Ugochukwu Anadi Profiles Three Nigerian Storytellers
Ugochukwu Anadị is a writer and an avid reader who loves writing about what he has read. In our latest feature, he writes on his three favourite Nigerian storytellers and the things about them that resonate with him.
From Okey Ndibe whose stories and literary activism remind him of Achebe; to Ọ́là W. Halim who writes queerness in an unusual way; to Nnamdi Oguike for his introduction of a new form of pan-Africanism.
Okey Ndibe
Okey Ndibe is the author of the novels: Arrows of Rain (2000) and Foreign Gods Inc. (2014). He also authored the memoir, Never Look An American in the Eye (2016) and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics (2019), all of which I have read.
His fictions, including the unpublished manuscript, Memories Lie in Water, remind me of how I love stories served: with an elevated language, an unwavering dedication to beauty at the sentence level (every word, every sentence, must count) and a richly nuanced and multi-layered perspective such that the book’s store of interpretations cannot be depleted even by the most adroit of critics.
His two novels remind me of the works of my favourite writer, the late Chinua Achebe. Ndibe shows that with the right writing, the regional can become universal and the universal localized in his use of local flavour (idioms, proverbs, metaphors, symbolisms, etc.) in such a way that a non-Igbo person will still love his ‘Igbo-conscious narrative’ just in the same way Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, what might be referred to as an Igbo story written by a then young Igbo man, was able to gain global resonance. It reminds me that in all our differences, in spite and despite them, we share a common humanity.
But beyond Literature, the person of Prof. Okey Ndibe is someone I find extremely charming and likable, a role model of sort. In the Nigerian socio-political and cultural scene, Ndibe’s being and literary activism mirrors an advice a grandmother character gave to her journalist grandson (a major character in his Arrows of Rain): “a story that must be told never forgives silence”.
Okey Ndibe offers no silence to stories he believes must be told. He is one to constantly challenge and berate our inept political (mis)rulers and that has gotten him into many a trouble, including making him a regular customer (in every negative sense that word can assume) of the country’s State Security Servive (SSS) since 2008, after the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s administration added his name to a list of “enemies of the Nigerian State” for publicly stating that he will never accept Yar’Adua’s presidency since the road to his ascendance was paved with stolen and manipulated ballot papers.
In this regard, he once again reminds me of my literary god, Chinua Achebe, who did not only seek the best of Nigerian (and African) Literature but also of the Nigerian State. With publications like The Trouble With Nigeria (1983) and There Was a Country (2012) and symbolic gestures like the rejection of national prizes, Achebe criticised, condemned and proferred solutions to Nigeria’s plethora of problems.
Ọ́là W. Halim
Ọ́là is a Nigerian short story writer living with albinism. His short stories, scattered across different literary magazines and journals (both African and non-African) have as their major thematic thrusts, subjects like albinism, queerness and feminism. He believes that it is his duty to tell “stories not frequently told, themes rarely explored” and this he has been doing commendably well.
In his short story, The Road, which made it to the 2022 Gerald Kraak Prize, for “Writing on Gender, Social Justice and Sexuality,” Halim writes a story whose major characters are gay, but that is not the totality of the story, nor even its focus. In his writing of the story, he was able to create likeable and vulnerable characters who are gay and other things (in fact, characters who are many other things and gay too), as against the kind of queer stories normally published–where the queer characters can only be queer and persecuted. Read this description of the story by Open Country Mag:
“A moving evocation of a man and a woman discovering their shared love for a man who died trying to escape to Europe as an economic migrant. The depiction of the hell of trans-Sahara migrancy is robust, and the engagement between the two characters subtle and complex, revealing the limits of what they know about the man they love. It is a tale of reconnection via grief.”
“An Analysis of a Fragile Affair,” short-listed for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is another splendid story of Halim. In it, the major characters are unnamed: the boy, young, fragile, naïve, gay; living with albinism and seeking for love in a country where to be gay is to be a faggot waiting to be burnt, and the man, older, in a heterosexual relationship, gay, closeted; manipulative and abusive. In this story, the complex layers of oppression and abuse were peeled open; it wasn't just the homophobic Nigerian society oppressing the homosexual Nigerian. It was an older, supposedly more informed, better exposed gay Nigerian, wanting to make a slave, a toy, of someone who sees a father and a mentor in him. It was really a fragile affair, one the objective observer will be pushed to break.
In the rest of his many masterpieces, “Running,” “Master Zambezi,” “Loving You Vs Leaving You,” “Eyes,” etc., Ọ́là reminds me of another two of my beloved writers: Okey Ndibe, in his attention to details and dedication to writing a well crafted story even if it comes at the expense of not being ‘prolific’; Bryan Okwesili, who does with flash fiction almost exactly what Ọ́là Halim does with short stories.
Nnamdi Oguike
Nnamdi Oguike is currently working on his debut novel after publishing Do Not Say It's Not Your Country (2019), his debut collection of short stories.
The 2019 winner of Morland Writing Scholarship for African Writers wrote in his collection as if he was on a journey across different countries of Africa with a camera in his right hand and his writing materials on the other. The collection set in over ten African countries, shows living in Africa in both its grimmest and its most glorious of states and teaches a new form of pan-Africanism.
While I am yet to fully theorise what this new form of pan-Africanism is, I think it is one that is not reactionary (to Western incursion, or neo-colonialism) but one rooted in an admiration of the Self while being receptive of superior ideas from the Other. It is a sort of pan-Africanism that is not interested in (and actively abhors) the deodorization of the faults of Africa and Africans (and shifting all blames to the colonisers, slave trade, or even the White Saviour Complex); it is not reluctant to blame the 'outsiders' when and where the blame is necessary too. But above all, the author understands perfectly that unlike the anthropologist or the historian whose work is to document, the fiction writer creates and that creation he did in Do Not Say It Is Not Your Country.
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Ugochukwu Anadị is an avid reader who loves writing about what he has read. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry and critical pieces and reviews have been published by: Afapinen, Afritondo, Afreecan Read, Afrocritik, Arts Lounge, ANA Review, Brittle Paper, Conscio Magazine, The Shallow Tales Review, etc. He won the Nelson Mandela Peace Prize for Human Rights Writing as awarded by IHRAF, USA and has been shortlisted or longlisted for the Ikéngà Prize for Literature, Africa@2050 Climate Fiction Contest, The Green We Left Behind Climate Nonfiction Contest, amongst others. He explores the issues of human sexuality, climate change, African Literature, Igbo Cosmology amongst others in his writing.
