THE PEN IN
PERILOUS TIMES
BEING A WELCOME ADDRESS BY GEORGE NNAMANI, FCIArb, FANA,
DURING THE 2025 SPECIAL RETREAT OF THE ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIAN AUTHORS (ANA)
ENUGU STATE, HELD ON 15TH NOVEMBER, 2025 AT ST. VINCENT AUDITORIUM,
JUSTICE GEORGE NNAMANI STREET, LIKKE-IHEAKA, IGBO-EZE SOUTH, L.G.A. ENUGU STATE
Protocol
I welcome
you all to St. Vincent Auditorium. It is a day of happiness, a day to
cross-fertilize creative ideas in our arable minds. It is a day to genuflect
before the colossal literary stature of Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka,
GCON. It is a day we literally conjure the spirits of William Shakespeare,
Chinua Achebe, George Orwell, Ola Rotimi, Charles Dickens, Elechi Amadi, James
Hadley Chase, Gabriel Okara, Flora Nwapa, Frederick Forsyth, Chukwuemeka Ike,
Buchi Emecheta and other legends, other Field Marshals of literature, whose
works have continued to epitomize the universality and timelessness of sublime
prose, drama and poetry.
Permit
me, in principio, to go down memory
lane, with understandable nostalgia, into the seasons of my youth. My father,
Chief Vincent Nnamani (1916 – 2002), was an awesome storyteller. As I recounted
in the acknowledgement to the book The Vincent
Nnamani Tales: “I spent my early
years listening, in rapt attention, to his accounts of the contrivances,
frustrations, incredible tricks and breathtaking escapes of the tortoise and
other weak but wily animals from trying situations in Animalia, the animal
kingdom. The stories were tailored to entertain, educate, inculcate good
manners, and deter from vices. Twice or more I refrained, as a child, from
‘stealing’ fish or meat from the family pot, deterred only by the suspicion
that the malevolent spirits in my father’s stories were lurking somewhere there
in the dark, waiting to strike once I touched the lid of the pot! As a village
boy, whenever I saw an old woman in need of assistance to carry firewood or
water on pathways, I quickly lent a helping hand. In my father’s stories, such
conducts sometimes earned fictional characters great fortunes when the
supposedly old, bent woman leaning on a staff would suddenly transform into a
benevolent spirit and instantly bestow on the kind-hearted lad great fortunes
before disappearing into thin air! I grew up vowing to do good, to be kind,
generous and selfless, to be like the heroes in his tales.”
My
peers had similar experiences growing up, and our yesterday, notwithstanding
its challenges, was orderly, peaceful, honest, brotherly, sisterly, lovely and
sweet. Beyond the family, there was a country. We didn’t have fantastically
corrupt politicians (apologies to former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair).
We didn’t have bandits, kidnappers, ‘yahoo boys’, organ harvesters,
transnational prostitutes, et al.
Nigeria was not what it is today – a nation of a million pastors and a billion
demons; a morbid replica of The Kingdom
of the Wicked by Anthony Burgess!
So, why have
things fallen so hopelessly apart today? Why is evil getting so gargantuan,
walking on two colossal legs, trampling virtue underfoot while we look
helplessly and hopelessly on? Before our very eyes, a generation of heartless
beings has emerged, speaking only the language of money; doing the unspeakable
so as to, by any means, get rich quick! Igbo youths are no longer in the
church. There is this sudden mass exodus of our boys and girls to paganism and
atheism, with the obsession of modern-day churches with material prosperity at
the expense of salvation not helping matters. In the name of a return to
tradition, our misguided youths have taken the wrong route and, expectedly,
arrived at an abhorrent spiritual destination. They have wittingly ushered in
the abominable era of okeite, ezenwanyi and human sacrifice! Innocent
blood of Abel continually cries up to heaven from scores of shrines where
cutthroats practically cut throats! Trade in human parts has become just
another genre of commerce. Organ harvesters are as ubiquitous as kidnappers for
ransom. And our land is bleeding. The wailing of Rachel once again rents the
air! Like the ululation of Chielo in Things
Fall Apart, the voice of this ‘bemoaner’ of iniquities tears through the
stillness of the night. She’s inconsolable because these sons of perdition are
unrelenting in their abhorrent, ear-tingling iniquities! A yahoo generation is
here! While on the surface it is internet fraud, underneath it is human
sacrifice and trade in human parts. Freely our sons are hurling burning coals
into their loins, generating generational curses!
Feminine
dignity, once nurtured in decent dress sense, is dead as a naked generation is
suddenly upon us! While maidens flaunt the outlines of their easily-offered
genitals in flimsy, skin-hugging fabrics, our sons, not to be outdone in the
fashion lunacy, pull down their trousers to exhibit dirty pants or no pants at
all, in the hideous trend of “sagging”! For good measure, these modern day sons
of Eli have grown effeminate, adorning earrings on ears around which dirty dreadlocks
dangle!
Who is to
blame in all this? The Government?, God?, The gods?, The devil, as usual? Pray,
who gave birth to these sons of Baal? Who begat these daughters of Jezebel? Are
these our children? If no, whose are they? If yes, why are our bloods of peace,
love, industry, patience and abhorrence of filthy lucre not running in their
veins? Did we fail in our parenting duties? Did we pamper when we should have
flogged? Did we go schtum in sealed lips when we should have yelled in
admonition? Did we cuddle when we should have chastised? Did we storm our
children’s schools to berate and assault teachers when they correctively
flogged them? Did we fail to nurture our children with our character-molding
folklore? Did we fail to pass down to these successors of ours the wisdom that
our predecessors nurtured us with? Did we give them the GSM phones too early?
Did we fail to police their use of these multidimensional, porn-prone gadgets?
Could it be that they learnt all this heartlessness and sexual perversion
online under our very noses? Were we too busy with our jobs to care about
nurturing them? Have we become ‘too analog’ to understand and police their
digital mischiefs?
Fellow
writers, fellow conscience of the world, I urge you all to answer these questions
in your next novels, dramas and poems. Vincent Nnamani, my father, did his part
by telling his children tales by moonlight. I named this auditorium after him.
Christmas carols are also held here yearly, for he was a catechist in the old
Benue-Plateau State where I was born. From time to time, fiction writers,
poets, playwrights and artistes congregate here for a communion of this nature,
in retreat, for literary introspection, and to unwind. The gyre will widen with
time, Deus volente.
I urge you
to stand tall. Keep your heads high, for as writers, you influence the world in
more ways than you know. The aphorism the
pen is mightier than the sword is immutable. Long after you are gone, you
will continue to speak to the world in the voices of your fictional characters,
in the stanzas of your ballads, sonnets and odes. Future generations of readers
will see their role models in the heroes and heroines your pen created.
Expressions, phrases, clichés, names and characters will walk out of your books
to rule thoughts, words and actions in continents and climes you never set foot
on. With any luck, lexicographers will enrich lexicons and dictionaries with
them as the case with the word doublespeak
from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984,
published by Secker & Warbug
on 8 June, 1949. When you hear “Big Brother is watching you” in the reality
show Big Brother Naija, don’t let
your mind wander too far in the search for the origin of the expression - it is
straight from that Orwellian evergreen bestseller, 1984! And yes, “Orwellian”, now an English word, immortalizing that
impossible critic, that nemesis of despots, who died of tuberculosis in 1950!
What of the world-famous allusion to “Oliver Twist” when we ask for more of
anything? Straight from Charles Dickens’ pitiable central character in Oliver Twist published in 1838! From
Dickens we also now have “Dickensian” as a word in the dictionary! Because of Okonkwo, the bellicose star of Things Fall Apart, which President or
Prime Minister in Africa, living or dead, can withstand Chinua Achebe in
popularity rating more than a decade after his transition? From Robert Walpole,
Benjamin Disraeli, Stanley Baldwin, through Margaret Thatcher, right down to
KeirStarmer, which British Prime Minister commands as much universal popularity
as William Shakespeare, centuries after his death in 1616? That’s the power of
the pen in the hands of fertile, creative minds! That’s the power you wield as
writers! With time, we hope to see “Chimamandian” and a host of other new
words.
So many
things have gone wrong in the world, in humanity, to the extent that, as
William Butler Yeats wrote in the poem The
Second Coming, “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” We need to, as
Michael Jackson sang in one of the songs in his 1991 album Dangerous, “heal the world; make it a better place for you and for
me and the entire human race.” As it is, all hands are needed on deck to stir
us out of social passivity into positive activism, to trigger off the Gani Fawehinmi
in all of us, to build and love our nation,
to resurrect our dead conscience, to, in the words of Reene Brabazon
Raymond a.k.a. James Hadley Chase, Make
the corpse walk! That way, the labours of our heroes past and present will
not be in vain. That way, Chinua Achebe, Kole Omotoso, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Odia Ofeimun,
Gimba Abubakar, Femi Osofisan, Olu Obafemi, Wale Okediran, Jerry Agada, Remi Raji,
Camillus Ukah and Usman Oladipo Akanbi and all other leaders of the Association
of Nigerian Authors (ANA) would not have toiled for nothing.
The theme of
this year’s retreat: The Pen in Perilous
Times is, in this perishing time, as good as it comes. It echoes, from a
loud siren, the prophecy of the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 3: 1-2 that “…in the
last days perilous times shall come.” Has it not come already, with the times
so evil? It certainly has, the reason the ink of the pen should never run dry.
The rivers of prose, poetry and drama should continue to meet at the confluence
of condemnation of evil. We should continue, with literature, to decry moral
decadence, to confront oppressors as did Ken Saro-Wiwa, to, through satyr,
unmask religious charlatans, as Wole Soyinka did in The Jero Plays, to speak truth to power, even if hiding behind
pseudonyms, cryptic euphemisms and weasel words, as did Eric Arthur Blair
a.k.a. George Orwell in his timeless allegory, Animal Farm. “If you stand for the truth,” sang South African
reggae star, Lucky Dube, “you will always stand alone.” Stand for the truth,
even if you stand alone! The John in us should confront the King Herod in the
world, even if it births death! The Esther in us should waltz into the chamber
of King Ahaserus yelling “If I die, I die!”
Like I said
earlier, it is a day of merriment - not a day to die. Free your minds,
therefore, of all worries and worriers. Let’s lose ourselves in the allure of
fiction, poetry, dance and drama! Fasten your seatbelts. We’ll be cruising at a
digital, supersonic speed so we can do justice to every item on our program.
Deus
benedicat tibi omnia!
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