Chinua Achebe is a household name in Nigeria, Africa, and even beyond. He was a young man of 28 when he published Things Fall Apart. The novel was the first to come out of Africa, written by an African, in Queen’s English. Before it, Joseph Conrad had written two nasty novels about Africa and the monkey mentality. Achebe felt that was not right. There was an error to correct about the white man’s perception of Africa. And so, Achebe told the story of Okonkwo.
Many years later, 20 years or more, after the publication of that novel, the story of Okonkwo’s confrontation with the first white missionaries became a classic in the annals of world literature. And, for all time, Achebe’s name would reverberate in the deep waters of the internet. Many years after he left the face of the earth, in fact, Achebe’s fame still resonates in the hearts of literature lovers and students of fiction. This was the sort of man that Charles Nnolim chose to confront in a matter that has continued to baffle me.
Our class was setting eyes on Achebe for the first time that day. We could always see Nnolim because he was our everyday teacher. Nnolim was the only lecturer who would walk into our class and elicit an automatic merriment of the spirit, if not an outright outburst of laughter. The very thought of him, the very sight of him, brought a smile to the lips, and that’s because Nnolim was always smiling. He always had a joke to share. Even if he wore a frown, it was just a mask, a passing masquerade.
He was the sort of man that Achebe would describe as a puny little man with funny little steps. He had sideboards made more prominent by his readiness to amuse, and a mischievous laughter that was very personal to him. Nnolim wore his sideboards, he said, in honour of his favourite English critic, Matthew Arnold, known for his blunt opinions and, especially, his urbane wit. Nnolim was like that too. He was blunt and witty to a fault about his beliefs and convictions.
For instance, Nnolim held strong reservations about the originality of Chinua Achebe, with particular regard to the novel, Arrow of God. Nnolim took every opportunity to insist that Achebe virtually copied the story line from a small pamphlet written by his uncle. Our lecturer did not stop at that. He actually produced a copy of The History of Umuchu by Simon Nnolim, placing characters and events alongside Arrow of God by Achebe, and drawing striking parallels. The connection could not be missed.
Charles Nnolim went so far as to publish an extensive study of both works in the pages of African Literature Today, the foremost critical volume on literary exegesis on the continent edited, no less, by Prof. Eldred Durosimi Jones. Achebe did not like this expose at all, and he did not hide it. On the day I first set eyes on the author of Things Fall Apart, all the lecturers in the Faculty of Humanities stood in line to shake hands with him. I mean all the professors, virtually all the dons in the university, were waiting to welcome him.
Achebe was dressed in a grey French suit, and I could only but marvel at how simple he looked as he greeted each person with courtesy. When he got to Prof. Nnolim, however, the famous novelist pretended not to see the puny little fellow with the sideboards. He passed him by, ignoring the extended hand, and shook the next extended hand instead. Nnolim took the embarrassment in his strides, joined the admiring crowd to the lecture hall where the University of Port Harcourt played host to Achebe. In his remarks, the acclaimed novelist did not as much as take notice of Nnolim. Neither did he visit the English department as scheduled.
I had no way of knowing how our lecturer took the slight, frankly. Every one of my classmates had an opinion as to why this happened, and it was all too obvious anyway. Jude Iheanacho did not take it kindly that Achebe shunned his master like that in public, but he could understand why. Jude was the only student Nnolim would not chide in our class. The hunchback would sometimes forget himself in his merry moments, point directly at the lecturer, and tell Nnolim that he was being funny about what he just said concerning Ezeulu, the chief priest. Not long afterwards, I read in the papers that Achebe had an accident and was confined to a wheel chair. But that is another story altogether.
As I was saying, Nnolim would walk into our class, head straight to the blackboard, scribble a word or two, while taking greetings from the class, and then turn to face everyone with his trademark smile. That would be the switch for Jude, Ovie, Ebikake and the rest of us to go into stitches. To teach us a lesson, Nnolim would begin to tell a story far different from the topic he had spelt out on the board. He would traverse borders and break barriers and recall his days as a young, dashing scholar in England and in America.
He would recall his adventures from territory to territory, the ladies lining the route to cheer him on, like a gallant African Don Quixote. He would talk about the pilgrims he met, virtually in the company of Geoffrey Chaucer, the places he visited, and the ideas that teased him along the way. He would go from Greek mythology to Roman lore, from Italian masterpieces to Greco-Roman classics in the mould of Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey .
He would talk about the adventures of Moby Dick as though he was talking about The Titanic. He would talk about Lady Chatterley’s Lover as if he was an incarnation of D.H. Lawrence. By the time Nnolim would complete his narrative trip and return to Ezeulu and the sacred yams waiting to be roasted, the class would have ten minutes left of the one hour lecture time. And in those 10 minutes, Nnolim would demonstrate why he still holds the ace as Africa’s first and foremost authority on formalist criticism with particular regard to the novel as an art form.
I learnt a great deal from Nnolim, to say the least, and I remain flattered that he gave me so much attention and reckoned with my opinion at all. Many years after I left his class, I was overwhelmed the day he called me out of the blue and said he had chosen me to edit and publish his books under my publishing label, Treasure Books. He was in earnest, and actually invited me over to his apartment at Gambia Ama, the residential estate for lecturers. I drove all the way from Yenagoa to Port Harcourt, just to hear from him directly. He was grateful when I published his book entitled Issues In African Literature, without charging him a brass farthing. He had become like a father figure to me.
Nnolim would often say he was proud that his daughter in literature had accepted to marry his son in literature. He taught the daughter in class before he taught the son. Then came news, many years later, that Bina and Nengi were wedded, and he was not there to do the joining like a roving catechist. He took particular interest in our home, and when our daughter Pentecost was born, he gave her a name. He called her Bliss. Till date, the child spells that name out on her exercise books as belonging to her alongside the names her parents gave her.
On the day my wife was to present her first book to the world, we thought about the chairman of the occasion and settled for Nnolim. The Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, represented his boss as special guest of honour. Nnolim and Jonathan sat side by side on the high table, and they were both grateful to be meeting for the first time. Jonathan said he could remember the name in his early days as a student at the University of Port Harcourt, and he was glad to find the professor so full of life and good humour, especially when Nnolim said he had decided to become a Bayelsa man and had chosen for himself the name Owei.
Nnolim, on his part, put it down to the difference in faculties, which was why they didn’t meet earlier. Jonathan was a student in the sciences at Choba Park, while Nnolim was a lecturer in English at Abuja Park. Then, of course, there was the disparity in age to speak of. The younger man should know the older man, not the other way round, especially in a university setting as diverse as Uniport. Nnolim spoke at length at that event, expressing surprise that the Bayelsa State government could find one of his students, that small boy Nengi, worthy of holding an exalted office such as speech writer to the Governor.
I was smiling in my corner throughout Nnolim’s speech, grateful that a lecturer I hold in such high esteem could honour my humble invitation and drive from Port Harcourt to Yenagoa to grace my wife’s book launch. The professor became our family friend from then on. What’s more, I felt flattered when Nnolim entrusted me with the publication of another book, a critical work he had kept in abeyance for many years. It was a treatise on Joseph Conrad entitled Pessimism as Dialectic: The Form of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . It was what you might call a pedagogical foray into the nexus between the European novel and the African novel as related art forms. It was also a study in style and technique. I felt as if he was handing me his literary estate.
As with the first book, I went through the second manuscript with a clinical tooth-pick, working on every detail to the minutiae of punctuations, and putting the index in proper order, according to scholarly standards. Again, I picked up the bill and published the book on my own label, Treasure Books. I could afford it, yes. But more than that, I was simply overwhelmed that, out of all fifteen classmates of mine who sat in Nnolim’s class in the 1986 set of the Department of English & Literary Studies, University of Port Harcourt, the professor found me worthy to consult as a publisher, and to engage my editorial services for two books in a row.
Nnolim’s sense of humour was huge, if not rollicking. His unfailing response to any silly question was simple. ‘Whenever he opens his mouth’, he would say, looking at the defaulting student, ‘a toad jumps out’. And our class would break out in laughter. Imagine how my classmates would feel if they were to hear that our beloved lecturer, Nnolim, is no more. He is gone the way of all flesh, taking with him his lively jokes, all that refined scholarly intellect, and his proverbial pouch of wisdom.
