How I was mistook for a robber in America — Okey Ndibe

United States-based academic and writer Professor Okey Ndibe, spoke about the experiences that influenced his latest work, Never Look an American in the Eye, at the last Ake Arts and Book Festival.

BEFORE he had the honour of hosting eminent Kenyan writer and headliner of the 2016 Ake Arts and Book Festival, Professor Ngugiwa Thiong’o during the newly introduced Life and Times Series segment last November in Abeokuta, Ogun State, academic and writer, Professor Okey Ndibe, had himself been grilled.

Linguist and writer, Kola Tubosun, was his and Zaire’s Alain Mabanckou’s ‘inquisitor’ at one of the book chats held at the festival. Expectedly, the session focussed on the writers’ latest works — Ndibe’s Never Look an American in the Eye and Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe Noire.

Relating the evolution of the travel novel to the audience, Ndibe, began: “My last novel, Foreign Gods Inc. tells the story of an immigrant in New York, who is facing very difficult challenges and decides to return to his native community to steal the statue of the god of war and sell it to a gallery in New York City. And as I travelled in the US and Europe promoting the book, wherever I went, somebody would say to me, is this story a biography? In other words, did you steal the deity? It really astonished me that people would think that the product of fiction was from the life of the author. And it occurred to me that I had a very interesting story to tell.

“I went to America in 1988 at the invitation of the great novelist, Chinua Achebe, to be the founding editor of African Commentary Magazine. 13 days after my arrival in America, I was arrested for bank robbery. Somebody robbed a bank and the police felt that I fit the description. So many different interesting things happened within the first few years of my arrival in America and people began to ask me whether my story, the fiction, was my life translated as fiction. I said I might as well write my life, at least the part of it that has happened in America.   What I decided to do was to pick the year, the moment of that life and to narrate those moments and present it as part of my broader experience in America. And it turned out to be the most joyful book that I’ve written. My mother- in -law has always been worried about my fiction; she feels that my fiction tends towards darkness, towards bleakness and she always says to me, please write a happy book. And I always said even in the bleak, there’s always humour in my writing. So, I decided to tell my personal story and hopefully, those stories are happier than the novel.”

Tubosun’s question on why he thinks Professor Achebe chose him to edit the general interest magazine that had a very strong focus on culture but which later folded up because of funding, made Ndibe recall the beginning of his special relationship with the late writer. “When I started out as a journalist in Nigeria, before I started the job, I had met Chinua Achebe through a friend who was from Ogidi. And Achebe told me he would give me an interview any time I wanted. So, I arrived at the Concord newspaper at the time and told my Editor that I had Achebe’s number and that he’s agreed to give me an interview. So, I called Achebe, got a date for the interview, the magazine flew me out to Enugu. I went to Nsukka and sat down with Achebe for three hours doing an interview.

“When I came back to my hotel room in Enugu and some of my friends gathered, they wanted to hear Achebe’s voice. And I had interviewed Achebe, so I was feeling like a king myself.  I brought out the tape recorder and pressed play. Silence. I put in another tape, I pressed play. Silence.  Three tapes! Later, I realised that I had wasted my time but even more importantly, I had wasted Achebe’s time. So I called Achebe in great panic and said I’m sorry, I don’t know what has happened but I interviewed you for all this long time but I didn’t get a word that you said. And I wasn’t taking notes; I was in awe. I was just  gazing at the man. So, I said to Achebe, please if I don’t get another interview, I would lose my job. Would you give me just 20 minutes?’ And he was a man of great generosity; a man of grace. He said to me, ‘tomorrow, I am busy but if you come the day after tomorrow, I will give you as much time as you want.’

“Two days later, I went with three tape recorders. I went with notebooks and I did another interview with Chinua Achebe, so he saved my career. I think I appreciated that great generosity by writing a good cover story for the magazine which he loved. So, he and I developed a particularly great relationship so that when something happened in his career, like he got another honorary degree or some award, I was the first person he told. In 1988, he happened to be in the US promoting his last novel, Anthills of the Savannah and he got into conversation with some of his friends about founding a new publication, a magazine. And Achebe told them he knew the perfect guy to be the editor.”

On the particular experience that informed the book’s title,Ndibe disclosed: “There was a time when from time to time, there would be a cinema in an open field at night and it became an occasion for the community to gather and watch some, usually cowboy movies. I can’t quite tell who organised these things but in retrospect, I’m thinking perhaps the CIA did as part of their way of seducing our minds to like America. These were usually black and white things; they were very grainy and often, there was a gap in the movement of the actors and the sound of their voices. Nobody knew what they were talking and yet this did not in any way negatively affect our sense of enjoyment of these great films. At some climactic moment in the movie, these cowboys, usually in a bar, would stare each other down and start shooting.

“From that encounter, my uncle formed that idea that if you looked an American in the eye, that was a capital offence and they are going to shoot you. Before I went to America, he said to me,‘whatever you do, never look an American in the eye or they would shoot you.’ I should have known better but somehow I believed my Uncle. So the first couple of weeks living in America, if I was talking to an American, I’ll look up; I never looked an American in the eye.

“You can imagine then the day that a policeman stopped me because they were looking for somebody who robbed a bank. As the officer was questioning me, I made sure I didn’t look him in the eye. It was that encounter that disabused me because later as I related what happened to other people, they said to me, when you weren’t making eye contact with the officer, you were reinforcing in his mind that you were guilty; that you were some kind of scheming, lying character. That was why the guy actually took you in for a moment. So, it became a moment where my understanding of America began to evolve to the moment where it is today.”