By Obi Nwakanma
I too spent a few times visiting COE Ekwensi at his Ojuelegba home, on the third floor. That house, built smack at the crossroads, on Itire road, was a numinous place. The roads leading to Yaba, to Itire, to western Avenue and to Ayilara, converged all the edges of the city. From that house, Ekwensi observed Lagos. He had lived there consistently from 1954, and wrote People of the City, and the Jaguar Nana novels from there. If Nigeria’s ministry of Culture or the Lagos City Council were as smart and historically minded as they should be, that house at Ojuelegba junction where Ekwensi lived, could have had a plaque by now to mark it/ and preserve it as part of a national monument of historical places, to be managed by the Antiquities Commission. But Nigeria does not have such measurable priorities, perhaps because the right people are no longer in the right places thinking for Nigeria and shaping public policies and actions. We gave careerists not thinkers in the Civil service. The Ministry of culture possibly has no personnel that does policy on national heritage and on antiquities. But that’s another question. Ekwensi in fact also had a very magnificent home on independence layout in Enugu. I do remember the couple of times I visited the novelist. At each of those moments, he refused to be interviewed, but preferred an easy, unmediated conversation. I understood he was planning to write his memoir. One of the quick things that sort of became clear to me in my conversations with Ekwensi was that beyond the bohemian style, was a very complex man, who was highly trained. Few Nigerians know that as the Federal Director of Information, Cyprian Ekwensi was the Head of Nigeria’s National intelligence service through the First Republic . The Ministry of Information( until 1963, the Ministry of Information and Research) was the Intelligence arm of government until 1966, when the military disrupted the system and imposed a more martial service. But Ekwensi was Nigeria’s budding spy chief, and adviser to the president and prime minister on national security information. He had dossier on everyone. I keep hearing this talk about how Ekwensi was the most “ underrated Nigerian novelist,” and kept from the canon by “ gatekeepers.” This is a very flawed view first retailed by a particular American critic and now everyone writing about Ekwensi parrots it! It is untrue. Ekwensi was the gatekeepers, gatekeeper. Although he was like Ike, and there is a reason for it which I will not go into here, not a member of the Mbari club; he was however a frequent and valued guest of Mbari around which much attention was built, perhaps because of Mbari’s connection to the CIA, among other factors. Ekwensi is a different part of the canon, and nobody has or can ignore him! He was interviewed in the famous African Writers Speaking program of the Transcription Center, afterall. His novels have been studied and continue to be studied. A great aspect of the Onitsha Market literature tradition was ascribed to him by Obiechina, and it is therefore inaccurate that he has been ignored, neglected or decentered. This should actually not be the question around Ekwensi. There must be new material. I was disappointed when I saw the unpublished manuscripts of his proposed memoir at the Ransome Center, at Austin, Texas. It was at best a sketch of his notes towards a memoir! I think he left telling his story a little too late, by which time, he had lost juice. The war also did numbers on him, and left him, like many of his contemporaries from the East, tongue tied. They had lost their muse and were no longer able to imagine Nigeria. That’s the story. Ekwensi’s story, as I once told his son, George, is a biographer’s dream. If I still had it in me, I would have told it. But I think I have just had enough! One thing most Nigerians also do not know about Ekwensi was that he was an avid Cricketer. I think that he may have played for the GCI XI. But I once happened on him one weekend at his Ojuelegba home halfway to listening to an England vs India game on BBC, recording the scores methodically on a notepad in front of him! Ekwensi was many things: including a forester, and it is important to understand how a solitary life in the wilds, observing night animals may have fueled his imagination. Those aspects of Ekwensi, including his handling of the controversy of the Nigerian government’s censorship of Jaguar Nana which had prevented it from being turned into film by an Italian company that had already bought the rights, situates Ekwensiin the lore of nation in a more interesting way. Indeed, his story is at the very core of Nigeria’s literary modernity: as a broadcaster and novelist . He is a central figure therefore of a global cultural late modernity.
Obi Nwakanma
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