OH PANASHE / THIS TABULA RASA: an open letter to Panashe Chigumadzi
By Fifi Oddly
They say check your privileges so let me check ours: we are legion for we are many. We are dominating the African scene in the West and different art forms. We are too proud. We’re not letting other Africans be seen. Recently, @tidetherecluse tweeted, ‘I hate being Nigerian and they hate us too.’ This is how I felt at your lecture in Bijlmer theater. This is why we must talk about it. The title of your essay, Why I’m No Longer to Nigerians about Race is gotten from Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. The histories wedged against the subjects in Reni’s book are much heavier than those wedged against Nigerians in your essay. The system perpetrated by white complicity is the enemy but somehow you’ve managed to make Nigerians the enemy too. Perhaps this and other factors are considerations for effects of xenophobia, where because a people feel like they’ve been left alone by people who should have their backs — they lump them up with the enemy, erasing the even more complex histories. The fact that you thought it was okay to shift that title back to Nigerians either shows that the grievances you bear with us are too heavy, or that you were looking for trouble, going for a kind of exaggerated effect — and I love that. It reeks of troublemaker. I’ve seen you tweet ‘bolekaja!’ which is Yoruba that translates to ‘Come down let’s fight’ so Panashe, I have brought the war to your door. In her book Reni quotes Theodore W. Allen, who after reading W.B Dubois begins to develop thoughts about race saying ‘… the injury dealt out to the black counterpart has its counterpart in the privilege of the white worker. To expect the white worker to help wipe out the injury to the Negro is to ask him to oppose his own interests.’ Racism is systematic as fuck, this is why I can’t talk about Nigerians or anyone else from the point of morality or goodness. I don’t think those are inherent things except for my older sister, who is inherently good, James Baldwin too, everyone else’s goodness is up for contention. We have absolutely nothing to gain from injuries dealt to other Africans. It’s in our interests that all Africans prosper. I’ve spent so much time trying not to be a victim that to concede to victimhood so that it is clear that we are not perpetrators weighs heavy on me. Nigerians too are victims of the world. The crimes weighed against us aren’t enough to stop the conversation — you must talk to us about race, Panashe. Our country is a cacophony of conflict, our bragado is a means of survival, it is do or die. We unsee race because we are wrecked in so many other ways, and we hope you can make allowance for that. It’s not the same thing as a white person unseeing race, it is a people sworn to survive regardless — which is both our biggest strength and is also fast becoming our biggest downfall. It’s the stuff of fiction how Buhari sits in Aso Rock and makes decisions concerning our welfare, and we click our tongues and wail, and by the next day, are ready to just dissolve into the new system set up for us. We are too busy surviving, and too scared to look up from the work of persevering our survival.
In BijlmerPark Theater where you deliver a lecture on your book, These Bones will rise again and your essay, Why I am no longer talking to Nigerians about race, someone asks if you’ve gotten any responses to Why I’m No Longer talking to Nigerians about Race. You say most of your responses have been by Nigerian men defending Nigeria. You suggest it’s not a personal attack on Nigerians, it’s only to open a broader Pan-African conversation, where we center our selves and our history and bring the story back home. At your talk for the first time in my life, I felt a visceral kind of embarrassing empathy for the white man. I looked around the room to see if there were white people — or other Nigerians — who felt like I felt, like the enemy. It was not a pity party look at me I am a victim (too!) feeling. It’s that I’d come all the way there to feel among my people only to realize we are not each other’s people. The divide was clearer than I’d hoped. Why I’m no longer talking to Nigerians about race was more real than I’d thought. It was way more than a profound literary hand-flex, or you digging into your curiosity. Decisions had been made. I would find myself after the talk explaining the situation to my friend who I’d brought along for the talk with so much excitement. I had, for a while, kind of alluded to an assumption — maybe we would find our people here — only to chuckle awkwardly after and start explaining that ‘Yeah, Nigerians are kind of the Americans of Africa’ ‘I don’t think other Africans like us much’ — a reality that was opening up before me. ‘Yeah, but we’re also very blind to empathizing with other African cultures about their racial history,’ I conceded.
I love the word Chimurenga and everything it stands for but can I say it without feeling like an appropriator. Before the answer would’ve been a resounding Of course! now it’s an uncertain I don’t know. I guess for me the question has become are we all brothers and sisters? It’s something I’ve said since I was barely seven. Now I can’t say it without second-guessing the very beliefs those foundations are built on. One can’t be too romantic about these ideals. If the ‘middle-class’ of African countries are gathering in rooms both on the continent and in the diaspora to debate these issues, it’s because it is a reflection of our lived experiences with real-life consequences. This is why we must talk about it. In the preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy — and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood.” On Monday, July 15 2019, Nigerian Senate President Ahmed Lawani condemned the killing of Nigerians in South Africa warning that further attacks of Nigerians in South Africa will no longer be “condoned”. He said not less than 118 Nigerians in South Africa have been killed as a result of xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa. These are enough numbers to incite civil unrest. On 13 April 2018, Habib Miller, publicity secretary of Nigeria Union inside South Africa confirmed the death of ThankGod Okoro from Ogbaku, in the Awgu local government area of Enugu state south-east Nigeria. ThankGod Okoro was another Nigerian killed by hate crimes inspired by xenophobia on Nigerians and other Africans living in South Africa. In September 2017, South African Police arrested the now-late Mr. Kingsley Ikeri because he was suspected to be carrying hard drugs. Ikeri was a young man of 27, a businessman and a native of Mbaitoli Imo. Mr. Bartholomew Eziagulu, Chairman of the union in the province, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Durban that Ikeri was tortured to death by the police. He said the union’s investigations revealed that the police arrested Kingsley Ikeri and a friend on suspicion that they were carrying hard drugs. He said while interrogating him, the police used plastic to cover his face to extort information from him. In the process, Kingsley Ikeri suffocated. When the police took him to the hospital, he was confirmed dead.
It feels like I have assumed the position of the perpetrator who quickly becomes the victim to become absolved of consequences of their actions. Even in Renni Eddo-Lodge’s book, where she writes about why she is no longer talking to white people about race, the ‘white people’ in white text invisible on the white cover, she talks about how the book was first birthed from an essay also entitled Why I Am No Longer Talking To White People About Race and how it was not a suggestion, the decision had already been made. What came as a surprise to her was the sort of love letters she received from white people kind of being regretful about her decision to no longer engage with them on the issues of race. The beauty of that essay is that it would become a fierce book. The irony of her career is that she would since the book spend a large chunk of it talking to white people about race. It cannot be denied that she was born to write that powerful book. I hate to fit the mold and approach this somewhat from the point of the defensive but in having personal conversations with myself and turning your thoughts — the ones transpired through your book and your essay — and my thoughts over in my head, I realized it would be deceitful to pretend that I wasn’t on the defensive.
I want to be entirely honest. And if you by any chance decide like Reni to make a book out of your essay, I hope you write about me. I hope you say, ‘there was even a Nigerian who outrightly wrote to me and said they were defending their Nigeria.’ In Mozambique I made a friend who would always say ‘No no, let’s talk about it’ whenever a delicate topic came up. Now I want to talk about it. But really how do we talk about this? First of all, by me saying there is the time to proclaim about the tiger who displays tigritude by going straight for the pouncing. But there is also a time where we as Nigerians must step out of our bubbles and share in the struggles of other African countries whose lands have been forcefully taken by white settlers. It’s not a conversation about empathy; empathy can be too performative. We say, ‘I cried’ as though because we have been moved, the work is done. It’s not enough. I must admit that I understand your grievances. I do not write to tamper with your experience of race and your countries’ painful history. I imagine you talking to the stone-cold faces of Nigerians, trying to convince us that this is how much we’ve had to suffer only to be met with disbelief and complicity. What I must say is that the conversation is still too fresh for you to ‘stop talking to us about it’. I don’t talk to white people about race, the emotional labor demanded from my part in such a conversation would be too much. But I talk to every African I meet about race. It is because I want to see how they’re doing, to know if they’re still hanging in there. I cannot imagine a future where we stop talking to other Africans about race. I don’t want to imagine it. We have our work cut out for us.
I think the biggest palaver here is making race the context of the conversation between black people, between brothers and sisters. I don’t intend to ever be patronizing when I call us brothers and sisters, but I feel a keen belonging to my race. Even though race is an external, more ‘global’ context forced us on by a sudden and traumatizing inclusion on the other-other. And that is the problem. Yet it’s a problem that exists and we cannot escape it. We cannot escape the world. Every time Jay z, after the order of OJ Simpson says, ‘I’m not black I’m OJ… okay.’ in his song The Story of OJ, I start cackling. The only way to escape the world is not to be born. The only way to escape racism is not to be born black. Its effects reach far even into ‘undiscovered’ African villages. The end always comes with scars, sometimes too many. Race adds a more political layer to our conversation and our conversation is already so political. Let’s not get started on the inter-tribal wars and conquests between a people of the same tribe, brothers killing brothers under the same roof, selling cousins. All is political, all is personal. Rape accusations resound through a church and people want to make it their reason why they stopped attending church — because it is as corrupt as the government, because men rape women in churches too. A lady’s hairdresser tells her that she should better enter into a partnership with her man, a partnership that would give her documents. She knows this would add a political subtext of power to her already systemically skewed relationship (he is a man after all) but she does it anyway. It’s a political decision she makes to be able to decide where she goes and where she does not go, to be influencer over her own decisions. She is an immigrant. Her world has already made itself political by virtue of where she is.
I know you’re interested in complex histories. Your book, which I bought at the Bijlmerpark theater in Amsterdam and which you signed, ‘Afopefoluwa, I hope this resonates with your spirit. Bijlmerpark theater, 23 Juni 2019,’ your cursive letters sprawled along with the off-white sheet of the first page. I started devouring the book on the train back home and it indeed resonated with my spirit. I saw you trace your history way back to the origins. I saw you trace the patterns of your personal history using your grandmothers, Mbuya Chigumadzi and Mbuya Chiganze, and the one whose bones will rise again, Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation, as a kind of a map leading you back home. I listened to the music of your Chimurenga — Thomas Mapfumo and Dorothy Masuka, the famous Rhodesian Stage Star, played dubbed from my speakers too, just as they played from yours. I finally understood Zimbabwean history, leadership, Mugabe, and all this while you wrote history back to history, decentring those who have tried to claim it. This work is so important. The reason why I’ve probably not been able to stop thinking about this since is because I like a woman who does her work, sitting and watching you glorious read from your book, read from your essay, your toes popping through your sandals, your blue jumpsuit perfect around you, your glasses glistening in the low-lit theatre is why I have to write to you openly. I am very inspired by you and the work that you do and it was a powerful and enlightening conversation. You are a revolutionary woman and on that beautiful hot Sunday afternoon in Amsterdam, I did not come to you by chance so that this response is both personal and political.
I am Pisces, a fish but also a mountain goat whose whole life experience is first filtered through my emotional core. This is an emotional response. I would always be emotional and then find the facts that corroborate the emotions I feel too strongly. These are the facts: at your lecture in Bijlmer, you set the mood of the theater. You had opened up a conversation where it was now okay for people to ‘speak up’ against Nigerians because you had done the same when you spoke your truth when you wrote the essay. It still came as a surprise to me when during the time for questions and answers, a lady raised her hand and asked, “Why does it seem like a certain Nigerian novel of the immigrant experience becomes so popular in the West?” I thought about why this question came as a surprise to me. I remember I had earlier read the same sentiment expressed in your essay Why I am no longer talking to Nigerians about race and I had agreed. I thought someone had to say it. But in the theater, it did not sound the same as when I initially read it. Something had shifted internally, a scary reality had dawned: there is no home anywhere, not in Africa. Not even in Nigeria. Warsan Shire said no one leaves home except home is the mouth of a shark. I know this truth thoroughly in and out. She said you can’t make homes of human beings — she was wrong — human beings are the only homes, you carry bits and pieces of people you have spent your life loving with you, you carry yourself with you.
I considered your response to the lady’s question very familiar in a Nigerian way. You shrugged in an ‘I don’t know o’ way before you went on to explain that perhaps it was because of the extremely large Nigerian diaspora population in America, giving all credit to the Nigerian mass. No mention was made of talent or hard work or perseverance or discipline, all words which must be credited to any successful writer in any part of the world regardless of population mass or luck, and then again, a fellow African. I understand the sentiment about the popular West African immigrant story trope that the West seems to lap up like it’s tea and biscuits. But I had hoped for a more welcoming space where these conversations could be had on an unprejudiced ground. I couldn’t hijack the conversation to express how I was feeling for two reasons: I wasn’t exactly sure how I was feeling, I would have stammered into the microphone and said nothing still. Two, earlier during your lecture you’d cracked a joke about Nigerians defending the essay like you wrote it to them. You’d said it wasn’t written to us and how would we think you were coming for us when you named the essay after a book written by a Nigerian, and everyone had laughed. Even I had laughed. I did not want to be the ‘typical Nigerian’ being loud and making everything about me but the apple doesn’t ever fall too far from the tree. I too hate cliches but here I am. I know you hate when Nigerians say this but even my journey to discovering race was cliche. The first night I would have a break down over racial anguish I would frantically call my friend to apologize for unseeing the struggle. I would say I couldn’t just see until I saw. This was only a few days before the lecture at the Bijlmer theatre. This is why I would process everything extremely. The effects of the painful truths of the world hitting me gbas gbos from everywhere would bring me to my knees, would make me write this essay, would make me pray the serenity prayer over and over again. God please grant me the courage to accept the things I cannot change, but also grant me the courage to talk about them. Then God gave me fifi oddly.
I believe this is why we must create our systems. Our system of value and credibility as a continent is skewed. Even our critical sensibilities are skewed. Can we judge something of artistic value for what it is, for the blood and sweat that went into it or diminish a product because the West helped make it successful? How do we know what is good work from bad work? How do we separate the politics from the product? What are our units of measurement? What are our own merits? These are questions that are yet to be answered and this is why we need to keep talking about it. No one can tell me Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing or Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, or Taiye Selasi’s Ghana must go aren’t first gorgeous (feminist) books before they are anything else, western acceptance or not.
During your lecture, you had said something about the essay form becoming more popular among the younger generation. During the question and answer session, I raised my hand and asked why you thought this was happening. You answered that when you made that statement you’d meant it on a more International scale. I wondered what context or ‘scale’ you thought I’d asked the question in. A Nigerian context? A West African context? An African context? I was befuddled. Also, because you didn’t think to ask what ‘scale’ I’d meant when I asked the question before you answered. I wondered, ‘What is international? The West? The world? What, even, is the world?’ Michael Jackson answered and said we are the world but I have my doubts. In our race to define ourselves and have thorough conversations, we must remember that Africa is a continent, not a competition. We cannot afford to be lulled into a divide and rule system all over again. In The Jig is Up, Kendrick Lamar said, ‘You’re too infatuated with the fucking numbers, which makes it easy for me to divide and conquer.’ In this verse, Kendrick Lamar is echoing systems that have been tried and tested and worked far too many times. Let us not be fooled. Later in the song, and this is my favorite line, he says, “I pray to God this beat is good enough for Shawn, if not J cole your shit is traaaasssshhhh. But at least my opinion just made everyone laugh.” In the second part of that sentence, he breaks into a chuckle. It’s a great beat J Cole has made him, yet he jokes about seeking Shawn Carter’s approval, about the human condition to always seek for approval. I wish we could joke about the need for Africans to constantly seek validation from the West but we can’t. I find this need manifested in myself, begging the New Yorker to validate me, or anyone at all. If there truly is a Nigerian privilege then let’s address it and deconstruct it for what it is, lest it assumes the form of something that grows too big and out of our control. If there is a Nigerian privilege, I do not want to hold on to it. If it looks like that is what I am doing, then forgive me, I am only digging for the truth.
Nigeria and South Africa are both former colonies of Britain. Both countries are members of the Commonwealth of Nations and the African Union. During the apartheid era in South Africa, Nigeria was one of the foremost supporters of anti-apartheid movements, including the African National Congress. The Nigerian government issued more than 300 passports to South Africans seeking to travel abroad. Sonny Okosun, a Nigerian musician, wrote the hit song “Fire in Soweto” in 1977 to commemorate the 1976 Soweto uprising against apartheid in South Africa. As stated in your essay, Wo̩lé S̩óyinká did make some bold statements at the 1962 African Writers Conference held at Makerere University, as is expected of a man who built his whole career making bold statements: a Nobel Prize Winner. It’s safe to say that every sentence the man has ever made and that every sentence the man would ever make would be bold. Bold sentences very often take up the form of two-edged swords. In your essay you cite an example of one of these bold statements saying, “Wo̩lé S̩óyinká who had been so unimpressed and impatient with the Negritude movement spearheaded by the Francophone writers of African descent that he famously dismissed them at the 1962 African Writers Conference held at Makerere University, quipping: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.” At a conference in Berlin two years later, S̩óyinká elaborated this: “a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: ‘I am a tiger.’ When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.”
But it’s important to reckon where Wo̩lé S̩óyinká was coming from. Wo̩lé S̩óyinká had been interested in the decolonization of Africa from a young age and for a very extended period. In David Atwell’s Wo̩lé S̩óyinká’s South Africa, David Atwell quotes an excerpt from an interview Biodun Jeyifo had with Wo̩lé S̩óyinká in the early 1990s. In the interview, Wo̩lé S̩óyinká said: “Twenty-five years ago, I was almost exclusively concerned with the problem of black liberation from the settler-colonial and apartheid obscenities. As a student just beginning to write seriously, I saw the political battleground as being situated in South Africa, nowhere else. … My first two ‘serious’ plays were on Southern Africa. One of them was a melodramatic piece, which after about six versions, I realised was just ‘wrong’ and I destroyed it in a sober moment. The other marked my debut on the professional stage in London. Neither was very satisfactory to me and, later on, I understood why. The passion was there, it was ‘correct’ and genuine and honest, but I was experiencing the situation vicariously. “That instant, I think, I received what the Japanese might term ‘political Baton’, you know, instant illumination. I realised that the first enemy was within … And since then I’ve been doing nothing but the danse macabre in this jungle of ours.”
David Attwell goes on further to explain: “Throughout the apartheid years, in fact, Soyinka returned periodically to the question of South Africa, suggesting that he was haunted by it, or troubled, as if by a festering wound. We could distill his relationship with South Africa in this period to four memorable moments. The first is the work mentioned in the Jeyifo interview, the two plays, one of which he destroyed, the other being The Invention, which he never published although it was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1959. The action entails an accidental nuclear explosion which obliterates all traces of racial difference, whereupon a group of white South African scientists sets about inventing a device to recreate them (Larson 80). As it happens, the date projected for these events is 1976, which certainly turned out to be an explosive year for South Africa. It was in 1976, in fact, that Soyinka then produced Ogun Abibiman, an epic poem occasioned by Samora Machel’s declaration of 3 March of that year, placing Mozambique on a war footing with Rhodesia and announcing that Robert Mugabe’s ZANU forces would establish themselves on Mozambican soil. Ogun Abibiman was republished in Johannesburg in 1980, with a new dedication to “the dead and the maimed of Soweto.” The third high point in the story is Soyinka’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1986 which was published under the title, “This Past Must Address Its Present.” Amounting to a plea from the podium in Stockholm to the international community, especially Europe, for tighter sanctions to end apartheid, the address was dedicated to Mandela. Finally, there was Mandela’s Earth, a collection of poems published two years later, in 1988. While it is true, then, that Soyinka’s attention was generally focused on problems closer to home, it is also clear that he could not resist the temptation to break with declared intention and speak out on a troublesome subject when the occasion seemed to demand it. “We know, and we embrace our mission,” he said to the Swedish Academy, “It is the other that this precedent [the Nobel lecture] seizes the opportunity to address.”
Wo̩lé S̩óyinká wrote his first two serious plays about South Africa. You must understand that he didn’t just go around diminishing the efforts of other Africans in the civil rights struggle, it was a topic he had contemplated for most of his life, he was even consumed by it. This is a man who had given a huge chunk of his life to pondering Africa, to pondering Nigeria. The revelation would hit him that he had to come back home for he still felt like an outsider writing about South Africa. But that didn’t mean he cared any less and his whole career is littered with proof to show this. Yet Nigerian youth gathered on twitter to celebrate how they would not give up their plane seats for him: the young fools! This is Nigerian wickedness at its best. We are insensitive people. A lot of conversations I would have about Nigerian situations with my friends would often end like this: “But Nigerians are not good people sha.” It’s hard to unsee this truth. It’s a single story but it can be seen as a general conclusion. Why do we get the treatment that we get? We’re insensitive. We’re loud. Haha, but I ran away from my country only to realise ‘yh no one is really good.’ Is it the white man that refuses to aggressively fight, or in the least, even acknowledge the violent suffering upheld by a system they’ve perpetuated that is good? Abegi. They are all so horrible. All of us! We suffer because of our complicity, and also in spite of it.
Nigerian organised crime groups, mostly involved in illegal drug trafficking, in South Africa grew rapidly between 1994 and 1998. Following the end of apartheid in 1994, South African businesses sought for professionals to immigrate and a large number of Nigerians did so. It is estimated that there were 24,000 Nigerians living in South Africa in 2011. Much of South Africa’s good will towards Nigerians for supporting the ANC during apartheid disappeared due to the activities of Nigerian organized crime in the country. Nigerians would also have to look inwards and address our rampant perpetuity toward crime, a big example of which is our destructive cybercrime culture. Whoever told us any of this was okay?
But killing us? It is devastating when ordinary citizens attack and kill foreigners at random. A situation where the police is often named in the killings is a serious cause for concern. What it this? A war on Nigerians? Something must be done. And soon.
The world as it is today is the biggest pain. I am constantly wrecked by all the injustices but this is not about me. Yet I hope that everyone who decides to remain silent chokes on their guilt. You have chosen not to remain silent by writing and so I have in return chosen to write back to you. What I want to see is the decolonized Africa Fanon writes so clearly about, with a perpetual insistence on an ending in which we get free, all of us. Nigeria. South Africa. Afrika. It’s almost 2020. The clock is ticking. And the Pan-African ideal, no matter how romantic, is the line on which I will die. It is also me writing back to my seven-year-old self saying, Listen, my dear, fuck what you heard. When you sang and daydreamed about your African brothers and sisters, you were right. The first religious song that you felt in your bone marrow was when South Africans sang to the Christian God, calling him the crowned King of Africa. Bayete Inkosi, they hailed him. You are crowned King of Kings, they sang. It was not the worship that moved you, it was the unity: so my brothers and sisters can sing like this, so Bayete Inkosi is how Africans worship their God. Fourteen years later, I would watch Shaka Zulu on Netflix and hear them hail him Bayete Inkosi. This is before the whites and before the Christian God. The real Inkosi. I am telling my seven-year-old self to choose what to believe and to stand by it. They are telling me we still choose the same things we chose when we were only seven: love for our kind, tiwa tiwa, and an immovable kind of togetherness.
References
“Why I am No Longer Talking to Nigerians about Race.” Panashe Chigumadzi. Africa is a country, 2019
“Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race” Reni Eddo-Lodge, 2017.
“These Bones Will Rise Again.” Panashe Chigumadzi. Africa is a country, 2019
“Les damnés de la terre”, Frantz Fanon. 1961
“Wo̩lé S̩óyinká’s South Africa.” Attwell, David. English in Africa, vol. 30, no. 2, 2003, pp. 31–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40238988.
“The story of OJ.” Jay Z, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7lw0Ovzq0
“The Jig is up” Kendrick Lamar, J Cole. https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-the-jig-is-up-dumpn-lyrics
Another Nigerian, Kingsley Ikeri, killed in South Africa https://dailypost.ng/2017/09/01/another-nigerian-kingsley-ikeri-killed-south-africa/
South Africa and Nigeria relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria%E2%80%93South_Africa_relations
about the author: books r stuff & life is stupid
