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r such suffering the travellers should now enjoy their most elaborate rest. But the ease and luxury they do encounter in the White Tree surpass all expectations. Free food and drink in a cabaret atmosphere and a gambling casino are among the amenities of this European-style haven of conspicuous consumption. Predictably the Drinkard very quickly relapses into his old addictions:
I began to lavish all the drinks as I had been a great palm-wine drinkard in my town before I left.7
And naturally also he loses the will for the quest, so that when Faithful Mother tells him that it is time to resume his journey, he begs to be permitted to stay in the Tree for ever. When she tells him that this is impossible, he makes a second plea—for her to accompany them to the end of the journey. Again she says no. Totally disconsolate the Drinkard then contemplates a third possibility: death. But even that escape is also impossible for him or his wife because they have already sold their death.
I think that what Tutuola is saying here is very important for an understanding of the meaning of the story. The three ways in which the pilgrim might seek to evade the rigours of a dangerous quest are taken up in turn and rejected: he may not prolong the interlude of rest and enjoyment at the inn; he may not be assisted to arrive at his destination without the trouble of travelling; he may not opt out of the struggle through premature death.
As the Drinkard and his wife resume their journey there is even an oblique suggestion that their recent interlude in the White Tree has been of the insubstantial nature of a dream:
… it was just as if a person slept in his or her room, but when he woke up, he found himself or herself inside a big bush.8
If we accept this suggestion the implication may well be that play, though a necessary restorative, is not only a temporary but even an illusory escape from the reality of waking life, which is work with its attendant pain and suffering.
The Drinkard’s fault, as we said earlier, is that he attempted to subvert the order of things and put play in the place of work. He does this because he has an appetite which knows no limit or boundary. His punishment is exact and appropriate. He is launched on a quest in which he is obliged to wage adequate struggle to compensate for his previous idleness. While he is undergoing this learning process he is shown many positive examples from other people of what his own life should have been. We have already referred to the visit made to him one night by Give and Take. Then there is the example of Death himself at work in his garden; and there is the king of Wraith Island, who neglects to invite the smallest creature in his kingdom to join in communal work and is compelled to offer apologies to the little fellow for the slight.
But perhaps the most striking object lesson for the Drinkard is the terrible son born from his wife’s swollen thumb. Although the Drinkard may not know or acknowledge it, this child is like a distorting mirror reflecting his father’s image in even less flattering proportions. He is really Palm-Wine Drinkard Junior, in other words. He has the same insatiable appetite, the same lack of self-control and moderation, the same readiness to victimize and enslave others. He is of course an altogether nastier person than his father, but the essential ingredients of character are the same.
There is a secondary theme which runs beside that of work and play and finally meets and merges with it. This is what I shall call the theme of boundaries. A few incidents in the novel will elucidate this.
As the Drinkard and his wife leave Wraith Island we see the friendly inhabitants come out and accompany them to the frontier, and then stop. And we are told quite explicitly by the Drinkard that
… if it was in their power they would have led us to our destination, but they were forbidden to touch another creature’s land or bush.9
Similarly, at the end of the sojourn in the White Tree the travellers, disinclined, as we have seen, to resume their arduous quest, ask Faithful Mother to lead them to the end of the journey: “But she told us that she could not do such a request because she must not go beyond their boundary.”10
There are numerous other instances in the book where boundaries play a decisive role in the plot. For instance, a monster may be pursuing the travellers furiously and then suddenly and unexpectedly stop at some frontier such as a road. And we have a variant of the same basic prohibition in the case of Give and Take, who “could not do anything in the day time”—thus observing a boundary erected in time rather than space. And finally the Drinkard is to learn on setting foot at last on Dead’s Town that “it was forbidden for alives to come to the Dead’s Town”11—an example of what we might perhaps call an existential boundary!
What all this means is that here in this most unlikely of places, this jungle where everything seems possible and lawlessness might have seemed quite natural, there is yet a law of jurisdiction which sets a limit to the activity of even the most unpredictable of its rampaging demons. Because no monster however powerful is allowed a free run of the place, anarchy is held—precariously, but held—at bay, so that a traveller who perseveres can progress from one completed task to the domain of another and in the end achieve progressively the creative, moral purpose in the extraordinary but by no means arbitrary universe of Tutuola’s story.
This law of boundaries operates more subtly but no less powerfully at other levels in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. A boundary implies a duality of jurisdictions both of which must be honoured if there is to be order in the world. Tutuola suggests that promise and fulfilment constitute one such duality, for a promise is no less than a pledge for future work, a solemn undertaking to work later if you can play now. Consequently, we find that Tutuola never allows a broken promise to go unpunished. There are quite a few examples of such breach and punishment in the book but we shall only refer to the case of the Drinkard’s father-in-law. We may recall that this man has promised that if the Drinkard rescues his daughter he will direct him towards the goal of his quest. The Drinkard performs his part of the bargain, but the man, not wishing to part from his daughter, who has in the meantime married the Drinkard, begins to prevaricate. Consequently, the Drinkard tarries in his father-in-law’s town for three years. It is during this time that a terrible scourge of a child is born to the young couple, a child who begins straight away to terrorize the town. He causes so much havoc that the community conspire to burn him to ashes. After this experience the old man needs no further persuasion to give his son-in-law the information he has withheld for years in breach of his promise.
The principle of unfulfilled promise explored in this episode and elsewhere is developed further and given a new twist in the activities of that strange personage called Give and Take. You will recall that when we first encounter him he is meekly seeking to enlarge his experience by knowing poverty at first hand. The Drinkard obliges him by setting him up to taste the bitter life of an indentured labourer. Later, we learn to our great surprise that Give and Take is no ordinary fellow but “the head of all the Bush-creatures … and the most powerful in the world of the Bush-creatures.” This mysterious monarch of the jungle does get the experience he seeks but in the process establishes the principle behind his name: that a community which lets some invisible hand do its work for it will sooner or later forfeit the harvest. Give and Take proves a merciless exactor; for the labour he has given he takes not only the people’s crops but, in the conflict that ensues, their lives as well.
Finally, we can also apply the concept of boundaries to the dual jurisdictions of work and play. Because the Drinkard’s appetite knows no limit or boundary, he takes and takes without giving and allows play not just to transgress but wholly and totally to overrun the territory of work. His ordeal in the jungle of correction changes him from a social parasite to a leader and a teacher whose abiding gift to his people is to create the condition in which they can overcome want and reliance on magic, and return to the arts of agriculture and husbandry.
“Relevance” is a word bandied around very much in contemporary expression, but it still has validity nonetheless. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Tutuola is we
aving more than a tall, devilish story. He is speaking strongly and directly to our times. For what could be more relevant than a celebration of work today for the benefit of a generation and a people whose heroes are no longer makers of things and ideas but spectacular and insatiable consumers?
The first Equiano Memorial Lecture, University of Ibadan, 15 July 1977.
CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO could not enter or leave a room unremarked; yet he was not extravagant in manner or appearance. There was something about him not easy to define, a certain inevitability of drama and event. His vibrancy and heightened sense of life touched everyone he came into contact with. It is not surprising therefore that the young poet/artist Kevin Echeruo, who died even younger, soon after Okigbo, should have celebrated him as ogbanje, one of those mysterious, elusive and often highly talented beings who hurry to leave the world and to come again; or that Pol Ndu, who was to die in a road disaster, every gory detail of which he had predicted in a poem five years earlier, should call Okigbo a seer.
Okigbo’s exit was, for me, totally in character. I can see him clearly in his white “gown” and cream trousers among the vast crowd milling around my bombed apartment, the first spectacle of its kind in the Biafran capital in the second month of the war. I doubt that we exchanged more than a sentence or two. There were scores of sympathizers pressing forward to commiserate with me or praise God that my life and the lives of my wife and children had been spared. So I hardly caught more than a glimpse of him in that crowd and then he was gone like a meteor, forever.
That elusive impression is the one that lingers out of so many. As a matter of fact, he and I had talked for two solid hours that very morning. But in retrospect, that earlier meeting seems to belong to another time.
He had suddenly appeared at Citadel Press, the little publishing house we had set up together in the safe stronghold of Enugu after our flight—he from Ibadan and I from Lagos. He came like that from the war a few times to discuss our publishing programme. That morning our editorial chat had been interrupted by the sudden drone of an enemy aircraft overhead and the hectic and ineffectual small-arms fire that was supposed to scare it away, rather like a lot of flies worrying a bull. Not a very powerful bull, admittedly, at that point in the conflict before the Russians beat the British to it and supplied jet fighters to the Federal Army. In fact, air raids then were crude jokes that could almost be laughed off. People used to say that the safest thing was to go out into the open and keep an eye on the bomb as it was pushed out of the invading propeller aircraft! As Christopher and I listened uneasily, an explosion went off in the distance somewhere and the attack was soon over. We completed our discussion and parted. But that explosion which sounded so distant from the Citadel offices was to bring him back for a final silent farewell on that eventful day.
When he took the decision to join the army he went to great lengths to conceal his intention from me for fear, no doubt, that I might attempt to dissuade him from taking that hazardous step. I probably would have tried. He made up an elaborate story about an imminent and secret mission he was asked to undertake to Europe which put me totally off the scent. But to make absolutely certain, he borrowed my travelling bag and left his brown briefcase with me. When I saw him again two weeks later he was a major by special commission in the Biafran Army, though I never saw him in uniform. He always came to Citadel Press in civilian clothes.
One afternoon I was driving from Enugu to my village, Ogidi, where I lived following the bombing. My car radio was tuned to Lagos. Like all people caught in the mesh of modern war we soon became radio addicts. We wanted to hear the latest from the fronts; we wanted to hear what victories Nigeria was claiming next, not just from NBC Lagos, but even more extravagantly from Radio Kaduna. We needed to hear what the wider world had to say to all that—the BBC, the Voice of America, the French Radio, Cameroon Radio, Radio Ghana, Radio Anywhere. The Biafran forces had just suffered a major setback in the northern sector of the war by the loss of the university town of Nsukka. They had suffered an even greater morale-shattering blow in the death of that daring and enigmatic hero who had risen from military anonymity to legendary heights in the short space of eighteen months, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, the leader of the first military coup in Nigeria. Before his enlistment, Okigbo had begun to talk more and more about Nzeogwu, but I had not listened very closely; the military didn’t fascinate me as it did him. Driving almost mechanically in an open stretch of roadway I was only half-listening to the radio when suddenly Christopher Okigbo’s name stabbed my slack consciousness into panic life. Rebel troops wiped out by gallant Federal forces. Among rebel officers killed: Major Christopher Okigbo.
I pulled up at the roadside. The open parkland around Nachi stretched away in all directions. Other cars came and passed. Had no one else heard the terrible news? When I finally got myself home and told my family, my three-year-old son screamed: “Daddy, don’t let him die!” He and Christopher had been special pals. Whenever Chris had come to the house the boy would climb on his knees, seize hold of his fingers and strive with all his power to break them while Christopher would moan in pretended agony. “Children are wicked little devils,” he would say to my wife and me over the little fellow’s head and let out more cries of pain. Christopher (he always preferred the full name to Chris) had a gift for fellowship surpassing anything I had ever seen or thought possible. He had friends, admirers, fans, cronies of both sexes, from all ages, all social classes, all professions, all ethnic groups, in Nigeria and everywhere. He was greedy for friendship as indeed he was for all experience, for risk and danger. He never took anti-malaria drugs because he rather enjoyed the cosy, delirious fever he had when malaria got him down about once a year. He relished challenges and the more unusual or difficult, the better it made him feel. He went to Government College, Umuahia, which did not teach Latin, and yet opted for classics at the university. After graduation he rapidly ran up a list of jobs that reads like a manual of careers: civil servant, business man, teacher, librarian, publisher, industrialist, soldier. A mutual friend who is a professional librarian was somewhat scandalized when Okigbo announced that he was going to Nsukka to be interviewed for a position in the library of the new university. Reminded that he knew nothing about librarianship, Okigbo blithely replied that he had bought a book on the subject and intended to read it during the 400-mile journey to the interview. And he got the job!
Although he turned his hand to many things in his short life he never did anything badly or half-heartedly. He carried into all his performance a certain inborn finesse and a sense of elegance. When he fell in August 1967 in Ekwegbe, close to Nsukka where his poetry had come to sudden flower seven short years earlier, news of his death sent ripples of shock in all directions. Given the man and the circumstance it was impossible for everyone to react to the terrible loss in the same way. The varied responses, I think, would have pleased Okigbo enormously, for as he once said he liked to get to London a different way each time—sometimes via Rome, sometimes Barcelona and sometimes direct.
When his nephew, Dubem Okafor, and I put together a collection of poems in memory of him in 1978, the variety of the tributes bore witness to the power of the man’s personality, his poetry, his life and death. Some of the contributors were close friends of his; some only knew him slightly, and others not at all. Some were his fellow countrymen, sundered at the time of his death by a horrendous fratricidal conflict and today still made uneasy by its memory, repercussions and the hypocrisy it engendered. Some were fellow Africans who may have heard Okigbo declare at Makerere in one of his impish moods that he wrote his poetry only for poets; and some from far-away West Indies, U.S.A., Canada and Great Britain. Some of the poems were written within a few weeks of his death and some several years later. And to underline further the variety of the Okigbo phenomenon, two poems in Igbo were included.
