Black Mustard Seed

Emeka Aniagolu

Despite the twelve years that it took Aniagolu to write Black Mustard Seed (2002), it is by no means a sophisticated or verbally dense text. On the back cover Chinua Achebe refers kindly to Aniagolu’s “robust” writing style. The reader soon discovers that this refers, inter alia, to a sort of comic book descriptive style, used when the author wants (it seems) to entice his reader into taking an interest in the central characters, a group of young intellectuals in Lagos (Nigeria — thinly disguised as “Wazobia”):

[Bisi’s] breasts are like two papaya fruit, ripe and ready. She has well-formed legs that attach to equally well-built hips that flute out in a gentle but firm swell. Her posterior gives the impression of the rotund firmness of an African earthenware pot. (9)

If that “yum-yum” description is meant to show that this young medical student is no bluestocking, her male counterpart, Chike, despite being “one of the best students” in their fifth-year medical class, is equally clearly signposted, “This is no nerd”:

He stands six foot one inch tall. … His rather impressive shoulder muscles taper down to a narrow waist by way of a solidly hewn torso, which conjures up an image of a triangle turned downside up. (10)

What redeems this rather puerile African romance is the courage and openness with which Aniagolu tackles the painful topic of tribalism — mainly on our continent, and especially in Nigeria. For what divides the two young heart-throbs described above, despite the instant and enduring attraction between them, is the fact that Bisi is Yoruba, and Chike Igbo — members of two of the major cultural groups of multi-ethnic Nigeria. Many of the passages in which Aniagolu makes this point are, however, couched in somewhat schoolmasterish form, with the main term italicised lest the reader miss the point. Concerning the three majority groups (the northern Hausa being the third of these, along with the above-mentioned Yoruba in the west and Igbo in the east), the author (thinly disguised as Chike) pronounces:

They all shared in the blame … although one can point to strong evidence that the fires of tribalism had been largely started and stoked by unpigmented outsiders. (160)

Early on, Bisi had solemnly told Chike that “the problem of ethnocentrism or tribalism … has been an endemic part of our society since [colonial times]” (33) — with reference to the arbitrary drawing of the borders of African states in the 19th century.

A better passage (one with resonance for South Africans) refers to the devastating (here unnamed) Biafran War of the sixties in which over a million Nigerians died when the attempted secession of Igboland was fiercely put down:

How does a country bury its dark past? How does a country purge its collective memory of the horror of its own wilful savagery? Do you punish those who remember — who refuse to forget, as traitors of the hard won peace? Do you hire court historians to sing the obsequious praises of the victorious king, damning truth to kingdom come? Or do you assemble the nation’s sages and let the truth they speak free the nation? (16)

The most appealing aspect of the text is its lively, appreciative descriptions of particular social and cultural practices of many kinds, such as the full listing, in richly ceremonious languages, of the moral, legal and social obligations of the titled members of the honorary Ozo society among the Igbo people (70). The author also quotes J-P Clarke’s beautiful lines about the city of Ibadan: “running splash of gold and rust/ flung and scattered among seven hills/ like broken china in the sun” (94). The great commercial capital of Nigeria, Lagos, gets a far more cynical and detailed description — one snippet of this informs us that

(everybody) in Lagos and the other parts of Wazobia understands well the rules of the game. The game is to get rich, however you can, and stay rich, however you can.” (161)

Aniagolu (who, like so many African intellectuals, makes his living as an academic in the United States) does his best to foreground the rich and unique cultural heritage of the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo groups and the deep cultural pride and fierce dignity of each of these groups, whilst demonstrating how the issue of cross-cultural marriage amongst the younger generation arouses unpleasant and ugly forms of inter-ethnic prejudice. The novel is a very earnest attempt to help the reader to see the cultural differences as real and deep — both valuable resources and dangerous cleavages. He tells us, for instance, that

(the) Igbos are deeply republican whereas the Hausas are raised on the sap of absolutist monarchy. For the Hausas, the word of their king is law. For the Igbos, every man is a king, especially in his own house.” (208)

Because marriage among Africans “is never of two individuals, but of two families or even two clans” (178), the two young “cross-cultural” couples who are the novel’s main protagonists experience seemingly insurmountable barriers from their respective parents when they announce their intentions of getting married. An Igbo proverb is opportunely used by the author pithily to describe these obstacles:

the eyes with which a lion whose main food is meat sees a lone antelope, are not the same eyes with which a cow whose main food is grass, sees the same antelope. (185)

One of the many things the different cultures depicted here have in common, is their emphasis on patriarchal values. Aniagolu suggests that although it takes a concerted effort from many quarters to overcome inter-ethnic prejudice, the contribution of women is of particular importance. As Chike at one point tells a fellow student in a similar predicament to his own:

The women are the key to reigning [sic] in the stubborn and egotistical territorialism of the men. Only the women can ultimately call a truce in the pissing contest of the men! (206)

A more dignified expression of the same idea occurs when the Yoruba mother manages to solve an impasse in one of the difficult inter-ethnic marital negotiation scenes:

(Men) build great empires but women build great bridges between them. (195)

The image used to describe the daringly innovative strategising of this mother, on the (cultural) warpath on behalf of her daughter, is a wonderfully vivid one. She is said to be transformed from her usually courteous, even placid manner (likened to that of a quiet farmyard chicken) as follows:

Her feathers fanned out like the ears of the great African elephant. (188)

Her counterpart is the powerful (Igbo) aunt of the other woebegone would-be bride, a matriarch who berates the young woman’s mother as follows:

Need I tell you, Ifeoma, that a mother’s bosom is a child’s last refuge? (242)

Aniagolu may not quite have managed to “weave threads of proverbs into cloth-lengths of philosophy” (269), but his text has many charming sections and nuggets of good sense (if not wisdom). For example, the exposure of parental (and cultural) possessiveness as arrogant and wrong (253) rings true as articulated towards the end of this bundle of family sagas. One of the daughters respectfully corrects her conservative father by saying:

Only those whose reaches are well beyond the confines of their homestead will have the necessary tentacles to cope with the complexities of tomorrow’s world. (256-57)

Typically of the stylistic see-saw of the text we are also given a pedantic version of more or less the same idea:

She said that intelligence tends towards rationality, and prejudice tends towards what she called symbolic emotionalism. (273)

A poignant aspect of the text, given the recent spate of bloody Muslim-Christian (and therefore probably Hausa-Igbo) clashes in northern Nigeria, is the patrician Hausa father’s gesture, during his negotiations with his prospective (Igbo) in-law, of placing a Bible and a Koran side by side on a table, with the grave statement that

if we fail to partake of our shared humanity and national community, then, we effectively relinquish any rights to the bountiful fruits that fall from the branches of that tree of knowledge. (279)

This seems a fitting note on which to conclude my brief account of this swashbuckling, flamboyant and distinctly “popular” text, which contains much to amuse and to instruct the willing reader.

Postscript: From a technical point of view it must be noted that the reader should be prepared for a text that is marred by a large number of glaring language errors that betray insufficient editorial care — such as the use of catchiest (for catechist — 22 and 301), despise (as noun, for contempt — 148) and grizzly (for grisly — 13).


LitNet: 12 March 2004

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