‘Concubine’ author dies, leaving behind beautiful works

Even if you can’t remember very well who Captain Elechi Amadi is, you must have met his Ihuoma, that woman so beautiful and “quite so right in everything, almost perfect.”

Amadi, who died on Wednesday this week at the age on 82, was the author of one of the most popular African novels, The Concubine, in which the village beauty, Ihuoma, features as the principal character. The 1966 masterpiece has been studied in Kenyan schools — first starting in the mid 1970s, then later in the early 1990s. 

As the Nigerian scholar Ebele Ewa Eko describes him in a 2008 essay, Amadi is “erudite, sagacious and disciplined, a guru of African culture and literature, a rare peacock at the great waterfalls of African arts and creativity.” 

The plot of his most well-known novel, The Concubine, revolves around the beautiful Ihuoma and the tragic death of the men who fall in love with her. Ihuoma is married to a jealous Sea-King, who uses her as a bait to lure men to untold suffering and death. 

While Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is no doubt better known in Kenya and the rest of the world, there are critics who feel that Amadi is more accurate in his depiction of rural Africa.

URBAN WAGS

Indeed, if Achebe’s novel produced nicknames like Ikemefuna, Unoka, and Obierika in Kenya, our many Ihuomas, Wodu Wakiris, Madumes, and Ekwuemes come from Amadi’s novel about village life in pre-colonial Nigeria.

The urban wags we read in Kenyan prose are the offspring of Amadi’s Wodu Wakiri, the hilarious village comedian, whom the author uses to create comic relief in an otherwise sad novel about the cosmic punishment of a woman who deserves better than she gets from life.

Elechi Amadi was born in the Delta region of Eastern Nigeria in an Aluu village, near Port Harcourt, on May 12, 1934. Elechi’s father had 11 wives.

His father’s fifth child and the only surviving one at a time of high infant mortality, Amadi went to a local primary school before joining the prestigious Government College, Umuahia in 1948.

“I was a typical village,” he is quoted as saying in Ebele Eko’s Elechi Amadi: The Man and his Work (1991). “I took part in dancing, singing, trapping, wrestling and farming.”  

These cultural and economic activities are reflected in his work, including his loneliness as an only child for a long time. 

He says that in Umuahia (1948-1952), he was a schoolmate of the poet J.P. Clark, and that Chinua Achebe (who “always carried a novel”) was his dormitory prefect. “My love for reading and my deep interest in literature was nurtured in Umuahia by devoted teachers and a well-stocked library.” 

WRITING AMBITION

But he went on to study surveying at the Survey School, Oyo (1953–1954), before joining the University of Ibadan (1955–1959), from where he bagged a degree in mathematics and physics. He married Dorah Ohale in 1957, and they had eight children.

Upon graduation, Amadi found employment first as a Land Surveyor in Enugu (1959-1960) and then as a teacher at Protestant mission schools in Oba and Ahoada.

In 1963, Amadi joined the Nigerian Federal Army at the rank of captain, but he resigned his commission after three years because, according to Rodney Nesbitt, “his ambition was to write.”

Amadi took a teaching job at the Anglican Grammar School in Port Harcourt, hoping to get more time to write. This paid off. The Concubine was published in 1966 (the same year as Achebe’s A Man of the People).

The author’s second novel, The Great Ponds, came out in 1966. It is another mythical story about the deadly struggle of rural villages over ponds that are considered supernatural. He insists that it has nothing to do with the ethnic tensions in Nigeria around the time of its publication.

His third novel, The Slave (1977), is about a man who has spent his life serving the gods and is unable to fit in as a normal member of the society. The next novel, Estrangement (1986), is about the consequences of civil war.

FATALISTIC WORLD

The struggle to survive in a fragile and sometimes fatalistic world in Amadi’s novels is also dramatised in his plays. Isiburu (1973), is a verse drama about a champion wrestler who is ultimately defeated by the supernatural power of his enemy.

Amadi’s other plays, Peppersoup and The Road to Ibadan, were both published in a single volume in 1977 and depict the struggles in a supernatural world. The Dancer of Johannesburg, also published in 1977, focuses on the fight against apartheid in South Africa. 

During the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s, like several other Nigerian writers (e.g., Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and Chinua Achebe), Amadi was regarded as rubbing the authorities the wrong way.

He was imprisoned two times, not by the federal government like the other writers, but by the Biafran secessionist government. This movement was not comfortable with Amadi’s military background.  

It is in Sunset in Biafra (1979) that Amadi records, in non-fictional form, his experiences during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s. He has been criticised for downplaying the legitimacy of the fight against the corrupt federal government of the time.

He comes from Ikwerri, a minority group within the Igbo, and he may have feared that his group’s culture and political interests would be suppressed by the dominant Igbo groups. He also says that he found his fellow Igbo people a little insensitive towards other Nigerian communities.

LITTLE CRITICAL ATTENTION

Believing in a united Nigeria during the civil war, Amadi rejoined the Federal army, and at the end of the war in 1970, he worked for the government of the newly constituted Rivers State. He later became head of the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Education.

From 1984 to 1987, Amadi was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at College of Education in Port Harcourt. He has also served as Commissioner of Lands and Housing.

Compared with African writers who deal with similar rural themes (e.g., Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye), Amadi has not been given the critical attention he deserves.

Some critics like Ebele Eko speculate that this neglect could be because Amadi does not subscribe to the dominant schools of thought in African literary studies.

According to Eko, unlike Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sembene Ousmane, Femi Osofisan, and Alex la Guma, Amadi saw literature as primarily an art, not a tool for ideological ends. 

As a novelist and playwright, Amadi believed that “literature shall remain more as a form of entertainment and sense of beauty, than a political tool or source of information for shocking facts that may move man ideologically.”

The creator of Ihuoma, Captain Amadi will be fondly remembered by everyone who has read The Concubine.