By Rudolf Okonkwo
Aburo, how are you doing?
Rarely do I feel like interfering in the affairs of men in your place of aboard. But I have been itching to write you since July of 2013 when you tactically referred to Patience Jonathan, the wife of President Jonathan, as a hippopotamus. I cringed as your admirers cheered you to the high heavens, including that renegade called Dr. Damages. I was new here and could not figure out how to message you.
Let me start by saying that your friends Christopher Okigbo and Emmanuel Ifeajuna finally figured out the hack I am using to send this message to you. Those two and the likes of Olumuyiwa Awe, Nathaniel Oyelola, and Fela Ransome-Kuit all thrive here with little or no opportunities for mischief.
They said I should tell you that they are glad to see that you are still wagging fingers, ruffling feathers, and, as young people of today say, busting balls.
For those of us who were with you in the 50s and 60s, we understand you and the Agwu messing with your head. Your adoration for a “third force” in every war is not something we expect you to abandon at this late stage in the game of life. Having said that, I write to say, nwayo, aka nyo, softly, softly, my brother.
I can see that you are having minor problems understanding the young ones. I could help you out.
I have been here for over a decade now. As an ancestor in excellent standing, I can tell you without any doubt that the great beyond is not what you imagined it to be. Forget what the colonists force-fed us; our ancestors were right all along. That knowledge should influence how you live your life on that side of the divide.
You know that the Igbo people say that when a young man lifts his father, the old man’s loincloth will cover his eyes. In the same breath, the Igbo recognize that if a deity misbehaves, its worshipers will go into the forest and show the deity the tree used to carve it.
You are a wonderful poet, my dear Ogbuefi of African literature. However, our forefathers’ proverbs have more wisdom than all the poems ever written by members of the dead poet’s society.
It is self-evident that elders should not watch a tethered she-goat give birth. Mbanu! Iro. The children may appear distracted, but they know when a snake stops acting like one. That is when they use the snake to play, and as they go home, they use it to tie their gathered firewood. Our people know when a handshake passes the elbow.
Do you know the basket our forefathers say people put on faces to tell the truth to kings who have gone astray? In this age, that basket is called the Internet. It grants people who otherwise cannot untie big men’s shoes the anonymity they sometimes need to speak truth to power. It does something else. It eliminates the gap between the mighty and the low, the rulers and the ruled, the gods and the worshipers.
More importantly, it shrinks distance. With that, it reduces the time between the birth of an opinion and its delivery to the intended targets. It vanquishes not just the gatekeepers but also the entitlement they bestow on the privileged few. Floods of unfairness and inequality have eroded natural filters in people who have suffered discrimination, disillusionment, and decades of dehumanization. With the cancellation of delayed gratification, what is available now is pure fornication of opinions.
In a situation like this, what should a wise man do? He will rush to Death and the King’s Horsemen and remember, “The elephant trails no tethering-rope, that king is not yet crowned who will peg an elephant.” Likewise, that laureate is not yet born who will gag social media and hold the information superhighway up at gunpoint. Social media is not a radio station in Ibadan.
There is an essential expression that our people propound for peaceful co-existence. It is called enete-agbara – observe and ignore. It is why fire ignores the pot and cooks what is inside it. Our forefathers warned that curiosity and the desire to see and respond to everything is why bullets hit the monkey on the head.
I don’t need to remind you of your Pyrates Confraternity motto. When you stop “to uphold human dignity,” the direction your hands face will betray you. When the words out of your mouth stop gearing towards “maintaining a just and progressive society shorn of discrimination and unmeritorious considerations,” even those who attended night schools will smell it. As we have seen recently, the only way to drain the swamp is to start draining from the swamp, not from the “scourge of hyacinths” in the water inside a nearby pothole.
Ogun, your kindred spirit, must have told you to be mindful of your penchant for confrontation this evening hour. Your strong-headedness won’t let you remember that the sleep that lasts for more than ofu izu (native week) is death. There are no buttocks you will examine without finding poop in them. All dogs eat faeces, but it is the one that has faeces on its nose that is called the faeces-eating dog.
Brother Wole, today’s world differs from the one you and I grew up in. But I can tell you that simultaneously, the world came about due to the life we, the people you called “wasted generation,” lived. To understand this new phenomenon, you must abandon the old ways of the ’60s and ’70s and adapt to the new world.
More brilliant scholars have famously observed that most people cannot tell what a poem is. But they know one when they see it. It is the same thing with moral fortitude. They can read from a distance a poet compromised by his entanglements or buried fears. And nothing gives joy to this generation like being the first to call out poets who drowned in their inkpots, pastors who pooped on the pulpits, and philosophers who choked on their borrowed words.
I don’t envy you. I am glad I am not there to use old weapons to battle a new generation with new propensities. All that I can say to you is the same thing Ezeudu told Okonkwo about Ikemefuna: do not have a hand in the beatification of that area boy in Aso Rock. Some say you are involved already. But it is still morning on creation day. You can still remove the monkey’s hand from the pot before it becomes a human hand.
You can go out fighting to adapt a fast-changing world to your caprices or adapt yourself to a fast-expanding universe. The choice is yours.
As an Anglican Church choir member in your youth, you are familiar with the core message of Don Moen’s hymn, “Trust and Obey.” It is not too late to expect you to trust that the new generation will find their mission and obey their new rules of engagement. There is no other way to be happy living with today’s generation but to trust and obey. If you cannot trust and obey, remember Newton’s 3rd law of motion, which says that action and reaction are equal and opposite. The law applied to your “3rd force” during the 1967-1970 Nigeria-Biafra War. It also applies to today’s Indomie Penkelemes Wars.
As you noted in your Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “the past must address its present.” The present also has a responsibility to purify its future.
Talking about the future, Wole, my brother, Happy 90th birthday. I hope you do not use the last part of your life to destroy the first.
Yours truly,
Chinua Achebe.
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo teaches Post-Colonial African History, Afrodiasporan Literature, and African Folktales at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is also the host of the Dr. Damages Show. His books include “This American Life Sef” and “Children of a Retired God,” among others. His upcoming book is called “Why I’m Disappointed in Jesus.”
