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Books by Wole Soyinka
Death and the King's Horseman /
You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir /
Ake: The Years of Childhood
Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized
World /
The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of
the Nigerian Crisis
The Lion and the Jewel /
Ibadan /
Myth, Literature, and the African World /
Interpreters /
Conversations with Wole Soyinka
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Books by Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
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Arrow of God /
No Longer at Ease
/
A Man of the People
/
Anthills of
the Savannah
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What Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and
Others
Have Done To End the Darfur Crisis
By Orikinla Osinachi
Nigeria received more bad news from Darfur last week as
seven Nigerian soldiers with the UN/AU Peace Keeping
Mission were killed by one of the lawless terrorist
militias.
The fact is, the only solution to the question of Darfur
is to sack the oppressive regime of President, Prime
Minister, and Commander in Chief of the Armed
Forces--Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir. Because,
there is no democracy in Sudan, but a despotic
government that continues to violate the rule of law and
tramples on the UN Charter on Human Rights.
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The most lionized
Nigerian writer, Nobel Laureate Prof.
Wole Soyinka
has been the most vocal African writer on the
Darfur Crisis since the National Association of Seadogs
(Pyrates Confraternity) (NAS) Capoon, Andrew Obinna
Onyearu addressed it in his "DARFUR: A Genocide We Can
Stop" at the 9th Annual Wole Soyinka Lectures Series,
held on Friday, July 14, 2006, at the Cannel View Hotel,
in Calabar, seven days after I left the city. And
exactly a year ago on September 20, 2006, Soyinka
accused the Arab League of complicity in the genocide in
Darfur in a paper he delivered in Paris at the 50th
anniversary of the First Congress of Black Writers and
Artists.
Soyinka said:
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“It is depressing to
observe the studied indifference of the Arab
family to the criminality of one of its
members, a nation historically placed as a
cultural bridge between two races”.
“The Arab family has steadfastly refused to
call Sudan to order, indeed placed obstacles
in the way of sanctions.” |
Soyinka accused the
rampaging Janjaweed "devil on horseback" as the
“arrowhead of a state policy of ethnic cleansing,” who
have a “naked language of racial incitement” with
“claims of race superiority, complemented by the
language of contempt and disdain for the indigenous
African”.
Soyinka did not want the African Union (AU) peace
keeping mission to leave Darfur, because it would be
“preparing to abandon the peoples of Darfur, leaving
them to the mercy of murdering, raping and burning
gospellers of race doctrine”.
“When a deviant branch of that family of nations flouts,
indeed revels in the abandonment of, the most basic
norms of human decency, is there really justification in
evoking the excuse that protocol requires the permission
of that same arrogant and defiant entity?”
But like the late Nigerian dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha,
the head of Sudan, President, Prime Minister, and
Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces—Lt. Gen. Omar
Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir, is deaf to reason and would
prefer to kiss the dust than kiss the UN Peace Keeping
Force. He has only accepted a joint AU/UN hybrid support
operation, because China and Russia gave him their
assurance that they would protect his selfish interests
in Darfur and his policy of Arabization and Islamization.
So, the AU/UN only
recently got the permission of the government in
Khartoum to intervene and stop the genocide in Darfur.
I had an insider in Darfur who was a senior officer in
the military who corresponded with me and sent me the
details of the intricate local and international
political intrigues of the bloody conflicts in Darfur
and I reported the crisis on the
Darfur Blog I started to join global efforts to save
the millions of innocent refugees suffering and dying in
Darfur.
I told Jan Pronk,
the former Special Representative of the Secretary
General of the United Nations in Sudan that my insider
in Darfur was working on a book on the realities and Jan
Pronk was looking forward to the book until the Sudanese
Armed Forces accused Jan Pronk of "waging psychological
warfare on the armed forces" and demanded his
deportation after Jan Pronk published thoughts on the
military defeats of the Sudanese Army in his weblog.
The government in
Khartoum forced the former UN Secretary General, Kofi
Annan to recall Jan Pronk to the UN Office in New York
for consultations. And later, Jan Pronk left the UN to
become a Professor of Theory and Practice of
International Development at the Institute of Social
Studies in The Hague.
Another highly esteemed Nigerian writer who has become
outspoken on the Darfur Crisis is
Prof. Chinua
Achebe. "African nations will realize the Bantu
maxim 'a human is human because of other humans,'"
Achebe said. And he recalled how African nations watched
whilst the Rwanda holocaust occurred before their eyes.
Achebe said:
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"It is said of the Jewish
Holocaust that the world slept and did not
know. Today, there is perhaps nowhere on
earth where the crime of genocide is more
glaring than in Darfur, Sudan. In that
region, domestic bigotry in juxtaposition
with foreign multinational oil interests has
served to create a humanitarian emergency of
epic proportion."
"The world community has responded to this
crisis, albeit belatedly; however, much more
needs to be done to address a most tragic
situation. When President Bush first
declared that what was happening in Sudan
was genocide, one African president left his
country and travelled to America to 'correct
Bush' and instructed him that what was
happening was rebellion against the
government of Sudan."
"As hundreds of thousands perish in Darfur,
it is African nations and their leaders,
this time, that have become silent
spectators. The African Union (AU) must play
a far more central role in bringing about
suitable solution to the crisis in the
Darfur region. By galvanizing their
resources, African nations will realize the
Bantu maxim 'human is human because of other
humans' which represents the African
communal viewpoint." |
I have noted three
Nigerian writers who have stepped out of the silent
crowd of the Nigerian elites to save Darfur from
becoming another Rwanda, because they are worthy of
emulation.
I have some classified mails from my insider whilst he
was still in Darfur, but I cannot publish them, because
he would prefer them to remain classified. He has
decided to hold on to his dairies and publish the book
later.
Source:
Darfur Blog
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
posted 9 October 2007
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