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Don’t rattle your begging bowl in
this economy.
Later, in another sequence of the same poem, a hot-blooded beggar, living as many do in Lagos, prehistorically in concrete caves below modern bridges, gives out this invitation:
Come here into the hollow of my conscience
I will show you a thing or two
I will show you the heat of my love.
You know what?
I can give you babies too
Real leaders of tomorrow
Right here under the bridge
I can give you real leaders of thought.
I don’t think that elegant Miss Nigeria will have the imagination or conscience to explore the possibilities of that encounter. She will dodge the rude beggar and speed away in her expensive car to a sterile assignation with her bloated Mr. Overhead Capital.
No, indifference to suffering is not clever at all. The late Hannah Arendt showed real perceptiveness when she called her study of the psychology of totalitarianism The Banality of Evil.
Imaginative identification is the opposite of indifference; it is human connectedness at its most intimate. It is one step better than the golden rule: Do unto others … Our sense of that link is the great social cement that really holds, and it will manifest itself in fellow-feeling, justice and fair play. My theory of the uses of fiction is that beneficent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality. One thing that worries one above all else in the frenetic materialism that pervades our contemporary life is that as a species we may be losing the Open Sesame to the mundo of fiction—that ability to say “Let us pretend” like grace before our act; and to say “Our revels now are ended” like a benediction when we have finished—and yet to draw from this insubstantial pageant essential insights and wisdoms for making our way in the real world. The supple articulation of our imagination seems, alas, to be hardening rapidly into the sclerotic rigidity of literal-mindedness and material concerns.
An English friend, a marvellous raconteur at dinner, had just told a group of us of an anxious flight he and his wife recently made from the Far East when it occurred to his wife to ask him, by the way, if he had taken out flight insurance on that trip. “Oh yes,” he replied blithely, “if the plane had crashed we would have been the richest couple in the cemetery.” A few days later I repeated the joke to a doctor friend, who retorted promptly and unsmilingly that the money would have been paid to their next of kin. I thought: Oh my God, what a fate to befall the descendants of those incomparable fabulists who made our great oral traditions!
And I began to think of that other and far more serious experience which I had. I wrote a social satire called A Man of the People, which was published in January 1966, as fate would have it, two days after Nigeria’s first military coup. Because the novel ends also with a military coup a certain degree of surprise and conjecture and, I might add, admiration was inevitable among my readers. What was not inevitable, however, was the theory which grew apparently during the civil war in certain quarters that because I wrote the novel I must have been one of the planners of the military coup. Long after the civil war I was questioned rather closely on this matter after I had given a lecture in one of our universities. Rather annoyed, I asked my questioner if he had read the book and he said vaguely yes. Did he remember, I asked him then, that before the coup in my story there was first a blatant rigging of an election, civil commotion in the land, murder and arson, which happened to be paralleled also by similar events in Nigeria before the January coup. Was he suggesting that I too planned those upheavals in Ibadan and elsewhere? Did he remember that my story specifically mentions a counter-coup, a prophecy which, alas, was also fulfilled in Nigeria in July 1966. Was he suggesting that I sat in on the planning of that as well? In general, did he think that a group of dissident army officers planning to overthrow their government would invite a novelist to sit in on their plot, go back to their barracks and wait for two years while the novelist wrote up the book, had it edited and produced by his publishers, and only then spring into action and effect their coup to coincide with the book’s publication? Such a theory might have been excusable in 1966 for the armed soldiers who had gone in search of me first to my office and then, fortunately, to a house I had already vacated. How could they know that the offending book had taken two years to write and publish? But a university teacher in 1977!
This lengthy personal anecdote would not be necessary if it did not show more clearly than almost anything I have direct experience of how easy it is for us to short-circuit the power of our imagination by our own act of will. For when a desperate man wishes to believe something however bizarre or stupid, nobody can stop him. He will discover in his imagination a willing and enthusiastic accomplice. Together they will weave the necessary fiction which will then bind him securely to his cherished intention.
The fiction which imaginative literature offers us is not like that. It does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of an orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience.
Convocation Lecture, University of Ife, 1978.
MAN is a goal-setting animal. Alone or in concert with his fellows he does frequently tend to select and tackle his problems in graded priorities. He identifies personal goals, family goals, community goals, national and international goals; and he focuses his attention on solving them. At the national level, for example, he has invented short-term annual budgets and long-term five- or ten-year development plans; and, for good measure, we do have in this country chiliastic expectations such as health for all in the magic year of 2000.
Setting goals is a matter of intelligence and judgement. Faced with a confusing welter of problems all clamouring for solution at once, man’s most rational strategy is to stay as cool as possible in the face of the confusion and attack the problems singly or in small manageable groups, one at a time. Of course the choice of what he must assault first or what he can reserve for last is of the utmost importance and can determine his success or failure.
The comprehensive goal of a developing nation like Nigeria is, of course, development, or its somewhat better variant, modernization. I don’t see much room for argument about that. What can be, and is, vigorously debated is the quickest and safest route for the journey into modernization and what items should make up the traveller’s rather limited baggage allowance.
But the problem with goals lies not only in the area of priorities and practicalities. There are appropriate and inappropriate goals, even wrong and unworthy goals. There are goals which place an intolerable strain on the pursuer. History tells us, for example, of leaders who in their obsessive pursuit of modernization placed on their people such pressures as they were unable to bear—Peter the Great of Russia, Muhammad Ali of Egypt and others. Out of contemporary China rumours have come that the national goal of the one-child family which was set to combat a disastrous population problem has come into conflict with the desire of ordinary rural parents for male children and has apparently led to the large-scale secret murder of female children. It is clear from these and similar examples that a nation might set itself a goal that puts its very soul at risk.
At the Tokyo Colloquium in October 1981, under the theme of Diversified Evolution of World Civilization, Professor Marion J. Levy of Princeton University, known for his study of the history of modernization in Japan and China, made the following remark about Japan:
Well over half a century ago when everyone else was occupied with describing Japan in terms of the warrior and merchant classes Yanagida Kunio took the position that the real heart of Japan was in the customs of the Japanese farmer.1
/> If Kunio was right the point made by Professor Levy is very instructive. The mercantile and militaristic (but particularly the militaristic) goals of Japan in the first half of this century would then seem to have been at variance with the real heart of Japan—or perhaps one should say that the heart of Japan was not fully in them. This is of course an area of discourse where firm proof and certainty would be unattainable. But I think that Kunio’s view does gain credence from the fact that Japan, whose celebrated militarism suffered one of the most horrendous defeats ever visited on an army in modern, or indeed any, times, was yet able to survive and muster the morale to become in twenty-odd years a miracle of technological and economic success, outstripping all comers. A very colourful metaphor comes readily to mind—snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat.
The history of Nigeria from, say, 1970 to 1983 can be characterized by contrast as a snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory, if one considers how nearly 100,000 million naira went through our hands like so much sand through the fingers of a child at play on the beach. How do we begin to explain that? Did we not have goals? Did we not have development plans? Did we not have experts to guide our steps on the slippery slopes of modernization?
But we did have all those things—annual budgets, development plans, the lot. We were not short on experts, either.
If we didn’t have the particular kind we required, surely we had the money to hire him. What went wrong then? Our heart? Our mind? It seems our heart was not in it. Perhaps we suffered a failure of imagination. Perhaps psychologically we did not really wish to become a modern state; we saw the price of modernization and subconsciously decided we were not prepared to pay it.
Let us examine one or two of these suppositions, beginning with the question of the expert. No nation which contemplates modernization can neglect the role of the expert. He is needed; he must be paid for and he must be given adequate protection of tenure as well as respect so that others inferior to him may be motivated to strive and attain his expertise rather than hope through cheap politicking to manoeuvre themselves into his seat.
