How about that.
Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has backed his
literary colleague, Prof. Chinua Achebe, in the raging controversy over the
roles of some prominent Nigerians during the Nigerian civil war.
Soyinka, in an interview published in The Telegraph of
London, but obtained by THISDAY yesterday, said the Igbo were victims of
genocide during the three-year civil war, which was fought to break up Nigeria.
Achebe had stirred the hornet’s nest in his civil war
memoir, “There Was A Country”, when among others, he accused wartime Head of
State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon and the then Finance Minister, Chief Obafemi Awolowo,
of carrying out a genocide against the Igbo.
The claim has generated considerable controversy, with
many commentators accusing Achebe of re-writing history.
Soyinka, however, justified the secession bid and
described Biafrans as “people who’d been abused, who’d undergone genocide, and
who felt completely rejected by the rest of the community, and therefore
decided to break away and form a nation of its own.”
He also condemned religious militancy, saying now is the
time to tackle Boko Haram, the insurgent group that has visited terror on the
North, killing over 1,500 since 2009.
According to him, what Boko Haram is doing is not
religion, but criminality.
He said: “All religions accept that there is something
called criminality. And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour. Let
me repeat something I first said at the meeting organised by UNESCO a few weeks
ago, which was prompted by the recent film insulting the religion of Islam and
depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a very crass way.
“The first thing to say is that we do not welcome any
attempt to ravage religious sensibilities. That can be taken for granted. But
you cannot hold the world to ransom simply because some idiots chose to insult
a religion in some far-off place which most of the world has never even heard
of. This for me is a kind of fundamentalist tyranny that should be totally
unacceptable.
“So a group calls itself the Boko Haram, literally: ‘Book
is taboo’, the book is anathema, the book is a product of Western civilisation,
therefore it must be rejected.
“You go from the rejection of books to the rejection of
institutions which utilise the book, and that means virtually all institutions.
You attack universities, you kill professors, then you butcher students, you
close down primary schools, you try and create a religious Maginot Line through
which nothing should penetrate.
“That’s not religion; that’s lunacy. My Christian family
lived just next door to Muslims. We celebrated Ramadan with Muslims; they
celebrated Christmas with Christians. This is how I grew up.
“And now this virus is spreading all around the world,
leading to the massacre of 50 students. This is not taking arms against the
state, this is taking up arms against humanity.”
He said the unrest in Nigeria following the Boko Haram
insurgency had attained a critical mass and criticized the way the Federal
Government was handling the terror war.
“The president of Nigeria is making a mistake in not
telling the nation that it should place itself on a war footing. There’s too
much pussyfooting, there’s too much false intellectualism of what is going on,
such as this is the result of corruption, this is the result of poverty, this
is the result of marginalization.
“Yes, of course, all these negativity have to do with
what is happening right now. But when the people themselves come out and say we
will not even talk to the president unless he converts to Islam, they are
already stating their terms of conflict,” he added.
Soyinka said if religion were to be taken away from the
world, he would be one of the happiest people in the world.
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