Remembering Chukwuemeka Ike’s Protean Aesthetics

Prof. Sule Emmanuel Egya
Director, Centre for Arts and Indigenous Studies

Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University
Lapai.
As we celebrate the life and work of Ike today, I would like us to look at his achievement as a writer, especially a fiction writer, a novelist, even though he wrote and edited interesting non-fictional books such as University Development in Africa: The Nigerian Experience (1976), How to Become a Published Writer
(1991), and The Book in 21st Century Nigeria and Universal Basic Education
(2000).

The range of Ike’s concerns and themes is as protean as his career in civil
and public service. It seems that Ike had a story to tell in every sphere of life he
found himself. As we all know, he was a teacher, an accomplished university
administrator, a chief executive officer of the West African Examinations Council
(WAEC), a director at Daily Times of Nigeria, a director at University Press, a
chair of the governing councils of many institutions, a visiting professor at
University of Jos, Jos, and a traditional ruler of his community. His was a versatile
life lived in full. That a man who had such a varied career, moving from one
serious executive position to another, could have the time and the fecund
imagination to write the novels he published, besides other numerous non￾fictional books and articles, suggests that indeed Chief Chukwuemeka Ike was a
man of prodigious talent and extra-ordinary achievement.
He wrote about twelve fictional works, each of them dealing with a
different issue in the socio-political life of Nigeria. His writing life, like his career
life, was also protean, marked by a keen eye for the ills his society faced and his
prolific output.

This suggests the rather complex personality of Ike as a human
being: he was both a leader and a social critic, two rather conflicting subjectivities
in one person. We might ask, how was it that the same Ike who worked as a WAEC chief executive (1971-1979) published a novel titled Expo 77 in 1980 that exposes examination misconduct as one of the corrupt practices that have permeated the society? There is what one might see as a double consciousness beneath Ike’s personality: on the one hand, he was undertaking his work as a civil servant, a chief executive, ensuring the smooth running of the institution; on the
other hand, his consciousness as a writer, as a social critic, made him exposed the
ills in the establishment, including the institutions that he presided over. In other
words, Ike was the writer with keen eyes for social ills who did not shy away
from working for the same institutions which ills he exposed. Some writers find
this to be a problem and would rather detach themselves from the establishment.
Ike’s double-consciousness could be the result of his zeal to tackle the
human condition from both ends, as a conformist civil servant and as a non￾conformist creative writer.

We also saw that later in his life he did not shy away from taking a traditional leader’s role. As it turned out, his career life robustly fed his writing life and from his creative talons we have interesting novels that do not
only historicise significant turns in Nigeria’s socio-political life, but also teach us
how to build a nation. They include Toads for Supper (1965), which is about inter￾cultural relations and national integration; The Naked Gods (1970) about the dirty
politics of position-seeking in our universities; Sunset at Dawn (1993) about the
inhumanity and horror of the Biafran war; and The Bottled Leopard (1985) about
the reality of African culture in the face of modernity. It is significant to note that
Ike’s novels remain very relevant today because they are about socio-political and
institutional issues. Indeed, some of them are even more relevant today than when
they were published. For instance, the dirty politics surrounding the position of
vice chancellor in our universities has grown so worse that Ike’s The Naked Gods
would be considered prophetic.
Ike’s novels are well received. He is a master storyteller. His plot structures
are loaded with suspense and intrigues and the curious reader may not be able to
put down his book until the end. His literary language is quite appealing, appropriately spiced with colloquiality and local speech wisdom. One of his greatest techniques is humour. It is indeed rare to read Ike without having to laugh at the follies of societal villains, since most of the times he deploys humour as a tool for satire. Ike’s narratives are an entertainment delight to the young and the old. They are also loaded with didactic messages, foregrounding good morals and condemning bad habits in our society. The politics of Ike’s novels is such that his stance in the issues he presents is often made clear with authorial intrusions. It is however interesting to note that while Ike is well received by his audience, he is rather neglected by institutional critics and scholars. His work has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Ike is one of those writers who, on the one hand, are well-received authors by their readers and, on the other hand, constitute an enigma to the institution of literary criticism and scholarship in Africa. Other writers in this category might include Cyprian Ekwensi, Abubakar Gimba, and Wale Okediran.

The work of these writers, including Ike’s, enjoy great reception across Africa. On account of their language and style, and their extremely relatable stories, both the young and the old read them. And yet their writings, which are so well loved, are often disparaged by a section of the institution of literary scholarship, one of the reasons being that their work lack what Charles Nnolim vaguely termed “high seriousness” (quoted in Patrick 55). You don’t need to dig much to know what Nnolim is referring to. Recall Matthew Arnold’s concept of high culture that informed the doctrine of the twentieth￾century modernism. This Arnoldian high modernism is the received mode of literary criticism in Africa, and profoundly shapes the practice of the first generation of African literary scholars, such as Nnolim, who constitute the institutional authority in literary scholarship. The institutional denigration of Ike’s work and those of other writers categorised as popular fiction writers is a function of high modernism that produced the formalist criticism of the twentieth century. I suggest that since we are now, or we think of ourselves as being, in the postmodern era where grand narratives and institutional regimes have collapsed, giving way to epistemic plurality and the staging of marginalised voices, literary scholars today need to rethink the ways in which they view the work of writers like Ike. The notion of postmodern subjectivity suggests that we can today successfully confront the ideology of modernism and allow all voices, narratives, and tendencies to grow in literary scholarship without institutional discrimination. Ike’s novels could therefore be read as literary representations of wide-ranging socio-political realities of Nigeria without anyone magisterially judging its literary quality. After all, literary quality is a subjective matter that varies from one individual to another.

With the possibilities that postmodernism offers, I expect to see more robust studies of Ike’s novels so that justice is done, in terms of commensurate critical attention, to his work. Whatever is the case, Chukwuemeka Ike remains a conspicuous and significant part of Nigeria’s literary consciousness. He should be celebrated all the time as one of the greatest story tellers to have emerged from Anambra State, a state of great story tellers such as Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ike may not have enjoyed institutional lionisation like Achebe and Adichie, but his contribution to Nigeria, Africa, and the world, as a writer and professional, cannot and should not be neglected. To that extent, let me conclude by suggesting that public and private organisations should do more to immortalise him with concrete projects that include the creation of literary prizes in Ike’s name, the establishment of a writing residency in his name (which could be located in his much beloved Indikelionwu), and an annual conference on his writing. Thank you for your time.