 Welcome, everyone. I'm so glad to see a good crowd for this event. My panel, our panel for today, is called, We Intend to Do Unheard of Things. And hopefully, some of those unheard of things will happen in the next hour or so. I feel very pleased to have the writers who have gathered with us today. And I'm going to introduce them in the order in which they will be delivering their pieces. The first is Mazamenkiste. Mazamenkiste's first book, Beneath the Lions Gaze, brought an interesting range of voices to address the defining turbulent moments in Ethiopia's history. It garnered a number of awards, and we are all looking forward to Menkiste's next, soon-to-be-published book, The Shadow King. She has written for The New Yorker, The Guardian, Granta, and other prestigious venues. She has held fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Prague Summer Program, and other places. With her interest in the larger machine of history and the particular voice of ordinary people, she is a very interesting writer to bring to today's discussion. And Chinalo Akparanta has gathered much attention for her books, Happiness Like Water, and Under the Udala Trees. She was named one of Granta's six new voices for 2012, and has had work published in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and other notable publications. Akparanta received her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is an O'Henry Award winner and has been shortlisted for a cane prize. Significantly, she received the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is an exciting addition to the panel. And in the middle, Chuma. Chuma Umukolo has a wide range of interests. He is a lawyer and editor, essayist and poet, and a fiction writer, and has demonstrated accomplishment in all these modes of expression. He has been writer-in-residence at the Ash Millia Museum in Oxford, and is a publisher of African Writing Magazine. And he has published a number of interesting and well-received books, including the novel Diaries of a Dead African, The Memories of Stove, and The Final Testament of a Minor God. This does not cover all of Umukolo's writing, nor all of his accomplishments, and I haven't addressed any of the lawyer stuff, which shows an impressive level of engagement. I think it's safe to say that Chuma Umukolo is a very busy man, and that we are lucky. He has taken time out of what must be a packed schedule to share his thoughts on Achebe and writing with us. All right, and to that end, I would like to invite Martha. The problem with being short is that people forget I have a neck. But I would like to thank the University of Massachusetts for putting together this symposium to Steven Klingman, Vouter, wherever you are for those emails and the kind of chaotic travel plans that you managed to keep in order. I really would like to thank everyone. Dr. Chidi, it was, if he's here, it was really incredible to hear your words. And I was particularly moved with the speakers from yesterday and gave me much to think about last night as I was kind of organizing and reorganizing what I would say. So I did not drink as much wine as I would have liked, but I do thank all the speakers. I've been really struck by kind of the title of this panel, We Intend to Do Unheard of Things. And so it's under that influence that I will speak today. There is a saying in Ethiopia, when the one who will be killed is in the presence of the killer, there is freedom. In that moment, there is nothing left to lose. It is possible even to do unheard of things. I am in London on a cold November morning and the last of the 900,000 ceramic red poppies will be placed around the Tower of London, one for every soldier from the UK and the Commonwealth who died during the First World War. It is a scorching August day. And the world has fallen silent as a young man in an orange jumpsuit is paraded across a sandy hill and made to kneel. It is April and another group of young men, black like me, are marched across both sea and sand and forced onto their knees. I turn my head, I close my eyes, I shut my ears, unheard of things. Chinua Chebe says all those men in Nazi Germany who put their talent in the service of racism have been generally and rightfully condemned for their perversions. He seems to imply that in the end, true talent cannot be twisted. A gift cannot be subverted and subsumed by evil. The talent is a virtue, stalwart, loyal as a well-trained soldier. Arthur Rambo gave up the pretense of poetry, a Chebe says, when he opted, or gave up the pretense of poetry, a Chebe says when he opted for slavery. But I have been to Harrah, a city where Rambo lived. I have seen some of his belongings. I know that when he put down the pen, he picked up the camera. I have borne witness to his vision of those with skin just like mine. There is beauty in the frame. There is poetry. Poetry surely can only be on the side of man's deliverance and not his enslavement and this I want to believe. Like some of you in here, I come to this language of English secondhand. I have fallen between its cracks trying to trudge my way towards comprehension. I have marveled at its flexibility, but never so much as in recent years. I have seen what I have seen and what we have seen is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore, though we have tried. It is strong enough to reside in troubling landscapes, malleable enough to be both poetic and cruel. It has the capacity to draw us in and push us back and send us spinning with speechless grief. And while those red ceramic poppies want to remind us of the transcendent power of memory and imagination, the ISIS videos want to drive home that we are in the end, no more than our bodies. That we are all shatterable, interchangeable political symbols knotted around a stoppable heart. Both the installation and the videos demand that we take note and look. In both instances, our gaze is the first step in receiving a prescribed message. Yet to watch the ISIS videos involves a heart-rending complicity with the murderers. Our gaze would be an instrument in the oppression depicted, a continuation of the vulgar narrative. But it is a narrative. It is language. It communicates. It is poetry because it is a language of representation. All those men clad in orange, dragged across sand and sea, have been reduced to brightly colored metaphors. All those poppies, blood red and stuck in dirt around the Tower of London Moat, were once full-bodied men strung across battlefields. One reminds us cruelly of our fragility. The other tries valiantly to shield us from the stink and rot that also makes up who we are. I'm speaking of violence that is put on display. At its most aesthetic, it strips back and erases a harsher reality. At its most garish, it is a billboard for all our most human and most primal fears. A symbolic language come to us so fully and frightfully formed that we have not always found the words to confront it. When it comes to war, when it comes to violence, it seems that we have not always been able to keep up. We have not always been able to locate the vocabulary that will take us from shock and stunned silence towards a coherent and visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us. I've long believed in a concerned writer's need to look at photographs and images of violence. The power of our particular gaze has the ability to reshape a narrative and turn victim into human being. But then came the videos, then came the requests by the families of the victims to remember them as they had been alive and active rather than as they were intended. Yet in the aftermath of the shock, in the deliberate decision to look away, where is there to settle a gaze when turning away feels like forgetting? To look is to be a pawn in the propaganda, to turn away is its own kind of acquiescence, one that renders these victims as simple symbols. I know what Acebe is saying. I believe in what he says. I believe that art carries the potential for vast and dramatic change, but it also carries discomfort and it is by its nature both a tool and a weapon, both a salve and poison. It is not only the righteous woman who holds a gift, it is not only the truth teller who can and should be heard. If language can withstand and support the heaviest, most brutal of activities, then that is also a testament to its inherent strength, one that can allow us transcendence and peace. But the stakes are high. And though they may be no higher than they have been in other decades and centuries, you and I are here now in this moment in history. And somewhere in this swirling of unpredictability and ever-shifting alliances is the writer's place. For years I have been searching for that point on the axis on which good seems to pivot too easily towards bad. I want to know where the ground begins to shift and how language both erodes and glues it back together and what there is to be done about it. I am talking about my responsibility, about our duty in the face of those unspeakable and unheard of things. How do we begin to construct a vocabulary if all we can do is stand in numb and silent grief? What is there to really see of those who once stood and then were forced to kneel if all we do is look away? I am asking who will stand in the bloody fields and make the world understand that a poppy can never recreate a full-bodied man, no matter how lovely. I am not sure that language can grow to its full potential if we choose to leave certain words unsaid, if some things are deemed too hideous to understand, if we must distance ourselves from all that does not hold sway to our own beliefs. And this is where I am today, wondering about the writer's role when there seems there is nothing we can say to change anything. What I have begun to think, that before the word comes the image, that before we describe, we must first be willing to look. We must stare, then verbalize, then reclaim. We cannot, we learn to comprehend what is in front of us by writing, by recreating in such a way that we urge others not to turn aside. There are those who came before us, who have looked and written and forced our gaze towards greater empathy and our language towards greater capacity. Here are just a very few. Chinua Chebe, James Baldwin, Baalu Gurma, Usman Semben, Asya Jabbar. But they would be no more than mere voices, unintelligible words carried through empty space. If we, if I, if all of us did not take part in their protest against silence and read. Thank you. Good afternoon. Okay, and if I would say, I should say it again. Good afternoon. Thank you, Uncle Uke. Okay, so thank you so much, Steven. Thank you to Valter. Thank you to UMass. It's an honor and a privilege to be here. So I will, the complete quote from Chinua Chebe was let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it. So I will talk about language and my relationship to it, but before that I'll talk about my relationship with Chinua Chebe. The morning of March 21st, 2013, at about 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, I woke to the news that Chinua Chebe had died. I read it on the internet. I sat in shock for nine minutes, nine minutes exactly. I know this because I keep very close watch of time, mornings especially. After those minutes I reached for my cell phone, sent text message notifications about Chebe's death to my mother and sisters, all several states away. Perhaps they had not yet heard the news and I reasoned and I was right. Later while I talked with my mother, she would make a soft wailing sound that I've come to associate only with Nigerian women and she would lament and ebou. Ohotu siwe mou, so this is how he died. Of course, Chebe was 82 years old and ill and my mother, sisters and I were well aware of these facts, so there should not have been any shock at his death. But it was shocking, all the same, perhaps because there are those elders amongst us, amongst us, sages, who we inadvertently come to view as being outside the wingspan of death. Following the lamentation, I went about my day as people in mourning often do. I dressed all in black, although quite subconsciously. There was an aura of disbelief, sadness as I walked out the door, as I got into my car, as I drove to the university, even as I taught my classes. On returning home, I found a request waiting for me on my computer, an invitation to write a piece, a tribute to Chinua Chebe. This was the tribute that I wrote. But before I wrote it, my first instinct was to decline, of course. I never knew Chebe in the flesh, never had the opportunity to meet him. I have no family ties to him. Chimamanda Dichie tells of living in the house where the Achebe's once lived. Okendebe talks of interviewing him and working with him on the African Writers series. There are many such anecdotes of people who knew the man, but I have no such anecdote to share. I am evil, yes, the same as he was, and people will notice the similarity in our names, but same tribe and similar names do not a connection make. So what could I possibly have to say about a man I never met? I sat at my desk, ready to politely decline the request, but somewhere between clicking the reply button and typing the first line of the email, a thought occurred to me that there was never a time in my conscious childhood when I did not know Chino Achebe's name. Indeed, it is impossible to pinpoint the first time I heard it. His name was something like water, something like air, an ongoing and essential part of my existence, though often taken for granted. It was spoken all around and followed me like a shadow, and with the name also the lines which back then we recited as a song. Things fall apart and the center cannot hold. Mayor Anarchy is loosed upon the world. We sang the words, my siblings and I, not really understanding their meaning and certainly having no clue about their origin and youth. Back then we watched television dramatizations of things fall apart. We laughed at Okonko, then sighed over his death. Back then I had not yet read the novel. And years later when I did, I relived the devastation of the arrival of the colonialists and I relived Okonko's death just as vibrantly as I'd experienced it in those television dramatizations many years earlier. Last year a story of mine was bought by conjunctions, the magazine at Bard College. As I was unfamiliar with the journal, I decided to browse their website and in doing so, I ran into a recording of Chinoachebe in which he read a poem. He had written the poem in honor of his friend, Christopher Okibu, an Igbo man killed in the Nigeria Biafra war. The poem is written in the style of an Igbo traditional dirge. It goes, Obonekainacho, Obonekainacho, Okibukainacho, in Zuma Liso. There was something devastatingly moving about this poem for me. At the time I attributed the effect to its topic, but this was only part of the cause. The other factor was that never before had I heard literature, aside from the stories my mother used to tell when we were children, spoken in my native language. I listened to Ochebe. I listened to the beautiful cadence, the lilt of my mother tongue as it flowed from his mouth. And in that moment, English sieved to exist. I was thousands of miles away from Nigeria, but in that moment I was home. It's important to explain that the poem is essentially a chant sung by young people when a member of their age group dies prematurely. It is a call and response sort of recitation. The refrain, Zuma Liso, is a combination of the words zoe hide and mali, which is a playful sort of sound, which could loosely be translated as hiding in play. And so it is that the singers are just saying that their friend is merely hiding, not dead because of course they cannot bring themselves to believe that he's actually gone. They sing this song throughout the night and in the morning when they still do not see their friend, they finally admit that he has died. Reading the news of Ochebe on March 21st, 2013, I thought back to this poem. Of course, Ochebe was far from my age mate and his death was not exactly premature. Still, I could not bring myself to believe that he was dead. What are we looking for? What are we looking for? Ochebo is who we're looking for. He's hiding in play. Lines later, the poem continues in slightly muddled order. Esiteku, onega balai. Ese togu, onega balai. Obone kaynapo, Ochebo kaynapo, Zuma Liso. If a new dance is learned, who will dance for us? When war is declared, who will shoot for us? The dance has stopped suddenly. Our mask has departed in the heat of the festival. The rains have drenched the hero. Who is it that we are calling? Ochebo is who we are calling. He's hiding in play. Though intended for Christopher Ochebo, these are the lines I now associate with Ochebo himself, Ochebo from whom I drew my inspiration to write whose name existed in my mind long before I was aware of its significance. Whose voice made me feel at home again, though I was continents away. A man, despite my never having met him, whose loss I mourned with every fiber of my being. And so, just as he once called on Christopher Ochebo, in memoriam, I call on him now. Chinu alamo, guachepe. The rains have drenched you too. May your name continue to be called upon. Now and forevermore, may it remain untarnished. Though you no longer breathe, may you live through the breaths of those who speak your name. And may you rest in peace. So now, like I said about my first encounter with Ochebe's reading of the Ochebo poem, there was something moving about hearing him read it because I had not heard Ibo spoken in literature since I was a tiny little girl in Nigeria. These days in my own writing, I try to pass forward the gift that Ochebe give to me. I use Ibo freely in my writing so that perhaps one day when some Ibo man or woman or girl or boy so far away from home inadvertently falls into my work, he or she will instantly be transported back to the warmth of home. In my novel, Under the Udala Trees, I choreograph a happy dance between Ibo and English. And of course, for practical reasons, which we talked about yesterday, English takes the greater part. But Ibo gets a good share. In the novel, I allow my characters to sing folk tale songs that my mother used to sing to me. War chants. Ochebo is a Biafranine, Emmerianaburi, naburi enahoro, Yakubugawon, Emikemerian Biafran. I think some of us Biafrans know this song, though. Maybe you're kidding me, Dove. Bible verses. Nihin ka kamoke garapun naya na nea. Woke na mune, Adam naive. Keme uchegi nowa. Kese meya ne luigwe folk tale songs. And I could sing many and many of them. Traditional women songs. And I know Chika knows this one. Most Ibo people know. Woni hem nevi weyabiko weboya selen. Osukoso wampi yabiko suboya selen. Okay, so these are all of my writing. And all of us Ibo people will know it. And we will enjoy it. And other people will read and also learn and enjoy and dance to it. Because, of course, there are people who go out of their way to learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, Chinese, Cantonese, Swahili, Arabic. My hope is that one day they will also go out and learn Ibo. Perhaps one day Ibo will be a solidly teachable language with a generally agreed upon standard set of linguistic rules. And it will flourish just as English or French, Chinese, or any other language. But, of course, not at the expense of these other languages. For in this instance, we need not do to others as has been done on to us. After all, the world is big enough for many languages to peacefully coexist. Peaceful coexistence rather than dominance and subjugation or total elimination. Inclusivity rather than exclusivity. In the meantime, until that becomes a reality, I hope that we Ibo people are unafraid to insert our language into our literature without judgment against ourselves and with the confidence that those readers who matter will take the initiative to research and to understand and to enjoy the lyrical beauty of our language. And now, to Achebe's essay on Conrad, which is the reason we're all here. Achebe, in his essay, An Image of Africa writes of the Western desire. One might indeed say the need in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil in Europe, or shall we say in the West? To set Africa up as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe's, or shall we say the West's, own state of spiritual grace will be manifest. Now, Africa is not a country, but sometimes the easiest way to address us as a unified whole is to address us as if we were one country. So please excuse me for taking the liberty with doing just this now. Which is all just to say that indeed Achebe is correct. As a writer, I write stories of Nigerians at home and away. Some of the comments that I often get from my Western readers are along the lines of, what a shame that women in Africa are still so behind, still struggling for equality, still stuck with having to establish their social status. What's all this obsession with marriage and men, with having children? Can you speak to the status of the struggle of women in Nigeria? Or, isn't it crazy all those bombings in Abuja? How terrible that Nigeria is still having ethnic violence. Or regarding the LGBTQ community in Nigeria. Isn't it terrible that Africa still hasn't developed itself enough to be accepting of the LGBTQ community? Isn't it terrible, isn't it terrible, isn't it terrible? Isn't it terrible about all those cheap old girls who got kidnapped so sad, what Nigeria is allowing to happen to its children? And the comments go on and on and on. But the truth is, one has only to look honestly to see that the Western world is not much different from Africa, that Africa's issues are the West's issues as well. Marriage rights aside, the LGBTQ community is daily persecuted here in the US. One only has to ask personal questions to individual members of the community to find this out. Even in the Western world, women are still expected to stay at home with children while men work. A recent survey I read indicated that over 60% of Americans believe that it is the women's role to stay home and watch the kids while it is the men's job to go out and work. Even in the Western world, women are daily abandoned by men and left to be single parents. Even in the Western world, the pressure for women to bear children is still a burden. Hence, Western women's worries about freezing their eggs. Just a different manifestation of the same African women's preoccupation, which is all just to say that we live in one world. We share the same preoccupations, only that these preoccupations manifest in slight variations, shades of the very same color. Even in the Western world, children still suffer abuse. Even in the West, school shootings and racial violence abound in parallel fashion to ethnic tribal violence in African countries. Did you know that there have been over 150 school shootings in America since 2013? Essentially nearly one a week on the average. This I like to point out when they point out the bombings in Abuja for me. There's Sandy Hook Newton, Newton, Connecticut, Columbus, Ohio, Littleton, the list goes on and on. I was teaching at Purdue University in West Lafayette when the shooter shot and killed somebody. As an asphoracial violence index, we have the cases of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, many, many more, whose names just did not happen to make the news. These are all examples of terror-like violence in the United States. Even in the West, there is evidence of poor government. We have the case of the financial crisis. Even in the West, there's rampant unemployment, there's nepotism, there's corruption, there's political scandal. Just maybe the West is slightly more skilled at hiding its corruption and scandal. Just maybe the West even goes so far beyond being skillful at hiding its corruption and scandal. Maybe it's good at exploiting the situation. Maybe it's good at intruding and exploiting other cultures as well. Presenting itself as doing a service when all too often its purpose is to profit from someone else's belongings. Maybe Africa is just a little more honest about itself. Maybe Africa just wears its heart on its sleeves, does not expend energy pretending to be better than it is. Does not deny or attempt to gloss over its growing pains. Well, sometimes I ask myself, well, who would you rather deal with? Because I do belong to both sides. I am an American and I am Nigerian. Would you rather deal with the one who tells you exactly who they are or the one who pretends to be something other than themselves? And I think of the dating process because I like to talk a lot about dating. A young girl goes out on a date, spends two years dating a young man. He presents himself so ideally that of course she falls for him. This is American branding, the American dream. She falls for him, they get married and it's not until they are married that his true colors start to come out. He beats her, he stops doing any house work, expects her to do it all. He allows his temper to rain freely, et cetera, et cetera. Another scenario, a young man who has taken the time to know himself tells the young woman exactly who he is, what he wants, his desires, children, no children, pet peeves, et cetera. She does not have to waste two years of her life only to wind up with someone who is not what he professes to be. Countries and continents are often like people, unsurprising as they are in fact made up of people. Perhaps in a more ideal world, we might realize that there is greater strength, greater integrity, greater power in being able to look oneself honestly in the mirror and acknowledging that one is not really better than anyone else. Perhaps in a more ideal world, we might realize that there is greater strength, greater integrity, greater power in being humble about oneself. All of this of course is not to say that Africa is not flawed, that Nigeria is not flawed, that it should not try to improve upon itself. Rather, all of this is simply to say that the same way that this burden to grow, to develop, to become better, to improve upon ourselves, rests upon African nations, it also rests on the West. From an honest, global perspective, there is no one side that is truly better than the other. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Oh yeah, thank you. I didn't have to say that again. My presence here is a little adventure. I won't tell you anything about it, so you can buy the book on it. When I own retire from my retirement. But in the meantime, I'm really grateful to the university for having me and for all those who have made it a really interesting visit. We shall do unheard of things. I'd like to call this, is this a paper if you read it from an electronic device? I'd like to call this paper The Extended Family and the Trojan Horse. And I'd like to quote a poem by Chinua Chebe, which he had written. It's called The Relictions in his Collected Poetry. Where does a runner go whose oily grip drops the button handed by the faithful one in a hard, merciless race? Those are the lines I like to look around in this paper. Now I have read and re-read the lecture and image of Africa, seeking a central idea to fashion into a button. Unfortunately, all ancestors of Chebe's pages drip with wisdom. And it seems easier sometimes to simply roll them all into a scroll to run with. But if I were pressed on the point, I would say that Chinua Chebe tried to break one respectable intellectual tool on which institutional racism filed its iron tooth. He ends his lecture in these words and I quote, perhaps a change will come. Perhaps this is the time when it can begin. When the high optimism engendered by the breathtaking achievements of Western science and industry is giving way to doubt and even confusion. There is just the possibility that Western man may begin to look seriously at the achievements of other people. I read in the papers the other day a suggestion that what America needs at this time is somehow to bring back the extended family. And I saw in my mind, I future African Peace Corps volunteers coming to help you set up the system. I think you're looking at them now. Now the extended family is a sexy concept in political science, the idea of government organizing policy, not on the basis of modern isms, but on the immemorial idea that every man, woman and child in a clan or state is a member of the head of clan or head of state's extended family. In a sense, it is already in practice all over the world. The only problem being that the current constitution of the head of state's extended family, instead of every man, woman and child, consists of special interests, cliques and ruling classes. Now I will now spend a few minutes to introduce a Trojan horse in my title, which is an important member of the extended families and state houses across the world today. In doing so, we will not try to let the button drop by having a go at another respectable intellectual which sharpens a bug beer of Achebe's life. This is the iron tooth of bad governance. The definitive horror story of my teenage years was actually a slim science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein called The Puppet Masters. Has anybody read it here? The Puppet Masters. Well, it's out of fashion, it's not a literary text, but he was written in the 50s and the plot was simple. Earth was invaded by parasites, which took over the human race one person at a time. Conversion was by contact and the ultimate horror was having a loved one turn into an automaton, their loyalty switching from family, country, or race to the invaders from outer space. Of course, if Heinlein's aliens were to arrive on earth today, they would find that they were hundreds of years too late because when the colonial history of the world is written, there is usually a focus on the wrong colonists. The British, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese colonists eventually left. But there is another race of colonials who did not really leave their colonies in America or Asia or Africa and who are in the commanding heights not just of the African political economy, but the walls. The story may have started in the first flush of colonialism. In 1600, the East India Company was established primarily for profit, but for a hundred years, it also ran the India State House. This became the norm. Not America's state houses were run by governments of the company by the company for the company. Long before President Lincoln's Gettysburg address in 1863. The Masachi Sets Bay Company first settled and governed the land on which we stand and set in your case. The Hudson Bay Company once owned and governed the full 12% of the earth, of the land mass of earth, before birth in Canada. And Africa? Africa first appeared in the global imagination as tracks of land, political estates managed by companies like the Imperial British East African Company, the German East Africa Company, the British South African Company. And then on a plot of land acquired from my village in Asaba, Goldie's Royal Niger Company politically governed and commercially exploited the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria until 1900 when they surrendered their governmental ambitions for a payday just shy of a million pounds, 1900 money. But they didn't go home. Like the Hudson Bay Company, a survivor of the Royal Niger Company retained their commercial remits and is active on the stock exchange today. I'm talking of USC PLC in Nigeria. I give you the Trojan Horse. The corporation is a curious thing, demonized by many, they are indispensable to life as we know it today. Scriptile into the DNA of the company is the one gene that a human being is most envious of, immortality, because a well-run company need never die. However rich we are, however well we care for ourselves, you and I will eventually pass on. The well-run company need never die. It need never have its UMass PhD moth-bound, to never have its assets divvied up between debt, duty and children. It continues to acquire assets and experience to merge and to moth. And that is a good thing for us. Yet there's one thing about the corporation that continues to trouble us and that is the fact that it does not go to church. In place of a moral compass, a company's religion is to be large enough to survive any order of natural disaster. But with size and power comes complications. Corporations have become so powerful that although they are under the rule of law, they have the clout not only to omit rules, but laws as well. Although they have no right to vote, they can influence the composition of governments, the establishment of policy. And when it comes to corruption in Africa, corporations are major partners and vehicles of commercial and political corruption, all over the world for that matter. In attempting to pick up an Achebian baton, one has to understand the tragic trajectory of not just Achebi, but all the writers of his generations. From books to assert the manifest destiny of the African to rule himself, they turned to writing books that bemoaned the imminent despair of African self-rule. They lived to write for a revolution, lived to write against revolutionaries. Africa is constantly instructed to build institutions not men. We need strong institutions, go to mantra, not strong men. But a follow-centric 21st century manifestation of the institutional has welded public and private interests. Public-private partnership is a buzzword, I think. Into partnerships like defense industries, prisons, correctional firms, et cetera, whose combined vested interests, whether rooted in the north or south, west or the rest of us, are wholly inimical to humans, not just Africans in the global imagination. In the trouble with Nigeria, ancestor Achebi said that the problem with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of true leadership. He was wrong. I suppose you did tell us that we could disagree with. It is also wrong, though, to argue that since the 170 million followers lacked the courage or will, power to recycle their morally bankrupt leaders, the problem is simply and squarely a failure of followership, either. That would convert this critical question into a chicken and egg conundrum. Africa had her clutch of good rulers, but Mandela's and Sankara's will inevitably give way to Zoomers and Compaorates. And there is nothing a good leader does in four years that a bad leader cannot undo in four weeks. So we must look squarely instead at the system, which can restrain the excesses of a bad leader and enable the vision of a good. We must look instead at the puppet masters that work the levers of our leaders and followers alike. We must look instead at the Trojan horses left on the colonial beaches of our Pyrrhic victories and independence. In addition to the billions lost to direct political corruption, the Economic Commission for Africa estimates that illicit financial flows from Africa, top 50 billion dollars per annum, double the annual ODA sent to the continent. In critiquing bad governance today, there is no north-south divide, just like Chinelo had expressed earlier. Come around morning, the power lost at returns of a Google or a Tesco. It's just as instructive as American public policy blowing in a metered wind, stirred by parks and super parks. It is not Africa versus the west and the rest. Even though the global south comes off worse in the coalition with bad governance, the north cannot be sanguine. In every country, there are men, women, and children on the bread line. And they suffer disproportionately the brunt of bad governance and the victimhood of Trojan horses. Surely you might think some countries benefit in some way, but I still recall a horde of coins at the Ashmolean Museum. It was discovered in a field and it was deposited in a museum intact, a horde of gold coins. And it was up to you as a novelist or as a spectator to make up the story behind this horde of coins. Because beside it in the Ashmolean was the mummy, the mummified body of a child who probably died of some disease, which might have been healed by some expenditure of money. And this was like a metaphor for what does happen today when huge stores of wealth are kept separate from the need that it can meet. And so, yes, monies go to countries and satisfy needs, but we still have to come back to this issue of in our state of governance, although the world's population of seven billion people does not include a single company with a voter's card. In most state houses in the world today, there are Trojan horses in residence. This then is the nature of the baton that actually has commonly slipped to us, as slippery as hell. We are to disinfect an alien Trojan that we think we invented to convert a manufactured horse with a mind of its own into a beast that truly serves humanity. Because the corporation is a species of economic intelligence, one of the most innovative inventions of the human race. Here are immortal, incorporeal beings, aliens almost, because you cannot touch a company. They can be wiser and richer than Solomon, control more territory and resources than many states. Indeed, some companies have more staff than nations have, citizens. And for all their size, they are extremely nimble. If you want to mobilize men and materials to achieve any human goal under the sun, if you can pay for it, invite a tender. Actually eloquence refuter of Conrad's racism 40 years ago is confounded by the state of our continent. Our leadership and followership have the apportion of the blame for sure. But we also have puppet masters at work on both leaders and followers who have had hundreds of years of experience in this game, more than we flesh and blood can ever acquire. Yet this horror story is not irredeemable. Our challenge is simply to speak intelligent economics to economic intelligence. Now, of course, I believe I've run out of time and it only remains for me to invite you to visit bribecode.org. That's the commercial section of this. That is really where I address the way to actually mix these issues. Otherwise, we can extend this conversation at question time. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Thank you to our speakers. I do want to invite people to ask questions. I'm going to jump in with a question just to start us off. And I hope it will inspire other people to leap up and start a good argument with these people who are all adequate to a good fight, I'm sure. I want to ask you, just as a fiction writer, I'm listening to all of your different perspectives and I've read your work. And as people who are well-informed and articulate and engaged, I'm curious to know why fiction. Because to me, it's the truest form of literature. With fiction, ironically, I can be the most honest. Fiction also allows us to open the door for these conversations to be had. Some things I write if I wrote as non-fiction, the attacks would be personal. And it doesn't really lead anywhere. And I think fiction allows that distance so that we can actually engage in conversation with certain things. Not always, there are exceptions, of course, but for me, that's how I see it. But I think fiction allows me to lie properly. All my writing is truth. But I have two painful experiences, realize how dangerous it is to write about yourself and to write truthfully about yourself. If you do that, you do it purely for yourself in the form of a diary. But with fiction, I can lie inventively, effectively, and so it works. But I do not, obviously, there are certain other inspirations that arrive vertically. And you have to be true to that inspiration. Sometimes they arrive with too much immediacy for the veils of it, a poetry or fiction. And then you have to really get on your feet and do things, you know, become activist about it. So I think I'm almost repeating what the other two panelists have just said really eloquently. But I'm reminded of something that one of my first professors in my writing program told me when I was really debating about my qualifications as a fiction writer to write about a revolution that took place in Ethiopia in the 1970s. And I had almost convinced myself that this was the territory of the historian or the political scientist or the sociologist. And I wasn't quite sure that fiction could carry the weight of this kind of tragedy. And he said to me, fiction is the way to do this. And it might, in fact, be the only way because fiction tells a truth that history cannot. And I ran home and wrote it down and put it on my computer. And that's what gave me the motivation to write this. And to believe that fiction, as the two of you have said, does carry a weight and a truth that I think is the only way sometimes to tell a story. You mentioned vast potential for change in your talk. That was very, I think, an emotionally charged and challenging way of looking at the potential of fiction. Potential for change, what do people think about that? What kinds of change are we trying to affect as writers? Who address these difficult topics in our fiction? The change fiction can, in fact, is always very, it's not direct and it's the most effective. These ladies actually messed up my performance because I came a little bit more combative, but I was almost in tears after listening to what they were saying. And I think that is the impact of fiction. It comes at you in a very indirect way. The punchy delivers are sucker punches most of the time, but they don't hit you where the writer intended. It has a life of its own. Books grow with readers. When you read it in your teens, it makes one sense. You read it at an 80-year-old. It makes a totally different sense. So they create a life of their own and the change is also like that. Who knows what a certain book will mean? A hundred years, 200 years after it's written. So that's the nature of the change. It's never what the writer intends. He writes it and it becomes irrelevant, but if it is powerful, it endures. And this has been something that's been popping up at tables, casual conversations over drinks that people will drop in these books that at some point meant one thing to them and then you pick them up, you know, 20 years later or 10 years later. A book that's come up a few times is The Palm Wine Drinker and how the first time that it was read, it meant one thing. Looking back on it from more perspective, it means another thing. Since we're talking about the works of Achebe, it would seem that maybe this same kind of reaction is possible with things fall apart in his other works. And I do want to think about this. There's actually a line in Chuma's book about three quarters of the way through where he says, the character says, why must we all write like Achebe? I think that this is an interesting question to pose now with two Nigerians on the panel and an Ethiopian writer, especially after we've been informed that, you know, what is Africa? Africa is, you know, it's a company construct. It's something that's emerged in the global imagination as monitored by Achebe. So I'm just wondering, you know, must we write like Achebe? And what does it mean to write like Achebe or to not write like Achebe? OK. OK. Well, the first thing that I like to say is that Achebe himself was a product of this Igbo storytelling tradition. So he did not come out of nowhere. And some of us also are products of that Igbo storytelling tradition. And so we also write in similar fashionings sometimes to the way he writes, you know, some of us do. But it's not necessarily that people are trying to write to a certain kind of writing or to a certain canon of literature or that sort of thing. I think we just, this is what humanity is, that we come from somewhere, we all come from somewhere. And, you know, had there been people who had the same resources that Achebe did at the same time, there might be other Achebes. And so that, you know, it would not be that anybody is trying to write like anybody else, but they just came from somewhere, from the same history, the same culture, the same tradition. But I don't think we all have to write like him, but it's totally personal. Some of us can, if we like it, some of us can. We don't have to. I think on Okendebe's timeline, I think one of his, one of his numerous fans once attacked him in a critical intervention to accuse him of plagiarizing Achebe. And he pointed out several obvious points of contact, of plagiarism. And the accusation flew for a few minutes and Okendebe, which is not normally not advisable, but in this case, perhaps understandable, by explaining that Chinua Achebe did not invent a lot of the towns or idioms that he used. He was simply part of a tradition which he gave voice to and he quite adequately met that accusation. And obviously the reader came back. He was outside the Igbo tradition. He came back with an apology. And it's the same thing for me. I came to Achebe through my mother. And for many years after I got into the books, I tried to separate which ones were my mothers and which ones were Achebe's and which ones were really the culture, the tradition. My mother would have written like Achebe or maybe Achebe would have written like my mother. She was another great idiomatic speaker. Her language was rich and layered. And I later discovered it was not unique to her. She was simply an extremely good student of the culture. And if I go to Asaba, go to Achala, go to Ibuzo, I know the old people I can sit at and I would be inundated by proverbs, idioms, concepts, deeper than Achebe. So it's not true that we can all write like Achebes. We can actually write better than Achebe if you are a good student because Achebe is not superior to his culture. It's not superior to his tradition. He's simply a good student who gave good account of gifts he had. Also that the character he quoted is not me. He was simply saying what he thought. Yeah. So this is very interesting. I just need to let everyone know that the center of the world is really Ethiopia. I mean, it's not Nigeria. It's not Nigeria in my world. So my first introduction to Achebe was in college. And before that, in Ethiopia too, the literature there because of the differences in language and the nature of the publishing industry is that we had our own Achebes. And we had, it's interesting to speak of maybe things fall apart and how that might be interpreted in Ethiopia, which had a history of Italian presence for five years. But it's a different kind of colonialism. Whereas maybe literature from Somalia or Eritrea or Libya might resonate a little bit more than Achebe because of the history of Italian presence in those countries as well. It's different. So I had my own writers to look at when I was wondering if it's possible that an Ethiopian could throw aside her parents' dreams that she'd become a doctor. Yeah, I see everyone understands that. And that's universal. And, you know, and become a writer. I was looking at Dania Chaworku and Sahle Selase. And these other writers, by the way, who had been published by Heinemann, which was a way that I could read them. So there was that connection there. But I remember my introduction to Chino Achebe was at the university in Michigan. And I happened to be taking a class where I was reading, I remember Professor Lemuel Johnson, who was just a dynamo in the classroom. I will never forget him because he instilled in me this enthusiasm and passion for literature. And I remember this man who was probably my height, if my memory, and I'm not tall. And, you know, he's just running back and forth in front of the classroom, just enthusiastic. So, oh my gosh, I love this man. You know, then these books, I'll read anything. And so that was, you know, and so reading Achebe under that spirit of that professor was profound. But it was also in that class that I was introduced to the works of Amma Atta Aidu and Our Sister Killjoy. And that book completely changed for me what fiction could do. So it was reading the both of them together that I began to understand maybe a place that I might have in literature. Do you have some time for a couple more questions from the audience, maybe? Yes, Chika. Well, thank you to Matzah and Chuma and Chinyelo for the wonderful presentations. I mean, from the deeply reflective to the, you know, provocative, it was really, really, really awesome. And because we've touched on bad government and corruption and Africa and reading and Chinyo Achebe, I'd like to know if you had to recommend a book for Mugabe to read, one of Chinyo Achebe's books for Mugabe to read, what would you recommend? And also Matzah, everybody else in the audience, Nigeria is the center of the world, period. I know what you mean. Booklist for Men Without Ears. Did you write that? Actually, I have a lot of admiration for Mugabe. I go into, I start with history. I am, he was an inspirational character in the way he fought the liberation war, his prevations, his discipline, he was an intensely disciplined man. Everything started falling out gradually after the accession to power. I don't always forget, we shouldn't always forget the amount of intellectual work he did. He's better read than me and many other African leaders, best educated president in the world, I believe. So I don't know that he has not read all of Chinyo Achebe's books, but it's not what you read, it's what you retain. I think the, what for me, you know, destroys his legacy, is really the position of self and the community. My poem identity talks about the question of the readiness of a man to give himself for his people. And so that I think is what tarnishes the image and I would simply recommend a man of the people because of the ending to remind him that there is an ending, there will be an ending and after that it's a legacy we talk about. I think that was a good recommendation. I think things fall apart would be a good one just because there's a way in which we learn from someone else's self-destruction and what leads to that. So when we see a concord and you know, there's a lesson to be learned even from a concord's own decline and not that I'm going to, I'm not, you know, encouraging anybody to climb here but there are just lessons to be learned, many lessons from things fall apart and it's also the one, the work of his that I know the best. I'm going to jump on Chica's question because I thought that was great. Just because I, you know, I'm somebody who's long believed that fiction has a particular power and the way that we recall things, we were talking a bit about this at lunch yesterday. If you think about Victorian England, you always, you know, my teacher on that is Dickens. Why would my teacher be a fiction writer on that? But it has a particular power. So given this, the idea that I'm just, if we're going to think about knowledges that you think that American college students, typical American readers would really benefit from knowing, from books that maybe you have accessed and read and think are important for an American readership, what would these books be and why? Just in terms of increasing knowledge and increasing engagement with Ethiopia, with Nigeria. What books are important now? I think that from the point of view of readership, almost any book is important. The reason is because it's the skill of reference and I've learned more from the bad books I've read than really the good books. Every single book, somebody was asking me the first time I arrived in America, what surprised me? I said nothing. I have read so many bad American novels, watched so many B American films. You know everything, you know, there's absolutely no surprise. You know, everybody is a stereotype. Everything has been said and done and it's not a good or great books that taught me this. It was the trash really. I read everything, you know, growing up. Most of the novels I read didn't have a cover. I just picked up a book and I read it. Sometimes I watch films without knowing the titles and sometimes I'll pay for a film and halfway through I say, oh, I've seen this film before. So it's not a greatness of it, it's just the availability of it. And I think the problem we have in many countries that our minds are closed. Read a canon, a critic tells us this is the book to read and we read it and that's it. But the canon is incomplete because the critic doesn't know it all. He has gotten excited about something he smelt on his mother's knees and it has a nostalgic charge for him. He's a decantian and that's what he is. So he doesn't know it all and every single book you read teaches you something. So I would simply say, open the doors of a library and let people in. I think one of the things that I often, I tell my students, like Chuma was saying, on one hand it's not really what kind of books you read but you're the level of engagement with it and to be able to understand that even in books where the characters are completely different from you that you are constantly asking questions and seeking, not just commonality because I think that's the part. We sometimes want books that make us comfortable but to actually seek those books that disrupt and disturb what we find comforting in our own worlds. And that, you know, one of the things that I encourage them to do is to really be honest with themselves and find out what their prejudices are and then read against those and see what emerges after that. Because I'm always interested in making parallel worlds, I find that much of African literature, Nigerian literature has its parallel in the Western world. So, I mean, Alice Monroe's stories are very often stories that I think are Nigerian stories, you know, but unfortunately when a Nigerian writes a story like Alice Monroe's, the comment that a person will say is, oh yes, that is the story about that corrupt country where there's a lot of money being stolen from oil. So, but Alice Monroe will write the same exact kind of story about a man who loves a woman or a man who cheats on a woman and nobody says, this is commentary on the entire nation and the corruption of the entire nation. But that is what we get as Nigerians who write such stories. Suddenly, we're being, you know, our stories are just symbolism, metaphors for what's like for a decaying country. And so, I like to parallel these stories. I might, for instance, pick up, you know, one of Alice Monroe's stories and pick up one of Jima Wanda Di Che's stories and, you know, talk about how these stories are actually similar. And maybe it's just the story of the failure of love and not a commentary on the country as a whole. Or I might pick up Egoni Barrett and he has his new book which is entitled Black Ass about a guy who wakes up one morning and finds that he has turned white, except his butt is still white, it's still black. So he has a black ass. But what that is is actually a Kafka metamorphosis novel, really, because that is the same thing this man wakes up, family of a mother, father, and a sister, he wakes up one morning and he has become this beast, you know, he's something else. And so it's always wonderful to realize how small our world really is and how much the literature that one is in one continent or one country, how much it actually speaks so much to the other literature. And yes, of course, oftentimes these writers have read one another's works but sometimes not and that's just the way it is, it's a small world. Steven, and then, okay. Thanks for three fantastic presentations which I'll reflect on for quite some time. I have a question, you know, there seems to me to be a part of Chinua Cheve and even things fall apart that we haven't really discussed explicitly but which is in there. When I teach that novel which I tend to do about once a year, I usually ask my students to consider the proposition that it's a novel as much about gender as it is about race. The fact of the matter is that you have a Conqueror, the main character and he has all of the characteristics of in the Western tradition, the tragic hero, you know, with the tragic flaw, et cetera, and there are other ways within his own culture that he could be understood and his failings could be understood. But one of his failings is that he has the fear, Chinua Cheve tells us explicitly the fear of being thought weak and he associates weakness with being female and he will insult other members of his clan and call them, I forget the term, you know, for being female and say, you're not a proper man, you're not a titled man, you're a woman. He is shocked to think that people can be strong and respect women at the same time. He beats his wives, for example. And there's a little story in Things Fall Apart about an older couple who die within the same period, almost at the same time. And this was, I forget their names exactly, one of them is Ozu-Amena. That's right, Oguendule. I'm trying to get the pronunciation right. And his wife, Ozu-Amena, right? Yes. Yes, thank you. And one of a Conqueror's friends comments to him, you know, that the man always consulted his wife and a Conqueror says, but I thought he was a strong man. And the friend, all the friend says, well, you know, he led Oumuafia to war in those days when he was a young man. In other words, it's not a contradiction to be strong and to respect women. And it feels to me, that's a really powerful thing that Chinua Chibi was doing in his own day, 1958, you know? And what about that tradition? We were quite deliberate in framing this symposium in inviting women writers as well as men. We wanted to hear voices which would be different from Chinua Chibi's own voice, but which would relate to other aspects of his tradition. So as we think about what he said and what he wrote and what traditions to take up, it feels to me, I'm not sure I'm exactly asking a question, but what about that aspect of his tradition? You know, what did he liberate in other ways of thinking about what it means to be a human being, what it means to be an empathetic human being, what it means to be a respectful human being who can respect human beings no matter what color, gender, sexuality, whatever they come in, and has he been inspirational in that way, or have you felt the need to go beyond what he said in your own work? I think that Chinua Chibi's work was a, it's a work in progress. He started something, he painted a culture large. I suppose if he didn't write that book, our cultures would have been in a more, maybe the intensive care unit. Right now they're in hospital. But for instance, look at the Thanksgiving tradition, which is very strong here. It is a medieval, I mean it dates back into the hundreds of years ago. It's a religious thing. People, you know, it's a harvest. It's basically related to the harvest, the pilgrim fathers made their harvest. And we don't have that kind of waiting the whole year. You might die if the harvest goes bad, which many, many settlements suffered. But then finally, it happens and the harvest is good. And then they have Thanksgiving, and it has that charge. The charge is no more here, but it is observed. I look at the power in Nigeria, we have the, all the traditions are Chinua Chibi painted about harvest. And I wonder if it has the same power right now in our communities. The answer is it doesn't. If you are modern, you don't do things like that. That is for heathen villagers. And so it's all about this cultural positioning. And whether it's, whether you see an inequality of women or a destruction of the institution of a gender, of one gender at the expense of the other, or you simply see a continuation of culture, it behooves on us as human beings to continue to interrogate our culture and to recognize justice and fairness at every point. And without throwing away the culture to be able to remediate what we see as wrong. And we always have to see with new eyes, this is a power of fiction, that you can reconstruct my reality in such a way that I can empathize with people I'm victimizing today. That I see the house girl in my house who I'm oppressing and suddenly in fiction. It's normal to me because it's in my house, I don't see it. Then I see it in fiction. And the writer puts the house girl in center stage so that immediately I am relating to that person. And then I can only look at my situation with more empathetic eyes. That I think is what Chino has started. He could not have finished the work but it now is left for another generation of writers to continue to throw those nexus between our culture, the weaknesses which you pointed out and where we are today. We cannot throw it all away and we can't remediate. For me as a woman reading Chino Achebe, it is a male dominated, male dominant work of fiction. But interestingly enough, for me, reading that novel is what people say which is that it gave us our dignity back, which is that it gave us, it allowed us to tell our own stories. It reminded us that we had the power to tell our own stories. It gave us license to tell those stories. And so for me, I actually did not think about that novel in terms of the gender necessarily because it was doing such a larger work so that for me, I just knew, okay, well if this sort of story can be told, then I can tell mine as a woman, as whatever I am, I can tell that story too and there's a place for it. And so I would say that because it was doing such a larger work, of course there are other women who though there's Buji Emecheta, Emecheta. There's Laura Mappa, you know, there are many other Nigerian women who were writing and so I read them as well. And together I just, you know, I felt safe and as if there was an audience to hear my stories as well. I'm thinking about the question, Stephen. I think the thing that struck me in what you said and the moments that you raised in the book is this idea that to disparage a man, you tell him that he's acting like a woman. And two things, the fact that Achebe wrote this decades ago and really had this sense of the inequality of the genders in his community and was able to put that down on paper, I find incredibly, it's inspiring. But I've often wondered about this idea also of manhood and how closely it is connected to what a woman is or is not. I mean, we speak of race in Achebe's that essay where he talks about Conrad is not worried just about the differences but about the kinship, you know, how one is reflective of the other. And I think gender is a similar, we see it in a similar way. A man is afraid of the kinship to womanhood. And in Ethiopia, you know, Ethiopian identity has been tied so closely to a kind of national hero to fighters, to warriors. Even this quote that I started off with was this thing from, you know, this is a lot of these sayings are connected to men. And, but the reality also in Ethiopia is that, and I'm wondering, I'm curious to know about this in Nigerian culture and traditions of remembering heroes. But in the fight against Italian colonialism, there are tons of accounts of these Ethiopian warriors who led armies and, you know, boys and men. And there are stories and songs and paintings and photographs. And in the research that I have done for my second book, it's only by chance and really accidentally that I have found one line in mounds of archival research or another line somewhere that will say, well, so-and-so's wife picked up his fallen sword and charged and led his men into the next battle. And I'm wondering if those moments exist. I'm sure they exist everywhere, but we don't have that. And I think when I think about what Achebe was working against even back then, I find that really astounding because it is still in Ethiopia, as I'm sure in every patriarchal country and every country that salutes or in some way valorizes war and warriors that if you flip it, you know, there is this other side and it's not masculine, it's feminine. And I think we haven't really talked about it yet. Thank you very much for, excuse me, for that three extraordinary presentations. I actually had a different question that I was gonna pose, but I think that Stephen in his inimitable way has provoked different response, which is to explore the question that he raised perhaps a bit more. I think that the feminist consciousness and things fall apart. And Achebe's larger body of work is underrated or not properly appreciated. Achebe portrays or conquer precisely as a character that lacks balance. And evil society is one that is founded on duality. And Achebe, in a lot of his essays, spoke about this idea that wherever one thing stands, another thing stands beside it. And that apprehension is what Okonkwa lacks, which is, so in a lot of ways Okonkwa is both a stranger amongst his people and a precursor of the colonial figure, the sort of one track-minded person who will say, as the Europeans said, that our history is the only one that is worthy of narration. So Okonkwa saw himself, saw a particular narrative of manliness and of masculinity, which is a very stunted vision. And Chino Achebe makes it clear in giving us a counterfoil of Obierica, his friend, who is but an intellectual, a man of great meditation and reflection, but also a man of strength, so who would fight when it became necessary. And Achebe, for example, encroaches the idea of female participation, even in the war department, when he shows us that the very deity that controls war is called what, Abwala, which is a kind of epithet for effeminate men, right? So the war deity in Thinsvalapa, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves is also named Abwala. And the active ingredient in that deity is what? And a very feeble, weak woman who has one leg, who hops around on one leg. The other thing that Okonkwa fails to realize is that the intercessor between that deity and the community is always female. So it is Chica, earlier, in the contemporary moment of Thinsvalapa, it is Cielo. And because the deity constantly requests to have Ezyma Okonkwa's daughter to come as the daughter to visit his groves, we get the sense that Ezyma is being prepared to become the successor to Cielo once Cielo dies. So the voice of the deity that enables the community, that gives the community permission to go to war is a priestess, always a priestess. So in Achebe's world, the depiction of this Ibo world, which is not Achebe's world as much as it is Achebe's depiction of the Ibo world, the feminine is always fused to the masculine, even in war matters. But the single most powerful deity is Allah, the earth goddess. It is not a male. And this is a deity that controls fertility, controls more. I'm sorry. Because I think my question to you then, because I find this really interesting, and what you're saying is raising some questions that I've always had, is that a lot of cultures have female deities. But how do you transfer that kind of belief, this belief in the mystical into something that's more tangible in everyday life? Because you can have these societies that might worship these deities. I mean, it's everywhere. But then when it comes to the daily interactions with women and with girls, I don't know how that translates. It translates very well in TensorFlow part actually. Neka. Okay. When a kong has to go into exile, where does he go? To his maternal home, right? To his maternal home. And when he's there, he wears a sad face and his uncle instructs him Uchendu. And he says, why do we name, why do the Igbo say Neka, right? And he says to him, because when a child is in difficulty, the child runs to his mother. So the feminine, the female space in TensorFlow part, which is a reflection of the female space in Igbo land, is a very profoundly revered space. But it is Okonkwa's consciousness that fails to recognize it. So Okonkwa has a very stilted, a very fragmented understanding of Igbo culture. And that's what makes that clear. So Okonkwa is in a lot of ways an anti Igbo man. So they just to go back quickly to the section that Professor Klingman pointed to, right? Here is Obuefi Ndule, who is close to his wife, Ozemena. So the same day he dies, the wife is told that her husband has died and she comes and calls him three times and then she goes back to her hurt. So they let her go to call her to witness the bathing of the body and she's died. So showing a kind of great psychic connection between husband and wife. So when Okonkwa hears that the man never did anything without confiding in his wife, he said, I thought he was a strong man. You see, a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be a strong man. And somebody says, indeed he is. And Okonkwa shakes his head doubtfully. Yet this man was the Okonkwa of his time. He led Ommorphia to war, just as Okonkwa is doing today. So constantly Achebe shows us that Okonkwa misapprehends. Even his father, Onoka, that he despised, right? Onoka said to him, do not despair. I know you will not despair when he suffered that tragedy with his family, with his agricultural tragedy, right? He lost all his crop. And he says, you know, I know you have a proud and manly heart, okay? Such a heart can handle general failure. It is more bitter and more difficult when a man fails alone. And when do we fail alone? When we struggle alone. So when later Okonkwa is in his bed after he's been detained by the white man, and he's saying, if Ommorphia wants to fight, that will be fine. But if they don't want to fight, I will go out there alone and avenge myself. We already have an intimation, of course, to come, which is his tragic end, okay? I do have to say we're over time at this point. I want to give the panel a quick chance to respond to what Okonkwa is saying. I know there are other questions. I see Roland. I've seen another hand over here. We might have to bring this out over snacks, coats, and bags of pretzels if I'm correct. Take the question. You don't want to respond. There's a comment. Okay, please. One question here, and then I'm going to respond. Just quickly. Yeah, I just have to ask that. I'm so inspired by this, I'm a retired businessman. I read a lot of books, and I buy them and don't read them. And I had bought Girls at War, and I was so inspired by this last night that I went home and read Girls at War, and it speaks to this subject because Reginald was one of the most disgusting creatures I've read in fiction, and Gladys was the hero of that story. And that was written, I looked and see in 1972. So is there perhaps a shift in this focus of gender? I mean, because we clearly have a female hero in that story, and it's titled Girls at War. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen, for the question. I want to say one thing. I believe Cinello did say something earlier on which maybe flew past most of us, and that is that African writers are very honest, even though they're writing fiction. Actually, in my opinion, did not come out as an advocate for, you know, I don't think it was in his mind to start defending gender or no gender territory. I think he was reporting, or not reporting, he was conveying to us what he knew, what his culture was all about. Now, indirectly, he was actually critiquing that culture. He was not condoning it. And I think that might be lost if we read that things fall apart superficially. And as, okay, actually pointed out, one of the, perhaps, one of the most powerful dates in Hebrew culture is Allah, not to talk of akoniche and many other dates, that in fact, it would be impossible, it would be impossible for the Hebrew culture to survive without the female presence. Now, I want to also say that in South Africa, among the Yoruba, I found out some interesting things that the resistance, for example, put up by the women when they are sharks who are going to be mowed down by the police, the women came, not the men. The women came, they undressed, and they succeeded in preventing, in stopping the police from going further. Not to mention, of course, the Abarayut, not to mention the Ransomkoti resistance put up against the colonial powers. There are so many references. And in my own opinion and my own research, I had to go. In fact, it's probably the only, I'm probably the only person who has found this out, and I hope someday people will find it out too, that all the, that all the adulation and so on, or all the references to male kings and so on are false in Yoruba culture. They are not. In actual fact, there was equality, and this has been proved archaeologically. So this is not going, this is not doing fiction. This is doing real science, archaeological work. So I think it would be wrong to look at Chebe's work as though he was writing at this moment to advocate for gender equality. No, but I think deep down, I always saw his heartfelt critique of his own culture at that time. Remember that the colonialists were already coming in, the missionaries were coming in, and he was trying to draw attention to something that needed to be felt and to be addressed. Okay, we have a bunch of other questions here, and I'm not really sure if we actually have, we're over by 15 minutes. So could I please just encourage everyone to gather over drinks? I'm glad that it was such a generous discussion.