By Biko Agozino
‘What do you think accounts
for the white man’s success in Africa, Richard’, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Odenigbo,
the ‘revolutionary’ professor in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, asked
Mr. Churchill (no relations to Sir Winston).
He was jealous of the white
man with whom his earlier lover and later wife, Olanna, cheated on him. The
twin sister, Kainene, and lover of the white man who cheated on her with her
twin answered with an ironic twist on this query, ‘Perhaps you should first
account for the black man’s failure to curb the white man’s mission’.
Ignoring the sexually
charged retort, Odenigbo asserted that racism was the tool with which the white
man made possible his conquest of Africa and he was challenged by Kainene to
say if racism would also account for the conquest by African men over other
Africans. Here, Adichie does what she does best in all her novels, mocking the
pseudo intellectual masculinists in African universities who have invented
nothing and have published nothing original enough to merit the recognition
accorded to intellectuals.
While black men were busy
committing genocide against millions of their own black brothers and sisters
with machetes and clubs but mainly with weapons supplied by Europeans and with
starvation as a weapon of war, all our ‘revolutionary’ intellectual could
muster was a blame game with the only white man who stuck the war out in
apparent identification with the victimized, who ran out with Kainene to save a
deserting soldier who was being lynched by women, and later stayed to mourn the
loss of his Kainene beyond the end of the war after she had gone in search of
food for the idle men but did not return.
By contrast, the so-called
revolutionary intellectual, Odenigbo, engaged in no single revolutionary act or
thought throughout the movie - he never stopped to offer a lift in his beaten
down car to any of the refugees trekking on foot despite having room to spare
and he never volunteered for the army but chose to 'work' in the distribution
of relief from international donors where he was sure to secure bottles of
brandy for himself. That was probably why his landlord kicked him out, not
because of rents because no one charged rents to refugees during that war.
From beginning to end, Dr.
Odenigbo indulged in excessive consumption of alcohol with other professors on
campus and under fire during the war but with no evidence that any of them was
working on any research project nor even attempting to read a book. In fact,
Odenigbo had no book shelf or even a single book displayed in his house and
when Olanna tried to move in with her books and book shelf he complained that
she was taking up his space!
The only person doing any
writing was the white man, Richard Churchill, who was writing a novel, ‘A
Basket of Hands’. When Olanna introduced herself as a sociologist, the natural
science colleague told her that hers was a voodoo science and asked why she did
not major in real science as if he himself had anything to show for his ‘real’
science.
Therein lies the answer to
the question of Odenigbo – the technological and scientific weakness of African
intellectuals is what made the conquest of Africa by a few Europeans feasible
and not the moral superiority that he claimed as an excuse by the victimized,
Adichie seems to suggest. In this sense, the film and the novel failed to
account for the awesome technological innovations by the scientists empowered
by Biafra to fabricate weapons and refine oil for the war.
Even if the focus is on
literary scholar growth with Richard as worthy of emulation, Adichie owes it to
her readers to include in her characterization of African intellectuals, such
literary gems as nna anyi (our father) Achebe in whose former official
residence she was brought up at the University of Nigeria Nsukka and who served
as a peace diplomat during the war, the mythical Okigbo who died fighting to
end the genocidal war, the indomitable Soyinka who languished in solitary
confinement throughout for opposing the war, the Amazon, Flora Nwapa, who was
an activist in self-defense during the war, or even the prophetic Azikiwe,
whose poem, 'Land of the Rising Sun', was adapted as the national anthem of
Biafra, to mention but only Nigerian productive writers.
In the film, the women came
across as decisive and strong characters who improvised classes to teach the
children during the war, provided food for the men and the children, and
comforted the men as if they were big babies. The men, except the inventive and
resourceful adult male house 'boys', appeared feeble and lacking in any serious
pursuits other than sleeping with any female under the excuse that the strong
Mama figure, Onyeka Onwuenu, got her son drunk to get him to sleep with the
maid and give her a grandchild. Even the father of the twins had no shame in
attempting to pimp them to a corrupt politician just to secure a contract but
the young ladies who were educated abroad resisted the sexual harassment.
The so-called revolutionary
Odenigbo never plucked up the courage to ask his mother what indigenous
knowledge system she had used to ‘make him’ impregnate the maid after one
attempt whereas he had been trying for a baby with Olanna but only succeeded in
shooting blanks. Mama thought that Olanna must have been an evil witch out to
steal her son but later found her to be devoted and begged her to marry him.
Adichie is always trying to demystify superstitious beliefs.
‘Baby’ was soon abandoned
by the maid and by the grandmother, forcing Olanna to insist that she and
Odenigbo should keep and raise her as their own instead of sending her to an
orphanage as he had intended. Odenigbo’s revolutionary credentials were
questioned when he cowardly left his mother to die at the hands of the
approaching enemy troops only for him to attempt the suicidal stunt to go and
bury her corpse behind enemy lines.
Biyi Bandele, the director,
must have paid a lot for the archival footage of the war news but the children
all looked far too well fed and the women and men too well-dressed to come
close to the nightmarish experience of kwashiorkor kids and adults in rags
perhaps because the focus of both the film and the novel was on the perspective
of the elites who obviously did not suffer as much deprivation as the average
Igbo family during the war. On the other hand, the more garish footage
may have been censored by the Nigerian censors board that initially refused to
license the release without cuts.
The special effects brought
back the scare of the air raids from which we ran as children during the war
and the pogrom scenes on the streets of Kano and in the airport remind us of the
continuing slaughter of fellow Nigerians by terrorists and by uniformed
officers. The provocative newsreels from the BBC in the film raised questions
about the ethical responsibility of journalists who stoke up ethnic hatred and
thereby facilitate genocide in Africa. But the overall responsibility lies with
Africans who have themselves to blame for abandoning our vital philosophy of
non-violence under the seductions of militarism, the film seems to moralize.
Thanks to the Black
Graduate Students Association, the Black Students Association and the African
Students Association at Virginia Tech for organizing an Africana Studies Film
Festival during Black History Month and for screening this film along with
Tsotsie on February 28, free of charge in the Lyric film theatre in
Blacksburg, Virginia.
Source
http://massliteracy.blogspot.com
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