Far Eastern Economic Review

'A Universal Journey '
Delia Jarrett-Macauley
15 June 2008

In 1969, a broad, young Nigerian man, wearing a fine black polo-neck sweater under a black leather jacket, struck up a conversation with my mother on a train journey from the east Midlands to London. He introduced himself as Obi. B. Egbuna, a writer and journalist, and I could discern from the easy smiles my mother exchanged with him and from the intensity of their discussion about West Africa, literature, and life in '60s Britain, his ability to use language as a persuasive weapon. He must have had considerable personal charm to hold her attention when she would normally have been reading, or listening to me. When, much later that year, I set eyes on his autographed books, stored alongside other fiction in our home library, a world of possibilities opened up inside me, as enchanting as a springtime parasol. 

Today, a copy of Mr. Egbuna’s Emperor of the Sea, first published by Fontana Books in 1974, reminds me of the twilight years when, having gobbled up the English classics, favoring especially the moody Brontes, and European masters such as Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann, African literature remained an unfamiliar landscape even within our vibrant West African home. Turning to the preface of Mr. Egbuna’s collection, I read “He has been a journalist in Britain and director of the Writers’ Workshop in Enugu, in Eastern Nigeria. He is now in America, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa. This title story of this collection has been broadcast by the BBC, who has also televised a dramatized version of his novel, Wind Versus Polygamy.

Was Mr. Egbuna an early role-model?

“Role-model” is among the most imperfect cultural words in English. It can mean several things at once for an artist; for a writer, it can conjure up a literary history that has not yet been written; it can be used in celebration of a lifestyle, or as thanks for teaching a useful lesson.

In the life of an African girl in 1970s Britain, the chance meeting with an African novelist and short-story writer sliced through the world of English literature whilst also affirming the acceptance and indeed celebration of African stories in the Euro-American world—the University of Iowa, the BBC and the publishing houses of London. Although nonfiction in the form of history books including Christopher Fyfe’s History of Sierra Leone, James W. St. G. Walker’s The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870 and the groundbreaking childhood memoir by Robert Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy, laid the foundation for my understanding the colonial enterprise that was "Sierra Leone," I hungered for fiction, with its more dense, richly allusive portraits of life as palimpsest.

‘Would you tell me please which way I ought to walk from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where,’ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way to walk,’ said the Cat.

Graduating from university with a literature degree and after years of translating Tacitus and Cicero, singing in the Chapel Choir and reading much more of the English canon, it took me only a few weeks to track down my first African woman novelist, the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta. Author of several acclaimed novels—In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Joys of Motherhood (1979)—Ms. Emecheta had been engaged by Birkbeck College, University of London, to teach a creative writing course focusing on African women. Her books, especially the early London novels, gave me a glimpse of a partially familiar African-British world, and in her person, Ms. Emecheta presented a picture of who I might be in five or 10 years' time. A seed was sown.

Creativity, like imagination, works by stealth.

Many years later, when I was writing my first novel, Moses, Citizen and me, I pictured the child soldiers of Sierra Leone standing in a forest clearing, waiting for their leader and "host," Bemba G, to entertain and even to thrill them with magical tales or games. He obliged. Tales about the rainforest, memories of his childhood came to mind. But as a genie, older than anyone could say, he employed tools which would help the child soldiers to think about "which way to walk" in the future. His tool box gave a glimpse of the classical world and the African world, a mixture in the form of the African version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Over a long period of years, African literature had made more of an impression on me; favorites included Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and Bessie Head’s novels. Ahmadou Kouroma’s prize-winning novel, Allah n’est pas oblige, published in 2000, gave the child soldier protagonist a voice, but the specifics of the Sierra Leone situation had not been treated in fiction within a decade of desperate war when I started to construct my novel.

Several facts or concerns shaped my initial thinking. The great mass of Sierra Leonean people had been affected by the war, not only the child soldiers and their families.

If you looked back over Sierra Leonean history, asking, “How have we reached this nadir?” The answer would be: “There has been a history of poverty, social inequality, following colonialism and unsettled governance; and the seeds of internal strife with frequent political coups were dramatized by Decker in the post-Independence period.”

The West African child soldiers, instrumental in political acts, were distinctly ignorant about their own political system, and yet theirs was not a unique plight. It is easy to allow geographic boundaries to limit our understanding of the universal: in such a paradigm, the African child soldier becomes emblematic of the failures of the entire continent—undressing hunger, societal collapse and early death. A sideways glimpse at Iraq where child soldiers are used in the militias of the current Iraqi insurgency, or towards Burma where tens of thousands of boys, from age 12, serve in the national army, should encourage a wider view, encompassing not only other geographic territories but other landscapes of the imagination.

The journeys of the adult female narrator in Moses, citizen and me, from London to Freetown, Sierra Leone, and from the capital into the mystical rainforest, symbolize a universal journey to seek and understand home: In the end, it is the mind that battles, and finds peace and redemption.

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