Editor of Who Gave The Order: The History of a People’s Movement, Chibueze Darlington Anuonye, believes that 20 October 2020 stands as an indictment of the Nigerian conscience and urges Nigerians to remember that day: ‘What happened at the Lekki Toll Gate could be described as a country waging war against its citizens.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What kinds of books did you read growing up?
I was eight when I found my mother’s copy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child on a shelf in our store and read it. I didn’t fully understand what was happening in the novel, yet I continued reading it till the end. I returned to the book when I was 15. In that second reading I saw the resilient image of Kenyans entangled in foreign and local wars they didn’t ask for. The characters’ sadness, their occasional joy, their strife, their courage and their hope illuminate the travails of African societies under colonial attack. But I was especially moved by Njoroge’s relationship with his mother, this mother and son resembled my mother and me. Maybe this maternal affection explains why I connected with Buchi Emechata’s The Joys of Motherhood at ten. Nnuego’s condition was dreadfully tragic, but her life was meaningful. She said ‘yes’, and said it loudly, when her chi said ‘no’. That’s courage. That’s joy. O, as a child I was nicknamed ‘Eze and the river’, after Michael Crowder and Onuora Nzekwu’s novel, because my name is Chibueze.
What’s the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?
The texts I’ve read recently and the ones I’m currently reading have transformed my life. Not that they made me change my mind about anything, but they have deepened my understanding of the human experience. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft, for instance, does something magnificent to the mind. It made me think about the lives of African anti-colonial warriors. What became of them after colonialism? When one has lived in struggle for many years, how does one suddenly return to peace, to calm? And this is also a question we can ask about Colour Sergeant Bombay in Rotimi Babatunde’s sublimely heartrending short story ‘Bombay Republic’, that spectacular specimen of the psychotic impact of dictatorship, war and racism. What of Esiha and Nkwa-daa, the exploited Ghanian women in Tryphena Yeboah’s ‘The Dishwashing Women’? Did they abduct their master’s son because they were kidnappers or because their minds had been twisted by colonial violence? I think about the why of every act, even if that act is unforgivable, even if that why is ridiculous.
I am rereading Willa Carther’s My Ántonia, a novel published over a century ago by the American novelist. In June, I gave a talk on this text at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a speech driven by my experience as an immigrant in the United States. My Antonia reassures me that non-white immigrants in America are human beings, that our humanity requires no proof. Jim, the novel’s narrator, was only a boy when his parents died in Virginia. After their death, he was sent to Nebraska to live with his grandparents whom he had not met before. Following my mother’s passing when I was twelve, I also moved from Aba to Owerri. I hadn’t left my mother’s side before that journey, but her death forced me, a grieving child, into the world. Like Jim, I didn’t know then how much my loss contributed to my sense of isolation in Owerri. But if we listen attentively, if we read empathetically, we’ll hear and see the resonance of our lives in other lives. The immigrant characters in My Antonia, Pavel, Peter, and the Shimerdas, who left their countries in search of a new life in America always remembered the people and the life they’d left behind. I’m like them.
I reread Things Fall Apart a month ago for a guest lecture I delivered at Tennessee Wesleyan University. What did I tell my audience that still matters today? Think about the vulnerable, the weak. Think about small lives. Think about Nwoye, Ikemefuna and Unoka. They matter, as much as Okonkwo. When Ikemefuna was taken to Umuofia, Okonkwo became his first father figure. Ikemefuna had no such relationship with his own father. So, Okonkwo’s involvement in the boy’s death is more than tragic, it is an abomination. When Ikemefuna screamed, ‘father, they have killed me’, what did we hear? What did we see? Okonkwo is an embodiment of the madness of manhood and courage. Also, think of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, a brilliant satire on courage. Mother Courage profits from a war as a trader but loses her children to the same war. Where is her courage? Where is her wisdom? And how does this relate to me? What has happened in Igboland in the last few years is enough to make us, Igbo people, consider our notion of courage? Recently political opportunists, kidnappers, murderers and other people with vile intentions have taken advantage of the condition of the Igbo since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra War to create unspeakable violence in the southeast. And there seems to be a conspicuous silence among the Igbo political class. What can we learn from Things Fall Apart? What can we learn from Mother Courage? When we destroy our own, what will our past and our future look like? We have descended into savagery, and I do not know, I do not see how we can recover from this without recognizing our complicity in this tragedy, without atonement. But if we are willing to try, literature, ever dependable, is available to support us in the challenging journey of restoration.
The #EndSARS movement was a cry for help. As we moved from junction to junction, as the protest reverberated across cities, we were only asking the police to stop killing us.
You are the editor of Who Gave the Order: The History of a People’s Movement, a collection of thirteen essays remembering the #EndSARS protests. When did this book start for you?
It started on 20 October 2020, immediately after the massacre at the Lekki Toll Gate. I was in Lagos attending a conference on the first day of the protest. I threw myself into the protest once I arrived in Owerri, Imo State, two days later. The #EndSARS movement was just inevitable. The outrage was inevitable. I lived at Aladinma in Owerri for several years. There are no words to describe the indiscriminate and violent attack meted out daily on young people by the police. The police decreed and even persuaded us to believe that it was criminal to be beautiful, to be young, to own an iPhone, to drive a luxury car. Young women were harassed and sometimes arrested for ‘dressing like prostitutes’. A friend told me a few weeks ago that although he now lives in America, he is still reluctant to go out with his iPhone. Perhaps this is a trauma response. If you have been running for a long time, then it might be difficult to stop looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Nigeria forces you to always look over your shoulder, like a fugitive, like a criminal. The things that we have endured as Nigerians, the things we have been subjected to, the things we have done to ourselves and to one another, are they not unthinkably cruel? The #EndSARS movement was a cry for help. As we moved from junction to junction, as the protest reverberated across cities, we were only asking the police to stop killing us arbitrarily. In some communities when a goat is lost, everyone joins a search team until the animal, or its lifeless body, is found. What about us? Who was searching for the victims of SARS? We wanted the police and the government to see that we were, like them, human beings. But, as you know, they didn’t recognize our humanity. They didn’t care about us. 20 October 2020 is an indictment of the Nigerian conscience. I want Nigerians to remember that day. That is why I started Who Gave the Order in partnership with Brittle Paper led by Aniehi Edoro. What else can one do?
It has been five years since the #EndSARS protest of October 2020. What’s one thing readers should be aware of when reading about the movement?
Nigerians are already familiar with the story of #EndSARS. But I hope readers everywhere will see and feel how police brutality cuts through individual lives, dreams, relationships, love and leave wounds that are too deep to heal completely.
The anthology comprises essays that document the experiences of Nigerians during the #EndSARS protest, the related events surrounding it and how these moments continue to shape both the lives of Nigerians and the image of the nation. What role do you hope the anthology will play in shaping Nigeria’s collective memory of #EndSARS?
The then president, Muhammadu Buhari’s initial reaction to the protest was a deafening silence. Do you remember the current president Bola Tinubu’s response to the massacre at the time? He said it was crucial to summon the victims to answer some questions about why and how they were at the Lekki Toll Gate that night. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State told us there were no casualties until he saw CNN and admitted that they saw ‘two dead bodies’. When it seemed like the floodlights were out, Babatunde Raji Fashola, the then minister of works and housing, turned himself into an investigative journalist and visited the Lekki Toll Gate. In that visit, Fashola miraculously found a camera he claimed was planted by ‘some subversive elements’, a piece of evidence he avowed would be useful in identifying the perpetrators of the massacre, the same evidence he couldn’t account for when the need arose. These men were united in their brazen defence of their political patrimony. What happened at the Lekki Toll Gate on 20 October 2020 could be described as a country waging war against its citizens. I should be glad if the readers confront these misleading official silences and narratives by listening to the stories of people whose lives have been irreversibly shaped by that moment in history. I want Nigerians to consider that violence an aspect of our history. It is dark, but it is our history. For a nation that has excluded history from its secondary school curriculum, it is necessary for a book like Who Gave the Order to exist. Our stories matter, whether they are tragic, funny, happy, or consist of all these emotions. And now that Nigeria is, unlike any time in recent history, divided across ethnicities, I hope that reading this anthology will remind us of when we acted as one without ethnic considerations.
We wanted the police and the government to see that we were, like them, human beings. But, as you know, they didn’t recognize our humanity. They didn’t care about us.
Were there particular stories or individuals whose experiences left a deep impression on you during the curation and editing process?
My life was impacted by all the stories. I have read Ukamaka Olisakwe closely for years and even published a full-length critical analysis of the autobiographical and feminist background of her novel, Ogadinma. But reading her essay, ‘Happy, Really’, was a new experience for me. I found myself beholden to a tenderer portrait of the author, one that could have only emerged from a deep, quiet reflection. Anthony Chibueze Ukwuoma’s ‘I am Somebody’ made me sad. I was with him when the incident narrated in the essay occurred in Owerri. I was the friend who asked him not to go out the same day he was brutalized by the police. But I didn’t know what he experienced. He didn’t tell me about it. Perhaps he was ashamed. Perhaps he was just overwhelmed. So, reading his contribution felt like knowing him again, like knowing him anew. What can a story not reveal? Where can it not reach? And talking about the power of stories to disclose the shadows of the human experience, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s ‘Fences’ is an example of how violence can provoke shame and silence even among the most animated of our kind. But, again, a story enters and brings light, a story enters and chases away shadows, like Abubakar Ndakotsu’s ‘The Death of Tomorrow’ does when it took me to the Lekki Toll Gate and held my hand while I witnessed the massacre.
A few days ago, 88-year-old American poet, Eleanor Wilner, told me that metaphor ensures that we see and touch fire without being burnt. How aptly her words describe my feeling of reading Ndakotsu, who is the youngest contributor to the book. Zenas Ubere’s ‘What You Saw’ made me feel like I was home, in the middle of that turmoil. Moreover, Ubere and I protested together in Owerri, carrying a similar placard of hope that tomorrow would be better. Ola Halim’s ‘Bonfires in Sunset Cities’ made a great impression on me. Halim’s talent for summoning anger with mellifluous prose is evocative of James Baldwin. As a person living with albinism, Halim’s participation in the #EndSARS was a protest in itself. He dared to live above the limitations society sets for people like him. And his unfettered exploration of queer desire calls attention to the contradictions of freedom, as envisioned by the dominant heteronormative faction of the #EndSARS movement. In this regard, both Halim and Mazpa Ejikem are exceptional. Their essays infuse a decisive diversity without which Who Gave the Order would have been inadequate in its documentation of history, in its pursuit of justice. I should add that Halim’s and Ejikem’s essays made me return to Oscar Wilde, that beautiful, iconic, witty, but deeply traumatized Irish playwright and poet. I suppose that Wilde foretold his misery in The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am currently rereading The Trial of Oscar Wilde, the uncensored transcript of Wilde’s trial for his sexuality, ‘a trial for his life’, as Wilde’s only grandson and editor of the text, Merlin Holand, described the prosecution. The tragedy is that 130 years after Wilde’s indictment, a movement dedicated to freedom in Nigeria couldn’t visualize such liberty for queer Nigerians.
What was the biggest challenge in bringing together thirteen different voices and perspectives?
Apart from the daunting task of fact-checking the submitted works, every bit of the process of editing the book was smooth. I am grateful to Briggitte Poirson and Vivian Ogbonna, who read drafts and offered useful suggestions. What I remember now are the laughter, the courage and the commitment of the authors. TJ Benson and I met some weeks after I edited his essay. I didn’t even know he was the one when he walked into a friend’s room in Iowa, where I was visiting. Once we were introduced, our chatter lasted several minutes. Olisakwe and I spent hours on the phone talking about a word, a sentence, a paragraph, the essay. It is a miracle to think about language as an instrument of enlightenment and empowerment. My editorial correspondences with Anthony Chibueze Ukwuoma, Ayomipo Ifenaike, Basit Jamiu, Iruoma Chukwuemeka, Mazpa Ejikem, Nnamdi Oguike and Zenas Ubere spanned across WhatsApp, email, phone calls, often into the midnight. I met Okonkwo for the first time on Zoom during our editorial meeting. We spoke and laughed as though we had known each other since childhood. Oppression in its nature sets out to destroy people and things and places. But, as our experience of working on Who Gave the Order shows, the human spirit naturally resists oppression.
Documenting the refusal of the #EndSARS movement to acknowledge the humanity of queer Nigerians is one way to balance our story.
What does it mean to you to document #EndSARS in book form, given how recent and raw the events still feel?
We might be underestimating the Nigerian tendency for forgetfulness, if we think that the #EndSARS protest is recent. We move on so easily, as a nation. It is just necessary that a monumental history such as the #EndSARS protest should be documented in a book.
As an editor, what’s more important to you: the story or how it is written?
Both. But since Nigerians and indeed the rest of the world were witnesses to the violence of SARS and the Lekki Toll Gate massacre, I didn’t feel any need for stories that recount the experiences without offering empathy to readers. I encouraged the contributors to think of this anthology as a way of returning to the past without succumbing to its inherent violence. I was interested in narratives that delight with language, emotion, silence and surprise, but also honest enough to name the history they describe.
What is the most important contribution an editor makes to a piece of writing?
Frankly, I don’t know. But in thinking about my role as the editor of Who Gave the Order, one thing that the writers said was important to them was the fact that I knew the experience they were recreating and had lived through the chaos they were trying to make sense of. Our shared emotional and historical background made them feel more comfortable in invoking the spirit of #EndSARS because they knew I would understand. Also, I was interested in what Achebe called ‘a balance of stories’. Documenting the refusal of the #EndSARS movement to acknowledge the humanity of queer Nigerians is one way to balance our story.
You are both an editor and a writer. Do these roles influence each other? Are you a better writer because you’re an editor, or a better editor because you’re a writer?
As an editor, I approach a project with an understanding of the writer’s world and the world of the characters. So, I can tell a writer, ‘Wait, listen to yourself. Listen to your character. Pause, have you thought about this line, this action, this inaction, this paragraph differently? Why is she screaming in a dark room and yet the light is on?’ When I write, I try to listen to myself, to my characters. But it is hard to take one’s advice, so I have my draft readers Anthony Chibueze Ukwuoma, Brigitte Poirson, Dera Duru and Nnamdi Oguike. I appreciate their firm guidance and their compassionate understanding of my imaginative vision.
What excites you today about African storytelling?
I teach literature from across the world. Whenever a student tells me they have discovered the work of an emerging African writer of great imagination, I dance with joy. This semester, I have hosted the poets Bhion Achimba, Romeo Oriogun and Ameen Animashuan, in my body poetry class. The novelist Chukwuebuka Ibeh was recently a guest in my writing class. Last year, Edwardson Ukata, Chimee Adioha, Chinonso Ezeh and Ezechi Onyerionwu contributed to discussions around migration, aging and the body in the classes I taught. As an editor, curating emerging Nigerian poets, as well as working with Cheta Igbokwe on his plays has been remarkable. At World Literature Today, I am always thinking of ways to ensure more representation of African literature in our journal by promoting the works of writers from across the regions of Africa. As a literary conversationalist, I’m engaged with writers across Africa and the diaspora. In all of these, I’m inspired by how much space African writers are claiming in the world, by how we use that space to tell the many strands of our stories that lead the continent into a modern, more progressive future.
Nigerians are already familiar with the story of #EndSARS. But I hope readers everywhere will see and feel how police brutality cuts through individual lives, dreams, relationships, love and leave wounds that are too deep to heal completely.
What topic do you wish more authors were writing about these days?
I said in a recent essay that ‘the imagination is under attack by ideology.’ I hope more writers will realize this and act, like Isabella Hammad has done in Recognizing the Stranger, where she talks about the role of language in the project of dehumanization and war. But there is hope. Judith Butler’s recent letter to UC Berkeley in defence of the right to fair hearing is an iconic example of how to face tyranny with imagination and wisdom. Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind shows us how to live fully, despite the turbulence of migration, or the conflict between tradition and modernity. And many thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wish more writers would be inspired by Coates’ courage to look the world in the eye and tell it the truth that no life is more important than the other. The Message is the latest addition to Coates’ brilliant effort.
What do you want your work to represent in the world?
I suppose everything I have said so far could be summarized in one word: live. I want my work to remind people to live, to live fully, to live unashamedly. We are here. We are not going away, not before we are done living. And since we are here, since we will continue living, we will speak the truth, all of the truth, even if no one listens, even if no one cares. We are after all talking to ourselves. If someone listens and recognizes our truth, that is beautiful, but if no one listens, that is life⎈
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