The ‚penkelemes years’ in Ibadan Hardly had I arrived at ‘Nigeria’s premier university’,the University of Ibadan or U.I., to do field research for a German PhD on the ‚Intelligencia and Politics’, when my planned empirical research was seriously endangered by the violence accompanying the elections in Nigeria’s Western Region. Because of the rigged elections the region was very soon re-named ‚Western Rig-on’ in popular language. Already the election campaign had turned into a rather violent excercise. All over the huge, sprawling city with its then 1,5 million inhabitants, fires and black smoke-clouds could be seen. Some days I passed by the German consulate, the local Citroen dealer, and enquired with Mr. Nau ‘the house of which politician had just been set aflame’. Mr. Nau warned me NOT to go near that place, a piece of advice which I regarded as a hint to go near that very place and find out more. I then drove to the central Post Office, from where I telexed my report to Deutsche Welle in Cologne.
Or so I thought I did, for a few months later I was told by the chief of police in Ibadan that ”NONE of my reports had ever left Nigerian shores”. They had simply been intercepted in the capital Lagos. But I only found this out after Nigeria’s first military coup on January 15th 1966 – when I was ‘persona grata’ again in Nigeria, having been on the list of those ‘oyingbo peppers’ to be expelled from the country some time later in January... together with Walter Schwarz of the London ‘Guardian’.
But back in time and back to election day proper when I did a hectic tour of Ibadan to find out how the election was being rigged. The most hilarious rigging trick was that of a ‘pregnant’ woman who was found to be pregnant with hundreds of ballot papers in her wrapper! On the evening of election day I drove to the Ministry of Information, which we journalists had long since re-named the Ministry of DIS-Information. Kaye Whiteman, the old West Africa horse of the magazine by the same name, and myself had gone there to get the ‘results’. We were – truthfully – told that the ‘results were still being “processed”.’
They were in fact being ‘processed’ until the ‘proper’ results were available and S.L.Akintola, the rigging premier with his high-pitched voice, had ‘won’. We spent most of that night on the floor in that ministry, and thus missed the real show. For, instead of staying put in that Ministry we should have moved to the near-by Western Nigerian Broadcasting station where the real action took place... For while we were watching the ‘processing’ or sleeping on the floor, a certain Wole Soyinka seems to have broken into the ‘election studio’, armed with a pistol, and to have told the technician to take the tape with the Premier’s ‘victory speech’ off the tape machine and replace that tape with his own in which he called upon the people of Western Nigeria “to rise up against tyranny.”
Immediately afterwards Wole went on a trip to the Eastern region, only to reappear two weeks later, expressing his “surprise that the police should be looking for me as the man ‘who did that deed’.” Subsequently he was arrested and held in custody at the Central Police Station near Cocoa House where he received an endless stream of visitors. Among them was someone whom Wole calls ‘a wild man from German Radio’.
“…A wild man from the German radio named Gerd Meuer, braving the xenophobic reaction to foreign pressmen, baffled, irritatred and entertained the officers all at the same time; and they finally learnt to live with his unpredictable irruptions. Once he crashed through their latest ‘restraining orders’ with picnic basket, laden with an eight-course Indonesian meal, prepared by his wife. Both prisoner and gaolers had their fill of the exotic treat while the Investigation Department continued to seek witnesses, take statements, look for missing bodies.”
Wole Soyinka, “Ibadan”, p. 367,
describing my regular visits to him while he was locked up
in a cell at Ibadan Police Headquarters in September 1966
In the early nineties ‘Ibadan’ was translated into German for Amman Publishers in Zurich, Switzerland. How surprised I was when I found out that Egon Ammann - without consulting either the author or the translator - had changed the original title of ‘Penkelemes Years’ into ‘Ibadan – the ‘Vagabond Years’... a totally mis-leading misrepresentation of the meaning of the book. The original title did after all use a quote from one of the prominent politicians of the time, who in his creative Nigerian use of English had turned ’peculiar mess’ into ‘Penkelemes’.
To stay close to the English original the translator had - after a lot of brain work – coined his own German word for PENKELEMES: SPEZIMASSEL, a contraction of Schlamassel’ and ‘very special’, a coinage which Wole liked very much. It was, however, rejected by the publisher ‘because it had “a very special Jewish connotation”, indeed coming from the Jiddisch dialect but very much in use in post-Nazi Germany: even my ‘Aryan’ grandmother kept using it all the time. Surprise, surprise: some clever reviewers later used exactly MY expression – but without my involvement - for their own reviews!
But his wasn’t the only absurdity introduced by the – otherwise excellent – publisher. On the back-page of the book he also described Ibadan as ’a small town in Western Nigeria’, although even at the time I was a student there, that ‘small town’ already had more than 1,5 million inhabitants. But obviously for European publishers African authors must of necessity always come from some quaint ‘small African village’! |
