Amadi's flair for description was unmatched

Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, has been a part of the set books in Kenyan schools. was a highly respected writer who, nonetheless, was content to sit in the back row of the literary podium right from the beginning, even with success and international recognition. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • The Concubine was appealing to us because of many reasons. The rural set-up and cultures that many of us could relate to, its sociological structures and the corresponding gender roles, and the idioms that spoke to our then emerging sense of being human or, more precisely, being men.
  • Amadi was a highly respected writer who, nonetheless, was content to sit in the back row of the literary podium right from the beginning, even with success and international recognition.
  • In the days when literary debates revolved around commitment or lack of it, Amadi easily fit in the same group as Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo, who in different ways, were victims of the Biafra war that pushed to the fore the nationalist concerns of marginalisation and the futility of colonial borders as structures of forging national unity.

I was a third-year student at Chesamisi High School when I first read Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, which was then part of the set books in English, apart from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Jean de Grandsaigne’s edited work, An Anthology of African Short Stories in English, to me the best ever collection of stories to be put together.

I remember a collective excitement in class when we read Amadi’s novel, especially what we then considered to be excellent characterisation and development of the themes of love and society.

In many ways, the novel was also a continuation of the ‘heroism’, in our minds then, of Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that was still very much part of our reading staple.

And so, in our small groups back in high school, we had a few Okonkwos from Achebe’s imagination, and Emenikes and Madumes from Amadi’s. All these characters had some influence on some of us, who would go on to read literature at university.

The Concubine was appealing to us because of many reasons. The rural set-up and cultures that many of us could relate to, its sociological structures and the corresponding gender roles, and the idioms that spoke to our then emerging sense of being human or, more precisely, being men.

To our young minds then, the seeming valorisation of violence not only sounded normal, but was actually desirable because such violence provided a spine around which our then nascent masculine aspirations could swivel.

SELF-EFFACING

It was later, in college, that we placed Amadi in the larger context of African literature and understood his novels as sociological commentaries on a bygone Africa. We could then pick out the distancing irony and understand his abhorrence of violence and his very nuanced analysis of human struggle against nature.

We went beyond The Concubine to discover that it was part of a trilogy that included The Great Ponds and The Slave, all of which were inspired by the history of his Ikwerre people of eastern Nigeria in the pre-colonial period.

Amadi was a highly respected writer who, nonetheless, was content to sit in the back row of the literary podium right from the beginning, even with success and international recognition. His self-effacing nature is discernible in a letter that he wrote to James Currey in 1963, about the manuscript of The Concubine.

“The title of this book and a few passages in it will probably make it unsuitable material for your African Writers Series, which is educational. However if the material is worth publishing at all, I don’t mind in what series you put it.”

In Currey’s recollection, Amadi also attached a postal order of five shillings in case the manuscript was rejected.

The manuscript was published, as were many others, but Amadi remained self-effacing so much so that, on his visit to Nairobi in 2011 as a guest of the Centre for Multiparty Democracy, he indicated to his handlers in Nairobi that he wanted to visit the University of Nairobi.

SUBDUED RECEPTION

My colleague, Mumia Osaaji, soon received a call from journalist George Orido informing him that Elechi Amadi was in town, and he would like to visit the university. Osaaji was very excited because he assumed that anybody with even a remote acquaintance with the basics of African writers would want to meet Elechi Amadi.

Osaaji’s excitement was swiftly punished when, on the appointed day, Amadi naturally walked to the Department of Literature to encounter silence and the absence of any ceremony or gesture of recognition whatsoever because, for some reason, the department was not expecting him.

Yet Osaaji had informed his colleagues and even put up posters all over THE Education Building. But these had not been enough to shake us to attention.

Eventually, Amadi took some stairs up to the School of Journalism, where he was received a little warmly. Somehow, Osaaji braved the situation and, with colleagues from the School of Journalism, found a space to Amadi to deliver his talk, which turned out to be a riveting affair presented in the style of anecdotes and their relevance to Africa. Soon after, Amadi left and we moved on, leaving us with memories of his presence and works.

Elechi Amadi, a trained physicist and mathematician, was also a soldier of the captain rank. He lived through the most trying political and economic crises of Nigeria, and lived to tell the tale, as it were. Detained by General Ojukwu during the Biafra war in 1967, he only managed to escape when Port Harcourt was liberated by the Federal Forces.

KEEN OBSERVER

Throughout his tribulations, he remained dignified and observant of the human situation that further fed his imagination. That he was a keen observer of his surroundings is borne out by the praises that he earned upon the publication of Sunset in Biafra, described by James Currey as “one of the very best books about the war.”

In the days when literary debates revolved around commitment or lack of it, Amadi easily fit in the same group as Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo, who in different ways, were victims of the Biafra war that pushed to the fore the nationalist concerns of marginalisation and the futility of colonial borders as structures of forging national unity. These struggles still continue even in Kenya today.

Writing in a style once described as "of elegant restraint", one would understand that Amadi’s works have been undone by concerns of relevance.

Indeed, James Currey notes the misgivings that Laban Erapu and Henry Chakava had regarding Amadi’s The Slave, of which they lamented that by offering the East African reader this novel, “we are taking him back to the period before Things Fall Apart.” The two would, however, add that “strictly as a novel, it reads well.”

As we bid farewell to Elechi Amadi, we remember him for what he described as his "modest contribution to African literature", and thank him for that.