Adewale maja pearce on achebe biography
•
The New Gong
Adewale Maja-Pearce tends to describe himself as an Anglo-Nigerian. Born of a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Maja-Pearce spent his childhood and teenage years in Lagos before returning to the U.K. for his university education in the 1970s. It was there that his writing career took off with the publication of Loyalties and Other Stories and the autobiographical In My Father’s Country: A Nigerian Journey.
In the decade from the mid-1980s, Maja-Pearce was at various times the editor of Heinemann publishers’ African Writers Series (founded by Chinua Achebe) and Africa editor of the London-based magazine for free expression, Index on Censorship. Since the mid-1990s, Maja-Pearce has lived in Lagos, Nigeria’s bustling commercial capital, where he features frequently in the literary and arts circuits.
His other books include How many miles to Babylon?, A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties, and Who’s Afraid of Wole Soy • John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, who was widely regarded as Nigeria’s unofficial poet laureate, died on October 13 at the age of 86. He was a precocious talent. In the late 1950s, when he was a student at University College, Ibadan, a lecturer invited him to contribute to an undergraduate anthology; he rejected the offer on the grounds that he wrote “poetry and not ‘student verse.”’ This was proven true by his collection A Reed in the Tide (1965), the “first volume by an African poet to be issued by a leading British publishing house,” as he described it to me when I agreed to undertake a critical biography of him for the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. It contains all the poems beloved by generations of schoolchildren, including “Ibadan,” perhaps the most famous, a haiku-like evocation of what was then West Africa’s largest city: Ibadan My own • By the time of the 2023 elections in Nigeria, we had “enjoyed” almost a quarter-century of democracy, having previously “endured” roughly the same under the military. I use quotation marks because, although the population doubled to 220 million in that period, making us the sixth largest nation in the world, it was also the case that a greater number of Nigerians fell into extreme poverty, currently standing at 133 million. Given that most of them are young, it is hardly surprising that they are also becoming increasingly restless in the face of their bleak prospects, as evidenced by the 2020 #EndSARS movement that led to the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators. Our underlying problem is that we are not really a country in any coherent sense. What passes for “Nigeria” is an amalgam of both world religions (in roughly equal numbers) and over 250 ethnic groups, with often wildly different traditions, all of them arbitrarily yoked tillsammans by the British colonia
Death of a Poet
running splash of rust
and gold—flung and scattered
among several hills like broken
china in the sunDisintegration Nation