|
Books by
Chimamanda Adichie
Purple Hibiscus /
Half of a Yellow Sun
* * * *
*
Books by
Binyavanga Wainaina
Kwani? /
Discovering Home
* * * *
*
Fidelity Bank and the Binyavanga Wainaina
Jibe
By Uche Nworah
Businesses always seek to add value to their shareholder
investments; at the same time, they aim to satisfy the
interests of other stakeholders. It is in juggling these
stakeholder interests that conflicts arise but it is
always in the best interest of the business to satisfy
the interests of the businesses’ core stakeholders
first.
Many
businesses in Nigeria are beginning to re-appraise their
true corporate social responsibility (CSR) roles. Few
have gone a step further and have incorporated CSR as a
core part of their daily business activities, just like
other business activities such as production, marketing
and sales. In this regard, companies like MTN, Globacom,
UBA and Oceanic Bank readily come to mind. These
companies have now created special Foundations into
which fixed percentages of their annual profits are
channelled to be used for corporate social
responsibility initiatives.
It is probably this line of thinking that influenced
Fidelity Bank Plc and their arts loving managing
director, Mr. Reginald Ihejiahi to sponsor the creative
writing workshop which recently held in Lagos – Nigeria.
The bank invited Nigeria’s Orange prize award – winning
writer Chimamanda Adichie as the lead facilitator.
Kenyan–born Commonwealth prize winning writer,
Binyavanga Wainaina was also part of the facilitation
team, likewise Nigerian–born fountain of Afro-centric
knowledge, the very respectable Chinweizu.
I heard about the workshop before travelling to Nigeria
from the UK and had included it in my to-attend list
while in Nigeria. Unfortunately I didn’t make it to the
workshop due to other engagements but I was able to
catch up through the several media reports about the
workshop afterwards, especially the report filed by
Ahaoma Kanu of the National Daily newspaper. I
was almost singing the praises of Fidelity Bank for
coming to the aid of arts in Nigeria through the
sponsorship of the creative writing workshop while
granting an interview to Ahaoma Kanu at the Ikeja office
of the National Daily newspaper, when in the course of
our banter, Ahaoma raised the issue of something
Binyavanga Wainaina had written about the Igbos in his
article titled—How
To Write About Africa.
I couldn’t believe my ears and had to actually search
for the article myself on the internet to confirm that
Ahaoma wasn’t peddling pepper-soup joint rumour. I
couldn’t also believe that Binyavanga had actually
written these words in his article— “The Ancient Wise
Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the
money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the
Shona)”.
I have since read and re-read the said article trying to
understand from where Binyavanga was coming from,
unfortunately I could not. Therefore, it will be
difficult for me to rationalise his reasons for fuelling
further the stereotype of the Igbos being‘money–grubbing
people’.
Had I stumbled upon Binyavanga’s prejudiced and biased
view about Ndigbo while the workshop was still on
in Lagos, perhaps I would have endeavoured to attend one
of the sessions with the hope of engaging him in banter
to find out the source of his ‘money-grubbing’ theory.
I would also have used the opportunity to remind him
that Richard Ihejiahi, the man who facilitated his trip
to Nigeria is of the Igbo tribe, and that the bank
itself (Fidelity Bank, formerly Fidelity Union Merchant
Bank) was co-founded by another Igbo man in the person
of Chief Onwuka Kalu of Onwuka Hi-Tek fame (Okpuzu
of Igbo land). I wonder if Binyavanga would have turned
down the offer and the money from Fidelity Bank to take
part in the workshop had he known that his honorarium
was coming from an Igbo bank managing director. Would he
have still gone ahead to also ‘grab’ or ‘grub’ his own
share just like the ‘money–grubbing Igbos’?
Perhaps Richard Ihejiahi and his team at Fidelity Bank
were not aware of Binyavanga’s views about Ndigbo; I
would really love to know what they would have known had
they been aware of Binyavanga’s Igbo bias. Would they
have still paid his flight ticket, put him up in a five
star hotel and feted him like a celebrity if they knew
what he thinks about them?
Perhaps this would serve as a lesson not only to
Fidelity Bank but also to other Nigerian businesses that
are increasingly importing ‘foreign experts’ to
facilitate seminars and workshops in Nigeria. My advice
is that they should check out the credentials of such
people and their antecedents before signing their
cheque. Were this (Binyavanga’s race blunder and
prejudice) to have taken place in the western world; it
would have been classified as a public relations
disaster for all the parties concerned.
The case of Jade Goody and her racial slur against
Shilpa Shetty while both were in the United Kingdom
Celebrity Big Brother house should be used as a case
in point. In the aftermath of the crises, Channel Four
lost a major advertiser – Carphone Warehouse which
pulled out from sponsoring the reality show as it didn’t
want its corporate image to be tarnished by association.
Within days after the crises broke out, Jade Goody lost
several of her endorsement deals and major high street
shops stopped stocking her newly introduced line of
perfumes. Till date, the various parties are still
licking their wounds and counting their loses.
What Binyavanga said about the Igbos also reminds me of
Baroness Dianne Abbott who visited Nigeria in 2006 and
was feted by Nigerian government officials on tax payers
money, only to come back to the UK to write a damning
article about Nigeria, comparing Nigeria to her home
country – Jamaica in an article titled;
Think Jamaica is Bad? Try Nigeria.
Nigeria and indeed Ndigbo do not need two-faced friends
at this stage in our national life. While recognising
that Binyavanga has the freedom to write whatever he
likes protected by poetic license, it is also important
to recognise that Ndigbo also have a right to
correct any wide-off-the-mark prejudiced comments about
them, as such do indeed create misunderstandings and
even affect the psyche and sense of identity of the
younger Igbo generation.
Again I wonder if Binyavanga is aware that his new chum,
Chimamanda Adichie is also Igbo, and if in the course of
his interactions with her, she had exhibited any traits
to make him come to the conclusion that Ndigbo
are truly big–time hustlers as he insinuated in his
article.
And speaking about Chimamanda, I would like to believe
that she is not aware of what Binyavanga said about her
people; else one would have expected her to demand a
clarification or even an outright apology. Perhaps it is
for this reason that she should mind the company she
keeps. As an Igbocentric, I’m sure that she knows
that even the elders would counsel her likewise.
Since Binyavanga and his race in Kenya do not like
money, nor grub for money like the Igbos, I do hope that
he went to Nigeria for free, or that he left part of his
cheque for the use of local orphanages in Nigeria or
even in his home country, else if he goes ahead to spend
the Fidelity Bank cheque he must have received, then I
don’t see how different he or members of his race are to
the Igbo race he derided.
It would help the African literary course if Binyavanga
sets out to educate himself a little more about the
Igbos seeing that he is now benefiting from them. While
he is at it, he might as well educate himself about
other African tribes and races so that he would be in a
better position to educate his readers and inform them
accurately about their culture instead of reinforcing
stereotypes that are well-worn and outdated.
I am sure that Chimamanda Adichie, Reginald Ihejiahi and
all the other Igbo people Binyavanga came in contact
with while he was in Nigeria would have shown him a
sample of Igbo hospitality, the next stage will be for
them to teach him the age-old Igbo mantra of hardwork
(Igba mbo, onye luo, ya erie), and
that being enterprising is not the same as ‘grubbing’
for money.
Perhaps an apology from Binyavanga Wainaina and a
clarification from both Fidelity Bank and Chimamanda
Adichie may be necessary at this stage to prevent the
Nze na Ozors in Igbo land from calling
on their Chi and on Amadioha to be
on Binyavanga’s case. We don’t want that, do we?
* * * *
*
Nworah teaches Marketing Communications
at the London Metropolitan University.
The Longharmattan Season /
(info@uchenworah.com)
posted 18 August 2007 * * * *
* Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan
writer, is the founding editor of
Kenya’s only literary Journal, Kwani?. He lived and worked for ten years in South Africa. He
has been writing from Nakuru, Kenya for the past two years. He
is now based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has been published by various
literary journals around the World. He writes regularly for the Sunday
Times (South Africa) and the East African (Kenya). He
has also written for the Guardian (UK), The Mail and
Guardian (SA), The Cape Times and the Cape Argus
(Cape Town).In July 2002 he won the Caine Prize for African Writing -
Africa's most prestigious literary prize. The Caine Prize for African Writing is named
in memory of the late Sir Michael Caine, who was Chairman of the
Booker Prize management committee for almost 25 years. The
patrons of the prize are three African winners of the Nobel
Prize for Literature: Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and Naguib
Mahfouz. The two African Booker Prize winners, J. M. Coetzee and
Ben Okri, have joined the Council of the Caine Prize.
* *
* * *
|
One Day I Will Write About This Place: A
Memoir
By Binyavanga Wainaina
Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his
middle-class Kenyan childhood out of
kilter with the world around him. This
world came to him as a chaos of loud and
colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his
mother’s beauty parlor, black mamba
bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the
music of Michael Jackson—all punctuated
by the infectious laughter of his
brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He
could fall in with their patterns, but
it would take him a while to carve out
his own.
In this vivid and compelling debut
memoir, Wainaina takes us through his
school days, his mother’s religious
period, his failed attempt to study in
South Africa as a computer programmer, a
moving family reunion in Uganda, and his
travels around Kenya. The landscape in
front of him always claims his main
attention, but he also evokes the
shifting political scene that unsettles
his views on family, tribe, and
nationhood.
Throughout, reading is his refuge and
his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing
prize comes through, the door is opened
for him to pursue the career that
perhaps had been beckoning all along. A
series of fascinating international
reporting assignments follow. Finally he
circles back to a Kenya in the throes of
postelection violence and finds he is
not the only one questioning the old
certainties. |
 |
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* * * * *
|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless Mammy’s
behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to white folks’
domestic concerns, often at the expense of those of her
own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
|
 |
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
update 29 March
2010
|
