My people, the Bekwarra of northern Cross River State, and the Tiv people of Benue State, are neigbours. They share a common boundary and they interact liberally. The Tiv occupy all of the northern flank of Bekwarra almost encircling it at the northern eastern flank.
As to be expected, the level of the social and economic intercourse between the Bekwarra and Tiv peoples is so high. It is such that unless a stranger is told, he may not be able to distinguish between the two neighbours. Many prominent and not so prominent Bekwarra people have friends in Tiv land and vice versa.
In Gakem, which is my own village, there lived a certain famous man called Achoda Ushie but known more famously by his guy name or cognomen as Achoda Ojiji. Achoda Ojiji was a man ahead of his time in terms of wealth and wisdom.
At one point he had the highest number of children in Bekwrraland most of whom looked like him. He was generally acknowledged as one of the wisest, smartest and most knowledgeable men in the whole of Bekwarraland and beyond. His exploits of wisdom are too numerous for me to recount here. At any rate, it is not the subject of this piece.
Achoda Ojiji, who passed on less than twenty years ago, had a younger friend from Tiv land who used to literally worship him for his wisdom and sagacity. His name was Amena. I refer to him in the past tense because I guess he may have died also.
Amena used to dot on Achoda Ojiji. On most days of the week, especially on the weekly market day, Amena was certain to be found in the house of Achoda Ojiji, feeding on his wisdom and also on his food and drinks too! He waited on the words of wisdom that fell from the mouth of Achoda Ojiji and the food that flowed from his table!
One day, when Amena had a sumptuous meal in Achoda’s house, he broke out in prayer, beseeching the Almighty God to grant him one favour, namely that God should make him to die the very day that Achoda Ojiji dies.
When asked why he made such a request of the Almighty God, he said he wants his death to coincide with that of Achoda Ojiji, so that when concerned social commentators sit to review the heavy harvests of death that have lately taken place in Bekwarraland as well as in neighbouring Tiv land, it will be said that Achoda Ojiji has passed on and many other prominent people’s names will be mentioned also.
Then, even if in passing, his own name, Amena, will inevitably be also mentioned and he will feel mightily fulfilled that he has received a favourable mention in this roll call of prominent persons that have passed on to glory that glorious day!
I do not know how psychologist will call this type of craving for glory. May be it is called associated glory. But however it is described, Amena wanted to ride on the back of Achoda Ojiji to glory! He wanted to climb on the shoulders of a giant to prominence.
From an unknown quantity to a known personality even if it is only momentarily in death!
This famous story of Achoda Ojiji and his Tiv friend, Amena, came to my mind when I read the story of one unknown writer who goes by the name of Anne Giwa-Amu who claims that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has plagiariased her own work.
I must confess that I have not read a dot of what Anne Giwa-Amu has ever written in her life to be able to compare her alleged work which she says Chimamanda plagiarized in her Half of A Yellow Sun. I am, therefore, not in a position to authenticate or disprove her claim.
But on this issue, I am biased in favour of Chimamanda based, firstly, on report that a court has sat over her claim and dismissed it as baseless and even awarded a cost against her.
For her, therefore, to continue to make the claim seems to me like embarking on a campaign to tarnish the well earned image of Chimamanda’s.
Secondly, on a purely sentimental basis, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a genius, one of our greatest exports to the world. She deserves to be protected and even promoted. Chimamanda has shown in Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus and other of her output that she is a writer of great quality.
Even in the unlikely event fhat CNA has copied her, I expect Anne Giwa-Amu to feel flattered and give God thanks for using her to inspire a writer of Chimamanda’s calibre.
I am not in any way saying that a genius cannot steal ideas from even dunces. No.
As I have noted, we Africans must not become unwitting weapons in the hands of those who despise us against our few successful fellows. We have very few heroes in Africa or the Black World.
When, therefore, a genius like CNA emerges, we do not need dunces to rise up in confederacy against them as a certain gifted writer once said.
Thirdly, I am angry at Anne Giwa Amu because I suspect that she wants to use Amena’s tactic on me and other persons to compel us to read her own book. Whatever may be her writing prowess I do not think it can in any way be a match against CNA’s.
If CNA is a plagiarist, she must be a mightily good one indeed. For her to have copied and come up with those three great novels aforementioned means that she is a great copyist and may she continue to copy forever.
In truth, Chimamanda may not have pioneered the African Writer’s Series like Achebe did but her abilities as shown in her plot, characterization, imagination, use of language, descriptive powers and all the techniques of a modern writer are unsurpassed by any other African writer or any modern writer from anywhere else in the world.
In my humble estimation, Chimamanda is better than Achebe, better than Soyinka, better than Ngugi Wa Thiongo, better than Ayi Kwei Armah and better than Mongo Beti (Alexander Biyyidi Awala), my favourite African novelist.
Like Mongo Beti’s Mission to Kala, I have re-read Half of a Yellow Sun several times because of its sheer beauty, wit and the entire craft. She may not have attained the type of significance which those other writers I think she is better than have achieved, but her place in African or world literature is assured.
I am sure Anne Giwa-Amu’s campaign has not gained traction with the Western world, especially the Illuminati-dominated media, because of Chimamanda’s politics which they love but which I loathe utterly.
The West has left Adichie alone because of her total support for Feminism. I think Feminism is a variant of the well known Satanic Movement to turn the world upside down.
Fourthly, and even more importantly, as a student of Oral Literature or Orature, I believe that literature is a communal thing. The raw material from which various stories are fabricated is there and everyone is aware of it and can draw from it for his own use.
What makes children and scholars to esteem one story teller better than the others is their ability to add to it by their witty inventions and narrative techniques.
Even with modern literature, I do not think there is any single writer in the world who can say with confidence that he or she has consciously or unconsciously not plagiarized another writer. Influences come to people who read widely.
If we are given an opportunity to look critically at Anne Giwa Amu’s work, we may discover that there is nothing entirely original in her work after all whether in her plot, the statements some of her characters make and other things she complained CNA copied from her without acknowledgement.
I feel bad that I feel called upon to defend Chimamanda whose feminist politics I abhor. You will recall her anger at Mrs. Hillary Clinton for describing herself first and foremost as somebody’s wife.
What is Chimamanda’s business if someone decides that one of her most powerful identities is as a loyal and loving house wife? I also utterly hate the way Chimamanda treats her husband, Ivara Esege, as if he is only tangential to her life.
See, for example, her grudging, footnote-like, I-nearly-forgot, kind of acknowledgement of Mr. Esege in her book Half of a Yellow Sun.Esege is on the second to the last paragraph in the perking order of a roll call of those acknowledged in a tribute that covers two whole pages!
Moreover, she is not even identified as his wife. If she does not like the institution of marriage, she can as well not be married and not go into it and have a child through it.
I often wonder to myself what type of man this Mr. Esege is. If marriage is not a big deal to Chimamanda, why marry her in the first place? As agberos in our motor park would quip, as famous as she is and as womanly sophisticated as she is, does she impregnate herself? Certainly, no.
Whether she likes it or not, she needs a man, some bloody man to do it for her! Chimamanda must therefore show respect, if not to the man, but to the institution that makes for her servicing in a respectful manner.
Chimamanda simply overdoes her feminism. In the course of my rereading Half of a Yellow Sun, I was struck by the unrealistic portraiture of most of her female characters who are, uncharacteristically, initiators of the sexual act. They are the aggressors and their male spouses innocent ‘victims’. They do not obey feminine sexual protocols of indirection, pretended indifference or uninterest by which they allow the male to be the dominator, the perpetrator-in-chief of the sexual encounters.
Take for example, Chinyere, a house girl next door who will come to Ugwu, the house boy to Odenigbo, the novel’s hero, pull off her blouse, untie the wrapper around her waist and lay on her back on Ugwu’s bed.
Ugwu will take the cue, do her and she will get up, dress up and leave as silently as she had come! An uneducated Nigerian girl of the 1960s will never behave like that even if she will die of pent up passion. But Chimamanda must invest her female heroines with the abilities to decide and determine which man they sleep with, when and how.
Again, when Kainene slept with Odenigbo her twin sister’s husband and Olanna also slept with Richard her twin sister’s man at different times, it was the two women who took the lead in initiating the abominations. Most women in her writing are sexual ‘predators’.
I thought of writing a doctoral dissertation on the topic “Female Sexual Initiators: Contrived Feminist Lies in the novels of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; the Example of Half of a Yellow Sun’’. I gave up the idea because ASUU with their sometimes unreasonable, infantile and incessant strikes will not allow me to finish such a project in a Nigeria public university.
Chimamanda, a convinced feminist, appears to me like one who takes delight in creating caricature men, castrated men who are under the suzerainty of warrior women, something that is very unrealistic in Africa.
This is the depth of my feelings towards Chimammanda yet I feel very bad that one upstart writer from somewhere not known to Idang Alibi wants to ride on her back to fame and fortune.
I will deny her what she is craving for by not reading her work whether it is indeed true or not that CNA plagiarized her. I hate a sardine behaving like a whale.
