Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-87

  We want risk capital

  Not beggars

  Social overhead capital

  Not a begging bowl

  Don’t rattle it

  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.

  But having an expert among us does not absolve the rest of us from thinking. To begin with, the expert is generally an expert only in a narrow specialism. He can build a bridge for us perhaps, and tell us what weight of traffic it can support. But he can’t stop us from hiring an attendant who will take a bribe and look the other way while the prescribed weight is exceeded. He can set up the finest machinery for us, but he can’t create the technician who will stay at his post and watch the controls instead of going for a chat and some groundnuts under a mango tree outside.

  So there is a limit to what an expert can do for us. In 1983, just before the overthrow of President Shagari’s administration, I gave an interview for a television programme which subsequently caused some offence in certain quarters. One of the questions put to me was what did I think about the President’s Green Revolution programme. And I said then, as I would say today, that it was a disaster which gave us plenty of food for thought and nothing at all in our stomach. Whereupon a certain fellow with a lot of grouse in him wrote in the papers that I should not have been asked to comment on agriculture because I was not an expert in that field. Well, we don’t really need a Ph.D. in agriculture to tell us when our stomach is empty, do we? If we are in reasonable health we should all carry around with us reliable, inbuilt alarm systems popularly called hunger to apprise us of our condition!

  I must say in this regard that the best experts do not themselves encourage us to have foolish and superstitious faith in their ability to solve our diverse development problems. In an essay published by the American Economic Review in 1984 Sir Arthur Lewis, one of the foremost development economists in the world and no stranger by any means to problems of African underdevelopment, did highlight in his inimitably elegant fashion the sheer plethora of prescriptions among development experts of differing persuasions:

  Every school has offered its own candidate for driver of the engine of growth. The physiocrats, agriculture; the Mercantilists, an export surplus; the classicists, the free market; the Marxists, capital; the neo-classicists, entrepreneurship; the Fabians, government; the Stalinists, industrialization; and the Chicago School, schooling.2

  To sum up this marvellous passage I have composed a couplet which I beg pardon to inflict on you:

  There! we have it on the best authority

  Theorists of development cannot agree!

  I will turn now to another world-famous economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, for a different kind of testimony. Interestingly, John Kenneth Galbraith is the current President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I must crave your indulgence to quote a fairly long extract from his address to the Academy in 1984 about the role of the arts in industry:

  Finally let no one minimize the service that the arts render to established industry. In the years since World War II … there has been no economic miracle quite like that of Italy. That lovely country has gone from one political disaster to another with one of the highest rates of economic growth of any of the industrial lands. The reason is not that the Italian government is notably precise in its administration, that Italian engineers and scientists are better than others, that Italian management is inspired or that Italian trade unions are more docile than the AFL-CIO. The Italian success derives from the Italian artistic tradition. Italian products over the widest range are superior not in durability, not in engineering excellence, not in lower cost. They are better in design. Italian design and the consequent industrial success are the result of centuries of recognition of—including massive subsidy to—the arts.

  In concluding his address, Galbraith made the following affirmation:

  The arts are not the poor relation of the economic world. On the contrary they are at the very source of its vitality.3

  Before I leave these foreign references I must return very briefly to that other miracle, Japan, to which I have already made reference. If “there has been no economic miracle quite like that of Italy,” there has been none to match Japan’s in dramatic suddenness and awesomeness of scale. It has been uniquely salutary also for thoroughly debunking all the bogus mystique summoned to explain Western industrialism—the Protestant ethic, the Graeco-Judaic tradition, etc. We, the latecomers (as Marion J. Levy calls us), have every reason to pay special attention to Japan’s success story as we take our faltering steps to modernization.

  In the 1981 Tokyo Colloquium which I spoke about earlier we were attempting, among other things, to define the cultural ingredient, or as one of the Japanese scholars put it the “software,” of modernization. One of the observations that made a particularly strong impact on me in this connection was a little family anecdote by Professor Kinichiro Toba of Waseda University:

  My grandfather graduated from the University of Tokyo at the beginning of the 1880s. His notebooks were full of English. My father graduated from the same university in 1920 and half of his notes were filled with English. When I graduated a generation later my notes were all in Japanese. So … it took three generations for us to consume western civilization totally via the means of our own language.4

  If Professor Toba’s story is at all typical of the last 100 years of Japanese history (and we have no reason to believe otherwise), we can conclude that as Japan began the countdown to its spectacular technological lift-off it was also systematically recovering lost ground in its traditional mode of cultural expression. In one sense then it was travelling away from its old self towards a cosmopolitan, modern identity, while in another sense it was journeying back to regain a threatened past and selfhood. To comprehend the dimensions of this gigantic paradox and coax from it such unparalleled inventiveness requires not mere technical flair but the archaic energy, the perspective, the temperament of creation myths and symbolism.

  It is in the very nature of creativity, in its prodigious complexity and richness, that it will accommodate paradoxes and ambiguities. But this, it seems, will alway
s elude and pose a problem for the uncreative, literal mind (which I hasten to add is not the same as the literary mind, nor even the merely literate mind). The literal mind is the one-track mind, the simplistic mind, the mind that cannot comprehend that where one thing stands, another will stand beside it—the mind (finally and alas!) which appears to dominate our current thinking on Nigeria’s need for technology.

  The cry all around is for more science and less humanities (for in the narrow disposition of the literal mind more of one must mean less of the other). Our older universities have been pressured into a futile policy of attempting to allocate places on a 60:40 ratio in favour of science admissions. In addition, we have rushed to create universities of technology (and just as promptly proceeded to shut down half of them again) to demonstrate our priorities as well as confusions.

  Nobody doubts that the modern developed world owes much of its success to scientific education and development. There is no doubt either that a nation can decide to emphasize science in its educational programme in order to achieve a specific national objective. When the Russians put the first man in orbit in 1961, John Kennedy responded by doubling United States space appropriations in 1962 and intensified a programme of space research which was to land Americans on the moon within the decade. But Kennedy did not ask the universities to starve out America’s liberal arts education. As a matter of fact he had previously demonstrated sufficient awareness of the national need for the arts when at his inauguration he broke with tradition and gave pride of place to a reading by Robert Frost, the great New England poet.