Magnus Eze, Enugu
Professor of Anthropology, Prof. Peter-Jazzy Ezeh is the Head of Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN). He was recently interviewed by the American Anthropology; the first Nigerian to be so honoured and the UNN celebrated him for that rare feat. In this interview with our Correspondent, P-J, as he is fondly called, highlighted what Nigeria stands to gain from anthropology.
What are your contributions to the field of anthropology?
When I left journalism, I thought I should go and do scholarship full-time. I found anthropology as the province that would give me the widest latitude to do this. The discipline is very broad. It is possible to find your niche in one of its four main branches; social or cultural, physical or biological, archaeology, and linguistics, and, of course, draw some assistance from one of or all the four. It is not for nothing that the discipline is called the intellectual storehouse of the social sciences. It straddles the humanities too. Someone called it “the most scientific of the social science disciplines, and the most humanistic of all social science disciplines. Unfortunately, it happens to be the illest understood of all the disciplines that are taught in Nigerian universities at the moment. But note also that it is as well the most helpful to any country that has made significant progress in the highly competitive inter-dependent World that we currently inhabit.
In my school and in Nigeria I am thought of as the ethnographer, who has shown the level commitment that foreigners who come to study indigenous culture-bearers here and elsewhere demonstrate. My interest in that area has also led me to innovate in it. Before I defended my Ph.D. thesis in 2004, a UK-based journal that is considered the foremost authority in qualitative research had already published the innovations that I brought to a method that we call participant observation, which I employed in the study of the Orring group, a different group from my native Igbo group. They spoke a fascinating previously unwritten language of the Benue-Congo family that is known as Korring. I went on to write a primer of the language besides my main project of investigating the interstices of free speech and effective traditional social organisation in that centralised (monarchical) society. There is no inhabited continent on this planet where professors and their postgraduate students have not written to me to ask questions on my innovations on participant observations.
The publication by the American Anthropologist, which attracted your attention, is not even what Nigerians know me for in the academia. I never included the books that the Americans refer to in the CV that I present for purposes of a preferment or other research assessments locally. I just keep working quietly, knowing what I do in that regard as a labour of love. The pleasant surprise is that the products of those efforts get noticed favourably overseas. I had always known that the time for works on translations of serious secular literature would come but I did not expect that to happen so soon. When I translated Les femmes savantes of Molière in 1998, it was the first European fiction to be translated into Igbo. This demonstrates the paucity of such intellectual endeavour in these parts. I gave the Igbo translation the Igbo name, Filamint na ndiotu ya, after the chief character of the drama. I compare my surprise on this recognition to the way that I felt when the book got a good press here in Nigeria years back. One wit chose for the title of his article, “Molière speaks Igbo”.
Although Leopold Bell-Gam’s Ije Odumodu jere is the first Igbo novel-length fiction written in Igbo, and although it had drawn the attention of literary scholars locally and internationally since the 1930s, nevertheless it remained restricted to only those readers that were literate in Igbo. Yet it contains very powerful ideological statements on inter-racial relations that the wider world needs to know. It shows in an unobtrusive but thoroughgoing artistic manner how it was the black that brought civilisation, in the Western sense of the word, to the white, and not the other way round.
We have to encourage our people to read works of secular creative arts from other cultures and also take similar works from our part of the World to others. Monomania in terms of restriction of what people read in sectarian literature is very dangerous. It restricts the worldview of such readers. To give only one out of zillion possible examples, average Nigerian would consider it a heresy if you should tell him/her that other archaic cultures have creation stories, apart from the Hebraic or the Arabic versions that he/she is used to reading in the sacred texts of the two religions that were imported here. Yet some of those ancient creative stories predate that of the Jews and the Arabs. Indeed many scholars have evidence that the Jews and the Arabs copied the older narratives. The wider a person reads, the better informed he/she is, and the more informed any decision that person might make in any sphere of life. In inter-cultural relations, religious or any other type, a good knowledge of the other group is important, and literature is a fruitful starting point in such cross-cultural dialogue; indeed polylogue. Ngugi wa Thiong’o in an interview in Germany the other day had coined an elegant word for such. He called it “globalectics”. Interestingly he also sees translation as an effective tool in this. He told his interviewers in a publication of the world’s largest centre for African studies at the University of Bayreuth, “Translation is very crucial in the conversation amongst languages.” I couldn’t agree more.
Looking at JAMB statistics every year, applicants hardly apply for Anthropology, what is responsible for this?
Anthropology, not least its social or cultural branch, is a very challenging area. It is one field where it is impossible to copy another writer. You must be original. Every anthropologist that is worth the name has a group that he/she has studied. Even if another anthropologist goes back to re-study the same people, the anthropological community will watch out for the differences and similarities in the two accounts. The example you might know is Philip Nsugbe’s classic study of the Ohafia, and the re-study of the group that was published in the year 2000 by John McCall. However, note also that when people apply to study archaeology, linguistics, or human anatomy, they are also studying other aspects of anthropology. Again, some universities have the strategy of combining anthropology and sociology. The University of Nigeria, University of Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, are only a few examples. So, for the statistics you cite to be fully representative, you have to take all this into account.
Very few universities also run the course, is it that the course is unpopular in Nigeria?
I think that this ties back to your last but one question. The difficult aspect of the present question for me is the one that refers to popularity. I am afraid that I see popularity as the antithesis of serious intellectual enterprise. Is the field important or necessary? Of course, yes. Is it easy for all-comers? Certainly not! As I said, most countries that have done well in cross-cultural relations that drive development have also taken the study of anthropology seriously. And why not? This is a field that makes the study of human and related species in all their dimensions: biological, social, language, remote history, its specialisation. On one occasion I have suggested in a journal in London that if in the current space exploration the physical scientists found sentient, symbol-using life forms outside this planet, they must enlist the help of social anthropologists to make sense of it all. A few disciplines are as useful. If not many people are able to pursue it, it is not the fault of the discipline. Happily, even on our continent, some countries are beginning to rediscover anthropology as a tool for development. A university in Bamenda, Cameroon, has just begun a department that combines anthropology and development studies. South Africa has a relatively longer history in such a combination.
What and how has the course contributed to national development?
We may even go farther than that, if you permit. The first anthropologist from Nigeria was Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the foremost anti-colonial campaigner who led other nationalists to get independence for the country. He wrote his thesis on the Onitsha indigenous oral literature at the University of Pennsylvania in early 1930s. When I read autobiographies or biographies of those nationalists I see impact of anthropology on the positive aspects of the governments that they ran in the immediate post-Independence period. This is so even for those of them, who did not specialise in anthropology, for example Mbonu Ojike, Adegoke Adelabu, Dennis Osadebey, Obafemi Awolowo, and so on. You see a deliberate effort to blend what is helpful from other cultures and what is useful in modern statecraft from the indigenous cultures. Ojike epitomised it in his famous rallying cry, “Boycott all boycottables”. Take time to study Nigeria’s development efforts before the putsches of 1966. For example, a World survey by the Michigan State University that was published in 1963 rated Eastern Nigeria the fastest industrialising economy in the world. A reference book on countries of the world that was published in early 1970s lamented that the military interrupted what the authors of the book called “the most successful export of the British Westminster model of government”.
The progress did not happen by chance. Anthropology is the only field of study that can mediate between where the traditional systems and the internationalised systems that contemporary multicultural structures are based on. No people can command such ineluctable melange. I have on diverse fora spoken of what I call Obi complex after the chief character of Chinua Achebe’s No longer at ease. Obi complex is the social malaise of trying to bluff through the complicated task of harmonising the more than one social system which a people need to survive and prosper on in a post-contact situation. No group can hurdle such a challenge through mere wishful thinking. They will need the assistance that anthropology can give. Israel, for example, still has government anthropologists to guide them on inter-cultural or inter-ethnic decisions. When it was claimed that the Ethiopian Falashas were Solomonic Jews; it was the government anthropologists that were sent to study and advise on the matter. Nigeria or any country that chooses a desultory path may try but it is difficult to succeed when a state ignores anthropological assistance in challenges that have to do with the negotiation of the labyrinthine boundary between tradition and modern statecraft.
Congratulations on your recent recognition by the editors of the American Anthropologist journal. What does this mean to you and colleagues in the field?
I very much appreciate their goodwill. It is not every day that this type of thing happens in the life of a scholar. We are talking about a journal that has existed for a hundred and twenty-one years, and it is one of the most respected in the discipline worldwide. I happened to be one of the only two that were interviewed on account of their works on that special edition on translation and anthropology – the other person being a colleague in Japan. However, as I said, the recognition does not mean anything to me. I just keep doing things that I believe that a scholar in my shoes should be doing. I am shy to the extreme. I am not the type that set about looking for recognition although colleagues and well-wishers, nationally and internationally, have been lavish with this. The less I am noticed the better for me so that I find the time to keep doing those things that I judge as truly necessary. But colleagues and benefactors outside our discipline have been very generous with support.
It was my university’s publicity of the American Anthropologist’s publication on me that attracted your attention; wasn’t it? The immediate past Vice-Chancellor, Professor Benjamin Ozumba, gave encouraging words and had supported me in other forms including granting me the permission for the travels that my positions demand rather frequently.