When I once received a letter from Professor Chinua Achebe inviting me to the United States of America for a conference on Nigerian and African elections a Yoruba friend of mine committed the cardinal sin of saying that I was the only literary star from my part of the world! I immediately shut him up by narrating the exploits of literary pacesetters from my Umuchu hometown, Marius Nkwoh and CC Umeh, who became acclaimed before me. I told my friend of the epochal book, The History of Umuchu, written by Simon A. Nnolim which Professor Charles Nnolim cited in a universally controversial essay as the source of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.
For our purposes here, I have to for now concentrate on the literary exploits of CC Umeh whose play, Double Attack, was published in the esteemed African Writers Series (AWS), and Marius Nkwoh who played a pioneering role in the founding of the Onitsha Market Literature phenomenon.
Just after the Nigeria-Biafra war in 1970, Charles C. Umeh emerged as a star playwright. He was among the prizewinners in the BBC London-sponsored “Write a Play for Africa” competition with his entry Double Attack. The play was published in 1973 in the collection African Theatre, Eight Prize-Winning Plays chosen by Wole Soyinka, Martin Esslin and Lewis Nkosi. The book was edited by Gwyneth Henderson as number 134 in the African Writers Series.
Wole Soyinka who served as one of the judges in the BBC London contest described CC Umeh’s Double Attack thus: “It is really good to see the corruption which accompanies every kind of civil upheaval, but is particularly prominent in a war in which there is so much rush, so much pace, and so much energy and emergency that quite a lot of wealth disappears in the wrong places. It is a real farce but at the same time a strong and scathing social commentary.”
On his part, the great English theatre critic, Martin Esslin, who was also a judge in the competition wrote the following words on CC Umeh’s Double Attack: “I like it because of the good use of language, its great sense of humour and its fearlessness and objectivity in handling a delicate social problem like corruption in the Nigerian Civil War. It is hilariously funny.”
CC Umeh wrote other plays, notably Naira and Kobo which was staged at St. Peter’s Secondary School Achina in the 1970s.
The other pioneering Umuchu literary star, Marius Nkwoh, led the pack in initiating the Onitsha Market Literature revolution that took the world by storm from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967.
The attention that Onitsha Market Literature has earned across the globe is strongly underscored by the following excerpt from the treatment of Marius Nkwoh’s Cocktail Ladies by the Universityof Kansas, United States: “This pamphlet is compiled from broadcasts made by Nkwoh over the Eastern Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation network. According to the introduction written by V. C. J. Mbah, these broadcasts, a combination of an editorial and a talk show, were deemed fairly controversial. Nkwoh’s positions on these issues, however, were considered to be well informed. Each chapter is
a separate broadcast and the pamphlet’s title comes from the second chapter about ‘cocktail ladies.’ This broadcast discusses a group of women known as cocktail ladies, a class that Nkwoh purports to be career women who have abandoned the idea of marriage and live off of sugar daddies and big men. Nkwoh describes them as ‘human parasites, lazy drones, and good for nothings.’ Deceived by feminism and the promises of a fleeting beauty, these women ‘infest’ every walk of life they now occupy. Nkwoh points to feminism as the main culprit, for it misleads ‘cocktail ladies’ into thinking that women can and want to do everything that men do. As a result, these women have become ‘birds of passage or changelings to every big man,’ according to the author. In pursuing their ‘radical’ lifestyle, cocktail ladies contract diseases, lose husbands, serious boyfriends and jobs, and fail to play their true and proper role in society as dutiful assistants. Nkwoh explains, ‘Women are made to help and not to nag, sap or impoverish men. They should not be a burden, nor nuisance, nor articles of commerce. There is still plenty of time for our women to think twice.’ However, he continues ‘they should now face the facts around them and consider their life past, now and to come […] Nobody can ever cheat nature . . . I am advising those of them that are youthful enough and still marriageable to go now and marry.’ Other chapters include broadcasts about night marauders, hypocrites ‘in our midst,’ road accidents and superstitions.”
Marius Nkwoh incidentally was among the early graduates of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka while CC Umeh took his degrees at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). It is crucial to point out that the writers who started out as pioneering playwrights and market literature beginners ended up having distinguished careers in the civil service and tertiary administration.
Marius Nkwoh of blessed memory had a distinguished career in the civil service while CC Umeh, whose daughter Sabina blazed a trail as the Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria, served as an esteemed Registrar in an institution of higher learning and still teaches as a professor. Their homes are only some 100 metres away from our family compound in Umuchu, Anambra State.
· Published as my backpage column of The Union, Sunday November 30, 2014.