RELATING NIGERIA’S AMALGAMATION WITH HAGHER’S THE CONQUEST OF AZENGA

May 19, 2021

 

A review of Iyorwuese Harry Hagher’s The Conquest of Azenga by Tunde Adeniran

 

Iyorwuese Harry Hagher is widely known within and outside Africa as one of the writers who have played very prominent roles in placing the arts at the forefront of mental decolonisation, democratic struggles, and nation-building in the last five decades. With his rich background and accomplishments, a novel from him prompted curiosity as to whether it would be a work of imagination grounded in reality or some tales of natural and supernatural adventures. He is very much at home with the two traditions in which the modern novel is rooted – the mimetic and the fantastic, or the realistic and the romantic.

In The conquest of Azenga, Hagher has chosen to be allegorical. The novel is about Nigeria, a multi-ethnic country which he calls “Sofalia”. It is a historical excursion into one of the darkest eras of British imperialism. Azenga is Tivland peopled by the Tiv people of North-Central Nigeria that have always been very proud of their heritage and was a turbulent part of the old Northern region. It is an episodic novel set in a specified past, employing the genre of “the non-fiction novel” and using the Lord Lugard (as Lord Gilbert Payne) story as an imperialist adventurer in Africa, “the African Emir”, as a metaphor for the evil of colonialism.

The Conquest of Azenga, a 282-page novel broken into 24 chapters with an Epilogue at the end, is dominated by a mixture of exceptional characters with ordinary people that are seen through ordinary situations and extraordinary circumstances. There are sharply memorable and effective scenes in this arresting epic. Lord Lugard had been used to unleashing violence on native colonial populations in Asia before coming to Nigeria to become the arrowhead of an invading imperial power on the wings of the Royal Niger Company. An easily excitable racist of the Darwinian school, his hubris fitted perfectly into a dramatic display of white supremacy in giving effect to a strategic colonial enterprise in Africa’s most populated territory.

With brute force, structured diplomacy, and deception, the unrepentant power monger established the basis for Nigeria’s plundering by, and dependency on, Britain. The accomplice who later became his wife, Liliana Payne the future Baroness, had a pitiable upbringing, she was determined to avenge her past and had a fortuitous meeting with Lord Lugard. The protectorate of Northern Nigeria offered her a unique opportunity to utilise her basic intelligence to resolve the concerns and dilemmas of her past while it also brought about illusions that led her into some miscalculations and misadventures. She was, however, the power behind Lugard’s imperial throne, indirectly gingering his courage to act within the context of a high hubristic adventure.

Tivland (“Azenga”) was a thorn in the flesh of Lord Lugard. The subjugation of the unyielding, culturally sophisticated, and politically conscious Tiv people required more than mere determination on the part of the resentful Lugard. He used different means and different personalities to penetrate Tivland and understand the psychology of the Tiv people. The Sokoto caliphate was a willing and able servile but a cunning partner in the imperial gamble that paid off and in the internal colonialism which remains part of the Lugardian legacies. Not only were other emirates put under the Sokoto caliphate that had been an enslaver and coloniser before the coming of Lugard, but the Northern and Southern protectorates were also amalgamated in a way that compensated the caliphate for cooperation and secured dependency on Britain.

The role of Saaju, the ex-Fulani slave-boy, in the life of Mrs Lugard revealed that lordly imperialists could be as weak as any other human beings when it comes to emotions and the demands of libido and the flesh. The author’s narrative style and technique here and the various patterns of dialogue combine gripping and gruelling evocation of traditional values and possibilities with the bombardment of the colonial system. Although a rather tortuous course was taken to make the reader understand the nature, meaning, and purpose of imperialism in Africa, there is a consistent attempt to heighten our consciousness to the nexus of colonial conquest and the present-day crisis of nationhood, bedevilled by parochial leadership, corruption, mass poverty and exploitation, injustice and widespread violence.

One of the ways of letting out steam by gifted African writers constipated with grief and overwhelmed by frustration is recourse to creative lamentation of the African experience. In The Conquest of Azenga, Hagher has brought out the outcome of in-depth research into a major source of contemporary conflicts and misery in Nigeria, especially Tiv land. With extraordinary skill, an aspect of British colonial policy, the supreme imperialist’s criminal grip displayed with impunity is woven into a fabric of a moving tale to provide background for the narrative that led to the darkness of Nigeria’s present existence and the nightmare of the Tiv farmers in the hands of the Fulani herdsmen.

Most novels that touch on Africans’ encounters with Europeans (as enslaver and coloniser) usually take one’s mind to Chinua Achebe’s novels. If Chinua Achebe was a political writer concerned with universal human communication across racial and cultural boundaries as a means of fostering respect for all people; and if in the works of Achebe Africa’s meeting with Europe could be accounted a terrible disaster in the matter of human understanding and respect, Iyorwuese Harry Hagher’s The Conquest of Azenga depicts a catastrophe. It is a damning revelation of a bloody colonial enterprise, white supremacy, and the Darwinian racism of Lord Lugard.

British imperialism and the legendary bravery of the Tiv people remain at the heart of this novel which reveals the ruthlessness of Lord Lugard, first as the High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria and later as Governor-General of an amalgamated Northern and Southern Nigeria that were British protectorates. Through some striking technical inventiveness in language and novelistic technique, the reader is taken through the callous subjugation of the Tiv people, giving profound insight into the tragic African experience and their determination to resist the occupation of their land and their conquest as a people.

Hagher’s firm control of language is sustained with dramatic episodes, poetic touches, and creative energy. It is prophetic but does not fully capture how a country rigged against rationality and modernity has been turned into a horrific hell on earth by those who have seized control of the levers of state power.

The Conquest of Azenga is didactic, a novelistic reminder that the amalgamation of Nigeria has expired and needs to be reviewed.

 

Adeniran is a professor of Political Science and formerly Nigeria’s Minister of Education and Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany.

 

Culled from https://tribuneonlineng.com/relating-nigerias-amalgamation-with-haghers-the-conquest-of-azenga/