Mr Nurudin Farah and Mr Kunle Ajibade at the event

By Femi Olugbile

This year’s Ake Festival of Arts and Books was holding, not in Abeokuta, as in the past, but on a whole floor of the Radisson Blue, a posh new hotel on the swank Isaac John Street in GRA, Ikeja.

In your mind’s eye, you had conjured up pictures of bohemian writers in their torn jeans and faded sneakers looking uncomfortable as they trod gingerly on the spick and span marble titled corridors, fearful their hands might stain the wall.

In the event the festival seemed to settle easily into its new accommodation. Writers came in all varieties. New books were being published by authors ranging from fresh-faced youths just out of school, to scarred old veterans. It was an exciting, exotic mix.

The Vice President was there on the Friday to declare the festival open. He was voluble and engaging as usual, that man, and he started off by telling the audience a story of an early love he had pined for at the age of ten who had driven him to writing poetry. However, his mother, and later his school teacher, had not thought it was a good idea, and they had taken turns to beat the daylights, and the poetry out of him. He went on thenceforth to deliver the usual pitch about how the government of the day was keen to create an enabling environment for the Creative Arts to thrive. At the end of his delivery, he reminded the audience about the story he told them at the beginning. Did they enjoy it?
‘Yes’ the audience chorused.

Femi Olugbile

‘It is fiction’ he announced. There was a great deal of laughter round the room.

Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/vdzISKhar0A

Every year there is a headline guest at Ake. For this year, happening on the Saturday, it was Nuruddin Farah.

Nuruddin knew his way around Nigeria, having, lived in the country and been married to a Nigerian before.

After Lola Soneyin, the affable moving spirit of the Festival introduced the writer and his interlocutor, you could feel a wave of excitement course through the audience. The two men took their seats on the podium.

Kunle has made an art-form out of these interviews. You have watched him in conversation with Ngugi, as you have with Niyi Osundare. There is a certain earnestness about him which makes him able to draw out the most intimate details from his guests, and to humanize them before the audience, establishing a bond. Lately you have been seeking to persuade him to compile these masterclasses in artistic conversation into a book, even offering to edit the volume.

Nuruddin Farah is a seventy-three-year novelist, playwright and essayist from Somalia. His country has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst places on earth to be born, or to live. He was born into a large family of eleven. His father was a merchant, and his mother an oral poet. His earliest memory was that his father dealt cruelly with his mother and his female siblings. He developed an early passion for the feminist cause, long before the term ‘feminism’ was invented. He has written over fifteen books and plays, mostly on the subjects of Nationalism, Colonialism and Feminism. His work has been translated into several languages. He has won a number of literary prizes and been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

On the podium with Kunle, he was a jovial affable man, full of wisecracks. He knew four languages from early – Somali, Amharic, Arabic and English. At the age of nine, he had earned pocket money by hanging out at the post office and offering to write letters for people in any language of their choice.
He wrote his first major book – ‘From a crooked rib’ while he was an undergraduate in an Indian University.

‘I wrote it to avoid reading for my exams…I failed the exam, but I was allowed to do it again…’

‘Is it true that because the book was so favourable to women’s rights, it won you a lot of female admirers?’ asked Kunle, coming at him from a blind side.

The author smiled coyly, admitting guilt.
The interviewer brought him to the subject of the collapse of his country Somalia.
One of his early books ‘Naked Needle’ led him to voluntary self-exile. It was a timely move, as he was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment in absentia shortly afterwards.
Another novel, ‘Sweet and Sour Milk’ took matters beyond the pale. He was sentenced to death by the government of Siad Barre.
As Nuruddin explained to the audience on this Lagos evening, the protagonist in the novel went to confront the President after he murdered several opposition clerics and told him he had violated the Constitution.

‘I am the Constitution’ replied the President.
Shortly after, the protagonist was himself murdered.

At a point, several years later, when he was a lecturer at Makerere University and his country was undergoing a cataclysmic explosion, he tried to work with the government of President Museveni to broker peace among the warring factions in Somalia. It was a frustrating process, and at a point he said something critical of his host – Museveni.

‘I had to escape from Uganda in the night … leaving all my things behind…Museveni is still there now…’

Nuruddin had a theory about the origins of religious terrorism.

‘People in rich Arabian states pay these people to go and cause havoc in other countries, selling them the false narrative about going to heaven. They kill more Muslims than anyone else…’

And the solution?
‘If people were educated and employed, they could not be recruited to fight for a hopeless 13th century utopia and a false narrative about going to heaven.’

He suffered a personal tragedy a few years back when his sister, who worked for a UN agency, was killed by Taliban bombers in Afghanistan on the eve of her return home from a tour of duty. The event almost exactly mirrored the drama in a novel that he had just then written and published. He tried, unsuccessfully, in his grief, to withdraw the book from circulation.

A case of life mirroring Fiction.
Why were there so many Dictators in Africa, he was asked?

Nuruddin’s view was that it was a mirror of a patriarchal family structure, with oppressive fathers lording it over hapless females. Each family was a dictatorship, and the State was merely an aggregation of several million dictatorships.

The crowd wanted him to go on and on, and some even wanted to dispute his viewpoint. But Lola Soneyin was hovering in the background, giving the ‘Time Up’ signal. It was time to close the discussion, for now. The festival itself would go on for another day.

-Dr Femi Olugbile, a psychiatrist, an award winning novelist and former Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Health

Watch the Ake festival video here: https://www.pscp.tv/akefestival/1vAxREQQdmjJl