sure.
I am from Abba, in Njikoka LGA. My mother is from Umunnachi
in Dunukofia LGA. I grew up in Nsukka, in Enugu State, a town that remains
deeply important to me, but Abba and Umunnachi were equally important to me. My
childhood was filled with visits. To see my grandmother, to spend Christmas and
Easter, to visit relatives. I know the stories of my great grandfather and of
his father, I know where my great grandmother’s house was built, I know where
our ancestral lands are.
Abum nwa afo Umunnachi, nwa afo Abba, nwa afo Anambra.
I am proud of Anambra State. And if our sisters and brothers
who are not from Anambra will excuse my unreasonable chauvinism, I have always
found Igbo as spoken by ndi Anambra to be the most elegant form of Igbo.
Anambra State has much to be proud of. This is a state that
produced that political and cultural colossus Nnamdi Azikiwe. This is a state
that produced the mathematics genius Professor James Ezeilo. This is a state
that produced Dora Nkem Akunyili, a woman who saved the lives of so many
Nigerians by demonstrating dedicated leadership as the Director General of
NAFDAC. (May her soul continue to rest in peace)
This is a state that produced Nigeria’s first professor of
Statistics, Professor James Adichie, a man I also happen to call daddy. This is
a state that produced the first woman to be registrar of Nigeria’s premiere
university, UNN, Mrs Grace Adichie, a woman I also happen to call Mummy.
This is a state that has produced great writers. If Chinua
Achebe and Flora Nwapa and Chukwuemeka Ike had not written the books they did,
when they did, and how they did, I would perhaps not have had the emotional
courage to write my own books. Today I honour them and all the other writers
who came before me. I stand respectfully in their shadow. I also stand with
great pride in the shadow of so many other daughters and sons of Anambra State.
But the truth is that I have not always been proud of
Anambra. I was ashamed when Anambra became a metaphor for poor governance, when
our political culture was about malevolent shrines and kidnappings and burnt
buildings, when our teachers were forced to become petty traders and our school
children stayed at home, when Anambra was in such disarray that one of the
world’s greatest storytellers, Chinua Achebe, raised the proverbial alarm by
rejecting a national award.
But Anambra rallied. And, for me, that redemption, which is
still an ongoing process, is personified in our former governor Peter Obi. I
remember the first time I met him years ago, how struck I was, how impressed,
that in a country noted for empty ostentation, our former governor travelled so
simply and so noiselessly. And perhaps he is proof that you can in fact perform
public service in Nigeria without destroying the eardrums of your fellow
citizens and without scratching their cars with the whips of your escorts.
I was struck by other things – how he once arrived early to
church, because according to him, he tried not to be late – in a society that
excuses late coming by public officials – because he wanted young people to see
that governors came to church on time. How he visited one of the schools handed
over to the missions and gave the school prefect his direct phone number. How
Government house here in Awka was often empty of hangers-on, because he had a
reputation for what our people call ‘being stingy,’ which in other parts of the
world would be called ‘prudently refusing to waste the people’s resources.’
Former governor, Peter Obi, ekenekwa m gi. May the foundation
you built stand firm and may our governor Chief Willie Obiano build even more.
Anambra was and is certainly one of the better-governed
states in Nigeria. We measure good governance in terms of accountability,
security, health, education, jobs, businesses. All of these, of course, are
important. But there are other values that are important for a successful
society. Two of those in particular are relevant to ndi Anambra and ndi Igbo in
general: the values of community and consensus
Most of the recorded history we have about the Igbo – and
indeed about many other ethnic groups in Africa – came from foreigners, men and
women who did not speak the language, missionaries and anthropologists and
colonial government representatives who travelled through Igboland and recorded
what they saw and who often had their own particular agendas. Which is to say
that while they did useful and fascinating work, we still have to read their
writing with a certain degree of scepticism.
However, all the history books written about Igbo people are
consistent on certain things. They all noted that Igbo culture had at its heart
two ostensibly conflicting qualities: a fierce individualism AND a deeply rooted sense of community.
They all also noted
that Igbo people did not have a pan-Igbo authority, that they existed in small
republican communities, to which that popular saying Igbo enwe eze – the Igbo
have no kings – attests.
Many of these
missionaries and anthropologists did not approve of the Igbo political system.
Because THEY themselves had come from highly hierarchical societies, they
conflated civilization with centralization. Some of them wrote that the Igbo
people were not civilized. This was of course wrong. The fact that the Igbo did
not have an imperial system of governance did not mean that they were not
civilized.
One of the writers
summarized the Igbo system as being based on two things: consultation and
consensus.
In fact one can
argue that it was a much more complex form of organization, this system that I
like to call the democracy of free-born males, because it is much easier to
issue an order from the top than it is to try and reach a consensus. Professor
Adiele Afigbo beautifully describes the political culture of precolonial
Igboland when he writes that “AUTHORITY was dispersed between individuals and
groups, lineages and non-lineages, women and men, ancestors and gods”
Perhaps it was this
diffuse nature of authority that made it difficult for those early travellers
to understand the Igbo. Professor Elizabeth Isichei has argued that if we are
looking for unifying institutions among the Igbo, then we cannot look to
political organization since there was no centralized system. Instead we must
look at other areas - social institutions and customs, philosophical and
religious values. And language.
And on the subject of language, I would like to tell you a
little story.
Some years ago, I met an academic in the US. An Igbo man.
He wrote articles about Igbo culture, organized conferences about Igbo history.
We had an interesting conversation during which he bemoaned the behavior of
Igbo people in America.
“Do you see the Chinese children?” He asked me. “They
speak Chinese and English. See the Indian kids? They speak English and Bengali.
But our children speak only English!”
He was very passionate. Then his phone rang and he excused
himself and said it was his daughter. He spoke English throughout the call. At
the end, I tried to be funny and asked him if his children spoke Igbo with an
American accent? He said no.
Something in his manner, a certain discomfort, made me
ask—do your children speak Igbo?
No, he said.
But they understand? I asked.
He paused.
Well, a little, he said. Which I knew meant that they
probably did not understand at all.
I was suprised. Not because it was unusual to see an Igbo
whose children did not speak Igbo, but because I had imagined that THIS
particular man would be an exception, since he wrote and spoke so passionately
about Igbo culture. I imagined that he would not be infected with that
particular condition of the Igbo – a disregard of their language.
It is not enough to bemoan this phenomenon or to condemn it,
we must ask why it is happening, what it means, what it says about us, why it
matters and most of all what we must do about it.
This condition is sadly not limited to the diaspora. I
once ran into a woman here in Nigeria, an old friend of my family’s, and her
little son. I said kedu to the boy.
His mother quickly said no, no, no, he doesn’t speak Igbo.
He speaks only English.
What struck me was not that the child spoke only English,
but that his mother’s voice was filled with pride when she said ‘hei mbakwa, o
da-asukwa Igbo.’
She was proud that her child did not speak Igbo.
Why? I asked
Her reply was: Igbo will confuse him. I want him to speak
English well.
Later as we talked about her work and her son’s school,
she mentioned that he was taking piano and French lessons. And so I asked her,
“Won’t French confuse him?” (okwu ka m na-achozikwa!)
The woman’s reason -- that two languages would confuse her
child -- sounds reasonable on the surface. But is it true? It is simply not
true. Studies have consistently shown that children have the ability to learn
multiple languages and most of all, that knowledge of one language can AID
rather than HARM the knowledge of another. But I don't really need studies. I
am my own proof.
I grew up speaking Igbo and English at the same. I
consider both of them my first languages and I can assure you that in my almost
37 years on earth, I am yet to be confused by my knowledge of two languages.
My sister, my parents first child, was born in the US,
when my father was a doctoral student. My parents made a decision to speak only
Igbo to her. They knew she would learn English in school. They were determined
that she speak Igbo, since she would not hear Igbo spoken around her in
California. And I can assure you that she was NOT confused!
My parents are here/I could not have asked for better
parents/Grateful to them for much/for giving me the gift of Igbo
I am richer for it. Sometimes I wish I could speak
beautiful Igbo full of proverbs, like my father does, and I wish my Igbo were
not as anglicized as it is, but that is the reality of my generation and
languages have to evolve by their very nature.
I deeply love both English and Igbo. English is the
language of literature for me. But Igbo has a greater emotional weight. It is the
enduring link to my past. It is the language in which my great grandmothers
sang. Sometimes, when I listen to old people speaking in my hometown Abba, I am
full of admiration for the complexity and the effortlessness of their speech.
And I am in awe of the culture that produced this poetry, for that is what the
Igbo language is when spoken well – it is poetry.
To deprive children of the gift of their language when
they are still young enough to learn it easily is an unnecessary loss. We now
have grandparents who cannot talk to their grandchildren because there is a
hulking, impermeable obstacle between them called language. Even when the grandparents speak English, there is often an
awkwardness in their conversations with their grandchildren, because they do
not have the luxury of slipping back to Igbo when they need to, because they
are navigating unfamiliar spaces, because their grandchildren become virtual
strangers with whom they speak in stilted prose. The loss is made worse by imagining
what could have been, the stories that could have been told, the wisdom that
might have been passed down, and most of all, the subtle and grounding sense of
identity that could have been imparted on the grandchildren.
Some things can’t be translated. My wonderful British-born
niece Kamsiyonna once heard me say, in response to something: O di egwu.
She asked me: What does it mean Aunty?
And I was not sure how to translate it. To translate it
literally would be to lose something.
One of the wonderful things about language, any language,
is that it gives you a new set of lenses with which to look at he world. Which
is why languages sometimes borrow from one another – we use the French au fait
and savoir faire in English -- because communication is not about mere words but
about worldviews, and worldviews are impossible to translate.
Some people argue that language is what makes culture. I
disagree. I believe identity is much more complex, that identity is a
sensibility, a way of being, a way of looking at the world. And so there are
Igbo people who don’t necessarily speak the language but are no less Igbo than
others who do.
But I focus on language because while it is not the only
way of transmitting identity, it is the easiest and the most wholesome.
I'd like to go back to the story of the woman whose son did
not spoke Igbo and the pride with which she related this.
The corollary of her pride is shame. Where is this shame
from? Why have we, as Ama Ata Aidoo wrote in her novel CHANGES, insisted on
speaking about ourselves in the same condescending tone as others have used to
speak of us?
There are many Igbo people who say the same thing as the
woman with the son. Others may not think that Igbo will confused their
children, but they merely think it is not important in our newly globalized
world. It is after all a small language spoken only in southeastern Nigeria.
Kedu ebe e ji ya eje?
It is indeed true that the world is shrinking. But to live
meaningfully in a globalized world does not mean giving up what we are, it
means adding to what we are.
And speaking of a globalized world, I remember being very
impressed by the effort that the people of Iceland put in preserving their
language, Icelandic. Iceland is a tiny
country with a population less than that of Igboland. Many people speak English
but speaking Icelandic is also very important to them. It is NOT because
Icelandic has economic power. Iceland is certainly not the next China.
It is because the people value the language. They know it
is a small language that does not have much economic power but they do not say:
kedu ebe e ji ya eje?
Because they
understand that there are other values that language has beyond the material
and the economic. And this I think is key: Value.
To value something is to believe that it matters and to
ACT as though it matters.
We don't seem to have this value. It is one thing to say
speaking igbo is important, but it’s another to make a conscious, concerted
choice to speak Igbo to our children.
In many respects, to argue for the preservation of a
language should be a conservative position, but oddly, in our case, it has
become a progressive position.
I should pause here and say that I am not trying to
romanticize Igbo culture. I quarrel strongly with a number of things in Igbo culture.
I quarrel with the patriarchy that diminishes women. I quarrel with the
reactionary arguments that try to silence dissent by invoking culture, by
saying that so and so is not our culture as if culture were a static thing that
never changes.
Igbo is not perfect, no people have a perfect culture, but
there are Igbo values that we can retrieve and renew. The values of community.
Of consensus.
In his book about President
Yar Adua’s administration, Segun Adeniyi tells a story about the dark
weeks when Nigerians did now know where their president was, and whether he was
alive or dead. He writes that Dora Akunyili came to him and said, “Segun ,my
conscience will not allow me to continue keeping quiet.”
Her conscience. It seems to me that conscience is rare in
Nigerian public life. It should not be, but it is.
Conscience and integrity are central to Igbo culture, and to
any culture that has strong communitarian principles. Conscience means that we
cannot think only of ourselves, that we think of a greater good, that we remain
aware of ourselves as part of a larger whole.
Some years ago, my cousin from Eziowelle told me a story that
his grandfather had told him, about ISA ILE, where people in a dispute would go
to a god and swear that they had not lied, with the understanding that whoever
had lied would die. My cousin said, ‘thank God we no longer do that.’
Have we become, I wondered, a people now overly familiar with
falsehood? Are we now allergic to truth? Should we not continue to have a
metaphorical isa ile as a guiding principle? Should we not have a society where
willfully telling lies that cause harm to others will have real consequences?
The Igbo are famed for their entrepreneurial spirit. But at
what point did we decide that we will no longer sell goods and services, but
instead sell the safety of our sisters and brothers? How did we come to a place
where people no longer sleep in their ancestral homes because they are afraid
they will be kidnapped for ransom by their own relatives?
Igboland was once a place where people were concerned about
WHERE your money came from. Now that is no longer the case. Now, it matters
only that one has money. As for where the money came from, we look away.
In
Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart, Unoka consults Agbala about his poor yam
harvests.
Every
year, he said sadly (to the priestess), ‘before I put any crop in the earth, I
sacrifice a cock to Anị, the owner of all land. It is the law of our fathers. I
also kill a cock at the shrine of the god of yams. I clear the bush and set
fire to it when it is dry. I sow the yams when the first rain has fallen, and
stake them when the young
tendrils appear. I weed...'
'Hold
your peace!' screamed the priestess, her voice terrible as it echoed through
the dark void. 'You have
offended neither the gods nor your fathers. And when a man is at peace with his
gods and his ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the
strength of his arm.’
So
while we, ndi Anambra, till our fertile soil with strength, let us also be sure
that we have not offended our fathers or our mothers. Let us retrieve and renew
the values that once were ours. The values of conscience and
integrity. Of community and consensus.
Let us disagree and agree to disagree
but let us do so NOT as separate fractious groups fighting against each other
constantly, but as people who ultimately have the same goal: a better community
for everyone, a better Anambra State.
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