How JP Clark Led Achebe and Soyinka To IBB

Writing is fighting.

That is the dictum of the fiery African-American writer Ishmael Reed who wrote a book entitled Writing is Fighting.

 Whether taken literally or otherwise writers fire bullets with words, and in some instances actually take up guns to go shooting.

A landmark example was Nigeria’s most influential poet, Christopher Okigbo, who died young on the Biafra warfront.

It’s not my meat here to take up issues with Ali A. Mazrui who published the controversial novel The Trial of Christopher Okigbo.

It suffices to accept the reality that Okigbo died for a cause he believed in.

Okigbo was the friend of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and JP Clark in his lifetime. The Biafra war somewhat sundered the friendship of the writers. Achebe was heavily involved on the rebel side. Soyinka was thrown into jail for alleged Biafran sympathies. Clark was solidly on the federal side of the war effort.

The broken fences of the Nigerian triumvirate of writers were mended after the war in very interesting ways.   

A crucial humane aspect of JP Clark’s life can be seen from when he initiated a move for Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and him “to plead with the Military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, to spare the lives of the soldier-writer Major General Vatsa and his colleagues over the alleged military coup plot of 1986.

According to JP Clark in “The Burden Not Lifted”, his Nigerian National Order of Merit Award Winner’s Lecture, delivered in Abuja on December 5, 2001, he got in contact with Achebe “surprisingly on my first telephone call to Nsukka.”

Incidentally, Clark and Achebe had made up soon after the war when the poet invited the novelist to serve as his external examiner at the University of Lagos, Akoka.

However, in the case of Wole Soyinka, Clark reveals: “I had seen only once, and that’s in Dar es Salaam, since he asked me to his publisher’s office in London to show me page proofs of The Man Diedin which he libeled me. I told him then I would take him to court which I did, and there were quite a few people waiting for the fight.”

As Clark needed to see Soyinka in the bid to save Mamman Vatsa, he wondered on how to reach the playwright “with his roving style.”

Someone gave a suggestion to Clark to try Soyinka’s man, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, at The Guardiannewspaper offices in Lagos.  

Clark made the contact with Dr. Ogunbiyi and got directions to Soyinka’s home in Abeokuta. He dashed off straight to the place. 

In the words of Clark, “Wole was away hunting somewhere in the forest of a thousand and one demons. So I sat waiting for him at his neighbour’s flat. Of course, I was the last person he expected to see at his doorstep. I cannot remember whether he came back with a kill and what kind. All I know, we had a great recognition scene of it, and then good host that he is, he cooked us a great meal. Of course, like Chinua, he was a prophet needing no preaching to.”

Eventually, the three great authors put their heads together at Clark’s place at the University of Lagos “to send our petition to the power that was and some say still is and shall be.”