FOROYAA Newspaper (Serrekunda)
15 June 2009
opinion
Just think In The last two weeks, the Gambian community, both at home and abroad, the Academic community- the world over, the writers, poets and the family of Dr Lenrie Peters are still reeling from the shock of his demise. The end came in Dakar, Senegal, after a short illness and he was laid to rest at the Banjul cemetery on Wednesday, June 3rd. I would like to join all those who mourn his loss and pray that he rests in peace and for his legacy to live on.
Lenrie's passing is no ordinary passing. It is the fall of a hero, the loss of a library and the wisdom of an elder. His exit from this life is a true reminder of the fragility of life and of our own mortality.
The Gambian literally icon stood shoulder to shoulder with Achebe, Ngugi, Sembene, Amah, Soyinka et.al , to blaze the writing trail and become Africa's first generation of writers. These were the pioneers that made us proud and told us that we do have our own literature, our own history and a vibrant culture to be proud of.
In Lenrie's words:
"We are pledged as writers to reveal to our utmost capacity the essence of the human condition. To illuminate the human spirit and in so doing to lift it out of the bondage of darkness and to drag it towards the light. Let us, let us move towards the light."
These sages may come from different political and ideological hews, but they all share the belief that literature is a powerful tool in evolving the distinctive spirit of a people or an era in their history. A pioneer par excellence. He was a surgeon, a writer, a poet and a social critic. In short, Lenrie was the embodiment of all these and many more!
If I say that I met Lenrie in 1969 at Georgetown, when he was the Medical Officer at Bansang Hospital, it would immediately smack-off and elicit some unwitting emotions and thoughts of a kind like; who is he? A pretender? A friend of Lenrie's? An equal; a contemporary-trying to pull ranks with him and so on. Nothing could be further away from the truth.
In fact, I was still on my final year at Armitage. Lenrie came to give an appraisal of the status of African literature and poetry.
His delivery rocked the very foundations of my consciousness, my perception of education and indeed my world view. In my experience at the time, knowledge was atomised and compartmentalised. The scientists were a breed apart, so were the social scientists and the liberal artists were also a 'tribe' that had nothing to do with each other and their concerns had little or no bearing on each others work. In short, they lived in different cocoons and their methods for contemplating the world were different. It was difficult to see how a Surgeon could write Poetry, writes a novel and still had people under the Scalpel at the theatre.
From then on, the paradigm shift that Lenrie created in me still lingered. Even though I could not relate to much of the dialogue between him and my teachers, the issues, the abstractions, the different inflections of the word, that the discussions threw up, kicked-off a relatively permanent change in my behaviour. And, I dare say this had happened to several of my peers. At that lecture, Lenrie did, right before our own eyes, unmask the sacred Kang Kurang at the home of the Kang Kurang-Jang Jang Bure.
Later on I garnered that Lenrie's influences were legion. His family as the first unit of socialisation and his later life's experiences in Sierra Leone, and in Britain have had a colossal impact on the man. All of these had distilled a larger than life character and personality. On a closer psychological assessment, the dichotomy that prevails between the natives and the nurturing schools tussle over who had had a bigger bear-on in respect of Peters would flounder in the face of the overwhelming evidence of his childhood and adult life. Both schools would be content with any credit apportioned to them as both perspectives are tenable and complementary in this instance.
Peters did drink deep from many well-springs, to earn him the breadth and depth of knowledge and the respect and admiration of many people the world over To paraphrase Pope A little education is a dangerous thing. 'Drink deep or taste not from the well-springs of the Daanyaan river' my emphasis! . He did not hunger or thirst for much but for his country and continent to be proud and move confidently forward as a strong, united force and to take their rightful places in the comity of nations. This was why he joined the band-wagon so that at the very minimum, Africa could feed itself, educate itself and restore the dignity and the splendour of the past as well as to create a new African.
Peters latched on to the 'Gorong-beats' of the founding fathers of Pan Africanism. W.E.B.du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Ashford Garvey, Ras Makonnen, Wallace-Johnson, Awolowa, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikwe, Peter Abrahams and other illustrious sons. All of them played a significant role in unseating the 'imported oligarchy' from the African soil.
Peters could not, would not have missed the famous declarations of the Atlantic Charter, the declarations of the four British West African delegates at the World Trades Union Conference in London and the empty promissory notes to the war veterans from Africa.
In 1945 when, these true sons of Africa met at Moss-side, Manchester, for the fifth Pan-African congress and dreamt their dreams, planned their plans for a free Africa, a unified Africa, an Africa without boundaries. Pan-Africanism, for them, was a metaphor for unity, comradeship, the acknowledgement of a common purpose, the dream of a common people - to be free of the shackles of colonialism, and find their own way in the world.
Peters came back, his imagination fired by the rising tide of African nationalism and he launches an appeal to Africans to remember that with time we tend to be losing the most significant values that have defined our strengths and our resolutions to move forward.
I would like to turn to a tiny slice off Peters' voluminous work. His poem; 'Where are the banners now and proffer a reply and hope that others more able and conversant with the Poet's work can postulate a more reflective and refined position. ?
"Where are the banners which once we carried when we led the people to the shrine of freedom
I want to find an answer to the question by trying to locate the banners, who were those that carried them and where are they now in the general run of things and their role in the disappearance of the banners and placards. To answer this question I want to quote another literary giant Achebe. By quoting Achebe, it will put us in good stead to put things into perspective. He states that; What we need to do is look back and try and find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us. Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse, to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the years of denigration and self abasement.
Peace came after the end of the war in 1945. Nothing changed in the colonial landscape.
Yet beneath the apparent calm, huge political undercurrents were building up.
Even in remote and rural areas, the message for a different future began to be heard.
The expansion of urban towns gave political leaders mass audiences for the first time.
The struggle for political independence moved to the streets. The cries of 'We want bread and butter; Ujamaa and Uhuru gained currency and mass demonstrations were organised. The new political elite held rallies and the messages of freedom, unity, and self-rule on the banners and placards reverberated with the protest songs and the formation of political parties.
Independence was handed over to the petty-bourgeois radicals and intellectuals, along with a national flag, a national anthem and a constitution, raked up from the polite drawing rooms of Whitehall or from Marlborough house.
Lamentably, the most important dimension of independence-economic independence was forgotten or compromised. The very same petty bourgeoisie elites that took over the reins of power took over and maintained the whole colonial apparatus, lock stock and barrel.
What was confusing to the masses was the elite soon shoved the banners under their beds and the messages of freedom and unity were left to gather dust, to decay and hopefully to atrophy in their own minds and the minds of every one. Others burnt the placards and let the flames gutted-up the slogans, their messages and the spirit and force that threw their weight behind them.
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