Okey Ndibe. Image credit: Goethe-Institut/Jeremiah Ikongio

Repercussions of mangled memories of the civil war…

When you find a country that is allergic to memory, to telling stories and to history, you don’t tell stories of what happened in the past. I don’t care the perspective you tell the stories from, just tell it. If you fail to tell a story and the failure is a wilful one, or you chose not to tell a story because it is uncomfortable, you create a repeat of the tragedy you are trying to conceal. When I looked at the Biafra war as a child, I saw what a child’s eyes should not see: cars that were charred and mangled, human remains that were charred and blackened to a horridness; markets reduced to rubble and me ncrumpling and falling to the ground while waiting in line to receive relief. It was not a pretty sight to constantly live in fear of the military jets that would come in, fly very low and shake the very earth while dropping metallic eggs that wreaked havoc and frightening explosions.

To live through the war and not have the story told has created a certain type of fantasy that is of two kinds: one part of the fantasy is that our country has lived and even killed history and that our experiences are normal. The other fantasy is that some young people now see in Biafra, the answer to the mess that Nigeria is. And I always say that as a fundamental principle, every people should have a right to determine how they want to live. If a village establishes its will and wants to live as one nation, they ought to be allowed to do that. But having said for so many years that Nigeria is a tragic mess or a tragedy in progress, I think that Biafra and its adherents have not convinced me that Biafra is the answer.

I was addressing some young men and women in Athens two weeks ago, and I said in Biafra we still have to struggle for justice and insist on the accountability of our leaders. And I said, “if you think that you’re going to achieve development or justice once you have Biafra you have something else coming for you”. And I cited the example of my father, during the war, some corrupt Biafra officials took the little food that was donated and monopolised/hoarded it for their own families or sold it in open markets. You would see bags of beans in the market, on which were written not for sale, that were being sold in the market. Somebody made that decision and it wasn’t the ordinary merchant, it was somebody powerful in the government who decided to sell it to people who were suffering in war. My father, along with other civil servants, wrote a petition against that corruption and he was rounded up called a saboteur.

So, I tell young people that their anger is understandable. Nigeria has failed all of us, not just the Igbos. Nigeria has failed everybody but it is because we have not struggled to achieve the Nigeria of our dreams. If we give it our best effort and we can’t achieve it, then I will say everybody might as well go their way. But I’m not convinced that we’ve done that yet.

His profound respect for his father…

My father fought in World War II, fighting beside the Allied Forces and he served in Burma. At the end of the war, a young British officer called John Tucker was seconded to be the commanding officer for the signals platoon where my father served. My father recalled that this man was carrying himself with a certain British haughtiness, so one day my father was so upset that he told the man, “look, you can’t even send signals, you depend on us Africans.The only reason you’re our commanding officer is because you’re British”. The man turned and walked away in a huff and the other Nigerian and African soldiers turned to my father and asked him if he was crazy. The war had ended, they no longer needed him and he risked being court-martialled or shot. This man must have reflected on his behaviour, because he came back and apologised to his soldiers and he was seconded to bring the Nigerian soldiers back to Nigeria. He gave everyone who served under him his address in England and he and my father corresponded for almost 50 years until my father’s death. After my father died, I went to England to see the man and I have had several more occasions to visit him and his wife, both in their home where they used to live in Taunton, Somerset and now where they live in an elderly people’s home.

My father fought in World War II, fighting beside the Allied Forces and he served in Burma. At the end of the war, a young British officer called John Tucker was seconded to be the commanding officer for the signals platoon where my father served. My father recalled that this man was carrying himself with a certain British haughtiness, so one day my father was so upset that he told the man, “look, you can’t even send signals, you depend on us Africans.The only reason you’re our commanding officer is because you’re British”. The man turned and walked away in a huff and the other Nigerian and African soldiers turned to my father and asked him if he was crazy.

Folktales and precocious children…

One of the gifts my parents gave to me and my siblings was the gift of folk tales; so when I began to have my own children in America, I began to tell them all these stories. I saw what a magical experience it was for them to hear tales about interactions within the animal kingdom and sometimes interactions across sectors of being, and how some of the animals would come into the human space and argue with people. My children were so enchanted by them and I used to offer to tell these folktales in their classrooms because the children and their teachers loved them.

One of the stories I loved to tell was how the tortoise went with birds for a feast in the sky. I started by saying there was great famine in the world and that the only animals that had food to eat were birds because they had friends up in the sky. So, one day as they were going to the feast, the tortoise came and begged them to take him with them and they said “we will love to take you but you have no feathers”. But the tortoise, who is always a wily, cunning animal, said “if you each lend me a feather, I’ll be able to fly”. So the birds used their beaks to pull their feathers and they gave them to tortoise and they began to go for this feast. As they came to the top of an Iroko tree,the tortoise said to them, “let’s perch, there’s some new discussion that should be part of the agenda”. So they perched and he said to them, “when we get to the sky today, there’s a new game in town and it involves people taking new, powerful, flamboyant names”. So the birds began taking different pretentious names, and when they asked the tortoise for his name, he said, “my name is all of you.”

Once they got to the sky, the host spread out the most magnificent meals for the birds to eat along with the tortoise. The birds were so hungry and they were about to start eating, but the tortoise said “wait a minute! Before we eat, let us know who the food is for”. And the host said, “the food is for all of you.” To which the tortoise replied, “you see, I knew that the food was for me alone, my name is “all of you;”  and so he began to eat all the food and he stuffed the rest in the bags he came with. The birds were hungry because all they ate were little crumbs that fell on the floor as tortoise wolfed it down. So they said to him, “we want our feathers back right here and now, up in the sky.” He begged and begged but they said no and each bird would walk up to him and use his beak to pick the feather that he had loaned the tortoise. As they left, the tortoise beckoned to one of them in a plaintive cry and said, “Please could you do me a favour?” One of them came back and tortoise said, “could you go meet my wife and tell her to bring out all the soft things in my house; the pillows, the mattresses the balloons so that I’m going to fall from the sky and land on it so that I will not die?”

The birds agreed, but went back and told the tortoise’s wife that her husband said to bring out all the rocks, steel and wood out to his compound. And so up from the sky, the tortoise shouted down to his wife, “have you done what I asked you to do?”The wife could hardly hear him, but she heard him enough to shout yes, and then he jumped and for a long time, he fell before he crashed on all the rocks and wood and steel and his shell was broken into different pieces. His wife had to send for a healer who lived at a far end of the world to come and use a special glue to fix it all together again.

Every time I finished the story, I would ask the children what lessons or morals they had learned and some of them would say the tortoise was nasty and greedy and it wasn’t good to be nasty or greedy, but there was one particular kid who raised his hand so insistently. I noticed that this kid he was almost rising, yet I hadn’t called him. I felt he had something new to say, so I called him and he said that the lesson of the story is that next time the tortoise should pack a parachute. I realised that was a child who must be headed to Wall Street.

On gate-crashing and meeting his wife

I went to party one day (innocent me) and I met Sheri and she just loved me. She found me so irresistible and she still does.
I went to a party a few months after I arrived in America, in June. I was told by a Nigerian friend that a young Nigerian woman was throwing a birthday party. He said he wasn’t invited, but I insisted on going, because who waits to be invited to go to a party? I stepped into the party and I saw to my right, a man sitting, reading a book and I looked closely and it was Professor Babs Fafunwa…

There was no gate there, I walked in. I ‘door-crashed’ maybe, but the door was open and I just walked in to the party. I walked up to Professor Fafunwa and I was surprised that he knew who I was through my journalism in Nigeria. We were talking for a long time and finally a young beautiful woman came and said to her father, “dad why don’t you let him come and dance?” Her father replied that he wasn’t holding me and so she invited me to the dancefloor.

I would say that people must read the book, it’s a fascinating. A lot of people have told me that it’s their favourite part of the book -the story of how I met my lovely wife, Sheri. I encourage people to go and read the rest of the story in my book.

Finally…

After dancing, and I went to take food, a woman came to me and said “Okey, I see you and you are not to joke with this one”. Well, I did have a little reputation as a playboy and this woman told me that Sheri was special. As I was leaving, Sheri and I exchanged numbers but I didn’t call her until 7 days later when she called me. I wanted to play hard to get, and told her that I was too busy and wanted to call, but she didn’t believe me. We started dating and one thing led to another and she has been my wife for 25 beautiful years, blessed with 3 beautiful children whose names all begin with Cs, we call them “the 3 Chis” – Chibuike, Chiamaka and Chidebe.

To be a father and a husband are responsibilities I take seriously, which is consistent with my parents’ example. I am devoted to my wife in a very singular way and I am devoted to my children as they are the spring for every other thing that I do.